Finding Cassidy

by Laura Langston

  “I thought you’d be upset,” Mom said.

  “If I am, I’d better get over it.” He cracked his gum between his teeth and gave her a lopsided smile. “It’s not like I’m going to be around for most of Cassidy’s life. Somebody might as well be.”

  He didn’t understand. “I’m not trying to replace you!” Just because Frank wasn’t my father didn’t mean I could replace him like…like the wrong colour blush. “I just want…to know some stuff.”

  “You have every right to know,” Frank said. “I’m behind you 110 per cent.”

  “I…uh…want to get my DNA on file, too.” And Jason’s. But voicing that thought might lead to questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.

  “One thing at a time,” Mom said. “Let’s deal with the clinic first. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

  Frank gave her a look. “I don’t think so, Grace. If Cassidy gets serious about someone and there’s any question at all about his paternity…” He shrugged slightly. “It’s probably a good idea.”

  Clearly my emotional reserves were running at about minus fifty, because instead of making me happy, Frank’s support choked me up. While he and Mom discussed the pros and cons of registering DNA, I had to leave the room. I couldn’t stay and listen.

  Call me stupid, call me irrational—Lord knows, Jason had called me everything else—but it would have been easier if Frank had gotten mad about the search. Or had opposed my DNA plan. I could’ve gotten mad right back. We could have yelled at each other, and I would have been upset, and then I could have gone off and found something else to cut up.

  Instead I felt bad about the stupidest thing.

  I felt bad because Frank MacLaughlin wasn’t my real dad. And I wanted him to be—even though I would have been at risk of getting Huntington’s.

  At least then I would have belonged to him. And he would have belonged to me.

  And dying is way easier to face when you belong to someone.

  I dreaded Monday morning. And it turned out I had lots to dread.

  First, Frank spooked me silly before I left for school. As I wolfed down my cereal and talked about stuff, he wouldn’t answer. He just stared at me, all vacant in the eyes, like a body without a soul. Mom said he was tired, said he’d been up half the night. Her voice must have snapped him back because his vacant look disappeared, and he nodded and agreed as if he’d been present all along.

  But I knew better. And the whole experience creeped me out.

  Then there was school. Things were uneventful until lunch. They might have stayed uneventful the whole day if I’d been smart enough to keep a low profile, maybe hide out under the seat of my car or something.

  However, I’d refused to hide the week before, and I wouldn’t skulk around now. Especially since I was hungry. I could have headed to the mall, but it was a wet, miserable day. Who wanted to go outside and get soaked? Nobody, apparently. Which is why the entire student body had gathered outside the cafeteria.

  I expected Jason to be there. And while a part of me wanted to avoid him, another part wanted to see him.

  Initially, all I saw as I pushed through the crowd was a mass of bodies. But then I heard Yvonne’s laugh, followed by Prissy’s high-pitched voice. I turned the corner and they were there, just past the pop machine.

  Yvonne was slopped all over Jason’s shoulders and arms like jam slathered on toast. I mean, she was everywhere.

  Well, not there, but everywhere else.

  She caught my eye and smirked. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it.

  She sure hadn’t wasted any time.

  Mike saw me next. He nudged Jason, who glanced over, paled and immediately shrugged away from Yvonne. For a minute I thought he was going to come over, but when the rest of the crowd turned their collective eyes on me, he froze.

  There was nothing Jason liked less than an audience. Unless it was obsessive, melodramatic women.

  I fled. Maybe the only place worth going was under the seat of my car. I gave myself a mental talking-to.

  Don’t be so upset. Jason isn’t your guy anymore. He might be your half-brother instead. As if that was a comforting thought.

  “Hey, slow down,” Quinn called as I sprinted up the stairs to my locker. The bandage was off her foot, but she still moved like a turtle. “What’s the rush? The bell hasn’t rung.”

  “Something’s come up.” I dug around for my law book, determined to get today’s assignment and leave. The last thing I needed was another sighting of Jason with Yvonne.

  Quinn leaned against the wall munching a sandwich. I smelled cream cheese. Maybe onion. My stomach growled. “Tonight’s the night,” she said softly.

  I frowned. What was she talking about, tonight’s the night? Yvonne was slopped all over Jason. Was tonight the night for them? “Look, Quinn, I’m a little busy, okay?” I wanted to get out of the school before Yvonne wandered up to the second floor. “I have to go.” I gave her a quick, apologetic glance, noting the healthy colour on her cheeks, the neat little scab on her head. She’d bounced back pretty quickly from her dunk in the lake.

  “Tonight’s the night for the geese. Come on, Cass. Help me out.”

  Tonight’s that night. Oh, man. Talk about timing. I grabbed my book and binder, shut my locker, fastened the lock. “I don’t know. The timing sucks.” More than you know.

  Quinn followed me down the hall, eating the last of her sandwich as she walked. Then she pulled a paper sack out of the canvas bag she carried over her shoulder and extended it to me. “Mom always makes too many. Want one?”

  My stomach gave another tell-tale growl. Murmuring my thanks, I took it. It was salmon, cream cheese and onion, and it was delicious. “You don’t have to do anything,” Quinn said. “Just keep an eye out while I do the”—she lowered her voice—“the actual removal.”

  “It’s pouring rain.” I glanced pointedly at her infamous sandals. “And the forecast is for more of the same.” I picked up my pace.

  “That’s what makes it so perfect,” Quinn replied. “Nobody will be watching tonight. Security will be practically non-existent. Come with me.”

  It was the kind of logic she used on me for years. I realized then that I’d missed it. Missed her. But I had more important things on my mind than geese. “I don’t think so.”

  Annoyance flashed across her face. “I need your help with this, Cass. You said it yourself the other day—nature can right itself, but not if man keeps messing with its rhythms.”

  If my mother hadn’t messed with the rhythms of nature, I wouldn’t be here. I wasn’t sure if the thought made me feel better or worse.

  A familiar burst of laughter floated down the hall. We both turned. It was Yvonne and Prissy and Mike and everybody. Jason too. He hadn’t seen us. But we’d both seen Yvonne doing another slop job all over his shoulders.

  “Yvonne’s with Jason?” Quinn’s eyebrows flew into the stratosphere. “What’s up with that?”

  Quinn had come down with the flu shortly after we’d done the chat room together. I hadn’t talked to her since. “We’re over.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.” Unbelievable but true. Jason laughed as Yvonne tickled his neck. I’d like to tickle her—to death. Unable to watch anymore, I turned back to Quinn.

  “Some things are worth fighting for.” Her gaze was directed over my shoulder at Jason and Yvonne. “I’ve said that for years.” When I didn’t answer, she looked back at me and added, “Maybe you should start with the geese and work up to the big stuff.”

  The big stuff. She meant Jason. But how could I fight for a guy who didn’t understand me? That was like a major no-win situation. I slipped into the law room out of sight of slop girl. “Okay, I’ll go with you tonight.” Anything to forget the sight of Jason with Yvonne. “I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty. And, Quinn?” She peered around the corner at me, a question in her huge brown eyes. “Make sure you wear pants and boots.”

  She frowned. “Boots?�
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  “The ground’ll be muddy after all the rain. You don’t need to fall again.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  I suppressed a sigh and headed for the law teacher. Quinn had brains, but not enough smarts to wear the right kind of shoes. Luckily for her, I was around.

  “Jason called,” Mom said when I arrived home after four.

  I’d spent almost three hours at the library. The homework had taken less than an hour. Trying to find books on how to steal a DNA sample from an ex-boyfriend had taken the rest of the afternoon.

  “He wants you to call.” Mom shredded carrots into a bowl.

  “Sure.” I had no intention of calling Jason Perdue, a.k.a. Traitorous One Who Might Possibly Share DNA. I tossed my bag onto a kitchen chair and pawed through the fridge for something to eat. “How’s Frank?”

  “Okay.” Mom hesitated as if she wanted to elaborate, but then she said, “Dinner’s early tonight. Your father has a council meeting and I’m going back to the store to do the books.”

  “Works for me.” More than you know. I emerged with a block of cheddar, grabbed the cutting board from the drawer and began to slice. “Did you call Cypress Hills?” After Frank’s little freak-out routine this morning, Mom had walked me out to the car, reassuring me—reassuring herself?—that Frank was fine. “He needs more sleep,” she had kept saying. “That’s all it is.”

  I’d changed the subject, partly because I didn’t want to consider the possibility that Frank was already getting worse and partly because I didn’t want her to forget her promise to make the call. “Did you?” I repeated.

  “Uh…yeah.”

  My heart lurched; the knife stopped mid-slice. Something about Mom’s tone told me this wouldn’t be good. Furiously, her fingers worked the grater. “They refused to tell me anything,” she said.

  I slammed through the last few slices of cheese. “I’m not surprised.”

  “I’m not surprised, either,” Mom admitted.

  I was no closer to finding my real father, to figuring out who I was. QTGYRL’s chat-room post spooled out in my head. I have a petition on my site. I’m fighting for the rights of donor offspring. But that was her fight, not mine. All I needed was one name. “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  Mom added raisins and cinnamon to the grated carrots. “I called your dad at work immediately. He promised to get the city lawyer to phone.” She dressed the salad with mayonnaise. “He figured a little legal intimidation wouldn’t hurt.”

  But the lawyer called and struck out, too. “There’s one other thing we can try,” Frank said later as dinner wound down. His hands were steady; his eyes were focused and determined. “We can go to West Vancouver and meet with the doctor.”

  This was the old Frank—taking control, making things happen. Not so long ago, the old fight-for-causes Frank had made me crazy. Now I wished the old Frank would hang around forever.

  Mom gathered plates, scraped chicken bones and leftover bits of potato into a pile. “Will it make a difference?”

  “It’s worth trying,” Frank said. “It’s easy to brush someone off on the phone, but not so easy to brush them off when they’re sitting right in front of you.”

  “What if they won’t agree to see us?” I asked.

  A slow, satisfied smile spread across Frank’s face. “They already have. Our appointment’s scheduled for the day after tomorrow.”

  SIXTEEN

  When birds get scared, they fly away or scream or get mean. Like the Cassowary in Australia which is five feet tall and if you get close to it, it will kick you in the guts and kill you.

  Cassidy MacLaughlin, Grade Four Science Project

  I went to the lake with Quinn mostly because of Jason. I mean, it was mega-dumping rain and I was mega-depressed, and slogging through mud trying to convince a bunch of geese to leave their nests was better than sitting home obsessing about him.

  But a funny thing happened in the middle of it all. I started feeling better. Frank claimed that helping others was a good way to forget your problems. Now, let’s be honest—my problems were way too big to forget. Still, the night was a distraction.

  “You wanna do one more?” Quinn asked after we took the eggs from nest number three. “There’s another nest by the dock. We practically have to walk by it to get to the car.”

  I pushed up the sleeve of my windbreaker and rubbed the rain from my watch. It was nine-thirty. If I made it home by ten, I’d beat my parents. “Sure,” I said.

  We adjusted our hoods, positioned the beam of our flashlights on the ground in front of us and started walking. For a change, Quinn was quiet. Maybe she sensed my mood, or maybe she was watching for security guards. Whatever the reason, the silence gave me time to think.

  Jason and I were over. I had to accept it and move on. There was nothing I could do if he ended up with (barf) Yvonne. I’d chosen to break up with him. It hurt, but it was the right decision. The DNA was only part of it. Of course, I wanted to know Jason and I weren’t related—I needed to know. But it was his understanding I craved. Without it, I felt even emptier, as though someone had taken a shovel and scooped out my heart.

  I couldn’t live that way.

  There was a flash of white in the darkness. “It’s a goose,” Quinn murmured when I jumped.

  That emptiness—did birds feel it, too, I wondered? Did they feel a hollow kind of grief when their eggs did not hatch? Something told me they did. The fact that I could give them back a chance for reproductive happiness eased my pain a little.

  “I’m glad I came.” I gestured to the addled eggs Quinn had in her backpack. “Doing this feels right.”

  “It feels right because it is right.” Her voice was low; I had to lean close to hear her. “Nature should always prevail,” she added. “Now it’ll be allowed to.”

  Falling silent, I pondered her words. Nature should always prevail. What did that say about me? About my conception?

  Catching sight of the dock up ahead, I remembered that night less than two weeks before when the others had teased me about my love of birds, when Jason had stood up for me and said we were all allowed one bit of weirdness.

  I was way past the one-bit stage.

  “The nest is down here.” Quinn shimmied down the bank.

  I followed her. Together we chased away the sentinel bird and then rushed the nest. I like to think the geese knew we were helping them, because they kicked up way less of a fuss than they had when I’d addled the eggs with Tom Bradley.

  Fifteen minutes later we tossed our dripping wet windbreakers into the back of my car and climbed into the front seats.

  “What will you do with the eggs?” I turned on the heater and wiped the condensation from the inside of the window. We’d collected sixteen of them.

  “I’ll crush them in the backyard and throw them out.” Quinn used her plaid scarf like a towel to dry her hair. At the look of disgust on my face, she added, “Don’t worry. They were just laid. The embryos are barely developed. Some of the eggs will be practically empty.” She frowned. “What’s that noise?”

  “It’s called rain.” It beat a tinny symphony on the roof of my car.

  Quinn shook her head. “Not that.” She lunged for my glovebox. “It’s your cell.” She handed me the phone.

  I popped it open. “Hello.”

  Mom screamed down the line at me. “Cassidy, where have you been? I’ve been calling you for the last hour. Dad’s been in an accident. Meet me at the hospital.”

  “They aren’t sure what happened.” Mom paced between two rows of plastic orange chairs in the emergency room. “A witness said Dad’s car crossed the centre line and crashed into a utility pole.”

  Like I’d reminded Quinn before she’d gone off to find her mom in the lab, this was Frank’s third accident in a little over a month. I didn’t want to think about the implications.

  “Sit down.” I grabbed Mom’s arm and pulled her into the chair beside me. “You’re making me dizzy.”

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nbsp; “I can’t.” She checked her watch. “He’s been in there almost two hours.” She jumped up and went to the nurses’ station. After a minute, she came back. “Soon. The doctor will be out soon.” She sighed in frustration. “They told me that half an hour ago.”

  Forty minutes later, we were ushered down the hall and into an empty examining room, where we were met by a stout, middle-aged doctor with a pencil-thin moustache and a blue Elmo button beside his Dr. Turner name tag.

  He waited until we were sitting, and then he said, “Frank is alive, he’s breathing on his own, but he has been seriously injured. Among other things, he has sustained a head injury—a baseline skull fracture.” His words were blunt and matter-of-fact, but his brown eyes were kind. “So far we aren’t seeing any internal bleeding, but he is slipping in and out of consciousness. The next twenty-four to forty-eight hours are critical. What we want to see is steady improvement.” Dr. Turner paused, his face grave. “But he could slip into a coma—particularly if he experiences internal bleeding.”

  A weighty silence fell. Then Mom asked, “What other injuries does he have?”

  “A fractured collarbone, three cracked ribs and a broken right arm.” Dr. Turner shrugged ever so slightly. “Unpleasant but fixable.”

  Mom fiddled nervously with her watch. “Can we see him?”

  “For a few minutes, once he’s settled and stabilized.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  The doctor hesitated. “I understand Frank has Huntington’s?” When we nodded, he said, “My guess is he blacked out at the wheel. Have you noticed any periods of vagueness? Or blankness?”

  Mom shook her head.

  “Yes,” I said. “The other day at breakfast.”

  “He was tired, Cassidy. Ridiculously, brutally tired. I told you that.”

  The doctor smiled gently. “I’m sure Dr. Braithwaite will talk to you. He has been notified about the accident.” After telling us that it would be some time before we could see Frank, he suggested we go to the cafeteria and get something to eat.