Aftershock Read online

  Eventually Declan said quietly, An empty nest. So you don’t live with your not-boyfriend or unloved lover.

  A car alarm, blocks away, stopped, making her wonder when it had begun. The sky became bigger and blacker, and their island of light felt warm and close, the only bright spot in a universe of night. She sighed.

  Nope. Now it’s just me.

  Just the one kid?

  Jules’s lips folded in on themselves, her jaw tensed, an ingrained reflex of thought suppression. She nodded, tried to stay in the moment.

  Europe or something?

  What? Oh god. I wish. New Zealand, and then who the hell knows. She’s “only a text away,” though. So.

  She folded her arms over her chest.

  But, she added, shrugging and at a loss.

  Declan moved around and leaned on the deck railing, facing Jules. Shook out another smoke.

  Sounds like you’re worried about her.

  Does it? I guess I just don’t know what she might do.

  Oh yeah?

  The porch light was hitting Declan’s face at a sharp angle. He looked sinister and strangely beautiful. Jules swallowed.

  People can be unpredictable, he said.

  There’d been a time, way back at the beginning of it all, when Jules had felt like she knew Chloe, inside and out. When she’d sat with her for hours in the evenings when her own work was done, revelling in their shared love: math. Even at age four, when she could barely read, Chloe knew her numbers, could count to a hundred and was getting the hang of basic addition, counting it out on her short little fingers. By the time she was six, she was learning her times tables. Jules was entranced by Chloe’s curiosity, her excitement at finding a solution, her satisfaction at understanding the basic rules. She had watched her daughter learn and been filled with love and awe.

  There followed complicated years when life had intervened, and distance and walls had grown between them, but even though Chloe was not an easy teenager to live with, Jules had always assumed a certain consistency, that her daughter was still the child she’d known.

  When Chloe met Jill, her flannel pants had torn away, her button-downs had come untucked, revealing ripped jeans and vintage rock T-shirts like a secret identity. She started to go out on weekends, came home late and spent evenings chatting online in her room. She wanted more money for her cellphone. She smiled more—never at Jules, but still.

  At a low point she could barely bring herself to recall, Jules had back-doored into Chloe’s social media account to figure out what had brought about these changes—was it simply adolescence? should she be worried?—and she’d seen pictures that made her more curious rather than less. Pictures of Chloe and a pierced, turquoise-headed girl around her age. Jill, she knew now. And in the photos, Chloe looked like a different person, one Jules barely recognized: she looked happy. She’d tried to casually ask Chloe who she was hanging out with, but her daughter had seen right through it, started spitting livid words about “violated privacy.” Which was true. Jules winced at the memory and shoved it aside. What mattered was that Chloe so obviously starting to thrive had been a sign that things could change: a lifeline for Jules. Even if it meant her daughter wanted less to do with her than ever. Even if Jill was flaky, a bad influence and sometimes mean.

  Jules felt herself getting maudlin, which was annoying, so she turned the tables.

  What about you? You have kids, or a partner?

  Smoke plumed and dissipated.

  Nah, Julie. No partner.

  Jules took a stab at the dark. But . . . you did?

  Declan nodded. She fought for a long time. Until . . . she just couldn’t.

  Something resonated in Jules, underground thunder vibrating in her bones. A distant awareness of profound loss, buried somewhere underneath all the layers, all the years, of drugs, depression and denial.

  She moved around to lean on the railing next to him, putting him on the side away from the pain in her neck.

  That how you met Drew? She knew Drew still went to a grief support group.

  Aye, he said, a soft almost-growl. They both held the rail that supported them, the edges of their hands barely touching. They stood in silence for more than a minute. Then Declan said quietly, Drew thinks it’s time I moved on.

  Clearly, they both knew Drew had arranged this.

  And what do you think? In a way that could have seemed inadvertent but wasn’t, and not even sure herself what she thought she was doing, she leaned on her hand so that it pressed into his more firmly. Just a little.

  And he didn’t pull away, but he didn’t answer, either. He never got a chance. The back door opened, and when Rod stepped through it, they both dropped their hands from the rail.

  Neptune.

  When a kid invites you to see their room, it’s like being invited into their mind: you have to pay it the reverence it’s due. And you can’t say no. Unless you hate the kid. Which I apparently didn’t.

  As Char took my hand and led me through the house to her room, Amanda called out that I shouldn’t judge her by its state because she tidied it every evening but then Char happened every morning. I heard Lance telling her she should just blame it on the earthquakes.

  The room was a mess, but I’d seen worse. I thought it was probably genetic.

  Stuffed animals crawled over piles of books and blankets, and the dog I’d met earlier (Spot) sat at a toy piano. A princess castle dominated one corner, which made my lip curl a little, but the whole centre of the room was cleared to make room for a pad of paper as long as Char when she lay down beside it.

  Sit down here, Chlo. She pointed to a spot beside her. I moved to sit close by. No, not there. Here.

  Okay, I laughed. I’ll do what I’m told.

  Yes, she said. Here, you can draw with this colour. She handed me a blue crayon. Over there, she said, pointing to one corner of the paper.

  Okay, I said. Not really knowing how to act around kids, I found her instructions quite helpful. What should I draw?

  Char looked up at me for a few seconds, thinking. Can you draw . . . a dog?

  I think so. What kind of dog?

  Um . . . the kind that rescues people.

  I looked at her, remembering the torn-apart buildings of this city she lived in. That’s bleak, kid.

  She nodded.

  Okay. And what are you going to draw?

  She looked down at the paper and started sketching a shape in purple. I’m going to draw our spaceship, she said.

  Our spaceship?

  Yes. We’re going to go to Neptune.

  I froze, watching her, a whorl of forces scrapping it out in my brain, my chest, my stomach. Love, kinship, jealousy, resentment, fear. At Char’s age I had a favourite game, invented by me and my father. He would smooth out the sand in the sandbox in our backyard and draw a rocket ship in it, big enough for us to sit inside its outline, me in between his legs, and Lizzie, a few months old, propped up between mine. He’d already taught me the names of all the planets, we’d paint them together, uneven splotches of colour across a page in the order of their distance from the sun. Neptune was our favourite destination, the beautiful purple-blue jewel that called to us, invited us to go as far as we could, and then farther. David would make some sound effects while I narrated our trip through the galaxy and Lizzie giggled and gurgled in my arms. I knew he would look after us, and we would both look after her, and we would adventure together every minute we could before he went away again for work. And then it would just be me, keeping my sister safe.

  Char looked up from the very not-aerodynamic shape she’d drawn, saw my blank corner of the page. You’re not drawing, she said. Draw! But I couldn’t.

  I left her there looking confused, and I felt even worse. But I wasn’t about to get too attached.

  THE PRESSURE FROM Amanda didn’t help.

  I knew she was just trying to make me feel welcome, but her approach was all wrong. First there was the conversation where she asked me if I woul
d babysit while she ran errands.

  I don’t babysit, I told her, thinking of Mo-mo and how that turned out.

  But she’s your sister.

  I barely know her. I’m not good with kids.

  Well, you’ll have to learn sometime.

  Why?

  Don’t you want kids of your own?

  No.

  You’ll change your mind.

  I don’t like kids, I finally said.

  But she’s your sister.

  And maybe I would have caved, just to be nice. The truth was, I found it hard not to like Char. But then Amanda called her in from the backyard, where she was terraforming with her mini-bulldozer, to the kitchen where I sat reading at the table.

  Wouldn’t you like Chlo to stay and play with you while Mummy goes out for a little while? As she talked, she bent over, wrapped her arms around her daughter and nuzzled her face into her curls.

  Char’s face lit up. I closed my book.

  I wish I could, I lied. But I’m still so jet-lagged. And I went to the guest room and shut the door, trying not to hear my half-sister crying in the kitchen.

  I felt bad, but I hate being manipulated.

  SECOND WAS OUR conversation when we went out for dinner the next night:

  Well, I think education is very important. Amanda had Char on the seat next to her and watched her colour as she spoke, but her words were clearly aimed at me.

  Now she’s in the school of life, Lance said. Seeing the world and all that.

  David, dragged away from his ongoing kitchen-sink project, rubbed at his forearm where he’d missed a spot of dirt.

  Remember the last time we saw her, Davey? She was, what, fifteen?

  I can’t believe how grown-up you are, David agreed as he inspected his other arm.

  She had those chubby cheeks, and such pretty hair. Amanda lightly pinched Char’s cheeks as she said it, making her giggle and squirm away. Then Amanda eyed my bleached brush cut. Hope it grows in okay.

  That’s what hair does. It grows.

  Amanda tugged a few of Char’s curls as though unsure.

  Part of the whole gay thing, right? David could have been confirming the weather.

  What? I choked out.

  The haircut, David clarified.

  I gaped at him while I searched for words.

  Amanda was still scrutinizing me. Should I take you shopping for clothes?

  What’s wrong with my clothes?

  No need to have you in ratty T-shirts all the time.

  I looked at Char, who seemed to have nothing but pink in her wardrobe. But she also had untameable black hair and a tummy no T-shirt could contain, and was never unmarred by streaks of Magic Marker and her latest meal. Amanda clearly chose her wardrobe, but Char resisted with all available materials.

  You have such a nice figure, sweetie. Don’t you want to show it off?

  I stood and drained the end of my pint. I needed to get out of there. Out of the pub, out of their house, out of this fallen-down town.

  I need some air, I said as I not-quite-slammed my glass down, grabbed Lance’s cigarettes from the table and walked towards the door.

  Chlo!

  I kept going but heard Amanda behind me asking why I couldn’t take a compliment.

  Outside, I lit a smoke and looked up into the sky at the completely unfamiliar stars. The air even sounded different here. No bass drum of distant highway. The crickets sang a half-tone high. My head rushed with nicotine, a free fall of galactic disorientation. My heart pitched. I leaned against the wall and stared at the empty parking lot, trying not to hyperventilate.

  I’ll have one of those, said David, settling in beside me. I gave him a smoke. I don’t usually, he said. I quit. But. Special occasion. He inhaled deeply.

  It was a quiet night, but maybe all nights here were quiet. The Firkin Forget It was squished between two other shops on a tiny parking lot. A single car went by in a breath. Faint laughter and old rock gave the pub a heartbeat.

  David stared at the woods across the road. She’s just trying to be nice, he said.

  Stepping away, I kicked an army boot at a crack in the asphalt. I know, I said. But you could all try a little less. A tiny shard flew off and bounced against the pub’s wall.

  Next door was a hastily boarded-up bakery. Nice Buns, said a dangling sign.

  It hasn’t been easy, though, this past couple years, I’ll tell you that. The quakes have us all walking a tightrope, twenty-four-seven. And with Char to worry about. Every moment is just . . . waiting.

  Graffiti-marred boards in angry red, partially blacked out: God H---s F--s. I shivered in my leather jacket.

  Could be the next big one, sure, David was saying, as though I’d asked. Or could just be all the books falling off the shelves again. Or maybe the ground opens up one morning, just by dumb luck right under where you’re standing. And you know it could happen, because it’s happened to . . . He waved a hand around. People we know.

  He rubbed his bald head, looked tired and sunken. But somehow, Amanda and Char are always this good thing I find at the end of the day, that tells me I’m still here. Still waiting. But still here.

  I heard his adoration, and his terror that something might happen to his little girl. The fault lines in his voice as he thought about the happiness that he needed to protect, and the people who shared in that happiness, who made it possible.

  He paused to take a long drag off his half-finished smoke before stamping it out. Terrible things. But something’s gonna kill me, right?

  He stared down the road into the darkness. I pulled my eyes away from him, looked back at the bakery. Spidery cracks of windowpane crept out from behind the boards and terrified me.

  David searched the ground, mustering. I’m really happy to have you here, kid.

  Um. Yeah, me too. I’m happy to be here, Dad. To . . . see you.

  But as I said it, I knew it was a lie, and realized I wasn’t at all happy to be there, in a place so insidiously hostile.

  It hurt, in fact, that David would want me there, in such a place. It hurt to be around him and to feel so disappointed in him. He’d historically been the soft parent, steady and reliable, holding my hand as we walked to the store, obediently driving me to hockey practices. Jules, by contrast, was the storm front that regulated our lives, filling every horizon with roiling dark clouds and forks of fire whenever she was home, a humid and heavy vacuum of anticipation when she wasn’t.

  I’d thought David would thrive in his new life, burst out in colour like the Dr. Seuss flowers in his yard. But looking at him now, shoulders rolled forward from a submissive life, I wondered if he was just weak.

  A memory chased itself across my brain, Jules’s voice thick and wet and threatening to burst, Are you really that spineless, the lower buzz of David responding, barely interrupting her messy and deteriorating rant about the time she’d had to spend alone with me, alone with a dead baby, alone in the house when he should have been there with her. Jules slamming out of their bedroom, the door bouncing in its frame. David on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands.

  I shifted around him to go back inside the pub, to move past this moment.

  I’ll really try for that day off, and we can do something. Whatever you like. Hey, I don’t even know what you like.

  I sucked in a deep breath. I need to go, Dad, I said.

  Go?

  Yeah. Like, go.

  I saw his face start to fall, saw him catch it before it hit the ground.

  But he said, Okay, and heaved the pub door open, attempted an awkward arm around me as I squeezed past him.

  It’s okay, kid.

  I saw that he meant it, in fact I sensed his relief, that the pressure my presence caused would soon be easing.

  As I went back inside, the world tilted and rocked.

  I DREAMED ABOUT Lizzie, as I so often did. The sister that wasn’t. The sister that was. The sister who haunted me, aging in parallel, skipping around time in m
y mind:

  There she is as a baby, gurgling in the air, in my father’s upstretched arms, spitting and drooling as he brings her to his face—

  I stand on the porch and hold her hand as we watch a cab drive our father away. I look at Lizzie, imagined as a fairer version of my tweeny self, shorter and girlier, already showing curves I still don’t have, but also bookish, a tight ponytail and glasses, plastic dolphin earrings dangling, and she smiles a crooked smile at me. Could have been you, she says—

  Carpet, scratchy as grass, prickles the backs of my legs, the wall behind my head as immovable as stone, my mother sitting on the floor of her bedroom while my grandpa and my grandma Nan stand over her. She shouldn’t see you like this.

  If my mother raises her head, she could meet my eyes.

  I try to call out, I have something to tell her, but panic blooms as my throat closes, my lungs rattle their cage—

  I woke gasping and sat straight up. My body pounded with my heart. The old clock radio was buzzing, insistently. It was 4:34 in the morning and I felt like shit.

  The house was quiet. Lance would be up soon, but I had some time before we left—we both needed out of there. I dressed in the dark, padded to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. I slid open the door to the backyard and stepped out, anticipating cool mulch smells and crickets, wincing instead in the sudden glare. A motion-controlled light made sharp bed-headed shadows of the grass. I sat on top of the picnic table and tried to become invisible until the comfort of darkness blinked back. Moon- and city-glow dimmed all but the brightest stars. The silver fly of Lance’s tent shone like a ghost.

  One thing my dad and Amanda both needed to understand: I knew how to look after myself. I’d been doing it long enough. Jill called it Selective Parenting. Most of the time Jules didn’t give a shit. I did my own groceries, my own laundry, got myself to school, arranged my own rides for hockey, and had since the day David left when I was thirteen. And other than the ban on sleepovers with Jill, I had a lot of freedom: I never had a curfew, I got a weekly allowance for food and clothes, and Jules had no say in it when I came home with my hair dyed black and blue in grade eleven. (In fact, when she saw it, she just rolled her eyes and kept watching TV.) Or when I got my tongue pierced in grade twelve. (Try not to drool, dear. And when I took it out because I was drooling too much: See? You should always listen to your mother.) But it also led me to joke—in that funny-because-of-how-true-it-is way—that my mother would rather take the Benz to a car wash than watch one of my hockey games.