Escape Velocity

by Robin Stevenson

  Heather snorts. “Some way of showing it. You let him kill himself. You bought him that car. You admitted it yourself.”

  Zoe is crying now, silently, tears overflowing her eyes and streaking her cheeks with dark lines of mascara. Alice, I think, and a line from Escape Velocity suddenly comes to mind: As hard as I try, I can’t stop asking myself what I did to make my mother leave. What was it about me that made me so easy to abandon? Deep down, I know that there must be something terribly wrong inside me. I do not deserve to be loved.

  “Stop it,” I say. My voice is a frog-like croak. I clear my throat. “Stop,” I say again, getting to my feet. I point at Heather, and my hand is trembling. “You were the one who left your kids. You weren’t even there. So don’t try to blame my mom for anything that happened.”

  “Oh, now you know all about it, do you? Now you’re going to pass judgment?” Heather says. “You’re going to join her in blaming me for everything?”

  Zoe wipes her face roughly. “Just go, Mom,” she says. “I don’t want to fight with you, and we don’t seem to be able to do anything else.”

  Heather gets to her feet and shrugs like she couldn’t care less about any of this. “I could use a few bucks,” she says.

  “Fine.” Zoe crosses the living room and grabs her checkbook. “Last time, Mom. So don’t bother coming back.” She writes quickly, scrawls her signature, hands the check to Heather.

  Heather looks at it, and her eyebrows lift in surprise. “Well. That’s generous of you, Zoe.” She folds it in half before sticking it in her pocket. “I was thinking I might go back to Vancouver anyway. There’s a lot of flights over this city, and I’m pretty concerned about all the radiation.”

  “I wish you’d see a doctor,” Zoe says.

  “I have, I have.” Heather zips up her coat. “They don’t believe me about the radiation. The last one I saw, I think he worked for the government. I saw a letter on his desk. So I knew better than to trust anything he gave me.” She buries her hands in her pockets. “Didn’t even fill the prescription. I’m not that stupid.”

  Zoe opens her mouth as if she is about to say something. “Mom…” She stops. “Good luck. Take care of yourself.” She opens the door to let Heather out.

  I wave hesitantly, but Heather is gone without even a glance in my direction.

  Twenty-Two

  Zoe closes the door behind her and sinks onto the couch. She closes her eyes. “God.”

  “I’m really sorry.” Words feel worse than useless. “How much money did you give her?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “She’s horrible.”

  Zoe opens her eyes. “She isn’t well. That’s not her fault.”

  “I don’t mean the airplane stuff. I mean what she said about your brother.”

  “Tommy,” Zoe says. “My mother blames me. I blame her.” She sighs. “And I blame myself too.”

  “How does she even know about what happened?” I ask. “She wasn’t around by then, right?”

  “No, she’d been gone for six years. She left when I was twelve and Tommy was ten.” She laces her fingers together tightly. “I knew I should try to find her when Tommy died. To let her know. To tell her about the funeral. But I couldn’t face it. I didn’t want to see her, so I didn’t even try. Selfish, I suppose.”

  “You weren’t much older than me,” I say. “And you’d just lost your brother.”

  She shrugs. “When I found my mother in Vancouver, after you were born, I told her about Tommy. She was furious that no one had contacted her about the funeral.”

  “It’s not like she left you a phone number,” I protest.

  “I probably could have found her if I’d tried. Turned out I was right to be scared though. As soon as I told her what happened, she blamed me.”

  “But he was drinking and driving, right? How could you have stopped him doing that? Half the kids in my old school did that every weekend, and it’s not like their parents even knew.”

  “I bought him the car,” Zoe said.

  “You did? But you were only—what, eighteen?”

  “Our father died a couple of years after Mom left. He had pancreatic cancer.” She drops her eyes to her hands and is quiet for a moment. Then she clears her throat and looks at me. “It was really sudden. He was diagnosed a few weeks before I finished grade eight, and he was dead by the end of the summer.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yes. It was. I was fourteen, Tommy was twelve. We didn’t have any other family, so we ended up in foster care. A nice family, good people. They took in lots of kids.”

  The photograph. The picture of the mysterious family that I found in the file.

  “When I was eighteen, I was able to access some of the money Dad left us. And when Tommy turned sixteen, I bought him the car. An old beater, you know?”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  “I knew he drank sometimes. I did too. Everyone we knew did.”

  “It isn’t your fault,” I say. “If you bought me a car and I did something stupid and crashed it, it’d be my own fault, right?”

  “I do know that,” she says. “In theory.”

  I stand up, walk toward her and perch on the arm of her couch. “When Dad had the heart attack, I wondered if it was my fault.”

  Her eyebrows lift. “Why on earth would you think that?”

  “Because I’d been thinking about how much I hated Drumheller and my whole life there. I’d been thinking about wanting to get away. And then, twenty-four hours later, there I was on an airplane.”

  She looks confused. “But…”

  “I know,” I say. “It doesn’t make any sense. And I know Dad’s heart attack wasn’t really my fault. In theory, I know it.” Zoe looks at me steadily, keeping her eyes on me for so long, I start to blush and have to look away.

  “Lou? What I said to my mother about you being a great kid? I meant it.”

  I blink back tears and swallow hard. “You know how you said your own mom wasn’t a good role model?”

  She gives a rueful laugh. “You see what I mean now?”

  “Yes, but…” I shake my head. “That wasn’t what I was going to say. Just, well, I thought that finding her might help me understand more about why you didn’t want to be a parent. Why you left me with Dad, you know?”

  “Like I told you, I panicked.” Her forehead creases. “You know, I loved you. I loved you before you were born. Being pregnant wasn’t planned, and for me it was a bit of a disaster, because I was so determined to get a degree and be successful. Your dad wanted to marry me and do the family thing, but I was very career-focused, you know? I wanted to be a famous poet.” She laughs. “I had no idea that famous poet was a bit of an oxymoron.”

  “Yeah. I got that the pregnancy wasn’t planned. I mean, Dad has told me some of this stuff.”

  “But not how I felt, Lou. He hasn’t told you that. And I loved you. I loved being pregnant with you.” She twists her mouth to one side, and her voice is rueful. “I think I’d have kept you inside me forever if I could have.”

  “When did you decide not to keep me?” I am holding my breath.

  “I don’t think there was one particular moment. I remember your dad would try to make plans, try to get me to look at apartments with him, and I’d change the subject. I used to tell him to stop being such a worrier, that it would all work out.”

  Poor Dad. He’d have been no match for Zoe’s determination.

  Zoe looks at me. “I didn’t even let myself think beyond the pregnancy until I was actually in the hospital and delivering you.” She shakes her head. “Once you were born, I felt nothing at all. I was on autopilot, I suppose. I did what I had to do.”

  “Left me?”

  “I felt like I was protecting you. Keeping you safe from me.” She presses her hands to her face, covering her mouth with the tips of her long fingers. “I thought I was such a terrible person, Lou. My mother leaving, Tommy dying.”

  “Yes.”


  “It’s taken me years,” Zoe says. “I just added leaving you to the list of evidence that I was rotten to the core.” She forces a laugh. “How’s that for a cliché?”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say. “If anything, it was Heather’s. I can’t believe I was so desperate to meet her and she turned out to be so awful.”

  “Oh, Lou.” Zoe looks at me and suddenly starts to laugh. “She really is awful, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, she really is.”

  Zoe starts laughing harder, tears filling her eyes, and it’s that kind of laughter that is halfway to crying. I don’t see anything funny about any of this, but for some reason I start to laugh too. We’re both sitting here, side by side on the couch, laughing and crying, and I feel almost close to her. Connected.

  After a minute, Zoe sobers. “We shouldn’t laugh,” she says. She reaches out and touches my arm. “I guess she has her own story, you know?”

  “I guess she must have,” I say reluctantly.

  “I know,” Zoe says. “At some point, it becomes irrelevant, doesn’t it? I mean, how far back are you going to go, trying to find a reason for the way people are?”

  I stare at her for a minute and imagine blame snaking back through the generations. I imagine following the fragile twisting thread of it like a strand of fishing line, barely visible yet strong enough to pull us all in crazy, half-understood directions. I imagine retracing it through the years and finding explanations for Heather: a violent father, perhaps, a mother who drank herself into a stupor every night, a grandfather who crept into her bedroom.

  And maybe it’s nothing like that. Maybe it’s all chemical: an imbalance in the brain, not enough of one thing, too much of another. Bipolar depression. A mental illness that could have been treated. How would my mother’s life have been different if it had been? Would I even exist? “I don’t know,” I say at last. “I don’t know. I mean, if she’s mentally ill, does that mean none of the stuff she did is her fault? That she’s not responsible for any of it?”

  Zoe looks at me but doesn’t answer right away. Her eyes are shiny, and I can’t tell what she is thinking. After a long minute, she sighs. “I don’t know. And if she’s not responsible, do I even have a right to be angry?” She gestures helplessly. “I’ve gone around in circles, Lou. I’ve tried to get her help.”

  I reach out a hand toward her and brush her arm with my fingers. “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  I want to tell her I love her, but I don’t quite have the courage. I’m not even sure whether it’s true, not sure whether love is the right word for this tentative new feeling I sense between us. “Thanks,” I say instead.

  “For what?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Talking to me about this stuff, I guess.”

  “I should’ve told you a long time ago. When you started asking questions, I had the feeling you weren’t going to let it drop.” She grins at me and stands up. “You may have got your dad’s looks, but you got my determination.”

  “Was that what you meant earlier? When you said I had inherited something from you after all?”

  “Come on. I need to eat.” Zoe walks toward the kitchen and beckons me to follow. “Drive, determination, persistence, stubbornness. Whatever you want to call it.” She pushes the half-sliced melon to one side and takes a loaf of bread from a paper bag. “Toast?”

  I nod.

  “Garland wasn’t like that,” she says, dropping two slices of bread into the toaster. “He was a nice guy. Gentle, always kind and generous. But he didn’t like conflict. He’d rather give in than argue a point.”

  “He’s still like that,” I say. “He never wants to offend anyone. He had this girlfriend, Dana Leigh?” I glance up at her, unsure if this is okay to talk about, but she just nods. “And every time they’d have an argument, he’d be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, okay, you’re right.’ And then he wouldn’t change a thing.” I blow out a breath of frustration, remembering. “I mean, she really tried to make it work. She would’ve stuck around if he’d been willing to try.”

  “You liked her,” Zoe says.

  “Yeah. And she would have been really good for him. But”—I shrug—“after a while she figured out that nothing was going to change.”

  “Did things need to change much?” Zoe asks carefully.

  “Some things,” I say, shrugging again.

  Zoe frowns, her expression thoughtful, her words halting. “Lou. It’s none of my business. But if there’re problems, with your dad…other than his heart, I mean.”

  I bite my lower lip, wondering how much I should say.

  “You know about him hurting his back, right?”

  “That fall he had? I remember. You visited right after that.”

  That awful visit. “Well, he’s had a lot of pain,” I say.

  “And he’s been taking a lot of medication. That was what he and Dana Leigh used to fight about. The medication.”

  “Pain medication? What was he taking?”

  I picture the bathroom cabinet with its rows of plastic bottles. “Vicodin and Percocet, mostly. Plus Ativan. Plus whatever else he could get.”

  Zoe raises her eyebrows. “That’s pretty serious stuff. Addictive.”

  “Yeah. Dana Leigh told the doctors in Calgary. So maybe, you know, he’ll get some of that sorted out.”

  She looks at me, head tilted. “You sound doubtful.”

  “I don’t want to get my hopes up, you know?”

  “Yes.” Zoe hesitates. “You said something before about hating Drumheller. I assumed it was just the usual teen angst but…Well, are things okay with you and your dad? Otherwise?”

  Otherwise? Other than the fact that he hardly moves from the couch anymore, other than the fact that his life revolves around getting prescriptions filled, other than the fact that I have to take care of everything from the groceries to the laundry to the bills, other than the fact that Dad says he loves me but can’t remember what day my birthday is? I wonder what Zoe would say if I told her, No, actually things aren’t okay at all.

  Maybe she doesn’t really want to know, since she doesn’t wait for my answer. “When did you talk to him last anyway?” she asks. The toast pops up, and she puts one piece on a plate for me. “How is he doing?”

  “I talked to Dana Leigh last night. He’s doing okay.”

  “You want to call him?”

  “I guess I should.” I turn away from her, open the cupboard door and stare at the jars. Peanut butter? Raspberry jam? I don’t know if it is all the talk about Dad’s problems, or the letdown after all the drama of the last hour, but I feel suddenly flat, deflated, depressed. Last night I would’ve done anything to be on a bus heading to Alberta. Right now, though, I’m remembering how much I wanted to get away. I want Dad to get better—of course I do—but his recovery will mean it is time for me to return to Drumheller, to that hot little house, to my job at the World’s Biggest Dinosaur, to my classes full of kids who don’t talk to me, to those big empty skies.

  It will mean leaving my mother. And right now, I’m not sure that I want to.

  Twenty-Three

  After my mother heads out for an appointment downtown, her long coat flapping around her ankles and a gray felt hat tilted elegantly on her silky hair, I sit for a while in her living room and watch the dim afternoon light turn dusky. Finally I pick up the phone and call my father.

  “Lou? I was about to call you.”

  “Hi, Dad. How are you doing?”

  “Great.” He sounds surprised. “Pretty amazing, huh? They’re making arrangements for me to get transferred to a rehab hospital. Get this leg of mine working properly again.”

  “How’s the back?” I ask. What I mean is, How’re you managing without all those drugs?

  “Better than it’s been in a while, actually.” He clears his throat. “This heart-attack thing sort of puts some other stuff in perspective, you know? I’m quitting smoking, did I tell you that? It’s been a real wake-up call, as they s
ay.”

  Dad uses expressions like that all the time. I wonder if Zoe used to get on his case about it like she does with me. Personally, I don’t see what the big deal about clichés is. It’s just shorthand. Everyone knows what a wake-up call means, so why spend ten sentences trying to explain in a more original way? “Does that mean you’re feeling okay about stuff?” I ask.

  “Yeah, not too bad. Looking forward to getting back home. I miss you, kiddo.”

  I picture the living room, Dad’s couch, the TV always on, the ashtrays overflowing. “You’re really going to quit smoking?”

  “Haven’t been able to smoke since I’ve been here. So I guess I’ve already quit.” He laughs. “Course, it’ll be harder at home. Dana Leigh’s quitting too, to support me, she says.”

  “She doesn’t inhale anyway.”

  “I know.” He’s quiet for a minute. “She ever talk about me?”

  “Sure. If I ask her how you’re doing.”

  “I mean, when you were back here? At your job?” He sounds sort of embarrassed.

  “Dad. She has a boyfriend, you know.”

  He sighs. “I know. I really blew it, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah. You really did.”

  “She’s been up to visit a lot,” he says. “Been a good friend to me. Better than I deserve.”

  There’s a lump in my throat. There’s nothing I’d like more than for Dana Leigh to ditch Trevor and get back together with my dad. “A good friend is a nice thing to have,” I say lamely.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  He sounds so sad. “Dad? Here’s what you have to do, okay? Quit smoking, stay off the drugs, get healthy, be a good friend to Dana Leigh when her boyfriend rides away on his Harley and breaks her heart.”

  “You think he will?”

  I snort. “Of course he will.” Trevor seems like an okay guy, but the tattoos across his chest and running down his arms tell a story. Woven among the roses and serpents and skulls is his relationship history: Linda. Jennifer. Carla. Dolly. Christina.