Lisa

"Come on,” Teryn whispered. She had opened my window from the outside, and was on her hands and knees. I had fallen asleep with a book on my chest. “Hurry. If Mom and Dad catch you we’re both dead.” My bedroom was in the basement and it was a small casement window. I put on the black leather jacket Lisa had given me four years ago—it finally fit me—and climbed up on my chair, and Teryn helped drag me through the window onto the gravel. We took the back streets up the hill behind the Glencoe Club in case my stepfather (her father) was out driving: It was late but often he had to go to the halfway house he ran, 1835 House, at unpredictable hours. We smoked Teryn’s Du Maurier cigarettes and she had a warm bottle of beer that we split, sitting in the grass and the cold—it was May and almost midnight, Calgary, Alberta, 40 degrees—looking at the lights of the houses below us and the black uncoiling streak of the Elbow River. Then I took a vial of hash oil from my pocket, a pin, tinfoil, a Bic pen, and a lighter. I wouldn’t normally share my hash oil with Teryn, but it was our night. I scraped the thick black chocolaty paste onto the foil and held the flame underneath, and we each took a few lungfuls with the Bic pen (you take the writing part out, naturally). It was good Afghan hash oil, 30 bucks a vial, and I knew (though Teryn didn’t) that we were going to be very stoned. Then we finished the beer, coughing, and headed through Mount Royal down to 17th Avenue where Lisa was playing in the finals of the foosball tournament. I hadn’t seen Lisa in six months or so, but Teryn told me she had run away from her last foster home—she’d been in five or six of them and had lost her spleen trying to escape from the Foothills Hospital psychiatric ward—and was living in a house near Western with her boyfriend and their roommates. Supposedly they had a marijuana farm in the basement. Lisa was 17, Teryn was 13, and I was 11. In Henry’s it was crowded and filled with adults. We looked for Lisa. A bartender spotted us, and they were taking us out the door when Teryn shouted, “Lisa!” and I saw her, wearing a baseball cap, even skinnier, in an AC/DC t-shirt (she shouldn’t listen to that crappy music, I thought), with her boyfriend’s arm around her. He was an Indian with strong features, straight glossy black hair that hung to his shoulders, and a generous, powerful smile. I had met him once before. Eight years from this time, my mother would call me in my dorm room at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, and tell me that my sister was dead. Teryn had returned from getting ice for a party that she and Lisa were throwing and found the apartment empty, blood in the bathroom and on the steps outside, and after calling the police they’d discovered Lisa’s body in a dumpster, beaten to death by a baseball bat swung by this same boyfriend (over some money she owed him on a pot deal), and he would serve seven years in prison. Lisa caught my eye and smiled and then saw we were being kicked out and hurried through the crowd—both her arms in the air, a beer in each hand—to catch us and explain to the bouncer that we were her kid sister and brother, we were here to watch the match. “Keep an eye on them, Lisa,” he said. “If I catch them drinking it’s your ass.” Lisa won that night. She beat a man with a broken nose—he was wearing a baseball cap, too, and kept a cigarette in his mouth the whole time he played—five to one in a best of nine games. They cheered, shook beer bottles, and sprayed her with beer. “Watch the pool tables!” the bartender shouted. She gave me a shot of rye whiskey and said leaning close, “You know, I love you, Clancy.” The big gold wood-and-plastic trophy was on the bar. I wished she would kiss me. Just a kiss from my big sister, nothing weird. The light was clean through her bedroom window, and she had a record playing on her bright orange plastic record player. It was that high, long mountainborn light of the summer in Calgary. She was playing a John Denver album. I watched her brush her hair. I sat on the end of her bed with my feet dangling. She and Teryn shared this room, and there was a balcony outside with a door that came off my and my little brother’s room (he was a real brother, not a stepbrother) so we could walk down and climb through their window if we didn’t want to use the doors that went into the hallway. Lisa was taking us to Stanley Park that morning—it was about a three-mile walk—to catch grasshoppers. She sang along to the music and I would have liked to sing as well (I knew the words), but I have no singing voice. In her tight striped knit shirt I could see the sharp wings of her shoulder blades. She turned to me and said, still brushing her hair, “You know, when my mom died and Mom moved in, I hated her. But I love her now.” I didn’t understand. Later that day, after we brought the grasshoppers back and closed them up in shoe boxes with grass to eat, Teryn and my little brother stayed home and Lisa and I went to Elbow Park, a few blocks from our house. We sat in the middle of a clump of bushes and she taught me how to smoke a cigarette. I tried to inhale but couldn’t (to this day I can inhale almost anything but cigarette smoke). She explained how to hold your tongue against the roof of your mouth, swallow, and exhale through your noise. That was the one way I could manage it. When we came back, just in time for dinner, Mom smelled smoke on us. My stepfather got the plunger from the downstairs bathroom and knocked Lisa to the floor with a slap on her ear. He took her hair in his fist and pulled her up the stairs to her bedroom while she fought him, bumping up the stairs on her back, screaming. He had the plunger in his other hand. He slammed her bedroom door. Then we listened to them—six of the nine of us kids were home then—while he beat her with the wooden handle of the plunger. My mother frowned at me the whole time: I had been smoking too, and I was in first grade, which exacerbated the injury I had done her. The fact was, I understand in retrospect, he wanted me to hear her take the punishment that, because of my mother, he could not inflict upon me. They let me go to her when he came back down, after he made sure that I ate my dinner (I didn’t like to eat, as a kid), and she cried with her head in my lap. I did not know what to do as she cried. Two more times, over the next seven years—before I would stop speaking to her altogether—both times in a hospital room in the psych ward, she would cry into my lap, and I had no better idea how to help then, either. We were in the parking lot outside Shopper’s Drug Mart on 14th Street. The poplar leaves were red, and the air was rich with that smoky smell of autumn that you only get in the mountains. When I think about growing up in Calgary, now, the thing that makes me feel most forlorn is the memory of that smell. A proof of the value of suffering: It’s much easier to be an adult, but childhood was better. “OK, this isn’t some Paki’s candy store, Clancy. They have cameras in here and mirrors. First you walk the aisles and spot what you want. If it looks like it’s going to be hard to grab don’t move it off the shelf but pretend like you’re shopping and make it easy to get to. Then go look at a few other things. Comic books or whatever. When you come back make sure the guy at the register isn’t watching you and do it behind your back, right into your underwear.” She checked to see my shirt was untucked and my pants weren’t tight. She was wearing the black leather jacket that she would give me, two years later, when she moved to her first foster home. “You ready?” I nodded. I had been shoplifting since I was five so I had several seasons under my belt but I stuck to the small stores and Eaton’s downtown like Lisa had made me promise. We went in. The store was busy and that was good. I went to the toy aisle and spotted the Green Lantern spy binoculars I was after. They hung on a hook, but were a bit high to grab from behind, so I had to move them down a shelf. Then I walked to the other side of the store where the candy was and shuffled the Coffee Crisps. I looked for Lisa but didn’t see her among the aisles. I knew she was stealing makeup, but using her purse, which was trickier. Then I wandered back by way of the vitamins and cold remedies to the plastic toys. The pharmacist was watching me, I could see. There were round mirrors in all four corners and one camera, as far as I could tell, but the toys were in the middle of the aisle in the middle of the store, there couldn’t have been a more hidden location. I inspected the girls’ toys with embarrassment while I waited for the pharmacist to look away. Then I backed up, lifted my jacket and my shirt, and slipped the binoculars into my pants. I missed my underwear and they fell into the pant seat. Ugh. I forgot to check the cashier. He was watching me. The binoculars were balanced between my legs. If I walked they were going to drop out of my pant leg. But I couldn’t reach between my legs and put my hand there, or stick my hand back down my pants now. Rule number one was keep your hands out of your pockets. The cashier still had his eyes on me. I walked as carefully as I could toward the front door, trying to keep the binoculars in place. If I took very small steps and kept my legs and back straight I could hold the crinkly plastic-and-cardboard bag in place. It must have looked like I had shit my pants. I waited for a hand to fall on my shoulder. “Excuse me, son, stop right where you are.” Calling my mom on the phone. The police frowning and shaking their heads. The cashier watched me all the way out the door. Outside I grabbed the binoculars with my hand in my pocket and ran around back to our meeting place behind the dumpster. I took the binoculars out of my pants and their wrapper to admire them. They did not work very well but they were collapsible. I was thirsty with the great thrill of a successful theft. (In more than 25 years of thievery, from age five to 30 or so, when I retired, I was only caught once, stealing an INXS tape in a mall store for my little brother’s birthday. I had the 20 bucks I had planned to use to buy the tape in my pocket, which made the judge go easy on me—along with my good grades—because it was clearly “a onetime thing.”) I sat on the curb and waited for Lisa. She didn’t come. When I got home two hours later—I waited and waited—my mom said, “Where have you been?” and I knew she’d already talked to the drugstore. “At Tom Davis’s,” I said. She went to call the Davises, but Tom’s parents were never home. I didn’t see Lisa again for a month. She had a record, and she often went to juvenile detention. She told me good stories of how they smuggled in hash and beer and went on a day trip to the bowling alley on the weekend. The last time I spoke to Lisa I saw her on the other side of the swinging wood bridge that crossed Elbow River on the way to Rideau Junior High. The river was iced over and there was snow piled in tall, precise narrow lines along the ropes of the bridge. I was in seventh grade. Her boyfriend the Indian was there. She said, “I hear you’ve been telling Mom that I shouldn’t smoke pot.” There was more to the story than that. It was one of those lies moms make you tell, by asking questions you can’t answer truthfully. “I ought to beat you up,” she said. “He’s your kid brother,” the Indian said. “Give him a break, Lisa.” He was wearing a yellow cowboy hat and a blue down vest. Under his vest he wore one of those checkered lumberjack shirts. Lisa was wearing a brown toque and gloves with the fingers cut off. They were sharing a cigarette. I walked past her, trying not to cry. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, and I had expected her to hug me and tell me how tall I’d grown (I’d had a growth spurt over the summer and fall and was probably taller than she was, I thought). She called a week or so later to apologize, and I wouldn’t take the call. After that she called five or six times a year, and always called on my birthday, and sometimes—if my mom made me—I would listen to her voice on the phone before I hung up. “Please talk to me, Clancy,” she’d say. But my father had left when my parents divorced, and my older brother had left (my other real brother) when he was sent to reformatory school (that’s when Lisa became his stand-in, I realized many years later), and I decided, that winter morning on the way to school, from then on I was doing the leaving. Of course I was wrong about that.