Catch My Drift Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Genevieve Scott.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Cover illustration by JaySi, Shutterstock.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Scott, Genevieve, 1978-, author

  Catch my drift / Genevieve Scott.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-988-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-0-86492-989-1 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-0-86492-990-7 (KINDLE)

  I. Title.

  PS8637.C68615C38 2018 C813’.6 C2017-906115-1

  C2017-906116-X

  We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  To Gillian, my sister.

  The Best Time

  Wise

  Anything

  Ernie Breaks

  Vacancy

  Bounced

  Girl Friday

  Catch My Drift

  Black River

  Shiva

  The Favour

  Clutch

  Arrangements

  Freedom

  The Best Time

  Summer, 1975

  Lorna stepped to the edge of the pool and stared down at her toes. Though the evening air was thick and warm, her nail beds were purple. Somewhere through the pool fence, she could hear the bell of an ice cream truck.

  The pool was closed for the evening, but Debbie, Lorna’s roommate, was the lifeguard in charge of Wednesday lock-up. She and Lorna had planned this session back at the beginning of August.

  “Just say when,” Debbie said. The stopwatch swung casually from her narrow wrist.

  Nerves contracted in Lorna’s stomach, bunching into the shape of an apple. She looked up and ahead. Across the park, men and women strolled in pairs or stretched out together on the dark green grass. Focus, Lorna told herself. Fukiss. She shook out her hands and wiped them across her nylon-plastered ribs. “Yeah,” she said. “Ready.”

  Debbie whistled; Lorna leapt. She felt the tidiness of her dive, the satisfying surge of water against her forehead. She tore across the twenty-five-metre pool, legs pumping, sucking air deep into the branches of her lungs. At the wall, she turned with a hard kick and began to visualize her next target: the delicate, tanned knobs of Debbie’s knees. As she reached Debbie’s end and turned again, Lorna’s mind jumped to her own lumpy knees, now motoring her through the water. Focus, her brain shrieked. But the thing was, they really were potato knees: thick, draggy things laced right up the middle like footballs. Focus, focus, fukiss.

  At the end of the four laps, Lorna slammed her hand on the deck, splashing Debbie’s shorts. Her breath was scorching, ragged. She tried her best to look unruffled.

  Debbie nodded as she stared down at her watch. “You’re getting there,” she said. “That’s for sure, definitely.”

  Lorna couldn’t bear to look at Debbie’s crinkled, earnest face. She looked instead at the concrete deck, the grey puddles becoming shiny in the dropping sun.

  “You slowed down in the middle there. Just a little, huh?” Debbie said.

  “Time?”

  “One minute eleven.”

  Lorna slapped her bathing cap on the deck and ducked below the surface. Water tingled across her scalp. Debbie was training to be a teacher. When Lorna came back up, she’d say, “Chin up, you!” She’d say, “Don’t sweat it. You’re getting better every day!” She’d suggest doing something “fun” to take Lorna’s mind off things. Lorna needed her mind on this and this alone: varsity tryouts were two weeks away. She kicked off the tile and swam underwater to the other side of the pool.

  ...

  One year ago, Lorna had been a shy freshman from Albany, New York, and the fastest newcomer to the varsity swim team. She chose the University of Toronto, six hours from home, because the school had sent two girls to Munich two years earlier. The Montreal Olympics were just around the corner. At her very first varsity meet, Lorna missed the first-place spot by just tenths of a second. Her speed caused a stir among her teammates. Climbing back to her seat in the stands, a boy named Kenneth tossed her a clementine. He was a senior, an engineer, a butterflyer. In the showers, she’d heard a teammate describe his body as a perfect swimmer’s V. Across a crowded campus, it was always easy to make out his shape, and all the swimming girls wanted to slide in next to it. A week after that meet, Lorna dropped her time to match that of the missed first-place spot. The next week, she and Kenneth were dating.

  Normally Lorna cut through campus to get home, but tonight, after dodging Debbie’s invitation to someone’s back-to-school barbeque, Lorna walked to their apartment alone, the long way. In the last day or two, the university grounds had become crowded with hugging, squealing students. Lorna wasn’t ready for all of that; she wasn’t ready for the summer to end. Her best time — in a short pool with extra turns — was still two seconds behind last year’s qualifying time for the women’s varsity team.

  Halfway home, Lorna’s left knee began to click and she slowed her pace, stopping for a moment in front of a bus bench. She put her leg up and pressed two fingers into the soft hollow under her kneecap. Come on, she whispered. It was always the left knee that bothered her at night: an ache that felt like a toothpick pressed deep into the meat beneath the skin. The right knee was more of a problem in the rain. Neither hurt much in the water. In June, Lorna’s physiotherapist said that she could start training again. His office had a lemony smell and a framed poster of marathoners on the wall with the caption “Keep on the Sunny Side.” “Just see how it goes,” he told her. “One day at a time.”

  It was going, but it wasn’t going great. And Lorna felt sure it wasn’t just her knees holding her back. Not completely. In high school, her coach stressed that focus was job one. “Fukiss!” was the thing Coach Heli repeated to her swimmers again and again in her quick Estonian accent. Lorna was always proud of her ability to jam her mind shut in the water; her brain was just another body part, doing its bit to coordinate with her heart, her arms, legs, and lungs. She pitied the undisciplined swimmers who couldn’t focus. What Lorna liked best about swimming was not thinking. Thinking slowed swimmers down. But in the last few weeks, Lorna’s mind wouldn’t shut all the way. There was always a crooked gap left open: thoughts slipped inside and burrowed like moths. “Broken,” they whispered. “Spoiled legs.” For the first time in her life, Lorna’s mind was making her lose her rhythm.

  Lorna had been a swimmer since the seventh grade at Greensides Junior High. The pool was brand new and anyone could be on the team. Lorna joined because her father said she needed a hobby. He explained this while she helped him stake tomatoes on a summer afternoon, a forced break from the many hours she spent watching TV in their cool, dark basement. “What you need, Lorna, is a stake,” he’d said, spearing a liver-coloured stick into the ground. “A skill or an interest to stop you from sprawling out of control. Give you something to aim for.” Lorna’s father was a widower and a commercial real estate man with very few indulgences. He believed a good life came from finding what you did well and doing it better than other people. He drove Lorna to practices ever
y morning, and she swam at a steady, respectful distance from the pale feet of the boy or girl in front of her.

  Lorna didn’t stand out until her first competition: the whistle blew, her mind shut down, and her body shot forward with blurry speed. There was no one beside her when her fingertips slammed the deck. Up in the stands, she could see her father and teammates shouting hard and waving their arms. Until the other girls came, splashing and gulping behind her, Lorna was sure she’d had a false start. She had never had good haircuts or a huge group of friends. Her grades were middle-high, not exceptional. But that day in the pool, she understood who she was.

  Alone in the apartment, Lorna got in the shower and let the hot water pound her shoulders until they itched. She always preferred to shower at home, even during varsity training. The spray from the locker room showerheads was too sharp, and an older clique of girls — girls with broad shoulders and nicknames like Fin Lizzy — screamed popular songs and joked about the shape of each other’s tits like it was nothing. They asked Lorna crude questions about Kenneth and laughed without waiting for her answer. In her bathing suit puffed with soap, Lorna was always lonely in the showers. When she thought about the upcoming varsity season, she tried not to think about those girls.

  Feeling her body relax under the spray, Lorna rinsed her plastic razor under the water and ran it over every reachable hair on her arms and legs, weaving carefully around the scars on her knees. The tickly movements near the tender skin made her body shudder. She thought of Kenneth’s fingers, brushing her knees under the tablecloth at last year’s fall athletic banquet. The pads of his fingertips had been rough as pencil erasers. She wondered, then, if the other girls could tell where his hands were and hoped that they could.

  Lorna snapped the thick rubber band on her wrist. She’d been doing this all summer — it burned like hell, but it was the only way to keep her focus, to “Keep on the Sunny Side.” She rinsed the razor and left it on the edge of the tub. Later, she’d ask Debbie to shave the downy patch on her nape.

  Lorna snapped off the warm water, got out of the shower, and towelled off in her bedroom, staring at the distant view of the city’s grey lake, massive and forgettable. The sun was gone now, vanished into the water. Lorna imagined a pile of sunken summer suns at the bottom of Lake Ontario, lost forever like pennies in a well.

  The apartment she and Debbie shared was on the eighteenth floor of the Northway, the tallest in a string of white and beige 1960s towers east of the university. Debbie was an easy roommate because she was often out. She had her job as a lifeguard, a sick mother an hour away, and countless girlfriends in identical buildings on the same street. Still, it wasn’t exactly luck that brought the two of them together. From February until May, Lorna had lived with Kenneth on the first floor. On the afternoon that Kenneth left, he had given her the handwritten ad for the room at Debbie’s place, torn from the lobby bulletin board. She’d stared hard at the googly-eyed double o’s on the word roomie, trying to understand what she’d done to make them enter her life.

  Kenneth was behind the wheel during the accident the January before. He was driving too fast, annoyed by his fifth-place finish in the first meet of the new year. On the highway, Lorna held the door handle tight and didn’t say anything: she’d placed first on the women’s side. They were only minutes from her dorm when he slammed the brakes to avoid a burlap-wrapped Christmas tree that had rolled off the sidewalk. Kenneth steered the car onto the curb and right into a newspaper box. Lorna didn’t have time to brace herself, and both of her knees slammed into the dash. Kenneth was fine.

  After the two surgeries, the doctor said it would be a month or more before Lorna could walk without help, several months before she could swim. Lying in her hospital bed, fingering the hot, bandaged lumps under the sheets, Lorna couldn’t imagine who she was. She thought of her father, who’d wanted her to swim so that he wouldn’t have to worry. She thought of her mother, Marion Kedzie, a talented pianist and popular music teacher, invited once to play at the governor’s mansion. She died a week after Lorna was born, a case of post-partum septicaemia, but Lorna had one photograph from the hospital: a new mother in a frilly, collared nightgown, peering at a tiny baby in what seemed to be a large Pyrex tray. The expression was hard to read, maybe because Lorna had never known her mother’s face, but she thought of the look as one of hope. Lorna wept for the person she wouldn’t become, now that she had nothing to aim for.

  It took Kenneth four whole days to visit the hospital. When he did, he brought a ficus tree wrapped in a yellow bow with decorative foil. His wet hair had frozen during the walk over. In the cracked vinyl chair next to Lorna’s bed, he jiggled his leg up and down and avoided looking right at her. She hadn’t wanted to, but she started to cry again. He put the tree down next to her meal tray. He didn’t say he was sorry; he said, “Here.” When she told him what the doctor said about swimming, what the dormitory said about not being able to accommodate handicaps, what her father said about coming home and finishing her degree at the community college, Kenneth got up to look out the window. He told her that if she wanted, she could probably just move in with him at the Northway Apartments. He only had a bachelor, but it was on the first floor, so she’d be fine. Lorna said her father would never let her, but then Kenneth said that maybe, depending on how things went, they could get married after his graduation in the spring. They could take off somewhere with sun and salt water that would fade her scars.

  Living in Kenneth’s apartment, sharing his bed, Lorna found with relief that she didn’t miss the five a.m. practices, the five p.m. practices, or never seeing the sun. She didn’t miss the constant hunger, the itchy skin, or the apple-shaped fear that sprouted in her gut before every time trial. It was astonishingly easy to focus on her new goal: she was a wife-to-be. She didn’t want Kenneth to feel guilty about what he’d done to her; she wanted him to know how lucky she felt to be with such a clever, V-shaped man. She made Kenneth’s mother’s Ukrainian recipes and grew tomatoes on their tiny balcony overlooking the dumpster. She researched places they could escape with sun and salt water. When the physiotherapist told Lorna she was strong enough to swim again, it was only the honeymoon she thought about. Kenneth took her to dinner when she told him the news, and afterwards they made love in his quick, jabbing way. A week later, Kenneth put his hands on Lorna’s shoulders and said he was sorry, but it sounded like she’d be OK. He said that if he were ever back in Toronto, the Northway — quite possibly the whole block — would remind him of her. She pulled away from him then. Minutes later, Kenneth and a rented van full of books, records, and swimming trophies were making their way to an oil field in Alberta.

  The streetlights were coming on now outside Lorna’s window. She turned on her desk lamp and stretched out on her single bed to start her physio routine. She pulled one knee up to her chin and listened for pain. Quiet. As she pulled on her second knee, Lorna found herself wondering if there were any Olympic-size pools in northern Alberta. She snapped the rubber band on her wrist again.

  The next day was cloudy and everyone said it would rain, so Lorna had the two-hour lane swim at the public pool pretty much to herself. She was practising dives when she heard her name and looked up to see Alex Ketchum, gripping the diamonds of the pool’s chain-link fence. Since July, Lorna had been tutoring Alex every Sunday evening at the Burger Shack across from the park. All freshmen needed to pass English 100 to complete the year, and Lorna, who’d gotten an A in the second semester, tutored jocks and foreign students for rent money during the summer repeat session. Alex wasn’t foreign or an athlete, but he was an actor and that distracted him. He played the teenaged son on Dog Daze, a local TV program about a suburban family with a talking sheepdog. He was the curly-haired hero for the preteen audience. On the show, he always wore the same expression: sweet and slightly dumbfounded. But when he smiled, you could see his incisors, and it made Lorna think of some rascally storybook animal. A good-natured fox or wolf. He was cute, if a little
goofy, and Lorna liked to be seen with him. She often fantasized about being spotted by one of the swim team shower girls: the girls who pitied her, or at least pretended to pity her as a way to preface their gossip.

  Lorna and Alex always met at eight, just after lane swim, but when he called her name it was still before seven. “Thought I’d find you here!” He had to shout across the deck.

  Lorna knew she should get out of the water and speak to him, but she felt self-conscious in her bathing suit: an old one, a little see-through in the back. The wind was also picking up, blowing Alex’s hair and the leaves of the poplar trees behind him. She closed herself into the corner of the pool. “You’re early.”

  He leaned into the fence. Alex was short for an actor, although you couldn’t really tell on TV. “Ballantyne’s is having fifty-cent drinks till nine,” he said. “Want to go?”

  Lorna had never been to Ballantyne’s, a smoky bar frequented by graduate students and artists, not athletes. “Right now?”

  “Whenever you’re done.” He squinted at her. “It’s shitty weather for swimming, isn’t it?”

  “Give me a minute.” Lorna dipped back underwater and pushed off the side. She glided way out and then began her strokes, reaching forward with arms elegantly curved. Lorna always swam better when someone was watching. She wanted to show Alex what she did out here, shitty weather or not. When she looked up after six laps, he had wandered away. She hauled herself out of the pool.

  All of the windows were open at Ballantyne’s. Alex and Lorna sat right up at the bar on stools. Being in a bar, much less sitting up at one, was not something Lorna was used to. She felt awkward, on display, and she hoped Alex didn’t notice.

  A barmaid leaned over to kiss Alex on both cheeks. She had the small, bra-free breasts and shaggy short hair of a French pop star. She poured Alex a rum and Coke, and then turned to Lorna, her head cocked as though to say: Realize, of course, that you don’t belong.