Niagara Motel (5 page)

“No shit.”

“It's very serious. She has bruising on her heart.”

“That sucks.”

“She actually died for two minutes. But they brought her back.”

“No way.”

“Code Blue, it's called.”

“
Shit
.”

We stared out at the thundering water. A seagull sailed over us and dropped a crap on Nikola Tesla's head.

“What did your mom say about it?”

“About dying?”

“Yeah.”

“She said it was like there's no chalkboard at all.”

“What is she, a teacher or something?”

“No.”

“What's her job?”

“She's sort of like you, I guess.”

Meredith looked at me for a too-long second. Then she picked at a hole in her pantyhose.

“Mostly she dances at clubs and stuff, but she also does … the other things. Sometimes.”

“So, you know what I do?”

“I guess.” I shrugged.

“And your mom does it too?”

“Sometimes. Mostly just dancing.”

“You mean stripping.”

“Exotic dancing.”

“Stripping. She's a stripper.”

I shrugged.

Meredith took out a cigarette. She watched me out of the corner of her eye while she lit it. “You want one?”

I looked out to the falls, at all the white mist billowing up. It was like a giant cloud was trapped inside the waterfall and wanted nothing more than to get back up to the sky with its other cloud friends. “Sure.” I took the cigarette from her and stuck it between my lips. She flicked her lighter, and I leaned toward the flame. Her lighter was black and so were her fingernails. I blew out a mini-cloud of smoke and coughed. I had smoked before, once, in Prince George, behind the grade-six portable, after school with Bryce. It was a menthol cigarette he had stolen from his mom. I smoked half of it, then puked in a garbage can while Bryce laughed at me and smoked the rest. This time wasn't so bad though, because Meredith didn't smoke menthols. She smoked Export A Gold. And also because I wasn't really inhaling, I was just trying to make little smoke clouds. Meredith blew a smoke ring like it was the easiest thing in the world.

“Take a picture, it lasts longer,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She blew another white
o
that floated above my head. “Where are you from, kid?”

“I don't know.”

“Come on, you don't know where you're from?”

“Paris, I guess.” I tapped my cigarette and the ash drifted down and dissolved into the grass.

“
Paris?
You speak French, then?”

“Paris, Ontario.”

“
Ah
. But of
course
,” she said in a French accent.

“But I've lived a lot of different places. I've gone to sixteen different schools. That's why I said I don't know.”

“Where have you lived the longest?”

“I'm not sure. I'd have to ask Gina.”

“Gina's your mom?”

“Yep.”

“What's her stripper name?”

“Angel.”

“Angel,” Meredith smiled. “That's a good one.”

“Do you use another name?”

She took a drag that lasted an age, then said, “Mary.”

“That's a nice name.”

“You like it?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't really like it. I thought that it might make the johns be nicer to me. Even if it's only subconsciously.”

“You mean because Jesus's mom's name was Mary?”

“Yep.”

We laughed. A kid rode by us on a shiny silver unicycle and Meredith whistled at him. I wished that I had a unicycle. If I had a unicycle, all of my problems would be solved.

“I like Angel, though. It's pretty. People would be nice to an Angel.”

“Yeah, they probably would,” I said.

“Are people nice to your mom?”

“I think so,” I said.

“So,” Meredith said. “You're from nowhere and everywhere, eh?”

“I guess.”

“Where was the last place you lived?”

“Prince George.”

“Never heard of it.” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

“It's in northern British Columbia.”

“BC's cool.”

“Yeah. Prince George isn't, though.”

“Where else have you lived?”

“Um, Winnipeg, Regina, Medicine Hat, Calgary, Red Deer, Moose Jaw, Edmonton, Vancouver, Nanaimo, Thunder Bay, Sudbury… some other places. What about you?”

“I'm from Toronto.”

“Cool.”

Meredith took a hard drag off her cigarette.

“How come you came here?”

“Too many people there. I didn't like feeling crowded all the time.”

“I don't like crowds either,” I said.

“Plus, the waterfalls are supposed to be good for you.”

“Good how?”

“Apparently, if you're around a lot of water, it gives off these negative ions, and it makes you feel better, it makes you feel happy.”

“Oh. So … are you?”

“What, happy?”

“Yeah.”

She took a puff, exhaled. “I don't know. Is anyone?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. I guess, sometimes, maybe.”

Meredith tapped her cigarette. The wind ruffled the ends of her hair against her shoulders. She didn't look sad to me, she looked … thoughtful. She looked like maybe she'd had more of life than other
kids her age, but she was wiser for it.

“Do you like being sixteen?” I asked.

Meredith exhaled a thin stream of smoke out toward the falls. She nodded slowly, her eyes glazed over as she stared into the green crush of water. “It's okay.” She stood up and let her cigarette fall to the ground. “I have to get back to work,” she said. The cigarette rolled away and smoked itself from a crack in the sidewalk.

“Okay.” I stood up.

I felt dizzy, as if the mist-cloud trapped in the falls had landed on my head and gone inside my brain. Meredith began to walk. I dropped my cigarette on the sidewalk and wondered if the old man in the green rain hat would find it and put it into his soup can. I hurried to catch up with Meredith until she stopped to tie her shoelace. She had the same shoes as me, black and white Converse sneakers. But hers were high-tops and came up past her ankle. When we got close to the cigar shop she said, “See ya later, kid.” I knew that was my cue to leave although I didn't want to. What I wanted to do was sit on that bench in front of the statue of Nikola Tesla and talk with Meredith all day. I wanted to ask her if she had ever felt happy. I wanted to ask her if her hair was really that black or if she got it out of a box of Nice 'n Easy. I wanted to ask her if she had poked all the holes in her pantyhose on purpose or if they just got that way over time. I wanted to ask her why she was at Bright Light and what
her
mom's job was. I wanted to ask her to be my friend. But instead I said, “Okay,” shoved my hands in my pockets, and kept walking.

7

After school, I went to see Gina. She was lying on her back staring up at the ceiling, her sky-blue eyes all glassy and blank. For a second, I thought she was dead. A sinkhole in the floor opened up beneath me and started to swallow everything that ever was. The chairs and all the machines and the IV stand got sucked down into the hungry hole. Then Gina's pinky finger moved, and I could breathe again and the floor closed up and everything went back to its place. She was sleeping with her eyes open, which she sometimes did, but I had forgotten. I wondered if she was sleeping like a normal person or if she'd had a sleep attack. I went to the vending machine and bought a pack of Skittles. Then I went to the nurse's station and talked to Heather, the fat nurse with the black hairs growing out of her chin. Heather wore scrubs with hearts and teddy bears on them and she usually gave me a honey-dip donut on Saturdays if there were any left. She was the nicest nurse in there. I had thought that all nurses would be nice, but it's not true. Most of them are too busy to even say hi, and some of them scowled at me if I came in after visiting hours. Heather said Gina had been like that for awhile and they knew she was narcoleptic so they just made sure that she was breathing and her heart was beating, and they let her sleep with her eyes open.

“Do you want to wake her up?” Heather asked.

I shrugged and offered Heather some Skittles.

“No thanks, hon. I'm trying a new diet.”

“The kind where you eat less and exercise more?”

She laughed. “Something like that.”

“Because that's the only kind of diet that works.”

She smiled for a millisecond then held out her hand, and I poured a pile of Skittles into it.

“When is Dr Chopra going to let Gina out of here?”

“I don't know, sweetie.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“To Dr Chopra?”

“Yeah.”

Heather looked down at her clipboard, then back up at me. “She's not in today.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's her day off.”

“But she's a doctor.”

“Everyone gets a day off once in awhile, kiddo.”

“Not me.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Yeah, the hardest job there is.”

“What's that?”

“Being a kid.”

“Ha! You think that's hard, you should try being a woman!” She popped the whole handful of Skittles into her mouth and smiled big at me to show me her rainbow teeth as she chewed them up. I laughed and showed her a mouth-rainbow too.

That night the dinner at Bright Light was pork chops, boiled potatoes, and broccoli. But the pork chops were overdone and rubber-chewy and Dirtbag Daryl kept going on about how everyone was masticating so hard and how the pork chops were really difficult to masticate. He kept saying masticate this and masticate that, and at first it was really obnoxious and people told him to shut the hell up. Meredith threw a piece of broccoli at him but he kept on doing it and eventually everyone started cracking up, even Brian, who
was the SOD, which stands for Staff On Duty. The word masticate means chew and it sounds like the word masturbate which means jerking-off for boys and humping a pillow for girls. I pictured a girl humping a pork chop which is totally ridiculous, so then I started cracking up too. I looked around the table at everyone laughing. Kyle's face was turning red, Jayleen was choking on her milk from laughing so hard, and Josh was snorting like a pig, which made everyone laugh even harder, and for a minute, you could almost believe that we were a regular family, just sitting around the table, masticating our pork chops, laughing at our idiot brother. The laugh session seemed to go on and on, and I was glad Gina wasn't there because she always gets a sleep attack when she laughs hard like that. Finally, it faded out. Shawn moaned. Tiffany wiped tears from her eyes. Then everyone got really quiet, even Dirtbag Daryl. There was a strange heaviness upon us, like someone had just made us all a promise that we knew they couldn't keep. Kids started to get up and put their plates in the dishwasher. Chairs scraped against the tile floor as people shoved themselves away from the table. I sat at the table staring down at my plate until everyone had left the dining room. I pushed my broccoli stumps around in a circle and waited for the heavy feeling to go away. After awhile, Brian, the SOD, came back in. He tucked in all the chairs but one and then sat in it, across the table from me.

“How are you doing, kid?”

“Okay.”

“Yeah?”

I shrugged.

“How's your mom?”

“Not good. Her heart's bruised. Bad.”

“She's going to get better though, right?”

“She could die if things don't heal properly.” Saying it made
my legs feel watery, but I knew it was true. I made a pillow with my elbows and put my head down. I kept looking at Brian with one eye.

Brian scratched his beard. It was brown and thick and made him look like a wannabe lumberjack. Or maybe he was a lumberjack when he wasn't supervising juveniles. It's hard to tell what people do in their spare time just by looking at them. But I was pretty sure that Brian wasn't a lumberjack. He wore a Nirvana T-shirt. The one with a yellow smiley face on it and x's for eyes. “I know it must be hard in here for you sometimes,” he said.

“Most of the time.”

“But you know what?”

“What?”

“You're one of the lucky ones.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, man. You're going to be leaving soon, to live with your mom.”

“So?”

“So some of these kids don't ever get to leave.”

“You mean they have to stay here for their whole life?”

“Well, until they're nineteen, then they have to move out and look after themselves for the rest of their life.”

“Get jobs?”

“Yep, get jobs, find a place to live, buy groceries, make food, pay bills, all that.”

“Can kids have jobs?”

“That depends.”

“On what?” I thought of Meredith, working her corner. She probably made more money than some adults did.

“Well, it depends on what you want to do. See, kids under fourteen aren't supposed to work for a company or a store or a restaurant, but it's okay for kids your age to do other work, like mow lawns,
babysit, deliver newspapers, stuff like that.”

“Brian?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think that
I
could get a job?”

“I don't see why not.”

“But not some crap job. I need to make a lot of money.”

“Why's that?”

“Because I need to go find my father.”

“Why's that?”

“Because he's my
father
.”

Brian squinted at me, waiting.

“And because, if something happens to Gina, I mean, if she doesn't get better, or if she has another accident, then …”

“Okay.” Brian nodded. He swallowed and his Adam's apple bounced in his throat like a super-bouncy ball. “Do you know where he lives?”

“I think maybe Boston. I think he might own a bar there.”

“Shouldn't be too hard to track him down then,” Brian said.