Vanishing and Other Stories (43 page)

Then, on Saturday, Dad always wanted us to do something in nature. We went hiking or fishing, and after, we'd usually hang out with Laura and Roger. And at least once over the weekend, Dad would cry.

Usually, it started like this: “Do you girls want me to come home? I mean, if you do, then I will. You know I love you like crazy. Just say the word.”

Sure we wanted him to come home. But we'd been raised to let people go on their own journeys, to allow others to grow and change. So we just stood there with our hands dangling at our sides. Anyway, we figured that Dad would sort it out on his own, since he was our dad, since he was a grown-up.

“If you want to come home,” I said, “why don't you just say so?”

“That's very sweet, June. But life is more complicated than that.”

“No, it's not.”

That's when the tears started. “I just need to know that you girls are okay.” He knelt down so he was at our level. “I hate to think of you being harmed by The Separation. I hate to think that my children have been damaged.”

“Hey!” I said, suddenly remembering a message I was supposed to pass on. “Mom says you should pay for therapy for us.”

“She said what?”

“Dad, you're the one who's damaged if you think I'm still a child.” Claudia was good at ending these sorts of conversations. She understood something that our parents didn't get: that they could never really damage us. That we transcended them, lived outside of them. They were
them
and we were
us
. We had our own concerns: Claudia had her period and boys who called her on the phone, and I was growing out my hair and memorizing the lyrics from
13 Flavours of Doom
. What our parents didn't understand was that we were busy.

 

 

WHEN WE STOPPED IN NANAIMO
, a stranger got on and sat beside Claudia. He must have been a young guy, but he seemed old to me at the time. I could easily tell a ten-year-old from an eleven-year-old, but everyone over twenty seemed vague and dangerous. He carried a backpack and wore a toque. He said, “Is anyone sitting here?”

Claudia said, “Nope. Go for it,” despite the fact that I should have been sitting there, that I was her sister, that I was stuck next to a woman who wouldn't share her sexy book.

Mark put his backpack on the shelf above the seat and sat down beside Claudia. I knew his name because, once he was seated, he turned to my sister and said, “How's it going? I'm Mark.”

He asked my sister where she was headed and she said, “Port Hardy,” which was the truth. Then she added, “To visit some friends,” which was a lie.

Mark said that he was going to Port McNeill, the stop before hers. “I work in Nanaimo. But I go back to Port on weekends.”

“Cool,” said my sister, as though it really was. “What do you do? When you work?”

“Construction. I'm an industrial welder. You?”

“That's so cool.” Claudia sounded fascinated, intrigued, amazed—I'd never heard her exhibit so much interest in anything in my life. “I don't really work. I'm a student.”

“Oh, yeah? At the college?”

I could feel Claudia's elation in the air. I could almost inhale it. She might have told the truth: that she was only fourteen and attended Vic High. But the purple bangs and the makeup had paid off, and she was going to cash in. “Kind of,” she said. “At the university.”

“Sweet.”

“Yeah. It's all right.”

Then they didn't talk for about twenty minutes. Mark didn't get out a book or anything, and I imagined that he was sitting there with his legs spread wide, staring at the seat in front of him.

When we'd passed Wellington, my sister took out her Walkman and Mark said, “What are you listening to?”

“D.O.A. They're this band from Vancouver.” Mark didn't say anything, so my sister, her voice full of hope, asked, “What kind of music do you like?”

“I like tons of stuff. I listen to pretty much everything.”

And it became official: I hated him. I was only eleven, and my musical snobbery was in its embryo stage, but still I knew a fraud when I heard one.
Everything
. The only people who claim to listen to everything are the ones who know nothing, who are happy to swallow whatever the radio feeds them.

“Totally,” said my Judas of a sister. “Me too.”

 

 

CLAUDIA AND MARK
talked for the next three hours. She let him listen to her tapes and gave him the kind of musical education some people pay money for. He told her how his girlfriend had cheated on him when she went on a three-week tour of Europe, and Claudia seemed to feel real sympathy for him. “That totally sucks.”

He said that, since the breakup, he'd just focused on work. “You're pretty much the first girl I've talked to since then.”

He showed her pictures of his two dogs, and at one point they both held up their hands to compare them. Next to his
workman's hands, Claudia's looked like they belonged to a child. Which they did.

Between Bowser and Courtenay, I couldn't hear what they were saying because they started talking more quietly. I couldn't make out words, but I could hear their soft voices and Claudia's laughter. They leaned close to each other, and in the space between their seats, I could see that their heads almost touched.

 

 

WHEN WE HIT CAMPBELL RIVER
, where we had a forty-minute stop, they acted like best friends. They got off the bus together and my sister didn't wait for me, didn't even turn around to look at me.

I followed her into the depot's bathroom, which had only two stalls, an empty soap dispenser, and an overflowing garbage. Names and life stories had been penned onto the walls, and usually Claudia and I hung out in there and made fun of people who wrote things like
Linds B. wuz here
and
I wanna do Kris 4ever
.

“Thanks for waiting.” I kicked the door of the stall Claudia was in, but she didn't say anything back. I heard her peeing, and I said, “That guy you were talking to was such a loser.”

Claudia flushed the toilet and came out of the stall. She didn't answer me or look at me. She turned on the faucet and ran water over her hands.

“And the woman beside me is so fat. And she's reading this sickening book.”

“Shut up!” Claudia slammed her wet hand against the mirror, against the image of her own face. “Who cares? Who cares if she's fat? Who cares what she's reading?”

“What's your problem?”

“You are. I don't want you to talk to me anymore.”

“I have to talk to you. Mom gave you the money, and I'm hungry.”

“Here.” Claudia took a five-dollar bill from her pocket and threw it at me. “Take this and leave me alone. Don't look at me. Don't breathe on me. And every time you want to talk to me, just remind yourself that you don't even know me.”

 

 

USUALLY, IN CAMPBELL RIVER
, we bought chips and pop from the vending machine and ate them while sitting on the depot's row of plastic seats. We weren't used to carbonated beverages, so they made us hyperactive and strange. We jumped from seat to seat, and competed to see who could jump the farthest. Claudia always won because she could leap over four seats at a time. I'd been hoping to break her record.

But instead, I sat in one of those seats alone. The hard plastic dug into my neck. I bought a bag of chips and ate them by myself. Actually, I didn't eat them. I licked the dill pickle flavour off them and left them in a wet pile on the seat beside me. But even that was no fun without my sister to tell me I was disgusting.

I used some of the change to phone our parents, since Claudia seemed to have forgotten that we were supposed to do that.

When Mom picked up, she said, “Is that you, Juney-looney?”

“Yeah.”

“That's great—you're ahead of schedule.”

“Yeah.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have lunch?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you have?”

“Sandwiches.”

When I called our dad, he said, “Hey, June-bug!” He spoke in his ultra-happy voice, the one he used when he was trying to convince us that he was ultra-happy in his new life. “You in C.R.?”

“Yeah.”

“You're ahead of schedule!”

“I know.”

“Is your sister behaving?”

Through the bus depot's dirty window, I could see Claudia and Mark. They sat in a sunny part of the parking lot. She'd taken off her hoodie and wore just her Converse, jeans, and a black tank top. One of the straps had slipped off her shoulder, and Mark kept looking at it. And she kept looking up at him, through her purple bangs.

“No,” I said.

Dad laughed. “You keep her in line, then. You lay down the law.”

For the rest of the stop, I leaned against the payphone and watched my sister and Mark. They talked and laughed as they shared fries and a cigarette. If our parents had found out, Claudia would have been so dead. It was one thing to smoke weed that the neighbours grew. But to support the big tobacco companies was out of the question.