Middle of Nowhere

  Middle of Nowhere

  Caroline Adderson

  GROUNDWOOD BOOKS

  HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS

  TORONTO BERKELEY

  Copyright © 2012 by Caroline Adderson

  Published in Canada and the USA in 2012 by Groundwood Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  This edition published in 2012 by

  Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  or c/o Publishers Group West

  1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.groundwoodbooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Adderson, Caroline

  Middle of nowhere / Caroline Adderson.

  eISBN 978-1-55498-202-8

  I. Title.

  PS8551.D3267M53 2012 jC813’.54 C2011-906894-X

  Cover illustration by Simon Ng

  Design by Michael Solomon

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF).

  For Joan and Graham Sweeney

  1

  I HEARD A SIREN in my sleep. I thought it was Artie, but the sound came closer and got louder. Then, just outside our apartment building, it stopped. But not before it woke Artie, who picked up exactly where the siren left off.

  “Wa-wa-wa!” Artie went.

  A light swept through the room, then again, painting the walls red each time.

  The police. Not exactly who I wanted to see. I stared at the lights, hoping they weren’t for us, while Artie wailed on and on. He can be hard to stop.

  Then I remembered the PNE and the giant beam that shines out of the fairground and circles the whole sky at night.

  “Look at that light,” I told Artie. “Do you remember the Exhibition last summer?”

  He stopped wailing, just like the siren, and sat up staring at the red swirls.

  “Is there a ferris wheel outside?”

  “Let’s look,” I said.

  We got out of bed and opened the curtains the rest of the way. It wasn’t the police.

  Artie climbed onto the back of the couch and perched there with his bare feet on the windowsill. He watched what was happening across the street like it was on TV.

  “An ambulance! Look! They’re coming out of that house!”

  The old lady’s house across the street. They were carrying her out on a stretcher, sliding her into the back of the ambulance, slamming the door.

  Artie sang along as the ambulance drove away.

  “Wa-wa-wa! Wa-wa-wa!”

  THE NEXT MORNING I looked out the window again. The drapes were closed in the house across the street, like it was asleep. It was a little house, one story and covered with stucco that had bits of broken glass mixed in. I felt sorry for it because there were apartments all around it now. It was the only house on the block that hadn’t gone extinct. But I didn’t really feel sorry for the old lady who lived there, who never said hi even though Artie and I walked past her house every single school day.

  One Saturday, the old lady was out watering her garden. She was the only person in the neighborhood who grew flowers. We walked by with Mom and the lady made a sound like a grunt as we passed. I don’t know what she was trying to say, but it didn’t sound very nice.

  Today was the last day I thought we could get away with the I-forgot-my-lunch excuse. On the way to school I told Artie to use it one more time.

  “But I didn’t forget my lunch,” he said. “You didn’t make me one.”

  “Tell her I forgot, then.”

  “You didn’t, though. You’re talking about it now.”

  Artie is five and a half and what you’d call “literal.” He didn’t understand that we were running out of food. If you forgot your lunch, Mrs. Gill would ask everybody in the class to contribute something. But if it happened too often, or more than twice in a row, she’d get suspicious and phone to find out if anything was wrong at home. I knew this for a fact because Artie’s teacher, Mrs. Gill, was my kindergarten teacher, too, six years ago.

  “Artie,” I said as we walked past the house of the old lady they took away in the ambulance. “Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend I have amnesia.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s when you get knocked on the head and you can’t remember anything.”

  Suddenly he remembered the night before.

  “Is that why the ambulance came?”

  “Exactly! Except when the first-aid guys got to the door, I couldn’t remember why I called them so I sent them away. Tell that to Mrs. Gill. Because of my amnesia I forgot to make your lunch again.” I thought that sounded like the crazy sort of thing kindergarten teachers hear every day.

  “Okay,” Artie said.

  “And don’t mention Mom’s away.”

  We had already discussed this. He nodded to show he understood how important it was that we kept this information to ourselves.

  “And if you get a lot of stuff, don’t eat it all,” I said. “Bring some home.”

  AT THE END of the day I spread out on the table everything that Artie had brought from school. Cheese stick, fruit leather, four halves of different kinds of sandwiches — jam, ham and cheese, plain cheese, and something that looked like butter.

  A butter sandwich? The kid probably ate the meat and just handed over the bread. A granola bar and an apple.

  I took our last can of tomato soup from the cupboard and heated it with more water than the label said, so it would seem like more. Then the phone rang and I ran to answer it.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “I’m looking for Debbie,” a man said.

  “She’s out.”

  “This is Greg, from Pay-N-Save.”

  Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. I put my hand to my chest, but it was Artie in Mom’s room throwing a ball against the wall.

  “Greg,” he said again. “Her boss? Maybe she forgot she had one. Can you give her a message?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to sound casual. This time the thump, thump, thump really was my heart.

  “Tell her not to bother coming back. Ever. She’s blown it.” Then he said, “I’m surprised. She was a good worker. Honest, dependable. Or so I thought — ”

  I hung up on him and went back to the kitchen counter, still thumping. I kept back one of the sandwich halves and the cheese stick for Artie’s lunch the next day, even though I was one hundred per cent positive that Mom would turn up by morning. She’d go back to Pay-N-Save Gas and Greg would change his mind. Then, when we woke up, she would be home again, pouring out cereal for us.

  I divided the rest of the food Artie brought home and splashed the soup into bowls. My hands were shaking.

  “Supper’s ready!”

  AFTER SUPPER I made Artie take a bath. I had to wrestle him down t
o get his shirt off.

  “I had a bath last night!” he said.

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did! I did!” he shrieked. The thing is, he really thought he had. He has no concept of time. When I finally got the shirt off and tossed it on the pile in the corner, an idea came to me.

  “It’s not actually a bath. It’s laundry.”

  “I’m not laundry!”

  All the light-colored things went in the tub with some bubble bath drizzled on top. As soon as the bubbles bubbled up and the clothes rose to the top, Artie whooped and stripped naked and jumped in.

  “This is how they make wine,” I told him as he sloshed around.

  “From dirty clothes?”

  I tricked him into sitting down and bouncing around for a bit until he and the laundry were clean. He seemed happy. But later, after I read him a story and tucked him in the hideaway bed, he started crying again.

  “When’s Mom coming back?”

  “Soon.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. But when she comes back, she’ll be so happy our clothes are clean.”

  He pitched another fit. Artie’s fits are straight out of horror movies. The little kid explodes and — surprise! There’s a monster inside him.

  “Something really good is going to come out of this, Artie,” I promised.

  He stopped bawling. “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s what happened last time she went away and came back,” I said.

  “Did she bring us a present?”

  “She brought me a present.”

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “You,” I said.

  Artie thought about this while he ground his fist into his eye. Then he exploded again.

  “I miss her!”

  “What do you miss?”

  “I miss sucking her hair!”

  Every night that she didn’t have a class, Mom lay down with Artie and let him suck her hair until he fell asleep.

  “Suck your own hair.”

  “It doesn’t reach! And it’s not the same! I miss how she smells!”

  “How she smells? Why didn’t you say?”

  In the bathroom a giant bottle of Economizer Extra-Strength Hand and Body Lotion sat on the windowsill. I pumped some into my palm. Back in the living-room, I dried Artie’s tears with the sheet, then I dabbed some of the lotion on his cheeks. At first he shoved my hand away, but as soon as he smelled the lotion he closed his eyes and let me rub his whole face with it.

  “Mom?” he whispered. “Mom, I smell you. I smell you coming closer. I smell you coming home.”

  2

  I WAS SO sure that she would be back the next morning, but she wasn’t. She didn’t show up. She would, though. Soon. I was sure of it.

  I was.

  Mr. Bryant stopped me after class and said if I didn’t bring back the permission form, I couldn’t go on the field trip.

  “We have a field trip?”

  He took a lunging step forward and swung his arm like he was launching a bowling ball down the hall.

  “Oh, right,” I said.

  “If it’s the fee,” he said, pretending to pick something off his sleeve so I wouldn’t be embarrassed, “it doesn’t matter.”

  Mr. Bryant is maybe my favorite teacher ever, though Mrs. Gill was pretty nice, too. Mr. Bryant calls us “people,” but the best thing about him is that he wears earrings.

  The first day of grade six this kid, Mickey Roach, put up his hand and asked Mr. Bryant if he was a lady. Mr. Bryant said he was a person, and he expected us all to act like people, too.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mickey asked. Mr. Bryant explained that human beings bore a grave responsibility because we’ve evolved. It was our duty to demonstrate tolerance and compassion just as it was our duty to exercise the extraordinary reasoning abilities only human beings possess. He said we would be studying all about this in science, in social studies, in language arts, in every subject across the whole curriculum, because it was what really mattered. Then he congratulated Mickey for being the first one in the class to show an interest in the subject.

  None of us really understood what he was on about, but I went home and asked if I could get my ears pierced anyway. Mom said no. She said I needed new shoes first.

  In the hall, Mr. Bryant waited for my answer. I looked right at his gold pirate earrings and wondered, should I tell him?

  I wanted to. But I couldn’t because he would contact Social Services. As a teacher, it would be his duty.

  “I hate bowling,” I said.

  SO THAT WAS how I ended up at home on Friday morning. I took Artie to school and when I came back, I went straight to Mom’s room and got her wallet out from under the cardboard box that she used as her bedside table. It was where she hid things ever since we were broken into. Burglars broke in, but they didn’t take anything, not even the computer. It sounds weird, but that made me feel even worse. Like everything we owned was junk.

  The day of the non-robbery, Mom came to me after Artie was asleep.

  “I do own something valuable.” She held out a tiny box.

  “What’s that?” I thought there would be a diamond ring or a gold nugget inside.

  It was a tooth.

  “Do you know who gave that to me?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Pennypacker.”

  It was my tooth. I closed the box and handed it back to her. I didn’t like to think about that time in foster care with the Pennypackers.

  Mom was robbed at the gas station once, too, by a boy waving a steak knife. He took her wallet and all the money in the register, which is why she always left her wallet behind when she went to work and only took her bus fare and fifty cents for the phone. She would sit in the lit-up booth all night and study for her high-school-equivalency exam, which is for adults who never finished high school and want another chance. After she passed that, she wanted to become a nursing assistant or even a nurse.

  I emptied Mom’s wallet on the bed. Pictures of me and Artie, a bank card I didn’t know the PIN for, a credit card, her community college ID. There was still a five-dollar bill and enough change to bring it almost to seven, and a huge wad of coupons. If I could have exchanged the coupons for money, we could have gone another month. Not that we’d have to, since I was positive Mom would show up in the next day or two.

  Just as I was thinking that — that Mom would come home or at least call — the phone rang.

  “Congratulations! You’re the lucky winner of a Caribbean cruise! Press five to claim your prize. Press five now. Please press five.”

  I hung up and went out. Across the street, the little house was awake now. Somebody had opened the drapes.

  One block up, on the corner of Broadway, was the Pit Stop Mart. The whole block smelled like old fried chicken grease from Chancey’s Chicken down the street.

  I bought four apples, a jug of milk and a dozen hotdog buns from the clerk with the gold front tooth. The hotdogs I had to put back in the cooler because there wasn’t enough money. With the change, I got some penny candy to bribe Artie with if he pitched another fit that night and the lotion treatment didn’t work.

  I walked home, past the apartment blocks with their balconies crowded with plastic flower pots and plastic furniture and clothes racks draped in underwear. And mops. We lived on the ground floor with a sawed-down broom handle wedged in tight so the window couldn’t be opened from the outside.

  Then I saw the old lady. I saw the old lady and I froze where I was on the sidewalk and just stared at her. I guess I thought she was never coming back. The old lady, I mean. I was so sure Mom would be home first. I actually thought the old lady had died, but there she was, sitting on the bott
om step of the last house left on the block wearing that little knitted cap with wisps of white hair sticking out, a man’s shirt and those big glasses. There was something like a three-sided ladder made of shiny chrome standing in front of her. A walker.

  And I felt sick when I saw her. Sick, because who was dead then? Who was dead?

  “You!” she called. “Come over here, would you?”

  I crossed the street and stopped in front of her closed gate. There was a sign on it that read ABSOLUTELY NO FLYERS!

  “You been to the store?” she asked.

  I held up the plastic bag by the handles.

  “I saw you. I waved to you from the window, but you hurried by so fast.” She just sat there with her speckled hands on her knees, scowling at me through her glasses. “I don’t normally ask for help.”

  She was stuck. She couldn’t get up off the step.

  I went through the ABSOLUTELY NO FLYERS! gate and offered my arm. The way she grabbed it and held on tight, I realized that she was scared of falling. If I hadn’t come by, who knew how long she would have sat there? I really had to haul to get her up.

  The second she was on her feet, she reached for the chrome walker and clutched it just as hard.

  I waited until she was steady. “Okay?”

  “I wanted you to go for me,” she said, taking a twenty-dollar bill from her slacks pocket and putting it in my hand.

  “To the store?” I said.

  “Hold on.” She switched hands that held the metal rail and took a list and a five-dollar bill from the other pocket. “This is what I need and that’s for you. You’re not going to run off with my money, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “Here.” I put my bag down on the walk and left it with her as security. I felt dizzy with good luck, or maybe it was just that I hadn’t eaten anything since supper the night before.

  Back in the Pit Stop, I bought the hotdogs to go with the buns I’d already got. I bought the things on her list and made sure I kept the change separate from mine. The package of hotdogs I put in that big pocket on the side of my pants that I never used. They fit exactly.