“I had none.
“But they found other girls who would come to my ‘birthday’ parties, on May 1, which was exactly two months after their son’s birthday and two months before their daughter’s birthday.
“I can’t remember any of their names.
“But they made me birthday cards and they made me breakfast and dinner and they made me welcome. I could watch them grilling burgers in the back yard by the above ground pool in the summer from my bedroom window. I could watch them building forts or freezing skating rinks in the winter. I could listen to them eating dinner together while I did my homework in my bedroom. There was a place for me at the dinner-table, but I couldn’t sit there, though I can’t remember why.”
“Wait a second,” Alan said. “You don’t remember?”
She made a sad noise in her throat. “I was told I was welcome, but I knew I wasn’t. I know that sounds paranoid—crazy. Maybe I was just a teenager. There was a reason, though, I just don’t know what it was. I knew then. They knew it, too—no one blamed me. They loved me, I guess.”
“You stayed with them until you went to school?”
“Almost. Their daughter went to Waterloo, then the next year, their son went to McGill in Montreal, and then it was just me and them. I had two more years of high school, but it just got unbearable. With their children gone, they tried to take an interest in me. Tried to make me eat with them. Take me out to meet their friends. Every day felt worse, more wrong. One night, I went to a late movie by myself downtown and then got to walking around near the clubs and looking at the club kids and feeling this terrible feeling of loneliness, and when I was finally ready to go home, the last train had already gone. I just spent the night out, wandering around, sitting in a back booth at Sneaky Dee’s and drinking Cokes, watching the sun come up from the top of Christie Pitts overlooking the baseball diamond. I was a 17-year-old girl from the suburbs wearing a big coat and staring at her shoelaces, but no one bugged me.
“When I came home the next morning, no one seemed particularly bothered that I’d been away all night. If anything, the parental people might have been a little distraught that I came home. ‘I think I’ll get my own place,’ I said. They agreed, and agreed to put the lease in their name to make things easier. I got a crummy little basement in what the landlord called Cabbagetown but what was really Regent Park, and I switched out to a huge, anonymous high school to finish school. Worked in a restaurant at nights and on weekends to pay the bills.”
The night highway rushed past them, quiet. She lit a cigarette and rolled down her window, letting in the white-noise crash of the wind and the smell of the smoke mixed with the pine-and-summer reek of the roadside.