Skylark Read online

  Clem and I would go out in the evenings, pedal our crappy bikes through the city’s neighborhoods to rummage Blue Boxes for returnables, stuffing the sticky cans and bottles into the emptied schoolbags that swung from our handlebars.

  One of those evenings, Clem swiped a gleaming bike from someone’s garage and left his own in its place. Did his rounds on that good bike, filling its titanium basket and leather panniers with bottles, ringing its silver bell as he rode down the center line of the city’s dark streets. After dumping the night’s collection at the apartment, he headed out on his own, telling me not to worry. I thought maybe he was going to sell that bike, but he came home on his old five-speed. He’d returned the rich kid’s bicycle and retrieved his own. It wasn’t the last time Clem borrowed that kid’s bike though.

  He was always careful with it. Never did a slide or a skid and not one bunny hop. Mom, meanwhile, scrambled up work with ads on Craigslist and posts on Facebook. She’d weed someone’s garden for a few hours or help paint someone’s front stairs, but her back would act up and she’d lie on the couch in pain for two days afterward. She applied for jobs too, but pickings were slim, partly because there just weren’t a lot of jobs and partly because she had never finished high school.

  Finally, she got a job at Sandwich Shack. The owner is nice and lets her sit on a high stool to build sandwiches, which saves her back. He also gives her leftovers for Clem and me. But he won’t give Mom more than three shifts a week. Mom says nobody hires full-time because then they’d have to pay for their employees’ health insurance and other stuff.

  Clem begged to get a job to help out, but Mom gave him the look. The you’ve-got-homework-to-finish-because-you’re-graduating-high-school look.

  We couldn’t chase the white page away permanently. It kept landing on the door like it was a ghost that wanted in and that was that. Once, I came around the corner after school just as the landlord’s teenage son tacked it to the door. I looked at him, hoping that maybe if he was caught in the act, there was some rule that he had to take it down. He smiled, but his lips were tight. He squinted as if he couldn’t quite see me. As if I was so small. He left the notice on the door and walked away like he was angry, not saying hello.

  I’ve thought about that notice of his and how it was so mean. Now, I fill my own pages—blue ink on loose leaf. Which is stronger? His scolding legalese? Or these rhymes that find each other with ease?

  Gloves

  At the BMX track, Clem and I are known as The Kids, but Clem’s The Star. The Champ. I like to ride, but mostly I sit on the fence and watch Clem. I gulp when he catches air. My stomach knots when he does his daredevil moves. My eyes hurt following him as he whizzes past—a streak, a blur, a smudge of color. I’ve heard that the Earth turns fast, spins a thousand miles an hour. Most of the time, that’s hard to believe. But not when Clem pumps around the track. Speed is what he is.

  Three years ago, the neighborhood association put in the BMX park, along with a basketball court and a community center that has kitchens and meeting rooms but no gym. They put in community gardens too, down the hill from the BMX track. There was a waiting list for the garden plots, but Mom said we weren’t good at being on waiting lists. She tried to sound like she was joking, like she was lighthearted.

  Mom wandered down to the gardens once when Clem and I were biking. She came back excited. “I’ve seen community gardens before,” she told us, “rich with leaves at this time of year, kale up to your knees, tall garlic stems, peas winding upward—but these garden beds? Nothing. One or two, sure, have lettuce and chard. One even has stepping stones and a wicker chair. But most of those gardens are struggling. Some of them are empty, with nothing but dirt and dandelions and thistles.”

  So Mom logged onto the library computer and she Twittered and Facebooked and Craigslisted for tools, plants and seeds. Because we had a “rolling address,” she gave people the Sandwich Shack coordinates to mail stuff to. And if the stuff was too big or difficult to mail, she said to take them by the BMX park and leave them with The Kids. Clem and I were to be at the park from four to seven every day for a week.

  Well, people reposted Mom’s post, and word got around. By the end of the week, Mom had a rake and a shovel and a bunch of hand tools and plants and packages of seeds. While Clem and I biked the circuits, Mom worked in her “found” community-garden plot. Just one month later, we had parsley, lettuce and kale. We set up at a picnic table in one of the city parks and cooked the kale on our Coleman stove, with olive oil and sesame seeds sprinkled on top, and it was good. Really good.

  One problem though, was Mom’s hands. She couldn’t get the gunk out from under her nails. You can’t serve sandwiches with grimy hands and wrists scratched up from blackberry canes. So Clem and I did a special bottle run—a big one, three hours—then biked all the way to the depot with what Clem called our Blue Box booty. Two hundred cans and bottles in one afternoon! Twenty dollars. We bought Mom a sweet pair of gloves. Leather, and they would not let a thorn through, the salesman told us.

  Clem had his biking. Something he was good at. And I’d sit on the fence and watch. But after seeing that first slam at the Spiral Café, I had something to do too. I had somewhere to be. In my head. In my heart. In my fingertips, drumming out the beat. In my mouth, feeling out the shapes of syllables. In my ears, listening.

  Two days after that hot chocolate at the Spiral for the first time without Dad, I sat on the BMX park fence with my binder on my lap and my hand ticking across the page, pen scratching, ink looping, the lines on the loose leaf like tightrope wire, my words its acrobats.

  “What did you think? Angie? Yoo-hoo! Snap out of it.”

  I looked up. Clem was breathing hard. His ginger freckles glimmered on his flushed face, matching the ginger hairs that curled out from under his helmet. I didn’t really want to snap out of it though. I liked where I was. I was swimming in warm water, netting fish, most of them alive and colorful, a few white as bone and eerie.

  “Did you like my new trick?”

  I bit my lip. “I didn’t see it.”

  “Let me do it again.”

  Clem pedaled off down the path between the bushes. He wound his way out of sight, then soared up in front of me. The bushes shook in his wake. Their tiny green buds were like little lanterns. There were hundreds. The longer I looked, the more I saw. It was like Clem’s freckles, or the stars when we parked on the edge of town where it’s dark—more and more, and more of them the longer you stare. I looked down at my notebook. Each letter on the page was a bud on a tree, or a dark star in a white night… “Angie!” Clem called.

  “Yeah!” I yelled back, my voice a lie, a shallow puddle. I stirred it up. “That was great!”

  Clem pedaled up the next rise. I pretended he wasn’t shaking his head in exasperation. No, he was just getting his ginger curls out of his eyes.

  Dad

  My father has the widest shoulders I have ever seen. One of his friends calls him Popeye, because that’s him—skinny legs, narrow hips, long back and then wham, those wide shoulders. I rode on those shoulders plenty of times. It was like sitting in an armchair. Dad would hoist me up with one hand.

  He would forget I was up there too. That’s how strong he is. Once, he walked under a rose arbor while I was on his shoulders. My face got cut up from the thorns. He knelt by me saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” And, “stupid Daddy, stupid daydreaming Daddy.” He tore a sleeve off his T-shirt, ran it under a tap and wiped my face so carefully.

  Dad got his big shoulders from lifting rock and brick. One of his last jobs in Victoria was laying a path at a friend’s house. I visited him there on my way home from school. Dad wasn’t in the front, so I followed the path around to the back. The bricks zigzagged, spraying outward and then retreating inward. The path swirled and scrolled in on itself. It swooped this way and that as the bricks wound and unwound, then suddenly crisscrossed and tightened into a Celtic knot. It was magical.

  I stood at the v
ery center of the knot. The sun shone on me, piercing the chill of the afternoon. Sometimes, I wish that I had never left that spot.

  But I did. Dad was in the backyard, crouching, which isn’t unusual for a bricklayer. His head was lowered, and he was shaking. I didn’t understand at first. Not until I heard him breathe in, making a sound like a backward laugh. A sob.

  “Dad?” I asked, stepping closer.

  Dad wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “Hi, honey. Just allergies.”

  “Allergies?”

  “Yeah.”

  His voice was hoarse, raspy. He cleared his throat. He looked at me and smiled, then shoved a brick into the sand. It was the path’s last brick. The path was finished. Dad stood, put his hands on his hips and stretched.

  “That’s that,” he said. “Want a ride home?”

  He was all pale, powdered with brick dust. There were lines through the dust beneath his eyes—tear tracks. Dad loaded his tools into his wheelbarrow. “Hop in,” he said. He wheeled me—a trowel sticking into my back—to the road where he’d parked his friend’s truck. He’d recently sold our own truck to raise money for food.

  As we drove, I played the same question over and over in my head. Dad, why were you crying?

  At a red light, Dad looked over at me and answered it. “Honey,” he said. “You know that your mom and I are going through a tough time. I’m not making enough money.”

  “I know. I know.” I wanted him to stop talking. He and Mom had been fighting lately. They had never fought much before—in fact, it was normal to find them hugging in the kitchen or holding hands on the couch and talking. With all the fighting, Clem and I had started going to the BMX track more often or holing up in the closet in his bedroom and playing Skip-Bo. It was hard to tell red from purple in the dark.

  “I’m going away, sweetheart,” Dad said.

  “No.”

  “Just for a while. A friend in Ontario has work for me.”

  “No.”

  “Not for long, honey.”

  Tears stung my eyes. “Is that why you were crying?”

  “I don’t want to leave you, sweetheart.”

  “But you are leaving me.”

  “For work. Only for work.”

  After supper, Dad and Clem went for a walk. When they came back, Clem’s eyes were red and he went straight to his room, slamming the door behind him. Mom did not move. She stayed in the armchair by the big window overlooking the harbor. As she looked out, rain began to splash against the window. The raindrops rolled down the window, leaving wobbling paths. Mom took a deep breath.

  Dad busied himself in the kitchen, whistling loudly. Next morning, he was gone. I could tell as soon as I woke up. The apartment felt like it had too much air. Empty air. On the breakfast table, Dad had left two envelopes, one with Clem’s name, the other with mine. Inside my envelope was a goodbye note and fifty dollars. Clem got fifty too, and a note, but he’s never shown it to me. I haven’t shown him mine either. I feel like I’d ruin its spell if I showed it to anyone else. Spell? The love. Four months later, I still can’t read it without crying. But I do. When I get a moment alone in the car, which isn’t often, I pull the letter out and read its misspelled words.

  Angela My Angel,

  Do not worry about me Kid-o. I love you in my heart every second of every minute. Be good to your Mum.

  See you online, right?

  Your the best daughter a father could wish for. I love you.

  Your dad.

  I read the letter over and over, looking for words that say he will be back. But no matter how many times I read it, I never find them.

  Pity

  My heart drops every time I think about tonight’s slam. I can’t concentrate in class. I keep running my words through my mind, repeating them over and over. Then, before I know it, Mom’s driving Clem and me to the Spiral Café. Clem’s not happy about it.

  “Everyone’s pretentious! Precious! Puffed up. Preening,” he complains.

  “No, they aren’t.” I laugh. “They’re profound! Poetic. Perceptive. Powerful.”

  “They piss me off.”

  “Well, they inspire me.”

  “You lose.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Clem, keep your sister company. Remember, she spent Saturday afternoon at a bike park in Langford for your sake.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “In the rain. And you didn’t even win.”

  I mean to tease Clem, but he looks wounded.

  “I was tired,” he begs.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “My legs were stiff.”

  We go silent. Mom looks ten years older than she did a minute ago. Her mouth is tight, and she clenches the steering wheel. Even her skin looks dull. It’s the wear of worry—and guilt.

  Because, of course, Clem is tired and stiff. What kind of champion sleeps with his knees bent and the soles of his feet pressed against the cold vinyl of a car door? Clem’s height is the saddest thing about living in the Skylark. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he’ll get out of the car just to stretch. Mom wouldn’t let him for the longest time, saying it would draw too much attention. But finally she relented after Clem practically cried, his legs hurt so much. His whole body was hurting, even his underarms, he said. Sometimes, as we’re falling asleep, he rolls his window down and sticks his legs out and wiggles his pale toes in the inky night.

  When we pull up to the Spiral Café, Mom reaches into her purse and hands us a five.

  “See you in two hours,” she says. She has a cleaning job to get to. I hate it when she cleans. I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself again.

  We’ve learned to open and close the car doors quickly, so people don’t see all the stuff inside. “Going camping?” people have asked. Or, “Moving day?” I’m worried that if people figure it out, they’ll call social services and Clem and I will be put in a foster home. Mom says this won’t happen—“The police left us alone, remember?” But I’ve heard stories about kids being taken from their parents just because there isn’t a table in the house and the kids eat sitting on the floor. Anyway, it’s cozy in the Skylark. The heater works fine. Mostly, we shut the door fast because we don’t want the cold getting in.

  The sidewalk is dark and empty. But the café is bright, thrumming with the people inside talking and laughing. On any other night, it would be comforting, but tonight my heart drops. It drops and drops, like a penny falling from the top of the Empire State Building, burning against the air. Like a bird, wings tucked in, bombing the surface of the water for a fish. A fish that it will miss.

  “I’m nervous,” I tell Clem.

  “What about?”

  I haven’t told him about my poem. I didn’t tell Mom either. I don’t want to be cheered on. I just want to do it.

  “I’m nervous too,” Clem says.

  “What are you nervous about?”

  A clump of girls with pink hair and lip rings push past, laughing over an umbrella that won’t close.

  “Not really my crowd,” Clem says, offering a quick, apologetic quarter-smile that I’ve seen cross Dad’s face lots of times. “I don’t belong in artsy-fartsy places.”

  I check him over. He’s wearing skater gear from head to toe.

  “You should have won that bike race,” I say. “You’re a phenom on the track.”

  “Whatever.” He shrugs, then mumbles, “I need a coach.”

  “When we get that swimming pool.”

  It’s our joke. It’s as close as we come to saying, Where the hell are we? Why are we living in a car? Without Dad? The unspoken theory is this, if we can afford to see our lives inside a joke, then we’ll be okay. We’ll have a future.

  A big guy wearing a bandanna and eyeliner, his sideburns trimmed into spirals, is collecting the entry fee. His T-shirt has a picture of a banana inside a circle. Bananarchy, it says.

  “Three dollars,” the guy tells us.

  My mouth goes dry. Clem shoots me a troubled look.

  “Eac
h of us?” I ask.

  “Unless you’re performing.”

  “I’m performing,” I say.

  “Then it’s free.”

  Clem elbows me. He’s smirking, but his eyes are wide. How are you going to get out of this lie?

  I just smile back. The big guy gives me a clipboard. My hand trembles as I add my name to the list. I think of my dream—our family name climbing that list for public housing. But here, it’s not Kilpatrick. It’s just me, Angie.

  “Great, we’ve got two dollars for a night of fun,” Clem hisses as we find a table at the back. “And how are you going to get your name off that list?”

  “I’m not. I’m performing.”

  “No way.”

  “Wait and watch,” I say. “And clap when I’m done.”

  Clem rolls his eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’ll just have water,” I say.

  “We could share a tea,” Clem says, scanning the menu. “Wait, here’s something…I’ll be right back.”

  Clem heads to the counter to order. His jeans are baggy, and his band T-shirt—something overblown from Walmart—hangs from his shoulders in a way that makes me hurt. It’s as if it’s hanging from a hanger. Clem has gotten bony. Maybe he’s going through a growth spurt. Stretching out.

  I rehearse my piece in my head for the hundred-thousandth time. Last week, only one performer read from the page. The rest had their stories in their brains—whole paragraphs, whole pages. A few times, people got stuck. They forgot their words. They’d look up at the ceiling, then at the audience, and smile sheepishly. After ten seconds or so, the people in the audience would start snapping their fingers. It was a way to offer support—they were holding the beat of the piece. It’s neat to hear a dozen people snapping their fingers. It’s warm and low, like rocks knocking under the waves at the beach. Or maybe it’s the sound moths make to themselves when they bat their furry little wings. The finger snapping really seemed to help—the performers came around. They’d break into smiles and raise a finger—Right, got it!—and they’d dive back in. The snapping would fade away.