“I'll take you to the free clinic then, okay?”
“Okay.” Zoe was so terribly, horribly, awfully tired. She just
wanted to lie down, rest her head on her good arm and go to sleep. It was all over. The Beckoners were done. She'd survived. Roll the credits. Drop the curtain. Up the lights.
The nurse at the
clinic gave Zoe thirty stitches and did not believe for one second that she had slashed herself, which is what Zoe told her. The nurse had Zoe draw an X with her left hand, the one she would've had to have used. She couldn't do it neatly, let alone with any control. The nurse pursed her lips and sewed Zoe up, all the while carrying on an elaborate conversation over her head with Leaf about asinine gang practices, the dangers of tetanus, and the stench of rotting gangrenous limbs.
“Sorry about your shirt, Leaf.” Zoe sipped the apple juice the nurse gave her in the waiting room after, along with a packet of cookies the nurse said she had to eat before she was allowed to leave. The sugar would help her body work to replace the blood she'd lost. “It's ruined.”
“Never mind that.” He pushed a lock of hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “I don't care about the shirt.”
“You do so.”
“Okay, so I do. I'll have a little cry later on in private, but hey, guess what? I've got good news for you.”
“Brady's truck exploded and all the Beckoners died in a ball of flames?”
“No. The good news is that you still have your hair.”
“Nah.” Zoe fingered ends of her braids. “The good news is that it's finally, completely over. Let's go home and tell April.”
Zoe and Leaf launched
into their story before they even got their coats off, but April was in a hurry to leave.
“I have to go.” She pulled on her coat. “The babies are asleep in Alice's bed.” She pushed past Zoe to the door.
“Stop, April.” Zoe grabbed her. “Don't you get it? It's over.”
“That's great.” April opened the door.
“That's it? I get thirty stitches for you and that's all you have to say?”
“I'll believe it when I see it,” she said, and then she left.
Zoe and Leaf looked at each other, eyebrows raised, and then went upstairs to check on the kids.
Teo called the mess
on Zoe's arm her beauty mark. Simon called it the alien probe site. Leaf did his best to avoid mentioning it, and April never talked about it at all. In fact, she wasn't talking to Zoe much at all those days. Neither was Alice, for that matter. How could Alice not notice something was wrong? Before Zoe got the stitches out, she'd walk around clutching her elbows to keep from picking at them, and yet Alice floated around the house like she lived there all by herself. This was a problem. The day after Zoe got her stitches out, she
came home and found Cassy squatting on the counter beside the stove, all four elements glowing orange hot. Alice was in the living room talking on the phone.
“Mom!” Zoe whisked Cassy off the counter with her good arm and dumped her on the linoleum. Cassy started to cry.
“Hon, is that you?” Alice pulled the phone away from her ear and covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “Would you see what Cassy's crying about? I'm on the phone.”
That's for sure. On the phone
all
the time. Zoe couldn't remember the last time her mother actually cooked a real meal, or cleaned the toilet bowl, or asked her how her day at school was, or if she was surviving at all or was slowly dying before her very own oblivious eyes.
Alice always kept emergency
cash behind the phone bills in the file cabinet, and it was when Zoe went in there to help herself to some money to rent a movie that she noticed the amount of the last phone bill. It was triple what it should be. It was as much as they spent on groceries for an entire month.
They'd never had a phone bill for that much. Zoe wondered if Alice had skipped paying for a couple of months, so she looked back, but no, all the bills they'd received since they'd moved to Abbotsford, except for the first month, were all that much or more, and every single long distance call was to the same number in Whitehorse.
Zoe took the bills downstairs, perplexed. Leaf was at the table cutting a puppet stage out of a cardboard box for Connor and Cassy, who were playing on the floor, piling up blocks and knocking them down. Zoe showed him what she'd discovered.
“Classifieds.” He sliced out a wide arch. “She's met someone. Probably on the Internet.”
“My mother doesn't know how to use the Internet.”
“Then a newspaper ad, unless it's some long lost relative or something.”
“We don't have relatives. The only long lost relative is Kenneth, my father. He Who Shall Not Be Mentioned.”
“An old boyfriend?”
“No. She's a staunch graduate from the love âem and leave âem school of dating.”
“Someone new then.” Leaf shrugged. “So what?”
“So what? Why won't she tell me about it? I'm down here making dinner and doing the laundry and practically raising her youngest child, and she's up there having phone sex with some bushman of the north?”
“Yeah.” Leaf set the box on the floor. “That about sums it up.”
After listening to her
speculate all over the place for nearly a week, what if this and what if that, Simon finally clutched her shoulders and said through gritted teeth, “Just call the damn number and ask.”
So Zoe did, but after the man said hello she'd chickened out and hung up. Maybe she didn't want to know that bad.
Zoe tried listening at Alice's bedroom door again, carefully setting the glass quietly against the door, but Alice heard. She managed not to hear when Cassy was screaming because Zoe was washing her dinosaur cup, but she could hear that?
“Scram.” She snatched the glass and kicked the door shut with her foot.
The next day, Zoe had been talking about the bushman again, in the Dungeon after school with everybody there, even Teo. He was still April's official bodyguard, even though Zoe tried to convince him that it was all over. April had been quiet, typing away, and then she suddenly sighed, dropping her hands to her lap.
“Just ask her.”
The others looked at Zoe, eyebrows raised.
“She tried that already,” Simon said. “Her mom wouldn't tell her.”
Zoe looked at her shoes.
“Well?” Simon said. “You've asked her, haven't you?”
“No,” Zoe muttered.
“Why not?” Leaf asked.
Zoe was about to tell them why not, but soon realized she didn't have any good reason except for that's not how things worked in her family. Outright asking? Too easy?
The next day was Teo's birthday. Wish was making pizza for them all next door. The boys and April convinced Zoe to ask Alice while they were all there to make sure she did it. They trooped next door and everyone but Zoe slipped upstairs to wait in Zoe's room while she stayed downstairs to ask Alice, who for a change was not busting out of the house to go to an AA meeting. She was curled on the couch under an afghan, settling in to watch
I Love Lucy
on the channel that came in the least fuzzy.
Zoe plunked herself down on the other end of the couch and waited for a commercial break, as Alice was always testier if Zoe tried to talk to her when a show was on.
“So,” Zoe hoped her voice sounded casual. “Who've you been talking to all the time, on the phone?”
“You think that's any of your business?” Alice's eyes were locked on the TV.
“Yes.”
“What makes you think that, huh?”
“The fact that you might as well be on another planet.” Zoe fought the urge to launch into an inventory of all the reasons that made it her business. “You have no idea what's going on around here.”
“I don't, do I?”
“No, you don't.”
“You could tell me anytime you felt like it.”
“And you could maybe bother to ask.”
Alice pushed aside the afghan and sat up.
“Can you guess?” She lit a cigarette and looked at Zoe, even though the show had come back on. “Come on, guess.”
“I have no idea.”
“None?” Alice smiled. “Sure you do, come on, take a guess.”
“I don't want to guess, Mom. Just tell me.”
“Harris.”
“Harris Kellerman?”
Alice looked back at the TV. “He's the only Harris I know.”
“You dumped him.” Zoe thought back to when they left Prince George. “What does he want with you?”
“What do you think?” Alice made a great production of getting up and turning up the volume. “Do you mind?”
“Do I mind what?”
“I told you what you wanted to know. I'm watching this.” Her eyes wandered up. “Don't you have guests upstairs? Or did they leave over the roof?”
“What the hell?”
“
What
?”
“What's up with you and Harris?”
“Look, Zoe,” Alice stubbed out her cigarette. “We talk on the phone. That's all.”
“That's all? Hours and hours a day and you say that's all? What's going on? Is he trying to get you back? Is that it?”
“You remember that night before we left? When he came over? He asked me to marry him.”
“Since when did that mean anything?”
“He quit drinking.”
“Again? How many times is this? As many as you? Huh?”
“Watch where you're going with that, missy.”
“Where I'm not going with that is anywhere near Whitehorse.” Zoe stood up. “Do you get that? There is no way I am moving to Whitehorse. Do you understand what I'm saying?”
“It's kind of hard to understand someone when they're acting like a spoilt little brat.”
“Must be hard to understand yourself, then.” Zoe turned to leave, but Alice grabbed her wrist.
“Don't you use that tone with me!” She wagged a finger at Zoe, her voice rising. “Just who the hell do you think you are talking to me like that? Harris is a kind, loving man who treats me right. You want me to turn away from that?”
“Then why did you make us leave?” Zoe yelled at her. In the pregnant pause that followed, she heard her friends moving around upstairs.
Alice went to the bottom of the stairs, hands on her hips, and called for them to come down.
“I think your friends should leave,” she said as they filed passed, eyes on the floor.
“Well, I think they should stay.” Behind her, the others were pulling on their jackets.
“We'll be at my house,” Leaf mumbled, holding open the door. “Bye, Alice.”
“Uh-huh.” Alice fixed her eyes on Zoe and waited for Leaf to shut the door behind him. “I suggest you take a minute to think before you open that big fat mouth of yours again.”
“Is that a suggestion from one of your precious self-help tapes?”
“You betterâ”
“I'm not moving to Whitehorse.”
“I'm not deaf.”
“Nobody is moving to Whitehorse.”
“Oh yeah? And just who is it that makes the decisions around here?”
“You, and they all suck!”
Alice reached out and smacked Zoe across the face so hard that Zoe reeled back and knocked into the wall.
“You're grounded, young lady!”
“Right, nice try.” Zoe walked out and slammed the door behind her.
“Fine then, never mind being grounded!” Alice flung open the door and hollered from the stoop. “Don't even think of coming back here until you are good and ready to apologize!”
Wish and the others
were waiting for her next door. It was muffled, but they could all hear Alice ranting through the walls, swearing up a storm. Zoe heard Cassy wailing for her and decided to go get her. She pounded on the door, but Alice had locked it and was ignoring her. Zoe thought she'd outsmart her by going over the roof, but Alice had already thought to lock Zoe's window. Zoe stood outside on the carport roof in the rain, looking in at Cassy, who had her face pressed to the window, crying for her.
“Go find mama,” Zoe told her, giving up. She waited until Cassy toddled out of the room, sobbing, and then she crossed back over to Leaf's.
Later, after the others left and Wish and T-Bone had gone up to bed, Zoe and Leaf crawled under the covers of his narrow single bed and turned off the light. The two of them had to spoon tight so neither of them would fall off. They fell asleep like that. Zoe woke in the middle of the night and when she turned to stretch her cramped legs, Leaf woke too, and in the silent still night, the streetlight illuminating their faces, they pulled off each other's clothes.
“Whoa, hang on.” Leaf twisted away. “I don't have any condoms.”
“Who said we were going that far?”
“We're not?” Leaf kneeled over her.
“No.”
“Soon?” He kissed her nipple.
Zoe closed her eyes. She wanted to. If he kissed her there again, it might be sooner than she planned. “Yeah. I think very soon.”
Leaf rolled onto his back. After a minute, he said, “I have an idea.”
“What?” Zoe wasn't sure what she could handle at this point.
“Let's make it sound like we're doing it, and then in the morning we'll see what kind of lecture Wish'll think up.”
The two of them bounced and groaned dramatically, breaking into giggles at the sound of the bedsprings creaking like something out of a B-movie.
In the morning, Wish
brought them breakfast in bed: eggs and toast and frothy lattes in deep bowls. Either Wish and T-Bone had slept right though the racket, or they weren't going to bother with any lecture. Not at this point anyway.
In the light of day, the idea of apologizing to her mother didn't seem so bad. To be honest, Zoe figured she had reason to thank her mother. If they hadn't had that fight, Zoe would not have ended up in Leaf's bed. There was no way Alice would've
let
her spend the night with Leaf.