Catch My Drift Read online

  Violet’s humming gets louder. Are we selling the house? You got it.

  “Sam?”

  “Shhh.”

  “It’s the sign.”

  “What is?”

  I let go of her hands. “Violet. The song.” My heart is racing.

  Sam narrows her eyes. “What song?”

  When the door swings open at the top of the stairs, Sam and I both scream. Like seriously scream, as if we were on a roller coaster.

  Violet switches the light on. “What’s going on down there?”

  Sam rushes to blow out the candles, but Violet is already bumping down the steps with the vacuum cleaner. When she gets to the bottom, she looks only at me with her hand on her hip. Violet is a big woman with a permanent puddle of red in the corner of her eye. It’s hard to ignore her. “We’re just playing,” I say.

  “Playing at what?”

  “Only a séance.”

  Sam looks at me like shut up. “A Shabbat,” she says. “That’s what Cara meant.”

  Violet grunts as she bends to pick the plate up off the floor. She looks back at me like everything’s my fault. “Who teaches you to play games with the devil himself?”

  “It’s fine,” Sam says.

  “You silly, stupid girls.” Violet pulls her gold crucifix out from her dress. She wraps her fist around the chain and holds the whole thing away from her chest. “Lord Jesus,” she says, “please give these girls your white light of protection.”

  I glance at Sam. She turns her finger in a circle around the outside of her ear. She looks like she’s trying not to laugh, but I don’t think it’s funny.

  “Why do we need protection?” I ask.

  Violet takes the necklace off and puts it on the laundry shelf, holding it down under a jumbo bottle of detergent. “The devil’s always on your back,” she says. “He’s waiting for an invitation to your soul.” She leaves the necklace dangling there as we follow her up the stairs.

  Later, when Ruthie comes home, I expect Violet to tell on us but she doesn’t. Ruthie invites me to stay for spaghetti bolognese, but I’m glad when Mom comes and takes me to Romeo’s Pizza instead. She tells me there wasn’t much interest in our house, which should make me happy, but I can’t stop thinking about Violet’s bulging fist clutching that crucifix away from her boobs.

  It’s hard to say exactly when, but a little while after the séance, I start getting scary thoughts. The sentence Hell take my soul starts barging into my head several times a day, right out of nowhere. I don’t even know if I believe in hell or souls, but it doesn’t matter, the thoughts still stick to my brain. It can happen anytime: when I see the picture of Debbie, if there’s violence on TV, during the “Deliver us from evil” part of the Our Father prayer at school. Sometimes I think of my brain as a great big fishbowl. All my regular thoughts are little fish, spinning around and minding their own business. But the hell-thoughts are sharks. They eat up everything. I decide that if I do a little more door tapping at night — plus all the windows, plus everything in my room that’s square — I might be able to save myself. But the sharks are vicious.

  Mom smokes and smokes in the yard every night, even though she supposedly Quit4life and we even went to the sandwich party. I wonder what her fishes are while she sits there: does she miss Dad? Does she wonder what he’s doing? Is she sad about the house? But every time I ask what she’s thinking, she says that question never gets an honest answer. I know she’s right. Once when she asked what I think about when I bounce my tennis ball against the house for hours and hours, I told her that I’m just practising to make it to Wimbledon. When Mom was around my age, she was already a major athlete, so I knew she’d like that answer. The truth is, though, mostly I make up stories about people I know. One of my favourite things is to make up stories about the kids in my class whose parents are divorced. I think about how their parents met and fell in love, and then I invent whatever went wrong. Usually when the parents meet in my stories, they have raincoats on and they laugh a lot and run hand-in-hand to catch buses or ferries or something. Then, ten years later, the father might disappear when he gets up to use the bathroom at the movie theatre. Or the mom might get caught with her boss in a hotel fire. Other times, I just think about Dan Bangor, my tennis teacher, which I’m not about to tell Mom. And I definitely wouldn’t tell Mom about the hell thoughts. I’d have to explain everything about the séance and Debbie’s ghost. She wouldn’t like it. She never wants to talk about Debbie.

  . . .

  Mom says a family is coming back to see the house, so she makes Jed and me tidy everything. She bursts in while I’m brushing my hair in the bathroom. “There is toothpaste everywhere,” she says. “It looks like a bird shit all over the sink!” She scrunches up a wad of toilet paper and rubs at the counter. “Your revolting stains can turn a buyer right off.”

  “Do you know who’s coming?”

  “Goddammit, Cara. What difference does it make?” She sighs and throws the tissues into the toilet bowl. “Just go get changed for tennis lessons.”

  “I am changed.”

  Mom looks up at my jean shorts and green tank top and rolls her eyes. Then she leaves me alone.

  The flamingo has been at our house since before I woke up. She rolled big barrels of pink and white flowers into the yard and made a fan of magazines in the living room. Now she walks down the hallway blasting vanilla air freshener with two hands.

  “I was just coming with these!” She hands me some fluffy yellow towels from under her arm. “It’s amazing the difference some decent hand towels will make. Even in a bathroom that refuses to look clean!” She finishes spraying, sniffs, and then sighs like not even the whole can will get the house to smell good.

  “Do people take showers here?” I ask.

  “No, they do not. They just take a little boo. Test the bones—” I don’t hear the rest of the description. It’s just that word: bones. This morning I woke up feeling normal, but now the sharks are back.

  “Well don’t just stand there!” The flamingo takes the yellow towels back from me and hangs them in perfect squares on the rack. “There.”

  I tap the towels then chuck them in the bathtub as soon as she leaves.

  Tennis lessons are always the best part of the week, but it’s even better today because Petra Sokolov, my tennis enemy, is away. I’ve been worried lately because Petra told me Dan Bangor asked her out. I said there’s no way that’s true because Dan’s twenty and she’s only twelve. She said Dan doesn’t mind how old she is because she has a lot of maturity. “Plus,” she said, “he likes my hair. Not just the hair on my head.” Then she burst out laughing.

  The tar court is so hot it feels like it’s melting around my running shoes. Dan Bangor invents a game called “Beat the Heat,” where only the champion gets to play on the shady side. I am the champ every time. After a while, no one except me wants to play anymore so I get to hit alone with Dan while the other kids practise air band with his new portable stereo. Dan has skin the colour of chewy caramels and he plays with his T-shirt tucked into the back of his shorts. He has muscles like great big cables in his back.

  “Your overhead’s looking awesome,” Dan says, taking a long sip of water from a bottle before dumping the rest on his head. “Most girls can’t get any power.”

  “Thanks,” I say, but quietly, because it’s hard to talk in a regular voice around Dan.

  “But you need to practise your groundstrokes.”

  I tell him that where I practise tennis at the side of the house there isn’t much actual ground.

  Dan shakes out his hair and water drops spray my T-shirt. “Find a brick wall or a garage door and just give ’er, you know?” I nod and he crouches to my level, pointing two fingers at his eyeballs. There’s a strip of pink zinc on his nose. “Visualize, OK? See your opponent and just hammer the ball where she won’t expect it.”

  At the end of the lesson, the other kids do a lip-synch using Dan’s stereo. The guys stand in the
back, holding their racquets like guitars. The girls put tennis balls underneath their shirts to make tits and use the ends of their racquets for microphones. They don’t take tennis seriously like Dan and me. While they do Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” I pick at the cracks on the court and pray that one day Dan and me will get married. Mom’s always saying people shouldn’t get married too young, but in eight years I’ll be practically twenty and Dan will be twenty-eight. I won’t ever fall out of love with him, so he’ll never have to trip and smash his stereo and cry his eyes out.

  When we get home from tennis, a man is standing on our front steps talking to the flamingo. At the slam of the car door, both of them turn around and I see the man’s face. Mr. Sokolov.

  Petra and her sister Marta come flying out our front door. “Hi, Cara!” Petra says. There are Cheezies in her braces. “If we move here, I’m getting your room.”

  “No. Stamped it!” Marta says. She has a long shiny nose and the same stickuppy bangs as Petra. I want to mash my racquet into her face.

  Petra sits down on the stoop like she already owns the place. “Dan miss me today?”

  “No.”

  I go past them through the yard with my tennis racquet. The ugly barrels of flowers take up all my space, so I dodge around them, smashing the ball. I realize that I didn’t have a single hell-thought the whole time I was at tennis. The Sokolovs destroyed that. I let the ball land in front of me for a groundstroke and then whip it back up, spraying the stupid flowers out from one of the barrels. The ball bounces back to me and I spin around and smack it in an unexpected direction just like Dan said, but it hits the screen door. There’s the quietest crack, then the glass crushes inward all at once. I run up to the gate to see if anyone saw, but the Sokolovs are jamming themselves into a car, and Mom is waving goodbye with a big dumb grin on her face. I go back and collect as many of the pink flowers as I can and squish the stems back into the barrel.

  Mom comes over to the yard once the car drives away. I start to cry before she even sees anything. I can’t help it.

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  I go right to her, burying my head in the crook of her arm. Her cool dampness feels good on my hot cheeks. “I don’t like the Sokolovs.”

  She runs her hand up and down my back. “The Sokolovs are lovely people,” she says. “Their family is growing.” They’re growing, but we’re shrinking.

  “This is our house.” My teeth are jammed together. It’s not fair that the Sokolovs get to live here just because their father is still at home.

  “Cara, anything can be our house,” Mom says. “We’re lucky that way.”

  “They broke our door.”

  “They did what?” Mom lets go of my shoulders and I hold my breath and wait. She walks to the glass and pushes it gently with her sneaker: jagged pieces rain down like icicles. She stands back but shields her hands around her face to see in. “Where’s your tennis ball?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She turns back to me. “I’m going to ask you one more time.”

  I can’t even look at her.

  “No tennis lessons this summer to cover the cost.”

  I smack my racquet down hard on the rim of a barrel. Mom comes over and grabs me by the shoulders. She squeezes so hard it pinches. “I know this isn’t easy, Cara. But for Christ’s sake, don’t make it worse.”

  That night, I can’t fall asleep even after three rounds of tapping. The hell-sharks are eating up every other fish in my brain. If I were little, I’d go sleep in Mom’s bed, but I haven’t done that in years. If I tried it now, she’d want to know what’s wrong, but it’s too much to explain. She’d think I was going crazy, on top of already being mad at me.

  I get out of bed to see if Jed’s awake and wants to do something, anything, but I hear him snoring through the door. I listen, like I used to when I was little, wondering if his breathing sound can still put me to sleep. I try to make my breath do what his does. Up and down, in and out. A little while later, Mom shakes my shoulders. “I think you were sleepwalking, sweetheart,” she says. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  After school the next day, Mom’s on the phone with the flamingo non-stop. She keeps talking about “the number,” like “What happened to my number?” and “That’s not the number we talked about—” Jed and I listen from the kitchen where we’re both pretending to do homework.

  “The Sokolovs aren’t going to buy it,” I tell Jed. “They’re too poor.”

  He shrugs. “Petra Sokolov says she got 896 on Breakout.” Breakout is my favourite arcade game. It’s like playing tennis against a wall: you knock down as many bricks as you can with a paddle and ball.

  “She’s lying. They only have Dragon’s Lair. I even went to her ugly apartment, so I know.”

  “She says they got a Commodore 64,” Jed says. “So they can probably play whatever they feel like.”

  “Do you think we’ll get a computer when we move?”

  “No. Mom’s cheap,” Jed says.

  When Mom looks over at us, it’s like she forgets I’m supposed to be in trouble. She pulls a twenty from her purse and tells me to get an extra large with olives on half.

  On my walk to Romeo’s Pizza, I notice that a house on the end of our street has a “Here when you ‘Needham!’” sign, too. It’s the same one we have on our lawn, except it says “Sold”. I stop and examine the house. It’s bigger than ours with a pretty row of trees out front. The car in the driveway looks more expensive than Mom’s, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is the driveway itself, which is long and wide with a garage door at the end of it. It’s perfect for groundstrokes. I run all the way to Romeo’s. What if Mom wants to surprise us? What if we’re getting a bigger house? A way better house with a huge garage door for bouncing.

  That night, I wait until I see Mom’s bright orange cigarette tip from my bedroom window. I take my wallet from the top of my dresser and go join her outside. She tries to hide her cigarette behind her back when she sees me, but it’s too late. “I’m sorry, honey,” she says. “I know I shouldn’t do this.”

  “That’s OK.” I sit next to her on the grass in my nightgown, one of Dad’s old T-shirts. Since I caught her doing something bad, there’s a better chance she’ll forgive me about the door.

  “I’m going to miss the lilacs,” she says, taking a deep breath in with her nose. “Don’t you love that smell?”

  I sniff hard at the air but all I can smell is the smoke whirling up from between her fingers. “Are you still mad about the door?”

  She rolls her cigarette on the edge of her ashtray, shaping the burning end into a cone. “I’m disappointed you lied.”

  I put my wallet on her lap. “There’s $12.19.”

  “That’s thoughtful.”

  I take a quick breath. “Can I please do tennis this summer?”

  She leans back and tilts her chin to the sky. “I don’t know, Cara.”

  “I’ll never play near glass again.” I want to tell her about the hell-thoughts, that maybe I need tennis to stop thinking about hell, but I just can’t explain.

  Mom takes another big puff of her cigarette and blows the smoke out in a straight line. “I know this is a lot of change, Cara,” she says finally. “A lot for your age. I’m sorry for that.”

  I hug my knees up to my chest and tap my chin against them seven times. I wonder if Mom remembers being my age. I’ve seen exactly one photo of her from around my age, and it was in a really old newspaper. In the picture, she’s standing up to her knees in a lake, wearing a white bathing cap and a swimsuit with a strip of maple leaves down the side. “I don’t mind change,” I say.

  Mom laughs then coughs. “Oh, really?” She crushes her cigarette into the ashtray.

  I look around the yard. “Yeah.”

  Right in front of where we’re sitting used to be a metal climbing dome that Mom and Dad built. When Mom took it apart, I cried seeing all the coloured ribs on the ground. I hadn’t climbed on i
t forever, but I didn’t want to be too old for it. I didn’t want to get old. Mom said it was important not to think that way. “Not all the good things are in the past,” she said. “Especially not for you. You just don’t know what’s ahead yet.”

  When we go inside, Mom tucks me into bed and I ask her to leave the door open. I feel like hearing Jed breathe while I’m falling asleep, even if I can’t hear that much.

  On the last day of school before summer holidays, Mom tells us to wait for her at three thirty because there’s a place she wants us to see. When Mrs. Durant asks everyone what they’re doing for the holidays, it doesn’t even bother me when Petra brags about moving into my house.

  Durant asks where my family is going to go and everyone looks at me. I want to keep the secret, I really do, but I can’t hold it in. “Well,” I say, turning my tennis racquet against the hard orange carpet, “pretty much a mansion.”

  “A mansion, Cara?” Durant says. “Seriously?” She bunches up her face like she doesn’t believe me for a second.

  I look at Petra. “Maybe you can come over.” I give her a not-very-nice smile and look to see if one of the Ericas is listening. “It practically has a tennis court.”

  I’m hopping from foot to foot when Mom shows up in the parking lot at three thirty.

  “What’s up with you?” Mom says.

  “Shotgun!” I walk to her car, but the passenger door is locked. I look up, but she’s just standing there.

  “We’re only crossing the street,” she says.

  Jed and I look across at the apartment tower opposite the school. Dirty white, a million windows, disgusting. No one lives there. She can’t be serious. I roll my eyes. “Funny.”

  “There’s a stylish three-bedroom I’d like you to see on the seventh floor.”

  I point my racquet at the building. “There?”