Escape Velocity (4 page)

Dad is lying on a narrow bed in a room full of machines. Tubes and wires snake from beneath his green sheets, from the back of his hand, from electrodes and from needles. A plastic bag filled with mystery fluid hangs from a pole beside him. He looks like a cyborg, or else a human abducted by aliens. I try to think if I have ever visited someone in hospital before. I don't think I have. It looks exactly like it does on
TV
.

“Lou.” He looks tired, but the grayness in his face has gone.

“You sure scared me.” If I say anything else, I'm going to start crying.

“Sorry about that, kiddo.” He looks past me, over my shoulder to where Dana Leigh is hanging back in the doorway. “Dana Leigh. Thanks for looking out for her.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dana Leigh's voice is reassuringly normal. “Course. How are you feeling, Garland?”

“Like hell,” he says. He closes his eyes, and I feel another wave of fear. My dad's fifty, but he's never seemed old to me. Up until the accident, he always hung out with younger people—musicians, mostly, or the guys he worked construction with. Now he doesn't hang out so much with anyone, but he still jokes that his developmental age is stuck at nineteen.

Now, though, with his eyes shut and all those tubes and wires everywhere, he looks every day of fifty. I remember that his father died from a heart attack before I was born. I wonder how old he was. I haven't ever asked.

It never seemed relevant before.

Dana Leigh and I don't stay long. Dad looks like he needs to sleep, and besides, a nurse came in and told us to keep it short. Dana Leigh drives with her right hand on the wheel and her left hand hanging out the window with a cigarette burning between her fingers. She goes through almost a pack a day, but she tries not to take too many drags. Sometimes she lets a whole cigarette burn down without putting it to her lips more than a couple of times.

After a few minutes she turns and looks at me. “You want me to stay with you at your house tonight?”

I shake my head. “I'll be okay. Thanks though.” I think about how the doctor assumed Dana Leigh was my mother, and I get this ache in my throat like I might start to cry.

“Sure,” Dana Leigh says, and I can hear the relief in her voice.

Dana Leigh drops me off at home. The house is silent and empty. Dad and I have lived here for over a year, and I could probably count the number of times I've been alone in the house on the fingers of one hand. Dad hardly ever goes out anymore.

I put on the album Dad has left on the record player— Lou Reed's
Transformer
. Dad is more up on current music than most kids my age, but he also collects vinyl from the seventies: Velvet Underground, Bowie, Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd. I lie down on Dad's couch and listen. This is the album with that goofy song Dad used to sing to me when I was younger.
If I could be anything in the world that flew, I would be a bat and come swooping after you
. It makes me cry a bit, and in a funny way, I feel better. But then the next song is “Perfect Day,” and I think about how Dad always says this song is so sad. I've never understood why, because it should be a happy song, a song about spending a perfect day with someone; only now I think maybe I do understand, because how could one perfect day ever be enough? It would just be a taste of something you couldn't keep. Like those lunches out with my mother.

I curl my knees up and wrap my arms around them, and when I close my eyes, I hear Dad saying, “Ah, Lou, listen to this song. This song breaks my heart.”

Breaks my heart
. We never think about our own actual, physical hearts pumping away in our chests so faithfully, but we talk about hearts all the time.

Good-hearted, kindhearted, tenderhearted: that's how people always describe my dad. A heart of gold. “You know, Lou, your dad may have his problems, but his heart's in the right place. He'll find someone else.” That was Dana Leigh, after she left him.

The heart of the matter.

Heartfelt.

Heartache.

Heavyhearted.

Brokenhearted.

Heartless. Coldhearted. Dana Leigh again, last summer, talking about my mother: “A coldhearted bitch. What kind of a mother abandons her own child?” Dad just shook his head. “Men do it all the time,” he pointed out. “Look at your friend Carly's husband.” Dana Leigh was quiet for a minute, perched on the end of our living-room couch with her feet on Dad's lap, watching the cigarette burning between her fingers. I stood frozen in the hallway, eavesdropping, waiting to hear what she would say. “That's different,” Dana Leigh said eventually. Then she sighed. “Poor Lou. Well, at least she has you.”

My teeth are clenched so tightly my jaw aches.

Heart to heart, I think. Take heart. Lose heart. Heart of stone.

When the record ends, I make myself get up and walk over to Tim Hortons. Other than the bars, it's the only place that'll still be open. I buy a chicken-salad sandwich, a Boston Cream donut and a coffee, and sit at a corner table. It's almost midnight and the place is empty.

Dad will be home in a couple of days, I tell myself. The doctor said he was stable. I pick at my sandwich. I thought I was starving, but the food is suddenly unappealing and I don't want to be here anymore. Everything feels a little unreal: the plastic seat too hard and smooth, the lights too harsh. Even my hands look freaky, all those tendons and veins visible beneath the skin like some creepy scaffolding. I feel kind of like I did when I was fourteen and my dad's friend Ken gave me some acid at a party back in Vancouver. I crashed my bike and wandered around alone all night not even realizing my face was all bashed up.

I wish Dana Leigh had stayed with me after all. I wish she'd ignored my protests and said that of course she wouldn't leave me home alone.

“I have to close up,” the guy behind the counter says. “If you aren't eating that, you want me to pack it to go for you?”

I suspect the sandwich will be even less appealing tomorrow. On the other hand, I still haven't got any groceries, so I nod and take my food up to the counter. “Thanks. Sorry.”

He wraps the sandwich and tucks it into a paper bag with the donut. “Well, have a good night.”

I have an almost overwhelming urge to tell him that my dad had a heart attack. “You too,” I say instead. “You have a good night too.”

Back home, I spend a couple of hours tidying and cleaning the house. Wash the kitchen floor, vacuum, fold a load of laundry. I watch some
TV
and eat the donut and the sandwich, which aren't too bad after all. At two in the morning, when I am finally starting to feel tired, I change into a baggy T-shirt and boxers and crawl into bed.

And I can't sleep. Not a chance. My mind is zinging all over the place: Dad in the kitchen complaining of heartburn, Dana Leigh holding me tight, Dad lying in a hospital bed with his eyes closed.

I think about the bottles of pills in the bathroom cabinet and wonder if one of them would take this awful anxious feeling away. Maybe even let me sleep. A couple of years ago I'd have tried that, but drugs of all kinds scare me now. I get out of bed, drag my blankets to the living-room couch and watch
TV
until I fall asleep.

Five

W
hen I wake up, sunlight is streaming in the window and the phone is ringing.

“This is Dr. Ramirez,” a male voice says. “Is this Lou?”

“Yes.” My pulse quickens.

“We met last night. Is your aunt there?”

“My…” I realize he means Dana Leigh. “No, she's out. Is my dad all right?”

He clears his throat. “Your father had an episode of tachycardia a couple of hours ago.”

“What?” I pull my feet up under me on the couch. “What does that mean? Is he okay?”

“It means he developed a very rapid heartbeat.”

“Is that…I mean, he didn't have another heart attack?”

The doctor's voice is low, careful. “No, but it can be quite serious. We were able to correct his heartbeat, bring it back to normal.”

My own heart is racing.

“We're transferring him to Foothills.”

I shiver and pull the blanket over myself. “In Calgary?”

“Yes. They have a cardiac-care unit. They'll do an angiogram, take a look at his heart and see what kind of damage there has been, see how many vessels are blocked.”

“And then what? I mean, if a blood vessel is blocked?”

“He might need what is called an angioplasty. If there is some narrowing of a blood vessel, they can put something called a stent in to dilate it. But let's take this one step at a time.”

“Can I come in and see him? Before he goes?”

“He's already on his way to Foothills.” He pauses. “Actually, he's probably there by now.”

In Calgary. Two hours away by bus. “When can he come home, do you think?”

There's another pause. “It might be awhile. When we shocked him to correct the tachycardia, he had a small stroke. It happens occasionally. A blood clot forms in the left ventricle, breaks off, travels to the brain. He has some left-sided weakness as a result.”

“A stroke? He had a stroke?”

“The first priority is getting your father stabilized with respect to the cardiac problems. After that, we'll see. You're fifteen, right?”

I nod, clear my throat. “Yes. Fifteen.”

“I've asked the social worker at Foothills to contact you.”

“A social worker? What for?” I have to call Dana Leigh.

“She can fill you in, let you know how your father is doing. Help you to make arrangements.”

After I hang up, I call Dana Leigh, but she isn't home. I sit on the couch for a while, but she doesn't phone. So, not knowing what else to do, I pull on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and walk to school.

I'm halfway there when it occurs to me that I should perhaps let my mother know that Dad has had a heart attack. I really don't want to call her. The truth is, I am a little afraid of my mother. It's been over a year since I saw her. Before that, I'd kind of gotten used to the way things were with us, but actually staying with her in Victoria— seeing where she lived, being a part of her life for more than an hour in a restaurant—stirred up all kinds of stuff for me. Even though the visit was hellish, I've thought about her a lot since then.

My mother would have no way of knowing this, but I've read all her books. Three collections of poems. Two novels:
Leaving Heaven
, which came out two years ago, and
Escape Velocity
, which got published this fall. Reading her books makes me feel like I know her, but of course, I don't really. I don't even know if any of the things she writes are true. I asked her about one of her poems once, on the phone, and she was dismissive: “Poems aren't autobiography, Lou. You should know that.” And her poems are mostly strange and hard to follow. Often I don't know what they are about at all.

But her novels are different. They seem to me to be full of clues, coded information, slippery grains of truth. Why did she never want me? I've underlined whole passages of her novels, lines of dialogue, anything that might answer that question. Here's a paragraph from her first novel:
Every time the baby kicked, his hard feet jabbing at her lower rib, Gillian felt a tightening in her chest. She thought perhaps it was her heart growing harder. The future was closing in and setting around her, as gray and hard as cement
. That could be about her. The character in the novel, Gillian, is even younger than Mom was when she got pregnant—only fifteen, same age as me. She lives in this religious community, sort of a cult, and she got pregnant by this much older man who had always been a father figure to her. My dad is fifteen years older than my mother, so that sort of fits too. Except for the cult part. Also, in my mother's novel, Gillian's baby is stillborn. So obviously that doesn't fit either.

Her second novel is more clearly autobiographical. The details might be changed, but not the feelings. In Escape Velocity, a woman called Claire leaves behind her two children, ten-year-old Alice and eight-year-old Billy, and runs away from
the grinding monotony of laundry and lunches to pack and always the bottomless wanting, the clinging bodies and groping fingers, the endless neediness of children
. It hurts to read it, to think that's how my mother sees me. Wanting, clingy, needy? She knows nothing at all about what I want. She has no idea what I need.

She never even gave me a chance to cling.

I'm late to school, and the hallways are empty. I run my fingers along the cool metal of the lockers and try not to think about anything at all. When I get to my classroom, I slump to the ground outside the door and wait for the first-period bell to ring. I can hear Mr. Samson talking about vector diagrams and ray diagrams.

When the other kids all leave, I stand up and go into the classroom. “Mr. Samson?”