Waiting For Sarah (7 page)

Robbie had never discussed it with Mike, had never acknowledged his lucky escape.

Fate: some live, some die. Yes, he believed in fate all right.

Sarah said, “So who takes care of you? Your grandparents?”

He shook his head. “There aren't any. I live with Aunt Norma, my mother's sister.”

“Why?”

“She wanted me. And she's the only relative I have.”

“What is your sister's name?”

“Becky.”

“How old was she?”

“Ten.”

The sunbeam had lasted only a few seconds and now, for some reason — perhaps the thought of Becky dying so young, before her life had really
started — the archives room seemed cold and gray. The old newspapers and books and files that before had seemed to him a historian's delight now seemed like so much trash. The whole mess should be thrown out, he thought, and burnt to ashes. In his mind he saw a mountain of paper burning in a huge fire, saw the black-and-white pictures brown and curl as hundreds of smiling crewcut boys and beehive-haired girls blistered into spirals of smoke and flame.

But the room evidently didn't seem cold and gray to Sarah. “What's your favorite food? Mine's chocolate ice-cream.” She swung her legs restlessly, a little kid once more.

It was amazing how one minute she could be so grown up and then the next minute be a child again. No, it wasn't amazing, it was annoying. And frustrating. Just when he was talking seriously, she started acting like a stupid little kid, changing the subject, asking childish questions. He was sorry now he'd told her about the car crash; he had never really talked about it to anyone, not even to Robbie or Norma.

“I don't have a favorite damn food.”

“Everybody has a favorite food, Michael. Don't be so grouchy. And you must stop swearing like that.”

“I'm not grouchy.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I'm not!”

“Then prove it. Tell me your favorite?”

“I refuse to discuss food.” Now he sounded like a jerk.

She got up and started leafing through the yearbooks on the shelves, turning her back to him.

“And you're stopping me working.”

She made no reply, carrying on as though she hadn't heard him.

He felt a stab of annoyance. He was wasting time. The school history would never get done at this rate. He started reading through a pile of newspapers, but couldn't concentrate with Sarah moving about the room, even though she was silent. Kids! He grabbed a bundle of newspapers for reshelving off the desk, but moved too quickly and lost his balance. Sarah spun around as he fell out of the chair onto the floor, dropping the bundle. He swore loudly. Sarah rushed over to help him, but he pushed her away, explaining to her how to apply the brakes while he clambered back into his seat. He was angry with himself, allowing a kid to see how awkward and helpless he was.

“Are you all right, Michael?”

“Of course I'm all right. I'm used to falling. It's nothing.” He felt like a fool.

The bell rang. Another fast seventy-five minutes gone. He retrieved his notebook and slid it into his pack. He hadn't got a lot done this morning; maybe he should tell her not to come so often. He wouldn't have fallen if he hadn't been so annoyed with her.

She stood, watching him. “G'bye, Michael.”

Before he could say anything she had hurried out of the room ahead of him. When he got to the hallway she had disappeared into the milling crowd of students.

“Robbie, do you think I look like Harrison Ford?”

Robbie laughed. “Harrison Ford is an old guy. Been around a long time.
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round
was his first movie, in 1966. That's like, what? Thirty-four years ago? Ford played a hotel bellboy, a bit part. The guy must be way over fifty by now.”

“You're not answering my question.”

“Do you look like Harrison Ford? Hardly. More like Donald Duck, I'd say.”

Mike ignored the humor. They were on their way home along the False Creek sea wall. The city was hidden in a thick broth. Foghorns wailed. Robbie pushed Mike's chair off the cement and onto the grass, through sodden leaves, seeking the thickest piles, plowing vigorously, puffing with the effort, while Mike squinted into the fog and gathering darkness from under the peak of his baseball cap. Robbie might be a little on the heavy side, but he was strong, with big arms and wide shoulders.

Robbie said, “I like Harrison Ford. Even if he is an old guy he's great. I'll tell you a secret, Mike, but
you're not to tell anyone, okay?”

“What do you think — I can't keep my mouth shut?”

“Sorry, man. But whenever I think of my dad — I never told anyone this — I see him as Harrison Ford. Pretty stupid, huh?”

“No, Robbie, I don't think it's stupid.”

Robbie had never known his father. His father was a mystery. All Robbie knew was that he was an engineer and had gone to work in Argentina on a special project when Robbie was a baby. He never returned. His letters stopped suddenly. Enquiries led nowhere. He had disappeared. Robbie's mother believed he was dead.

“I kinda see my old man as Indiana Jones — like in
The Temple of Doom.
You know what I mean? Danger­ous adventures and fighting hard to get back home but being prevented by the bad guys.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But he'll never come back. I know that, really.”

“You never can tell.”

“Yeah, well. Why don't you come over to my place this weekend? We could watch
The Temple of Doom
together.”

“Sure. Good idea.”

“Indiana Jones is the greatest. So you think you look like Harrison Ford?”

“No. Sarah Francis said I look like him.”

Robbie grinned. “Ha! She came back. You didn't scare her off after all. So now you know the kid's full name, huh?”

Getting no response, Robbie continued chattering on about Harrison Ford. Whenever he discussed movies his face shone with manic delight. His memory was prodigious, photographic almost. Now his face went into shining transfiguration mode.
“Raiders of the Lost Ark
was 1981. That was a good year for movies. Lots of people thought
Raiders
should've got the Academy Award for Best Pic, or even
Reds
or
The French Lieutenant's Woman;
instead a Brit movie called
Chariots of Fire
got it. Crazy. Ask most kids about
Chariots of Fire
and they won't know what you're talking about — you ever heard of
Chariots of Fire?
— right, nobody has, but mention
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and they'll know right off. I mean, everyone's seen
Raiders
, right? What does that tell you? Also, if you want my opinion, Meryl Streep should've got Best Actress that year, instead of Katherine — ”

“Robbie!”

“Sorry. Anyway, Harrison Ford made three Indiana Jones movies: after Raiders in '81 there was
Temple of Doom
in '84 and
The Last Crusade
in '89. After that, he — ”

“Robbie!”

“Keep you shirt on. Anyway, I'm not telling you any more until you tell me more about your slave girl.”

Mike growled, “There's nothing to tell. She helps me, that's all. Pain in the butt most of the time.”

“So, where does she live?”

“I didn't ask her. Hey! Would you mind staying on the sea wall and not driving through the hydrangeas? I'm getting showered with bits of twiggy garbage and dead flowers.”

“I don't know why I put up with your obnoxity, man. I push you home; I give you the benefit of my razor-sharp memory and mind, and all I get is your personality disorder problems.”

“You do it because you're my pal, Robbie. And because you're a good guy.”

“I guess.”

“Hey, Robbie?”

“What?”

Mike grinned. “Is there really such a word as obnoxity?”

He thanked Robbie for the bumpy flight home, dodged through scaffolding and piles of new siding sitting out on Commodore Road and let himself in to his co-op building. The reconstruction work — fixing the leaks — was, incredibly, still going on after eight or nine months. The contractors worked for only a couple of days at a time and then, like migratory birds, disappeared for long periods of time. Then they returned for a day or two or three and disappeared again. The huge blue tarps had become a familiar part of the building.

He fought his way over the cables and construction detritus, took the elevator up to the third floor, unlocked the apartment door and wheeled into his room. Norma wouldn't be home until late. She worked long hours for the Vancouver School District as a Human Resources Supervisor. Sometimes she didn't get home until seven or eight, and often worked Saturdays.

“ ... more than seven thousand dead ... Indian coastal state of Orissa ... fiercest cyclone in twenty-eight years ...
worker at the Xerox company in Honolulu shot and killed seven of his colleagues ... ”

The radio, left on as usual. Norma believed thieves would hear the radio and think that someone was home. It was the first thing that greeted him when he got through the door.

“ ... dug up more than two thousand bodies ... Kosovo ... mass graves.”

Death and destruction.

Chaos and turmoil.

A normal day. He reached up to the kitchen shelf to switch off the radio, but the shelf was too high and he overbalanced and fell to the floor, cursing. By the time he was back in his chair and had switched off the radio he was sweating from the effort.

His room was small. All the co-op rooms were small, and many had leaks or damp patches, including Norma's room, which had a swath of ugly gray-green stains on its outside wall and ceiling. But Mike's room was okay; there were no damp patches and he appreciated the handicap aids, like his room's automatic pocket door and the special frame over his bed and the extra handrails in the bathroom.

The building's tenants were okay too, not that he ever spoke to any of them much except he usually said hello to the Dhaliwals across the hall — Dolly and her husband, a big man with a beard and turban, and their two small children whose names he didn't know — and a man in a wheelchair on the main floor whose name was Chris Telford. Mike usually just kept his head down, and if anyone tried to start a conversation he did his scowl-and-growl routine; that
usually shut them up. If this failed he simply turned his back on them, swiveling his chair rapidly away; that always worked.

Chris Telford drove an old Lincoln with special hand controls because his legs were paralyzed. Chris still had his legs, even though they were no good to him. Dead-weight, like a ball and chain, thought Mike, who considered himself better off than Chris because without the weight of his lower legs he could swing himself about and lift himself up more easily. Even though there was a twenty-year difference in their ages Mike and Chris were friends. Chris had already given Mike several driving lessons, but progress was slow: it would take hundreds of repetitions, Chris said, before the hand controls would become instinctive. Not that there was ever any immediate hope of Mike owning his own car. But some day maybe...

He gripped the steel bars over his bed, pulled himself up out of his chair, and swung on to his bed. His arms and shoulders were getting stronger. It was always good to lie down, for his behind was always sore by the end of the day from the constant sitting. Some of that soreness often developed into blisters, like bedsores, and he had to be careful they didn't become infected.

Norma had gathered up most of the junk from his old room and put it aside instead of storing it with everything else, so that Mike's co-op room was decorated with his old airplane posters. Hardly any actual wall or ceiling showed; there was everything from CF-18 to B-29, Messerschmitt to Mustang,
Stealth to Spitfire, Hurricane to Wellington, F16 to Hawker Harrier. There were even ultralight posters he'd obtained from the manufacturers: a Weedhopper, an Avenger and an Aero-Lite 103.

The rest of the room, though, was untidy: a torn and damaged map of Tolkien's Middle-earth hung askew under a Sopwith Camel biplane poster; CDs and cassettes, escaped fugitives from plastic cases, lay scattered about the floor; a collection of
Clarions
and a couple of yearbooks from the archives decorated the furniture — the chest, a chair, and bookshelves, which were also messy with sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks in heaps and framed snapshots of Mom and Dad and Becky. At least there were no dirty socks, he thought, and no shoes; he wouldn't be needing footwear anytime soon. “Some people are just naturally disorganized,” he had once explained to Robbie, who always kept his stuff neat.

He was tired. He closed his eyes and, as usual, thoughts of his lost family came to mind. Becky laughing and happy, just the way she was seconds before the crash. The sounds came back to him: soprano on the car radio; Becky giggling and singing. His mother's voice, “Becky!” Blackout.

He missed them and he missed his strong legs and it was like he was hollowed out and empty because so much of his life had been stolen from him.

Thoughts of his father: William J. Scott. Will Scott. Husband of Joanne Scott. Proud father of Michael and Rebecca. Dad. When he was little he had sometimes visited his dad's real estate office, Satur
­day mornings, helping, churning out information sheets on the copy machine while his dad made preparations for open houses and appointments. Mike liked it there. His dad's co-workers came and went, telephoned, faxed, e-mailed, talked to Mike, joked with his dad, complimented Mike on the good work he was doing, reminded his dad how lucky he was to have a son old enough to help. Mike enjoyed the praise, smiling up at his dad, waiting for him to praise him too — just a word would do — but it never came. When Mike was older, his dad watched him run at track meets. Mike would look out for him in the crowd and wave shyly when he saw him standing there. His dad always waved back, but carelessly, it seemed to Mike, without the same enthusiasm he thought he saw from other dads. His mom and Becky came sometimes, especially if it was an important meet, and they would yell and cheer him on. Becky was a neat kid; they all spoiled her, especially Dad. She could do an ear-piercing whistle as good as any boy and did cartwheels and cheerleader routines on the sidelines while yelling his name. She looked a lot like her mother: fair hair, freckles, wicked grin.