Record Breaker
RECORD
BREAKER
Robin Stevenson
Text copyright © 2013 Robin Stevenson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known
or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Stevenson, Robin, 1968-
Record breaker [electronic resource] / Robin Stevenson.
Electronic Monograph
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 9781554699605(pdf) -- ISBN 9781554699612 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8637.T487R42 2013 jC813'.6 C2012-907284-2
First published in the United States, 2013
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012952479
Summary: In 1963, cataclysmic world events threaten to overwhelm Jack as his family tries to deal with the death of his baby sister.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia
through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover design by Teresa Bubela
Cover photography by Getty Images
In Canada:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 5626, Station B
Victoria, BC Canada
V8R 6S4
In the United States:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 468
Custer, WA USA
98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
16 15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1
To Sarah Harvey—fabulous editor, generous mentor and great friend.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
One
The world record for rocking in a rocking chair is ninety-three hours and eight minutes, set six years ago, in 1957, by Mrs. Ralph Weir, of Truro, Nova Scotia. More than three days of nonstop rocking! Of course, Mrs. Weir never had to deal with my father.
“What are you doing in my chair?” Dad was standing across the living room with his hat still in his hand. “I’ve been on my feet all day. Move it.”
“I can’t,” I told him. “I’ve been rocking since I got home from school. Almost three hours.” You wouldn’t think rocking in a rocking chair would be physically demanding, but my legs were getting tired already. My calf muscles were starting to burn. Still, I figured I had to be able to rock longer than Mrs. Weir. She was in her fifties, after all. Old enough to be a grandmother.
My father gave an exaggerated groan as he hung his hat on the coat rack inside the door. “Don’t tell me this is another record attempt.”
Why else would anyone rock for three hours? I wondered. I didn’t say it out loud though, because Dad gets hopping mad if he thinks I’m being cheeky, and I couldn’t afford to annoy him. I needed his chair for at least another ninety hours. “I really think I can do this one,” I said instead. “I can break the record.”
He took off his coat and set his briefcase down. “How’s your mother?” he asked, lowering his voice.
“Really good,” I said. “She was up when I got home from school. And she’s making dinner! Sausages.” I could hear them sizzling in the pan.
“Thought I smelled something good.” Dad’s face relaxed into a smile. “You should be helping her, Jack.”
“I offered.” I rocked more vigorously. “She said I could do this.”
He took a couple of steps toward the kitchen; then he stopped and glanced back at me. “You do realize that you’re not eating dinner in that chair?”
“Dad! I can’t stop now. If I stop now, the last three hours was a waste of time.”
“As opposed to what?”
“Huh?” I didn’t know what he meant.
Dad frowned. “Pardon. Not huh.”
“Sorry. Pardon.”
“You can rock some more after dinner, if you must. Now come on. Get out of that chair and help your mother get dinner on the table.” He headed into the kitchen, calling my mother’s name. “Marion? Marion?”
I kept rocking.
“Marion? You know what your son’s doing now?”
Mom’s voice was soft, and I had to slow my rocking and strain to hear what she was saying. “It’s harmless enough. How much trouble can he get into in a rocking chair?”
There was a long silence, and I knew what Dad was thinking about. A few weeks earlier I had tried to eat twenty-four raw eggs in less than two minutes and eleven seconds but threw up after the first seven. Eggs, not minutes. Right on Allan’s shoes. Of course, Allan had to go and tell his mom, who told his dad, who told my dad.
“Your sister,” Dad muttered. “Sending him that book.”
Mom’s sister is my aunt Jane. She sent me the Guinness Book of Records for my eleventh birthday, which was a year and a half ago. All that time, and I still haven’t broken any records.
Mom actually laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, just a hmph with a hint of a chuckle in it, but the sound made me grin all the same. I rocked harder, the chair thumping a soft rhythm on the carpet. Out of bed, making dinner and now laughing: today was a very good day. Mom didn’t laugh much anymore, not since Annie had died, but whenever she did, I always felt this sense of relief. Like someone had lifted something heavy off me and I could suddenly breathe more easily.
“Jane couldn’t have predicted that he’d take it like this,” Mom said.
“Hmm.” Dad lowered his voice, but I could still hear him. “Good to see you up.”
I couldn’t see into the kitchen from the chair, but I didn’t need to. I could picture Mom standing at the stove, her shoulders hunched up all tense, like she was in pain, her hair limp and her face pale above the same old yellow dress and cardigan she wore practically every day. In the old days, she had always sprayed on perfume and put on bright lipstick right before Dad walked through the door.
I used to be embarrassed by how lovey-dovey they were—the way Dad used to kiss Mom when he got home from work, grabbing her and pulling her close, bending her backward as if they were movie stars. He’d put on his Perry Como voice and sing to her: “Till the end of time, long as stars are in the blue…” I used to think it was sappy. Now I’d give anything to have things go back to the way they were.
Maybe Mom would laugh again if I broke this record. I closed my eyes and imagined her telling her friends about it: My son Jack set a world record, can you believe it? He rocked in a rocking chair for three days! What a riot…I could almost hear the peals of laughter from Mom, the chuckles and admiring comments from her friends.
I rocked harder. My legs were starting to hurt. I grabbed the Thermos from beside my chair and took a sip of water. A very small sip. Peeing was going to be a cha
llenge. I had put an empty bucket beside the chair, just in case, but it wasn’t going to be easy to pee into it without stopping rocking. I couldn’t imagine how Mrs. Weir had managed it.
“Jack! Come set the table.” Dad stepped into the living room. “You can go back to your rocking after dinner, if you really must.”
“I can’t stop. I already explained this, remember?”
He frowned at me. “Of course you can, Jack. You need to eat.”
“The record is for continuous rocking. You can’t just do an hour here and an hour there. Otherwise there’d be thousands of old people breaking the record every day. It wouldn’t mean anything.”
“And it is supposed to mean what, exactly?”
“It’s a record,” I said, exasperated. “It means you are the best in the world at something.”
“At rocking a chair? Hmm. And you have to do this for how long?”
“Ninety-three hours and eight minutes. Well, nine minutes, I guess. To beat the old record.”
He stared at me. “Ninety-three hours! Good Lord, that’s almost four days, Jack. You can’t sit there for four days.”
“I’m not just sitting,” I reminded him. “I’m rocking. It’s actually good exercise.” I thought this might help my cause, since Dad always wanted me to be more active.
He snorted, and Mom appeared at his shoulder. “You have school tomorrow,” she said. “Anyway, you can’t stay up all night.”
I looked at my watch. “I’m past three hours already,” I said. “I really think I can do this.”
Dad crossed his arms across his chest. “And I really think you’d better get your backside out of that chair and help your mother get dinner on the table.”
“But…”
“Now. And don’t you let me hear you arguing with your mother again.”
You would have thought he’d want me to succeed, but apparently not. I stopped rocking and the squeak-bounce of the chair was replaced by silence.
I stood up and staggered toward the kitchen. My legs were trembling like I’d run a marathon, but I knew I could have beaten the record if they’d left me alone. When was I ever going to get four days at home without anyone telling me what to do?
Never, that’s when.
Two
It felt like the middle of the night when Dad shook me awake. “Jack. Jack.”
“What?”
“Time to get up,” Dad said. “School day.”
It was dark in my room, but the light from the hallway was shining in through my bedroom door. I could hear rain dripping from the roof: the eaves trough was blocked again.
“I have to go to work,” he said. “Get yourself some breakfast, and don’t bother your mother.”
“She’s staying in bed again, isn’t she?”
He nodded. “I think so. Yes.”
It wasn’t unusual these days, but she’d seemed so much better last night. She’d even laughed, sort of. I got out of bed and picked up my pants, still lying where I’d dropped them at bedtime. “What’s wrong with her, Dad?” I asked for the hundredth time.
He didn’t answer for a long minute. He stood there, watching me dress. Finally he sighed, a long, noisy gust of air, like something deflating, and said the same thing he always said. “She’s just sad, Jack. Very, very sad.”
I made myself some toast, brushed my teeth and packed myself a lunch. There wasn’t a sound from my parents’ bedroom. I eyed the closed door. Dad had said not to bother my mother, but it never felt right to leave for school without even seeing her. I pushed the door open a crack and peeked inside. The room was dark, the curtains closed, and Mom was lying curled up under a heap of blankets in the middle of the bed. I tiptoed into the room and leaned forward, bending over her so that I could see her face in the light spilling in from the hallway. She didn’t move. “Are you okay?” I whispered in her ear. Her hair smelled like lemons and stale sweat.
She turned her face away from me, but not before I saw the tear-shiny streaks on her cheeks.
“Mom?” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother you. I’m going to school now. I’ll see you later.” I backed out of the room and closed the door behind me.
I usually walked to school with Allan. My dad and his dad are cousins, which makes us second cousins. We’d sort of grown up together, and he only lived a couple of blocks away. It would’ve made more sense for him to pick me up, because I lived closer to the school, but Allan insisted that we take turns. I’d pointed out that this meant I had to walk the two blocks to his house and then right back past my own, but Allan insisted it was only fair. I didn’t mind the actual walking, but his lack of logic drove me crazy.
Mrs. Miller met me at the front door of their house. She was wearing a white housecoat, and her hair was in curlers.
“Come on in,” she said. “Allan’s getting his things ready. How’s your mother?”
I shrugged. “Same, I guess.”
“You poor dear.”
There was a hard lump lodged in my throat, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. It had been almost a year since Annie died, and Mom had been like this for most of that time. On her good days, she got out of bed and tried to act normal, but you could tell she still thought about Annie a lot. She often had a blank look on her face, like her mind was far away, and I’d have to ask her a question at least twice before she’d hear me. And those were the good days. On the bad days, she didn’t leave her room.
Dad always said she was sad, but lots of people were sad, and they still got out of bed every morning and looked after their kids. I knew it was awful that Annie had died, but sometimes it seemed like my mother had forgotten she still had a kid to look after. Didn’t I count? I couldn’t help wondering if there was something else wrong with her, like cancer or something. She complained of headaches a lot, and sometimes she wouldn’t eat at all. I had a feeling Mrs. Miller knew more about my mother’s problems than I did, and that bothered me. It always made me nervous when grown-ups whispered things to each other. It made me think there was something scary going on that no one was telling the kids about.
Allan and I walked to school in the rain. Allan’s house was a big new one at the end of a dead-end street. A cul-de-sac, Mrs. Miller called it. We walked up the hill and past the brick bungalow where my friend David used to live. Before he moved away, we’d played together practically every day. I’d done jigsaw puzzles at his kitchen table, eaten his mom’s pumpkin bread and peanut butter candy, played Yahtzee in his bedroom, climbed the old tree in his backyard. I still thought of it as David’s house, but he’d been gone for months now. I kicked a pine cone along in front of me as we walked around the bend and on to Church Street. The houses on Church Street were smaller and more rundown than where Allan lived. Mine was the fourth one on the left. I knew Mom was probably still in bed, but I couldn’t help scanning the windows as we walked past.
“Aren’t you ever going to put the fence back up?” Allan asked. He screwed his face up as if my house had a bad smell.
It was a bit of a mess: piles of wood stacked alongside the house, dead grass and weeds, a mound of dirt still heaped up against the back wall. Dad had pulled the fence down last fall so that the workers could get their machines into the backyard. He’d hired them to build a fallout shelter for us: Just in case, he’d said. Best to be prepared.
It was the American president, John F. Kennedy, who had got Dad so steamed up about the bomb. Kennedy had said people should build shelters in case of nuclear war. Dad started talking about it all the time, waving around a copy of Life magazine, but Mom was pregnant with Annie then, and she said she didn’t want to think about that sort of thing. She said Dad was obsessed and that there wasn’t going to be a war. “People aren’t that stupid,” she said.
Mom glanced my way. I was on the couch with a comic book, pretending to read, but my ears were wide open and I was hanging on every word. “Even if it happened, we wouldn’t be a target,” she said. “New York, maybe, or Washington.”
“Ottawa could be a target,” my father said. “Even Hamilton, with the steel factories. Besides, New York isn’t that far away. There’d be fallout.”
Our house in Ancaster was only a twenty-minute drive from Hamilton’s steel factories. I imagined the bright flash, the ball of white fire like a second sun on the horizon, the column of smoke rising into a poisonous mushroom cloud, the invisible but deadly radiation being carried toward us by the wind.
“For God’s sake, Frank. That’s enough.” Mom’s lips were pressed together tightly, one arm cradling her belly protectively. “You’ll give Jack nightmares.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard. Truth was, I was already having nightmares. Every time we had a drill at school and had to hide under our desks, I’d start thinking and dreaming about it all over again. Would it be better to die right away? If Hamilton was hit directly, we’d be vaporized, like the people in Hiroshima. That might be better than a slow, lingering death from radiation poisoning.
Allan had lent me a book a few months earlier—he’d swiped it from his parents’ bookshelf, but they didn’t know—called Alas, Babylon. It was about some survivors of a nuclear holocaust in a small town in Florida. They managed to stay alive by fishing and farming and shooting the highwaymen who tried to steal from them. We didn’t have a river to fish in, or land to farm, or a gun to defend ourselves. Even if the bomb and the fallout missed us, I didn’t think we’d stand a chance of surviving the aftermath.
I suppose Dad felt like he had to do something, because after Annie was born, he started planning the fallout shelter, reading government brochures and sketching out designs, calculating how many inches of concrete or steel it would take to protect us from radiation. I guess it should’ve made me nervous, but the truth was, it made me feel better. We were doing something. Like Randy, the hero of Alas, Babylon, we would be prepared.