Aftershock Read online

  Dedication

  This one is for Sabine.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Airport.

  Departures.

  Hotel.

  Arrivals.

  Dinner.

  Sink.

  Porch.

  Neptune.

  Bed.

  Minke.

  Drive.

  Lee.

  Neck.

  Pharmacy.

  Concussion.

  Cops.

  Lawyer.

  Ghost.

  Pool.

  Bedroom.

  Road.

  Hike.

  House.

  Help.

  Aftershock.

  Tank.

  Work.

  Call.

  Quake.

  Diary.

  Masculinity.

  Piha.

  Photograph.

  Court.

  Feelings.

  Breathe.

  Departures.

  Voices.

  Arrivals.

  Daughter.

  Jenga.

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Airport.

  Chloe said something, but Jules wasn’t listening.

  She was trying to judge, without tweaking her neck, if she could, with an adequate margin of safety, slide her Benz in between the two cabs. Partly to allow Chloe room to get that ridiculous duffle bag out of the back, partly because airports were full of exhausted, over-emoting travellers, banging around their hard-edged baggage. The Oxy cushioned a lot of things, but she still felt every threat to her car like a needle on her skin.

  Mum? Chloe was digging in her “day pack,” also too large and, in Jules’s opinion, hideous. She’d come home the other day with the army surplus bags, monstrous vomit-green canvas things. Totally impractical. Outmoded by the army for good reason. But then, Jules didn’t have to carry them. And Chloe. Well, Chloe would do what she wanted. Like her haircut. If you could call it that. Her gorgeous auburn hair hacked down to a quarter inch of bleached white spikes.

  Jules sighed. Nothing was ever easy, with Chloe. The constant push and pull between them left her drained, and this horned and acid-tongued stranger that was her daughter’s latest metamorphosis shredded her heart and her composure as it clawed and spit fire, refused her embrace. But letting go was still painful—like everything else these days, unexpectedly so—and the idea of Chloe leaving still sucker-punched her with the force of a car crash every time she thought about it. She couldn’t bear the thought of prolonging her own metaphorical spiral through the windshield any longer than necessary. So, when one of the cabs pulled away, she slid into the gap, double-parking. Immediately, there were two young men gesturing at her madly, pointing at the Taxi Stand sign, their voices muted by the well-sealed windows of the SUV.

  Better make it quick. Jules avoided eye contact with the cabbies, holding up her forefinger in the universal signal for just a minute.

  Chloe looked up sharply from her rummaging. You’re not coming in?

  I can’t park here, look at these— She flinched as the one in the turban rapped on the passenger window.

  So park in there! Chloe nodded towards the short-term parking garage fifty feet away, both arms elbow-deep in her pack. Jules shuddered inwardly at the ghosts residing in that particular garage.

  Chloe, I have a meeting.

  This was a lie. She’d taken the day off to deal with the inevitable emotional bruising of this exact and dreaded moment. With one hand still on the steering wheel, she thumbed at her phone, pretending to check for email. Swallowed twice. Threw a glance in her daughter’s direction that was never intended to land, slammed up against Chloe’s glare and quickly looked away again.

  Go on, I’m in a hurry. Pinched voice she hoped passed for irritation.

  Fine.

  Chloe punched jeans and underwear back into the top of her pack, yanked the top flap over and roughly tugged the straps closed. Jules kept her eyes pointed at her phone, tried to block out the huffing and puffing in her peripheral vision. Took deep breaths.

  Pop the trunk, please, Mother.

  Chloe pushed her door open and jumped down. The two protesting cabbies had become four. They stepped back to let Chloe out, then moved to lean into the passenger side to talk at Jules.

  Close the door, Chloe!

  Jules fixed her eyes straight ahead, on nothing. Chloe slammed the door, much too hard, but not before Jules heard her say: Don’t bother. She’s a racist bitch.

  Love you too, dear, Jules said. But the sealed car swallowed her words. She waited for Chloe to reach the back, then popped the hatch open for her. One of the men brought a luggage cart over when he saw the size of Chloe’s duffle bag and helped her lift it on.

  Try not to miss me too much, Chloe called up through the car’s interior. I’m only gone for a year. She would have slammed the trunk closed too, and Jules felt a dark satisfaction at her daughter’s frustration as hydraulics eased it shut.

  Jules gave the cab drivers a courtesy wave as she pulled away from the curb. She caught a last glimpse of Chloe, in her buzz cut and motorcycle jacket, gesturing rudely at her in the rear-view mirror.

  Driving down the 427, she felt totally uncalled-for tears sting her eyes. She never cried. Hated criers. What the fuck. Not getting along with Chloe was not new. But she felt worse about it than usual. An accusation that she was a terrible parent sang nastily in her brain, and she didn’t even know whose voice it was.

  She’d hoped to establish a truce, before Chloe left. Had meant to slip her a couple hundred bucks when she dropped her off. But, like so many of her better intentions, she’d lost her grip on it, and now it was too late.

  The drive to the airport, too, had been a peace offering. Well. So much for that.

  It had all started with the phone call. Jules, ear-deep in a glitchy algorithm, had only answered because it was after hours, hitting the speakerphone button without taking her eyes off her monitor.

  Jules Wright.

  Hi, Mum.

  What’s wrong? A call at work was as rare as it was unwelcome.

  Nothing’s wrong, exactly . . .

  Can I call you later?

  This is later. I called you last week. Remember?

  Jules scanned through lines of code for anything problematic—a misplaced ampersand or asterisk could wreak havoc.

  Don’t whine, Chloe. I can’t stand it.

  The line hissed. Creating the database was the easy part, but to provide the client with live analytics it had to work fluidly with the algorithm she’d written. The whole thing was hours late going online, she’d had to wrench it away from a junior associate who’d been streamlining it towards disaster. She shouldn’t have passed it off to him in the first place, but lately her workload had swelled malignantly. Still, the price was hers to pay.

  I’m in the middle of something, so.

  I’ve withdrawn from school, Chloe said, and she started to say something else, to explain or elaborate or make some kind of excuse, but Jules wasn’t listening: she was imploding.

  What’re you gonna do, Chloe? Work retail?

  Something non-linguistic tore out of her throat. Her hand shot out, picked up the receiver and slammed it down again.

  She knew what Chloe wanted. Chloe wanted to travel.

  EVEN THROUGH THE Oxy, Jules felt fresh frustration. She banged on the steering wheel, her arms dragging a half second behind her impulse. She hit the horn accidentally, swerved slightly and earned a scowl from the young man in the next lane. She gave him the finger and sped up to get in front of him.

  Th
e day after Chloe’s phone call, after spending an hour longer than normal in standstill traffic on her Toronto–Hamilton commute, Jules arrived home to find her front door open wide. Already aggravated, she had the brief thought that she’d been robbed and felt the grim vindication of catastrophic expectations fulfilled. Then she heard the racket coming from inside. Not robbed: invaded. Angry female voices yelled to distorted guitars from portable speakers on the mantel, a sticker-covered cellphone lying next to them. Also on the mantel, crowding out the single photograph of Chloe in her grad robes (Here, Mum, so you don’t forget me—as though she might) and the two sleek silver candlesticks, were a couple of beer cans, a pack of cigarettes (when had that started?), some keys and a pair of Ray-Bans. The matching black roller suitcases Jules had bought her the previous month—to take to university—were hunched together on the hearth like kids on a smoke break, everything ripped open and loose, uncontained. Black T-shirts, boys’ underwear, flannel sheets and expensive toiletries all fled the suitcases in a desperate mass exodus. Some jeans and sweaters had conquered the couch, a scuffed leather jacket lounged in an armchair. Someone had pulled up all the couch cushions to look for lost change. A tower of textbooks swayed on the coffee table, topped by an empty fast-food container.

  Well. At least she’d bought some books.

  Jules took off her shoes and was straightening cushions when Chloe wandered out of the kitchen eating a sandwich. Without a plate.

  It started like this:

  You smoked in my house?

  Nice to see you too, Chlo, welcome home.

  Are you staying long?

  I used an ashtray.

  But no plate?

  I’ve only been here like an hour.

  Rod’s coming over later. Think you could take your shoes off?

  Well, I couldn’t stay in residence. My flight’s on the eighteenth.

  And ended, maybe, finally, with that last rude gesture at the airport.

  JULES SIGHED. SHE did a lot of sighing these days. She shoulder-checked so she could change lanes for her exit, craning her head around to the right, and—

  Fuck.

  The kink in her neck flared up, scalpel-sliced through the cotton wool of the painkillers. First the angry twist under her right shoulder blade. Within seconds, pain spiked up her neck and down her back, into her upper arm. Oh fuck. It was a bad one. She leaned over, pulled a heat patch from the glove compartment and slapped it on.

  She needed more pills, and soon. Maybe Rod would show up tonight.

  Departures.

  The customs officer—who was practically my age—called me Sir, then got all awkward and stammering when he heard my voice and saw the name on my passport. When my duffle bag was three pounds overweight, he muttered something about the scale being off and handed me a boarding pass while calling me Miss at least three times in some sort of limp apology. But I didn’t give a fuck. People are so attached to their genders.

  Walking through the airport with just my day pack, I felt light, almost buoyant. As if I could imagine my heart back in place where Jill had ripped it out.

  Fuck you, JJ.

  THE LINE THROUGH security moved like held breath, a delayed moment of release. At the conveyor belt, I took off my leather jacket and my combat boots, emptied my pockets. You’ve been selected at random, they told me, as I watched them rifle through my pack, a guy-girl team of security officers smugly pulling out each item one by one, scanning for who the hell knew what with a beeping handheld. My paperback. My toothbrush. The emergency underwear in case my duffle got lost.

  The ten minutes it took me to repack made me miss my official boarding time. I sprinted through the terminal to find my gate, swearing at people who blocked my path.

  I CAUGHT MY breath and watched the world slide away, gravity pushing me into my seat as the airport, the city, the sprawling suburbs, the parking lots of farmland around them, withdrew into the distance, receded into the past. I pondered that from down there, you might only see one plane climbing into the sky, but from up here the cars on the road were shrinking into roaches, then ants, then mites, scurrying and indistinguishable. I imagined Jules pulling over on her way out of the airport, watching the plane take off, wistfully regretting our interaction. Imagined Jill, writing her exam, and hoped she could feel her own heart tearing out as the plane rose. The concrete-coloured day slid under a carpet of postcard-perfect clouds and pure blue sky.

  MY FIRST STOP was to see David. My father. I had a sense of tracing a path he’d laid down years before.

  When I was little, he’d been a journalist, a foreign correspondent. He was away a lot. But when the baby died, he put freelancing aside and got a job as a staff writer at our city paper. He stayed home more, started taking me to school, made me lunches, came to my atom hockey games. And Jules was around less, if that was possible. She travelled for work more, closed herself in her room whenever she was home and fought with David. Around the time I started high school, David seemed to finally concede that Jules would never come back to him, never emerge from wherever she’d gone after the baby died. He said he wanted to write a novel, but he couldn’t do it there, in that house, with Jules and her grief. And me. And Lizzie’s ghost, although no one ever said so.

  Before I knew it, I had a new stepmother: Amanda. When Amanda’s law firm opened offices in New Zealand, the newlyweds jumped at the chance for a fresh start. I was fourteen when they moved to the other side of the world. Then, a couple years ago: an unscheduled call from David. His voice wavered with excitement, not something I’d ever heard from him before, as he told me I had a sister. A half-sister, I thought. It wasn’t lost on me that he’d waited until she was born to tell me, hadn’t alerted me to any of the warning signs, like pregnancy. I didn’t want to be bitter, but he was so proud, so joyful, I didn’t even recognize him.

  Another damned little sister, I may have said, knowing it would hurt him, but he was so elated that I don’t even think he heard me.

  Not that I could really blame his impulse to get away from Jules—or from our house, heavy and stale with something no one could name—to start something new. Here I was, acting on the same impulse, fleeing a continent that held too many memories in the hope that if I travelled far enough and long enough, I might somehow be able to breathe more easily. And maybe sleep better.

  Hotel.

  The heat patch was even less helpful than usual. By the time Jules got to the hotel, where she thanked her platinum card for allowing early check-in, she could barely turn her head. She took a forty of Oxy, lay on the bed as her eyes leaked in silent frustration, or maybe self-pity, and tried to relax her neck muscles through deep breathing.

  CHLOE HAD DROPPED all her courses and the university had dropped a refund into her sweaty little hands. She’d booked a flight and had three weeks to get ready for her trip. So she’d come home, and they’d argued every single day of it.

  Do you know how long I’ve been saving for your education?

  Big sigh. You tell me every fucking day.

  Don’t you speak to me like that in my house.

  Another big sigh. Well. You do.

  Your whole life, that’s how long. And now you want to throw it away—

  I wasn’t learning anything.

  You wouldn’t know it if you were. And you’re too young.

  Too young to learn?

  Too young to be gallivanting around in dangerous places—

  Gallivanting. Seriously.

  —when you should be getting your degree, so you can get a decent job, so you can pay for your own damn trip, instead of stealing from me.

  Her biggest sigh yet. Whatever. Can I borrow the car?

  As if.

  IT WAS CIRCULAR and stupid, and Jules knew it. Part of the problem was that she didn’t have a straightforward reaction to the situation, or, really, to Chloe, if you got down to it. She was appalled. She was overwhelmed. She was disappointed. She was proud. Her heart could burst. Rage simmered in her brain
stem.

  IT WAS 2 P.M. The day before, Drew, prognostic as usual, had said, Sweetie, come for dinner, stay the night. Jules had said yes to the meal but opted for a hotel room because Rod had promised to meet her after his shift. We’ll have a hotel date, he’d suggested, which sounded dreamlike, as in somewhat dislocated from reality, but also with the potential to be quite mundane. She wondered how late he would leave it before cancelling.

  A hot shower, the pulsing water directly on her neck, the Oxy easing its way forward: the kink eased somewhat. She could still feel the knot pulling when she turned her head, but there was a bit more give. His-and-hers terrycloth robes hung from the bathroom door, matching Ss emblazoned on the shoulders. She pulled on the shorter and boxier “his” and sat on the edge of the bed.

  A YEAR. SHE had, after weeks of arguing about it, come to accept that protesting was futile. Chloe was going to go no matter what Jules did. She had then used her remaining mental energy to distill her reaction into its two major components. One, she was livid that Chloe had so glibly thrown away her first year at school, not to mention the money, which was not insignificant. Two, she was terrified. Anything could happen to Chloe, the places she was going. Anything. At nineteen, she was irrational and impulsive—more than Jules herself had ever been, of that she was certain—and seemed to relish opportunities for danger. New Zealand, fine, David was there, they had infrastructure. Bad enough they got all those earthquakes. But India? Thailand? Poverty, tsunamis, underdevelopment, filth—these were not places for children. She didn’t think she was being racist, despite what Chloe had said. Just . . . careful. What Chloe didn’t realize was how much work Jules had put into building the life they had, with its tightly woven safety nets. If she’d seen where Jules had come from, the shitty one-bedroom over the storefront in Hamilton’s north end—well, then she might be less eager to jump from the plane without a parachute. So to speak.

  Jules pulled the bottle of twelve-year-old Bowmore from her roller suitcase and free-poured a “double,” which meant almost filling the tumbler, leaving just enough room for ice. If she could be bothered to go get some. Which she couldn’t.