The Picture of Nobody (6 page)

I took the hot chocolate to the little girl. When I saw her mother holding back, I told her, “Don’t bother paying. Mr. Chum told me to give it to her.” She opened the cup’s cover as her daughter eased onto her lap.

At the end of my shift, as I was leaving, the woman asked me, “What’s your name?”

“Tommy.”

“Thanks, Tommy.”

I should have been relieved, but those two words made me feel worse than ever. She had nothing to thank me for.

Each evening, from then on, the young woman came into Sip and Sup with her child. She sat at a corner table, not smiling or talking with anyone, just staring outside. It seemed she was scanning the parking lot, searching for Sid. Once, one of the old ladies walked over and asked her, “How old is the pretty girl?”

“Three.”

“What’s her name?” She smiled in her frozen manner at the child.

“Lavinia.”

“Lavinia? That’s an unusual name.”

“Yeah.”

After that, the old ladies left her alone, but sometimes I caught them glancing at her and whispering to each other.

During one of these conversations, I went to a nearby table with my rag. One thin old lady had flowery patterns on her sweater and a thick blue vein on the side of her neck. She was talking in a soft voice. I moved closer and heard the lady say, “She’s made some bad choices. It’s always the little ones who suffer. The innocent ones.” The entire group went silent, as if they were thinking deeply about these little ones.

The following day, another woman said, “Her father’s a preacher, too, wouldn’t you know. I wonder what the poor man thinks of this whole mess.” I waited for some explanation, but once again, the group got quiet. I wished I could read the minds of these old women who preferred silence to normal talk. Maybe they were thinking that life was simpler when they were young.

Throughout all of the talk around her, the woman with the child just stared outside, as if she was the only person in the place. Whenever she spotted young men leaving the bus terminal,
she would become alert and pull Lavinia closer. Sometimes the black men in the puffy jackets would glance at her while they were waiting for their coffees. I wondered if they, too, wished she would smile instead of looking so unhappy. She never did, even when Mr. Chum came over and greeted the child in a silly baby voice.

It was Mr. Chum who told me one evening, “Father just disappear. So sad. So sad.”

“The father of the little girl? Where did he go?”

He shrugged. “Back to Oshawa. Good for pretty lady. Now she can start over. Get job somewhere. Maybe I fire you and hire her. Hah. She here every day in any case. Now give baby this muffin.”

Later, my mother asked me, “Is everything okay at work, Tommy?”

“Yes, yes,” I answered quickly. I noticed Allison looking at me from the computer desk.

Mom was always good at detecting my problems. She felt my sadness after we left Fredericton. She knew how ashamed I was when the boys in Napanee called me Lindsay Lohan —
not just a foolish person, but a girl, too. And when Allison teased me and called me a geek because I had no friends.

Thankfully, Dad walked through the door just then. He was holding a pizza. “
Win her with gifts, if she respect not words
,” he said, bowing and placing the pizza before Mom. Usually Allison would roll her eyes at Dad’s corny quotations and romantic acts. Once again, though, I noticed her looking at me in a strange manner. She did the same during dinner.

By the time we finished eating, I was certain Allison knew what I had done. Perhaps I had left some trail in the computer. Or maybe she found it strange that all her friends had received the same brief message. They would certainly gossip about such a thing on Facebook.

After Allison and Dad left the table, Mom asked, “Can you help me with the dishes, Tommy?” She turned on the tap, and the spurting water covered the sound of her voice. She said, “You have been very quiet lately, Tommy. More than usual. You hardly say a word to anyone.”

Dad appeared carrying a dish towel. “Words must touch us here.” He pointed to his chest.
“They must have melody. They must float and dance and sing and...”

“Words must have rules,” Mom said, without looking up from the sink. “They must show us how to act.” I felt she was soothing me and warning me at the same time. But all I could think of was how dangerous words were.

For three weeks, I imagined the worst. Maybe Sid was in a prison somewhere, being tortured for information he could not give. Or he was on the run, moving from town to town, always watching over his shoulder. I imagined Lavinia, years from now, still asking her mother if he would ever return. I pictured both mother and child forever waiting, forever staring at the GO bus terminal, forever unhappy.

The spiteful act that led to this situation had been done quickly, before I had time to think about its effects. I decided to be more cautious in making my next decision. I watched the old ladies whispering to themselves. I studied the expressions of the old men as they slowly
walked past the little girl. I saw how all their attention had shifted from me to the pair. I listened to Mr. Chum joke each evening about firing me to hire the woman. One evening he said, “I think baby like this place. Maybe is nice cake smell.”

I told him of my decision quickly, before I could change my mind. “Mr. Chum, I will have to leave next week. The end of the month.”

“Leave? Why you leave? After all the free training?” His loud voice awoke the little girl. She gazed sleepily at the chocolate in Mr. Chum’s hand and reached for it.

In my mind, I went over all the excuses I had prepared. The constant mopping and sweeping was too difficult. The work was affecting my studies. It was really my parents’ decision. Yet, when I saw the woman watching me with her big sad eyes, all of the lies stuck in my throat. It seemed as if she was trying to read my mind.

Mr. Chum saved me from lying. “Okay,” he said. “I hire mother. Baby stay as decoration.”

“Me? I’ve never worked in a coffee shop before.”

“Oh, so easy. So easy. If Tommy does it then anybody can. Hah!”

My father, for one, seemed relieved when I told him that I’d quit. He’d be glad that he would never have to explain to his foreign relatives that his son was mopping and sweeping a coffee shop. Mom didn’t say anything, which was unusual. However, later, while I was helping her with the dishes, she asked, “Are you going to look for another job?”

“Not right now.”

She was rinsing the cups longer than usual, as if she had something on her mind. For just a second, I wanted to tell her everything. I would explain how I had taken revenge on Sid by spreading this rumour about him. I would confess that I never knew it would affect other people. Especially not a sad woman and her little girl. I would say that I never suspected that rumours could be so hurtful to innocent people. They were like fires that could never be put out. I had learned my lesson well.

But that brief moment passed when I noticed Allison by the fridge. She was looking straight at me.

Mr. Chum soon grew quite attached to Lavinia. Sometimes, on my way home from the library, I would see him standing in front of her with a treat in his hand. I imagined him cooing to her constantly while her mother was cleaning the place. About a month after I left the job, I spotted the mother behind the counter for the first time. I guess she had been promoted.

Dad smiled when I showed him my latest grades. “Good job,” he said. Mom said something similar. And, for the first time, Allison did not look offended by these compliments.

Why had Allison’s attitude towards me changed? Had she figured out what I had done? Did her discovery change me from a chubby,
pesky brother into someone mysterious? Did my unhappiness keep her from giving away my secret?

Maybe she had just grown up a bit, and I hadn’t noticed. Anyway, she no longer seemed in a hurry to leave Ajax. Perhaps she had found in this little town what she had hoped to find in Toronto.

One night during dinner, Mom told us a story I had never heard before. A woman who had recently come to Canada had prepared herself for her new country in every single way she could think of. She stepped off the plane carrying a briefcase filled with newspaper clippings about Canada.

I thought Mom was on this lady’s side, but no. The woman soon began to see herself in these clippings.
She
was the woman who would never be hired to a top job.
She
was the woman who would always live in some crowded part of Toronto. The woman who would be mocked for her accent and pitied for her shyness.

I remembered my story of the house with one hundred doors and the boy who walked through them all. But this woman had gotten
stuck at the first door. She could not even see all the other doors.

Dad chimed in with one of his favourite Sufi sayings:
When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices for what it has gained
. Corny, as usual, but I pretended he was telling me that hidden inside every bit of sadness is some important lesson. Maybe Mom was telling me that I could be anyone I chose. I was not a terrorist or a geek or a terrorist geek because other people said so. I didn’t have to remain stuck at the first door.

I could be anyone I chose. The choice was mine. Perhaps Allison had been one step ahead of me all the time. She had been able to control her picture. I glanced at her and felt I was seeing her in a new way. Not as a whiny pest, but as a kind of adventurer.

I pretended that Allison and I were having a conversation about Ajax. I imagined telling her that I was wrong to blame the town for my recent problems. It was just bad luck that I had met Sid and the other loafers. But I had also met Mr. Chum and the sad mother and her pretty little girl.

That was my good luck. In our imaginary conversation, I told Allison that just this morning, as I was passing Sip and Sup, the woman saw me through the glass door. She whispered something to Lavinia. The child stood up on a chair and waved to me. The woman seemed happier than I had ever seen her.

Maybe she, too, had chosen to be someone new.