The Lottery (26 page)

“Kinda late,” muttered her brother, running a heavy hand through his hair.

“It’s only 8:15, and I need practice driving at night.” Catching his arm, she dragged him toward the door. “C’mon Dusty, please? Pretty please?”

“All right,” he sighed, melting. “A short lesson, just around here.”

They came out the back door into an evening that was oddly warm, a last pocket of summer. Standing at the
curb, she waited as Dusty backed the car onto the street. Then they switched, Sal easing into gear, peering between headlight beams. Parked cars and street signs flashed by, there and gone, coming and going in the dark.

“Slower,” said Dusty. “Remember, this is your first time at night.”

“It looks so different in the dark.” Shadows twisted and muttered at the back of Sal’s head. She blinked, trying to focus. “I hardly know where I am.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be driving,” Dusty said. “Pull over, I — ”

“No,” she said quickly. “I’m doing okay. I stopped at all the stop signs, didn’t I?”

“I guess.”

“I know what I’m doing.” The shadows in her brain were taking shape, on the edge of revealing their true form. She fought them with words that tumbled heedlessly, end over end. “I know exactly what to do, I’m a good driver. I won’t let anything — no accidents, no dead people, no blow-up brains — stop me from being a good driver, right Dusty?”

“Sal,” said her brother, reaching for the wheel. “Pull over, you’re crying.”

Impatient, she shoved his hand away and pressed down on the accelerator. The car engine grumbled, urging itself forward into the dark.

“I’m a good person, aren’t I, Dusty?” Her voice skipped across the words as if they were red hot. With an angry fist, she swiped at the tears blurring her vision. Where was she? The street kept shape-shifting like something in a bad dream, something that didn’t know itself. But she knew who she was and why she did things. She had everything under control.

“I’m a good person and a good driver too.” Her voice spiraled upward, fighting the craziness in her head. “I know just where I am and what I’m doing, and it’s not going to happen to me now, it’s not ever going to happen to me again.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Dusty. “Why are you pulling in here?”

Without warning, the shadows erupted from her mind and took solid form. A familiar darkness rose wide before her, the inescapable landscape of an eight-year-old’s terror repeating itself yet again. Giving herself up to it, Sal twisted the steering wheel and swerved directly into memory. The screaming began, the endless I hate you, I hate you. Headlights arced, the car jolted as it swung into position, and then she saw it — the wall, the great brick wall of Saskatoon Collegiate coming toward her at top speed, and she was going to hit it head — on, smash it into shattering crumbling bits.

“Sal!” Dusty’s hands came down on the wheel and his foot hit the brake. The car spun a wild donut, the wall veering to the right, then reappearing dead ahead. As the car squealed to a stop, Sal opened the door and ran full tilt toward the school. If she couldn’t run the wall down with the car, she’d do it with her body — smashing her shoulder into it, grunting as the air was punched clean out of her lungs. Backing up, she ran at the wall again, screaming, “I hate you, I hate you. You’re wrecking everything, nothing’s like it used to be.”

Then she was knocked to the ground, Dusty holding her tight as her gut exploded, the great inner wall collapsed, and she finally understood what happened seven long years ago.

“It was my fault,” she sobbed. “I killed my daddy, I killed him.”

They lay motionless, Dusty listening like a body-wide ear. “What?” he whispered.

“You know how Mom calls it an accident? Well, it wasn’t.” Sal’s voice staggered under the weight of telling. “Daddy was driving to the store to buy beer, and I was mad because ... because I’m evil and I hated him. So I screamed, ‘I hate you, you’re wrecking everything, I hate you so much.’“ Her voice faded, crawling into itself to escape its own sound. “He looked at me, so sad, like I’d stabbed his heart. And then he drove the car into the tree on purpose, because ... oh Dusty, because I said I hated him.”

Suddenly she was writhing, convulsed with self-loathing, waiting for her brother to get up and leave her for the no — good, disgusting piece of shit she was.

“Sal.” Dusty knelt over her, his long hair falling across her cheek. “Sal — are you listening?”

He was still there, he hadn’t gotten up and walked away.

“Do you hate me?” she whimpered, covering her face with one arm.

“No, I don’t hate you.”

“Do you promise?” Her body released its last deep shudders, and she lay exhausted and spent. “You’re not going to leave me and go away forever?”

“I’m not going anywhere unless you come with me.” Dusty leaned closer, his warm breath traveling across her face. “But first you have to listen to me, okay?”

“Yeah.” She was so tired, she was drooling onto the pavement. She wanted to crawl inside her brother’s breathing and stay there forever.

“First of all,” said Dusty, still crouched above her, “Dad was an alcoholic. He was drunk when he killed himself. Second, he went bankrupt about half a year before he died.
Third, he and Mom had been fighting and were probably going to get a divorce.”

“But I said I hated him.” Sal twisted to look up at him. “And his face was so sad — ”

“I hated him too.” Dusty settled onto his heels, combing back his hair with both hands. “I was a kid, what did I know about what was going on inside his head? All I saw was his alcoholism wrecking everything.” He paused, rubbing his face. His wire-rim glasses glinted, tired stars in the dark. “Did you know he left a note?”

Sal gaped. “A suicide note?”

“Yeah.”

She sat up, the blood roaring in her head. “So he planned it? With me in the car?”

“No,” Dusty said quickly. “You just happened to be with him. He was so miserable, he wouldn’t have thought about what he was doing to you.”

“I wish he’d killed me too.”

Tears began to slide down Dusty’s face. “I don’t,” he whispered. “All these years, I don’t know what I would’ve done without my kid sister.”

The words were unbelievable, the world turning itself inside out once again. “But what did I ever do for you?”

“You were just there.” Dusty hugged himself, rocking gently and staring off into the dark. “Bringing me into each day, then putting the day away again. Mom’s been like a fading picture. I think she blames herself for Dad’s death, thinks it was her fault, something she did. Maybe she’s afraid of hurting someone else too, and that’s why she keeps pulling back. Whatever, most of her life seems to be over, she just fades more and more into herself. But you’ve always been there, following me around, asking a million
vivid questions, needing me, making me feel human. You love me, Sal. That’s helped me love myself.”

They sat, snuffling their runny noses into their sleeves. “D’you think,” Sal mumbled, “that if I’d yelled ‘I love you’ instead, he might not have done it?”

“Who knows?” said Dusty carefully. “But it was his decision to make. You were just a kid — you didn’t control him, you didn’t make him do anything. He’d already written the note, remember?”

A sigh shifted through her, leaving a deep quiet place. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“You’d been through enough already. Mom didn’t show me the note either. I found it on her dresser.”

“So why does she lie about it?”

“We all lie,” said Dusty, “to stop the hurt from hurting deeper.”

He reached out a hand, and they pulled each other to their feet. The parking lot took shape around them again, quiet and ordinary in the dark. Saskatoon Collegiate loomed to their right. Sal stared at it in surprise. She’d forgotten where she was.

“Let’s go home,” said Dusty. He took her arm and she let him lead her to the car. Splayed in the passenger seat, she watched the school wall slip away as the car eased out of the parking lot. A great weariness lapped through her, peaceful, like water. As her brother tooled through the night streets, she wanted nothing more than to let him drive her through the rest of her life. Then, slowly, she realized what a mistake this would be. She needed to be more than what happened to her. She wanted to be made up of her own choosing.

“It’s gone now,” she said, touching Dusty’s arm. “The
wall inside me. I feel a huge open space where it used to be.”

Even in the dark she could feel the smile that spilled across her brother’s face. “Sally-Sis,” he said, “that’s the best thing anyone’s said to me in a long, long time.”

Chapter Eighteen

She woke Wednesday morning to find the great inner space still with her. The wall hadn’t rebuilt itself overnight. It was well and truly gone now that she no longer needed anything to stand between herself and her fear. I’m not a murderer, she marveled, leaning her chin on the windowsill and staring out. When it happened, I was just a squirmy scared little kid. I didn’t kill Dad — it was because I loved him that I said I hated him. I wanted him to be different, to be happy the way he used to be. I just didn’t know how to say it properly. How could I? I was only eight and scared out of my mind because he was driving drunk.

Her entire body felt different, no longer the prison of guilt it had been. Not the hand of a murderer, she thought, watching her finger trace a heart into the condensation on the windowpane. She touched her lips. Not the mouth of killing words. How was it possible that six words — I hate you, I hate you — could have controlled her life for
so long? But they had, causing such tremendous guilt she’d blocked them entirely from her memory. Only the guilt had remained, vague and undefined, affecting every aspect of her life. Sal breathed deeper, deeper still. The air felt so good, as if it somehow belonged to her again, as if she’d regained the right to breathe. Standing, she spread her feet firmly on the carpet, claiming space. Brilliant happiness blazed through her. She threw back her head and howled.

“Jeeeeesus!” came her mother’s long-suffering voice.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Dusty groaned from his bedroom. “I’ll check my textbooks. It’s probably considered absolutely normal for fifteen-year-old girls.”

“Maybe,” said Ms. Hanson dubiously, retreating into the washroom with a firm click of the door.

If only, thought Sal, as she mounted her bike and coasted the streets toward Saskatoon Collegiate, all the outer walls had gone down with the inner one. But there was still her mother’s Teflon-smooth barrier, not to mention Shadow Council’s impenetrable divide — and — conquer system. Sal wasn’t kidding herself about the latter — she knew it was still out there, waiting for her, every brick in place. And this morning, Shadow Council would be ready. It had been twenty — three hours since she’d handed out the key to their secret coded universe, and they weren’t likely to have forgotten her refusal to deliver the second Diane Kruisselbrink duty. The summons would probably come at her locker. Perhaps Willis would deliver it himself, at their pre — school practice session.

But when she arrived, Room B was empty, and though she sat waiting until 8:45, Willis didn’t show. No envelopes were presented at her locker for delivery, and when
she passed Rolf in the hall en route to her 9:15 class, he brushed past her as if she didn’t exist. The lack of response was unnerving and made her feel as if an attack was continually about to launch itself from anywhere and everywhere. Why hadn’t Willis shown? Were they still going to perform the duet? Fidgeting through her first-period math class, Sal avoided the curious glances of other students. Band members weren’t excused from classes to warm up for the assembly until 10
AM
, and the waiting was interminable. Finally, the assembly participants were summoned over the PA. Filing into the music room with the rest of the band, Sal took her seat and ran through a few nervous scales. Pure high notes ascended from the back-row trumpets. When she’d entered the music room, Willis’s eyes had flicked across hers, complete blanks, as if nothing had ever lived there.

Without the inner wall, there was nothing to block her fear. Shrugging off Brydan’s attempts at conversation, Sal chewed the inside of her lip and surfed wave after wave of panic. Why had she ever trusted Willis? There had to be a catch to this duet, some way for Shadow Council to exact its revenge. Surely after the notebook incident, Willis would have told them about the surprise performance. That was probably why he hadn’t shown for their morning practice — he’d been told to screw her up so badly the entire audience would break out jeering. The way she was feeling, it wouldn’t take much.

Sucking her bloody lower lip, Sal dug herself deeper and deeper into her thoughts. Slouched beside her, Brydan sat without speaking. If he’d heard about the distribution of Willis’s notebook, he wasn’t asking and she sure wasn’t explaining. Surrounded by the band’s warm-up cacophony,
they tooted their clarinets half-heartedly until Pavvie mounted the podium. With a moan, Sal sank further into her seat. Time for the deadly pre-concert tune-up, the moment that distinguished the afficionados from the musical scum. Setting the electronic tuner to concert B flat, Pavvie listened carefully as each individual band member adjusted his tone to its pitch. When her turn came, Sal squeaked, then found she was flat. Pavvie nodded politely and misery claimed her, rising thickly above her head. What had she gotten herself into? Why had she agreed to a duet with the school’s chief predator? She was a third clarinetist, for chrissakes, with the emphasis on third rather than clarinetist.