What is Real

by Karen Rivers

  I don’t know which way to go. I get in the car. Dad’s car. I have the car. I don’t remember driving here, but I must have because now I’m in the car and the engine is roaring and I’m driving faster than I should, but now is not the time to slow down. Not yet.

  chapter 34

  My dad is in the basement. He is on the floor. He has gathered up all the plants, dumped them from their pots. There is a pile of dirt on the floor beside him and empty plastic pots tossed into the corner. The plants are in his arms. How many plants? Ten? Twelve?

  Gary is with him. Of course Gary is with him; Gary is always with him. Only Gary isn’t helping him; Gary is helping himself to the plants. I want Gary to get fucking caught. Not Dad. I am on the stairs, out of breath—my lungs are empty balloons and refuse to fill up. I gasp and gasp. But I am just trying to say what they already know. How did they know?

  I thought I was the director. This film didn’t end this way. It just didn’t. It ended with Dad being caught, Dad paying the price for his goddamn choices. And me and Tanis in New York City and Our Joe in jail and and and…

  Then the credits, rolling.

  I forgot about Gary.

  Gary is taking what he can, and Dad is grabbing it back, but why?

  I see Gary push my dad, and then my voice comes back and I say, “Don’t fucking touch him.”

  “Yeah?” says Gary. “Like you can stop me.”

  My fists curl up by my sides like I am going to do something, which I don’t do, and instead Gary pushes past me roughly and I fall the last three steps to the floor, jarring my knee.

  Something pops in my knee.

  I feel a tearing, deep inside. But this has already happened, I think.

  I hear Gary’s bike roar to life.

  My dad is cradling an armful of plants, and only when I look closely do I see that they are tomatoes, not pot. I think he is laughing or maybe he’s crying. I grew those plants.

  Because he used to. I don’t know why, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

  “They are just plants,” I say. My breath tastes like stomach acid and eggs.

  I help Dad up. Of course he can’t stand. His legs buckle. I push him onto Chelsea’s old bed in the corner.

  “I forgot,” he says. “Tomatoes.” He looks dazed. “I’m sorry. I ruined your crop.”

  “Dad,” I choke. “Dad.”

  “Open the back door,” he says. “I can’t reach. We aren’t done here.” He puts the tomato plants down on the bed beside him. The bed still has a pink bottom sheet on it. He lays the plants out like they matter. He smoothes the sheet. He looks so pathetic and small. When did he get so small? Maybe he is the tiny one in all of this, maybe when he jumped from that grain elevator, he just got smaller and smaller until he hit the ground.

  I forget for a minute that this is my doing, that I wanted him to get caught. And to be taken away and for me to be set free of this.

  This.

  But this is my home and this is my dad and I don’t know what I was thinking and I don’t know what I’m thinking now except, No, I don’t want this after all.

  I go and open the door, and the cold, bright air rushes in on a wave of watery light.

  The doorbell rings upstairs. I freeze and my blood runs cold. I think maybe I’m going to pass out again, the floor pounding into my skull.

  But Gary didn’t take all the plants. There is a whole table behind me of pot plants that are just starting to bud. Rows and rows.

  “Fuck the tomatoes,” I say. “Do something.”

  I hear the front door opening. Footsteps on the stairs. I’m frozen. I can’t move. My legs don’t work. I have a ghost of a memory, so faint I can hardly see it. It’s like looking through milk, opaque, impossible. I think I remember a plan. I can see Kate, nodding. I can hear Kate saying, “They’ll find the Christmas boxes when they find the pot.”

  Was it Kate?

  An arm draped around my back. The smell of beer and laughter. A drawing. A piece of paper. Tanis’s cheeks and how they flushed while she explained.

  “Our Joe is going to pay.”

  “Your dad is going to pay.”

  I have a taste in my mouth. Bile. Acid.

  There are footsteps on the stairs.

  My psychiatrist has a name for what I do. He calls it “selective editing.” As soon as he gave it a name, I started doing it more and more. Is that how it’s supposed to work?

  I have been lying. Lying and editing are the same thing. A few edits can change a story into something else. Edit someone in. Edit something out. It’s so easy. Stories change as you tell them. You think, “Okay, this is the screenplay that I’m writing.” But even as it’s being acted out, you’re the director. You can still change shit. And so you do. It’s never done until it’s done.

  Tanis comes down the stairs.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I say. “About New York.”

  “It’s too late,” she says. “I can hear sirens.” She is crying. “Don’t change your mind, Dex.”

  “It isn’t,” I say. “It is not too late.”

  I start moving. I am moving so fast I can hardly make out my own movements. I have never moved so fast. Nothing has ever mattered as much as this matters now.

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” she says.

  “It’s different,” I say.

  My dad says, “It’s too late. I probably deserve it, right?”

  “No,” I say. My hands are tearing out plants, and Tanis and I are moving impossibly fast around my dad, sitting on the pink bed, his new shoes flat on the floor.

  I run outside to the back shed and grab the red gas can. Danger, it says on the side. Highly flammable. Tanis has the plants in the pit and my dad is still inside on the pink bed yelling, “Dex, for Christ’s sake, come and get me. DEX!”

  The gasoline glugs out of the can, splashing my shoes and my jeans.

  I step back and Tanis jumps forward. She has a long match, like we used at the lake in the summer to light the hibachi. I back away. The flame is huge, it leaps up like a wave and for a second she vanishes behind it, and then I can see her again, wavering like an apparition.

  Tanis is real. I did not make her up. My knee buckles. For a second I think I’m going to fall into the fire or be sucked into it.

  I go into the basement and I pick my dad up and carry him outside. I put him a safe distance from the flame. Safe enough. And we watch it burn and time is running out and the smell is thick and heavy and we are going to suffocate, I think. But of course, we aren’t.

  This is not selectively edited.

  This part is the truth.

  It’s possible that I can’t tell the truth. I don’t know what it is anymore. Or maybe I do know and I can’t tell it because it is too real. Maybe I never did.

  When you start to lie, it’s easy to lose track of what is what. Sometimes it’s impossible to know when you start. You think it’s just that one wall, with the door and the tunnel and then suddenly it’s a whole house, a whole city of tunnels and lies and none of it matters. You can’t keep track because it’s not trackable. The tunnels don’t lead anywhere that you remember because you are busy remembering the lie.

  That’s how it is.

  I think I started when I was five, riding my bike down the street, a book taped to the handlebars.

  Fiction was the first lie that made more sense to me than real life.

  Maybe that’s when it started.

  Something flaps loose in my chest and I cough and cough. I can’t stop coughing. Tears stream down my cheeks. They aren’t tears. I’m coughing.

  They are tears. How much goddamn crying can I still have left to do?

  “It’s okay,” Dad says. “Whatever happens, happens.” The air is red and white and blue. Except it isn’t. It’s the lights. The sirens suddenly fill my ears too full and I want to clamp my hands over them, but I don’t. The flames lick the blackberries and that’s when I realize what I have to do. I don’t know if I have
time. I grab the gas can and start splashing the shrubs closest to me. I throw the match just as Lundstrom rounds the bend. I can tell he’s smelling the air. The smell of the blackberries burning is so similar to the smell of pot that maybe…

  Maybe.

  My heart is pounding like crazy when the bush takes the flame and there’s a whoosh so intense that I have to jump back. The blaze sighs and then recedes, and I look at my dad. He nods.

  “What’s going on here?” Lundstrom asks.

  “Just doing some burning,” Dad says, like he’s shooting the shit about the weather, completely ignoring the fact that he’s sitting half-slumped on the ground. The bottoms of his shoes are black, melted. “Damn blackberries. Only thing to do is burn ’em out.”

  “Blackberries,” repeats Lundstrom.

  “Anything else we can do for you?” Dad says, like this is normal. Seven cop cars. A fire twenty feet high. The smoke turns toward us and envelops us in a black hug. I can’t breathe.

  I can.

  I am okay.

  I am not okay.

  “Guess not,” says Lundstrom. “Unless you lose control of this thing. Hate for you to lose your house.”

  “We have control,” says Dad.

  “Yeah,” says Lundstrom. “Speaking of your house, mind if I go in and look around?”

  “You got a search warrant?” Dad says.

  “Go ahead,” I say quickly. I know what he ’ll see. The empty pots, the fresh dirt, the grow lights.

  The tomatoes on the pink bed.

  “I don’t need to look,” he says. “No search warrant, kid. Your dad’s right.”

  “See you at the game,” says Lundstrom. “Big game tonight, huh?”

  “You bet,” I say. “I’m not playing though. Knee injury.” I roll up my pants and show him, and my knee is purple and livid.

  “Shit,” he says. “What the hell happened?”

  And then Tanis is there and she looks like a kid, too young for this, for anything. She says, “Can I talk to you?”

  Lundstrom is confused. “What?” he says.

  And I can see Tanis getting braver. And maybe part of this is going to end the way it is supposed to end, after all. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but as she talks, I can see her getting lighter and lighter. And then she’s floating above the ground.

  No.

  She’s taking Lundstrom inside. Then he is coming out of the house with the box. The box. And she holds up her hand and waves a bit. And I really want for it not to be goodbye, but I say it anyway. I say, “Bye.” And that’s it. It’s not a good movie ending, is it? There needs to be a UFO, hovering overhead. A hail of bullets. Someone, maybe me, dying slumped over the fire.

  But me and Dad just sit there, watching the fire until the smell starts to make me feel sick, and then what we do is we drive into town and get some Chinese food. If this was a movie, that would be some kind of fucked-up ending, right?

  Roll credits.

  chapter 35

  october 2, this year.

  I get the camera from under the stairs. The battery is still alive and I don’t know how that’s possible, but it’s true. Sometimes true things are harder to believe than lies. A good liar doesn’t make things too complicated. He just takes simple ingredients and layers them together to make an interesting story. Take, for example, some corn.

  Add a maze.

  And an alien abduction.

  A pretty girl.

  Two pretty girls.

  I take the camera outside and I press Record. It’s as familiar to me as anything, but not quite, like when you’re in the shower and washing your hair for the first time after a haircut and it doesn’t feel like yours somehow.

  I don’t know what I’m recording. The smoldering remains of our fire. The corn, waving in the cool autumn wind. The clouds tracking across the sky like nothing happened and maybe nothing did.

  Speed it up.

  Slow it down.

  Add a soundtrack.

  A murder of crows.

  Film inside the house. Inside the dollhouse. Go closer and closer. Zoom in until all you can see are the crumbs of what is left.

  Dust.

  Nothing is real.

  The table is not real and the tiny yellow house is not real and my dad is not real and Tanis is not real and Olivia is not real and aliens are not real and I press the black mark on my arm and remind myself that I am not real either.

  Poof.

  Make it all a dream.

  chapter 36

  now.

  You are clean when you decide to stop.

  I am deciding to stop.

  I am sitting in my psychiatrist’s office, which is above a gas station just outside of town. He has boxes of Kleenex scattered around the room. Dozens of them. Like a patient should never be more than an arm’s reach away from a box of Kleenex. I can smell gasoline. I never cry in his office. His name is Dr. Gleason. His office smells—apart from the gas—like nose spray and the dust that burns on old slide projectors, moth wings burning.

  I show Dr. Gleason a film. It’s a documentary. I’m going to call it What Is Real. It is about me and Tanis, Kate and T-dot. A drawing, perfectly to scale. A map with instructions. The way we held the boards and the corn fell in front of us like it was there the whole time, just waiting to become art.

  It’s going to be about how you have to be careful when you contrive an ending because nothing ever goes the way you think it will, unless it’s fiction. I used to like fiction.

  When I was a kid.

  Dr. Gleason asks, “What now, Dex?”

  I start to laugh. “I don’t know,” I say. I’m not lying.

  I laugh more. The office fills up with those brown birds, hopping. I can’t stop laughing. But sometimes laughing like that can make you cry.

  Crying is a different kind of bird. Crying is crows calling. Crying is the blackness of water in the lake. Crying is in the needle.

  No. Crying is in the bubbles, rising to the surface.

  But you just have to follow them. And once you get there, you don’t have to go back. You can start again.

  And then.

  chapter 37

  CUT TO:

  INT.—OFFICE OF MAIN STREET SCHOOL

  Show Dex Pratt arriving late to school. He’s not hurrying because he can’t, his injury slows him down enough that rushing isn’t an option. Show how he isn’t hurrying. Zoom in on his knee. Use CGI to make it seem like the camera goes through the fabric. That way it’s still real, it’s just reality amped up.

  Show Dex half hopping, half limping into the office. He’s late, but he’s always late. Show Dex picking up a bright pink piece of paper from a tray. Dex flicks the paper. Show how the sound fills up the empty room for a split second so he feels like he’s not alone.

  DEX

  Stacey? You here?

  Show how he’s not alone. In a chair, in the corner behind him, there’s a girl with a crooked smile. She clears her throat.

  Karen Rivers is the author of fourteen novels, mostly for young adults. Her books have been nominated for a number of awards, including the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Award and the Silver Birch Award. Karen lives, reads and writes in a yellow house near the beach in Victoria, British Columbia, and can almost always be found online at karenrivers.com.