Catch My Drift

by Genevieve Scott

  In front of the elevators at last, Edwina stabbed the down button and they waited, Lorna standing a few feet back. When the doors whooshed open, Edwina stepped inside and only then turned to face Lorna. The shininess in her eyes was gone. She had, suddenly, the wan look of someone who’d just finished a long exam, one for which she’d been up all night studying. Then she was gone. Sucked down the throat of the elevator.

  Crossing back to her office, Lorna felt wobbly on her feet. The perspiration was damp and cool under her blouse. She closed her door, straightened the photo on her desk, and put the highlighter back in its cup. She sat down in front of the crumpled paper bag. Lorna pressed her palm down on top of it — immediately it was clear there was no letter inside. What Lorna could feel instead was something hard and thin through the paper: a metal ring of some sort. Lorna turned the bag over, and a small silver bracelet dumped out onto her desk. When she pulled apart the hook and eye, she saw the silver engraving on the inside of the bangle: To LK love Mom.

  Lorna’s initials, but not Lorna’s bracelet.

  Lorna returned the bracelet to the bag. She seldom wore jewellery and was allergic to most silver. It came to her without needing to think. The bangle belonged to Lizbeth Kotsakos. There was no other answer.

  Lorna stood then, her body twanging with adrenaline. She had an urge to rush back to the elevators, to chase Edwina down, to tell her exactly whose goddamn bracelet this was. No, Lorna had not torn apart Edwina’s family; she was not responsible for Edwina flunking out of university or for whatever mess she was making of her life as a result. Lorna looked at her reflection in the darkening window. She flinched at her arrogance. In the end, Ian’s death had nothing to do with her.

  Lorna’s phone began to light up and ring again. She let four, five, six flashes go by before reaching shakily for the receiver.

  “Lorna Kedzie.”

  “Jesus. Mom, it’s just me again.”

  Lorna felt a fresh bolt of alarm. Why was Cara calling again? Had Edwina done something completely deranged? Left a bag of dead mice outside the apartment door? “Sweetheart? Is everything OK?”

  “Um, yeah. You’re the one who pretty much hung up on me.” Cara sighed. “I just need to know if you care if I stay at Dad’s tonight?”

  Lorna glanced down at her watch. Edwina struck her as one of those zigzagging, inattentive fast-walkers. If she rushed, would it still be possible to track Edwina down now?

  “It’s game five,” Cara said. “You are aware it’s the World Series, right? Dad wants to watch with me.”

  “Did you eat dinner?”

  “He’ll boil hot dogs.”

  Out the window, Lorna heard the bright eruption of a siren. An ordinary downtown sound, but she approached the glass to look. On the sidewalk across the street, a gathering of people had stopped to face her building. Lorna drew in her breath. She could see it happen: Edwina, blind with rage, stepping right into traffic. Maybe she even put herself there on purpose. Fucking Ian. Fucking Lizbeth.

  But not Lorna’s fault.

  “Helloooo?” Cara said.

  Lorna stood on her tiptoes, but from the sixteenth floor, and with a foot of radiator in front of the window, she couldn’t see directly below her. She slipped out of her shoes and stepped up on the rad, the cheap metal yielding under her weight. The phone jerked and tumbled over the edge of the desk, the black console twisting like a bass on a fishing line.

  “What’s that random noise?” Cara asked.

  Lorna put her face right against the glass.

  “Somebody’s hurt,” Lorna said. The glass fogged when she spoke.

  “Who?”

  “No one you know.”

  “But who though?”

  Lorna looked down at the crowd of people. She was glad that what she said was true, glad that her daughter didn’t know Edwina, and glad that she would never know about Edwina, or Ian, or any of the stupid things that Lorna had wasted too much energy on. Not letting Cara become like Edwina, not ruining her children with her own selfishness, should clearly be the point of every decision she made.

  Lorna drew a line through the fog. “Cara,” Lorna said, “what would you say is your best skill?”

  “What. At school?”

  “Sure.”

  “French,” Cara answered without hesitation. “I have, like, an 86 now. Why?”

  “Eighty-six. That’s very good.”

  Of course there was Alex, and Lorna couldn’t control his imprint, but could a kid be all that damaged if she still liked watching baseball with her parents?

  As the siren shut off, the crowd across the street began to break up. Squinting through the early evening, Lorna could just make out Edwina’s stooping shape, not moving with the crowd, not lying in a puddle of her own blood, but steadily watching someone else’s disaster.

  Edwina was safe; Lorna could likely catch up to her. But what could she really say? What would it change? Her dad was gone. Like Cara and her brainwashing story, the girl needed someone or something to blame. She was hurt, and she didn’t want to believe it was her father who hurt her.

  Lorna stepped off the windowsill. She returned her phone to the spot on her desk and slid the bracelet back in the bag.

  “I’m coming now, sweetie,” Lorna said quietly into the phone. “Just wait and I’ll drive you over.”

  Clutch

  Summer, 1994

  The night before the test, Dad takes me to dinner on the Fatso’s patio overlooking the Don Valley Parkway. We sit facing the sun, eating our burgers, watching tiny cars bubble up from downtown and shoot off to the suburbs.

  Dad stretches his legs and crosses one ankle over the other. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do, Care Bear?” he says. “First thing when you get your license?”

  “We’ll come here.”

  “No way,” Dad says, his eyes on the passing traffic. “The first day of your license is a memory you make on your own.” He crunches the paper wrapper from his burger. “What I’d do? Stick on Gimme Shelter, crank it, drive the parkway the whole way along.”

  I hate driving on any kind of highway, but I let him keep on imagining whatever he’s imagining until he slides the keys across the table and it’s time to go.

  I’ve been meeting Dad for driving lessons every Friday for the last two months. We get together at Suds laundry where he drops off his clothes, and then we just drive until dark. He brings the tapes he wants me to hear — really hear, like Pink Floyd and the Who — and he tells me everything you could ever want to know about any car on the road. It works out well, Dad teaching me. Mom is the most uptight driver you’ve ever seen. We did a couple of practices in the parking lot together, but she couldn’t let go of the holy shit grip and it started stressing me out, too. After that she sent me to Nolan from Safety-First, whose car smelled like apple cores. He was always swallowing for no good reason and telling me to keep my eyes on the road when obviously I wasn’t about to look at him. I did my twenty hours with him and everything, but Dad’s the one I learn from.

  Back in the car, Dad cranks his seat all the way back, and I ease us onto the road. He just trusts me.

  “What time again tomorrow?” he asks.

  “Nine is good.” That gives us a full hour before the test. You have to give Dad the extra time.

  “You feel OK about it? Not too nervous?”

  “Were you nervous before you got your license?”

  Dad scratches under his ponytail. It’s a weird look he has going on because his hair is all soft and wispy on top like a baby, but the ponytail bit is dark and stringy. “Can’t remember, Care Bear. You know that.” Dad has the worst memory, and it used to drive Mom crazy. Mom remembers everything. These days she’s constantly getting watery-eyed over old stuff. Even on a regular weekday morning, she’ll be in her bathrobe, scraping her spoon inside an empty yogurt container all, “Remember your first window plant? Remember how big it grew?” I’ll lie and tell her I have no idea what she’s talking a
bout sometimes, just so she’ll get over it. You can’t just sit around remembering things all the livelong day.

  Driving west toward downtown, the sky spreads out all grapefruity pink over the lake, like a postcard from California. Dad lowers the sunshade and wriggles down in his seat. The warm wind coming through the window blows my hair to one side, and I feel like a girl in a music video, like I’m on some cool road trip, even if it’s just with Dad. He’s mellow, tapping his fingers on his thigh like there’s a beat somewhere I can’t hear. That’s one thing about Dad since he came back from Black River: Mr. Relax-o. He even has this new slow way of speaking like he’s been in the sun too long. “Let’s go somewhere,” I say.

  “Let’s do it. Get on the expressway.”

  The reason I hate the expressway is you can’t trust yourself on it. At those speeds you can kill someone before you even finish thinking about it. One quick jerk and it’s all over. How can you know you won’t do it? “Expressway’s not on the test,” I say. “I only have to drive fifty.”

  As we drive past the expressway entrance, Dad sighs and rolls his head toward me. “You shouldn’t be afraid of it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You don’t want to end up scared of life like your mother.”

  I can feel his eyes right on me when he says that. I shake my head because I don’t want Dad to think I’m like Mom at all. I want to be the kind of daughter he would have had with a more easygoing chick, the kind of woman I’ll bet he wishes he’d hooked up with instead of Mom back in the seventies. The real problem between Mom and Dad was that Mom’s a total tight ass. “I just like regular streets,” I say. “With people and stores and stuff.”

  “How is she?”

  I glance at Dad. “Mom? She has this new short haircut. She thinks she looks like Lady Di.”

  “Does she?”

  “No. She looks weird.”

  “She dating at all?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Dad bites the edge of his thumbnail. “When I met your mother, I thought she was the most confident woman on earth. She knew exactly what she wanted.”

  I consider what he means by confident. I picture some New York lady shouting at her home renovators from a car phone.

  “I hope you make her laugh sometimes,” he says.

  “Seinfeld does.”

  “Don’t let her get too old.”

  Mom is thirty-eight, same as Dad. It’s different for women, though. I don’t know when it happens, but at some point women start getting older than men. Even with Dad’s disappearing hair, Mom seems, like, ten years older. “We’ll go somewhere on the expressway next time,” I say. “I have plans tonight. I just forgot about them.”

  “If you’re ever going to visit, you need to drive at highway speeds.”

  “Visit who?” But the second I say it, I know.

  “Shari’s invited me to live with her.”

  After Dad quit Black River, he told us about Shari. They quit together. She lives up north near Barrie somewhere, and I met her once when she came down to Fatso’s just to have a banana and a plastic bag of pistachios, brought from home, with us. She showed me a picture of her twin daughters: little blond girls in life jackets with their hair all blown back. I asked who took care of them when she was at Black River. Dad shot me a disappointed look, but Shari said, “That’s fine, sweetie. Ask me anything.” But somehow she didn’t actually answer the question.

  When I don’t say anything Dad says, “Great skiing near Shari.”

  “It’s summer.”

  “Sure it is, now.”

  “You only just got home,” I say. “Plus how well do you even know Shari?”

  Dad lets out a long breath. “Well enough. You need to take risks sometimes.”

  “Most people snowboard these days, by the way. Only people from the seventies ski.”

  “OK, Cara.” I glance over, and notice his eyes are closed, a curtain on the conversation.

  I make the car jerk at the red light. Dad’s eyes open, but his attention drifts to a teal convertible in the next lane and a girl’s freckled legs dangling out the back window. “A 1982 Honda Prelude,” he says. “Cool colour, huh?”

  “It’s weird,” I say.

  “Cara, weird is a pretty irritating expression. Judgmental. I know where you get it from, but I expect more of you.”

  When I turn right, I stall the car for the first time in over a month. Dad’s whole body rattles, and some punk chick on a bike gives me the finger and smacks the side of the car. “Ugly bitch,” I say.

  “Cara,” Dad says, in that dazed new voice, “is cursing really the best way to handle that?”

  “Yes.”

  Dad knows I’m pissed so he suggests stopping by the carwash. When I was little, going with Dad to the car wash was my favourite. I loved being all snug in the car against the downpour of soap, the wet slap of blue noodles, and the hairy pompoms. Today, though, I just remind him that I said I have plans, and we drive the rest of the way home in silence. I’ve been quiet in the car with Dad before, but this is the first time it feels lonely.

  Mom’s watching Seinfeld when I get home. We finally got cable a month ago and she’s the one who uses it most. Dad’s right about her complete lack of a life. She twists right around at the sound of the door. “How did the driving go?”

  “Fine.”

  “How’s your dad?”

  That question is Mom’s most annoying. She’s happy not to be my driving teacher, but I know it makes her nervous whenever I’m out with Dad. I know she distrusts him, like she thinks he’s going to turn me into some New Age freak. I usually go out of my way to talk about how Dad lives like a normal person now and has a normal job at TravelWorld, but I don’t bother today because who knows, maybe that’s all going to change. So I just say, “Same.”

  “What all did you talk about?”

  “Different stuff.” I go to the kitchen for a snack.

  “Feeling good about tomorrow?” she yells.

  Extra loud, I yell back, “Yes! I know how to drive.”

  When I pass by the TV again, Mom is still all cranked around and wanting to talk more, like she’s been waiting all day for a conversation. Her hair is flat and still a little wet from her old people swim practice at the Y. “It’s OK to be nervous,” she says. “Driving is serious business.”

  “Yep.” And of course that message is loud and clear because right on top of the TV is that picture of Mom’s friend Debbie who was killed in a car accident. What happened to Debbie is sad, but I don’t see why we have to be reminded all the time. If Debbie were still alive, she and mom might not even be friends anymore. As far as I can tell, Mom only has friends at work, and they never come over. What would she and Debbie even do together?

  “Why don’t you put those crackers on a plate with some cheese?” Mom smiles and pats the seat next to her. “We can watch Wimbledon instead if you want.”

  “Nah.”

  I used to like tennis. At least, I liked being good at it. In the summer of grade seven, I got to play with a junior competitive team. I could hit the ball hard, but I never had much of a game plan. I was never able to think fast enough, and I did lots of stupid things. All the pressure made my head go wild. I couldn’t serve without thinking something bad would happen if my serve didn’t go in, like I’d fail grade eight or Mom would have a heart attack or something. Anyway, it’s depressing that I’ll probably never get close to being really great at anything else. I’m already sixteen. When Mom was my age, everyone thought she would make the Olympics for swimming. She hurt her knee in some accident — another reason that driving is “serious business” — or else maybe she’d have really been famous. Now she competes against other old people on Saturday mornings, and then they go out for pancakes at the Golden Griddle. This is the highlight of her week, pathetically enough.

  I start toward my room, but Mom’s still watching me. In the pale TV light, her skin looks like a bulletin board with one million
tiny holes. It’s not great to look at, and it makes me sad enough to sit down next to her. Shari’s not exactly young, maybe thirty, but she’s skinny with long hair and smooth, shiny skin.

  The morning of the test, Mom’s at her most aggravating. She just stands in her swimsuit and bathrobe, a shadow over my cereal bowl, being all Do you feel relaxed? Are you sure about no socks? When’s your Dad getting here? I tell her to take a chill pill because we still have a ton of time, but I’m kind of panicked myself because there’s just under forty minutes. Mom gives me her wrinkly really? face and checks the calendar for the three hundredth time.

  “I should take you there myself,” she says. “I don’t want you to be rushed.” Mom thinks rushing is the worst possible situation.

  “Don’t you have a very important swim competition?”

  She rubs her thumbnail against her teeth. “Well, if you miss your appointment, you’ll have to wait another month.”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  Mom looks at her watch and then at the intercom. “Come on, Alex,” she mutters.

  “Go stress out somewhere else, please.”

  Mom clears the breakfast table while I’m still eating, like if she just starts moving, everyone else will. I wonder if Dad forgot. Maybe he’s at home listening to Gimme Shelter and packing for up north where everyone has layered hair and frosted lipstick, except maybe Shari who is “nonconformist” like him, which as far as I can tell basically means not caring about your family.

  Sometimes it makes me feel better to just let Mom go off on Dad, so I say, “Do you know Dad’s moving to Barrie?”

  Mom stops with the clearing and leans her back against the counter. “Oh.” She pushes the sleeves up on her bathrobe. “He mentioned the possibility.” She already knew. She’s probably happy about it even.

  “Well doesn’t that seem, like, incredibly far away?”

  “Your father’s restless,” she says. “You know that.”