The Sweetest One Page 4

  I start reading about saints, enjoy it even though I’m not religious. Agnes in the brothel against her will, God striking men blind as they raped her. Anthony in the desert fighting the devil. These stories make me want to write my own, so I find the contest entry form Mac gave me earlier today. It’s in Comic Sans, the font most commonly used by adults in their communiqués to kids they don’t really understand. Thanks, adults. I wasn’t going to read this before, but now I see it’s in Comic Sans.

  1997 Central Western Alberta

  High School Non-Fiction Writing Contest

  Theme: Travel. Where have you been? Where do you want to go and why? What does travel mean to you? (Is it the blending of cultures? A way to experience new things?) Keeping in mind that travel is an everyday part of life (eg., travelling to the grocery store or to a friend’s house), what are some of your favourite places to travel?

  The essay can be narrative, telling the story of someone else’s travels. Does someone you know have a particularly touching, funny, or interesting travel story? (Newspaper articles count.)

  Contest Deadline: November 30, 1997

  Winners will be selected in the summer and published in a special travel insert in the July 3rd edition of the Edmonton Journal.

  First Prize: $250 scholarship, and a $500 travel voucher, courtesy Destiny Vacations

  Second Prize: $100 scholarship, and a $250 travel voucher, courtesy Destiny Vacations

  Where have I been? Vancouver. Edmonton. Calgary. The mountains. Nowhere else. Where’s Trina been? Where is she now?

  4

  *

  EIGHT YEARS AGO, my mom got a package in the mail with Chinese writing on the front. Packages didn’t come from China every day or even every week, but they came often enough that I didn’t ask questions. Usually they were packing tubes with Chinese celebrity magazines inside, or letters from my mom’s old school. This one wasn’t anything special, I thought. But a couple of days after it came, I heard my parents talking, not angry and not about the store. Their tones of voice were weird, not ones I’d heard them use with each other before. They were solemn. I didn’t understand some of what they said, but I got that he was telling her to go, he was insistent. Go where?

  It turned out they were talking about my mom’s high school reunion. The day after the letter came, while rummaging in a drawer, I found a black and white photo of her lounging off the front of this old car. It was a convertible, dark coloured with chrome details, a grill, a hood ornament that said mg. She had on a skirt, something I’d almost never seen her wear. I showed the picture to Stef, Trina, Gene, Reg, and finally to my mom, and when I did it turned up her face’s dimmer switch.

  “Whose car is this?” I said.

  “I don’t remember,” she said, sly and playful.

  “An old boyfriend’s?”

  “Yah, maybe. Do you know how big my waist was?”

  “No.”

  “Eighteen inches,” she said.

  “How old were you?”

  “Maybe eighteen?”

  It’s hard to believe anyone ever had a good time in high school, but my mom did. She loved those days. I’ve seen other pictures of her since: Pretty and excited with friends at a sock hop. Playing croquet with some guy in a suit, a toothy, formal smile on her face like she’s winning the game and doesn’t want to rub it in. It’s only through these pictures that I can imagine her being my age. She loves dancing the Twist — when no one else is in the store, we do it while I sing Buddy Holly love songs to her. She was a good kid who loved to read. She likes talking to me about how she read Dickens and Shakespeare back then, how she learned to speak Mandarin fluently with only one lesson a week. She had so many friends and so much fun back then and no friends and seemingly so little fun now.

  I asked her that night if she was planning to go to the reunion. She said she wasn’t sure. I asked her again a couple of days later and got the same answer.

  Eventually, Stef confronted her. “You’re going, right?” she said. My mom had not been back in twenty years.

  “Who will take care of the store?”

  “I will,” Stef said.

  My mom wasn’t sure about that.

  “So Dad will,” Stef said. “You have to go. You haven’t seen those people in decades. You know you’ll regret it if you don’t, right?”

  “I don’t want to go alone.”

  “I’ll go with you.” Stef said it off the cuff, but it made sense. It was summertime, no school, and she spoke the best Cantonese of all of us. She was fifteen, not too young for something like that. It was settled.

  In the weeks before they left, my mom was happier than I’ve ever seen her, and the trip did not disappoint. Stef said she had a good time, too, though the weather was way hotter than she expected and she would have preferred less time on the bus and more time at destinations. Days were spent driving by rivers, mountains, pagodas, and fields, the tour guide speaking of the local vegetation and economy while my mom and her old classmates drowned him out singing their school songs.

  They did stop at some places. One of them was this monastery in the desert: Sand Temple, it was called. It used to have old, intricate engravings on the outside but they’d been worn away by sand over the course of centuries. Inside it had no real floor, just drifting piles of sand and dust, and there were monks walking around in square hats and dark robes. Stef, who’d never been inside a church, said the temple was serious and silent, but the desperation of people begging things of gods was jarring. You could write a wish on a card then put it on a wall. There were hundreds of them there, overlapping out of lack of space. Imagine all those wishes, all those needs, all those impossible odds. Stef couldn’t read Chinese, but she imagined people pleading for luck they’d never have, for terminal illnesses to be cured, for indifference to change to undying devotion. She thought it was a weird juxtaposition, the visitors — many of whom were probably poor — in this temple full of expensive sacred objects. There were silk scrolls, embroidered tapestries, glass mosaics, thrones, and pictures inlaid with gold. Stef checked all the rooms and saw gold statues in every one, but some rooms had curtains and she couldn’t see in. She and I are alike. We need to know things. There were long lineups outside the rooms. Stef asked my mom what was going on and my mom asked the tour guide and translated his reponse. “This temple famous for fortune-telling,” she said.

  “How much time do we have?” Stef said.

  My mom checked her watch. “Half hour.”

  “Can I have my fortune told?”

  My mom hesitated — she’s different from my dad in that she’s generous with us in terms of money and things we want from the store — but eventually said yes. Stef joined a line and ended up spending most of her time in the temple waiting while my mom looked around some more. She got in less than five minutes before they had to leave. Inside the small room, a smiling monk sat on the floor behind a table. He asked her to shake a stick out of a jar and throw pieces of wood onto the ground, then told her fortune.

  Stef and my mom went on to see the Great Wall and the Yangtze River, giant pandas and Tiananmen Square. They also stopped in on my uncle, grandma, and cousins. Before they knew it, two weeks had gone by, and they were coming home. It couldn’t have been soon enough.

  We fell apart without Stef. If a family is like ingredients in a recipe, she was our salt. Salt is vital. It brings flavours out of the other parts and makes everything work better together. With-out it a dish falls flat. If you run out of salt, you might still get by with soy sauce, salted fish, or preserved sausage. In our case, though, there was no one to take Stef’s place. My dad kept getting mad for dumb reasons, and there was no one to talk him down. When I tried we’d end up fighting. Gene had girl trouble, he always did. Too good-looking. Trina was caught cheating on a test at summer school. Reggie was depressed. Stef would have been the one to console us, but with her gone, we had to console ourselves.

  “He’s so stupid,” I said to Trina about our d
ad. “I wish he was dead.”

  “I didn’t cheat,” Trina said to me. “I was just getting paper from my notebook.”

  “What do you do,” Gene said, “when two girls like you and you like both of them back?”

  Stef and my mom’s return flight arrived in Edmonton on a Sunday morning. My dad came in to wake us so we could pick them up, and one by one, Reggie, Trina, and I stretched, yawned, and got out of bed. We knew how my dad can be. He’d come by once, twice, and if you weren’t awake by the third time he came, depending on how he was feeling, there could be trouble.

  When my dad started yelling, I was on the other side of the house, brushing my teeth. I came out of the bathroom — I was always missing out on stuff — and saw my dad and Trina standing in the doorway of the boys’ room. The light was on. Something felt off so I ran there.

  Gene was lying in bed, looking scared, which surprised me. “Wuck’s wong?” I said, my toothbrush in my mouth. What’s wrong?

  “I told you I can’t move,” he said to Trina, who was by the bed now. She put her hand on his chin, maybe to force his mouth open and closed while she said something funny, but he made a terrified dog noise and screamed, “Stop it,” without trying to knock her hand away.

  That was when she started to believe him. She squeezed by me, started running to the phone, and I followed her. When we came back, Reggie was standing there, dumbstruck. He was never much help in crunch times, but he helped my dad bring Gene to the car. Gene was having trouble moving on his own. I pictured him playing basketball earlier that week and it distressed me even more.

  We drove to Emerg, where they did X-Rays, took a blood sample, asked Gene about his medical history. We did what we could, told him when the elastic cuff was going to go around his arm and when the needle was about to go in, but Gene was panicking and there wasn’t much we could say to help. Trina was thirteen and I was twelve and nothing bad had happened to our family yet.

  My dad was leaning forward in his chair with his hands on his thighs. He looked like how I felt, worried, dazed, and like we needed some propping up. Reggie seemed to be thinking about something else entirely. Maybe it was school. He looked a little annoyed.

  Eventually Dr. Bosch called us in. He said he’d looked at the X-Ray and blood results and didn’t know what was wrong. “His muscles are fine, and his vitals are intact.” he said. “No sign of stroke, not that we’d expect one at his age.”

  “Something wrong,” my dad said, drawing out the words for emphasis. “He can’t move.”

  “I’m suggesting he see a neurologist,” Dr. Bosch said. He didn’t know which of us to talk to now, so he was talking at all of us.

  “Special doctor?” my dad said. The doctor looked at him.

  “Yes. For the brain.” He spoke louder, slower than before. “I’ll get him an appointment. It’ll take a couple of weeks.”

  “Brain,” my dad said, astonished and worried. “He don’t need to see special doctor now?”

  “It takes a long time to see one,” Dr. Bosch said. “There’s a waiting list. But it might not be as bad as you think. His heart and everything else is fine. He’ll live. What we need to work on is … the connection between his muscles and brain.”

  “How do you know he be okay?” my dad said.

  “Well, you can leave him here for another day or two if you want, and we’ll keep watch.”

  “Yah. Please,” my dad said. It was past noon. Stef and my mom would have been at the airport for hours by then, and we had no way to get a hold of them.

  My dad left us at the hospital and drove to the airport alone. Reggie, Trina, and I took turns staying at home to wait for a phone call from Stef and my mom, and staying in the hospital with Gene. He was scared. Of course he was. I brought books so we could read to him. It was hard to choose which ones, since most of the best books are sad or weird. I read some of The Hobbit to him because it’s fun and long and has a happy ending, but reading never was Gene’s thing. He said, “Keep talking to me,” so Trina told him fun stories about people who came into the store, like the guy looking for horse deodorant and the drunk guy our mom chased out with a boot. It was all stuff he already knew about, but he didn’t complain.

  THERE WAS LOTS to do when Stef came back. It was back-to-school, one of our busy times. Gene was going to the city for tests around once a week or every other. No one knew what was wrong with him, but we heard different theories: Multiple sclerosis — which was weird for someone his age — young-onset Parkinson’s disease, Lyme disease, lupus. When he was home, we fed him and helped him go to the bathroom — I turned away when I took off his pants for him, saw it anyway but pretended I hadn’t so he’d feel okay — and we helped him with homework when school started.

  We also shot the shit. Stef told Gene about her trip to keep him amused and calm. She talked about the temple, its dust and monks. She said she saw a fortune-teller, but she didn’t tell us what he said.

  “Come on,” Trina said. “That’s the best part.”

  “Naw,” Stef said. “It’s private.”

  “Private?” Trina said. “Even to your own family? I bet he said you’ll end up a millionaire, a professor with ten kids and a good-looking husband.”

  Stef was grim. “No,” she said.

  “I bet he said you’ll be famous for your survival skills,” Trina said.

  Stef said, “No. Stop asking about it.”

  “I bet he said you’ll get the store.”

  “No,” Stef said for the last time, ferrying a spoonful of rice with beef and greens towards Gene’s mouth.

  Gene said, “I bet it’s about me. It’s why she doesn’t want to say.” He closed his mouth around the spoon.

  He was right. Later that night, with Gene in the next room, Stef told me and Trina about the fortune. Sickness in your family and premature death. I’m not religious — I don’t think Jesus died for our sins or that ancestors pull for you to win the lottery after you visit them at their graves — but what happened to Gene sounded an awful lot like sickness to me. You don’t have to believe in it, but fortune-telling is a very old art. Stef, though, said fortunes were like horoscopes: you could read a lot into them and find what you were looking for. She was too rational, too scientific, to believe that stuff, said that she only got her fortune out of curiosity, because it looked fun. When in Rome, right? Still, I wondered if she was pretending not to believe so we wouldn’t be worried about the future.

  5

  *

  THE LIGHTS IN the library start going out. Closing time, five-thirty. I walk out, past a brown metal cart full of university calendars, flimsy and useless as phonebooks for a town you know you’ll never visit. Nancy showed me one of hers the other day. I had to pretend I wasn’t interested. But Abnormal Psychology, Classics of Dystopic Literature, Invertebrate Zoology — fucking hell. My mouth was watering.

  There’s a bite in the air. Two minutes out the door, the feeling of pins pricking at my face. I’m cold even with my coat on. It’s from the 1970s, I got it from the White Elephant.

  I come home through the back just in time to hear my dad yelling at my mom about why I’m never there, as if it’s her fault. They’re in the main part of the store, in front of customers, which is bullshit. Get some self-control, you fucking ape, I want to yell at him, but you don’t want to be around my dad when he’s in a bad mood. My bedroom door locks, so I head upstairs, climb into bed.

  What do I want? I want to be in this family and I don’t want to be in this family. Like Trina. She could be anywhere, even in Caroline. Maybe in love with some guy, maybe pregnant. Too busy to call. Maybe she doesn’t want to. Maybe she’s still travelling. She always wanted that. You can drive all the way to Peru from here, through mountains to the tip of Chile where South America, at the very last minute, points away from Antarctica. I’d like to go to there, to experience twenty-four-hour darkness or sun. There’s not a lot I don’t want to see, especially if it’s weird like that.

  A fe
w minutes later, my dad clomps down the outside hall and opens the apartment door. Sometimes you can tell a person is angry by the sound of their walk, but this time I can’t. He pauses outside my room. He’ll start banging on the door any second now. I want a nicer dad. I love my parents, just wish my dad wasn’t always so mad. Please. He keeps walking.

  Half an hour later, my mom comes up. I unlock the door. “Can I come out? Do you think he’s still mad?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. She crossed the biggest ocean in the world for this, for a husband who takes everything out on her and a kid who can’t stop getting into trouble. “Why can’t you be home?”

  “Why do I have to be home? What is there to do?”

  At dinner, my dad is quiet, acts like he hadn’t just embarrassed himself and us in public. Steamed chicken leftovers, they look fully cooked but I only take one piece. You never know. When we’re done eating, my mom and I do the dishes while my dad lies on the couch, falling asleep to some show. There’s one of us at each sink.

  I turn to her. “Did anybody call?”

  “What?” she says. She’s watching tv, too, keeps putting dirty dishes in the rinse water. A film of oil on top.

  I repeat: “Did anybody call.”

  A shock in her water. She looks at me. “When? Today? No. You expecting a call?”