Best Canadian Stories 2020

by Paige Cooper

  Your Random Spirit Guide

  Eden Robinson

  My Haisla and Heiltsuk ancestors would never come to you in a dream. They have super stressful afterlives watching over their great-grandchildren as they make unfortunate dating choices at the All-Native Basketball Tournament or decide to put their lustrous, black hair in un-Indian man buns.

  If you want to talk to my ancestors, you need to burn their favourite food and drink. Put it on plates and in cups; real ones, not disposable. Don’t throw it in the fire. Say their names as you place the dishes and drinks near the flames. Otherwise other ghosts will try to steal their food.

  They’re not going to emerge from the clouds like angels or the Lion King. They’ll be a flicker in the corner of your eye. Your keys showing up on the coffee table when you’re sure you left them on the kitchen counter. A song that repeats endlessly in your mind, usually their favourite, a song with sentimental meaning. They’re not going to whisper their stories in your ear as you sit at your laptop, no matter how much you feed them. A ghost doesn’t have that kind of energy. Our worlds are separate and difficult to transcend.

  Or you might be listening to a liar. Human ghosts aren’t the sole inhabitants of the other world. The thing that’s whispering to you can say it’s my ancestor, but I doubt it and so should you. Know the names. Trust, but verify.

  Hazel & Christopher

  Casey Plett

  1

  When Hazel grew up and moved out of the prairies, she would learn from movies and the news that small towns were supposed to be poor and dying. But Hazel never thought of her unhappy childhood as horrific, and Christopher’s family was not only happy but rich. They lived in a cul-de-sac next to a canola field with a wide yard surrounded by poplars; they were always renovating their basement. If you had pressed Hazel as a child, she maybe could’ve admitted she was jealous. In a glossily submerged way, maybe. Mostly, at that age, she just loved being Christopher’s best friend.

  When they first touched each other they were eight, sleeping in an old inner room without windows in the basement. They were hyper and laughing hard and then her eyes were close to the freckles on his shoulders.

  They talked about gay-ness exactly once, just after Hazel and her mom moved across the province. They were on the phone and about to start high school. Hazel was in a stage of proto-transness, a stage in which she was terrified of herself and had no idea why.

  She brought it up this way: “What do you think about gay people? Are they OK or should they be killed? I don’t know.”

  “They should probably be killed,” Christopher said.

  “OK.”

  They talked on the phone a lot after Hazel moved away. She’d always wondered if Christopher remembered that. It would’ve been unusual for two boys. (“Boys.”) Mom let her call him for twenty minutes on the weekend. Long distance. Hazel’d say, “But you talk to your boyfriend every night for hours!” And Hazel’s mom, forever calm, just said, “This’ll make more sense to you as an adult.”

  It did make sense to Hazel now, if not in the way her mother probably imagined.

  Christopher was always happy to talk. He didn’t have the same emotional needs back then and even as a young teenager, Hazel recognized that. But he always made time for her. He did.

  *

  Hazel last saw Christopher when she was twenty. Home from out west, knowing her boy-days were numbered and so were the reasons to come back to this part of the world. She and her mom were at her aunt’s for Christmas and Hazel walked from the other end of town in the snow, the creak of her boots the only sound in the pale afternoon sunset.

  She walked in the door of Christopher’s house and no one was on the first floor. She went down to the basement, noticed a bedroom off to the side with power tools everywhere and half-installed hardwood floors. In the rec room, Christopher and a couple other guys were watching The Departed with a two-four of Bud. (There was a particular kind of American, Hazel had learned since, who was bummed to know that Canadians drank Bud.) One of the guys said he wanted more beer, but hated the girl who worked at the vendor.

  Hazel had felt herself teetering on an edge then, between a fear of how volatile it might be to continue knowing these boys, and a distant sadness in the knowledge she might never see these stupid fuckers again.

  Crazily enough, there had been a trans guy in town, her age, who’d come out around a year prior. He’d announced himself, then right away skipped off to the city. Hazel brought up his name like a test, like hazarding an exhibition round.

  “So you guys hear about. . . ?”

  “Oh god the dyke!”

  And everyone laughed.

  “I have no problem with gay people,” Christopher said. “But gender reassignment. . . .” A visible shiver came over him, something real and revulsive. He shook his head like he’d stomped on something crawly and was trying to forget about it.

  When the two-four ran out, they all went to a party where they did shots, then played a drinking game, then drank rum out of Solo cups, then shotgunned beers in the garage with their coats on, and when Hazel stumbled into a wall the boys laughed and said incredulously: “Are you drunk?!” It was 7 p.m. and the moon was shining behind a cloud of blankets and after that they went to the bar.

  The main takeaway for her: How did Christopher Penner, in Pilot Mound, Manitoba, years before Chaz Bono would ever grace a magazine, know about the term gender reassignment? Weeks later, Hazel got on a plane and flew back west, and weeks later she transitioned, then dropped out of school, then fell away from all she’d ever known. And as the following decade churned, in tiny rooms in roiling bright cities, the thought of Christopher would flit down onto her, like a moonbeam startling her awake.

  *

  Ten years later Hazel crash-landed back home—untriumphantly, the prairie winter beginning its months-long descent into lightlessness. And among other things, she began to search for him.

  She didn’t have any friends left in Pilot Mound. Her aunt wouldn’t talk to her, her mother didn’t know anything, having moved to the city years ago. And Hazel couldn’t even fucking find anything on social media. Last she’d heard of Christopher, years ago, he’d moved to the city, too. Even his parents she couldn’t track down.

  Idly and with pleasure, she set up parameters for him on OkCupid, boys of a certain age and height range. She looked for boys with red hair and dustings of freckles around their collarbones. She checked this every week or so. When she heard of anyone with the name Chris, she would ask, “No chance you mean Christopher Penner, do you?”

  Hazel really didn’t expect anything to come of any of this. Her searches were like periodically buying a lottery ticket: a nice, dependable, dopamine-filled surge where the come-up of hope somehow always eclipsed the comedown of disappointment.

  She wasn’t doing much with her days besides going to AA and volunteering with a nascent sex workers’ rights organization, of whose members Hazel was somehow the only one who’d ever touched boy parts for money. The nights she was home, she made dinner for her mom, but usually Hazel’s mom was at her boyfriend’s place or at work, and usually that suited Hazel just fine.

  *

  She had no idea what to do with her life, if she had a future, or if she wanted one. In the absence of the alcohol she’d flooded herself with for half her life, her tired, newly sober body handed her a sense of alertness she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager. At the same time, she also felt herself turning into a slug as that body barely moved. Many days she never left the house. She slept and watched Netflix and cooked.

  Hazel figured sooner or later one of three things would happen:

  Welfare would dump her

  She’d fall off the wagon

  Her mom would move in with her boyfriend, who, no matter how much he got along with Hazel, would be unlikely to in tandem take in a 30-year-old transsexual ex-hooker in
recovery

  Or maybe all of those things would happen at once. Regardless, she didn’t imagine this quiet un-life would last forever.

  In the meantime, she hoarded her cash, went to AA and the nascent sex workers’ rights organization and shut off her brain. And one of few bright spots in imagining her future was when she indulged this loving spot of her past and scanned the internet in search of Christopher.

  *

  Well, Hazel did do one other unusual thing in this period. She went on a date.

  Marina from the nascent sex workers’ rights organization—Marina who was not a sex worker, but who was a grad student—introduced the two of them. Marina knew the guy through lefty something or other. Hazel had seen him around at a couple things. He was cute. Tall, blonde hair, glasses. Good politics, ungregarious. Hazel was into all of this.

  *

  “You’re getting dressed up like that?” asked her mom that evening.

  Hazel was in the bathroom with the door open, in a flowery blue dress, applying eyeliner.

  “I’m going on a date,” said Hazel.

  “A date,” said her mom slowly. “Where?”

  “Baked Expectations.”

  “No shit,” said her mom. “Your dad and I went there once. Long time ago.”

  “I haven’t been on a date in years. A real date, anyway. I don’t remember the last time that happened.” Hazel said this awkwardly, still re-learning how to talk to her mother as an adult, a woman, a person commiserating.

  Her mother softened at this. “No, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’d be nice if you met someone,” her mom said quietly.

  Hazel turned to look at her. What a normal conversation, she thought. What a normal conversation for a daughter and a mother to be having. Her mother shut the door behind her, and Hazel stared at the towel hanging on a hook, her feet shifting in the fluff of the rug.

  *

  The guy had a steaming tea in front of him when she sat down and he invited her to get a coffee or something.

  That was the most disappointing part. Not even dinner? she thought.

  He didn’t get her, but he was smart, turned out to run an after-school arts program, and by the end of the night she’d started to like him. “I did a workshop in the country,” he said. “Seventh-day Adventists, right? And they asked me if I was an atheist, and I said yes. And then they had this look of shock on their faces. And they said to me—I swear—they said: ‘Do you live in Osborne Village?’” Hazel laughed.

  It was eleven o’clock when he revealed he had a wife. And a kid at home. They were opening up their relationship after thirteen years. “She’s cool with us being here,” he stressed, as if this would soothe her. When he drove her home, he joked about making out in the car and she got out the second he parked.

  Then a Facebook message half an hour later: I wish I had kissed you. I just wasn’t sure if you wanted to. I’m not always totally sensitive to—blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

  *

  “How was your date?!” her mom asked the next evening.

  Hazel savoured the excited look on her mother’s face, letting its image settle and take root in her mind. “He had a wife and kids.”

  “Ew!” her mom said instantly.

  “I know.”

  “Ugh! I. Well. You deserve better, I suppose that’s all I’ll say. You deserve better then someone expecting you to—slink around.”

  Hazel didn’t tell her she wouldn’t have had to slink around, that that was the thing that pissed her off, the burning phrase in her head: “She’s cool with us being here.” I don’t care how goddamn cool your wife is. Was that progress, that the wife now gave the other woman her blessing? Why wouldn’t Marina have mentioned this? (Would she have done so with a cis girl?) Was it really so weird she wanted to see what Christopher was up to these days?

  *

  Months later, after the new year, she was restless. Her mom was spending more time at her boyfriend’s. She’d filed some job applications for real, but her heart wasn’t in it. Plus, having firmly committed herself to alcoholism and sex work for much of her twenties didn’t do much for her resume.

  The nascent sex workers’ rights organization was plugging along, though. It had grown to ten members and consisted of two factions: white academics/camgirls and twinky Métis social workers. The latter were starting to get their way after a disastrous public event led by the former.

  Hazel was cheered by this, though she didn’t say much in the meetings. When she’d joined she’d hoped to just do boring legwork, but once it became clear the group was in infancy—and the others discovered her to not only be the sole transsexual but also the sole person who’d sucked dick for money—suddenly everyone wanted her opinion on things, and a decade of Facebook and queer culture had made Hazel very tired of needing to have opinions.

  So when Festival du Voyageur came along, Hazel went and she went alone. She wanted to be in a crowd and watch people get stupid. She put on her old faux-fur coat and vamped up with thick makeup and a purple toque and caught the 29 up Route 70 and then the 10 over to St. Boniface and began to feel alive and did not want to drink, not one iota. Hazel felt good about it. Those two things had been connected for a long time.

  Drinking socially was never her problem anyway. Passing the LC after dark, being alone and sleepless ten blocks from the late-night vendor—that was hard. But now? Going to watch idiots instead of being the idiot? That sounded fun.

  She had her last thirty dollars for the month in her pocket and paid fifteen to go in and watch Radio Radio thrill a crowd in a tent. Wandering outside in a cold chill of French and English and pretty young people in spacesuit coats, she saw a stand advertising “Giant Perogy Poutine with Bacon—$10” and barked: “Ha!” to no one. Throw in some bannock to soak up the gravy and you’d have the peak Manitoba food, she thought. Then she bought one. Twenty minutes later she was walking back from vomiting in the Porta-Potties, but even that didn’t feel horrible—who knew the last time she’d thrown up from something besides drinking? It felt innocent in its own way.

  It was while drinking water in front of the main tent that she spotted red hair in a circle of snowsuits, and right then Hazel knew.

  She lingered on the periphery of their circle. An alpha type with a ballcap who looked so much like Christopher’s old buddy Matthew was talking. The whole circle, actually, looked like those guys from years ago.

  Christopher glanced at her with a second’s blankness, then went back to listening to the ballcap.

  Hazel thought: He still looks so young. He looks so unbelievably young.

  Tall—a couple inches taller than Hazel. She’d forgotten. Freckles all over his face. His mother’s Irish red hair grown just over his ears. Thick, loose black jeans, blue mitts, and a grey toque sticking up like a chef’s hat. And blue eyes with a ring of gold inside them. She was that close to him.

  And he’d looked through her at first, as if she was any other girl. A specific kind of joy came to her in that, a joy she would always treasure in not being noticed.

  The boys left to go back inside, and she said: “Christopher?”

  He stopped, confused. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Hazel,” she said.

  “Hazel?”

  At first he didn’t get it, and she waited for him to at best laugh or go lifeless—but then it was beautiful, old Hollywood in the finest way, and Hazel would never forget this scene for as long as she lived. A dawn of recognition traveled across Christopher’s body. She said, “Hazel Cameron,” and
took off her toque and shook out her hair, letting it spill down her fake-fur coat, and added: “From Pilot Mound.”

  His face spread and cracked, like sunlight coming out of an egg.

  “We used to know each other,” she said, smiling. “A long time ago.”

  “HOLY SHIT! HAZEL!” And without another word (they came later: “You look amazing!” “I’ve thought about you for years!”), he hugged her. He hugged her and lifted her off the ground, her boots kicking and her nose buried in the back of his hair. It all really happened exactly like this.

  *

  On the first call (he called), she made it clear: “Do you want to go have dinner with me?”

  “Yes,” he said immediately. “Yes, I do.”

  “Like a date,” Hazel said, unwilling to entertain any maybe-fantasies anymore. “You realize this, right, what I’m asking you is to go on a date?”

  I sound like I’m his boss, she thought, leaning against the kitchen cabinets while her mom’s dinner burned.

  “Yes,” he said again. “Yes. I want to go on a date with you, too.”

  *

  They went to Paradise, that Italian place by Gordon Bell with the tinted windows. It was almost empty, with a sweet, apologetic, middle-aged waiter and menus with two-word items and no descriptions and prices that, if Christopher didn’t offer to pay, were just low enough for Hazel to still make it to the next month. “Well, fuck, I dunno, you were in Toronto then?” he said to her. Christopher was wearing a hoodie and blank T-shirt, and Hazel wore a tank top and a pencil skirt.

  “Montreal,” she said. “Though I did live in Toronto a couple years. And Vancouver before that.”

  “I went with my parents to Montreal once,” he remarked. “In high school. For a fencing competition.”

  “The fuck,” she said with a laugh. “A fencing competition?”

  “I was on the fencing team in high school!” he said, grinning. “I did it all four years. I”—he paused with a sense of grandeur—“was internationally competitive.”