TWENTY-SEVEN

Finn wakes up to a pillow being thrown in her face. “Get up!” Nicki screams at her. “Where the fuck is my daughter?” Finn barely has her eyes open when a second pillow slams into her gut. “Where. The. Fuck. Is. London?”

Finn had been dreaming that she was back in her own house. There was nothing more to the dream than that, just Finn, in her house, sitting on her couch, breathing her air. Alone. Now, she struggles to remember where she is, what is going on. She pushes the pillow off her face and sits up. “In her room?”

“Nope,” says Nicki, her eyes blazing. She is already dressed for work, in tight black pants, a tight black scoop-neck shirt with a shiny, bedazzled cross on the front, and black patent leather stilettos. Just looking at her makes Finn sweat. “She’s not in her room. She is not anywhere in the whole house.”

“Did you try texting her?” Finn asks, rubbing her eyes.

“Do you think I’m an idiot? Of course I texted her!” Nicki shakes her phone in Finn’s face. “Then I texted the twins, who said they haven’t seen her since yesterday. Not since yesterday. When you fucking told me my daughter was in her room!”

“You didn’t go in and check on her?” Finn asks, and then immediately regrets it as Nicki’s whole body clenches with rage.

“No, Finn, I didn’t go check on her, I was too busy cleaning up the mess that inevitably happened when you decided to go off god knows where and leave a bunch of kids in charge of the house!”

“Excuse me? This is my fault? Where the hell were you?” Finn watches Nicki’s chest rise and fall, her face pink with rage. “What was that, Nicki? Where did you say you were? I didn’t quite hear you.”

“Fuck you, Finn.”

Finn pushes back against the pillows, shifting so she is no longer sitting directly on the rollbar. “You know, you’re so quick to blame everyone else for everything all the time,” she says. “Why do you get a free pass?”

“Because I’m always here, Finn!” Nicki yells, slamming her fists against the bed. “While you’re off doing whatever the hell it is you do all day in Mississauga, I’m always here! I’m dealing with Mom constantly forgetting where she is and Dad just ignoring everyone all the time. I have to deal with everyone’s bullshit, and the second I want to do something for myself, everything falls apart.”

“Do what, Nicki? What did you want to do for yourself? What was so important to you?” Finn covers Nicki’s fist with the palm of her hand. “No, really, you can tell me,” she says sweetly. “I’m your sister. I just want you to be happy. If you want something, I want it, too. Oh wait.” She pulls her hand back. “I’m sorry, I forgot. It’s the other way around.”

“You’re a fucking psychopath,” Nicki says.

“At least I’m not a liar.”

“No, you’re just a backstabber.”

“Look who’s talking!”

They lock eyes. Then the phone starts ringing in the kitchen, and Nicki storms out of the room, her shoes clacking against the floor. Finn yanks off the covers and follows her into the kitchen, leaning against the counter in her T-shirt and underwear while Nicki listens on the phone. The rest of the house is quiet – Finn imagines the twins and pseudo-Kate upstairs sleeping off their bender, the boys, who Shawn left sleeping here last night, playing somewhere outside, Hamish in his shed playing with his new parts. Meanwhile Finn and Nicki stand with nothing but three feet of linoleum and a phone call keeping them from just going ahead and killing each other.

Nicki slams down the phone without saying a word to the person on the other end, then continues to stare at it, as though it might come to life and attack her. “That was the hospital,” she says, still watching the phone warily. “The security footage they pulled from the loading bay shows Mom leaving the hospital yesterday with a teenaged girl at 4:37 p.m. They said it shows them driving away in a green Volvo.”

“Wait, what?”

Nicki goes over to the kitchen window. Finn joins her, and together they do a mental check: Nicki’s Civic. Shawn’s Jeep, with a crushed right fender. Hamish’s Chevy, with the trailer still attached. Walter’s truck is with him, wherever the hell that is. Also gone: Kate’s Volvo.

Finn puts her hand on Nicki’s back. How is it that despite everything, she still feels the need to comfort her sister? “Hey,” she says. “We’ll find them. It’ll be okay.”

Nicki tightens up, shrugging Finn’s hand off her back. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she says through gritted teeth.

Finn’s jaw tightens. “You were just bitching that no one ever helps you,” she says, through her own now gritted teeth. Nicki turns away from the window, starts gathering up her stuff – keys, wallet, lipstick – and shoving it in her purse. “Nicki, look at me,” says Finn. Nicki ignores her, keeping her eyes stubbornly averted as she picks up her phone and begins scrolling through her contacts. Finally, Finn grabs her arm. “Nicki!”

Nicki wrenches her arm free. “You think you can just sweep in here like some kind of superhero and save us all? No one trusts you, Finn! When things get tough, you run.”

Finn steps back, reeling. She takes a breath. “I’m not going anywhere, Nicki. I’m here, okay? I’m here until we get things back to normal.”

Shaking her head, Nicki puts down her purse and sits at the kitchen table. “That’s what you don’t fucking get, Finn,” she says. “This is normal.” With a resigned sigh, she starts phoning her clients to cancel the day’s appointments.

When they were kids, Finn used to imagine herself and Nicki as two halves of a whole, balancing each other out, like yin and yang, coming together to make one full person. As she got older, the image changed to a pair of magnetic poles, each constantly repelling the other. But now she thinks that maybe they are just two versions of the same person, and if circumstances were different – if she had been the one to get pregnant and stay in Thunder Bay and live with Kate and Walter all these years – she wonders if she would have turned out just like Nicki.

—

The Thunder Bay Mall hasn’t changed much in the years since Finn has been gone – it is still mostly teen moms with giant strollers, old men drinking Tim Hortons coffee, middle-aged women scouring the sale rack at Zellers for discount bras. Finding herself back here, with the same drab vinyl-tile floor and dusty fake trees that were here in the eighties, wearing the same Superior Tours T-shirt that she slept in and Kate’s ugly ancient Birkenstocks after discovering her own flip-flops were covered in raw hamburger meat, she feels like an acne-scarred sixteen-year-old misfit again, hunched over and self-conscious, all too-long arms and legs, her eyebrows unplucked, her hair dull and lifeless.

Nicki had eventually conceded to let Finn help her search for London and Kate, sending Finn to the mall while she went down to the police station to file a missing person report and Hamish stayed home with the kids, including three very sorry-looking thirteen-year-old girls with wicked hangovers. When Finn left, he was cheerily forcing them to eat plates full of runny eggs and fatty bacon, saying, “It’s gane be awright once the pain has gane away,” which Finn translated into “I’m having a lot of fun torturing you little demonspawn.” At least he has a sense of humour about it.

Nicki had said the mall was as good a place as any to start looking, but London’s not here. There are just a bunch of girls with shiny hair and expertly shaped brows who Finn is guessing are the popular kids at her school and probably hate her because if memory serves, that’s what popular girls do in high school: hate you. Finn knows teenaged girls don’t come with any kind of warnings. But she was a teenaged girl once, and she knows she wanted to be sexy and she wanted people to like her, and she wanted to be smart, and she was never sure how to make all those things work at once, or in her favour. More than anything, though, what she wanted was to be smarter than her parents, and for a while she thought she was – after all, they were old and out of touch and dead inside. Like London, she thought that unless you grew up to be an artist or a humanitarian, you had sold out.

“Everyone just, like, buys into the facade of happiness that society is trying to sell them,” she can remember London saying last night, before dinner. “Like, really, death is the only thing that can ever save them from their boring, pointless life of drudgery.” The embarrassing thing is, at thirty-four, Finn can still relate to this. She watches the girls hanging out in the food court on a Monday morning in July texting their friends, drinking pop, flirting with boys, and waiting for something to happen, thinking their lives are going to be so much better when they are grown up because they are going to do it right, they are going to beat the odds and hold on to their ideals and not let themselves turn into boring, jaded adults. And she thinks, Yes! Yes, do that! For the love of god, please, somebody do that.

It’s with this hope in her heart that Finn goes over to the nearest table of long legs and pink hoodies and, in what she hopes is her least creepy-old-person voice, says, “Hey, do any of you guys know London Parker-Stewart?”

Four blond-ponytailed heads turn towards her. “Who?” asks the ponytail closest to her, in a voice so withering she can almost feel her inner child curling up and dying.

“London Parker-Stewart,” another girl says. “London Parker-Stewart. Doesn’t she go to Westgate?”

“Isn’t she some kind of eco-slut?” another girl asks.

“Doesn’t she have, like, seventeen brothers and sisters, all with different dads?”

“Didn’t her mother, like, die in a boat that went over the falls?”

Finn clenches her fists at her sides. “It was a barrel,” she says. “And it wasn’t her mother. And she didn’t die.” And what the fuck is an eco-slut?

Four blond ponytails whip away from her. “Um, touchy, much?” the first girl says. “By the way, nice Birkenstocks.”

It’s amazing how you can grow up and think you’re self-assured and confident and then one biting comment from a bitchy teenaged girl can cut you into pieces. She looks down at her sad feet in her sadder shoes. She can still smell the coffee she spilled on herself in Hamish’s truck on the way here, which is bigger than her father’s and unwieldy and a bitch and a half to park with a Tim’s cup in your hand. She doesn’t understand why they haven’t mentioned her swollen nose, or her three-days-unwashed hair, or that her shirt is on inside out, something she is just noticing now as she surveys her pathetic self. “So, what I’m getting from you is that you haven’t seen London,” she says, mostly to her feet.

“Check, like, the forest or something,” the first girl says. “She’s probably off hugging a tree.”

“Or fucking a shark,” another girl says.

At the next table, a girl Finn recognizes sits with three boys, watching something on an iPad. Could she be a friend of London’s? Someone whose face she remembers from sleepovers at Victor Street? As she approaches their table, Finn realizes that whatever they are watching sounds familiar. The girl, who has been looking at her while the other three watch the screen, tilts her iPad sideways as Finn walks over, making sure she can see what it is.

Drop, bang, flip. Shit.

“The Conqueror of Kakabeka,” the girl says, gesturing to the iPad. “What an adorable sobriquet. I know you. You’re the other twin.”

This is what you get for leaving, Finn thinks. Forever known as the other twin.

“I’m London’s aunt,” she says, feeling this is a more pertinent relationship to focus on. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her shorts, tries to appear casual. The video starts playing again – they obviously have it on some kind of loop. The girl places the iPad screen up on the table, volume at full. Drop, bang, flip.

“Ugh,” she says, reaching her hand out across the table towards Finn. “I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine what your family must be going through right now.”

The three boys laugh, although now that Finn is closer she’s not sure if two of them are actually boys or not. “Uh, thanks,” she says. “You guys are friends with London?”

“Oh yeah,” the girl says. “We’re super close.”

“Super close,” the one most likely to be a boy says, a big grin on his face.

The girl turns to him, eyes wide. “Andy, she must be just devastated about this.”

“Well, actually,” says Finn, “she, uh, she went missing last night.”

The four of them glance at one another, and Finn could swear she sees something pass between them. “Oh, dear,” the girl says. She pulls a long red Twizzler from a bag on the table and sticks one end in her mouth, and when she leans back in her chair Finn can see she is wearing a black-and-white-striped shift dress that barely skims her crotch. With her thick black bangs and red lips she looks like something out of a French New Wave film, and definitely not someone you would find in the food court of the Thunder Bay Mall. She seems like someone that London could be friends with, Finn thinks. So why does she suddenly feel like she’s being duped?

“Do you have any idea where she may have gone?” Finn asks, deciding to forge ahead.

The girl sighs loudly, chewing on her Twizzler. “Unfortunately, I do,” she says. She raises her eyebrows questioningly. “Should I tell her?” she asks the other three. “I feel kind of weird about it.”

“Anastasia, you can’t,” one of the androgynous ones says. “You promised you’d keep her secret.”

“I know,” Anastasia says. “But I’m just so worried about her, Dylan. I have a totally bad feeling about this. I think it’s time we got a responsible adult involved.” She gazes up at Finn with black-lined eyes, her face plastered with a perfectly arranged expression of concern. “What would you do, Ms. Parker? If you had made a promise to someone, but keeping that promise might end up hurting them?”

Drop, bang, flip. Finn doesn’t want to be talking to these four anymore. She is sure she has heard the name Anastasia before, from London or Kate or maybe one of the twins. She wishes she had paid more attention, had been a better aunt all these years, knew her niece better. This is all Nicki’s fault, of course. If Nicki hadn’t been such a miserable human being, Finn would have been able to spend more time with her children.

“I don’t know, Anastasia,” Finn says. “I think I would probably keep the secret, and then feel really shitty about it when something terrible ended up happening that I could have easily put a stop to just by telling someone. But that’s just me. I do stupid stuff. I’m pretty sure you’re smarter than that, though.”

Anastasia smiles. “You’re right, of course. I don’t think you’re stupid at all, Ms. Parker. Or do you go by your married name now?”

WARNING: ATTACKING TEENAGED GIRLS IN SHOPPING MALL FOOD COURTS IS NOT RECOMMENDED. “I didn’t say I was stupid,” Finn says, staring at her. “I said I do stupid stuff.”

“Just tell her, Anastasia,” Andy says. “Then we can get the fuck out of here.”

“Andy! Don’t be so callous.” Anastasia bites her lip. “I heard she…met someone on the internet. A boy. Well, a man, actually.” She rips off a piece of the Twizzler and begins to chew.

Finn feels her stomach drop to the floor. “A man? On the internet? Are you sure?”

With the licorice still in her mouth, Anastasia nods.

“Do you know his name?”

“No. I’m sorry, I wish I could tell you more. But London’s been so secretive lately, hasn’t she, Ms. Parker?” Anastasia folds her hands primly on the table in front of her. “Do you think she’s going to be okay?”

“I don’t know.” Something is working in her brain, sifting through all the mush of yesterday’s chaos. London, down at the dock, her glasses, her legs in the river, a video about…what was it? “Something to do with sharks?” Finn asks.

Anastasia smiles. The video starts up again. Drop, bang, flip.

—

Finn speed-walks through the mall as fast as her Birkenstocks can take her, dialling Nicki’s cell on the way. She can’t stop shaking. I should have known, she thinks, dodging an old man with a walker. I should have figured it out. I should have done something. No wonder no one fucking trusts me.

“I know where they are,” she says as soon as Nicki picks up.

“You found them?”

“Well, not exactly.” Finn tells her an abbreviated version of the story, leaving out the part about London asking her to drive her to Duluth.

“So they’re heading for Duluth?” Nicki says. “Great. That’s just great.”

“At least we know where they’re going. You can get the cops here to call the police in Duluth and put out an APB or whatever on the Volvo, track them down somehow.”

“These stupid piece-of-shit cops aren’t going to do anything,” Nicki says. “She’s with an adult family member, and she hasn’t been missing for twenty-four hours. They told me to go home and calm the fuck down.” Nicki’s voice has turned shrill, bordering on unbearable. “Did you hear that, Finnie? They told me to calm the fuck down.”

“I heard you,” Finn says, trying to remember the last time Nicki called her Finnie. She must really be scared. “Well, look, we can try to track that guy down, the shark guy. He has to be the person she’s going to see. I can Google him –”

“Adam Pelley,” Nicki says. “London’s been obsessed with him for years. He’s not just a shark guy, Finn, he’s a TV celebrity. She’s being fucking scammed. Some disgusting pedophile stalked her Facebook profile or something and convinced her he was Adam Pelley to lure her in.” Nicki’s breath comes in short bursts. She sounds like she might be running. “What the fuck, Finn. How can this be happening?”

“I don’t know.” Finn sprints across the parking lot and reaches Hamish’s truck. Inside, it still smells like coffee. “Look, if she thinks this guy is Adam Pelley, she’s going to go to Adam Pelley, right? He’s definitely in Duluth, Nicki, I saw the news clip.”

“You saw it?”

“Yeah. London showed it to me.” So much for leaving out her own part in this. “Yesterday. She showed me this news clip about how he was in Duluth filming some kind of shark special. She wanted me to drive her down there.”

She hears a banging noise on the other end of the phone, then a muffled scream. Finn starts up the truck and presses her head against the steering wheel, waiting for Nicki to finish her tantrum. When she finally comes back on the line, her voice is dangerously calm. “So. London asked you to drive her to Duluth, and you didn’t think to tell me about it?”

“I’m sorry, Nicki, I had other things on my mind.”

“Right. And even when she went missing, you didn’t think to mention it?”

“I said I was sorry! Can we just move on and figure out a plan? We need to go to Duluth.”

“We are not going anywhere,” Nicki says, her voice like an ice pick. “I’m going to go to Duluth and try to stop my daughter from being kidnapped by some dirty criminal. You can go wherever the fuck you want.” The line goes dead.

“Right,” says Finn, slamming her phone down on the passenger seat. She should know better by now. No matter how many times she tries to do the right thing, it will never balance out the millions of times she has done the wrong thing. It’s strange how, once she made the decision to come home, she thought it was her family who was going to have to fight to win her back. It never occurred to her that it would actually be the other way around.