A Park Project diagram mounted on the fence showed how what had been A-Block would become a forest of poplar trees that stretched all the way to a campground at the lakeshore, where there would be a beach. Centre Throughline would be moved underground, tunnelled beneath the park all the way from the southside to the island’s northern shore, overtop of which would be a field and a pond. It was impossible to imagine what was pictured ever becoming reaclass="underline" Lakeview Homes looked as though a meteor had struck and incinerated its entire southern half, how could anything grow here, it was just a dead empty hole or a giant mouth gaping wider and wider until it swallowed the whole complex down.
Their mama took off her pumps and with one in each hand wiped her forehead with her sleeve and threw her shoes over the fence, one then the next plunging birdlike down into the shadows. The back of her blue dress was dark with sweat. Okay, she said, and barefoot continued home along what had once been sidewalks and now was just dirt. Sam and Adine followed her up Centre Throughline, north through B-Block and C- and D-, west along North Throughline into the 50s, then north again to their unit, H-54, wedged amid a row of identical units, where the screendoor smacked closed behind her.
If you had your car stolen you were supposed to call the police, yet their mama did not. She sat in the living room smoking cigarettes with the front curtains drawn until the matching ashtrays Sam and Adine had made her at school overflowed. After church their mama always fixed lunch but today there was no lunch. She got up only to take down the cross that lived above the kitchen sink and dump it in the trash.
From that day on their mama became a pinched-in version of herself: smaller, and taut, and when she talked her mouth barely opened. It seemed something was hiding inside her that she couldn’t let escape. Though sometimes whatever it was would claw to the surface and come stabbing out in screams and slaps. When she found Sam inside the living room armoire dismantling her hairdryer he cried not because it hurt to be hit, but because of the surprise.
By the time school started in September the demolition had swept into C-Block and everything changed. Their mama switched to nightshifts at the factory, so there was no longer time in the evenings, she said, to cook or say Grace. Instead she heated TV dinners from the freezer, slid the trays onto the kitchen table at her kids. Eat, she said, putting on her coat as they peeled off the tinfoil covers and folded the warm edges into the still-frozen centres. While Connie was at work Sam and Adine would watch TV until they couldn’t keep their eyes open, and in the mornings she’d often come home to them still sprawled head-to-toe on the couch. Go to school, she said then, and she would go to bed, and they would go to school.
In October Sam and Adine came home one afternoon and a bicycle was leaning against their front steps. Inside a hardhat sat on the kitchen counter and mud had been tracked down the hall to their mama’s bedroom, the door was closed. At dinnertime she came out with a man she told Sam and Adine to call Uncle Bruno, but he was no uncle of theirs, they called him nothing. Bruno never said much to anyone, and around him their mama spoke in a whisper like she was embarrassed or sorry for something. He drove the crane, they learned, that swung a big ball on the end of a chain into their neighbours’ units and turned the walls to dust.
As the weeks went on and the Park Project crept north Bruno moved in, frying bacon every morning that he never shared with anyone, at night he took over the TV with his workboots up on the couch. With their mama at work and nothing else to do Sam and Adine hid inside the armoire and told each other the stories of TV shows they’d watched, including the one with the terrorist who made a bomb from batteries he was going to use to blow up an airplane — before, of course, he was stopped. They were always stopped.
The day of the first snowfall of the year, Sam and Adine came home from school to their mama crying in the dark in the living room, two bits of bloody paper towel stuffed up her nostrils. The matching ashtrays were smashed on the living room floor and there were cigarette butts everywhere. Bruno was gone. Adine swept up and then she and Sam sat with their mama, one on either side of her on the couch, each holding a hand. That night in the armoire they made up a new story, and it was about bad strange people coming from the outside and ruining everything, and it ended with revenge.
The next morning, a Saturday, Sam and Adine woke up and their mama was still sleeping. As quietly as they could, they rounded up all the batteries in the house, emptying flashlights and smoke detectors and other various small electronics — and put them all in the tin can of bacon grease that Bruno had left on the ledge above the stove, and last of all dug a pack of matches out of one of the drawers. We need more batteries, said Sam, so they stole one small bill from their mama’s purse and went to Street’s Milk and from the Polyp behind the counter bought the biggest battery they could afford.
This was November, the Park Project was demolishing C-Block. Then work would break until the spring, when Sam and Adine and their mama were supposed to move to some new big building across the city. The workers took weekends off too, though their equipment — backhoes and diggers and tractors and bulldozers — remained onsite. So this is where Sam and Adine headed: through the fence, their makeshift bomb ready, toward the big tall crane and its wrecking ball, inside the shadows way down in the pit.
IN THE TRAUMA ward of City Centre Hospital, Sam stood beside his mama as the doctor explained what had happened to Adine’s eyes and when his mama said, So she might be blind, it seemed she was almost wishing it. There was a cold, white sharpness to her voice. The doctor said something about surgery, and recovery, and that it was good she was young — but Sam’s mama just said again, She’s blind, and rocked a little on her feet like she might fall. Sam put his hand on her lower back to steady her and at his touch she stiffened and wriggled away. Thank you, she said to the doctor, and sat down on the other side of the waiting room. The doctor looked at Sam and smiling in a soft kind way asked if he wanted to see his sister. Sam did not but he had nowhere else to go.
They went through two sets of doors and down a hallway and stopped outside a room. In a bed underneath a window slept a person that was almost Adine. Beside the bed was a chair. The doctor gestured at the chair and left. Sam didn’t move. Bandages hid his sister’s eyes. Across her cheeks were dark ridges and speckles of dried blood where gravel and battery acid had sprayed up from the ground. A big cut on her chin had been stitched with crude blue knots. Tubes ran from her arms to machines that beeped and hissed. Another tube ran to a box on the floor. Under the blankets Adine’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell. Sam leaned over the bed, watching his sister breathe.
What the fug are you doing, said his mama’s voice from the doorway, and Sam stepped away from the bed.
He didn’t know where to look or what to say. His insides felt hollow, scooped out.
You aren’t even going to cry, his mama said. You haven’t even cried.
She leaned against the wall in a small hunched way.
You did this to her and you can’t even fuggin cry?
Sam looked out the window: a pretty sunset over the city, big fat bands of gold and pink that darkened into mauve, indigo, all the way to black.
The last thing he’d seen before the explosion was Adine squatting over the coffee can, igniting the fuse, the fast sizzle of it, the thunder of the bomb blowing, a cruel ripping sound as the can sheared in half, and so much light.
It left a tone in his ears like when the TV went to coloured bars at midnight. He sat up, discovered Adine sprawled with her limbs at weird angles, the coffee can split and blackened between her feet. Sam went over. Through the thrashered mess of her face she seemed to be looking up at him for an answer. The gore was black in places, wet and raw in others. You couldn’t see her eyes.