Pain & Wastings (6 page)

We get smuggled into the theater by her friend, who is a janitor for the shopping complex. When it's over and we leave, the sunshine of the afternoon is like a slap in the face. Kelly marches back toward Main and Hastings. I decide it's time for a peace offering.

“Pain and Wastings,” I tell her as we approach
the corner. “That's what we call it down here.” Before I can correct the
we
to
they,
Kelly pipes up.

“Look.” She roots in her enormous purse for a cigarette. “I'm going to score. I understand if you don't want to. I know you think I'm just some junkie skank. But there it is. That's what I'm going to do with the rest of my afternoon, okay?” She pulls out three packs, but they're all empty. Barely missing a beat, she sidles up to a group of men who are walking hurriedly and speaking Italian, clearly tourists who got dangerously lost trying to get from Chinatown to the harbor.

They are all young and they are all quite taken by Kelly. Four cigarettes are whipped out. She slips the first one between her lips and lets the man light it for her. Then she takes the other three and tucks them into one of the empty cigarette packs.

“
Gracias
,” she purrs. They laugh and start on their way again. She walks with them. They don't seem to mind. My back goes up. I want to pull her away, but this is Kelly. You don't mess with her or she might knock you over with her
purse and stomp your eye out with one of her high heels.

She's not your girlfriend, I tell myself as one of the men puts his arm around her waist, and the balding one lays claim to her shoulders. She looks tiny between them.

“See you later, Ethan.” She offers a little wave over her shoulder, leaving me utterly alone at the corner of Pain and Wastings.

“Where you headed, little guy?” I know this man. He is called Clifford and has red hair and is big, just like the big red dog in the picturebooks. This is before the Ovaltine, but the same day, only minutes earlier. I am clumping along with my snow boots on the wrong feet, my bare chest cold. It is fall and sunny, but colder than I expected.

“I'm getting milk,” I tell him.

“Where's your mom?” He leans down. He reaches into his pocket and offers me a caramel, sticky and squished. I know it is safe to take candy from him because Mommy always lets me. I take it and turn my attention to peeling off the wrapper. That takes too long, and I am too hungry and this is the first thing in who knows
how long that I've been offered to eat. I shove the whole thing in my mouth and take off at a run when I see the hand signal says it's safe to cross. I want to get away from him before he asks me where my mother is again. “Wait up, Ethan!” Clifford calls after me. But he has a limp and can't walk fast, so I'm across the street before he starts after me, and then the light changes and he has to wait.

I manage to get on a bus out of the Downtown Eastside. I should never have left the house this morning. I'm not sure if I want anyone to be home when I get there or not. Unless it is Harvir. I wish he were there. I wish I had someone to talk to. I'm not mad at him for what he said to Kelly. So long as that's all he told her.

When I get off the bus, I spot a penny in the street. I pick it up and make a wish to find Harvir up in our room, reading his East Indian comics and smoking against the rules, aiming the evidence out the window.

Maybe I am going crazy. Maybe this is the beginning. Before Tyrone moved in, Marshall sat us all down and explained about schizophrenia
and what it does to your brain and how it can usually be managed by medication. He told us it often presents in the teenage years but isn't usually diagnosed until later. He said there is sometimes a family link, which is why Tyrone has the diagnosis already. His mom had it and couldn't take care of him.

Did my mom have it? Do I? There's no way of finding out about her. Her brother died four years ago, and I don't know how to get in contact with any of the rest of her family, and neither does Chandra. When my mom got really drunk and put on her sad music, full of mournful saxophones and deep bluesy voices, she would sometimes tell me about her dad. He was a musician, but that's pretty much all I know.

All of this started with Holly. She's like some dark angel making me relive all this stuff. Maybe I'll bail on the last two shifts. Juvie would be better than this hell.

But then Chandra's outside, honking her horn. I pull the clothes from the dryer, put them on damp and run out to her car. I'll do tonight and then I'll decide.

Before I even get there, I am angry at Holly. I
do
want to know how she knew my mother. Was she one of the paramedics who came in the end? Or did she pick her up one of the other times, when she overdosed, or when she was flopping on the floor, seizuring from some bad heroin? I knew how to call 911, but we rarely had a phone. So if I got scared, I'd go into the hallway and just start screaming at the top of my lungs until I got someone's attention.

The art therapist asked me why I didn't do that in the end. I remember staring at my painting on the easel in front of me. It was of the inside of the front door, with its three locks and peephole and the pictures of jazz greats Mom taped up there, although you couldn't tell who they were in my rendition. They were just blobs.

“Can you tell me why that time was different, Ethan?” Marigold asks.

Ages ago, at our first session, she told me her name. Marigold, like the flower. She must've guessed by my expression that I didn't know what a marigold looked like, so she led me to a pot of them in a square of sunlight and let me stand
there quietly staring at them until I was ready to begin.

“It's okay to tell me what was different about that time.” Now it was almost a year and two foster homes since I had started seeing her. “Take your time.”

“It was different,” I told her, “because the door was locked way up high.” I pointed to the highest lock in the picture. “And that one needed a key.”

“I wonder then,” she said gently, “how you got out. Remember when they found you wandering around in your pajamas?”

I didn't tell her the whole story that time. I clammed up, like I usually did. I fixed my sights on the marigolds at the windowsill and didn't pick up another pencil or crayon or paintbrush for the rest of the hour.

The memories are coming back more than I would ever wish them to. The smells, the flies. The hunger. I stumble through the nightshift making stupid mistakes. Holly yells at me when I admit that I left the oxygen tank up in some old folks' home hallway after we were all the way to the hospital. We had to tell dispatch that we had to go back. There were calls waiting. They were pissed off.

“I told you to get some sleep!” she snaps at five in the morning when I drop the burns kit,
sending the sterile gauze and saline tumbling under the ambulance. “You're lucky it's packaged so well or I'd really be mad.” She collects what she needs and tells me to pick up the rest. She goes inside to where John is trying to calm the little kid who pulled the pot of hot water onto himself off the stove. I trail inside, exhausted. My limbs are heavy, and the short slices of sleep I got on the station couch in the downtime make me feel worse than if I hadn't slept at all. The mother is bawling.

“It's not as bad as it could've been,” Holly is saying. The mother is holding the child still while John dumps another liter of saline over the pink blotch on the kid's belly. He's about three, dark skinned, which makes the pink look kind of odd.

“I was getting my husband his breakfast,” the mother says. Her accent is thick, Middle Eastern maybe. The husband is standing near the door in oily coveralls, gripping a lunchbox. He looks crestfallen, as if it were all his fault. You can tell he's not sure if he should risk being late for work, or if he should leave now and break his little boy's heart.

“Daddy!” the boy wails. He reaches out. “Daddy!”

The father drops his lunchbox and gets down on his knee beside the boy. “It's okay, Amir. You no worry,” he says in faltering English. “I stay for you, son.” Then he switches to his mother tongue, murmuring into the boy's ear as he strokes his hair. There are several other people lurking in the dim light of dawn. A set of grandparents sitting quietly at the table, eyes full of concern. Two older sisters in matching pink nighties. Another much older man, maybe a great-uncle or another grandfather. This boy is so loved it makes me hate him. I am jealous.

As we pull away with the son sitting in his father's lap on the cot, the whole family comes out to see him off. The mother is crying, a daughter clinging to each arm. The others are consoling her. The boy has stopped bawling. He sniffs back more tears, his nose dripping with snot. His father wipes at it with a handkerchief he takes from his coveralls. Holly offers him one of the bears they keep to give to kids. Amir
clutches it to his chest and whispers a shy thank-you in English when his father prompts him to.

I am full of envy. And so mad I cannot utter one word for fear that I will let loose all of the wicked thoughts in my head. Where was everyone when I was his age? Why didn't anyone look after me? How could they have not come for me? Why didn't anyone know what had happened?

I don't say a word as we make our way back to the station after dropping little Amir and his father off at the children's hospital. I slam out of the back of the ambulance and stalk into the station to splash my face with cold water in the bathroom. When I've taken as much time in there as I can without drawing attention, I head back out to the bay to help Holly and John clean up the car.

“You better be more on your game tonight,” Holly says as we heave a new main oxygen tank into its cabinet. “I don't know what your problem is, but you were about as useful as a tit on a bull all night.”

“I think you know exactly what my problem is,” I growl as we wedge the heavy tank into place.

“You want to talk about it, I'm right here,” she says. Her words are sharp, like she's frustrated, or pissed off, I'm not sure. “We've been dancing around the issue for three shifts now, and I've been really good about it, leaving it up to you if you want to talk about it. I'm not going to press. You're not six years old anymore.”

I slam the cabinet shut. I ball up my fists and eye the fiberglass door of the supply shelves. I want to punch something so bad I can feel my muscles tightening in anticipation. Instead I back out of the ambulance and trip on the last step. I land on my back, my head cracking on the cement floor.

“What the hell do you want?” I put a hand to my head and then the other one too. I grip my head and yell the words at her again. “What the hell do you want from me?”

John pops his head out of the stockroom and catches Holly's eye. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Holly says. She climbs out of the ambulance and offers me a hand up. “Want some ice for that?”

“Leave me alone!” I twist away and turn onto my knees. I stand, my head pounding.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“What the hell do you care?” I grab my backpack and take off out into the morning. It's only 6:00 AM, but already it's bright and getting warm, as if spring is putting extra effort into this day. I head up to Hastings and turn east. About five minutes later, I hear Holly's car clunk down into first gear beside me. There's no way I'll replace her clutch now. She's a bitch. She's toying with me. Like this is some warped version of
A Christmas Carol
and she is the ghost of dead mothers past.

“Want a ride?”

She was going to drive me home, which is why I don't have any money for a cab or bus. I shake my head, refusing to look at her. Why? Not because I'm afraid I might reach through the open window and throttle her or hit her or something. The urge to swing at something has vanished. If I look at her now, I might cry. I clench my jaw and keep walking. “No thanks,” I say.

“Suit yourself,” she says and wrenches the clutch into second. The car lurches off just in time. I start crying. I'm at the overpass above the train tracks. I turn away from the slow-moving
slug of commuter traffic oozing into the city and grip the railing. I could be over it in one hop. What would go through my mind in the seconds between jumping and splatting open on the tracks far below? Would thoughts of my mother finally go away? Or is that all I would think about? I push my weight onto the balls of my feet, testing the effort it would take to throw myself over.

There are a couple of tarps set up under the overpass. An old man crawls out from one. He's wearing one-piece underwear, like in the olden days. He puts his hands to the small of his back and stretches, letting loose a great bellow of a yawn. He sees me at the railing and waves.

“Top of the morning to you,” he yells. “Beautiful day!”

I lift my hand in an empty greeting and then take off at a run. If I do go ahead and kill myself, I'll do it on Holly's shift so maybe she'd be the one to have to scrape my brains off the train tracks. It'd serve her right.

I'm not a pussy. The crying is just because I'm tired. It can get to you. I am
not
a pussy. I'll do the last nightshift because I
can
. I'm strong enough, and it's true: I'm not six anymore. I'll do
it and then I will walk away and never set foot in the Downtown Eastside again. A last good-bye to Holly, and she's gone from my life. I know how that goes. It's not hard to say good-bye. I've had fourteen foster moms and lived as a citizen in a nation of ever-rotating foster “brothers” and “sisters.” The easy part is saying good-bye.

An unmistakable, high-pitched scream from Kelly wakes me up that afternoon. I poke my head out into the hallway and see her knee-deep in her crap in her room at the end. She's hurling things out at Marshall, who is leaning—weary with red-rimmed eyes and a look like he's about to break into a yawn at any moment—against the banister.