Escape Velocity (19 page)

“Is that what your dad told you?”

I nod.

She brushes tears from her cheeks. “I might have told him something like that. The truth is that I panicked. I thought I wouldn't be able to keep you safe. That I wasn't—that I
couldn't
—be a mother. My own mother wasn't exactly a good role model.”

My heart skips a beat. It feels like a kick in the chest. I'm talking to
Alice
, I realize. Sad, messed-up, abandoned Alice. For a brief moment, I can almost see her looking out of Zoe's reddened eyes, and some of my anger dissolves and vanishes like snow in a river. “I read your book all wrong,” I confess, speaking quickly, before I can change my mind. “I thought Claire was you. Based on you.”

Zoe's hands fly up to her mouth. “You thought Claire was me? Why would you think that?”

“I thought the things she said…about children being like parasites…I thought that was how you felt.”

“God, Lou.” She looks horrified. “Claire's character was based on
my
mother.”

“I figured that out.” My hands are icy. I tuck them under the sheets and push them against my bare legs. I picture Heather's mocking, gap-toothed grin and her narrow shoulders as she shuffled off down the rain-slick sidewalk into the night. “Zoe…”
I met your mother.
I talked to her.
The words stick in my throat. “So your mom left when you were twelve? That part was true?”

She nods. “When you said you'd read my book, I assumed you realized that.” She leans against the doorframe. “Alice was based on me, and the parts from her point of view are all true. I started out writing a memoir. It was going to be my story.” She lifts her shoulders in a rueful shrug, and gives a half-laugh. “Then I got caught up in Claire's character and started writing from her point of view. Trying to make sense of my mother, I suppose. Cheaper than therapy.” She laughs, but it sounds bitter. “I wanted to understand why she left, who she was. To make some kind of sense of it by turning it into a story. Stories always make more sense than real life, don't they? They have a completeness that reality seems to lack.”

I'm struggling to follow, but she's losing me. “So the parts about Claire, after she left, are those parts true?”

Zoe shrugs. “It's fiction,” she says. “Interpretation. Speculation. I don't know how my mother really felt. I was just a kid when she left.” She sighs. “I guess she's the only one who knows if my story came close to the truth. Assuming she's even read it.”

“Have you talked to her about it? Asked her if you got it right?”

“No.” She shivers and folds her arms across her chest. “I doubt she could tell me anyway. She's not always the most coherent person.”

“How come? I mean, what's wrong with her?”

Zoe shrugs again, hands turned up like she's showing me they're empty. “When she left, Dad told me that she was manic-depressive. Bipolar, I guess they say now.”

Dad told me
. Not,
Dad told us
. I want to ask about her brother, but I can't. I don't want her to guess I've been snooping in her files. “You think that's right?” I ask instead. “That she's bipolar?”

She sighs. “I don't know. Anyway, she's a lot worse now than she was back then. I don't know if it's dementia, or street drugs, or just years of mental illness with no proper treatment.”

I can't say this, obviously, but Heather didn't seem crazy to me. Strange, definitely, but not crazy.

“When she showed up the first time, at that awards gala in the spring, she was drunk. She was rambling about cloud seeding and chemical trails in the sky. She said we were all being poisoned.” Zoe tugs at her necklace. “She said she came to warn me.”

“Oh.” That sounds crazy, all right.

“My mother can't separate fact and fiction,” she says.

Since both Zoe and I seem to have had problems of our own with this distinction, I don't say anything.

Finally Zoe sighs. “After you were born, I started wondering about her. I left Ontario, moved out west because I knew she'd grown up in Vancouver and thought she might have gone back there. I hadn't seen her since I was twelve, and when I finally found her, she was living on the streets and not doing too well. I tried to help her. I found her an apartment, even paid her rent for a few months, which I certainly could not afford. I pulled strings to get her a job at a friend's coffee shop. You know what she did?”

I shake my head.

“Stole money from the till.” Zoe looks at me. “Everything I tried to do, she sabotaged. I'd make her doctors' appointments, and she wouldn't bother to show up. She was infuriating. Impossible to help.”

“Is that why you stopped seeing her?”

“That, and other things. We fought a lot. She said some awful things.” Zoe straightens, leans against the doorframe. “I didn't need that in my life.”

“You didn't need me in your life either.” Her crying and talking about her mom made me forget my anger, but it's rushing back now and I feel like I might explode with it. “For
twelve whole years
.”

She blinks, taken aback. “I never forgot about you, you know. Your dad sent me letters. Pictures of you. I always wondered if I'd made the right decision.”

I can't believe she has to ask. “God, Mom. I bet most people who abandon babies at least know they shouldn't have done it.”

“Don't be so melodramatic.” Her voice is cold. “You make it sound like I dumped you in an alleyway.”

“Where you left me is hardly the point. I think you should at least know it was wrong.”

“Was it, Lou? Don't you think you were better off with your father? Tell me the truth.”

Telling her she's wrong would feel like betraying Dad. Things haven't been perfect, but that's none of her business. Anyway, living with her might have been worse. “I don't know,” I say instead. “Whatever.”

Zoe is quiet for a long moment, and I wonder if she is about to walk away, but instead she takes off her wet coat and hangs it on my doorknob. “Three years ago, your father wrote to me. He thought you needed to meet me. And you were the age that I was when my mother left. I'd been thinking about that when I got his letter. And Lou—I'd been wanting to see you for years.”

My eyes fill with unexpected tears. I grit my teeth and try to blink them back before she notices. “Me too,” I admit. “I'd been wanting to see you too.”

“I was scared,” Zoe says softly. She moves closer and sits on the edge of my bed. Then she reaches out and hugs me—a long hard hug, like she means it. I'm so startled that it takes me a few seconds to respond, but I hug her back just in time, just as I feel her arms start to loosen.

“Go to sleep,” she whispers. “We'll talk more tomorrow.”

“Goodnight,” I say. Watching her walk out the door makes me think about Alice/Zoe seeing her own mother leave for the last time, and I quickly lie down and close my eyes, pushing the thought away.

If it wasn't for the secret I am still holding on to, I would feel almost peaceful right now, lying in this warm bed and savoring the memory of the hug and the hope that maybe, somehow, my mother and I will work this out. The last thing I want to do is risk wrecking this fragile connection by telling her that I met Heather, but the memory of that meeting keeps floating to the surface of my mind, and it feels like a betrayal.

By the time I fall asleep, the dark sky is starting to fade to pearly gray and I can hear the muffled sounds of early morning traffic outside my window.

Twenty

Z
oe is awake before me. I can hear her moving around, grinding coffee beans, opening and closing the fridge. I stretch out beneath the soft comforter, enjoying the feel of the smooth sheets against my bare legs. Last night feels like a dream. I slip out of bed, pull on a pair of flannel pajama pants and pad barefoot down the hall to join my mother in the kitchen.

Zoe is slicing a cantaloupe on a large wooden cutting board. “Coffee?” she asks. Her hair is pulled up in a ponytail, stray locks loose around her face, and even in a housecoat and no makeup, she looks beautiful.

“Thanks,” I say.

She pours coffee into a mug and slides it across the counter. I pull up a stool, sit down beside her at the island, and watch her carefully cut the rind of the melon away from the soft orange flesh. “I've been thinking,” she says.

“Yeah?” I clear my throat. “Yes?”

“I know I haven't been very good at the mother thing.” She puts down the knife and turns to me. “God, this is such a cliché…But I guess I'm hoping that we can at least be friends.”

I can feel myself stiffen, like I'm bracing myself for something. “I have friends,” I say.

“Of course you do.” Her tone is patronizing. “I just thought that now that you are fifteen, perhaps we could have a different kind of relationship. As adults.”

As adults.
Right. She's smiling at me, head tilted to one side. Last night, I actually thought things might be different. Now it's like she wants to wriggle off the hook. I cut her off. “God, Zoe! You're my mother, okay? Yeah, you've been a lousy mother, but that's what you are. You're not my friend.” I blow on the surface of my coffee, heart racing, not trusting myself to say any more.

Zoe turns away. I can hear the knife thwacking through the melon and hitting the wooden cutting board.
Snick. Snick. Snick
. “It's almost noon,” she says. “You'd better eat something and get to school.”

I guess the conversation is over.

I arrive at school halfway through lunch. Justine is alone at the far side of the field, sitting cross-legged on the grass by the fence. I walk toward her, feeling embarrassed about last night. “Hey.”

She looks around, startled, and then smiles at me. She has a cute smile—Zoe hates that word, but it really is the only one that fits Justine's lopsided dimples and baby face. “Lou. How are you doing? What happened with your mom when you got home?”

I sit down beside her. “Sorry about being such a basket case last night.”

“It's okay. Forget it.” She tightens the cap on her half-f bottle of apple juice and shoves it into her bag. “Anyway, you weren't a basket case. You were upset, that's all.”

“Did you get in trouble? For being out so late, I mean?”

She shakes her head. “It's all good. You?”

“Mmm. Well, Zoe was mad, but we ended up having a pretty interesting talk.” I don't know how much to say. I've known Justine for less than a week, and already she knows more about me than anyone else does. Or if not exactly more, at least she knows different things. “I didn't tell her about meeting Heather,” I say. “Zoe, I mean.”

“Would she be pissed?”

“Yeah, beyond pissed. She'd be totally furious.”

“So, don't tell her.”

“No.” I pull up a handful of grass and scatter it over my outstretched legs. “I don't understand how she can let her mom be, you know…homeless or whatever. When she has this nice condo and everything.”

“It's probably more complicated, right?”

“I guess.” I study the pattern of the green blades against faded denim, brush the grass off. My jeans have that velvety softness around the knees that jeans always get right before they tear through. “She told me that she tried to help her mom,” I say. “You know, get her off the streets and all that. But her mom kept screwing everything up.”

“Yeah, well. You can't change people,” Justine says. “I tried with my mom. Hoping she'd dump the asshole boyfriend. Hoping she'd put me first for once.” She shrugs. “Eventually you get tired of hoping for stuff that isn't going to happen.”

“But she left him in the end, right?”

“Yeah. But she…” She trails off, looks down at her hands, knots her fingers together. “I wouldn't say she's really changed. I mean, she has in some ways, and I'm proud of her for leaving him and getting this job and all that.”

“But?”

“She's
impossible
,” Justine says explosively. She looks up at me for a second, then drops her eyes to her hands again. “I moved back home for a while and it was a disaster.”

I want to know more, but I don't want to push her. “You don't have to…I mean, if you don't want to talk about it…”

“It's okay,” she says. “Just, I don't really get my mother. Sometimes I think she's someone who shouldn't have had a kid. Except then I wouldn't be here.” She shrugs. “She blames me for every single thing that has ever gone wrong in her life. Even the asshole was my fault, according to her.”

“How did she figure that?”

“Oh, let's see.” Justine's voice is sarcastic, her eyebrows drawn together in a frown. She holds up a hand, counting on her fingers. “One, I was born. Two, she quit school. Three, she was broke. Four, she was dependent on her boyfriend. Five, he beat her up.” She lifts her other hand, still counting. “Six and seven, so did the next two boyfriends. Eight, I—according to her—tried to seduce her boyfriend.”