Betsy Wickwire's Dirty Secret (6 page)

I
managed to dump Dolores at the bus stop and headed up Chebucto Road alone. The sun was shining. It took me a while to realize that, and a while longer to realize that it was making me hot.

My T-shirt stuck to my back and my hair felt like a fur hat. Sweat crept over my scalp like ants. I stopped and looked at the purple shade on the other side of the road. It would be a lot cooler over there. I'd have to cross the street. I'd have to wait for a break in traffic. Then I'd have to cross back again when I got to First Avenue.

Just contemplating all that tired me out. I rolled my sleeves up over my shoulders and kept walking.

The heat made me think of Williams Lake. I'd have loved to be there right now. I pictured myself jumping off
the big bronze boulders, my legs and arms spinning, the shock of the freezing water.

Then I pictured Carly stretched out on the rock in her pink Billabong bikini. I remembered those boobs she was so proud of. Nick splashed her with his wet hair and everything jiggled.
Oh, Nick! Look what you've done!

How could I have been so stunned?

I turned like a mule and headed down First Avenue. It was cooler here with all the trees, and quieter off the main road too.

Off the main road
.

How appropriate. The perfect metaphor for my life. Everyone else was parading down Main Street and here I was scuttling around in the back alleys in my cheesy little cleaner's outfit. It dawned on me that I always used to be in the parade. Now I was just a spectator.

I kept walking.

No, I'm not even a spectator
. I wondered if there was a word for the people who don't even bother coming out to watch. I tried to think of one. The distraction was oddly comforting.

I heard someone gasp. It shocked me back to reality. I looked across the street to the park and saw a guy, doubled over, his hands on his knees, heaving.

Nick
.

It was as if I'd been sucked backward out of a gash in the side of an airplane. I had no sense of having moved at all but suddenly I was behind a tree, eyes wide open, mouth wide open, everything pounding.

That's Nick
.

I tried to stick a strand of hair back into my braid but I was shaking too much. What if he saw me? Had he seen me? I looked at my hands with the dirty nails and the dry patches and the bleeding cuticles.

I could just picture him staring at me in horror. Or pretending he didn't see me. Or saying,
Oh, hey, Betsy, how's it going?
as if I was someone he sort of knew from someplace else. He'd smile in a vague way and keep doing whatever it was he'd been doing. (That's how he handled the old lady who lived next door to him. He somehow managed to be nice to her without ever actually having to talk to her.)

I put my hand on my chest to keep my heart from bursting through. I felt like someone in a song.
Dying, screaming, begging, aching
— all those words made sense now. Why couldn't he see what he'd done to me?

Maybe—and it was almost more frightening to think this than anything else—maybe that was it. Maybe he just needed to see what he'd done to me.

Nick wasn't a bad person. I remembered when Hank got cut from his junior high soccer team. Nick took him
out for lunch, he coached him, he built up his confidence, and Hank made the team the next year. Nick had a heart.

Maybe if he just saw me. He'd realize he'd made a mistake. He'd look at me and his eyes would go all soft again and he wouldn't be able to help himself. He'd put his arms around me and lean his face against mine and tell me how sorry he was.

It wasn't that crazy. We'd had our little spats before and we'd made up. We could do it again. We could get over this.

I heard him cough in a breathless sort of way. It almost sounded like he was crying.

I realized for the first time that this might have been hard on him too. Yes, he'd cheated on me and, yes, it was his fault—but everyone makes mistakes. I remembered overhearing Mom say how much Karen regretted leaving her husband. Karen knew she'd been stupid. She was willing to do anything to fix it but Craig wouldn't take her back. She cried about it for months.

Nick must have been ashamed of what he did. I thought of all those texts from him that I wouldn't look at. He could have been apologizing, begging me to forgive him. I should have read them. I should have talked to him when he came over. Dad shouldn't have sent him away.

Maybe I should just say hello. What could it hurt? Sooner or later, I was going to run into him anyway and
then we'd have to talk. We were together for two and a half years. He must miss me. A little bit. He has to.

This could be my only chance.

He gasped again. I should go to him.

I peeked around the tree, my heart all full and ready as if I was waiting for him to arrive on that very first date, and then I realized what an idiot I was.

Nick wasn't thinking about me. He wasn't crying. He was gasping because he was doing push-ups.

What else would he have been doing? It was twelve-thirty. When he was on the late shift at Jitters, he always worked out at noon. He always ran from his place to Larry O'Connell Field because it was exactly 5K. (I was the one who'd driven the route to check the distance for him.) Now he was going to do sit-ups and crunches and lunges, then he'd run around Citadel Hill, down Spring Garden Road and home. Shower, shave, at work by three.

My life had been totally destroyed, but Nick was still running on schedule.

I rolled back to the far side of the tree and covered my face with my scaly hand. The image of him with his sweaty hair and bare chest was tattooed on my eyelids. I knew then that I'd never get away from it, ever, even if I wanted to.

He was perfect. And I wasn't.

No wonder he'd dumped me for Carly.

I hid behind the tree until Nick got up and ran away.

A
week later, I was sitting at the dining room table, actually having dinner with my family again. If I smelled bad, nobody was mentioning it.

“You must be exhausted!” Mom said, and dished me out a sumo-sized helping of pasta primavera. (She was a big believer in slender, but skinny scared her. It had a bad-mother ring to it.)

“Oh, yeah. Beat,” I said. Exhaustion—real or faked— was my best friend these days. It gave me a reason not to talk, a reason not to finish my dinner, a reason to excuse myself from the table early and watch how-to cleaning videos in my room.

Mom smiled and shook her head like
poor thing
. Or maybe it was more like
thank god
. The truth is we were both relieved I was getting out of bed most mornings now and going to work. It occupied my time and, in a weird way, actually made life easier for everyone. It provided
my family with a story they could live with: I had a job. I was doing something productive. They didn't need to worry about me any more. There was still a chance I'd get myself all straightened away in time for university in the fall. They didn't need to know the truth.

I could tell by the way Dad scratched his ear when the subject first surfaced that he wasn't keen about his honour roll daughter becoming a cleaning lady even for the summer, but he came around. Mom just did her PR thing and spun it into something he could like.
Betsy has her own business! That shows gumption, enthusiasm, energy!
They were both so proud and excited No one needed to concern themselves about me being lonely any more either. They could stop saying embarrassing things like, “I ran into Annie-Mae MacKinnon today. Sweet girl. Why don't you give her a call?” Or, “I see they're having a dance at the Saraguay Club this Friday. Could be fun …” That part of my life was all taken care of now. I had a new friend.

It was ironic, really. What if I'd dumped all my old friends and shown up with Dolores two months ago? What if—and this was even better—Hank had announced he was dating Dolores instead of pretty little Marnie Breed? How fabulous would my parents have thought she was
then?
I could just hear them buzzing away behind their bedroom door, frantically trying to
figure out some politically correct, morally responsible but absolutely foolproof way to get Dolores out of our lives.

Under the current circumstances, though, Dolores was “a great girl. One of a kind!” Her only fault, apparently, was that she was a bit of a slave-driver. I was too pooped after work to go out and have fun.

Mom just totally made that part up, but who cared? If that's what she needed to believe—or, at least, needed her running group or her book club or her business partners to believe —fine. I wouldn't roll my eyes.

“This is good, Mom,” I said, and conspicuously loaded up my fork again.

She dabbed at her lips, her face all charming and amused behind the napkin. “Oh, well, I know how you love your cream, sweetie—especially now that you don't have to worry about fitting into …”

You could see the alarm bells going off just behind her eyes as she realized, too late, that that whole sentence was careening full-speed into the dreaded words “ … your prom dress.” Panic broke out over her face like hives. She coughed and said, “ … your winter coat.”

Hank looked up from his food and said, “Fit into your winter coat?”

Dad said, “Hank.”

Mom said, “Here's to a long and glorious summer!” and raised her wineglass.

It was probably the most pathetic I'd felt since this whole thing started, especially once Dad and—only because he had to—Hank raised their glasses too. (Toasting anything with a glass of milk is depressing at the best of times.)

Never in the entire history of our family had either of them ever missed a chance to heap ridicule on someone's stupid comment—but here they were toasting the fact that I didn't need to worry about fitting into my winter coat in the middle of July.

“Speaking of coats,” Dad said, “I'm not pleased with the hospital laundry these days. My lab coats are coming back stiff as a board. You wouldn't have any tips about how to soften them up, would you, Bets?”

I looked up, figuring this was the start of one of his elaborate so-called jokes, and felt almost hopeful: someone needed to put this conversation out of its misery. But he was serious. This apparently was an honest inquiry from one professional to another. I could barely look at him.

“Uh … I don't do laundry, Dad.”

“Oh. Right.” He touched his forehead with his index finger. “Of course. Don't do laundry — or windows either, I guess!” He laughed. Mom said, “Oh, Mike!” and laughed too. I didn't get it.

“No, I
do
do windows actually.” I turned my lips up
into a joyless little U and moved a slice of mushroom around my plate like a tiny mop.

“Really?” Way too much interest. “You should help Hank with that! I bet he'd like to get those old Pokémon decals off his bedroom window. Wouldn't you, Hank?”

Hank looked up, all blank-eyed and chipmunk-cheeked with food. We all knew he didn't care about his windows. We all remembered what happened the last time I went into his room uninvited. And we all, no doubt, were prepared to have him tell me what would happen to my ugly face if I ever tried to do it again.

His chewing slowed. He looked at Mom, then at Dad. Then he looked at his plate and said, “Yeah, okay. ‘Bout time I got rid of them, I guess.” He said it as if he wasn't quite sure if he'd got his lines right.

Mom slapped the table and promised to get the cleaning supplies we needed. Dad made a joke about videotaping this momentous event for posterity's sake. Hank and I went back to our eating. I loved him quite a bit then. Not for playing along with them—but for playing along with them as little as he did.

When I figured I'd choked down enough pasta that Mom wouldn't feel obliged to force dessert on me, I asked to be excused. Exhaustion, you know.

“Sure, sweetie, sure,” Mom said. “You relax. You had a big day.”

Dad actually stood up when I left, as if the Queen were exiting the room or something. Hank gave a little snort at that but he managed to cover it up with a belch, which at least Mom knew how to respond to.

I dragged myself up the stairs and saw that someone — i.e., Mom—had replaced the photos of me and Nick on the wall with baby pictures of my cousin. Did she really think I wouldn't notice? That was like using one of those cheap erasers to rub something out. They always leave a bigger, smudgier mess than what you started with. The pictures not being there just made me think about them all the more.

Nick
, I thought, and saw the two of us, in love and smiling, on the hull of Dad's sailboat the day the picture was taken. Then I saw us on other days when we took the boat out ourselves. And that made me think of the times we moored at Devil's Island and swam ashore, and how I'd bought Nick the sunglasses he was wearing and how he left them in Bobo's car after The Trews' concert, and the colour of his eyes behind them, and him looking at Carly in Jitters, and me catching them about to kiss and then falling apart and hating them and hating myself and cleaning other people's toilets for a living.

I went into my room, flopped on my bed and watched YouTube stain-removal videos until I fell asleep.

I
'm an amoeba
. I was heading to work one morning and that just popped into my head. It was vaguely disturbing. I used to think about stuff like clothes and food and homework and friends and what we—it was always “we” back then— were going to do on the weekend. I never used to think,
I'm an amoeba
.

What did that even mean? I pictured the two-tone illustration in my biology text. The amoeba looked like a splat of aquamarine yogourt that someone had just left there to congeal.

I stopped and waited for the light to change. The girls on the other side appeared to be Asian summer students. I didn't have to worry. No skulking required. They wouldn't know me.

An amoeba is the simplest form of life.

Was that true? It had been a long time since the test.

Maybe
I'm
the simplest form of life.

I reviewed the last few weeks of my existence. Eat. Work. Sleep. Repeat as necessary. You couldn't get much simpler than that. How had that happened? Obviously the Nick and Carly thing had affected me—but where had the rest of my life gone?

Where had the rest of
me
gone?

The little green man lit up and I crossed the street. The Asian girls were tiny and pretty with their streaked hair and platform shoes. They were all talking at once.

It wasn't just that I was hurt or sad or lonely. I felt like a whole different person now, a whole different species.

I remembered that song from
Sesame Street. “One of these things is not like the others …
” Other people my age did things. They wanted to do things. They tried to do things. That was sort of the whole point. They went places, bought stuff, watched stuff, read stuff, hung out, goofed around, changed, grew, hoped. Someday, no doubt, they'd also mate and raise young.

I leaned against a mailbox and shook a pebble out of my sandal.
I just exist
.

I'm an amoeba
.

The most I could expect out of life? Someday, maybe, I'd divide. Pass my DNA along to the next generation of jellied blobs.

That was sad, but something about it almost made
me laugh. I realized, this time last year that would have been a joke. There'd have been a bunch of girls hanging out in someone's bedroom and I'd have said
I feel like an amoeba
and they'd all have laughed (except Fiona, who wouldn't get it) and pretty soon, they'd have started calling me Amoeba or Amoe-Betsy or maybe just plain Moeb. The Moeb. Moebo.

They'd put a bunch of private jokes about it in the yearbook. Before long, everyone would be calling me Moebo, even the people who had no idea where it came from. That's how you showed you belonged.

“One of these things just doesn't belong …
”
I don't belong
.

I'd never put it in those words before but it didn't surprise me. I was way past that point. I scratched my head and realized I needed a new elastic band. My ponytail was already falling out.

*

I was on my way to Mr. McCaffrey's again. Mr. “Call-me-Frank” McCaffrey. He was the guy whose daughter phoned us that first day. He was eighty-two and lived alone in a little house down by the water, the last little
one down by the water now that the monster homes had moved in and crushed the rest.

He never went out, never opened a window and, no doubt, never would have had anyone in to clean if his daughter hadn't insisted. He was the only one of our clients who stayed in the house while we worked. I didn't mind. It occurred to me that he was an amoeba too. He sat in an old plaid La-Z-Boy with greasy patches on the headrest and smoked cigarettes and watched the Weather Channel until it was time for his bologna sandwich at noon. That was his life.

I stopped halfway across the railway bridge. I leaned over the fancy plaster wall and looked down at the hard, grey tracks below. I could almost taste the metal in my mouth. Did amoebas die? I couldn't remember what it said about that in my textbook.

If you never really live, can you ever really die? It sounded like something you'd see on a Dilbert coffee cup. That would have been a joke a few months ago too.

I kept walking. Some bird chirped in a tree. I looked up but I couldn't see anything. I'd never really noticed birds before. My life had never been that quiet. I could just imagine Mom perched on my bed, holding my limp hand, trying to spin that bird into some big bonus. The silver lining of the getting-dumped cloud.
You can finally hear the birds, sweetie!
It didn't seem like
much of a trade-off to me. I'd have taken Nick over a yellow-bellied sapsucker any day.