Walking Backward (14 page)

I read online that there are over 2,800 road accident deaths in Canada every year. I found a website full of photographs of car accidents. The whole point of the site is to show mangled cars and dead people. It has captions like “massive fatal crash” and “serious head injury,” as if car crashes are totally awesome. I didn’t stay on that site, because that’s just wrong. A lot more wrong than the Darwin Awards, which are at least funny and not gross. I was worried there might be a picture of Mom’s car on the crash site, but I didn’t look. It’s time to move forward. Not away from Mom, but away from worrying about how stupidly she died.

She would agree with what I just wrote. If she knew she was going to die freaking out over a snake in her car, she’d have admitted it was stupid. Then she’d have asked, “How on earth would a snake get in my car?” That’s the most seriously stupid thing of all.

Karen is in two of my classes this year, drama and geography. I sat on the other side of the room from her in both classes. She could tell that she better not try to talk to me.

Simpson is in all of my classes, which is awesome. Turner is in all of them too. Ameer is only in geography and gym, but there’s an after-school computer course we’re going to take together. He’ll probably make the soccer team with me and Simpson, so I’ll still see him a lot.

The first few days of school have been all right— it’s great seeing my friends and having something to do all day—but man, I’m tired. I almost fell asleep in English this morning. I was used to sleeping in and drifting through the days. Hurrying is totally out of character for me now. I manage to make the bus every morning. Dad sets the alarm and gets me out of bed in time to have a shower. My clothes are usually wrinkled but they’re acceptable colors, so I’ve been looking pretty good.

For English we had to write a page about ourselves and our summer. I was dreading that. I thought of totally lying, but I didn’t. I wrote that my mom was killed in a car accident the day before Canada Day, so my family was in mourning all summer. I wrote that we’ll be in mourning for a year, but next July we’ll go see the fireworks and our mourning will be over—except it won’t be, because every time a really good firework goes off, I’ll wish Mom was there to see it. It just came to me in class how that should be our ritual. Sammy and I love fireworks, and because they’re at night, Dad won’t be able to read through them.

That’s a joke, and I didn’t put it in my English paper.

School is good so far, but Sammy and I really have to get to bed earlier. The first morning Sam was like a zombie. He’d forgotten basic hygiene routines like how to brush his teeth. When Dad asked, “Did you brush your teeth yet?” Sam looked at him like he was speaking Russian. I guess he didn’t brush his teeth all summer. That’s disgusting, but I never really noticed at the time.

Sammy’s a total whiner at breakfast because he got used to eating waffles at eleven o’clock every day through the summer. Five minutes to wolf down cereal is a shock for him. But he made his bus. It’s a different bus from mine. It comes half an hour earlier. The first day of school, I woke up with him because I wasn’t sure Dad could handle it. But Dad was already awake, so I slept in a bit. Sammy whined over that, until we reminded him that his bus comes home earlier than mine too. That’s when we realized Sammy would be getting off the school bus at three o’clock and no one would be here to meet him. Dad called the school in a panic. They said Sam was enrolled in after-school daycare, so Dad can pick him up after work. Even when she’s dead, Mom thinks of everything. I don’t tell Sam she’d arranged it when she registered him for kindergarten last year. It makes him smile to think of her making phone calls from Heaven.

Sam loves school so much he won’t shut up about it. He already knows the names of every kid in his class, and he calls them all “
mon ami
.” Nobody is just “David” or “Jacob.” They’re “
mon ami
David” and “
mon ami
Jacob.” He loves his teacher, Madame Denis. When I told him that Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, he freaked out because Madame Denis says it is. Most adults are totally unaware of any scientific advances that have occurred since they left university.

Sammy loves daycare too, because it’s two solid hours of fun. His first day there, he made a giant sombrero with cut-out butterflies all over it, and it’s been on his head ever since. He just ran into my room wearing it. Now he’s bouncing on my bed, holding the blue Ranger, looking like the happiest kid in the world. Cleo must have sensed him coming, because she slunk away before he got here. The cats haven’t trusted him since the dress-up incident.

Sam told his ring-around-Uranus joke to Madame Denis on the first day of school. She sent a note home to Dad about it. She obviously has Dad labeled as a neglectful parent. The next day she wrote a note saying that Sam was a good student and very helpful to his classmates. It could be the truth, or it could be that Sammy started talking about his dead mother and Madame Denis felt bad about the first note.

Sam goes to school and daycare with Chloe across the street, and they’re best friends now. Chloe’s dad, Mr. Simpson-is-my-
last
-name, is going to share daycare pickups with Dad. He feels so sorry for Sammy that he’ll probably invite him to dinner every night. So instead of Dad finding Sam a new mom, Sammy has found a whole new family.

I better have my friends over to the house often this year. If Sammy’s across the street and I’m at a friend’s house, Dad will be all alone. That’s just sad. He’s being a good dad now. He waits with Sam for the bus and packs him a good lunch—not pasta salad and chicken drumsticks, but a ham sandwich with grapes and Pringles and peanut-free granola bars.

He did something totally awesome for me and Sammy this week. He scanned photographs and downloaded pictures and digitized the home movies and made an amazing electronic map with his work software.

It starts with a map of the world, with cities you can zoom in on, like London and Orlando and Montreal. You click on a section of town to see the streets. When you click on a street you get a picture of Mom with a story of what she did there. It’s like a huge computer game—there are a thousand pages of pictures and stories and movie clips. It’s a map of Mom’s life with us.

You can click on the hospital and get pictures of me and Sammy when we were just born, and the nurses who delivered us, and news clips of what was going on that day. You can click on different buildings at the university and get stories from Mom’s friends, like Cheetah and Mitchell. There’s nothing about the stalker guy though, because I looked.

On our street, the map gets busy with pictures of practically all the neighbors. Even Karen—because I hadn’t told Dad what she did yet. There’s a map of our yard, with pictures of the garden and the cats and our old dog, Kiwi, who really was alive when I was a baby—there’s a picture of us together.

It has a virtual tour of our house, so you can circle around each room. If you click on the front door, you see me when I’m one year old pushing a carriage into the screen—which is how I asked to go outside before I learned to speak.

In the map of my room, you can click the tv and get a picture of all my video games. Then if you click
Final Fantasy X
, there’s a picture of me when I was eight years old and a story about how it took me three weeks to beat the third transformation of Seymour. Or if you click
Scooby-Doo! Mystery Mayhem
, there’s a movie of me holding the controller and laughing while Sammy hides his eyes in my armpit.

Dad said he wanted the map to be a memorial of family life with Mom. So there’s a lot about me and Sammy in it. I was totally surprised, because I never thought Dad was paying attention to us all these years. I had no idea he knew where I stashed my Halloween candy.

Maybe Dad knows more than he lets on. And maybe his job’s not so boring after all, if he can make something so totally awesome in just a week. He could probably help me with my
Evolution
game.

When Dad clicked on Karen’s house in the map of our street, I didn’t say anything for a while. I’d been trying to ignore that part of the map. Dad clicked on it, and up popped a picture of me in Karen’s yard when we were nine years old. Dad said, “Look at you two,” like he thought it would make me happy. The picture showed me and Karen in the winter, building a snowman with her parents, who weren’t divorced yet. We were all smiling and pink from the cold. We looked like a family, as if Karen and I were brother and sister. I’m so glad we’re not—how awful would that be? I stared at the picture for a minute without talking, just looking at her face. She looked young and happy, like she could never do a bad thing in her life. Dad asked me why I was crying. So I told him that Karen put the snake in Mom’s car.

He was shocked and confused at first, like I’d been. He asked what she was doing on our property, which I thought was a weird thing to ask. He asked how I knew it was her, so I told him about the night at the beach. Then he left the house.

For a while I thought maybe he’d gone up the street to kill Karen in revenge. He looked ready to explode when he left. He did go to her house, but he didn’t kill her. He just yelled at her. And at her mother. He told me he made them both cry—which isn’t nice, but really, they ought to do a little crying. After all, we’ve cried for the past two months, and we’ll cry for the rest of our lives. I don’t know exactly what Dad said to them, but he came home all yelled out and cried out and pretty much a mess.

I told him I was sorry, and that if I’d just gone to my soccer practice in the car, Mom would never have died that day. I started bawling. Dad hugged me and said, “It’s not your fault, Josh.” I blew my nose and said, “I guess it’s nobody’s fault.” Then Dad said, “It’s Karen’s fault.” We looked at each other and laughed in a crying sort of way. I said, “I always hated her mother.” Dad said, “Me too.” And we laughed and cried some more. Then Dad erased their house from the map of Mom’s life.

I think Dad is starting to live in reality again. There’s nothing like a good dose of anger to push you out of the denial stage of grief. Even though we’re not Jewish and we have no guidelines to help us mourn, I think we’re moving forward. It’s not like we’re walking away from Mom. I’ll never let myself do that. It’s more like we’re keeping her with us, but without getting stuck at the place in the path where she died.

I know my whole life will be different without her, all because of those few stupid decisions that led to the accident. I’m so sad about that, and I miss her. That’s all there is to say. I miss her. I wish she were here so I could make her laugh, and she could be proud of me. And maybe she could put Sammy in his own bed so I could stretch out for a change.

I checked back over this journal tonight, like Dr. Tierney suggested, but there weren’t a lot of strong emotions in it. Maybe I’m more like Dad than I realize. I didn’t write every day, but the scrapbook has taken a lot of our time. It’s going to be totally awesome.

I know I can’t keep Mom’s life in a book. I can’t even keep my own life in my head. Like the way I forgot leaving the house the day she died. How could I forget something like that? There must be a million things my head won’t hold. I’m putting the best things in the Mom Book, to hold them there in case I forget. It’s different from Dad’s map, because it’s mine and Sam’s. When we look at it years from now, we’ll think,
Wow. We were just kids when we made this. That’s totally amazing. We must have loved her so much
.

We’ve started gluing in the pictures and writing out stories that go with them. We’re not using the paper Karen’s mom gave us. We’re drawing our own captions and borders. I put in some of Mom’s jokes here and there, with cut-out pictures of her face and little speech bubbles for the words.

Sammy wants to put in knock-knock jokes that are four hundred years old. Like “Knock-knock.” “Who’s there?” “Hatch.” “Hatch who?” “Bless you.” And “Knock-knock.” “Who’s there?” “Lettuce.” “Lettuce who?” “Let us in, it’s cold outside.” Which is totally stupid in the middle of summer. The only knock-knock joke that was actually Mom’s was the rude one, “Knock-knock.” “Who’s there?” “Gope.” “Gope who?” “No, I don’t have to.” You only get it if you say it out loud.

Even without the knock-knock jokes, it’s going to take up four giant scrapbooks. It’s a bit long, but really, it’s a whole lifetime, so what do you expect?

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my editor, Sarah Harvey, for supporting this book so enthusiastically. Special thanks to my son, Sawyer Austen, for proofreading the original manuscript. And thanks to my husband, Geoff, for paying the bills while I wrote it.

Catherine Austen lives in Quebec with her husband, Geoff, and their children, Sawyer and Daimon.
Walking Backward
is her first novel.