Escape Velocity

by Robin Stevenson

“What is it?”

  “Her brother. In the book, Alice has a little brother.”

  “So you have an uncle out there too?”

  I remember the file I found, the photo of the two children, the newspaper clipping. “No,” I tell her. “I think he’s dead.” I explain about my snooping. “None of it made sense at the time, but it’s all falling into place now. The book only covers a short time period. It starts when Claire leaves—that’s when Alice is twelve. And it follows Claire’s life over the next few years. There’s some parts about the kids being in foster care, but it’s mostly about Claire.”

  “What happened to him? Her brother?”

  I make a face. “Nothing happens to him in the book.

  But the newspaper clipping I found said he was killed in a drunk driving accident when he was seventeen.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Yeah.”

  She is quiet for a minute. Across the room, the door opens and a chilly draft blows in from around the door. Justine speaks softly. “What was his name?”

  “Billy,” I say. Then I shake my head. “No, that’s in the book.” I picture the newspaper article, try to see the words in my mind, but it’s no use: I can’t remember his real name.

  When I look up again, Justine is watching me closely. “You haven’t talked to your mom about any of this, right?”

  “Haven’t seen her yet. Don’t want to.”

  She hesitates.

  “Go ahead,” I say. “Say it.”

  Justine catches her lower lip between her thumb and finger and says nothing for a minute. Then her hand drops to the table. “Honestly? Don’t get mad, but I don’t really get what the big deal is. I would have thought you’d be glad that your mom wasn’t like that woman in the novel.”

  I don’t answer right away, and Justine’s words seem to hang in the air between us. I am glad my mother never said those awful things about me being a parasite, and that she wasn’t thinking about me when she created the character of Alice. Knowing that my mother was abandoned as a kid, that she, like Alice, probably ended up in foster care and that her brother died…I should feel sympathy.

  But I don’t. I still feel angry. If anything, more angry than ever. Because if she was abandoned by her own mother, you’d think she’d know how hard that is. You’d think she wouldn’t do the exact same thing to her own daughter.

  Justine sighs. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” I make a face. “Maybe I can get back to Alberta somehow. Hitchhike or something.”

  Justine shakes her head. “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I know. I’d be too scared anyway.” I fold my arms on the table and rest my head on them. “I just want to get away, you know?”

  “Oh, I know. Believe me, I know.”

  I look at her sideways, without lifting my head. “You ever regret it? Running away?”

  “Didn’t have much choice.”

  I think about what she said about her mom’s broken arm. “Was he…your mom’s boyfriend…hitting you as well?”

  She snorts. “Hitting on me. Which may seem unlikely to you.”

  By the way she gestures down at her body, I can tell she means because she’s fat. I want to say something about that not mattering, or about her being beautiful, which she actually kind of is, but I feel too awkward. “Some of my dad’s friends used to be like that with me,” I say instead. “Flirting with me, you know? When I was, like, thirteen, fourteen. Before we moved to Drumheller. And I looked like a twelve-year-old back then, no boobs at all.”

  “Yeah, well, guys aren’t too particular.”

  I bare my teeth. “See this chip, here? One guy gave me acid at a party and I got totally high. We’d been kissing and he wanted me to do other stuff with him, fool around, you know? But I freaked out. Left the party and wiped out on my bike.”

  “Ouch.” She winces.

  “Yeah. I used to get drunk with them sometimes. The guys in my dad’s band. Dad sort of saw it as treating me like an adult.”

  “When you were thirteen.”

  “Yeah. At the time, I thought it was cool. Now, well, not so much.” I feel a pang of disloyalty. “I love my dad though. I mean, he’s a great guy. And I don’t think he knew about a lot of the stuff that happened. He trusted his friends, that’s all. He trusts everyone. He’s just like that.”

  She shrugs. “No one’s perfect, right? Still, you have a right to be mad about that stuff.”

  “I guess.” I fold my arms on the table and rest my head against them, picturing Dad, gray-faced and scared, lying in a hospital bed with monitors and tubes and wires all around him. Then I think about our smoke-filled living room, and potato chips for dinner, and all Dad’s pills. I think about the silent seething frustration I felt, and my secret fantasy that Mr. Samson would somehow rescue me from the whole mess of my life. “Sometimes I was,” I whisper. “Sometimes I was really mad.”

  Justine reaches across the table, and to my surprise, she touches my hair. Strokes it like I’m a cat. I don’t pull away. It’s weird but sort of nice. “I think you should go back to your mom’s place,” she says. “Talk to her.”

  “You do?” I straighten up and look at her. “What if it’s in my genes? You know? Maybe I’m like them, Heather and Zoe, I mean. Wanting to run away from things. Wanting to escape all the time. What if I’m predestined to be crazy and fucked-up?”

  She snorts. “Predestined? Give me a break.”

  “I’m serious. I always have this feeling like I want to get away from wherever I am. Vancouver, Drumheller, Victoria.”

  “Maybe you’ve just been in a lot of situations that suck. Did you think of that?” Justine raises her eyebrows. She stands up, gathers the plastic signs in her arms and begins redistributing them onto the neighboring tables.

  I watch her for a minute, until the Thank you for Pot Smoking signs adorn all the tables in our half of the restaurant. I wonder how long it will take anyone to notice. Justine gestures toward the washroom and heads that way. I know she’s trying to give me time to think—to give me a bit of space—but I wish she wouldn’t. I wish she’d come back and stroke my hair again.

  I turn toward the window. In the dark glass, my reflection stares back at me, blurry and hollow-eyed. “I’m tired of feeling alone,” I whisper to the image in the glass. My reflection gazes back at me. I guess it’s a trick of the light—the cars going past outside or whatever—but my face suddenly comes into sharper focus. I can see my dad’s eyes and nose, and for the first time, I see something of my mother too. Inside me, something shifts. Justine might be right about it not being in my genes to want to escape. Because what I want to escape from isn’t really Dad or Drumheller or even this mess with Zoe. It’s this feeling. Loneliness, I guess. Not feeling connected to anything or anyone.

  So in the end, there’s no getting around it: I have to talk to my mom. Because if I leave now, I’ll always wonder what might have been.

  Nineteen

  It’s nearly three in the morning by the time I slip my key into the door and step into my mother’s apartment. My hands are cold, but I can still feel the warmth of the hug Justine gave me. I take a deep breath and walk down the hallway, past my mother’s bedroom door. It’s closed, and I wonder if she is alone or if Simon came back here with her. I wonder if she even noticed that I wasn’t home.

  I take off my clothes and curl up in bed, but sleep is impossible. I’m rehearsing, playing out possible conversations in my head, figuring out how and where to begin. I’ve been trying to construct an image of my mother for years, and now that it turns out I’ve been misreading the clues, I’m not sure what is real and what is not. Finally I pull out a sheet of paper and start writing down stray thoughts. It’s like a True or False quiz, and I’m weighing the evidence on both sides.

  Selfish. Claire is selfish in the novel, for sure—all that stuff about sacrificing her children to save herself. And while Zoe isn’t Claire, my dad even agreed that she was self-centere
d. Plus she did choose to give me up to focus on her career. So that’s still true.

  Ambitious. Definitely. Even Heather said Zoe had always been ambitious.

  Doesn’t like kids. I don’t know. Claire didn’t like kids much, but Alice loved her little brother. She took care of him after Claire left. Then again, those things I overheard my mother saying last summer made it pretty clear that she didn’t much like me.

  I crumple up the paper. It’s all so confusing. Maybe I should just forget the novel and go on what I know, but it is so little. The one thing I keep returning to is that my mother chose to get in touch. She chose to have a relationship with me after all.

  So that is something. That’s a place to start.

  I am drifting off to sleep when I hear the front door bang shut. My mother’s voice. “Lou? Are you home?”

  I sit up and switch on my bedside light. “In here.”

  Zoe appears in my doorway, jacket still on, hair wet, eyes wild. “Where the hell have you been? Oh my god, Lou. What were you thinking? I’ve been driving around half the night looking for you. I was about to call the police.”

  “I’m sorry. I went out with a friend. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  “You didn’t leave a note; you didn’t call.”

  “I wasn’t planning to be so late,” I say defensively. “Anyway, I didn’t think you’d really care.”

  Zoe pushes her wet hair off her face and unzips her jacket. “Christ, Lou.” She puts one hand against her chest. “I’ve been completely…I mean completely…beside myself.”

  “I’m sorry.” But I’m not really. The truth is, seeing her freaking out like this, her control slipping, her perfect surface cracking, actually makes me feel a little better. Like maybe she actually would care if something happened to me. I take a deep breath. “How come you suddenly decided you wanted to see me three years ago?”

  She blinks. “Lou. It’s the middle of the night. I’ve been out searching the goddamn streets for you.”

  “I want to know. What made you change your mind and want to meet me after all? Was it because Dad wrote to you?”

  “I am really not in the mood for this conversation.”

  “You never are. You never talk about the past at all.”

  “You’ve never asked.”

  I stare at her. “I’ve tried to,” I say. “It feels like it’s sort of off-limits.”

  Zoe shakes her head. “Lou. Enough. You’ve been out all night, god knows where, doing god knows what…”

  “With a friend,” I say. “Drinking coffee.”

  “And now here you are, trying to twist things around to make everything my fault. Just…just go to sleep.” She turns to leave.

  “Do you regret it?” I ask. “Do you wish you’d never bothered to get in touch with me?”

  Zoe stops. “Now is not the best time to ask.” I guess she sees me flinch, because she sighs and shakes her head. “Of course I don’t regret it, Lou. What kind of a question is that?”

  “I know you don’t like me,” I say.

  She unzips her coat. “That isn’t true.”

  “I heard you on the phone. Last summer.” I sit up straighter, pulling my knees up to my chest beneath the comforter.

  Zoe freezes, her hand still holding her zipper. “What?”

  “Unlikable. That was that word you used. Also ingratiating. And what else? Oh yeah. Sullen. Such a cliché,” I say, mimicking her voice.

  “Lou. God. Is that why you stopped talking to me?”

  I shrug. “I guess I was a big disappointment to you.”

  “No. No. That visit was hard for me.” Zoe gestures helplessly, as if it was all too difficult to explain.

  I cut her off. “I didn’t exactly have a blast myself.”

  “Listen to me, Lou.” Zoe keeps her eyes on mine, frowning as she chooses her words. “I thought once you were in my house, actually staying with me, I’d feel like a mother. Like your mother. But I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t even know me! I mean, we’d had lunch together a few times and that was it. What did you expect?”

  She shakes her head. “You were trying so hard, and it just made me feel worse. Guilty.” She looks at me and then away, blinking. “I think I wanted to blame you for that.”

  “Thanks,” I say sarcastically. “That was really helpful. Nothing like having your own mother consider you unlikable.”

  To my shock, Zoe starts to cry. She covers her face with her hands, but I can see her shoulders shaking.

  I clench my teeth, determined not to feel bad for her. “You know, if you wish you’d never got in touch with me, that makes two of us.” I feel a surge of something like cruelty. “My life was a whole lot simpler before you showed up.”

  She doesn’t look up. “I thought Garland would be the better parent. Older, steadier, happier. I thought he’d take good care of you.”

  I think of all the times Dad left me home alone while he went off to gigs or out drinking with his buddies, the times he picked me up from my friends’ houses reeking of booze and I wasn’t invited again, the times he went off with girlfriends and disappeared for days, the dozens of dentist appointments and school events I missed because he wasn’t around to drive me. I remember Marco, the guy who used to mix me drinks and get me to sit on his lap, and Ken, the guy who gave me the acid. More than twice my age, and I actually thought he was my boyfriend. I can’t believe I fooled around with him. I can’t believe Dad never knew.

  Zoe glances up at me and misunderstands my raised eyebrows. “It’s true, Lou. I thought it’d be the best thing for you.”

  “Right,” I say. “Nothing to do with wanting to be free to write then? Nothing to do with wanting to focus on your career?”

  “Is that what your dad told you?”

  I nod.

  She brushes tears from her cheeks. “I might have told him something like that. The truth is that I panicked. I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep you safe. That I wasn’t—that I couldn’t—be a mother. My own mother wasn’t exactly a good role model.”

  My heart skips a beat. It feels like a kick in the chest. I’m talking to Alice, I realize. Sad, messed-up, abandoned Alice. For a brief moment, I can almost see her looking out of Zoe’s reddened eyes, and some of my anger dissolves and vanishes like snow in a river. “I read your book all wrong,” I confess, speaking quickly, before I can change my mind. “I thought Claire was you. Based on you.”

  Zoe’s hands fly up to her mouth. “You thought Claire was me? Why would you think that?”

  “I thought the things she said…about children being like parasites…I thought that was how you felt.”

  “God, Lou.” She looks horrified. “Claire’s character was based on my mother.”

  “I figured that out.” My hands are icy. I tuck them under the sheets and push them against my bare legs. I picture Heather’s mocking, gap-toothed grin and her narrow shoulders as she shuffled off down the rain-slick sidewalk into the night. “Zoe…” I met your mother. I talked to her. The words stick in my throat. “So your mom left when you were twelve? That part was true?”

  She nods. “When you said you’d read my book, I assumed you realized that.” She leans against the doorframe. “Alice was based on me, and the parts from her point of view are all true. I started out writing a memoir. It was going to be my story.” She lifts her shoulders in a rueful shrug, and gives a half-laugh. “Then I got caught up in Claire’s character and started writing from her point of view. Trying to make sense of my mother, I suppose. Cheaper than therapy.” She laughs, but it sounds bitter. “I wanted to understand why she left, who she was. To make some kind of sense of it by turning it into a story. Stories always make more sense than real life, don’t they? They have a completeness that reality seems to lack.”

  I’m struggling to follow, but she’s losing me. “So the parts about Claire, after she left, are those parts true?”

  Zoe shrugs. “It’s fiction,” she says. “Interpretation. Sp
eculation. I don’t know how my mother really felt. I was just a kid when she left.” She sighs. “I guess she’s the only one who knows if my story came close to the truth. Assuming she’s even read it.”

  “Have you talked to her about it? Asked her if you got it right?”

  “No.” She shivers and folds her arms across her chest. “I doubt she could tell me anyway. She’s not always the most coherent person.”

  “How come? I mean, what’s wrong with her?”

  Zoe shrugs again, hands turned up like she’s showing me they’re empty. “When she left, Dad told me that she was manic-depressive. Bipolar, I guess they say now.”

  Dad told me. Not, Dad told us. I want to ask about her brother, but I can’t. I don’t want her to guess I’ve been snooping in her files. “You think that’s right?” I ask instead. “That she’s bipolar?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know. Anyway, she’s a lot worse now than she was back then. I don’t know if it’s dementia, or street drugs, or just years of mental illness with no proper treatment.”

  I can’t say this, obviously, but Heather didn’t seem crazy to me. Strange, definitely, but not crazy.

  “When she showed up the first time, at that awards gala in the spring, she was drunk. She was rambling about cloud seeding and chemical trails in the sky. She said we were all being poisoned.” Zoe tugs at her necklace. “She said she came to warn me.”

  “Oh.” That sounds crazy, all right.

  “My mother can’t separate fact and fiction,” she says.

  Since both Zoe and I seem to have had problems of our own with this distinction, I don’t say anything.

  Finally Zoe sighs. “After you were born, I started wondering about her. I left Ontario, moved out west because I knew she’d grown up in Vancouver and thought she might have gone back there. I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve, and when I finally found her, she was living on the streets and not doing too well. I tried to help her. I found her an apartment, even paid her rent for a few months, which I certainly could not afford. I pulled strings to get her a job at a friend’s coffee shop. You know what she did?”