This has nothing to do w.., p.1
This Has Nothing to Do With You, page 1
THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU
LAUREN CARTER
this has nothing to do with you
© Lauren Carter 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical—including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems—without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Freehand Books acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program provided by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Freehand Books
515–815 1st Street SW Calgary, Alberta T2P 1N3
www.freehand-books.com
Book orders: LitDistCo
8300 Lawson Road Milton, Ontario L9T 0A4
Telephone: 1–800–591–6250 Fax: 1–800–591–6251
orders@litdistco.ca www.litdistco.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: This has nothing to do with you : a novel / Lauren Carter.
Names: Carter, Lauren, 1972– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190130555 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190130571 | ISBN 9781988298542 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988298528 (html) | ISBN 9781988298535 (pdf)
Classification: LCC PS8605.A863 T45 2019 | DDC C813/.6—DC23
Edited by Naomi Lewis
Book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Author photo by Heather Ruth Photography
Printed on FSC® recycled paper and bound in Canada by Marquis
Epigraph from ALL THE LITTLE LIVE THINGS by Wallace Stegner, copyright © 1967 by Wallace Stegner, copyright renewed © 2001 by Mary Stegner. Used by permission of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.
FOR TIM
“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.”
— WALLACE STEGNER —
Contents
Part One
1.
2.
Part Two
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Part Three
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Part Four
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Part Five
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Part Six
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Part Seven
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Part Eight
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Part Nine
1.
2.
3.
4.
Part Ten
1.
2.
Part Eleven
1.
2.
Part Twelve
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Part Thirteen
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
part one
1.
THAT MORNING, just past dawn, my brother sat in the driver’s seat of the minivan, reading the liner notes from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me by The Cure. The sky infused with pink like the wash you’d use on an Easter egg, to get that bottom tint of colour.
“Ready?” Matt asked when Lara, Josie, and I came out of the cabin, leaving our sleeping friends. The windshield was splattered with dead mosquitoes, dark smears of blood, and he hit the wipers before manoeuvring the van between somebody’s pick-up and a stand of birch trees. Dust billowed from our tires and he asked me to squeeze some calamine lotion into his palm, then rubbed it on the bites spotting his skin from the hungry bugs that had come out in the night, during the party for the Hixon River High School Class of 1991. My grad.
Now, nearly three years later, I still remember how I felt right then: this deep, steady calm, fringed with an eager excitement, like a quiet morning spent waiting on the platform for a train to arrive with its promising rumble. The rest of my life was just beginning. Matt would be heading back to university in the fall, and this time I’d follow, starting school to become a vet. Lara was moving, as well, to go to art school out West. Only Josie would stay behind, but she was getting married in a week. I said nothing to break the quiet as we drove, until Matt shoved in a tape and Springsteen growled Glory Days, and I said, “Good choice.” Behind us, Josie started to talk, rambling on about the flowers for her wedding, changing her mind again about using the white lilacs cut from the tree in her parents’ backyard.
“They’re full of ants,” she said, and in the side mirror, I saw Lara roll her eyes, then swivel her head to look down the steep sandy bank at the brown river.
“Seems fitting to me,” she muttered, and I would have shushed her, but Josie hadn’t even heard, was going on about how much nicer roses would be. She was worrying the ring that Bruce had bought her, the gold band with the tiny diamond chip that hung on her slender finger, stopped only by the jut of her knuckle bone. Lara glanced back, let out a sigh, then reached over to still Josie’s fidgeting. When they were clasping hands, Josie looked at me, grinned, and wiggled her fingers, beckoning. Lara groaned. We all knew what was next, the familiar chant from our childhood, the club call we’d taken so seriously when we were eleven, gathering in the loft in Josie’s garage to add scratch-and-sniff stickers to our communal collection book or read the dirtiest parts out loud from Judy Blume’s Forever.
“Come on, Mel,” Josie said, when I hesitated, and I don’t know why I didn’t do it. Fatigue, maybe, or maybe because I’d already noticed what was coming up ahead: a red glaze streaking the dark pines in the parking lot of the Happyland Campground. Sirens blaring.
Three police cars blocked the entrance, throwing light across the familiar sign with its worn yellow paint, a garish red smile spotted with pitch that dribbled from an overhanging spruce. Past that, the old log cabin, a luminescent neon sign that said Office in its grimy window.
A single police officer stood beside the highway, his handgun a black lump on his hip. His serious gaze slid over our windshield, and I stared back before my eyes drifted to Matt’s face, gone pasty so the dark stubble on his jaw stood out, the calamine lotion dried to a flaky white powder on his chin. He imagined what I did, I figured: a poor alcoholic dead in his mouldy trailer, or a man who’d beaten up his wife. The campground was full of people down on their luck, living in broken-down motorhomes and rusty camper vans, and our mother used to make fun of it, calling it Sadland whenever we drove by on the 143-kilometre drive to Sault Ste. Marie, the Soo, the nearest big city, to go see a specialist or shop for Christmas presents or see a movie at the mall.
For a split second, it was Mom’s Electra I thought I saw — the same burgundy colour, a dent in the rear fender — when one of the cops pulled back to let in a screaming ambulance. But that couldn’t be, I thought, and quickly enough the car was hidden by the boxy vehicle coming to a stop beside a wide lump on a carpet of pine needles, covered with a sheet, soaked in blood.
I pushed my fingers against my lips. None of us said anything as we rolled past. All we thought to do was stare, and now, in my memory, knowing what I know, I also imagine her.
Wrapped in the plush purple robe she always wore, the hems of her pajama bottoms flapping around her bare ankles. Her heels bent slightly in, those collapsing leather moccasins. A gun in her hands.
2.
THE MORNING BEFORE, the day of my graduation, my mother slept until eleven. I worried she wouldn’t be ready in time for the ceremony in the high school gym, but then Matt went to her room, helped her get up and put on some clothes, and together they left the house. Through the front window I watched them walk down the steep driveway, turn right towards the path to the beach. They moved slowly, my mother stopping every few steps while Matt talked. They didn’t go far. Soon they were just standing on the side of the road, Matt clutching her arm as my mother held both hands over her face, then turned away from him, turned back like she couldn’t decide which direction to move in.
“What were you talking about?” I asked him later that night at the party, the two of us side by side on the dock, facing the lake.
He stood there fidgeting, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, ripping the paper label off a bottle of Canadian.
“Tel l me,” I said, but he wouldn’t.
It had been his idea to escort us, to drive Lara and Josie and me out of town, past Copper Bridge, down the dirt road to the cabin on Lake Mattawa, and I was glad. He was my big city brother, into things nobody in Hixon River had ever even heard of — the Violent Femmes, booze cans, protests at the U.S. Embassy in Toronto, which he called the “grey fortress of Imperialism.” For three years, he’d been away at school, although it would take him five to graduate because he’d switched his major from biology to political science and seemed to be more focused on his volunteer job escorting women through demonstrations at a downtown abortion clinic. Every spring, he came back North to work at the Ministry of Natural Resources, the job he’d started the summer after Grade 13, the one he hated, still does.
Part of me was relieved that Matt wasn’t talking that night. I didn’t really want to think about my family. Besides, it wasn’t unusual, my being kept in the dark. Most of the time it seemed my mother couldn’t see me, that I wasn’t much more than a shadow cast by Matt. He was bright, living colour, the love of her life. So I turned away from his silence, wanting only that moment: the two of us standing on the dock, watching the sunset bleed into the deep neon blue of dusk. The stars blinking open like tiny, watchful eyes. Josie and Lara plunking down the boards to join us. I looped my arms around their shoulders, one best friend on either side.
It was a perfect time, before the night came on, before Todd picked up Lara and threw her in the lake, before the rest of us stripped down and waded out past a fringe of reeds and lily-pads to swim, one girl screaming at the sight of a blood sucker and running back on shore, forgetting she was naked. Before Charlie got so drunk he set fire to the dry, yellow lawn, and we watched it smoulder, sending up fat, noxious rolls of smoke, beers loose in our hands until somebody shouted fire, and we all looked around for a place to set our bottles down. It was nearly three a.m. before we got to bed, escaping the bugs and the stench of the grass, crisped to charcoal, to stumble into the cabin to sleep. I couldn’t have known what would be waiting when I woke up, that I’d spent the night on the rapidly diminishing surface of my childhood, that last patch of solid ground.
WE DROPPED LARA AT her uncle’s place in town, then brought Josie home. Her wedding was the following Sunday, and I was her maid of honour, Lara her only bridesmaid. Josie sat sideways on the back seat of the van and swung her feet like a little kid while we sat stopped in her driveway.
“What do you think?” she asked. She meant about the roses.
Matt shut off the van, and as if he’d suddenly remembered something, popped the rear door, leapt out, and went around to the back.
“Too expensive.” I knew the budget as well as she did.
She sighed. “We might not have a choice.”
I liked how she said “we,” because I knew she meant her and me, as if the two of us were getting married, not her and Bruce. We were probably a better match. Since Grade 10, she and Bruce had been on again, off again, until he proposed after the Christmas formal. I knew the story: down by the marina, six falling stars in a row. Lara and I assumed he was afraid that if he didn’t hold on to her she’d leave along with us. We tried to talk her out of it, but it didn’t do any good, and I remember how astonished I felt to be witnessing the first big mistake that one of us was making, at least according to me and Lara.
“Roses,” Josie said, a decisive statement, then leapt to the ground as if off a swing. In the side mirror, I caught a glimpse of my brother holding a shiny thing to his face. A bottle. The vodka from the night before. He capped it as Josie leaned in my window to kiss me on the cheek, happiness coming off her like a vapour. I smelled the wood smoke in her hair. “Sweet dreams,” she said as the front door opened, and I watched as her mom took Josie in her arms, gathered her up, drew her inside.
Our own house was empty. The only sign of life was Frankie barking at our arrival, scampering around our feet to be let outside. I opened the back door and watched as he rushed through the long grass that needed mowing, to the garden at the edge of the woods. He peed on a crooked wire cage around a tomato plant that already needed its suckers snapped off. My mother’s boots sat at the top of the basement stairs, orange Cougars, the laces loose like collapsing spider webs. I saw them as I hunted for Matt in his room, then in hers, and finally downstairs in the family room. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then there he was, scattering orange flakes of fish food into the aquarium. A cloud of red cardinal fish poked at the surface while the shimmering angelfish made its way up from the bottom, its fins drifting like fallen streamers at the end of a party. Garbo, he’d named her, after the movie star from the 1940s.
“Where’s Mom?” I asked.
“How should I know?”
I had a lump in my throat. The glimpse I thought I’d caught of her car stuck in my head like a dream I didn’t want to admit having. Any moment now, I told myself, she’d walk in, glance at me, push by to get to Matt.
I walked to my father’s bedroom. When I knocked, the weight of my fist pushed the door open. The bed was unmade. Two glass Pepsi bottles stood on the dresser, and when I lifted them, I saw they’d left intersecting rings. His smell was in there too. Cologne he’d started wearing that winter, which had saturated the air in the house. My mother had complained about it while they were out for a drive, and it was that fight, the one about the pungent, spicy sweetness of his new odour, that led to his spontaneous confession.
I shut the door. I carried the pop bottles to the stairs. The silence hummed in my ears as I watched my brother’s back in the large mirrors that my father had installed, back when my mother was still dancing. Matt had one short sleeve pushed up onto his shoulder, and his arm was fully immersed. He moved the fake sunken ship with its overflowing treasure chest, the fake stone archway, while the fish nibbled at his skin.
He was trying to be normal. If we were religious, we might have gone to church, since it was Sunday, around nine in the morning by then. Instead, we stayed put and I stayed down there with him. I thought about putting on a pot of coffee, but I didn’t think I could drink it without throwing up. Not because I was hungover, but because I was aware that we were waiting. At ten, almost on the dot, the doorbell rang, and Matt’s eyes bounced over to me, ricocheted away. When he opened the front door, there were the police, Frankie with them on the concrete steps like he already belonged to somebody else.
I fell to my knees on the living room floor when I heard, pushing my face into the carpet like an animal needing to burrow. Matt above me, his hands on my back, and the cop, launching the story into the air. My father, dead. His mistress too. My mother, their murderer.
part two
1.
I DON’T LIVE WITH Matt and Angie anymore, but I’m over there a lot. Sometimes I babysit, other times I’ll go for family gatherings when her parents are in town from the Soo. That’s where Angie lived when she met Matt, when I was out West. He frequented the same diner that she did before our mother was sentenced and sent to the Cornwall Prison for Women. Angie ordering cups of tea before her morning hairdressing courses; Matt picking up double-doubles to take to the jail.
“Come for dinner,” Angie said when she saw me at the library this afternoon. It’s only April 14, but it’s one of the first warm days of spring, one of those balmy afternoons that remind you the grip of winter has loosened, and summer’s beckoning up ahead. I told her yes, but it would have to be quick, because I had to go to the animal shelter where I volunteer.
“You’re still doing that?”
“I just started.”
“You keep yourself so busy.”
Working with books was her idea. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. She helped me get the job when I moved to Norbury in January, but my dream isn’t to spend the rest of my life cataloguing articles about long-ago accidents or binding hardcovers in cellophane. I like to read as much as the next person, although not nearly as much as my mom and Matt. It’s just that I like animals more.
THREE BURGERS ARE SIZZLING on the barbecue when I walk under the carport and into their backyard. Angie hands the baby to me, and Ellie immediately starts wriggling, swinging her arms, kicking her pudgy legs.
