Months were spent braving cold nights beneath wooden stoops and escaping ice storms and floods under highway overpasses in an endless game of hide-and-go-seek. As the weather warmed, Bahadur managed to sneak into a condo parkade, where they nestled into a corner of the building’s storage room undetected. They slept between cages of surplus belongings with the hum of the electric lights ringing in their ear.
One night, when sneaking past security cameras to the condo’s dumpster for food, Bahadur noticed a black Grand Caravan with the driver’s window rolled down. A white man and woman sat in the front seats. It was trailing them. Bahadur ran. They bolted from the bin towards a line of bushes, but the van managed to circle around the bushes and drive directly into their path.
“Bahadur?” said the man from the driver’s seat. Bahadur flinched at the sound of their name. “Are you Bahadur? Get in the van.”
The automatic door closed and the man began driving. The woman looked back at Bahadur from the passenger seat.
“We’ve been searching everywhere for you. My name is Liv. I know Firuzeh.”
4
I awake to find that Bahadur and I have fallen asleep holding hands, both of us supine under the weight of blankets. Our grip is less like romantic lovers and more like the kind of grasp you use on someone you’re fishing out of the water, someone who doesn’t know how to swim. Only we don’t know who is saving whom, our hands are so tightly clasped around each other. I try to loosen my grasp, but they only hold me tighter. Bahadur’s eyes race right and left under eyelids squeezed tight. Their square jaw is clenched, chewing at a scene I cannot see. Even the tendons of their stocky neck pulse at relived trauma. I wonder what they are dreaming about. I relax into this odd embrace with a stranger, in this moving car driven by another stranger heading to somewhere we do not know. I have not felt someone else beside me in so long that I realize my skin hungers and longs for you. I shake my head of your memory and squeeze my eyes of the sting.
The van’s radio is shut off and I can hear the wheels crunching along a dirt road now.
“Wake up, everyone. We’re here.” The white man rolls down the windows. The smell of chicken shit.
I lift the blankets aside and peek out of the van’s window. Two silos stand against the cooling amber of the afternoon sun. Beside the silos is a low, grey open-air building. Across an expanse of coarse gravel is a two-storey house with faded blue siding. Everything looks like it’s standing on its last legs and could collapse with one push of a finger.
“Who are these people?” I say to Bahadur, pointing to an old man exiting the farmhouse. He is wearing worn jeans and a sad button-up shirt. At the sight of our van, he looks at our driver, confused for a moment, then settles his face into a grimace. He wipes his greased silver hair off his forehead and dabs the back of his sweaty neck using a handkerchief.
The van stops. Our driver exits. Slowly, with a faint smile he says, “Hi, Dad.” He rubs the blond stubble on his chin, unsure.
The old man shifts his feet like a soldier standing at attention. A retired military man. There is a look of recognition. A confirmation in posture.
“It’s me, Beck.” His voice cracks at this attempt to be forthright.
“I don’t know you.” The old man maintains a look of solemn contempt.
“I know you, Dad.”
“Don’t call me that.” They both look at their shoes. The stalemate is broken when the old man sees Bahadur and me peering at him from the van. “Who’s in there? You brought people?! You brought Others over here?!”
“I need them to stay here for the next while.”
“Hell, no!”
“I have supplies for you and Mom.”
“I don’t want your supplies!”
“I know the floods hit McGregor’s Bend hard, Dad. I know you need these supplies. I have food. I have clean water.”
“I can get that at the Costco.”
“Twenty-seven kilometres away in North London? Between the fuel cost and them gouging people because of the shortages, you can’t afford that.”
“Why didn’t you come sooner, then?”
“I was still in service.”
“You could have called! You’re just here because you need something!”
The screen door creaks open and an old woman braces herself against its frame.
“Just shut up, the two of you, and get inside!” Silence. The old woman waves her cane towards the van. Her clumsy grey coif reveals a sunburned scalp and thinning hairline. “And tell those Others in the van to clean up before we eat. They look filthy.”
Beck leads me and Bahadur into the farmhouse, and I enter with caution. It feels like forever since I have interacted with white folks other than Liv, and I feel my body folding in on itself, making itself as small, as inoffensive, as possible. The old woman tells me to take off my shoes, but when I do so she sees my socks are no cleaner than my sneakers, so I have to keep them on. Instead, I fastidiously wipe my soles on the mildewed welcome mat outside to ensure the pea-green shag carpet from the front entrance into the living room remains clean, even though it has been stained and tatted by moisture. With armfuls of supplies from the van, I enter and re-enter the house again and again, feeling apologetic for my very presence. When the last of the water bottles are brought in, I stand by the bottom of the stairs where dead-people pictures adorn the walls of a long hallway. I look closely at black-and-white images of babies in bonnets, men in overalls posing in front of a newly erected building, and plain women with intricate hairstyles smiling at the camera. The down on my forearms stands on end knowing these people most likely lived here once and all we have left of them are these creepy pictures. I scratch my arm skin to calm my goosebumps.
“Kay? Bahadur?” Beck says to us. I look to the side and see that Bahadur has not moved an inch from the front door and looks just as reticent as me. “You hungry?”
Beck opens four cans of corned beef using the attached key and divides it among all of us. Even with the congealed fat still waxy and yellow, layered between fibres of unknown meat, I bite my lip to keep myself from swallowing the plate whole.
We cautiously make our way to the kitchen, which is a sea of beige linoleum, and settle ourselves in the booth-like seats, side by side with these strangers. For a moment, all that can be heard among us is the ticking of a wooden clock sitting on the fireplace’s mantel. Beck and his parents exchange soundless glances. Even when the old man and old woman motion for us to say grace before the meal, it is done in silence. Their hands automatically stretch out to join in a praying circle around the kitchen table, but they both realize it means they will have to actually touch us. They silently decide to just hold each other’s hands in prayer. We sit awkwardly outside their grasp. The old woman closes her eyes.
Finally, she says, “Dear God. Thank you for this wonderful meal, for the hands that prepared it and for the generosity of Beck to bring it here.” The old man’s lips purse. Beck sighs. The old woman opens her eyes and looks at us sideways. An afterthought. “And thank you for these . . . visitors. I hope they like McGregor’s Bend as much as we do. Amen.”
Bahadur and I share a look, then eat.
“You all seem hungry.” The old woman daintily places a napkin on her lap and nibbles at her food in polite forkfuls. I am unsure if I should tell her that meals are a luxury after the Renovation, so thank you for letting us share your table, but before I can craft my sentence, she says, “My name is Hanna. I’m Beck’s mother. And this is Peter . . . Beck’s dad.” I open my mouth, about to say, “Thank you.”