Escape Velocity (2 page)

The bathroom cabinet, on the other hand, is well stocked. Overflowing with a variety of poisons or riches, depending on your perspective: Xanax, Vicodin, Percocet, Darvocet, Ativan, Valium, Desyrel, Roxanol, and T3s. Plus a half-empty bottle of Pepto-Bismol and some multivitamins.

Dad's back got wrecked in an accident at work a couple of years back. He was working at a jail, as a guard. The ironic thing is that he took that job because he thought he was getting too old for construction—too many problems with his back and his knees from all the lifting. Then he ended up getting hurt anyway. When I tell people that, they assume there was a riot or something, but actually he just slipped going down a flight of stairs. He's pretty much been in constant pain ever since. Sometimes it is bearable and he can get up and putter about the house a little. Sometimes it is excruciating, though he does his best to hide it. I can't imagine what it must be like to be trapped in a body that hurts all the time. So while I wish things were different around here, I don't think anyone should judge him for doing what he can to escape.

I don't have to be at work for an hour, but the apartment feels too small and stiflingly hot, and being around my dad lately makes me feel all twisted up inside. I toss my school stuff into my room, slip out the front door and stand there at the end of our driveway, watching the heat radiating from the pavement.

I keep thinking about Samson and how his voice was so kind.
If you ever need to talk
…But what would I say? I could tell him how lost I've felt since last summer, tell him that my father is slipping further away all the time, that I already know this place will never feel like home to me. I could tell him that the sky here—the big blue prairie sky the tourists rave about—makes me dizzy and turns the world beneath it into something flat and two-dimensional. Everything about this place, from the ancient dinosaur bones buried in the hills to the star-filled black nights, makes me feel as insignificant as an ant. I could tell him that I can't breathe properly here. I could tell him that I can't even look at the long straight road out of town without wanting to run down it, screaming.

But I won't. He'd think I was crazy. Right now he likes me, and I'd rather keep it that way. Words would only mess things up. They always do.

My mother's the one who taught me that. It's funny, because she is in love with words. In fact, I think words are the only thing she truly loves. Only her own words though. Not mine. My face feels hot, remembering my visit with her last summer. The more I tried to talk to her, the worse things got. Even when I tried to talk about things that I thought might interest her. “Christ, Lou. If you must speak to me when I am working, at least do me the favor of giving a minimal level of thought to what you are saying. At least attempt to sound like an intelligent human being instead of a self-centered adolescent.”

I used to love words too. I wrote poems, long descriptive rambles mostly, just for the pleasure of painting pictures with words. I used to spend hours trying to craft the perfect phrase to capture an image and pin it down on paper. Not anymore. I haven't written a word since that visit, except for when I have to at school. Nothing creative. No more poetry. I don't want to be like my mother in any way at all.

She's a writer. Zoe Summers. I have her surname, which was Dad's choice. I guess he realized I wasn't going to get much else from her. She lives in Victoria, and she writes poetry and novels, long dense ones with no quotation marks, only little dashes. Reviewers describe them with words like
lyrical
and
haunting
and
evocative
. Or
compelling
, but she hates that one. She says it is so overused that it has lost all meaning.

Oh, she loves words, my mother does, and she despises anyone who is careless with them. Sometimes I listen to the kids at my school with their
likes
and
totallys
. The way they say he goes or he's like when they mean he says. The way they punctuate their speech with the f-word, using it as verb, noun, adverb and adjective, sprinkling their sentences with obscenities as carelessly as they dump salt on their greasy cafeteria fries. And I don't know whether what I feel is disgust or envy.

Other teenagers are like a whole different species. I can't relate to them. My dad says I am a chameleon, and the truth is I've had to be. Dad and I have moved so many times I've lost count, and for no good reason other than Dad's restlessness. He always thinks somewhere else will be better than wherever we are. We moved from small-town southern Ontario to Toronto, then all the way to Vancouver when I was seven, then to Galiano Island a couple of years later, then back to Vancouver, and now Alberta. The Badlands. Who would choose to live in a place with such an ominous name? But Dad and I have lived in all kinds of places: suburbs with grassy lawns and wide driveways, downtown apartments where junkies left needles discarded in stairwells, even a sort of tree house in the woods for a few months.

Maybe parents never know their kids as well as they think. When Dad says I am a chameleon, he means that I fit in easily—that I find friends anywhere, that I can be like the other kids. But if you think about it, chameleons don't try to be like the other lizards. They don't try to befriend them or hang out with them or impress them. They merely fade into the background. And that is what I do: I become invisible.

Still, Dad may not know me as well as he thinks, but he's miles ahead of my mother. She doesn't know me at all. I didn't even meet her until I was twelve, when she suddenly called Dad and said she wanted to see me. I took the ferry over from Galiano to meet her. It was probably the strangest day of my life, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that I had been fantasizing about meeting her for years.

We spent the afternoon together. She picked me up at the ferry terminal, drove me into Victoria and took me for tea at the Empress Hotel. I have a photograph of the two of us posing on the green lawn in front of the ivy-covered walls, my mother's arm around my shoulders. We don't look like mother and daughter. She's tall and blond, thin and elegant; I am broad-shouldered, with dark hair and eyes, olive skin and my dad's slightly beaky nose. In the picture, I look stunned but happy, grinning stupidly at the young German tourist who was taking our picture.

Inside the hotel, I ate tiny sandwiches and pastries served on a three-tiered cake stand, and watched my mother sip her tea. She was the most glamorous woman I'd ever seen. Beautiful. Brilliant. Romantic, somehow, like a character in a movie. And she was a poet! I told her, shyly, that I wrote poetry sometimes. She just laughed and asked me if I liked the tea. It was clear and fruity, and I would have liked sugar in it, but I said I loved it. She nodded approvingly and told me it was called Kea Lani. I wrote it down when I got home. I wanted to remember every detail of the afternoon.

Pretty soon after that, Dad and I moved back to Vancouver. My mother came over from Victoria a few times and took me out for lunch. That was during eighth grade. She introduced me to sushi and green tea, pad thai and dim sum. She told me about ballets and operas she had been to, and promised to take me some day. Sometimes she talked to me as if I was grown up, gossiping about parties and confiding in me about the men she dated. She showed me the jewellery they gave her and laughed about the things they said.

I only saw her a handful of times, but I thought my mother was amazing. After all those years of making her up in my head, I could hardly believe I was so lucky. Then last summer, right before we moved out to Drumheller, I took the ferry over to Victoria and stayed with her for a few days.

And that was when it all fell apart.

I haven't seen her since then, though very occasionally she'll call out of the blue and be all excited about some new guy or some big review or some major award nomination. She'll act like we're good friends. It's hard to shift gears so quickly, hard to move into that mother-daughter space when months can go by in between phone calls. She acts like last summer's visit never happened, but I can't forget. My cheeks still burn every time I think about it.

I don't think my dad exactly
likes
my mother, but he's still sort of in love with her. He says he can't help it. Then he usually grabs me and says, “Well, how could I not love the woman who gave me you, hey?”

He means it literally. My mother handed me to him at the hospital, less than twelve hours after I was born. While he was holding me—
oohing
and
aahing
over my fingers and toes, he claims—she packed her bag and told him she was leaving. Leaving him. Leaving me. Moving on. Having a kid had never been part of her plan. Like she says, she isn't the kind of person to let one mistake ruin her life.

I guess you have to respect her for that.

Two

N
ow that I'm back in school, I work three evenings a week plus Saturdays at the WBD: the World's Biggest Dinosaur. In the summer, I worked full-time. Tourist season.

You can see the World's Biggest Dinosaur from a long way off. It's a T. rex, supersized and made of fiberglass and steel. Its head towers over the buildings and the trees, and it looks like it could walk right across the parking lot and crunch the cars beneath its feet. Except, of course, that its feet are firmly anchored to the ground and a staircase leads through its insides, winding up and up, right through its empty head and into its gaping sharp-toothed jaws. So this T. rex isn't going anywhere. It's stuck here, just like me.

Dana Leigh greets me with a wave and a grin and a long breathless spiel about how hot it is and how busy she has been and how much her feet hurt.

“You heading out then?” I ask.

“Yeah. Over to the Dino Shack. Emmy called in sick for her shift tonight, so I'm on.” She applies a fresh coat of dark lipstick. She has a leather lipstick case that looks like a bullet and has a mirror inside it that is about the size of my little finger. She squints into it, checking her teeth. “All I want to do is kick back with a beer, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

She snaps the compact shut. “How's your dad?”

“He's okay.” Dana Leigh used to be Dad's girlfriend. She's the reason we moved to Drumheller. Things didn't work out for them, but Dana Leigh still looks out for me and from time to time asks how my dad's doing. She's got this new boyfriend now, a big guy, a biker with about a hundred tattoos.

A sharp look. “Yeah? And you? School okay?”

I nod. “Yeah, it's fine.”

“All right then.” She hands me the keys. “You okay to close up on your own tonight? Carly's in the gift shop, but I told her she could leave early. Her kid's sick.”

“Daniel? What's wrong with him?” Carly's kid is a manic three-year-old with stick limbs and a mop of red hair. He looks like a small bush fire.

“Just a cold.” Dana Leigh steps out from behind the counter and slips her bare feet into spike-heel sandals, wincing. Her toenails are painted red. “She wants to be home for tuck-in, that's all.”

“Can't the sitter do that?”

Dana Leigh gives me a look that I can't read.

I shrug. “Whatever. Yeah, that's fine. I'll close up.” I take her place behind the counter. A group of tourists is heading our way, so I wave goodbye to Dana Leigh and get my welcoming smile ready. It's the hardest part of this job, having to be friendly for hours at a time. Otherwise all I have to do is say, “Three dollars each please, kids five and under are free, go on up,” over and over again. Which is monotonous but not exactly difficult.

Tourists always say the same things. These are nice people, families on their holidays having a good time, and the more I listen to them, the more irritated I feel. I don't want to be like them. But what choices are there? I could feel superior to them, like I am somehow different and wouldn't say such stupid things myself. That's my mother's approach. Or I could feel like we're all the same, all connected, all human, which is Dad's world view, no doubt accurate but also depressing.

Maybe I'm burned out after the summer's flood of tourists. Anyway, it's slow enough tonight. I spend my time watching the second hand and the minute hand tick around the face of the clock.