Over Our Heads

by Andrea Thompson

  By the time Sam came home Rachel had already gone to bed. The next morning, Rachel and her mother were up already when he came in the kitchen. He looked at them and asked: “What happened? Is it Dad?”

  Mom said, “Yes,” and then told him that Dad didn’t have time to know what hit him. She didn’t use the word “decapitated.” Rachel never heard her say that word to anyone. Still, it was as if Sam could see the same movie Rachel saw, with the sheets of metal from the truck slicing Dad’s head right off and sending it rolling down the road. Sam’s face went white, and he sat down fast with a thud.

  “Shit,” he said. “Holy shit, what are we gonna do now?”

  Mom didn’t answer him. Just turned away and went to pour some more rum and Tab in her coffee cup and get the Captain Crunch out of the cupboard.

  Nobody said anything else all through breakfast. It was like they couldn’t think of anything to talk about anymore. After breakfast, Mom got the newspaper from the carport and put it on the table. She stared at the headline about how the new CN Tower was about to be completed and that it was going to be the highest freestanding structure in the world. For a while Rachel thought she was reading the article, but after a while she realized that her mom’s eyes hadn’t moved across the page at all.

  By the time Rachel was ready for school, Sam had already shovelled the driveway. All the driveways on the end of their street had been shovelled so that a pair of small snow hills stood at the side of the bottom of each one. Rachel walked to the end of the driveway and climbed one of the piles of snow, then slid down the other side. Then, she went up and down the snow hills beside the end of the driveway of the house next door. She stopped and looked at all the hills at the foot of all the driveways down the street, and decided that if she was going to climb some of them she should climb them all.

  By the time Rachel got to school, class had already started. Miss Bertrand raised a surprised eyebrow, and asked her what time she had left her house that morning. When Rachel told her, both her eyes got small and squinty, and her lips made a hard flat line. Rachel didn’t care. She thought of maybe calling Miss Bertrand a “motherfucker,” to see what would happen, but instead just laughed out loud. Rachel didn’t say anything else to anyone till afternoon recess. Then she found Marcia Miller and played jumpsies and pretended to be bionic like everything was normal. She started talking between jumps, and didn’t want to stop. She talked about Miss Bertrand and how mean she was. She talked about who she liked in the class, who she didn’t like, letting all the stupid words just fall out of her head. She talked about anything that came into her mind, saying any word except “accident” or “Dad” or “dead.”

  For the next three days nobody talked about Dad at all, so Rachel didn’t either. Sam stayed in his room all the time and Mom just stared off into space. Everything in the house was quiet, and even when Rachel decided to put Mom’s Simon & Garfunkel record on, the air in the house seemed to eat all the happy up from the music before it could get in her ears.

  The day before the funeral, Grandma arrived, back from her condo down south. Rachel hadn’t seen her for a long time. Not since that Christmas when Dad was on the road, and Grandma had come and given Rachel a Malibu Barbie and that snowman card with five bucks in it. Rachel thought it was great to have Grandma there with them, but Mom had yelled at her and told her to leave before New Year’s. “As if you would know the first thing about being a mother,” Mom had shouted, shaking. “A mother is supposed to protect her daughter, not turn a blind eye. So, if you don’t like the way I live my life, then you should go back to Florida.”

  Grandma told Mom to pull herself together, and that the drinking in the morning was out of hand. Then Mom told Grandma to mind her own bloody business, because it wasn’t like people could turn their lives around on a dime, and forget everything that had happened to them.

  “Okay, Wanda. I’ll go.” Grandma said when Mom’s shaking had finally stopped. “But remember, it’s not me you’re fighting with. It’s yourself.”

  9.

  EMMA STOOD ON QUEEN STREET, waiting for the 501 streetcar to take her west, back to the old house on Indian Road. She pulled out her phone to check the time. She was early, a rarity. Rachel would be amazed. Lester had wanted to walk her to her stop, but she told him no. He almost didn’t listen, but she stopped him before he could get his other shoe on. He was only trying to help, but he didn’t understand. He’d only been a kid when he lost his parents. He thought that Emma’s desire to be alone was somehow abnormal, another case of macabre Emma wallowing.

  “You need to at least go for a walk, Emma,” he’d said, when she came back from Rachel’s the night after grandma went to spirit. “You need fresh air and to have some sort of mental stimulation. At least listen to some music.” He had clicked on the old transistor radio in the kitchen of his Kensington Market apartment. The Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker,” a song from their Columbia Street days, filled the room. Lester had looked at Emma and smiled.

  Emma hadn’t replied. She could try to explain, but she knew he wouldn’t understand. Lester was a typical Taurus, always sure that his way was best, stubbornly refusing any invitation to see the world through any but the most comfortable, familiar perspective. She had tried to smile back at him, but only her mouth moved. Her eyes remained lifeless.

  Lester’s smile slid from his face, and his shoulders slumped. Emma gave up, went into the kitchen and clicked the radio off, too tired to explain that she didn’t want anything else to digest, not even music. Her body already held too much. Her belly was too full of chewed-up feelings and memories. Funny how loss can do that to you, how it took away a person who lived in the middle of your body and filled that gaping hole with a stew of uncooked emotion. Cold potatoes that Lester had wanted her to drag around town. Emma had walked toward him, eyes down. She’d held him to her for a moment, and then left without a word.

  It had been early Saturday morning when Grandma went to spirit. Emma had called in to work to let them know that she wasn’t sure when she’d be back in Vancouver again. Not her real work – her soul’s calling – but that other work, the one that paid the bills. The manager of the Java Hut on Water Street in Gastown had given her a hard time.

  “What do you mean you don’t know when you’ll be back? You expect me to just hold your job open for you? I mean I’m sorry you lost your grandmother and all, but shit, Emma, it’s peak cruise ship season down here. We need everyone on board. Come on, just get yourself together,” he’d said, adding, “It’s not like it was your mother or something.”

  Emma hadn’t meant to tell him to go fuck himself, but she said it anyways. So, that was that for the coffee shop job. But the upshot was that it had given her a full week to go back to the old house on Indian Road and help sort it out. She didn’t want to stay at Lester’s place in Kensington Market, watching him moon over her. She needed to go back home to number 66 for a while. Besides, she knew that Rachel was in a hurry to pack up the old house and everything in it, and auction it off to the highest bidder. Done and dusted, like nothing had happened – just another item to cross off her to-do list.

  The 501 pulled up in front of her before Emma noticed. She climbed on, shuffled to the side of the aisle by the driver. Half a dozen passengers boarded behind her. While she fished in her pockets for fare, they all seemed to be scowling as they pushed past her. The driver sighed. Emma wanted to tell him to go fuck himself too. Anger. Kübler-Ross’s second stage. At least she wasn’t stuck in denial. Emma dropped her change into the coin box and gave the driver a weak smile.

  The streetcar rattled down Queen, past Bathurst and the kitschy mix of hip restaurants, fabric stores, and boutique clothing shops, past the old Prague Deli and Terroni’s. Past the old Queen Street Mental Hospital, which had been all re-done now. The name had also been changed to the more holistic and respectful, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. There were new buildings as wel
l, and a huge sign with their new slogan in bold print: Transforming Lives.

  The Sadhus, India’s Hindu holy men, called death “the great transformer.” They believed that the human soul died and was reborn again and again for eternity in a cycle called Samsara. The Buddhists also used the word Samsara when they talked about reincarnation, except in Buddhism it was possible to end the cycle through enlightenment. Amazing how geography had such a drastic effect on how people viewed the end of the line. Christianity had its moments of resurrection, sure, but they were extreme scenarios only achievable by big name players like Jesus or Lazarus, and not an everyday occurrence. Emma liked the Eastern versions better. The idea of transformation seemed more in tune with nature.

  The streetcar stopped in front of one of the remaining dingy old Parkdale bars. Everything was getting gentrified along this strip. First came the campy antique stores, then Stella Luna’s funky second-hand clothing shop, and once the retro café Easy moved into the hood, with its black and white posters of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on old Harley-Davidsons – the hipness factor of this end of Queen West became firmly established. Artists. It was the artists who kept a city’s neighbourhoods alive – until the developers would catch on, of course, and commodify the whole thing. Then the culture-pollinating, bohemian butterflies would have to find a new downtrodden pocket of the city to call home.

  The streetcar squealed to a stop outside St. Joseph’s hospital. A wild-eyed woman with greasy, grey hair plastered down the side of her face, and a dirty oversized winter parka dangling off one shoulder, ran toward the bus. She got on, and Emma right away could see the crazy in her eyes, which darted from side to side like she was watching a horror movie only she could see. Emma knew it wasn’t drugs, she could feel drugs a mile away. Coke vibrated through a person with a jagged, cocky, please-love-me or I’ll-kill-you desperation. Heroin seeped into a user’s skin, into their bones leaving a smell like old socks and sulphur. When they were high, junkie’s faces were blissful and dopey, and when they were jonesing, they were pouty and resentful like a child on the verge of a tantrum. Either way, being near them always felt like drowning. Once, Emma had crossed the street to get away from a guy in front of a bowling alley who zigzagged across the pavement with a mania that felt to Emma like a hundred razor blades under her skin. It wasn’t until she got home, and had the deadbolt firmly locked, that she figured out what she had felt was methamphetamine.

  No, this wasn’t a drug, it was something else. Something more deeply disconnected. More permanent. It was the woman’s eyes that said crazy first, but you could also tell it from the rest of her body. Her hands and arms shook uncontrollably. She’s not being taken care of by anyone, Emma thought. The woman shuffled down the streetcar, muttering to herself as she walked past. She smelled rank of psoriasis and clothes gone stiff with filth. Once at the back of the streetcar, she started drumming on the seat in front of her with an empty green pop bottle. Her muttering grew louder over her own din.

  Emma closed her eyes, and imagined that the woman was an incognito Shaman, issuing secret chanting prayers over the inhabitants of the area. Who knows? It could happen. If some saintly, wise person were to suddenly appear in the midst of Parkdale, they’d be just as likely to show up as a bag lady as looking like Jesus in sandals and a flowing robe. And what else would such an angelic being do besides bless the lost and tragic masses on the westbound Queen car? Apparently the Dalai Lama once blessed Lake Ontario, so that peace would flow out of the water taps and into the bodies of everyone in the city. At least that’s what Emma remembered reading somewhere. Anything was possible, of that she was certain.

  The wind picked up, and blew the woman’s stench through the streetcar. Emma wanted to cover her nose, but resisted. The chanting wise-woman fantasy was becoming difficult to maintain. If the song was right, and God really was one of us, surely she’d bathe. Only one more stop till the Parkside overpass. With her free hand Emma pulled the yellow cord. The bell rang, and as she rose and moved toward the door, the volume of drumming and muttering grew.

  “Oh, I know what you’re all thinking,” the woman yelled at no one in particular. “You think I’m crazy. You think I’m just some lunatic who doesn’t know anything. That’s fine. I don’t give a shit, because I know what I know. I know all kinds of stuff about all kinds of people. That’s why they lock me up. They don’t want to know the truth. They’re afraid, so they say it’s me who’s crazy. Ha! Look around at this world – it’s the people who run it who are really fucked up. They’ll tell themselves anything just so they don’t have to look in the mirror. That’s what I am, a walking, talking mirror in a fucked up world.”

  The streetcar stopped. Emma pulled her foot up from the sticky floor and stepped down. Just get me off this thing, she thought, get me away from this woman, with her bad smells and bad vibes. This time the woman screamed.

  “You’re one to talk. You think you’re all high and mighty, but I’m not so different from you, you know. I bet your mother’s just as crazy as I am. You’ll see!”

  Emma looked back, and the woman’s eyes grabbed on to her.

  “Yes, I’m talking to you! ” She yelled, pointing, then started to laugh.

  Emma stepped down. The streetcar doors opened. Without looking back, she ran along the platform, then down the concrete staircase that led to the street below the overpass. At the bottom, she stopped and steadied herself against the wall, thinking she might throw up. She tried to put the streetcar woman out of her mind, and continued to walk down Parkside Drive, and right along Garden Avenue. It wasn’t the mental instability of the woman that had scared Emma, it was the foreboding of her prophecy – and right after Emma had imagined Shamanic powers. Be careful what you wish for.

  The turning in Emma’s belly stopped as soon as she saw the backyard of number 66. She turned the corner onto Indian Road, and went up to the front walk of the old 66. Her sister’s black Mercedes gleamed in the driveway. Yellow tulips at the edge of the weedy garden rounded the house like a moat. Emma pulled out her phone to check the time. It was only three minutes after two o’clock. Good thing she had caught the early bus from Lester’s place. She was almost right on time. She knew Rachel would assume she’d be late. That would give her sister time to get into the closet first, and then who knows what she might hide away. Not that she would want or need anything. She’d do it on principle. She’d decide that Emma didn’t deserve this, or wouldn’t know how to take care of that.

  The prodigal granddaughter, that’s what Rachel had called her the day Grandma left her body behind. Emma had spent that last night in the hospital. She had known Grandma’s travelling was coming to an end, and that she was about to arrive at her destination on the other side. The doctor in palliative care told Rachel that Grandma had at least a couple more days, but Emma knew better. The night before that last night, she’d had the dream where all her teeth fell out. The cots in the palliative ward could be pulled out, in case family decided to stay with their loved one as they departed, so before she had gone to the hospital that morning, Emma had packed a bag.

  She wished she wasn’t thinking about that last night with Grandma as she stood on the front porch of the house, steeling herself to see her sister again. It had only been a couple days since they’d last seen each other. After Grandma had departed, Emma called her half-sister, and she came to pick Emma up from the hospital. From there, the two of them went back to Rachel’s place in Yorkville. That was a bad idea. Rachel was angry, and on her own turf. She hadn’t been there, that last night in the hospital, and she had questions. Why hadn’t Emma called? Because it had happened too fast. One minute she had been asleep on the cot, and the next minute the nurse had woken her up and said, “It’s time.” Emma tried to explain this to Rachel, but her words seemed to hit some invisible wall. Rachel was hurting, and she didn’t want to be. She would rather be angry.

  Emma would rather have gone back to Lester�
�s place that night, but she didn’t want to rub it in. Rachel still had a thing for Lester. Emma could feel it whenever she mentioned his name. No, Rachel was fragile enough as it was. Like ice over a puddle in spring, Rachel seemed solid, but was prone to cracking. Emma should have known Rachel would need to numb herself out. At least she had let Emma sleep for a while when they got back to Rachel’s place. It was still morning when Emma lay down on the pancake flat futon in Rachel’s guest room, and dark outside by the time she woke again.

  “You know, you could have called me,” Rachel had repeated after Emma woke up, and they’d ordered a pizza. Rachel was on her second vodka tonic by then. At least the second one that Emma had seen her pour. “It’s not as if it would have taken me long to get there.”

  Emma was sitting in the living room trying to get comfortable, but the furniture in Rachel’s condo was too sparse, too modern, and too cold. Every piece of furniture was more for show than comfort. Everything screamed affluence, other than the tattered old futon Emma had slept on. That, Rachel had inexplicably kept since her university days. The white leather of the couch she sat on felt chilly beneath Emma’s thighs. There were no throw blankets to be seen. There was a fireplace, but Rachel never used it. She said it was a hazard, and filled it with bricks.

  “It’s amazing, you know, how you just waltz in at the last minute,” Rachel had continued, when it’s been me holding down the fort, handling the doctors, paying Grandma’s bills. And then you show up, and all of a sudden I’m the one left out in the cold.” Rachel pulled two square-shaped blue plates out of her immaculate white kitchen cupboards, and placed them with an unnecessary firmness on top of the white cotton place mats that sat on her glass dining room table. Then she was back to the kitchen, fishing around loudly in the cutlery drawer. Utensils retrieved, she smashed the drawer closed, took a long sip of her drink, and then left it there on the counter as an emergency reserve.