by Frances Koziar
“What do you mean?” Ali asked.
I had been raising my Coke to my lips, but paused at the palpable change in the room. Three sets of eyes now stared at me. I lowered the can.
“You were in rez with me first year,” Taarah pointed out, as if she thought I’d only slipped up in my answer. I thought over what I’d said.
What’s the longest you’ve lived alone? Ali had casually asked the group.
Three months, Taarah had said.
A couple weeks. Zori with a shrug and half a smile.
A year and a half. Me.
I cleared my throat. “It was in high school,” I said. Had I actually forgotten for a moment how different my life had been? That it, like me, was an oddity?
“You lived for a year and a half on your own in high school?” Zori asked. Ze was Ali’s agender roommate, with short, messy black hair and bright blue eyes. We sat on a comforter on the floor of the living room in the apartment I was sharing with Taarah for a second year. All four of us were in our third year of university.
“You ran away from home,” Ali realized, his thick unibrow lowered in the middle in concern.
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure if that was the best way to describe it. For one, I had only run to the end of the street. For the other, I had run to something as much as away. A tent. A home. A new life.
“Well?” Taarah demanded, her black eyebrows raised in her dark umber face. The arm crutches she used to walk lay behind her on the comforter. “You’re not just saying that!”
I smiled and then looked down at my light-brown hands. They were softer now than they had once been when I had lived by the creek. I thought of waking to sparkling snow like I had been born to a new world.
But I started at the beginning.
#
The sky had been clear and sunny the morning of my seventeenth birthday, but the ground was soggy from the previous day’s rains.
“It’s my birthday,” I told my mom, when I realized she would run to work without saying anything.
She hovered in the doorway, a cool breeze blowing in around her, and looked back, frazzled before the day had even started. “Oh,” she said, and something in me deflated at that. “Today?” she asked. “Oh. Happy birthday!” She made an effort to smile, and I only waved and turned around before she could read my face. Not that she was ever around long enough to do that.
I joked about it at school, that she’d forgotten. A way of releasing that moment, perhaps.
I had too few friends for a party, so when I got home, I watched The Little Mermaid instead. It was my favourite movie as a kid, and I wanted to watch something with a happy ending, sitting alone in that house.
My dad came home at the happiest moment in the movie—Ariel smiling brilliantly at her father, her dreams coming true—and my smile froze, shattered on my face, as my eyes flicked to the clock and back to his angry face. I knew the window of time when he normally came home. My life revolved around it.
He had come home early.
“This is what you’re doing?” he growled. He was only just getting up when I had left in the morning, so it was the first thing he said to me on my seventeenth birthday.
“Since you don’t have anything better to do,” he said scornfully, “mow the lawn.”
And then, without even stopping the movie, he switched the setting to TV and sat back to watch hockey.
I left quickly. I paused in the hallway, one hand pressed to the wall, and looked back. I took a steadying breath, my eyes burning, and walked away.
I mowed the lawn and then made dinner. Just as I was turning off the stove, my dad walked in, muttered that he was going out with someone that night, and left. I laid the three dishes I had made on the table anyway. Then the phone rang.
“Hello, Amanda? It’s your mom. How was your day?”
She asked the question hurriedly, and I mumbled the non-answer she was looking for.
“Good,” she said, almost before I’d finished speaking. “I took a shift for someone, so I won’t be home until after nine. How’s dinner coming?”
She sounded tired—she always did—but I felt even more tired, suddenly.
“It’s ready,” I said quietly, and my voice came out sounding like a crestfallen child’s. Not that she noticed.
“Is your dad there?”
“He left to meet someone,” I said, looking at the empty house, the table set, the dishes steaming. Right on time, as always. It had been years since I’d been careless enough to warrant the worst of my father’s anger by doing something like making dinner late, but at the mention of him, I absently traced a scar on my forearm as if his spirit had brushed by.
“Oh, okay,” my mother said, her voice even more distant through the phone. “Just leave the dinner on the table, then. I’ll clean up when I get there.”
I didn’t even respond, just closed my eyes as I held the phone to my ear.
“I’ll see you later. Bye.”
“Bye,” I said as she hung up.
I sat down at my spot for dinner. The house was silent, the air still and empty. I rested my elbows on the table and held my head in my hands. I looked up at the dinner I’d spent an hour making. Beef curry. Homemade naan. Catered, as always, to my father’s tastes, with a salad for my mother.
My vision swam as I fed myself automatically, hearing only the sound of my own chewing, my fork hitting the plate, my uneven breathing. The world was still and broken, like the shards of a kaleidoscope. Nothing left but spaces and indistinct colours.
I didn’t feel anything when I stood up. I put some of the curry in a container and began wandering around the house packing other things. It wasn’t the first time I’d packed to leave, but it was the first time I’d left.
#
“I just stole stuff from their house,” I said with a shrug as if none of this was a big deal, but my heart flew like a captive bird beating its wings against a cage, and my words grated along my throat like sandpaper. I’d never told anyone. No one had ever asked.
“The first night I had a tent and some blankets, but I got in the habit of picking up stuff from their house on the way home. Food.” I hadn’t really planned on leaving, would never have thought it possible if I’d stopped to really think. I waited for my father to come after me in a violent rage, but when he didn’t, the space between us was like breathing in fresh air after too long of holding it underwater.
I shrugged again, my fingers fiddling with the tab on my pop. It snapped off. “I stayed. I dug a tent pad into the slope after a couple days, and when it rained, I had to add a trench around it, because I got soaked.” But I hadn’t considered going back. If it was possible to escape, then nothing would have made me return.
“But what did you eat?” Zori asked, and with zer voice, the warm lights of the present flickered into focus again.
“Leftovers mostly. I think my mom made more of them for me. She wanted me to come back,” I said half-heartedly, generously. She hadn’t wanted it very much if all she had done was make extra food. My father seemed to regret the day he’d had a kid at all, but in some ways that was easier to accept than a mother who was just too busy, too tired, too oblivious to bother loving me.
“I cooked on the fire,” I explained, suddenly wanting, needing to tell this story, burning inside me like that fire for all of these years. “I kept a stash of food in my tent too, if I couldn’t cook.” At first, I’d been deterred by light rain, and in the winter by snow, but the penalty of a dinner of crackers and bread and maybe a fruit was enough to encourage me to try harder, until nothing but a storm would stop me. I ate a lot of half-cooked food and got sick a couple times too, but somehow, it still gave me strength to know my suffering came from ordinary mistakes, from my mistakes, rather than my parents’. I felt myself growing stronger, like someone coming back from the brink of starvation.
“Didn’t your parents come get you?” Ali asked quietly, his eyes grave with concern.
“Did anyone find you?” added Taarah, her legs stretched out beside her.
“My mom came, at the beginning,” I said to Ali, not mentioning that it was to tell me that my dad wanted the tent back so he could go camping. When she had left, I had ranted my fury to my empty tent, but when I’d lain down to sleep, my face was streaked with tears that she hadn’t come for me, and when I’d slept, I’d had nightmares of my father. I was afraid he would come, afraid he would take the tent by force. Afraid that I’d have to go back and live in fear of his footsteps again.
“I did meet some people,” I admitted to Taarah. “A few.”
#
In summer, people walked their dogs along a rough dirt trail through the trees by the creek. I had pitched my tent away from the path, but I often had a fire going, and perhaps it was inevitable that someone would spot the smoke.
A woman appeared while I was cooking lunch. She had a little dog with her, barking and running about and all-in-all ten times friendlier than she was.
“What are you doing?” she asked me sharply, approaching from my side. She was dressed well and had greying brown hair and icy blue eyes.
“Cooking hotdogs.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Do you know that you can start a forest fire like that?”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I’d been living there for two months, making fires every day in my now-well-established fire pit. Perhaps she would have judged me better if I had been stir-frying vegetables instead.
“Excuse me,” she said aggressively, stepping forward.
I dropped my hot-dog stick on one of the rocks around the pit and stood up quickly, bracing myself for anything. She wasn’t my dad, but that’s who I saw for a moment.
“I said, do you know that you can start a forest fire like that? Where do you live? This is public land, you know.” Her nose had wrinkled as if I were a rotting vegetable, and something in me wanted to fight back at that.
“This is where I live.”
“You’re squatting?” She looked me up and down, surprised, perhaps, that I was dressed like normal person. “Where are your parents? Give me their number.”
Yeah, right, I thought, almost laughing. “One of them is dead and the other ran off,” I lied.
A pause as she stared at me, her blue eyes as sharp as frostbite. “Then I’ll call the police,” she stated. “How long have you been here?”
I didn’t respond, realizing too late that I shouldn’t have said anything.
She asked a couple more questions before she finally left, presumably to call the police. When she was gone, I wolfed down my lunch with a racing heart, my ears hypersensitive to any suggestion of someone coming, and set about hiding my tent. It was green already, and there was enough undergrowth between the trees that you couldn’t see it from the path, but still I spent some time collecting sticks and branches to make a barricade of dead wood and one broken pine branch so that it couldn’t be seen from where the woman had come from. I didn’t have the heart to scatter the stones of my fire pit, but I did put out the fire and put some other debris on top of it, so you wouldn’t see it until you were close.
The woman herself didn’t come back for a week—and then I hid and silently scoffed at her when she couldn’t even find my fire pit—but a police officer came by soon after. I saw another one from a distance, so I don’t know if there were many; maybe this was just the only one who found me.
He found me, not my campsite. I was fetching water from the creek in my pot, to boil for pasta, when he hailed me. He startled me and I panicked and senselessly dumped the water, hiding the pot behind my back as if he hadn’t just seen me fill it. I considered running. Maybe it was loneliness that made me hesitate, seeing the friendly compassionate smile on his face.
The officer was alone, dressed in a black police uniform that matched his short, curly hair. His skin was a rich brown. “Hi,” he said cheerfully.
“Hi,” I replied reluctantly.
“What were you doing?” he asked, nodding to the arm I had tucked behind my back. I pulled out the pot, my cheeks flushing, dread rising in my heart that maybe this was the end, that maybe I’d have to go back and lose everything I had dreamed of.
“I was just boiling water.”
“For drinking?”
“Pasta.”
“The water’s not clean,” he pointed out, his tone conversational and laid back, as if we were just talking, as if he wasn’t about to get angry, but I couldn’t trust that.
“I boil it first. Before I boil the pasta.”
“Okay,” he nodded.
I knew he was unlikely to just walk away, but I was still hoping for it. Just as I was hoping to stay there by the creek when the chances of someone finding me, or of so many other ifs and disasters was so high. But still I hoped, with the stubbornness of a weed clinging to the non-existent dirt of a rocky cliff.
“Are you boiling it around here?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. I was desperately considering the possibilities, and I didn’t like any of them. I loved my life there. Looking back, it was in a desperate, crazed sort of way, but I did love it. I loved being able to sing and laugh and smile and not have my dad yell at me or insult me or give me chores for it. I loved not waiting for a mother who never came home, and who was too busy even to fetch me back. I loved cooking for myself and having the food be appreciated. I loved waking up in my own house, for what little it was.
And it was beautiful, that place. I felt an affinity for the trees and the sparkling water of the creek that separated me from the people who just walked through. It was like I’d found a different world, right at the end of a normal street, and that world had become mine.
#
“Did he make you leave?” asked Zori, zer single earring flashing as it reflected the light from the ceiling.
“No.” I shook my head, a spark of gratitude flashing again in my chest even after so much time. “He was really nice actually.” I’d made him lunch and had felt so ridiculously happy to have a visitor who wasn’t a threat. He’d been impressed that I could boil water on a campfire.
“I asked him not to tell anyone. He tried to persuade me that I should.”
“Why didn’t you?” asked Taarah, her lips turned down in a frown.
“What would that have done?” I asked in reply. “He could have talked to my parents, and my dad wouldn’t have said anything, and my mom would have said they both wanted me back; he could have talked to the police, and they would have made me go back home, or Children’s Aid could have gotten involved and they wouldn’t do anything.”
My gaze clouded as I looked down at the comforter we sat on, brown with flowers. The first time Children’s Aid had come they had given my father a warning. The second time they had come they had charged him. The third time, they said, they would take me away. Three times, I thought as I had sat alone in my room one lonely night, going mad with helplessness. They thought three times was necessary, when I couldn’t bear to remember the first two, just wanted to forget I’d ever had a father, just wanted to sleep without being afraid of assassins in the night and a mother who would never protect me from them.
I pushed away the past before it could claim me.
“But,” I said, looked around at those three sets of eyes, all watching me seriously. I didn’t remember how I’d gotten here, telling this story during what had been and was supposed to be a light-hearted evening, but somehow, telling it felt like living. “I did like it there,” I argued earnestly. “I didn’t want to go into a foster home by then. It was beautiful there, you know. Especially in the winter. No one went through there in winter, so it was just me.” It had been stunning, some mornings, to wake up to unbroken snow glittering everywhere, like I’d come to a new planet.
“You stayed there in the winter?” Zori, zer eyes wide.
“What did you do?” asked Ali quietly. He was the oldest of us by a couple years, his short black hair tightly curled.
“It was cold”—ridiculously cold—“but it wasn’t that different,” I replied. “There was one time I thought I might freeze to death,” I admitted while the others exclaimed.
I had gone back to my parent’s house for that one night, had crept in, praying to a god I didn’t believe in that they wouldn’t hear me. I was used to dropping into their house on weekdays before they got home but having them in the house was a different matter. I was terrified just to enter. Terrified of my father’s anger, terrified that I would lose my freedom when I was still learning what freedom was. Maybe, I’d considered afterward, I’d always been scared when I lived there too, but had just forgotten what that meant.
“But I learned,” I assured my friends. “I got more blankets.” So many that it had almost been hard to breathe beneath them and sitting up felt like a workout.
“Did anyone ever ask you about this?” asked Ali. “I mean, friends or relatives?”
“Most people didn’t know,” I explained. “They couldn’t tell at school. I don’t think my aunts and uncles even knew. I was there at Christmas, so.”
A decision I’d regretted, but even as I’d stood there, smiling at the visitors and acting like I still lived with my parents, it had felt so easy to put on my old armour, my old clothes, my old lies, and to turn off feeling.
“The policeman,” I added, “the one who ate lunch with me, he dropped by a couple more times, including on Christmas Eve. He was like Santa Claus.” A real smile warmed my face, and its echo lit Taarah’s. “He brought a box of cookies that his husband had made. Shortbread ones with sprinkles.”
#
Apart from my parents and the hostile woman, the police officer had been the only one who had known about my change in circumstance. It had been surprising, in a depressing way, that no one at school had been able to tell that my life had changed. The school librarian was the only one to ask, one day after school.
I had been using my laptop for assignments and charging it when I was at my parent’s house, but I needed to use a computer for more than those couple hours and I needed the internet, so most days I went early to school and stayed late to use the library computers. I was always there till they kicked me out.
“Do you have a computer at home?” the librarian asked me once in the winter of grade twelve, as I transferred my work to my USB and logged off at the end of the day. She was young for a librarian—mid-thirties maybe—with a shock of spiky pink hair and half a dozen not-quite covered tattoos.
“I only have a laptop,” I admitted truthfully, “but no power. I only have a couple hours each day, and no internet.”
“Hmm,” she said, her compassionate eyes a bright shade of green that I hadn’t seen in months.
I stood to go. “See you tomorrow.”
“See you,” she said with a sad smile.
I hesitated, then hurried out. The sun was setting, and I didn’t want to get home after dark, but I wished, almost, that she had called me back to ask more.
When I wasn’t working, I was reading, which only gave me one more reason to frequent the library. In winter I often had to recharge my flashlight batteries, and even then I probably got a longer night’s sleep than most teenagers. At first, I checked out a lot of survival books, reading them as much for tips as because it was nice just to read about people like Brian in Hatchet and Cleo in The Island Keeper that were on their own like me. But later I began reading different stories, of families and foster homes and happily ever afters, impossible as they were.
“That was a crazy storm,” I remarked to a friend at the beginning of grade twelve. It had been the worst storm I’d ever seen. The lightning had been almost constant, and even with my eyes closed it had been as bright as day. I’d covered my eyes with a bundled shirt and then another, but even when it was a little darker the explosions of thunder kept jolting me awake. The trench around my tent had held, luckily, but I’d had to re-dig it.
“Last night? Yeah, there was some nice lightning,” she replied.
I stopped mid-yawn to stare at her. “Yeah,” I said slowly.
“What?”
“It kept me up,” I explained, too late remembering that she, like everyone else, spent her nights within the quiet walls of a house.
“I’m not a light sleeper,” she said, and then she waved goodbye as she headed off to class.
Neither am I.
Later in the day I overheard someone else mention the storm, and the person they spoke to said they hadn’t even noticed it.
I was moving further into a world of my own. I had always felt different, but as the months passed, I came to relate less and less to the people at school who could stay out late and leave when the bell rang, who had parents and friends and never worried about the weather.
But the past, too, felt further away. Living with my parents became a bad dream, one that I remembered each time I stepped back into that house, but quite happily forgot about the rest of the time. It was as if the very air of that house was a poisonous fume. Poisoned with work and chores and anger and violence. Poisoned with loneliness and rejection and frustration and hurt. I didn’t like to think about those things. I didn’t think about the past. I thought about the present: I thought about what to make for dinner and how to store my wood and how to keep my tent from flooding and what to do if someone found me again. And I thought about the future: I thought about university, that light at the end of a tunnel. I was in limbo, in a way, by that creek. In a place between worlds, that was its own world too.
#
“Do you talk to your parents now?” Zori asked. “Your mother?”
I looked down at my hands, now rotating an empty pop can between them. “I guess,” I said uncomfortably. Sometimes I never wanted to hear from her again, and sometimes, it felt like all I wanted. All I’d ever wanted.
“She calls every few months.” When she had the time. “And I see her at Christmas. It’s not as depressing as it sounds,” I said to them, for they were all watching me now with consternation, and Zori, feckless, open-hearted Zori…was that a tear in zer eye?
“It sounds pretty depressing,” Ali remarked.
I smiled, but no one else did.
“No,” I said clearly, and I meant it: “It wasn’t depressing. The depressing part was everything that came before.” The chores, the insults, the silence. “The creek was everything. A chance to live with just myself. A chance to…” I shook my head, unable, after all this time, to describe what had really happened, if I even knew.
But I could feel it in me still: the creek, the storms, the everyday problems, the sparkling snow blanketing my tent like a promise of better days to come. Some days I wanted to go back, just for a night, to visit the creek I’d come to know so well. To visit my self, my faith, my hope. To visit the only home I’d ever had.
“Anyway,” I said self-consciously, remembering what had started the conversation so long ago. I closed the dusty tome of my story and put it back on the shelf. “My turn’s definitely up.”
I looked at them—Ali, Zori, Taarah—all listening, all caring as no one had ever cared before, and even as I felt confusion, even as I still didn’t understand quite what I was looking at, I knew it was beautiful. I knew they were beautiful.
I smiled, with wonder and gratitude, and then I nudged Taarah’s leg affectionately with my foot. “You’re next.”
FRANCES KOZIAR has prose and poetry in 75+ different publications, including “Best Canadian Essays 2021” and “Daily Science Fiction”, and she is seeking an agent for NA fantasy novels and diverse children’s fairy tales (PBs). She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.