The letter from Maple Bridge came on the fourth of December, five days before the circle on my calendar.
I’d been getting the mail every day since October. I got home from school before Tracy, and I went straight to the mailboxes at the end of the crescent before I’d even taken my backpack off. Mostly it was bills and flyers and things for the people who’d rented the house before us. That day it was a long white envelope with a blue maple leaf in the corner, addressed to Miss Paige Dekker in typing.
I opened it standing in the snow by the mailboxes.
Dear Miss Dekker,
Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding your adoption file. Maple Bridge Children’s Services is committed to supporting adoptees and their families.
Under our privacy policy, requests for file documents concerning a minor must be made by, or accompanied by the written consent of, an adoptive parent or legal guardian. Please find enclosed a Release of Information form, which must be signed by your parent and returned with a processing fee of $45.00 (cheque or money order payable to Maple Bridge Children’s Services).
Please allow 6 to 8 weeks from receipt of the completed form.
Sincerely,
Client Services
There was a form behind it. It was two pages. There was a line at the bottom of the second page that said Signature of Adoptive Parent with an X beside it.
I stood by the mailboxes until my feet were cold through my runners.
* * *
Nathan’s came the next week, to Hawkwood.
Donna got it. She brought it in with the rest of the mail and put it on the kitchen table in front of him at supper. It was a brown envelope with the Alberta crest on it, from Alberta Children and Youth Services, Post-Adoption Registry, addressed to Mr. Nathan Reimer.
“What’s this?” Donna said.
“School,” said Nathan. “Social studies. A project. About where we’re from.”
Donna looked at the envelope. She looked at him.
“You wrote to the government?”
“Mr. Baptiste said to.”
“Oh,” Donna said. “Okay.”
She didn’t open it. She waited for him to. He didn’t, not at the table. He took it upstairs after supper and phoned me from the landing with the cordless held up as high as it went.
“It says it’s sealed,” he said. “The file. It says the records of Prairie Crossing Adoption Society were transferred to the Registry in 2003. It says identifying and non-identifying information can be released to an adoptee who has reached eighteen years of age, or to an adoptive parent on written application.”
“Eighteen.”
“Or a parent.”
“Everything needs a parent,” I said.
Neither of us talked for a while. I could hear Gordon’s TV under him, through the floor. Hockey.
“I could ask Gordon,” Nathan said.
“And say what?”
He didn’t have an answer.
“I could ask Tracy,” I said. “I could say it’s for social studies too.”
“She’d want to know why you need the whole file for social studies.”
“She’d read it first,” I said. “Before she sent it. She’d read every page.”
“Yeah,” said Nathan. “She would.”
* * *
On the calendar, the circle on the ninth of December came and went. I put an X through it like any other day.
I asked Tracy about the papers again, at breakfast on a Saturday, lightly, the way you’d ask where the scissors were.
“They’re at Trish’s,” she said. “I’m almost sure. In the storage unit, with the filing. I’ll look at New Year when we’re down. Why? Is it the school thing again?”
“Sort of.”
“I’ll look,” Tracy said. “Remind me.”
* * *
Christmas was just the two of us.
Tracy did it the way she did everything, with too much of it. She put up a tree in the living room in front of the window, a real one from the lot at the Co-op, and decorated it on a Sunday with the ornaments from a box marked XMAS that she’d kept in her closet. Half of them were things the kid had made at school in Lethbridge. A clothespin reindeer. A paper star with glitter falling off it. A clay handprint, small, with a ribbon through a hole at the top and LETHBRIDGE 1999 scratched into the back.
“You made that in kindergarten,” Tracy said. She held it up. “Look how little. Look at your little hand.”
I looked at it. It had the hook. Even at five, even in clay. The little finger bent in at the top, toward the others.
She hung it at the front of the tree, where she could see it from the couch.
On Christmas morning she gave me a digital camera, a little silver one, in a box with a bow on it bigger than the box. She’d saved for it. I could tell from her face.
“So you can take pictures,” she said. “Of your friends. Of cheer. Of everything. So you’ll have them. So you’ll remember.” Then her face did something. “I mean. So you’ll have them.”
I gave her a scarf from the Bay, red, that I’d bought with my babysitting money from looking after Pickle’s people’s kids next door. She put it on over her pyjamas and wore it all day.
* * *
On Boxing Day we went to the Reimers’.
Donna had invited us at the Grey Cup, in the kitchen, and Tracy had said yes before she’d finished asking. The Reimers did Boxing Day the same way every year. Turkey sandwiches on buns, with the leftover cranberry, and the rest of the Christmas baking on the good plates, and the walk.
The walk was up Nose Hill, after lunch, all of us, in boots, no matter how cold it was. Gordon said it was to work off the sandwiches. Donna said it was a family thing. It was a family thing. We’d done it every Boxing Day since I was born, Gordon in front breaking trail, Donna behind with a thermos, Brett and me at the back throwing snow at each other until Brett got too old for it. He was twelve and I was nine.
I knew the walk. I had to be told about it.
“Oh, you’ll love it,” Donna said, handing Tracy a pair of her own snow pants. “We go up to the top. You can see the whole city. On a clear day you can see the mountains.”
We could see the mountains. It was minus eighteen and clear, and the snow squeaked. From the top of Nose Hill the whole city was laid out under us like a map: downtown with the towers, the river, the mountains along the west, white against the blue. Tracy stood at the top with her red scarf over her mouth and said “Oh my God,” and Donna stood beside her and said “Isn’t it?”
Nathan was behind me. He’d been behind me the whole way up.
“You did this every year,” he said.
“Since I was born.”
“Did you like it?”
I looked out at the mountains.
“I liked this bit,” I said. “The top. Nobody talks at the top.”
* * *
Back at the house there were presents. Just small ones. Donna had got Tracy a candle. Tracy had got Donna Nanaimo bars, in a tin with a bow. Gordon got me a Stampeders key chain, and Tracy a Stampeders key chain, and laughed at himself for it.
Then Donna went to the tree.
The Reimer tree had the same ornaments it always had. The glass ones from Donna’s mother. The wooden ones from a craft fair in Sylvan Lake. The felt ones. And at the front, where she could see it from the kitchen, a felt circle with a photo glued in the middle of it, of a little boy in a red sweater, with NATHAN 1998 written around the edge in glitter glue.
I’d made it at preschool. I’d hated the sweater.
Donna took it off the tree and held it out to Nathan. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“You made this,” she said. “Do you remember? You were four. You came home with glitter in your ears. You wouldn’t let me wash your hair for two days because you said it was magic.” She laughed. “Every year you hang it. Every year since. It’s your job.”
Nathan took it. He held it in his big hand, the felt circle with the photo of my face, four years old, in a red sweater, with the glitter glue going all the way round.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he hung it back on the tree. Front and centre, where Donna could see it from the kitchen.
“Like that?” he said.
“Like that,” said Donna, and went to the kitchen, quickly.
* * *
Brett gave Nathan a wristband. It was a black one, the kind football players wear, with a white C on it. CROWCHILD. It was Brett’s. It was worn soft.
“For next year,” Brett said. “When you’re there.”
Nathan put it on. He looked at it on his wrist.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sure,” said Brett.
He didn’t give me anything. Why would he. I was Nathan’s friend, the girl from Royal Oak, somebody who came to supper. Tracy and I got our coats on in the front hall at five o’clock. Everybody was saying goodbye and thank you and Merry Christmas. Somebody said see you at New Year’s, and somebody else said no, they’ll be in Lethbridge, well, happy New Year then.
Brett came down the stairs while I was doing up my boots.
He had something in his hand. He held it out to me without a word.
It was a toque. A grey one, old, with a pom-pom on top that had gone a bit flat. CROWCHILD FOOTBALL was knitted across the front in blue. It was the one he’d worn when he was in Grade 9 and 10, before he made the senior team, the one he’d worn every single day of my Grade 6 winter until it smelled like him.
I took it.
Brett looked at me. Just for a second. He didn’t look at my face. He looked at my hands, holding the toque.
Then he went back upstairs. He stepped over the fourth stair.
“Oh!” said Tracy, beside me. “Well! Isn’t that nice. Paige, say thank you.”
“Thank you,” I said, to the stairs.
From the top, Brett said “Sure.”
* * *
We drove to Lethbridge on the twenty-eighth in the Sunfire, two and a half hours down Highway 2 in the snow. Tracy sang the whole way. She sang every song on the radio, even the ones she didn’t know, and I didn’t say anything, the way I’d been told.
Aunt Trish’s house was a bungalow on the north side with a basement. Trish hugged me in the driveway till my feet came off the ground again. Her husband Kurt shook my hand and called me Squirt.
“Don’t,” I said.
Kurt laughed. “There she is.”
Murray came on the thirtieth. He came to Trish’s for supper with Deanna, in a red Ford Ranger with a dent in the tailgate and a Hurricanes sticker. He was big and sandy, the way he was in the photos, only older and wider. He had his hat in his hands. He stood in Trish’s front hall and looked at me.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. I didn’t know what else to call him. Then I said, “Hi, Dad.”
It was easy. That was the strange thing. It was the easiest word I’d ever said. I’d said it to Gordon for fourteen years and it had always had something in front of it, like a step you had to climb. With Murray it was just a word.
He hugged me. He did it awkwardly, one arm, patting my back twice. He smelled like the cab of a truck and the cold.
“You look different,” he said, standing back. He looked at my hair. It was up in a ponytail with Tracy’s pencil through it. “You look... huh. You look happy, kiddo.”
“I am.”
“Well,” said Murray. “Good. That’s good.” He didn’t know what to do with that. He turned around and introduced Deanna. She was small and blond and nervous, and she’d brought a cheesecake.
He was nice. All night he was nice. He asked about school and cheer and Calgary. He didn’t know me at all. That was a relief: there was nothing to get wrong. He didn’t ask me what I remembered. He didn’t look at me waiting for something to come back. He’d never known what was in there to begin with.
Then at the end, at the door, putting his coat on, he said, “You want to come for a ride? Tomorrow? In the truck? Like we used to?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You used to put your feet up on the dash,” he said. “Drove me nuts.” He laughed. “Your mom’d kill me if she knew how often I let you.”
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about it. It wasn’t mine.
That was the bit that wasn’t a relief.
* * *
Tracy went to the storage unit on the thirty-first, in the morning, while I was at Trish’s. She was gone three hours. When she came back she had dust on her jeans and a box of old tax files under her arm, and she put it down on Trish’s kitchen table and stood there.
“They’re not here,” she said. “The papers. Your papers. I went through every box. They’re not in the filing. They’re not anywhere.”
“Maybe they’re at home,” said Trish.
“I’ve been through home.” Tracy rubbed her forehead. Then she stopped. “Not all of home. I haven’t been through the dining room. I haven’t been through all of it.”
“Well, then,” said Trish.
“They’ll be in a box,” Tracy said to me. “When I unpack. When I finally unpack. I’ll find them.” She smiled at me. “I’m sorry, honey. I know you wanted them for school.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
At midnight I phoned Hawkwood from Trish’s kitchen, long-distance, with everybody in the living room yelling the countdown at the TV. Brett answered.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Paige. Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year, Paige,” said Brett.
He didn’t ask me who it was. He knew my voice. He’d known it on the first word.
* * *
Nathan got the flu on the fifth of January, the first day back at school.
He phoned me Monday night sounding like his head was in a bucket. Donna had given him NeoCitran and put him to bed. On Tuesday he didn’t come to school. Tuesday night he was on MSN for about five minutes. nate says:
dying dekker #7 says:
you’re not dying nate says:
i feel like i got hit by a truck. the whole truck. the trailer dekker #7 says:
set your alarm nate says:
dekker #7 says:
check it nate says:
ok. 6:30. going to sleep dekker #7 says:
mesage me in the morning. as soon as you wake up. promise nate says:
promise
He was always on at a quarter to seven. Every morning since October. up, he’d type, and I’d type up, and that was all, before Tracy was out of the shower. It was the first thing either of us did.
On Wednesday morning at a quarter to seven there was nothing.
I sat at the computer in my pyjamas. His little man was grey. At seven it was grey. At seven-fifteen I typed u up? and it sat there with nobody to read it. At seven-thirty Tracy came down in her work clothes and said “You’re going to be late, honey.” I said I didn’t feel well. That was true. She put her hand on my forehead and frowned and said “You’re cold,” and went to work.
At seven-forty I phoned Hawkwood.
Gordon answered. “Reimer residence.”
“Hi. It’s Paige. Is Nathan there?”
“Paige! Hi. He’s sick, sweetheart. He’s in bed. He’s dead to the world.” Gordon laughed. “He’s been sleeping since about eight last night. Donna checked on him at six. He’s out like a light.”
“Can you wake him up?”
“What?”
“Can you go and wake him up? Please. Can you just... can you see if he wakes up?”
There was a pause on the line.
“Paige, honey, he’s got the flu,” Gordon said. “He’s sleeping it off. Let the kid sleep.”
“Dr. Anand said,” I said. My voice was doing something. I couldn’t make it stop. “She said if he’s ever really hard to wake, you call. You don’t wait. She said nobody waits.”
“He’s not hard to wake. He’s asleep.” Gordon’s voice had gone careful. “How do you know about Dr. Anand?”
I sat on the stairs with the phone and had no answer for him.
“Paige?”
“He told me,” I said.
“Okay,” said Gordon, slowly. “Okay. Well. He’s fine. I promise you he’s fine. He’s snoring. I can hear him from here.” I could hear him trying to be kind. I could hear him not understanding at all. “I’ll get him to call you when he’s up. Okay? Okay. You go to school.”
He hung up.
I sat on the stairs with the cordless in my lap.
I didn’t go to school. I sat on the third stair from the bottom in Royal Oak with my back against the wall and the phone in my lap and the card in my other hand, and I looked at the front door. I didn’t move. At nine the school phoned and I let it ring. At ten I went and got the toque Brett had given me off my dresser and put it on, I don’t know why, and sat back down.
Episodes like this can recur.
He’d gone to sleep at eight. It was ten. That was fourteen hours. I’d slept for a week in June and woken up as somebody else. What if he was in there, in my old bed in Hawkwood, under the blue blanket, and something was happening. What if the wish was coming undone. What if he woke up and he was back in Royal Oak, in this body, sitting on these stairs, and I was in Hawkwood, in that bed, with Gordon standing over me saying there he is.
I held the card so hard it bent.
At noon, the phone rang in my lap.
“Paige? It’s Donna.” Her voice was gentle. “Gordon said you phoned. I just wanted to tell you. He’s up. He’s fine. He slept fourteen hours, the poor thing, but he’s up, he’s had some toast. He’s fine. He’s sleeping it off.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Are you all right, sweetheart? You sound...”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you for phoning.”
I put the phone down. I sat on the stairs. I wasn’t fine. I took the toque off and held it in both hands and put my face in it. It smelled like the front closet in Hawkwood. I sat there until I could breathe.
* * *
That night he was on MSN at nine. nate says:
i saw the time dekker #7 says:
14 hours nate says:
i know. i woke up and it was 10. i looked at my hands first. before i even looked at the clock dekker #7 says:
i sat on the stairs till noon nate says:
gordon said. he said you were really upset. he said how does she know about dr anand dekker #7 says:
what did you say nate says:
i said i told you. he looked at me funny nate says:
paige i was so scared. when i woke up. before i looked. i was so scared i couldnt move dekker #7 says:
me too nate says:
i dont want to go back dekker #7 says:
me neither
Upstairs, Tracy was asleep. The house ticked. On the shelf over my desk, in the dark, the wizard was looking out at the lane.
That night I set the alarm, checked it twice, and lay there with the light on until the window went grey.