Under the Dusty Moon

by Suzanne Sutherland

  “Thank God you were wearing your helmet!”

  Eighteen.

  “Mom, it was … like, sort of my fault. Kind of. I wasn’t really — I mean, I wasn’t paying that much attention. I was kind of … I was upset, okay?” I lowered my voice to a pain med-slurred whisper. “Just sad. I was really sad.”

  “You were so sad you biked into a car?” she said loudly enough so that everyone, including the cute medic who was filling out paperwork nearby, could hear.

  “Shut up,” I hissed. My arm was still dully throbbing and I’d reached a boiling point. “I finally got up the nerve to text Shaun today, okay? So we went out. And it was horrible and embarrassing, and I left but he didn’t, and I was biking home and I rode through a red, which was stupid, which I know, but I was fine, and then this car …”

  And then Mom wrapped her arms around me. Tight. Which was actually kind of a dumb thing to do since I couldn’t really move my right arm because it hurt so badly; she was probably making my bones warp. So we sat there — technically I lay there, since I was still on the stretcher — with her arms wrapped around my middle, my left arm sticking out like a scarecrow and my right arm, in a sling, squeezed hard against my torso. Classic Mick and Vic.

  And in that moment I hated her, but there was no one else in the world I wanted to see.

  They took me in for X-rays and showed me what bones I’d broken: my wrist and my thumb.

  “How long is it going to be like this for? How long will I have a cast?” I asked the emerg doctor with the cloud of ginger hair who seemed to be in charge of me. I couldn’t stop staring at his orangey halo and I’m pretty sure he could tell. He pretended he couldn’t, though. What a pro.

  “It’ll be six to eight weeks, I’m afraid,” he told Mom and me grimly. “Hope you weren’t planning on writing a novel this summer.”

  I refused to dignify his terrible joke with a laugh, though Mom gave a small dad-joke chuckle for his benefit. I would’ve grouchily crossed my arms if I’d been physically able to manage it, but my injured arm stole the gravity of my favourite protest pose.

  Six to eight weeks without my right hand and thumb meant I wouldn’t be playing Lore of Ages V any time soon — or finishing my portrait of Stara. Lucy could probably play the game one-handed, but I was so slow to begin with, and so not a lefty, that I knew I wouldn’t be able to manage with my cast on. And drawing was most definitely out. If my skills had been weak before, I was straight back to kindergarten now — pass the crayons. The icing on the whole crap cake was that there was no way I’d be back on PYT any time soon. Even if she hadn’t been mangled in the accident, the idea of getting back in the saddle made me way too nervous.

  Great, I thought. Not only had I ruined my chances with Shaun forever and was never going to be in with Lucy’s hardcore LoA friends, but Mom was going to be off to Japan any minute, and I couldn’t even ride around town on my bike to stave off being bored to death without her. My eyes started leaking in a way that I swear on Stara Shah’s leather jacket was against my will.

  Doctor Ginger Cloud gave us directions to another room down the hall where I’d have my cast put on and then he left the two of us alone. Mom turned to me and then noticed my involuntary eye-slobber.

  “Aw, sweets, don’t cry,” she said. “It’s okay, that’s not such a long time to have the cast on. It’ll be off before you know it. It’ll be off by the end of the summer — the fest! And in the meantime, I’m going to sign it, I LOVE MY DAUGHTER VERY, VERY MUCH AND SHE’S THE SMARTEST AND PRETTIEST GIRL IN THE WHOLE WORLD, EVEN IF HER CYCLING HABITS LEAVE JUST THE TEENSIEST BIT TO BE DESIRED.”

  “Mom,” I said, weakly laughing through my dumb tears, “seriously, shut up.”

  “Do you think they’ll let you pick your cast colour? Like DayGlo green, or camou or something?” she said, getting up from her chair. “Come on, let’s go, I want one, too!”

  “Stop it,” I said, pointing my weak left hand at her to sit back down. “Would you just — can you, like, listen to me for a second?”

  She sat back down next to me on the examining table, kicking her sneakered feet. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t want you to go to Japan,” said my drugged-up mouth, to the great surprise of my brain. I mean, sure, it was what I’d been thinking, but I didn’t have any intention of telling Mom that.

  “Oh, honey,” she said, giving me her charity-smile like she knew I was stoned out of my gourd. And, I mean, I was, of course, but that smile still totally pissed me off.

  “Seriously,” I whined. “Why is it so important? It’s-it’s … stupid. What’s so good about Japan?”

  “Sushi, for one,” Mom said, retracting her pity.

  I couldn’t believe that after all I’d been through that day that she still wasn’t taking me seriously. That she couldn’t just for one second be a normal mother.

  “You’re the worst,” I whine-yelled like some spoiled four-year-old who’d been told they couldn’t eat candy before dinner.

  “Ohhh-kay,” she said, reassessing the situation and getting up off the table to stand in front of me. “What’s really bugging you?”

  “It’s you!” I said, giving in and letting my drug-induced neediness take total control. “You just — you just leave. You keep leaving. You leave me here. With Gran. And I hate it, I’m sick of it. It’s stupid.”

  “Yeah,” Mom said, unmoved, “you mentioned that.”

  “And you never listen to me when I’m upset!”

  “Well what do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to stay,” I said in my smallest voice ever. I couldn’t look her in the eyes, so instead I studied the intricacies of the hospital floor.

  “But you know that I can’t, right?” Mom said, her voice almost as small as mine.

  “You could quit.” I was pushing it, I knew. This wasn’t going to end well, but I wasn’t sure I wanted it to.

  “And do what exactly?” Mom asked. “Work at Sal’s place every day?”

  “You could get a real job.”

  I was going for blood. Or my tongue was, anyway. I couldn’t stop it. It was flapping of its own free will.

  “This is my real job,” Mom said, for once using a serious parental tone. “Lots of people travel for work. I mean, I know it sucks sometimes — and believe me, it sucks for me, too, this isn’t just about you. It gets lonely on the road. And it gets boring and — but, anyway, it’s what I love. It’s who I am.”

  “For now,” I said. The venom kept coming.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry if you don’t always like it, but this is who I am, all right? Your mama’s a wandering wind.”

  “Oh good,” I said, speaking slowly to make the sure the arrows of my words stuck hard in her chest, “you’re writing song lyrics while waiting for your daughter to get a cast put on her shattered arm.”

  “Let’s talk about this later, okay?” Mom said, suddenly looking as exhausted as I felt. “The doctor’s waiting for us. And I don’t think they were exactly planning for a monster family brawl in emerg tonight.” She was pulling mom-rank. And sober-rank. All I wanted was to be able to cross my arms.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Come on, Eeyore,” she insisted. “Time to hit the casting couch.”

  I wouldn’t even meet her eyes, I knew they’d be wide with delight at her own terrible joke and I couldn’t believe that she was still trying to be my best friend.

  “Worst. Joke. Ever.”

  They put the cast on — plain white, despite Mom’s insistence that I choose something more interesting — and told me not to get it wet.

  “It’s just like in Gremlins,” Mom said excitedly on our cab ride home, trying to keep things upbeat despite our unresolved argument.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. I didn’t want to offer her anything that could be construed as curiosity.

  “Oh, come on,” she said, reaching to slap my arm before remembering that it wa
s now wrapped up in a plain vanilla cast. “You know. That movie? They were these, like, cute, fuzzy little critter-guys, but if you got them wet or fed them after midnight or — I forget, there was some third rule — they’d turn into gremlins. And they terrorized the city!”

  “I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “I think you might need a few more T3s to get yourself prepared,” she said, jabbing the little pharmacy bag of painkillers that lay between us on the car’s back seat.

  “The drugs for my broken freaking arm are not to be used to help you conjure some dumb movie that doesn’t even exist,” I said, trying to sound as snooty and offended as I could, which was tough because I was so completely zonked and also I was still pretty stoned.

  “The dope fairy has a lot of rules, huh?”

  “What does that even mean?” I said. “Are we going to finish what we started talking about back in the hospital, like, ever?”

  “We will, sweets,” she said, “of course. But I think you’ve had enough for the night. Let’s just watch a movie and sort this stuff out later.” She’d totally read my mind, but I wasn’t willing to give up the fight just yet.

  “You do know that this isn’t how normal parents act, right?” I said.

  “No one in the history of the world has ever accused me of being a normal parent.”

  “Obviously.” I exhaled audibly and tried my best to let it go, just for the night. “And anyway, you’re totally making this movie up. Gremlins is not a thing. And it’s definitely not on Netflix.”

  “That’s it? You’re finished with your attack on my child-rearing capabilities?”

  “Rearing?” I asked. “Since when have you reared anything?” But I stopped myself from going any further. Plus the word rear was sounding really weird in my mouth. “Look, I’m exhausted, okay?” And I was. There were so many more things I wanted to say to her, even yell at her. But right then all I wanted to do was crawl into her bed and watch a movie on the laptop we share custody of. “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll bet.” She put her hand over mine on the back seat of the cab and held it there for almost a whole minute without speaking.

  “But I can’t believe I never showed you Gremlins! It’s the best. The best. It was basically my all-time favourite movie growing up.”

  “So it was a stone age blockbuster? I hear their DVD players sucked.”

  “The ice age, actually. Their Blu-rays were surprisingly advanced.”

  “Oh yeah, chiselled out of snow and permafrost, right?”

  “Exactly. And Gremlins was the best of the icy best. Hmm, you’re sure it’s not on Netflix?” She raised her voice then, and called to the driver, “Excuse me, slight change of plans. Can you drop us off at 7-24 Video, please?” The worst-named place in town, which was also our regular. “It’s right at Fuller, just up here.”

  Yes, my mom and I are probably the last people in the world who still rent movies. Blame it on Mom’s downloadophobia. Like that’s the most surprising thing about us?

  I crawled out of the backseat, hauling my smashed arm behind me, while Mom paid the driver.

  I wanted so badly to believe that we could just have a normal movie night and pretend that nothing had happened, and that we had nothing more to talk about and could just go back to being ourselves. But I could tell that things were bubbling up just below the surface. I wanted my perfectly-normal-to-us life. For nothing to change, even though I sometimes hated Mom for being the weirdo she was. But it was already happening, I could tell.

  Six

  Mom and I stayed up until almost two in the morning watching Gremlins, which, as it turned out was a thing. It was pretty good. The parts of it that I saw, anyway. I passed out, drooling on Mom’s shoulder for the last hour of the movie, jolting awake just as the credits started to roll.

  We were slow getting out of bed the next morning.

  “You mind making breakfast?” Mom called as she finished doing her makeup in the bathroom.

  “You do remember that I broke my arm, right?”

  “Aw, come on,” she said. “You can still fry up a couple of eggs, can’t you? Please? I’m so late.”

  “What,” I asked, getting the carton of eggs out of the fridge, “did you finally get sick of the muffins at work?”

  “Are you kidding?” Mom said. “Francisco’s muffins are the best in the state!” Francisco is Sal’s boyfriend, practically his husband, and does all the baking for Northeast Southwest.

  “Canada, Mom,” I said as I took the skillet out of the cupboard. “We live in Canada.”

  “I know,” she said. “But best in the province doesn’t have nearly the same ring to it.”

  She had a point. “Okay,” I called, “so why no muffins, then?”

  “I’ve just been starving lately, I go through four or five muffins during a shift and Sal’s not such a fan of me scarfing down his profits.”

  “At least someone has business sense,” I said, clumsily cracking an egg with my left hand. Half a dozen fragments of shell landed in the skillet along with it. These eggs would definitely be Mom’s. “Besides, how can you be so hungry with this heat?”

  “Dunno,” she said, coming out of the bathroom, with her hair still half-wet and hanging around her shoulders, but with flawless eyeliner — somehow on her that combination looked good. “Maybe I’m pregnant again.”

  “Not funny,” I said, trying my best to flip her sloppy eggs. “You’ve got to finish with one daughter before you start on number two.”

  “But don’t you see?” she said, coming up behind me to give me a weird half-hug. “I could fix all the screw-ups I made with you. I could have a perfect kid!”

  She was joking. I knew she was joking. But the fact that we still hadn’t resolved our conversation from the night before and she was feeding me lines like this, ones she knew would irk me, got me pissed. While Mom crossed the apartment to change, I turned up the heat on the stove and watched her eggs slowly sizzle and burn.

  “Geez, Vic,” she said a couple of minutes later when she’d finally finished getting ready. “It stinks in here.”

  I scooped her scorched eggs out of the skillet and onto one of the plates I’d set out. Putting down the serving spoon, I handed them to her. I was amazed at how long it took to do anything with only one good arm. “Breakfast.”

  “Huh,” she said, surveying the slop. “Guess I better work on my material, eh?”

  “It’s better than you deserve,” I said, half under my breath.

  “Ouch. Hey, be nice. Remember who your human slobber rag was last night.”

  “You’re the worst,” I said, turning the heat back down on the stove so I could cook my own breakfast.

  “Hey, Vic, look at me.” She put down her plate and, taking me by the shoulders, made me turn to face her.

  “Ow, god, Mom, my arm, remember?” I struggled out of her grip and massaged my right shoulder like I was in serious pain, even though it didn’t actually hurt. If Mom was going to be as annoying with all of this stuff as she was, I was going to play up the arm as much as I could.

  “Oh right, yikes, sorry!” she said, trying to pet my arm like a dog, as if that was going to help. “But, look, can we talk about this?”

  “What, now?” I said. “You’re on your way to work.”

  “Okay, fine, then when I get home?”

  “You’re sure Sal isn’t going to ask you to work a double again?”

  “I’ll tell him no,” Mom said. “You and me, okay? Tonight.”

  “Fine.”

  “Great,” she said, picking up her plate again and dumping the burnt mess into the garbage. “But I told you, I don’t like my eggs flambéd.”

  I knew it was stupid and wasteful, but still felt smug satisfaction as I ate my own eggs, which were a little sloppier than usual but still delicious, and definitely not burned. I cleaned my plate and then checked the time. Ten-thirty. What was I supposed to do with myself a
ll day?

  I pulled out my phone and texted Lucy. It took me ten minutes just to type my message out. Apparently the fingers of my left hand were a lot rustier than I thought.

  You have to come over, I texted. I broke my arm.

  What? Lucy answered, How?

  Just come over. Please?

  K, Lucy texted, be there soon.

  It was almost two hours before Lucy got there. I went back to bed for an hour and then screwed around on the computer for a bit, checking Instagram and looking up random stuff on Wikipedia, including a page that looked like a twelve-year-old girl had been using it as her diary. Weird.

  Everything was harder with just my left hand, and turning the doorknob and opening the door when Lucy finally rang the bell was a surprisingly difficult job.

  “What took you so long?” I asked, as I let Lucy in.

  “Oh stop it,” Lucy said, racing up the stairs to our apartment, “this is worth the wait, trust me.”

  “What,” I said, “did you bring me a new arm from your parents’ store?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, pausing to get a good look at my cast. “That looks bad. What happened?”

  “Ugh. Long story,” I said, grateful for some sympathy from someone who wasn’t about to take off on tour without me. “Sit down, you want a popsicle?”

  “Sure,” Lucy said. “Purple me.”

  “Clearly.”

  I clumsily grabbed two ice pops out of the freezer and dropped them on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  “Can you open mine for me?” I asked, pointing to the pink one.

  “Wow,” she said, “you really can’t do anything now, can you?”

  “Let’s just say that LoA is on hold.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I figured.” She gestured to my arm. “So?”

  “I got doored,” I said. “On my bike. I was riding home from the Island. I was on a — you know, I was hanging out with Shaun.”

  “Oh?” she said, sucking thoughtfully on her popsicle. “I thought you said he was an idiot.”