The Lilac Cube

9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Vita put a lump in my throat.I realized I hadn t given her a single thought since I spoke to the judge.I knew I d broken her heart, as completely as if I d stolen her wedding ring and sold it for drugs.The look on her face was the look of someone who was watching a tidal wave approaching and knew there was nowhere to run.The black enormity of that thought caused her face to waver and blur as tears I hadn t realized I d been holding back filmed my eyes.As she hugged me, I let them spill, wanting to confess how quickly I d made my choice, but I couldn t speak.She quieted me tenderly, whispering how much she loved me in my ear, telling me not to cry, not to feel bad, that she would never leave me.I d never felt closer to my mother than at that moment.A month before my parents got their divorce, Dad sold the beloved Kenworth W900 he bought in 1979 and finished paying for seven years later, and took a job as a dispatcher with the company he drove for.I guess he wanted to show my mother how committed he was to saving his marriage.It was sad.At nine years old, I d seen most of the Maritimes and Newfoundland, gone all the way out to Alberta and down the Eastern seaboard, knew most of the waitresses in the truck stops along the way, even tinkered a little bit under the semi s huge hood (okay, handed Dad his wrenches).As much as Dad wanted me to go to university and become someone important, I knew that a tiny part of him, buried deep and out of sight, was tickled by the idea of me following in his footsteps and becoming a trucker, maybe even driving the same black Kenworth.And now, all that was left was a dried-up oil slick in the gravel driveway of our bungalow.So, I stayed with Dad while Travis wound up out at my grandparents apple orchard in the Annapolis Valley.My mother had grown up there, and had decided that the best thing for her was to go back home and try to get a fresh start.Travis would have to start at a new high school, but my mother compensated for this by giving him permission to drive her car to school.This smoothed things over, and by the time he and my mother were packed and ready to go, Travis almost jumped into the driver s seat, eager to get onto the highway before the sky grew dark.Walking back inside after watching my mother s taillights disappear into the dusk, I was amazed at how completely she d erased herself from the house.She d packed up most of the glass ornaments that she loved so much, emptied out the closets (most of the clothes were hers anyway), and taken down almost all of the family photographs from the walls.She and Dad had argued softly about those pictures for most of the previous night as I listened through the door of my bedroom.My brother s room was even more barren.He d stripped his bed of its blankets and pillows, and he and Dad just loaded the dresser, clothes and all, into the U-Haul trailer.The only trace that he d left were the tape scars on the wall from all of his AC/DC and Metallica posters.I could only look into that room, with its bare mattresses and pillows for a couple of seconds before slamming the door and running back into my own room to bury my face deep in my collection of stuffed rabbits.As I fought back tears, I could hear the floorboards creaking under Dad s weight.There was a knock on the door.Hey, sugar.What do you want for dinner?The pizza came at 7:00, the biggest pie they had, and the two of us ate more than half of it in total silence.It was a strange meal, made stranger by the fact that Dad forgot to turn the kitchen light on.Dad had quit drinking about three years ago, but that first night alone, he stayed in the living room, drinking glass after glass of whiskey and strumming his guitar.He wasn t very good at it, and he mostly played trucking songs by Red Sovine, Porter Waggoner, and Hank Williams, but I stayed up with him to sing along until after midnight.We sat together in the darkness of the living room, me wailing along on top of his slurred baritone, until he finally closed his eyes, went silent, and let the guitar slide down from his lap to the floor.I picked it up, tried to strum it, but my fingers weren t strong enough.I ventured a tiny sip from his unfinished glass, sputtered at the hot bitterness of the whiskey, then decided to haul myself off to bed, leaving Dad alone in his favorite armchair.Dad never once stopped paying for my piano lessons, or gave up his dream of one day seeing me perform a solo at Carnegie Hall, probably sitting at my custom Steinway between a full orchestra and a packed house.I had been taking lessons since I was eight, going over to Dr. McCaskill s music store every day after school.Dr. McCaskill (Dr.M to me) ran the biggest music store in Truro and he gave cheap lessons to kids from all over town, most of them high schoolers in the CEC band.Dr. M was a small man, an ex-professor from the music department of Dalhousie University.He wore bifocals and had a tidy little wrinkle-lined smile when he talked with my parents, anyway.With me, he could be an unmovable, meanspirited villain, forcing me to recite my scales over and over for an entire session, or getting me to play the same piece at different tempos until I went home with the eight-year-old pianist s version of carpal tunnel syndrome.But whenever he dropped by the bungalow to make sure my parents planned to continue my lessons, he was the picture of easy dignity and literate charm, sipping black coffee from my mother s best china as if he were a visiting diplomat.Although both of my parents considered it their duty to keep me at my lessons, Dad was the one to actually make sacrifices in his own recreation budget to accommodate them.Summer after summer, he was forced to give up his precious membership at the Truro Golf Club so I could practice six days a week instead of four.I hated him for it.But, by the time I was eleven, I was starting to see the results, and actually began to think that being a concert pianist might not be a lifetime of torture.I started to enjoy wearing my cute little frocks to Dr. M s store, showing off a bit to the other parents who were dropping their own kids off or picking them up.It helped that for those two years I was the youngest kid studying with Dr. M, and I became almost his prized student during that time.Not really because I was more talented than any of the others, but because I was so young, Dr. M preferred to spend a lot more time working with me one-on-one.By the time my parents got divorced, prices had gone up, and my lessons were costing the family $10 an hour, a lot more than we could really afford at the time.Dad s golf club CHAPTER 2When I started high scho ol, Dad decided to go back to driving, so he was go ne for long stretches at a time, and although he called me faithfully every night at around eleven, it was never qu ite eno ugh to war d off the night sou nds.The bungalow had been built in the early seventies, and now it groaned with every gust of wind, which always seemed worse out here on this side of the marshes.And lately when he talked to me, I could hear a distracted note in his voice, and I guessed he was probably checking his watch because there was another call he had to make.This past year, he d started dating some wo man named Diane fro m Truro Height s, and I knew that the moment he said goo dbye to me, he didn t even put t he phone back in its cradle befo re dialing Diane s number.It pissed me off a litt le, I guess, but I was most ly just angry t hat he was gone all the time.I hated coming home to an empty house and having to cook soup-in-a-can on t he stove.On my first day of school, I went down to the music department to audition for the school band .I rea lly had no id ea if t hey ne ede d a d rummer, bu t I felt I ha d t o jo in so mething.All day, I d been shuffling along in a kind of daze from science math, to music classes, to English, to French, never quite sure I d gotten the right classroom, getting the nodes all confused.Most of my friends had decided to take general classes instead of academic, so I mostly only saw them during breaks and at lunch.If I joined the band, I would at least have a ready-made group of people to talk to at my locker.Cobequid Educational Center was a surprisingly multiethnic school for a town the size of Trur o.A Micmac reservation bo rdered the town, and t he native kids went either t o CEC or t he high school in Brookfield, a tiny village populated mostly by bored teenagers who got their kicks huffing gasoline and racing their pickups from the town s only intersection.There were also two small enclaves of black families downtown, so while I wasn t living in inner-city Detroit, I didn t think I was a total rube either.In fact, the school was a colorful mix of kids from just abo ut ever y back gro und: met alhea d hillbillies from Onslo w and Belmo nt, pre ppies in To mmy Hilfiger sweaters, blue-collar girls in frizzed hair and clad in acid-wash jeans that had gone out of style years ago, who dreamed of becoming hairdressers at the Style Factory in the K-Mart Mall, ska teboa rders wit h sha ved heads a nd dyed-red bang s who listened to band s like the Day-Glo Abor tions, wannabe ho meboys with Adidas High-T ops and backward baseball caps, and even a few punks, although most of them had been impor ted from Halifax, like Dave Rasmussen.And then there was me.I de cided on a simp le loo k, w ear ing t he black blo use my mot her had g iven me for my birthday, and a cream-colored skirt.I d agonized for almost an hour, wondering what to do with

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