One More Step (4 page)

“I said you're staying. Stop packing.”

“What are you going to do? Make me?” I couldn't resist.

He grabbed the handle of my gym bag. I pulled back.

“Stop it now, you two, stop it!” It was Erika. She was standing in the doorway rocking Maddie back and forth. Maddie's eyes were wide as pie plates.

They were there in the nick of time. I think we were getting ready to punch each other out.

“Sorry,” I said to her. “But I'm outta here.” I shoved the rest of my clothes into my bag and brushed past all of them. Erika reached out and touched my arm. “Julian,” she said. “Your father's been looking forward to this week. Not just to ski. To spend some time. With
you
.”

“Yeah, right,” I said and thumped downstairs. I threw on my coat and went to wait in the back porch. My heart was pounding. I was fighting back tears. The nerve of that b —.

Chris hobbled into the porch on his crutches. “It's okay,” he said, “he'll get over it.”

“Shuddup,” I said.

“What did I do?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “You never do anything wrong. That's the problem. I'm the troublemaker.”

“Yeah? So what else is new?”

“Just get outta here, okay?”

“I'm the one who told you to go, remember?” he said.

“I don't want to go, okay? And I don't
Sheree Fitch want to stay here, either!” My teeth were chattering.
I will not cry
, I thought to myself.
I will not cry
.

“The lesser of two evils, huh?” he said quietly.

“Something like that. Some holiday.”

“Want to trade places?” he asked and pointed to his leg.

“No way.” I made an effort to smile.

“Go back in before Mom gets here,” he said.

So I did. Dad was helping Hanna put together a Sesame Street puzzle. He acted as if nothing had happened. Erika was packing me up some goodies for the road. It was a thick turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce and dressing on homemade bread and some sugar cookies.

Truth is, I felt pretty shitty when Mom and Jean-Paul came to pick me up. Lukie cried and said I promised to build a space ship with him. When Dad scooped him up and rocked him I wondered for a second if he'd ever done that to me. Must have. He looked
really tired, until he smiled.

“I'll keep the skis waxed for some weekend in January. Okay, Jules?”

“Sure thing. See ya.” Erika pecked me on the cheek. Hanna hugged my kneecap. Chris gave me thumbs up. Maddie waved bye-bye.

It took eight hours to drive to Quebec City. I slept most of the way. Between Edmundston and Riviere du Loup, Jean-Paul played Alanis Morissette on his new CD player.

“Good taste in music,” I said. I had to give him that.

“
I got one hand in my pocket and the other one's giving a peace sign
,” she sang.

“The other one's picking my nose,” I sang. “The other one's scratching my butt.”

Mom laughed along with Jean-Paul despite herself.

“What other music you like?” Jean-Paul asked.

“The Bare Naked Ladies are wicked.”

“Wicked. This word, you say it all the time. I think it mean something bad.”

“It does, usually,” said Mom. “It's sort of teenage slang. You know what I mean by slang?”

“Of course. So when Julian says wicked he means awesome, cool?”

“Only even better,” I said.

“Ah,
oui
. In French the kids say
écoeurant
. Usually it means disgusting. But when they say it means the… opposite.”

So while he boned up on his English and Mom kept practicing phrases from her French-English dictionary, I went back to sleep. And had a nightmare.

About number three. He was swimming underwater. Pulling me down.

Remembering him gives me shivers. A chill in my bones. I've erased his name from memory. But his eyes? Those, I remember. They were the cool white-blue of a killer shark. Reminded me of pictures I'd seen in magazines. The Shark. That'll do.

“He has a Windsurfer and a motor boat,” Mom told us after their first date.

“The guy has possibilities,” I said.

“What's he do, Mom? Rob banks?” This time it was Chris who was negative. “Greasy,” is how he'd described him after they left on that date. “Greasy as an oil slick.”

“I'm not sure exactly. Investments or some such. He owns his own company. Something to do with stocks and bonds.

“A con man,” she told her girlfriends afterwards. Crazy would have been closer to the truth. I don't think she could ever admit her judgement was so poor.

They were hot and heavy for about six months. Then, he invested money for my mother—like she had so much to begin with. We probably would have lost our house if
we owned one, but we didn't. We still don't. Probably on account of that jerk. We still rent. All Mom's savings, from her clowning money, were history. That wasn't the worst of it, though.

When she asked him to stop coming around, he didn't.

“He was lurking outside of work today,” she whispered to Bette, her best friend.

“He's creepy,” said Bette, sipping her tea. “I'm worried.”

“He followed me to the grocery store,” she hissed into the phone to Poppie.

“Maybe I will,” she said. “Yeah, okay, Dad, I'll call the police. That's a good idea.”

The police did nothing.

The phone would ring and no one would be there.

Just breathing. We knew who it was.

Well, this went on for about three months. During this time Mom was a bag of nerves. She jumped every time the phone rang. She was always looking over her shoulder. She lost weight. I began biting my fingernails.
Chris slept with a baseball bat by his bed.

Then, one night, around two in the morning, there was a banging on the front door.

Mom said after she didn't want to wake the neighbors, so she let him in. Big mistake. He was wired.

“Holy crap, he's high as a kite,” said Chris. “Go now. Call the cops.”

I crept upstairs and for once did as I was told. It was still too late to stop what happened. The Shark grabbed a fistful of Mom's hair and was screaming at her.

“Bitch!”

“Let her go, asshole,” said Chris. Then he whacked him a good one across the back of the neck with the bat. The guy was out cold. There was blood. We were bawling and screaming by the time we heard the sirens. The whole neighborhood was out on the street.

It was nasty. I'd rather not remember. The shark guy was not dead. He charged my brother with assault. Imagine. He left town suddenly, though, and the charges were
dropped. Chris figures Poppie and the rest of his pals chased him out of town. That was four years ago. I was ten. My mother hasn't dated since then.

Until now, I mean.

Je suis Molly. Tu es Jean-Paul. Julian est mon fils
. When I woke up, Mom was still trying to prepare herself. None of his family spoke English. She was paranoid that they wouldn't like him bringing home an Anglophone.

“Just don't talk, Mom,” I teased. “No one will ever know.”

“Your mother, not talk?” Jean-Paul winked in the rearview mirror. That frickin' winking of his.

“Something wrong with your eye?” I snapped at him.

We took the ferry across the St. Lawrence River from Levi to Quebec City.

“For the romance,” sighed my mother. The river was packed with ice. It was like a glacier had exploded. The chunks of ice were a dirty gray. It was hypnotizing, watching them curl away from the bow of the boat.

“Julian, look! It's the Château Frontenac!” My mother was almost jumping for joy.

“Just looks like all the postcards,” I said.

“Wet blanket,” she said. And stuck out her tongue.

“Time for a bite to heat?” asked Jean-Paul.

“Yeah. I could heat a horse,” I replied.

“Okay, Julian, that's enough,” said my mother.

Jean-Paul whispered something in her ear.

The café was a hole in the wall. Really, it was this cool cave dug in the side of an old stone wall. It looked like people had been carving their names in the tabletops for centuries. In the middle of each table, straw-covered wine bottles plugged with burning candles made shadows dance on the walls around us.

“Does everyone in Quebec smoke?” I asked. My eyes were stinging.

And everyone was talking French. I couldn't understand the menu until Jean-Paul pointed out it was in English on the opposite page.

“Are you illiterate or just English?” He asked. I biffed him on the side of the head.

“We say
touché
in French.” He really wanted to dig it in.

“We say it in English, too.”

“One more thing the English have taken from the French.”

“What's with you two?” My mother was frowning.

“None of your beeswax,” I smiled back.

The split pea soup looked gross but it was delicious, I told the waitress. What a knockout she was.

Mom was staring at me like I was an alien.

“My, we really can be charming at times, can't we?” she jabbed.

“Pretty women can make a guy do many tings!” said Jean-Paul. He caught himself just in time. He didn't wink.

We walked around old Quebec for a while. In front of the Château was the biggest toboggan hill I'd ever seen. Right there, in the middle of the city! Three long tracks of
ice humped in places like a water slide, only going straight downhill. The people in those sleds were screaming their heads off.

“Looks like a hell of a good time! What are we waiting for?” This trip suddenly looked like it might be fun. But Jean-Paul said we didn't have time if we wanted to get to where we were going before dark. Mom looked disappointed, too.

“But, after all,” she hissed to me when she saw the pout I'd put on, “that's not why we came. We came to meet his family. Now smile.”

I smiled. For almost a week, I smiled. And smiled. My jaw ached. We made the rounds of nearly all the brothers and sisters. There were ten in all.

We only got a break from all of it the day I went skiing with Mom. Jean-Paul wanted to shop for some new scuba diving equipment. He took us to the hill and bought us our passes.

“Are we ever going to sleep in the same
bed twice?” I asked her on the chair lift.

“I don't know, “she said. “In fact, I don't know what's going on around me half the time. I'm worn out trying to keep up.”

She did look tired.

“You're doing okay, Mom,” I said. “Sheesh, I didn't know you knew so much French.”

“I don't,” she said. “I just nod and smile. And then I just take English words and say them with a French accent.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fantastic.
Fantastique
! Marvellous?
Marveyyou
! No problem?
No ProBLAM
!”

I almost fell out of the lift.

“Anyway, tomorrow is New Year's and we'll head home after that. And… thanks, Julian.”

“What for?”

“For coming. For being so great.”

“Yeah. Well, the food's good.”

“Still, there are so many people!”

“And he says there'll be even more tomorrow.”

“
Fantastique!
” she said. And sighed.

There were seventy-two people, including Mom and me.

“We rent the whole lodge so everyone can fit,” Jean-Paul told us.

“Crazy,” I said. “
Crrrrazee
!” I repeated, rolling my rs.

It was, too. Everyone was hugging. All those
bonjours
. The names all sounded the same to me. Double names. Marie-Claude. Marie-Luc. Marie-Jean. Jean-Marc. Too many to remember.

Except for one.

Bernadette.

She was about my age. She had straight black hair longer than Alanis Morisette's. Some of it covered her left eye. Her eyes were the color of forget-me-nots, and those lips. Asking for a kiss. I kept catching her looking at me, out from under her bangs.

So there we were. Seventy-two of us, sitting around the main room of the lodge.

“Have you ever seen so much food?” asked Mom.

“Or so many babies,” I added as another one shot me dead. I fell to the ground and the little bugger stomped on my head.

“Show time,” announced Jean-Paul.

The guitars were brought out. Everyone sang. Not just French songs, either.

“Welcome to de Otel Callyfornia,” they sang. “What a lovely face,” I sang. Looking right at Bernadette.

Two guys did a two-man skit. Or, rather, a two-woman skit. It was a blast, even if I didn't understand. Then we played some sort of guessing game. Well, they did. And then?

Enter Stage Left… Molly the Clown!

My mother's got some nerve. There she was, meeting all his family for the first time and what did she do? She put on her clown suit and painted her face. And did a one-woman show. I grabbed the camcorder.

Roll camera! Take One:

Bonjour
, says the first card she holds up.
No one says a thing. So she leans forward. She points at the card again and cups her hand over her ear. They get it.

“
Bonjour
,” they all say back.

Je suis Molly
, says the next card.

Je suis une anglophone
, says the third. Then a fast fourth,
MAIS…

A fifth:
Parfois, la langue n'est pas le problem
!

There's a lot of giggling and some polite claps. Then she grabs Jean-Paul and makes him sit in a chair. He doesn't know what's going on. For ten minutes my mother, with almost no words, tells the story of how they met and fell in love. “Vroom, vroom,” and “Oh là là” are the only sounds she makes. When she says, “Oh là là” she wiggles her butt, which is stuffed with pillows. And honks her red nose. And does a little hop.