I burned up on a gurney in a noisy hallway while an intake nurse jotted my particulars on a clipboard.
“Please call my husband,” I croaked. “We’re from Canusa.”
She looked at me as if I was quite mad. “Where is Canusa?”
“North of the border,” I said.
“You mean Canada.” She didn’t even look up. “What’s your husband’s telephone number here in New York?”
“I don’t know. A hotel in the Village. The Excelsior.” A coughing fit stopped me from talking further. I could barely draw a breath. My chest felt as if it were being crushed by an elephant. “Please, give me something,” I managed to beg.
“The doctor has to see you first,” said the nurse, staring at her clipboard as she walked away. I was nothing special in this hall of suffering: two gurneys over from me, a woman in restraints was screaming that cockroaches were eating her face off.
Two hours later, my cough was competing with her terrified screams for the doctor’s attention. After a cursory examination, I was diagnosed with pneumonia and pleurisy in both lungs, complications of a type of viral infection that had been eradicated in Atomic Mean Time thanks to the U-shot: influenza.
The intake nurse returned. “I looked up Hotel Excelsior. Number’s out of service. One of the orderlies said it’s been torn down for a condo development.”
Head lolling, I tried to focus on her indifferent face. Fighting to form coherent words, I managed, “Wha’ — ’s gone overnight?”
The nurse finally made eye contact with me: “They razed it six months ago. Your hubby isn’t there, honey.” Then she bustled away, her crepe-soled shoes kissing the linoleum.
* * *
I was in the charity ward at Saint Clare’s for six weeks. By the day of my discharge, I was still barely able to stand on my own. When I kept insisting that I had had the Universal Vaccine and was therefore immune to all known infections, I did a stint in the psych ward at a notorious hospital ironically named Bellevue, where a psychiatrist diagnosed me as possibly psychotic and suffering from shock — what we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder. They administered electroshock therapy. I’d rather not talk about that.
Finally, a kind social worker made it her mission to find someone who knew me, who would look after me. She patiently took down the names I could remember of family and friends in New York and Shipman’s Corners. She called directory assistance, presenting me with a list of unfamiliar numbers that I dialled from a payphone in the hall, asking the operator to reverse the charges. None of them would accept my collect calls: not my cousins in Brooklyn, not Sandy Holub or Beatrice Kendal. No one knew who I was.
The social worker tried tracking down John Kendal in Shipman’s Corners and Toronto but the number of men with that name defeated her. I also tried every Linda Biondi and Pasquale Pesce in New York City. Nurse, construction worker, accountant, anthropology professor at Columbia. None of them was my sister or my friend.
Worst of all was when I tried calling my parents in Shipman’s Corners. I had a moment of hope when I heard my mother’s voice agreeing to accept the charges.
“Debbie? How can this be true?” Her voice was shaking.
“It’s really me, Mom. I’m down in New York. I want to come home.”
She gave a sob, followed by the sound of muffled voices. I thought I could make out, Give me the goddamn phone.
Dad was on the line now. “Who the hell is this?” He sounded furious.
“It’s Debbie, Daddy.” I started to cry. Duff had said I never existed in Earth Standard Time, yet clearly they knew who I was.
“Is this some type of sick joke? What are trying to do to my poor wife?” shouted Dad just before he hung up the phone.
Discharged from Bellevue with a bag full of Medicaid antipsychotics, I was still weak and confused, not to mention flat broke. No credit cards. No identity of any kind. Even my university education had disappeared. Any records showing that BIONDI, D.R. had graduated summa cum laude from the University of Toronto with a bachelor of science had vanished, as if the hand of God had dabbed celestial Wite-Out on my official transcript.
I was a girl with no identity. No past. No family or friends. No husband. And no immunity to a long list of miserable diseases that I caught in succession over the space of six awful months — chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough and repeated bouts of the flu. Shivering with fever for weeks on end, I began to wonder whether the flu was actually worse than radiation sickness.
I discovered that a lot of other things had changed, too. In Earth Standard Time, everything was a little out of sync with the timeline I had left behind. I was surprised to learn that Nixon was alive and well, writing his memoir in California, while two of the Kennedys had been assassinated back in the ’60s. Our longest-serving prime minister, Robert Stanfield, hadn’t won a single election, and that one-term leader, Pierre Trudeau, had been PM for twenty years. He hadn’t married Castro’s sister, but someone named Maggie, who’d left him to party at Studio 54, of all places. Protest songs by the likes of Bob Dylan and Marvin Gaye — marginal singers at best in Atomic Mean Time — were revered in Earth Standard Time. Instead of the annual Cuban Missile Crises of my childhood, Earth Standard Time had seen only one. And instead of flattening the Kremlin, or hurtling deeper into space, Skylab had crashed in Australia (the day after I’d met Gabriel the Twistie — sorry, Exceptional), killing a single cow. So much for the falling space junk starting World War Three.
Four months later, I was living at a women’s shelter in the Bronx. Viral infections had broken my body; being diagnosed as psychotic and delusional almost made me finish the job myself.
One evening, standing on the front stoop sharing a cigarette with another no-hoper, watching the nightly parade of hustlers and hookers, I saw a beautiful young man in a pair of gold boxing shorts and a tight T-shirt, obviously waiting for a trick. Bum Bum.
Staggering over to him, tears running down my cheeks, I put my arms around him. He embraced me back. “Do I know you?”
“Yes,” I sobbed. “We knew each other in another world. You were my friend.”
Bum Bum stood with me at arm’s-length, his dark eyes searching my face. “I remember you from my hometown. Shipman’s Corners, up in Canada,” he said slowly. “We were in middle school together.”
I almost shouted with joy. “Yes. St. Dismas, yes, you and I were both there.”
“Your name’s Debbie, right? I could swear the teachers told us you were . . .” He hesitated.
“I was what?”
He paused, then said: “That you were dead.”
Bum Bum’s hands tightened on my shoulders. Holding me up.
He could have left me there on the sidewalk or gently guided me back to the shelter. But he didn’t. Maybe it was the residual memory of our friendship in Atomic Mean Time. Or maybe it was something simpler: compassion. Bum Bum understood what it was like to hit rock bottom.
I clung to him so tightly that it was hard to get me into a taxi. He told me he’d left Shipman’s Corners for New York after dropping out of high school. When I mentioned Kendal, he shook his head and said the Kendals had moved away from his neighbourhood back in the ’60s.
“I lost contact with the guy after that. We hung out with different people. Kendal was always one of the smart ones.”
Bum Bum took me home to a tidy little bachelor pad where he had been living for years. He made soup, built me up, nursed me back to health, listened to my crazy stories about stopping a nuclear war. Most importantly, he believed me.
“I feel like I dreamed all the stuff you’re telling me,” he said. “It seems so familiar. When I saw you on the street, I felt like I knew you, as if everything that happened that day, happened before. What do they call that?”
“Déjà vu,” I told him.
But there was more to it than that. One night, when the two of us were companionably slumped on his couch sharing a doobie, eating popcorn and watching a movie on the Late Late Show, Bum Bum looked at me and said, “I kinda remember being at a party like this one with you.”
On a snowy black and white set that Bum Bum had liberated from someone’s trash can, Russian dancers, blonde starlets, a black woman in a French maid outfit and a baby elephant were dancing by a pool with Peter Sellers. Psychedelic sitar music played in the background. Nothing made sense. I didn’t know this version of the swinging ’60s. If anything, it looked more like the 1970s in Atomic Mean Time.
“It was a Halloween party,” I mumbled, my mouth full of popcorn. “Remember anything else?”
Bum Bum thought about it, his eyes on the movie. Now Peter Sellers and a starlet were romping in soapsuds. A woman in an evening gown fell headfirst over a balcony into the pool. The French maid did the Watusi.
“Some asshole dressed like the Playboy guy was coming on to you. You threw a drink in his face,” said Bum Bum.
“You and Rocco saved me.”
“Who?”
“Your boyfriend in Atomic Mean Time.”
Bum Bum laughed without meaning it. “I know who Rocco is, Debbie. We were together in Real Time, too.”
“Atomic Mean Time was also real,” I reminded him.
“I know, I know, but it’s not ‘real’ anymore, is it. Anyway, Rocco broke up with me and got married because his family couldn’t stand the idea of their oldest son being a fag. I’d rather erase the jerk from my memory.”
I reached over and took his hand. Sometimes I was so focused on my own problems, I forgot that Bum Bum had had heartbreaks, too. But knowing that he could remember something of the old past gave me hope. If he remembered me, maybe others would, too. By which I really meant Kendal.
* * *
Eventually, when I was strong enough, we went searching for Linda. Locating her turned out to be easier than I thought. I saw her face on a poster stuck to a telephone pole.
She lived in a lower Manhattan loft, paid for with royalties from a record she’d made with Dylan’s producer, same guy who discovered Springsteen. Under her stage name, Lindy Bond, she packed them in at CBGB’s every night. Thanks to my hop into Earth Standard Time, her personal history had changed for the better.
When she opened the door and saw Bum Bum and me standing there, I could tell by her shocked expression that she recognized me right away. Her dead sister, Debbie. I showed her the Lady of Lourdes medal.
“I thought Mom and Dad buried you with this,” she said, holding it in her hand. “How can it be possible that you’re alive?”
I tried to explain my time hop to her, as I had to Bum Bum, but the look in her eyes made me stop. She turned to Bum Bum and asked him to come into the kitchen to help her make tea.
I could hear them in there, whispering about me.
“What’s the matter with her? Is she psychotic? Schizophrenic?”
A short silence. “She’s been through some major shit,” mumbled Bum Bum. “I figured she was a runaway.”
“My parents must have sent her away. They did that to me once, but they let me come back. No wonder they kept the casket closed. My God.”
“Why’d they want to get rid of her?”
“Let’s just say she was a handful.”
“You should tell them.”
“No way. Mom’s health isn’t great. Heart trouble. I’d rather just let Debbie live here quietly, but I’m leaving on tour soon. I’ve already sublet the place.”
“I don’t mind if Debbie goes on living with me,” said Bum Bum.
A short silence as this good news sunk in; I could just imagine Linda’s relief at Bum Bum volunteering to take responsibility for me.
“Do you need money?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” said Bum Bum.
In Earth Standard Time, Linda was the doting daughter, while I was the long-lost one. Why rock the boat? In the end, Mom died never knowing Linda and I had been reunited. Dad started losing his memory a few years later — dementia symptoms, the doctors said. I cried for days when Linda told me. Not only for Dad, but also for me: now there was no chance he’d remember me, in either time continuum.
With Linda’s money, Bum Bum paid the first and last months’ rent on a little railroad flat not far from Orchard Street, where Nonna Peppy had lived. He continued to bus at Studio 54, among other places, but he was tired of sleeping with rich clients for tips. It was getting too risky because of a new retrovirus emerging in New York. Back in our apartment, I spent most of my time sleeping, reading, watching soap operas, familiarizing myself with the twisted history of Earth Standard Time, trying to let my mind and body heal, wondering what the hell I would do without an identity.
Bum Bum did well in New York. He turned out to be a smart guy with cool ideas and the instincts of an entrepreneur; within a couple of years, he’d started running a bookstore and print shop in the Village. One day, he brought home a copy of an underground comic that he’d printed called Raw.
“We’re selling it at the front cash. You’ll like it,” Bum Bum told me, handing me an issue called the “Graphix Coffee Table Book for your Bomb Shelter.” I sat and read one visceral story after another, including one about a family of mice during the Holocaust. In a radio interview, I heard the creator say it was a way to work out painful family stories, to deal with a horrific legacy in a way that he could manage.
I can do that too, I thought. Then: I must do that. For my own sanity.
Comic books are one of the places where you can turn what a psychiatrist at Saint Clare’s Hospital called “delusions” into alternate realities that readers desperately want to live in. A medically acceptable way to turn fantasy into truth. I’ve met hundreds of people eager to do just that at comic book fan festivals.
Bum Bum saw a want ad in the Village Voice for a graphic designer/art director for a pulp magazine called Psychics of Fortune based out of Fort Lee, New Jersey. He convinced me to let him take me out there, even borrowed a car for the trip across the George Washington Bridge to a tumbledown industrial park to meet my future boss, Madame Gina. She asked me if I had a portfolio, and of course the answer was no, so I demonstrated my drawing skills on the spot. She was impressed by the realism of my horses, but she still wasn’t sure I had the right stuff for a fast-paced career with the number one psychics’ magazine in America.
“Let’s consult the experts,” Madame Gina said, and took out her tarot cards.
When Death, the Devil, the Tower, the Ten of Swords and the Hanged Man turned up in succession, Madame Gina’s face went grey.
“Destiny brought you here. The cards don’t lie. You are from the old doomed time. You are the Tagger, destroyer of an evil world, saviour of humanity.”
“Does that mean I’m hired?”
By way of answer, Madame Gina shook my hand so hard that her heavy rings left deep purple bruises on my fingers that I have to this day.
Turns out, she was part of a group of Exceptionals who were living in Atomic Mean Time 1979.
“We were looking for respite from our mutations by hopping into the past. Of course, it didn’t work,” said Madame Gina, sighing over shots of a clear, pungent liquor that reminded me of Mr. Capitalismo’s homemade onion vodka. “When you collapsed Atomic Mean Time, we couldn’t believe our luck. We all tagged along with you into this time. Our physical mutations vanished, leaving only our psychic abilities.” She leaned toward me and touched the side of her nose conspiratorially. “That’s how we get by in this timeline without identities. Craps tables, lotteries, playing the ponies. That gave us the do-re-mi to start the magazine. We can enjoy life as long as we observe the rules: no big weight changes, no children, no formal property ownership. Cash on the barrelhead.”
“How come you remember being tagged when no one else does?” I asked.
Madame Gina waved one ringed hand dismissively. “More do than you think. Remembering the old time requires spiritual insight. Most Normals are too distracted to notice anything except the boob tube,” she told me, then patted Bum Bum’s hand. “Present company excepted, of course.”
Bum Bum stood up, suddenly uncomfortable. “I’m going to buy some smokes.”
As he slid through the beaded curtain of Madame Gina’s office, she nodded at his disappearing back. “Your friend could remember everything about the old time, if he let himself. For a Normal, he is an exceptional man in many ways.”
“He’s very kind, if that’s what you mean,” I said.
“He saved you,” said Madame Gina. “And you saved everyone else. He is an exception even among Exceptionals. Accept him as your guardian and advisor. He may know more about your past and future than you do.”
* * *
Working for Psychics of Fortune helped rekindle some long-dead creative spark, the one the Famous American Artists Correspondence School had talked about in their ads. Madame Gina showed me how to capitalize on the limited psychic ability I had acquired during my time hop to make a nice nest egg at craps and roulette in Jersey City. An unintended pleasant consequence of being the Ion Tagger, and one I feel that I richly deserve.
A couple of years later, inspired by Raw comics and the crash of Challenger, I had the confidence to draw the first issue of Sputnik Chick: Girl With No Past. At first I churned out my little underground comic on Bum Bum’s Xerox machine and sold it in his bookstore, but after the obscenity charge, the series turned into a worldwide phenomenon and Grey Wizard became my publisher. I’ve even sold the film rights, although I’m still waiting to see the project greenlit by a studio. They’re such unreliable fuckers in the movies. They either let the concept wallow until it dies a natural death or suck all the juice out of it in an attempt to reach the broadest possible market.
Despite my successes, a question continued to eat at me every day: what had happened to Kendal? I wouldn’t know for sure until the dawn of the internet age. In 1995, sitting in front of my PC, I learned that he was in Toronto. I was able to follow the trajectory of his career as he went from lawyer, to head of an environmental organization, to deputy mayor of the city, to leader of a federal political party. So, he had been destined for law school, all along.
In 1986, Kendal had married a woman identified in the archives of the Star’s Society pages as Alexandra “Alex” Holub, Sandy’s name in Earth Standard Time. Inspired by her father’s mission to popularize ethnic food, she went on to launch a chain of Eastern European–themed fast food restaurants, Mr. Yumchuck’s.
I cried when I learned about Kendal and Sandy. I tried to deal with my anger and sorrow by developing a storyline in which Sputnik Chick stalks her ex-lover Johnny the K, shadowing him to the house of his fiancée, CC the waitress. Sputnik Chick spies on the two of them through a window as they make love. Then she goes home, gets drunk and finds some Twisties to beat up.
At least I was living in New York City, far, far away from the CBC national news. In Canada, Kendal was everywhere — on TV, radio, in the newspapers. Living in the States, I could pretend he didn’t exist. That all changed six years later when my spidey sense sent me to the window of our condo in lower Manhattan and I saw the first plane hit the tower — a disaster rushing in to fill the void. I leaned my head against the superheating glass of the window and prayed to no one in particular.
As borders closed and identity requirements tightened, it became obvious that Bum Bum’s lack of a green card — and my lack of an identity — would be a problem. Even my cleverly forged passport wouldn’t cut it much longer. And so, in 2002, we returned together to Canada — Toronto, to be exact. A place big enough to lose ourselves in.
I never really settled down in one neighbourhood, just went from hotel to hotel, a lifestyle I liked well enough. Bum Bum set himself up in a nice loft apartment where I crash whenever I need someone to split a bottle of pinot noir, watch TV and experience normal life. If you can call Bum Bum’s life normal.
When I felt ready, Bum Bum drove me to Shipman’s Corners. I wanted to see for myself whether every shred of my past had truly vanished without a trace.
My childhood home on Fermi Road was covered in aluminum siding. The grapevines had been ripped out for a swimming pool.
The wreck of the candy store had been torn down to make room for a Valvoline oil-change shop. As we drove past the Holub house, I noticed two young girls in hijabs in the tiny front yard, kicking a soccer ball back and forth. Like everywhere else, newcomers to the neighbourhood were replacing the older postwar immigrant communities.
In King George Park — what I had known as Plutonium Park — the Atomic Bomb memorial engraved with the names of the Radiant Dead had vanished; only the statue of the soldier fainting into the arms of an angel remained, chiselled with a list of all the conflicts where Shipman’s Cornersians had laid down their lives: World Wars One and Two, Korea, Afghanistan. The Atomic War of Deterrence had never taken place, apparently, although I read in a history book that a similar idea had been floated by Churchill. Cresswell’s Collectibles had been replaced by a tattoo parlour and the old Royal Bank building had been subdivided into the offices of mortgage brokers and collection agencies. Déjà vu tingling, I asked Bum Bum to park out front.
He frowned. “Why do you want to stop here?”
“I don’t know. Just wait for me.”
On the sidewalk, I scanned the list of businesses in the old bank building. One caught my eye: White Fin Financial.
At the reception desk, a sixty-something blonde in a crisp white blouse was working at a computer. She looked up at me with a coral-lipped smile, and I saw that she was wearing a necklace with DOTTY spelled out in script. It was her, all right: evil Nurse Dotty from Atomic Mean Time was a grandmotherly secretary in Earth Standard Time.
“May I help you?” she asked in a sweet voice that implied she had no memory of me kneeing her in the chest and pushing her into a freezing cold shower.
“I’m interested in buying a commercial property. Do you handle business mortgages?”
Dotty nodded. “Absolutely. Larry’s got a client with him, but if you can wait a few minutes, I’m sure he’ll be delighted to speak with you.”
“Larry . . . ?” I said, raising my eyebrows.
“Kowalchuck,” supplied Dotty.
A familiar instrumental played softly on the sound system; it took me a second to recognize Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra playing “Love’s Theme” — the first dance at my wedding to Kendal back in Atomic Mean Time. I took a seat and flipped through the Shipman’s Corners Examiner. “More layoffs announced at ShipCo Automotive,” read the front page. The local economy was shifting to service sector jobs, some idiotic alderman said reassuringly, as if mopping the floors of fast food restaurants was a reasonable way to fill the void left by the vanishing factory jobs. No wonder the whole town seemed down in the dumps.
As I closed the paper, I felt a presence in front of me and looked up at the Shark, his thinning blond hair plastered into an unconvincing comb-over. He’d kept his aging body trim, but the explosion of red blood vessels on his nose advertised his taste for cocktails. He peered down at me through unfashionable aviator glasses.
“Larry Kowalchuck, pleased to meetcha,” he said, and offered his hand.
I shook it, introducing myself by my real name, but he gave no sign of recognizing me. We went into his office, where he lowered himself into a high-backed Naugahyde chair behind an oak veneer desk.
“Now, what kind of business property would a beautiful lady like you be after?” he asked with a grin. I suddenly felt myself back in the Donato living room, fending off his come-ons. I couldn’t hate him anymore: he’d turned into a cliché of a dirty old man, unaware of how repellant he was.
I smiled. “I’m opening a spa in Shipman’s Corners. Something high-end.”
He leaned across the desk and smiled at me lasciviously. “Spa, eh? How much you looking to borrow?”
Thinking fast, I said, “Five hundred thousand, give or take. Depending on location, of course.”
The Shark gave a low whistle and leaned back in his chair, the vinyl squeaking under him. “Half a mil? You Martha Stewart or something? You could buy and sell most of the businesses on this street for a quarter of that. You’d have to cut and curl a hell of a lot of hair to turn a profit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of just hairstyling. Manicures, pedicures, facials, all that.”
“Uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh,” said the Shark, regarding me with open amusement. “Look, up in Toronto you might get women paying top dollar to keep their faces on straight, but here in Shipman’s Corners most of ’em are the do-it-yourselfer types, know what I’m saying?”
I crossed my legs. “Should I take my business elsewhere?”
The Shark raised his hands in mock surrender. “Whoa there, Oprah, don’t get touchy. I’m just trying to tell you how it is. Look, why don’t I close up early and take you out to dinner at Soaring Starling Wine Bar? Or Yumchuck’s Ukrainian Eats, if you like ethnic food? I’d love to discuss your business plan.”
I stood up. “I’ll have to take a rain check, Larry. Duty calls in Toronto. But if you give me your business card, I’ll shoot you an email next time I’m in town and we can do lunch.” I offered my hand for him to shake.
Larry let his eyes walk all over me. To my surprise, he kissed my hand.
“I’ll count the days,” he said, smirking.
When I found Bum Bum watching his coffee cool in a Tim Hortons down the street, he said, “How did it go? Discover anything important?”
I shook my head. “Nothing at all. Let’s go.”
On the way out of town, as we approached the on-ramp to the Queen Elizabeth Way, a sign caught my eye. VICTORIA LAWN CEMETERY.
“Let’s see if we can find the family grave,” I told Bum Bum. “Turn right here.”
He shook his head and left-turned to the on-ramp.
“No matter what we find, you’re going to fall to pieces and it’ll be my job to put you back together again. I’m tired of that, Deb. Just go home and live your life.”
As we passed a sign reading TORONTO 100 KM, I wondered if that’s where home was now.
* * *
In 2004, I decided to find out how Kendal and Sandy — excuse me, “Alex” — were getting along without me. Google told me they were living in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood, an affluent but not filthy rich area on the other side of town from Bum Bum’s west-end condo in hipsterland. One weekend morning, I hung around Withrow Park, a few doors away from the Kendal family’s renovated Victorian. Eventually, John Kendal came out the front door with his twelve-year-old twins, Nelson and Marushka. I already knew their faces and names from a steady stream of media coverage about their lives, given Kendal’s public profile as an environmental lawyer and newly minted Member of Parliament. Some hoped he’d skip over politics altogether and become a diplomat. I suspected Duff knew what he was doing when he told me that if I saved Kendal, I’d save the world.
In faded jeans and a leather bomber jacket, Kendal looked as handsome as ever. My eyes fell to his left hand: normal. The grotesque disfigurement by blowtorch had never happened in E.S.T. The kids were beautiful, of course: leggy and slim, with Kendal’s curly black hair and his wife’s blue eyes. Half black, half Ukrainian — what else would you expect?
Kendal laughed as Nelson and Marushka told him a story about their homeroom teacher, every step of their perfect feet breaking my heart. I followed the three of them to a painfully trendy coffee shop where Kendal ordered an espresso and hot chocolates for the twins. I sat two tables away, trying to look absorbed in my MacBook while I eavesdropped. I learned that Marushka liked mini marshmallows in her hot chocolate and Nelson was late handing in a history project on Louis Riel because he hadn’t done the required research. Read the graphic novel, kid, I felt like telling him.
Once, while the kids were squabbling over Pokémon cards, I noticed Kendal’s attention wandering. His eyes skipped around the inside of the coffee shop until they met mine. He offered me that half-smile I knew well. Thinking he’d recognized me, my heart picked up speed: I wondered if he’d come over to my table and look down at me with a Do we know each other? Or better yet, I’ve been looking for you all my life.
Then I saw his eyes climb over me to the pretty young woman sitting at the table behind me, her notebook open — a CBC reporter who had interviewed him numerous times, I learned from the conversation that ensued between them. He hadn’t offered me a smile of recognition, just the look famous men give middle-aged women who recognize them in coffee shops.
Sitting in the cozy café with its piped-in jazz and fair trade coffee, observing Kendal’s perfect life and healthy kids, felt like tearing the scab off a not-quite-healed wound. I couldn’t stop picking away at it, almost enjoying the hurt of scratching at tender spots. This could have been my life, I thought. I resented the kids for being normal. I hated Kendal for being happy. Because neither word could describe me.
What a monster I am.
I went back only once more to the Kendals’ neighbourhood, hoping to catch sight of the woman I’d known as Sandy. I knocked on the front door, not knowing what I would say to her if she answered.
When it opened, I found myself face to face with a tall black man in his seventies wearing a Maple Leafs sweatshirt. Grey-haired, bearded and fit-looking, like someone you’d see on a sailboat in a retirement planning ad, he was the kind of guy you’d invite over for a beer. The lopsided smile, the angular nose, the almond shape of his eyes — he was an older version of Kendal.
But not my Kendal. I was facing Dave Kendal, who in E.S.T. obviously had not died in an industrial accident at ShipCo when his son was a kid.
Dave was smiling when he opened the door but when our eyes met, his expression changed from welcoming to puzzled.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
I stared at him, this aged man who did not live to see his thirtieth birthday in Atomic Mean Time standing before me in the glow of good health. That’s when it occurred to me that the whole Tagger thing might actually have been bullshit. That I’d simply been sacrificed to give Dave Kendal a lifetime to play a role he didn’t get to play in Atomic Mean Time: raising a future world leader. Did he know that I’d given up my identity for him? That I’d been forced to give up his son? That his grandkids should have come from me, not that backstabbing bitch, Sandy?
“Help me? Only if you can give me back my life,” I said.
Inside the house, a familiar woman’s voice called, “Dave, who’s at the door?”
It was Bea Kendal. She and Dave must have been babysitting the grandkids for the weekend while Kendal and Sandy enjoyed some alone time. Sweet.
Dave called to his wife, “It’s no one, hon.”
“Then why are you still talking to them?”
From the depths of the hallway, she walked briskly to the door. She’d aged well. Grey hair, stylishly cut. A strong, trim figure — lots of yoga and boot camp, no doubt. None of the worry lines I remembered: this was a woman with a comfortable life, a devoted husband, and a loving son who was expected to become Canada’s first black prime minister. None of the tragedies of the old time had touched her. No young widowhood. No door-to-door job in a hateful little town. No child whisked off by the authorities to an industrial school — which, let’s face it, was just another name for slavery.
She stood at the door beside her handsome, undead husband and looked steadily at me. She knew me. More precisely, she remembered me. I opened my mouth to say something that would make her call me by name, but before I could think of anything, she gently moved in front of her husband. Shielding him.
I could see her struggling to choose the right words to push me out of the life I’d been robbed of. Although, in fairness, it was the Trespasser who’d set me up. Presumably for some higher purpose, saving-the-world-wise.
“Please don’t trouble us again. Goodbye,” she said.
Her eyes never left mine as she closed the heavy wood door in my face.