The Sweetest One Read online

  The

  Sweetest

  One

  Melanie

  Mah

  The

  Sweetest

  One

  Copyright © 2016 Melanie Mah

  This edition copyright © 2016 Cormorant Books Inc.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (cbf) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

  Mah, Melanie, 1980–, author The sweetest one / Melanie Mah.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.isbn 978-1-77086-432-0 (pbk.). — isbn 978-1-77086-433-7 (html)

  i. Title.

  ps8626.a3758S94 2016 c813’.6 c2014-907699-1 c2014-907700-9

  Cover photo and design: angeljohnguerra.com

  Interior text design: Tannice Goddard

  Printer: Friesens

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  The interior of this book is printed on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.

  cormorant books inc.

  10 st. mary street, suite 615, toronto, ontario, m4y 1p9

  www.cormorantbooks.com

  The

  Sweetest

  One

  1

  *

  THE LAST TIME I saw Trina was the best night of my life and I didn’t know it at the time. It was my birthday, and I’d just had this massive blow-up with my dad. He said something I disagreed with — I can’t remember what — and he thought I was talking back. My dad can’t stand not being right, so he started yelling, and because I have my pride, I started yelling too. And when it got to the point where his face was turning red and he was spitting when he talked and he could barely look at me because he hated me so much, I left. Hadn’t even had my birthday dinner yet. I pushed the front door so hard it slammed into the side of the building, bounced back into my face, and smashed my nose. It started bleeding, but I just kept going. I was hungry, I didn’t have any money, and it was getting cold — it can be cold here in June if you don’t have a jacket — but I wanted him to feel guilty, realize he was wrong. I thought I’d show him — what, I don’t know. I pinched my nose with one hand, wiped it with the other, and went down the hill towards Anders Park. Halfway there, a set of lights came up behind me, and I turned around. Trina’s car, a powder blue Civic, and she was whistling the happy birthday song out the open window.

  “What do you want?” I said. It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to go back.

  “Get in the car, Chris. Please?”

  “Why should I?”

  “We’ll go for a drive,” she said, “wherever you want,” which she almost never did.

  I kept walking.

  She drove beside me, jolted her car from time to time to keep up. The stereo was on. Depeche Mode. “Come on,” she said. “We could get some pizza, go to the lake? I saw meadowlarks there on Thursday.” Trina likes birds. It’s something we have in common. It’s fucking nerdy knowing birds by sight, but somehow she pulled it off. People liked her. She made life look easy.

  I got in the car, didn’t talk at first.

  “That’s better, right?” she said, soothingly. “I’ve got the heat on.”

  The song changed to old-school jazz, Ella’s voice thick like smoke. Dream a little dream of me. Trina cracked the window and lit a cigarette. Sang and blew smoke at the windshield. I asked if I could have one, waited for a reply, but Trina kept singing.

  “Well?” I said. I was being bold. Then I saw the town limit sign. No.

  “Put it out of your mind,” she said when she saw me. “It’s gonna happen or it’s not. No sense being afraid.”

  It’d be the first time I’d leave town in two years, but I trusted her. We sped past and rocked the car into the drive-through of Perry’s Pizza. Ali Meer’s voice in the little foghorn speaker. Trina asked me what I wanted and I shrugged. “Mushroom, onion, tomato?” she said.

  “Just mushrooms,” I said.

  She sneered but that’s what she ordered — that and a bag of fries, the best ones in town. We pulled out to the side. They bring you the pizza when it’s done. She opened the FRY bag and took a whiff, put her hand in and looked me in the eye. “So you’re gonna take up smoking now?”

  The trees hanging from the rearview twisted on their strings, pink red pink.

  “No, I just wanted one.”

  She dropped the fries between us. Grease spots on the paper bag. “Don’t smoke,” she said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “You smoke ’cause it suits you?”

  “Well, I can’t live without it now, can I? I’m addicted.”

  No, she’s lazy. People never blame themselves, they always blame the drug.

  “Chrysler,” she said, levelling with me, “you’re into books.”

  “Yeah?” I said. Probably rolled my eyes.

  “You like books and weird shit. You think of patterns on bathroom tiles, which vegetables are actually fruits. You’re smart. You’re gonna do something good someday.”

  “If I live,” I said.

  “Just don’t smoke, okay?”

  Cars went by on Highway 11, streaks of white and red under yellow streetlamps in the dark. Highway 11 goes west to the mountains, east into Red Deer. No one ever stops here unless they have to. I was gonna say something about that, insult Spring Hills to make myself seem cool, but just then, Trina turned the stereo up, some loud punk love song. When the pizza came she started the car and it roared to life, cantankerous. Her little piece of shit, a boxy metal hatchback from the eighties. We drove with the windows cranked down and the music up. We ate straight from the box, no napkins, and a slice went cold in half a minute because of all the wind. We sang along. I made a joke about the Wanderer, this local guy in a black turtleneck who spends his time walking through town, no job or anything, and then suddenly, we saw him on the shoulder. We stopped at the Red Mart for slushes, then turned around, went to the Dairy Burger for ice cream, where Mr. Berkson, our old science teacher, lurked in the bushes installing irrigation, and we waved and beeped our horn at him and he scowled at us because he hates our entire family. We went west down the highway, past another town limit sign, to the lake, where we chased rabbits on the bike path with the car, whipped shitties in open fields, sped down Half Mile Hill like freefall, and even though the car slipped on our second pass of the hill, and I got scared, it was the most fun I’d had in years. I felt happy, lucky, proud to be with her. Cool Trina Wong and her weird little sister. We were fine.

  Eventually we parked by the water where she convinced me to get out of the car. I fucking loved it. It was totally black, the peaceful lap of lakewater on shore. There was a ghostly noise. We gripped each other and laughed so hard, louder than the loon. I told her about the time our sister Stef and I caught fish with safety pins, that other time we saw an owl. I wasn’t used to doing all the talking, I’m still not, but I liked it. Her eyes on me, she huddled in like I was a fire. Her smell. Perfume, shampoo, makeup, cigarettes. Sweet.

  Still, the fight was in my head. I started talking about when Gene, for fun, yelled down from our apartment window at some C
hristian parade, and without meaning to, went on to rant about our dad.

  “You have to understand where he’s coming from,” Trina said, putting on her big sister hat, though I didn’t want advice then — not from her or anyone. “Dude’s got a Grade Three education, but Mom lets him walk all over her. He wants us to do the same. You know you’re smarter than him. We all know. And it’s a shame. He has the money, and he has a bad temper. He can make your life hell. But someday you’ll graduate and then you’ll be gone, and he won’t be there, cutting into you.”

  The lights were out when we got home and snuck in together. Our room a grubby apricot, stinky beetles in the crevices, walls streaked grey where our hands and feet had rubbed while sleeping. Dreams of fighting or running away. We talked some more, about her boyfriend Kirk and whatever guy I was crushing on at the time, about the clothes she wanted from the store and the things we wanted in general. Good boyfriends, long lives. She described the house she was going to live in, a purple bungalow — orchid purple, like the number five crayon — with white trim and a concrete step. I told her I thought it would be cool someday to go to university.

  “You should,” she said and flicked out the lamp. “Happy birthday, Chris. Have a good year, okay? Be crazy if you want to.”

  I collapsed in my dirty bed smiling. Everything’ll be good, I thought. Happy birthday. Seventeen. Your sister loves you.

  At 3:06 a.m., I woke up. Sometimes you just know. I felt for her in her covers, lightly, in case she was there. It’s something I did a lot back then to see if she’d gotten home from wherever she was. No one to check if not me. Sometimes I did that and felt an arm or a leg, then went back to sleep. A few times, she woke up and yelled at me. This time there was no one there. I turned on the light. Her bed was made — she’d never made her bed in her whole life — and on top of her blanket was a folded sheet of paper, a note that said she’d gone to see the world, that she would write, that she was sorry, that she might come back someday, maybe to visit, maybe to live, she didn’t know, and that she hoped I’d have a good life, whatever I chose. I had already chosen to stay.

  I went through all the rooms and closets in the house. I kept expecting her to jump out. Boo! Fucking scared you, didn’t I? she would say. I went downstairs and turned on all the lights and went aisle by aisle through the store like a snake. Only when I came up empty did I go out back, outside. Her car wasn’t there. I woke my parents to tell them that thing no parent wants to hear. “We have to go,” I said.

  My dad and I had been fighting nine hours before, but he cared about me again and didn’t want me to leave. “You know why,” he said, and didn’t need to.

  I said, “If you don’t come, I’m going on my own.”

  It hurt him, I saw it and was sorry, but he got out of bed and into some outside clothes while I called the cops, who said call back in two days.

  My mom insisted on staying home. She said she didn’t think she could help, even though she’s always talking about how fast her eyes are. I didn’t push because there wasn’t time to hear all her excuses. Saturdays are busy during rodeo. No one else can open the store. Truth is, she’s scared. She thinks her body will evaporate the second she leaves town. Part of me, a big part, understands, but she still should have come with us.

  My dad and I went to Kirk’s house first. I thumped on the door, rang their bell for a whole minute. Kirk’s mom was probably awake and just didn’t want to get it. I stumbled around in the dark to the back of the house, where her bedroom was, yelling “Hello! Is anybody there? Hello!” I would’ve woken the neighbours if I had to. I came back to the front of the house and thumped on the door some more, till I heard shifting and rustling inside, someone mumbling. The door opened.

  “She’s not here,” Kirk’s mom said, all squinty in her housecoat.

  Don’t mess with me, I thought. I’ll knock your fucking teeth out. “Please,” I said, and explained the situation. My dad stood around awkward in his orange hunting cap maybe ten feet behind me.

  She made us wait in the hall. Kirk came out in a grey sweatsuit, hair smushed in the back, face scrunched against the light. He knew it was bad news. We went into the kitchen and he sat down right away, head in his hands as I told him what had happened.

  “Do you know where she might have gone?” I asked. “Did she borrow any money from you?”

  He spoke quietly, didn’t have any useful answers. He said he’d last seen her the day before, asked about the note, said she wouldn’t have left without telling him. That he couldn’t believe it.

  I looked for signs of her anyway. The house was messy, socks and gossip magazines on the floor, junk piled high on every surface. “Call us if you find anything,” I said as we left.

  TRINA HAD AT LEAST an hour on us. She could’ve been anywhere by then. My dad drove slow so we could see down side roads, then sped up so we could look into cars as we passed them. Around Alhambra, he said something about bad luck and then went quiet. I wanted him to say more, about how it felt, how it was happening again — another kid gone, the fourth one — but I knew it wasn’t something he could give me. Instead I thought about the people and animals who leave their clans and go wandering into the woods when they know their times are coming. Why would they do that, I asked myself, and thought of reasons: They don’t want to spread sickness. It’s their last chance to see that pond, or the aurora by themselves. Solitude before death is just a thing some want. But there is no want, just instinct. I decided then that when it came time for me, I’d choose to stay with the people I love.

  Dawn came a couple of hours in. I peered into ditches, forests, and fields, down other roads, wishing that my dad was a better driver or that I was fast enough to take it all in. The sun, rising ahead of us behind a hill, seemed brighter than normal. I was staring into fields. Everything I saw was yellow and blue. But then I looked out the windshield and saw we were on the centre line. “Ba,” I said, but he didn’t respond. A sad look in his eyes, or maybe not. His hands were steady on the wheel.

  As we reached the top of the hill, we saw another car, so sudden it was like it wasn’t there. It blocked out that sun, so bright if I were a believer, I’d say it was God. Does God even exist? You’d think with all we’ve gone through I might have faith in something, that I’d be like my dad and fear the power of ancestors and dead people, or I’d go to church, but where’s the proof?

  I wrapped my hand around the wheel and yanked hard. We lurched into the ditch — the pull and speed — and things flew around in the car, coins, bits of dirt. I was so fucking scared. I tried looking at him, my favourite person left alive besides Trina, I would’ve been okay if he were the last thing I saw, but I couldn’t, I tried harder, inertia, PLEASE, then something big hit me in the face and chest, and everything went white.

  I didn’t see him. I missed my chance. The afterlife is white. We come from nothing, then go back into nothing. But then the white started to shrink, and there was pressure on my shoulder and lap. I was upside down, held in by my seatbelt, and the airbag was deflating. My dad was rubbing his head, slow and confused. He was hurt. I reached out for him, but he shoved my hand away, yelling, “Why you grub the wheel?”

  “What do you mean? You almost killed us!”

  He started swearing at me in Chinese, things I mostly don’t know the translations for, though one of them means I hate you. I almost told him off, but stopped myself. Part of why we fight so much is that one of us can’t be the bigger person. That’s what Stef used to say, and I saw it was true when Trina or my brother Gene fought with my dad. I remember thinking, If only you could just shut up and walk away, we wouldn’t have to hear all this, we could go back to laughing about the chicken head on Trina’s plate and her acting mad about it.

  I’m not an athletic person, but I somehow got out of the car without hurting myself. My dad had his window down by the time I got to him, still obviously pissed, his arm resting on the frame. “Are you okay?” I said. He didn’t answer. It was
like he was pretending I wasn’t there. Who’s the adult now, fuckhead, I wanted to say, but instead I told him I was gonna get help. I asked if he wanted to come.

  “Why I come with you?” he said, sputtering.

  It was beautiful where we were — sunshine, rolling hills, a couple of old barns a few miles away. A car passed, loud.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked. He has diabetes.

  “No.”

  “Lei ho noi mo sic yeh,” I said. You haven’t eaten in a while. There was nothing to dispute. “We’ll get you something to eat.”

  Eventually he said “Aww, hell!” and got out. We started thumbing for a ride, beseeching RVs and big trucks towing boats and trailers to stop. Turns out a Saturday morning in June is a very bad time to hitch a ride — one of those things you won’t know until you try. Everyone is in a rush to set up at a rodeo or to get the last good spot at the campground. They assume someone else will help. I imagined Trina going by in her car. What would that be like, her leaving home then seeing us all pathetic on the side of the road? She would stop. Oh my god, she would say. I put you through hell. I’m so sorry. We’d drive home, leave my dad’s broken-down car where it was, and she’d promise not to leave again.

  After a while, we started walking — slow because of his low blood sugar, his foot problems, a bad hip, a bit of arthritis. My dad’s not a runner. A truck with jet skis in the back honked its horn at us, roared by. I saw some bushes at the edge of a field and went to take a better look. Stef told me that white berries are usually poison, blue berries are often edible, and with red berries, you have a fifty-fifty chance. The berries were blue. I was scared — there’s always an outside chance, right? — but I tried one. Seemed okay. Saskatoon? I called my dad. He limped over to where I was, arms pumping, perked up, not mad anymore. My photogenic dad, eager and roguish like a little kid who loves adventure and who for some sad and awful reason got stuck in a decrepit old body. I had him wait a couple of minutes, in case the berries were poison, but when nothing happened, I picked a few for him.