Going Down Swinging (28 page)

Their kitchen was as big as our living room but bright with white see-through curtains. It reminded me of the kitchen at our house in Toronto, the one with my dad. Todd and I sat at the table and Mrs. Hood made us tea. I explained how my mum liked me to have it half milk. She smiled and said that was a good idea. Todd chuckled and chewed the inside of his cheek, then started asking Mrs. Hood about her girls and their hobbies and stuff; he told her about my baton lessons. And about Explorers. He kept nodding and grinning, making his eyes go wide, and I tried to act like it was interesting. A skinny cat with hardly any tail walked in the room and made it easier.

Mrs. Hood set the teapot on the table. “That’s Spike,” she said, “he’s Lilly’s cat—where’s your ball, Spike?” Spike charged back to the living room right when the front door opened and slammed, shaking the windows. Mrs. Hood tilted her head toward the front of the house. “Hello-o?” and then a hello back from two girls. Then shoes clunking and sock-feet rubbing toward the kitchen.

The two of them came in and stood in the middle of the floor, all half-smiles and bored sort of helios. Wendy and Lilly. Wendy was the bigger one, eleven. Lilly was eight. I’d be nine in two weeks, older than her. Todd said on the way over that Lilly was in grade 3. She looked it. I knew we wouldn’t be friends. Lilly looked like what Mum called a sprite: a puny head, too-big black eyes, bee-size mouth and two black braids that hung long over skinny-boned shoulders. She looked tricky. She looked like she bit. Her sister was thicker: thicker lips, thicker hair, a thicker body. Her eyes were slower. Their mum introduced us and said, “Grace might be staying with us for a little while.” Wendy nodded.

Lilly’s eyes poked over me. “What school do you go to?” I told her. “Do you know a boy called Tom?” I didn’t. Nobody said anything, so Wendy said she was going up to change and Lilly ran upstairs behind her—the steps to their bedrooms were in the kitchen like Sadie and Eddy’s place. Todd gave me one of those fake kind of smiles like teachers use the first day of school and I copied it.

When we finished our tea, Todd told Mrs. Hood we had to get going. She stood and wiped her hands on her apron, said it was lovely to meet me and led us to the door, talking about umbrellas. Todd and I clomped down the wet steps; it’d started to rain. Neither of us said anything until we were back in the car.

He turned the ignition. “So? Did you like them?” And the wipers rubbed squeaks and grunts against the window.

“Yeah. They were pretty nice.” If they were his friends I didn’t want to talk bad about them. And they did seem pretty OK and I’d probably like them better if I knew them. “Mrs. Hood was nice and I liked Spike.” I waited. I wanted to meet whoever else he had in mind before I decided.

Todd watched me and rocked his head up and down. “Well, I mean, do you think you might like to stay here while your mom’s in the hospital?” He said
Mum
like
Mawm
. It sounded fakey or prissy or something.

“Um, here? Well, I guess so. Yeah, sure. What about my cat, because I have to have Henry with me, so I don’t know.”

“Well, no, you couldn’t bring Henry, someone else would have to look after him. It wouldn’t be for long, I’m sure we could find someone.” He looked so big on the whole thing that I didn’t want to be a pain. Mum was always calling me a fuss-budget about stuff so I thought maybe I should just stick it out for a few days. Todd smiled and grabbed the pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Good.” He stuck one in his mouth. “OK, let’s go back to your place and get your things together.” He lit one and sucked it like there was milkshake on the other end. “The sooner you’re taken care of, the sooner we can start taking care of your mom.” The engine shook as he put it in gear and started down the street.

“Yeah but. Um. Well yeah, but does my mum know? I can’t just go if my mum doesn’t know,” and I didn’t think she did really. Of course she did, Todd told me, she signed the consent didn’t she. Yeah, but. She changed her mind. She told me the night before that she didn’t want me going anywhere, she couldn’t bear it. Todd just talked about the hospital and her drinking and how much better things would be. I figured he was right; if I left, she wouldn’t have any excuse, she’d have to go wherever it was she went when she quit drinking. And in a few days I could come home and the place would be clean and we could pack up and move. I could start a new school and maybe we could live on a street with trees.

When we got home, Henry slithered through my shins and made his chirpy meows at me. I kneeled and scratched his head, picked him up, and Todd asked if I had a suitcase. I stood still, breathing Henry’s fur, and thinking how much worse everything looked when a stranger was in the house, how bad it smelled, how dirty it still was even since the Welfare sent someone over to clean it up. I was a traitor again and I kept my nose in Henry’s shoulder. Todd looked fidgety. Neither of us was saying so, but half the game was getting out before she came home. If she caught us, if she caught me leaving with a bag of clothes, she’d go crazy. Henry wiggled away and jumped on the floor. There was probably a suitcase somewhere, but I didn’t feel like stealing Mum’s to run away from her.

Todd went to the kitchen and came back with a garbage bag. “OK, let’s try to grab as much as we can so you can have a few things with you.” We picked through my drawers and stuff lying around the bedroom. Todd winced when he picked my clothes off the floor. I didn’t look at him again until he brought me back to the Hoods’. Then I didn’t want him to leave.

He sat in the living room with Lilly and me while we watched Wendy show off Lilly’s cat: she threw a red ball, the kind I used to play jacks, and Spike scrambled down the living room to get it. He pounced and bit and clawed it with his back legs before chomping it up and trotting back to Wendy’s feet. He dropped it there and looked up at her. She threw it again and Spike fetched. I looked at Lilly; she sat straight like a spelling-bee kid, all proud of herself. The Persian never moved from the windowsill. She was Wendy’s cat—her name was Marble and nobody said much else about her. Then Lilly squealed and said, “Show her hockey.”

Wendy grabbed the ball and all of us followed her to the bathroom. Lilly was second through the door, said “Gimme,” and took it out of Wendy’s squishy thick hand. “Com’ere Spike, com’ere boy,” and she threw the ball in the bathtub. Spike leaped in and fwapped the ball around the sides, then bounced back to guard the drain, batting it just in time to keep it out of the hole. Todd chuckled over my shoulder and I could hear teeth clicking from biting his nail. The ball boinged off the side of the tub and plopped in the drain. Spike pounced and growled, tore it out of the hole and ripped at it with his back claws, before he chucked it down the tub and went back to playing goalie. Todd nudged me. “Pretty good, eh?”

After he left, the house was strange and prickly. Nobody said much. We had hamburgers for dinner at the dinner table, not in front of the TV. And they didn’t know how to play switcheroo, so we just watched
Happy Days
until it was bedtime for Lilly and me. It bugged me going to bed when she did. I was practically nine.

I took the bus to school the next day and daydreamed about Mum, what she did when she came home and found me gone. Todd said he was going over there when he left me. But he couldn’t talk to her really, not like me. I wanted to be the one to talk to her, but he told me not to call. None of my friends even knew where I was. Nobody did. If I never went to school that day they would’ve thought I disappeared, which I kind of liked—the mystery of it—but then I still didn’t have much friends at my new school, so they might not’ve even noticed. I wondered if Mum was in the hospital or in her bed right now. Probably crying. Maybe she had to cry, though, maybe she had to just cry out everything until she got better.

After school, Mrs. Hood picked me up and took me to get my hair cut. She scowled at me in the mirror while the hairdresser pumped my chair up. She didn’t really look as mum-ish as I thought. She told the hairdresser to just try and make me look presentable, told me she was going to go have a coffee and left us staring at the mirror.

The hairdresser picked some hair from the side of my head, sighed, and let it drop before bringing me to a sink. I thought about the way Todd took my clothes up off the floor, like he was picking up snotty Kleenex. She tied a brown plastic bib on me, then wound a towel round my neck and lowered me back against the sink. My neck didn’t go down the way she wanted, in the groove thing on the sink. She huffed and pulled me back up, pushed me back down, nudged the chair closer to the sink. She blew air out her nose, left and came back with three towels for me to sit on. When she finally had my head where she wanted, she soaped it up and then kinda stared around my ears and said, “When’s the last time your hair was washed?” She sounded like her face when she first touched my head.

I didn’t know. I said, “Probably day before yesterday.” She hmmed and scrubbed harder. I shut my mouth and kept it shut till she finished the haircut. My eyes hurt from not crying and I imagined horrible things my mother would do to her for this.

Next morning was the doctor’s appointment. We sat in the waiting room for around half an hour, Mrs. Hood flipping through magazines, her lips squishing up under her nose at stuff she was reading. I watched the glass door we came in through to see my reflection; see, if I looked quick and pretended not to know me, if my hair really looked like Keith Partridge. The receptionist called “Hoffman” and I went frozen. Mrs. Hood nudged me. I went to the counter; the receptionist smiled. “Hi there, how are you today? Here, maybe you can just go to the bathroom and bring me back a sample.” I took the cup and the key and went down the hall. I figured she meant pee but I wasn’t sure exactly, and if she meant pee, how much did she want? And how was I supposed to hide a cup of it coming back?

Then the key didn’t fit the lock. I tried it upside down. Didn’t fit. I went back to the receptionist, trying not to touch my hair again and draw attention. I asked her if it was the key to the girls’ room.

“No sir!” She said it loud and smiled big like she was in a talent show or something. “That’s for the boys’.”

I put the key on the counter. “I’m not a boy.”

Her face kept still a second till it went, “Ah—oh! I’m—” and she made tisky noises and shook her head and grabbed at my file. “Grr … ace—of course you’re not. Did I give you the boys’ key? Here you go. Miss.” Her smile was smaller.

I brought back the cup mostly full and a nurse took me in a room and asked me to take off everything except my underpants, said she’d be right back. She didn’t leave me anything to put on. Mum’s doctor always gave me a paper poncho. I took off my clothes and sat scrunched on the table with my hands between my knees, feeling the room breathe on me until she came back. She was pretty with a hoppy ponytail. She wrapped the black band thing around my arm, pumped it tight and asked about what I did that day, if I had a bowel movement. Figured it probably meant pee again, so I just said yes. She asked me what it was like, I told her regular. When the black band thing was loose again, she took it off my arm and asked about the colour; I said that was regular too. She asked me about sleeping, eating, aches and pains; anything I had to tell about, I called it regular. She seemed to think that was pretty funny and I liked her for it. I liked hearing someone laugh again and have it be cuz of me. When we finished she told me to sit tight, she’d be right back.

Kind of a while went by, and I was sitting there thinking how I was glad I ate lots of bacon and eggs and toast for breakfast and had good blood sugar cuz, God, it would’ve been crappy to hear the English Lady arguing or else whispers and stuff and be naked on top of it. I started thinking how Sheryl Sugarman was maybe right and smart and then I figured maybe I was supposed to get dressed and I was about to jump down, my chest all light again, when the nurse opened the door and came in with a little Chinese man. He was in a white coat and his face hardly moved. “Grace, OK, this is Doctor Lee, he’s going to examine you today,” and she left.

I folded my arms. It was cold. He told me to lie on my back in not-that-great English and started looking over my whole skin and everything, pressing and knocking, asking if it hurt—breathe in, breathe out. Then he looked down my underpants. I was going to cry and I crunched my teeth together. He asked me to turn over on my stomach and asked where every one of the marks on my back came from. I fell and tripped so much, I couldn’t remember how I got any, except for the big scar on my backbone that I had from sliding down the porch steps when Eddy chased me and Sadie. I said I fell, and Dr. Lee’s face kept still and he sounded like he thought I was lying. He wanted me to explain better, but I didn’t want to tell how Eddy was running after us with the
shitbag
, a paper bag of poo he said he found. I started making stuff up. Dr. Lee didn’t look at my eyes; it was like I didn’t have any.

I looked away and clenched some more and changed my mind: I wasn’t going to cry, and I looked at the wall to think about something else. I saw his framed doctor certificate up there and two things cut out of the newspaper. I kept staring at the newspaper pictures until I figured out he was in both. One headline said “Child Abuse,” and “Lee Heads C.P.A. Crackdown” was on the other; one picture showed just his face and one showed him at a table with some other people. He was some kind of famous doctor-guy. He wasn’t just Dr. Lee, he was
the
Dr. Lee, Bad Mother Hunter. In my imagination I sat up and yelled, “She hits me.” He wouldn’t smile exactly, but he’d be glad or proud or something. I never said anything in real life though, so he pulled up the elastic on the back of my underpants and looked in at my bum. No one ever saw me without a paper poncho on and never without my mum in the room.

I closed my eyes. He was in on it too. They all wanted to trick me into saying something bad about her. She warned me. She said it only took two doctors’ signatures and they could put her away. I kept my mouth as shut as I could; just yes and no. I wasn’t going to help him up on any more walls.