The Very First Girl in the Whole World to Win the Dakar
One day I come home to Cherry Tree Hill to find my sister Rachel trying to steal a car. This car is a 1999 Mazda MX5 Miata with many features, such as a 1.8-liter, 140 horsepower, four-cylinder, 16-valve engine with dual overhead cams, 15-inch aluminum alloy wheels, 5-Speed Manual Transmission, AM/FM/CD Audio System, Bucket Seats, Center Console, and Dual Front Airbags. Also, you should know that this car belongs to Mama.
Mama won this car a long time ago on a game show called Place Your Bets. Ever since Daddy had the Accident at Work, Mama has been on lots and lots of game shows, the most recent one being a few months ago when she was on the game show called The Million Dollar Question that maybe you have heard of. It has a host whose name is Gene Sugarman and who always says this one thing so that the audience will say it with him. The thing that Gene Sugarman says is, “Are you ready for the big one?” which means the big question that will make you win or lose all your money. Even though Mama has been on lots of game shows, she has not won anything except when she was on Place Your Bets, and I know that this is why Mama loves this car so much and does not ever let anyone else drive it, and this is how I know that Rachel is stealing it.
Rachel does not know that I see her because I am standing on the other side of the street and she is halfway in the side door of the passenger with her head under the seat. “Damnit,” she says, along with many other words that I am not going to repeat to you because they are rude. I wonder at first what Rachel is doing and then I remember that this is where Mama keeps the extra key to the Miata in case she loses the other one or someone steals it and so on and so forth. This does not seem very logical to me but it makes sense to Mama and Mama is the smartest person I know.
Rachel finally finds the key. She holds it in one hand and shuts the passenger door with the other. “Sweet,” she says. Then she turns and sees me on the other side of the street and waves the key in the air. “Come for a ride, Taylor?” she asks and my heart starts thumping very loudly in my chest because unlike my other sister Lauren, who talks to me all the time, even sometimes when I am in the bathtub or when I am in my bed while I am asleep, Rachel never even talks to me at all under normal circumstances and most of the time I am not even sure she knows that I am a real alive person. But I do not answer her, and the reason I do not answer her is because, if you do not already know this, I am eleven years old and do not know how to speak, which is also to say that I do not know how to make words with my voice, and if you ask me why, I am not going to tell you right now because I do not feel like it. So now I am going to tell you about something else.
The something else that is what I am going to tell you about is Puerto Vallarta, which is the place I was before I was standing on the street across from Rachel. If you do not already know, this is of course not really the real Puerto Vallarta, of Mexico, where Mama and Daddy met many years ago when Mama was young and even more beautiful and Daddy was an almost famous hockey player and very handsome even though he was missing three of his teeth, but only a place in the No Trespass Zone down the street from my house where there are four trees which are spruce trees and two rocks made of granite that come together to make one big rock made of granite, and where I can see the ocean and the islands in the ocean and the boats going by the islands. I call this place Puerto Vallarta because Mama told me that this means “the place that makes you feel like you are wrapped in a blanket” in Spanish.
To get from Puerto Vallarta to Cherry Tree Hill, you have to do this: first you crawl out along the mossy ground under the four trees and around to the side of the left rock of the two rocks that come together to make the big rock, then you pull yourself up to the top. I’m sure you will find it easy to do because I can still do it even though I am very small for my age. Once you walk along the third rock, which is flat and covered with lichen and seagull turds, which are often blue during berry season, after a while you will see a path through the lichen and you can follow that path straight off the rock and through the alders, past the little campfire pit and dirty mattress where homeless people sleep.
You can follow the trail a little farther, through some old trees with beards, and then you will come to a clearing. You have to be careful here because there is always broken glass on the ground, as well as disgusting cigarette butts and sometimes bags from fast food restaurants and so on and so forth, but it is still a nice place because you can look down through the trees and rocks and see Purple Lake on one side and Red Lake on the other, which are not the real names of the lakes but the names given to them by me. But whatever you do, do not look in the space between Purple Lake and Red Lake, because then you will see a burnt-up car that someone didn’t like anymore and it will probably make you sad. So it is best to just look up, which is good when it is sunny or if there are clouds in interesting shapes but boring if it is just one big cloud covering the whole sky.
Then after a minute you will come to a chain link fence with barbed wire running across the top, but do not be afraid because you do not have to go over the top. There is a hole in the fence where you can go under right at the spot with the rock that is shaped like a planet with rings around it. Once you go under the fence you will be on a street that is called Walnut Grove, but you shouldn’t be confused because there are no walnuts on Walnut Grove. The one thing there is on Walnut Grove is a small brick building with a big fence around it and that is a very scary place called the Power Station. Mama says you should always stay away from the Power Station, even if your dog jumps in there or your ball goes over the fence, because it is a very dangerous place and maybe it could make you electrocuted, and I believe her because Mama is the smartest person I know. On the other side of the Power Station is the street called Cherry Tree Hill, and if you turn left you will see three houses that are all white and tall and have black driveways in the front, the one in the middle being number 21, where we all live together, Mama and Daddy and Lauren and Rachel and me.
Rachel walks to the side door of the driver and gets in. Then she backs out of the driveway and over to where I am still just standing there on the other side of the street. She looks right at me and I can see that her eyes are very dark. I do not mean that the skin around her eyes is dark, like sometimes Mama’s skin gets when she has not had time to have a proper night’s sleep, but the actual eye part of her eye is dark, like as if someone was drawing in her eyes with a pen and then the pen exploded and all the ink just pooled around in there. They are all dark and shiny like that and I am not afraid to tell you that they scare me. They scare me so much that the only thing I ever wanted in the whole wide world, which of course is for Rachel to turn around and look at me, suddenly becomes the last thing I want in the whole wide world.
“Are you coming, Taylor?” she asks.
I do not know where Rachel is planning to go. The only thing I know is that Rachel never ever wants me to come with her anywhere, and so this is a very special day. So before she can change her mind I run over to the passenger side of the car and open the door and climb into the seat and I think about fastening my seatbelt underneath my arm just like Mama once showed me so that the strap won’t choke me in case we get into an accident, but I don’t because that is something that little girls do and I am not a little girl anymore. Then I fold my hands in my lap and look straight ahead and in my head I am saying, don’t change your mind, don’t change your mind and I am not moving at all or doing anything that might make her kick me out of the car. Then I realize she is staring at me, and when I look back at her she leans over and hugs me really hard. This is the most surprising thing that has possibly ever happened to me and the worst part about it is that now my arms are pinned underneath the seatbelt because I did not fasten it the way that Mama told me I should, and now I cannot hug Rachel back. This makes me feel really upset and I know that my muscles are tightening up, and I do not want Rachel to feel this happening because then she might think that I do not want her to hug me anymore. So instead I concentrate on making myself very soft and cuddly like Chris Bosh, who is not of course the real Chris Bosh, formerly of the Toronto Raptors, but my teddy bear who I call Chris Bosh. I let my arms and legs go limp and lean forward into Rachel’s body and rest my head against her shoulder.
These are the things I can feel: her fingers pressing into my side right underneath my ribs, one of her breasts all mashed up against my arm, her nose bumping up against my neck. I can even feel her shoulder digging into my ear and even though it hurts, it feels good. Her hair is on my face and tickles my nose. I breathe in but it does not smell like anything except cigarettes. I can hear her breath going in through her nose and coming out through her mouth and I think that this is maybe the best moment ever and if Rachel was not hugging me and holding me together that maybe I would explode.
Okay. I am ready to tell you the reason now.
The reason that I am eleven years old and only learning to talk now is because of Gabe. If you do not know Gabe, he was my twin brother who died when we were both still inside of Mama. Gabe died because the cord that attached him to Mama, which is called the Umbilical Cord, was wrapped around his neck when it was time to come out. The Umbilical Cord made Gabe not be able to breathe, and then he became scared and started thrashing around with his little tiny legs and arms, and when his foot kicked me in the throat it made my voice box crumple up like a juice box you squish in your hands. The doctors told Mama I would never ever be able to talk but Mama says I am still a very lucky girl because Gabe did not make me dead, too. But I do not hate Gabe. I love him very much because Mama told me he died so that I could be alive, and when someone does that kind of thing for you, you have to love them whether you want to or not.
But here is the big secret. I’ve been teaching myself to talk.
I do this in Puerto Vallarta. Puerto Vallarta is one of the Sneaky Words like ocean and island that sound different in my mouth than in my head, so even though in my head the place I go sounds like PUR-TO VALL-AR-TA, in my mouth it sounds like PWER-TO VAI-ER-TA. So I started with this word, PWER-TO VAI-ER-TA. I could say the “P,” because the P is just putting your lips together like you’re going to kiss someone and then making a kind of popping sound. Then I tried to say the “WER,” but somehow the E got lost and it sounded just like “WRRR,” which is the sound of a car engine in first or maybe second gear.
“WRRRRRRRR,” I said, and I put my hands in front of me and closed my fists, and I could almost feel them vibrate as if I was really holding the wheel of a car like a rally car racing around Sanremo, “WRRRRRRRR,” just like Sébastien Loeb or Marcus Grönholm, until after a while I remembered that I was supposed to be practicing talking and not practicing driving, which is the other thing I like to do when I am in Puerto Vallarta. So then I tried to say the P and the WER together, but this made me spit all over my pile of overdue library books that were hiding in the Dark Space, which is what I call the place where the one rock meets the other rock to make one big rock, and this made me distracted and I start thinking about how when I took them home I opened them all up and looked in the back at the list of people who had taken them out, there was not one single name of one single person on the whole list. And I thought about the books sitting on the shelf in the library all by themselves and it made me too sad.
Then after I looked at the library books I had to look at all the other interesting things I keep in the Dark Space, and then I forgot all about trying to talk. The Dark Space is the safest place in the world, and the only bad thing that could happen would be maybe the one rock would slip off the other rock and then it would be stuck there because I imagine the rock is so heavy that not even Daddy could lift it, and Daddy is the strongest person I know. I keep all of my most important possessions in the Dark Space, such as the picture of Sébastien Loeb’s blue Citroën C4, which is the car that I want to drive when I become a world champion rally racer, and the scarf that is Mama’s scarf and that she was going to throw out because Rachel told her that the colour of it reminded her of puke and that I rescued from the garbage can, and so on and so forth. And of course my most important possession of all, which is a brochure for a very beautiful place you can go stay with your family called La Maison Baie Bleu which is in Quebec and is owned by the one and only Luc Belliveau.
If you don’t know about Luc Belliveau, well, let me tell you. He is just about the greatest rally racer the world has ever seen, and he is from Canada! Actually, he is the only Canadian to ever win the World Rally Championship and the Dakar Rally, which you might not know is not really an official rally race but what they call an endurance race which means that you have to go very far for a very long time across the worst places on the planet and you don’t have anyone to help you except for your team and lots of people die in it. Rally racing is the greatest sport in the world because number one, it takes brains and stamina, and number two, you do not have to be able to talk to do it.
It is better than any other kind of car racing because you are driving real cars that anyone can buy and you are driving on real roads that anyone can drive on, and you have to really work hard as a part of a team with your navigator. Luc Belliveau’s navigator was a man called Per Hogarthe, of France, and Luc Belliveau and Per Hogarthe raced together for many years in their Toyota Celica GT-4 but then suddenly they stopped because when they raced the Dakar together they had a very big fight about nobody knows what and now Per Hogarthe navigates for a Finnish driver called Jari Harju who drives a Mitsubishi Gallant VR-4 and who has been credited with inventing the Scandinavian Flick which is a very sophisticated driving technique. As you can tell, I know almost everything there is to know about rally racing, which is very important if I am going to be the very first girl in the whole world to win the Dakar.
Ever since he won the Dakar no one has heard much about Luc Belliveau. Some people say that he married an African woman who he met during the race and now he lives somewhere in the desert, and other people say that he bought a big floating raft and has given up living on land altogether and just floats around on this raft that he has made into its own country. But I know that none of this is true because this brochure that I found one day when me and Mama were at the ferry terminal is telling me that Luc Belliveau is alive and well and living in Quebec with his wife Judy and their two small children, Alex and Sophie, who have their picture on the back of the brochure.
I am not telling you all this about rally racing because I want to show off for you or to make you think that I am smart. Many people think that because when I make sounds with my mouth they come out like someone is placing the heel of their foot on my neck that I am stupid. But I am really not stupid. I know everything that any other eleven-year-old knows, and then I know about many more things than that, such as the constellations, William Shakespeare, the Pythagorean Theorem, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and so on and so forth. I am actually the smartest kid in my class if you ask any of my teachers. But you know what? I do not care if you think I am stupid. Mama and Daddy and even Rachel might care that people think I am stupid, but I do not. And neither would Luc Belliveau, I am sure of it.
So. This is what happens next:
Rachel presses her foot very firmly on the pedal underneath the steering wheel called the clutch and presses the button which turns on the radio and some man who I know is called Pink Floyd is singing “We Don’t Need No Education,” but I think he really means that he does need education, because when you have the word “don’t” in the same sentence as “no” this is called a double negative and it means the same thing as a positive. Rachel turns it up louder and nods her head along with the beat. She starts driving the wrong way down the road called Cherry Tree Hill, away from Purcell’s Cove Road and towards the No Trespass Zone. She drives past Walnut Grove and then comes to the end of the road called Cherry Tree Hill, which is a round piece of road that is called a cul-de-sac and then she turns around fast and stops the car by the side of the road.
In case you do not know about Cherry Tree Hill, let me tell you. First thing is this: there is not one single cherry tree in Cherry Tree Hill. There are many other kinds of trees, such as birches, maples, chestnuts, fir and spruce trees, and other kinds of trees that you probably have never even heard of. But there are no cherry trees. The second thing is this: you should not come to this end of the road that is called Cherry Tree Hill, ever, because this is where the teenagers come to do bad things that their mothers will not let them do at home, such as drinking, taking drugs, smoking and having sex with each other. I know this because there are some kids in my class who talk about how they come to the top of Cherry Tree Hill to do these things, except they do not call it Cherry Tree Hill, they call it Cherry Popping Hill, which I do not understand but know it has something to do with taking drugs and having sex with each other.
When Rachel pulls the car over, she leans her arms on the car door and looks out over the No Trespass Zone, so I look out too and I realize that from here you can see way more even than in Puerto Vallarta. You can see the ocean and the islands in the ocean and the boats going by the islands in the ocean, but you can also see inside the mouth of the harbour and the container pier and the oil refinery and the park and the tops of every building in Halifax, probably, and then on the other side of Halifax if you turn your head all the way around, you can see the very tippy top of one of the bridges. Rachel’s head is turned away from me but I can tell that she is not looking at any of these things, she is not looking at the houses or the oil refinery or the container pier. She is not even looking at the tippy top of the bridge. I think maybe she is looking at a place that she is the only person who can see it. Rachel is always doing that and it seems like she is thinking of something very sad and important but Mama says it is just because of her being a teenager and she should get over it already.
“Where should we go, Taylor?” she asks me.
I can tell that this is a very serious question. I do not know why Rachel is crying or why she wants to go somewhere that she does not even know where it is, not because I am stupid but because nobody ever tells me anything. But I can understand what it is like to want to be somewhere other than where you are. I look back out over the city and try to remember the last thing I was looking at before Rachel asked me where to go. I see the tippy top of the bridge poking up on the other side of the city. I point to it.
Rachel turns her head. “Is that the bridge?” she asks.
I nod.
“Yeah. Okay. Let’s go to the bridge,” she says.
The question that Gene Sugarman asked Mama on The Million Dollar Question was this:
Meteorology is the study of a) weather b) the ocean floor c) meteors or d) stars?
Mama had been practicing really hard to be on The Million Dollar Question and I really thought she was going to win because like I told you before she is the smartest person I know. She sat in the dining room every night with her laptop computer with a program that made up random questions that were multiple choice, and sometimes she even watched old episodes of The Hundred Thousand Dollar Question, from back when people thought that a hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money. Sometimes if I was really quiet, she let me sit under the table, and I would play with the laces on her shoes and listen to Mama answer the questions, which I can tell you she got right almost 97% of the time and which Mama said was because I was her Good Luck Charm.
Like I told you before, Mama has been on lots and lots of game shows. The first one she was on was Place Your Bets, when she won the Miata and a new refrigerator and all kinds of other stuff, too. She won everything there was to win on that show, and after that was when we bought the house in Cherry Tree Hill. Mama was very lucky, everyone said. The newspaper did a story about her, and she got to be interviewed on Live at Five with Bruce Frisko and also was the special guest at the Atlantic Winter Fair at Exhibition Park where she got to judge the Super Dogs and so on and so forth. But after Place Your Bets, Mama was not so lucky. She went on all kinds of other game shows and did not win any other prizes at all, except for the play-at-home version of Jeopardy that they gave her when she went down into the negatives and she was not allowed to stay and play Final Jeopardy because she had no money to wager.
But after The Million Dollar Question, Mama became very famous again. Lauren was at dance practice so I watched the show on television at home with just Daddy and Rachel, even though I wanted to go to New York to see Mama because as you remember she told me she was her Good Luck Charm! Daddy said it would be too expensive and that would defeat the purpose of winning all that money, but really I know that it is just because Daddy does not ever like to leave the house since the Accident at Work that made him be in a wheelchair. So we were watching it at home in the living room just like it was any other boring show we would watch on TV.
“This show is for stupid people,” Rachel said. I knew even before she said that that she was in an angry mood. Rachel has all kinds of moods, such as angry, sad, happy, contemplative, excited, morose, and sometimes drunk. I know all about Rachel’s moods because she has them all the time.
“Oh Rachel,” Daddy said. “That’s not a nice word.” He looked at me when he said it, but I pretended that I did not see, because I knew he had the Sorry for Taylor face on and the Sorry for Taylor face is the face I hate most in the whole wide world.
“What? It’s not like I was swearing,” said Rachel. “I didn’t say ‘this show is for stupid fucking people.’” Rachel is very good at being mean to Daddy. I think if there was a Being Mean to Daddy Olympics, she probably would win the gold medal.
Daddy drank some of his drink and looked at Rachel really sadly, as if he was trying to figure out some big mystery just by looking at her. I thought maybe he was going to cry, but then he just said, “Watch your mother on TV.”
Then there was some really tense music. I was in my pajamas and Rachel was wearing a black dress because she was going out that night with some friends to a club and Daddy was wearing his sweatpants and his number 93 Dougie Gilmour Maple Leafs jersey which he sometimes let me wear too but just around the house. Mama was wearing a red suit with a skirt instead of pants and I thought she looked very beautiful even though Rachel said she had on too much makeup. Then it was time for the very first question, which is supposed to be the super easy question that gets you started and sometimes makes everybody laugh. Gene Sugarman leaned forward and he said, “Are you ready for the big one?” and the audience said it along with him and the Gene Sugarman said the thing about meteorology and Mama took a deep breath and Daddy took a drink of his drink and Rachel played with a hole in her stocking and I sat very, very still.
“C. Meteors,” Mama said.
Then the music made a sad noise. Gene Sugarman stopped smiling. Rachel stopped picking the hole in her stocking. Daddy stopped drinking his drink. None of us said anything, we just stared at the TV for a few seconds and then Rachel said, “What a fucking moron,” and got up and turned off the TV and Daddy turned his chair around and wheeled out of the room and I said in my head, it’s okay Mama, it’s okay, meteorologists should study meteors, it only makes sense.
When Mama came home she was very angry and wouldn’t talk to any of the reporters who came to the house, and when David Letterman made a joke about her on his TV show she did not even find it funny at all. In fact it made her cry a little bit, which I can understand because it is not nice to make fun of people you do not know because you do not know if they are going think it is funny. After that I wrote a letter to David Letterman and told him how sad he made Mama, and he sent me back a letter with a picture of himself with his name written on it, and in the letter he said thank you for your letter but did not say anything about Mama, not anything at all.
Now I am going to tell you about what Rachel and I do next.
Rachel and I drive all the way to the bottom of the road called Cherry Tree Hill and then take a left turn onto Purcell’s Cove Road. As soon as we make the turn, Rachel starts driving faster, which makes the wind blow my hair around. The sun is shining brightly, and this makes me wish I had sunglasses. With sunglasses and my hair blowing around I could imagine that I was a movie star, and Rachel too, and we are driving our movie star car to a big premiere where there are going to be all kinds of people taking our picture and asking us for autographs and we will link arms and walk up the red carpet and into a big lush air conditioned theatre where we will get to eat all the popcorn we want, and even get extra butter because we are the stars of the movie. Rachel already looks like a movie star, even though her hair is dirty and she is wearing no makeup and her clothes have holes in them and she has a great big zit in the space between her eyebrows. Rachel usually wears at least some lipstick, and if she is going out at night she puts on a lot of black stuff on her eyes. I think that maybe after this adventure we have together, that she will show me how to put on makeup the way that she does. Then I will wear it to school and all the other kids in my class will be jealous because they will know that I am best friends with my sister Rachel and they are not.
At the end of Purcell’s Cove Road there is something called a rotary where cars drive around and around in a circle until they see the see the street that they want and then they get out of the circle. To get in the rotary, you are supposed to take turns, first one person goes, and then the next person goes, one, two, one, two, and so on and so forth. I do not drive a car yet (even though I practice all the time in Puerto Vallerta) but even I know how to make the rotary work. But when we get there, Rachel just stops. One car drives by and then the next car stops to let Rachel go because it is Rachel’s turn. But Rachel still just sits there. When I look at her I see that she is staring at her hands on the steering wheel. She just keeps staring and then the car that is waiting for her gets mad and drives away really fast.
“Look at my hands,” she says, so I look at them. She has her palms pressed against the steering wheel and her fingers are spread out. They look like very normal hands, her fingers are long and slender and very pretty, and her nails are very short. I know that they are short because she has made them that way by biting them.
“Look at this … skin,” she says. She takes one hand and pinches the skin on the other hand. “It’s so …” she pauses, letting go and letting the skin settle back into place “… fucking thin.” She pokes the same spot with her finger and sort of moves it around.
Then the car behind us gives a little honk.
“Shut up!” Rachel screams. I jump in my seat because I was not expecting Rachel to scream at that moment. She wraps her fingers back around the steering wheel very tightly. Then she slams on the gas before she even looks at whether or not there is a car coming, which I can tell you, THERE IS! Luckily the car, which is a taxicab, slams on the brakes very hard and does not hit us. The driver honks the horn and yells something out the window but Rachel is not paying any attention at all, she is driving away very fast through the rotary and then up Chebucto Road and under the train bridge and then straight through the intersection by the mall even though the light is yellow-turning-red.
I will tell you, all of this makes me a little bit nervous to be in the car with Rachel.
Before Rachel became a teenager, and when I was just a very little kid, we used to have our own zoo. Maybe if you asked her today, she would not tell you about the zoo but I will bet a million dollars she remembers. The zoo consisted only of animals that we could find in the backyard, mostly just all kinds of insects, such as butterflies, bees, hornets and wasps, beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, centipedes and millipedes, caterpillars, dragonflies, damsel flies, horse flies, deer flies, fireflies, ladybugs, ants, and spiders, which are actually not insects but actually arachnids. We kept them in jars that used to have jam in them and Rachel would pound through the tops with nails to make holes that would make them be able to breathe. We would give them sticks and leaves and moss, which if you do not already know are the things that insects eat, but no matter how hard we tried to look after them, they always became dead. And then, you know what? A thing that was weird happened. The thing that was weird was, we started to get used to bugs that were dead, and we would do all kinds of things to them such as poke at them with sticks, scratch at them with our fingernails, pull off their antennae or their wings or their legs, peel apart their bodies, and prod at their insides and so on and so forth and you do not have to tell me that this thing that we did was a very mean thing to do but I was only a very little girl and did not know any better.
After a while, there was one day when we had already gone through all the bugs that were dead and we had all these other bugs in jars that we knew were going to be dead soon anyway, and what was the big deal if we just did it for them a few hours in advance? At least that was what Rachel said. She said, “What is the big deal, Taylor? They’re only stupid ugly bugs anyway, right?” So we got a bunch of rocks and put them over the holes which were for the bugs to breathe and soon all the bugs were acting very strangely and doing things such as stumbling around in their jars, burying themselves under the moss and leaves, and climbing slowly up the glass walls trying to get out and stop from being suffocated. But it was okay, Rachel said, because way worse things would happen to them if we let them out of their jars, they would probably get stepped on or run over with a lawnmower or smushed on the windshield of a car and so on and so forth. It was better this way, because they just sort of went to sleep and they did not feel any pain at all.
But you know what? Even though Rachel said the bugs didn’t have any feelings, I did not believe her because when I shut my eyes really tight I could hear them inside their jars making noises like they were screaming. And I do not mind telling you that the screaming became even louder screaming and it was making my head hurt, like someone stuck a fork in there and started mashing up the part of me that was my brain, so when Rachel went inside the house to get some Kool-Aid to drink I grabbed the first jar I could see and lifted the rock off of the lid and opened it up. Inside the jar were three bees that were all tired and hiding under a leaf that was a leaf from the birch tree next to the picnic table. At first I was a little scared because bees can sting you but then I remembered that they will not do this unless they are Bees under Attack. But these bees, which were our bees in the jar, made very angry bee noises and then the first one flew out and stung at a spot on my hand and another one flew out and stung at a spot on my shoulder and another one flew out and stung at my eyelid. Then they were all very dead bees. So I picked them up and put them back in the jar and put the rock back on top of the jar and sat very, very still and waited for Rachel to come back out with her Kool-Aid. Let me tell you that I very much did not want Rachel to know this thing that I had done, that I had tried to make the bees free and that they had died anyway.
When Rachel came back out with her Kool-Aid, the first thing she saw was that the bees were dead. “See, Taylor,” she said. “You just need to have a little more patience.” She took the rock off the jar and opened the jar and shook the bees onto the ground while I just sat there watching her through one normal eye and one eye that was slowly becoming a very red and puffy eye. “They look so peaceful,” she said, studying them as they lay there with their little legs all up in the air.
The next thing that happens is this: Rachel says, “Let’s walk up to the bridge.”
We are driving down North Street and I can see that the bridge is right in front of us, and I want to tell Rachel that we should drive over the bridge because outside of the window I can see three men standing on the side of the road and I do not want to get out of the car and have them try to talk to me or steal something from me. The men all have shopping carts that are filled up with empty pop bottles and other recyclables, and there are bags tied to their carts that are also full, and they are standing over a garbage can and it looks like maybe they are arguing about who gets to have the bottles that are inside. Except I cannot hear them arguing so it is possible that they are arguing about who will get to pull out the knife when they rob the next little girl who walks by them, and what nasty things they will do to her when they discover that she has no money.
I wonder if the men tried to rob me whether Rachel would try to save me. When I look over at her, I see that she is pulling hairs out of her head and then letting them fly out of the car on the wind. She is doing this with one hand while the other hand still grips the bottom of the steering wheel, but she is not looking at the road—she is looking at the hairs that she is pulling off of her head.
“It all comes apart so easily,” she says to me when she sees me looking at her. “I feel like I could just pull my whole body apart.” I want to ask Rachel what she means but then she has turned the corner onto Gottingen Street and pulled over to the side of the road and the car behind her honks really loudly because I do not think you are allowed to park your car where she has parked it, but Rachel just lets another hair fly away.
“Come on,” she says after a minute. Her eyes are very bright and when she looks at me I get this feeling like she is not really looking at me but at something behind my head. I open the car door even though I am still worried about the men on the side of the street with shopping carts. They have stopped arguing and now one of them is coming toward me, and his cart is so full that it makes a big banging clashing noise as he pushes it over all the cracks in the sidewalk. He is wearing a green coat that makes him look like an army person and his hair is long and more matted and dirty even than Rachel’s. He stops in front of the Miata and peers over the door and into the inside of the car.
“Nice wheels,” he says. I do not say anything. Rachel does not say anything, either, because she is standing in the middle of the street staring at the bridge and I do not think that she hears him. Then he winks at me and walks away, whistling a little tune, and suddenly I feel very bad for thinking that he was going to rob me. And when I look at Rachel standing in the middle of the street and I look at the man walking down the sidewalk whistling a little tune, I have to tell you that even though most of me was happy to be with Rachel, a little tiny part of me would have rather gone with that man.
So what I do instead is, I think about how I am going to be the very first girl in the whole world to win the Dakar. I think about how maybe Luc Belliveau would teach me everything he knows about rally racing, because Alex and Sophie are good kids but they are not at all interested in cars. Alex is in little league and Sophie is going for her bronze medallion, and even though Judy is a good and kind woman who bakes cakes every Sunday and volunteers at the school library, she could never understand the thrill of racing across the desert and feeling all the different shapes of the earth through the steering wheel and into the palms of your hands, and hearing about me and my dream to be the very first girl in the whole world to win the Dakar has reminded him about how much he loves racing and how much he misses it, and he will decide to fly down here and find me at 21 Cherry Tree Hill and come inside and ignore everyone else in the room and come right over to me and say “Taylor, come with me!” and he will take me back to La Maison Baie Bleu, and Judy will hug me and Sophie will hold my hand and whisper secrets into my ear and Alex will pull my ponytail and then one day Luc Belliveau will take me outside, and hiding in a garage somewhere will be his old Toyota Celica GT-Four under an orange tarp with pine needles that have fallen all over it and we will drive through the countryside of Quebec and he will be my navigator and I will show him how I am such a good driver even though I am only eleven and how I know how to do the Scandinavian Flick and even how to do a handbrake turn and he will be so impressed and we will drive VRRRRMMMM through the countryside together VRRRMMMMM over hills and down dirt roads VRRRRMMMM around hairpin turns and up over rocks and down into big puddles VRRRRMMMMM, VRRRRMMMMM, VRRRRRMMMMM until I realize I am no longer sitting in the car anymore—I am on the sidewalk instead, and Rachel is still standing in the street and many cars are passing her and honking their horns.
Then I am not sure what to do because even though I do not get to go out in The City very often I do know that you are not supposed to stand in the middle of the street like Rachel is doing because a car might come along and hit you. So I just stand on the sidewalk for a few seconds and then finally Rachel walks out of the street but she walks to the other side of the street from where I am standing and then she just keeps walking toward the bridge as if she has forgotten all about me.
I decide that I should follow Rachel but instead of walking out into the middle of the street I walk down the sidewalk to the corner where there is a traffic light and I wait at the corner for the little Walking Man to come up, which is how you know it is your turn to cross the street. I have to tell you I am feeling a little worried at this moment because even though I can see Rachel on the other side of the street, and even though there are two other people standing with me waiting for the little Walking Man, I feel like I am all alone. Most of all I am scared that I will lose sight of Rachel before the little Walking Man comes up. I am scared that she will walk up over the bridge and just disappear while I am just standing here like a stupid person, waiting for the light to change.
I have another secret. I made Mama lose on The Million Dollar Question.
I didn’t want to make her lose. I wanted to make her win. I sat under the table while she practiced and soon I discovered that she was only getting 37% of the questions right, even the questions that I knew the answers to even though I am only a little girl. And then I started playing with her laces under the table and I was her Good Luck Charm and I would pull once on her laces if the answer was a) and twice on her laces if the answer was b) and so on and so forth, and then she started knowing all the answers to the questions and everything was okay and I knew she was going to win!
But she did not win, as you already know. And it is my fault because I made Mama think she was smart even though she is not. I made Mama think she was smart because there is no way her stupid daughter Taylor Marie Harnish would ever know the answers better than she would.
The light changes. I walk quickly across the street but I do not run because Mama once told me not to run across the street because I might trip and fall and then a car will drive right over me. When I reach the other side of the street, this is when I start to run. I run along the sidewalk that starts to go a bit uphill, and I realize that I am now running onto the bridge. There are cars driving past me on one side and once I make it up over the first little hump toward the middle very big hump I can look down and there is a space between the sidewalk and the road where I can see down to the underneath of the bridge. Let me tell you, this is a really weird feeling, as though you are flying, with that whole world underneath you, cars and people and dogs and birds and sidewalks and plants and dirt and air and so on and so forth. I am having a hard time running and trying to keep my eyes on Rachel because I cannot stop myself from looking down through that little empty strip and seeing that underneath world, and then all of a sudden, poof! The underneath world is gone and it is all blue. And I look up and then I stop, because I see that ahead of me, Rachel has stopped, right at the very highest point of the bridge between where there are these two towers that hold up all the big cables that are keeping the bridge from falling into the harbour.
Rachel is leaning with her arms across the railing looking out over the water. I start walking towards her again but really slowly because I am scared that she will start running away from me again and I do not want her to do that. I do not want her to run away from me again because then I might start to think that she does not really want me to be with her, and even if this is true, I do not want to know it, at least not yet. Maybe someday in the future she will say, “Hey Taylor, remember that day that we went to the bridge? Well, I really just wanted to be all by myself.” But at that point it will be so far in the past that maybe instead of being sad about it, we will laugh about it, because we will probably be best friends by then.
I walk up beside Rachel and put my arms up on the railing the same way that she is doing, except I am much shorter than Rachel so I have to stand up on the first rung on the bottom of the railing in order to reach. Rachel is looking out over the water and so I look out over the water too and it is windy and I can feel the breath being pulled out of my lungs as I look and then there is the whole harbour in front of me, and it is so big that it fills up both of my eyes and I can look from side to side and still see it. I can see George’s Island and MacNab’s Island and all kinds of little boats, tugboats and sailboats with their big white sails and motorboats making little lines in the water behind them and big container ships and navy boats with their little flags flying and seagulls flying and other birds flying. I can see all the buildings all along the waterfront on both sides and more water and more water and more boats and clouds and sky and sky and sky and it is so beautiful you do not even understand how beautiful it is—it is so beautiful that for a second my eyes hurt just from looking at it and I have to turn away.
When I turn I see that Rachel has put her feet up on the bottom rung as well, but because she is so much taller than me it makes even more of her body rise up over the railing, and she is leaning forward with her arms open and for a second I think she is going to jump and even though at this moment you would think that I would be thinking about Rachel and whether or not she is going to jump, I am not even thinking about Rachel at all. Instead of thinking about Rachel and whether or not she is going to jump, I am wondering what my life would be like if Gabe was alive. I wonder if we would have bunk beds and Gabe would sleep on the top bunk and then I would sleep on the bottom bunk staring at the dent that his body made in the springs, instead of sleeping on the pull-out couch in the basement like I do now.
I wonder if Gabe would stick up for me at school when the other kids called me a retard, if he would come down off his top bunk at night and climb into the bottom bunk with me when I had that nightmare about the giant bee with the ripped wings that crawls up between my legs. I wonder if Gabe was alive if Mama and Daddy would love me, instead of being mad at me all the time for being the one who is alive, and that maybe everyone would be better, Mama would win on her game shows and Daddy would never have been in the Accident at Work and Rachel would not be so mad at everyone all the time.
But then I think that maybe if Gabe was alive then I would not have those nightmares at all, and I would not get called a retard at school. Maybe if Gabe was alive I would be able to talk like a normal person. And then I get very scared because I don’t know who I would be without all of these things that are part of me. I wouldn’t even know who Taylor Marie Harnish is at all. Sometimes I think that I am glad Gabe is not alive and then I hate myself very much for thinking that.
So it is good luck for me that Rachel does not jump. Instead, she looks back at me and says “Do you think that they could see us from Cherry Tree Hill?”
I shake my head.
“But we could see the bridge from there, right?” She squints her eyes and looks to the west which is in the direction of Cherry Tree Hill, and I look that way too, but all there is to see are other buildings that are not our house or any of the houses on Cherry Tree Hill. “You’d think we could see it from here.”
But it was the tippy top of the bridge we could see, not the bottom where the cars drive, so I raise my hand in the air and point up.
Rachel tilts her head back. “Good idea, Taylor,” she says and her voice sounds very soft because most of it is carried away by the wind except for a very little part of it that makes it all the way over to me. She moves down the railing and I move down the railing after her until we are both standing underneath one of the big towers that hold up the cables that keep the bridge from falling into the harbour. Underneath the cables there are supports that come down from the top of the cables to the railing that we are leaning against, and they are shaped just like narrow green ladders with rungs going across them and everything and then all of a sudden I know what Rachel is going to do. By the time I reach her, she has climbed up on the bottom railing again and is looking out over the water, and then she reaches up for the lowest rung and grabs it with her hands, pulling it a little as if she is trying to see if it will break. Then without looking at me, she raises her other hand and she points at the support next to hers and she says this:
“You take that one, Taylor. I’ll race you to the top.”
And then she is moving up and up and up, and all I can see are the dirty bottoms of her feet. “Rachel,” I say, and the word feels like glue in my throat, and it hurts and makes me want to cough, but I say it, I say it and it sounds like the word I want it to sound like, but Rachel doesn’t hear it because the wind takes it away before it reaches her. The wind takes away the word it has taken me eleven years to learn how to say.
