Yesterday (17 page)

The fi rst room we come to upstairs is a children’s bedroom with two single beds. Someone’s painted a Smurfs mural on one of the walls and there’s a Wonder Woman alarm clock on the dresser next to a stout pink night-light.

Children’s books line the top two shelves of a red plastic bookcase. The bottom shelves are fi lled with things I’ve seen advertised on after-school television— My Little Pony fi gures, a giant Barbie head to style, plush Care Bear toys and two identical Strawberry Shortcake dolls.

Garren and I dart over to opposite sides of the window and cautiously pull back the minimal amount of curtain that will allow us each a view outside. Every so often a car jogs along the roadway and after several minutes we see a woman dawdle by with a little girl in her arms, the two of them bundled up against the cold. Garren releases his hold on the curtain and moves to the nearest bed, lowering himself onto the purple bedspread.

“Is your foot bothering you?” I ask from the window.

Garren curves his fi ngers around the edge of the bed.

“Not really.”

That’s not the same as no and I say, “Maybe you should ice it. I mean, if no one comes for us.”

“It’ll be fi ne.” Garren folds his hands around the back of his head and lies back. “I’m just having a hard time process-ing all this.
It’s unbelievable.
Those guys with guns coming for us and Henry being in on whatever the hell’s going on.

It must go back to our fathers and something top secret they knew but I don’t get how it can stretch back to our grandparents too.” He rubs his eyes. “I don’t understand any of it.

With the scope of this you’d think our mothers would have to know something but mine seems clueless. I don’t just mean today. I feel like I’d know if she’d been hiding something this big.”

I don’t have any more facts than Garren does but the uneasy feelings I had before this served as a warning and our current situation doesn’t come as quite as much of a shock to me as it does to him. I think about describing my dreams about the blond boy for him but I don’t want to risk upsetting Garren by telling him about the boy snarling like a wild animal and wanting to hurt me.

Instead I talk about Doctor Byrne and the fl u my family had after fl ying home. It turns out that Garren and I both traveled through Australia to reach Canada. My family never left the airport in Sydney but Garren’s father lived in Mel-bourne for two years in his youth and Garren’s mom wanted to sprinkle some of his ashes there. He says they were fi ne while they were in Australia but that the fl u hit after they’d been back in Canada for only a couple of days.

Neither of us has an inkling of how the fl u ties in to everything else but it must. All the similarities between our lives must add up to the same thing. We go over it and over it, talking in circles as I, at fi rst, continue to glance out the window and then gradually drift towards the other bed.

Darkness has begun to fall and it’s chilly in the house (the owners must have turned the heat down before they left) but still warm compared to outside.

I lie down in my coat and shut my eyes, intending to open them again in a minute because it’s important to stay alert. When I do force my lashes open the room’s dark and I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep for. The tension must’ve drained me more than I’d realized.

I get up and feel for the light switch, realizing just in time that I shouldn’t fl ick it on because I’m not supposed to be here. The house needs to appear vacant. I stumble over to Garren in the blackness and reach for his leg. “Garren, I’m going downstairs to look for fl ashlights or candles.”

He turns over in his sleep and I try again, saying his name until he stirs more wakefully. “What time is it?” he asks.

I tell him I don’t know and repeat what I said about looking for sources of light that won’t announce our presence in the house.

“Good point,” Garren says, sitting up on the bed. “Something to eat would be a bonus.”

Food, yes, I’m starving.

We shuffl e downstairs in the dark. I feel like a ghost haunting a stranger’s house, only a ghost wouldn’t need to hold the banister and wouldn’t feel hungry. On the ground fl oor, I head directly for the kitchen, which is solidly in the middle of the house, between the play room and combina-tion living/dining room, and swing the fridge open so that we’ll have something to see by.

“I’ll make sure all the curtains down here are shut,” Garren says before wandering off into the adjacent rooms.

I shove one of the chairs from around the kitchen table against the fridge door to keep it open. The refrigerator is depressingly empty except for a selection of condiments— ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, pickles, relish, Cheez Whiz— and a jar of applesauce and half a carton of orange juice. Inside the freezer there’s a package of waffl es, a carton of Neapolitan ice cream and a box of frozen hamburgers. I check inside the box to see how many hamburgers are left and am relieved to fi nd fi ve remaining.

Garren returns while I’m rifl ing through the cupboards and says, “I turned up the thermostat. It should start to warm up in here soon.”

I can’t believe we’re camping out in someone else’s house.

Bizarrely, on some level that feels weirder to me than having Henry turn against us and being chased by men with guns.

We’re an intrusion here; we’ve invaded other people’s lives.

Garren adds that there are drapes in each room and that the ones in the living room might even have a thick enough lining to block out the light from the TV if we wanted to turn it on but that he’s not sure.

“I guess we should leave it off then,” I say as he begins to explore the contents of the cupboards with me. We fi nd a jar of peanut butter, instant coffee, olive oil, Worcester sauce, a box of crackers, two cans of tuna, two jars of Ragu sauce, one can of sliced mushrooms, one can of peas, an unopened box of Count Chocula cereal, a large can of Beefaroni, four Cup O’ Noodles packages, three cans of Campbell’s soup, three lunch-size fruit cups, a package of dried spaghetti and multiple sachets of Kool-Aid.

We could stay here for a week without going hungry.
Not
that
we’ll have to,
I tell myself. Tomorrow everything could change again. Tomorrow Doctor Byrne could supply us with all the answers we need to free ourselves from this.

As we continue searching the kitchen, Garren discovers an emergency fund of thirty dollars stuffed into the smallest of three red canisters and I locate a working fl ashlight behind a box of garbage bags. Garren says he bets there’s another in the garage but since there’s no entrance to it from the house we can’t check. In the dining room we fi nd matches and a box of long taper candles. I stick two of them in pewter candleholders (which were in the same drawer as the candles) and light a candle for each of us so we can explore the rest of the house.

“There has to be more money somewhere,” Garren says.

If we weren’t in so much trouble I’d feel bad about taking from these people. There’s a formal family portrait of them hanging in the living room and their grinning faces make them look like understanding folks— father, mother, and two daughters who both appear to be about seven years old but who must be fraternal twins because one’s a blond and the other a brunette.

Garren looks at the picture too and I assume he’s feeling guilty, but then he says, “Your binder with the photo of your family in it— did you leave it at Henry’s?”

That’s the fi rst time I’ve heard Garren refer to our supposed grandfather as Henry the way I’ve been since this afternoon. “Do you really think he’s our grandfather?” I ask.

I’d forgotten about the photo until Garren brought it up. The last time I had it was when we sat on Henry’s couch.

The article’s gone. The photo’s gone. I don’t know which parts of my life are real. There’s nothing concrete for me to hold on to.

“I don’t know.” Garren looks tired in the candlelight.

“Maybe he’s the imposter— not your sister.”

“Or maybe they both are. But anyway, the photo and binder must be back at his house.” I try to make a joke out of it. “He can spend the night trying to crack the code of my biology notes and fi gure out where we’ve gone.”

Garren smiles but it doesn’t make him look any happier.

We go back upstairs and, after making sure the drapes are shut, root around in the master bedroom, which feels like the worst invasion of privacy yet because I uncover copies of the
Kama
Sutra, The Joy of Sex
and
More
Joy
of
Sex
beneath several issues of
National
Geographic
in one of the bedside tables.

In the walk-in closet Garren fi nds a forgotten ten-dollar bill in the back pocket of a pair of the father’s jeans and I come across a glittery silver clutch purse that has a tube of lipstick in it along with a crumpled fi ve-dollar bill and a compact of blue eye shadow.

That brings us to a total of eighty-fi ve dollars plus whatever cash we each happened to have on us earlier and Garren and I empty our pockets to count it up properly. Between us we began the afternoon with thirty-six dollars and fi fty-seven cents, which means we now have just over a hundred and twenty dollars. It sounds like a fair amount but Garren says, “We need to spend as little as possible. Who knows how long this might have to last us?”

I don’t want to think about that. Doctor Byrne has to be the answer. “Let’s go eat,” I suggest. “We can try the burgers.”

We fry them up along with the mushrooms while listening to top-forty radio on low. Neither of us has much to say as we eat by candlelight but a few minutes into the meal we hear a thud from the second fl oor. We race upstairs with the fl ashlight to discover that some of the clothes we’d disturbed in the master bedroom closet had caused a previously unseen briefcase to fall to the fl oor.

The leather briefcase is lying open on the carpet and I bend to start picking up the papers that have spilled out (Garren shining the fl ashlight on the mess), automatically skimming through the typed pages, as though any information I run into now will inevitably be about us. It’s not. The only things in the fi le are a lengthy marketing statement for the company the father or mother probably works for and a bunch of corporate invoices.

I feel Garren’s eyes on me as I shove the papers anxiously back into the briefcase. “I don’t know why I had to look at them,” I mumble. “You don’t even know these people so they can’t have anything do to with us.”

Garren aims the fl ashlight away from me. “You don’t trust anything anymore,” he says simply. “Of course you’d look.”

He’s wrong, though— there’s still something left I trust and that’s him.

Later we listen to the news station in case there’s anything about us on it and devour mountains of ice cream.

We spend most of Friday night planning out how we’ll approach Doctor Byrne outside the restaurant tomorrow. It’s not far from Garren’s neighborhood so he knows precisely where it is and what’s around it. We decide that we’ll have to make the doctor think we have a weapon; otherwise it will be too easy for him to pull away from us. We need to seem like a threat. If his wife isn’t involved her presence might work in our favor because he won’t want her to get hurt. We’ll need to stay on the move while we talk to him too. A moving target is much harder to locate.

Garren and I agree that if either of us is taken the other should run rather than surrender, but not return here because the house might no longer be safe. By that we both mean, although neither of us says it, that the captured person could be forced to talk. I don’t want to believe that I’d turn Garren in and I don’t want to imagine what they could do to me to make me change my mind.

Just before we go to bed, when hopefully most of the neighborhood is asleep, we do a quick evaluation of the back door. Luckily all of the visible damage is on the inside and won’t advertise the breakin.

Garren retreats to the spare bedroom and I take the twins’

room (because it feels safer than the master bedroom— like the parents have cast a protective spell over it) where I lie awake for hours worrying about Garren or me being taken.

I wonder repeatedly whether Doctor Byrne remembers mentioning the Bellair Café while I was in his offi ce yesterday and whether he’ll be expecting us, laying a trap. No amount of worrying I do will make a difference and being tired tomorrow will only slow my reaction time and increase the likelihood that I’ll be caught. But naturally, pressuring myself to sleep in that way only helps drive sleep farther away and the sun is starting to rise by the time I fi nally drift off.

I dream that my younger self is sitting in an airy room with my mother and she’s just told me something that has me frantic and furious. Nothing will be the same afterwards.

I will never love her like I used to, never trust her. There’s a fi re inside me when I go to school in the morning and when a guy, no more than a child really, bumps into me hard and fails to apologize, I turn on him in the school’s neatly mani-cured front lawn, pummeling him with my little fi sts.

I’m vicious in a way that is not me. I’ve been betrayed.

Somebody has to pay for it.

The men who are not men apprehend me quickly. Hold on to me with an iron grip. I can’t blame them either because the boy’s nose is bleeding and I’m already sorry.

The dream Garren— the younger Garren, just as I am a younger me— appears beside the men and tells them, “You better be careful there— you know that’s the boss’s daughter.”

One of the men replies, “Thank you for your concern.

The situation is under control.”

When the men release me after fi ling a discipline report I know it’s not because of anything Garren said— that’s not how they work. A tear snakes down my face. It doesn’t seem right that I can feel so lost and hopeless and yet the world carries on as usual.

“I did punch him,” I say to Garren. “I made him bleed.”

Garren folds his arms in front of him. “I saw. But I also heard what happened at your house a few days ago.”