Escape Velocity Read online

  I don’t know what to feel now. Sometimes I think I hate her. It seems stupid to hope for anything at all.

  Eight

  My mother returns with bags of groceries, and I help her unpack them: strawberries, romaine lettuce, pita bread, hummus, tomatoes, cucumber, capers, tuna steaks, red peppers, a loaf of sourdough, all kinds of cheese and fruit…My mouth waters.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I nod. “Starving.”

  “Help yourself to whatever, okay? I’m teaching a class this afternoon.”

  “You are? Will you come back here for dinner?”

  She puts a jar of olives on the counter with unnecessary force. “I can’t rearrange my whole life because you’re here.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I was just asking.”

  She sighs. “I’m having dinner with some of my students. They asked if they could take me out. I suppose I’ll have to come pick you up for the reading though.”

  “Could I walk there?”

  My mother brightens. “You could take the bus. I’ll write it down for you. It’s easy.”

  My mother changes into dressier clothes—loose black pants, heels, a shirt that would show cleavage if she had any boobs. Instead it shows her collarbone. Even my mother’s bones are elegant.

  She writes down directions to the bookstore. “I’m leaving you change for the bus. And my cell number, but don’t call before five, because I’ll have it turned off when I’m teaching.” She glances up at me. “You’ll be okay on your own here all afternoon?”

  I wonder what she’d do if I said no. “Yup.”

  She fastens a necklace around her throat: sparkling silver with black and green stones that lie flat against her smooth pale skin. “All right then. I’ll see you tonight.” To my surprise, she leans close and gives me a sort of one-armed hug. Her perfume is nothing like Dana Leigh’s, and I feel a wave of homesickness.

  It’s easier after she leaves. I walk around the apartment, snooping a little. My mother’s sleek wooden desk is tucked-into a corner of the living room, and there is a small black filing cabinet beside it. I tug on the drawers, but they are securely locked. Her laptop is sitting open on the desk, and I consider turning it on and going online but decide not to. Dad and I didn’t have a computer at home, so I always had to use the school ones, and despite my sixty or so friends on Facebook, I’m not really that connected to anyone.

  I push open the door to my mother’s small bedroom. Queen-sized bed with smooth white sheets, mirrored closet, pale beige blinds, one tall pine bookshelf. I run my fingers along the shelves of books and look in the closet, touching the silky clothes. On her bedside table are two novels, a small bottle of body lotion that smells like roses, and a digital alarm clock. I slide open the drawer, but all that is in there is a wooden jewelry box, a pen and a small notebook with nothing written in it. I lie on her bed until my stomach starts to rumble; then I head to the kitchen and make myself a sandwich—fresh tomatoes and cheddar—and a bowl of sliced-up nectarines and berries.

  I take it all to the living room and eat it in front of the television. Dr. Phil is interrogating a woman whose son shot some people. He wants her to take responsibility for not preventing it. I don’t get it. Her son is older than I am, and I wouldn’t blame either of my parents for anything I did. I mean, if I took a gun to school and shot people, how would that be their fault? Even if Dad handed me a gun and suggested I go shoot some people, it’d still be my choice. Dr. Phil is an idiot.

  The streets downtown are busy, crowded with people who all look as if they belong here. After small-town Drumheller, Victoria is like another world. Fairy-tale lights sparkling on the legislature buildings, boats lining the docks in the harbor, tall ivy-covered buildings, busy roads, lights and signs and doorways everywhere. Even the people around me look different: silky-haired women in high heels, clutching Starbucks coffees; a couple of brown-skinned girls with their hair covered with pretty pastel-colored scarves; a guy with spiky blue hair and a studded dog collar around his neck. Excitement is buzzing through me as I wait for my bus. Here I am, this is me, Lou Summers, alone in the city at night. It feels like anything could happen.

  I find the bookstore easily. It is huge, right in the middle of a shopping mall. A small crowd has already gathered, some taking seats in folding chairs that have been lined up in the open space of the mall’s hallway, and others milling around looking at the books or talking to each other, or standing by the food, pouring coffee and grazing from trays of cookies and cut-up vegetables. My mother is standing by a table stacked with copies of her books, and I make my way through the crowd toward her.

  “Lou!” She actually looks pleased to see me. “You didn’t have any trouble finding your way?” Without waiting for an answer, she gestures to two young women standing beside her. “Anneke and Kristina. Two of my students. My daughter, Lou.”

  Anneke is blond, tall and pretty in a generic kind of way; Kristina is short, plump, Asian. She flashes a mouthful of steel braces when she smiles at me. “Your mother is brilliant,” she says. “I guess you know that though.”

  And I guess they don’t know anything about me or my mother. I don’t want to be rude, but I can’t think of the right response. Yes, as if I do know that? Or, Thanks, as if they are somehow complimenting me by extension? Too much time passes, and Anneke and Kristina exchange uncomfortable glances. “Uh, you enjoyed the class then?” I say, belatedly.

  Kristina flashes me some more metal. “Very much,” she says. “Your mother is a very inspiring teacher. I’ve been working on this novel…well, it’s only a few chapters at this point…but now I feel like I have a direction, you know? And confidence. I mean, Zoe gave me more confidence in my own voice.” Her cheeks flush dark red, and she glances at my mother. “You really did.”

  Confidence in my own voice. I have no idea what she means, but it sounds like a nice thing to have.

  Anneke chimes in. “Everyone, well, we all talked during the breaks, you know? And everyone said it was the best writing class they’d ever taken. I learned more in three afternoons. And Zoe is so supportive. Like, there was this guy in the class whose stories, well, he read some aloud and they weren’t...” She glances at my mother. “They needed a lot of work, you know? But Zoe picked out this one thing in his story that was original and interesting and talked about how it could be developed and even though the story was so…you know?”

  I hope she expresses herself better in writing than she does out loud.

  Zoe catches my eye, and there is something there—a flicker of sympathy, maybe, or amusement—and then it is gone. “Well, you two are very kind. It is a terrific class. A real pleasure to teach,” she says. “And I always get a lot out of it myself.”

  “A two-way street,” Kristina says, nodding solemnly.

  I know my mother hates expressions like that—she has practically bitten my head off for using them. She says using clichés is sheer laziness, but now she smiles. “Exactly.”

  Then a woman—the bookstore manager, I think—is ushering everyone into their seats. The front seats are full, so I find one near the back, at the end of a row. Mostly the crowd is made up of older women, with a handful of men scattered about. The manager, who has short spiky hair and a lot of brightly colored jewelry, steps onto a low stage, adjusts a microphone and introduces my mother: “Very pleased…Zoe Summers…local poet and novelist…award nominations…critically acclaimed…” It is kind of freaky. This is the stuff I already know about my mother, the information from her book jacket basically, the public face. And yet seeing her up there in front of all these people makes it all real in a different way.

  “Your mother said she needed to be free in order to be an artist,” Dad told me once, trying to explain her decision to leave us. I look at her, the books, the crowd, and I think, So this is what she traded me for.

  My mother moves to the center of the stage. “Hello,” she says. “Thank you all for coming. I won’t bore you with a lot of talk
about myself. I’m going to read from my novel, Escape Velocity.” She drops her eyes to the page, holding the book with one hand, lightly touching her necklace with her other, and she starts to read aloud from the story of Claire.

  “Claire Rosser had always assumed that she loved her husband, but when she realized that he was in love with someone else, she felt a tremendous and unexpected sense of relief. It was all very well to love someone, but being loved— being the object of love—conferred a tremendous weight of responsibility. It wasn’t until after that weight was lifted that Claire realized it might have been the only thing holding her down. Living without it was like living in a world without gravity…”

  I’ve read these words so many times, but seeing my mother read them aloud, hearing them in my mother’s voice—well, it’s kind of hard. I’d figured out that Claire’s character is based on my mother, that Claire’s feelings are my mother’s own, but hearing her read it makes the words sink in even deeper, and it hurts. Claire escaped, and she had no regrets about it. I’m pretty sure my mother doesn’t either. My eyes sting. I blink a few times and let the words wash over me, let the meaning fall out of them so that it is like listening to a rushing stream. Like listening to music

  What scares me most is that I recognize those same feelings in myself. That desire to escape, to run away. To shake myself free of all the things that hold me stuck in place.

  I decide there and then: I will never, ever have a child.

  When my mother finishes reading, there is a moment of silence and then everyone starts to clap. The applause lasts for a while, maybe twenty or thirty seconds, and then it fades away. Except for one pair of hands at the back of the room that keep on very slowly clapping, clapping, clapping, probably only ten seconds or so longer than everyone else, but long enough that people are turning around to see who it is. A couple of people start clapping again, like they’re confused about whether they stopped prematurely; then the clapping trails off.

  Like everyone else, I crane my head around. The lone clapper is a woman standing at the back. Long fair hair streaked with gray straggling halfway down her back, a colorful scarf, faded black sweater that hangs limply to her knees, long skirt, winter boots. She’s older, maybe fifty or sixty, and extremely thin. A backpack lies on the floor beside her and a large plastic bag dangles from one arm, swinging back and forth and bumping her leg as she claps. She looks like a homeless person who has wandered in off the street, and I wonder if she just saw the crowd and decided to join in.

  Then I look back at my mother. She is staring past the crowd, her eyes fixed on the woman at the back of the room, and it is clear that the woman, whoever she is, is no stranger to my mother.

  “Bravo!” the woman calls out. “Bravo!” Her voice sounds like forty years of cigarettes.

  My mother ignores the woman and answers a few questions from the crowd. I want someone to ask if the novel is autobiographical, but no one does. Someone asks what inspired the story, and she answers evasively, talking about how so many things inspire her and how writing is an organic process and how difficult it is to analyze the origins of a novel after the story has taken on a life of its own. Liar, I think. I want to stick my hand up and say, Me! I inspired it. I was born and she had to escape before I sucked the life from her. Check out page twenty-four, where she calls breast-feeding infants parasitic creatures. Check out page seventy, where she talks about the bottomless wanting and endless neediness.

  But I don’t say anything.

  After the questions, she sits down to sign books. Anneke and Kristina wander over to me. “Great reading,” Anneke says.

  I nod. “Yes.” I look around, but I can’t see the old woman. Maybe she left. “Who was that woman at the back?” I ask. “The one who kept clapping?”

  Anneke shrugs. “Looked like a wino. Getting out of the rain, probably.”

  “Is it raining?” I look at the window, but it is so dark out now and so brightly lit in here that all I can see is the reflection of lights and bodies and books.

  “Pouring,” Anneke says sourly. “And I didn’t bring an umbrella.”

  Eventually the lineup to get books signed shrinks down to five, then two, and finally none. Kristina and Anneke head off on foot, and I follow my mother to her car.

  “Good turnout,” she says. Her voice is flat.

  “Really good,” I say, even though I have no idea what would be considered good or bad. We walk in silence, ducking our heads to avoid the rain, and get into her car. She drives fast through the dark streets. I expected her to be excited about the reading, but she seems distracted.

  “Who was the woman in the back?” I ask.

  My mother doesn’t take her eyes off the road. “What woman?”

  “The one who went on clapping after everyone else stopped. Long gray hair.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Mom?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know her? You looked sort of shocked to see her.”

  My mother says nothing. Then, just as I decide she isn’t going to respond, she turns and looks at me. “No one important,” she says. “She is no one important.”

  It is an obvious lie, but she doesn’t say anything else and something in her tone warns me to drop the subject.

  I can’t though. I can’t leave it alone. “I wondered…”

  She sighs. “What. What did you wonder?”

  “Who she was. Why she was there.”

  My mother is quiet for a long time, maybe a minute, and I start to think she isn’t going to answer at all. “She showed up once before,” she says at last. “A few months ago she came to an awards gala and tried to talk to me. She was drunk and smelled awful. It was embarrassing. I told her I didn’t want her there and, to be honest, I thought that would be the end of it.”

  “So she’s like some kind of celebrity stalker or something?”

  “I’m hardly a celebrity. But stalker? I guess we’ll see.”

  “She looked like she was maybe homeless or something. Didn’t you think? I mean, everyone else was all dressed up.”

  My mother shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

  I don’t believe her. I don’t know why I am so sure about this—I don’t know her well enough to be so sure— but I am certain that my mother is lying.

  Nine

  Zoe and I stay up late and watch one of the movies she rented. It is artsy, slow-paced and subtitled, and I’m tired, my mind too full to follow the story. I let my attention drift while keeping my eyes fixed on the flickering images, and hope my mother won’t want to discuss the movie afterward. She doesn’t. When the credits are done, she goes to bed without saying more than good night. I think she rented the movie so that we wouldn’t have to make conversation.

  The next morning I end up sleeping until almost noon, despite the time change, and when I wake, the room is bright and the apartment is still and silent.

  I lie in bed, with no real desire to get up or do anything. Tomorrow I start school here. I am nervous, as I always am when I have to go to a new school, and I don’t like the reminder that I might be here for a long time—weeks? months?—but I feel a stirring guilt as I realize that I am also excited. Back in Drumheller I could see the future stretching out in front of me like a dusty road, straight ahead all the way to the horizon. No surprises. No friends. That line from my mother’s first book slips into my head: The future was closing in and setting around her, as gray and hard as cement. That’s how I felt too. Trapped.

  Here in Victoria, I don’t know what to expect. It feels like anything could happen.

  Eventually I make myself get up. Zoe isn’t home, and I can’t be bothered showering. I pull on the same jeans I wore yesterday, pour myself a glass of orange juice and snoop around my mother’s apartment some more. It’s sort of creepy, how little clutter there is, how little there is that is personal. No photographs, no scrawled notes, no diary. Even laundry is neatly folded in the hamper in her closet—what kind of person fol
ds their dirty clothes? Her apartment is like her car—clean, empty, impersonal. I pick up her copy of Escape Velocity, which is still lying on the coffee table where she left it after last night’s reading, and flick through it for markings, notes, highlighted sections. There is nothing though—no clues to help me decode it further than I already have.

  I think again about that odd woman at the reading. My certainty that Zoe was lying is fading, but still, there is something about that woman and my mother’s reaction that I can’t let go of. It is a rough spot on a smooth surface, a dirty mark on the polished veneer, and my mind keeps going back to it the way my tongue always finds that chipped place on my front tooth.

  It feels like a crack in my mother’s armor.

  Zoe shows up mid-afternoon, but she has someone with her: a tall slender guy with dark-lashed eyes, dreadlocks to his shoulders and smooth skin that is closer to black than brown.

  “Lou, this is my friend Brian.” Zoe is wearing a white shirt and faded jeans, and she looks like she is lit up from within. I feel a pang of something—envy or admiration, love or hate—and have to look away.

  I shake his hand and wonder if Brian is the latest boyfriend. He is good-looking enough, and my mother is never without a man in her life. Men are one of the things she would talk to me about during our occasional phone calls. I guess she thinks it’s a good subject for mother-daughter bonding, only obviously I never had much to share so the conversations usually ended up with her giving me advice: Never let a man know how you really feel. Keep them guessing. Watch out for men who need you. You don’t want to be someone’s crutch. Always remember who you are. Etcetera, etcetera.

  “Are you guys dating?” I ask. I know it’s considered rude to be so direct—Dana Leigh’s always bugging me about it—but sometimes I can’t seem to help it. It’s like the words scoot right past the little brain filter that is supposed to stop them.