“There you are,” she says, with that sappy look on her face, all droopy-eyed, sad, and pensive.
I’m trapped.
She sits down on the white plastic chair, pulls one of the laundry baskets toward her, and starts sorting our socks and underwear. She looks like hell—straggly hair, no makeup, purplish bags under her eyes.
“Is it Ricky’s?” I ask, doing the math and figuring her stress must be that it’s probably not Scott’s.
She sighs. “I don’t know.”
“Giovanni’s?”
She laughs. “No. Impossible.”
“Why?”
“We used protection.”
“Ichhh.” I make a face. Somehow, the thought of my mom having anything to do with a condom is disgusting. “They’re not a hundred percent, you know.”
She glares at me in response. “Since when did you become a sex education teacher?”
“Why don’t you have an abortion?” I offer.
“Never.” She rejects the idea quickly and lowers her hand to her belly. “Out of the question.”
I’m unsure what to say to her next. She sits there all mopey, like she wants me to make things better or say the right thing—but what? “You’ll be okay”? “You’ll make a great mom”? I look to the door, wishing someone would come to rescue me. Someone older and wiser and optimistic.
I try to think of what my mom would say to me if I told her I was pregnant. I wish I were. I wish I had sliced open my skin and pulled out that birth control capsule five months ago. I wish I had Michael’s baby in me right now. Is that what my mom was doing—trying to hold on to someone?
“We’ll get through it, Mom,” I say to her, but then instantly regret my words. I should have said You, not We. You will get through it. Because if she thinks I’m taking care of some baby, she’s got another thing coming. I have my own problems. I start to feel really angry. Like, Screw you for dumping this crap on me. You’re an adult. You should know the answers.
She takes my supportive comment as an invitation to complain. She says she wakes up every morning feeling like she just wants to crawl back into bed. She says she can’t even walk past the fridge without gagging. And she’s so tired, she can barely stay awake after noon. Part of me worries that she’s drinking even though she promised she would stop and even though I checked all the cupboards and her drawers and there
was no sign of anything.
She sighs again. “Oh … I just don’t know what to do.”
I get up to walk out ’cause I’m so angry and I don’t want to have a fight. As I pass her, I say, “I’ll get extra hours at the clinic.”
“It’s okay, Hon. It’s my problem. I’ll figure something out.”
I shake my head and roll my eyes. Whatever. I know these complaints mean she’s going to stop working soon. “Well, I’ll get some more hours anyway,” I say, and walk out.
I have no faith in her working it out. And I won’t go to a shelter again. And I won’t take care of her like I did after Bradley died and my mom vacated her body for about a year, and returned all patched up from therapy. This time I’m old enough to do something about it. This time I’m not going down with her.
Forty-Two
Up, up, up.
Syphilis keeps straining against his rock. Doomed to the eternal attempt with no reward.
Up, up, up out of bed I get.
It’s strange, but the worse my mother’s life gets, the more inspired I become about my own. It’s one thing to mess up my own life, but I’ll be damned if I let my mother screw me up because of her mistakes. “You decide to be happy,” Uncle Freestyle tells me.“It’s a decision.” I’m not entirely sure I agree, but for some bizarre reason I get the notion that maybe all the recent events of my life can be seen as necessary things that are forcing me off a certain road and onto another that (unknowingly) is leading to success. Maybe my mom’s pregnancy is just the thing I need to kick me in the butt and get me to move into action.
Sometimes I wonder where these bursts of optimism come from, the ones that get me out of bed the first time my alarm goes off even though experience has told me that there’s no point, I’ll end up in the same place I started from. But like Ms. Dally says, we make our bed each day knowing that we’ll only mess it up again that night. Sometimes the only point to anything is the attempt, because the alternative, never trying, can only lead to inevitable doom.
I start to make plans to move out, get a second job, maybe even have my own apartment. At school, I tell Ms. Dally that I want to make a resumé so I can find work to fill the gaps in between my veterinary clinic shifts. When I say this, it’s like I just told her she won a thousand dollars, because she gets all excited and starts putting piles of papers and folders and booklets on my desk, and for a second I regret having said anything because it looks like too much work. But then she guides me toward the computer and we start writing my resumé right away using a special program, and it looks so professional to see my name in bold at the top of the page. After, we write lists of places where I’ll drop it off: McDonald’s, Coffee Time, Walmart.
I feel so good about everything, for the first time I tell her about wanting to be a veterinarian.
“Fantastic, Melissa. You’re certainly off to a good start with your job.And you’re great at math,” she says in such a teacherish tone that I quickly look over my shoulder to make sure no one is listening. I feel silly that I’m feeling all proud about her dumb comment, like I’m some goody-goody teacher’s pet.
All week I work on a career studies project on veterinarians. I spend a lot of time researching on the internet, and I even interview Dr. Keystone at the clinic. My mom buys me a cool Duo-Tang with a clear plastic cover to put the project inside, and when I give it to Ms. Dally she exhales in elation. For the first time in my life, I’m actually proud of something I’ve done in school.
Forty-Three
Up. Up. Up.
I find the paper Eric gave me, call the group home and make an appointment. The supervisor, Pat, takes me on a tour of a huge old-lady house that feels a hundred years old. Even the furniture smells old and musty. At first, I think it is a mistake to be there and I almost walk out. But then I see a list of names on the fridge and some photos, and it turns out the group home is the same one that Jasmyn and Snow, a pregnant girl who used to go to the day program, are living at.
I stop and point to the photo. “I know these girls.”
Pat is immediately at my side. “You do?”
“Yeah, Snow and Jasmyn.”
“Ah!” She raises an open hand to stop me from speaking. “You shouldn’t have told me any names. We’re unable to discuss the whereabouts of our clients. And it doesn’t help in your application if you know current residents. It’s necessary for us to keep a safe mix of girls here.”
Residents? Clients? Safe mix of girls? What is this place?
“Can we wear shoes?” I ask sarcastically.
She smiles, knowing exactly what I’m saying. “It’s not prison. You can wear shoes.”
Pat’s smart. I like that. I like her.
At the end of the tour, we sit in this teeny room by the front door, crammed with a desk, a computer, and a futon couch. There’s barely enough room to stand. I take a seat, squashed up at the desk, and fill out an application. Then Pat gives me a list of house rules to help me decide if it’s the right place for me. The list is long. Real long. She tells me if I want to continue with the application, we’d have a few more meetings. “You know, Melissa, you might actually enjoy living here. Many girls do.”
“Hmmm … maybe,” I respond, wondering if that would be possible. How could I live with so many rules and a bunch of girls knowing each other’s business 24 –7? Arts and Crafts Night and day trips to Wonderland sound all right, though, as long as the group home pays for everything.
Pat tells me to take a few days to think about it. If I’m interested, I can call her back and she’ll set up the last two meetings, one with my
mom and one more with just me. Then I can move in right after that. I thank her, take the orientation envelope, and leave.
I decide to walk a few blocks before I hop on the bus. I smoke three cigarettes in a row, trying to work out what’s on my mind. Now that the group home might be a reality, I’m feeling kind of scared. It’s like committing yourself to jail—you’d have to be insane to do it. But I look at my life and what’s happening, and I’m only sixteen. It can only get worse. My mom will never give me rules, and even if she did, I wouldn’t follow them. And I can’t get my own apartment yet because I don’t have the money. Or if I wanted to save up for first and last month’s rent, I’d have to quit my job at the animal hospital to get another one that pays better. I could move in with someone, like Jasmyn’s friend, but then I’d only party all the time. And for sure I’d end up dropping out of school. And then what?
I turn onto a side street to take a shortcut. This car speeds past and—SPLAT!—a squirrel appears from beneath the tire. I can’t believe it! It’s horrifying! A black blob is lying on the road about twenty metres up ahead, and just as I’m about to rush out to see if I can help it, I see this little baby squirrel, all patchy fur and twitchy tail, tentatively move toward the body. It pauses and then approaches slowly to nudge the mother with its little nose. It pokes and nudges and steps back, then climbs right on top of her and nudges more, carefully inspecting. An approaching car scares it away up a tree, but then it comes back again, climbing up on her.
“Ooohhhh!” I shout, and hurry my pace, worried that the baby will get run over too. When I reach the body, the baby runs up the tree again and waits on a low branch, watching me inspect the remains: eyes bulging out, lower body squashed, blood coming out of its bum. Totally dead.
I don’t want to touch it, but I don’t know how to move it, so I end up pushing it along the ground with my foot to the gutter. I look up to the baby, who is now halfway down the trunk, watching me closely. Poor thing. But what can I do?
I step back and let the baby examine its mother’s dead body once more. It nudges and pokes with its nose, climbs on top again, and sort of sits there. Another car whips past, but it doesn’t scurry back up the tree ’cause it’s safely by the curb now. I watch the baby for about ten minutes before I walk away. It’s the saddest thing to see. The baby just doesn’t understand what happened to its mother. And it won’t leave the useless carcass because it doesn’t know what to do without her.
I decide to walk the extra few blocks to the subway station. Mother Nature has a funny way of sending me messages. It’s not the first time something coincidental has happened to me like this. It’s strange, because just before the squirrel got hit I was starting to think about my mom and having to tell her about the group home, and I was imagining how upset she’d be. Even though I make her life hell, I think deep down she knows she’d be lost without me. I was thinking I’d feel too guilty to leave her alone and then—BAM!— this baby loses its mama but it can’t let her go, even when it must in order to survive.
Forty-Four
For some reason I get all clingy with Fortune. I hate losing control and I hate myself for being that way. Even when I’m doing it, I’m aware that I’m being an idiot, but I just can’t stop myself. It’s like I have this addiction, this yearning in the pit of my stomach that needs its hourly fix. I call him a thousand times a day, I walk by his house hoping to bump into him, I email him and text him. The more I do all this, the less he wants to see me. And even though I know this, I still do it.
My thoughts are crazy. I think he’s found someone else. I think he’s avoiding me. I think he doesn’t like me anymore. One afternoon I wait outside his house till he gets home and then I show up at his door and basically jump him. I give him such amazing sex he’s bound to want me more. Then, when he goes to shower, he leaves his jeans on the floor and I get the phone out of the pocket to check his text messages. It’s just what I thought: full of messages from girls. Baby. Honey. Miss you babe. Want you. Kiss …
When he comes back, I confront him, holding the phone up in the air, reciting the messages. He grabs it out of my hand and starts erasing.
“Don’t bother! I’ve already seen them!”
He whips the phone down onto the bed and then pauses a second, like he’s thinking about what to say next. Then he glares directly up at me. “Why are you going through my phone? Why are you in my property?”
And just like that, he turns it around. Instantly, he’s the one who gets to be angry. Suddenly I’m on the defence, despite the fact I just caught him fooling around with a ton of girls. “You’re an asshole. You know that?” I start to walk away.
“It’s nothing, babe. They’re just texts. It don’t mean nothing.”
“I’ve read them.” I raise my pitch to a flighty-girl voice. “Miss you. Love you. Baby …”
“They don’t mean nothing.”
“Who—the girls or the texts?”
“Both.” He comes toward me, all sexy with a sweet smile. His shirt is off and his skin is still wet. “Come on, babe, you’re the only one. You’re the one for me.”
“Puh-leeze! You think I’m an idiot?” I push him away and grab the cellphone off the bed. “Get away from me, prick. You can take those girls. All of them. Go fuck them. Go use them. Go party with them … You can have all of them. Know why? ’Cause you don’t deserve me.” I’m talking fast and crazy and can’t stop myself even though I know I should shut up. I keep going, blah blah blahing, clenching the phone in my hand. I head toward the window. “’Cause I’m better than that. I can’t believe I fell for a stupid loser like you, driving around in your stupid-ass car like you’re all that. And you’re nothing. You’re a piece of shit. You’re a fucking dumb-ass—”
“Shut up!” he shouts forcefully. He reaches out to grab my arm as I’m about to chuck the phone at the window. He squeezes so tight I drop to my knees in response. He holds my arm up above my head and I feel like it will rip out of its socket. “Let go,” he warns in a growly voice. I drop the phone. He releases his grip, leaving my skin burning. I quickly stand up, but then he pushes me. “Bitch!”
He pushes so hard I go flying and hit the corner of the dresser and then fall to the ground. My ribs pain. I lose my breath.
It’s like everything is still for a minute.
I don’t breathe.
I don’t blink.
My face is flat against the hardwood floor.
My lips hang loose from my face, my mouth open wide.
I look out of the corner of my eye and see his expressionless face towering above. He doesn’t move to help me. And for a split second it’s like I have become my mother. That night she fought with Scott. And it’s like I’m in her skin. And I see myself and her all at the same time, like we’re this overlapped person in the same body. And then … “Huuuhhhh.” I take a choky, choppy gasp.
Breathe.
I scramble to my knees, onto all fours, and then up. I grab my backpack and coat and rush toward the door because I’m afraid of what might happen next.
As I run down the stairs, trying to put my jacket on, his voice trails after me. “What about you? All the guys you fuck? Everyone knows you’re a slut! You know what they call you? Black hole. You bitch. Yeah! You hear me? ’Cause guys disappear inside your huge, slutty pussy.”
His words are like forceful blows as I pass through the front door. I run down the porch stairs, but it seems as if my feet are barely moving. I stop a second to catch my breath.
Everything before me is in slow motion. I take it in all at once, like a painting. A sharp, cold wind blows the single remaining yellow leaf off a tree. Threatening black clouds surge. A woman walks her little white mutt past the driveway. A red car goes by. A squirrel prances across the road then up onto the fence that separates Fortune’s house from his neighbour’s.
A bang from inside the house brings me back to reality. I begin to move again. Another gust of wind takes my hair and blows it up and all over my f
ace, into my mouth, but I don’t stop to take it out. My legs just go. Too scared to think. Just running against the strong wind. Fight or flight. I choose to fly.
I start bawling again when I get into my room. I take off my top to inspect my ribs. Already my skin is red and purple from hitting the furniture. Slut? After being with me, after saying he loved me even though we both knew it wasn’t true, he calls me slut? Uncle Freestyle was right, guys do talk shit about you. Not that I really care. Jerk. I hate Fortune. I fucking hate him. I knew he was with other girls. I hate all men.
I go into the kitchen and down three shots of vodka and wait for my head to clear. I turn on the TV and flick the channels. Then I go take three more shots.
Even when I start feeling drunk, I still feel a little weird. Shaky. Like I’m scared or something. I hate myself for being afraid of him. It’s stupid. It’s not like anyone has ever hit me before. I’ve seen it happen to my mom, when I was little and she had some idiot boyfriends. So maybe that’s why I expect it will happen to me. When a guy raises his hand, I brace.
I hate this weakness. I hate being a girl. There’s always this inevitable submission. Men will always have the last word. The last fist. They will always have that ultimate power.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling really bad, I reach into my mind and bring out a memory of Bradley. It’s the only thing that can possibly make me feel better, as if somehow I’m not alone. As if somehow the ghostly memories bring his spirit to my present. I go take two more shots and lie back down on the couch, just letting my mind roam, like one of those roulette machines that bounces a ball around until it randomly lands on a number. My head spins and spins and spins until it lands on this:
I’m playing with Bradley on the front lawn of our apartment building. His favourite thing to do was spin. I’d take his wrists and pull him up into the air and twirl around and around, his feet flinging wildly. I have this image of his face imprinted on my mind: his open, laughing mouth, his ecstatic eyes locked on mine, intoxicated with his cocktail of pleasure and thrill and trust all mixed together. I remember loving this face ’cause I could recall feeling like that when I was younger. I used to cherish that feeling of weightlessness.
Lesley Anne Cowan Page 13