Yesterday (13 page)

But nothing will make me leave the area without speaking to Garren; I’m not going anywhere … except back to Walmer Road. I tuck my binder tightly under my arm as I venture out onto Bloor again. The wind whips at my cheeks, bringing tears to my eyes. I move decisively in the direction of Garren’s house, pretending to myself that I can’t feel anything, like a machine.

From down Garren’s street, I spy a car in his driveway and my legs turn to mushy broccoli stalks underneath me.
Someone’s home
.

I hurry up the road, telling myself everything will be okay—that I’ll make him listen. My gloved finger is freezing as it taps the doorbell. I already know that when I open my mouth, my voice will crack. Too much depends on this.

The door inches open to reveal a stunning brunette roughly the same age as my mother. She’s rubbing her hands together to combat the blast of cold air she’s allowed inside.

“Yes?” she prompts, staring particularly hard at my eyes, which must be a sloppy mess of smudges that I should’ve thought to clean up before ringing the bell.

“I … Is Garren home?” I stammer.

“He is,” she confirms. “And you are?”

“Freya. Freya Kallas.” My stomach flips over as I stare at the woman standing in the doorway. She’s not as familiar as Garren but she doesn’t look like a stranger either.

The woman motions for me to step inside. Then she retreats to the kitchen. I hear running water in the distance. It stops as Garren’s raised voice peals through the house. I can’t make out many of the words but then I hear his mother advise, in a steely stone, “
Be nice about it.”

Garren advances through the hallway towards me wearing the face of someone who has been lied to one too many times. “
You
,” he says accusingly.

I reach into my binder and shove the article at him. “Just read it. Please.”

He must not want his mother to overhear us because he hasn’t started shouting yet. “This doesn’t mean anything,” he says as he takes the scrap of newspaper from me and begins scanning from the top.

I slide my New Zealand driver’s license out of my wallet and show him that too. “Here, look at the last name—Kallas. The man in the article—the diplomat they talk about—he’s my father.”

Garren refuses to take the ID but he looks it over as he commands, “Outside.” He jams his feet into a pair of
running shoes on the mat beside me, jerks open the door and steps onto the doorstep.

I follow cautiously, afraid it’s a trick and he’ll abandon me outside. But if he thinks that will make me disappear, he’s wrong.

While Garren’s scrutinizing the article a gust of wind catches the photo tucked within my binder, steals it from between the covers and dashes it to the ground. As I bend to snatch it up, Garren’s attention shifts to the image between my fingers.

“What’s that?” he asks, his cheeks already blushing from the cold.

“My dad—and the rest of my family. I thought …” Garren’s holding out his hand for the photo and I don’t bother to finish my sentence.

He takes the photograph from me, suddenly very still and quiet despite the second gust of wind cutting through us on his porch. I squeeze the binder to my chest and say, “Did you tell your mom why I was here?” He must’ve told her something since I heard her warn him to be nice.

Garren glances up from the photo, his green eyes unreadable. “She’s been through enough—and I still don’t know why you’re really here.” He moves closer to me, his thumb tapping my grandfather’s image. “Who’s this?”

“That’s my grandfather on my mother’s side.” I point at my father’s face. “And this is my dad.”

“What’s your grandfather’s name?” Garren asks.

“Henry Newland. Why?”

Garren’s mouth jerks open. “You’re the one who came to me with a story that makes you sound like a paranoid schizophrenic. Don’t you think I should be able to ask you whatever I want?”

“You can. I’m not hiding anything—I was just curious.”

Garren’s head drops. He hands the photograph and newspaper article back to me. “Wait here while I get my coat. It’s fucking freezing.”

He turns to grab the doorknob and I snap, “You can’t ditch me that easily.”

Garren shoots me a look over his shoulder. Something in his face has changed. “I’m coming back. Just give me a second.”

I don’t really have a choice except to trust him. So I wait, and in a moment Garren reappears, wearing the same black coat he was sporting that day outside the museum. “Walk with me,” he says, like it’s not a question but a demand.

We fall into step together as we head away from his house. “Tell me again what makes you think you know me,” Garren says, his eyes on the sidewalk ahead.

I’m glad that he hasn’t turned me away but so far speaking with him hasn’t provided me with a single answer. If I have to go home feeling the same lost, crazy way I’ve been feeling for weeks now, I don’t know what I’ll do. I need Garren to start opening up and tell me what he knows.

“I can’t explain it,” I tell him, my teeth as cold as metal as we walk. “I wish I could. It’s only a feeling but not like a hunch, much stronger than that. Something a part of me
knows but that my conscious mind can’t access.” I’m still clutching my binder in front of me, like a shield, and there are tears in my eyes because of the wind but I don’t want Garren to think I’m crying. Just because I need his help doesn’t mean I’ve given up my pride. “I dreamt about you a couple of nights ago,” I confess, blinking back the tears. “We were in a strange, old-fashioned kind of school. We were both a little younger and I already knew who you were.”

Garren shakes his head resolutely as I speak. Once I’m finished he looks at me sideways and says, “I don’t remember you. We’ve never met. I’ve lived in other places most of my life too—Denmark, Japan, Switzerland—but none of the countries you mentioned. We never went to school together, Freya, but”—Garren straightens his back, ripping his gaze from me again—“the man in the photo that you say is your grandfather, he’s my grandfather too.”

I freeze on the sidewalk for a second but Garren hasn’t stopped and I have to rush to catch up to him. “On my mother’s side,” he specifies. “My grandmother died a long time ago, from cancer.”

“Mine too,” I whisper. “I can hardly remember her.” This is not what I expected—that apparently Garren and I are related—and I don’t understand how or why our families would’ve hidden it from us all these years and what the relationship has to do with our father’s deaths. The shock makes me stumble on the sidewalk and Garren automatically reaches out to steady me. “What about your other grandparents?” I ask breathlessly.

“Dead too. In a car accident just a couple months after my parents got married.”

My ears are ringing. The sidewalk rises and falls in front of me, like a series of cement waves. I stop short and sit in a snowbank next to someone’s blue spruce. Then I fold my hands behind my neck and lower my head to my knees so I won’t pass out like I did yesterday.

Garren stops and hunches down next to me, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet. “No,” he says quietly. “
Don’t say it
. You have to be lying. There’s no way any of this can be true.”

“I don’t know what’s true,” I mumble to the ground. “I only know what I’ve been told.” And I was told exactly what Garren relayed—that my father’s parents died in a car accident before I was born.

My binder’s cradled in my lap and Garren eases it away from me. He gets to his feet again and stares at the article and photograph as he says, “My dad was killed in a train accident in Switzerland on December seventeenth. Two cars derailed and four people died. Thirteen more were injured.”

The same day even. It must not have been an accident—our fathers were murdered. But what about our grandparents? Who has the power to control that many events and why have they done this?

I’ve begun to feel the cold in the back of my legs. It keeps me conscious and, as much as possible, restores a semblance of calm. “Do you remember your life in the other places you
lived?” I ask. “I mean, do you remember them in the same vivid way that the present’s happening?”

“Of course I remember.” Garren furrows his eyebrows. “Are you saying you don’t?”

I begin to describe the bizarre feelings and thoughts I’ve had since returning to Canada with my family. I tell him about not being able to remember details from the past that I should know, like my best friend’s favorite band, and about feeling as though my sister and grandfather aren’t my real family.

“Like they’ve been replaced?” Garren asks incredulously.

“I don’t know.” I unlock my hands from around my neck and straighten my back.

Garren slams the binder shut. “How do I know that any of the things you’re saying about your grandparents are true? It would be so easy for you to just say your grandparents died the same way as mine. Can you prove it?”

“Can you?” I fire back, suddenly angry that after everything I’ve said I’m still the one being cast as the potential villain. “
I’m
the one in the photo with my grandfather. That’s proof of something. How do I know
you
even know him? And I brought evidence of the accident that they say killed my father. Where’s your evidence about the train accident?” I believe Garren one hundred percent but I’m tired of him doubting me. “And for the record—I was told that a kid without a license was the one who crashed into my grandparents’ car. Some boarding school rich boy who took his father’s car
out when he was home one weekend and lost control of it on a patch of black ice. My father said that my grandfather was dead at the scene but my grandmother lived another three hours.”

Garren turns in the street, peering steadily back at his house in the distance as though he’d like to rewind history to a point when his life felt solid, a time before I knocked on his door and made him question everything. The cold has turned his skin a blue-gray that strengthens his resemblance to a statue. I can imagine him frozen that way forever, trapped in a moment of perpetual confusion and denial.

“I don’t understand any of this,” he says. “Who are you?” His expression and tone are stark enough to make me wish I didn’t have to do this to him.

I stand up, brushing the snow from the underside of my legs. “I only know what I told you; I don’t know what it means. That’s why I had to come to you. You’re the only one I’ve had this feeling about. I thought … I thought you’d know me.” I can’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.

“I don’t,” Garren says. “I still don’t. But that’s what I was told about my grandparents too, that some kid not old enough for a license smashed into them. Even the part about my grandmother dying in the hospital later that same night—the details match.”

I ask him their names, which are different from my father’s parents. It turns out Henry Newland is the only name we have in common—Garren says his grandmother’s (Henry’s wife’s) name was Irene while my grandmother’s
name was Evelyn. I continue to question him about the people closest to him—especially those in Canada who he sees regularly. Garren tells me he has an aunt (on his father’s side) who never married but that aside from her and his grandfather, he and his mother don’t know many people in the area.

“That’s like us,” I say. “My mom has one close friend but really there’s no one else except my grandfather.” I explain how the three of us were really sick with the flu right after we arrived from New Zealand and about the doctor my grandfather set us up with.

Any remaining color drains rapidly from Garren’s face. “We were sick when we got here too. For almost two weeks. My grandfather called his doctor, Doctor Byrne. He came to see us a couple times.”

“Yes, Doctor Byrne!” I cry. “His office is on Yonge Street, near St. Clair. I had to go in and see him again yesterday.”

Garren nods slowly, his mouth a pale slash. Without further warning he crumples into the snowy lawn next to us, like his mind and body can no longer stand the shock.

My binder lands next to him, flipping open and releasing the article and family photo into the wild while my useless biology notes remain safe (thanks to the three metal rings fastened inside). The newspaper clipping and snapshot jolt along the sidewalk, powered by frigid northern air, and for a split second I hesitate, not sure whether to sprint after them or check Garren’s condition.

“Fuck,” I mutter as I dive down next to him. “Fuck, fuck,
fuck.” Garren’s eyes are shut and I hover over him, feeling for his breath. It’s warm against my palm and I pull back, trying to remember what Mr. Payne did for me when I fainted yesterday.

The first thing that comes to me is that he’d raised my legs. I rush to Garren’s feet, sit on my knees on the sidewalk and prop up his feet on top of them. Then I give him a minute to wake up.

Before long his eyelashes are fluttering. I watch him stare blankly up at the sky like an upended turtle that doesn’t know what happened to it.

“Don’t try to move yet,” I advise. “Just lie there a minute.”

Garren props himself up on his elbows to look at me.

“Lie back,” I repeat. “Do you want to pass out again?”

Garren groans but obeys. “What happened?” he asks from his place in the snow. If he’d stretch out his arms and legs he could make a taller snow angel than I’ve ever seen.

I glance down at Garren’s Nike running shoes in my lap. Could he really be my cousin or some other kind of relative? We don’t look alike but Garren and his mother have the kind of photogenic good looks that make people turn their heads. My grandfather, Henry, on the other hand, looks like an ordinary person, a retired school principal or former department store employee.

“I’m getting up,” Garren announces, slowly shifting his weight to his elbows and lifting his feet from my knees. As he sits forward in the snow my mind turns to the lost photo
and news clipping and I shoot up, scurrying off in the direction I last spotted them.

I scan the unevenly shoveled sidewalk, slushy street and nearby lawns, picking up speed as I stagger forward. There—ahead, caught in the naked, low-hanging branch of a maple tree, sits my family photo. I run towards the tree and rescue the photograph but the clipping is nowhere to be found and as I’m searching for it, Garren gaining on me, a car honks.