From This Moment On (18 page)

The plates shattered against my body, cutting my skin in clean, long slices. I had cuts everywhere, even on the soles of my feet, and it hurt like hell, although, strangely, I wasn’t bleeding much. After a time, the throwing stopped. That’s when I woke up.

I sit up in my bed, breathing heavily with my eyes open, keenly aware of where I am. The nightmare is still rolling, though I’m no longer sleeping.
I have to get out of bed to check on the others!
Although I’m awake, I’m still in the clutches of the dream. As far as I’m concerned, my father is coming for us. I have to warn everybody. What if he’s hiding in the house? I’m expecting him to be.

I attempt to get down from my bunk, but my whole body aches. When I try to brace myself with the palms of my hands, they hurt, from the cuts—yet I don’t see any cuts. It feels as if I have razor-thin slices all over me. When my feet touch the carpet, I can barely stand the sensation of the cut skin grabbing the knit of the carpet. I have to walk on my tiptoes, but I pad around to each bed in the house and check on my mother, my sister, and my brothers, certain that I will find them dead. Much to my relief, all four are still breathing and fast asleep.

I gingerly make my way down to the main floor, to check that the front door is locked. Yes. Good. But what if he is waiting for me in the basement? If I turn on the light, he might see me, so I creep downstairs and feel my way around in the pitch dark. Another surprise: no one there. I am sure, however, that my father will certainly be coming to get me. After all, it was
my
idea for us to leave him. It was
me
who convinced my mother, mired in depression, to climb out of bed, get in the car, and drive all of us far away. It was
my
doing that he came home from work that night to an empty house, to be greeted only by a pathetic one-sentence note of apology dashed off in a minute: “I’m
sorry things didn’t work out.” I was responsible for his abandonment, and I was going to get it.

I am shivering from the pain as I crawl back upstairs and hide underneath the kitchen table. From here I can see every window and door on the ground floor. The cold touch of the metal chairs hurts so much against my cuts, and my feet are in agony. It’s three in the morning, and this is where I will stay, frozen and wide eyed, until dawn. I’ve been scoping the house for an hour. I know this because it was two o’clock on the digital clock beside my bed when I woke up from my “dream.”

I huddle beneath the table for hours, knowing that any second my dad is going to bust through the door with a shotgun. I’ve seen him in action, I’ve heard his roar, my mother’s screams, our cries, the banging, the punching, and the yelling of two people entangled in violence. I am ready for the worst. I’m worked up and ready to take him on if he comes through that door trying to hurt my family. But he never comes. Around six in the morning, the sun streams through the window. My father never came. A warm sensation washes over me; I am all of a sudden no longer stiff and in pain. I’m back to normal. I shake my head and ask myself aloud, “What the hell are you doing here under the kitchen table?” I know the reason, but I can’t believe it. It’s as if someone had walked me there in my sleep, and now I’ve woken up, only I was awake the whole time. I crawl out from under the table with no pain, trudge up the stairs, and flop into bed like nothing ever happened.

A few hours later, my mother was shaking me awake. “Your father’s on the phone,” she said urgently. “He needs to talk to you.”

“I’m too tired,” I mumbled.

“He says it’s very important.”

I came downstairs and picked up the receiver.

“Eilleen, are you all right?” he asked breathlessly.

Hesitantly, I answered, “Yes, I’m fine. Why?” I was anxious at his adamant concern for me, especially after what I’d experienced the night before.

He persisted. “Are you sure? Tell me you’re okay.” I reassured him that, yes, I was okay. Why was he asking me this? Was this part of the dream? I was utterly confused.

“Well, it’s just that I had a bad dream about you last night, and I wanted to make sure you were okay,” my father explained. Then he went on to describe his dream. “You were at the foot of my bed, waving your hands and shouting, ‘No, no, stop, no!’” He’d woken up startled. The dream was so realistic, he told me over the phone, that he was worried about me and wanted to make sure I was okay. I believed that his concern was genuine. I also believed that he must have really been with me during those hours, in some way, and felt the power of whatever it was that happened. Our dreams were so parallel. He added that
his
mother woke him up around three o’clock because she’d heard him stirring and moaning in his sleep, obviously entrapped in a nightmare.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Even the times matched. I was freaked out—who wouldn’t be?—but I didn’t say a word to him about my dream. “No, everything is fine,” I said, and left it at that.

The summer I turned sixteen, in 1981, my mother went back to my father. She had become less dependent on me emotionally over the course of that period in Toronto, which had allowed me more time with Daniel. My communication with my mother diminished, and I wasn’t included in her decision to move back to my father. She did openly allude to the fact that the boys needed their dad, though, and I could sense that she was growing weary of trying to support us on her own through working and collecting welfare. So it wasn’t surprising to me that she would eventually decide to move back up North to a more familiar environment where there was some family, even if not to live with my dad. The fast pace of city life in Toronto wore on my mother, too. She was intimidated by the city dwellers’/peoples’ less friendly attitudes.

I let it be known that, plain and simple, I wasn’t going! I would not leave Daniel, and that was it! I was so set in my decision that my
mother had no choice but to leave me behind, taking Carrie, Mark, and Darryl with her. Naturally, I couldn’t stay in the town house anymore, now that my mother had given it up to move back. I packed up a trunk of belongings, pages of my song lyrics, stuffed animals, pictures, a diary, and a host of other personal trinkets to send on with the family. The only thing I kept with me was a small suitcase of clothing and a few functional items for my daily needs. I decided I could squat in the old house some nights to stay close to Daniel and ride the bus through the night as another solution for lodging. Did you see the movie
The Pursuit of Happyness
starring Will Smith, which was based on the true story of a man who was homeless for a time but went on to become a wealthy stockbroker? When I watched the scene where he and his young son ride the bus all night because they have nowhere else to go, it brought me right back to Toronto, 1981.

Squatting in our old town house wasn’t very practical, as the electricity, phone, and water had all been turned off. Ironically, I guess you could say that in some respects I’d had ample training in roughing it under similar circumstances. My parents continued to try to talk me into coming home, as they knew I was bunking in the vacant house. Eventually they tracked down a distant relative of my dad’s, an aunt who lived about forty-five minutes away, but I was reluctant to stay there, as I felt it was too far from Daniel.

I remember being alone in the empty town house one night when lightning lit up the sky, and with no curtains, it brightened the room in flickers. I was frightened, as the setting felt a bit like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I was uneasy being alone there in the dark, but it was never as scary as the dream—was it just a dream?—I’d had when we were living there as a family. I had no bed, but the carpet was cushiony enough for me to sleep on. I was okay and would manage, I told myself. Daniel had asked his parents if there was any way either they or a neighbor friend could take me in, but no one wanted any part of housing this little small-town hobo. It made me feel like a tramp, embarrassed that no one wanted to get involved, but I also understood that it was an awkward imposition to expect
anyone to engage in the drama of a teenage girl who wasn’t with her own family because she refused to leave her boyfriend.

By the end of the summer, right around my sixteenth birthday, I realized I couldn’t make it on my own anymore. Even though my father did eventually convince me to go to his aunt’s, I was able to stay only a short time in her already cramped apartment, and there was no long-term solution that would enable me to remain in Toronto. I wouldn’t be able to support myself working part-time at, say, McDonald’s, and manage to get through tenth grade at the same time. I was gutted, but it was either drop out of high school in order to be with Daniel or go back to Timmins to live with my parents and continue high school there. Dropping out was never an option. As much as I loved Daniel, I knew that I had to finish school.

I reluctantly got on the Greyhound bus for the fifteen-hour journey back to my hometown. I knew my family would be happy to see me, and I was looking forward to reuniting with them as well, but leaving Daniel felt like a death—I was being ripped away from my best friend and first love!

Except that we weren’t
home,
exactly. After my mom, my siblings, and I had fled our house on Proulx Court for the battered-women’s shelter in Toronto, my father let the house go. From what I remember, he simply stopped paying the mortgage, so it was repossessed by the bank. He then went back to live with his parents in Timmins. I recall my parents later talking about how forfeiting on the mortgage had damaged their credit and made it very difficult for them to obtain loans for their future tree-planting business and a mortgage for another home once we rejoined my father in Timmins. They decided that while they were getting back on their feet financially, we would all move into my grandparents’ house on Maple Street—one of the many streets in Timmins named after the local trees: Balsam, Birch, Cedar, Spruce.

Our family of six crammed into my grandparents’ tiny six-hundred-square-foot home, making for a grand total of eleven people living under the same roof. There was my grandfather Gerry; my grandmother Selina; my dad’s younger siblings, Uncle Timmy and Auntie Karen; and my cousin Lorie, who was my age. Now add in the six of us: two young boys, two teenage girls, and my parents. Needless
to say, things were pretty tight, especially with just two bedrooms and one bathroom.

Once again, a basement served as my bedroom, except that this time our entire family lived there. The floor was all dirt, except for one small area covered with wooden floorboards that was just large enough for my parents’ bed. Mark and Darryl shared the small space with them, sleeping all in one open room. As for Carrie and me, our bunk beds were squeezed into what used to be a cold storage room—built for preserving root vegetables during the winter—only the door was missing. Did you ever read the Gothic horror novel
Flowers in the Attic,
in which four children are coerced into hiding for years in the attic of their grandparents’ mansion? Well, a book based on the Twain kids during this time would have been titled
Roots in the Cellar
, only, thankfully, our grandmother wasn’t trying to kill us.

The basement had no bathroom; however, since the washer and dryer were down there, we had access to a couple of large, square laundry sinks, and I used one as my bathtub. I was a pretty tiny teenager, so I was able to crouch down with my knees pulled up tightly to my chest to have a soak. I was more than used to bathing like this from the years of rustic bush camping, having to sponge bathe by dappling open-fire-heated lake water from a metal bucket with a rag or coffee cup—so more like a bushman’s shower than a bath, really.

Still, being a teenager, seeking acceptance, I was too embarrassed to bring a friend over or admit to anyone that I was living like a bushman with my family, right there in town. Anyone visiting me in our basement dwelling would have been more likely to leave with their shoes sandier from our dirt floor than when they came in from outside. I would have felt uncomfortable having to ask a friend to keep her shoes on rather than take them off when she entered. It was dark and dingy down in the basement, with meager peeks of natural, outside light and only a few naked lightbulbs that dangled from exposed electrical cords off the unfinished two-by-four timber framework of the floor above. I could jump up slightly and easily touch the rough-cut timber over my head, as the ceiling was low. I was probably only
a couple of inches over five feet at that age, to give you an idea of the lack of headroom down there. The basement was not finished as a living space, only as a storage, laundry, and utility area.

The cold storage room where my sister Carrie and I slept had a tiny ground-level window, no more than two feet wide by one foot high, with the bottom frame at the same level as my mattress on the top bunk. My sister was on the bottom bunk bed, and I’m not sure which of us was colder once winter came. Carrie’s bed was closest to the only bit of “finished” flooring in this basement, as it was the cold storage corner, so it had a concrete slab. Concrete with no heat is cold, and having this under her back couldn’t have been very healthy. My upper bunk, however, was like being pushed up against an ice block. I remember scraping frost off the inside of the window at night while trying to fall asleep. I’d draw shapes and doodles with the edge of my fingernail till the tip of my finger would sting from the cold, then I’d change fingers and carry on until I was ready to close my eyes.

This lone window came in handy as more than my bedtime doodling pad, though. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d throw on my clothes and slip outside just to escape reality for a while. Sneaking out was easy; the tricky part was easing myself back inside without getting snow all over my mattress.