Yesterday (20 page)

I need to know that she’ll be okay and I reach out with my mind, trying to find her the way I saw the men coming for us at Henry’s house. It’s no use. The only things I see are memories from the last few weeks. Us making Hamburger Helper together. Her sitting on the side of my bed holding out a glass of orange juice for me.

I fall asleep thinking about her and when I wake up on Sunday most of the morning’s already over. Garren and I watch TV all afternoon until the sun begins to set. It feels like a luxury and in between extremely serious discussions about where we should go (Garren thinks Vancouver, which makes good sense to me because it’s about as far away as we can get without crossing a border or falling off the continent) and how we’ll manage to get there (is it better to steal a succession of cars or unload a wad of cash from some
unfortunate person and use it to take the train cross country and can we really be having this conversation?) we try to make ourselves feel more normal by talking about regular things like our opinions of the various music videos and TV shows we’re watching. Garren likes U2 and Kate Bush and hates Madonna, Duran Duran and Wham! I tell him that my friends at school are sort of music snobs who mainly listen to new wave and that I’ve kind of turned into one myself. Garren says he could guess that from looking at me—not so much now because I’m wearing Paula’s bank-teller clothes—but when I first came to his house. We’re both sitting on the Resniks’ leather couch, with our feet on the coffee table, and Garren tilts his head and adds, “Maybe it’s because I’ve only seen you in real life with dark hair but it looks more like the real you than when you were blond in the picture.”

It feels more like the real me so that’s good to hear, especially from him. But after Garren says it, I can’t take my eyes off him. I’m frozen. Staring at his green eyes with my heart in my mouth as Johnny Rotten hollers out the lyrics to “This Is Not a Love Song” on the TV.

I fidget as I tear my gaze away. Pretend I was thinking something else. Then I say, “It’ll be dark soon. I’m going to have another look around the house and see if there’s anything we missed.” We’ll each need to pack a bag of clothes to bring with us tomorrow and whatever food we can carry. Most of all, we need more cash or things we could sell. Paula Resnik’s jewelry.

Garren lets me go and later I hear him thumping around
the house searching for buried treasure just like I am. We end up with a collection of watches, a Waterford crystal mantelpiece clock, and masses of glimmering earrings, bracelets, rings and necklaces from Paula’s jewelry box (because neither of us can discern what’s valuable or not). The only money left is in the twins’ room and it’s just piggybank change, which we leave alone. Garren says there’s a carton of cigarettes under the bed in the spare room that we should be able to sell too.

I shove several of Paula’s sweaters, T-shirts, socks and her longest pairs of pants into one of two matching beat-up carry-on bags (Paula and her husband must’ve brought more presentable ones along on their trip). I even have to steal a handful of her underwear. You know you’re in a bad way when you find yourself taking someone else’s underwear and I stop and sit on the bed, replaying Lou Bianchi’s voice in my mind in the hope that it will catapult me into a vision that will offer a clue of what’s in store for us tomorrow.

It’s useless, though. There are a dozen different thoughts coursing through my brain—how my mom must be sick with worry for me, what Doctor Byrne said about the greater good, the Latham boy from my dreams, Garren’s green eyes and how I feel when they look at me, the nagging fear that Henry’s men are biding their time, just waiting for us to run so they can snatch us off the street and put us down like dogs or worse, and on and on and on. Worries and questions but not a single thing that comes close to qualifying as a vision.

When Garren and I come together again in the kitchen
that evening I almost lie to him. I mean to inspire a bit of hope by saying that I had a flash of something, a feeling that we’re going to be okay, but then his eyes do their magic trick on me and I’m nothing but warm and flustered. Survival and everything else, for a couple of moments, take a backseat to the feelings I’ve been denying. “You’re so …” My voice is a swirling whisper, a dream thing. It’s not what I’d intended to say or how I meant to say it and I shake my head and leave the abandoned sentence shimmering in the candlelit kitchen like a sparkler on firecracker day.

“So
what
?” he asks, hanging on the freezer door, about to reach for the frozen hamburgers.

“So … familiar.” I have my voice under better control at first but then it begins to twirl and swell. “I can’t believe you don’t know me.”

Garren releases his hold on the fridge, stands with his shoulder against the wall. “It’s still weird to hear you say that,” he murmurs, and though we’re in the middle of a conversation I feel like the kitchen couldn’t get any quieter. “You’re so sure of yourself that you make me feel like I should remember.”

I yank open the fridge myself and grab the hamburgers, just to fill up the room with something other than what we’re saying. There’s too much longing inside me. Not only for him but for something he represents. Something I don’t understand. A whole world of longing.

“I wish I could remember more,” I say, draining my tone, clipping it into neutral syllables.

Garren stares down at the candles in the middle of the table. The light dances across his features, turning him golden. “Maybe tomorrow.”

I smile, solidly back in the real world of the here and now because that’s the first time Garren has sounded like there just might be a point to my session with the hypnotherapist. “Tomorrow,” I echo. His words weren’t the sign I was looking for but I accept them as the good omen they are. “I think so.”

I absolutely do.

E
ven Paula Resnik’s longest pants are short on me, making me look like the victim of a laundry shrinkage accident when we leave the house with our stash of clothes, jewelry, a transistor radio, both flashlights, extra batteries and a smattering of food (the rest of the peanut butter and crackers, two cans of tuna and the box of Count Chocula) early Monday afternoon. Because Paula’s boots are also too small I’ve left them behind and am wearing my Doc Martens—if we need to run for any length of time it’s important to do it in comfortable boots.

As soon as we step outside I feel separation anxiety from the house and want my Docs to sprint me straight back inside again. It’s no longer a surprise to hear Winston Churchill pipe up. In his inimitable gruff voice he declares, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.”

I march on with Garren, each of us in possession of roughly half the money we’ve amassed over the past few
days. Yesterday we decided that maybe we were being paranoid to worry that Henry could find out we’d holed up at the Resniks’ and check who we’d called from there but that it was a case of better safe than sorry. That leaves us having to do our travel research from the anonymity of a public telephone and when we reach the subway station Garren calls a bunch of bus companies and the train line. He’s just hung up from his final call when he lunges for me, throwing his arms around my waist and burying his head in my shoulder.

“Janette’s here,” he whispers, his body crammed up against mine as if that will make him invisible.

I hold him tight the way Janette would. Close my eyes so that they won’t search her out and call attention to us. Would she recognize me? She only saw me once and I was dressed so differently. I can smell Mr. Resnik’s aftershave on Garren and the mint toothpaste we’ve both been using. We should’ve brought that with us too, I think.

You think the weirdest things when you’re in trouble. Toothpaste. Deodorant. When the next opportunity to shower will come along. How my arms are holding Garren but I just feel numb. And then I begin to thaw and it’s harder not to let go. My arms and the rest of my body are flooded with feelings of self-consciousness.

If Janette had seen him surely she would’ve stalked over to interrupt us by now. “I’m afraid to look,” I whisper back.

Garren eases himself away from me and glances around the station. “She’s gone.” His shoulders relax. “She was leaving the station. She must be going home.”

“Shit, that was close.” I pick up my carry-on bag and sling it over my shoulder. Garren snaps up the rest of our things—his matching bag and then a canvas knapsack we found in the laundry room, which has the flashlights, cigarettes and some of the food in it.

We walk down to the platform where Garren tells me that train tickets to Vancouver are a hundred and fifty-two dollars each. He thinks we’d be stupid to catch the train in Toronto, where there are people looking for us, and that we need to get ourselves north to Parry Sound. “We can catch up with the cross-country train there,” he explains. “But I think the first thing we need to do after your appointment is get out of the city. There’s a commuter train that heads out to Oakville every hour. It leaves from Union Station same as the cross-country train does but the second stop on the way out of town is at the exhibition grounds. It isn’t far but hopefully just distant enough from the inner hub of the city that they wouldn’t look for us there.”

I’m amazed by how much Garren’s worked out just by spending a few short minutes on the phone. We don’t have the money for the train fare and we’ll have to find a way to get from Oakville to Parry Sound, but having a general plan makes me feel more secure, like we actually can do this. We’ll disappear and they’ll never find us.

As we speed underground towards Lou Bianchi’s place, we talk about what we’ll do once we reach Vancouver. Since Garren’s been working at a restaurant he says he knows we’ll be able to find under-the-table work in the food industry. “A
lot of people I work with have been paid cash by other restaurants. I hear there’s a lot of construction jobs off the books too.”

Thinking out loud I say, “Housekeeping too, I bet. Child care. Different types of manual labor.” I drape my arms over the carry-on bag and try to picture myself doing one of those things on the other side of the country.

“It’ll be shitty in the beginning,” Garren acknowledges. “Until we have enough money to buy some decent identification and move on to something better.”

Something better
. Something better, somewhere else. The vagueness of that puts my mind in free fall.

Garren adds that he has an international student identity card, in a fake name, which lists his age as twenty. He bought it from a guy at his school for drinking purposes (since the legal age here is nineteen) and says it might come in handy in the meantime.

“What did you want to do before all this?” he asks.

“I didn’t have that figured out.” I thought I’d be in school for years yet, that there’d be plenty more time to come up with the answer to that question. “What about you?”

“I don’t know either. I was going to take a year or so off after graduation. That’s why I was working at the restaurant, to get some traveling money together. See more of Europe and Asia.”

It’s funny, Garren’s already spent so much of his time outside the country but it seems what he wants most is to leave again. “Maybe you still will,” I tell him.

We have to take a streetcar after we get off the subway and when we arrive at Lou Bianchi’s house hauling everything we own with us, I feel as though we’re oozing teenage-runaway vibes. The homes in Lou’s neighborhood are tiny and claustrophobic but brightly painted and welcoming. There are two wicker chairs on his porch, even though it’s winter.

Lou himself answers the doorbell when I ring. I know it’s him before he asks if I’m Lisa Edwards (the fake name I gave him). I also sense, as Garren and I follow Lou into the house, that he’ll be able to help me remember but that it will be at a cost. I’m about to lose something and I can’t see what. Only that it will make me unhappy.

Lou shows Garren into a small waiting room at the side of the house and then leads me to his office downstairs. I see a tape recorder laid out on the desk. Lou notices me eyeing it and says, “So you can play back everything you had to say while under hypnosis if you want to.” He rubs the underside of his beard and adds, “You’re younger than I thought.”

“I’m twenty,” I lie. “But I get that all the time.”

Lou motions for me to sit in the lounge chair in the center of the room. As I do he hands me a release form to sign. It frees him from any guaranties or liabilities and I jot the name Lisa Edwards down on the dotted line and give the form back to him along with the forty-five-dollar fee. Lou fishes a receipt out of his top desk drawer and scrawls the date and his signature on the bottom. The entire time my stomach’s fluttering. I can’t stop worrying about the unhappiness I sense ahead.

Lou mentions my sister and stresses that there are no certainties when it comes to hypnotherapy but that he’s going to do his best to help me. He asks my sister’s name (which I give as Sarah) and whether there’s any particular information or events about her that I’m hoping to remember. I tell him that I just want to remember what it was like to be with her but also what it was like to be with my parents before her death because I sense that they haven’t been the same since losing her.

I hope I’m not fucking up my chances of success by leading Lou down the wrong path but I’m afraid I’ll scare him away if I get anywhere near the truth. Lou explains a bit about hypnosis and does a relaxation exercise with me. He has a voice like trees rustling in a warm wind. It makes me feel floaty and calm. And then we’re stepping into my subconscious, Lou Bianchi’s voice guiding me into a tranquil meadow. I hear birds sing and can feel the heat of the sun on my face. Slowly, a mist begins to descend and then he’s leading me backwards in time through the fog. “Back to when you were four years old and in the presence of your dear sister, Sarah,” Lou intones.

I’m fully aware of my lie and why I told it, but in my current state I no longer want to hide anything from Lou and I amend, “I don’t have a sister. I have a brother. His name is Latham. I think he’s dead.”