Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

“Woof,” I said.

Letitia was staring at us. “Finnegan doesn’t make any noise at all, Lucy,” she said in a serious tone. Lish just laughed.

The United States of America. Both Lish and I had, of course, crossed this border many times when we were younger and were travelling with our parents: weekends at the Holiday Inn in Grand Forks or Fargo or sometimes even as far as Minneapolis. Wearing our new Levis over the border so Mom didn’t have to declare them. Not to mention the new sneakers, underwear and t-shirts. But since we had become adults ourselves, and poor ones at that, our trips anywhere had been almost non-existent, unless you count the laundry room downstairs. That little lift we once felt entering another country wasn’t there this time. Everything looked the same, except that the roads were better than in Canada.

Had my dad and I been talking about my mom? Not really, I guess. And yet he had made the crack about speeding and I had mentioned the honey sign. Only the two of us could have known what we were talking about. Maybe that was progress. Maybe we just didn’t realize it was. Do we see ourselves growing old or do we wake up one day and startle ourselves looking into the mirror? It happens in steps. So I told myself that our conversation was progress.

Soon Dill would be walking and my dad would think he’d always walked, knowing he hadn’t really, but somehow not believing it because he never saw it. Maybe we can’t imagine what we’ve never seen. If Lish doesn’t see Gotcha again, ever, she will retain her memory of him: the memory of passion, if not love. If Podborczintski asks me who Dill’s father is, I still will not be able to give him an answer. At least I know who mine is, and I could say I was talking to him just the other day.

Lish had changed black t-shirts from one that read “Talk Minus Action Equals Zero” to one that had the Pepsi-Cola logo on it, but instead of the swirling letters spelling Pepsi-Cola they spelled Peepee Caca. She’d designed it herself. Since we had arrived in the United States she had taken on a more serious look. And I noticed the fields were drier over the border. It was getting hotter. The kids were playing some game having to do with catching up to the disappearing patches of water on the highway. Naturally they kept disappearing just when we were getting close. The game consisted of getting all excited by going oh o h OH OH GONE! over and over. I remembered a sign I had put on the back window of our car when I was travelling with my parents. It read “Help I’m being Kidnapped!” Nobody seemed to care. They all went swooshing past, grinning. Even when I gestured madly for them to cut the car off and rescue me they laughed. Some just looked annoyed. Others didn’t look at all. I grabbed my neck and shook my head, sticking out my tongue and rolling my eyes. I pointed a finger that looked like a gun to the side of my head. I did everything to get noticed. Nothing. Nobody stopped. My parents didn’t even turn around. The radio kept playing the hog and crop report. The cars kept whizzing past and the patches of water kept disappearing. I guess I looked like I belonged in the back of that car with that woman and that man. I suppose some people just sense if someone belongs or not.

All the girls, except Hope, who was too sophisticated to be naked in the back of a van, had removed their clothes. Dill was chewing on a shoe. The van wasn’t making any weird noises yet and we were almost in Grand Forks. Geez, Podborczintski would be mad if he found out we had left town. I smiled. The dole. Daddy to us all. Would we ever stop running away and needing it at the same time? Anyway, right now we were looking for one of those low-slung fleabag motels with a lot of burnt-out neon and an angry teenage son or daughter left behind the office counter who you can be sure never heard of hotel management courses. We were, after all, on a fixed budget. I had reminded Lish that we had all the camping gear in the back of the van, and she had looked at me and arched her eyebrows and said, “Who’re you kidding? We’re not Terrapin and Gypsy. If I’m gonna meet the love of my life after five years I’m not gonna have that refugee look you get after camping with kids. It’s overrated, trust me. Maybe one kid and the Marlboro Man to start the fire and put up the tent. Then maybe. You know, wine spritzers and no bugs and hand-knit sweaters and perfect roasted marshmallows and bird sounds coming off the lake. A little skinny dipping after the one wellbehaved child has happily gone to sleep in the tent. Then maybe. In the meantime, look for a motel out your side. We’ve got more practical survival skills, Luce.”

After we had put the kids to bed and they were sleeping and Lish and I were lying awake in the dark, I noticed she was very quiet. Our limbs made the only noises as they rubbed, from time to time, against the stiff motel sheets. Then Lish sighed and spoke. “Maybe this is stupid.”

“What? What’s stupid?”

“This. Just taking off in search of some guy I met five years ago and happened to get pregnant by. I think it is. Stupid. What the fuck am I gonna say to him anyway?”

“How should I know? Like I’m an expert in communications.”

“But it could be good. I guess.”

“This.”

“Yeah. I guess. For sure.”

Only me and Teresa back at Half-a-Life knew that there couldn’t be anything, good or bad, between Lish and the busker. Because it hadn’t been anything to begin with: I know I should have learned my lesson a long time ago when me and my cousin wrote those fake love letters to her brother and permanently screwed up his life. Who did I think I was, anyway? Lish’s life wasn’t a Brazilian soap opera, and it wasn’t up to me to decide what happened next. For all I knew Gotcha was married with three kids and living right in Grand Forks working at Wal-Mart.

This whole crazy thing was really because of my selfishness and a big fear that without Lish’s happiness my own would crumble. And if that happened, what would happen to Dill? That’s about what it amounted to. I figured if she got some postcards from the busker saying how much he really cared and thought about her and then he just up and died somehow, dramatically, trying to reach her … I thought that would be a better way to remember him. And for the twins too. Better a dead father than an absent one. I thought. Look at my mom. I seem only to be able to remember the funny, good things about her. I miss her, but her death is less painful than my father’s life. He only makes me feel sad. And I wonder why we could never get it together just to get along, just to feel relaxed with each other and laugh suddenly at the same stupid thing. What happened in between the time he held my hand all the way to The Waffle Shop and called me his bombshell blonde and my adulthood? Better dead than absent, I say. Or I think I say. Now I just don’t know. I realized after calling my dad at the border that things could always, maybe, change. Better a late father than an absent father.

But it was too late to turn back. Was it wrong to make up a person when they’re gone? We do it when they’re dead, so why not when they’re missing? Not dead, neatly buried in the ground, but missing. Teresa was my accomplice. I had let her in on my scheme. To a certain degree, Teresa depended on Lish, too. This was the plan: when we got to the Badlands we’d call to ask about the mail and Teresa would tell Lish that another postcard had arrived. One from a friend of Gotcha’s, saying he’d been killed in a drive-by shooting coming out of a movie theatre in downtown Denver. Just like John Dillinger.

I used to think my mom had staged her death. She must have been burnt out from the stress of counselling people and had plotted her death (hell, if I could fake a death, why not her?) and had taken off to South America. Speeding through banana plantations in a Land Rover, doing crossword puzzles in Spanish, laughing at the world and her great escape as she whizzed along patting the top of the Land Rover with her hand. You know how all mothers are nervous about getting their baby mixed up in the hospital. Well, how do I know it was really my mother in that coffin? Well. I do. I know it was her, because if she was still alive she’d know about Dill and the three of us would have lunch more often. I was a fool, a major league fool. My dad at least figured it out that mom was gone for good and maybe he was a lonely recluse because of it. But he knew the truth. And let it be.