The Sweetest One

by Melanie Mah

  He says he has to go, too. “But that was good, right?” he says. “The hangout?”

  Surprisingly good. It was fun, exciting. I do a reluctant diagonal nod, all cool like a breakdancer.

  “You gonna call me?” he says.

  He had to wreck it. I shrug, but Conrad keeps asking in different ways, like an enemy in wartime. Airplanes, soldiers, U-boats, tanks, and bombs.

  “Okay! Okay! Fine!” I say. “Are you happy?”

  “Do you promise?”

  I throw up my hands. “Okay! Whatever! Fine!”

  WHEN I GOT home, sadness creeps back in. It’s dead downstairs, so I go up to take a nap and read. Peter Pan’s just lost his shadow when I hear the door and my dad’s footsteps. There’s something comforting about those sounds. He’s in the kitchen by himself. No cupboards slamming, no chopping today. It occurs to me that when he’s not yelling or turning up the tv because he’s half-deaf, my dad is quiet. I like it.

  Pretty soon, he calls me to help with dinner. Walking down the hall to the dining room, I see: Trina’s pictures gone again. I rummage through the first few layers of stuff in the drawers and find nothing. I check the hallway shelves. Books, papers, and clothes, no pictures.

  My mom comes up, and I ask her where she’s put them. She walks by, acts like she didn’t hear me. I follow her to the kitchen, where she’s all excited, telling my dad about the German tourists who came in just now, what they said about the store, how much they spent. He pulls a plate of steaming fish from the wok. Fish is the only thing my mom can eat an entire portion of.

  I stop asking about the pictures. An unwritten rule: don’t talk about stuff with my dad around. He overhears and gets confused, tries to participate, gets mad sometimes. Doesn’t know that some talks don’t concern him. I grab bowls from the cupboard, start scooping rice, a heaping bowl for my mom, less for me, even less for my dad.

  My mom goes by with bone plates and chopsticks and I say, “Mom, wanna burn off your cold sore?” She doesn’t. Stef or Trina could’ve convinced her, though. It’ll make you feel better, Stef would’ve said. Do it. You’ll look better, Trina would’ve said. And it won’t hurt that much. “You’ll feel better,” I say. “Look better.”

  “No, thank you,” she says, overenunciating.

  After dinner, I check for Trina’s pictures in places I didn’t before. The garbage. The shelves in my room, the dresser in the girls’ room. Between and under mattresses, in the guest room. I find a few, amass a little pile, but there aren’t as many as there were before, and I can’t find any of the ones that were hanging. I check the downstairs garbage, the dumpster outside, my mom’s office, the filing cabinet. I go back upstairs, check my parents’ bedroom. No dice.

  My parents are in the living room with the tv on. That mini-series about the family, that one with Fei Fei. She’s fat, bold, funny — Hong Kong’s sweetheart. My dad’s asleep on the couch, unaware. I crouch down beside my mom, my voice low: “Mom, don’t mess around. What’d you do with the pictures?”

  “I’m keeping them.”

  “Why? So no one else can see them?”

  Her eyes back on the tv, but she’s not watching.

  “Where are they?”

  Fei Fei’s at a restaurant table, talking to a young couple, imparting a lesson with her forefinger raised.

  “Mom, where are they?”

  Jaunty music. Food has arrived. Fei Fei is sampling soup.

  “Did you throw them away?”

  Wow, it tastes really good! Fei Fei says.

  “Mom!”

  “Yes! I threw them away!”

  I go back to the hallway drawer, dump out the rest of the photos. I linger and find a few more of Trina. One of them was taken when she was a kid — like, seven or eight. We looked the same when we were younger. It’s like I’m holding a picture of myself. Trina. When you’re that age, do you have any idea who you’re going to be when you grow up, how much you’ll devastate other people by what you’ll end up doing?

  I take the pictures of Trina to my room and lock the door, put on my headphones, look through them. Trina and her friends at a studio shoot, glamorous, she in white shorts and a red silk shirt, permed hair. Trina in a pink wig and vintage dress in a park in Edmonton, last year. Trina at the wheel, on a road trip to Vancouver to see New Order. It’s sunny. She’s wearing a tank top, her new tattoo out for all to see. Squiggles in a frame. Birds. So many bruised and bleeding birds, all flying together.

  SOMETIMES A BAND can change your life. That’s the way it was for me with New Order. Before I got into them, I liked mostly bad music, cheesy eighties hits I’d learned from my siblings and things I’d heard on the radio. Tears for Fears, Eurythmics — that kind of stuff. Only three stations here, not including the cbc, and two of them feature an identical mix of heartsick tear-in-my-beer ballads and whose-bed-have-your-boots-been-under anthems. The third station plays mediocre rock.

  A few years ago, Trina and I were getting snacks, driving around. It was Sunday, our day off. The tape player was broken, which left the radio. I was riding shotgun eating cheese fries when this song came on that felt like spring. I opened my window and stuck my head out, filled my lungs with melty air. The song made me happy, sad, and nostalgic for a time I never had. It made me want to dance. Most songs don’t make me feel anything.

  It was “Regret” by New Order. To this day, I don’t know how it got on that station. A few weeks after I heard it, we were in Edmonton, and I bought some of their music as well as a British magazine that had them on the cover. That’s where I learned about Joy Division, the band New Order used to be.

  We left to see them on the morning of my sixteenth birthday. Trina woke me up at five a.m. and asked if I wanted to go on a road trip.

  “What?” I was annoyed.

  “Road trip. You and me. Wanna go?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  It wasn’t long after Gene had died. Eight months. I didn’t really wanna go, but I also kind of did. Trina and I hadn’t hung out in a while, so I was surprised she invited me. We packed bags and music for a couple of days, then woke our mom up to tell her we were going. I didn’t know about the New Order concert till we pulled up to the theatre. Trina wasn’t a fan of theirs. I still can’t believe she would do something like that for me.

  She made me drive a couple of times, even though I didn’t have a licence. I was scared, but it was great, fun, and the responsibility made me feel closer to her. She sat with me for twenty minutes the first time before going to sleep.

  It’s eleven hours to Vancouver if you don’t stop. Mountains. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road. And she didn’t just sleep the whole time. We ended up talking a fair bit about our parents, our siblings, ourselves — old stories we loved, our hopes for the future. I told her not to smoke and she said, “There’s nothing I can do about that.” We were quiet some-times, and sometimes there was music. We took a walk through the Kootenay Plains. Weird patchy grass, mountains rising around us like we were standing in a massive bowl, cars zooming by, a terrible, menacing sound when you’re outside and twenty feet away. “Stef died around here,” Trina said. We stopped at fruit stands, diners, and roadside monuments. Radium Hot Springs. She met and hung out with some guy there for, like, an hour. I thought, What about Kirk? We saw clouds on the horizon and drove towards them. Vancouver.

  The concert was great. She bought me a shirt. I thought things were going to be good after that. Looking back I wonder, why did I think that?

  JOY DIVISION COMES on through my headphones. “Atmosphere.” A perfect song for now. I fuck everything up. Ty at the party, me on the bridge. What did I wanna do there? Who walks on the train tracks? Will I ever find Trina? She left, after all. Wanted to leave. My mom got rid of her pictures. Maybe she was onto something.

  The song changes to “Disorder.” Sparse, echoing drums, high, fast bass. It makes me wanna dance. Shimmering, dirty guitar like an organ. My shoulders and hips tick to the
drums like I’m being electrocuted. Ian Curtis, the singer, was known for the way he danced. He had epilepsy, sometimes he had fits onstage. People watching thought he was crazy, dying. My head thrashes side to side like I’m refusing everything, like I’m some ugly, hated punk rock kid in a dirty, little club in the seventies. Hair swinging in my eyes. No future. This is my crazy dance. He sings about disconnection, but when I hear it, I feel connected to everything. Guitars like rain dripping on cobblestones at night somewhere in Europe and you’ve just arrived. The song starts on a high point, gets higher, and I dance harder, spin around as I sing along, loud. I thrash around like everything depended on it instead of nothing, I kick and spin faster and faster, my limbs everywhere like I’m not in control of my body. Around and around and around and around.

  Then no music. Did it finish? Someone’s banging on the door. My head hurts. Hard. I feel around with my hands. Hard and dirty. I’m on the floor. “Yeah?” I yell half-heartedly, but the banging keeps on. I lay my head back down. Screaming headache. I touch the back of my head and there’s blood on my hand. Pounding on the door. “WHAT!”

  Muffled voice, my mom. “Chrysler?” Lighter knocking. “Chrysler?”

  “Mom?”

  She keeps knocking so I get to my knees, lightheaded, grip the side of the mattress and haul myself up. Collapse on the bed. Toilet paper on the nightstand because we’re too cheap for Kleenex. I grab some, hold it to the back of my head. “Just a sec!” I call out and look at it. Lots of blood. I limp to the door — my hip hurts — and open it. My mom with a worried look on her face. “What’s up?” I ask, aiming for alert but casual. It’s hard to stand.

  “Everything okay?” she asks.

  Hide the damage. “Uh, yeah. I just fell.” But the ache in my head is like my tongue on a battery. I try resting on the doorframe but miss, slip, end up crashing into her. She almost falls, but she’s stronger than she looks. Tissue on the lino floor, red blotch like a Rorschach test. Her hand on her mouth. I pull myself back up. “Mom, it’s nothing,” I say. “Just a nosebleed.”

  She’s usually gullible, but the lie is bad. She calls my dad, who looks in my nose, finds the split in my head instead. He half-supports, half-drags me down the outside hall past the clothing room, where my mom tries to share a bit of the load by pulling up on my belt loops and giving me a wedgie.

  At the top of the stairs, weak and whiny, I tell my dad I’m cold and my mom runs to get me a coat. My dad and I try to navigate the stairs but they’re not wide enough for two. I take more of my own weight because I don’t want to push him down, but it’s killing my hip. “I’ll meet you down there,” I say, and sit. Old wood. Tired. I close my eyes, lean back, and the angles dig in. My head. Silence for a while, then creaking. It gets louder. Something on my stomach, on my back, and then I’m being hoisted in the air, light like a leaf in the wind.

  It’s cold for a while and then there are voices. Movement. Something goes around my arm, squeezing tighter and tighter. Something on me, blankets, but it’s still cold. Voices. I’m on my stomach. Something’s touching my head, wrapping around it. Then I’m being rolled onto my back — my hip — something’s in my mouth, around my finger, biting at my arm.

  I wake up in a dark room, head heavy, a doorway lit yellow, white figures walking by. Am I dead? I lift my legs and arms, wiggle my fingers and toes. I can move.

  A woman with a pen and clipboard walks in. “Oh. You’re awake.” Light goes on, blinds me. She says they’ve put stitches in my head, asks me what my name is, how old I am, what town I was born in, what I did on Friday.

  “Went to a party.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Is this some kind of test?” I say.

  “We’re just checking your cognitive skills.”

  “Three, then.”

  “Good.” She holds up a finger, tells me to follow it with my eyes. She draws a cross, then drops her pen. I catch it. She doesn’t even say thanks. “I’m going to say three words,” she says. “I want you to remember them.”

  “Okay.”

  “Random. Faith. Pronunciate.” She says it with a straight face.

  “You mean pronounce?”

  “Pronunciate.”

  “I hate to be a smartypants,” I say, “but I don’t think pro-nunciate’s a word. It’s either pronounce or enunciate.”

  The corners of her mouth pull back. It’s not a smile. “Congratulations, Chrysler,” she says. “You just made a doctor feel stupid.”

  Doctor. “Where are my parents?”

  “I sent them home. You’re gonna spend the night here.”

  I’ve never spent a night at the hospital before. When the doctor leaves, fear sets in. The building’s public, open twenty-four hours, anyone can come in. There’s no security. I check the closet, under the bed. No one there, so I lock the door — then unlock it again. What if there’s something still in here? I go back to the bed, then tell myself a story to stay awake.

  8

  *

  MY OLDEST BROTHER Reggie was odd. He had an existence I now know was typical of child geniuses, but back then, we had no explanation.

  He did things like win the National Math Award and the science fair four years in a row. There were stories in the newspaper about him — some of them even had pictures. We taped them up on the fridge. One, from May 19, 1991, shows a seventeen-year-old Reggie holding up this giant check with some tall guy in a suit, who the caption says is a representative of the Power Corporation. Reggie’s got this serious look on his face, like they forgot to tell him to smile before taking the picture.

  “Why didn’t you smile?” we asked.

  “Aren’t I smiling?” he replied.

  Gene’s finger on the newsprint photo. “No, man. You’re not smiling at all.”

  We were a family of jokers. We’d do things like surprise each other on the can with a camera, put chicken bums and heads on each other’s dinner plates, leave weird things in each other’s stockings on Christmas Eve — a black banana, some dusty toy found abandoned on a shelf, crumpled pages from a porno. Reg hardly ever laughed. He’d just pull a thawed fish or whatever from his stocking, say What’s this? and move on to the next thing. Either that or he’d get mad. Reg had a temper. He once threw a set of keys at Stef when she came home late one night while my parents were away. Left a triangle of holes in the drywall. And where each of us had our little obsessions — Stef with the outdoors and our family; Gene with girls, art, and basketball; Trina with boys, clothes, and music; and me with reading and being weird — all Reggie had as outside interests were the dictionary and advanced science texts, and he probably only read those for academic benefit.

  How do you know when the quiet person in your family starts feeling sad about life? His unhappiness crept up like cancer, unseen at first, then visibly manifesting the year he turned seventeen. Cheering Reggie up became the big family project. We each made a point of saying something nice to him every day, things like Reggie, you’re going to do so much someday, or Have you been working out? We bought him weekly lime misties from the Dairy Burger — his favourite — and over Christmas we let him win all the games, even our favourites like Crazy Eights and Taboo.

  We kept on with our practical jokes, though, we just didn’t play them on Reggie. We put a fake cockroach under the covers of Trina’s bed four nights in a row, and pretended Old Rick Jones had the hots for Gene. We cracked ourselves up and even made our parents laugh. Reggie just watched us, though, like who are these people and where is my real family of astrophysicists and Model un participants?

  I’ve tried to figure out why he was like that. Birth order, maybe. We all had our theories about what was wrong with him. Trina thought it was about school ending, thought he might be sad about leaving town for university. Stef worried he wasn’t doing as well as he wanted to academically. “You’re a high achiever already,” she’d say. “You’ve got the best marks in your year. What else do you want?”

&nb
sp; Gene’s idea was simpler. He thought Reggie was lonely, so he drew up a plan he called “stud coaching.” It was a twelve-step program tailor-made to get girls to like Reggie. We didn’t think he could pull it off, though, since it was obvious that Gene got girls’ attention without actually trying — even after he got sick and began occasionally walking with a limp. It’s amazing how popular he was despite that. It could have been because he was handsome and tall and used his weight machine religiously when he was feeling well. Plus, he had a real talent for art — these chaotic pencil and ink drawings of skulls, needles, and shards of glass — and a brash confidence only sometimes shaken by his health problems. If I wasn’t so scared for him, I’d have thought the way his limp transformed his walk looked cool.

  Unlike Gene, Reggie was pale, skinny, and socially awkward — things that took us a while to realize. Love and familiarity are strange that way: they blind you to a person’s flaws.

  Still, according to Gene, the twelve-step plan was about “distilling the essence.” Steps one to six related to hygiene. Gene tried hard to be tactful about the benefits of regular showering and tooth-brushing. One morning before school, I saw them in the bathroom together. Reggie was taking notes, engrossed in Gene’s every move like he was the younger brother. Gene raised his arms one at a time, spraying his pits with Preferred Stock. “See that, my man? Chicks love it. Pheromones! Works for butterflies, it’ll work for you.” It sounded like a bad sales pitch, but Reggie wrote wildly, underlined and drew asterisks in his notebook. He came home from school that day with a bottle of Old Spice, and Stef let him reek like the high seas for half a week before she intervened.