Vanishing and Other Stories (42 page)

 

CLAUDIA
'
S TEENAGE REBELLION
was awkward, an adolescent flail. In her twenties, she came to understand how to really get to our parents, and her techniques became much more sophisticated. But when I was eleven, I didn't understand how young and stupid she was, so I copied everything she did. I ripped my jeans the way she ripped hers. I coloured my hair with markers from school, so that my head looked and smelled like blueberries. I made mixtapes and listened to them until they unravelled. I took the music seriously—more seriously, it turned out, than Claudia ever did. It started as imitation, but in the end, it stuck.

 

 

“
ON A SCALE OF ONE TO TEN
, how much do you think your father and I have messed you girls up?” This was the kind of question Mom started asking over dinner. “A moderate amount? Or more than average?”

“You're so weird, Mom.” Claudia brushed her fork over the quinoa on her plate.

“Yeah.” I tried to copy Claudia's nonchalance, her way of averting her eyes from our mother's. “You're weird.”

“We always tried to make sure you were happy.” Mom covered her face with her hands. “We tried so hard.”

It was sweet of Mom to worry, but I knew that, for Claudia, The Separation had its advantages. She had been the only one of her friends who lived in a two-parent home, and that had embarrassed her. And, bonus: she'd been able to fake tears—
my parents are getting divorced
, etc., etc.—to get out of gym class.

There was one thing I liked about it too. It meant that, every month, Claudia and I got to visit our dad in Port Hardy. This was farther from home than I'd ever been, and I loved the bus trip. On the first Friday of each month we caught the Greyhound at 5:45 in the morning. Claudia liked it because it meant we got to miss a day of school. I liked it because it meant a whole day—ten hours, including stops—with Claudia.

 

 

THE BUS HAD GREY SEATS
with little footrests that flipped down, and wide windows that didn't open. Claudia and I always took a seat close to the back, because we knew from riding the school bus that this was where the cool kids sat. My sister always took the window seat and put the armrest down between us.

I can't speak for Claudia—she's still mysterious to me—but I can be almost sure that what we both loved most about those trips was the freedom. It's true that we were limited. Really, how much cool stuff can you do on a bus? When all you had was the ten bucks that your mom had given you to buy lunch? But still, when the door was sealed shut, we were fully separated from our parents—and this hardly ever happened, since school was full of parental replacements. That bus was our territory. Who cares that its seats made me lose all feeling in my ass? Or that the air that shot from
the vents above our heads smelled like old carpets? Or that the sun poured in the windows and made us sweat? Our only responsibility was to call our parents from Campbell River, because they both insisted, separately, that we check in. Other than that, we could do or eat or say whatever we wanted. For ten hours, between Victoria and Port Hardy, we travelled fast, suspended above the road and outside supervision.

Of course, it turned out that when we were left on our own, we didn't usually feel like doing anything wild. I'd read adventure novels—Mom's old Trixie Beldens, or a Famous Five. Claudia would arrange herself so her sneakers were against the seat in front of her. She always brought a pillow, which she propped against the window. She listened to her Walkman and either slept or pretended to sleep. And I sat beside her, which was my favourite part. For once, she couldn't kick me out of her room, slam the door, or tell me to go somewhere and die.

 

 

THERE WAS ONE BUS TRIP
that was different. It was September, and it would be our last trip up-island, but we didn't know that yet.

Things started out wrong: after Mom dropped us at the depot, Claudia waited until she had driven away—so I couldn't run and tell on her—then insisted that we sit in separate seats. As we dragged our backpacks through the parking lot toward our bus, Claudia said, “I'm not sitting beside you. I feel like being by myself.”

“Yeah, right. Mom says some guy will sit beside us and fondle us if we don't stick together.”

“Oh my God.” Claudia stepped onto the bus and showed the driver her ticket. “You're such a crybaby.”

Another thing that went wrong was that the last seats of the bus were already taken by people who were obviously cooler than us. So Claudia chose a seat in the middle. She sat near the window, and put her legs up so I couldn't sit down. “I'm not kidding,” she said. “You're not sitting here.”

I sat directly behind her. “You're such a bitch.” I spoke through the space between the back of her seat and the window. “I hope you do get fondled.”

 

 

IN PORT HARDY
, our dad moved from place to place, and finally ended up renting a room in a house where people like him—people without luck or money—ended up. It was a big, crumbling house by the water. The wind coming off the ocean was so loud that when Claudia and I stayed there, I couldn't sleep at night. There was a smokehouse in the back, but Dad didn't know how to use it and had almost burned it down accidentally. After that, the other tenants teased him by calling him White Man, even though most of them were white too.

Living there for less than a year had aged our dad. Maybe it was all that wind battering his skin. His hair was always tangled, and he wore clothes I'd never seen before: fraying plaid shirts, jeans that were too big for him, rubber boots.

He spent a lot of time with one of his neighbours, a woman named Laura. She had a tattoo of an eagle on her back and a baby named Roger that she carried in a Snugli. She was pretty, with
shiny dark hair and a round face. I liked her because she gave us jujubes and other petroleum products that we weren't allowed to eat at home. Claudia liked her because Laura shared her makeup. And she would let us take turns holding Roger, teaching us the right way to carry him. His soft baby breathing even calmed Claudia's hormonal rages.

Mom was convinced that Laura was Dad's girlfriend, but I was never sure. I think Laura just felt sorry for him, and for us. But when Mom found out about her, her hands and her voice got shaky. With a new urgency, she phoned everyone she knew.

“Breaking news,” she said. “He's now dating Pocahontas.” She paused. “Not that I don't respect the Salish people and their culture.”

Then she inhaled and exhaled, deeply and calmly, the way she'd learned to do from a book.

 

 

ONE GOOD THING
about being separated from Claudia was that I got a window seat. I was able to look out at deer munching broom on the side of the road. I saw birds in their flight. I had views of the vast and untamed ocean.

It turned out that I got bored of that pretty quick. By the time we hit Ladysmith, it was all I could do not to lean over Claudia's seat and start smacking her head with my book.

The only reason I didn't do that was because there was a stranger beside me—an overweight woman with a winter coat, despite the fact that it was hot in the bus. She sat next to me, purse on the floor, coat spread over her legs like a blanket. She
turned on the little light above her seat and started to read a novel.

The book's cover had a picture of a dark man in a feather headdress, holding a pale woman in his muscular arms. The woman looked like she'd swooned or died or had low blood sugar. Her eighteenth-century dress was slipping off one shoulder. The man in the headdress looked like some of the guys my dad hung out with at the Legion, except a lot less hunched and exhausted. He had huge pecs and there was a forest behind him. I could tell from the cover and the tag line—
In the wilderness of New America, she found a wild stranger
—that this book was full of sex. From Victoria to Nanaimo, I kept trying to read over the fat woman's shoulder.

 

 

EACH VISIT TO OUR DAD
'
S
was pretty much the same. After we arrived on Friday night, he'd take us to the Legion. All the guys there recognized us and said, “Hey, little ladies. How are the princesses this evening?” They asked us about school and we told them stories. Usually Claudia and I invented some adventure about the bus trip, some fantastic thing that involved several near-death experiences.