Leaving home
The clock said eight three five. Ruby and Isabel knew if they didn’t leave soon they’d be late for school. But they’d never done this alone before. He always took them. Why wouldn’t he get up? They’d tried everything – shouting “C’mon dad” lots of times, shaking him by the shoulders, even poking him with the backscratcher. He just lay there in his flannel pyjamas under a big pile of blankets.
They knew he hated mornings, even more so now that he’d lost his job. They weren’t supposed to wake him from the time mom left for work to the time they had to leave for school. No hollering or banging on the keyboard and even the tv had to be on real low. Until the numbers on the clock read eight two oh, then they could call up the stairs that it was time to get up (which Ruby usually did since she was the older sister – by five minutes – and since everyone said she was more responsible than Isabel). There’d be a big creaking noise from inside the bedroom, then the toilet would flush and he’d come clomping down the stairs in his Chinese slippers, his hair unkempt and his eyes bleary. “Donkey at your service,” he’d mumble. It was a joke he made every morning because he’d carry their backpacks for them until they got to school, but he was the only one who still found it funny. Then off they’d go, the two girls scooting out in front, each trying to beat the other to the corner where they’d wait for the ‘donkey’ to catch up before crossing the street. At school they’d each grab their bags and run for the yard just as the bell rang. In grade one, he’d hung around the fence watching them as they lined up with their classmates and waving at them whenever he caught their eye. But now in grade two, he’d thankfully stopped embarrassing them that way: they were happy when he just let them go and left. But this morning was different, this morning they were stuck.
They tried calling their mom’s cell, but it just kept ringing for what seemed like forever. “It’s in her bag and she doesn’t hear it,” said Ruby. Isabel tried shouting into the phone to help her mother hear, but nothing happened. Her dad would laugh when he finally woke up and they told him. “Why do we waste money on a cell phone if you never answer?” he’d say to mom at the dinner table and it wouldn’t be long before they’d be into a familiar quarrel where words like “ignorant”, “failure”, “how dare you” and “not in front of the kids” went back and forth. It would usually end with one of them shoving away a half-eaten plate of food and retreating to another room, or else there would be a stony silence at the table so that it would make your heart jump if someone coughed or sneezed or dropped a fork on the floor. Later, when Ruby and Isabel were lying in bed, they could hear more angry words and they both knew they were thinking the same thing – would their parents get a divorce, like Jilly’s parents and Amelia’s, and would they end up together with one parent or “chopped up” like Jilly and her little brother between their mom and dad? And then they’d remember how their dad had smiled the one time Isabel had had the nerve to ask him straight out (in a warm pizza parlour on a sunny winter day just after they’d seen Amelia through the window walking with her dad) and he’d said there was no way they’d get divorced because they couldn’t afford to. Isabel thought that he was just making a joke to get around answering but Ruby thought it didn’t matter about the joke so long as the answer was no.
Eight-four-five. Could they go on their own to school? Even going to the corner store was something they hadn’t yet done alone, and school was blocks and blocks further away. Alone was something you didn’t do as a kid. There was always an adult around, even if it was someone you barely knew. This was much more than just a rule, it was about being safe, and there was nothing more important than that. Even happy wasn’t as important as safe, and anyway without safe there couldn’t be any happy. Only once had they found themselves crossing the line to unsafe: their mother got distracted talking to a neighbour at a street fair and the girls got caught in the flow of the crowd and suddenly couldn’t see her. For all those minutes they were lost, the world went dark with strangeness and they stood as still as they could near the doorway of a health food store, their heads hanging, wishing they were invisible. And so now it seemed that there was really only one thing they could do, one thing that was safe, and that was to stay put.
Except that this obvious truth seemed not so obvious, at least to Isabel. It would be an unimaginably long time before mom got back, and until then, wasn’t staying home really like being alone? “What if he’s sick?” said Isabel. “He’s not sick, he’s just sleeping,” said Ruby. “But sometimes that’s what sick people do, they sleep,” said Isabel. Ruby had to admit that this was true. “Then we should stay here to help him,” she said. “But what if he’s really, really, really sick?” said Isabel, raising the stakes beyond anything either of them could grasp or handle. “I think we have to go to school and tell Ms. Belmont,” said Isabel very quietly. “Nooo,” said Ruby in a plaintive voice, wringing her hands in a gesture she’d picked up from her mother, “we’re not allowed!” Isabel found that those words, which could usually bring her forward momentum to a grinding halt, weren’t enough this time. “If we don’t go to school,” she said, “then Ms. Belmont’ll be upset because she won’t know where we are. And mom’ll be angry that we missed a day of school.” “Angry at him,” countered Ruby. “And at us,” said Isabel.
Ruby was still not convinced. Whatever Isabel said couldn’t get around the plain truth that staying home was safer than leaving. But Isabel had made up her mind because it was more frightening to her to be alone all day with a dad who wouldn’t wake up than it was to be alone on the street. She got on her backpack and headed for the front door. “You can’t go by yourself,” moaned Ruby, almost in tears. “Then come with me,” Isabel shot back. She was almost shaking with the effort to keep Ruby’s wallowing from engulfing her. With a deep sigh Ruby got hold of herself and went to get her bag. She felt that whatever they did, they should do it together.
When they got outside, they knew where to put their feet but every step was careful and heavy, like they were walking on a creaky floor. They also had to force their eyes to look up and meet other faces. The street was full of them, streaming by in different directions to the various neighbourhood schools. In the big clanging mix of bodies, bikes and scooters, the slower-moving flotillas of families, typically captained by a mother or nanny, were constantly being overtaken by the older, parentless kids who seemed intent on getting to where none of them wanted to go sooner than anyone else. Half a block from home Ruby and Isabel came to their first street crossing. Holding hands tightly, they approached the foreboding figure of the crossing guard, a big pillar of a man who wore a parka and fur cap all year round. He always stood stock still, looking off into the distance through thick, black-framed glasses perched on the end of his nose, never noticing when anyone needed to cross the street. It was as if over all the years of standing on that corner he had sprouted roots beneath the cement. Isabel and Ruby stood waiting for him to notice them. Then Ruby remembered what their father would do to get the man’s attention, and trying to be sing-songy, she shouted: “Goood mor-ning!” The fur cap and glasses slowly swivelled around, and the girls’ presence was acknowledged with a grunt so low and inarticulate that it might well be how a tree would talk if it could. Then he uprooted himself from the corner and replanted himself in the street, sticking out his red sign and emitting a single blast of a whistle that seemed to have popped out of his mouth. Across the street the girls went, and they were so pleased at having made it past this first obstacle that they kept holding hands and swinging them in happy arcs until they started to feel self-conscious under the glare of two older girls, whose spiky hair and makeup elevated them to a superior order of being.
Isabel made herself think about school. They were doing a unit on pioneer life in class – strange-looking women in long dresses and men with lots of hair on their faces. “They were hardy and resourceful people,” Ms. Belmont had declared. Isabel liked the word “hardy” because of how adding a y to hard tilted the word into a new meaning, a better one: hard was cold and mean, hardy was strong and admirable. And it gave her a little pulse of pleasure to imagine her mother or Ms. Belmont turning to her and saying: “My, what a hardy girl you are, Isabel!” So she felt that she liked the pioneers, even though their clothes looked ugly and uncomfortable and they didn't have many of her favorite things like scooters and peanut butter, and using an outhouse would have made her skin crawl. They came from long ago, and like other groups in this category – slaves on subways, concentrated Jews – they were “owed respect.” When the class had to draw pictures of the pioneers, she tried to imagine them as real, and then she’d think of the oldest person she knew, her mom's grandmother, who lived in a nursing home. Her mom always called her “ancient,” which could mean that she was as old as the pioneers or maybe older, but you couldn’t ask her about stuff like that because “her mind was falling apart.” Her hair was snowy white, her skin looked waxy and yellowish, but the most noticeable thing about her was her ankles, which were so swollen they made her feet look like the stumpy paws of an elephant. She was always lying in bed when they came to visit, wearing sunglasses and singing to herself, but every so often she would burst into tears and start wailing that all her money was being stolen. It just didn't work, using her great-grandmother as a model, no matter how much respect she was owed: Isabel couldn't picture someone wearing a pioneer bonnet with sunglasses or stumpy and smelly feet lifting a person into a saddle, and what you were supposed to hear in silent forests by glistening lakes were songs like Land of the Silver Birch, not tearful moans about lost money. It seemed there were different kinds of long-agos, some that were hardy and others that weren't, and trying to mix the two together didn't work.
Ruby was thinking about the future, specifically about how she would explain to Ms. Belmont and her parents the decision to go to school on their own. She’d won an award in grade one for good behavior and had since become a fanatic about rules. The key thing was to establish who was to blame, which was Isabel, and there was no way her sister could squirm out of that. Then Ruby would need to explain why she’d gone along with it, and she wanted the various adults to understand that this was because she loved Isabel, and you could hardly blame anybody for that. Even though it would be clear to everyone that she tried to be good, Ruby was still angry that she was in a situation that required her to make explanations. And the anger soon coalesced into an imagined outburst at Isabel about how dangerous a thing she had forced them both to do. This was already a habit of Ruby’s, a kind of pretend-game inside her head where she berated whoever had hurt her – parents, classmates, often Isabel. She got to say things that she could never say out in the open, and it would make her feel a little better, though not for very long. One way she did make her indignation palpable was to quicken her pace, soon opening up a gap that forced Isabel into a run to catch up. When Isabel grabbed hold of her arm, Ruby got red-faced with shame at all her angry thoughts. Maybe the best thing to say when they got to school was that it was both their faults; that way if there was any trouble, they would share it. But something still rankled: she was sure that Isabel would never, ever, do the same for her. That’s what was so unfair – she always thought about Isabel way more than Isabel thought about her. The unfairness hadn’t always been there: before they started school, they were not just sisters but best friends, standing up to the world together. But in school Isabel soon found new best friends and now Ruby was just her sister. Soon Ruby came to hate it when her parents would ask her innocently, “Who’s your best friend?”, because she never found one. In her heart that place still belonged to Isabel.
They turned the corner and were now on a long, tree-lined block of single-family homes. The houses were all old brick, with a patch of unfenced grass separating each one from the sidewalk. Sombre maples and chestnuts, toweringly unclimbable, stood guard at every third house or so. This was an inner city Polish neighborhood where the second generation had long ago decamped to the suburbs, leaving an ever-dwindling band of old-timers to hang on grimly, sweeping their faded porches or fussing religiously over little rectangles of lawn and small flocks of timid flowers. By now lots of houses bore the telltale signs of gentrification – floor-to-cieling windows, stained-wood decks, baby joggers parked on the porch and SUVs on the curb; on the main shopping street, lattes and sushi now jostled with perogies and kolbassa. In real estate parlance this passed for charm and everybody pretended not to notice that a mere fifteen minute walk away was an old and very unreclaimed skid row, whose addled and homeless denizens would sometimes wander the gentrifying streets pushing junk-filled shopping carts, like customers coming back from some comically twisted supermarket.
Ruby and Isabel's parents had moved into the neighborhood soon after the twins were born. Unlike most of the other parents they rented their house, and this was the cause of much bitterness in the marriage since soon after they'd started living there the landlady (with a beaky nose that made her look like a big bird) offered to sell them the place. Their mom was all for it and even lined up loans from her family to make the down payment, but their dad was against it and wouldn't budge. He didn't want to be a homeowner, didn't want to be entangled by property and tied down to a mortgage. A spate of radical activism at university had left him with a lifetime habit of thinking in apocalyptic terms, so that the future was always the most important tense and the present was just something to be gotten through. Better to be as makeshift as possible when it came to things like homes and jobs, since otherwise you could drown in quotidian banality and never notice the big changes just over the horizon.
Their mom, whose parents were both lawyers, found this attitude bracingly unconventional, and it helped sustain their marriage for years, but when her biological alarm clock went off and she insisted on getting pregnant, a makeshift existence soon lost its appeal. What she had once admired as defiance of common sense now struck her as irresponsible and even a little pathetic. Like his constant railing at politicians on tv or the imploring look he gave her as he handed her the latest draft of his resetting of “Anne of Green Gables” in Toronto's LGBT community or the heavy drinking after his community college contract was finally terminated. But the house business was the worst. It wasn't just that they could no longer afford to buy it, it also was likely that they'd soon be kicked out since big bird was moving to a nursing home in a few months and signing the place over to a nephew in Calgary, who planned to sell it. When she thought of what that would mean – ending up in a dump somewhere for twice the rent they were now paying and with only one income, all the hassles of moving, the kids having tantrums over going to another school – she found there were times that she could barely look at him. It was only when she let herself drink with him, usually on Friday nights, that the hard edge of resentment softened into a sodden vestige of their old affection. But it never lasted much beyond the weekend. After he lost his job, he took to sleeping in the attic.
The girls sensed a threat in all this but only vaguely. So long as disaster hadn't struck, a world that contained crunchy frog ice cream, Webkinz and monkey bars was still a magical place to live in. Maybe even their dad's not waking up this morning was also some kind of magic they were simply too young to understand.
There was less sidewalk traffic to contend with now, which meant that the passing faces were no longer a blur. On the other side of the street there was a boy walking with his mother. He had black hair, a pale face and a green cap. He was small, probably still in kindergarten. His mother was tall and unsmiling. She held his hand by the wrist and pulled him along like a reluctant dog on a leash. At one point he got free of her grip and stopped walking. He tried saying something to her but she cut him off in a loud, angry voice: “I don’t care! I don’t care! Do you understand?” Then she grabbed his wrist and yanked him back into motion. The woman’s words got stuck in Isabel’s head: she imagined saying them to Boris, their cat, and then clapping her hands to send him skittering away. Then she imagined saying them to her father, only this time she was the one who ran away. Other faces passed them, including familiar ones, but without the protective layer of their father’s presence every face had a strange intensity. A man with a cowboy hat and silver hair blew out a puff of cigaret smoke and gave the girls an owlish grin. A black dog started sniffing Ruby’s feet and a small fat woman attached to the other end of the leash announced in a raspy voice, “She doesn’t bite,” which did little to reassure Ruby, who was afraid of dogs and ashamed of being afraid. Three girls came by next, all with the same pale and pretty face in different sizes and wearing the same Catholic school navy-blue tunics. As they passed Ruby and Isabel, they moved in single file, with the tallest first, stiff-necked and staring straight ahead like a mother duck, and the shorter girls following with heads bowed. Isabel thought she could hear the littlest one whispering to herself. It was as if they were part of some other, hidden world.
As the sisters got close to Forrest Avenue, the neighborhood shopping street and the last big hurdle on the way to school, a sudden clatter of noise and shouting brought them to a halt. Three boys, ages 11 or 12, came bursting out of a laneway that ran behind the Forrest Avenue stores. One was on a bike and the two others were running full tilt, pushing a shopping cart and hollering in mock pathetic voices, “Spare change! Spare change!” The cart itself was full of plastic bags, pop cans and beer bottles, sticks and newspapers, with a blue tarp flapping over the edge. One of the runners pulled the tarp free and started wearing it like a cape and soon all three had a new chant: “Superbum! Superbum!”
By the time they were halfway down the block, a tall man with scraggly gray hair wearing a torn t-shirt and black jogging pants came limping out of the laneway. The girls immediately recognized him because one of his arms was a stump. His name was Gord and they knew this because he panhandled in front of the liquor store where their dad had got to know him over the years, so that whenever they went with their dad to buy wine he'd made them say hello. “Homeless people are people,” their dad said to them, explaining why he did this. “They have names, they're not animals.” Their dad would always shake Gord's hand after giving him a few dollars (though the girls noticed that he'd wipe his hands with sanitizer after he got back to the car). Gord would crouch down, and giving them a mostly toothless grin he'd say: “I bet you'd like to know how I lost my arm.” After the first time they knew, but they still held on tight to their dad's arms. “You know when you're in the car with your mom and dad and they tell you not to stick your arm out of the window when they're driving? Well, I was a bad boy and didn't listen, so ...” And he'd shake his stump for effect, which always got a chuckle out of their dad.
Now, as this man stared at the trio of boys far out of reach with his shopping cart, he let out a howl like a dog in pain and then plopped himself down on the sidewalk, his whole body shaking. The girls couldn't figure out what to make of this, but they both knew instinctively that they wanted to get as far away as they could before he noticed them.
They now had to get across Forrest Avenue. Normally there was a crossing guard on this corner, but the guard was gone, which meant it was already after nine. There was no traffic light here or at any corner nearby, and the cars, trucks and buses rumbled past in an unbroken convey, oblivious to the special pleading in the eyes of two girls stranded on the sidewalk. They waited for what seemed a long time. At last the traffic ebbed on one side and they advanced into the middle of the street, but the cars kept coming the other way and Ruby suddenly realized that if they didn’t hurry back to the sidewalk they’d be trapped, with cars coming at them from all sides. Back on the curb it was another long wait, and standing there looking at the traffic gave them both a strange feeling, like they were being sucked into all that movement.
Isabel looked up and saw that someone was standing next to them: it was Gord. “I know you girls, don't I?” he said in a hoarse voice and they nodded shyly. “Well, I'm gonna go to that school and find the rotten punks who stole my cart.” He glared at them: “You wouldn't know who they are, would you?” Isabel shook her head, Ruby was too afraid to do anything. “I get it: don't wanna be tattletales. Don't blame you, but I'll find them, and when I do, I'm gonna teach them a lesson.” And then he smiled in a crooked sort of way, and stood quietly staring at his feet, maybe imagining what that lesson would be. Ruby reached for Isabel's hand: what would they do now? Gord let out a grunt and moved off the sidewalk. Then he stuck his stump out and all the traffic came to a screeching halt. A step or two into the street he turned around, “You coming?” As if in a daze they responded to his summons. He scooped Isabel up into his good arm and told Ruby to hang on to his t-shirt, and slowly they crossed the avenue, and it seemed as if all the cars and trucks and buses and cabs were snorting impatiently, full of pent-up menace that was only being held in check by magic emanating from that chopped off arm.
They were across. Isabel noticed, as Gord let her down, his strong smell. They thanked him, trying not to look in his eyes. He crouched down and gave them a big smile: “A pair of cuties. Twins huh? I bet you” (his finger moved from one to the other) “you look more like your mom and you more like your dad ... Or maybe it's the mailman.” He let out a raucous laugh. His teeth were brownish. “I've always liked girls way better than boys.” Then he encircled them with his good arm and hugged them. His arm felt really strong. “If you ever need help crossing streets, Gord's your man.”
When the three of them walked into the office, Wanda the school secretary got up from her desk and looked at them nervously. She looked a lot littler than Gord. “You girls better get to class,” she said and handed them each a pink note to give to Ms. Belmont. As they were leaving they heard the two adults talking: “No, they're not my kids. So what?” “This is school property.” “I want my cart back and I'm not leaving ...” Then there was a banging noise and as they got to the end of the hall, there was yelling and then Mr. McLatchie the gym teacher was running past them towards the office and Ms. Belmont was standing at the classroom door and she looked nervous too and she didn't even take their slips but just told them to come in and join the others and for everybody to be absolutely quiet.
Later, after the sirens and police cars and all the kids at the window watching Gord being led out with a red streak through his gray hair and police all around him, like a king and his escort, and then the principal Mrs. Wright taking Isabel and Ruby to her office and wanting to know if “that man” “did anything” to them – after all that, it didn't seem a surprise to find their mother waiting on the bench outside the office a little after lunch. Ruby wanted to explain to her that it all happened because dad hadn't woken up, Isabel wanted to see if their mother was proud of them for making it all the way to school on their own. But their mother was crying, and so they both said nothing.