Yesterday Read online

  “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.

  I turn to see its lone female occupant wave. “Shiiiit,” Garren rasps from behind me. Only then do I realize the woman was his mother, disappearing down the road. “Now I’ll have to wait until she’s back to talk to her.” Garren’s front teeth scrape together and tension lines etch into his forehead.

  I tell him she might not know anything—that I tried fishing for information from my mother without any luck. Then I ask if he’s okay now.

  Garren’s hands dive into his pockets. He nods, his breath streaming out a frosty white. “As okay as I can be, considering.” He jogs back to the place he fell to retrieve my binder from the snow and then sets it in my hands. “I don’t know how that happened. I’ve never passed out in my life.”

  “Not that you remember,” I correct, my eyes still scanning the surrounding area for the newspaper article. It’s just a scrap of paper and shouldn’t matter now that Garren believes me, but it feels like losing a small part of my father a second time.

  “I remember everything. Not like you. I was just”—Garren yanks his hands halfway out of his pockets and inhales sharply—“lied to.”

  I don’t argue about his memories; it’s enough that he’s no longer fighting me.

  “Come with me to see my grandfather,” Garren urges. “We’ll catch him off guard. He won’t have time to come up with a cover story.” He sounds decisive, like when he asked me to leave yesterday, and it’s a good idea. My grandfather will be shocked to see me and Garren together. What choice will he have but to tell us the whole truth when we’ve figured out so much of it already?

  “We should go right now,” I agree. “But the article …”

  Garren frowns, his eyes turning over the neighborhood like mine have. “The wind is blowing westerly.” He points at the estimated trajectory, which we follow for approximately twenty-five feet without success.

  I could look until nightfall and never find the clipping. It feels as if it could be halfway to New Zealand by now, like the world’s working against me, stealing the truth at every opportunity. “Forget it,” I tell him. “It’s gone.”

  “I’m sorry.” Garren shakes his head in regret.

  “It’s not your fault.” I think of the Garren from my dream and how I felt about him. Definitely not the way you feel about a relative. There was enough longing inside me to fill an entire museum. But neither of us are those people now and I’m not sure we ever were entirely. A dream isn’t the same thing as a memory. It has a life of its own.

  “We should just go,” I add. “Catch the subway over to Henry’s place.” I don’t want to call him my grandfather anymore. He’ll have to prove he deserves the title.

  Garren and I push on against the wind, neither of us wasting another second looking for something that doesn’t want to be found.

  TEN

  I walk to the Spadina subway station with Garren and follow him down to the platform where we hop into a waiting subway car. Since Garren lives in Toronto and is undoubtedly more familiar with the transit system than I am, I don’t pay much attention to our surroundings until I happen to notice that we’re pulling into Christie Station. There, I check the subway map hanging above our seats and find we’ve been moving farther away from my grandfather’s house in Davisville ever since we stepped onto the train.

  “We’re going in the wrong direction,” I tell Garren. “We should be heading east and then transferring to the Yonge line.”

  “It’s west all the way to Islington,” Garren argues. “And from there we have to catch a bus.”

  “But he lives near Davisville Station.” I’ve only been to Henry’s house on Hadley Road once since we’ve been back in Canada (mostly he comes to us) and we didn’t go by subway, but Henry’s mentioned the station several times.

  Garren’s left leg jerks. He stretches it out into the aisle and folds his arms in front of him, his fingers digging into the fabric of his coat. “The address we have for him is in Alderwood, Etobicoke.”

  Two addresses. Two wives. What other bombs will Henry drop on us when we see him?

  Garren says we should go to the Davisville address, since it’s closer, and that if he’s not there we’ll jump on the subway again and head for Alderwood. We decide against making phone calls to either address to check Henry’s whereabouts since that could backfire on us and ruin the element of surprise.

  Once we’re headed in the right direction, squished together on an eastbound subway car that grows more crowded with every stop, Garren and I exchange basic information about ourselves. I learn his last name’s Lowe and that he’s eighteen and all but finished high school, requiring only two more credits to graduate. He’s been going to school part-time since he and his mom arrived back in Canada and, for the last couple of weeks, has been working as a dishwasher at a restaurant several times a week.

  “I’m due in there at four-thirty,” Garren says, checking his watch, which has a slew of buttons on it and must be one of those calculator ones that I’ve seen around the wrists of some of the kids at school. “I’m not sure I’ll make it.”

  I tell him I’m supposed to be home after school to watch my ten-year-old sister and that I won’t be there for that either.

  “Your impostor sister,” Garren says. “You really think she’s not who she says she is? Even if that were possible, a ten-year-old would slip up—there’s no way she’d be able to hold the act together.”

  “I know. But I feel what I feel. And look, I was right about you.”

  A shadow-smile appears on Garren’s lips for the briefest moment before fading into unhappiness. He makes me describe my Victorian school dream again. I leave out how I felt about him in the dream (it’s not necessarily relevant anyway) but even on the subway, where the majority of people are cloaking themselves in urban anonymity and avoiding looking in people’s faces, I notice women notice Garren.

  He must notice them noticing too and I wish I could ask him if it was the same in Switzerland or whether it only started in Canada, like it did for me with the boys in my school.

  When we segue into discussi
ng our fathers Garren says his was rarely home and that when he was, he was like an absentminded professor, permanently in his own world. He tells me that his mother almost left his father about a year ago but that she wouldn’t know he was aware of that. “I heard things, though,” Garren says. “It’s funny how they think you don’t.”

  Garren, slumped in his seat, looks over at me. “So you see, I do remember everything. I don’t know exactly what you think has been going on with you, but it’s different than what’s happened in my life.”

  We get off the subway at Davisville Station where Garren and I study a map posted on the wall near the ticket booth. Having pinpointed Hadley Road, Garren estimates it’s a fifteen-minute walk and I begin to get nervous again, unsure what to expect from Henry when we arrive.

  “I feel like I’m dreaming,” Garren says as we step onto the sidewalk. “You asked me if the past seemed as vivid as the present but it’s this that doesn’t seem real.”

  His ears turn beet red as we walk and maybe I’m turning red from the cold too but there’s a second where I have to fight the impulse to cover his ears with my gloved hands to warm them. I catch myself in midair, my arms poised to swing around either side of his head.

  The movement doesn’t register with Garren; he’s thinking of other things. “We can’t let him try to sweep any of this under the rug,” he says. “And I’m not going to keep any bigamy secret for him either.”

  A current of confusion and anticipation’s swimming through my veins. I slow my pace, trying to get a grip before we reach Henry’s house. The feeling’s not as overwhelming as when I was approaching Garren’s door earlier and I funnel it into anger. We deserve the truth about our families. No one has the right to hide it from us.

  “It’s there.” I motion to the redbrick house across the street. “Supposedly he’s lived here for over thirty years.”

  Henry’s blue Buick is parked in the driveway and Garren says, “That’s his car all right.”

  We march past it, up the steeply narrow steps to his porch. The steps are caked with ice and if Henry was really my grandfather I’d be worried he could trip down them and break his neck.

  Garren raps loudly on the screen door. We stand like police officers or soldiers waiting for Henry to answer. Garren’s raising his hand to knock a second time when Henry pulls the wooden front door open. Expressionless, he pauses in the doorway before reaching for the screen door too.

  “Surprise,” Garren says, his unsmiling face as hard as granite.

  Henry pushes the screen door open and motions for us to come in.

  “We found each other,” I announce as I step through first. “I guess you didn’t think that would happen.”

  Garren trails me inside and the two of us, jammed into the close quarters of the entranceway with the man who calls himself my grandfather, hover on the edge of a moment that could change everything.

  “Say something,” I demand. “Tell us why our fathers died on the same day in different continents. Did you have something to do with that?”

  My so-called grandfather’s silence speaks volumes. His piercing gaze shifts continually between Garren and me.

  “Answer the question,” Garren growls. His arms are stiff at his sides and his legs are solidly rooted to the floor. “We’re not leaving until you tell us everything. Why does so much of my family tree match Freya’s? Everything but people’s names are identical and you must know why.”

  “Calm down, son.” Henry raises a cautionary hand, like he’s afraid Garren might take a swing at him.

  “We don’t want to calm down,” I spit out. “We’ve been lied to and our fathers have been killed.”

  “They weren’t killed,” Henry replies. “I don’t know who told you that, but it’s not true.”

  “And our grandmothers, Evelyn and Irene? How is it that they both died of cancer? How do you explain your two addresses and two wives?” I’ve begun to shout.

  “Come inside,” Henry beckons. “Sit down. Please. I’ll tell you everything you want to know but there’s something I have to take care of first.”

  Garren and I twist to look at each other, our gazes steeped with skepticism. We watch Henry shamble towards the living room, following him in from a distance of roughly ten feet behind. There’s a wedding picture of him and Evelyn on the wall and I nudge Garren to point it out to him. Various photographs of my family are planted around the room too. On an end table beside the couch sits an old snapshot of Olivia and me. She’s about five years old and wearing a gauzy fairy costume. I have both my arms around her and am hugging her to me while baring a vampire grin. I remember that Halloween the way I remember most other parts of my life—as though they were something that happened to someone else.

  “Please sit,” Henry says worriedly, his outstretched hand indicating the couch. “I have something to show you that will explain everything.”

  Garren scoffs as he glances at Henry’s mottled hand. “Something you should’ve shown us long before now.”

  “I have my reasons,” Henry insists as his hand drops to his side. “When you see what I’m talking about you’ll understand.”

  Reluctantly, Garren and I move towards the couch.

  “I am sorry for what this must be putting you kids through,” Henry says as we sit down. He sounds as harmless as an old wool sweater, the same as always, and regards us with a sympathetic gaze. If I felt even a slight attachment to him the kindly tone and matching stare would probably make me feel better. They don’t. The couch is equally uncomfortable. Any support it had in it feels like it expired a decade ago. I take off my gloves and lay them on the arm of the couch along with my biology binder.

  “Just give me a moment to access it,” Henry continues, lingering in the living room doorway. “It’s upstairs, in a safe place.” He backs out of the room and soon we hear him on the steps.

  I’m relieved that Garren and I are in this together but as Garren shifts his weight on the couch, it emits a creaking sound that makes me shiver. Something’s not right. Even beyond the lies my grandfather has promised to come clean about. An image of armed men jumps into my head and I can’t explain how I know that they’re coming for us but the truth of it is there in the pit of my stomach because I want to run.

  I grab Garren’s arm, my fingers closing viselike around it. “We have to get out of here. Someone’s coming.”

  “What do you mean?” Garren’s eyes bore into mine, expecting an explanation.

  “I think we’re in danger.” I don’t know what I expected coming here but it wasn’t that. Already there’s a flame of doubt inside me but in my mind the men are hurrying—they don’t want us to elude them. “You have to trust me on this.” I can’t afford to second-guess myself.

  Garren gets soundlessly to his feet and creeps towards the staircase. I trail behind him, listening for any sounds from Henry upstairs. There’s dead silence from the second floor.

  “Someone killed our fathers,” I whisper, tugging at his jacket. “You don’t know what they could do to us.”

  “But …” Garren’s eyes drift into the empty space on the stairs. He must still be thinking of Henry as his grandfather, at least in part; he can’t conceive that we might have something to fear from him. “The evidence … just give him another minute to come down with it and after we’ve seen it, we’ll go.”

  I shouldn’t listen to Garren. So far my instincts have proven better than his. They’ve brought us this far, after all. But I want to see Henry’s proof as badly as he does and we edge quietly back to the couch together where I say, “Two minutes and then we go up after him.”

  Garren cups his hands around his kneecaps. “Deal.”

  Three and a half minutes later Henry has yet to reappear and Garren storms over to the staircase and yells, “What’re you doing up there?”

  A set of footsteps thumps along the ceiling and then tackles the stairs. From my spot on the couch I listen to Henry apologize to Garren. “But you see,” Henr
y continues, “it turns out that what I was speaking about isn’t in my possession at the moment after all. I was sure it was, but … well, I’m not the only person involved in this.”

  Henry reemerges in the living room to face me, Garren three steps behind him. “I’ve had to contact a friend who is bringing the documents, so if you’ll just sit tight awhile longer,” Henry adds hastily.

  “What kind of friend?” I ask, a knot of fear tightening in my stomach. The armed men are closer. I see them in a black sedan. I can’t exactly read their minds but their intent clings to them in a way that makes my toes go cold—they’re not just after us. They don’t plan to arrest us or bring us home to our mothers. This is deeper and darker than that. They’ll do whatever they believe they have to in order to clean this situation up. There’s an inexplicably familiar urgency to my fear that lifts it beyond any remaining doubts.

  “It’ll be clear soon enough,” Henry replies. “I understand your impatience and why you’re upset but I need to do this correctly so you’ll see why it was all necessary.”

  Garren’s still standing. His jaw’s clenched and he says, “Start without your friend. The blanks can be filled in later.”

  Henry presses his palms together and fits them under his chin. “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid.” There’s a dispassionate glint in Henry’s eyes that makes him look like someone else.

  I stand and move away from the couch. “Are you really my grandfather?” I point to Garren. “Are you his? You must know that much.” As I’m asking the question the black sedan turns up Hadley Road. I see its presence in my mind and run to the window where I yank back the thick maroon drapes just in time to spy the car pull into Henry’s driveway.

  “They’re here,” I tell Garren. “We have to go!”

  We’re about to lose everything. We should never have come.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Henry says calmly. “That would be my friend. Let me get the door and see him in.”