He phoned at six-fifteen exactly.
Tracy got it on the second ring, with a wooden spoon in her other hand. “Hello? Yes. Yes, she is. Can I ask who’s... oh. Okay. Hang on.” She put her hand over the bottom of the phone and turned around to me at the table with her whole face lit up. “It’s a boy,” she whispered. “He says he’s a friend from school. His name’s Nathan.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, and gave me the phone, and then stood there with the spoon.
I took it upstairs. I shut my door and sat on the floor with my back against the bed, where nobody could see me from the hall.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said.
Neither of us said anything. The Hawkwood kitchen went on behind him, and I knew every sound in it. The dishwasher, which clunked when it changed cycles. The radio on the windowsill on CBC. Gordon, somewhere far off, telling somebody about a heat exchanger.
“This is weird,” Nathan said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m on your phone.”
“I’m on yours.”
Then we both laughed at the same time, and couldn’t stop, and I had to put my face in my knees so Tracy wouldn’t hear. It went on until he said “okay, okay,” and breathed out. He’d leaned back against the kitchen wall by the calendar. I could tell from the way his voice moved. I used to lean there too.
“Donna’s looking at me,” he said, lower. “She’s doing the face.”
“Which face?”
“The one where she’s pretending she isn’t.”
“Go upstairs. Take the cordless. It reaches as far as the landing if you hold it up.”
“How do you know that?”
I didn’t answer that. He laughed again, once, through his nose. Then the stairs creaked under him, one, two, the fourth one loud. I’d known it would be the fourth one.
* * *
We couldn’t do it on the phone. There was always somebody. Tracy on the couch with the TV turned down too low to be watching it. Donna in the hall putting away towels that were already put away. Gordon picking up the extension in the garage to call a supplier and saying “Oh, sorry, bud,” and not hanging up for a second too long.
So we did it on MSN, at night, after everybody was asleep.
His account was my old one. I gave him the password at school the next day, writing it on the back of his hand in the hall by the gym, while about forty people went past and didn’t notice. He read it and looked at me.
“Barnswallow?”
“It’s a bird.”
“I know it’s a bird.”
“I like birds,” I said. “Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything,” he said, and he didn’t, and he didn’t laugh either. He just put his hand in his pocket like he was keeping it.
The first night we talked until two. The family computer in Royal Oak was in the corner of the living room, right under Tracy’s room, so I turned the volume off and typed with two fingers so the keys wouldn’t click, and sat in the light of the screen in my pyjamas with a blanket around my shoulders like I was camping. nate says:
u there dekker #7 says:
here nate says:
ok. tell me stuff dekker #7 says:
what stuff nate says:
everything. i dont know anything. gordon asked me at dinner if i wanted to do “the usual” saturday and i said sure. i dont know what the usual is dekker #7 says:
the dump. saturday morning with the trailer. then tim hortons. he gets a double double and a box of timbits and you eat the timbits in the truck and he says dont tell your mother nate says:
does she know dekker #7 says:
she always knows. she says it every time. she says did you two have a nice time at tims
He typed lol and then nothing for a while. nate says:
ok ur turn. ask me something
That was how it went. One of us asked and the other one told. Every night that first week, and most nights after.
He gave me Royal Oak. The batteries were in the drawer under the microwave. The hot water ran out after one and a half showers. The cat next door was called Pickle and would come in if you left the back door open. Tracy sang in the car, every song, even the ones she didn’t know the words to, and you weren’t supposed to say anything. Murray said kiddo on the phone and buddy in person. Aunt Trish’s husband, Kurt, called him Squirt, and if Kurt ever called me Squirt I should say don’t, because he always had.
In return I gave him Hawkwood. Donna hid the good chocolate behind the flour. On the basement stairs it was the second step from the top that creaked, not the fourth, and Brett knew it too and stepped over it. Gordon said bud, and Donna said sweetheart, and Brett mostly didn’t call me anything, or Nate when he wanted something. nate says:
he calls me nate all the time dekker #7 says:
what nate says:
like every day. nate pass the salt. nate you awake. nate whats up with you dekker #7 says:
he never called me that every day
Neither of us typed anything after that for a minute.
* * *
On Thursday he gave me back the wizard.
He did it at my locker after third period, in the crowd, without saying a word. He just held out a sandwich bag, the kind with the zipper, and in the bottom of it was the wizard, lying on his side with his staff, wrapped in a piece of paper towel so he wouldn’t get scratched.
I took it. I held the bag in both hands.
“He’s yours,” Nathan said. “He’s not mine. Manny made him for you.”
“Manny doesn’t know that.”
“I know it,” he said, and then the bell went, and he went off down the hall toward the gym with the football guys, and I stood at my locker holding a sandwich bag with a wizard in it while people went around me like water around a rock.
That night I put him on the shelf over my desk in Royal Oak, beside the soccer medal. I put him facing the window, so he could see the lane.
* * *
On Friday he sat with me at lunch.
I was on the bleachers by the field, at the end farthest from the doors, where I’d eaten every lunch that week. Tiffany had asked me twice to eat with her group, and I’d said next time both times. I had Tracy’s turkey sandwich and a Nanaimo bar gone soft in the bag.
He came out of the side doors with his lunch in a Co-op bag and walked straight across the grass and sat down two rows below me, sideways, with his back against the bench above.
“Hi,” he said.
“People will see.”
“So?”
Then Manny came out of the same doors. He stopped on the steps. He looked around for Nathan, found him, and came across the grass slower, with his hands in his hoodie pocket, and stood at the bottom of the bleachers.
“Hey,” he said to Nathan. Then he looked at me.
I’d known Manny since Grade 5. He chewed the left side of his lip when he was nervous, and he was doing it now. He’d sat by himself in the cafeteria for the first two days of school, at our table by the window, waiting for Nathan to come. I didn’t have to see it to know. Get faster updates on g.com.
“This is Paige,” Nathan said.
“Hey,” said Manny.
“Hi.”
He sat down at the end of Nathan’s row, not right beside him. He took out his lunch: a paratha folded in foil, the way his mom always packed it, and a juice box. I’d eaten half of Manny’s lunches for four years. His mom packed extra on purpose and pretended she didn’t. I made myself look at my sandwich.
“You’re new,” Manny said.
“From Lethbridge.”
“Cool.” He nodded. He didn’t have anything after that. Manny always had something after that. He looked at Nathan, and at me, and at Nathan again, and his face did a thing I’d never seen it do. It shut.
“You want to come to the skate park after?” he said to Nathan.
“Can’t. Practice.”
“Right. Yeah.” Manny unwrapped the foil a bit more. “Practice.”
A girl from 9A went by along the bottom of the bleachers with two friends. She looked up at the three of us, then at Nathan and me, and said to her friends, not quietly, “Are they related?” Her friends laughed, and they kept walking.
“People keep asking me that,” Nathan said.
“Asking what?” said Manny.
“If we’re related.”
Manny looked at us. He looked at us a long time, me and then Nathan, our faces, back and forth, as if the girl had handed him a puzzle with a piece missing. He didn’t ask about it. He held out the paratha to Nathan instead.
“My mom made too much,” he said. “Like always.”
Nathan tore it in half and took his half. Manny held on to the other half for a second. Then he looked up at me and held it out.
“You want some? It’s aloo. It’s good.”
I took it. I said thank you. It tasted exactly the way it had in Grade 5, on the steps outside our elementary school with his mom’s foil on my knee. I ate it slowly, so my face wouldn’t do anything, and Manny watched me eat it the whole time.
* * *
The second week, I phoned Hawkwood.
I’d dialled the number on Tuesday night in the hospital, six digits of it, and put it down. This time I dialled all seven, sitting on my bedroom floor at a quarter to eight on a Monday, and it rang twice, and somebody picked up.
“Reimer residence.”
It was Donna.
I hadn’t heard her voice since the morning she’d knocked on my door with the pancakes. It was the same voice. A little higher on the phone. A little tired. I knew exactly how she was standing: at the counter, with her hip against it and the phone between her ear and her shoulder and both hands in the sink.
I couldn’t say anything.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry. Hi. Is Nathan there?”
“Who’s this, please?”
“It’s Paige. From school.”
“Oh,” Donna said. Her voice did something. “Oh. Okay. Hang on, Paige.” She didn’t put her hand over the phone. She turned and called down the hall toward the stairs: “Nathan? Nathan. There’s a girl on the phone.”
There was a girl on the phone. It was me.
His feet came down the stairs, the fourth one loud. He said “Thanks,” and Donna said something I didn’t catch, and then she didn’t leave. She stood there. I’d done it with her a hundred times, when Manny called and she stood in the kitchen wiping the same bit of counter.
“Hi,” Nathan said, very flat.
“She’s standing there,” I said.
“Yep.”
“She’s wiping the counter.”
“Yep.”
“It’s the same spot. By the toaster.”
“Yep,” Nathan said, and I put my hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t laugh into the phone.
I phoned every night that week. By the Thursday Donna didn’t ask who it was. She said, “Oh, hi, Paige,” the second I spoke, in a voice that smiled, and called up the stairs: “Nathan! It’s Paige.”
On the Friday Brett answered.
“Yeah?”
“Hi. Is Nathan there?”
There was a second of nothing. Then, without moving the phone from his mouth, he yelled up the stairs.
“Nate. It’s your girlfriend.”
From a long way off, Nathan’s voice. “She’s not.”
“Sure,” said Brett. He put the phone down on the counter and walked away.
* * *
“Your mom thinks we’re going out,” Nathan said on MSN that night. dekker #7 says:
she’s not my mom nate says:
u know what i mean. she asked me at supper if i liked you. she said it like this. “do you LIKE her” dekker #7 says:
what did u say nate says:
i said shes nice. gordon said nice is good. brett laughed into his milk dekker #7 says:
ew nate says:
EW dekker #7 says:
tracy keeps saying “your friend nathan” like this. “your FRIEND nathan” nate says:
we literally were each other dekker #7 says:
i know nate says:
ew
It was a joke, and it was the best joke I’d had all year, because it was ours. Nobody else in the world could get it.
The next Saturday Tracy came to pick me up from the Crowfoot library, where we’d been sitting at the same table pretending to do the science worksheet. She came in through the doors with her keys and her sunglasses on her head and saw us. She saw him stand up when she came over. He was so much taller than her.
“So you’re Nathan,” she said.
He was quiet for a second. He was looking at her. I don’t know what his face was doing. I couldn’t look.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hi. Hi, Ms. Dekker.”
“Tracy,” she said, and shook his hand, and then held onto it a second, and looked up at him. “You’re a big one.”
“Yeah,” he said. His voice went funny.
“You too.”
We both smiled at her. We smiled very politely all the way to the doors. Then she turned to go out ahead of me, and I looked back at him over my shoulder, and he was standing by the table with his hand still out a little where she’d let go of it.
He mouthed it at me. Ew.
I mouthed it back. Then I got in the car with my mom.
* * *
A few nights after that, Tracy was making supper and talking about her day. A guy at work had brought in muffins with bran in them and lied about it. The C-Train had stopped for twenty minutes outside Lions Park. She was cutting carrots.
I said, without planning to, “Rusty used to sleep on the heat vent.”
She stopped cutting.
“In the hall,” I said. “At the old house. On Twenty-first Street. He used to lie on the heat vent in the hall in the winter, and you had to step over him to get to the bathroom.”
Nathan had told me on MSN the night before. He’d told me in four lines, and then typed dont say it unless u want to.
Tracy put the knife down.
“You remembered,” she said.
She came around the counter and took my face in her hands. Her hands smelled like carrots. Her eyes went, all at once, the way they did in the car outside the Co-op, but this time she was smiling, and she didn’t say anything about the poplars.
“You remembered Rusty,” she said. “Oh, Paigey. Oh, honey. Dr. Anand said it might come back. She said. Oh my God. What else? Do you remember anything else?”
“Not really,” I said. “Just that. Just him on the vent.”
“That’s okay,” Tracy said. “That’s okay. That’s enough. That’s a start.” She kissed my forehead, hard, and went back around the counter and picked up the knife. She cut three more carrots. Then she put it down again and laughed and wiped her eyes with her wrist. “Rusty on the vent. God. He was so fat.”
I stood at the counter and smiled.
The floor of it was a long way down. I could feel how far down, standing there in her kitchen with her kiss still on my forehead. Somewhere under the floor of the kitchen in Royal Oak there was nothing at all, and I’d just stepped out onto it, and she had no idea.
* * *
Late that night, after Tracy had gone to bed singing, I sat at the computer in my blanket. dekker #7 says:
i did the vent nate says:
what did she do dekker #7 says:
she cried. good crying. she said “you remembered” nate says:
ok nate says:
good dekker #7 says:
is it good
The little line at the bottom said nate is typing. Then it stopped. Then it started again. nate says:
theres something i didnt tell you dekker #7 says:
what nate says:
in gords office. in the filing cabinet. theres a file with ur name. my name. NATHAN. it has the adoption stuff in it nate says:
theres a paper in english. it says where they found you. east gate of a hospital in yueyang. june 14 1994 nate says:
it says you were found together with a female infant
I read it. I read together. dekker #7 says:
what nate says:
together with a female infant. another baby. a girl. they found you with a girl nate says:
i read it in august. i didnt know if i should tell you dekker #7 says:
i never saw that. they never showed me nate says:
do you know what yours says. mine i mean. your new one dekker #7 says:
no. do you nate says:
no. mom has a brown envelope somewhere. i never looked. i never wanted to
The house ticked. Upstairs, Tracy turned over, and the bed creaked, and went quiet again. dekker #7 says:
together nate says:
yeah dekker #7 says:
it doesnt mean anything. lots of babies got found together. they found babies all the time nate says:
yeah dekker #7 says:
i’ll ask her where it is nate says:
ok
I asked Tracy the next morning, at breakfast, with my mouth full of Shreddies, like it didn’t matter.
“Where are my adoption papers?”
She looked up from the Herald. “Why? Is it for school? Oh, honey. They’re... God. They’re in a box somewhere. A brown envelope. I put them somewhere safe and now I don’t know where safe is.” She frowned at the dining room, at the boxes. “They might be at Trish’s. In the storage unit. I left a lot of the filing there. Why? Do you want to see them?”
“Just wondering.”
“I’ll find them,” she said. She wrote PAPERS? on the back of her hand in pen and left for work, and it went down the driveway on the back of her hand in the morning sun. She’d wash it off before lunch. I knew that the way I knew everything about her now, from the outside.