In the window, the moon had made itself so tiny it was just a hole in the elbow of a black sweater.
I WOKE AROUND NINE O’CLOCK in the morning. Alphonse was in exactly the same position as when he’d passed out. I was cold, which was strange because Alphonse’s body temperature always kept me really warm at night. I sat up abruptly, startled by the realization that unnatural things were at hand. As soon as I looked at Alphonse’s face, I knew that he was dead, even though I had never seen a dead body before. People still had expressions on their faces when they slept, but his face was empty. His skin was a chalky shade of green that I’d never seen anywhere in the world before.
I had the strange feeling that I was dead myself. It felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a grave and earth was being thrown on me. When death takes someone you know, he holds you and whispers all his secrets in your ear.
I tried to drag Alphonse into the bathroom because people always did that in the movies. It took all my strength just to get him on the floor, and the thud of his body hitting the floor made me dizzy and almost faint. I knew it was pointless to drag him any farther. I threw a glass of water on his face so that I could feel I had done everything I could, and I decided to get as far away from this room as possible.
I put my things into a plastic bag and ran down the stairs of the hotel. I walked quickly down St. Hubert and turned onto St. Catherine, which was still quiet. The drugs from the night before made me feel completely gutted and hollow. I didn’t know what on earth I was supposed to do without Alphonse. Even though I was making all the money, it seemed that since he was the adult, he was the only one who could get us a place to stay and food to eat.
I was thinking that perhaps I could make it on my own. Maybe I could stay at this trick Marcel’s house for a bit. He could marvel over how I liked to eat sugared cereal for dinner and how I still liked to watch Walt Disney on Sunday nights. He’d invited me to live with him, but, I knew he wouldn’t be nice to me now, even though he swore and swore that he would. It was a lesson I had learned from Alphonse. When you are vulnerable, the worst of society will fail you too.
A cop car rolled up beside me and the cop in the window told me to hold on a minute. “Shit!” I screamed at myself. I’d always been careful to keep clear of cops and to duck down alleys and take back streets if I spotted them cruising around. I considered running just so they would shoot me, but I didn’t even have the energy for that kind of thing.
I stood there freezing, waiting to be punished. They both got out of the car. I noticed they were both very young and similar looking. I was intimidated by how normal they were because I felt they would be disgusted by me. I wasn’t exactly sure what they would find wrong with me, but there was a lot they could choose from.
“What do you have in that bag?” one asked me.
“Can we also see what’s in your pockets?” the other one added.
I was terrified by them. My hands were shaking horribly as I emptied the bag and my pockets onto the hood of the police car. Together we all examined the contents. I had a big white rock that I had been meaning to paint a picture on. I had a Peanuts comic that I had colored in myself with pencil crayons. I had a Smurf with a white coat and a top hat that I was quite convinced was the most wonderful Smurf in existence. I had my “Kiss me I’m Polish” T-shirt. Thanks to Alphonse taking all my money, I only had about sixty-five cents in my pocket. This was a normal amount for a child to be carrying: enough for a telephone call and some candy.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Mary,” I lied, trying to come up with the most normal name possible.
“What are you doing here?”
“I slept at my friend’s house and we woke up early. I’m going home.”
“Do you want us to drive you home?”
“No, thank you.”
“All right then. Move on. You shouldn’t be hanging around here. It’s a very bad neighborhood. You’ll just get into trouble.”
“Yes. Okay. I will.”
“It’s silly to be out on your own around here.”
“I know. I’ll go now.”
“Okay.”
One waved to me from the window. The results of their investigation had clearly uncovered the fact that I was still just a child. I had thought every single thing about me was something seedy, but really, there was nothing wrong with me.
WHEN I’D LEFT THE HOTEL, going to see Jules hadn’t been an option for me. All I knew now was that I kept walking and walking toward the Mission, the shelter where he was staying. In fact, the only thing that sort of calmed me down was walking in that direction. I felt that if I stopped, even for a second, I would completely collapse and throw up on my shoes. My body seemed to believe this was the only way to escape the mess I was in. The Mission was on St. Laurent Street, at the bottom of two hills, between Chinatown and Old Montreal. It seemed to be surrounded by bits of debris, as if the garbage from both parts of the city rolled down there. The Mission was an old building whose stones had been stained black, as if it had been touched by hundreds of people who’d just finished reading newspapers. There were big windows on the ground floor that looked into the soup kitchen, but garbage bags had been taped all over the glass to prevent strayed tourists from looking in at the homeless people. This was where Jules and I had always had our Christmas dinners together until this year.
On the second and third floors were rooms where men slept at night. They didn’t allow children to stay at this shelter, so I had never been upstairs. Until I’d run away, neither had Jules.
I cut through the parking lot, which was filled with men smoking cigarette butts. The ones who were worse off had tangled hair and looked like Moses when he came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. From the distant looks on their faces, they seemed to be experiencing a level of profundity that could kill an ordinary citizen.
I walked inside the entrance and down the hall to the cafeteria. I was feeling out of place because I was younger than anyone else who was milling around. No matter how old I got, I always seemed to be younger and more immature than everyone else. I accidentally caught my reflection in a mirror on the wall in the hallway. My hair looked dirty, like I had been clogging up a drain pipe. I seemed skinny, and my clothes had become too big for me. My face looked red and bruised from where Alphonse had hit me the night before. I put my hands on both cheeks and tried to somehow fix my face. I don’t know why they would put a mirror in that hallway. I couldn’t imagine anyone there was in the mood to take a good look at themselves.
When I stepped into the cafeteria, I spotted Jules right away. I hadn’t seen him in almost two months, which at my age was an incredibly long time, especially since this time I’d been the one who had decided to stay away. It was almost supernatural to see him in the flesh again, after I’d spent so much time thinking about him. He was sitting on a bench all the way at the other end of the cafeteria beside an upright piano. He had on a large checkered jacket and a sheepskin hat. He was wearing a pair of bright yellow running shoes that he’d bought last year when they’d been on sale for seventy-five percent off because of their unfortunate color. It made me sad to see him in his yellow shoes.
Jules was fiddling with the radio on top of the piano. I could hear the song from where I was standing. It was an old Félix Leclerc song. “When I don’t love you anymore, so as to let you know, I’ll be wearing my hat.” The guy next to my dad asked him to change the station, but Jules just ignored him. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth that he was obviously looking forward to smoking.
I didn’t want to call out to get his attention. I decided to stand there and wait until he spotted me. I had an uneasy feeling about standing there. It reminded me of a time when I was little and Jules and I were at a lake. I hadn’t had a bathing suit, so Jules had told me to take my shirt off and swim in my underwear. He had said that no one would think there was anything wrong with me. When anyone had looked at me that day, I’d wondered if t
hey were thinking I was a pervert for swimming without a shirt on. It had been terrifying.
I didn’t expect anything physical or material from Jules. After all, he was living in a homeless shelter and had nothing. I just needed, more than anything else, for him to love me like he did when I was a baby. That’s all I wanted from him. I felt tense as hell waiting for him to turn around and see me. It was as if I were standing on a window ledge of a six-story building. If he was furious with me or hated me, I would just plunge to a certain death right on the spot. It seemed particularly easy to die that day.
Jules turned his head in my direction. Our eyes met and he stared at me for a split second, not recognizing me. I waved slightly. The minute he looked over in my direction, his eyes lit up. They really did. They got bigger and bluer, as if they’d been filled in with a bright blue pencil crayon. His face broke into a grin. And his big smile—in the way that smiles sometimes can—fixed things between us. I felt a rush of relief come over me. It was an unexpected warm feeling like the way your lips feel when you kiss in the rain. He wrenched himself up and hurried across the room to me.
“Where have you been!” he cried and took me in his arms.
He smelled like terrible things. He had that smell that is in the air in the morning sometimes, of animals that had been killed in the night. He smelled like dirty, sweaty clothes and garbage trucks. He was and probably still is, to this day, the worst-smelling person I have ever hugged. But it was wonderful. He just wrapped his arms all the way around me. He hugged me the way that parents hug: with them doing all the work.
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” he said, while hugging me. “I’ve worried so much that it’s taken a year off of my life. Shit, I didn’t know where the hell you were.”
He looked at me in the face. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say anything because I was so tired and strung out that I felt the sound of my own voice might be too much for me to bear.
“You must be hungry!” he cried.
He sat me down at a cafeteria table and went to get me what appeared to be a gravy sandwich and a glass of milk. He laid the plate down in front of me and handed me a fork and knife that were wrapped up in a napkin.
“Kids get to have a glass of milk instead of pop. Go ahead. It’s full of calcium.”
I’d never heard him talk about the nutrients in food before. I found it odd, as if he was a stranger. He seemed like an adult, like a real parent for the first time. I didn’t know what he was going to do next. I was starving and was surprised that as soon as I put the food to my mouth, I completely lost my appetite. I chewed on a mouthful of bread for a long time before I could swallow it. Jules watched me eat with a sort of desperate relief in his face. He seemed to know something had been fixed between us, and he didn’t want to mess that up. He had to handle this responsibility.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you were gone,” he said seriously at last. “This isn’t right. You shouldn’t have to run around. You need some stability. This isn’t your fault; it’s mine.”
“I’m okay. You really don’t have to worry about me,” I said, not wanting to spoil the mood. “I just came to say hello.”
“Don’t just say hello. This is fucking stupid. You’re a baby. You’re a teeny-weeny baby, and I’m going to make sure you’re taken care of.”
I started to tremble violently. It was warm in the cafeteria and I still had my winter coat on, but every part of me started shaking. My teeth were even knocking together.
“Look at you, you look like you’re suffering from diphtheria, for Christ’s sake. You need a change of scenery.”
“Yeah,” I said, shrugging and smiling weakly. I figured that that was some sort of joke.
“I spoke to Janine.”
“Who?” I asked, as I’d never even heard that ridiculous name before.
“Janine.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“You know Janine.”
He said this all natural, not like he was trying to convince me of one of his tall tales. He couldn’t fool me, though. I had an almost religious memory for the things that Jules had told me, and I knew he had never mentioned anyone named Janine.
I looked at him as though he was crazy. He pursed his lips for a bit. Usually when he did that, he would say that he wanted a cigarette. Instead he sighed.
“She’s my cousin. Janine?”
“I don’t know who that is,” I repeated.
“All right!” he yelled, putting his hands in the air. “I was out of touch with her. You know she wasn’t my style. She was the only person that I sort of talked to when I left Val des Loups. I mean she kept calling until I changed my phone number.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. Ten years ago? Time flies faster when you’re an adult,”
“Okay,” I said in agreement, thinking that would end this topic.
I took another sip of milk. I didn’t know what he was going on about. I was still in such a state of shock that I had no ability to do anything with new information.
“She came to see me. And we were talking about you.”
“Okay,” I said, for the millionth time.
“I’ve been talking to a cousin, and she wants you to visit with her for a bit.”
“What?” I asked, sort of startled. I was finally getting the gist of what he was talking about. I was shocked that he was talking about something concrete about my future. I thought he was equally as confused as I was at the moment.
“You knew her when you were a baby,” Jules continued, despite my bewildered look. “She really wants you to stay with her. She always did. When you were little, she was very aggressive about keeping you.”
“Who is this person again?” I asked.
“My cousin.”
“Okay. You want to visit her. I’ll go. That would be nice.” I wanted to be able for us to agree on something. I was being very optimistic. I didn’t even care where she was or how we were going to get there. “For how long?”
“She used to piss me off. I wanted you all to myself, you know. But things are different. I think it might be better for you if you did stay with her.”
“But I want to stay in Montreal. I want to stay near you.”
I surprised myself when I said that. I didn’t even know that I knew what I wanted so clearly. I felt my eyes smart Jules’s face got all red and had a goofy forced smile on it, as if he might be holding back tears. Yet, at the same time, I didn’t feel so bad about the idea of going. It was making a little bit more sense each second. It was as if I was climbing down a ladder.
“I’ll come and see you all the time. It’s not a long drive away. It’s better for now.”
“Where does she live?”
“In the sticks, outside Val des Loups.”
“What! You said it was like a toilet bowl out there.”
“It’s not that bad. Once when I was little, there was a goose that used to follow me around all the time. It thought I was its mother.”
“Really,” I said, pleadingly, as if this goose would be waiting for me as soon as I stepped off the bus.
“I called that goose Peter; I always liked that name.”
I guess if I was a boy, my name would have been Peter. A lot of other things might have been very different too. Jules stared at me, waiting for me to commit. I felt overwhelmed. I wasn’t sure what was going on, whether I was losing Jules or not.
“Are you okay? Are you going to be sick? It’s all right if you are. People here get sick all the time. Nobody would be surprised by anything.”
“Are you going to come with me to Val des Loups?”
“Sure, I’ll stay for a bit,” he said, smiling sadly. “Look what I have for you. Wait here. Paul, keep an eye on her. I swear to God, if I come down and she isn’t here, I’m going to burn this place down. You know I’m capable of it.”
He went into the pastor’s office at the back of the cafeteria. When he ca
me out, he had a wrapped package in his hand.
“Here’s a present for you. The pastor put it aside for you. He was like shocked not to see us here this Christmas.”
It was soft and wrapped in purple tissue paper. On it was a little paper tag that said “GIRL 5 and Up.” I opened it slowly without ripping the paper, but taking it off neatly, as if I was folding a sweater. Inside was a little family of toy mice made out of some sort of real animal fur. There was a mother and a father and two children mice. They were dressed in miniature tuxedos and frilly Victorian dresses. It was, by far, the best gift I’d ever gotten.
“Aren’t they beautiful!” he exclaimed. “Look at the tiny umbrella the girl one has.”
“It’s a parasol,” I whispered.
I had to whisper so that I wouldn’t start to cry.
“I love you,” he said. He looked a little appalled at how unconvincing that word sounded. He had used the word “love” to describe everything from flip flops to pickle chips to a soda pop commercial. But what else could he say? “Will you let me take you out there?”
I shook my head no. I didn’t know where out there was. All I knew was Montreal.
“You don’t have a choice. We’re going, okay. I’m going to call my cousin.”
He jumped up and walked over to a yellow phone that was on a wooden shelf on the wall. I stayed seated, finishing my glass of milk and watching him take action. He went through all his pockets to find the phone number. He took out some candy, a pack of cigarettes, and five or six scraps of paper, which he examined carefully and then threw on the shelf with disgust. Finally, he took out a piece of paper that he seemed satisfied by and dialed a phone number. He looked excited about being in charge. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could see that he had a lot of trouble staying still while talking. He took off his hat suddenly and rubbed his hair really hard. It was so dirty that it looked wet. What a bum, I thought, and smiled. He hung up the phone and hurried back to the table triumphantly.
Lullabies for Little Criminals Page 30