Mistakes to Run With

by Yasuko Thanh

  * * *

  —

  I breezed through paperwork, the formulas needed to pay taxes at intervals throughout the year. I was hopeful that this process represented a shift in Avery’s outlook toward a view that was more in line with mine: namely, that we’d finally go legit. I no longer wanted to live looking over my shoulder. I wanted to pay taxes, something I’d never done before. To be the kind of person who paid taxes. I no longer wanted to live in fear that an official from Revenue Canada was going to knock on our door, point at all the material goods we’d amassed, the speedboat, the cars, the leather furniture, my camera equipment, and say, “Where’d all this stuff come from? Unless you can prove it was obtained legally, we’re going to seize it all. You owe us.” I was terrified of being audited, of the government seizing and then auctioning off what we’d worked hard for. Arguing with an imaginary bureaucrat, I’d defend my position. “Where the hell were you when I needed you? I never asked you for anything and now you want to rip everything away from me?”

  My defensive posturing hid the fact that I longed to be the kind of adult who contributed to society, who understood that tax dollars make the country’s social safety net possible.

  Sifting through paperwork took time, but the math wasn’t difficult; it was within my capabilities.

  I thought of ways we could advertise, how we could get Avery more business than the trickle of phone calls from friends wanting a good deal for removing a chipped windshield, a cracked passenger window.

  For the duration of my relationship with Avery, the pinnacle to reach had always been the “one day” when we’d have our own business. Another ho and her man had bought a laundromat. I felt optimistic that this move toward legitimacy represented progress in our evolution as human beings.

  * * *

  —

  We caught a ferry to one of the Gulf Islands so that Avery could change a windshield for a man who’d gotten his number through friends. I watched more than helped as he removed the old windshield and put in a new one we’d brought over in the van, held securely on the boat voyage in a custom rack he’d built that could hold up to seven windshields at a time. In a driveway surrounded by tall evergreens, carpeted with pine needles and cones, he lowered the windshield with rope, craftily slipping it into the rubber seal that would hold the glass in place; then he pulled the rope away by degrees so that the windshield sank into the empty space in the seal he’d already filled with glue. His arms flexed, his hands got dirty.

  Looking back now, I think Avery went along with the plan so he could say “See, I wasn’t lying. After all these years, we’ve got our business.” He never intended to expand it past the point of frivolity; for him it was consequential only as a front for the weed-growing operation. Filling out chits for ICBC, the province’s insurance program, felt like a game. Our money came from weed; plus, our Mobile Arrow company allowed us to write fake receipts for services never performed. So, while Avery ignored calls from potential customers, we’d deposit the grow op’s profits into the Arrow account.

  Nonetheless, I’d proven to myself that I was smart enough to run a business. I had the means to organize as well as the skills to seek out the information I needed to make things happen.

  And I’d stopped working the streets. I can mark down the date on a calendar but there was no declaration, no singular point in time where I identified as a working girl and then didn’t.

  Iron Web and Office of Fair Trading

  The car pulled in around noon. Even from a distance I’d recognized the rumble of the 454 engine that Avery had installed in the blue Chevelle. Not the stock motor—but then it wasn’t even a real Chevelle SS. Like so much about our lives, it was fake. He’d added the racing stripes and the SS chrome himself. As he got out of the car I spoke to him over the fence that divided the carport from the backyard.

  “Just getting home?” I said, stating the obvious. The subtext: Why have you stayed out all night? Don’t you know I keep track on the calendar? When the x’s I’ve marked outweigh the unmarked dates, a catastrophe will take place.

  He grinned the unmistakable grin of someone high. The contortions idiosyncratic to each addict. The grin also held shame.

  I’d been awake for hours. So had he, all night by the looks of it. I continued busying myself with small outdoor tasks, puttering away as if his presence meant nothing to me.

  “I don’t care, you know.”

  Still he said nothing. But he didn’t make a move to go into the house, either.

  Remorse, promises, failures, more promises, begging. How easy for anyone to look at the addict and say, “It’s not his fault.” I lacked the essential part of the argument: that this didn’t mean I had to let it into my own life. Back then, it was too easy to equate leaving because of his drug addiction with being a judgmental person—something I abhorred. To leave because of an illness was mean. What about for better or for worse? In sickness and in health? In these ways and others I’d rationalized his addiction, my staying. I’d chosen to believe him when he said he quit and ignore his nights out as normal.

  “You and I,” I continued, “have absolutely nothing in common. So, I have a plan. How’s about you live your life and I live mine. We’ll keep them separate. Like meat and potatoes on a plate.”

  His demeanour crumpled. “But I don’t want that,” he said. “I don’t want you to live your own life.”

  “If you didn’t know me today, would you still seek me out? I doubt it. In fact, you hate my type.”

  We both knew it was the truth.

  “Nothing,” I underlined the word, “in common.” I took pleasure in this, in being cruel, fuelled by anger, his duplicity, the strength of my conviction. A wall went up between us. Surrounded by my books, working toward getting my General Equivalency Diploma and practising the writing portion of the test, a three hundred word essay, the only assignment I cared about, I could live with him while knowing that only my body walked around that house.

  In a few months his addiction would see the Chevelle and the twenty-five thousand dollars we’d put into its restoration gone—all to cancel out a seven-thousand-dollar drug debt.

  Accrued when he partied down the street at a restaurant owned by a friend of his. At first, I’d been relieved that he was hanging with the boys and not in the bar chasing skirts. Avery did nothing but grind his jaw when he got high. He could never fuck a woman.

  I released myself from caring about his wants and needs.

  The fence between us was perfect. I stepped away, into the sunshine, as if to prove how little this all meant to me—knowing he couldn’t follow. I’d spent half the night crying but now stood in the sun. Avery was left in the shade of the carport, which stank exactly like the garbage we kept there. I wasn’t weak, and I didn’t need him.

  I understand now that the burden was never on me to save him. A person can be saved only if you have their permission.

  * * *

  —

  So, with that certain measure of cruelty all ultimatums contain, I walked out with my backpack, leaving a note saying that if he wanted me to return he’d better think about things. Left my car, the note, our dog, and over the dog alone I cried. Sure I’d never return, I waited for a bus that would take me to the West End.

  I went to my friend Patti’s. I’d met her at a writers’ camp in Campbell River where twenty contest winners were sent to workshop under Jack Hodgins, a local writer.

  I’d titled my story “Fear.” I wrote about living in a biker house, stereo blaring, the coffee table and shot glasses, the empties in the kitchen. I described how it felt to be choked against a wall, how hands squeezing your throat felt from holding your breath. The surprise that a neck could support the weight of your body as easily as it held up your head.

  The other participants spoke of Jack Hodgins in hushed tones, or, if addressing him directly, did so with lowered eyes that bordered on awe. I’d never heard of him, nor did I know what a “workshop” was. I’d been horr
ified to learn, on my first day of the seven-day camp, that workshop was a verb. “To workshop” meant that you read everyone else’s short story, that you came to class prepared to share your comments out loud. So that’s why they sent us an envelope stuffed full of fiction, I thought.

  Others characterized my work as “raw.” Most of the participants were older. Apart from Patti and me, no one else was in their twenties. One woman, in her thirties, had worked as an editor for PRISM international magazine. More than Jack Hodgins, it was she whom I revered. Whom I shyly spoke to. With whom I exchanged phone numbers. Not only because she had beautiful red hair and drove a cool vintage car and sang in a jazz band, but because she’d worked for a magazine where I’d long been sending my work. Whose every issue I read in the Vancouver Public Library as if studying the Bible.

  * * *

  —

  Speaking to Avery on the phone from Patti’s apartment, I told him that things had to change.

  The trip, I added, was the only thing that would save us.

  By now I’d been off the track for four years. Time contracts or expands according to how it fills: routine blurs years; time speeds up walking the dog, taking out the garbage. When settling into a movie before bed could be any other day, time seems reversible, you can move ahead, or backward. In moments of drama, time tightens its chains affixing events to us forever. Adventure marks its irreversibility, yet the days in which nothing happens slip by without leaving a mark.

  The years that followed were steady, predictable. I lived inside my stories, fooling myself with words. I grasped at my history, recounting it, and saw yesterday through mine and Avery’s stories, negating the present while sucking the past dry. Time flowed with the speed of a river, sweeping me up in a surge of thoughts, occasionally crashing on the rocks of Avery’s violence that I had once confused for passion. I rewrote myself.

  Even though we’d blown through the half-million dollars I’d earned, he’d granted me equal time to write. I’d worked as his ho for four years. I’d written for four years, without working the track. Now the books were balanced; we were even. Stay or leave, it didn’t matter.

  He could fund a trip for me, I said to him over the phone, or I’d leave. Furthermore, the trip came with no guarantees. The distance between us gave me leverage. From Patti’s living room I could make demands.

  We decided to give it one more shot: we’d travel together much as some couples have a baby together to strengthen their bond. Because Avery’s sister had said he wouldn’t survive without me. Because he said he’d do anything to make it work.

  * * *

  —

  Avery placed an ad for our Mustang in the Buy & Sell newspaper, listing it for ten thousand dollars. A few days later the man who’d buy the Mustang, our last remaining car, stood in our living room. He picked things up, looked at them, and put them back down as if he owned the place.

  The week before I’d stood in Patti’s living room, tears streaming down my face.

  “You know you were right to leave him.” She paused. “Right?”

  She’d once had a suicidal boyfriend. Whenever they fought he threatened to do himself in. After I stopped crying I asked her what had happened to him. “Did he kill himself?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  Now I watched the man walk around, pompous as a peacock, as Avery answered his questions about the car. I knew his type: gym monkey, too much testosterone. He hadn’t spoken to me once or bothered to look my way even though I was by Avery’s side the whole time. Finally the man asked for a test drive.

  Avery returned a while later with no car and eight thousand dollars cash.

  * * *

  —

  We gave up the house, the dog, the grow op, and put all our furniture into storage. Funding the trip with the proceeds from the Mustang, we left at the beginning of August 1995 for Central America.

  I bought a Jack Hodgins book to bring along.

  For the next four months Avery danced and made friends with everyone, regardless of where we were. A mountain town in Guatemala where we studied Spanish at a school that had a Homestay program, butchered chickens for dinner, and ate tamales wrapped in corn. On an island in Honduras. In the ruins of Copán. On a beach in Playa del Carmen. Every action brought him closer to an essential version of himself. We swam with sharks and barracuda. Learned how to score pot in Spanish, how to roll it in banana leaf. He was becoming the man he’d always meant to be.

  We met a man sailing around the world. My teenage love for boats and the sea resurfaced. “The ocean as your home,” I said.

  “To make a move like that…” I said dreamily to Avery that night. We’d figure out the logistics upon our return. “What do you think?”

  “I’m in.”

  We had no plan; for now, it was enough to know we shared a vision.

  * * *

  —

  When we got back to Vancouver in December, we rented a small apartment off Commercial Drive. I made up index cards with our names and phone number—“Couple happy to crew for food and berth”—and added that I could cook, that Avery could fix anything broken. “Pin them up at yacht clubs,” I told Avery. “Find a bulletin board by the Westin.” Rather than buy our own sloop, we’d learn how to sail on someone else’s first.

  But he never pinned up any cards. They lay in a pile on the kitchen counter, where they remained. I refused to move them. I couldn’t touch them, much less clear them away. Their presence on the spotless counter spoke of more than I could bear to hear.

  I looked out the bedroom window onto a potholed alley lined with dumpsters and the back of another four-storey walk-up like ours, a low-cost housing initiative from the seventies. Four narrow flights of stairs up to our rooms with their mouldy tiles, scored floorboards, wall cracks, mice, cockroaches, bricked-off fireplace, cardboard walls. I saw only death and decay.

  * * *

  —

  I’d been trying to write, but my sense of uncertainty about the future, and about myself, ruined every story I started. I couldn’t find the right voice; the apprehension I felt had infected my writing. The answer was clear. No amount of craft or technique would improve me so long as I stayed with Avery.

  * * *

  —

  My great-grandfather, the story goes, abandoned his wife and children for months, even years, at a time. Chased women. Gambled. Through sheer grit his family managed to survive, even thrive, during his absences. But, to my amazement, my great-grandmother would let him return at intervals to collect money from their meagre savings, to reclaim his place as head of the household. How easily beauty blends with ruin.

  This story haunts me.

  I had to believe there was more to my great-grandmother’s compliance than simple weakness or stupidity. I saw myself in her.

  * * *

  —

  On my office wall was what I called my memory box. Wooden with a glass front, it held things from my childhood. Among them was a bookmark I once drew of Alice in Wonderland where she cried so hard that everyone floated away on her tears. Carried off by her sadness, washed away by her pain.

  My writing would do this. Wash away my pain.

  Vindication. I write to be free. The words will free me. Then it would all have been worth it. All? What all? The streets, Avery? Yes, I’d show them. A child’s threat: “Then they’ll be sorry.” For years in my secret heart I’d been waiting for discovery. It felt like reaching in the dark—for an outstretched hand that would touch me, know me.

  I sat in my office and made myself write lines:

  You will not be homeless.

  You will not go hungry.

  You will continue to write.

  You will get your break.

  You will make your own money.

  You will have the options you have created.

  I also wrote a to-do list:

  Extract self from all joint accounts and ventures.

  Gather precious belongings, snor
kel, Christmas cards.

  Money!

  Call landlord.

  Photocopy birth certificate, SIN, passport. Keep in a safe place.

  Cut an extra set of house keys and hide them?

  Then I wrote a story as if I had five minutes left to live.

  * * *

  —

  But first I needed a way to survive, resources to deal with the repercussions of leaving. I found myself a “socially significant” job working at the Wilderness Committee, an environmental group that lobbied for the protection of old-growth forest. My role as a canvasser was to go door to door Mondays through Thursdays to talk about upcoming campaigns and collect donations. The pay was $120 a week, plus commissions for signing up members.

  When I had enough in the bank, I left Avery.

  * * *

  —

  January 17, 1996. I woke that morning and pretended to still be asleep. Avery kissed my forehead, his whiskers tickling my face. Then his steel-toed boots were clomping across the hardwood of the living room. He had a new job at a body shop, an effort to prove the sincerity of his love, but I knew better than to think it would last.