North Vancouver
“Where the hell’ve you been?” Michael called as I walked up the cul-de-sac. My legs shook as the last of adrenaline worked its way out of my body. I’d never been so happy to see that ten-foot fence.
The neighbours stopped talking and started acting oh-so-casual. I imagined them sharpening their ears. I pretended not to hear Michael until I neared the gate. “I went to visit Tony. Didn’t you get my note?”
“How’d you get out?”
“You didn’t close the lock last night so I figured you left it open for me.”
“You’re full of crap.” The gate whined as he opened it. Jake stayed on the porch, the non-combat zone. Michael limped toward me. “You are so out of line. You thought it was okay to leave the fence turned off and me asleep? I don’t believe that for one second.”
I refused to argue or apologize. “What happened to your leg?”
He hobbled up the stairs and turned around at the front door. His words blazed. “The Redgraves tried to get in this morning. If Don Redgrave wasn’t such a loudmouth we might have ended up with him, his wife, and their jackass boys living with us.” Michael sighed long and heavy: a windup for the guilt trip he was about to lay on me. “Anyway I charged up the stairs from the basement so fast I missed the top step and twisted my ankle.”
“You should have heard him swear,” Jake said, grinning. Michael and I glared at him and he sat back and studied his fingernails.
I followed Michael inside, hoping to keep his lecture to me as private as possible.
“I got the electricity back on though. Apparently some of the neighbours saw you saunter away. Harry Mueller said everyone was talking about the way you just let yourself out of here and the Redgraves figured that the fence must be turned off.” When Michael frowned, he became Tony’s twin. “You put us all at risk, Rowan. Way uncool. Don’t you get it? We have to protect this place until Tony’s back. And in case you haven’t heard, there’s an effing curfew and you could’ve been busted. And what would Tony say to that?”
I didn’t ask how he would explain being so hungover he didn’t even hear me leave the house. I slid that ace up my sleeve. “Don’t worry about it. I think the curfew’s only theoretical. I’ve seen exactly two cop cars out there and way more homeless people than you could imagine.” I rubbed my arm. It still throbbed from where Green Toque had grabbed me, not that I’d breathe a word of that to Michael.
“Anyway the power was off to let you in but it’s going back on again.” He stepped into the office and flicked the switch.
“From now on, we’re sticking to a serious eight-hour watch each. We’ve got no idea how long we’re going to be here.”
He went into the kitchen and I followed. My body felt as dry as a sea monkey and I sucked back three glasses of water. He flopped down at the table and picked up his PSP.
“So how is Tony?” he said.
“I didn’t get to see him.”
Michael pounded his fist on the table. “Then where the hell have you been?”
“Walking. Thinking. Trying to find Oliver.”
“You’re so self-centred! Searching for your dog when we have this whole house to look after.”
“D’you want to know what I found out about Tony?”
He nodded and shut up for half a second. When he was mad he turned into a one-way valve, only capable of dishing out words, not taking any in. So I talked fast while I had his limited attention. I jumped right in with the bit at the hospital and how the Mountie took Tony’s bag and then got on the walkie-talkie to get more information about him.
“Wound botulism? Is that even possible?” Michael squinted.
“That’s what I said. The cop said it’s airborne.”
“Could we catch it off him?” Jake interrupted from behind me.
“Good one, Jake,” I said. “Just think about yourself.”
“At least he was here to help me.”
“We listened to the radio.” Jake sat across the table from Michael and stared out the window.
Michael opened his outflow valve. “What we heard was worse than ever. There’s still no power, no internet, only satellite signals city-wide and beyond. A huge tsunami hit Vancouver Island. Some neighbourhoods in Richmond have been being sucked into liquefaction fields. There’re hundreds of thousands of people missing. No one knows how many people are buried in buildings all over the place. And it’s not just Vancouver; the quake rocked the coast from California to Alaska. Four major cities have been hit: Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland. And all the little cities and towns in between.” Michael pushed his hands through his hair and bent his head. When he looked up, sparks flew from his eyes. “You better shape up. We don’t just have to be smart now. We have to be uber-smart.”
“God, is that your plan? We’re going to lock ourselves in here forever?”
“If we have to. Tony said what we’re supposed to stay inside and don’t let anyone in. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
A wintry chill crawled down my arms at the thought of being stuck in the compound forever. Okay not forever but it sure would only feel like forever. I hugged myself, as if I could banish all the horrors of the past day and the bleak future ahead. Please let mom be okay. Please let Tony get well soon.
Jake snapped his gum and folded a napkin into a fan shape. He handed it to me, a hopeful smile lifting his face. I smiled back as I accepted it but my voice quavered with guilt when I said to Michael “Is your ankle okay?”
“Of course.” He slammed his chair back under the table. “Spare me your sympathy. I’m going back to bed. I’m taking the graveyard shift every night, Jake gets three to eleven because he asked for it and he was here. That means you get 7 AM to 3 PM, being as you like to get up so early.”
Without another word he lumbered downstairs. I turned back to Jake. “What a hothead. As if I can’t take care of myself.”
“He was pretty worried about you.” Jake rubbed his nose. “So was I.”
“Did you get lunch?” It was almost dinnertime but I needed to change the subject.
“Yep. Two peanut butter and banana sandwiches.”
I sighed at the hopelessness that was Jake. “I hope you enjoyed those, Jake. These bananas are all we have, probably for a very long time. If the whole of the West Coast has been hit, it may be a while before there are any more bananas in Vancouver. You might want to learn to eat a little differently.” My voice didn’t sound guilty or frightened at all now. It sounded aggressive and mean. Like Tony.
For what was left of the afternoon, Jake and I worked in the garden. Of course he’d never worked in the dirt before—his parents had a la-di-dah service that cut their lawn and weeded their flowerbeds. Jake thought gardening was a treat and refused to wear gloves, said he liked the earth under his fingernails. He weeded two garden beds in the time it took me to do one. At one point aftershocks shuddered the ground beneath our feet, and I dragged him down beside me. We held hands tight and he looked at me with wild eyes. I said in an exaggerated casual voice, “This is all sooooo boring, isn’t it?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. When the aftershocks stopped and we dusted ourselves off, he asked, “Where d’you think my mom is?”
“Your mom?” I faked a smile. “She’s downtown, ordering everyone around, telling the troops to get those damn bridges fixed so she can get back here and resume command as the Grand Empress of the North Shore.” He laughed, a deep rich sound. I got to my feet and handed him a hose. “Okay each plant gets a quick drink. Count to five slowly, then water the next one.”
He watered with his left hand and, with his right, popped a cherry tomato into his mouth. “Mm. My favourite,” he said, still chewing. Then, self-consciously, “Mom’s the reason I’m vegetarian.”
“Really.”
“Yeah I’m vegetarian because she is. But sometimes when just my dad and I go out, we eat chicken and don’t tell her.”
“I won’t tell her if you want to eat meat with us.”
“Thanks. And I’m sorry if your dad finds me, and you get into trouble. I know he’ll probably kick me out.” His tone was quiet and wistful.
If he were on the outside alone, left to forage in the crowds I’d seen today, he wouldn’t have a clue how to survive. If he was going to survive inside, he needed a speed lesson in how to deal with Tony. I said, “I’m going to tell you something that you can’t tell anyone else, okay?”
He nodded.
“I know it’s hard to talk to people sometimes,” I said. I crushed a tomato leaf between my forefinger and thumb and sniffed its summery scent. I was marooned with Jake; we might as well be friends. “When I was ten I looked pretty androgynous.” I laughed a bit at the memory. “I didn’t even know what that word meant back then.”
He showered the tomato plant with water.
“All I knew was that I liked it when no one was sure if I was a boy or a girl. I kept my hair really, really short. I only wore jeans and hoodies and high-top runners.” I hadn’t spoken about this for so long the words felt alien in my mouth, as if I were telling a dark fairytale. I watched the water pool around the bottom of one tomato plant, then another. The wet earth smell floated up from the garden bed. The sun warmed my skin and a thrush sang a spiralling call in the trees behind the house. Fortress Tony was a good place to tell secrets and feel safe.
“I was tall back then too. I’ve always been in the upper percentile for height.” Jake nodded again and I spoke slowly. “One day I got to the rink and there were a bunch of older boys—grade six or seven—playing pickup hockey. They’d already started and one team was way better than the other. The captain of the good team said ‘you look like a loser. You can play with them.’ He didn’t know that I was playing in the girls’ gold league.” I pulled a few weeds and took a big breath. “That made me mad so I showed off. I scored on them lots and we won six-zero. My team invited me to come back and play the next day. I said I couldn’t because I was playing for the championship. You should have seen their faces when they realized that the only championship game that day was the girls’ division.”
I smiled at the memory of how good that moment felt, letting those obnoxious boys know they had been beaten by a girl. Jake smiled back at me as if he was waiting for the happy ending to the story. I shook my head. For all that I wanted to hang on to that one golden moment, I couldn’t. “The leader of the other team called me a bitch. I just said, ‘thanks for the practice’ and walked away. The losing team came after me. At the far end of the park they dragged me inside the boys’ washroom, twisted my arms behind my back and shoved my face into a toilet again and again.”
Jake gaped at me.
“I thought I was going to drown. I don’t know how long I was in there. It felt like they kept me prisoner forever. Then a dog walker came along with his two big labs. He heard me crying and stormed into the washroom. His dogs went apeshit at all the excitement. The boys ran away.”
“The thing is, I didn’t speak to hardly anyone for the next year or so. I didn’t want to, but mostly I just couldn’t. Even when I did want to talk, the words just wouldn’t come.” I dug the muddy toe of my runner into the earth and remembered the long silent months when the only person I could speak to was Mom.
She was the one who suggested I get a dog. Before that, I’d begged and begged for one and she’d refused to have any pets at all. After the incident in the park, as she called it, she said I needed a safe friendship and a new responsibility, someone to take my mind off myself.
“Mom was good and gentle about it but Tony lost his sympathy really fast. After about a month he tried to push me into talking, like I wanted to be silent, like I wasn’t still paralyzed by shock.”
I didn’t tell Jake all this to make him feel sorry for me. I wanted him to understand Tony better. “What I’m saying is, Tony doesn’t like silence. If I go quiet he hassles me. He says stuff like, ‘If you don’t speak for yourself, who’s going to speak up for you? No one respects a person who can’t stand up for herself.’”
Jake looked at me, clearly not getting my message. “Jake, I’m telling you this so that if Tony finds you here, you don’t freeze again. You have to tell him you need to stay here. Tell him your house is a wreck. And don’t let him know that you’re afraid. Michael and I will defend you but Tony will listen more if you speak for yourself. Way more than if you shut down.”
Jake nodded and moved to the next row of vegetables, to the herbs and kale. I followed. “Really, I know that it can be hard to talk to people. Sometimes you feel like you just can’t.” I picked a snail off a head of lettuce and lobbed it toward the compost heap. “Sometimes, when I get mad or impatient with you, it’s because you are so quiet. Sometimes you remind me of my silent months.”
“Thanks for explaining,” Jake said. He spoke as he always did, by barely opening his mouth. He dropped his chin so his hair shielded his face. “I was bullied when I went to school in Dubai. That’s why I get homeschooled.”
He didn’t offer any more details and I didn’t ask. We both knew something had changed between us. But what about when Tony came home?
Lost in thought, I didn’t see Don Redgrave walk up to the fence but I heard him when he started to shout, “You hoarding bastards. Tell your father that he’s going to get his. The rest of us are dying of thirst out here and you’re watering your garden.” He scowled at us for a few minutes before stomping away.
“Wow. He’s scarier than the earthquake was.” I spoke calmly but I had to rub the chill out of my arms. Jake flicked the hair off his face and smiled. Strangely it felt like he was comforting me.
I wondered where Michael was. Ordinarily he was a light sleeper and Don Redgrave hadn’t exactly been whispering. He was probably just tired from his injury. I turned my thoughts back to Jake and rushed to keep things business-as-usual. “Mr. Redgrave doesn’t know this is grey water. It comes from the showers and sinks. It’s been filtered once but it wouldn’t be safe to drink even if we gave it to him. If he gets really angry, we’ll tell him. But for now we don’t offer any information to anyone, okay?” Water splashed around a green bean plant. “That’s too much. Count faster. There, that’s plenty.”
I put my hand over Jake’s and let a soft silence lap over us. For that moment there was only the two of us doing a job that we could see, smell, and feel. The whole world was inside-out but we had one small patch we could keep alive.