Just Like You Said It Would Be Read online

  “I’m surprised they let you go out after what happened with Mr. Cheng.” These days Joss’s family had a meeting daily, it seemed.

  “They didn’t. I just grabbed my shoes and ran for it. I texted my mom on the way to your house and then turned off my phone.”

  I bumped Jocelyn’s shoulder sympathetically. “You should’ve left it off longer.”

  Joss half groaned and half winced. “I know.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll walk you home then,” I offered. Back on the sidewalk seconds later Jocelyn dipped her fingers into the front pouch of her purse.

  “Here. It’s your colour.” She pressed a brand new tube of lipstick in my hand, all the packaging torn away. She answered my look of surprise before my mouth could form the question: “The alarm didn’t go off. We’re clear.”

  I slipped the lipstick in my pocket, relieved she wasn’t caught. The last thing her family needed now was to deal with more charges.

  Back in eighth grade Joss and I had walked into that very same drugstore together one Thursday after school, and each pocketed a cheap eye shadow palette. We were so stupid about it that we didn’t remove the packaging, and when the alarm rang out in complaint as we were leaving, the middle-aged cashier must’ve mistaken our shock for expressions of innocence.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, shooing us with one hand. “It’s been acting up all day.”

  Neither of us ever tried it again—until today.

  Every step took Joss and I nearer to her house, me doing most of the talking, until we were standing at the bottom of the driveway, eyeing it with the alarm a movie camera observes a haunted house.

  “Text me later,” I urged. “Tell me what they say.”

  Joss hunched her shoulders. “It won’t be anything good. But okay.”

  When I heard from her that evening her text said Ajay was bouncing off the walls, his guilt reaching new heights as he tormented himself afresh about what he’d done to the Cheng’s baby—stolen half of his mother away. She added:

  He should’ve thought of that before. It makes me so angry. But I hate to hear him like that too. I’m so worried about him. I want him to pay for what he did, but at the same time, I want him to be okay. I wish I could just feel one way or the other. It would be so much easier.

  I hated it all too. Most of all, what it was doing to my best friend. My worry for her punctuated each day, every conversation where she confided how the accident was warping her family—her parents’ bitter arguments, her little sister Ruby’s nightmares where she woke everyone up with her screaming and then claimed not to remember what she’d dreamt, and the pills the family doctor had put Ajay on for depression. Jocelyn had dark pouches under her eyes, proof she wasn’t sleeping well either, and each of her nails were bitten to the quick.

  The day she said—“This is crazy enough without you being thousands of miles away. I can’t believe you’re not going to be around this summer.”—was the day I went back to my parents and begged them to reverse their decision about Ireland.

  “Everything is coming apart on her,” I cried. “Can you imagine what that feels like?”

  But it was obvious from the moment I raised the subject that my parents had no intention of changing their minds, no matter what I said. In their opinion a summer wasn’t long and I could be emotionally present for Jocelyn from a distance, Skype with her whenever she needed. Never mind that Ajay seemed to be verging on suicidal and that being three thousand miles away and communicating via internet servers wasn’t anywhere near the same thing as being there.

  The conversation fell apart fast and soon I was fighting with my parents like never before. My rising sense of desperation made me shout as though I were some bad seed teenage delinquent type from Dr. Phil, all puffy-eyed and rampaging indignation and, when my parents stared at me in shock, I had to bite my lip to stop myself from crying. In the end the rampage only seemed to prove their point that I needed supervision because clearly I was unstable.

  I was still thinking about Jocelyn when my flight whisked over the Atlantic Ocean—not that I could see any hint of water from 35,000 feet. For hours there was nothing but black outside my window, my mind circling a gnawing doubt that seemed to sharpen with every mile.

  You should have told her months ago.

  But nothing bad happened that night last winter.

  It could have made a difference.

  But things probably would’ve turned out just the same.

  I replayed the night of December twenty-seventh in my head, scrutinizing the details to a soundtrack of airplane white noise and a periodically crying baby. How two days after Christmas I’d slept over at Jocelyn’s exactly like I had a dozen other times over the years. How Joss and I made sugar pie with Ruby, walked the Sandhu’s Westie Bert—who had a habit of burrowing into snow drifts like an arctic fox, watched a spy thriller together, lounged around with hair masks on and drifted off to sleep mid-conversation around two o’clock in the morning.

  How a couple of hours later I woke up thirsty from the pie and headed down to the kitchen in the dark. Ajay stood in the crack of light from the open refrigerator, downing the contents of a large water bottle, a set of keys looped around one of his fingers. Although he was home for the holidays he’d been out with friends earlier; it was the first I’d seen of him all night.

  “Hi,” I said, feeling slightly self-conscious in my Minnie Mouse print pyjamas.

  “Hi,” he echoed as he yanked the bottle away from his mouth. Ajay motioned to the fridge and stepped back, allowing me the space to take what I wanted.

  “Just getting home?” I asked, the smell of beer hitting me while I edged in to grab a jug of iced tea.

  He shook his head and capped the bottle. “Heading out to pick up a friend who got himself stranded.”

  “Are you okay to drive?”

  Ajay rolled his eyes, the rest of him freezing in place. “Don’t I look okay? You sound like you’ve been spending too much time with my sister.” He held up two fingers. “That’s how many beers I’ve had tonight. Hours ago.”

  Our stares locked in the barely lit kitchen, Ajay’s glare sparking with exasperation and impatience. “Unfortunately, I don’t have time to walk in a straight line for you,” he snapped. “I gotta go.” He stepped towards the counter, setting the water bottle down next to the coffee machine.

  I was the one who put the water bottle back in the fridge, and I didn’t yell after Ajay and tell him not to go. I didn’t start shouting and wake up the whole house so that his parents would stop him. In the moment I didn’t know what to do. Maybe he was right and I was wrong; I wasn’t sure. Like he’d said, he didn’t look drunk. The smell could’ve come from beer he’d spilled on his shirt earlier for all I knew.

  I poured myself a glass of iced tea, gulping it down as swiftly as Ajay had swallowed the water. Then I went upstairs and dove back into the sleeping bag next to Jocelyn’s bed, wondering whether I should wake her.

  Late the next morning, when Mrs. Sandhu casually mentioned Ajay was still asleep in bed, the fact of his safety seemed to prove him right and me wrong. I never said anything about the incident to Jocelyn, and for months that didn’t seem to matter. Only maybe in the end it had, maybe if I’d told Jocelyn or her parents they would’ve confronted Ajay last December and he wouldn’t have crashed into Melanie Cheng months later. It was a long shot, but it was possible. And then again, maybe Ajay truly was one hundred percent sober on the twenty-seventh and I was imagining a connection between two events that didn’t exist.

  I still didn’t know and I had a knot the size of a tennis ball in my throat by the time a flight attendant announced that passengers should return to their seats for our final descent into Dublin airport. Rain drops were pelting the window next to me and as the plane broke through the ceiling of cloud cover, I got my first glance at Ireland in eight years. People aren’t lying when they talk about how green the country is. Roadways divided a landscape of low-rise buildings and residen
tial neighbourhoods, but the land itself was such a vibrant green that it was nearly luminous.

  The middle-aged man on my other side stirred in his seat. He’d been asleep for most of the flight and he yawned as he grabbed the lever to propel his chair into an upward position. “The ears are aching,” he muttered, reaching into a blazer pocket and pulling out two candies wrapped in foil paper. He extended his hand to offer me one, smiling as I reached out to take it.

  “Thanks,” I told him. I smiled back, but my stomach was lurching. This summer couldn’t be over fast enough. If there were any way I could’ve fast-forwarded to the end of August to get back to Toronto and be there for Joss like I should, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat.

  As it was, I popped the butterscotch flavoured candy into my mouth and tugged a pen out of my knapsack. My right hand jerked across a fresh page in my notebook, composing a barely legible letter to my sister.

  Dear Rana,

  How far can you see from there? Do you know what I’m writing to you about without me explaining? And do know what will happen?

  Things can go really wrong and then get better, can’t they? I wish I wasn’t so far away, and that you weren’t so far away too, so that you could tell me that. Maybe coming from you I would believe it more. And if you were here, you could tell me whether I should confide in Jocelyn about that night in December and I’d listen to you. I’d do whatever you’d say because I’d know it was the right thing.

  From here, I don’t know how things with Jocelyn’s family can turn out right— or exactly what right would be — but whatever is for the best for them, is what I want. That has to be possible, doesn’t it?

  Amira xo

  It was the first time I’d written Rana since my mom’s breast cancer scare five years earlier, when the fear that I could lose my mother had made my insides feel like someone had attacked them with a scouring pad and bucket of bleach. Since there was nothing else I could do with the letters I used to slip them into the mailbox at the end of our block, as though they would someday reach my sister. I guessed that when I landed in Dublin I would do something similar with the new note, although this time I didn’t have an envelope to seal the message inside. No doubt in the end some Irish post office employee would divert the piece of paper into a stream of undeliverable mail, or maybe toss it directly into the trash.

  Why, then, did it make me feel slightly better—if just for a moment—to have written it?

  Chapter 3

  You love that story to bits, don’t you?

  The customs officer handed my passport back, remarking, “You picked a good time for a visit. They say it’s going to be a scorcher out there today.”

  I resisted the urge to ask him if he’d looked out the window lately and continued on to the baggage claim area where most of the others awaiting their luggage announced their Irishness via an unnaturally high ratio of impossibly blue eyes and pale white skin. If I’d bothered to listen, their Irishness would’ve been audible in the indistinct hum of voices in a crowd too. That’s desperate, they’d be saying. Will ye give it over! Ta. What’re you on about? Good man yerself. Howaya. It could happen to a bishop. Are you well? Don’t be bold! Clear off! Would you ever cop on to yourself?

  But I wasn’t listening; I was hoping there’d been no new disruptions in Joss’s family—no parental arguments, no bad dreams for Ruby, and no scary outbursts of guilt from Ajay—in the short hours that I’d been gone. Then my brain jumped tracks and found itself wondering whether my dad had warned his sister that I’d fought him and my mom about spending the summer in Ireland. I didn’t want to act moody with my aunt and uncle and make the next couple of months worse for myself, but I didn’t think I could convincingly fake excitement at finding myself in Dublin either.

  I flipped my hair back, slung my knapsack over my shoulder and strode over to the appropriate luggage carousel. My suitcase was heavier than it should’ve been because I’d defied my mother’s advice to pack light while she’d stood in my doorway watching me cram clothes into my suitcase. Irritated with myself for not having any euro coins to rent a luggage cart, I upended the suitcase so that it balanced on its wheels and then tugged it behind me into the arrivals hall where crowds of ashen-skinned, blue-eyed people had gathered to greet returning friends and relatives.

  My parents had been in Ireland for my grandfather’s funeral three and a half years earlier, but I’d been too sick with an ear infection to fly and had instead been shuttled over to Mom’s friend’s place for looking after. As a result my memories of Aunt Kate and Uncle Frank were foggy and my eight-year-old memories of my cousins only marginally clearer. Zoey, the youngest, was a tomboy and a show-off, always in trouble for something. Since Fiona and Matt were teenagers at the time neither of them had been around a lot. Thirteen-year-old Jack had been my outright favourite because he hadn’t pulled a superiority act, instead assuming I was fully capable of mastering his video games.

  Naturally I’d seen photos of my aunt and uncle over the years, but as I scanned the arrivals hall multiple middle-aged couples registered as rough matches for the fuzzy images in my head. I stopped pulling my suitcase and paused in place, hoping they’d spot me.

  Sure enough Aunt Kate and Uncle Frank appeared quickly at my side, throwing their arms around me in turn and declaring that it was great to see me. Stronger memories of the two of them began bobbing back into my mind. Among them, Aunt Kate heating pea soup from a can. Me, trying not to make faces when I ate it and her smiling and asking if I’d prefer chicken-noodle. “I would,” Uncle Frank had said, winking at me across the kitchen table.

  The man standing next to Aunt Kate at the airport was greyer than I remembered but still recognizable as the one who’d winked at me over a bowl of pea soup. “Welcome back, love,” he said. “How was your flight?”

  Uncle Frank swept my over-packed suitcase effortlessly into the air before I could reply. “What do you have in here?” he asked cheerfully. “Everything but the kitchen sink?”

  Aunt Kate began guiding me through the crowd while muttering something about the weather and the feast she planned to cook me when we got home. I kept up with her and my uncle, half-listening to them and half-asleep from being up all night. As we stepped outside I noticed it had stopped raining, although ominous clouds still loomed overhead.

  My aunt and uncle wanted to know about my flight and I humoured them, making small talk in the car while staring out the window at narrow roads and row houses. Compact cars and undersized trucks hurtled by us on the lean highway as I glanced, heavy-lidded, at bookmakers, various corner stores (not one of them featuring the words “7-Eleven”) and neighbourhood pubs with names like O’Shea & Sons or The Wicked Welshman. But the thing that caught my eye again and again was the very same thing I’d noticed from the plane—how unlike the half-scorched summer grass at home the healthy deep green Irish landscape was.

  I wasn’t the least bit hungry by the time we reached the house, just so exhausted that I felt like I was already dreaming. I leant against the kitchen counter and stopped my aunt before she could begin whipping up the promised feast.

  “Your dad told us you’re vegetarian,” Aunt Kate said brightly. “I picked up soy sausages. Or maybe you’d prefer an omelet?”

  I felt a sudden stab of affection for my father for having mentioned it, even though it was his fault I was miles from home when Joss needed me. “Maybe later,” I told her. “Really. I’m not that hun—”

  “It’d still be the middle of the night for her,” Uncle Frank cut in with a smile. “Only half awake, are you?”

  I nodded dazedly and just then my cousin Zoey burst into the kitchen in navy leggings and a long striped pullover. My aunt and uncle’s gaze zoomed towards their youngest daughter, her hair short and spiky but redder than I remembered. She was shorter than my five feet five inches now. Skinnier than me too.

  “You overslept,” Aunt Kate noted, disapproval etched into her forehead. “You missed your lift to the airpor
t.”

  “I know,” Zoey acknowledged. “Sorry, Mum. I worked to closing at the restaurant last night.” My cousin smiled as her attention swung back to me. “God, I can’t believe this. It’s a bit surreal, actually. You’d still know it was you—the eyes are exactly the same.”

  “Yours too.” Her eyes were really the only part of her that seemed familiar. “Where’s Jack?”

  “He’s down unda,” Zoey drawled, mimicking an Australian accent. “Him and his mates got their Aussie work visas and took off for Melbourne indefinitely back in January. Did your parents not tell you he was away?”

  “Right. They did.” Exhaustion and the unyielding desire to stay in Toronto had temporarily chased the detail from my mind, but it seemed the only cousin I’d be sharing the house with this summer was spiky Zoey with last night’s eyeliner still smudged on her skin. I took a long look at her, trying to conjure a vision of the future where we’d be friends.

  “You look knackered,” Zoey observed.

  As if to prove her point I erupted into an accidental yawn, my eyelids drooping. “I didn’t sleep on the plane. I think I need to lie down for a couple of hours.”

  “Your room’s all ready,” Zoey said, glancing at her mother. “I’ll take her up.”

  My cousin led me upstairs, clutching my ton-of-bricks suitcase without complaint. “Here’s my room.” She pointed to the right. “Mum and Dad are at the end next to the bathroom. This is you here, in Jack’s.” We stepped inside a smallish, off-white room with a double bed and Zoey dropped my case on the floor before motioning to the closet. “There’s plenty of space in the wardrobe. He emptied half of it out before he left.” Zoey sat down on the bed, her toes curled under her feet. “It’ll be nice to have another vegetarian around for a bit. They seem to think they’re not having a real meal unless it includes meat.”