I get home before Zoe. There’s a message from Justine, asking me to call her when I get in, but I don’t feel like talking. I slip a copy of Escape Velocity from a stack of identical copies under Zoe’s desk and take it into my room. Heather seemed to think it held all the answers, but I haven’t found the ones I’ve been looking for. I flip the pages until I come to the first section in Alice’s point of view. It has always made me angry that my mother would base a character on me when she has never made any effort to know the real me at all. And yet, even though Alice isn’t really like me, and even though she ends up being so screwed-up, I can’t help caring about the fictional child in this story. I read her words again.
I was twelve years old when my mother left. Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a shock. She’d been leaving for years, slowly, piece by piece: the sense of humor, then the patience, the affection I barely remember but have glimpsed in old photographs. Depression, my father told me, whispering. Since Billy’s birth, or maybe before that. She stayed in a hospital a couple of times, but it didn’t help. It seemed to me that my mother didn’t care about anyone but herself.
Then, long after we’d all given up hope, everything changed. She seemed to be getting better, laughing at my feeble jokes, tickling Billy, making elaborate dinners as if we were having company even though we never did. She looked different too: the blacks and grays of her wardrobe turning to pinks and reds and golds, the old runners traded for high-heeled shoes, her lips stained startling shades of fuschia, burgundy, maroon. She talked fast, bought us unlikely gifts, dragged me and Billy outside to dance in the rain. Billy loved it, but the change made me uneasy.
One night, after I was in bed, I heard my parents fighting. My father called her crazy.
—Shut up. Just shut up. I’ve had enough. Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? Damn it, Claire. I’m in love with someone else. I’m leaving.
She started to laugh and laugh. A few minutes later, she came up to my room. I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Her footsteps approached, and I felt her cool hand brushing my hair from my forehead. Then her hand was gone, the floor creaked, and I opened my eyes a crack to watch her slip out my bedroom door.
That was the last time I ever saw her.
Oh my god. Oh. My. God. I stare at the words. I have read them before, more than once, but this time, it is as if they have all been thrown into the air and landed in a completely different arrangement. Heather’s words are echoing inside my skull: Putting personal things in a book like that. Pretending she made it all up. It took Heather to make me see it, but the answers have been right there in front of me all along. This novel isn’t some metaphorical, emotional truth as I had assumed. It’s the actual literal truth. It’s my mother’s story.
Sad, screwed-up, abandoned Alice isn’t me. She’s Zoe.
The clues were all there: Alice’s blond hair, her little brother. I should have known. I drop the book onto my bed and stumble out of my bedroom into the empty apartment. I can’t take this in. I look at the apartment door and imagine my mother walking through it, and I feel like I might be sick. I’ve had it all wrong. All the things I’ve been so angry at my mother for—describing her babies as parasitic creatures, condemning children for their neediness— maybe those were never really her feelings at all. I have screwed everything up between me and my mother because I read it all wrong.
Then again, she did leave me. I close my eyes and feel the pounding of my heart, the beat of my pulse at my temples, the jaw-aching tightness of my clenched teeth. Everything is upside down, and I don’t know what is true and what isn’t.
Next thing I know I am out that door, running down the stairs and out onto the dark street below. I run toward the lights of downtown and away from my mother, as if I can somehow escape this awful feeling. The rain soaks my thin sweatshirt and my hair, and drips down the back of my neck. I’m gasping for breath, but I don’t know where to go.
So I just keep running.
When I finally stagger to a stop, gasping, I’m wet, cold and miles from my mother’s apartment. I’m on some dark industrial street: parking lots and chain-link fences and low hulking buildings.
When I was a little kid, I used to wear this one shirt of my dad’s every day. It came down past my knees, and the sleeves were so long they dangled almost to the ground. The other kids called me Loony Lou. Loony Lou. Maybe they were right; maybe I’m as crazy as Heather. Maybe it runs in our family. I shiver and tuck my hands into the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I just want to lie down somewhere and go to sleep until things make sense again.
“Whatcha doing?”
I spin around. A group of guys, five or six of them, all laughing. “Nothing,” I say. “Just going home.” Home. Where is that anyway? Not Zoe’s place. Drumheller? I think about Justine running away, living on the streets, and wonder what it would be like to do that.
One of the guys says something under his breath, and the others laugh. The street is dark, and no one else is around. I guess I should be scared, but I’m not. Maybe because they look like okay guys, or maybe because I don’t have room to feel anything else right now. “Do you guys have a phone I could use?” I ask.
Seconds later, they’re all rummaging in their pockets and holding phones out to me. I take one from a tall brown-skinned guy with a short beard and dark eyes. “Thanks.”
I dial Justine’s number and she picks up right away.
“It’s Lou,” I say. “Justine? Can I come over?”
She hesitates. “Um.”
“Please? I’ve screwed everything up. I can’t go back to my mother’s place.”
“Uh, I’m not really supposed to have people over after eleven.”
I interrupt. “Please, Justine? I really need a place to crash tonight.” My voice trembles on the edge of tears. “Please? Can you ask Nicole?”
“She’ll say no,” she says, and I can hear the sigh in her voice. “Look, I’ll meet you downtown, okay? There’s a twenty-four-hour place. We can get a coffee and talk.”
The guys actually want to walk with me to make sure I’m okay. From the way they act, all concerned and big-brotherish, I can tell they think I am younger than I really am. I thank them, tell them I’ll be fine and follow the directions Justine has given me. The place is a restaurant with a red and yellow neon sign that said Open 24 hours a day, which is probably its only selling point. Inside, it smells of coffee and grease and body odor.
I find a booth in a corner, avoiding the eyes of the half dozen customers, all older men. I order a coffee, hoping that Justine will be able to pay for it, because I have no money. Finally she arrives, pink-cheeked and breathless. “So,” she says, sliding onto the bench across from me.
“So. You know how you told me you ran away?” I ask abruptly.
“Mmm. What about it?”
“How come you did that? Was there something that happened? Or did you just want to leave?” Back in Drumheller, I used to have all kinds of fantasies about running away, but I couldn’t have left my dad on his own.
She shrugs. “Mom was dating this total creep. He moved in, I moved out.”
“They’re not together anymore?”
“No. It took awhile, but she finally dumped him after he broke her arm.”
I stare at her. “Jesus. Seriously?” She must think my own family problems are pretty trivial.
“Mmm. And now she works at the same shelter where she stayed after she left him.” Justine gives a short laugh and changes the subject. “So what happened tonight? Did you catch up with your grandmother?”
“Yeah. She wasn’t too pleased to meet me.”
“Did you get answers to your questions though? About your mom?”
I don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to admit how wrong I’ve been about everything. “They haven’t talked in ten years.”
“How come you don’t want to go home? I mean, back to your mom’s place?”
“I just want to go back to Drumheller,” I whisper.
She turns toward me and raises an eyebrow. “You told me you hated it there. That you couldn’t wait to get away.”
I turn away and look out the rain-streaked window. A pale yellow moon is peeking through the dark clouds. It looks unhealthy somehow, like a gross infected sore on the night sky. Despair settles over me like a cold mist. Other people look at the moon and think how beautiful it is. What is wrong with me that I hate everywhere I am? That I always just want to get away? Justine’s hand touches my shoulder briefly, and I realize that my face is wet with tears. “Everything is so fucked-up,” I whisper.
“You want to call your dad?” She pulls out her phone and lays it on the table. “Go ahead and call your dad if you want to.”
“It’s long distance.”
“Duh. I know that. Go ahead.”
I hesitate, suddenly unsure. I want to know that Dad’s okay, but I don’t really want to talk to him. He wouldn’t understand, and more importantly, he wouldn’t let me catch a bus home. Which is what I am planning to do. “Maybe I’ll call Dana Leigh instead.” I look at Justine. “My dad’s ex-girlfriend.”
“Call whoever you want,” she says.
I dial Dana Leigh’s number and listen to the ring. Pick up, pick up, pick up. And then her voice is saying hello, husky and familiar, sounding like she’s just in the next room and not a thousand miles away after all.
“Dana Leigh? It’s me. Lou.”
“Lou! Is everything okay?”
She sounds so close and so familiar. “Can you send me some money for the bus?” I ask. “I need to come home.”
“Honey! What is it? Are you worried about your dad?”
“Mmm.” Justine gets up and walks around, collecting plastic No Smoking signs from the empty tables closest to us. Trying to give me some privacy.
“I talked to him today. He’s doing fine. Seriously, Lou, it’ll take some rehab, but he’ll be in better shape at the end of this than he was before. Off all those damn drugs he was taking, for one thing.”
“He told the doctors about that?”
“Um, no. That’d be me.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Bet he was pissed.”
“Well, he cussed a bit. You know, I expected him to freak, but he got over it pretty fast. I think he might have been almost relieved to have it all out there.”
I don’t want to get my hopes up. This isn’t the first time he’s tried to quit. “Dana Leigh?” I try to think about how to explain. “I just really need to come home. Everything is messed up here.”
“Have you talked to your mother? She knows you want to leave?”
“Not exactly.” Justine slips back into our booth and pulls a marker out of her big black purse. I watch as she systematically changes Ns to Ps, so that the signs read Thank You for Pot Smoking. “She won’t mind,” I tell Dana Leigh. “She doesn’t even like me.”
“Don’t say that, Lou.”
“Why not? It’s the truth.” I try to hold my voice steady.
“She doesn’t want me here. Can’t I stay with you until Dad’s better?”
There is a long pause. Too long. Across from me, Justine looks up from her graffiti project, eyebrows raised in a question. Finally Dana Leigh sighs. “Let me talk to Trevor, okay? And your dad.”
“Okay.” My heart sinks. I’d forgotten about Trevor. He’s not going to want a teenager in the house, and besides, those awful drooling dogs of his make me sneeze and itch. “Now? Can you ask him now?”
“Honey, it’s awfully late. We were actually both sleeping.”
“Oh. Sorry I woke you.” I tighten my grip on the phone and ball my free hand into a tight fist. “Should I call you tomorrow or what?”
“Give it a couple days,” she says. “Maybe things with your mom will feel better by then anyway.”
“Fine,” I say. “I have to go anyway.” I hang up. My jaw aches, and I realize that I am clenching my teeth.
“No luck?” Justine asks softly.
I shake my head. “She says my dad’s okay though.”
“That’s something.”
“Yeah. That’s something.” I run one finger around the rim of my mug. “I don’t know what to do.”
Justine leans toward me, puts her elbows on the table and rests her chin on her hands. “What happened tonight, Lou? With your grandmother?”
I stare down at my coffee. It’s cold now, the surface scummy and opaque. “I’ve had everything wrong,” I say.
“Ass-backward.”
“What do you mean?”
“My mom’s book. You know how I said that girl, Alice, was sort of based on me?”
“The screwed-up one?”
“Uh-huh. Well, here’s the thing: That wasn’t really me at all. It was supposed to be my mom.”
She frowns. “So the woman, Claire. The one who leaves her kids…”
“Is Zoe’s mom. Heather. My grandmother.”
Justine sucks her lower lip. “Did she tell you that?”
“Not directly. She said a few things, and then I looked at the book again and it all kind of fell into place.” I take a sip of cold coffee and let the bitter taste spread across my tongue. “I thought the novel sort of drew on some real feelings of my mother’s, you know? About seeing kids as parasites, that kind of thing.”
Justine nods. “You told me something Claire said about having to sacrifice things to survive. I thought it was a horrible thing to say about your own kid.”
“Yeah, only it turns out it wasn’t my mom who said it. It was her mom.” I shake my head. “It’s so confusing. The thing is, I think the novel is actually partly true, but I don’t know which parts really happened and which parts are made up. I mean, I think Heather left when my mom was twelve or so, and—oh!”
“What is it?”
“Her brother. In the book, Alice has a little brother.”
“So you have an uncle out there too?”
I remember the file I found, the photo of the two children, the newspaper clipping. “No,” I tell her. “I think he’s dead.” I explain about my snooping. “None of it made sense at the time, but it’s all falling into place now. The book only covers a short time period. It starts when Claire leaves—that’s when Alice is twelve. And it follows Claire’s life over the next few years. There’s some parts about the kids being in foster care, but it’s mostly about Claire.”
“What happened to him? Her brother?”
I make a face. “Nothing happens to him in the book.
But the newspaper clipping I found said he was killed in a drunk driving accident when he was seventeen.”
“Ugh.”
“Yeah.”
She is quiet for a minute. Across the room, the door opens and a chilly draft blows in from around the door. Justine speaks softly. “What was his name?”
“Billy,” I say. Then I shake my head. “No, that’s in the book.” I picture the newspaper article, try to see the words in my mind, but it’s no use: I can’t remember his real name.
When I look up again, Justine is watching me closely. “You haven’t talked to your mom about any of this, right?”
“Haven’t seen her yet. Don’t want to.”
She hesitates.
“Go ahead,” I say. “Say it.”
Justine catches her lower lip between her thumb and finger and says nothing for a minute. Then her hand drops to the table. “Honestly? Don’t get mad, but I don’t really get what the big deal is. I would have thought you’d be glad that your mom wasn’t like that woman in the novel.”
I don’t answer right away, and Justine’s words seem to hang in the air between us. I am glad my mother never said those awful things about me being a parasite, and that she wasn’t thinking about me when she created the character of Alice. Knowing that my mother was abandoned as a kid, that she, like Alice, probably ended up in foster care and that her brother died…I should feel sympathy.
But I don’t. I still feel angry. If anything, more angry than ever. Because if she was abandoned by her own mother, you’d think she’d know how hard that is. You’d think she wouldn’t do the exact same thing to her own daughter.
Justine sighs. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” I make a face. “Maybe I can get back to Alberta somehow. Hitchhike or something.”
Justine shakes her head. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I know. I’d be too scared anyway.” I fold my arms on the table and rest my head on them. “I just want to get away, you know?”
“Oh, I know. Believe me, I know.”
I look at her sideways, without lifting my head. “You ever regret it? Running away?”
“Didn’t have much choice.”
I think about what she said about her mom’s broken arm. “Was he…your mom’s boyfriend…hitting you as well?”
She snorts. “Hitting on me. Which may seem unlikely to you.”
By the way she gestures down at her body, I can tell she means because she’s fat. I want to say something about that not mattering, or about her being beautiful, which she actually kind of is, but I feel too awkward. “Some of my dad’s friends used to be like that with me,” I say instead. “Flirting with me, you know? When I was, like, thirteen, fourteen. Before we moved to Drumheller. And I looked like a twelve-year-old back then, no boobs at all.”
“Yeah, well, guys aren’t too particular.”
I bare my teeth. “See this chip, here? One guy gave me acid at a party and I got totally high. We’d been kissing and he wanted me to do other stuff with him, fool around, you know? But I freaked out. Left the party and wiped out on my bike.”
“Ouch.” She winces.
“Yeah. I used to get drunk with them sometimes. The guys in my dad’s band. Dad sort of saw it as treating me like an adult.”
“When you were thirteen.”
“Yeah. At the time, I thought it was cool. Now, well, not so much.” I feel a pang of disloyalty. “I love my dad though. I mean, he’s a great guy. And I don’t think he knew about a lot of the stuff that happened. He trusted his friends, that’s all. He trusts everyone. He’s just like that.”
She shrugs. “No one’s perfect, right? Still, you have a right to be mad about that stuff.”
“I guess.” I fold my arms on the table and rest my head against them, picturing Dad, gray-faced and scared, lying in a hospital bed with monitors and tubes and wires all around him. Then I think about our smoke-filled living room, and potato chips for dinner, and all Dad’s pills. I think about the silent seething frustration I felt, and my secret fantasy that Mr. Samson would somehow rescue me from the whole mess of my life. “Sometimes I was,” I whisper. “Sometimes I was really mad.”
Justine reaches across the table, and to my surprise, she touches my hair. Strokes it like I’m a cat. I don’t pull away. It’s weird but sort of nice. “I think you should go back to your mom’s place,” she says. “Talk to her.”
“You do?” I straighten up and look at her. “What if it’s in my genes? You know? Maybe I’m like them, Heather and Zoe, I mean. Wanting to run away from things. Wanting to escape all the time. What if I’m predestined to be crazy and fucked-up?”
She snorts. “Predestined? Give me a break.”
“I’m serious. I always have this feeling like I want to get away from wherever I am. Vancouver, Drumheller, Victoria.”
“Maybe you’ve just been in a lot of situations that suck. Did you think of that?” Justine raises her eyebrows. She stands up, gathers the plastic signs in her arms and begins redistributing them onto the neighboring tables.
I watch her for a minute, until the Thank you for Pot Smoking signs adorn all the tables in our half of the restaurant. I wonder how long it will take anyone to notice. Justine gestures toward the washroom and heads that way. I know she’s trying to give me time to think—to give me a bit of space—but I wish she wouldn’t. I wish she’d come back and stroke my hair again.
I turn toward the window. In the dark glass, my reflection stares back at me, blurry and hollow-eyed. “I’m tired of feeling alone,” I whisper to the image in the glass. My reflection gazes back at me. I guess it’s a trick of the light—the cars going past outside or whatever—but my face suddenly comes into sharper focus. I can see my dad’s eyes and nose, and for the first time, I see something of my mother too. Inside me, something shifts. Justine might be right about it not being in my genes to want to escape. Because what I want to escape from isn’t really Dad or Drumheller or even this mess with Zoe. It’s this feeling. Loneliness, I guess. Not feeling connected to anything or anyone.
So in the end, there’s no getting around it: I have to talk to my mom. Because if I leave now, I’ll always wonder what might have been.