Who I'm Not (6 page)

Shan hugged me. “Well, nobody tampered with this guy's DNA,” she said. “He's just the same as he always was.”

I almost hugged her back.

Next, they asked a bunch of questions about Harley. I told the truth about where we'd been for the last while because it was too easy to check. When it was over, Swofford flipped his notebook shut and turned off his recorder and said he was glad I was back. He said he'd bring me a statement to sign for the files and that they'd be in touch with the FBI, who might want to talk to me too.

We all stood up. Meg bent to pick up her shoulder bag. I got another look down her top. Swofford looked too; I saw him. Griffin said, “Good to meet you.”

I nodded.

“We rarely get a happy ending.” He cocked a gray eyebrow. “Stay safe, huh?”

Stay away from you, I thought.

TWELVE

After the cops left, I relaxed a little. It felt like Shan did too. Maybe she was just getting used to having me around. Now the only ones I hadn't met were Danny's mom, Carleen, and his half-brother, Tyson. Peterborough, where Tyson lived, was half an hour north, but he'd had his license suspended for DUI. He'd also had his car repo'd. It didn't look like he was going to be much of a player.

Carleen, though, she was another story. I knew she was close by. Shan kept saying she'd be coming over soon. A couple times I heard Shan talking on the phone, and I got the feeling she was talking to Carleen. I don't know why exactly—just an edge in her voice that put
me
on edge. For a whole week Carleen didn't show. At first I worried that it was weird, a mother not coming to see her long-lost kid. Then I remembered Shan had said that things had been bad between Carleen and Danny before he disappeared, and that she'd been pretty messed up back then. Maybe she was worried about what
I
was going to do or say. Besides, what did I know about mothers? Whoever my mother was, visiting wasn't at the top of her list either. Finally, I decided not to worry about it. As long as Carleen wasn't around, she was one less person to fool.

I'd gone to the library a couple more times and gotten my card. I wanted to see if I could find that girl again. I just couldn't believe I'd seen
Gilly
on her name tag. It became a kind of good-luck thing for me. I thought if I could see the name and it was
Gilly
, then it would be some kind of sign that somehow things were going to work out all right. I couldn't get it out of my mind.

Harley could be like that too—watching for signs that his luck was running. He'd glued a little tourist-shop carving of a totem pole on the dash. He'd reach over, tap it and say, “touch wood” any time he was talking about how a deal should go. Other times, though, when he'd had a few beers or when he saw people lined up to buy lottery tickets, he'd start in on how there was no such thing as luck. “Luck is what you make for yourself,” he'd say. “Luck didn't buy this watch.” Then he'd flash his big silver watch at me. Which was kind of funny, because Harley was right. Luck hadn't bought it, he had, for ten bucks from a bald guy named Charlie, who'd had a gym bag full of fake Rolexes and Tag Heuers. I'd been with him. Sometimes Harley could get so into it that he'd forget what was a scam and what was real. Maybe that's what made him so good.

Whatever her name was, the girl never showed up at the library. I told myself that was okay, that it didn't mean I'd read the tag wrong. As long as I didn't know for sure, my luck was still holding.

Another thing about the library was, it was the perfect place to get away from everybody. With Harley I'd been like a con-game sprinter; now it was starting to feel as if I were running a marathon.

The getaway part backfired, of course. Shan was impressed that I liked books. “It's so great,” she said. I was lazing on Roy's recliner, which was a no-no. I knew Roy was also ticked about how much hot water I used. “Reading was such a problem for you. Remember how you used to hate it?” She was always saying stuff like that to me.
Remember how
and
remember when
or, holding something up,
remember this?
Sometimes I wondered if she was testing me, sometimes it was almost like she was coaching me. But I only thought like that when I was really uptight. Mostly it felt as if she just wanted someone to remember with her. It made her happy. That was my job, to make her happy.

Anyway, I wasn't surprised to hear about Danny not reading, and it was easy to handle. “There was no TV,” I said. “Just a bunch of old books. I didn't have any choice. Now it's a habit, I guess.”

“Good,” she said. “I hope it rubs off on Matt.” Then came the catch. “Listen, do you think you could take Brooklynne to the library? I haven't got time, and it would be so good for her.”

What could I say? I took Brooklynne. She wanted me to read to her. It wasn't so bad; I like little-kid books. I don't remember anyone ever reading to me, so it was like I was reading for myself too.

When we came back to the house, we went around to the backyard. Shan was standing in the wading pool. In front of her, smoking a cigarette, was a skinny woman in denim cutoffs and a sleeveless yellow top. She had a tattoo of a dragon or something twisting up one arm. It sounded as if they were arguing, but they cut it off and turned when they heard us. Shan's face was red.

“Gramma,” Brooklynne said.

So this was Carleen.

I used to have a dream about my mom. She was darkhaired, young and pretty, but still mom-looking. She'd have on a hair band and a blue gingham shirt and jeans, and she'd be smiling as she served me pancakes. I held on to that until the day I saw her doing the same thing on TV to a gap-toothed kid with freckles and realized I'd been rerunning a syrup commercial in my sleep.

For a while after that, I figured my mom was more likely a crack whore and probably dead. I wasn't even sure what a crack whore was, but it sounded like the worst thing you could be, and that had to be her. Otherwise, why wouldn't she come get me? Then I made her into someone more exotic who
couldn't
get to me, or didn't know about me. A cool spy who couldn't risk blowing her cover because her family would be in danger, or an heiress who'd had me when she was sixteen and whose evil family gave me away and told her I'd died, but she'd always kept a baby picture of me and one day she'd find me and take me home and I'd be rich.

Carleen wasn't any of those things. She was thin-faced, with streaked blond hair, pinched lips and eyes like bruises. Harley would have said she looked as if she'd gone ten rounds with the world. All
I
could say was, “Momma.”

Carleen's whole body stiffened. She jammed her cigarette to her lips and sucked hard. Then she threw the butt away and stepped toward me, shakily blowing smoke as if she were the dragon on her own arm. “Danny.”

Up close, I could smell weed under the tobacco. I still had my shades on. I wasn't much taller than she was. She clutched at her tattooed arm and twitched a smile together. Her eyes were flat and glassy as she stared at Bart Simpson's face on a T-shirt I'd borrowed from Matt. “It's been…It's…it's gr—it's good…it's…”

You could tell she didn't like hugging any better than I did, but she started for it, then stopped halfway and just held onto my arms. “Lissen.” She gave me a little shake, still staring at Bart. “Lissen, um, sorry I haven't, ah, been
by
, but there's been things, you know. Life, like.” She shot a look back at Shan. “But now…you're here.”

“It's good to be back,” I said.

“Are you?” she said. She finally looked at me. It was the blankest look I've ever seen. It was as if she wasn't behind her own eyes. At the time, I put it down to the weed and whatever else she was on. I'd been on a winning streak, and I'd started to think I could handle anything the Dellomondos threw at me. Maybe I was wrong.

THIRTEEN

Shan wanted Carleen to go clothes shopping with us. School was coming up soon, and I needed stuff. I'd ditched the hip-hop hat, but otherwise I'd been stuck with what I had worn on the plane and Matt's clothes when I had to. His stuff ran to Simpsons or camo T-shirts and twenty-times-too-large basketball shorts, which are fine if you're a moose hunter or Shaquille O'Neal but not so great on me. They weren't so great on Matt, either, but I didn't tell him.

With Harley, there were always lots of clothes. You had to dress for whatever line you were running. “Clothes make the man,” I read to him one day.

“Correction,” he'd said back. “Clothes make the scam.”

If we were working RV parks, we'd dress Walmart or Penney's. Upscale, it depended—either designer labels or preppy stuff like J. Press or Brooks Brothers. Price didn't matter, since Harley always paid with juiced cards. We'd boost lots of things, usually things you could resell, but not often clothes. For a little while we were heavy into that, because store security never paid much attention to an okay-dressed kid and his dad. I was a walking disguise. We stopped, though, after a husband-and-wife shoplifting team got splashed all over the news for going on one of those trash-talk TV shows and bragging about how they boosted stuff using their little kids for cover.

Now we piled into the family van and went to Walmart and Zellers, which was like the same thing, only Canadian. I hear it's Target now. I wondered if it was the same mall Danny had wanted to go to when he disappeared. Driving there, I was tempted to say, “So, I finally get to go to the mall with you after all,” but I kept my mouth shut. It wasn't a Danny thing to say, and I still needed to play it right with Carleen, whether she was stoned or not.

At the mall, I updated Danny. I picked black jeans and a pair of distressed ones, a couple plain gray tops and a striped shirt that buttoned up tight. With socks and underwear, they'd spent their limit. While Shan and Carleen talked to some friend they'd bumped into, I strolled behind a rack of shiny dress pants and boosted some tight black T-shirts to help out. It took about five seconds to lay one flat inside a gray top and fold one into the black jeans.

I was rusty. I remembered to check for scanner triggers on the tees, but I hadn't scoped out the cameras when we walked in. A security guard stopped us at the till. I said I didn't do it, didn't know how the shirts got there. Meg got called. I had to wait in a little room while she straightened it out.

I know we all want this to work.

Through the door I heard her telling Shan and Carleen that this was a “normal trauma indicator” and it showed how stressed I'd been. The store manager even gave me one of the T-shirts when he found out my sad story. I didn't tell him I was still wearing a third one I'd slipped on in the change room.

In a weird way, I think getting caught like that was a winner. It looked like exactly the kind of bonehead play Danny would have made. It matched right up with my lasting an hour in high school the next week.

FOURTEEN

Not that I'd planned on being there much. I hadn't been in a school since grade six in Oregon. I'd hated it then and I didn't see why it would be any different now.

Meg had put me in a remedial class until they figured out what grade I could handle and how well I would socialize. There had been stuff in the news about Danny being found. The local and Toronto papers had called. A TV crew had interviewed Meg and Shan and Swofford, but they'd all been kept away from me, so there were no new photos or anything, even though they said we lived in Port Hope now. Stories had gotten around, I guess. Anyway, I was at my new locker when I heard snickering and feet shuffling right behind me. Someone said, “You really blow all those guys?”

Usually, there are three of them. I went with that now. The main thing, no matter how many there are, is to move first and keep moving, so I just wheeled and smacked the closest guy in the face with my new math book. Which made it good for something. As the kid's head snapped back, I kicked him as hard as I could, right where it counts, and piled on as he crumpled. When you're my size, you hit first and hope someone breaks it up before you get hit back.

It worked in grade six and it worked now. By the time the yelling started, I had him on the floor, hitting him anywhere I could, and a few seconds later some teacher was dragging me off and I was on my way to the office. I wouldn't talk to anybody until Meg got there. When she did, looking hot in sandals and a summer dress, we all wanted to make it work, so the next day I started at Open Book, the “alternative” school.

I liked Open Book. It was just a room over the Big Sisters secondhand store downtown, about a block from the library—everything in Port Hope was close. It had tables and chairs and bookshelves, and sometimes even some students. For assignments, you filled in workbooks. The teacher, Mr. Hunter, was a short head-shaved guy who wore jogging shoes with relaxed-fit khakis and polyester dress shirts. He kept his car keys in the pocket of the jacket he always draped across the back of his chair. I knew that by the second day.

Mr. Hunter was happy if you showed up. The girls usually brought their babies with them. The guys were hip-hop hillbillies, skinny stoners with wallets on chains and bad everything. Mostly what they did was take smoke breaks in the alley. And mostly they left me alone—they were too vacant to care. One day I was passing the alley and one of them asked, “You the guy that pounded Brad Dillon?”

I shrugged. I didn't even know who I'd hit—and I didn't need enemies. He took it as a yes anyway and nodded back. “That guy's an asshole.”

But the main reason I liked Open Book was that on the very first day, when I climbed the stairs, I saw the girl from the library.

She was sitting by herself at a table, writing in some kind of workbook. It was a hot day, but she had on jeans and another sweater with those extra-long sleeves. I was over there before I even knew what I was doing. “Is it okay if I sit here?”