Escape Velocity

by Robin Stevenson

  Escape

  Velocity

  ROBIN STEVENSON

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Text copyright © 2011 Robin Stevenson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Stevenson, Robin, 1968-

  Escape velocity [electronic resource] / Robin Stevenson.

  Type of computer file: Electronic monograph in PDF format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-55469-867-7

  I. Title.

  PS8637.T487E83 2011A JC813'.6 C2011-903484-0

  First published in the United States, 2011

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011929278

  Summary: Forced to live with the mother who abandoned her at birth, Lou goes looking for truth in her mother’s fiction.

  Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council ®.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover photo by Getty Images

  Author photo by David Lowes

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B PO BOX 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  14 13 12 11 • 4 3 2 1

  To Ilse, with all my love.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Mr. Samson is up at the front of the classroom, goofing around. He’s pretending we’re all on Physics Jeopardy and he’s the host. He has a chalkboard eraser in his hand and he’s holding it in front of his mouth like a mike.

  “The answer is…eleven point two kilometers per second,” he shouts.

  The guy beside me bangs his hand on his desk and makes a loud buzzer noise. “What is escape velocity?” he says.

  I catch my breath. Escape Velocity. I can see the words spelled out in fine black lettering above my mother’s name, the jacket cover the pale grayish blue of a December sky, the dark silhouette of a bird in flight. Somehow, despite reading the book over and over again, I failed to realize that the title of my mother’s novel had anything to do with science. I wonder what else I have missed.

  “Very good, Meyers.” Mr. Samson points at him. “You’re the man.”

  Samson is setting himself up to be slaughtered. I’d warn him, but he probably wouldn’t believe me. Even though he’s at least ten years older than me, he seems kind of innocent. Saying stuff like “You’re the man” and not knowing how goofy he sounds. Not knowing he should be more careful.

  It’s like nothing bad has ever happened to him.

  He turns to me. “Bonus points, Lou, if you can tell us all what escape velocity is.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  Samson looks disappointed. “Take a shot at it.” He waits for a minute, but I don’t say anything, and then a girl up front raises her hand and he calls on her with a dramatic wave. “Ah, Ashley to the rescue,” he says and smiles at her.

  Ashley smoothes her long hair and returns his smile.

  “The term escape velocity refers to the speed an object has to travel to escape Earth’s gravitational pull.”

  I imagine myself flying into the sky, my body somersaulting through the clouds. It turns out that clouds aren’t like cotton wool after all but like strips of torn cloth, wet and cold against my skin. Then I’m hurtling onward, up above the layers of cloud. The air is thin and sharp as ice in my lungs, and I’m rocketing away from Earth, flying out of the blue and into the black. And I’m still flying, but there’s nothing to measure my speed against. There are stars all around me, but no real light anywhere, only space, silent and cold and empty and endless. Gravity is far behind me now; I can barely remember it. Nothing is holding me anymore.

  A hand on my shoulder. “Are you sleeping? Lou? You okay?”

  It’s Samson. I shake my head. “Fine. Sorry.” I stumble to my feet and realize that everyone has left the classroom except me and him. I didn’t even hear the buzzer. “Just tired I guess.”

  “If you ever need to talk…” His eyes are kind, his voice tentative. I can tell that he doesn’t want to pry.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’m fine.” A prickling feeling begins at my scalp and moves downward, like cold fingers brushing the back of my neck and tracing an icy path down my back.

  “Are you sure? Because if there’s ever anything I can do…I mean, you know.”

  He gives me a smile, a full-on genuine smile that seems to come from somewhere deep and real. I can feel the warmth coming off him, and I wish I could move closer the way you do at a campfire, stretching your hands toward the flames while behind you the night air sinks its chill into your spine.

  “Thanks,” I say again. “Uh, so what’s your name? I mean, your first name?”

  He blinks. “Tom.”

  “Well, thanks. Tom. Can I call you Tom then? Outside class, I mean? It’s a nice name. It suits you.”

  “I think you’d better stick to Mr. Samson.” He clears his throat. “You should get to your next class, Lou.”

  On the way home after school, I break into a run. I’m not a runner. I’ve always been clumsy, and besides, today is a scorcher. It’s late September, but the surface of the main road is radiating heat. You can see the blurriness of it in front of your eyes, like you’re not focusing right. I run anyway, fast as I can go, legs burning, chest bursting, heart hammering, feet pounding a straight line across the cracked tarmac. Escape velocity.

  My feet bring me right back to the same place as always.

  Dad’s half sitting, half lying on the couch in front of the television, a beer in his hand. He’s got a heavy glass ashtray balanced on the curve of his belly and he’s flicking channels with the remote, not watching anything for more than five seconds. The sound is muted, and he’s got Lou Reed playing softly on the stereo. A pizza box is on the floor, a big greasy circle imprinted on the empty cardboard.

  “Didn’t you save me any?” I ask. I am breathing hard, my back slick with sweat, my thin T-shirt plastered to my skin.

  He grunts and adjusts the ashtray so that he can sit up and look at me.

  I kick at the pizza box. “You ate the whole thing?”

  Dad stares at the empty box on the floor as if he doesn’t know how it got there. Then he shrugs. “Lighten up, Lou. There’s plenty of food in the kitchen. Anyway, I skipped lunch. I was starving.” He lifts his beer bottle, winks at me and puts on his Homer Simpson voice. “Dinner: a nice break between work and drunk.”

  Work
? He hasn’t worked in more than two years. “Hilarious. You’re a goddamn comedian.”

  “Yeah, I missed my calling all right.” He puts the ashtray down on the arm of the couch and gives me a look. “You okay, Lou?”

  I nod. “Fine. Hungry.”

  “Mmm. School okay? No problems?”

  “It’s fine. Like I said.” I look past him at the square of blue sky I can see through the window. Flat shafts of sunlight slice through the half-open blinds and catch on specks of dust and blue-gray smoke. Lou Reed is singing about heroin. You’d think if Dad had to name me after a junkie, he could’ve at least picked a female one. I run my tongue over the rough corner on my front tooth where I chipped it falling off my bike a couple of years ago. Lou. Such a dumb name for a girl.

  Dad winces, rubs his back and shifts his position on the couch. “Love you, kiddo.”

  “I know,” I say. “Love you too, Dad.”

  “Go out with some friends, why don’t ya?” He butts out his cigarette. “You’re fifteen, for chrissakes. You should go out more. Your friends’ll cheer you up.”

  “It’s Thursday,” I say. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  Dad is wrong about there being food in the kitchen. There never is, unless I buy it. Here’s what there is: mustard, ketchup and mayo in the fridge; a bulk-size box of crackers; three unopened cans of spaghetti sauce; a box of lasagna noodles that has been there for as long as I can remember, because I have no idea how to make lasagna; and a bag of hot dog buns. Dad’s disability benefits and my paychecks don’t exactly add up to luxury living.

  The bathroom cabinet, on the other hand, is well stocked. Overflowing with a variety of poisons or riches, depending on your perspective: Xanax, Vicodin, Percocet, Darvocet, Ativan, Valium, Desyrel, Roxanol, and T3s. Plus a half-empty bottle of Pepto-Bismol and some multivitamins.

  Dad’s back got wrecked in an accident at work a couple of years back. He was working at a jail, as a guard. The ironic thing is that he took that job because he thought he was getting too old for construction—too many problems with his back and his knees from all the lifting. Then he ended up getting hurt anyway. When I tell people that, they assume there was a riot or something, but actually he just slipped going down a flight of stairs. He’s pretty much been in constant pain ever since. Sometimes it is bearable and he can get up and putter about the house a little. Sometimes it is excruciating, though he does his best to hide it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be trapped in a body that hurts all the time. So while I wish things were different around here, I don’t think anyone should judge him for doing what he can to escape.

  I don’t have to be at work for an hour, but the apartment feels too small and stiflingly hot, and being around my dad lately makes me feel all twisted up inside. I toss my school stuff into my room, slip out the front door and stand there at the end of our driveway, watching the heat radiating from the pavement.

  I keep thinking about Samson and how his voice was so kind. If you ever need to talk…But what would I say? I could tell him how lost I’ve felt since last summer, tell him that my father is slipping further away all the time, that I already know this place will never feel like home to me. I could tell him that the sky here—the big blue prairie sky the tourists rave about—makes me dizzy and turns the world beneath it into something flat and two-dimensional. Everything about this place, from the ancient dinosaur bones buried in the hills to the star-filled black nights, makes me feel as insignificant as an ant. I could tell him that I can’t breathe properly here. I could tell him that I can’t even look at the long straight road out of town without wanting to run down it, screaming.

  But I won’t. He’d think I was crazy. Right now he likes me, and I’d rather keep it that way. Words would only mess things up. They always do.

  My mother’s the one who taught me that. It’s funny, because she is in love with words. In fact, I think words are the only thing she truly loves. Only her own words though. Not mine. My face feels hot, remembering my visit with her last summer. The more I tried to talk to her, the worse things got. Even when I tried to talk about things that I thought might interest her. “Christ, Lou. If you must speak to me when I am working, at least do me the favor of giving a minimal level of thought to what you are saying. At least attempt to sound like an intelligent human being instead of a self-centered adolescent.”

  I used to love words too. I wrote poems, long descriptive rambles mostly, just for the pleasure of painting pictures with words. I used to spend hours trying to craft the perfect phrase to capture an image and pin it down on paper. Not anymore. I haven’t written a word since that visit, except for when I have to at school. Nothing creative. No more poetry. I don’t want to be like my mother in any way at all.

  She’s a writer. Zoe Summers. I have her surname, which was Dad’s choice. I guess he realized I wasn’t going to get much else from her. She lives in Victoria, and she writes poetry and novels, long dense ones with no quotation marks, only little dashes. Reviewers describe them with words like lyrical and haunting and evocative. Or compelling, but she hates that one. She says it is so overused that it has lost all meaning.

  Oh, she loves words, my mother does, and she despises anyone who is careless with them. Sometimes I listen to the kids at my school with their likes and totallys. The way they say he goes or he’s like when they mean he says. The way they punctuate their speech with the f-word, using it as verb, noun, adverb and adjective, sprinkling their sentences with obscenities as carelessly as they dump salt on their greasy cafeteria fries. And I don’t know whether what I feel is disgust or envy.

  Other teenagers are like a whole different species. I can’t relate to them. My dad says I am a chameleon, and the truth is I’ve had to be. Dad and I have moved so many times I’ve lost count, and for no good reason other than Dad’s restlessness. He always thinks somewhere else will be better than wherever we are. We moved from small-town southern Ontario to Toronto, then all the way to Vancouver when I was seven, then to Galiano Island a couple of years later, then back to Vancouver, and now Alberta. The Badlands. Who would choose to live in a place with such an ominous name? But Dad and I have lived in all kinds of places: suburbs with grassy lawns and wide driveways, downtown apartments where junkies left needles discarded in stairwells, even a sort of tree house in the woods for a few months.

  Maybe parents never know their kids as well as they think. When Dad says I am a chameleon, he means that I fit in easily—that I find friends anywhere, that I can be like the other kids. But if you think about it, chameleons don’t try to be like the other lizards. They don’t try to befriend them or hang out with them or impress them. They merely fade into the background. And that is what I do: I become invisible.

  Still, Dad may not know me as well as he thinks, but he’s miles ahead of my mother. She doesn’t know me at all. I didn’t even meet her until I was twelve, when she suddenly called Dad and said she wanted to see me. I took the ferry over from Galiano to meet her. It was probably the strangest day of my life, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that I had been fantasizing about meeting her for years.

  We spent the afternoon together. She picked me up at the ferry terminal, drove me into Victoria and took me for tea at the Empress Hotel. I have a photograph of the two of us posing on the green lawn in front of the ivy-covered walls, my mother’s arm around my shoulders. We don’t look like mother and daughter. She’s tall and blond, thin and elegant; I am broad-shouldered, with dark hair and eyes, olive skin and my dad’s slightly beaky nose. In the picture, I look stunned but happy, grinning stupidly at the young German tourist who was taking our picture.

  Inside the hotel, I ate tiny sandwiches and pastries served on a three-tiered cake stand, and watched my mother sip her tea. She was the most glamorous woman I’d ever seen. Beautiful. Brilliant. Romantic, somehow, like a character in a movie. And she was a poet! I told her, shyly, that I wrote poetry sometimes. She just laughed and asked me if I liked the tea. It was c
lear and fruity, and I would have liked sugar in it, but I said I loved it. She nodded approvingly and told me it was called Kea Lani. I wrote it down when I got home. I wanted to remember every detail of the afternoon.

  Pretty soon after that, Dad and I moved back to Vancouver. My mother came over from Victoria a few times and took me out for lunch. That was during eighth grade. She introduced me to sushi and green tea, pad thai and dim sum. She told me about ballets and operas she had been to, and promised to take me some day. Sometimes she talked to me as if I was grown up, gossiping about parties and confiding in me about the men she dated. She showed me the jewellery they gave her and laughed about the things they said.

  I only saw her a handful of times, but I thought my mother was amazing. After all those years of making her up in my head, I could hardly believe I was so lucky. Then last summer, right before we moved out to Drumheller, I took the ferry over to Victoria and stayed with her for a few days.

  And that was when it all fell apart.

  I haven’t seen her since then, though very occasionally she’ll call out of the blue and be all excited about some new guy or some big review or some major award nomination. She’ll act like we’re good friends. It’s hard to shift gears so quickly, hard to move into that mother-daughter space when months can go by in between phone calls. She acts like last summer’s visit never happened, but I can’t forget. My cheeks still burn every time I think about it.

  I don’t think my dad exactly likes my mother, but he’s still sort of in love with her. He says he can’t help it. Then he usually grabs me and says, “Well, how could I not love the woman who gave me you, hey?”

  He means it literally. My mother handed me to him at the hospital, less than twelve hours after I was born. While he was holding me—oohing and aahing over my fingers and toes, he claims—she packed her bag and told him she was leaving. Leaving him. Leaving me. Moving on. Having a kid had never been part of her plan. Like she says, she isn’t the kind of person to let one mistake ruin her life.