Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (8 page)

Lana collapsed into my shoulder, soundlessly laughing.

‘I trust my daughter.’

Lana whispered, ‘Big mistake.’ I made myself smile but couldn’t laugh. I thought it was a nice thing for Mrs Kovalenko to
say.

My mother was still talking. ‘God, why did I say all those awful things about Stan back there? Stephen could have walked by
any second. I promised myself a long time ago I’d never do that. He’s only going to hear about the positives from me. The
good memories.’

Mrs Kovalenko murmured something about that being a nice healthy attitude.

Mom had started laughing, but I wasn’t sure why. Then she told Lana’s mother what I’d suspected all along, that she’d been
talking with my father on the phone for years. For years, and he’d never once asked to speak to me.

‘So where’s my positive there?’ she went on. ‘What should I say, “Wow, this is great, huh? He’s really giving you your space!”’

Painful to hear, I guess. But she was wrong. There was one time, about a month earlier. Mom hadn’t been home. The phone rang
and I’d picked it up. It was him.

I’d known the voice right away, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. There was a lot of noise. Loud music, people talking.
Then he came in more clearly. Maybe he’d been holding the receiver the wrong way.

‘This is Stan Shulevitz. I want to talk to my son.’

‘It’s me.’

‘No, I want to talk to Stephen.’

I’d looked out the window. He sounded high.

My father had made an impatient noise. ‘Who are you, the babysitter? Just put him on the phone. You know, little Stepan Vladimir.
Maryna’s boy. Stephen Shulevitz.’

‘It’s me! Stanley, where are you?’

The line had gone quiet for a few seconds. ‘No, this is all wrong,’ he’d said. ‘My son’s a child. He’s only …’ More noise
from the background or maybe Stanley was just getting quieter. ‘Wait, how old did you say you were?’

Before I could answer, the receiver went clunk against something. I’d kept talking, louder and louder, trying to get him back
on the line. Then I was standing there babbling to a dial tone.

And that was it.

Mrs Kovalenko murmured something about ‘giving him too much power over you’.

‘But, Larissa, you don’t know what it was like,’ my mother said. ‘He was gone, and there was this little person asking me
every day, “Where’s Stanley? When’s he coming back? Mom, can we call him? Can we go visit?” I even gave Stephen a fake address
once so he could write Stan a letter. I’ve still got that letter somewhere. I never opened it.’

I didn’t realise I’d been quite so pathetic. Jesus Christ, was this woman ever going to stop talking?

Lana and I were sitting side by side on the floor at this point. It was easier to whisper to each other if we were about the
same height. We could hear Mrs Kovalenko at the sink by the back door, probably getting my mother a glass of water. After
that, there was nothing for a
while except those almost soundless Mom sobs. Lana whispered in my ear that we had to get out of there and I nodded yes. Then
my mother started up again. Nothing on earth would stop her.

‘It just doesn’t seem fair,’ she said. ‘He hurt me, he hurt my child, and nothing happens to him. He’s got this great new
life now, a new family. And he was so insistent at the beginning that I, you know, terminate the pregnancy …’

‘Oh, fuck.’ I said it out loud, breathed it.

Lana reached her arm around my shoulders, told me in a half-voice that everything was okay.

Didn’t know that was your ambition for me all along, Stan. Or I would have been the best damn splash on the floor a father
could have asked for.

I couldn’t help thinking that if Mark were here, he’d despise me for the things my mother was saying. I wasn’t sure why, but
I was pretty certain he would.

If Mark were here. The image took hold suddenly, like a hand closing over my throat. If Mark were here with me instead of
her, instead of Lana. If it had been him under this sloping ceiling, passing me a bottle of vodka to drink. Star anise. Shoved
up against the wall, shelves pressing into my back, fumbling with buttons and zippers, half dying. Hands full, mouth full.
Of him.

Jesus Christ. I was losing my mind.

How could I be thinking this now? Sitting here getting all excited about something so sick and so weird, Lana with her arm
around me not suspecting a thing. When I’d just found out my father had wanted me dead before I was even born. This made no
sense. I made no sense.

‘And now out of nowhere, after all that, Stanley says he wants to see him …’

Everything stopped. When I could breathe again, I realised I was clutching Lana’s hand like a frightened eight-year-old.

‘Tells me to put Stephen on a plane and just send him off to Montreal this summer. I guess the new wife wants to meet him.
And he’s got sisters now, two little babies. I haven’t said anything yet. I don’t know how.’

Lana was mouthing at me, ‘Did you know?’

I couldn’t answer.

‘Time to shut this down,’ she said in my ear. Right. We pulled ourselves to our feet. Bits of ‘The Maryna Show’ were still
filtering through the door, Mom talking about how she had no boyfriend and no real friends and that her job was a big zero.
She had one thing in her life, she said, and guess what that was?

Block it out. Stay focused. Lana picked up a potato from the bag by the door, and I did the same. No idea what she had in
mind, but it felt good to have a potato.

‘It can’t be healthy for him,’ my mother was going on, ‘I mean, no father, and then there’s this crazy woman hovering around
all the time. And you know what people say.’

I think I sensed what was coming next. Don’t, Mom. Not out loud in front of everybody. Lana nudged the door. It had a slight
squeak in the hinges, but the two women didn’t notice.

‘… I’m just so terrified he’ll grow up to be a homosexual and it’ll be all my fault.’

Oh, God. I gripped the doorframe, couldn’t look at anything, couldn’t see anything. For a split second, I imagined Lana telling
this story in school, everybody gathered round.

But she was rolling her eyes at me, shaking her head. Disgusted with my mother. Lana wasn’t going to laugh at this. The girl
was on my side.

Mrs Kovalenko was giggling away. ‘Come on, Maryna, you know it doesn’t work like that. Anyway, weren’t you just saying he’s
going to marry Svetlana?’

‘Oh, wouldn’t that be
nice
?’

Then Lana heaved her potato into the opposite room where it made a very satisfying crash: sounded like a whole bunch of house
plants falling over. I lobbed mine and saw it go thunk against the wall.

But it worked. We heard a chair squeak along the floor, Lana’s mother mumbling to herself that she’d better see what on earth
that was, my mother toddling after her. When we peeped past the larder door, the kitchen was deserted. We disappeared out
the back and stayed there for a minute, watching our breath hitting the winter dark. Lana had to stand on my tractor boots
because she didn’t have shoes on. I put my arms around Lana to steady her, but it didn’t feel like romance anymore.

‘I’m so sorry, Stepanchik.’

‘It’s okay.’ The nickname actually did sound nice the way she said it.

She slipped a bit, pulled herself closer to me, mumbling into my T-shirt. ‘I never should’ve heard that stuff.’

‘Me neither.’ Hand on her shoulder.

‘Your dad sounds like a total bastard.’

‘I’ll let you know when I see him this summer.’

Lana drew back, looked up at me.

‘You’re going?’

I nodded.

‘Wish I could come along. I’d kick his ass for you.’

My fingers on the back of her head, her stiff, gelled-up hair, her pretty eyes.

I felt so lonely.

We heard someone knocking on the back window. Turned around to see my mother and Mrs Kovalenko, their faces framed in the
glass, waving at us and smiling.

So we shuffled inside, and I told my mother it was time to go home.

My mom was weaving a bit on the walk back. Part of me felt like pushing her into a snow bank. She’d humiliated me. But then
I’d watched her getting drunk and stupid and embarrassing herself and I’d done nothing. Nothing to save her. The heel of Mom’s
boot slipped. I took her arm and she didn’t fall. We stayed like that, walking.

‘So, Mom,’ I said. Then had to stop myself.
So, Mom, what? Was all that stuff true? Did Stanley change his mind about me after I was born? What are my sisters’ names?
But saying this was impossible. I couldn’t admit I’d been there listening.

‘Mom,’ I said again. Silence. I finished lamely, ‘You didn’t seem too happy back there.’

‘Got that right.’ She looked like she was concentrating very hard on putting one foot in front of the other. ‘Living in this
little town. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to talk to people. Either I don’t say anything, or I start blabbering on and can’t
stop.’

‘That was after you drank all that wine, huh?’

Mom gave me her you-little-brat look. ‘Yes, Stephen,’ she said, ‘that was after I drank all that wine. But it’s not okay to
drink just because you’re in a socially uncomfortable situation. You understand that, right?’ I told her, yes, of course I
did.

‘Excruciating,’ she went on. ‘Just like being back in high school. When I was so shy.’

‘You were?’ I tried to act casual. ‘How’d you get out of it?’

She didn’t say anything for a moment. The sky was dark and cloudy, a soft purplish colour. Probably getting ready to snow
again.

‘Well, I suppose I should tell you the truth. Same way I did tonight. Going to parties. Getting drunk. Getting stoned. Making
a complete ass of myself.’ She fished her pack of cigarettes out of her purse, opened it. ‘A bad example for you. I’m a bad
example. Of course that’s how I met your father, at one of those parties …’

‘Yeah, that worked out great.’

My mother had hardly heard me, off in some romantic daydream. ‘God, Stanley was adorable. Just the smartest, funniest, sweetest
boy. So many ideas. Talking to him was like waking up. I couldn’t believe he wanted me.’

We walked past houses full of warm yellow light, snow on the roofs, everything bordered with glowing dots of red and green
and blue from Christmas. Then we were back home. Mom threw her coat and purse on the floor and announced that she was going
to bed.

‘That was awful!’ she called out over her shoulder. ‘So embarrassing!’ She started lurching upstairs, holding on to the banister.
‘Let us never speak of this again, huh, Stan?’

I froze like I’d been shot, but she hadn’t noticed anything.

After she went to bed I stayed sitting at the kitchen table, still woozy from the beer, trying to figure out what had happened.

One thing I did know. What I’d been thinking in the larder. What I’d been thinking about Mark. I had to deal with that right
away.

I was a bit nervous because it had been a few months since I’d done this, since I’d had to. I’d thought things were getting
better.

Third drawer down, next to the fridge. A box of wooden matches under a casserole dish. I took out a match. Lit it, held my
little finger against the flame. Same place as last time because you didn’t want to have too many marks, draw too much attention.
The match burned out. I lit another one, kept it going. Until I started to sweat, felt like
throwing up. Until I was sure I wouldn’t dare think anything like that again.

This is what I did, what I’d been doing for the past few years. To stop myself from ruining my life.

I’d stick a Band-Aid on it. The next day in class if I was having the same kind of thoughts I’d dig my thumb in there, go
half crazy from pain for a second. But it would help to kill this feeling, keep it away from me, let it leave.

Such an idiot. It never left. It was mine. It was me.

The next morning I made my mother coffee instead of tea. She was sick from drinking so much. I was sick too, but I had to
hide it. We sat at the kitchen table together. Mom mumbled something about me babysitting for the Healeys. I said sure. Then
it was time to go to school.

And so we got set back on our little clockwork paths and went ticking on with our day, my mother and me. Continued with everything,
as if we were normal people. People who remembered nothing.

Okay, I guess there’s a lot I left out of this. In fact there’s a good chance you could accuse me of being full of it again.
And maybe you’d be right.

For one thing, the world didn’t end in my TV room this April because I realised I was attracted to Mark. You’ve probably figured
that out by now. It ended, all right. But the reasons were bigger, more complicated. That other stuff – the guilty thoughts,
the parts of me I was always trying to block. They’d been with me for a long time. Even before the party at the Kovalenkos’.

Let’s go back to Grade Eight. The year before I met Lana. I was thirteen, plodding home from school with Mark in February.
I was mad at him because he’d thrown that basketball at my head when I sat on the sidelines during gym class. He was mad at
me – I was sure – because I was an embarrassing spaz and I was holding him back.

The same afternoon I was talking about before. But I didn’t exactly tell the whole truth the first time this came up. Not
about what happened after we got back to my place.

The air was heavy and wet. Mark had kicked a flattened beer can all the way down the sidewalk. We’d trudge forwards another
hundred feet and when we met up with it again, he’d give it another kick. I shoved my hands in the pockets of my winter coat.
It was cold, but mittens were for little kids and gloves were for wimps.

Mark was still telling me about how everything I was doing at school was wrong and I was pissing people off, even if I didn’t
know it. It made me ashamed and crazy with rage. Like sitting in a room full of strangers with your mom showing everybody
your naked baby pictures.

‘So if you think I’m such a loser, then why do you hang around with me?’

‘What kind of stupid question is that?’

Heading for my house now. We were both sick of each other and I just wanted Mark to go home. But if he did, we’d be admitting
this was a real fight. A quarrel, a tiff. A couple of girls.

On the corner of my street, he took a pack of Player’s from his coat pocket and lit up.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘Put that away!’ I stood hovering, trying to block him from view of these tall wooden houses, every
window a potential watcher edging the curtains apart to see us better.

‘What is your problem? There’s nobody around.’

I couldn’t believe how stupid he was being. Of course there were people around, I told him. Just because you can’t see anybody
on the street doesn’t mean you’re not being watched. How did he think gossip spread so fast in this town?

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Mark growled, but he scraped the live end of the cigarette against a tree and the dregs drifted down into the
snow. He twisted the tip, slotted it back into the pack.

I wasn’t allowed to smoke. My mother was very clear about this.
She lit up a million times a day, but every time she did, there’d be this intense look in my direction. Then she’d start,
on and on, about how she never wanted to see me with a cigarette in my hand, that it was her one rule, how it was a life-long,
debilitating addiction and the surest way to break her heart.

We’d gone around to the back of my house and ended up at the rusty swing set by the shed. It was okay to sit on the swings,
if you made it clear you weren’t playing, just hanging out. The sound when you nudged yourself along was like something prehistoric
talking to you about its aches and pains.

Mark sat with one hand wrapped around the rusty chain links of the swing, his face tilted upwards, daydreaming. I forgot I
was mad at him for a second. Then I remembered, leaned back on my swing and scooped a handful of snow off the ground. I slapped
it into a dense ball and chucked it hard at the back of his head.

Mark spluttered – shocked and furious, like he couldn’t figure out who’d done this to him. He started to laugh. ‘You fucker!’

He got me back worse. Then we were running around the yard. The snow was wet, excellent packing – you could make something
more like an ice cannonball of destruction than the puffy round globes you’d see kids throwing at each other in the movies.
I got him at close range a couple of times, was pelted half to death in return. Finally he had me in a headlock mashing icy
crystals into my face and I had to give up. He stood there radiating smugness, then took out his pack of smokes again.

‘Jeez, Mark, would you put that shit away? You’re gonna kill yourself.’ I stopped. Sounded just like my mother. He was looking
at me like he wanted to say the same thing. I dug my fingers into the back of my neck.

‘Give me one of those, will you?’ I said.

‘You actually want to smoke?’

‘Yeah.’ I met his eyes. A bargain.

He shrugged and held the pack towards me. It was blue and white, with a scowling bearded sailor in a circle looking up at
us. Maybe he was the boy from the Cracker Jack box grown up. My mouth was dry. Ice on my neck melted into trails of cold water
mixing with the sweat on my back. There was a wooden fence around the yard, but that wouldn’t hide anything. Not from the
neighbours at their high, upstairs windows.

‘Not here,’ I said. ‘In the house.’ My voice dropped almost to a whisper. Mark seemed like he was about to laugh, but he didn’t
say anything. We walked in silence, suddenly serious, up the steps to the back door. I let us in with my key. Mark pulled
the door shut behind us and I heard it click.

‘The basement.’ I was still talking like I was in a spy movie. We left crescents of dirty snow water on the floor in the living
room. I pushed open the basement door, hinges squeaking in a long thin whine like a question. Then I stopped. It would be
safer if I used my mother’s brand – I had this idea she’d be able to smell the traces from something different. Mark loped
down to the basement and I told him I’d be there in a second, went upstairs and found the carton of cigarettes Mom kept in
the bottom drawer of the dresser in her room, next to a tangle of gauzy scarves and her letters from Stanley.

I’d read them all, of course. Some of the early ones were pretty embarrassing. In the last few he just seemed tired. ‘Maybe
it would be better for all of us if you let him forget me,’ he’d written. ‘Kids bounce back fairly easily, don’t they?’

Not the right time to be thinking about this. I took out a red rectangular pack of smokes from the carton, a thin light brick.
Okay. Back to the basement.

We were alone in the house and we had a secret. He was waiting for me. We were about to do something that wasn’t allowed.

Down the stairs and through the living room. I was forcing myself to walk slowly. Nervous. Excited.

Too excited. At the top of the basement steps, I had to sit for a minute and count backwards from a hundred in French.

I was used to this. For the past couple of years, I’d been turning into some kind of whack-off machine, and I figured this
was a side effect – fending off stray boners, usually at the most embarrassing times possible. I found ways to deal with it.
Nobody had caught me yet.

I continued to count backwards. When I got to
quarante-cinq
, it was safe to go down there. The air in the basement was already thick with smoke shapes.

‘Mark, what the fuck are you doing? Open a window!’ He grumbled that I was being, like, totally bossy, but he did what I wanted.

Mark had shucked off his winter coat and thrown it on one of the couches. He was wearing long sleeves, fake denim hanging
open over a white T-shirt that looked a little too small for him. He stretched and pushed at the window frame. The T-shirt
rode up.

Underneath he looked soft, like something unshelled. But you could see muscles moving under his skin. A few light-brown hairs
curled up from the waistband of his jeans.

I could feel my face going hot, and my ears. I looked away, but it was too late.

There was cold air melting into the room. Mark leaned against the wall and stuck a cigarette in the side of his mouth, tried
to inhale and exhale without touching it, like somebody on TV. The smoke kept drifting into his eyes and making him laugh.
I watched his mouth moving, his lips. I opened the pack of cigarettes and eased off the square
of silver paper. Looked at the shiny fragment held between my fingers like I’d forgotten where it came from.

That little glimpse. Where he’d looked so vulnerable, so much his secret self.

How would it feel to touch?

My own stomach kind of fell away. Just for a second I pictured it. Standing behind Mark, resting my head between his shoulder
blades, my arms around him. The heat from his body warming my face, the feel of his skin. How his breathing might change if
he liked what I was doing.

Oh, God. He was looking at me full on.

‘Man, are you okay?’

I nodded.

‘You sure we need the window open? You still got your …’

There was no way I was taking this coat off. I concentrated on the stupid cigarettes. My fingers felt thick and clumsy. We’d
just been running around like children out there in the yard.

Okay. Calm the fuck down
. This was just another body. Like the rest. In the locker rooms at school. On TV. Pictures. All those underwear and swimsuit
ads from the Sears catalogue, that thick heavy book with the slippery pages that we’d collect from the ordering counter in
town every four months. Mom would throw away the old ones and I’d rescue them from the garbage and stash them in my room.
Hidden better than her cigarette cartons and love letters.

But those were pictures. Real people were different. Harder to control my thoughts, my reactions. It made me feel so helpless.
Like when I’d be trying to do my homework and I’d go drifting off into stupid daydreams thinking about my English teacher
– Mr Randall, just out of college. He’d hand out poems on paper warm from the
photocopy machine, try to explain to us why he loved them. Actually said the word ‘love’ out loud, to a wall of blank hostility
and slouching stares.

I stuck the cigarette in my mouth, lit it, inhaled deeply.

It was horrible. Hot and poisonous, the kind of heat you’d get from an infected sore. But I didn’t start coughing. I was proud
of myself for that. And I made an effort to draw the smoke into my lungs, not to wimp out and keep it in my mouth where it
couldn’t contaminate me.

I thought I was doing pretty well there, but when I looked up Mark was laughing.

‘You’re holding that thing like a queer, man.’

I felt like somebody’d banged a book over the top of my head.

‘No, I’m not!’ I looked at the cigarette doubtfully. ‘I’m not.’

He was still laughing, leaning back with his head on the fake wood panelling under the window. ‘You are. Even your mom doesn’t
hold a smoke like that.’ I don’t know what my face was doing. Mark stopped, seemed sorry for me all of a sudden. ‘Hey. It’s
not a big deal. Just hold it different.’

I imitated him carefully: his posture, fingers, hands, how he inhaled and breathed out. It’s what I did whenever I wasn’t
sure of anything. Copying Mark. I was good at it.

‘See, that’s better,’ he said.

‘Okay.’ I didn’t want to get to the end of the cigarette because it would mean I’d probably have to smoke another one. I wished
Mark would leave. He was talking about our History teacher Mrs Blakely and how ugly she was, with her wide mouth and flat,
baggy body. I interrupted before he could go into detail.

‘Mark?’ Wasn’t sure how to say this, or if I should. ‘How do you know if somebody is … one. You know.’

‘Is what? Oh, a homo?’ Mark grinned. ‘If his name’s Chris Randall. Then you know.’

I forced a laugh.
Sorry, Mr Randall
.

Mark went on to say no, Randall probably wasn’t one. He was just some loser who’d never got laid in his life. You could tell
a fag pretty easy, he said. You can tell by looking. Didn’t I know this stuff? Didn’t I watch TV? They acted real weird and
talked weird. Like a girl, but disgusting. And they’d try to touch you.

‘Did you ever see one?’

‘No. Thank God. Cause if I did …’ He had plans. Mark got carried away, even went into a little imitation: what this person
would do and say and sound like as he was getting killed.

I felt sick and slow – my stomach, my head. Everything was crowding in and I needed to be alone. I wanted to tell Mark to
shut up and go. Stop bugging me with his body and his presence and his words.

Instead I started making suggestions for him. Intestines. All the stuff you could do with the guy’s intestines. Where to shove
the stick of dynamite before you lit it. Time was slowing and grinding down, like a pencil sharpener with its handle pushing
in circles, and the air was too thick to breathe. Everything I said sounded like somebody else talking.
Please go home, Mark
.

He did, eventually.

The house was empty. Mom wouldn’t be back for another hour. I couldn’t get the taste of cigarettes out of my mouth. And the
smell. I opened all the windows in the basement but it was still there. Probably in my clothes and hair too. Upstairs to the
bathroom. Not the little cold one off my bedroom – we should have called that the whack-off room – the big one we both used
for baths and showers.

Pulled the shower curtain back, that high clattering ring.

I don’t know how much time passed. I was picking at the edges of our crumbling bath mat, dry sides of the tub on either side
of me, all my clothes on, brown plastic shower curtain blocking off the rest of the house. I wanted to cry but nothing would
come. Not even my voice. Everything was stuck inside me boiling away to nothing.

The worst insult on the playground. You’d almost rather be dead.

I bit down hard on the muscled base of my thumb. I couldn’t feel it.

That stupid little daydream. Resting myself against Mark’s back. It would have been okay if I’d just imagined something dirty,
something hostile. I wasn’t proud of those thoughts – but I wasn’t afraid of them either. And somehow they didn’t touch me.
I wasn’t in them, any of the little porno movies I played out in my mind when I was alone, these perfect men together who
wouldn’t kiss or look each other in the eye.