“Okay,” I said. “I know what she did is serious. But do you have to charge her?”
I must have grovelled just enough, because then he eased off his by-the-book routine. “Here’s what I’ll do,” he said, as if he was doing me a big favour. “There’s this program we’ve got for first-time offenders now.” He handed me a card with a social worker’s name on it. “Just make sure she shows up.”
Great. Some social worker was going to poke into Severn’s childhood and blame everything on her parents. “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
He reached for the back door of the cruiser, but before he opened it, he turned to me and said, with a coy smile, “Grade ten history. You gave some pretty tough tests, Mr. Cruickshank.”
The bugger. He’d had to put the screws on me before he let on.
* * *
On the ride home, I asked Severn what the hell she was thinking. I asked her to explain to me why a girl who’d grown up in a house filled with books would want to steal one from a store. Of course I realized that shoplifting wasn’t about taking something you needed, or even valued. It was an act of rebellion. As a young girl, Severn had read voraciously. But recently it seemed that the notion that one could find useful knowledge in or inspiration from a book had become unbearably hokey to her.
“I don’t want you hanging out with Avery any more,” I told her.
Up to that point, her strategy had been to stare stone-faced out the window and weather my barrage. Now she sat ramrod straight and trained her withering sights on me. Like her mother, she tops me by a few inches. She likes to remind me of the fact when I really piss her off.
“You’d love it if I had no friends at all,” she said, her voice trembling between rage and tears. “No life. Just sitting at home every night like you.”
Her melodramatic tone was more than a little irritating. I thought of all the soccer practices, birthday parties, and sleepovers I’d driven her to as a girl. “I have papers to mark, lessons to prepare,” I said.
“You’re such a control freak.”
“I’m not the one who got picked up by the cops,” I reminded her.
She glared at me as if I wasn’t fighting fair, as if I was dumping on her. What was I supposed to do? Pat her hand and tell her that I understood? Because I didn’t.
“And why that particular store?” I said.
She gave a little snort. Obviously I should know, and I was just being dense.
“Was this stunt supposed to be some kind of whacked-out tribute to your mother?” I asked.
I remembered the last time I’d visited the store, years before. Seeing the back end of our Toyota sticking out through what was left of the front doors, the lights of emergency vehicles flashing all around me. I’d found Helen sitting in the back of an ambulance and wearing a mischievous, self-satisfied grin as a paramedic tended to a gash on her forehead. Since then I’d carefully avoided that parking lot, worried that I would come face to face with the store manager again. I was surprised she hadn’t cottoned on that Severn was Helen’s daughter, come to wreak further vengeance in the family name.
“So what are you saying?” Severn said. “That Mom embarrassed you?”
“I loved your mother.”
She gave another little snort.
“This isn’t some competition about who misses her the most,” I said.
She turned away, shutting me out, her arms crossed tight. We didn’t talk for the rest of the drive.
* * *
I’d only ever spoken to Avery’s mother over the phone, usually to confirm Severn’s whereabouts and the presence of an adult in the house. I got the impression from our brief exchanges that she was raising Avery on her own, Mr. Costello having flown the coop. We never strayed into chit-chat—partly because we were both embarrassed that our children had become such outcasts that they could claim only each other as friends, and partly, I suspect, because Mrs. Costello didn’t want to say anything to set me off, given that I was presumably still grieving the loss of my wife.
Our phone conversation after we’d both collected our children from the police was awkward, to say the least.
“It must be tough for you, raising Severn on your own,” she said to me. Perhaps she meant it as commiseration from one single parent to another, but I didn’t hear it that way. I detected a subtle rebuke, a suggestion that I’d let Severn get out of hand, that as a man I couldn’t possibly understand what made a sixteen-year-old girl tick.
“I think it would be better if Severn stopped hanging out with Avery,” I said.
“Fine,” she said, as if I was hopelessly naive to think we could control what they did.
Chapter 2
It’s now 3:00 a.m., and Severn isn’t home. This isn’t the first time I’ve waited up for her like this, contemplating all the horrific things that can happen to a girl of sixteen who’s bent on putting herself at risk just to annoy her father. Half a dozen times I’ve tried her cellphone, the one I insist she carries but she never turns on. I’ve even called the parents of most of her old friends, just to see if they have a clue where she is, but most of them simply say that they haven’t seen Severn for a long time, and that they’re so sorry about her mother and hope I’m doing all right. I murmur back my thanks, just as I always do when platitudes are cast my way like spare change to a beggar.
The last time I waited up for her, she finally arrived home at two-thirty. Instead of making excuses, she rolled her eyes and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing sitting up in the living room. Everyone else she knew stayed out late, and none of their parents stared at their watches all night waiting for them to come through the front door. I told her that I knew it had to be rough living with a father who actually cared where she was, but she’d have to get used to it, as embarrassing as that might be for her.
Although the thought makes me sick, I know that during one of her late-night excursions, my little girl has almost certainly found herself pressed against some boy with a hard-on and no fully formed idea of what to do with it. Maybe even Avery. Sure that Helen had talked with her about it before, I asked her once whether she was taking precautions. She looked at me like I’d propositioned her, like I’d violated the bounds of what any man should ask his daughter.
“Not that I think you should be in a position where you actually have to use precautions,” I sputtered.
God, whatever happened to that little girl I held in the crook of my arm at festivals in the park and sang silly songs with? The girl who wrapped her arms around my neck when I came home from school and blew wet raspberries on my cheek? Sometimes when I look at Severn now, she becomes unstuck in time, and I see her at sixteen, ten, and six all at once, her present and past selves superimposed, each blurring the other.
My first class is at eight-thirty. I’ve changed the lesson plan, and I know I won’t be able to sleepwalk through it. I should go to bed, I tell myself. What will another late-night faceoff resolve? I’ll demand that she give me a full accounting of where she’s been. She’ll stonewall me, then seal herself in her bedroom before I get the full story. She knows I’m growing weary of the fight, and I think she resents me all the more for it.
It’s at times like these that I sense Helen looking over my shoulder. She wouldn’t have let Severn brush her off so easily. There was a kind of détente between the two of them. They had their yelling matches, but they also had a tacit understanding of when an argument had gone too far. Within hours of a blow-up, I’d find Helen curled on Severn’s bed, offering her fashion advice or helping her rehearse lines for the school play. The ebb and flow of the relationship