Born Weird (23 page)

“I am unable to,” Angie said and it didn’t seem so bad when she said it like that. It just seemed like four words and not like something that had made the last two and a half years the worst of her life.

“Turns out that my blursing,” Angie said, “may have been more blessing than curse.”

“Angie, that’s awful,” Abba said.

“You haven’t been able to forgive anyone at all?” Lucy asked.

“Not in all this time?” asked Richard.

“Fuck,”
Kent said. No one said anything else. They didn’t have a chance to. It was at this point that the car, while going downhill, hit a patch of ice and spun out of control.

I
T WAS NOT SLEEP BUT IT WAS
something very much like sleep and Angie was deeply within it when the thought forced its way into her mind that the engine might still be running. She tried to open her eyes but they were locked. She listened. She heard the wind and the windshield wipers and then faintly, behind all those other sounds, the sound of a running engine. This impressed her. It was obviously a good engine if it could keep running after an accident. But then she thought that maybe this was a bad thing.

She was almost positive that after they’d flipped onto their side they’d slid backwards and suddenly stopped. Maybe a snowbank? She could remember a made-for-TV movie where this couple got into a car accident and their tailpipe was blocked by mud and they died from carbon monoxide poisoning and she was pretty sure that snow probably worked the same way. So she tried to open her eyes but they were cement. She waited. She tried again. Then they were open and she saw the keys dangling from the ignition but the distance between them and her made her eyes close.

When she finally got them open she got confused because gravity was coming from the passenger door. But, regardless, never mind that, the keys were still very much too far away. She looked at her brother, at how his body slumped against the seat belt. Then she didn’t want to look at him. She looked at the floor, which was presently the passenger window and there was Richard’s cellphone. HOORAY! She put it to her ear. She said, “Help us,” and then she remembered that she’d have to dial a phone number and this almost broke her. Putting numbers in sequence seemed mystical and baffling and it made her head droop and that’s when she saw her forearm and there they were, ten of them, already sequenced. HOORAY! Slowly and carefully and with very much effort she dialed the numbers written in Magic Marker on her forearm. The phone began to ring and on the third ring the ringing stopped.

—Hello?

—How are you?

—Who is this?

—It’s okay. You don’t have to know us. I can’t forgive. But I’m not calling about that. I’m only calling because my grandmother wrote this number on my arm before she died and now we’re about to die because we’ve had an accident on the road to Shell Cove. I don’t even know which one. Cape Breton! Carbon monoxide! How far away? Can’t say. Last place I remember is Capstick! Rhymes with lipstick! But we’re serious to die if not soon discovered. No joke, she said,
which made her laugh and she wasn’t sure whether she laughed outwardly or just inside but her eyes closed again and this time she could not, for the life of her, get them open.

T
HE PILE OF SNOW ON THE
carpet was four inches deep and just below the foot of the bed Angie woke up in. The room’s only window was open. Large, slow-moving snowflakes flew over her head. Each one cut a different path through the air but they all landed on the pile, making it grow. Watching this was calming. Angie could see her breath, but she didn’t feel cold. Every surface in the room was dusted with an undisturbed covering of snow. Angie took in all of these things and she began to suspect that she was dead.

Her suspicions were not lessened when she sat up. She was underneath seven woollen Hudson’s Bay blankets. On the opposite wall was a framed nail-art picture of a schooner. The room was filled with mass-produced furniture from the eighties. Should there have been an afterworld specifically created for the Weirds, it would look like this.

Her suspicions became a conviction when she looked out the window. At the edge of the parking lot was a sign. Through the snow the words
l ove Motel
shone in red neon. Angie couldn’t explain the space between the
l
and the
o
. But
she reasoned that for all her earthly sins and sufferings, an eternal reward in something as unglamorous yet pleasurable, comfortable yet transitory as a love motel seemed perfectly appropriate.

The door connecting her room to the one beside it was open. Struggling from under the blankets Angie stepped around the pile of snow. She walked through the door. There was a pile of snow in the middle of this room too. There were two beds. In the one closest to the door was Kent. In the other was Richard. Both were awake. Neither seemed surprised to see her.

“Are we dead?” Kent asked.

“I think we are,” Angie answered.

“We aren’t dead,” Richard said.

“How do you know?”

“I feel normal.”

“But normal is what dead would feel like to dead people,” Angie said.

“Good point,” Richard conceded.

“Do you think this is heaven or hell?” Kent asked.

“Maybe both?”

“It’s neither,” Richard said but his voice was defensive. “It’s just some tacky motel.”

“The Love Motel?”

“You mean the l ove Motel.”

“So?”

“You believe in God but you don’t think he can spell?”

“Good point,” Angie conceded. “But what about the snow? There’s a pile back in my room too.”

“I don’t know about that. I agree it seems odd.”

“It’s very peaceful.”

“That it is.”

“What do you think’s in there?” Kent asked. He nodded towards the door into the next room. It too was open.

“We are,” Abba called.

Angie led the way. She noticed that each of her feet wore three pairs of heavy wool socks. Richard and Kent wore three pairs of wool socks too. Together, they entered the next room. There was another pile of snow on the floor and two more beds. Lucy was in one and Abba was in the other.

“I agree that we’re dead,” Abba said.

“Don’t be so stupid,” Lucy said.

“Vote,” Kent said. “Who thinks we’re dead?”

Angie raised her hand. So did Kent and Abba. The door to the motel room opened. They all turned and looked. Snow and wind entered the room and then, so did their father. Angie, Kent and Abba lowered their hands; Richard and Lucy thrust theirs into the air.

T
HEY STARED AT THEIR FATHER
. Angie, as they all were, was stunned by how little shock seeing him caused. The thinning hair and stooped shoulders and the large black circles under his eyes weren’t just disappointing. They were demystifying. The longer he stood there the more human he became.

“Did we … die?” Richard finally asked.

“Almost. Yes, definitely, almost,” their father said.

“Did you save us?”

“How did you find us?”

“The RCMP called,” he said. He shut the door and kicked snow off his boots. “From Vancouver. They said some crazy old lady in the hospital called them, claiming that some crazy woman called her from a snowstorm near Shell Cove. Guess I was the closest. Closest with chains on my tires, anyway. Damn near didn’t go.”

“What’s with the name?” Angie asked.

“What?”

“The Love Motel. Why are we in the Love Motel?”

“Jesus. That’s what you want to know? It was the Shell Cove Motel when I bought it. Then the
s
burnt out and that sure didn’t help business. So I took out the
h
and the
e
and the first
l
and the c.”

“The Love Motel.”

“The l ove Motel.”

“It’s good. We have people coming all the way up from Halifax. The view off the cliff’s pretty, so no one really cares what it’s named.”

“And the snow?” Richard asked.

“It’s just a storm.”

“Why is it in the rooms?”

“Ventilation,” he said. The aggravation in his voice sent a rush of nostalgia through them all. “You almost died from carbon monoxide poisoning. You needed fresh air and lots of it. I bundled you up best as I could but it was touch and go from there. Didn’t know you’d woken up yet. For a second there I thought you were all ghosts!”

He pointed to the mirror above the wardrobe. They all turned and looked. Snow was caught in their hair and clothes. Their skin was grey from the poison. They did look like ghosts. They looked back at their father. He didn’t move towards his children. They didn’t move closer to him.

“Why aren’t you kids more angry?” he asked.

“Maybe we’re dead,” Lucy said.

“It’d be easier if you were just angry. Go ahead! Get angry! Let me have it.”

“We’ve been having a lot of epiphanies lately,” Abba said.

“I’m not even sure if seeing you is the most improbable thing that’s happened to us recently,” Kent said.

“We’re just amazed to see you alive,” Lucy said.

“Well you almost didn’t get the chance,” their father told them.

“But we did,” Richard said. “We found you. You found us!”

“Wait,” Angie asked. She took a step backwards. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t any of you know what day this is?” Besnard asked.

“I’m not exactly sure what year this is …”

“January 22?” he asked. Exasperation returned to his voice. His children shrugged their shoulders. “It’s my
fucking
birthday! I turn fifty-three today.”

“Don’t say it, Dad,” Angie said. “Please please don’t say it.”

“Don’t say what?” Lucy asked.

“Angie, listen to me,” her father continued, “what I’m about to say is very serious.”

“Please? Don’t say it.”

“What don’t you want him to say?”

“It’s not the year. It’s that I’m in the terminal stages of pancreatic cancer. My pain is constant.”

“Don’t you want to live to be at least a hundred?”

“I’ve fought it long enough. I was born at 7:17 p.m. on January 22. I will die at 7:17 p.m. on January 22. Not a second later or a moment earlier …”

“Who doesn’t love a countdown?”

“Angie!”

“… a little over three hours from now. I can only believe that this is no coincidence. That something divine and uncanny has brought you here, at this moment.”

“Until you realize coincidence doesn’t exist …”

“Stop it, Angie!”

“Shut up!”

“The biggest mistake of my life was abandoning you all. It felt right at the time. At least it felt like a solution. Then it didn’t, but there was no going back.”

“Please don’t ask, Dad. Please don’t ask.”

“In three hours and twenty-odd minutes I’ll be dead. I would like nothing more, my final request, what would allow me to go with peace and dignity, is for all of you to forgive me.”

Besnard began to cough. The coughing turned into a fit. He took a plastic bottle from his pocket. He twisted it open. As he poured yellow pills in his open palm he coughed again. The pills flew into the air. Angie was out the door before they landed.