The Sweetest One Read online

  He stopped me in the middle of picking and said, “Do you think we steal?” There was a house two hundred feet away — it was green and white, well kept, with bushes and windows like knocked-out eyes.

  I said, “You need the energy.”

  He chewed on his guilt for a while, then reached out, dainty, and took a berry, then another and another and another. I ate some, too, put more in an bag I had in my pocket. Always carry a bag. It was something else Stef used to say.

  We crossed the highway and started thumbing for a ride again. Didn’t have to do it long before this old steel truck pulled up, rolled down its window. Sometimes luck rains down on you and a bunch of good things happen all at once.

  “You goin’ to Carstairs?” I asked.

  “Yep,” the guy inside replied.

  We got there in under fifteen minutes, bought insulin, had breakfast, called my mom and a tow truck, which dropped us off at the hospital in Spring Hills. The clinic was closed, so we waited at Emerg six hours to be told we only had deep tissue bruises. My dad and his cute black eye.

  We walked home from the hospital, down Main. My mom was upstairs watching Chinavision, a slice of hot yam on the tv tray beside her. She shuffle-ran towards us when she heard the door, all jazz hands and incredulous eyes, this weird, sprightly smile on her face. A smile. Hadn’t we almost died? I guess it was a smile of relief. She told us to never leave town again.

  STEF ONCE SAID that when someone is missing, you’re more likely to find them the sooner you start looking. So even though the world almost succeeded in killing us that day, I had to give it a chance to finish the job.

  I went out to the living room, where my dad was telling my mom the story of what happened for, like, the fifteenth time. She was still in her chair. He was taking bone plates out of the microwave. One had a sausage bun, the other a piece of yam. Speaking in a mix of English and hillbilly Cantonese, he told my mom I caused the accident. “But she know how to help if trouble.”

  “Of course, she does,” my mom replied. “She knows how to do things.”

  He perked up when he saw me.

  “Wanna go back out?” I said.

  “What,” he said, both a question and not.

  “We could go back out with the truck.”

  “No,” he said. He hasn’t driven in the five months since. It’s not a thing I’m supposed to ask him about, so I don’t.

  I called Kirk. He said he came up empty, too, but fired off explanations left and right, said she needed time alone, that she was just in Edmonton, that she’d be back, I’d see, note or no note, he knew her. He was scrambling, like someone bailing water from a sinking boat.

  I tried keeping my anger in check. Kirk was cool, but a part of me knew he took her away from us — not because he encouraged her to leave, I don’t know if he did — but because a family like ours has its own rich life and that’s not something you should fuck with. They used to go out every night, and she loved him, maybe more than she loved us. Before she left, she was already gone. Kirk and I were united by our shared misery, by this shared goal of finding her, and I needed him for his car and licence. But we weren’t close, and I suspected we never would be.

  He picked me up and we took another road out of town. We drove around, made random left and right turns. Though he seemed really sad, like he wanted my condolences, Kirk was chatty. He asked me how things were at school, how the store was, how my parents were, had I applied to universities for early acceptance yet?

  I looked across the empty fields. Maybe they weren’t empty. Maybe I just couldn’t see what was there. It was getting dark again. I put my telepathic feelers out and wondered what she could possibly be thinking. Could she be happier somewhere else? Maybe she couldn’t be happy unless she knew what else there was. What else did there need to be?

  When Kirk dropped me off at home, I went to my room and saw that Trina had taken things: clothes from the closet, makeup and perfume, a box of tapes and cds, and her little player that skipped on bumps. Everything else was where she left it. The rest of her clothes. This red leather jacket I always loved. Her hat, a turquoise blue kids’ cowboy hat she wore almost every day for two years, even to Grad. Why wouldn’t you take your one iconic piece of clothing with you when you left? Maybe she wanted to start fresh. Maybe it was insurance, a promise she’d be coming back. Or it was something for me to remember her by. As if I’d forget. The room smelled like her.

  I took a moment, just stood there looking around till I couldn’t. Then I left, closed the door behind me, and went to the boys’ room. I plopped down on Gene’s bed and snuggled into the wall. Sometimes you can hear mice on the other side, but I didn’t that night. I pulled the blanket over my head and lay there wondering if and when she’d be back and how it would’ve been if my dad and I had died instead of only getting hurt.

  We filed a missing persons report two days later, but what was the use? She was long gone, maybe already settled somewhere by then, maybe — I wish she’d call. One call, one letter, just to let us know that she’s okay. Would that really be so much to ask?

  2

  *

  THAT WAS FIVE months ago. Since then, summer played out. I started sleeping in the boys’ room for good, moved my stuff in there. A few times I thought I saw Trina’s car and walked around all night looking. The store was quiet, a trickle of customers and some German tourists. It was a lean-your-chin-against-the-heel-of-your-hand-with-your-elbow-on-the-counter kind of summer. We didn’t go anywhere or do anything. We worked all day, and at night I watched my parents shrink, watched them do nothing but watch tv. I guess I could have been better. I could have joked, helped form a sense of family cohesion. But I wasn’t in a joking mood and my parents aren’t the kind to talk about feelings.

  It’s November now and I’m in Grade Twelve. Over summer, word got out about Trina. She was cool, as I said. Though she was outside the social order at school, and though she couldn’t give a fuck about that, she was liked.

  Summer gives your identity a chance to shift. If you’re lucky and try real hard, you can come back as someone else, someone better in their eyes. I came back a weirdo who likes to read, who likes music no one else likes. Doesn’t help that all the kids in my family but me are gone. First day back at school, Curt Mayhew called me Dead Girl and it stuck. Pretty soon, that was my name to everyone. I don’t mind. I have my friends. I have my cold, black heart and thoughts of Ty Rodriguez.

  The first week of school brought him here. I don’t know where he came from, but he’s six foot two and has a low-rider bike, Buddy Holly glasses, clothes from the seventies, and dyed orange hair. All week I float home from school, still looking for Trina’s car, but in a daze, dreaming about Ty Rodriguez. I pretend to do homework at the front counter of the store while imagining what it would be like to kiss him — he smokes, the smell and taste of that. Sometimes my mom will come and talk about university — will you be going? What will you take? More calendars came in the mail for you — and I’ll shrug off the stool, slink away, go find someone who needs help. Carly Anderson needs a size for her husband. Boyd Nielsen needs a claim ticket made for the pair of boots he’s bringing in for a half sole and heel.

  University is university. I always said I’d go, but I’m in Grade Twelve, and I’m gonna die this year, so what’s the point? Rather than read Aristotle or Marx or learn the finer points of botany or abnormal psychology for a couple of months, I’m gonna spend the time with my parents. Who would fault me for making a choice like that?

  MONDAY MORNING, MRS. Blackburn opens the door to her office, wearing a red and black polyester skirt suit and sheer black pantyhose. “Chrysler! Come in,” she says.

  We sit across from each other. Her office is small with no windows and metal shelves you can buy at the hardware store. She has posters on her wall. YOU CAN DO IT! one of them says in blue handwritten font, multicultural kids doing jumping jacks below. But all the kids in this school are white except for me, Aabidah Meer, and so
me Natives. Files and papers everywhere. There’s this thing on her desk, a clear glass globe the size of a softball with seashells trapped inside. I think of the factory it was made in, millions of live sea creatures shipped in one end and crates of glass balls coming out the other. Where would they have found all those shells?

  I look up, and she’s smiling at me. “You wanted to see me?” I ask.

  A baby starfish in the glass ball, tiny bubbles caught in its skin.

  “Is it true you’re not going to university?” Her face is earnest.

  I look down. “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You could do big things, you know.”

  It makes me smile, and I don’t want it to. “You’re supposed to say stuff like that.”

  “What happened with all those calendars we sent out for?”

  “My mom got kind of crazy when she saw the one from Harvard.”

  A teacher smile, then she waits for me to say something else. When I don’t, she says, “Well, you got a bunch, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” It was nice, getting mail.

  “But you haven’t applied anywhere.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “And you didn’t look at the calendars?”

  “No, I looked at them.” I thought it’d be a way to see places without leaving town, but all universities look the same. Stone buildings, weird buildings, big green lawns and trees, multicultural students. Even the University of Hawaii was nothing special to look at — just a bunch of people wearing leis over their normal clothes.

  “And?”

  I shrug.

  “Chris, I think I know why you’re not applying, and it’s sad. But you can’t just let go of your future because of what might happen. You owe it to yourself, and the world, I think.”

  The world? It’s not like I’m gonna discover the cure for cancer or something.

  “Isn’t there something you want to do, as a career?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say under my breath, but she doesn’t hear.

  “I look at your grades, and I guess you could do more work in English and Math, but let’s see: Bio, 87, Chem, 92 —”

  “Mrs. B., I know I get okay marks in some things, but that’s not the issue.” I’m trying hard not to tell her I’m probably gonna die within the next nineteen months. There’s a lot of ways to die — probably more than there are ways to live. You could get hit by a car, get a bad case of food poisoning, be the victim of armed robbery. Maybe you crash your bike or come down with something: tuberculosis, pneumonia, bronchitis, lupus, Ebola, diabetes, complications from diabetes.

  “Would it hurt for you to try?”

  Yes, it would. I see myself in a dorm room, lying awake at night, worrying about a pain in my chest that could be the start of a heart attack or heartburn — worrying about whether or not Trina came into the store that day looking for me, about whether or not she left when she couldn’t find me. Or say the pollution in whatever city I live in is bad and I get cancer, say someone jumps me on my way home from the library one day.

  “Can we just try something? You don’t have to answer me, but it’s probably better if you do. Are there any jobs that interest you?”

  “Yeah, dental hygienist,” I say.

  “What?”

  “A dental hygienist. You know, the people you see before the dentist? They clean your teeth.”

  “Anything else?”

  Entomologist. Ornithologist. Urban planner. “I wanna write.” You don’t have to leave town to write.

  “Like journalism?”

  “No, like stories.” I’m reading The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. If I knew an Illustrated Man, he’d tell me stories with his skin. He’d fill me up with words, pictures, ideas, everything exotic, so I wouldn’t have to leave.

  “So you want an English degree.”

  “No, I just want to write. What’s so bad about staying in Spring Hills? Work at my parents’ store all day, come home and write stories at night.”

  “It sounds like you’ve put some thought into this.”

  “I mean, I may go to university, but I don’t think now’s the time.”

  Of course it’s the time, I expect her to say, but she doesn’t. A phone rings in another room. Mrs. B. is looking at her hands on the top of her desk. She picks at a cuticle. Then she looks at me.

  “Chris, I have to tell you: you don’t belong here.”

  I look down.

  “There are lots of kids in this school I can’t imagine anywhere else. Their parents grew up here, their grandparents grew up here. But, Chris, your family —”

  No.

  “— has always been special. Reggie, I thought he was going to do something big, go off and be a doctor or scientist. Trina, I thought she’d move to the city, be an artist.”

  Fat lot she knows.

  “I just want you to think — if you could live somewhere right now, anywhere — I want you to close your eyes and think of where.”

  “I’d live here.”

  “Because you love it so much.”

  “No,” I say. “No one seems to understand. I have constraints.”

  “I know about your constraints,” she says. She pushes buttons on her plastic watch. Mrs. B. needs a timer because she also teaches gym. “But for three minutes, I want you to pretend you don’t have them. I’m going to time you, and at the end of that you’re gonna tell me where you want to be.”

  I don’t need three minutes to know. I’ve been thinking about it for years. New York. The most mythologized place you can name besides heaven. All the movies in the world probably play there. It’s got hundreds of clubs, all kinds of music. Fresh vegetables at all-night corner stores. Pigeons, bookstores, the Lower East Side. Ten million people, all strangers, at rush hour, a hundred thousand out in the middle of the night. Hundreds of nationalities. Good pizza. But it’s hard to move to the States, and school is expensive there. Honestly, I’d be okay with Edmonton. Anywhere with lots of people and a university. Or Toronto. That’s somewhere new. I don’t know anything about it, except it’s big.

  I tell Mrs. B. New York, Toronto, and Edmonton, so she’ll let me go. Nice ideas but they’re not gonna happen.

  AFTER SCHOOL MY dad and I go shopping at the Co-op. That’s where we go for groceries — and insulin at the in-store pharmacy. They have a senior’s discount. Everyone says hi to my dad, and he waves and replies in kind, using their names when he remembers — “Frank!” “Jim!” “Rick!” — and a loud, vague shout when he doesn’t. Spring Hills is a town of six thousand, the kind of place where everyone knows each other and their cars, where more often than not people in affairs get found out when someone sees the wrong truck parked outside a house.

  A flash down Aisle 3 — canned soup — catches my eye. Halfway down, a small, thin woman with long black hair. I go, telling my dad I’ll be back. “I don’t need anything,” he says. But I do. It isn’t her, though. Why would it be her? It shouldn’t be her. This lady looks at me like what the.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I thought you were someone else.”

  And then for some reason, from out of thin air, by a pyramid of cans, Ty Rodriguez is there in a brown Co-op uniform, writ-ing in a notebook, this look of concentration on his face. He’s smart. Writing with his left hand. I’m left-handed, too! I pull a can off the pyramid and read: corn, water, sugar, salt. Niblets. I take a deep breath. Smoke and musky cologne. He smells so good. His shoes are nice. You can’t get ones like that here, maybe they’re from Europe. I cough and his head moves. Dyed orange hair. Say something. I reach for another can, a few inches from his elbow. I imagine our skin grazing, the back of my hand, his arm, electricity. How many more ingredients are there in creamed corn? One, two, three, four — say something — five. A glimpse of his cool glasses, his nose has so much character. Say something! I don’t. I put the can down and walk away.

  When I find my dad he’s in the meat section, in the midst of another good smell. He hands me a toothpick poked
through a hunk of something brown and greasy. His thick fingers, bleached white at the tips. I look at him, he nods at me, his jaw working. “Go ahead,” he says. English slang sounds weird coming from him, like marbles in his mouth, but it’s still a comfort. I put it in my mouth and chew. Spicy, meaty, salty. Sausage. We try all the different flavours. The samples lady and her electric frying pan can’t keep up. People jostle around me, someone shoves me. Hands coming at the plate from all angles. Nothing in the garbage beside her but toothpicks. She tells us how much they are and my dad looks at me, eyebrows raised, mouth open in surprise over the price, before limping away and coming back with five packs.

  “So many?” I say.

  “What, you think we can’t eat them all?”

  “No,” I say like he’s a little boy. “You have a prime rib and a chicken in the fridge, and five packs of sausage — fifty sausages — are enough for two years. Do you know how much fat is in one of those? Look,” I say, turning over a pack to show him. “Thirty grams in one, and more salt than you’re allowed in a day.”

  “Well,” he says, scrunching his face and shooing the facts away like flies.

  “No. Not ‘well.’ You’re gonna buy five packs, you’re gonna put them in the freezer, and you’re going to try to feed me one a year from now, and I won’t want it.”

  “Two forty-nine good price!”

  “It’s only good if we eat them,” I say. “They’ll be on sale again. Just buy two.”

  “I like smoky dog,” he says. I like them, too, but I shrug my shoulders and smile like what can you do. He stands his ground — he’s old and lives for food, I should let him — but eventually his face opens up, this guilty smile. He pinches me hard on the cheek, and though I’m more than old enough to hate it, I love it. Every time he smiles I want to take a picture. He puts some away, and we walk down the meat aisle, at peace with each other for now, a small, rare battle won by me in this lifelong war. I’m pretty sure that my departure from the world, as long as my dad is alive, will be marked by the purchase of a number of smokies, steaks, and roasts limited only by what the Co-op can carry. He will need to buy another three freezers for all the extra meat he will buy.