Our main problem was going to be Dill. He was a good kid, happy most of the time, but he was only ten months old and it’s not easy to be stuck in a car seat all day when you’re ten months old. We’d be making a lot of stops. And of course there were all the girls to entertain him, and as long as we weren’t making a lot of sudden stops and starts he could be taken out of his car seat and allowed to sit and play in the back with the girls.
Lish had her money from her dad. I had some extra cash I had saved. And Sing Dylan had given us some money he said he had saved for a rainy day.
Good one, Sing. Naturally, it was raining when we left. It was a good thing, too, because without the rain we wouldn’t have noticed that the left windshield wiper didn’t work, and we weren’t going far without it. We stopped at the first garage and had to spend fifteen dollars on a new wiper. Lish was fuming. She couldn’t believe Rodger was so dense that he hadn’t noticed the wiper was broken. Where had he been living? The Sahara? So that was our first major expense. I told Lish that it was better than getting caught in a downpour somewhere in the middle of nowhere and finding out, but she said she’d rather have made it outside city limits before something went wrong. She had a point. At least the sliding door was still on.
I want to tell you right now I was feeling okay about the way things were going. There was something I needed to know though. That was how optimistic was Lish feeling about finding the busker and what exactly he meant to her. Part of me knew that he was more like a sweet memory, a dream, but not a flesh and blood thing really, a person. ’Course the twins were proof of his existence, but Lish never knew the busker in a big way, never actually, you know, loved him, really. I mean, how could you after a week? Wouldn’t it be better if she never found him?
It would be, wouldn’t it? That way he could just remain a sweet memory. And living in Half-a-Life, it helps to have these memories.
As for how optimistic she felt about finding him, well, that was another story. She seemed to waver between being absolutely positive to thinking she was a total fool for even trying to find this guy, let alone giving a damn about him. After all, he had stolen from her, ditched her, been busted for drugs, lived in a tent, and as far as she knew wrote terrible letters. Sometimes she talked about how great it would be to spend just one passionate night with him, just to feel young and crazy and alive again. Sometimes she talked about marching up to him after a show with the twins and grabbing the hat he threw down for money and saying, “We’ll take that, thank you very much. By the way, these are your children, you low-life prick!” And then marching off. She never talked about bringing him back to Half-a-Life. You have to be strong to live in Half-a-Life, and frankly I don’t think Gotcha would have lasted a week. It’s a nutty life when you try to combine romance and taking care of little kids. Now this is what we had in the van. And actually, it was quite amazing that we had the van at all.
Up until the evening before we left, Rodger was going to change his mind about letting us use it because welfare had scooped him up for some kind of job demolishing the old meat-packing plant and he was going to have to use it to get to work. Fortunately, Safety Canada or some such thing stepped in and said it was utterly criminal to send inexperienced men on welfare in to work with explosives and dangerous chemicals and heavy machinery. Only skilled workers could do that. What the hell, Bunnie Hutchison was going to try to get around it. She probably wouldn’t have shed a tear to see a few single welfare recipients go up in smoke or die slowly from asbestos poisoning. Rodger said welfare was getting too dangerous and he decided to just be done with it and live once and for all off his mother and write short stories in her basement until something better came along. So we got the van after all, complete with a bumper sticker that read, “I Brake for Hallucinations,” a back bumper that we had to hang onto the van with wire and pry off when we needed to put oil in the engine (which was in the back behind the bumper), and an ignition that could be started with a screwdriver. This is what we filled it with:
• one tiny ripped pup tent (some of us would sleep in the van)
• one Coleman stove
• one cooler full of fruit and vegetables and crackers and juice and some beer from Tanya and alfalfa sprout and cucumber sandwiches on rice cakes from Terrapin (who seemed to be getting skinnier and skinnier)
• one ghetto blaster and assorted tapes
• candles for emergencies and ambience
• paper
• markers
• Barbies
• toys
• books
• diapers
• sunscreen
• Dill’s ultra-deluxe two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar stolen stroller. (It had become a bit beat up after the women in Half-a-Life started borrowing it for bringing home the groceries.)
• bag of clothes for each of Lish’s kids, one bag for Lish, and one bag for Dill and me
• maps
• spare tire
• tire jack
• jumper cables
• motor oil
• pillows and blankets
• two inflatable air mattresses
• two women
• five children
Teresa had promised to get our mail and cover for us if any dole patrols showed up, but that probably wouldn’t happen. She told us, “Youse all have a great trip and don’t turn around halfway and come back neither. And get me some cheap American smokes.” She would also make sure our toilets didn’t overflow and the rain didn’t come through our windows. (Even when they were closed, rain would gather on the window ledge and sometimes seep under the caulking and run down the wall.) Nobody in Half-a-Life had their beds against the walls, and kids were constantly falling out of bed. In public housing it sounds like an explosion. Mercy, who is so tense all the time, bangs on the door of whoever she thinks fell out of bed so she can tell us not to move the kid too quickly, not before checking all the bones. Apparently she heard of a kid who had fallen out of bed the wrong way, broke her neck, and was paralyzed from the waist down forevermore.
It’s funny that Mercy is working for the Disaster Board because we think her life is a bit of a disaster—that is, the way it’s set up so disaster can never happen, so pinched and safe and boarded up from every danger. And yet she’s the one who tells us we’re fooling ourselves thinking we’re secure. You’d think, with that philosophy, she’d be the one to let loose, flirt with danger, live on the edge, take risks. Her motto is: “Disaster can strike anytime, anywhere.” According to her, Dill could choke on a piece of Lego, Hope and Maya might go to school one day and never return. These things we women of Half-a-Life knew. But I think Mercy was still hung up on that disappearing Mercedes, the car she was named after because it was the last memory her mother had of her father. Mercy was just trying to keep things from going away or getting lost. Her photographs were all wrapped up in plastic and binding. All her toys and books put away in the same place each time, her bike helmets and mosquito netting, too. Her fluorescent clothing, her neverchanging routine, her obsessiveness with the safety of her daughter, her nervousness. It occurred to me that she and I were the same, sort of. Both our mothers were dead and our fathers were just, well, they were just out there. And so was Dill’s and so was the twins’. And so was Lish’s. All these missing fathers, not even dead and buried. That would be easy. No, they were just out there somewhere, like space junk orbiting planets populated with wives and girlfriends and sons and daughters.
Speaking of fathers, the day we left was a Friday. Deadbeat Dad’s day. Sherree’s ex was back for Jasmine. Sherree, who was a born-again Christian, and Jasmine lived in the basement with eight or nine cats. Tanya’s kids were going off in separate directions and the librarian was there to pick up Teresa’s and Marjorie’s boys, both his. Also a couple of others I had seen but didn’t really know. The mothers who were saying goodbye to their kids had their lists of things to do and things not to do, for the fathers: brush their teeth, don’t lose their clothes, and so on. I don’t know whether it was harder to keep them for the weekend or to say goodbye.
Even Sarah came out. It wasn’t her weekend to see Emmanuel, she was just out for the social occasion of Deadbeat Dad’s day. That morning everybody was huddling under umbrellas and black garbage bags. Sarah got wet like always: she didn’t seem to mind the rain. Sherree’s ex had barely said hello to Jasmine before he looked pissed off and fed up with her. I remember Lish telling me that when Maya or Hope—I can’t remember which one—was born, she had gone over to Sherree’s place to show them the baby, and Sherree’s ex had said, “Don’t point that thing at me.” Now he hurled Jasmine’s little plastic knapsack into the back part, it wasn’t really a seat, of his Camaro and said in a very irritated tone of voice, “I said hurry up, get in the damn car already.”
Terrapin was actually allowing her daughters to go out with their father, a macrobiotic software programmer who had had a nervous breakdown but was recovering, thanks to the Lord and a daily journal of affirmations or some such thing. Terrapin said she could feel his pain, and although at first she was angry when he had his breakdown, she was now sympathetic. She was just so thankful he wasn’t put on any mind-altering medication. She was sure it was diet-related, though I didn’t know how that could be, because the man looked like he hardly ate anything at all.
Another couple was exchanging insults over the heads of their two kids, and the two kids were hitting each other. Apparently he was accusing her of putting his phone number in the Buy and Sell, advertising all sorts of things really cheap: like VCRs for ten bucks and a 1992 Volvo for one hundred dollars and furniture for free and stuff like that, so he’d get tons of phone calls and be driven up the wall. She said it was the only thing left for her to do to get even with him, and all the other women, even Sarah, were laughing; she said she’d already had three arrests for assaulting him—one more and she’d lose custody rights, maybe even visitation rights. This was stupid, because she actually seemed like a pretty good mother, she just had it in for her ex. Lish told me that even this woman’s own mother was on her ex’s side. Both thought she was crazy because she had been misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic. They never thought to get mad at the doctor. Anyway, so now all she could do to him were non-violent things like the Buy and Sell prank. I think she also wrote country songs about him and performed them at amateur Saturdays at the Blues Jam.
Geez, I tell you, we’d never have had kids if we’d known it would turn out like this. And besides, Lish said that women are always hornier when they’re ovulating because it’s nature’s cruel trick to get them pregnant. During that time the body takes over the brain and they get themselves in trouble. It’s not the brain talking, it’s the egg. Well, Lish never thought having the baby was a problem. She just wasn’t sure she could handle having the man. It made me think maybe I was better off not knowing Dill’s father. I couldn’t see myself shouting instructions from the front door of Half-a-Life every Friday evening and waiting, lonely and worried as hell, every Sunday evening for Dill’s return, waiting to see if his hair had been cut, or worrying about him growing fond of some other woman. Some of the women in Half-a-Life worried about their exes leaving the country with the kid or kids. Especially after the movie of the week had been on because it was usually about some nut who kidnaps his kid or tries to swap him with a different one or something else entirely freaky. I doubted Camaro Guy was up for that, let alone any of the other Deadbeat Dads. But if some kid wasn’t home at six on Sunday, oh boy, the cops were called, and there were police escorts home for the kids, trailing the father’s car all the way to Half-a-Life, cursing and crying and recriminations and shouts of see you in court and name-calling and sad, mixed-up kids. Like I said, it’s amazing how love can turn so rotten.
I noticed Jasmine had a little tear in her black tights that tore a little more as she crawled up onto the front seat of the red Camaro. I could smell the unmistakable odour of fried hamburger. Even if some of the mothers were losing their kids for the weekend, they weren’t saying goodbye to cheap meat and noodle dishes. Somewhere in between the time the women said goodbye to their kids and went upstairs to their quiet apartments, they’d have to find something good, maybe the look of the sky or the smile on their kid’s face as they drove away or a whiff of something that reminded them of a long time ago or a coupon for a two-for-one deal at Safeway or an invitation to the Scrabble tournament with tequila in the block that night. Something good, otherwise I would imagine the quiet of an empty apartment could kill you.
Anyway, Lish had spent about an hour deciding what to wear for our first day on the road. She was wearing a pair of Hope’s pink plastic sunglasses and frosted lipstick to match. Her hair was plastered back, held in place by her hat. Her spider had been polished for the occasion. Her black t-shirt was cut off so low in the front that with every little bump in the road her breasts jumped up and down and teetered for a while afterwards. She was drinking Roots ginger-ale and belching on purpose in between gulps. Around her neck, she had her good luck charm in a little leather pouch. The charm was actually Maya’s dried up umbilical cord with some rosemary and a couple of bay leaves thrown in. She had stuck the postcard of the sunset from Gotcha onto the ceiling of the van above her head. The kids, in the back of the van, were quiet. Their black eyes shone and I noticed they were holding hands. Nobody said anything. We all stared off to the side or ahead of us down the highway.
This was the first time Dill had left the city, our city. Centre of the universe. And right now an official disaster area. His head had fallen onto his chest. His rice cake had fallen to the floor of the van. He was asleep.
By suppertime we were well and truly on the road. If things worked according to plan we would make it to Fargo, North Dakota, by the kids’ bedtime. The van could only go about 55 miles an hour without starting to shudder, and with the load of stuff and all the kids and everything we really didn’t want to push it. Mercy had told us that a vehicle could be controlled when a tire blows at 55 miles an hour but not faster than that. She said that good tires were the most important safety feature of any vehicle. She said after 40,000 kilometres of wear and tear most tires are liable to blow. But at a hundred bucks a pop who can afford new tires? Not us, that’s for sure. Or Rodger. Or anybody else I know except my dad, and he didn’t need new tires, because since my mom’s accident he rarely ever drove. Anyway, we’d go slow. It would be a bit of a drag.
Like my mom, I was fond of driving fast. I remember a family trip we took to Quebec, and my mom almost went insane because my dad was driving so slow. When we got to Montreal, she said that was it. She told my dad to rake a nap in the back seat and she’d drive. She said, “Geoffrey, if we’re going to get anywhere in Montreal we have to drive like Montrealers do.” By the time we arrived at our hotel my dad was pale and stiff in the back seat. My mom was flushed with excitement and enormously proud of herself. Actually, the last time I talked to my dad just before Dill was born, he said he wasn’t driving any more ’cause of night vision or lack of it or something. He said he only needed to go to the university and the grocery store, and why bother insuring a car and risking an accident to boot? He had invited me and Dill to his house to visit him, but I figured if he was too stubborn or terrified to keep a car of his own and use it to visit us, then damned if I was going to bus it to his place with Dill and bags and stroller and stuff. Just because my mom, his wife, died in a car—well, she died in the ditch, but she wouldn’t have got there if it hadn’t been for the car about to be stolen—didn’t mean that he could just refuse to drive a car. Hadn’t my mother had any effect on him at all? I mean, while she was counselling women to get up and leave their husbands, live, start fresh, take a chance, move, move, move, drive away now, he, her husband, was just dying inside. Had it ever occurred to her to give him the same advice? Or had it ever occurred to him to take that advice? Probably. But something that occurs to us doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, does it? Look at Lish and me.
Here we were, going to Colorado to find some guy because it occurred to Lish that we could. I mean, people travel, they go places, they try to find people. Why not us? But that didn’t mean we’d find him. That didn’t mean we wouldn’t go back home to Half-a-Life and the rain and Serenity Place and sad Sarah and Sing Dylan and Podborczintski and all the other people and start doing the same things all over again. All it meant was that we had decided to do something adventurous and then we had done it. If it didn’t work out the way we had hoped it to, fine. Who cares how it all ends? We had taken the steps toward something. Anything. Some people wouldn’t understand how important that is for a woman on the dole. It’s like that song, “The Tennessee Waltz.” My mom used to play it on the piano. It starts off beautifully about dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz, but then an old friend cuts in and while they are dancing, the friend steals the sweetheart. But then we get the cold hard cruel facts of the song and it’s just way too sad. If we could just block out the second part of the song from our minds and sing the first part. But we can’t. The first part of the song is so beautiful because the second part is so sad. We can’t have one without the other. It doesn’t turn out like we thought. But still it’s a beautiful song.
I was lost in a reverie about this when I heard Lish’s voice: “Lucy!”
Dill had slipped down in his car seat and looked like he was choking to death. His head was where his waist should have been, squeezed between the back of the chair and the bar in front, and his legs were dangling close to the floor of the van. Lish slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road and I scrambled over to Dill to rescue him. I managed to get him out of the seat with all the girls hovering around saying, “Is he alright, is Dilly alright,” and Lish sitting behind the wheel muttering, oh my god oh my god oh my god. Dill was absolutely fine. In fact, he loved the attention and started giggling as the girls stroked his head and arms and back and stomach, and Lish and I stared at each other and at him and back at each other. I knew Lish was going to have another fit like the one about the curbs and the strollers she had had in the curry restaurant.
“You see,” she began, “you see, Lucy? Just because we’re poor we have inferior fucking car seats, borrowed secondhand pieces of shit that sooner strangle a kid than protect him. We’re driving in a piece of shit with bald tires held together with rope and wire, and why? Because we’re poor! We can’t even travel to a stupid place in the States without risking our lives. No wonder people like us are always dying before everyone else. We have to live with all these stupid risks, even in our apartments. Bad wiring, leaking freon from our inferior fridges, mice in our walls, roach spray making our hair fall out, wet mouldy rotten drywall and insulation that makes our kids cough all night, windows with broken screens so kids can fall out of them, burnt out lights in the hallway, elevators that don’t work, neighbours that are psychopaths, obscene graffiti on the walls, cops circling round all the time but never when you need them—”
“Lish, the car seat thing could have happened to a rich kid, too. He’s fine, don’t worry. I probably did the strap thing wrong. It’s not because we’re poor, we’re stupid.” I laughed.
“Yeah, but we’re poor because we’re stupid. And being poor makes us more stupid.”
“No, it doesn’t. It makes other people think we’re stupid. You know there are so many pissed-off people who are considered much more successful than me, but I think I’m happy, I feel happy. I don’t know why. I have Dill. I’m young. We’re on the road. Stuff’s happening. I wish it was enough to be happy. It should be, you know. That should be the mark of success, you know, just a general feeling of happiness. I mean considering everything, I think I’m fucking amazing for being happy. Happy, happy, happy, isn’t it a funny word? You know some guy could come along and say you still happy? Gosh darn, he’d say and shake his head and say, Well, okay, here’s your cheque for five million dollars, keep up the good work.”
“Jesus, how much caffeine have you had today, Lucy?”
“Oh, about ten cups, but it’s not that. Just moving, you know, this moving ahead thing makes me feel awake and—”
“Happy, yeah yeah yeah. But you worry a lot.”
“Yeah, that’s true, but maybe worrying makes me happy. It motivates me. I think worrying must relax me. I’m very optimistic about my future.”
“You are?”
“Yeah, I am. And so are you, or we wouldn’t even be in this stupid van travelling down the highway. You wouldn’t get up every morning and put on music and cook your garlic dishes and have real fun with your kids who actually like you, and go to the library and wear your goofy pink dress and play in that little sunlight on your wall. What do you want anyway?”
“I do not play in the little sunlight on my wall.”
“Yes, you do. When you think no one’s looking, you stop and make these little shapes and stuff and you—”
“Lucy. I do not play in the little sunlight on my wall, as you put it. I perform complex shadow puppet theatre.”
“Ah.” We were both laughing. In fact we were really laughing hard. And driving slow. And people passing us were staring at us, as if two women laughing hard in a beater van with five kids in the back of it was the strangest thing in the world.
“Oh Lucy, why can’t we get paid for the things we’re good at?”
“Well, in a way we do. You know, by the dole. We’re like government employees, you know, freelance ones. Those people who just passed us wouldn’t have had anything to stare at if they weren’t paying taxes to keep people like us alive.”
“Hmmmmmm. It’s a good thing I didn’t introduce you to my dad at that convention. He’d hate you.”
“Really?” I said.
“Guaranteed,” said Lish.
I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that somebody might hate me for being on the dole. I hadn’t meant to be on the dole. I wasn’t planning to be on it for a long time, not forever, anyway. I didn’t want anybody to hate me. What would happen if I started hating everybody before they could hate me? I’d have an awful life! I’d be a terrible mother! I’d become an alcoholic! Fuck him, I thought, why would he hate me? He didn’t even know me!
We had been on the road for fifty minutes and not one out of the five—well, out of four, really; Dill had a diaper on—children had asked to stop to pee. There had not been one argument, not one shriek, not one bad word, not one painful accident (besides the car seat incident, but that was only painful for everyone watching it happen to Dill and not for Dill himself), not one spilled box of apple juice, not one object thrown from the window, and not one automotive breakdown. Uneventful, a gossip columnist would have written of our trip at that point. We passed flooded fields, abandoned homes and barns, machinery, and even whole deserted towns. The highway was clear of water, other than the shallow puddles this morning’s rain had formed. The ditches, though, were full of dark, dirty water. Every now and then we saw a piece of some kid’s abandoned raft.
In Morris we saw a big billboard that read, “Give money to the chamber of commerce. Help pay for the flood victims’ hotel bills,” Lish had read that they were all covered by the government, so she snorted when she read the billboard. We wondered if Mercy’s blackmail plan would work with Bunnie Hutchison. We saw a billboard that read, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the light.” We saw another one reading, “An unborn baby’s heart starts beating at four weeks.”
Hope read every billboard out loud to herself and said, “Hey Mom, Lucy, didja know that a baby’s heart starts beating when it’s four weeks old?”
Lish hollered to the back, “An unborn baby’s heart, Hope.”
“What?” Hope yelled to the front. “Stubborn? A stubborn baby’s heart starts beating?—”
“Unborn, un-born,” Lish yelled back.
“How can you have a baby that’s unborn?” asked Hope. “You have to be born to be a baby.”
“Hope,” said Lish. “A baby that’s still in the womb is unborn. It’s alive in there, it’s just not out yet.”
“Well,” said Hope, “you have to be out to be alive, don’t you?”
“No,” said Lish. “The babies inside eat and pee and all that stuff living people do.”
“Oooh, yuck,” said Hope. “How big would the heart be? About the size of a lentil? MOM? I’M ASKING YOU A QUESTION!”
Lish put in a k.d. lang tape and turned the volume up. We chugged along through Morris and St. Jean and some other places. We were headed for Emerson and the border.
Rodger had assured us that he had removed all traces of marijuana and anything else from the van. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the “I Brake For Hallucinations” bumper sticker. Lish had taken off her sunglasses and hung them on the neckline of her shirt. Dill had dozed off again and the girls were drawing. It was our time of the day. Dusk. My favourite time. This time and very early morning. These were the times people like us made sense. Before and after the hullaballoo of the work day, before and after the real time, when interest rates and house taxes and rental equipment and bad debts and loan payments and funeral homes and car washes and TV repair shops and malls and soup kitchens and utility companies and garages and car dealers and daycares and daytimers and mandates and agendas and health clinics were all busy and we were hustled off to the wings. In the early morning and at dusk we emerged, purposeful, engaged, necessary. People stopped and smiled at us. We smiled at ourselves. During the day, the busy busy work day, we were temporarily forgotten. We mothers and children. Like the smell of Simonize floor wax and the distinct orange of Mercurochrome, we were reminders of another time.
“Okay, Lucy,” said Lish. “When we get to the border, let me do the talking, not that we have anything to hide, I just don’t want them to get suspicious.”
“Suspicious? Why would they get suspicious of me? Of totally normal me? Look at you. They’ll take one look at you and think you’re some kind of escaped mental patient or something. Me. You gotta be kidding.”
“No, no, Luce, you see I’m so obvious, they won’t even bother to bother me. They’ll worry about you. You know, being so normal and together-looking.”
“Yeah, well, they’ll worry more about me if I don’t say anything. Why don’t I fire up a chain saw and wave it out the window when we go past? Why don’t I just pretend to be dead in the back of the van? Geez, I can’t help it if I’m normal-looking.”
“No, no, they have a strict policy on bodies going across the border. You can’t even go over with the chicken pox. Rodger and I tried when Hope and Maya were two and three and they took one look at their spots and made us turn around and go home.”
“Well, you should have been at home anyway, if they were sick.”
“So, Lucy, when they ask us where we’re going, we have to know, and when they ask us how long we’re staying, we have to know that, too, and how much money we have on us, and we have to prove that the kids are ours. Or maybe that’s coming back. Is it going or coming? Now I can’t remem—”
“Lish! Look at that sign. Over there. Look. Where I’m pointing.”
“So? You want to buy honey? I don’t think we can bring honey across the border. You don’t feed honey to Dill, do you? Kids under a year aren’t supposed to eat honey for some reason. Mercy told me that, naturally. Although Teresa used to smear it all over her kid’s soother to quiet him down and he lived, so who knows?”
“No. No. Oh my god. You know what, Lish? That’s the place, right under that sign in the ditch. Where my mom died. I know it. Right under that honey sign. I can’t believe it’s still there. You’d think they’d have taken it down.”
“Geez, I guess. But, well, why? They’re still selling honey. Probably.”
“Yeah, I know, but who would feel like buying honey from a guy who has his billboard right over the place where somebody died? Like, was killed.”
“I don’t know. But Lucy, I don’t mean to sound callous or anything, but nobody but you and your dad really would know that somebody, I mean your mom, died there. You think he should move it over a bit or just take it down completely—Lucy?”
“What.” I had started to cry. I wasn’t going to cry anymore about it but now I had started to cry. Now I was crying just like everybody else seemed to be. This was turning out to be one wet summer.
“Do you want to stop for a minute by the sign or . . . ?” Lish was peering into the rearview mirror.
“No, no. Well. Okay. Yeah, okay. Do we have time?”
“Lucy. Of course we have time. Time is what we have.”
“Fine.”
“Okay. KIDS WE’RE STOPPING. SIT ON YOUR BUMS AND IF YOU HAVE TO PEE, GET READY TO DO IT NOW. Or maybe not Lucy? Would it be okay if like they peed here if they have to? Or we could wait, we’re almost at the border.”
Lish stopped the van and she and I got out. I stared at the honey sign.
“Lucy?” said Lish.
“No, no. Of course they can pee here. Geez. She’s not buried here. Look at that sign. It’s peeling. My dad said when my mom died they had just put up this new honey sign, ’cause the guy, the honey guy, came out to check his new sign when the cops were here and my dad and everything right after, and a lady cop who was with my dad asked me later if he was okay because he kept asking the guy Do you sell a lot of honey? Do you sell a lot of honey? and you know my mom lay there. And now the sign is peeling and all worn out looking. It’s so weird, like because for me my mom died, you know, like yesterday. She dies almost every day in my mind, you know, it’s fresh. But look at that sign. God, you must think I’m a total basket case. I’m sorry about this.”
“You don’t have to apologize Lu—”
“Lish!”
“What?”
“The kids are trying to get out of the van. You better go and let them out before they bugger up the sliding door.”
Lish muttered something and moved along the shoulder of the highway back towards the van. I stared at the ditch and the sign. I couldn’t go into the ditch because it was full of water. The honey sign, which was stuck into a farmer’s field on the other side of the ditch, had water about two or three feet up its post. Why on earth would someone want to steal that stupid car? I could picture my mom lying there wearing my dad’s big windbreaker and her wool skirt and sneakers, lying there on her back as she always did when she slept, holding that big briefcase of files across her chest. Or had it been flung beside her or way off into the field? All I know is that the guy who killed her flung it out of the car after her, or at her. The records of those women’s lives. My mom was desperate to keep them, to preserve them and protect them.
The guy had actually thrown them out of the car at her. Why? Did he think it was the right thing to do? Was it some crazy notion of his of respecting her last wishes? He hadn’t been thinking of the right thing to do when he slammed his gun over my mom’s head and threw her in the ditch to die. Why did he give her the files? The files of all those women trying to escape their lives, trying to find something better, trying to find happiness. ’Course they wouldn’t have all the details, like whether or not they played in squares of sunlight on their walls, if they wore spiders on their hats, if they ate hamburger every other day, if they had ever made love in a yellow canola field tenderly or passionately or awkwardly. If they preferred dresses or pants, if they shaved their legs or didn’t, or if they preferred red peppers to green. Stuff was happening. Even in Half-a-Life. Little things, but it all added up to something big. To our lives. It was happening all along. These were our lives. This was it. My mom was hanging on to the lives, the recorded lives, of these women. We might escape, but what if we didn’t? What if we lived in Half-a-Life all our lives, poor, lonely, proud, happy? If we did, we did. These were our lives. If we couldn’t escape them, we’d have to live them.
When my mom died I wanted to know every detail of her life. When did she have her first perm? Had she suffered from post-partum depression? Did she have a lot of friends when she was a little kid? Why did she want to be a therapist? Didn’t she sometimes just hate her clients? Was she in love with my dad? Had she ever had an affair? With a woman? Did she enjoy sex? Did she have any recurring nightmares? How did she get that scar on the back of her leg? Who could tell me? Why hadn’t I found out all these things when I’d had the chance? And suddenly it occurred to me that Dill and Lish’s kids and all the kids of Half-a-Life might want to know the details of our lives, too, right down to the last squalid detail.
Sometimes you can keep someone almost alive, still alive, by remembering the details, by always remembering. I could hear the girls laughing at each other as they squatted by the side of the road, peeing. Lish was giving them instructions. Dill was still sleeping. Good ol’ Dill. He had no idea who my mom was, who his dad was, who the twins’ dad was, where we were going, when we’d be back. All he knew was that he was with me right now and right here. I thought of my dad, scared stiff in the car while my mom sped around enjoying herself, unafraid. Sometimes the memory of the living hurts worse than the memory of the dead.
It came to me suddenly that while I was spending so much time remembering my dead mother, I was forgetting to remember my father, who was alive. My mother may have been what I needed, but my father was what I had.
“Lish,” I called over to where the others were. “I’ve got to make a phone call.”
“What?” Cars were swooshing past us, their occupants staring at us curiously. A VW van drove past us slowly and two guys in it gave us a peace sign and honked their horn. Lish and I rolled our eyes at each other.
“At the border. I have to make a call.”
“Who’re you calling?”
“My dad.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Okey doke.”
We were still kind of hollering at each other because of the wind and the cars and everything. The girls were just finishing up. Letitia was crying a bit because she’d peed on her dress, her favourite dress. Alba, in her bossiest voice, was telling her, “Well, you should have spread your legs farther apart and lifted your dress high, right Mom? Right Mom? RIGHT MOM? MOM, MOM, LETITIA SHOULD HAVE SPREAD HER—”
“YES ALBA! She should have. Drop it already. She’s already forgotten about it. Good grief. Lucy, Lucy, I’m sorry this has all gotten so . . . GET IN THE VAN,” she yelled, “YOU’LL FALL IN THAT DITCH LEAVE THAT GARBAGE ALONE. Geez Hope, Maya, haul Alba and Letitia into the van,” Lish said.
“Ugh, she’s covered in pee, I’m not touching her,” said Hope.
“ALBE HELP YOUR SISTER RIGHT NOW FOR GOD’S SAKE HER DRESS IS ALREADY DRY.”
“I always have to do everything, why can’t Maya . . .”
“Oh no, Dill’s awake now, Luce,” said Lish. “He looks pissed off. Maybe you should nurse him here. It’s okay, Dilly, your mama’s coming. Can you guys entertain Dill for a sec? Luce, I’m sorry this has all got so, you know, emotional.” She quieted down a bit as we got closer to each other. Lish dragged out the word emotional to make it sound ironic and comical. She knew it was one of those words that didn’t mean a hell of a lot and sounds cold when you just say it. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m just fine. But now I’m leaking all over the place. My right breast feels like it’s going to explode. I better nurse him.”
“Well, so far in one short stop we’ve got you crying and leaking milk, we’ve got the girls peeing on themselves, we’ve got some more rain coming right now, we’ve got fresh honey, we’ve got Dill screaming, we’ve got the girls bickering, I could use another cold root beer, or better a shot of tequila, and hey hey hey we’ve been on the road for all of ninety minutes. Isn’t travel relaxing? I told you we needed a holiday.”
“Okay. Well let’s just drive to the border and then we’ll give the kids a chance to run around for a bit and I’ll nurse Dill and call my dad and you can just sit . . . and like that.”
“Think he’ll be home?”
“My dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Definitely.”
“Lucy?”
“What.”
“I’m, you know, sorry about your mom. ALBA,” she said over her shoulder, “STOP TALKING ABOUT THE DRESS.”
“I know. Thanks.”
We both took big cartoon breaths with our mouths clamped shut, and looked at each other for a second or two. Then I said urgently, “Lish, watch what you’re doing or we’ll hit the ditch. I can’t swim.”
“Right.”