Shortly after my final trip to hound the police, I was walking around our neighbourhood scouting red huckleberries when I stopped in front of the Adamses’ house, about ten up from ours. I knew the Adams kids were away in Alberta, and that Mr. and Mrs. Adams both worked. Before I knew it, I was walking up the driveway and knocking on the front door. I figured that if someone answered, I’d say I was looking for the kids. But nobody answered. I went around to the garage and knocked on the kitchen door there, but again no answer. I tried the knob with my hand. The door was open—and so in I went.
Oh, the sensation of being all alone in a place I wasn’t supposed to be! It was fragrant: somebody
else’s
house. It reminded me of coming home from vacation and walking in the door of my own house, and smelling it as if I was a stranger entering for the first time. I felt like a police officer, investigating clues. I felt like a ghost who had come back, not to haunt, but merely to remember the world as it once was.
From that first venture into the Adamses’ house, my summers unfolded as long dull stretches punctuated by the occasional B and E. I’d walk up and down the mountain, find a house with no cars in the carport, walk up to the front door and ring the doorbell. If nobody answered, I’d try the door, and two times out of three it was unlocked. I’d open the door and shout,
Kelly? Kelly, are you in?
My logic was that, if someone answered, I could pretend I’d rung the wrong doorbell. Even if I ran away, the worst that could happen would be … nothing. I didn’t look like a criminal and, technicalities aside, I wasn’t one. I just wanted to be in a place where I wasn’t supposed to be, I wanted quiet and I wanted something to do. Snooping in drawers was always the most fun, with bedrooms being the biggest trove. To snoop inside a person’s bedside drawer is to take a carnival barker’s tour through their deepest self. The things people stash there!—knives, brass knuckles, pills, condoms, old love letters, birth control pills, gold coins, pornography, passports, wills, and, in one case, a Luger.
Obviously, I was perpetually on the listen for a car driving in or a door latch opening, and there was only ever one narrow escape—somebody dropping a set of keys on a kitchen table down a hallway. I hopped through a back window and into a salmonberry shrub—a shame, since I’d really been enjoying leafing through a family photo album, trying to figure out who was related to whom, and who were going to be the family’s winners and losers, and, obviously, figuring out who was cute and who wasn’t. But during all those B and Es, I
never
looked at the porn—yes, even sitting there by myself, opening the pages was too hard.
This
, from a girl who looked up the skirt of a drag queen’s corpse. But
that
was death;
this
was sex. As I said, in order to look at nude bodies I still had to make several bus transfers across town, and even there I always choked and ended up in the front reading
Newsweek
and knitting catalogues.
* * *
Everybody but me on the charter flight to Italy seemed to be in love, or to be searching for it as if it were a new restaurant they’d heard about. Elliot, the class thug, was in love with Colleen, the future ear-nose-throat doctor, who was in love with Alain, the future Volvo dealer, who loved Christy Parks, the future plant nursery saleswoman, and so on. Fifteen years later, I learned that Christy’s someone else was our Latin teacher, Mr. Burden. I bumped into them as they were buying croissants on Granville Island on an overcast Saturday afternoon amid cranky seagulls, bored tourists, bagels and mimes. Mr. Burden had kept his wavy hair in a way that made me think he was vain about it, but he was now chubby to the point where he probably had to go to a men’s big-and-tall store. Christy was her old self, with maybe seven grey hairs and skin that spoke of too much time in the sun. We went for coffee to reminisce about the school trip to Italy. Christy had never been unkind to me, but nor had she ever been friendly. Her current kindness was unexpected.
Reminiscing about our flight there, she said, “Oh! It was so brutal. Everyone smoking, the airplane seats were the size of letter paper, and that astronaut food they served us—my gut was a disaster the whole time in Rome.”
“So was mine.”
“But I snagged my teacher in the end.”
Mr. Burden was hasty to inject, “We met at a line dancing class. Nothing inappropriate happened on that trip.”
I said, “Remember that horrible little gas station?” Our hostel’s toilets had been plugged with what was essentially papier mâché. As the country’s plumbers were on strike that month, we had to find other options.
“How could I forget? And the guys who worked there—never seen any better, before or since.”
Mr. Burden looked at Christy. “You never told me any of this.” He sipped his Americano. “I almost gave myself cancer from stress on that trip. It was the last school trip I did. I had to make sure none of you brats were kidnapped or killed, though it might have taught you a lesson.”
There followed an awkward pause, during which Christy looked at my ringless fingers. “Have you been married, Liz?”
“Me? No. Not yet. Never fell in love.”
“Huh.”
Take it from me—the moment most people in relationships find out you’re single, their eyes start to wander. I thought I’d try to grab their attention. “You know, my own theory on love comes from a TV game show.” They both gave me their Liz-is-a-freak stare. “It’s not as if I spend my life watching game shows, but when I do, I remember everything,” I said.
“Really, now?”
“Oh yes. One show I caught asked the contestants how many times the average person thinks people are able to fall in love during their lifetime. The answer was six.”
Christy said, “Six?”
Mr. Burden—Dan—said, “That sounds a bit … excessive. How did they measure that?”
“I have no idea, but no wonder people have affairs. They have all of these unused love credits inside them, and they want to use them up before they die.” I could tell from the looks that Christy and Dan swapped that I’d pushed a button, but I’ve never found out which one. They abruptly stood, coffees left unfinished.
Christy said, “It was fun seeing you again, Liz.”
Mr. Burden was clearly annoyed at Christy—over what, I’ll never know—but he said a gruff goodbye and they were off into the packs of scavenging birds, dithering people and buskers singing Neil Young songs out of key.
I thought about how different Mr. Burden had been back in school. He was the Latin teacher who had to teach PE—he was never without thick white terry cloth socks and a nickel-plated whistle dangling across his grey kangaroo jacket. I was barely a blip on his radar; he only began remembering my name about halfway through my second year with him. When I raised my hand, it seemed to annoy him just because it was me and not somebody else.
Don’t start thinking,
Oh, just another case of low self-esteem.
I’ve never disliked myself. In my teens, I was merely clueless. Nobody had ever sat me down and told me about the currency of looks and bodies and—in later life—about money and power. William and Leslie, masters of those realms, were like movie stars to me. It was only when they matured that they became friends or counsellors, there to fill me in on the world’s ways. Until then my impression was that everybody started out more or less equal, and behaved as such.
* * *
The charter landed first in Montreal, where we drove to another airport, Mirabel, an hour away. We camped out there for six hours for the much-delayed Atlantic leg. By the time we boarded, Mr. Burden and our class, twelve in all, pretty much staggered down the
747
’s teeny aisles, buzzing from lack of sleep and grotesque food; all sense of fun had evaporated. Elliot was sick from rye he’d pilfered from the drinks wagon, and I was humming away on anti-nausea pills that made me tired but not sleepy. Somewhere over Ireland, noises and images began to blend together, and I remember everybody’s face having tweed-like dimples from the plane’s seat fabric. Then, over, I suppose, France, Mr. Burden snapped to life as if for a Monday morning gym class and shouted, “Everyone up. We land in one hour.”
* * *
Back to me in the hospital chair watching Jeremy sleep, wondering what he might be seeing in his dreams. I’d fallen asleep trying to guess what sort of guy he really was. Twenty is too young to be a complete adult, but most everything is there in some form or other. I didn’t see track marks on his arms, or tattoos, but … I wondered about his childhood, and … I simply had no idea what to do now that he was in my life.
When the sun came up and he didn’t stir, even amid the bustle of nurses, patients and machines, I left a note for him, giving him explicit directions that he was to call me once he woke up, and then I drove home. I hadn’t thought about my wisdom tooth sockets in hours, but now they felt sore. For the first time in ages, my condo didn’t feel simply bleak. I suppose you could say it now possessed a kind of charged bleakness.
I couldn’t rest or sit down. In spite of my lack of sleep I had vast amounts of energy and began to do all those dopey metaphorical things people do when their lives are somehow new: I opened the curtains, I walked around the place with a green Glad bag pitching out old magazines, I washed the windows and floors. When I was finished, the place was so clean and orderly I thought,
I ought to have flowers in here.
So, I got in the car and drove to a place in West Van that had some cool white peonies, very late in the season, and drove back along the highway, enjoying the early afternoon of a summer day. If I’d known that sleep deprivation actually gave me energy, I’d have started depriving myself of sleep ages before. I felt great.
Then, on the other side of the highway, eight lanes over, before the Lonsdale on-ramp, I saw what I thought was a black dog walking along the highway’s edge. But it wasn’t. It was Jeremy, crawling westward. Oh dear God.
I slashed across three lanes of traffic and screeched to a stop on the shoulder. Leaping out of the car, I dashed across the median and four more lanes of traffic, shouting Jeremy’s name. He saw me coming, smiled, waved, and kept on crawling.
“What the hell are you doing? Are you insane?”
He didn’t stop, and I had to walk alongside him. He said, “I’m crawling toward the sun. To Horseshoe Bay.”
“What the hell for?”
“Because it’s a light, and after last night I need to follow a light.”
“It’s fifteen miles away—and why are you crawling?”
“It’s humble.”
It was a ridiculous conversation to be having. “If you want to be humble, why not just walk there with your head bowed?” I looked more closely at him; his hands and knees were torn. “Jeremy, you’re cutting yourself all over.” I looked at the concrete—broken pop bottles loomed. “Come on. Stop right now. The cops’ll come and get you and who knows what that’ll lead to.” I was wondering why nobody had stopped to help him, or arrest him.
“I can watch out for myself.”
“Prove it to me by stopping. Jeremy, are you high on something?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Did you get my note?”
“Yup. I was going to call you at the end of my trip.”
“From Horseshoe Bay?”
“It seemed to me to be a manageable goal.”
I continued walking alongside him, cars ripping past us, unfazed by the sight of a plump woman and a crawling young man. “How long have you crawled so far?”
“Not too far.”
“Oh God.”
He looked up at me and said, “Okay, here’s the deal: crawl along with me for a little while and I’ll stop.”
“How long is a little while?”
“From here to that hubcap up ahead.”
It was about a stone’s throw away. “Deal.”
And thus I crawled along the Trans-Canada with my son. I’ve heard that parenting can strip you of dignity; here was my crash course.
He asked me, “How did you sleep last night?”
“Not much. I felt great today, though.”
“I’m glad. What did you do?”
“I cleaned out my condo.” A few cars honked at us, while the absence of a police presence made me wonder about the fate of civilization. “And I bought flowers. I haven’t bought flowers in—well,
ever
, really.”
“That’s nice. What kind?”
“Peonies.”
“What colour?”
“White.”
“They’re soft, aren’t they?”
“They really are.”
“I like peonies.”
The cool softness of the peonies was the opposite of grit, pebbles and hot pavement.
“You’ve really never bought flowers for yourself before?” Despite all his spying, I managed to surprise him.
“For myself? No.”
“How come?”
“Because it’s like something they tell you to do in those books that try to teach you to cure loneliness.
Buy flowers for yourself because you deserve it!
I mean, a man is in a bookstore and he buys a book on loneliness—every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.”
“So you’re lonely.”
“Yes, of course I’m lonely. Who isn’t lonely?” We were almost at the hubcap. “I think you’re too young to understand. And there’s our hubcap. Upsy-daisy.”
Before I could rise, he bounced up like a Russian gymnast and reached out his hands to me. I was grateful for the lift. His hands were burning hot, and caked in blood and road grit. My hose were shot, and I’d somehow broken the heel on one shoe. I reached down and removed it.
Jeremy said, “Give me your other shoe.” I did, and he broke off its heel. “There. Now you’re level.”
“Thank you. Let’s just cross this highway without getting killed, and I’ll drive toward the sun of your choice.”
Inside the car, air conditioning blasting away, I felt blood surging through my carotid artery, my head thumping away. “You need to eat,” I said. “I’ll make you something at my place.”
He was holding my peonies in his lap, looking longingly at the sun. For the first time I let myself wonder:
Is Jeremy really nuts? Come on, Liz, be practical. You’re a single woman. This is an unknown man you’re letting enter your life.
I was also wondering about the depth and breadth of what appeared to be a religious streak. He certainly knew the language, and yet he didn’t seem like he was the mouthpiece for any particular sect. His upbringing, I imagined. We had yet to touch on that. And of course, I had to wonder about drugs. “Are you on any medications?”