On the first of June I woke up at fourteen minutes past six, a minute before the alarm, in the basement in Ranchlands.
I lay there and looked at the window. It was up at the top of the wall, at the level of the lawn, and in the mornings the light came in through the grass. There was a dandelion right in the middle of it. Tracy kept saying she’d get to it.
At six-fifteen I phoned him.
He picked up before it had rung all the way once.
“June first,” he said.
“We’re here.”
“You’re there,” he said. “In Ranchlands. Not Lethbridge.”
“I’m looking at a dandelion.”
He breathed out down the phone, long and slow, like Gordon coming in from shovelling.
“Okay,” he said. “Thirteen days.”
Upstairs Tracy was in the shower, singing. She’d started at Alberta Health Services the Monday before, in an office on the ninth floor of a building downtown with a view of the Bow and a coffee machine that only made one kind of coffee. She came home tired and said the people were nice. She said payroll was payroll. She’d written something on the new kitchen calendar for Monday the fifteenth, in red: CROWFOOT STATION OPENS. You could walk to it from our front door in ten minutes.
She’d written something on the Sunday before it too. She’d written it very small, in pencil, like she might need to rub it out.
Kids.
* * *
The cake started on the Sunday, at the Reimers’, over the pork chops.
“So I’ll order it from the Co-op,” Donna said. “The usual. The big slab. I’ll get them to put both names on.”
“Oh,” said Tracy.
Donna looked up.
“No, that’s fine,” Tracy said. “That’s fine. Only I’ve made it every year. Her cake. Since she was one.” She put her fork down. “His cake. Since he was one.”
“I’ve ordered it every year,” said Donna. “From the Co-op. Since he was one.” She stopped. “She was one.”
They looked at each other across the table.
“Here we go,” said Brett, to his plate.
“I’m just saying I’ve got a recipe,” said Tracy. “My mother’s. It’s not hard. And then there’s no point paying for one.”
“It’s no trouble. They do a lovely job. They did the football last year with the laces.”
“Well, I could do the football.”
“You could do the football,” Donna said, the way Gordon said Oilers.
Gordon picked up the potatoes and passed them to Nathan very carefully, like the table might go off.
“How about two,” said Nathan.
They both looked at him.
“Two cakes,” Nathan said. “There’s two of us.” He took the potatoes. “Mom makes one. Donna gets one. Side by side.”
Tracy opened her mouth and shut it. Donna looked at Tracy.
“Two cakes is a lot of cake,” said Donna.
“Brett’ll eat one,” I said.
“I will,” said Brett.
So it was two. And then Donna said “Well, what do you each want on yours?” and it went quiet again. Nobody had ever asked us. I’d had a football every year since I could remember. He’d had pink. You didn’t get asked, at a Reimer birthday or a Dekker one. The cake just came out of the kitchen with the candles going, and everybody sang.
“I want the football,” said Nathan.
Donna stared at him.
“The one with the laces,” he said. “From last year. With NATHAN on it. In blue.”
Gordon put his knife down. His face was doing something it did at the end of a game. He picked up his glass of milk and drank it, all of it, without stopping.
“And you?” said Tracy to me. Gently. Like she knew.
“The pink one,” I said. “The one you made last year. With the writing on it.”
Tracy sat back in her chair.
“That’s the same,” she said. “That’s the same two cakes.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“The same two cakes,” said Tracy. She looked at Donna. “Just the other way round.”
Donna looked at her. Then she put her napkin up to her face and laughed into it until her shoulders shook.
* * *
Tracy stayed after supper to talk about icing with Donna, so Gordon drove me home.
He drove with the radio off. He went down Nose Hill Drive with both hands on the wheel. I knew what that meant. I’d known it since I was five.
“Science on Monday?” he said.
“The review. The exam’s the week after.”
“You’ll be fine. You were always good at that stuff.” He drove. “Your mother says you got the brains in this family.”
At the lights by Crowfoot he said it.
“I put you in hockey.”
“Yeah.”
“Timbits. Then the rest of it. Every Saturday.” He looked at the red light. “You cried on the way there. In the truck. Every time.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought it’d toughen you up.”
“Did it?” Gordon said.
“No.”
He laughed, once, through his nose. Then he drove.
“I’m going to get it wrong,” he said. “The name. Saying he. I did it twice at supper. Donna kicked me under the table.”
“I saw.”
“I’m going to keep getting it wrong. I’m forty-seven and I’m slow. I take a while to learn a new furnace.” He turned onto Ranchlands Boulevard. “You tell me. When I get it wrong. Don’t just let it go by.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He pulled up outside the bungalow. The crabapple in the front had come out, all at once, the whole tree pink. Tracy’s car wasn’t in the driveway. The porch light was on.
I got my bag and opened the door.
“Hey,” Gordon said.
I looked back. He had one hand on the wheel and the other arm along the back of the seat. He looked at me for a second like he did when he got called out to a house and stood in the basement working out what was wrong.
“There she is,” Gordon said.
I got out. I shut the door. He didn’t drive away until I was inside with the door locked, and when I looked out through the front window he was still there, with both hands on the wheel. Then he went.
* * *
On Monday I invited people.
I did it at lunch at Manny’s table, with my milk in front of me. Cassidy, Tiffany, Sadie. Manny and Connor at the other end, with Nathan. Sunday the fourteenth at the Reimers’ in Hawkwood, two o’clock, a barbecue. Brett was doing the grill.
“Is this the twins thing?” said Cassidy. “Are we celebrating twins?”
“It’s a birthday.”
“It’s a twins birthday.” Cassidy pointed a carrot stick at me. “I’m bringing one present. One. You can split it.”
“Sleepover after?” said Tiffany. “At yours? We could do your hair for summer.”
“No,” I said.
It came out too fast. Tiffany’s face dropped a little.
“I mean not that night,” I said. “Not Sunday. I just... I want to be at home Sunday night. In my own bed.”
“Okay,” said Tiffany. “Weirdo.” She was smiling again. “The Saturday after, then. I’m bringing the big curling iron.”
Sadie was looking at me across the table, quietly, the way she’d looked at the soccer medal on my shelf in January. Then she reached over and took one of my carrot sticks and ate it.
“I’ll come,” she said.
At the other end of the table Manny was telling Connor that he was bringing a present for both of them that was the same present but different colours. Nathan was laughing at something. He laughed like Brett now, all at once, with his head going back. Then he caught me looking and stopped, and his face went still, the way it did on the phone at six-fifteen in the morning.
* * *
We were sitting on the bleachers at the Bow Crest field on Wednesday after school when he said it.
Nobody else was there. The grass was long, waiting to be cut, and the sprinklers were going at the far end, round and round, ticking. The goalposts still had a strip of blue and gold tape on them from October. I could see the place on the sideline where I’d stood with my pom-poms while he ran forty yards and looked back.
“What if it’s a test,” he said.
“What?”
“The card. Stay, or go back. What if you have to mean it.” He was looking at the sprinklers. “What if it’s checking. What if one of us wishes and doesn’t mean it all the way, and it goes back.”
“I mean it.”
“You stopped before the end,” Nathan said. “Every year. You told Mom. Eight years, you stopped before the last word.”
I looked at him.
He was still looking at the sprinklers. He’d been sleeping four hours a night since Easter. Brett had told me. Brett heard him doing push-ups on the floor of his room at three in the morning, through the wall. In the end Brett had come in and sat on the end of the bed. Go to sleep or I’ll sit on you, he’d said, and Nathan had said I can’t, and Brett had stayed until six.
“That was before,” I said.
“I know.”
“That was before. I was in the wrong...” I stopped. I didn’t have the end of it. “I didn’t stop last year.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you saying it?”
“Because I’m scared you’ll stop,” he said. His voice went up and cracked, his big low voice, like it hadn’t done since he got it. “Okay? I’m scared. I’m scared you’ll get up there with the candles going and everybody singing and Gordon with his hand on your neck, and you’ll think about him. About him reading go back at Easter. I watched him read it twice. And you’ll stop.”
“He said okay.”
“I know what he said.”
The sprinklers went around. Tick, tick, tick.
“I won’t stop,” I said.
“You don’t know.”
“I do know.” I turned around on the bleacher to face him. “I’ve been a girl for a year. In this face. In front of everybody. I flew at provincials. I’ve got Tracy knocking on my door. I’m not going to stop.”
He looked at me then.
“What about you?” I said. “What if you sleep through it? What if you sleep through the morning and nobody can wake you up?”
“I won’t sleep.”
“You’ll have to sleep sometime.”
“Not till after,” he said. “Not till it’s done.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I said.
“Shouldn’t what?”
“Wish. Maybe we just don’t. Maybe we blow them out and don’t wish anything, and it stays the way it is.”
“Or it goes back,” he said. “It doesn’t say. It says wish.”
“I know what it says.”
“Then we wish.” He gripped the edge of the bleacher on either side of him. “It said together. It said one year. It’s been right about everything so far.”
“It hasn’t been right about anything. It’s one line in ballpoint. It doesn’t even say who it’s from.”
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. It came out of him like a cough.
“Nice handwriting, though,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“Like a teacher’s.”
I hit him on the arm. Not hard. He let me. Then he put his arm out along the bleacher behind me, not touching, the way Brett did on the back of the couch, and we sat there till the sprinklers shut off.
* * *
On the Thursday it was Brett’s grad, at the Jubilee. Gordon wore a tie. Donna cried from the moment the music started, and Tracy, who’d been invited, sat beside her with a packet of Kleenex and handed them over one at a time without being asked. Brett walked across the stage in a gown that was too short for him and shook the principal’s hand and looked up at the balcony, at the five of us in a row, and did a thing with his chin.
Gordon didn’t yell this time. He sat very still with his tie pulled loose, and when they said Brett’s name he nodded, twice, and that was all.
That night I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in the basement with the light off and the alarm clock beside me with its red numbers. It said 1:20. Then 1:48. Then 2:15. I wasn’t scared of the dark. I was scared of the next part, the part after you stop noticing the numbers, when you go down to the bottom of it like the deep end and don’t come up for seven days.
At 2:30 the stairs creaked.
Tracy came down in her housecoat. She didn’t turn the light on. She came and sat on the edge of my bed, the way she’d done in June, and put her hand on my ankle over the blanket.
“I can hear you,” she said. “Lying there.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“I know. I can hear you not doing it.” She sat. “Is it Sunday?”
“Yeah.”
She sat with that for a bit. Upstairs the fridge hummed. Outside, at the top of the window, something went past on the lawn, a cat or the wind.
“I’ve been thinking about it too,” she said. “Every night. What if it doesn’t. What if it goes back.” Her hand stayed where it was. “I lie there and I think, what would I want. If I could have it either way.”
I lay still.
“And I can’t do it,” Tracy said. “I can’t want it either way. I’ve got two kids now. That’s what I keep coming back to. I went to Changsha and came back with one, and now I’ve got two.” She squeezed my ankle. “So I’ll tell you what I’m doing Monday morning. Whoever’s in this bed on Monday, and whoever’s in Hawkwood, I’m making them pancakes. Both of them. Gordon can drive.”
I laughed. It came out wet.
“With the blueberries,” she said. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Go to sleep, honey. I’ll stay.”
She stayed. She sat on the end of the bed in the dark with her hand on my ankle, and I lay there and looked at the red numbers. The last one I remember is 3:04.
* * *
On Saturday night he phoned at ten.
I took it into the closet. It was a smaller closet here, with a sliding door, and the calendar hung inside it on a nail Gordon had put in. The Xs reached the thirteenth. There was one square left, and nothing in it.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
For a bit neither of us talked. I could hear the Reimers’ house behind him: the dishwasher, the TV in the living room, Gordon laughing at something, Brett’s music coming through a floor. I knew every one of those sounds. I’d grown up inside them.
“Everything’s ready,” he said. “Donna’s got the football in the garage fridge. She keeps going out to look at it.”
“Mom’s been making icing since six. The whole house is pink.”
“Gordon bought new tongs for Brett. He gave them to him like a medal.”
“Is Brett going to grill in the tie?”
“Maybe.” He breathed. “I got the candles. Donna sent me to the store. I got two boxes.”
“How many in a box?”
“Twenty-four.”
“We only need thirty.”
“I know,” he said. “I got extra. In case.”
I sat on the floor of the closet with my knees up and the phone against my ear. On the other side of the sliding door my room was dark, and the window at the top of the wall had gone grey-blue with the last of the light, and the dandelion was still in it.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What do you wish?”
He was quiet. I heard him move on the landing, where the cordless worked best.
“Same thing,” he said.
I shut my eyes.
“Same thing,” I said.