I wake up to the sound of the trunk slamming, my feet still rough with sand. Through my bedroom window, Jed and Dad load things into the car. Heike’s on the grass outside her van, rolling up a plaid sleeping bag.
Dad finds me on my way out the door. “Ready to move ’em out?” He’s grinning away like nothing ever happened.
“We’re not supposed to leave until tomorrow.”
“Is that right?” Dad scratches the back of his neck. “Well, Jed’s all set.” He looks back at the car. Jed’s bare feet are up on the dash.
“I’m not.”
“You need a hand?”
“No.”
Dad holds his hands up like he’s under arrest. “All right.”
In front of Simon’s house, Marie’s dress from last night is folded over the clothesline next to his orange trunks. When Dad’s out of view, I walk through the dewy grass and knock gently on Simon’s window.
The front door opens and Marie slides halfway out, wearing just a thin pink bathrobe. Her hair is piled high in a clip, and it looks like she ran her finger along the bottom of an ashtray and spread the dust underneath her eyes.
“Is Simon home?” I come up to the door.
She scrunches up her face so that everything on it sucks into the middle. “So you just bang on the window, huh? Good morning to you, too.” I don’t know what to do. I never say good morning. Only people on the radio say that. I try to look past her through the door. She moves to block my view. “You need something?”
“We’re leaving,” I say, my voice sounding teensy and dry.
Simon’s mom puts one hand on my chin and squeezes. I can see through the split in her bathrobe, but I can’t move my head to look away. “The spots on Simon’s body are not plant diseases,” she says.
“OK.”
“Simon has a condition. I don’t like little snobs from the city who make up stories.”
“I didn’t make anything up.”
“Simon was so upset last night,” she says. “His arms and legs bleeding all over, telling me we have to move again.”
“Not because of me,” I whisper.
“Because why?” Her long nails press harder into my cheeks.
“Nothing.”
When she finally lets go, I turn back and see Dad on our driveway. He smiles and waves but neither of us waves back. Marie lets the door slam behind her.
I rush back to the cottage and ram last night’s damp, sandy clothes into my bag, feeling like I’m about to cry. In the bottom drawer, I find Heike’s recorder and the baggie with Dad’s stereo springs and screws. I slide the baggie into my pocket.
Outside, Heike sits in the open door of her van, her knees pulled up to her chest. She is eating from a cracker pack with bright orange cheese. A guilty feeling bubbles up from deep down in my stomach. We should have been nicer.
“Here.” I cross the yard, holding out the recorder. “Are you leaving too?”
“I think so.” She smears cheese on a cracker.
“I’m sorry I didn’t learn more recorder.”
She takes the recorder from me and shrugs. “Who says I wanted to teach you?”
I just stand there, sucking my lower lip into my teeth. My Dad is not my fault.
Heike nods her chin in the direction of Simon’s house. “You say goodbye to your boyfriend?’
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
Heike’s laugh is sharp. “For many weeks, you will think about him everyday.” She snaps her cheese-dirty fingers. “And then this will stop. It’s always like this.” She looks right at me.
“Let’s go, Cara,” Dad calls.
Heike hands me her cracker wrapper. “Throw this out,” she says. Then she gets up, brushes her hands together, and walks around to the back of her van.
I yell to Dad that I’ll be there in a minute then cut back across the lawn, this time toward the beach.
Looking down from the top of the breakwater, the footprints on the sand go on forever. So many of them are Simon’s and mine. I jump down and dig a hole quickly, deep enough to feel water, packing my fingernails with ashy grey sand. Heike’s garbage goes in first, then the springs and screws.
Dad calls my name again, his voice getting louder, closer. I kick sand over the hole and stamp it down with my feet.
Simon’s footprints are just a little bigger than mine; I find one easily. With two hands, I lift the wrinkled sand and let it crumple slowly into the empty baggie.
Black River
Fall, 1992
After what happened to Jed, Lorna broke down and called Alex at the number he left for the Black River Peace Center in the foresty part of western Michigan. The young woman who finally answered said that Alex was in the middle of a “solo,” and unless it was an emergency, could she please respect his wishes not to be disturbed? Feeling herself start to vibrate, Lorna said, “Well, I’m afraid this news is very disturbing.” Then the woman, who sounded no more than twenty, asked, “Has someone died?” And Lorna said, “No, Alex’s son dropped acid at the school’s Run for AIDS and grabbed the new German teacher’s . . . backside.” The woman said, “Well,” as though evaluating whether or not this qualified as an emergency, as if it were up to her. “Tell Alex we’re coming,” Lorna said.
The first three days of Jed’s two-week long suspension from school wasn’t, in Lorna’s view, punishment at all. More like a luxury of time to sleep, play with his Sega, masturbate. Lorna had to do something drastic.
When Alex phoned back, he said that a visit would be very “destabilizing.” “I’ve been making progress,” he said.
“He’s your responsibility, too.” Lorna felt like she was playing the role of a mother in a very bad high school production. Alex often made Lorna feel that way. Like her requests were vaguely hysterical.
Alex sighed. “It’s awfully quiet here,” he said. “Not a lot of fun for a teenager.”
“Terrific.”
“There’s a real vibe here, Lorna, a real vibe that people work hard at. You can’t just bring all your outer circle issues in and disrupt everyone.”
Lorna’s reply got caught in her throat. She wrapped the phone cord around and around her wrist. “This is your child, Alex,” she said eventually. “There’s nothing more inner circle.”
There was a long pause. “I’ll have to speak to our mentor about it. It’s not something that can just happen.”
Lorna clenched her teeth into a hard underbite. “I’m not asking permission.”
The conversation ended with Lorna agreeing to bring down a couple of cans of corned beef. “It’s a strict macrobiotic diet,” Alex explained. “That won’t mean much to you, Lorna, but Jed will appreciate having the option when he’s here.”
“Sure,” Lorna answered, a mean spasm of satisfaction running through her, because the corned beef was clearly not just for Jed.
The drive could take six hours, more with stops. The plan was for her and Cara to spend the night and to leave Jed for the remainder of his suspension. Was it crazy to drop your kid off at a commune? (Not that Alex called it a commune. He called it “collective living,” “a place of “harmony,” a “spiritual retreat.”) Maybe it was a little crazy, but Lorna was fed up. Fed up with Jed and all of his bullshit, but even more fed up with Alex, who was making her cope with it all on her own.
Alex had been at Black River for nearly a year now. After losing his job at the bank, he moved to his mother’s run-down lake house with grand plans to insulate, renovate, and sell the place — “soul work,” he called it — but by Labour Day, nothing had been started, and it was getting cold. Over that summer of pretending to work, he’d become involved in something called “The Church of Remaking,” which he described as not a physical structure but a movement of people seeking community, simplicity, and spirituality. They met regularly in someone’s living room and had guest speakers, one of whom was from a centre called Black River. When Alex was back through the city at Thanksgiving, he told Lorna he was going to try a
season in “collective living.”
“What I’d like to do,” Alex told her, “is centre myself.”
“And how much will this cost you?” Lorna asked.
“Whatever I’m able to contribute.”
“Which is nothing. You have no money. Will you make any money?”
Alex took a moment. “Not in the traditional sense. Not for a little while.”
“So you’ll be making non-traditional money?”
Alex crinkled his face into a look of pity for her small mindedness. She knew that look well. Just thinking of it made her crazy. “It’s a season, Lorna.”
A season. What an airy way to describe time.
“I need to sort out some issues,” he told her.
Always Alex and his issues. Did he think that a bunch of meditation and stretching would make him rise above his problems? Alex had always had a woo-woo side, a grand faith that something was out there, something that he could find and unwrap, that could make his life better, that could make him the man he wanted to be. When they lived together, he would bring home crystals, meditation cassettes, Tibetan cookbooks.
Looking back, Lorna felt she should never have signed off on this collective living idea. But at the time, she was feeling a little sorry for Alex. He’d enjoyed his job at the bank and losing it was a blow. He’d also, in that Thanksgiving conversation, offered her a surprisingly large check from the sale of his Firebird. His baby. The car he bought at nineteen when he was making money as an actor and thought that one show under his belt meant a lifetime of celebrity or, at the very least, never having to look for a job. Beginner’s luck had a tragic side. Lorna took the check. It was just a season.
Lorna followed the directions Alex sent her, staying clear of the freeway wherever she could. Since Debbie’s accident she’d developed a fear of the freeway, a complete lack of trust in it. Still, if she had to drive at high speeds, something about having her children in the car comforted her. Their quiet trust, their confidence that she wouldn’t harm them, kept her from total panic.
Cara sat up with Lorna, looking out the window, listening to her Walkman. She pretended that Lorna’s “adult contemp” — Genesis and Richard Marx — could actually make her carsick. Lorna offered to put on one of Cara’s cassettes, but Cara said she was good.
A slow-moving truck in front of Lorna had a bumper sticker that said, “Take your country back: Perot for President!” She shifted her position on the seat. All of this tension everywhere! She was suffering a terrible bout of hemorrhoids. In her purse, she carried a small traveller’s pack of ibuprofen and some bullet-shaped suppositories, but none of it was having much effect. She’d been snappy with Cara all morning simply for wanting information like how long the drive would be and if she’d have any time to do her homework at “the Church.” It wasn’t fair to make Cara feel bad.
Lorna pulled into the oncoming lane and passed the truck. Time to be brave. She looked over at Cara, but her daughter showed no signs of being impressed. She was staring down at her suede clogs and workman’s socks, mouthing the lyrics to whatever was stuck in her ears.
Jed was the reason for the trip, but it was also an opportunity for Cara and Lorna. Lorna couldn’t help but feel that her daughter was lost. Recently, Cara had been talking about quitting tennis lessons. On the one hand, it was a relief. She wasn’t as good as she used to be, and Lorna understood the dangers in pinning too much expectation on something you were good at while you were young. But at the same time, if tennis wasn’t going to give Cara something to aim for, what was there? Her daughter didn’t appear to have any sense of self, any special interests. She seemed, finally, to have a circle of friends at school, but when she talked with them on the phone, it sounded like they did all the talking. Cara just seemed to cling at the edges of their lives. She got low Bs and watched a hell of a lot of television. And Lorna didn’t want Cara to learn that Jed’s style of behaviour was the only way to stand out, although it seemed that being noticed was the last thing Cara wanted. Even the way Cara walked seemed intended to achieve invisibility: shoulders in, arms crossed, like she didn’t want to be looked at. Like she might prefer to just disappear, even from her own mother. When Lorna was fourteen years old, just starting the high school swim team, she had liked to think of herself as the big, shining quarter in a fountain full of pennies. But Cara was so buttoned up, and so unnervingly private. She hadn’t even told Lorna when she got her period. Instead, Lorna had to find Cara’s “lost” swimsuit, stained and hidden at the bottom of the bathroom garbage bin. Lorna hadn’t found the moment to say anything about it, had no idea what to say, but she was hurt. The week Lorna started junior high in 1968, she found a sanitary napkin kit under her bed and taught herself to use it. She had wanted her daughter’s experience to be different, but Cara made it all so difficult.
Punished and Walkman-less in the backseat, Jed slept easily. Peering at him in the rear-view, Lorna could see a large rosy splotch on his cheek, the way his face would always go when he was tired as a little boy. Baby Jed had been as fair and puffy-haired as a baby chick, and she and Alex called him Garfunkel. Off he goes, they’d say as he ambled unsteadily in his bib overalls. Off he goes to Scarborough Fair. Now Jed’s hair was long and sweaty. He wore a plaid lumber jacket all day, every day, with the ragged cuffs of his shirts poking out. He made no effort whatsoever, but he was good looking and he knew it. It infuriated her how he ignored girls’ phone calls: too lazy to check the messages, didn’t notice or care, let their voices fill up the answering tape. Lorna didn’t know who Jed’s friends were anymore or how he spent his time. The acid was a shock, though she understood from the school guidance counsellor that the drug had recently become trendy again. A kind of resurgent hippie fashion among middle-class white kids, probably safer and easier on the allowance than the coke of the 1980s. Though frankly, at this point, Lorna was more concerned about Jed becoming an asshole than a drug addict. He’d woken up briefly at the border, handed over his passport, and re-closed his eyes, causing the border guard to knock on the window and say, “I’d appreciate you taking this seriously, young man.” Then the guard glared at Lorna as though her disgraceful son was all her fault, which . . . well maybe so. The thing was, Jed’s eyes always seemed partially closed. She’d given up trying to keep his eyes open. But as the guard waved them through, Lorna was hit with the realization that Jed was already sixteen. In a year he could get himself arrested for this behaviour. Did he understand that? Did she, truly?
Another thing: Lorna thought this road trip with her children might be a chance to take her mind off Ian, but as they drove thick into the country, through small, sweet towns with independent hardware stores and pumpkin displays, Lorna’s mind turned with him. For the last year, he’d been living at his country home, taking a leave of absence to work on a book about demographic trends in voting. He’d made that unexpected decision within weeks of their kiss in the office, and she assumed the suddenness of the plan was at least a little to do with her. Of course she’d thought about him frequently in the last year, but two weeks ago, she’d had a letter from him out of nowhere: a personal letter to her home address. He said he’d like to see her — specifically, he said that she could come out and see him. He surprised her. The handful of times he’d been into the office for meetings, their conversations were brief, polite, always led by him and mostly about his book. She was never sure how warm to be, how much to smile or in what way, and afterwards she felt lost and stupid for days.
But now, Lorna’s near certainty that Ian was inviting her to sleep with him, a scenario that would have been unimaginable just over a year ago, gave her a sexy kind of shock that sprang out like a firework from her lower gut. She imagined the two of them in rubber boots, taking a walk through foggy wet fields, making tea, and then fucking, eventually, by a fireplace: all images, it occurred to her, from a British TV movie she’d once watched. But she was torn about how to answer his letter. The career dangers of sleeping with one’s bo
ss were well established. And lately, with Ian out of the office, Lorna had reached a professional high point. She was leading all of OpinioNation’s focus groups herself; clients praised her all the time, and she didn’t want to risk that. But was she any better off turning him down?
While ambivalent, and likely screwed either way, Lorna found that she relished the control that indecision gave her. What happened next between them was in her hands, and this was big. Once she replied, control would shift back to Ian. If her reply made Ian feel guilty or rejected — the two likely outcomes — he would make her believe that this whole chapter between them was small, unimportant, and mostly the product of her imagination. He was frighteningly good at making people question their beliefs and change how they saw things. That was his grand talent; it was how he built his career and how he dealt with the world.
When the kids announced they were hungry, Lorna stopped for lunch at a restaurant next to a gas station, which, to the kids’ disappointment, did not have a deep fryer. A fan whirred needlessly above their table and a muttering old woman with a wet, shuddering cough was the only other person in the place. The kids didn’t appear to take much notice, but Lorna, who had the woman in her direct line of sight, found her deeply disturbing. She poured salt onto her burger before every bite. She spasmed nearly every time she lifted the burger to her mouth, toppings cascading down to her lap. How did this happen to her? Why did no one intervene? Where was her family?
“How much further?” Cara asked.
“Don’t talk with food in your mouth.”
“I didn’t.”
“An hour.”
Catch My Drift Page 15