Niagara Motel Read online

  I moved away so her hand wasn’t on my shoulder anymore.

  “She’s in serious but stable condition. Her right leg was crushed, and she has a fractured pelvis. She has three broken ribs and a collapsed lung. Her nose is broken too.”

  “But, she’s … is she …?”

  “She’s going to live, yes. But it will take a long time for her to make a full recovery.”

  “How long?”

  “Well, because she has bruising on her heart, I’ll need to keep her here for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe three, depending on how her lung is healing.” Dr Chopra opened the closet and took Gina’s purse off a hook. “This was found with her, in case you need anything out of it.”

  “Okay.” I hugged the purse against my chest.

  “Do you have any family you can call? Anyone you can stay with?”

  “Gina’s my family.”

  Dr Chopra nodded.

  “She has narcolepsy,” I said.

  “I see,” Dr Chopra said.

  “That’s probably why she was in the road. She probably had a sleep attack. She’s supposed to take her roofies but she forgets to get the prescription filled and runs out all the time. I keep telling her she needs to always take them but …” I wiped my nose on my sleeve.

  Dr Chopra wrote something on Gina’s chart then turned back to me. “Well, you’re welcome to stay here tonight and I’ll make sure someone from Child and Family Services comes and sees you first thing tomorrow. Oh, and I’ll give you these meal tickets for the cafeteria downstairs.” She handed me a roll of coupons.

  “Thanks.”

  “There are blankets in the closet here and just let the nurses know if you need anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “Right. Well, I’ll be back later on to check on her. Push that buzzer if she wakes up, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Dr Chopra left, and I stood in the corner and stared at Gina. She looked small and pale. I thought of the albino pigeon that used to nest on our motel balcony in Nanaimo. I went over to stand next to Gina’s bed and watched the mint-green sheet rise and fall with her breathing machine. The breathing machine was loud and sounded like whooshing water. I got dizzy after a while and had to sit down. My stomach hurt so I went to the cafeteria to eat.

  When I came back, I got some blankets out of the closet and set up the chairs so I could stretch out on them and rest my head on the edge of the bed. I fell asleep thinking about the guy in the mini-van who ran over Gina. I wondered where he was now and what he was doing. I wondered if he had ever heard of narcolepsy. I wondered if he had a mom.

  In the middle of the night, I woke up to Gina’s fingers running through my hair. I sat up.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  “Hi.”

  She smiled at me and my heart burst. She was alive. She was alive and she could talk and she knew who I was and she was broken but she would be okay. I told her everything Dr Chopra had told me; that she was fractured and crushed and collapsed. I told her that her heart was bruised. She put her hand on her chest and looked down to where her heart was, as if she’d be able to see it through her body.

  “Should I push the button now to tell them you woke up?”

  “No.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Because you’re here now.” She reached for my hand then, and we stayed like that, holding hands, until we both fell asleep.

  4

  It was decided that I would stay at a group home for kids called Bright Light while Gina was recovering. Really, the house was meant for teenagers, but Collette, the social worker, said it would be okay because I would only be staying there temporarily while Gina recovered. Collette had short brown hair that curled up against her forehead like fiddlehead ferns. We sat across from each other in the hospital cafeteria. Collette drank peppermint tea out of a paper cup. I drank chocolate milk out of a carton.

  “I’m only eleven, you know.”

  “I know that, Tucker. But I think you’re very mature for your age.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I still make fart noises with my armpit.”

  “Well,” she smiled. “You know when it’s not appropriate to do that too.”

  “I still watch cartoons.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Are you sure I can live with fifteen-to-eighteen-year-olds?”

  “It’s only for a few weeks, and unfortunately there are no spots available in foster care right now, so this is really the best option for you. I’m sure you’ll get along just fine at Bright Light.”

  “But I want to stay here, with Gina.”

  “I’m sorry, Tucker, but you can’t do that.”

  “Then let me stay at the motel. Chad can keep an eye on me.”

  “Who’s Chad?”

  “Chad’s the front-desk guy at the Niagara Motel. He has a scorpion tattoo on his neck.”

  Collette pressed her lips together.

  When I’d called the hospital and found out that Gina was there, Chad had taped a sign on the front door of the motel that said BACK IN 15 MINITS! I didn’t think it was important that he had spelled minutes wrong, so I didn’t mention it. Chad drove me to the hospital in his black Chevrolet Caprice. He lit a cigarette and rolled his window down an inch. I said thanks for the ride and he said no problem. He had told me he was trying to be a good person now, and that driving a kid to the hospital to see his mom who had just been in an accident was something a good person would do.

  Despite all this, Collette would not agree to me staying on at the motel. She also told me that she had registered me for school and that I would start at Niagara Elementary on Monday.

  “Do you even know what grade I’m in?”

  “Grade six,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  I didn’t completely hate school, but I didn’t love it either. School is just one of those things you have to do until you get old enough not to.

  I went back upstairs to say goodbye to Gina. She was sleeping and I wanted to wake her up so she would know what was going on, but I also knew that she should rest because resting helps you heal. I left her a note explaining about Bright Light and put it on the bedside table. In the note, I promised that I would be back tomorrow to visit her. I drew a heart on it, but then I thought that might make her think of her own heart being bruised and that would make her sad. So I erased it and drew a little cartoon of a farmer riding a donkey with a broken foreleg and the farmer saying, I broke my ass, because laughter is the best medicine. I watched Gina for a minute, all pale and broken like a crushed moth. A machine breathing for her. A machine feeding her. I hated to see her like that. It made my insides feel like they could drop right out my butt at any moment. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and told her I loved her, which I never usually said, but since she was asleep it didn’t really matter anyways.

  5

  Collette was totally wrong about me fitting in at Bright Light. I looked so much younger than all the other kids that nobody talked to me, nobody even wanted to be seen talking to me, except to say things like, “Watch it, ass-maggot,” after they trampled over me in the hallway, or, “Are you even potty-trained yet?” if they saw me in line for the bathroom. It wasn’t my fault I was born five or six or seven years after they were, I just wasn’t conceived yet. No one gets to choose when they’re born. The fact that none of the kids spoke to me based on my birth date was completely unfair. But no one considers justice in a place like that.

  On my second day there I stood in front of the fridge, looking inside it. I’m not sure what for. A blond, pimply guy named Josh came up behind me and shut the fridge.

  “Are your parents married?” Josh asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Ha, you’re a bastard.” He laughed and punched me in the arm, hard.

  “So?”

  “You gonna cry? Little bastard gonna cry?
”

  “No.”

  He slapped me across the face. “Can you fight?”

  “No.”

  He slapped me again. “Can you run?”

  “No.”

  He slapped me again. “Well, what can you do?”

  “Nothing,” I said, my eyes hot with tears.

  “I knew it! You’re a little bastard who can’t do nothing!”

  I ran out of the kitchen before he could hit me again.

  I knew I was a bastard a long time ago because this smart girl named Claire Christakos in Winnipeg had told me about it in grade two. But it didn’t matter. Lots of people were bastards. There are actually two different kinds of bastards, and the other kind has nothing to do with your parents.

  Because it was a warm spring, I spent most of my time outside, cruising the strip and watching people, watching the falls, and watching people watch the falls. I probably saw people take a bajillion pictures of the falls, and I was even in a few of them too. But it was good that people were taking pictures, because every day Niagara Falls looked a little bit different, and who would remember exactly what they had looked like the day before or the week before or the month before if there were no pictures out there for photo evidence?

  I visited Gina in the hospital every day after school from three to five p.m., which were the visiting hours. On Saturdays and Sundays I could stay from one to five p.m., and then Gina and I would watch a movie or play Boggle or I would read to her or give her a Cosmo quiz, and then I wouldn’t feel so lonely. Gina had a roommate named Mrs Jorgenson who was old and shriveled and coughed up phlegm all the time and spit it into a glass jar that she kept beside her bed. Mrs Jorgenson didn’t speak very much English. She sometimes hollered at Gina to turn the TV off or turn the volume down or change the channel, and she always yelled for the nurse instead of pushing the white button on the wall above the bed like you were supposed to. Gina said that even though Mrs Jorgenson was crabby and yelled at us, we should always be extra nice to her because she might not be leaving the hospital. I was lying next to Gina on her bed and we were watching The Golden Girls, which we thought was Mrs Jorgenson’s favourite show because she always hacked up a lung and a half while laughing when we watched it.

  “You mean she has to stay here for the rest of her life?” I whispered.

  “I mean, she might not have many days left in her life,” Gina whispered.

  “Oh.”

  Gina nodded and smoothed my hair. She gave me a little kiss on the head, and I curled in to her as close as I could without touching her ribs.

  Gina had given me all the money in her purse, $226.38, so that I could buy lunch and go to the arcade, and get some of those shiny bouncy balls with the little creatures inside them that she knew I liked.

  “Maybe if you bought something you could share with your house-mates, that would help break the ice,” she suggested.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, candy?”

  “Candy?”

  “What?”

  “Gina, they’re teenagers! They don’t like candy!”

  “Everyone likes candy.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “Look, I’m sorry it’s so sucky in there. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I’d change it if I could, Tucker.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re just going to have to make the best of it. It’s not going to be forever. Just a couple more weeks.”

  “A couple more weeks?”

  She nodded. “Dr Chopra says she needs to keep an eye on me for a little bit longer.”

  “Well, just tell her that you’re ready to go.”

  “I did. She said that’s fine but my heart’s not ready yet.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  She turned to look at me. “Did they tell you that I died?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “What the frig are you talking about? You’re right here, you jerk.” I poked her in the arm.

  “I went into cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for almost two minutes.”

  “No way.”

  “Way. They had to restart my heart with the heart-charger thingy.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “Do you know what they call it when your heart stops like that?”

  “What?”

  “A Code Blue.”

  “Code Blue?”

  “Yep.”

  “Blue’s my favourite colour,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “So … what was it like?”

  “Being dead?”

  “Yeah, I mean … did you see anything?”

  “You mean like God sitting on a cloud or angels playing harps?”

  “I don’t know! You’re the one who died!”

  “No. I didn’t see anything. But I felt something.”

  “What?”

  “I felt … nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Emptiness.”

  “Emptiness?”

  “Yep. Just this clear and total emptiness. Like, there was no me, there was no world, there was no nothing, just blank.”

  “No me?”

  “Not even you.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “Kind of like a chalkboard after it’s been erased?”

  “Like no chalkboard being there at all.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah.”

  We stared up at the ceiling. I wondered what it would be like to feel empty. It sounded kind of nice. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head, but stupid thoughts kept bonking around, and I could feel that my body was there, and I could feel that Gina was there breathing beside me, her arm against my arm, and I liked her being there, and if I were empty, I wouldn’t be able to do this, to feel this, because I would be nothing. Then I remembered that Gina had died. And I didn’t ever want that to happen ever, ever again. A tear slipped out of the corner of my eye, but I brushed it away before she could see.

  “Gina?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can’t die again.”

  “Okay.” She curled a piece of my hair around her finger.

  “Promise.”

  “Not for a long, long time.”

  “Not ever.”

  “Well, I can’t promise that.”

  6

  The other kids at Bright Light weren’t there because their parent was in the hospital. They were there because their parent was in jail or dead or an alcoholic or a drug addict or beat the living snot out of them. They were there because no one loved them enough to let them live with them. And even if someone did love them enough, that someone didn’t trust them. I knew all this because I had what one of my grade-four teachers, Ms Wesley, called Amazing Powers of Observation. Which is not the same as having X-Ray Vision or Being Able to Predict the Future, but at least it was something. Also, I was good at blending into my surroundings, so I could listen to the kids talk and watch them interact with each other without them really noticing that I was there.

  I knew that the leader of the kids was Leo. Leo was eighteen and had a buzz cut. He had a big red goatee that made him look way older than eighteen, and he had black letters tattooed on the knuckles of both of his hands. His right hand said HARD and his left hand said CORE, and I guess that’s what Leo was. He’d been to juvie three times for selling drugs and stealing cars. Now that he was eighteen, he could be tried in court as an adult so he was trying to stay out of trouble. You could tell he wasn’t trying that hard, though. Leo’s mom lived in a crack-house in Niagara Falls and his dad lived in St. Catherines with his second wife and their two kids. Leo hated the two kids, the second wife, and his dad. I’m not sure why. Anyone who’s lucky enough to have a dad should at least try not to hate him. One of the reasons I knew that Leo was the most powerful of all the kids in the house was because whenever he would walk into a room, everyon
e would shut up. And it wasn’t because they were talking about him. It was because they knew that whatever they were saying wasn’t important enough for Leo to have to hear. Another reason I could tell that Leo was the leader was because kids were always trying to suck up to him. Like they would automatically give him cigarettes whenever he asked instead of saying they only had one left or they didn’t have any, which is what they said to everyone else who asked. And when we ate together in the dining room around the big oak table, everyone would wait for Leo to start eating before digging in. Even the staff members sucked up to Leo, and no one ever gave him trouble for wearing his combat boots in the house or not getting in before curfew or not doing his chore on the chore wheel. Sometimes the other kids would do Leo’s chore for him so he wouldn’t have to do it, that’s how big of a deal this guy was.

  The kid who I figured was the lowest on the totem pole before I got there was a guy named Daryl. Everyone called him Dirtbag Daryl. Daryl was fifteen but looked younger. He smelled like wet socks and never combed his hair. He had so many freckles it looked like someone had splashed a bucket of mud all over him. He talked a lot and kicked chair legs and table legs and knocked over cups of water. He said rude things to everyone, especially the girls. He was constantly looking for something he’d lost—his key, his lighter, his pack of beef jerky—and he’d shoot into a room like a Roman candle.

  I could tell from the way he laughed, with his head tipped back and his mouth wide open, that Daryl wasn’t actually a mean person, it was just all he had going for him. Being mean, loud, and annoying, that was his shtick. Gina says everyone has to have a shtick. If Daryl didn’t have that, he’d be nothing. Just a foot-tapping, finger-drumming, red-headed mess of freckles that nobody cared about. Even if they were only telling him to shut the hell up, at least people talked to him. Once, I asked Dirtbag Daryl why his knees always bounced around like crazy when he was sitting in a chair, and he said, “You’ll find out when you’re older.” People usually say stuff like that when it has something to do with sex, but I know you don’t use your knees to do sex so I’m not really sure what he meant. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.