All the Broken Things (2 page)

Days passed, and they landed safely. They lived in a camp with others like themselves, and then the boy and his mother and the baby she was growing found a new home in a faraway country where no one knew them and they knew no one. And now they’d lived here for years, and it was like a dream where some things were real but you were never sure.

T
HE COCK WAS CROWING
. A day like every other. A Friday in September. Bo would get out of bed, he would dress, he would go to school. And he would fight. Bo did not know why the fighting had started or what exactly he was fighting over or about or for. He only knew that without the fights he was invisible. He’d been fighting all of the four years he’d been here, every day it seemed.

The neighbour to the west had a brood of hens and a cock. The cock and the fact of no curtains on his window were the main reasons why Bo never needed an alarm clock to get himself up and why his mother, whose real name was Thao, but whom everyone called Rose, never had to wake him. The cock’s crow tore the day from the night, and gave Bo enough time to watch, from his bed, the light edge up from the horizon, like the slow reveal of the movie screen at the Humber cinema when the velvet drapery began its ascent. Something—anything—could happen in a movie, even if nothing ever happened in real life, or nothing new. Still, this did not stop Bo from wondering if something could, and what this new something might look or feel like.

A sharp ray of light reached his eyes, and he shut them, then pushed his body to get out of bed. His T-shirt lay where he left it the day before, crumpled on the floor. He put it on, and also his jeans, which had been donated by the church people and, for once, were not too short. He pulled his shoes on. The shoes had been a gift from Teacher. They were Adidas, which in spite of being the height of fashion, did not improve his social standing. Sometimes when he looked at himself in a mirror he wondered how every kid at school knew that he was abnormal. He looked so normal to the naked eye.

He stretched in the middle of the kitchen. He did thirty squats and then thirty jumping jacks and then thirty push-ups. He wished he had a bar for pull-ups.
It would be easy enough to mount one in the doorway to the hall but his mother had said no, that it wasn’t their house and it would leave holes in the wood trim. The tiny bungalow belonged to the church group and his mother paid rent.

He heard her clearing her throat as she emerged from her bedroom and walked to the end of the hall. He heard the tap run. Bo curled his fists and held them in front of his chest, moved them up and down as if he were doing pull-ups, his body tense. It was a training day and he wanted to be ready for Mr. Morley.

“What have you eaten, Bo?” His mother had come into the kitchen. Her small figure bent toward the sink. She peered in at the dishes she had not done the night before.

“Nothing.”

“There’s food in the fridge.”

Rose had made an ugly casserole from the recipe on the back of the mayonnaise jar. She did this, he believed, to feel more North American. Bo opened the fridge door and looked at it now. It was caved in. Cheese and sauce congealed around the edges of the pan and it did not look edible. Glistening orange-yellow tubes of crisped macaroni had dried up—their little round mouths pleading. It hadn’t been that awful warm, but sitting there between the fish sauce and the eggs, it made him think of underwater creatures—squid and octopi—and how they could grab and squeeze you dead.

“Eat something!” his mum said. She reached in past him and pulled an apple from the keeper.

He could smell her. She smelled of puke.

“Mum.”

Rose was heading to the little ancestor altar in the corner, but she turned and squinted at him, indignant—she could be like that in the mornings. Bo put some macaroni in a bowl and spread it out, then cut it and cut it until it no longer resembled something so unspeakably dreadful. Then he ate, staring out the window, away from his mum. He heard a whistle and listened for the train that ran on the tracks near the house. The ground shifted and the rumble went up through his body. He loved this feeling, even if he knew the trains were bringing farm animals to the stockyards to be slaughtered. Sometimes, the trains would stop and he would hear a sheep bleating or a cow bellowing. He loved to hear them in spite of everything he knew.

“I have track and field this morning,” Bo said. “And also after school.” He was reminding her that his sister would be alone for a short time. Rose worked shifts. In Vietnam she had been a housewife but here she cleaned at the hospital to make money.

“Okay.”

They spoke English in their home—she wanted him to fit in. His mother knew English from school, had been a good student, but now, in Canada, in public, she sometimes pretended not to understand.

Rose crouched at the altar. It was a painted, six-inch medallion of the Buddha shoved into a sand-filled red metal box. It sat on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. Rose lit three sticks of incense, nestled them into the sand in front of the Buddha, and then placed the apple beside them. She made a hasty little prayer, then said, “I’ll make something for lunch.”

“Can we have soup?”

“Yes. But I won’t be home for dinner, remember. I’ll be late. Ten-thirty maybe.”

“Okay.”

Rose looked away from his food, averting her gaze on purpose. What you choose to see, Bo thought, and what you pretend not to see. He thought of the pieces of his past, and how he held them like photos, and the way they did not flow. The past lay in snippets, little nothings not adding up. He was picturing Rose in a doorway, somewhere. Where?

He whispered, “Mum, remember before?”

“I am lucky to have a bad memory,” she said.

Then she smiled. It was nice when she smiled.

Bo said
housewife
when asked at school what his mother’s occupation was, even though she never did anything remotely domestic if she could avoid it. She only did chores if they felt dramatic and interesting, or made a statement, like mayonnaise cheese slice casserole.

She looked back at his plate now. “Oh, Bo,” she said.

His fork hovering between his plate and his mouth, the pasta screaming
Help
at him.

“It’s for the dogs.” Rose pointed at the failed dish. “Put it out for them.”

“Okay,” Bo said. Dogs wandered around in their neighbourhood in the mornings, their owners too busy or lazy to take them on leashes to High Park. If Bo fed them, maybe they would come by for visits more often. It would be like having his own pet.

Rose turned back toward her bedroom, saying, “Check on Sister when you get home.” But he didn’t need reminding.

Orange.

Bo’s sister’s name meant Orange Blossom in Vietnamese, so he called her Orange. Rose called her Sister. Orange was their family tragedy. The one they mustn’t mention to others. Orange was unspeakable and unspeaking. She could not see very well and was all wrong, every part of her.

Bo barged through the front door and set the dish out on the lowest front step. No dogs were out. It was early though, and he didn’t see even a squirrel.

He called “Goodbye” to his mother, then walked backwards—he had practised this—watching in case anything showed up. He moved east on Maria Street until he hit the corner, then he took a last scan for dogs and turned south toward school. It was a Catholic school, and because of the church group’s generosity,
Rose had allowed Bo to be baptized so he could be sent there. She went to church herself, despite the fact of the shrine, and despite the truth, which was she didn’t put much stock in Jesus. Rose put stock in gratitude.

At Dundas and Gilmour streets a boy named Peter joined him. Peter was Bo’s friend from Dundas and Gilmour to Dundas and Clendenan, and down Clendenan until 86, at which point it was impossible to maintain the friendship. Ernie Wheeler lived in that little white clapboard house, so Peter lagged or sped up and occasionally punched Bo or yelled “Chink!” at him if he thought Ernie might be looking. The three blocks of friendship were worth it.

M
R
. M
ORLEY WORKED
the track team hard. If a child got cramps, Mr. Morley ignored that child. Bo never complained. The easy thing with Mr. Morley was that it was unnecessary to speak much—you could be like a dog, or like Orange. By the slight flicker in the coach’s eyes, or the edge of something like a smile behind his mouth, or the way his body leaned into the weather, Bo knew what Mr. Morley wanted and adjusted to please him.

Morley looked at his chrome stopwatch. “Three minutes.” He meant three minutes to get from their yard to
the high school racetrack. The team crossed the playground, then Clendenan, and went in through the chain-link fence to the track where they would do their laps. All the way, Bo tried to step so that he missed cracks in the pavement, for better luck. Now, he admired the shiny silver casing of Mr. Morley’s stopwatch.

Mr. Morley held the watch high, clicked down the starter, and nodded at the team. They began jogging around and around the track. Bo controlled his breathing, felt the hardness of pavement tremor up his legs, and worked to absorb and soften it into propulsion.

A mandatory ten laps to stay on the team, but Bo did more. He lost count. He didn’t care that this infuriated some of the other kids—the running removed care. Different things came and went from his mind: his mother, his father, sharks, Orange—her protruding eyes, and the way her body bent and twisted, and what she could be thinking. He wished he knew what she thought about when he was away.

Mr. Morley blew his whistle. Practice was over. An hour had passed inside the space of no time.

T
EACHER DREW A
wooden ship with a beautiful prow on the chalkboard. She wrote in cursive:
History
. She told stories about Cabot and Columbus. The one Bo liked
best was a story about a boat with horses on it and how they eventually ran away and made all the horses in North America.

“Like Noah’s Ark,” said Emily.

“Yes, a little like that,” said Teacher. She smiled at Emily. “Imagine how magical finding a new land must have been. I wonder if any of you has ever been in a boat on the ocean?”

Bo shrank down in his chair, but Sally stretched her hand skyward, like her shoulder might dislocate if she jammed it higher.

“Yes, Sally.”

Teacher always smiled a little when she listened. Her bobbed hair touched her shoulders. He’d known her for a long time—since he and Rose had come to Canada—and he had to pretend he didn’t know her all that well. It wasn’t cool to know the teacher. Bo didn’t know why this was, just that it was. But Teacher knew everything about him. He practised a neutral face.

Sally said, “We took the ferry back and forth to Ward’s Island over the summer. Twice.” Her arm stayed waving in the air as she spoke.

“Thank you, Sally. Anyone else?” Teacher tilted her head toward Bo. “That’s Lake Ontario, of course, a ferry boat. A lake is much smaller than an ocean, and it has sweet water in it, not salt water. Most of the animals that live in a lake cannot survive in the ocean. They cannot master the salt.” She looked directly at him.