by Heidi Wicks
“I haven’t been…but looking to catch up with some people now that we’re back in town.”
“Makes sense.” Bile rises in her throat. It tastes like evil excitement she desperately wants to suppress.
“Well, maybe I’ll send you a message sometime.” His hands are in his pockets, and he looks innocent enough. He turns to face Sam. “See ya, Sam, buddy. Glad we found your mom.”
Matt Bohmer. She spies his wedding band, made of black onyx. Just the kind of wedding band she always imagined he’d wear.
Sometimes on the yellow garbage-bag slide, she actually would slip too far to one side, in danger of falling over the edge. “Just be careful,” her mother always said. “It’s easy to get swept away in the fun of it all, but if you actually did fall…Just keep your wits about you, and stay in control.”
Strapped in the car, Liam wailing, Sam yelling, “Shut up!” she blasts the heat. It flushes her cheeks and burns her eyes until they sting and water.
Cait had also seen the plaid jacket. She and Jess had made eye contact, and they wove through the crowd, towards Matt. It was too loud, and there were far too many people for him to realize they were even there. Cait led Jess closer and closer, until they were about fifteen feet away from him. In perfect position to observe the interaction.
Lisa was getting close. Pushing out her boobs and brushing her nipple against his jacket. Jess’s blood bubbled and her face was as red as the room. Matt had no problem chatting back with her. Laughing, smiling, agreeing. Lisa leaned in. Closer. Closer. Towards his mouth. Jess felt all of the fluid in her body coursing with the blood of her bleeding heart. Then, right at the last minute, Matt stepped backwards. Put his hand up and shook his head, “No.” Lisa looked to the ground, ashamed, and she turned to walk away.
Jess realized that Cait was no longer holding her hand. Instead she was in Lisa’s face, pointing her finger, telling Lisa right where to go, tearing Lisa a new asshole. Jess looked back to Matt and he was looking right at her. A slow smile stretched across his mouth, one side turning upwards, entertained by Cait’s drama, and Jess felt her nerves calm, the red turned blue, and that smile was the sexiest thing ever. He walked slowly towards her. Outstretched his arms. Folded her into him. She knew right there that she would never love anyone else the way she loved Matt. Not for the rest of her life.
letter go
2016
Maisie watches Frozen for the eleven hundredth time in the next room and Cait holds the envelope in her hands. Brushes her palm across the front, over her name, scrawled in Jake’s handwriting. She turns it over to the back. Looks at it for a moment. She takes a deep breath. Things are about to change, one way or another. She braces herself as she slips her index finger under the flap and pushes the seal open:
Dear Cait,
Thank you. I know you mean all those things you said, which I love, but it saddens me to see you hurt. I want you to receive the happiness you deserve and feel that as a couple we are unable to provide that for each other. It would break my heart to see you wait for that if it never comes. I appreciate your heartbreak. It saddens me to no end that Maisie won’t have both of her parents with her every day. And us parting was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But I want her to be in loving environments. We only get one life and I don’t want to spend it unhappy and making you unhappy as well.
I feel like I’m living in a nightmare, as many people do when going through divorce or separation, but we all get through it. We find happiness, and life goes on. It is extremely hard. We both get to see Maisie more than some parents who are together see their kids. She’ll never feel at a loss for love.
I don’t think a resolution is realistic. I don’t want you to ruin your own opportunities by believing so. Whatever will be will be. But friendship and kindness to each other is what I’d like to ensure right now. I don’t want to fuel hope in areas where I can’t guarantee there should be.
I’ve been on a few dates. I’m seeing someone. Whether I find happiness with her or not, I don’t know. But I need to try the best I can and give it an honest effort.
I promise to always love you and treat you with care and friendship, but right now we need to let go of our partnered relationship and see what options work for us. Let’s take it a day at a time.
Love,
Jake
She reads the letter three times in a row. Well then. Fuck. You. Jake. You shitty, cheap piece of sandwich meat. Fury courses through every vein in her body. Years, she has given to this man. Her home life, where she has stared at his face through meals, sex, fights, laughing fits, crying fits. Her work life, where she has stared at his face through the glass of the production booth, where he edits her interviews and records her shows, and critiqued her afterwards, in the evenings, at home. Years of her life, she has given to this man. She has endured his mood swings, his selfishness, his fat-headed opinions, his bullshit, and to what end? This sanctimonious fucking letter, which paints him as Ghandi. Ghandi? Ha! Doctor Fucking Phil, more like. The hilarity of it all.
Enough.
Enough.
Enough.
She’s done.
No more crying, whining, whinnying over this man who doesn’t love her anymore. She still has to see him at work, tragically, but thank God she doesn’t have to look at him at home anymore.
If she was writing a screenplay about her life, this would be the second turning point.
The Disney princess in the movie sings, “Let it go, let it go….”
sunshine list slaughter
2016
“We got it.” Cait slams down the phone in her cubicle at the CBC. “He’s gonna do it.” The office of the finance minister, Jordan Baker, has agreed to a Morning Show interview with Cait. His first media interview since the dismal budget of 2016 gushed down the rusted water pipes of Newfoundland and Labrador. A $1.8-billion deficit projected to hike to $2.2 billion. Tax hikes across the board. Layoffs. Loss of the baby bonus. Best of all, a provincial levy. This is huge for Cait. Maisie is having trouble transitioning from one location to the next.” The tall, athletic, blonde, childless early childhood educator—Stacey—sits across the table from Cait and Jake—her legs-for-days folded over and around each other like a twist cone, her arms crossed over her chest. They’d been called in for a disciplinary meeting.
“‘Magine.” Cait’s father spat over their roast-beef Sunday dinner. “People being charged just to live here. Godforsaken here. Just imagine.”
“This is as bad as the ‘90s.” Her mother ladled gravy over the potatoes.
“Worse.” Her father raked the gravy through the potatoes with his fork, mixing it with the turnip, a defeated farmer with a hopeless and dead plot of crop. Dabbed the Yorkshire pudding into the heap, scooping up a mushy, sloppy chunk. Cait stared at the Yorkshire pudding, a symbol of the colonialism that has trapped the province in history.
Amy, the intern, scurries up to Cait with her phone.
“Look,” she shoves the phone in Cait’s face, “I made a Snapchat filter.” It’s the minister with devil horns and red eyes, with a border that reads, Yes to Austerity. Twitter hashtags #nlrising and #FreeNL are trending. “We can tweet it out to promote the show.”
Cait crumples her brow at the image.
Amy very carefully watches her reaction, awaiting a shower of praise, before a moment of realization hits. “Oh wait, do you know what Snapchat is?” she says, tenderly.
“Yes, Amy.” Cait rolls her eyes, she can’t help it. “I know what Snapchat is.” She knows she’s being saucy. “I work in media, and I’m also not a hundred.”
She pushes her chair back and stalks towards the studio. “It’s provocative, for sure, but slightly biased for a media outlet to post.” She calls it over her shoulder as Amy scampers behind her, already plodding her thumb against the phone screen. Forever eager. The ransack mentality of the millennial is powerful and contagious. Quick and impassioned. Whip smart. Millennials take shit like it’s not even
shit, not interpreting it the way a Gen Xer would. The millennial spits the shit right back, makes the shit gleaming and sunny and sparkling. But the Gen Xer can teach a thing or two to the millennial about being grounded. The Gen Xer is jaded, but also sensible.
Cait scrambles, these days, to research, to write, to edit, take photographs, shoot video, edit video, book interviews. It’s not like it was ten years ago when she was hired, and there was no social media worth talking about. There was MySpace, and there was ICQ Messenger. Facebook had just come out. Social media had zero credibility. Just a handful of silly websites and places for people to show off. A game. An indulgence. Nothing with the power to sway public opinion and launch movements with the pound symbol.
“This is pretty huge, Cait.” Jake drops that day’s Telegram in front of her on the desk in the studio. When Cait and Jake each had their own show on campus radio—hers on the local arts scene, his about music in general—there was a rivalry that still exists. “Don’t fuck it up, ok?” He winks at her. That same teasing, junior-high humour that sucked her in, except now she grits her teeth and moves the paper out of her way. She is focused on the task at hand and she has caught a wave of indignation.
On interview morning, in the parking lot outside the studio, protesters swarm the minister’s shiny black Lincoln. The signs are smeared in red spray paint.
A man wearing a trucker’s cap shoves his face as close to Minister Baker’s as he can. “How’s the levy fair if me, a poor person, is paying 1.2 percent, and you, a very rich person, are paying 0.2 percent? How’s that fair?”
Baker weaves his way through the crowd, not responding, working his way to the door. From behind the glass in the studio, Cait hears it all. Voices, so loud, so distressed, so angry. The building seems to heave. Throb. Her organs tremble and her blood bubbles and pops. She walks through the studio towards the porch. Extends her arm to greet the minister. He grips her hand too tightly and glares into her eyes. Politician’s handshake. Must. Assert. Power.
“Good morning, Minister, thanks for coming in.”
He nods towards the empty receptionist desk. “Certainly a colder feeling in here without Beverly.”
“Yes, well, that’s what budget cuts do, don’t they!” The joke does not fly. “Can I get you a glass of water?”
“Don’t have a coffee, do you?”
“Afraid not. Sorry.” The CBC can’t even afford a drop of coffee or tea to offer guests anymore. The café closed two years ago and it’s been a slippery slope since. Cuts, layoffs, contracts not being renewed. Cait has been fearing her appointment with the chopping block, but positive listener feedback has kept her around so far.
“Well, maybe a drop of vodka in the water?” Ha ha. Real funny, asshole, Cait thinks, a little too loudly.
She coughs out a fake chuckle and motions towards the hallway that leads into the studio. Walking behind him, his cologne causes bumps to form on her tongue, assaulting her senses. Enter studio. Glug-glug-glug from the water dispenser. Plunk glass on table. Take a seat. Headphones over ears. Fade-in, fiddle theme music.
“Next up on The Morning Show,” cue Cait’s radio voice, “we’ve got the one and only Minister of Finance, Mr. Jordan Baker joining us. Welcome Minister Baker, thank you so much for being here this morning.”
“Thank you, Caitlyn, for having me.” His brow is crunched and he glances at his watch.
“Now, the provincial government has just delivered one of the most dismal budgets in history. There have been tax hikes on gas, cigarettes, insurance, a two-percent increase on HST, even a tax on books, which now makes Newfoundland and Labrador the only province with a book tax. Minister, you were absolutely swarmed walking into the studio today. Very reminiscent of the cod moratorium announcement of 1992 in some ways. What do you have to say about the anger people are expressing over this?”
“Well, Caitlyn, I can certainly understand why folks are upset. It certainly will make a difference in the lives of citizens. But what I hope folks can understand is that this is temporary, and it’s necessary to get the province out of debt.”
“Perhaps the most controversial item is the Debt Reduction Levy that is being imposed on all incomes.”
“Yes, and the levy is absolutely temporary as well. The bottom line is that it will reduce the deficit by about $63 million, and even that is still just a fraction of the budget shortfall.”
Outside, the protestors shake their signs. The parking lot heaves with collective fury. This man is a lying motherfucker, thinks Cait.
“When will the levy be lifted?” Hit him hard, she thinks back to her days in journalism school.
“We don’t know, but we do know it can’t be this year and we do promise people that we want to remove that measure as soon as possible.”
“What do you say to the people who believe the levy favours the rich and further harms the poor and working class?”
Minister Baker does not appreciate the hard-hit so early on. Too bad, buck-o, the voice of Mrs. Morris, back in high school, hitting the slack-offs hard, trickles somewhere into Cait’s subconscious. This is a classic but ongoing point of frustration. The same rich families, the same bluebloods, taking care of each other, taking advantage of middle to lower-class families. Life is cushy for the rich, a struggle for the less rich, miserable for the poor.
“The process for paying the levy is based solely on the taxable income an individual makes,” the minister delivers the prepackaged lines that will be repeated in many media appearances in the coming months. “Filing taxes provides an opportunity to do that. Also, employers who update their tax tables would also have an opportunity to provide information to their employees.”
The reports say bankruptcy will escalate in the coming years. Cait is on a single income now. What will happen to her?
“I don’t really understand what that answer means,” she shouldn’t have said that, she knows it, she bites her tongue, “but let’s get to the phone lines. First we have Harold on the line. Go ahead, Harold.”
“Yes, hello, I just want to say how disappointed I am that you’re doing the opposite of what you said you were going to do when you wanted to get elected.” Harold sounds to be a senior. “I mean, it’s just so typical of a newly elected government, fresh in, no holds barred, no apologies. It’ll be a completely different message once the next election comes around. All on about diversification, you were, broadening our horizons, making Newfoundland more self-sustainable. It’s all lies, just like government has been doing here since we joined Canada. You’re a bunch of filthy liars, all of ya!” He’s yelling now. Poor Harold might have a heart attack. “You only wants to line your own pockets!”
“Harold,” Cait has to be diplomatic, as much as it grates her every last nerve, she has to reign herself in, “is there something specific you wanted to ask?” She’d love to tear a strip off Minister Baker herself.
“It’s just too bad that we can’t for once get some decent people in power, people who really cares about our people. I’ve lived here for all my seventy-eight years on this Earth, and I’ve never seen a worse time.” Click. He hangs up.
“Thanks for your call, Harold. Minister Baker, is there anything you’d like to address to Harold?”
“Again, I’d just like to stress that these are temporary measures, and we are thinking of this province’s greater interests with the implementation of this budget.”
Another content-free answer, she thinks. “Next we’ve got Linda on the line, and Linda has concerns about cuts to education. Go ahead, Linda.”
“Hello, Minister. I’d like to just say that I am a very concerned parent and my children’s futures are being severely, severely compromised by this budget.”
The voice on the phone is Jess. She can’t call in as a teacher, because teachers aren’t allowed to speak publicly about the conditions in the school system. “Just call in as a parent,” Cait had suggested when Jess started venting about the minister’s dismal performance. Cait’s ches
t swells with pride at the sound of her friend’s voice over the airwaves.
“I can understand that, Linda, and while I can’t speak directly to education cuts, I will do my very best—”
“It seems like you can’t speak directly to much,” her voice quivers, “There are children with diverse learning needs in classrooms. Teachers just do not have the resources to give them the attention they require. Special-needs educators have been cut, teachers get support for just thirty minutes a day, and as a result we are giving our children an inferior education.”
David, for example, is one of the three autistic children in Jess’s classroom. David wears the same blue and white striped shirt every single day. David has a penchant for planes.
“Did you know that there are one thousand and thirty-two pilots employed with Delta Airlines?” He approaches her with this spiel several times a week. “About half of that number are from the western United States?” He speaks urgently. If Jess doesn’t appear fully invested, he will crumble in devastation and panic. “See?” He hands her a photo. “I brought you a photograph of the very first Delta airplane. I have a model of it at home but my mom doesn’t want to let me take it to school because she’s afraid it might break and then that wouldn’t be very good. Not good at all.”
Another child in her classroom has a chromosomal imbalance and operates at the level of a three-year-old. Jess has three ESL students in the room. And now class sizes will increase even more. The kids without special needs, the kids like Sam and Liam, could also slip through the cracks.
Minister Baker leans into the microphone, his crunched brow lifting and oozing into a sinister, smug, raised-eyebrow pompousness. “Again, I understand your concerns—”