Here So Far Away

by Hadley Dyer

  Bill and I weren’t doing a good job of holding our faces in check. In fairness, it wasn’t always clear when Nat was trying to be funny.

  Lisa glowered at us and stroked Nat’s hair. “You shouldn’t have led Joshua on if you weren’t interested,” she said. “Keith is so pissed.”

  “How did I lead him on? By standing next to him at a party? Letting him drive me home?”

  “Leaving his girlfriend behind without a ride, kissing him . . .”

  I’d been betting that Joshua wouldn’t tell Keith any of it, never mind the kissing part, and I could see Lisa was doubly pissed that I hadn’t told her myself.

  “You said she wasn’t his girlfriend. He said she wasn’t his girlfriend.”

  “Duh. He lied,” Bill said.

  I guess I knew that, but I didn’t have to admit it.

  “Well, that is news to me. Also, technically? He kissed me. Which was . . . it was . . .”

  Lisa was giving me the eyebrow, not blinking, not getting it.

  Sid would have. Bill did. “Bad breath? Biter? Did he lick around the outside of your mouth?”

  Nat propped her head up on her arm to look across the table at him. “You really have to break up with Tracy.”

  “Not Tracy. Remember Becky, the cocker spaniel from hockey camp? My mouth, my nose, my ears.” He leaned over until his face was nearly touching mine. “So, what was it, little snake darts? Nasty hiss-hiss coming at you? Hiss-hissssssss—”

  I shook him by the shirt collar until he was all hissed out. “Anaconda tongue, you jackass.”

  “That’s it?” Lisa said. “Oh—phew!”

  “No phew,” I said. “How did we get to phew?”

  “You can rehabilitate a bad kisser.”

  “Hell no,” Bill said. “You can take mediocre to okay, and you can get from okay to some approximation of the fundamentals of good, but you’ll never get from bad all the way to good. Right, Nat?”

  “If you ain’t got no rhythm, ain’t no one gonna teach you to dance.”

  “Exactly. Homegirl.”

  “Geo-or-or-orge,” Lisa groaned. “We’re talking about a love story more than a decade in the making. Are you going to walk away because of one bad kiss?”

  In a word: “Yup.”

  “That’s cold-blooded, even for you.”

  “But good news for the Face,” Nat said. “Who, by the way, is coming over.”

  I twisted the soreness from my morning run out of my back and glanced behind us. Christina was leaving three tables of Elevens, who all watched as she strode toward us. She was a tiny thing—pipe-cleaner legs, dirty-blond hair down to her waist, razor cheekbones. She could cut a person. Would. And I had sort-of stolen her sort-of boyfriend in front of half the school. That was a big shack party.

  We were starting senior year as the reigning popular group, as you define it at a country high school. We’d inherited it. In eleventh grade, pre-Keith, Lisa had dated a senior, captain of the basketball team, and the rest of us got pulled along with her. They graduated, we got bumped up, she dumped the old captain for the new captain, simple as that. We were set to be the most benevolent and boring ruling class of any high school ever. We weren’t bullies, didn’t get up in anyone’s face. People liked us. We spent most of our time doing exactly what we were doing at that moment—making each other laugh and/or ganging up on someone for their own good—and we collectively gave only enough of a crap about where we stood not to give it up.

  But the new Elevens cared. They were a large group, slitty-eyed girls and thickheaded boys. Always posturing, always too loud, always lip-curling, slow-moving, filling as much space as possible. They could not wait until we were out of the way.

  I wasn’t worried about what this Joshua stuff might mean for us, but I could sense Lisa’s nerves the way she could sniff a lie as I exhaled it. She was, after all, my top-tier friend, and she’d been looking forward to senior year since kindergarten, when she started transforming herself from a frizzy-haired bundle of ugly duckling into the second coming of Molly Ringwald, Breakfast Club edition. Plus, she and Keith had gotten caught between me and the Tongue and the Face. So when Christina stopped at our table and said, loudly enough to be heard by her friends, “What’s wrong, George? Sex injury?”—I wasn’t having it.

  I stood up so I was towering over her and stretched my back again, nice and easy. “Yeah,” I said, “but, baby, I’m good to go again if you are.”

  It wasn’t one of my better lines, but in the pause that followed, I learned something about Christina Veinot: she wasn’t up for a quick comeback. That left her with pretending to laugh or being humorless and earnest, and her group didn’t do earnest. They learned that from us. She went with a small head shake and faint smile, like we were a couple of gal pals exchanging quips. “Well, say hi to Joshua for me,” she said, the hardness gathering again behind her eyes.

  It didn’t take much—just a fragment of movement, just the suggestion of a step in her direction. “George!” Lisa said.

  But I was already sitting down, having gotten what I wanted from the Face.

  She’d flinched.

  “You have no filter,” Nat said as we watched Christina retreat to the ladies’ room.

  Bill finished noisily vacuuming up the last of his float. “George has no . . . Dude, you’ve never had a period that I did not know about.”

  “Not having a filter means you say everything,” Lisa said. “George will say anything.”

  That’s what made them a little afraid of me, the Elevens, what made me the enforcer of our group. The girl version. I mean, I was wearing a delicately beaded yellow cardigan over my Tito Jackson T-shirt.

  “Only to the Elevens,” I said.

  Three

  I dreamt all night about eating wet, sour sausages, and when I woke up, with a start, realized I’d forgotten to brush my teeth. I did remember to wear my running clothes to bed, the surest way to get my arse out the door on a Sunday morning, but the gloomy sky outside my bedroom window was begging me to burrow deeper into the covers.

  “George? George!”

  I leaned in the doorway of my parents’ room. The Sergeant was sitting up in bed wearing an old RCMP training depot T-shirt, his reading glasses, and a skirt of newspapers.

  “You can’t get out of bed to yell at your beloved daughter?”

  He glared as he swung his leg out from under the covers and thunked it on top of the papers. The skin sewn over the place where his foot used to be was chafed and purple, angry-looking. A double row of black stitches circled his leg, just below his calf.

  “You can’t put a nice sock on your stump for your beloved daughter?”

  “My cast fell off,” Dad said. “Now, if you’re all wrung out of concern, go over to the dresser and get that stack of bills and the checks and a pen. And my cigarettes.”

  In my defense, had I said something more sympathetic, Dad would have batted it away. We were alike in that respect, two cats who only wanted to crawl under the bed and be left to suffer alone. He didn’t seem to be in pain, though who could tell? For weeks he’d walked on a foot that was dying before he would admit where the smell was coming from.

  “How does a cast fall off?” I asked as I collected everything. “Were you dancing the shimmy?”

  “The swelling went down all of a sudden. I was taking a whiz when I felt it slip. It was grab it or graffiti the wall. I protected the wall.”

  “Had to be a hero.”

  “Your mother’s fond of that wall.”

  I placed his things on the bedside table and took in the leg situation. Though the skin was irritated, the stump itself had a surprisingly soft look. It was flattish across the bottom with rounded edges, like a Nerf baseball bat. “Dad,” I said casually, lest a cat claw shoot out from under the bed, “do you think it’s okay for it to be out in the open like that already?” He’d been home from the hospital for just over a week.

  “We’re waiting for the doctor to call back and say
whether the local ER can put on a new one or we have to drive into the city.” He pointed to the end of the bed. “Sit. We’re overdue for a discussion.”

  For the past thirty-two hours I’d been nursing a false hope that for once Dad would let something slide, as though they’d removed his personality with his foot. “If this is about Friday night, I missed curfew by five minutes, max,” I said, perching on Mum’s side, which was tucked in already, her slippers neatly aligned with her bedside table.

  “It was twelve twenty-seven and that was not Lisa’s car. You think things are going lax around here because I’m short an appendage?”

  My eyes drifted back to the stump then to the crusted-over cut on Dad’s forehead. He’d fallen getting out of bed a couple of nights earlier, having forgotten the foot wasn’t there anymore. It was hard to fathom how you could fail to remember such a thing, even while groggy on meds, even for a second.

  “Well?”

  “Joshua Spring drove me home.”

  “Ah, the Springs. I had to pull his mother over twice for driving under the influence.”

  “Just because his mother—look, he drove me because Lisa has a one-o’clock curfew, like a normal person. He has a girlfriend.”

  Sort of.

  Mum appeared in the doorway, carrying a stack of linens. “His father had a wife, but that didn’t stop him from getting frisky with the dental hygienist,” she said. “Oh, Paul, I can pay those bills. You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “I’m sitting. Aren’t you supposed to be going somewhere with those sheets?”

  Mum looked down at the linens in her arms. “I am.”

  When she’d gone, Dad said, “I’m giving you Abe. As soon as I can talk your mother into taking the Honda.”

  I almost rolled off the bed. Borrowing my parents’ cars required heavy negotiations unless I was driving to work, and Abe was Mum’s baby, a secondhand 1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car. It was a ridiculous vehicle—tan colored, size of a small apartment, impossible to park—but Mum was convinced it was safer than Dad’s little Honda, even though she was always clipping things with that wide-ass hood.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t know what to say?”

  “I mean, thanks. Really, thanks.”

  “Well, let’s face it, kiddo. You’ll be doing a lot more of the driving while I’m laid up, helping your mother and brother. It’s only fair. But no more missing curfew. You have a car and no excuses. And hear me now: no bringing babies into this house.”

  “Wha— Where would I get a baby?”

  “You get pregnant, you’re on your own. I’m not your aunt Joanna, running a day care for her offspring’s offspring.”

  “Oh my god, Dad!” The unexpected sight of the empty cast lying on a chair in the corner of the room brought my voice down a few octaves. “I was only a half hour late.”

  And my slutty phase was ten months ago, thank you, not to be revisited.

  “Kids your age, on the brink of being sprung from high school, they decide the world has nothing left to teach them. This is your idiot year. You’ll never be stupider in your life.” He lit a cigarette. “Do me a favor and fetch that ashtray from the guest room before the rest of me gets incinerated.”

  I paused at the door. “Is that what the hospital did with your foot?”

  “No, they mounted it on the wall.”

  Before his surgery, the only place my father was allowed to smoke was in the basement with the door closed. There wasn’t supposed to be an after location.

  Mum was making up the bed in the guest room. “Did you know that Dad is smoking in— Who’s coming over?”

  “No one,” she said. “I’m moving in here for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your father is smoking in our bedroom. Don’t fuss about it, hey. The doctor doesn’t want him quitting just yet.”

  “I’m pretty sure he said that smoking could damage his blood vessels. Oh, and kill him.”

  “And later he said he’d never seen someone go through a more violent withdrawing than your father when he was in the hospital. Now. George.”

  Now period George period meant Pay attention.

  “Dad’s got pain enough. We’re not putting him through detoxivacation”—not a typo; this is how my mother talks—“at the same time. Soon he’ll be able to make it down to the rec room, and then maybe he’ll be in a mood to quit.”

  Mum raked a hand through her hair, which was dark and wavy like mine but coarser and aggressively pruned into a no-nonsense, silver-streaked cap. Her attention had drifted to the window. “Should have done something different in the garden this year. One day I’ll rip the whole thing out and start over.” She sighed. “I say that every year.”

  Down the hallway, a loud thud. “George!” Dad bellowed.

  “Go on, see what he dropped,” Mum said. She handed me the gigantic spleen-like ashtray I made for Dad in first grade. “And give him this before he gets ashes on the bed. I’ll be there in a sec.”

  My younger brother, Matthew, was lying unconscious on the carpet of my parents’ bedroom. “Did he see the stump?” I asked Dad, nudging Matty with my toe.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he might have seen a stump.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Mum said, pushing past me into the bedroom. “Did he faint, Paul? What are you two doing, just watching him?”

  “Here, put him on the bed with me,” Dad said, clearing away the newspapers.

  “I don’t think bringing him closer to it is going to help.”

  “It’s what they call exposure, Marlene. He has to confront his fears. What would you rather, drag him all the way to his own bed?”

  When Matthew came around, next to Dad—who’d tucked his leg back under the covers—he was the yellowy pale of raw chicken. At fifteen, my brother had a Victorian constitution that was unlike anyone else’s in our gene pool. He passed out at the sight of blood. He’d been known to pass out at the thought of blood. Or vomit. Or mucus. Or earwax. Or hair in his food. He fainted at the hospital watching Dad get prepped for surgery. Later, in the cafeteria, remembering Dad getting prepped for surgery, his pupils one-eightied and he slid gently under the table.

  “Did you dream?” I asked him. Matthew had once said that being out for a minute or two was like being asleep for hours, with vivid dreams, sometimes nightmares.

  He shook his head and pointed in the direction of Dad’s leg. “Are you going to take it out again?” he asked.

  “I’m not cruel,” said Dad. “Don’t mean it ain’t there. Aw, son, don’t start crying now.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s so unfair.”

  “What is? The partitioning of my foot and myself?”

  He looked at Dad incredulously. “A pebble.”

  My father cut his toe on a sharp pebble at the beach. He didn’t notice it at first because the feeling in his feet wasn’t great from the diabetes, ignored the cut when he did find it, ignored the infection that developed in the cut, ignored the gangrene-like symptoms that spread from the infection, and then faster than you can say transtibial amputation, the doctor was telling him the whole foot and ankle had to go.

  This was the first time his bad habits had seriously caught up to him. He’d been living like he was on a campaign to do himself in as quickly as possible without using a traceable weapon. Smoking? Check. Buttered donuts? Check. Exercise? Please. And he got away with it too. He passed every health test those Royal Canadian Mounted Police threw at him, year after year. You’d think getting diabetes would have smartened him up, except, so what? Have your slice of pie, or three, since Mum’s already shoving a needle of insulin into you. On the days he’d let her, that is, because he didn’t like the side effects and often couldn’t be bothered. Then he gave himself a teensy cut.

  “Fair is for sports and the application of the law and not much else,” Dad said. “Life’s a bad writer, son. So this is what’s happening
. I’m going to pay the bills. Your mother is going to drive me to one hospital or another—”

  “Local,” Mum said. “I called the doctor again. But we’ll have to go into the city Friday afternoon.”

  “I’m paying the bills. Your mother is driving me to the local ER. George is getting ready for work. And you, son, you will practice the tuba, as you always do, get ahead on your recommended reading list for school, as you always do, moonwalk through high school, graduate at the top of your class, and save us all.”

  That my father talked like this about Matthew all the time, that Matthew didn’t even have a curfew because he was too reliable and socially awkward to need one, had gnawed at me forever, but for once I didn’t care. Because a Friday afternoon trip to the city meant my parents would stay over with Aunt Joanna and her offspring and her offspring’s offspring so Mum wouldn’t have to drive home in the dark. And there was already talk of a shack party next week, and I desperately needed to kiss someone to replace the memory of Joshua Spring’s tongue. And I now had a car.

  Four

  After I polished all the windows and threw open the wooden shutters to let in the sun that was burning off the rain clouds, I stood on the steps of the hundred-year-old lighthouse, took a cigarette pack out of my pocket, and thought about the day when my friends and I would move far away from the valley, with its pastoral, old-world charm and soul-sucking tedium.

  There wasn’t a drop of water to be seen: the north mountain stood between the lighthouse and the bay. Farmland stretched in all directions, across the valley and up the slopes. It was as though the lighthouse had gotten lost on its way to the ocean, or maybe took one look at the eighty miles of volcanic range blocking its path and given up. In fact, it had been brought inland from a tiny island that was eroding. Some historian types had it taken apart and moved it to this fallow plot, then put it back together again with the help of the East Riverview shop classes. I was the keeper, the only staff member, with volunteers from the heritage society filling in the gaps.