The kid at the door had a skateboard under one arm and a plastic bag in the other hand, and a bike helmet on his head that he was in the middle of taking off.
Behind him a minivan was backing out of the driveway. The window came down and a woman leaned across the passenger seat and shouted, “Manveer! Helmet!”
“It’s off, Mom. I’m here.”
“Helmet on the way home!”
“Yes!”
The van went. The kid turned around and looked at me. He was a little shorter than me, skinny, with black hair cut close at the sides and a T-shirt with a dragon on it. He looked at my forehead first, where the stitches had been, and then at the rest of me.
Then he held out his empty hand, flat, palm up, and said in a high, hard, nasal voice, like a woman with a cold who’d had enough of everybody: “Tray.”
I looked at his hand.
He waited. He said it again, louder. “Tray.”
“What?” I said.
He put his hand down. His face did a thing. It went from a joke to nothing in about a second, the way a TV goes when you pull the plug.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Okay. Your mom said. The head thing.” He nodded about six times. “That’s cool. That’s fine. My cousin had a concussion in hockey and he forgot his PIN number for like a month. Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah.”
He came in. He took his shoes off without being asked and put them on the mat exactly side by side, and went up the stairs ahead of me like he knew where he was going. He did.
* * *
His name was Manny. He told me that himself, sitting on the floor of my room with his back against the bed. Manveer if his mom was mad. Manny since Grade 3. We’d been best friends since Grade 5, he said, since the day Brady Szabo took my lunch and Manny took it back and then we both got detention.
“You don’t remember Brady Szabo?”
“No.”
“Lucky.”
He took the figures out of the plastic bag one at a time and stood them on the carpet. Little armoured guys with guns, unpainted, grey. A dragon in pieces. A tiny jar of glue. He’d brought a brush in a pencil case with nine colours of paint in pots no bigger than the end of my thumb.
“You were going to do the dragon,” he said. “You picked it. At the store. Two months ago.” He held out the head. “You said you’d do it green.”
I took the head. It was about the size of a grape. I turned it over. You could see where every scale went.
“I can’t do this,” I said.
“You totally can. You’re good at it. You’re way more careful than me.” He looked at the wizard on the desk by the lamp, and his face did the thing again, the other way. “You kept him by the lamp.”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” he said. “Cool.”
We sat on the floor of the room for three hours. He painted and talked. He talked about a game I’d apparently been playing on the computer with him since Christmas, about his sister going to university in Edmonton, about a girl at the skate park who could do a kickflip and had told him to move. He did a voice for his sister. He did a voice for his dad. He did a voice for the lunch lady again, very small, under his breath, and looked at me while he did it, and I didn’t know what to do with my face.
I liked him. He was easy to sit with. He didn’t need me to say much, and I didn’t.
The whole time, he was looking for somebody. I could see him doing it. He’d say a thing and look up at me fast, to catch the face I was supposed to make. It wasn’t there. He’d look back down at the dragon.
At four his mom honked from the driveway.
“Stampede,” he said at the door, putting his shoes on. “Saturday the twelfth. My brother’s driving us down. You in?”
“Yeah.”
He stopped with one shoe on and looked at me.
“Okay,” he said. “Cool.”
He put the helmet on before he got to the van, without being told.
* * *
We went on the Saturday.
Manny’s brother dropped us off at the gate by the Saddledome. He said he’d be at the same gate at six. If we weren’t there, he’d leave. He meant it. It was thirty degrees. The whole grounds smelled of mini-donuts and diesel and horse. There were more people than I’d ever seen in one place, all of them in cowboy hats, even the babies.
Manny knew where everything was. He took me to the place with the corn dogs and the place with the pickle on a stick and the place where you throw a softball at a stack of milk bottles. I knocked the whole stack over with the first ball. The guy running it gave me a stuffed pink horse the size of a dog, and Manny laughed so hard he had to hold on to the counter. I gave the horse to a little girl crying by the Ferris wheel. Her dad said thanks, buddy.
In the line for the Zipper, Manny did the voice again. Not to me. To the guy taking tickets, who was about nineteen and had a mullet and wasn’t paying attention. He held his ticket out flat and said “Ticket.” Then, louder, in that cold, fed-up nose voice: “Ticket.” The guy looked at him like he was nuts.
I laughed. I laughed at Manny’s face doing it, all scrunched, like he was about to sneeze. I couldn’t stop.
Manny stopped doing the voice and looked at me laughing. He just watched. Then the cage came around and we got in.
On the Zipper you go upside down so many times you lose track of which way the ground is. I liked it. Manny threw up behind the beer gardens afterward, and said that was normal, he did it every year, it was tradition.
* * *
Donna told the dock story at supper the week after.
We were having pork chops. Gordon had his elbows on the table and was talking about a furnace he’d put in for a guy in Tuscany who wanted it on the other side of the basement after it was in. Brett was eating and texting under the table. Donna was cutting her pork chop into small squares and not eating any of them.
“We should go up to the lake,” she said. “Next weekend. The cabin. The water’s warm by now.”
“Good idea,” Gordon said. “Get him out on the water.”
“You love the lake,” Donna said to me. “You always loved the lake. Do you remember the dock? The year you fell off the end of it? You were seven. You were in your Spider-Man shorts and you went straight in, and I went in after you in my good white capris. Your dad laughed so hard he had to sit down on the dock. And then afterward, at the store at the marina, you know what we got you? What was it?” She looked at me, and waited. “Do you remember what we got you after?”
Everybody was looking at me. Brett had stopped texting.
“No,” I said.
“Oh.” She put her knife down. “Okay.”
She got up and started clearing, even though Gordon wasn’t finished. She stood at the sink and ran the water and did the dishes with her back very straight, all the way up, like somebody had put a broom handle down her shirt.
Gordon ate the rest of his pork chop. He looked at the back of her for a while.
“She’s just tired,” he said to me. “It’s been a long month.”
Brett took his plate to the sink and stood next to her and dried. Neither of them said anything.
* * *
We went to Sylvan Lake on the Saturday. It was two hours up the highway in the truck, past Red Deer, with a cooler in the back and Brett’s earphones leaking music the whole way.
The cabin was small and green with a screen porch, three cabins in from the water, with a path down to a wooden dock that went out about thirty feet. The water was brown at the edges and blue farther out. There was an orange buoy out past the end of the dock with a rope on it.
I stood at the end of the dock in a pair of swim trunks that came to my knees and looked at the buoy.
“Don’t you go far,” Donna called from the porch. “Nathan. You hear me? Not past the buoy.”
I dove in.
I’d always been a good swimmer, in the other body. Small and quick. This one was something else. The water came apart in front of my hands. My legs pushed and I went. The buoy came at me so fast I had to put a hand out to stop. I held the rope and turned around. The dock was a little brown line with three people on it.
Gordon had his hands cupped around his mouth. “Look at him go!” His voice came across the water flat and loud. “Look at him go!”
I swam back. I swam out again. I did it till my arms burned and the light went orange. When I came up the ladder Gordon was waiting at the top with a towel. He put it over my head and rubbed it around like he was drying a dog. Then he put a hand on my neck and kept it there.
“That’s my boy,” he said.
It was warm, his hand. It sat on me like a jacket that fit right across the shoulders. I knew it was meant for somebody else. I stood there and let him leave it on anyway.
Brett was sitting on the end of the dock with his feet in the water, watching. When I looked at him, he looked at the lake.
* * *
On the Wednesday Dr. Anand looked at my forehead. She shone her light in my eyes and had me walk heel to toe along a line on the floor of her office. Then she said I could play.
“Contact as of Monday,” she said, to Gordon, who’d taken the morning off to drive me. “Ease into it. If he gets a headache, he sits out. If he gets a bad one, he comes in. And remember the other thing.”
“If he’s hard to wake,” Gordon said. “Yep. It’s on the fridge.”
In the truck on the way home he hit the steering wheel twice with the flat of his hand. “Monday,” he said. That was all he said all the way up Crowchild. He grinned the whole time.
* * *
Camp was at Shouldice. Four fields side by side by the river, a row of trees, a parking lot full of dads. There were about sixty of us. Bantam, fourteen and fifteen. They gave us pinnies and lined us up by the fence and made us run.
I’d never run in this body. I’d walked it up and down a hospital hall. I’d swum it to a buoy. Once, in the backyard, I’d jogged it to the fence and back when nobody was looking. Never flat out.
The coach blew the whistle.
The grass went under me. I didn’t have to tell my legs anything. I pointed and they went. The air came at my face, and the fence at the far end got big. It was like standing up on the coulees outside Lethbridge on a day when the wind comes up out of the river valley. You open your jacket. You lean into it, all your weight, and the wind holds you up. I’d done that a hundred times as a kid. This was that, except I was the wind.
I got to the end and turned around and the next guy was still ten yards back.
“Reimer,” the coach said, looking at his clipboard. “You were here last year.”
“I guess.”
“You weren’t like this last year.”
I didn’t know what last year was like. I put my hands on my knees and breathed. I waited for him to say something else. He didn’t. He wrote something on the clipboard.
We did five days of it. Running, cutting, the sled, the dummies, catching. They put me at running back and then at linebacker and then at running back again. I hit the sled on the second day and it went back a yard. The coach holding it went with it, fell over, and got up laughing. I caught everything they threw at me. I got a headache on the Wednesday, a small one, and sat out an hour like Dr. Anand said, and was so mad about it I ate two sandwiches in a row.
Every night I went home and ate everything Donna put in front of me. I slept nine hours with the alarm set. Every morning the first thing I did was check my hands.
On the Friday, Brett came.
He was at the fence with the dads, in his golf course shirt, with his arms crossed on the top rail. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. We were doing passing drills, the backs throwing to each other, and I caught one and threw it back, a spiral, hard, right into the guy’s hands.
When we broke for water, Brett was still at the fence.
“You throw different,” he said.
“Okay.”
“You used to throw like it was hot.”
I drank my water. I had no answer for that.
“Huh,” Brett said. He uncrossed his arms and went back to the parking lot.
At the end of the day the coach went down the line handing back our cards. When he got to me he took the pen out from behind his ear and wrote in the POSITION box. He crossed it out. He wrote something else and gave me the card.
RB/LB, it said. And under that, in his writing: where has this kid been?
I put the card in my wallet, behind the other card.
At supper Gordon asked to see it. I took it out of my wallet and gave it to him, and he read it out loud. Where has this kid been? He read it twice. Then he propped it against the ketchup so everybody could see it while we ate.
“Where has this kid been,” he said again. “I’ll tell you where. Asleep. A week asleep and he wakes up a running back.”
Donna was looking at the card.
“Last year he cried,” she said.
“Donna.”
“He cried in the truck on the way there, Gordon. Every morning. I heard you tell the guys at the shop. You said he’d grow out of it.”
“Well, he did.” Gordon put a hand flat on the table. “Look at him. He did.”
Donna looked at me. I was holding a fork with a piece of potato on it.
“Did you?” she said. “Did you grow out of it?”
I didn’t know what he’d cried about. I could guess some of it, from the room.
“I like it,” I said.
That was true. Donna nodded. She kept nodding after there was nothing left to nod at. Gordon took the card off the ketchup and wiped a smear off the corner with his thumb and gave it back to me, and I put it behind the other one.
* * *
The Bow Crest team had a form too, for school, for September. It had to be signed by a parent and by me, and it had to be in by the Friday before school. On the Saturday Gordon put it on the kitchen table and went to get a pen. A guy in Edgemont phoned about a furnace that was making a noise, and Gordon went out to the truck. The form sat there with the line for my name blank.
The pen on the calendar string was dry. I tried the drawer under the phone and it was batteries and takeout menus.
Gordon’s office was off the garage. It had a desk with a computer on it and a lot of invoices in trays, a calendar from a supplier with a picture of a furnace on it, and a grey filing cabinet with four drawers. There was a mug of pens on the desk, but they were all from a hotel in Kelowna and none of them worked either. I opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet, because people keep pens in drawers.
It was files. Hanging green ones with plastic tabs. HOUSE. TRUCKS. TAXES 2007. BRETT. NATHAN.
I hadn’t meant to look. I’d been looking for a pen. But NATHAN was right there, and it was thick, and it was my name.
There were report cards. A swimming certificate. A letter from a doctor about the finger on my left hand. And at the back, in a brown envelope, papers from the adoption: letters from an agency in Calgary called Prairie Crossing, with a logo of a little house with a heart for a door; photocopies of forms in Chinese with red stamps on them; and an English page with a stamp at the bottom and NOTARIAL CERTIFICATE across the top.
I read the English one standing up.
It said the male infant was found on the fourteenth of June, 1994, at the east gate of the Yueyang Municipal Hospital in Yueyang, Hunan Province. It said no relatives could be found. It said he was taken to the Yueyang Social Welfare Institute and given the name Yue Jun. It said he was found together with a female infant. It said the female infant was also taken to the Institute. Then it went on about the date of birth being estimated from the date of finding, and there was a signature and a stamp.
Together.
I read that part again. I had my thumb on it.
The card was in my wallet in my back pocket. Wish again, together. I didn’t take it out. I didn’t need to.
Mom had papers like this somewhere. A brown envelope in a box. I’d never asked to see them. I’d never wanted to know what they said.
I put the notarial certificate back in the brown envelope. I put the envelope back in the file, behind the swimming certificate. I squared the edges of the file with my hands, let it down into its hanger, and pushed the drawer shut with my hip so it wouldn’t bang.
When I came out into the garage, Brett was there. He was getting his golf clubs out of the trunk of the old blue Civic with the cracked bumper, and he stopped with the bag halfway out.
“What were you doing in Dad’s office?”
“Looking for a pen.”
He looked at me. He didn’t look at my face. He looked at my hands, both of them, and then at the office door behind me, and then back at my hands.
“Pens are in the kitchen,” he said. “Second drawer. Left of the stove.”
“Okay.”
He got the bag the rest of the way out and swung it over his shoulder and went past me into the house. At the door he stopped and looked back at me, and he kept looking after there was no reason to.
Then he went in. I heard him open the second drawer left of the stove, and close it, and go upstairs.