“I’m proud of you,” she said. “I want you to keep looking inside yourself and to tell me everything you see.”
✴
MY MOTHER OFTEN talked about purpose.
“You all have one,” she said, driving us home from school, staring off above the glistening, leaf-blown highway as if we’d keep on toward our purpose and never return.
She told us that our gifts helped us to understand our purpose. Since my brother’s and sister’s report cards contained stars that mine lacked, they were clearly gifted in school. In particular, my sister’s gifts were singing and, when necessary, punching boys, and my brother’s were math and behaving. He was also gifted with an obsession for space travel and Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and he played so many hours of Tron Deadly Discs on his IntelliVision that his thumbs blistered.
Though I’d tried my hand at creating sculptures from trash and even made dolls with my mother’s old maternity underwear, stuffing them with cotton and twisting them the way clowns did with long balloons, none of this was appreciated. The sculptures returned to the trash, and the dolls, shortly after I gave them to the neighbor’s toddlers, unraveled and were left on the roadside.
As we were nearing home, I asked my mother why I had a purpose.
“So you can do something great for the world,” she said.
“But how can I know?” I practically yelled.
“What?”
“What my purpose is?”
“Just ask inside yourself,” she said. “All the answers you’ll ever need are inside you.”
Along the road, dead autumn grass resembled a dirty shag rug. Ten Speed appeared in the distance and zipped past, turning her head to take us in with her wide eyes. And then the road before us was clear. A few leafless trees leaned this way and that, hunched and bent and reaching, like old people.
“Do you have any invisible friends?” my mother asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are there people you talk to?”
It seemed like a dumb question. I talked to stuffed animals and books, to my pillow and the trees. I walked across the fields talking.
But my brother was eager to explain. “Not real people,” he said.
“Spirit guides,” she interrupted. “Your brother and sister have one. How many do you have?”
Ten Speed had made a U-turn and was trying to catch up to our van, her chin to the handlebars. I watched her, giving my mother’s question some thought.
“Twelve,” I said.
Briefly, no one spoke.
“Well then,” she told me, “you should have no problem finding your purpose. Just ask. I’m sure at least one of them will tell you.”
✴
NOVEMBERS WERE DISAPPOINTING. My father was gone, running his seafood stores or selling Christmas trees. My birthday passed while he worked, and that Friday, at school, the kids sang “Bonne Fête à Toi,” though I wouldn’t actually turn nine until Sunday. As they yammered, I mourned the few remaining weeks of salmon season. The teacher told the class my age, and they all asked, as they did each November, why I was a year younger than they were. I explained how my mother had thought kindergarten was a waste of time and made me go straight to first grade. They told me kindergarten was fun, and I said it was for slow learners, which she’d also said, though from what I’d heard, it did sound fun.
The next morning, when my father was saying good-bye to my mother in the kitchen, I grabbed my book on fish and ran downstairs.
“The salmon runs are going to end,” I whined and showed him the dates. “Can’t we go for my birthday? It’s tomorrow. You were going to forget it. You always do.”
He finished putting on his rain gear by the door and said, “We can’t go fishing, but how about I take you to work for your birthday? There’s a spare bed. I’ll bring you back tomorrow.”
“Sure, okay,” I told him, though I planned to harass him about salmon fishing and make him feel bad. On our way into the city, as I tried to bide my time, we passed a shallow river where Native people stood in the current, spearing salmon that splashed between the rocks. My father had long ago explained why they were allowed to fish this way and catch as much as they wanted, and I’d been jealous. I couldn’t help but mutter, “I wish I was Indian” as we drove past.
My father sold Christmas trees near downtown Vancouver, on a parking lot rented from the Pacific National Exhibition, which had closed its rides for the winter. He’d put up fences and turned the space into a maze of pine, spruce, and fir, and he slept in the mobile home that served as an office and a warm-up place for his employees, the young men who hauled trees and flirted with Helen, a pretty blond with fringed bangs who ran the till. She played Christmas music over the speakers until the last customer left, and then put on the Eurythmics or Duran Duran as everyone gathered in the cramped living room to drink beer and rum and coke, the trailer floor creaking.
Though his workers all had yellow rain jackets and pants, my father wore green, as if it were a general’s color. Yellow was ugly, he told me, and he pointed out that you called cowards yellow. In green, he blended with the trees, so that sometimes I didn’t notice him watching. I would be wandering, talking to myself, and then I’d see him, his eyes as still as unlit windows.
Though I was actually proud of going to work with him, I couldn’t stop worrying about the salmon runs. Each time I reminded him, he said, “Okay. I’ll think about it,” or “Stop asking, will you?” Then he went back to speaking with customers or giving commands.
By that night, I was starving. On the couch, I huddled in my jacket, trying to read Mystery of the Fat Cat, wishing I had enough friends to form a gang or that I lived someplace with interesting creatures like rats and cockroaches. My stomach clenched and gurgled, and I pictured myself sinking my teeth into Helen’s arm, like a famished rodent. I never used to worry about food. I feared I might cry, and this made me angrier. I threw down the book and went outside.
Misting rain drifted over the lot, gauzy halos shining around the hanging colored bulbs. No one stood near the trailer, the music turned low, Perry Como crooning softly as if from far away. Pine needles covered the asphalt, and I walked into a row of trees, hundreds tied in twine and leaned against two-by-four supports. Voices reached me, rising and falling, like the ocean from a distance. The corridor of trees became so gloomy that I froze, my senses overpowered by the smell of pine sap.
“André …,” I called. My voice broke, and I swallowed and tried to make my throat work. “André!” I shouted. Footsteps scuffed past beyond the trees and stopped.
“Hey, André!” a man barked. “Your kid’s looking for you.”
The footsteps scuffed off, and I pictured big rubber boots on indifferent feet, dragging through pine needles.
“Where?” my father shouted.
“Just over here,” the man said. “Over there.”
My father called my name, sounding tired. His silhouette appeared at the end of the corridor, his sou’wester gleaming faintly. He didn’t drag his feet but stepped quietly until he stood before me, his eyes lost beneath the rubber brim.
“What is it?”
“I’m hungry,” I said, trying to keep my voice under control, though it sounded whiny and on the verge of tears.
“It’s late. You should’ve told me before.” He spoke slowly, holding back his anger, and I forced myself to answer calmly.
“I didn’t know. I just realized.”
Hazing rain gathered on my face