Do You Think This Is Strange? (7 page)

My mom tried again. “I'm so happy to hear you got all the answers right! What words were on it?”

“Well, that's just GREAT!” I shouted, threw my fork into my mashed potatoes, and crossed my arms in frustration.

The worst thing about the Three Things You Did Today game is the prize. If I successfully guess three things that were interesting, then I will have to guess several more answers to the follow-up questions. It's mentally exhausting. It's frustrating to know that my reward for answering questions is more questions.

—

When I was eight, we began the tradition of walking the trails in the early evening. In the winter months, we raced the shortening day to see if we could escape the forest before night fell. Half the year, we shortened the trip to only the midway point, turning around at the first fork, fifteen minutes into the bush.

Sometimes the dwindling light made me afraid, and our walk slowed as I stared up the side of the mountain, watching for mountain trolls. To take my mind off of this, Bill would ask me about the three things. I answered as reluctantly as I did at the kitchen table, but it kept us occupied, and perhaps the trolls were interested enough to hear my answers: they never bothered us on those walks.

The three questions became a regular outdoor sport when Bill became too preoccupied with his other nightly activities. He began to ask them on every walk behind the house, and stopped asking at the kitchen table altogether. I was fine with that. At least, the game was shorter on our walks. All the more reason to like the walks.

Favourite thing number 3.

I opened my eyes
and I was six years old. The wind blew through the trees, and I held my father's hand as he walked with me on the trails behind our house. They wind along the bottom of the mountain, over steep gullies and through fir forests plump with mossy bedding. The trails were dug into the hillside, shored up with logs and gravel. They zigzag up the side of the mountain, spread out like a web, splitting and joining, and some go to the summit, thousands of metres up the ribs of the Coast Mountains. Always, we watched for trolls.

I learned there were mountain trolls in the hills behind our house earlier that year. We went for a walk through the forest, from a path that begins just up the road on the west side of our house and shoots straight into the trees.

“It's time you knew the truth,” Bill told me as we walked between two giant firs, the sentinels at the path entrance.

Our home is at the edge of town, high up on Westwood Plateau, where the rainforest tumbles down the steep mountain walls and spills into a steep gully. It's a beautiful neighbourhood, with a wide view of the valley. On clear nights, the city lights spread out away into the deep distance. On other nights, the lights are lost in the low-hanging mist. When the rain falls, the gully echoes loudly, angrily, with runoff. When I was younger, my father took me to the edge of the creek where we threw rocks into the tumbling water.

The trail follows the creek, through salmonberry and devil's club. It climbs out of patches of alder and dogwood, with blackberry bushes so thick a mouse would get trapped on their thorns. After it crosses a bridge, it winds up the side of the mountain and joins an old logging road reclaimed by alder and cherry wood.

We like to take walks along this path, and I'm happy to do so. We rarely speak, and, when I was younger he let me run ahead, or lag behind. He called to me to hurry up and called to me to slow down, depending on his mood and my energy level. But he gave me my freedom on those walks.

They are good memories. Favourite memories.

One day, I ventured off the path and climbed straight up the mountainside to the rocks above me, the tumbling cliffs where the sunlight burst through the canopy of hemlock and fir, where the moss-covered cliff glowed like gold.

That day, my father called me back in a tone of voice I had never heard before. When I came back to him, he got down on one knee, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “There's something you need to know about these woods. I'm going to share it with you, but you have to promise to keep it a secret. Do you promise?”

I nodded.

“Do you know what a secret is?”

“What?” I said.

He adjusted the hood of my rain jacket. “A secret is something that you only tell to one person. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And who is the one person you can tell it to?”

“You.”

He nodded. “So, you can't tell anyone else. Right?”

“Right.”

“You can't tell anyone at Excalibur House, right?”

“Right.”

“You can't tell the bus driver, or the cashier at the grocery store, or the person who stops traffic at the school at the end of our street. Right?”

“Right.”

“And you can't tell your mom. Right?”

I hesitated. He sighed. “Okay,
fine
, you can tell your mother, but only if I'm with you. Right?”

I nodded.

He looked around to see if anyone was listening. He pulled me closer to him, put his arm around me, and pointed to the cliffs above the path. “This forest is alive, Freddy,” he said. “With things you don't want to come across.”

Listen
: There are mountain trolls just beyond my backyard. They come out at night. If I went into the backyard by myself, they might come down from the cliffs, with thundering steps, with arms as thick as garbage cans, feet shellacked with calluses, toes growing out at every angle. Noses long and drooping, eyebrows hung like eaves.

If I went into the backyard alone, if they heard me, if they came down, they would eat me. If they didn't eat me, they might make a raucous noise and wake the neighbourhood. Then I would be responsible for disturbing everyone's sleep. I would probably have to answer a
lot
of questions.

So I stayed out of the backyard.

If I went into the forest alone, the trolls would see me and come stomping, guttural, growling, a stench of decayed flesh under their claws and between their teeth. If I went into the forest alone, they would sit on me, crush my bones into jelly, take me back to their caves in the cliffs, and hang me over a fire, slow cooking me for days. They would eat me like turkey dinner.

So I didn't go into the forest alone.

“You can't
ever
go by yourself, Freddy,” my father told me. “Trolls are not creatures to be made friends with. They are stupid and angry, and always want to look you straight in the eye.”

“Will they eat
you
?” It was a fair question. He'd walked in the forest alone plenty of times.

He fished a rock from his pocket. It was green, no bigger than my thumb, and polished. I ran my finger over its top, back and forth, back and forth. When I tried to take it, he closed his fingers and pulled back his hand, smiling.

“This is my talisman,” he told me. “So long as I have it, no trolls ever bother me. It's a sign that we have come to an understanding.”

“The trolls understand you?”

Nodding, he pointed to the forest. “I let them keep the forest as theirs. They let me keep this house as mine. They let me walk in the forest, and take whomever I want with me. And they leave us alone.”

He pointed to the sky. “You know how the clouds come over the mountain and it rains? That's the trolls, sending it our way. When there's thunder, that's the trolls. Sometimes, they're dancing. Other times, they're arguing. Thunder and rain are a part of their life, and it's a part of ours, and they have to keep sending it our way. So I let them.”

The cliffs loomed higher up the slopes, deep with cracks and fissures.

“Up there,” he said. “That's where the trolls live. That's their land, and up there, they have a legal right to sit on you and squish you into jelly.” He knelt down and looked me straight in the eye. “Do you want to be made into jelly?”

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said. “All you have to do is stay away from the cliffs.”

“Those cliffs up there.” I pointed.

My father nodded.

“The thunder is trolls dancing.”

“Right.”

“Like Mom dances.”

He shrugged. “Kind of, I guess.”

“Is Mom a troll?” I asked.

“Sometimes, Freddy.” My father sighed and patted me gently on the shoulder. “Sometimes we all are.”

When I was younger, thunder at night terrified me. When the winter storms arrived, my father came to my bedroom, sat at the windowsill, and talked with me.

“It's the trolls,” he said. “Just the trolls arguing.”

“They're loud,” I complained. “Why are they loud?”

He shrugged and stood up. His hands in his pockets, he was calm, while the wind howled and rain fell like the first wave of an invasion.

“Sometimes trolls argue for no good reason,” he said at last. “Sometimes they're just bored.”

There were some good thunder days, though. They were joyous occasions, because when the trolls grumbled in the hills, my mother danced. Sometimes she went out and bought orchids, white ones, for the living room. After she shook off her umbrella and hung up her raincoat, she hurried into the living room and found a spot for them on the coffee table or the end table against the sofa chair by the window.

The
TV
was off, the laundry folded, the dishwasher finished. Everything became quiet, except sometimes when the thunder rumbled. I ran into the living room and hid behind the curtains, my hands popping my ears or slapping at my thighs, just to make noise.

Still, I knew it was going to be okay, because soon the music would start. My mother stood at the stereo, smiling at me.

“I know just the song,” she told me and slowly turned up the music until it was pounding off the walls and I couldn't hear the thunder anymore. She gave me a book, and I sat and stopped moving, fidgeting, stopped clapping my hands. My mother closed her eyes and danced. This was one of my Favourite Things. I'm sure it was one of hers, too.

She danced with the blinds open, and sometimes people slowed as they walked by, standing under their umbrellas. The heat of their stares never bothered her. They were strangers she would never see again, or they were people who saw her dance often enough to not be surprised by it. My mother liked to dance a lot.

When Dad came home from work, he opened a Bud Light and sat back on the couch, to watch her. Relaxed, I sat in the living room with them and stared at the wall.

—

My first memory of my mother is of the thing she said to me, the same thing she said when she danced.

“
Look
at me, Freddy,” she said, and I remember her.

She doesn't say it anymore. If she asked I would look.

If she asked.

When I was seven years old, my mother drove me to the train station. “Look at me, Freddy,” she said. Then she kissed me on my cheek and was gone. I sat on a bench, lay on my back, and it rained.

I never saw her again.

At suppertime, our third chair is always empty, and my father fills the vacant space with questions, while I fill the vacant space with abridged answers.

The next day, Saskia Stiles sat at my lunch table in the cafeteria again.

She wore the same pink coat, the same knitted wool cap, the same Bose headphones. But she didn't have her notepad in front of her. She had her iPhone, and she clutched it to her chest like it was trying to leap from her grasp. She bent over, praying into it; her thumbs tapping away in bursts of frantic activity, then frozen in moments of thought assembly. She worked feverishly.

I didn't expect her to be at my table. I expected her to find somewhere else to eat. Somewhere less crowded. Somewhere uncrowded. That's what I would have done.

But there she was.

I sat down, at the opposite end. She squeaked.

We ate in silence, the only thing between us the empty space of a lunch table.

When Saskia Stiles squeaked for a second time, she put her sandwich down, brought her hands up, and flapped them.

Just then, a Tater bomb fell.

“Heads up, fucknuts!” Danny Hardwick called out to me.

—

Six days after I arrived at Hampton Park, Jim Worley asked me how I was getting by.

“Getting by what?” I asked him. His nostrils flared. Our relationship had progressed to the point where he was no longer certain I was as simple as he thought, and he suspected that I often baited him. His smile tightened a little more each time we talked. Although I understood what it means to “get by,” I also knew that with Jim Worley a literal response was the best response, because it annoyed him. The more annoyed he was with me, the fewer questions he asked.

“I see you're eating lunch in the cafeteria,” he said after my first month at Hampton Park. “Have you made any friends?”

“No,” I replied.

“You don't talk to anyone at the lunch table?”

I shook my head. “No one sits at my table.”

“Why do you think that is?” he asked.

“People throw Tater Tots at this table.”

Jim Worley paused to absorb this. “Do you mean,” he said after a moment, “that they throw Tater Tots at you?”

Don't tell him
, a thread advised.
He'll just ask more questions.

“No,” I said.

Jim Worley waited for more.
Told you
, shrugged the thread.

“Sometimes they throw them at the janitors' lunchroom. I think they're trying to annoy the janitors.”

Jim Worley nodded his head thoughtfully. “That stands to reason, I guess.”

He leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. “It seems odd that they sell Tater Tots in the cafeteria. People buy them to throw them. Not to eat them, you know. Little Tater Bombs, we called them when I was a student here.” He looked at me and smiled, as if he was sharing an inside secret. “Yes, Frederick,” he said. “I was once a student, too. And they had invented Tater Tots by then, too.”