It was nearly summer. School was out. Trying to make myself invisible in the new city where I lived, but knowing I couldn’t just stay in bed as much as I wished I could, I spent my days at the library, reading. I liked books, probably because I spent so much time alone with them when I was a child. Books don’t judge you. Books don’t think you’re awkward or wrong, and they don’t give you that cut eye you get from your mother when you should be washing dishes but you’re reading instead. Libraries made me feel at home. When I wasn’t reading, sometimes I went to the gym. Sometimes I went swimming at the community pool. Sometimes I went to a museum; there were a bunch of them in Edmonton, unlike Trinidad, which had only a few in the whole country. This place was so strange, so new. Sometimes, when I could stand to do it, I just walked around and listened to the city breathe.
This routine worked well with the reason I was here in the first place. I was officially in Edmonton on holiday, recovering from my recent troubles. In reality, my mom had shunted me off here. I was half a world away from home to hide until the end of the school term, which I had started off in a hospital bed.
It was now June and I was tired of my penance.
Why did I call it penance? Because my mother was so ashamed of my illness, when she sent me away to recover it felt like she was punishing me. So: penance.
Penance was hard. I missed the sunshine, I missed my room, I missed my house, I missed walking on High Street, San Fernando. I missed Akilah. I did not miss school. And I didn’t miss my mother as much as I should. Every time I thought of her I remembered the sour and hurt expression on her face when I was in hospital. She didn’t believe that my illness was real. She felt it was a personal indictment of her and my upbringing. It was clinical depression. I tried to tell her, the doctor tried to tell her, Aunt Jillian tried to tell her. Depression is an illness. It had nothing to do with her. It was inside me, like some kind of code in my basic programming. My operating software told my body and my mind that I was unhappy. It didn’t matter if she was a good mother or not.
I was still walking, alone because of my penance. Akilah was still on Skype, too, her quiet, sure voice talking to me, telling me, “Don’t worry, chick. You will get there, you will not get lost, you will find the bus station, you will catch a bus, you will get home.” She broke off, mumbling, “And Mummy will kill me if I don’t go back inside.”
Sure enough, I heard sharp high heels clicking on the other side of the call. “Akilah! Get off that phone! What have I said about leaving church to talk to your friends?” Aunty Patsy’s stern voice brooked no discussion.
“Got to go!” Akilah whispered, swiftly sending me a kiss and a wink before ending the call.
I clutched my phone in a sweaty hand. Akilah was gone, but her voice had helped; I could breathe again. The road wasn’t so terrifying anymore.
The summer flowers outside each house on this road were brighter than I would have imagined when I was living in the Caribbean. I had always thought of Canada—or any temperate place, actually—as dull and somehow less colorful than home. I had been surprised to see that the blossoms could be as red, as yellow, and as blue as the flowers in my own yard in Trinidad. Not caring to learn the names of the flora I wouldn’t be around much longer, I called these Canadian blooms by their sizes, shapes, and colors: the big pink one, the small blue one, the orange one with the dizzy, swirling petals. The wind had more success with them than with my wiry, tight curls. Those flowers danced in it, their little heads nodding and twisting in the strong breeze.
All the houses I passed were similar, though. Once, before I got the courage to take the bus at all, I tried walking straight home from the city. Twenty-four blocks didn’t seem like much—and it only took about fifteen minutes by car to get from the heart of town to my aunt’s house, so I figured I would be fine. Uh-uh. It was long. In fact, in my mind I called it the Day of the Longest Walk. I walked for three hours and just kept counting corners and counting corners until in frustration I stopped a little kid and asked where Second Street was.
Turned out I was standing on it, right by Aunty Jillian’s house. The houses all looked exactly the same to me, and I simply hadn’t recognized hers. But there it was: a small, brownish-white cottage surrounded by a perfect, jewel-green lawn and tubs of summer blooms, separated from its neighbors by hedges and chain-link fencing. On one side of the house was a black-doored garage with a car inside; another car was parked outside in the driveway. Aunt Jillian had a couple of garden gnomes cavorting in a Japanese-looking grotto she had made of rocks and stones, some dark-green perennial shrub, and pieces of driftwood she had collected on the grayish sand of Vessigny Beach, where she used to go with my mom and their parents when they were small. It was not a shrine, but she tended this grotto carefully, raking it and keeping it looking really nice, washing down the garden gnomes until they shone, even though she constantly made fun of them. I imagined they had secret lives like the singing gnomes in a movie I liked when I was a kid.
On the Day of the Longest Walk, I had been confused, too, because of perspective. I’d never seen Jillian and Julie’s house from that angle. I had always driven up into the garage in the passenger seat of their car, and entered the house through the side door in the garage. Nobody used the front door at all, I noticed. Seemed it was only there for decoration. People entered from the deck via the kitchen. From the garage, a side door led to the hallway between the formal living room and the rest of the house. The front door was seldom touched, except by Julie during her Saturday-morning cleaning rampages, when every bit of brass and glass in the house was polished till it gleamed like new. The front door was formal and austere, like the living room into which it opened, and perhaps nobody wanted that feeling of formality to be sullied with ordinary dirt and finger smudges.
Formalities or not, I wished I were there already, and yet I was still walking. I turned a corner, counting streets laterally this time. I knew the street names by heart now, and ran through them in my head as if I were afraid someday I’d be walking by and someone would have secretly changed them in the night just to confuse me. In my mind I called their names as I passed them: Evergreen, Fir, Pine, Aspen—names of trees I didn’t know from home at all, trees I wouldn’t recognize by sight. Then the bus station came into view.
Two cops idly watched me approach. They were wearing summer uniforms of short sleeves and short pants, and looked with obvious amusement at my over-padded appearance. I smiled uncomfortably at them and clenched my fists tighter in the pockets of my coat. It was a strange contradiction: I hated how nobody talked to me, but at the same time I didn’t really want anybody to talk to me, either. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d say in return. Or maybe I was afraid I’d just turn into a puddle of shame and terror right at their feet. Who knew?
Plus, they were cops. Canada is neighbors with America, and I briefly thought of the black people who’d been shot by law enforcement for doing absolutely nothing but what I was doing—walking. Even that wasn’t the same as in Trinidad, where police in jeeps pulled up on young black kids in the street to hassle them, rough them up, scare them, as a matter of course. But they didn’t shoot them. I was wary, to say the least.