by Leesa Dean
As we flew through the night, I flipped through my guidebook to Mexico City, a used copy, dog-eared and marked according to someone else’s sensibilities. I tried to guess what kind of people they had been based on the marks and symbols—probably young backpackers. They never stayed anywhere expensive. Neither would I. Below, the full moon reflected on the water. Could the fish beneath it feel the glow?
City lights soon blanketed the landscape and a quagmire of boulevards mapped the city’s sprawl. When the wheels hit the runway, the passengers around me had that look on their faces—home. We docked in the terminal and I followed the Mexicans until we were separated into two lines, one for residents and then me, not quite alone but almost. You were there, Alessandra, all tattooed and gorgeous. We talked our way through the customs line and I wondered if you were flirting, hoped you weren’t just being a friendly traveller. It’s hard to tell with some women. We took a taxi together, traversing the city, and you placed a hand on my thigh. At the hostel, even though I booked my own room, I spent the night in yours, wondering how someone I barely knew could feel so familiar.
The next day, we wandered. Huevos rancheros and café con leche on the hostel rooftop with a view of a smoggy, massive downtown, then plazas, mercados, museos, and a narrow alley with old printing presses where you had someone design a card that said SWEETHEART BE MINE. The man misspelled SWEETHEART even though you told him twice and he eyed us with curiosity, simultaneously aroused and disapproving. Over dinner, fish tacos in Zona Rosa, we agreed that we’d met a hundred times before—we were peasants in Constantinople, goddesses on a Grecian island. We’d drowned together during World War Two.
On the way back to the hostel, too late at night for unchaperoned women, we met a man chain-smoking outside his apartment. He invited us inside to see his galería, a living room crowded with paintings and blank canvases and low-burning candles that made the art seem curated instead of haphazard. You could tell by the colours and geometrics that most of them were from the eighties, images of social justice dreams and the national debt crisis. The man, though he wasn’t the artist, felt connected to the art. He was moved by our interest, the way we stood in front of each canvas for so long, and he wanted to give us a painting.
“No,” you told him in Spanish. “We don’t even live here.” “Por favor, bellísimas,” he insisted, pulling one down called Sueños Solitarios, a fugue of black and red. We carried the enormous painting through the streets, shifting our weight and laughing, ignoring the looks of everyone, including the hostel’s night guard, as we carried it to our room.
I wonder if it’s still there.
The next morning, I woke up first, excited by the very fact that you exist. I texted my mother and said, I met someone. You would love her. She texted back, Hopefully one day I will. When I could no longer be good and let you sleep, I slid my hand across your stomach, knowing you’d wake up and make love to me, once, twice. We eventually showered and took the subway to the Terminal del Norte where we caught a bus to Teotihuacan, the Aztec pyramids north of the city. Vendors filed through the narrow aisles of the bus and tried to sell us things like cookbooks and tiny screwdrivers and love potions. We ate homemade ice cream out of small plastic bags and listened to Manu Chao as the city sprawl thinned to grasslands outside the window. I rested my head against you and tried not to think about Wednesday, your departure for Mazunte, how I’d be alone in the city and what that might feel like. At the pyramids, we took selfies like we planned the vacation together, and I couldn’t help but wonder if you did the same thing with other women, if it was easy for you on the road, if you erased the photos when you arrived in the next town.
We were starving by the time we returned, but most restaurants near the hostel were closed because it was Sunday. A man on the street told us to go to Plaza Garibaldi, which wasn’t far. He didn’t tell us the place would be full of mariachis, absolutely full, a cacophony of trumpets and small guitars, men with round bellies belting out “Aye Mi Amor!” wearing dapper clothing with many metal clasps. There was a twenty-piece band on stage and a nonstop smoke machine clouding up the plaza. We kept ordering margaritas and a guy from the kitchen came out because he saw your sleeve from a distance. “Donde?” he kept asking, pointing at the tattoos. Where did you get them? You waved him off, saying, “No aqui. En Italia,” hoping you were saying Italy right. He told you he had ugly tattoos. “Feo,” he said, voice laden with disgust. We reassured him that they couldn’t be so bad until he lifted his shirt to expose an array of truly hideous shapes, faded and stretched beyond recognition.
What I didn’t know that night, drinking margaritas and kissing you, my three-day girlfriend, best I’ve ever had, was that I would wake up the next day and find out my mother, my sweet mother, my forever friend and confidante, had a heart attack while we were eating enchiladas.
I received the news early in the morning. The sun had already penetrated the Mexico City fog, all bright orange behind long garlands of cloud. You sat up in bed, hand in my hand while I spoke on the phone. My mother’s landlord regretfully informed me her chances of survival were less than five percent. She’d collapsed in the laundromat parking lot. Luckily, someone noticed her body, even though it was late at night. Had it happened at home, she would have died alone.
You helped me get dressed, looping my arms through one of your sleeveless blouses while I cried. You booked me a flight. You said everything was going to be all right and kept your arm around me. We had breakfast on the patio, a hasty affair of weak hot chocolate and cornflakes, before you took me to the airport in a taxi.
“We’ll meet again,” you promised, kissing my face, my neck. “We’ll be violinists in Spain, lovers on the moon.”
“Come with me,” I said.
You walked as far as you could, all the way to the security gate, and kissed me one last time.
In Dallas, there wasn’t much to see except a man waiting for his children who lived in Miami. I found out that he flew them out for two weeks every month. As they came through the gate, eleven and nine years old, I could see the trauma all over their faces, the custody battle, the confusion. They reluctantly hugged their father, not making eye contact. At least you have a father, I wanted to say. At least you have someone. On the plane, memories rushed in—the time me and Mom rented a car and went to Vancouver Island, all the way to Tofino. We had a picnic under a blue September sky, ate avocados, and buried the seeds in a grassy area so that one day we’d go back and have trees to remember us. That day, we swam in our clothes, thrashing in the waves, weighed down by pant legs while our shirts ballooned in the water.
I remembered my nineteenth birthday party at her trailer, and how we listened to “Runaround Sue” and danced in the kitchen half-drunk on cider. Lobsters we bought from a roadside truck boiled in a huge pot. “Lobsters!” we laughed, watching the shells turn pink. “What are they doing here?” For dinner, we sucked the tiny strings of meat from the shell, all salty and decadent, and you told me that one day I would have it all.
I landed at the Abbotsford airport and tried not to look at the café while I waited for my luggage. As I drove toward Hope, the setting sun filled my rental car with golden light. Irrigation sprinklers ticked in wide arcs, leaving tiny rainbows over the parched grass. The entire valley was so dry I feared it would disappear in a roar of flames if someone lit a match. Eventually, I arrived at my destination and parked by intensive care. I walked through the double doors, into a crowded waiting room until a nurse brought me to where my mother lay unconscious. There, I spent three days unable to get enough air into my lungs as I watched her, not even fifty years old with a brain that would never work again.
What I remember most about our last day together was how the nurse let me wash her hair. She didn’t say one last time, but the words were there anyways. They have this no-rinse dry-shampoo cap you can put on an unconscious person’s head, so the person doesn’t have to be moved. They can just sit comfortably while being massaged. I trie
d every technique—pressure points, shiatsu, massaging her third eye, hoping I could bring her back to life. I talked to her for an hour, working on her neck and temples, realizing how bending down all those years in the café must have destroyed her muscles. I told her about Mexico and about you, Alessandra, the paintings, the people, the food, all the gold in the churches, how with you I felt something people might call love. It took years for me to find it again.
Finally, the nurse came. She removed the cap from my mother’s head and readjusted the bed. She pressed some buttons on the machines and wrote notes in her chart. Afterwards, the nurse gently placed a hand on my arm and asked if I needed anything. I told her a coffee might be good. While she was gone, I held my mother’s hand and hugged her tight. Already, her scent was starting to fade.
SEPTEMBER
I LEFT ESTERHAZY EARLY ON A Tuesday. Most of the kids at the group home slept while I packed my belongings once and for all, but some of the older ones stood in the driveway and waved through their haze of envy—I was getting out. My car, a rusted Honda someone sold me for a dollar, would likely fall apart before Manitoba, but I didn’t care. I was on a mission. Fuelled by internet success stories, I had decided I was going to find my mother.
The afternoon was all Kenny Rogers and stealing gas, zooming past rail lines and fluorescent canola fields. “Ruby, don’t take your love to town!” I screamed out the window as I drove east, my fake twang echoing off grain elevators. Portage la Prairie, Winnipeg, Lake of the Woods—I held my breath as I entered Ontario for the first time. That night, the sunset over Lake Superior nearly destroyed me. The bright pink sky burst into the car and seemed to hug me. It felt like love and I couldn’t stop crying.
Three days later, I arrived at the Quebec border. BONJOUR, the sign said. Farmland gave way to derelict warehouses and a knot of highways converged at Montreal’s city limits. Side-winding past old factories turned into lofts, I was confronted by the sudden realness of a place I’d only dreamed of. Everything was so French—the billboards, the stop signs, the radio ballads. I’d never seen such tall buildings. The sun’s reflection flashed across a thousand windows and I couldn’t help but imagine my mother, out there somewhere, shielding her eyes from the blaze.
SLEEPING IN THE car was only supposed to last a few days, but money went quick and there was Pete—a sometime train hopper from Tennessee, living in a converted school bus at the corner of Duluth and Esplanade. His banjo music flooded the intersection where I waited for a pedestrian to cross, not sure where I was going or what I was looking for. Maybe it was him all along. I followed the sound until I saw his bare feet dangling from the blue roof.
“Hey,” I shouted.
The music stopped and Pete’s face appeared, hair furled under a pageboy cap. He looked like a chimney sweep.
“Hey-o,” he said back, tossing down a rope ladder.
That night, he told me about hopping trains all over North America, the ocean views, and how you could go south but not north in Mexico because the banditos would slit your throat. “The bus is okay,” he said, “but I miss the sway of the train, the grate of the tracks.”
I told him I’d come looking for Marie Tremblay, my mother, a woman who decided early on she did not want me. Social services had put me in contact with a lady who finds lost parents, and she’d followed my mother’s trail out east. Still, there was no guarantee she still lived here. No guarantee she was even alive, for that matter, but I was willing to try anything.
I made a list of 164 Tremblays who might be my mother. Every morning, after Pete rode his too-small bicycle to the Old Port where he shoved screwdrivers up his nose and stapled things to his chest for pocket change, I made calls from the Dairy Queen pay phone. The flashing neon cone gave me courage. Across the parking lot, people bought discounted parfaits with coupons printed on the backs of grocery receipts. The smell of hot fudge and waffle cones nearly drove me crazy, I wanted them so bad. Instead, I ate dry Ichiban and stolen chocolate bars. “Salut,” I said to anyone who answered the phone. “Parlez-vous Anglais?” They probably thought I was some degenerate, trying to scam them out of their life savings. Sometimes I said French things I’d copied from Google—“Je cherche ma mère. Est-ce que c’est toi?” No one understood my accent. Men with names like Marcel Tremblay seemed sad about my situation and women like Maude wished me all the luck in the world. Madeleine started to cry—she’d given up a child, too.
“I think of him every day,” she wept through the phone.
I told her to look for him.
“I already did,” she said. “He won’t return my calls.”
“One day he’ll change his mind,” I assured her. “You’ll see. Just be patient.”
PETE AND I met at six every night behind the dumpsters at Jean-Talon market. Neither of us had money for real groceries, but a lot of the stuff vendors threw out looked better than what we had at the group home. Primal instincts flared as soon as I got between those metal walls and I felt like a hunter-gatherer, wrangling zucchinis and bell peppers. Punks from other city parks went there, too. They looked so cool with their dogs and patched clothing. Some were squeegee kids, others were train hoppers. I couldn’t tell the difference, but Pete could.
“Dirt versus oil,” he said. “Look at their knees.”
I learned how to cook kale and make eggplant taste like steak. “No more Hamburger Helper for you!” Pete said. We dined in his rooftop garden among seedlings that sprouted from ice cream pails. After dinner, we’d split up the chores: whoever wasn’t on dish duty had to get water. I hated getting water. The park bathroom was always disgusting with wads of wet toilet paper on the floor and a lingering diaper smell. The small sinks meant I had to dump mugs of water into a bucket over and over again just to get enough water for dishes and the garden. After chores, Pete and I swapped stories about our days and I told him about Marie Tremblay.
“I bet she’s a singer,” I said. “A dancer, a drifter, a fire-eater.”
“We’ll start our own road show,” Pete said.
“Cool. What’s my act?”
“Snake charmer?”
“Ew! I hate snakes.”
“You’d be great,” he said. “You have the courage and patience, and you’re already a charmer.”
The compliment burned my cheeks.
Every night, people played soccer in the park and sang loud French songs on picnic blankets full of decadent food. We drank Belle Gueule on the roof and sang our own songs. At the end of the night, we tossed the empty cans down to a bottle collector named Bernard. It was like an arcade game with his bag wide open as we placed bets on the rim shots—breakfast, beer money, mostly water-fetching duty. Pete hated it, too. Eventually, we bought paper plates.
BY THE END of July, I hadn’t found my mother. I’d hoped it would be easier, that I’d walk into a labyrinth of Tremblays who knew each other or that the universe would just bring her to me. Sometimes, I envisioned us passing on the street—we’d immediately know we belonged to each other. I looked at everyone, studied their hair and skin. No one in that city looked like me. Every day I made calls, but they all led to the same place—nowhere. At night, I circled my finger on the dwindling list and waited for a sign, a clue, anything that might lead me to her.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told Pete.
He reached across the dirty plates and took my list. He held it against his chest. Eyes closed with the stapler wandering, he circled once, twice. Tack! No matter how many times he did it, I still winced whenever the metal hit skin.
“There,” he said.
The staple had marked 3970 Esplanade. Just up the street.
“Genius!” I yelled, scrambling down the rope ladder. I hit the ground running, sandals a-clack.
“No, no, you tumbleweed!” Pete shouted after me. “Come back and finish your wine!” Suddenly I was athletic, sprinting down the avenue. Voices in a language still strange to me rose like steam from backyard patios. I counted down the addresses,
rehearsed what to say if my mother happened to be on the stoop, happened to be getting out of a car—did she have other children? Seventeen years since she’d left me at a church wrapped in a pair of sweatpants, birth certificate under my chin. Why did I want this?
In the end, it didn’t matter. I was out of breath, standing in front of an empty lot. Instead of my mother’s house, there were bulldozer tracks. Nothing left there but a pile of bricks and mortar.
AS THE SUMER rambled on, the city became crowded with tourists who flocked to Mont-Royal for pictures with the statue, a stone angel with a quiet, Eastern salute. Pete loved their money, but I hated everything about them, especially their happiness. Whenever I saw them sashaying by on family outings, I wanted to throw rocks. By the end of July, temperatures flew to incredible heights and I coped by eating ice cream in the shade. Some days, the air felt so thick you could taste it.
I made Pete tell me over and over about the trains, the squats, the places he’d been.
“Don’t get all romantic,” he said. “You get cold, someone tries to cut your face, you smell bad, and you’re half-starving most of the time.”
“But you loved it,” I said.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
He watered the garden and sang songs and let me staple money to his chest. Sometimes we drew extra zeros and pretended we were rich. He tried to teach me to stick a screwdriver up my nose so we could busk together, but I could never get past the nostril.
One night in August, I tried to kiss him.
“Jailbait!” he shouted.
“I’m seventeen!”
“Exactly.”
He was twenty-five. That night, after he went to bed, I took the rest of the wine and lay in the back seat of my car, wishing I had money for more booze. Sometimes, all I wanted to do was wreck myself. Just drink myself blind and punch holes in things. I could become the person everyone expected me to be. It was too hot to sleep, even with the windows open, and my thoughts kept returning to Marie Tremblay. Where was she? Awake or sleeping? In a bed or on a bender? An ambulance raced into the hotel parking lot and I thought, That could be her. Maybe she wrecked herself. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and took off my shorts. They were sticking to my thighs. Pete had a fan—I could hear its hypnotic whir from a distance.