The Summer Is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved (3 page)

After a second, Tom said, “That’s what I’m talking about!”

Martin went to the sink, and tore a square of the paper towel off the roll. He carefully folded it twice into perfect quarters. He tore another square off and folded it twice. This would be good to start. Then he could come back for more. She had to clean that wine up properly. If she took too long, the wine would have more time to stain.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” Tom said, “You have spectacular tits.”

Martin elbowed through the group of them all crowded around his mother. She was in her bra now, shirt in hand. The whole room got quiet when Martin pushed through to give her the paper towel.

“Shit,” his mother said.

“Well, this is awkward,” Tom said.

Martin could feel everyone looking at him, but he didn’t care. If she didn’t get that shirt dealt with, it would stain. The wine would stain the floor, too. It always had to be red wine for some reason.

Tom laughed nervously, but Martin ignored him and crouched beside his mother. He offered her the folded paper towels.

“It’s red wine,” Martin said.

It was a stupid thing to say. She knew it was red wine.

Martin waited longer this time, trying to hear through the door, afraid to open it. All he could hear were murmurs from the kitchen and occasional laughter. His cheek and ear were pressed against the cool surface of the door. When the phone rang, he gave in to temptation. He was too curious. Who would be calling this late? So he opened his door. He didn’t leave his room though. He just sat on the floor in his doorway and listened.

“That was my sister,” his mother was saying in the kitchen. “They won’t take him.”

“Why the fuck not?” It was Tom again.

“They’re going away themselves,” his mother said. “Fuck me. And I can’t afford to have someone babysit him for weeks at a time.”

“Can’t he stay by himself?” Tom said.

“Jesus Christ, no, he can’t stay by himself. He’s eleven years old,” she said. “He needs someone to take care of him. I don’t know what to do. The producer needs to know for sure by the end of the week. If I don’t find something soon, I’ll have to say no. I’ll have to turn the job down. Fuck it. I knew what I was getting into when I had a kid at eighteen. I knew I’d have to give up opportunities.”

“Lord almighty, is this a crying party all of a sudden?” Carol said. “You’ve been so excited all night. Have some more wine and turn that frown upside down. Of course you’re going to figure this nonsense out. But this sounds like a problem for sober Elizabeth. Let her handle it tomorrow.”

“Sometimes things just don’t work out,” his mother said.

“Blah blah blah,” Carol said. “You have to drink through this. Have. Some. More. Fucking. Wine.”

In the kitchen, Martin’s mother laughed. “Don’t mind if I do,” she said.

Martin woke in the dark, certain that there was a man in the bedroom with him. He covered his mouth to keep from making any noise and listened. There were quiet sounds from the street coming through the window, but what else? Was there someone breathing? A man could be standing in the corner there, just smiling. Any second he could whisper Martin’s name, his lips pulling back slowly, his hairy fingers slick with sweat. Martin was going to scream and kick and thrash. He could feel it. He closed his eyes and pulled the comforter tighter. Nobody was there. It was just the dream again. Nobody was there. He squeezed the blanket to protect himself and listened.

He could hear his mother snoring in her bedroom down the hall. Maybe it had been that sound that woke him. She was loud enough. Every snore started quietly and got louder and louder.

But then he heard the clink of glass on glass. It had come from the kitchen.

Someone was in the apartment.

Martin wanted to stay in his bed. He wanted to pull the blankets up over his eyes and count to ten over and over again until he fell asleep, like it was just a dream and all he had to do was calm down. But he couldn’t. He had heard something. Someone was there. Maybe a burglar. What if they were dangerous? What if they went looking in his mother’s room and tried to hurt her. He couldn’t just pretend there was nobody there.

He lifted the blanket as slowly as he could, holding the edge between his finger and thumb. It made a quiet sliding sound, and Martin gritted his teeth. His mother snored, and when it was at its loudest, Martin pulled the blanket back quickly. Then he waited for her to snore again and rolled out of bed and onto the floor. He reached out for his glasses and unfolded them.

There was no man in the corner of his room. Martin stood perfectly still in the quiet between his mother’s snores, listening.

Nothing.

She snored again, and this time Martin made it across his carpet to the doorway. His door was open just far enough for him to see down the hall. There was no light on in the kitchen, and no movement. He should go back to bed. Everything was okay. There was no dangerous man waiting in their kitchen. There was no home invasion. But Martin didn’t go back to bed. He waited for the next snore and he slowly pulled the door open wider, terrified that it would squeak. He had never heard the door squeak, but now, in the dark, he felt certain that it would. But it opened smoothly and quietly, its bottom brushing over the carpet.

Martin looked down the hall again. If he was right, and nobody was there, then at least he would have peace of mind. That was better than going to bed and being wrong.

On the next snore, he made it halfway down the hall. The floor wasn’t carpeted here, so he had to move slower to stay quiet. His bare feet slapped a bit on the tiles, but the snore covered it. The second snore got him to the doorway, and he held his breath and crouched down low.

It could be anything in there. Maybe it wasn’t a burglar. Maybe it wasn’t human at all. What if it was an animal of some kind? A big dog thing, or something worse. What if it was a ghost? Just a little child standing in the middle of the room, with black, black eyes. Martin shivered and tried to get ahold of himself. What would a ghost be doing in their kitchen?

Waiting for me, Martin thought.

Back down the hall, his mother’s snoring was louder now. She coughed and muttered something in her sleep. Let’s get this over with, Martin thought. He leaned slowly out, bit by bit, so that he could see the whole of the kitchen.

There was no one there. No ghost. No drooling animal or masked man. Just a broken kitchen table that was kneeling over in the broken glass. The wooden legs jutted out from underneath it in crazy directions so that the table looked like a baby horse trying to stand up for the first time. Someone—probably one of his mother’s friends—had tried to clean up the glass. They’d swept some of it into a pile against the kitchen wall, but even in the dark Martin could see glimmers of other glass scattered all over. A half-assed job.

Well, there was no sense leaving it until morning. Martin went to the hall closet and took the broom out. He cleared a path to the garbage can, so it was safe to walk in his socks, and he got to work.

In the morning he woke up from a much nicer dream. He was planting rose bushes in his grandmother’s garden, standing in between the aisles of warm, dark earth. Martin dug a small hole in the dirt and planted a dark green bush with wide leaves that was also a lost kitten. She meowed.

It seemed perfectly normal. One of the bushes was actually a lost kitten. She was so small that her eyes had barely opened and her paws looked enormous on her tiny legs. She clamoured across the soft dirt, slipping and stumbling. Her fur was short and it stuck out in tufts like a mother cat had been tonguing her clean just moments earlier. Above them, the sun was so bright it was almost invisible in the sky. She meowed again.

Meow. Meow. Meow.

And then Martin was awake and the meowing sound was his mother’s alarm in the other room. The window was open and it was cool in his room. The alarm kept going. All his blankets were on the floor.

Martin was up and out of the bed before he was really awake. He stood there for a second. The alarm still seemed to be a kitten meowing. He picked his glasses up off the dresser and dressed for the day. The boats down on the northwest arm all looked quiet. There was no promise of adventure to them in the sunshine. His clothes from last night still needed to be folded and put away. His pyjamas, too. But the alarm kept going and for a second he was torn. Should he deal with his mother or fold his clothes?

His clothes were crumpled on the floor. They had to be folded. The worst that could happen with the alarm was his mother would wake up on her own. That wasn’t very likely. So he folded them quickly, but carefully, and tucked the clothes into the dirty laundry hamper. Then he hurried down the hall to the kitchen.

The table was still broken, but the glass was all gone. He took a quick look anyway, in the light, checking for shards he might’ve missed. Then he got down the box of teabags and a mug. He made his mother tea. No cream. No sugar. The cup rattled on the saucer as he carried it to her room. The more he tried to hold it still, the more it rattled.

She was sprawled asleep on the bed, naked and facedown in the pillow. Martin turned the alarm off and set her tea on the nightstand. She had a much darker room than he did and the shades were always drawn in the mornings. It took his eyes a second to adjust to the dim light. There were shelves and shelves of books against the wall and books stacked on the floor beside them. Martin looked around for anything he could clean up before he woke her. Her clothes were strewn and there was a pile of her special effects books on the end of the bed, by her ankles. Martin folded her clothes and placed them in the hamper. He stacked the books on her dresser beside a broken tube of lipstick.

The lipstick was broken because she had used it to write on her dresser mirror. In big sprawling red letters, his mother had written, “Get your fucking shit together!” and when he first saw it, Martin thought it was directed at him. But it wasn’t, and to clean it he would need the spray bottle of glass cleaner from the kitchen. He would have to do it later. Right now he had to wake her up for work.

It seemed mean to wake her up, though. She looked so peaceful in her sleep, with a little half-smile on her face. Martin sat down on the edge of the bed beside her. His mother’s snake tattoo curled all over the skin on her back, jet-black with twists of green. The eyes were looking right at him.

“Hello,” he whispered to it, and the snake twisted a little as Martin’s mother shifted in her sleep. He kissed the tips of his fingers and reached out and touched them to the snake’s nose. “Hello, good morning,” Martin whispered. The snake’s name was Sicily, like the place. When Martin touched his fingers to Sicily, he could hear the snake slithering in his head, like a slow rasp.

He liked this part of the day, just sitting with Sicily in the morning, before his mother woke up. It was calm. The sun was out there, but it couldn’t get into the room until they let it. The world hadn’t started yet.

Martin poked his mother in the back, and she groaned and rolled over a bit, but she didn’t wake up. So he shook her shoulder, careful where to grip, not squeezing Sicily. His mother grunted. She opened her eyes and stared at Martin for a second before she realized what was happening. She groaned and put her hand over her face and eyes.

“Oh god,” she said.

Martin looked down at his hands while she sat up and wrapped herself in a blanket. Part of Sicily’s tail went around the front of his mother’s body, where you weren’t supposed to look. Martin picked up her tea from the dresser and held it out.

“Black,” he said.

“Thanks.”

It always took her a minute to wake up, and for a while she just sat on the edge of the bed, sipping the tea. But today it seemed to take even longer. She didn’t smile and say, “Was I a total idiot last night or what?” the way she always did. Instead, she stared at the words on the mirror, and she drank her tea quietly.

After she was done, she sat for a few minutes more, wrapped in her bedsheet. Sicily’s tail peeked out at Martin, and he smiled at it.

“I’m sorry,” his mother said after a while.

Martin shrugged his shoulders, even though he didn’t know what she was sorry for.

“I’m sorry you had to see me like that last night.”

Did she mean in her bra? She was naked right now. It didn’t matter to Martin.

“Whatever,” he said. “It’s okay. Nothing I haven’t seen before!” He laughed, and he expected her to laugh, too. “Nothing I haven’t seen before” was what she always said when he was having a bath and she had to pee. She’d say, “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” and then it was okay for her to come in.

It wasn’t the right thing to say now, though. She set the teacup down and started crying. Martin didn’t know what else to do so he hugged her. He wrapped his arms around her and pushed his head into her shoulder and squeezed hard.

“I love you,” Martin said. “And you can’t be sad. Did you forget about
Blood Socket 2
?” She unwrapped herself from his arms and kissed his cheek.

“How could I forget about
Blood Socket 2
?” she said. “Blood and guts and kitten eyeballs.” Then she saw what time it was. “Fuck Jesus, I’m late.”

After he cleaned her mirror, Martin went looking for a list of emergency numbers that his mother had written down for him one night when she’d left him with a babysitter. He remembered her putting it away in the dresser, but now he couldn’t find it. He pulled open the very bottom drawer and started shifting notebooks around. The list was folded underneath one of her sketchbooks.

And there at the bottom of the list was the telephone number for his grandparents in Malagash. He’d never been to Malagash, but he’d seen it on a map, up on the north shore of Nova Scotia. His mother talked about it sometimes, when she told him about when she was a little girl. She never talked about his grandparents, but she loved to talk about the ocean out there. How you could walk out for half a mile and still only be up to your waist in water. Or about digging for clams, finding the small air holes they made and digging down as quickly as you could in the red sand before they escaped.

He closed the dresser and went out to the kitchen where the phone hung on the wall. He had only met his grandparents two years ago. They had come to the apartment and sat very still on chairs, smiling. Martin had shaken his grandfather’s hand, and given his grandmother a hug when she asked him if it would be okay.

“It’s nice to meet you, Martin,” his grandmother had said. And then, just before they left, his grandfather had held his hand out to shake again at the door.

“Maybe you could come up to Malagash for a couple weeks this summer,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” Martin’s mother told him.

“They’ve opened up the Bible camp again,” his grandfather said. “It might do him some good to get out in the sunshine. And learning about the Bible never hurt anyone.”

“Thank you for coming,” his mother said, ushering them out the door. “Goodbye.” She closed the door on them, and then she went to her bedroom and had a long nap.

Martin remembered how angry she’d been. She hadn’t wanted him to go to Bible camp then, but now maybe it would help. He could go stay at Bible camp while she was in Toronto making her movie. He wanted to help. It would be awful if she had to say no to the job just because of him.

He dialled his grandmother’s number, and listened as it rang.

“Hello?”

It was an old woman’s voice, and Martin was suddenly not sure if it was the right number. He couldn’t remember what his grandmother had sounded like.

“Hello?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Is this my grandmother?” It was a foolish question. She didn’t know who was calling. If he didn’t recognize her voice, how would she recognize his? There was a long pause, and Martin felt stupid. “Grandma?” he said.

“Is this Martin?” She sounded as uncertain as him.

“Yes,” Martin said. “Hi.”

“Oh, Martin! It’s nice to hear from you!”

He heard her yell something in the background with the phone away from her mouth. There was another pause and she yelled again, and this time he could hear her. “It’s Martin!” she yelled. Then she was back.

“How are you?” she said. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m okay,” Martin said.

He tried to imagine what her house looked like. Where she was standing when she talked, but the only images he had in his mind of Malagash were of the outdoors. Red beaches and red paved roads that his mother had told him about. Big wide open fields and vineyards full of grapes that were too sour to eat. Rowboats and old broken-down buildings.

“I wanted to ask you about Bible camp,” Martin said.

“Bible camp?”

Martin could hear a man in the background now. His grandfather.

“He’s asking about Bible camp,” his grandmother said. There was another pause. “Does your mother know you’re calling?”