Be Ready for the Lightning, page 5
I join the small woman at the windows and aim the nozzle the right way. We don’t look at each other or talk. No one does. The light continues to disappear. The smell is awful. The small woman moves to the back of the bus and spray-paints over the rear window with the American flag decal and the notice “Please No Littering Smoking Spitting Radio Playing.” The teamster man hands out more cans to us painters; they empty quickly, and we are afraid of missing spots, of being unsatisfactory. We paint carefully, conscientiously. My forefinger hurts and gets covered in paint. I switch hands sometimes.
The shooter nods to a tall, teenage boy with a paint can. It is the boy who thinks he can get a photographic memory from a book. “Come spray the front door and the windshield,” the shooter says. “Don’t miss any spots, please.” He moves against the door, while the boy sprays the driver’s barrier and the front windshield. The boy can’t reach the driver’s window, which is past the driver’s body, but painting the barrier covers most of it. The shooter shifts, so the boy can paint the door. “And the mirrors,” he says. “Up there.”
By now the horns are almost constant, the sound skewering the bus, but I can’t see outside. No one can. A narrow slice of sunlight creeps in at the front of the bus, where the boy hasn’t been able to reach around the driver’s barrier to paint the side window or the left hand side of the windshield, but everywhere else is dim and suddenly overheated.
The shooter is slightly silhouetted now. The boy who painted the door has slunk away and stands looking at the floor, a little behind me. The small woman clutches her can of spray paint like it is a lit candle. People press back, above the steps, trying to avoid the moustache man’s body and the shooter, but tentatively, not all the way back. Most still have their hands on their heads, revealing patches of perspiration under their arms, some of which nearly reach their waistlines. The paint smell is thick, like a finger down my throat.
There is a strange, still moment, and everyone looks to the front of the bus, expectant, passive.
The shooter nods, as if to himself. “I have something to tell you,” he says. “And something important to do.”
SIX
It wasn’t until two winters after our first cabin trip without our parents, almost Christmas, that Conrad got his first lawyer. Up until then, he’d always had some youth worker or city person talking him and my parents through it all. But once he finished high school and turned eighteen, things changed. He wasn’t a wild kid anymore. In the eyes of the law, he was a man, and a bad one.
When I got home from school that day, my parents and Conrad were sitting in the living room with a man in an argyle sweater. He was talking, but he kept running his hand over his goatee, which interrupted his speech with muffled gaps and made it hard to understand him. He was talking to Conrad. I unwound my scarf and hung it and my coat in the hall closet. I went into the living room and sat down on the armchair with the little tear in the seat and wiggled my finger into the rip.
“Stop that,” said my mother, seeing my hand. “You’ll make it worse.”
The man ran his hand over his goatee and said, “It’s going to be common assault. You’ve got a youth record, but mumble as an adult. Should be conditional or suspended sentence at mumble. You’re not going to see a day in jail, unless your buddy from downtown mumble a real fit.”
“He’s not my buddy.”
“Well, you know. Should be fine. You’ll get counselling, and mumble have to go—no excuses, no missed appointments, no I missed the bus or I got lost or whatever, mumble it’ll piss them right off. No weapons, no drugs, mumble the peace. Basically try not to be an asshole.” He glanced at my parents. “Just straight and narrow,” he amended. “Understand?”
“Do you understand, Connie?” said my mother. She seemed dazed, like someone who’d been in the sun too long. Her head turned too smoothly from the lawyer to Conrad and back.
“Yeah. I understand.”
Conrad had a bright red spot on one cheek but otherwise looked unharmed. He seemed so relaxed, and he looked handsome in his jean jacket and white T-shirt. It didn’t seem fitting that he was the one being lectured, corrected. The four of us gathered around him must have looked more like fans, like journalists waiting with bated breath to interview him.
The adults stood and shook hands all around, the lawyer reluctantly releasing his own facial hair to do so. He left two of his business cards on the coffee table.
After the lawyer was gone, my mother put her hand on Conrad’s face, over top of the red mark. He winced.
“Oh, Connie,” she said. She let out a puff of air, gave the sore spot on his face a little pat, almost a slap. “I thought we were done with this.”
The statement surprised me, until I remembered that Conrad and I had been hiding the evidence of his recent entanglements from them. And yet I was frustrated, as if they should have caught us anyway, as if they should have known.
My father stood off to the side, putting his hands in his pockets and then pulling them out, tapping his fingers on his thighs.
“If you need a ride to the counsellor or anything, you just tell me, okay?” He nodded as if Conrad had already answered him. He said this as though Conrad, who had had his licence for two years, didn’t know how to drive. “We’ll get it all straightened out.”
Then our parents disappeared upstairs. That was how I thought of it. Disappeared. Why did she listen to Conrad the first time he said, “No, Veda can do it”? I didn’t think any of us could stop him, but I wanted her to stop me. And yet, I would have fought tooth and nail to be with Conrad in those moments. It made no sense, and it filled me with a baffled rage that came out in the smallest, most pitiful ways.
I sat back on the armchair and pulled at the rip. The feeling of the material splitting filled me with a fierce glee. Once it was torn to the seam, I turned to Conrad.
“What happened?”
He sat back down and turned on the television, then stood again, pacing. “I was minding my own business, I swear,” he said. “I was just coming out of work, and this shithead bumps me on the street and goes, ‘Watch where you’re going, Chink,’ and I go, ‘What did you call me?’ and he gives me this pussy little shove with two fingers.” Conrad demonstrated on me, a jab under my collarbone, pushing me back in the armchair. “Sorry,” he said. “But, so, you know. I never thought he would call the police. I mean. Who calls the fucking police?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I turned to the TV, which was playing a commercial for the Hot Wheels cars Conrad and I had liked when we were little. “Too bad your birthday passed,” I said. I was sixteen by then, and Conrad had turned eighteen about a month earlier.
“Yeah. Well, it sounds like it’ll be okay.”
I looked at him. I was sure he couldn’t be this unworried, but nothing in his face revealed his answer for bravado or false cheerfulness. As far as I could tell, he really was unafraid. On the street with the racist prick whom he’d hit, he was unafraid. And he was unafraid there, in our house, staring down a dark tunnel of consequences.
He had graduated from high school the previous spring—his last-option-hanging-on-by-his-fingernails high school—but he hadn’t applied anywhere for college or university or an apprenticeship. He was working downtown, as a D.J. in a strip club, and seemed uninterested in where that might take him or not take him. Our father, who had his own business as a contractor, had tried to bring Conrad along on a few jobs, but Conrad suddenly became clumsy, bashing himself with hammers, breaking drywall, dropping drill bits. Our mother worked in fundraising at the art college. She said she asked around about something for Conrad, but all the jobs required a university degree. I couldn’t picture Conrad joining the group of careful, polished women she worked with, women who had been to our house with their tweedy husbands for dinner parties. Instead, Conrad ended up working in the strip club, which Annie and I went to once thinking it would be funny. It wasn’t funny, and we never went back.
He had a series of pretty girlfriends, some of whom were dancers at the club. Melissa was a nanny for a fancy family in Shaughnessy Heights, and she’d bring me beautiful hand-me-downs from the eldest daughter. Claire, a dancer, was tall and freckly and had a vintage bicycle she would lock up to the parking regulations sign outside our house. They all seemed grown up to me in a way that Conrad didn’t. Claire was paying off the student loans she’d racked up in Ontario studying African literature. Melissa was taking night classes in radio production. They were always girls on their way to something else—they were in Vancouver for school, or a job, dancing to make money for some specific goal, something that would end, and so eventually they disappeared.
As we sat together in the living room with the television on, I had a sudden conviction that Conrad’s fear was a tangible thing, something he had put down a long time ago and that I’d picked up, to carry for him. A clammy vibrating metallic thing strapped to my chest. Take it back, I wanted to say. Take it away from me.
Instead I made us some popcorn, and we watched The Muppet Christmas Carol. The tree was already set up, and my present for Conrad, a couple of new CDs and a pair of concert tickets to see his favourite band, the Tragically Hip, in March, was neatly wrapped and placed below the branches.
—
It was strange to prep for Christmas without Ted that year. Like Conrad, he hadn’t applied to any schools after graduation. Instead he’d worked all summer with Al, doing sweltering hot landscaping work that left them both with unscrubbable dirt under their fingernails and sudden biceps that made it look like somebody else’s arms had been grafted onto their skinny bodies. Red-haired Ted burned almost purple before peeling to a pinkish tan. But by the fall, when Al moved away to go to the University of Calgary to start a degree in economics, Ted had bought a used car and driven away from his grandmother’s apartment. He took his guitar and a backpack that I’d packed for him, his T-shirts folded with loving precision. Ted couldn’t have cared less about the T-shirts, much less the manner in which they were folded, but by that time, more than a year after that night in the back of the Hearse, I had carved out a specialty in useless offerings to Ted. Little presents, the sewing-on of buttons, the making of mixtapes, the checking of homework assignments, the supplying of lighters and orgasms and water bottles full of my father’s whisky.
Ted wrote me letters sometimes after he drove away, in his ugly boy-writing, from Florida and then a variety of cruise ships, sent postcards from Greece and Spain and Portugal. He wrote about working in ship bands, walking around playing elevator music while old couples danced cheek to cheek and Americans gorged themselves. He played covers of the Doors and the Beatles on theme nights and songs of his own invention in the staff quarters in his off hours.
I read the postcards to Annie, unless they were too personal and sometimes even if they were. I’d walk the two blocks from my house to hers, and we’d sit cross-legged on Annie’s bed. Al wasn’t home from university for his winter break yet, and it was still strange to me to visit Annie and not see him. The house was different, Mrs. Nassar’s vanilla candles finally asserting themselves in the absence of Al’s asphyxiating drugstore body spray. It felt like Annie and I should be done and gone as well, moved on, even though we still had a year and a half to go. Even with Ted’s postcards, I couldn’t help but see us as objects that had been left behind in haste, like the boys had accidentally dropped us on their frantic escapes from Vancouver.
The latest postcard was a photo of the pyramids and a stoic-looking camel. On the back it said, Alexandria is insanely gorgeous. I wish I had more time here. We’re cruising for two days after this and then back to Italy. Wrote a new song in Limassol that I’m feeling good about, will try to make a tape and send it home. Miss you, of course. Love to everyone at home. Hope yer well. Yours, Ted.
“He stopped in Egypt. Egypt. I can’t even imagine.”
“Cool,” said Annie. “Egypt.” Then she said, “Does he ever sign it ‘Love, Ted’?”
I rolled my eyes. “It doesn’t matter how he signs it.”
“You’re not going to just wait around for him, are you?”
“How long could he possibly be gone? And I’m not waiting. He’s not my boyfriend, but we’re—we’re a thing, you know? And he’s probably lonely—who cares if I like writing to him?”
Annie was looking at me as if I were injured or sick. “You think he’s lonely?” she said. But she changed the topic of conversation to the young algebra teacher who was her current object of obsession.
We stayed up whispering until early morning, when we padded down the stairs in our wool socks, and Annie opened the front door very quietly to avoid waking her parents. She kissed and hugged me before I left. She always did.
The cold night air woke me back up instantly. I took out a cigarette from a mostly stale package. Conrad smoked more than ever in his new job at the strip club, because his boss wouldn’t let him take breaks but would let him go out anytime to smoke. Ted, when he left, had been at nearly a pack a day, Al was a smoker only when he was drinking, and Annie had given it up. But I was a secret smoker, occasional and ashamed. When Annie asked me if I ever smoked anymore, I told her no. Never.
I lit the cigarette and inhaled. The warmth of it against the winter night.
At home, I unlocked the door and found my mother in the foyer.
“Do you know what time it is?” she said.
I shrugged. “Late,” I said. “I was just at Annie’s.”
She put her hands down at her sides, determined, some parenting book she had read—probably for Conrad, but waste not, want not—clearly running through her head.
“Well, I doubt Nasrin would want you girls up this late either.”
“She’s never cared before,” I said, a little cool but not too cocky, because I didn’t want to push it too far. I didn’t have the balls to add, And neither have you.
“I don’t want you coming home in the middle of the night. And you reek of smoke.”
I stared at her, incredulous. They’d never given me a curfew. They’d never sat me down for the birds-and-bees talk. My first period had been handled (expertly, calmly) by Annie, an early bloomer. My parents and I worked in the same office—the large corporation of Conrad’s Problems, and that was our main point of intersection.
But I’d noticed a shift in them recently, ever since Conrad finished high school. It was as if they’d really thought he would enrol at the University of British Columbia and get a degree in finance and buy a suit and work downtown, and everything he was and had been would be changed and forgotten, wiped away. Now that no magical transformation had taken place, it seemed that my parents had emerged, blinking, like people who had been bashed over the head and only recently come to. My father became easily annoyed, eager to exit any conversation, like someone at a party constantly looking over your shoulder for someone he knew. He talked about retiring early but then took on more contracts than ever before, until he was barely home, even on the weekends. And my mother had turned her attention to me with this capital-P parenting, declarative and sudden, as if trying to hold me still, like I was some protean creature. Some new task that could balance out Conrad.
With them, I tried to be the way I wanted to be with Ted—cool, calm and undemanding. But greed filled me from top to bottom, roaring for guarantees from all of them that no one, it seemed, could give. I wanted Ted to sign his postcards Love. No, more than that—I wanted him to come home and wrap his arms around me and say it to my face. I wanted my parents to dip into some secret adult knowledge and fix Conrad; better yet, I wanted them to have barged into our basement nursing station and put a stop to it years ago. And yet I had done everything I could to keep them out, to keep it all secret from them. And I never signed my own postcards to Ted with anything but Miss you, Veda.
I didn’t say anything. I just turned sideways and slipped past my mother, up the stairs. At school the next day, I asked Annie what she was planning on doing after we graduated at the end of our next school year.
“Oh, Engineering probably. Otherwise you’ll have to dig me up from the backyard in order to hang out, since my parents will have murdered and dismembered me. They’ve already got one kid in the dreaded Social Sciences. They couldn’t bear the shame of two. Though, Al could have gone and studied Robbery and Prostitution Technologies, and he’d still be the golden boy.”
“I mean are you staying here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Montreal? McGill? Drinking age there is eighteen. What about you?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ll do Science. Bio probably, it’s my best mark. But I feel like I should stay, if Conrad’s still here.”
A brief silence expanded, while neither of us named where else Conrad might be.
And even though it was stupid, too stupid to say out loud, I was thinking, too, of Ted, who would come back any day, surely.
“But I don’t want to live at home,” I said. “I’m only going to stay if I can move out of my parents’ house. I don’t care if I have to get a loan. I’ll get a job. I’ll figure it out.”
Annie looked at me. Her look told me she heard what I was asking, what I was pleading for from her.
“Yeah,” she said. We were eating lunch in the school cafeteria, and Annie was cutting her grilled chicken breast into tiny cubes, one of her many unnecessary dieting techniques. She cut a cube in half and placed the tiniest sliver of meat in her mouth. “I’ll stay with you,” she said.
—
Christmas had almost arrived before I heard from Ted again. As I came downstairs one morning during the school holidays, my mother stopped me.
“A postcard from Ted came yesterday,” she said. “I forgot to give it to you.”
Before she’d finished speaking, I’d snatched it from her and run upstairs, shouting behind me, “You didn’t read it, did you?” without waiting for an answer. And when I read it myself, I doubly hoped that my mother hadn’t, because the few sentences were exactly what I’d been hoping for.
