A Tinfoil Sky Read online

  Text copyright © 2012 by Cyndi Sand-Eveland

  Published in Canada by Tundra Books,

  75 Sherbourne Street, Toronto, Ontario M5A 2P9

  Published in the United States by Tundra Books of Northern New York,

  P.O. Box 1030, Plattsburgh, New York 12901

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011923469

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sand-Eveland, Cyndi

  A tinfoil sky / by Cyndi Sand-Eveland.

  eISBN: 978-1-77049-294-3

  I. Title.

  PS8637.A539T55 2012 JC813.′6 C2011–901450–5

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  v3.1

  For “Mel,” wherever you are.

  There was promise in your eyes,

  and you left me wanting to write that possibility into existence.

  I hope I have done you justice.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Starting Over

  Dreaming

  A Trick to Remember

  Gladys’s

  Knock, Knock

  July 7

  Looking for a Gig

  Homeless

  Waiting for Cecily

  The Strangers

  Your Honor

  Frohberger’s

  Tinfoil Sky

  Caught

  Sleeping Beauty

  The Letter

  Part-Time Job

  Paul

  Mel’s Letter

  A Visit with Rose, Gus, and Fearless

  The Alley

  The Phone Call

  The Interview

  The First Saturday

  Tux

  A Date

  Morning Mountain

  The Third Saturday

  Three Days

  The Locked Room

  First Light

  The Last Show

  Dancing in Silver

  Good-bye to Paul

  The Fourth Saturday

  Home

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks Kathryn Cole, Kelly Jones, and Kathy Lowinger at Tundra Books for your editorial feedback and encouragement! I am very grateful, Kathryn, that you gave this story not only one chance, but three.

  I am deeply indebted to Morty Mint, my agent, and Verna Relkoff and Sharmaine Gray, editors extraordinaire, who read, listened, and offered sage advice.

  My dear friends Robyn, Heidi, Val, Anne, daughter Kohe, sisters Sharrie and Jackie, and niece Ashley read and gave feedback on early drafts. Thank you!

  Thank you also to Lisa Menna, whose magic and long walks infused the early work on this story.

  Philip, Celeste, Sharrie, Sandy, and Mary Ann all willingly shared their experiences and valuable insights. Thank you.

  This book has taken time – lots of it – and that has meant that I have, once again, needed the support of my family, Todd, Kohe, and Mclain.

  A promise of more time to walk by the river I owe to Patches, our beloved family dog. He, more than anyone, has listened to this story unfold, and his sweet desire to be with me on this journey, whatever the hour I wrote, never wavered.

  Ann McDonnell’s students at Trafalgar Middle School read my first effort. The afternoon we spent with all of you passionately sharing your opinions, insights, hopes, and dreams for Mel, kept me rewriting. This book is also dedicated to you.

  Lastly, but most importantly, I want to thank you, the reader. A story and its characters are nothing more than simple keystrokes inked to a page. It is the reader who breathes life into the characters, allowing them to truly live.

  Cyndi

  1

  Starting Over

  “Girl,” Cecily said as they sped away from the curb, “we’re going home!”

  Mel turned and stared at Cecily, not quite believing the word had slipped so easily from her mother’s lips.

  And the way that Cecily said the word home left Mel wondering. Cecily said it like she meant that place you can always go back to, “that” kind of home. Mel knew Cecily wasn’t referring to the last place they’d lived. She always called that place The Dive.

  And so Mel repeated the word out loud. “Home?”

  “I’ve been thinking it just might be the right time to go back home to Gladys’s in Riverview,” Cecily said.

  Mel sat in a mixture of shock and silence. It was the eleventh time they’d moved in four years. But this time they weren’t being evicted, or finding a new place with cheaper rent, or moving in with a friend of Cecily’s. This time they weren’t just leaving with nowhere to go. They were going to her grandmother’s.

  Mel didn’t remember what Gladys’s place looked like, or, for that matter, what Gladys or Tux, her grandfather, looked like. The last time Cecily and Gladys had spoken, Mel was four. She only knew that Tux had died. That was almost nine years ago, and, for as long as Mel could remember, Cecily had refused to tell Mel much about anything that related to her grandparents, the city of Riverview, or the first three years of Mel’s life.

  As Mel stared out the car window into the dark, vacant streets, she thought about the events of the last hour. She’d woken to Cecily and Craig arguing again. Only this time, it seemed louder and seemed to go on longer than usual. Then the front door slammed – hard. The yelling continued in the street until finally she heard Craig tear out of the driveway on his motorcycle. Cecily had raced back into the house and stormed into Mel’s room. Mel had sat straight up in bed. Cecily had grabbed an armload of Mel’s clothes from the floor and piled her blanket and pillow on top of Mel’s lap, and then she ordered Mel to go and get in the Pinto station wagon.

  As Mel stood in the doorway leading into the living room, she looked at the clock that sat on the floor next to the TV. It was 3:39 a.m. She watched as Cecily raced around in a frenzy, gathering her things and stuffing them into a black plastic garbage bag. Mel kept glancing at the front door while Cecily rummaged through Craig’s jacket, digging out a pack of cigarettes and some loose change. Then she went into the kitchen and grabbed what was left of a loaf of bread and a jar with the last little bit of peanut butter.

  It wasn’t until Cecily was trudging out the front door herself, one hand dragging the bag, the other carrying her guitar case, her handbag clenched between her teeth, that she noticed Mel.

  Letting her handbag fall to the floor, Cecily yelled, “I told you to get in the car! Now!”

  Mel ran. And, as she ran, she had to keep gathering up the unruly heap of clothes, blanket, and pillow that seemed determined to fall from her grasp.

  She was glad to be leaving Craig’s place. They’d only been living with him for two months, but it was the worst two months Mel could remember.

  They hadn’t driven more than ten blocks and were just pulling onto the highway when Mel realized that her journal and small collection of books were still in her room.

  “We need to go back!” Mel shouted.
r />   Cecily gave Mel a quick look as she merged the Pinto into traffic. “Can’t do that, kiddo,” she said.

  “No, you don’t understand. My books and my …”

  “Listen, Mel,” Cecily said without taking her eyes off the road. “We can’t. Craig is probably back at the house by now.”

  Both the book set and the journal had been a gift from Cecily for Mel’s twelfth birthday. It was one of the few times Cecily had been able to afford to get Mel the gift that she had wanted. It had felt too good to be true. In the weeks since her birthday, she’d read all of the books except one, The Last Battle, the final book in the series. She’d been saving it.

  What Mel also knew was that with the pillow and blanket now off of her bed, anyone walking into the room would see the outline of her journal under the sheet that covered the mattress. What Cecily didn’t know was that the journal had become a place for Mel to express things she couldn’t say to anyone else.

  “I’m doing this for you, Mel,” Cecily said, interrupting Mel’s thoughts.

  Mel turned around and leaned over the front seat to pull her blanket and pillow out of the heap of clothes that were strewn across the back.

  Cecily found a song she liked on the radio, and began belting out the words as though she was singing live for a thousand people.

  The thought of Craig finding her journal left Mel feeling weak.

  2

  Dreaming

  Cecily continued to drive through the night with the hope of reaching Riverview by the next afternoon. Mel tried to sleep, but much of the drive was spent in and out of a series of nightmarish dreams.

  In the first dream, Craig ripped her bedroom apart. He’d found her journal. He was reading aloud the words she’d written. “I hate him. I hate everything about him.”

  Then he saw her standing in the doorway. He sneered.

  Mel tried to run. Her feet stuck to the floor. She tried to scream – nothing.

  She woke up to find herself in the car, with Cecily’s hand stroking her hair. She cuddled up to Cecily, who instinctively put one arm around her as she continued to drive.

  Mel quickly fell back to sleep, maybe for a minute or maybe an hour, but Craig was back again. This time he was ripping out the page about the police, about Mel’s plan to call the police and tell them that Craig was dealing drugs. As Craig ripped the pages, Mel’s dream took a turn. It left the scene of Craig and Mel, and it turned to Cecily, Craig, and the police.

  The police had Cecily.

  Mel was pleading with the them to let her go, but the police weren’t listening. They were leaving. Cecily was in the car. Craig wouldn’t let Mel run after her.

  And it had felt so real – too real. When she woke up this time, the car was stopped on the side of the road. Cecily was holding her.

  “Do you want to talk about your dream?” Cecily asked.

  “No. But do you think Craig will come looking for his car?”

  “This car is half mine,” Cecily said as she looked back over her shoulder. “So don’t worry. And I’ve already put three hours between him and us.”

  Cecily pulled the car a little farther off the highway and made space in the back for the two of them. With Cecily close, Mel felt safe, and the nightmarish dreams felt far away. She couldn’t help but hope that this time things were really going to work out. They both slept until morning, when the sun made the car too hot for sleeping.

  3

  A Trick to Remember

  It seemed to take forever to reach Riverview. And the expectation of seeing Gladys, who Mel hadn’t seen in almost a decade and couldn’t remember, left her feeling anxious. The rate at which Cecily was finishing one menthol cigarette and then lighting another increased until she was chain smoking, lighting the next cigarette from the last one before she butted it out.

  Mel read the sign out loud as they crossed the city limits. “Welcome to Riverview, Home of the Wildcats. Population: Forty-five thousand five hundred.”

  “Here goes nothing,” Cecily said.

  “Gladys knows we’re coming, right?” Mel asked.

  “Uh, well, not exactly. I was going to call once we were on the road, but, well … there’s no point calling now.”

  The plan was starting to feel like another one of Cecily’s failed great ideas.

  As they drove through the newer subdivisions, Mel tried to imagine exactly what “home” was going to look like. Before long, they were in an older neighborhood, with big trees and narrow streets.

  “Four more blocks,” Cecily said, as though she was counting them down. “One left turn, then a right, and we’ll see Frohberger’s, and then one more block and we’re home.”

  Mel noted that it was the third time Cecily had used the word home.

  “Frohberger’s?” Mel asked.

  “Yeah, the corner store. Mr. Frohberger was your grandpa Tux’s best friend. It was the two of them that came up with the idea to do the Saturday Magic Matinees in the back of Frohberger’s store.”

  “Did I ever go to the shows?” Mel asked.

  “No, it was back when I was a kid. But you know the coin trick where I pull a quarter out from behind your ear?”

  Mel nodded. She was enjoying this rare event. Cecily was talking about the past and about their life with Gladys and Tux.

  “Well, Tux used to do that trick for you with a bouquet of bright, orange plastic flowers.”

  “That’s funny,” Mel said.

  “He was funny; I’m amazed you don’t remember him.”

  “I wish I did,” Mel said as she looked out the window. It seemed to her that if there had ever been a time to ask the question, the time was now. “So did I live with Gladys and Tux for a long time?”

  “No, just sort of off and on. It’s not like you lived with them all the time or anything.” Then Cecily added, “They were just helping me out through some tough times.” She paused. “If I’d known that Tux was sick, I wouldn’t have left.”

  Mel didn’t know what to say.

  “I wonder if Mr. Frohberger is still alive …” Cecily said more to herself than to Mel. “I probably owe him an apology also.”

  It was something Mel liked about Cecily: that even though Cecily made mistakes, and she made a lot of them, she would apologize.

  4

  Gladys’s

  Cecily pulled the Pinto up to the curb and stopped. “Here we are.”

  “Wow, it’s huge,” Mel said, gazing up at the three-storey building.

  “Oh, don’t get your hopes up; Gladys’s apartment is right there,” Cecily said as she pointed up to the second floor. “You see those two windows?”

  “The windows that have the tinfoil on them?” Mel asked.

  “Ah, yeah. I don’t remember the tinfoil. But anyway, the one on the right, that’s the kitchen window and there are two bedrooms and a bathroom off the kitchen. The bathroom is by far the best part of the apartment. The window on the left is part of the living-room-slash-entry. The bigger window next to that is the hallway to Gladys’s front door.”

  Mel noted that it was the only one of the three that didn’t have tinfoil. “Are you sure Gladys still lives here?” Mel asked, sizing up the neighborhood. “Maybe she moved, or maybe she’s at work …” Mel said quietly, thinking of all the possible reasons Gladys wouldn’t be there.

  “Probably not at work,” Cecily answered as she leaned out the window and looked up at the apartment building. “It’s after two in the afternoon, and I suspect she’s still working at Fan’s Dry-Cleaning – she starts work at six-thirty and is home by two, one-thirty on short days.”

  “Really, do you think she’s still doing the same job?” Mel asked.

  “I don’t know what else she’d do,” Cecily said as she got out of the car. She leaned down and butted out her cigarette on the sidewalk, and then tucked the remaining bit back into the tinfoil pouch inside the package. “The place is looking a little rougher than I remember,” she said.

  Mel wondered why t
hey had waited so long to come home. Why was it Cecily refused to talk about Gladys and Tux? What had suddenly changed? She was definitely curious, but she didn’t ask. This was the closest they’d ever come to going home, and she wasn’t going to do anything to stop it from happening. She hoped that being here would spark her memory of the first three years of her life.

  The building’s exterior wasn’t as nice as she’d imagined it would be, but nor were any of the other similar buildings that lined both sides of the street. Most had peeling paint, and the gardens were overgrown with weeds; some buildings had broken windows fixed with tape and cardboard.

  As they walked along the sidewalk to the front door, Mel was careful not to step on any cracks in the concrete. It wasn’t easy: there were tons, and they were all connecting and interconnecting. One line of a nursery rhyme repeated itself in her head as she tiptoed. Step on a crack; break your mother’s back. Cecily paid no attention to the thin crevices. Mel wished she would.

  There was an intercom on the wall outside of the door, and a list of names that had been punched out of blue plastic – the kind done with a labeling machine. Many of the small, gray buttons didn’t have name tags. Cecily didn’t push the button next to the name Tulley; rather, she pulled on the door and it opened.

  “This thing hasn’t worked for years,” Cecily said as she looked back at Mel and proceeded up the staircase. At the top, the hallway went in two opposite directions. Cecily turned left. They walked four steps and then made a right and continued down the hallway. Gladys’s apartment was at the end, next to the window Cecily had pointed out from the Pinto.

  Mel followed, looking for anything that might seem familiar about the rough plaster walls or high ceilings. She had decided on the way to Riverview that she would call her grandmother Grandma, the proper name for a grandparent (and not Gladys, the name Cecily used). With each step, she recommitted to that idea.

  5

  Knock, Knock

  “You knock,” Cecily said as she backed away from the door.