Waiting for the Cyclone Read online

  “Mexico. On the Pacific Coast, you can camp where you want. I stay down there every winter. Don’t that sound nice?”

  “That’s so cool!” I said.

  “It’s real easy to live on the beach. You could do it if you wanted. Maybe in a few years. How old are you now?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Really?” she said, eyebrows up. “That’s it? I reckoned you was at least a teenager, walking around here by yourself.”

  “I almost am,” I said.

  “You got a point there. Either way, if you wanna live on a beach when you get older, you go ahead and live on a beach. People says the world’s an oyster and that’s damn true. You can do what you want, girl.”

  As we walked, Maureen told me stories about living in Mexico. She said you can go in the morning and get a fish straight off a boat for a couple dollars. I told her a thing or two about Canada and made up some stuff, too, like when I said we have a woodstove and maple syrup trees in the yard. I wanted her to think my life was interesting.

  “It sure ain’t warm out here,” Maureen said. “I’m thinking tea might be nice. You want some?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We half-skated across the pond, sliding our feet until we reached the other side. Maureen opened the van’s side door—she hadn’t bothered to lock it. Bags of dried mushrooms hung from the roof and they made me think of the elf kingdoms in Jordie’s video games. Maureen placed the kettle on the stove and turned on the burner. Soon, the air smelled like propane and camomile. Once the water boiled, Maureen pushed up her sleeves and poured hot water into each cup. She didn’t use tea bags. Tiny shrivelled flowers bobbed on the water as I sipped. They felt gross in my mouth, but I didn’t say anything.

  “This is how life should be,” Maureen said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yep,” I agreed, though I really had no idea how life was supposed to be. Mom had gone crazy and Dad yelled all the time. I didn’t know if life would ever be good again.

  “What are you doing here, anyways?” she asked me. “Shouldn’t you be with your folks?”

  “Mom and Dad had a fight.”

  “Oh, I see. That’s why I never bothered getting married,” Maureen said.

  “You don’t want a family?”

  “Nope. I never did want no husband or kids. Now, I hope you don’t take that in a bad way. I just don’t have a mothering kind of lifestyle. I’m always on the move.”

  Maureen didn’t say much after that. I tried to think of new stuff to tell her about Canada but ended up thinking about Mom and how she looked tired all the time and drank too much. Sometimes she cried when she made us breakfast. I didn’t understand what was happening to her.

  Maureen yawned and stretched out on the bed. I knew what was coming. She checked her watch and said, “You’d better get going, little lady, before your folks get worried. I don’t wanna be causing trouble with y’all.”

  I wondered if Mom had come out of the bathroom yet. Maureen lay on the bed another minute with her eyes closed and I tried to memorize her face because we’d never see each other again. Too soon, she rolled over and put on her coat and boots. The cold burned my cheeks when I got out of the van.

  “Take care of yourself, okay?” Maureen said. “You seem like a good kid.”

  Her puffy jacket made a hissing sound like a tire losing air when we hugged.

  My feet crunched on the snow as I walked, almost ran, across the park to stay warm. Back at the hotel, Mom was passed out in an armchair. Dad lounged on the bed eating pork rinds while he watched David Letterman. He smiled when I came in but didn’t ask where I’d been.

  I put on my pyjamas in the bathroom and noticed an empty vodka bottle in the garbage. Jordan and I had to share a bed but I stayed as far away as I could so his bum wouldn’t touch me in the night.

  The next morning, Mom was still asleep in the chair. The sun came through the window and landed on her face. She looked really nice like that. I bet that’s just how she looked when Dad fell in love with her.

  WE ARRIVED AT Uncle Jim’s house in Arizona the next night. He’s Mom’s brother. I sort of remember him from when we were kids, but I wasn’t even in kindergarten the last time he came to visit. We knew he had a wife named Debbie but no one had met her. As soon as we pulled into the driveway, we saw her sitting on the front step. I could tell right away she was going to be great.

  She stood up as soon as we parked and came to meet us by the car. “What beautiful children!” she said. When she hugged me, I smelled something nice, like the perfume samples you get inside magazines. We all went inside together. Their house was better than ours because it was bigger and they had more than one TV. The best part of all, though, was the swimming pool. I couldn’t believe they had their own pool! That night, the adults sat on the patio while me and Jordan swam. Halfway through December and there we were, floating on air mattresses.

  Our cousin Cindy was at a friend’s house and didn’t come home until late. She was Debbie’s daughter, not Jim’s, so I guess she wasn’t really our cousin. She showed up wearing fake leather pants and had a rat perched on her shoulder. The rat’s name was Sid, like the singer from the Sex Pistols. Cindy put on her bathing suit and came into the pool. She was only a year older but she had breasts, unlike me. Cindy strutted down the diving board, bounced once, and sailed into the water. I watched her torpedo past in a comet of blue bubbles. I wanted to dive like that, but my legs kept smacking the water every time I tried. We swam until our skin wrinkled and then we went to bed. That night, I felt better than I had in a long time.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Dad came into the room. I couldn’t tell what time it was because of the dark curtains, but it felt really early. Dad was wearing his Scooby-Doo shirt—I could tell even in the dark. It’s my favourite.

  “You sleep okay, kiddo?”

  “I’m still sleeping,” I grumbled.

  “You don’t have to get up,” he said. “I just want to tell you something. Your mother and I are going away for a few days.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your mother and I. We need to leave. It’ll only be for a few days.”

  “Why?”

  “We just need a bit of time alone. Be good for Jim and Debbie, okay?” Dad gave me a pat on the shoulder.

  “Is Mom sick?” I felt stupid asking but I needed to know.

  “She’s just having a hard time, honey.” Dad leaned over and gave me a smooch on the forehead.

  “Love you, kiddo,” he said.

  I had a terrible feeling he might come back without Mom. I felt like crying but waited until he left.

  THE FIRST DAY without parents was strange. Jordan seemed okay but I kept thinking about when Dad first told me and Jordan about the trip. I thought it was going to be a family vacation. Debbie felt bad for us, I could tell. She asked lots of questions about school and our friends back home and let us do things like eat ice cream out the carton and go to bed without brushing our teeth. Cindy still had school during the day but she said I could play with Sid whenever I wanted. Sometimes in the afternoon, I brought him to the yard and made him obstacle courses out of toilet paper rolls. Other times, I did stuff with Debbie, like shop for groceries and get my toenails painted by professionals.

  On Saturday night, a tour guide named Oscar drove me, Debbie, Jordan, and Cindy out to the desert in a Hummer. It was so cool! The dashboard had all kinds of screens like a spaceship, and it sounded like a fighter plane when we drove fast. Oscar drove through the city until there were no lights, and then he turned onto a road where sand swished under the tires. The trees had crazy arms and sharp needles that stuck out all over the place. “They’re called mesquite trees,” Oscar said. Sometimes they have to dig their roots a hundred feet for water. They have to work hard, but they’re determined to survive.

  Cindy and Jordan ran off to look for coyotes, but I stayed behind with Debbie. We sat on the hood of the Hummer and looked at the night sky, all lit up with stars. There wer
e so many of them all crowded together and it made me think of a star forest. I also thought of a story Mom read to me as a kid, about a lady who stole the night sky and made a sparkly dress out of it. Debbie told me some stuff about constellations. “That one’s Andromeda,” she said, pointing to a sideways V. “Someone chained her to a rock to be eaten by a sea monster.”

  “Did she die?” I asked.

  “No,” Debbie said. “Someone saved her.”

  Nobody wanted to leave the desert, but Oscar said we had to go. He sounded angry. We found out later it was because Jordan broke his compass. Back at the house, Cindy threw down her backpack and said, “Last one in the pool is a douchebag!” We ran for our bathing suits, bumping into each other in the hall. Mine was still wet from my afternoon swim so I inched the soggy bottoms over my hips and ran into the pool. When I came up after my dive, Cindy was staring at me. She had a look on her face that turned into a nasty smirk.

  “Baby tits!” she squealed, pointing to my chest.

  I looked down and saw that my bikini top had come undone.

  I jumped out of the pool and ran to the bathroom as fast as I could. The door was jammed so I threw myself against it. When the door swung open, I saw Debbie on the toilet seat. She had a syringe dangling from her hand, and one of Jim’s neckties flopped over her knee.

  “What’s the trouble, doll?” she asked. Her eyes looked fake and shiny, like the clear rocks at the bottom of aquariums.

  “Something stupid happened,” I told her.

  Debbie laughed. Her voice twinkled like a Christmas star. She didn’t even notice I was missing half my bathing suit. I pointed to my chest. She stared in wonder.

  “Where’s the other half?”

  “It fell off in the pool.”

  Debbie slid from the toilet to the floor. She held a hand out to me. I took it and sat beside her.

  “Cindy called me baby tits,” I said.

  “Oh honey,” she crooned. “Don’t listen to her. Breasts are no big deal.” Debbie looked down at her own chest. “These aren’t real, you know.” She started to undo the pearl buttons on her blouse.

  “They were supposed to be nice,” she said.

  She opened her blouse. There was a gaping scar under her left breast. It was dark purple, almost black, the way bruises are when you first get them. It looked like it hurt. I reached out and ran my fingers along the scar. Debbie leaned back against the wall. I snatched my hand away, embarrassed. She sat there with her blouse hanging open, staring at the space between the toilet and sink.

  “Why do you take needles?” I asked.

  “I have a medical condition.”

  “Do you have diabetes?” A boy I knew at school had to give himself needles every day because of it.

  “Something like that,” she said with her eyes half-closed. I could tell she wanted to be alone. I took a towel from the linen closet and wrapped it around my bare chest. Then I went to my room so I could be alone, too. Debbie knocked on the door a while later and asked if I wanted to watch a movie. Her eyes were back to normal and she acted like nothing had happened. We made popcorn and watched Wayne’s World with Cindy and Jordan, and even Uncle Jim hung out with us. I couldn’t stop laughing at the movie, and Uncle Jim told me I laugh just like Mom. We all went to bed late. It took me a while to get to sleep. I kept thinking about what happened with Debbie.

  I decided not to tell anyone what happened.

  MOM AND DAD came back a week later. Just like the first night, the parents spent the evening beside the pool with drinks while us kids swam. I knew it was going to be really hard to say goodbye. Cindy and I became friends after the pool incident and did some cool stuff like go to a roller rink where men in coloured spandex did figure skating routines. We went back to the desert, too, but not with a tour guide. It was just me, Jordan, Jim, and Debbie.

  I didn’t want to get up on departure day, but Dad did his usual door knocking and yelling thing. We all ate cereal and toast and drank juice by the pool. No one said much except Debbie. She tried to cheer us up by reading jokes from the morning paper. In the driveway, she hugged me so tight I could feel her bones.

  “Come back any time, doll,” she said. “You’re always welcome here.”

  I looked out the back window as we drove away until Debbie got too small to see. Dad put on the radio and Mom didn’t nag him about flipping between stations. They’d stopped fighting since they came back and I wondered if things would be different once we got home. Maybe we’d be a real family again. Me and Jordan were exhausted from staying up late every night and we both fell asleep in the car. When I woke up later, Mom and Dad were talking. I kept my eyes closed so they wouldn’t know I was listening.

  “Jim told me Debbie lost her nursing licence,” Mom said. “They caught her stealing from the pharmacy.”

  “Hmm,” Dad said.

  “We shouldn’t have left Janet and Jordan with her. She’s a junkie.”

  “The kids were fine,” Dad said.

  Mom snorted. “Jim told me Cindy stepped on one of her needles. He’s just about had it with her.”

  I didn’t believe anything Mom said. Junkies were dirty people who hung around the clock tower downtown and ate in soup kitchens. Once, a man came to our school and told us he used to be a junkie. He showed his scars and said he got AIDS from dirty needles. People like Debbie were not junkies. I knew that for sure. I wanted to defend her, but I was supposed to be sleeping.

  It started to rain. We stopped at a drive-thru once everyone got hungry and ate our burgers in the car. Dad wanted to make it to Malad before midnight, so he drove really fast. I rested my head against the window and closed my eyes. I thought about home and wondered what it would feel like to be there again. The house would be cold and there would be snow.

  I was almost asleep when I heard Mom’s voice over the windshield wipers.

  “. . . we’ll just tell them I’m going away, okay? I don’t want to make a big drama out of it.”

  “Mary. This is dramatic. There will be serious consequences,” Dad said.

  “It hasn’t been easy for me. You know that.”

  “Seems pretty easy now, doesn’t it?”

  “Paul, Please.”

  “You need help. Running away won’t fix anything.”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Think of the kids for once.”

  “You think they like me this way?”

  “Nobody likes you this way.”

  Jordan sat up and started moving around, so Mom and Dad stopped talking. He took out his Game Boy and started to play one of his wizard games. He kept the volume down low, but I could still hear the stupid music. I wanted to throw him and the Game Boy out the window. As long as Jordan was awake, I knew Mom and Dad wouldn’t talk again. I really wanted to know when Mom was leaving and how soon she’d be back and if she was going away to get better.

  We arrived in Malad after midnight. Dad pulled off the highway and parked in front of the hotel office. He came out with two separate keys: one for the girls and one for the boys. Me and Mom took our suitcases and watched Dad and Jordan go into a room together. Mom left her stuff by the door and lay down on the bed in her clothes. I sat on the other bed. I didn’t want to get too close in case she wanted space, but I wanted to be near in case she needed me.

  I could hear her crying even though she tried to hide it. I took a chance and sat beside her. There’s this thing she sometimes did when I was a kid where she scrunched her hand and walked her fingers down my arm like a spider. It was her way of saying, Hey. You’re okay. I thought maybe it would help. While I did the spider thing, I told her all the best stuff that happened since we left home, like meeting Maureen who picked mushrooms and lived on the beach. “I want to live on a beach someday,” I told Mom. “Maybe we could do it together.” I told her about the desert at night with all the stars and how it reminded me of the story she used to read me before bed.

  “Do you remember?” I asked.


  “Yes,” she said. “Of course I do.”

  She took my hand and brought me close to her. Each of her fingers felt like a hard bone—she’d lost so much weight it scared me. I lay beside her for the whole night. Eventually Mom fell asleep, but it took me a long time to wind down. There were too many thoughts in my head. So much had gone on since we left, and so much more was going to happen. I thought about all the possibilities; in the end, I decided I would accept whatever it would take for Mom to be happy again. Through the walls I heard Jordan and Dad watching TV, and I knew that from then on I would be in a house of men.

  TIEBREAKER

  CHRISTIAN WAS NOT PLANNING TO pick up any hitchhikers until he saw a woman at the roadside wearing a big hat like some kind of movie star. She looked like the type a travelling man would pick up and leave beaten in a cornfield. He pulled over because he didn’t want to feel guilty about it later.

  “Thanks,” the woman said, leaning through the passenger window. Her black hair was so long it touched the seat.

  “Put that in the trunk if you want,” Christian said, motioning to her suitcase.

  “No,” she said. “I like to keep my things close.”

  The suitcase was small and yellow. There couldn’t have been much in it. She placed it flat on the floor and put her feet on top. Her shoes were red.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  “Creston. You?”

  “Osoyoos. I can drop you off on the way.”

  “That would be lovely, if you don’t mind.”

  “Ain’t no trouble.”

  Christian lit a cigarette once they were back on the road. The woman reached into her purse and pulled out her own pack. They sat in silence while the wind rifled through the window and made their cigarettes crackle.

  “Where’d you come from today?” she asked, taking a drag.

  “Calgary. Was up in Fort Mac yesterday, though.”

  “Working?”

  “Yeah. I’m done now.”

  “How is it up there?”

  Good question, he thought. Loud. Depressing. He’d planned to quit after the first contract. That it was happening now, a decade later, was just bad luck. His grandmother was sick. He’d probably be back wrenching pipes once she was either well or dead.