Calgary. Saturday 14 June 2008.
Her · Hawkwood
The barber on Crowfoot had a jar of blue water with the combs standing up in it and a sign in the window that said WALK-INS WELCOME. Dad had made an appointment anyway. He’d made it in May.
“Morning, Gordon,” the barber said. “This the birthday boy?”
“This is him.”
I’d been getting out of haircuts since March. I’d had a dentist appointment, then a cold, then a science project on the water cycle that needed a whole Saturday. By June it came down past my ears. In the bathroom at home, if I pushed it forward with both hands and didn’t look too hard, it was nearly long enough.
“Real haircut for a real birthday,” Dad said. He put his hand on the back of my neck and steered me into the chair. “Number two all over. He’s fourteen today.”
The barber put the cape on me and snapped it shut at my neck and picked up the clippers. Then he looked at me in the mirror and said, “You sure, bud?”
Nobody had ever asked me that in that shop. I looked at Dad. He was in the waiting chair with the Herald open and his boots out in the middle of the floor, taking up two chairs’ worth of room.
“He’s sure,” Dad said, without looking up.
I put my hands together under the cape where nobody could see them. The clippers started at the back. There’s a way to look at a mirror without looking at yourself: you look at the part with the shop in it, the jar and the coat hooks and the door. I looked at the door. The hair came down the front of the cape in pieces and piled up in my lap.
When it was done Dad rubbed his palm over my head from front to back, hard, like he was checking a fender for dents.
“There he is,” he said.
“Thanks, Dad.”
He tipped ten dollars on a fifteen-dollar haircut. On the way out he held the door for a woman with a stroller and told her the baby was a big one, a real bruiser, and she laughed. Everybody liked my dad. I liked him too. In the truck I put my hand on my head, and took it off, and sat on it.
At lunch Mom put the presents on the kitchen island in a row, biggest to smallest, the way she did at Christmas.
Dad’s was a shoebox in Stampeders paper. Inside were my brother Brett’s old cleats, black, with white tape on one heel and a 12 on the tape in marker. Folded into the left one was the form for the bantam football camp at Shouldice Park, July 28 to August 1. Dad had filled it out in his capitals, NAME: NATHAN REIMER and AGE: 14, and beside POSITION he’d put a question mark. At the bottom he’d written PAID and the cheque number, and underlined it.
“They’ve got a season left in them,” Dad said. “Brett went up two sizes the summer he was fourteen.”
Brett was seventeen and on the couch with his feet over the arm, texting someone with one thumb. “Size ten,” he said.
“I’m a nine.”
“You’ll grow,” Dad said.
Brett was Mom and Dad’s from the start. I came from China when I was eight months old, adopted, and nobody at a Reimer thing had ever mistaken me for a Reimer.
I said thanks. I said it four times: once for the cleats, once for the form, and twice more when Dad told me how much I was going to love it. Mom looked at the cheque number.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
Then she went to check on the potato salad.
* * *
Him · Royal Oak
The dress was on my bed when I got out of the shower. It was pink. Mom had laid it out flat with the sleeves straight out to the sides and the tags still on, from a store at Chinook I’d never been in.
I put on my sweats and my grey hoodie and went down.
We’d been in the house in Royal Oak a week. It was just Mom and me now. The school in Lethbridge let me write my Grade 8 finals early so we could move when her new job started. The dining room was boxes, stacked to my chin in the middle where I’d put them. The movers charged by the hour, so I carried most of them. The table was under there somewhere. We ate at the kitchen counter.
“Did you see it?” Mom said. She was at the counter with her coffee and the phone book. “Do you love it? Is it too much? I kept the receipt. Do you want to try it on now or after lunch? The girls are coming at two. Did you eat?”
“After,” I said.
“After lunch, or after the girls?”
“After.”
She laughed like I’d said something funny and pushed the toast at me.
I took a piece out back. The yard ran down to a gravel lane with garages along both sides. In our garage I found a tennis ball in a box marked GARAGE. It was the only box in the house that had ended up where it said. I threw the ball at the garage door. It was the old metal kind, and it boomed every time. I caught forty in a row before Mom opened the kitchen window.
“Honey,” she said. “The neighbours.”
The girls from two doors down came at two. They were sisters, and they’d never met me. Mom had asked their mom. They brought a gift bag with pink tissue coming out the top, three kinds of lip gloss inside, and a card both of them had signed in purple pen.
“Thanks, Ms. Dekker,” the older one said.
They were polite. They sat on the couch and ate chips out of a bowl on top of a box. Mom told them I was a bit shy. The older one asked what grade I was going into.
“Nine.”
“At Bow Crest?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “The gym’s old.”
The younger one asked if I had MSN. I said no. I had MSN. Mom heard from the kitchen and didn’t say anything, and brought more chips.
The younger sister looked at Mom, who was blond, and then at me. “Are you adopted?”
“Yeah.”
“From where?”
“China.”
“Nine months old,” Mom called from the kitchen. “She had one tooth. She bit the lady from the agency.”
The younger one laughed. I ate a chip.
At three the phone rang, and Mom got it before the second ring. “Murray. Hi. Yes. She’s right here.” She held it out to me with her hand over the bottom. “It’s your dad.”
I took the cordless out onto the back step.
“Hey, kiddo. Happy birthday. How’s the big city?”
“Okay.”
“Your mom says she got you a dress.”
“Yeah.”
“You wearing it?”
“Not yet.”
He took a second. There was golf on a TV behind him in Lethbridge, and a woman’s voice I didn’t know asking if he wanted another one.
“Do it for her, okay?” he said. “She’s had a hard year.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Love you, kiddo.”
I went upstairs and put it on, and put the hoodie back on over it. The dress had no pockets. I didn’t know where my hands were supposed to go.
* * *
Her · Hawkwood
There were twenty-six people in our backyard, and I’d invited one of them.
Dad’s guys from the shop came with their wives. The neighbours on both sides came. Brett’s friends from the team threw a football back and forth over the trampoline. Mom’s sister drove in from Airdrie and said, “Donna, look at him, he’s shot up.” I had. I’d been trying not to. Dad did the burgers the way he did everything, with his whole body, talking to three people over his shoulder.
Manny came at four on his skateboard. He was my friend, my one friend, since Grade 5. He fell off the board at the bottom of the driveway in front of all of Dad’s guys, got up, and bowed. He had a present in a plastic bag from the hobby shop: a wizard about as tall as my thumb, holding a staff. He’d painted the robe dark blue with silver stars on it, each star a single dot.
“Nine hours,” he said. “The stars were four of them.”
“It’s really good.”
“I know.”
At the food table he handed me a paper plate and said, in the voice, “Tray.”
Then louder, the way she used to say it when you didn’t take it fast enough: “TRAY.”
I laughed so hard I put my plate down in the potato salad. Dad’s guys looked over. Manny kept a straight face. The voice was the lunch supervisor at our elementary school, back in Grade 5. Nobody else in the yard had ever met her. It wasn’t even funny, and we couldn’t stop.
Brett went by behind me with a plate of burgers. “Nice cut,” he said.
I couldn’t tell if he meant it. With Brett you never could.
The cake had a football on it made of brown icing, with white laces piped across, and NATHAN in blue letters on a green field. There were fourteen candles. Twenty-six people sang. Dad’s voice was the loudest and the only one on key. His hand was on the back of my neck, on the new short hair, warm and heavy.
I sat with my elbows in and my hands on the table. The little finger of my left hand bent in at the top, toward the others. A doctor had looked at it when I was six and said it was nothing, and Mom wrote nothing on the calendar.
I’d made the same wish every year since I was six. Every other year I’d stopped before the last word, in case something was listening.
This year I said all of it.
I wish I could wake up as a girl.
I blew. I got them all. Everybody clapped, and Dad said, “That’s my boy,” and right behind my ear, so low only I could hear it, Manny said, “Tray.”
* * *
Him · Royal Oak
At five Mom said, “Photo!”
She stood me in front of the fireplace, the only wall without boxes against it, and pulled the hoodie off over my head before I could get a hand on it. The static took my hair up. She patted it flat.
“There,” she said. “Look at you.”
She took a lot of pictures. The girls stood on either side of me for some of them. I could feel the younger one deciding whether to put her arm around me, and then not.
The cake was pink, with HAPPY 14TH PAIGE across the top in white and fourteen candles. They sang. Mom sang loudest and a little behind. I put my left hand flat on the table. The little finger on it bent in at the top joint. It always had. Mom called it my hook. It was the only part of me she’d never tried to fix.
I didn’t wish out loud. You don’t. I shut my eyes and said it in my head, slow, all the words, so it would count.
I wish I could wake up as a boy.
Then I blew. I got all fourteen.
At midnight I took the dress off and hung it on the back of the chair by the shoulders. I put my sweats back on, and the hoodie, and sat on the edge of the bed.
The headboard was still in its box in the garage, so the frame stuck out bare at the corners. One of the rubber caps had come off in the move. I’d been meaning to find it.
I got up to turn the light off, and my legs went.
It wasn’t tired. I know tired. I played three games in one day at a soccer tournament in Medicine Hat once and slept in the van with my cleats on. This was somebody pulling a plug out of the bottom of me. The floor came up sideways. The last thing I saw was the clock on the dresser, red numbers, 12:06, and the corner of the bed frame coming at me.
* * *
Her · Hawkwood
At midnight I was still at my desk. Manny’s wizard stood under the lamp, and I was turning him slowly so the silver dots on his robe caught the light. Up close you could see where Manny’s brush had slipped over the edge of a sleeve and he’d painted it back.
I had him halfway round when my hand stopped.
It didn’t hurt. It was like the bottom of the deep end at the leisure centre, after you’ve let all your air out and you’re sitting on the tiles. Everything up there is far away and very heavy. You know you should go up. You think, in a minute.
I stood. I think I meant to go to bed. The clock radio on the shelf said 12:06 in green. The desk had a corner. I’d hit my knee on it a hundred times.
* * *
Him · Royal Oak
“Honey?”
Somebody was knocking, far off, like it was two houses down.
“Paige? It’s after ten. Your dad’s going to call, it’s Father’s Day, you have to say it, okay? Honey? Are you up?”
The door opened. Mom’s feet came across the carpet. Her hand was on my shoulder, and then on my face.
“Paige. Paige.”
I heard all of it. I couldn’t do anything with any of it.
I didn’t wake up.
* * *
Her · Hawkwood
“Nathan. Bud. Pancakes.”
Mom always knocked twice, fast.
“Your dad’s been up since six. He did the bacon himself, so you have to eat the bacon. Nathan?”
Two more knocks. Then the door, and the hall light, and her voice going up into a word I’d never heard her shout. It was Dad’s name.
“Gordon. Gordon.”
I didn’t wake up.