Three Years with the Rat (16 page)

GRACE
,
THIRTEEN YEARS OLD
, head freshly shaven with wisps around the hairline, raccoon eyes, nails bitten to the quick. On the washroom counter are a box cutter and a chewed pencil. She looks at me in the mirror and says “It'll be O.K.” before she closes the door. I can hear her sucking air, wincing, on the other side. My mother drags me away before my father shoulders and breaks the door frame. Grace shouts, “Don't touch me.”

I woke out of the dream in our chilly basement apartment and was surprised to find myself still in my clothes, sleeping on the couch again. I dug through my jeans until I found my cell phone and called in sick to work. My bosses weren't in the office yet so I left a message.

Sometime later that morning, Nicole stood over me and spoke. “You're late for work.”

“Mental health day,” I said and immediately drifted back to sleep.

The night before she'd been frigid and distant, which was somehow much worse than if she'd been heated and angry with me as per usual.

The next time I awoke, the sun was filtering in through our little window near the front door. My phone was vibrating against a hard surface somewhere in the apartment. I wandered around the basement, wrapped in the blanket, until I found the phone skimming across the kitchen counter.

“Hello,” I said.

My eyes were bleary and wouldn't stay open.

“You busy?” John asked.

There was no sign of Nicole.

I put on my pea coat and locked up. Outside the apartment, the persimmon tree had lost most of its leaves but the plump, colourful fruit still hung from its branches. There were patches of blue in the sky but the air was bitterly cold in my lungs. Winter was coming too quickly.

I parked my car around the corner from John's apartment and ate some mashed potatoes at Features while I waited for him. He arrived carrying his shovel and a backpack and neither of us said much until we got back to the car. He saw the pile of Grace's belongings in the backseat, the boxes and bags of possessions that had once filled his apartment, and he said, “I hope it wasn't too inconvenient to pack it in the car again.”

“Didn't unpack it in the first place,” I told him. “It's been in my car for months, since we put it there.”

John lightly placed the shovel on top of Grace's things, the handle poking between the two front seats and interrupting our view of each other. I started the car and followed Bathurst Street to Highway 401 out of town, then eastward.

“Where to first?” I asked. “Your parents' place or mine?”

“My parents' house is farther,” he said, “so let's start there.”

The highway bordered the northern edge of the city and traffic was light. The skeletons of twenty-storey condominiums occasionally lined the sides of the 401, half-constructed promises of more sprawl. The rest of the landscape was concrete boxes, strip malls, and long lines of asphalt. We crossed the Don Valley Parkway and continued into the suburbs of Toronto.

“Is Buddy O.K.?” I asked.

“He's fine,” John said. It was hard to gauge where he was looking with the shovel's handle blocking his eyes. “Lots of food, lots of play for him. And how's Nicole?”

“Fine. She's fine.”

“And things?”

“Same,” I said.

He opened the glove box and started sifting through it. “Can you see a future?”

“I don't know. She's impossible to please.”

“Don't be so hard on her,” he said, catching me off guard. “She's a good woman, and I imagine you haven't been easy to be around this year.”

I grunted, noncommittal.

“I imagine no small part of that is my fault,” he said.

I kept both hands on the wheel and checked my mirrors.

“Well,” he said, “for what it's worth, I'm sorry. And for what it's worth, I think she's a keeper.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

Then I heard his breath catch in his throat and he was silent for a moment.

“What is it?” I asked. I looked over and in his hands was the CD Grace had made for my journey back to Ontario. She'd scrawled
Oblivion
across its surface. John had found it in the glove box.

“It's been some time since I've seen her handwriting,” he said. Without asking, he slipped the CD into the player and turned up the stereo.

The music filled our silences. We passed through the Green Belt and its temporary respite from the endless development, and at points the trees in the surrounding valley were below the height of the road. As always, I paid special attention to the second song on the CD, and even skipped back to it at one point:
I'll find my oblivion in the place where the water meets the trees.

“Shouldn't we have seen it coming?” I said, and recited the line to John.

“That isn't fair to Grace,” he told me. “If you judged everyone by the sad art and music and film that we consume, we'd all seem suicidal. And oblivion is never what she wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oblivion is the annihilation of the self. Grace was looking for the opposite, a way to remove everything
but
the self.”

“Didn't that ever offend you? That we were all obstacles in her desire to be alone?”

“Of course,” he said. “But I doubt she'd really want it once she got it.”

“Then where is she?” I asked.

The exits for my hometown came and went, and the highway narrowed from twelve lanes to six.

Finally John spoke again. “Take the next exit.”

We passed the welcome sign for Oshawa,
The City That Moto-vates
, and followed the off-ramp over a gentle hill and into the city. The roads were wide and littered with franchise coffee shops, like where I grew up, but overall the city had an older, unmaintained feeling to it, grubbier storefronts and virtually no pedestrians.

“Are you going to need gas?” John asked.

“Eventually,” I said.

John pointed me through the city, turn for turn, and without the regularity of a grid I soon had no idea which direction we were travelling. Eventually he pointed out a gas station that was bright and clean compared to everything around it. We pulled in.

He climbed out of the car and walked toward the station. “Fill it up, then come inside for a moment.”

I slouched out of the wind and kicked at my back tires as I pumped. The sun had hidden behind some clouds. My hands were stiff with the cold and my teeth were chattering by the time I finished.

I made my way into the station, a bell chiming above the glass door as I entered. John was leaning on the counter and talking to a middle-aged Asian woman behind the cash register. Her face was puffy with fatigue, but her hair was frosted and her make-up was impeccable. She didn't smile.

She glanced at me and said something in what I imagined was Korean.

“Yes, yes, I will, don't worry,” John said to her. Then he turned to me. “This is my mom. Mom, this is Grace's brother.”

“Nice to meet you,” his mother said, then looked to John and broke into a long string of Korean again. The only word I understood was
Grace.
John responded to her in Korean, and she fired back at him. I wasn't entirely sure if they were arguing.

“Pleased to finally meet you,” I said, waved, and walked out.

John returned to the car a minute or two later. He was quiet. I didn't know where we were going so I didn't start the engine.

“Everything all right?” I asked.

“As much as it ever is,” he said. “We're just a few minutes down the road from here.”

I drove and waited for him to speak. The shovel handle still blocked his eyes, but his mouth was pressed tightly into a thin line. Finally I said, “Care to tell me what that was all about?”

We passed into a newer subdivision, its look more familiar to me.

“My mom just doesn't think highly of someone voluntarily disappearing,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

He pointed down the street, the end of which had a diamond-shaped sign tiled in yellow and black. “Park near the dead end. My mom would just rather I forgot about anything to do with Grace.”

“Including me,” I said.

“Of course.”

I parked the car and we got out. He dragged the shovel and his backpack through the passenger side door and the pointed blade of the shovel clinked against the asphalt. He said, “I need to dig something up.”

“What? Here?”

“Here. Keep watch and tell me if anyone notices what we're doing.”

He walked toward the dead end. I could hear the sound of the shovel striking the hard earth, John jumping on the blade's footrest to sink it deep into the ground. I leaned against the back of my car and scanned the houses for activity.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“See the beige house? I used to live there.”

I examined the house but nothing suggested it was any different from any of the others in the neighbourhood. Behind me there was the unzipping of the backpack and John's breath coming heavily. He shovelled for a few more minutes, interrupted once by a brief, deep thud, and then he made his way back to the car. The backpack looked full and hung heavily from the straps.

“Step one is complete,” he said. “Let's get to your mom's house and unload your car.”

As we pulled away, I noticed that the diamond-shaped dead-end sign had been toppled and there was a large hole where it had stood. John's face had a glaze of sweat across it and he looked rattled.

We unloaded Grace's things into the foyer of my childhood home. My mother cried and cursed and tugged at her hair, saying, “She was always so goddamned difficult.”

I hugged her short, squat frame, the older and overweight version of Grace's figure, and avoided her questions about why I'd visited so infrequently over the last year. I wasn't entirely sure myself, but it had something to do with the last family dinner we'd had. John stayed out of the way.

My mother said, “Why would she do this to me?”

After our visit I waved to her as we drove off. John didn't look back and didn't wave, which bothered me, but he spoke up before I could mention it.

“School's almost out,” he said.

“What?”

“You and Grace went to the same school until grade eight, right? Would you mind showing it to me?”

I pulled into the next driveway and turned around. We passed my mother's house again but she was no longer on the front porch. We continued down the slow curve of the street. At the corner was the patch of grass we once called a park, and as always it was flooded in parts and the sod was torn down to the mud by kids playing sports. A line of unremarkable children trudged along the sidewalk toward their equally unremarkable houses in the subdivision. At the origin of this line of children was my old elementary school.

I turned left and followed the edge of the park until we reached the parking lot of the school. It was still mostly full of cars but there was a slow trickle of adults coming out the teachers' exit.

“Have you ever thought about why we swing things like sticks and bats?” John asked.

I put the car in park and turned off the ignition. “Jesus Christ, John, what are you on about? Do you want to see this school or not?”

“I do,” he said. “I was just thinking about physics. Who is that?”

A pudgy, be-sweatered teacher was huffing his way through the parking lot.

“No idea,” I said.

John was staring at his hands, squeezing and releasing them slowly. “I mean, why not just use your fist or hand in baseball? Why use a bat?”

I sighed. “Because it hurts.”

He shook his head. “Tennis, then. Tennis balls don't hurt. Why do we use a racket?”

“This is sounding like a conversation with Grace,” I told him. He didn't reply, so I thought about it for a moment. “I suppose we use sticks and bats because we can hit the ball farther.”