The house in Royal Oak was on a crescent, two storeys of tan siding with a garage at the back on a gravel lane. There was a For Rent sign still lying on its face in the flower bed by the steps. Tracy saw me look at it.
“I keep meaning to call them to come get that,” she said. “Do you want to go in the front or the back? We usually go in the back. I mean, we’ve only been here three weeks, so there isn’t really a usual. Do you want the front?”
“The back’s fine.”
We went in the back, through the kitchen. On the fridge, under a magnet shaped like a cow, was the paper from Dr. Anand about head injuries. Tracy had circled 911 twice in marker.
The dining room was boxes. They were stacked to about my chin in the middle of the room and lower around the edges, and the table was in there somewhere. Somebody had stacked them very neatly, all the labels facing out. LIVING ROOM. BATHROOM. BOOKS. LINENS. One box near the bottom, wedged under three others, said KITCHEN in black marker.
“That one’s a mystery,” Tracy said. “I packed it at two in the morning the night before the movers. It’s not kitchen. I know it’s not kitchen. I’ll get to it.”
She showed me the living room: a couch, a TV, a box with a lamp on top of it. She showed me the bathroom, where there was a plunger in a gift bag. Then she stood at the bottom of the stairs with her hand on the post.
“Your room’s at the top on the left,” she said. “I didn’t touch anything. I didn’t know if I should.”
* * *
The room had a window over the back lane. Through it you could see the garages, and the gravel, and somebody’s basketball hoop leaning against a fence. There was a bed made up with a purple duvet, a dresser, a chair, and nothing on the walls. A soccer ball sat in the corner, and a pair of soccer cleats with the laces knotted together. A medal on a ribbon hung off the corner of the dresser mirror: LETHBRIDGE YOUTH SOCCER, U14 GIRLS, 2ND PLACE.
The pink dress was over the back of the chair, hung by the shoulders. The tags were still on it.
I sat on the bed. The frame stuck out bare at the corner by my knee, black metal, with no rubber cap on the end. I touched it. Then I touched the back of my head, where the lump was, and took my hand away.
The closet was hoodies. Grey, navy, black, a green one that said LETHBRIDGE HURRICANES, another grey one. Under them were sweatpants in the same colours, two pairs of jeans, and T-shirts with nothing on them. On the floor of the closet there was a shoebox with a pair of white sandals in it that had never been worn, still wrapped in their tissue.
Whoever had lived in here had dressed every day so nobody would look at them.
I knew how that went. I’d spent fourteen years in golf shirts with collars.
I lay down on the purple duvet in my grey hoodie and looked at the ceiling, which had no stain on it, and listened to Tracy downstairs on the phone telling somebody called Trish that I was home, that I was okay, that I was tired, that I didn’t remember, no, nothing, not even the dog.
There was a clock radio on the dresser with red numbers. I got up and found the alarm button and set it for half past six in the morning. Then I lay down again.
Dr. Anand had said nobody waits. I wasn’t going to make anybody wait.
* * *
The next night, after supper, she brought out the albums.
The box they came from said PHOTOS. It had been in her bedroom the whole time, not out with the others in the dining room. She sat on the couch with me and put the first album across both our knees.
“Dr. Anand said pictures are fine,” she said. “Tell me if it’s too much. Tell me and I’ll stop.”
They went in order. First there was a baby in a car seat, then a kid on a trike in a driveway with a basketball net over the garage. After that came a kid with a soccer ball, a kid at a birthday party wearing a cone hat over a hoodie, and a kid at a lake in a life jacket with a hoodie on underneath it. At Christmas the kid held up a Barbie in its box and looked at the camera like the camera had done something wrong. The kid got taller. The hoodie got bigger. A big sandy man in a Lethbridge Hurricanes cap turned up, holding tongs over a barbecue, and so did Tracy, younger, with very large hair.
“That’s your dad,” Tracy said. “That’s Murray. That was the house on Twenty-first Street. That’s Henderson pool. That was your eighth birthday. That’s the dog.” A yellow dog with a grey muzzle lying on a step. “Rusty. He died last spring. You cried for a week. You wouldn’t let anybody else feed him at the end.” She stopped. “Anything?”
“No.”
“That’s okay.” She turned the page. “That’s okay.”
I looked at the dog on the step. He had his chin on his paws. Somebody had loved him enough to cry for a week, and I’d never met him.
The last album was older and thinner, with a red cover. The first page was a hotel room, with Tracy and the big sandy man sitting on a bed and a baby between them, all three of them in winter coats. Under the photo, in Tracy’s writing, it said CHANGSHA, MARCH 1995.
“That’s the day we got you,” Tracy said. “That’s the hotel. The heat didn’t work. Murray tried to fix the radiator with a hotel key and it came off in his hand.”
On the facing page there was a red envelope taped down at the corners, with a gold character on it, and under that a small square of newspaper in a plastic sleeve. The newspaper was in Chinese. There was a grainy photo on it, two babies lying side by side on a blanket, both of them looking at nothing with their mouths open.
“What’s that one?”
“That’s the orphanage’s picture,” Tracy said. “The agency sent it with the papers. They ran it in the paper over there, I think, the way they did. I think it went out for a lot of babies at once.” She touched the sleeve with one finger. “I always liked it. They look like they’re about to say something.”
There was a cookbook in the PHOTOS box under the albums, too, a paperback with dumplings on the cover and a lot of the pages stuck together.
“Every New Year,” Tracy said, when she saw me looking. “We did dumplings every year. You hated folding them. You said they looked like ears.” She laughed. “You did eat them, though.”
At the Reimers’ we hadn’t done New Year. Donna had asked me once, when I was nine, if I wanted to, and Brett had been in the room, and I’d said no.
I put my hand flat on the newspaper in its sleeve. Tracy put hers on top of mine.
“Anything?” she said.
“No.”
“That’s okay,” she said, and closed the album.
* * *
On Saturday we went to the Royal Oak Co-op.
Tracy did a big shop, with the flyer folded in her back pocket and the pencil from her hair behind her ear, and she asked me what I wanted for every aisle. Did I still like Shreddies? Did I want the yogurt in the tubes? What about the cheese strings? I said yes to all of it. By the end of the bakery I’d said yes to two kinds of cheese and a box of Nanaimo bars, and she’d stopped asking.
By the door, where you go out, there was a pile of free calendars. They were the 2008 ones, left over from January, with a different Co-op store on every month, and somebody had stuck a sign on them in marker that said TAKE ONE, with two exclamation marks after it. I took one. Tracy didn’t ask what for.
In the car she put the key in and didn’t turn it.
She sat with both hands on the wheel. The parking lot was full of Saturday: a man loading bags of soil into a minivan, a kid in a Flames jersey riding the cart corral like a horse, a woman yelling at him to get off. Tracy watched all of it. Then she started crying, with no noise, looking straight ahead through the windshield, and the tears just went down.
“Allergies,” she said. “It’s the poplars. The fluff. It gets in everything.”
There wasn’t any fluff. It was the end of June.
“Okay,” I said.
She found a napkin from Tim’s in the door pocket and blew her nose and laughed at herself, and started the car.
I looked out my window at the kid on the cart corral. She’d had her kid for fourteen years. She’d taken that kid to Henderson pool until their lips went blue, and held on while they cried for a week about a dog, and her kid had come home from the hospital without the dog’s name. Tracy was being so nice to me. She was being nice to me on somebody else’s account, and I was letting her, and I’d keep letting her.
I didn’t know where her kid was. I didn’t know if her kid knew where she was.
I held on to the free calendar in my lap all the way home.
* * *
Tracy went back to work on Monday. She’d only started at Coulee the week we moved, she said, and they’d been so good about it, but she couldn’t push it.
“Are you sure you’re okay on your own? Do you have the key? You have the key. Here’s the number at work, it’s on the fridge too, and here’s my cell. You can call me for anything. You can call me if you’re bored. Do you know how to work the microwave? Of course you do. Sorry. Did you eat?”
“I’ll eat.”
She stood in the back door with her lunch in a Co-op bag and her keys in her hand and looked at me.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Lock this.”
She drove to the train station in Dalhousie. I locked the door and stood in the kitchen of a house I’d never been in with nobody in it but me.
I went through the whole house that first day. I didn’t open any boxes. I looked. The bathroom cupboard had two toothbrushes, a purple one and a green one, and I didn’t know which was mine. I used the purple one. In the morning the purple one was wet from Tracy and the green one had been dry for a week. I’d brushed my teeth with my new mother’s toothbrush. I used the green one after that and never told her.
The TV got nine channels if you held the antenna. I watched Stampede commercials, a show about people buying houses, and a lot of news. On the news a man in a blue tie stood in front of a chart and said oil was at a hundred and forty dollars a barrel, and that this was good news for Alberta.
At noon Tracy phoned. She phoned at noon every day after that, too.
“Did you eat?”
“Yes.”
“What did you eat?”
“Toast.”
“Just toast? There’s soup. There’s the good soup in the cupboard over the stove. Did you have the good soup?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I love you. Lock the door.”
She said it at the end of every call, the same way, like you’d say bye. The first time, I held the phone away from my ear and looked at it.
* * *
That night I asked.
I’d been working out how to all day. I’d tried it on the cat next door through the window. I’d tried it on the bathroom mirror, but I didn’t look at the mirror while I tried it. In the end I said it at the kitchen counter while she was doing the crossword in the Herald, with my hands around a mug of the good soup.
“Could I get some new clothes?”
Tracy put the pencil down.
“Just some,” I said. “Not a lot. The hoodies are fine. Some of them. I just thought. For school.”
She had her hand over her mouth.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” she said through her hand. “No, no, no. It matters. It does.” She took the hand away. Her whole face had gone pink, all the way up to her hair. “What kind of clothes? Do you mean... what kind? What do you want?”
I didn’t know how to say it, so I said, “Not hoodies.”
Tracy got up and came around the counter and hugged me with the soup between us. She smelled like the hand cream she kept in her purse. She held on a long time.
“Thursday,” she said into my hair. “I’ll leave work early. We’ll go to Chinook.”
* * *
Chinook Centre was the biggest mall I’d ever been in with someone who wanted me there.
I’d been to it with Donna, plenty. Donna went to Chinook for things: a present for somebody’s wedding, Brett’s new hockey skates, new golf shirts for me before school, always the same golf shirts, two blue and one white, in a size up so I could grow into them. Donna walked through Chinook like she was crossing a parking lot in the rain.
Tracy walked through it like she’d been let out.
She took my hand at the top of the escalator and then let go of it, because I was fourteen, and then took it again outside a store with a lot of pink in the window. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. We should start with the boring part, though. We should do the boring part first and get it over with. Are you okay with the boring part?”
The boring part was the department store, upstairs, past the perfume. There was a woman there with a tape measure around her neck like a scarf, glasses on a chain, and a name tag that said LYNETTE. She took one look at Tracy’s face and one at mine and said, “First proper one?”
“Sort of,” Tracy said. “She’s been in the hospital. She doesn’t remember. It’s a long story.”
“Isn’t it always,” Lynette said. “Come on, hon. In here. Mom can wait outside and fret.”
The fitting room had a mirror and a stool and a hook on the back of the door. I looked at the hook. It was brass, a little crooked, with a screw missing. Lynette talked the whole time: her granddaughter in Red Deer, the price of gas, how the Flames needed a real backup goalie. She was quick and sure and not once embarrassed. She called me hon. She didn’t make it into anything. It took ten minutes. At the end of it she patted my shoulder twice through the curtain and said, “There you go. That’s that done. Now you never have to think about it again till you grow.”
I looked at the hook for a second longer after she’d gone. Then my eyes did something, and I let them. I’d been called a lot of things in fourteen years by people being careful with me. Nobody had ever been that ordinary.
Outside, Tracy was holding three of the same thing in different colours and pretending she hadn’t been listening.
* * *
After that it was easy.
It was jeans in a store with music too loud, where the girl folding sweaters said “Those are so cute on you” without looking up, and meant it the same way she meant it to everybody, and I wanted her to say it again. It was a rack of tops, and a girl about my age at the other end of the rack holding up two of them, a blue one and a green one, who turned to me and said, “Which one?” like I’d know.
“The green,” I said.
“Right?” she said, and put the blue one back, and went to pay.
It was sandals, and Tracy saying “you have the white ones at home, you never wore them,” and me saying “can I wear them now?” and Tracy’s face doing the thing again. It was a top with a little bird on it, a swallow, stitched in navy on the pocket. I picked it. I picked it myself, off the hanger, without asking anybody, and carried it to the till.
On the escalator going down, with four bags, Tracy said, “I haven’t had this much fun since we moved.”
“Me neither,” I said.
She laughed so hard the man in front of us turned around.
* * *
That night I put the bird top on the chair, on top of the pink dress, and got into bed.
I’d hung the free calendar on the inside of the closet door with a thumbtack I found in the desk drawer. The desk had come in from the garage on Saturday, in a flat box, with instructions in pictures. Tracy and I had built it on the bedroom floor. She’d held the instructions upside down and said “Oh, for crying out loud” every two minutes, and I’d done most of it. Gordon had made me help him build a whole deck when I was twelve.
“You hate this stuff,” Tracy had said, watching me with the Allen key. “You’ve always hated this stuff.”
“I guess I hit my head,” I’d said.
On the calendar I’d found June, and drawn a small X through the twenty-first, the morning I woke up. Then I’d turned the pages forward. The calendar stopped in December. It didn’t go as far as next June.
I took the card out from under my pillow and read it in the light from the lane.
One year. Then wish again, together: stay, or go back.
Together with who? I went through everybody I had. Tracy, who thought I was her kid. Manny, in Hawkwood, who didn’t know where I’d gone. The kid who’d lived in this room, who could be anywhere. Whoever had written the card, in a hand like a supply teacher’s.
I ran out of people before I ran out of night.
The alarm was set for half past six. I checked it twice. Then I lay on my side and watched the red numbers until they said 12:06, and kept watching until they didn’t.