Yesterday (20 page)

“What about you? Is there someone you wish you could call?”

“A couple of friends I made at school but they probably wouldn’t be able to help much and Henry’s people could be watching them.” I wish I could tell Christine what’s happened to me in the past two days. She’d hardly be able to believe it but I think she’d want to help. Like I told Garren, there wouldn’t be much she could do for me but she’d
want
to all the same. Derrick too, probably.

When it comes down to it the two of them feel like the only real friends I’ve ever had. In comparison Alison and my other Kiwi friends seem like cardboard cutouts or fi gments of my imagination.

I sit down at the table across from Garren and nab one of his crackers. “I know you think my memory thing is bullshit, like, some psychological issue or something, but it’s not. It’s related to all of this. I don’t know how yet. I just need some help fi guring it out.”

Garren pitches another cracker into his mouth and leans back in his chair. I watch him swallow and listen to him say, “I don’t think you’re crazy. Maybe your memory issues do tie in with everything else— I don’t know— I guess it could make sense. I just don’t want you to think seeing this guy on Monday’s going to lead to some huge lightbulb moment that makes all this other stuff disappear. You heard Doctor Byrne— we have to make tracks. Put as much distance between us and this place as possible.”

I’m counting on a lightbulb moment— Garren’s right about that. I’m tired of living in darkness, both literally and fi guratively. “We’ll leave Monday no matter what,” I promise for the second time. Between now and my appointment there’s a day and a half to kill. I don’t know what we’d do without this house. “Can we stay here that long? Do you know when the owners are due back from vacation?”

Garren says he thinks they left last weekend so we should still be all right today and tomorrow. Hearing myself refer to the family as
the
owners
seems both ungrateful and odd. I feel as though I should at least know the last name of the people whose home I’ve shared and after I fi nish my noodles, I begin searching through drawers and scanning shelves, trying to fi nd it. The company invoices we ran across yesterday referenced far too many names to be useful.

I don’t think Garren really cares who the owners are but he helps me look. He’s the one who fi nds an old MasterCard bill addressed to Paula Resnik crumpled up in the powder room garbage. So, the Resnik house, that’s where we spent last night and where we’ll remain until we leave for Lou Bianchi’s place on Monday afternoon.

We’ve decided it’s safest not to risk coming and going again until we have to. Everything we need is right here anyway and late into the night Garren and I retreat to the same rooms we opted for yesterday. I lie in bed, surrounded by the kids’ toys, thinking about my mother. My heart refuses to believe we’ll never see each other again. There’s only so much I can handle at one time.

I need to know that she’ll be okay and I reach out with my mind, trying to fi nd her the way I saw the men coming for us at Henry’s house. It’s no use. The only things I see are memories from the last few weeks. Us making Hamburger Helper together. Her sitting on the side of my bed holding out a glass of orange juice for me.

I fall asleep thinking about her and when I wake up on Sunday most of the morning’s already over. Garren and I watch TV all afternoon until the sun begins to set. It feels like a luxury and in between extremely serious discussions about where we should go (Garren thinks Vancouver, which makes good sense to me because it’s about as far away as we can get without crossing a border or falling off the continent) and how we’ll manage to get there (is it better to steal a succession of cars or unload a wad of cash from some unfortunate person and use it to take the train cross country and can we really be having this conversation?) we try to make ourselves feel more normal by talking about regular things like our opinions of the various music videos and TV

shows we’re watching. Garren likes U2 and Kate Bush and hates Madonna, Duran Duran and Wham! I tell him that my friends at school are sort of music snobs who mainly listen to new wave and that I’ve kind of turned into one myself. Garren says he could guess that from looking at me— not so much now because I’m wearing Paula’s bank-teller clothes— but when I fi rst came to his house. We’re both sitting on the Resniks’ leather couch, with our feet on the coffee table, and Garren tilts his head and adds, “Maybe it’s because I’ve only seen you in real life with dark hair but it looks more like the real you than when you were blond in the picture.”

It feels more like the real me so that’s good to hear, especially from him. But after Garren says it, I can’t take my eyes off him. I’m frozen. Staring at his green eyes with my heart in my mouth as Johnny Rotten hollers out the lyrics to “This Is Not a Love Song” on the TV.

I fi dget as I tear my gaze away. Pretend I was thinking something else. Then I say, “It’ll be dark soon. I’m going to have another look around the house and see if there’s anything we missed.” We’ll each need to pack a bag of clothes to bring with us tomorrow and whatever food we can carry.

Most of all, we need more cash or things we could sell. Paula Resnik’s jewelry.

Garren lets me go and later I hear him thumping around the house searching for buried treasure just like I am. We end up with a collection of watches, a Waterford crystal mantelpiece clock, and masses of glimmering earrings, bracelets, rings and necklaces from Paula’s jewelry box (because neither of us can discern what’s valuable or not).

The only money left is in the twins’ room and it’s just pig-gybank change, which we leave alone. Garren says there’s a carton of cigarettes under the bed in the spare room that we should be able to sell too.

I shove several of Paula’s sweaters, Tshirts, socks and her longest pairs of pants into one of two matching beat-up carry-on bags (Paula and her husband must’ve brought more presentable ones along on their trip). I even have to steal a handful of her underwear. You know you’re in a bad way when you fi nd yourself taking someone else’s underwear and I stop and sit on the bed, replaying Lou Bianchi’s voice in my mind in the hope that it will catapult me into a vision that will offer a clue of what’s in store for us tomorrow.

It’s useless, though. There are a dozen different thoughts coursing through my brain— how my mom must be sick with worry for me, what Doctor Byrne said about the greater good, the Latham boy from my dreams, Garren’s green eyes and how I feel when they look at me, the nagging fear that Henry’s men are biding their time, just waiting for us to run so they can snatch us off the street and put us down like dogs or worse, and on and on and on. Worries and questions but not a single thing that comes close to qualifying as a vision.

When Garren and I come together again in the kitchen that evening I almost lie to him. I mean to inspire a bit of hope by saying that I had fl ash of something, a feeling that we’re going to be okay, but then his eyes do their magic trick on me and I’m nothing but warm and fl ustered. Survival and everything else, for a couple of moments, take a backseat to the feelings I’ve been denying. “You’re so …” My voice is a swirling whisper, a dream thing. It’s not what I’d intended to say or how I meant to say it and I shake my head and leave the abandoned sentence shimmering in the candlelit kitchen like a sparkler on fi recracker day.

“So
what
?” he asks, hanging on the freezer door, about to reach for the frozen hamburgers.

“So … familiar.” I have my voice under better control at fi rst but then it begins to twirl and swell. “I can’t believe you don’t know me.”

Garren releases his hold on the fridge, stands with his shoulder against the wall. “It’s still weird to hear you say that,” he murmurs, and though we’re in the middle of a conversation I feel like the kitchen couldn’t get any quieter. “You’re so sure of yourself that you make me feel like I should remember.”

I yank open the fridge myself and grab the hamburgers, just to fi ll up the room with something other than what we’re saying. There’s too much longing inside me. Not only for him but for something he represents. Something I don’t understand. A whole world of longing.

“I wish I could remember more,” I say, draining my tone, clipping it into neutral syllables.

Garren stares down at the candles in the middle of the table. The light dances across his features, turning him golden. “Maybe tomorrow.”

I smile, solidly back in the real world of the here and now because that’s the fi rst time Garren has sounded like there just might be a point to my session with the hypnotherapist. “Tomorrow,” I echo. His words weren’t the sign I was looking for but I accept them as the good omen they are. “I think so.”

I absolutely do.

Even Paula Resnik’s longest pants are short on me, making me look like the victim of a laundry shrinkage accident when we leave the house with our stash of clothes, jewelry, a transistor radio, both fl ashlights, extra batteries and a smattering of food (the rest of the peanut butter and crackers, two cans of tuna and the box of Count Chocula) early Monday afternoon. Because Paula’s boots are also too small I’ve left them behind and am wearing my Doc Martens— if we need to run for any length of time it’s important to do it in comfortable boots.

As soon as we step outside I feel separation anxiety from the house and want my Docs to sprint me straight back inside again. It’s no longer a surprise to hear Winston Churchill pipe up. In his inimitable gruff voice he declares, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is the time to dare and endure.”

I march on with Garren, each of us in possession of roughly half the money we’ve amassed over the past few days. Yesterday we decided that maybe we were being paranoid to worry that Henry could fi nd out we’d holed up at the Resniks’ and check who we’d called from there but that it was a case of better safe than sorry. That leaves us having to do our travel research from the anonymity of a public telephone and when we reach the subway station Garren calls a bunch of bus companies and the train line. He’s just hung up from his fi nal call when he lunges for me, throwing his arms around my waist and burying his head in my shoulder.

“Janette’s here,” he whispers, his body crammed up against mine as if that will make him invisible.

I hold him tight the way Janette would. Close my eyes so that they won’t search her out and call attention to us.

Would she recognize me? She only saw me once and I was dressed so differently. I can smell Mr. Resnik’s aftershave on Garren and the mint toothpaste we’ve both been using. We should’ve brought that with us too, I think.

You think the weirdest things when you’re in trouble.

Toothpaste. Deodorant. When the next opportunity to shower will come along. How my arms are holding Garren but I just feel numb. And then I begin to thaw and it’s harder not to let go. My arms and the rest of my body are fl ooded with feelings of self-consciousness.

If Janette had seen him surely she would’ve stalked over to interrupt us by now. “I’m afraid to look,” I whisper back.

Garren eases himself away from me and glances around the station. “She’s gone.” His shoulders relax. “She was leaving the station. She must be going home.”

“Shit, that was close.” I pick up my carry-on bag and sling it over my shoulder. Garren snaps up the rest of our things— his matching bag and then a canvas knapsack we found in the laundry room, which has the fl ashlights, cigarettes and some of the food in it.

We walk down to the platform where Garren tells me that train tickets to Vancouver are a hundred and fi fty-two dollars each. He thinks we’d be stupid to catch the train in Toronto, where there are people looking for us, and that we need to get ourselves north to Parry Sound. “We can catch up with the cross-country train there,” he explains. “But I think the fi rst thing we need to do after your appointment is get out of the city. There’s a commuter train that heads out to Oakville every hour. It leaves from Union Station same as the cross-country train does but the second stop on the way out of town is at the exhibition grounds. It isn’t far but hopefully just distant enough from the inner hub of the city that they wouldn’t look for us there.”

I’m amazed by how much Garren’s worked out just by spending a few short minutes on the phone. We don’t have the money for the train fare and we’ll have to fi nd a way to get from Oakville to Parry Sound, but having a general plan makes me feel more secure, like we actually can do this.

We’ll disappear and they’ll never fi nd us.

As we speed underground towards Lou Bianchi’s place, we talk about what we’ll do once we reach Vancouver. Since Garren’s been working at a restaurant he says he knows we’ll be able to fi nd under-the- table work in the food industry. “A lot of people I work with have been paid cash by other restaurants. I hear there’s a lot of construction jobs off the books too.”

Thinking out loud I say, “Housekeeping too, I bet. Child care. Different types of manual labor.” I drape my arms over the carry-on bag and try to picture myself doing one of those things on the other side of the country.

“It’ll be shitty in the beginning,” Garren acknowledges.

“Until we have enough money to buy some decent identifi cation and move on to something better.”

Something
better.
Something better, somewhere else. The vagueness of that puts my mind in free fall.

Garren adds that he has an international student identity card, in a fake name, which lists his age as twenty. He bought it from a guy at his school for drinking purposes (since the legal age here is nineteen) and says it might come in handy in the meantime.

“What did you want to do before all this?” he asks.

“I didn’t have that fi gured out.” I thought I’d be in school for years yet, that there’d be plenty more time to come up with the answer to that question. “What about you?”

“I don’t know either. I was going to take a year or so off after graduation. That’s why I was working at the restaurant, to get some traveling money together. See more of Europe and Asia.”