The Dream Where the Losers Go (13 page)

Through the door, she heard Janey shout, “Girls, I want each of you to go into your own room and lock your door. You’ll be safe there.”

With a desperate sucking in of breath, Skey listened, but Janey didn’t add, “Like Skey did.” Almost immediately, she heard Ann enter the next room. After this, the noise in the unit continued unabated for what seemed hours. Lying curled into herself on the floor, Skey shuddered with each crash and scream. At one point, several bodies thudded
against her door and she scrambled toward the opposite wall, but the locked door held. A little later, she heard a deep male voice yell, “Police!” Things quieted soon afterward, but she didn’t open her door. Crouched in the white tunnel, she had wrapped both arms around herself and was rocking intensely.
Nothing is safe
, a voice wailed inside her head. No one could be trusted; everywhere people erupted into sudden violence. How was she supposed to know what would be coming at her next?

Something touched her hand. Startled, Skey opened her eyes and found herself alone in her room, the door still locked, the unit quiet. The sensation came again, someone’s fingers pressing lightly against the top of her left hand.

“Are you safe?” asked the boy.

Darkness faded in and she found herself crouched in the dark tunnel, the boy beside her, touching her hand.

“I’ve been thinking and thinking about you,” he said, “trying to pull you in here. For a long time you were just a glow. Purple-blue. But now you’re here. I can feel you, you’re in.”

“I thought you didn’t like to touch,” she whispered.

The boy squeezed her hand, then pulled away. “I don’t,” he said. “Especially you. You’re like touching a scream, you’re all pain. It wasn’t easy.”

“But you kept trying,” she said.

“I’m all pain too,” he said.

“We found each other because we’re the same,” she said. “We’re in the same place, aren’t we? No one else ever comes here.”

“When I ran away from you,” he said, “I got lost. I had to feel my way back.”

“Did you use the carvings?” she asked eagerly. “They’re like a map, aren’t they? I haven’t figured them out yet, but you must have—they led you back.”

“No,” said the boy. “There aren’t any carvings. I just thought about you—your voice, the way your voice feels to me. That’s how I found you.”

The darkness was like arms, holding them close.

“Just don’t touch me,” the boy said. “Not ever.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t. Never.”

T
HERE WAS A
knock on her door. “Skey?” called Janey.

“Yeah yeah,” mumbled Skey.

“You can come out now,” said Janey.

“Maybe I don’t want to come out,” said Skey.

“I need to know how you are,” said Janey. “If you don’t come out, I’ll have to come in.”

Skey let out a groan. Huddled against the outer wall for hours, she ached from head to toe. With a grunt, she pulled herself stiffly to her knees and creaked to her feet. Then she touched the rock in her pocket, took a deep breath and unlocked her door.

Her mouth dropped as she caught sight of the unit. Holes gaped in the walls, tiles dangled from the ceiling and the furniture was in pieces. Several cracks angled across the office window, but the wire had held firm. Beside her, Ann’s door slowly opened.

“Holy shit,” whispered Ann.

Across the unit, Monica and another girl wandered out of their rooms.

“You four are the only ones left,” said Janey. Glancing at her, Skey saw the woman’s left cheek was bruised and her sweatshirt torn. A small patch of hair seemed to be missing
from her head. “The others have been taken to the detention center,” Janey added quietly.

“Are they coming back?” asked Ann.

“They’ll be facing charges,” said Janey. “We’ll see what the judge says. You girls did the right thing. You went into your rooms and stayed out of trouble.” She blinked, and Skey saw tears in her eyes. “Way to go,” the woman added.

“I was mad,” admitted Monica, “but I didn’t want to wreck the place.”

Skey’s knees gave a sudden wobble beneath her. Too much. The whole thing was just too much of too much. Taking a step backward, she turned, about to fade into her room again, but Janey caught her by the arm.

“Don’t you waste a second thinking this was your fault, Skey,” she said fiercely. “Viv was looking for something— anything—to blow on.”

“I told her,” Ann said miserably, staring at the floor. “Skey didn’t.”

“But I told you,” said Skey.

“Of course you did,” said Janey. “Friends talk to friends. No crime in that.”

Their eyes met, and for the second time that day, Skey felt it. Opening—she was opening to the people of this place. But this time it was a different kind of opening; she belonged with Janey and these three girls in a different way.

“I’ll help clean up,” she said quickly.

“Me too,” the others echoed.

Janey smiled tiredly. “First, let’s have dinner. It’s nine o’clock and I’ve been hungry since four.”

T
HEY WERE FEELING
their way along the tunnel walls, the boy on his side, she on hers. What had happened in the
unit was now over, part of another life. She hadn’t told him about it—the riot didn’t belong with the two of them, here in the dark.

She stopped, her fingers tracing a carving of circles that radiated outward from a small hole. Sticking her finger into the hole, she slid it around the empty space.

The shape of it
, she thought.
There’s a sound to it. It’s the shape of a sound.

“What are you doing?” asked the boy.

“Come here,” she said.

He shuffled to her side, careful to stay beyond touching distance.

“Feel here,” she said. “It’s one of the carvings. I’ve felt one like this before. Here, touch it.” Pulling back, she waited as he brushed his hand over the wall. This particular carving, she felt
within
herself—deep, dark and curved. It was a groan. The carving told the story of a groan.

“There’s nothing here,” said the boy.

“Maybe you missed it,” she said. “Here.”

“Don’t touch me!” he said quickly.

“I won’t,” she assured him. Gently she ran her fingers over the groan in the wall, tapping to show where it was. “Move your hand toward here,” she said. “There are circles radiating outward. And a small hole at the center.”

Pulling her hand away, she listened as his slid toward the carving. She could feel it in the dark—the exact moment he touched the groan and passed on.

“Nothing,” he said edgily. “Why are you playing tricks?”

“You’re the one playing tricks!” Panicking, she swallowed heat and salt.

“No one’s playing tricks,” the boy said wearily. “You’re just imagining things.”

“I’m not imagining it!” she insisted. “There’s a hole here, it goes up to my second knuckle.”

“Yeah yeah,” he said. “And circles radiating outward.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

Confusion beat its ragged heart between them, huge, deep and pounding. The boy took a quick breath.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, “and you won’t hurt me.”

Everything stopped as she remembered.

“We promised,” he said.

“But you’re lying,” she stammered. “The carvings are here. You
can
feel them.”

“I’m not lying,” he said. “You think I don’t want to feel them?”

Surprise opened within her.

“You have your carvings and I just get the dark,” he said. “How come you get more than I do?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

“Tell me about them,” he said. “Tell me what you touch and I’ll listen.”

No one had ever listened. Not like this. The realization shook her once, violently, then rippled gently, aftershocks.

“Go on,” he said. “It’ll be like bedtime stories, except I won’t start yawning.”

So, in the dark, where no one could see her face or heart, she began to run her fingers over the carvings in the wall, telling the boy the stories they brought her.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

T
HEY WORKED ALL MORNING
, clearing plaster and debris, and dragging broken furniture down the main staircase to the side entrance, where a pickup waited to haul it away. A few girls from Units A and C came in to help, and by lunch-time, there was only vacuuming and mopping left to do. Staff ordered in pizza and the entire group sat in the middle of the floor, eating from paper plates and surrounded by silence because someone had kicked a hole into the stereo and smashed the TV.

“How many holes did they make?” asked Monica, and together they counted nine in the unit’s main walls, two in the girls’ washroom and several in the head of each girl who had been arrested.

“I hate to tell you this,” said Tena, a girl from Unit C. “I know how you love this place and all, but today it is not exactly home sweet home.”

This struck them all as absurdly funny. Through their howls of laughter, Tena continued sternly. “I mean, look at the way you keep this place,” she said, waving a finger at
them. “You have to take pride in where you live. Pick up your clothes. Don’t jump on the furniture. Vacuum those carpets.”

“Clean under your bed,” added Ann.

“Take out the garbage,” said Monica.

“Patch the holes in the walls,” said Skey.

More howling erupted.

“Sweep up between riots,” gasped Skey. This set them off again, until they were crawling away from each other, begging for the jokes to end. By the time the afternoon shift came on, the unit had been vacuumed and the kitchen and washroom floors mopped. A large dining table with matching chairs now stood in the eating area, and Ann’s clock radio blared from a corner, doing its best to fill up the large common room with its tinny voice.

Janey came in to work with the rest of the afternoon shift. After admiring the cleanup in the main room, she headed into the girls’ washroom. Hesitantly Skey followed her in.

“Janey?” she said.

“Hmm?” asked Janey, turning toward her. Since yesterday, the bruise on her cheek had darkened, and there was definitely hair missing from her head.

“I’m sorry I threw up on you,” said Skey, her eyes darting to the floor.

“Hey, it was an experience,” grinned Janey. “You don’t smell too good inside, Skey. Take it from me.”

Skey gulped air. “And I’m sorry I called you a lez,” she added.

“That’s not an insult,” said Janey.

Skey blanked. “Oh,” she said.

Janey smiled.

“Well,” said Skey. “I’m sorry I called you a pervert, then.”

“Now,
that’s
an insult,” said Janey. “Apology accepted. How long did it take you girls to clean up this place?”

Skey’s grin came clear out of the blue. “The whole morning while you were snoring in bed,” she said.

Giving her an answering grin, Janey stretched and yawned. “I had a dream about you girls working away,” she drawled. “Cleaning everything up for me. It was a lovely dream. I really enjoyed it.”

That evening they joined the girls in Unit C for a video, crowding together onto couches as staff set up the VCR. Squeezed in between Ann and Tena, Skey had a momentary flash of Viv sitting alone on a bed, in a small bare room with concrete walls and bars on the window.

“How d’you think Viv is doing right now?” she asked.

The girls stopped taunting staff and shoving popcorn into their mouths. For a moment, no one spoke. Then Tena said it for all of them.

“Loser,” she snorted.

“T
HIS PICTURE
...” She paused and ran her fingertips over the carving again. In the dark, an image had come into her mind, a memory of her mother at the kitchen sink, looking out of the window as the sun rose into another winter day. Her father sat at the breakfast table, entrenched in
The
Globe and Mail
. Standing in the doorway, Skey was watching her mother wipe the clean counter over and over, her beautiful face turned aimlessly toward the window as the gray sky lit up with pink and amber and she saw none of it. The carving in the tunnel wall seemed to move under her fingertips the way her mother’s hand had moved across the counter—
meaninglessly, without purpose. As if the day had nothing to bring her.

“This picture?” prompted the boy.

“My mother never touches things,” she said. “This is a picture of the way my mother doesn’t touch. Nothing can touch her either.”

“Or she’ll scream and run away?” the boy asked wryly.

“My mother doesn’t move,” she said. “She doesn’t make a sound. It’s as if I was never there at all.”

W
HEN
S
KEY TOOK
the birth control pill Sunday morning, she realized she hadn’t thought of Jigger in twenty-four hours, since she had taken the last one. After swallowing it, she stood for a moment, remembering his hands on the steering wheel, casually turning his car into an alley for more of the backseat, the sweat that glistened on his neck as they made love, the heat that flowered in her groin and legs. Then the fierceness of that heat, the way it tore her open, flimsy as paper. All she could do as he loved her was give out long curved cries of loneliness, even though they were together, even though he was inside her, even though he held her gently in his arms and was touching and touching and touching her.

A
S
S
KEY TURNED INTO
the first floor hallway that afternoon, she saw Lick standing outside the visitor’s lounge, peering nervously through the doorway. The room was crowded with girls and their families, relatives and boyfriends—no one who looked remotely like him. Even though he was probably wearing his toughest T-shirt and coolest jeans, Lick still looked as if he had tiptoed into a lockup to complete a high school English class assignment on architecture in
Shakespeare’s era. When he saw Skey coming toward him, he got a fuzzy look and seemed to go weak at the knees. For a brief singing moment, she wanted to kiss him thoroughly. It would probably hospitalize him for a week.

“I’m going to let you two work in here,” said the staff supervising the visitor’s lounge. With a smile, he led them to a very small room next to a social worker’s office. “Make sure the door stays open,” he said. “I’ll check on you every now and then.”