The Journey Prize Stories 28 (7 page)

The streets are dark, empty. Houses and houses and houses, stuffed with their hosts. The weights made tunnels in her. Dug her up again. She will go home again to the empty condo.

A white fish cruises along the side of the dark road.

The bicycle drifts in its lane.

Laura swerves slightly.

The cyclist jerks, bends outward, pulled by the magnet in the centre of Laura's driver's wheel.

She swerves gently again, hears the bellow of surprise from the cyclist this time, how she can press herself gently into him.

She swerves again, comes back to centre.

His yell comes clear through the glass: “CRAZY FUCKING BITCH.”

This time she slows down as she swerves. Looks across the passenger seat and sees the cyclist's face. Not the hardened urban cyclist she'd expected but a teenaged boy clinging to the handlebars like a tree branch he's climbed too far out on. His fearful hunch, face angled across his neck, eyes stretched wide.

She swerves one more time and watches him go over into the ditch.

When she gets home, she huddles in her bed, the whole quilt around her body. Her body shivers so hard her knees knock against her chest. She pulls her laptop from the bedside table, opens it, and there's her Facebook page.

She types in:
your body was my home
. She presses post. Sucks in her breath when she sees the words float there.

Hurriedly clicks her cursor in the blank space again.

Types in:
it isnt over if theres nothing left something was there then nothing

Post. A tiny red 1 appears in the top right corner of her screen. She doesn't recognize the name of the person who liked her first post. Her body is still so cold.

Another blank space and she fills it in:
breaking open

Another blank space.

She types:
nighttimes are worst when you sleep alone every night you feel alone all day you go back every time

She types:
you planned it for so long and i had no idea. HOW
. Post.

She types:
this is so poignant are you watching?

She types:
can a person actually just fall in love with a cypher?

She types:
blood vessels break down very easily did you know I didnt
. Post.

She clicks the white camera icon to take a selfie. There she is, shockingly lean. Eyes large, the strong arch of one arm, the muscles visible. She clicks and the selfie stabilizes, both unfocused and luminous. A stranger gazes back at her from her new profile picture, jaw set, unmoving. The image pops up beside each of the posts, a row of her, shrunken and staring, beside her words, the only true words she has spoken since Mallory left. Sleep takes her down.

She prefers the gym late at night. The bodies and wheels. The low hum. The feeling of this day, and that day, and the next, and the next, entering and leaving her flesh. Her limbs pressed into rotations deepening their paths. Joints; grindstones. Her breath under one hundred pounds, two hundred pounds. The soft hammer against the front of her throat, marking out time. She is so strong now. Stronger than she has ever been. People rise and move from one machine to the next, busy with their private reasons for hardening.

Every day parts of her shift and tighten. Parts of her slacken. Laura presses herself until her bones bloom, her arms arc
and make more room for more blood. There are gulfs and channels in her body, open spaces she has never known before. She enters them.

S
he is tiny and thin, maybe six, wearing a white blouse smudged with grease and oil, and a navy skirt that barely covers her scraped knees. When Kyle hauls up the door she's just standing there like a curious bird, dead still, echoes of the metal's clang circling her like nervous black cats half hidden in the shadows. The sight of her inside the container, amid the stacked pallets and crates, the smells of wet tin and briny mildew, is like a lullaby lilted over a pounding hardcore beat, incongruous and adorable and unsettling as hell.

It takes Kyle three seconds to realize he can't tell anyone about the girl, five to figure out he can't just leave her there, ten to know how fucked he is as a result. Fifteen to write it off as just more of the cursed luck that's his trademark, as much a totem of his being as the sleeve tattoos that fill both his arms from shoulder to wrist with a chaos of thorny blue vines.

He looks around the empty pier. The Atlantic sloshes and trickles, chewed around its edges by the croaking of gulls and the grinding of heavy machinery behind him. Pier 17 is out
on the far edge of the wharf, many rows of lots away from the main office and the warehousing deck. It's just him and his forklift and the sludge of trash and seaweed slapping the breaker wall. And the girl. Japanese, maybe. No. More likely poorer, easier to make disappear. Thai or Malaysian, something like that. Fuck knows. Wherever she's come from, she's far from home, and Kyle is willing to bet his signed vinyl copy of
Jane Doe
that the trip wasn't her choice.

He curses in his head, cycling through options at blastbeat pace,
what​todowhat​todowhat​todo
.

“Speak English?” he says. No response. “Name? What's your name?” The girl just looks at him, head cocked to one side, hiding with felted calm whatever explosions of terror and confusion must be raging in her brain like Bengal flares.

“Fuck,” he says to no one. The wind tickles his nose with gull shit, wood rot, and tar slag. In the distance he hears the bleating reverse alarm of another forklift, the harmonic whirr of the hydraulic elevator. Even out here at 17, he has ten, maybe fifteen minutes before someone drives by, fellow grunt or foreman, to ask what the fuck is taking him so long with the shipment from Kwai Tsing.

In the end it's maybe a two-minute decision, based on what's immediately available, proximity to the parking lot, number of hours left in his shift. All instinct, like the survival games he used to play as a kid. If there's anything Kyle can say he's good at, it's surviving.

There's a big roll of brown packing paper leaning against a nearby stack of crates. He gestures to the girl:
Come out
. She steps slowly from the container, blinking in the salt mist. Kyle notices the bruising on her arms. She probably spent her trip
through the Suez cowering back into a far corner of the container. Maybe did the same when it was opened in Amsterdam. Someone there made sure she knew better than to try to hide when the door was opened the next time.

He wonders what she's been eating, if he should check the interior for evidence—wrappers, crumbs, some kind of bed. Not that it matters. Whoever shipped her knows which lot she's in, will have carefully traced its route from HK to 17. There's no way she could have gotten this far without a network of people making it happen. Valuable cargo, this.

It's a freak chance, a big mistake, that Kyle's the one here on the receiving end. So he doesn't have time to work out the consequences: it has to be fast, brutal, full-on punk rock. Instinct over thought.

Maybe, he thinks for the millionth time, he isn't done with all that yet. Maybe he can save her.

Drawing out a large swath of the paper, he wraps it round the girl, placing his hand gently on the crown of her head to keep her still and try to communicate that he's trying to help, until she's just an inconspicuous brown sausage, another bit of material piled on the back platform of his Caterpillar. He makes sure she's on her back, has a slit to breathe through. Does what he can to tell her to keep still. She gives no push-back. Before folding the flap down over her head to hide her slick of smooth black hair, he leans in and whispers to her, shitting his pants, patting his chest, “Friend. Friend. Home. My home.
Konichiwa?”
A bit of packing tape and she's invisible.

Hour and a half until quitting. Finish your tasks, don't look anyone in the face, park the lift, haul her out like an old carpet or a bit of excess wrap for dumping, throw her in the back seat
of the pickup, drive home without speeding, get her inside. Between now and then, he figures, he can sort out what the fuck he's going to tell Abby.

They sit on the worn turquoise carpet, playing. Most of Abby's dolls have missing limbs and torn clothes, but she still manages to craft amazing mini-luxe fantasies with them: shopping, eating at nice restaurants, driving around astride the old Tonka truck Kyle picked up at the Sally Ann. The language barrier is less of a problem for kids. The Asian girl—he's resisted giving her a name—took no time to warm up to the dolls. She obviously knows Barbie. She and Abby are busy placing them in pairs, with their thin plastic legs stretched out, feet touching.

He thinks how much Krista would have loved this. She always said she wanted two.

It will be six years in November. It'd be impossible to forget anyway, but the anniversary coming a day after Abby's birthday always makes for a particularly hard emotional thrashing. He still has trouble believing it. Sepsis doesn't seem like a thing that should kill people, not in this country, not in this age. Not at barely twenty-three years old, with enough brass to tell a roomful of rich old men in Armani suits that they're vassals of the patriarchy, even while they sneer at your bleached hair and piercings. Kris had already been through hell by the time she met Kyle—touchy father, drunk mom, more than a few winter nights sleeping on the street. That she'd managed to pull herself up, find the strength to help others through her work at the shelter—it was a miracle. She only got the one, though. Unless you also count Abby, the
child she knew for a day and a half. Kris never even made it home from the hospital.

The girls are keeping busy for now, so Kyle gives himself a minute to sit on the couch and work up a plan. Normally he'd put on a record to help him think,
I Against I
or
Monuments to Thieves
, but he doesn't want to scare the new girl with the vicious noise he loves. Instead he turns on the TV and clicks around until he finds a station rerunning
The Shawshank Redemption
. Vanilla as it is, Kyle has a soft spot for the movie. He'd convinced his old band, Pinched Nerve, to name a song after it—“Andy Dufresne.” Krista had always loved that one, made sure to come up close to the stage whenever they played it, to watch him shred through the blitzkrieg chorus:
“He says there's no memory / I want to live what's left of my life / In a warm place / Without memory.”
Her smiling, arms raised, screaming along with him, feeling the same ache.

He'll have to keep the girl here for tonight, at least. He knows it can't go much beyond that. An orphanage, maybe? The thought chills him, all wrought iron beds and sadistic nurses and gruel. Besides, what's he going to do—leave her on the doorstep tied with ribbon? Rewrap her in the packing paper and call it an early Christmas parcel? He wants her to be safe, protected, but there can't be anything linking her to him. With the band long finished, the wharf is his lifeline now. Abby will be starting school next fall…which means books, clothes, backpacks. Things to pay for.

He opens a couple cans of Beef-a-Roni for the girls and gives them another hour or so before taking them together into the washroom. Abby picks up her toothbrush and squirts on a blob of bubblegum-flavoured toothpaste.

“Daddy, is it okay if Soo-bin and I share?” she says.

For a second he hears
soy bean
. Then he realizes. Winces. Nods his head.

“Yes, sweetie.”

The girl—Soo-bin—takes the brush, touches it to the stream of water gurgling from the tap, runs it back and forth across her little Chiclet teeth, curious and mute. He wonders how much of this is new to her, what kind of conditions she lived in back home. He wonders if she feels lucky that Kyle found her. He wonders if she is.

Once the girls are asleep, he sits down in front of
Shawshank
with a can of Pabst to decompress. He goes through the exercises his mother taught him after Kris died: start with the eyes. Then the jaw. Move down through the neck and shoulders…let relaxation fall over your joints like dandelion wisps. He still finds himself fighting it—answering every loosening with a desire to grit teeth, grip mic, bark a righteous retort. Pummel stress into submission. Live hardcore as a steady inner scream. There's no one to scream at, though. Just Red and Andy Dufresne, and why would he scream at them. He swigs beer, savouring the sour aluminum fizz. Closes his eyes, trying to feel the warm place.

Kris, massaging his shoulders after a show. Working the strained muscle, popping a joint into his mouth from behind, holding it for him while he inhales.

Over the droning of the TV, he hears a dull thump outside. His eyes pop open. The girl? He gets up, drains his beer, and goes over to peer through the half-open door to Abby's room. Two bundles snuggle each other on the bed, rising and falling with children's breath. Safe, both. He turns back to the movie,
where Andy Dufresne is counting seconds between thunderclaps. Kyle doubts anyone from the wharf would come for him at night. Not worth the effort, when you can intimidate someone just as well in the light of day.

He hears the hollow clunk again. Recognizes tactile, insistent scratching. This part of town is a magnet for raccoons. They must be at the garbage, rooting for old apple cores and cheese-caked pizza boxes. He grabs the broom and another Pabst and snaps the porch light on before stepping out into the foggy grey night.

Crouched comfortably on its haunches, nibbling away at the remains of an old corn cob, the fat masked invader squats in front of an upturned compost bin and turns its head toward Kyle:
What? What you gonna do?
Kyle waves the broom around a few times, smacks it on the paint-chipped porch slats. He knows it's futile. These things have no fear, will sit there ransacking your trash right in front of you unless you take drastic measures. Kyle's never had the heart. Krista volunteered at the humane society and would always come home with horror stories about coons full of buckshot, or choking their way through the last throes of death by Javex-brined chicken carcass. For the most part, he's learned to live with them, clean up their toxic feces during the day, and hope they end up moving on to another bin once they've cleaned out the meagre leavings in his.

Besides, Kyle and the raccoons go back a ways. He remembers a night his grandfather let him help set the traps. Non-lethal—just a bit of peanut butter bait and a trigger-action wire-mesh door that would hold them until morning, when Granddad would load the cage in the back of his pickup and
drive them outside the city limits to let them free. Kyle wanted to know why they couldn't just put them in the neighbour's yard.

“Thing about raccoons,” said his grandfather. “They know where they live. Know their territory. You gotta take 'em an hour out at least, go out beyond their home range. Otherwise, they'll just come back.”

Kyle stares at the big mangy guy gnawing the cob like an old man chewing on a pipe stem. He wonders if this critter has been here before. If he recognizes Kyle—knows that this thin, wiry ex-punk with the two-day stubble and bramble tats is no threat to him. Kyle can smell his musk, the sour stink of old fish and muddy water. The raccoon keeps nibbling, eyes cast sideways at Kyle, waiting for him finally to get angry and take a real swing with the broom.

Kyle turns and goes inside and turns off the porch light. White credits crawl up the black screen, hundreds of names disappearing as they crest the dusty curve of his old tube TV. Kyle clicks off the remote and the room plunges into darkness. He listens, for a minute, to make sure he can still hear the girls breathing, before going into his bedroom and collapsing into his unmade bed with his jeans still on.

The knock comes at 10 a.m., as the girls are tucking into their Quaker Instant Maple Brown Sugar oatmeal. Even though he's been waiting for it, Kyle flinches like he's been stuck with a shiv up under the ribs. He spent all night thinking, trying to sort out what to do with the girl—with Soo-bin. But he just kept coming back to Andy Dufresne, hammering on his
sewage pipe in the darkness, and to Krista, lying on the hospital bed, the berserking metronome of the heart monitor shocking her life into the terrible flatline that took all of Kyle's rage and pinched it into the helpless scream of a newborn. And to Abigail,
his daughter, his daughter, his daughter
, the word so charged with joy and pain that it still explodes, every time he thinks it, like a bomb inside the inner chambers of his scar-worn heart.

The next knock comes, more insistent than the first. He gets up and gives himself maybe thirty seconds to haul Soo-bin up out of her kitchen chair, shushing Abby to quell her hurt questioning look, and hauls the cargo girl into his bedroom, where he stuffs her into the closet and puts all the compassion he has into his eyes and mumbles an apologetic plea—
justaminu​tepleaseb​equietjus​taminute
—before piling an old Slayer hoodie on top of her and closing the door and heading back out to answer to whoever it is that wants her back. As he grips the knob, Kyle puts on his calmest face, thinking how natural it will be to pretend that the second bowl of Quaker is for himself, hoping for the absurd impossibility that somehow, instead of someone from the union, it's the raccoon from last night come knocking to ask him for another corn cob or to apologize for the awkward standoff they'd found themselves in during the midnight raid.