Escape Velocity (10 page)

“And she's homeless?”

“I think so. Maybe. I don't really know.”

Justine frowns. “I guess you've already done the obvious stuff, like googling her name.”

Would she be a Summers like Zoe? Or was that Zoe's father's name? I realize I know nothing at all about my mother's family—whether she has sisters or brothers, whether her parents were married, what their names are. Maybe I have a grandfather out there somewhere as well. Aunts, uncles, cousins…

“Lou? Have you googled her?”

I try to focus. “Uh, I don't know her name.” I look at Justine. “I know. It's impossible, isn't it?”

“Well, not
impossible
. Victoria's not that big. Still, if you don't even know her name…”

“Yeah.” I study my fingernails and pick at one of the torn edges. Dana Leigh would flip out if she saw what a mess my nails are in. She was always trying to give me manicures.

There's a long pause, and then Justine says, “So who is she? I mean, why are you looking for her?”

The hallways are emptying, everyone heading to their next classes. “She's my mother's mother.”

“Your grandmother.”

“Yeah, I guess that's right.” Duh. Obviously. But I hadn't really thought of her in those terms.
Grandmother
. The word doesn't fit easily with the picture of the straggly-haired woman.

Justine's dark eyebrows are raised. “I guess there are some places you could try. Shelters and stuff. But…”

“It's a kind of a remote chance. I know.”

“If you knew her name, you could ask people if they'd seen her.”

“I'll try to find out,” I tell Justine, and my stomach tightens. I can't imagine bringing the subject up again with Zoe.

Eleven

W
hen I get home, my mother is at her desk, staring at the computer screen. She swivels her chair around to face me. “How was school?”

“Fine.” I step closer and try to see what she is working on, but she has closed the window. “Are you writing?”

She shrugs. “Not productively, no. All this…” She flaps her hand. “You, your father…”

“Sorry.”

“Yes. Well. Don't you have homework or something?”

She is sending out go-away vibes that are as real and unmistakable as hands pushing me out the door. Little signals zipping through the air: get lost get lost get lost. “I guess I'll go to my room and read,” I say. “Can I call Dad?”

“Go ahead. Good idea.”

I can hear the relief in her voice. My own mother can't stand having me near her. She can't even be bothered to hide how she feels.

The spare room—my room now—is cool and quiet. I lie down on the bed and wonder why my mother dislikes me so much. Sometimes I feel like even being in the same room as me is painful for her. Like she has severe allergies and I make her itch, give her hives, make her throat swell up. I blink a few times and push my fists against my eye sockets until I see green stars. Then I pick up the phone and call my father.

He answers right away. “Hello?”

“Dad? How are you doing?”

“Ahh, Lou. I was gonna call you. Not doing so well, kiddo. The stent they put in? Remember? The tube thing?”

“Yeah.”

“I started having some chest pains again, getting short of breath.”

“Uh-huh?”

“They think it's blocking. Looks like I'm going to be having bypass surgery tomorrow.”

I roll over on the bed, lie on my back with a pillow clutched to my chest with my free arm. “Dad?” I don't want to upset him, can't let myself start to cry, but I'm scared. Except maybe for the moment watching him be helped into the ambulance, I've never been so scared.

“Listen. It's going to be fine. They do lots of these operations here.”

“Okay.” There's a knife-sharp pain in my throat, and I can barely push the word past it.

“You're scared, aren't you? I'm sorry about this, kiddo.”

I nod, even though obviously he can't see me.

“Don't worry. Is it going okay with Zoe?”

“Yes. No.” I lower my voice. “She doesn't like me.”

“That's just how she is. She probably doesn't know how to be with you.”

“Dad. She can't stand me.” My voice is rising, and I don't want to stress him out, but I can't help myself. “Can't I stay with Dana Leigh? Can you ask her?”

“I can't walk, I can't do shit, Lou. I'm not going home anytime soon. If it was only a few days, maybe Dana Leigh could help out, but…”

“She said no, didn't she? You already asked her.”

He clears his throat. “Yeah. I asked her.”

I bet it's Trevor that doesn't want me there. I wouldn't expect Dana Leigh to put me first, ahead of him, but it still hurts that she'd say no. I sit up and stare at the stupid oil-spill painting. “I don't think Zoe wants me here either,” I say.

“Tough,” Dad says. “She'll have to deal.” Then his voice softens. “It's not about you, okay? You're terrific.”

“Doesn't seem like she thinks so.”

“Lou.” He coughs, clears his throat again. “Your mother is a wonderful person in many ways. But she's, well, self-centered. To say the least.”

I've never heard him criticize her before. In fifteen years, I have never heard him say a single bad thing about her. “Dad? Do you know anything about Mom's parents? About her mother?”

“Her parents? Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“I never met them,” he said.

“Yeah, but…”

“I know her dad died when she was a teenager. Your age, maybe younger. Car accident, I think it was. Or cancer, maybe. I can't remember.”

“And her mom?”

“She never talked about her mom,” he said. “The topic was kind of off-limits.”

“Weren't you curious? I mean, didn't you think that was kind of odd?”

“Zoe was a very private person.” He gives a half-laugh, the kind that means nothing is really funny. “Independent, I guess you could say. Kept people at a bit of a distance. I figured she and her mom weren't close.”

“Yeah, but still. You really don't know anything about her family at all?”

“No.” He pauses. “There's one thing I can tell you. They weren't wealthy. Or at any rate, they weren't sharing the wealth if there was any to share. She was putting herself through school. Student loans, two part-time jobs. She was always worried about money.”

“Do you think her parents were—I don't know— abusive? Or something?”

“I really don't know, Lou. I don't remember her ever mentioning anything like that. But we weren't together all that long. A year, that's all. I didn't really know her very well.” He gives a short, bitter laugh. “Obviously.”

He sounds tired, and I'm worried that talking about my mother is making him unhappy. I should let him go, but I don't want to put the phone down. I don't want to give up this long-distance link, this connection through the phone wires to the building where my father is. Once I hang up, I'll be back in Victoria, alone with Zoe again. “You're going to be okay, right? Dad? Promise me?”

“I promise,” he says. “I'll be fine.”

Zoe lets me use her laptop—for schoolwork, she says— and I spend the evening making a list of soup kitchens and drop-ins and homeless shelters. It's pretty hopeless. Even after I cross off all the ones that serve only youth or men, there are still a lot of possible places. And I don't even know if the clapping woman is actually homeless. Maybe she has a skuzzy apartment somewhere with a dozen cats. Maybe she's just an artsy freak who doesn't like taking showers or doing laundry.

“I'm ordering take-out,” Zoe calls out. “Is Thai food okay?”

“Fine.” I close the laptop as she opens the door to my room. “Anything's fine.”

“I'm done working for today,” she says, and stretches, catlike.

Her hair is tied back in a loose ponytail, and she's wearing flannel pants that say
University of Victoria
in large letters running down one leg. She looks about twenty, and gorgeous. “Me too,” I say. “I was just emailing Tom.”

“Your poet boyfriend,” she says, smiling. It's as if this validates me in some way—as if the possibility that some guy likes me makes me a better, more interesting person. “Is he your first real boyfriend?”

“Um, yeah, I guess.” I actually haven't ever had a boyfriend. Back in eighth grade, when Dad and I lived in Vancouver, there was this older guy called Ken. He played guitar in my dad's band. I thought he was my boyfriend, but he wasn't really. I was stupid about everything back then.

“So what is he like?” she asks, moving over to sit on the edge of my bed.

I picture Mr. Samson. “Um. Nice. Handsome. He has this great smile…” I remember the way he wouldn't meet my eyes in Mrs. Robson's office, how he seemed glad to be rid of the responsibility of dealing with me. There's a bitter taste at the back of my tongue. “He's funny,” I say. “He makes me laugh a lot.”

“You don't have pictures?”

I shake my head. “I don't have a camera.”

“Oh, come on. Not even on your cell?”

“I don't ever take pictures. Anyway, I left my cell phone for Dad.” My stomach tightens and twists. I haven't told Zoe that my father is having surgery tomorrow. If I talk about it, I might start to cry, and more than anything, I don't want to cry in front of my mother. Besides, she hasn't even asked how he is doing.

“So where did you meet him?”

“At work,” I say.

“I thought you said he was at your school.”

I wonder if she's trying to catch me, if she suspects I'm lying. “Yeah, I guess we did meet at school first, but then he started coming around where I work.”

“Where do you work anyway?”

“World's Biggest Dinosaur,” I tell her. “It's a tourist attraction.”

Zoe's eyebrows are raised, mocking me. “You don't say.”

I ignore her. “Tom used to come around and hang out with me there. During the quiet times, you know? And we'd…we'd talk.” As I say it, I can almost imagine how it could have been: the two of us sitting out front on the steps as the sun dropped in the sky, close enough that I could smell his aftershave and feel the cotton sleeve of his shirt brushing against my bare arm.

“You really like this boy, don't you?” she says, smiling at me.

It's as if this Zoe and the other one are two different people. Too bad the one thing I've managed to say that actually interests her is a lie. “I'm crazy about him,” I say.

“Don't let him know that,” Zoe tells me. “You have to keep the upper hand. Keep him guessing.”

I nod, but I can't meet her eyes. After what she did to my father, I can't believe she thinks she can give me advice on how to manage a relationship. Even one that is entirely fictional.

Twelve

Dad has told me the story of how he met my mother. He was living in Hamilton, working for a construction company and moonlighting as a drummer in a band called Deep Underground. They were playing at the university bar, the Downstairs John. Dad was in his mid-thirties and said he was feeling old up there on the stage looking out at all the young kids in the crowd. Then he saw my mother. Love at first sight, he told me. She was sitting with a group but off to one side a little, watching the band instead of talking, and seeming somehow separate and alone. “She had this glow,” Dad said. “Like she was twice as alive as anyone else in that dark room. I couldn't take my eyes off her all night.”

He asked for her phone number after the show, and they started hanging out. He was crazy about her. She was very driven, very ambitious. A straight-A student. He said he always wondered what she saw in him, a man fifteen years older who had never finished high school.

I guess she must have seen something, because a couple of months later, she was pregnant with me. Dad says all through the pregnancy, things were great. “Zoe loved being pregnant,” he told me. “She looked gorgeous; she painted pictures of pregnant women and hung them on the walls in her dorm room. She seemed happy. She wouldn't move in with me though.”

Dad rubbed his face as he talked about it, looking up at the ceiling like that was where he kept his memories. “She called me from the hospital a few hours after you were born and said that she was leaving. She was already dressed and packed up. You'd never have known she just gave birth. She said if I wanted you, I could have you.” He got teary when he talked about it. “She'd already talked to a social worker at the hospital. If I didn't want you, she was going to put you up for adoption. Either way, she didn't want to see me again.” Dad hugged me tight. He's always been a hugger. “I never saw it coming. But of course I wanted you. There was never any doubt about that.”