18: JORDAN AND I
I walked for two hours, but it felt like more. It was the dead of night, and even though I had finally made it out of the small roads and onto pavement, a car hadn’t passed me in a long time. I seemed to be the only one awake, and I shivered in my New Horizons uniform. I walked until it stopped raining, and when the wind calmed down, I imagined myself walking all the way back to Basinview. That would be amazing.
I couldn’t help but let my mind sort though my thoughts. Nobody knew anything about me, and it was both exciting and sad. Maybe I hadn’t realized what it was really like to escape—that when you escaped, the excitement stopped, the adrenaline rush disappeared, and reality set in.
My thoughts strayed to what I was going to do. I had no idea what I should say to anyone when they figured out who I was. I didn’t have an excuse for leaving the program. And there wasn’t a good enough reason not to send me right back. By the time the morning rays of sun came through the trees, I had a version of what I would say to the first person who figured out I was missing. I practised it out loud because that was the scariest way to practise anything.
Are you Valerie Campbell?
“Yes. I am.”
What are you doing out here?
“I’m just walking.”
Where are you going?
“I’m going home.”
And where would that be?
“Why would you ask me that?” There were tears pouring down my face. Down the dirt on my skin, wetting it again. The space in front of me was blurry, but I could see Dad so clearly down the road from me because I had put him there in my mind. And Mum was beside him, shaking her head, no longer on my side. She took a step back, and then another, and then she was gone. Amanda was there too for a bit, smiling wide and really happy, before she turned her back, and walked away. But Dad stayed there, watching me. Waiting for me to make my move.
I was in the middle of nowhere, and even so, my family was still getting in my head. None of it was real, yet I couldn’t feel that.
“Hunnie, are you okay?”
I nearly tripped over my feet from the shock of hearing someone else.
“I’m sorry, did I scare you?” It was an old lady. She was driving in a station wagon beside me with her passenger window down. She had a Dalmatian in the passenger seat, and it was looking right at me.
“What?”
“Would you like some help with anything?”
“No, I’m fine.” I kept my eyes on the dog. He had so many spots on him. His right ear was entirely black, like it had been dipped in dark paint.
“What are you doing?” the old lady asked.
“I’m training.”
“Training for what?” she asked.
I’m training for…” I had no idea what to say to her. She was old. And I must have looked young. But maybe the mud hid my age. “I’m training for a triathlon.”
“A triathlon, oh my.”
“Yes. I’m very tired. It’s been a long process.”
“I can give you a lift to town, if you need it.”
“Okay.”
In the back of her car was a bunch of luggage. Old person luggage—a blue suitcase from the fifties and round hat boxes. I sat behind her dog, and it turned itself around to peer at me through the front seats.
“Are you going to the airport or something?” I asked.
“No, I’m a photographer.” She touched the top of her dog’s head. “Those are just props. I have a client who likes old things. I have a lot of old things at my house, so I bring stuff for her kids to sit with. You know the kind of photos I’m talking about? Lace dresses, stacked briefcases. Cream umbrellas. It’s all I do these days. Everyone loves old-style photos.”
It was a thirty minute drive to town. I liked knowing that I could’ve made it on my own. I had done most of the walking. She stopped at a gas station with a small restaurant attached to the side.
“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I will be.”
I sat outside on a bench near the doors. It was a nice morning. People were walking around, filling up their car gas tanks. The woods across the street had broken branches touching the road. The rain storm had done some damage, but it was minimal.
I sat there for a while and watched the people going about their small town lives. It was nice to sit and watch, and nobody noticed me sitting there until an old man came walking into the property of the gas station. He looked right at me and waved.
I waved back. I had no idea who he was.
The old man’s hair was dishevelled and he had a black lab dog with him. The dog was so close to him that it kept rubbing the man’s leg, and making him stumble. They both looked like they were running the same triathlon as me. I wondered how their training was going. What kind of course life was giving them.
“I’m fine!” he yelled.
I had no idea why he was telling me that. I hadn’t asked.
“Don’t worry about me!” he yelled again.
I wasn’t worried about him until he said that. People who were in trouble only yelled out to the world like that. If you were fine, you didn’t acknowledge it or anything about yourself.
The man went over to a payphone and lifted it up. He pushed buttons without putting any money in. I wondered if he knew that you had to pay. The black lab sat beside him while the man waited for the line to connect. He hung up and headed toward me. I was nervous he was going to ask me for money, but when he sat down beside me, he kept his gaze forward, as if he had never said anything to me.
I sat there and didn’t know what to do. His feet were flat on the ground like mine, but he had a twitch that moved one of them every ten seconds. I crossed my legs and wondered what I was going to be like when I was old and senile.
“When is the bus supposed to get here?” he asked.
I stared at the man. He had so many lines on his face. We were both sitting there, at a bench in front of a gas station, and a bus stop was nowhere near us. I didn’t know what to say to him.
“It’s supposed to be here at 10 a.m. Is it not 10 a.m yet?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He touched the top of his dog’s head. His dog leaned close to him.
“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked. I didn’t really care about his dog. I was concerned with the man’s well-being, and I was scared to ask if he was okay in case he got offended.
“Jordan. He’s not mine. He’s my neighbour’s dog.”
“Oh.” I looked down at Jordan. He was just sitting there. He must’ve liked the confused man’s company. “Are you borrowing him or something?”
“No. He got out in the rain last night so I found him.”
“How did you know he was out there?”
“My neighbour left Jordan out. I went over and saved him.”
“I have an ex-boyfriend named Jordan.” I smiled. I didn’t know why I was sharing that with a stranger. And I hadn’t talked about Jordan in a while. “It’s a cuter name on a dog.”
“He’s pretty much my dog,” he said. “I pretend he is. I walk him down the driveway and back everyday. I do everything for him.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah he’s more mine than anyone else’s. I don’t let him in the house though. Mum wouldn’t like that.”
“Your Mum?” There was no way an old man like him still had a mum. He was delirious. “Does she know you’re out here with him?”
“No probably not. The phone over there isn’t working.”
I didn’t really know what to do with him. He wasn’t thinking clearly. His head was somewhere else, in a different kind of world, and his body was trapped in reality. It was sad to think that his fragile, little life could be disturbed by people trying to explain to him how things actually are. That he was crazy and wrong and old. And that we were somehow the sane ones.
“To be honest, I don’t really know where I am,” he said.
I nodded. “Me neither. But we’ll
be okay.”
“I’d like to go home, but I can’t.”
“I can call someone for you if you like. And they can help you get where you need to be.”
“Okay.”
At first, I didn’t know if I should call 911. But I didn’t have any money to make any other calls, so it was my only option. I walked over to the payphone and dialled 911. I’d never called 911 before, and I didn’t really know what to expect. The female operator on the other end asked me what my emergency was.
“I don’t really think it’s exactly an emergency, but maybe it could become one, I really don’t know. This old man came up to me and he doesn’t know where he is—maybe I shouldn’t have called you—-”
“Does he know his name?”
I looked over at the man. He was talking to his dog, Jordan. And the dog was leaning on him, probably because he loved him. And needed him. I hadn’t thought to ask the old man what his name was. That seemed weird to ask him.
“What’s his name?” the operator asked again.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask him.”
“Is he alone?”
“He has a neighbour’s dog with him, but he wants to go home and he doesn’t know where that is. Honestly, I think he’s kind of crazy.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
I didn’t know for sure. He just seemed out of place, I guess. I had a slight idea of what I was talking about, but I didn’t want to get too deep into it in case I was completely wrong.
“Is there something wrong with him?”
“I guess he’s just…not all there.” I looked over my shoulder at the friendly looking man talking to his dog, and if I hadn’t talked to him, I would have understood the scene to be a typical, little moment in everyday life. A sane, normal moment. But sanity was a perspective.
“We will send an officer down to pick him up.”
It was as easy as that. The cops came and the man didn’t even run. He talked to the officer, and he got in the back of his car without any issues. Jordan followed the man, and I was glad they had each other.
I sat on the bench and watched it all from a distance, but when one cop car went away, one cop car stayed. The officer was tall and had dark hair, and he was looking right at me. I looked at him too until he came over and sat down on the bench beside me.
“And who exactly are you?” he asked.
I smiled. My eyes stayed planted on the street across from us. The trees went blurry, and I gazed into nothing.
“I think I know who you are,” he said. His voice was friendly. He was a young officer, and he looked into the same space I was looking at. The wet ground. The pavement with little smoke butts and pieces of filth floating around.
“I’m Val,” I said. There was no point lying. I was over being alone.
“And what’s your full name?”
“Valerie Campbell.”
“You’re from that camp up the street, I’m guessing.”
“It’s not a camp. It’s a facility for troubled youth.”
“It used to be a camp though.”
“So I’ve heard.” I wondered what he was going to do with me. He knew who I was. I wondered how many people were looking for me. And if my parents already knew. If they were imagining that I was hitchhiking across the country, prostituting for money. That I was never coming back.
“I’m Officer Marks.”
It wasn’t like I regretted getting out of the program. It was kind of funny, actually. That they had a fence, and guards, and a little system, and I had found a secret little hole—mostly secret—and slipped through it.
Officer Marks stood up.
I looked at him.
“Want to go get something to eat?”
“Okay.” I went with him because of several reasons. The first was food. I was starving for something warm and real. With sauce, maybe. And it was also no longer exciting to be off on my own, running away from something that wasn’t exactly chasing me. Nobody cared about anything to do with me, and if I wanted to make it out alive, I had to acknowledge some things about myself, and my life.
Just down the street were a few food chains, and some small sit-in cafes. Officer Marks went through a drive-through of a crappy burger place, and after ordering a huge meal for himself, he looked at me.
“What do you want?”
I wanted a lot. I could’ve gone for ice cream or maybe a milkshake, but I also wanted a cheeseburger. There was nothing better than eating bad food, so I asked for the biggest burger they had.
Officer Mark’s paid for everything at the first window and we were handed our food at the second window. It smelled amazing, and I wanted to start shovelling everything in my mouth as soon as he passed me the bag. He parked away from other cars, and as soon as he turned off the engine and cracked the windows, seagulls started to drop down from the sky.
I pulled my fries out of the bag and slowly ate them one by one. My stomach growled in happiness from having a good, full hot meal of bad food, and I washed it all down with a huge iced tea.
“It’s kind of weird.”
“What is?” he said.
“That the seagulls know we have food. And how they just sit outside our car and wait for it.”
“They must be smart.”
Maybe they were smart. But they were patient too. They were waiting for something that may or may not happen.
“How is your food?” he asked.
“It’s good.”
On his radio there was a woman talking about incidents in the area. Numbers and routes. It had to be an annoying thing to listen to all day. But it became background noise that we somehow ignored after awhile. When we were done eating, he started up his engine and then looked at me.
“What now?” I asked him.
“Your dad is at the station.”
“In Basinview?”
“No. Here in Sacton.”
“He came up?” I was surprised by that. I touched my face and I could feel the dried on mud coming off my skin. It felt thick, and it was beginning to crumble.
“Your dad was on his way up to get you. And then you disappeared.”
“Why was he coming to get me?”
“They were sending everyone home.”
That was insane. If I had waited it out, just a couple more hours maybe, that Dad would’ve come and got me. That I would’ve been free of that place. But I hadn’t known that at the time. And I wanted out right then.
“He’s probably relieved you’re okay,” Officer Marks said.
“Sure. That nature didn’t eat me.”
“And other reasons.”
“Are you referring to the other girl?” I asked.
“The other girl?”
“The girl who killed herself.”
“Yes.” He pulled out of the parking lot and got back onto the road. It was only going to be a short five minute drive. “We got the call about her.”
“She was my bunkmate. She slept right under me.” Everything was green outside the window. Wet and shiny and new looking. “That’s pretty crazy, eh? That someone who slept under me every night was going to kill herself. What do you do with that? I was up there sleeping, and she was down there thinking. I didn’t know.” I laughed.
“It’s not that funny.”
“Yes it is.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Someone would rather be dead than alive. Someone would rather never, ever get to breathe or get a chance to be happy ever again. That is hard to think about.” I had a deep urge to cry. I was exhausted, yet I held it in. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had seen. It was so messed up, and I couldn’t believe that I was the lightest sleeper in the cabin, and still, Bambi had snuck out on me and no one caught her.
“She was sick, and she wanted it to stop. And since she wanted it to stop, she believed that there was no other option but to kill herself. So if she didn’t do it that night, she was going to do it the next time she got over
whelmed with hopelessness. And the time after that. It’s hard to understand because we aren’t severely depressed like she was. It’s unbelievable, but if we felt what she felt, it wouldn’t be.”
Maybe if Officer Marks knew about my history, he wouldn’t be making wide and open statements about depression and death like that. But I knew what he meant. I wasn’t sick like Tracy was. Right then, I didn’t want to kill myself. Sure, I had said it before, maybe because I liked the sound of it coming out of my mouth—that I wanted to die. But right then I couldn’t take suicide seriously because I wasn’t in the frame of mind that I’d been in the night I had come close doing it. There was nothing bad enough in my life to end it, and that was a relief. I had forgotten that I should be grateful. Life was shitty, but it was bearable for me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“It’s just so sad,” I whispered.
“It is sad. It’s really sad.”
I wiped the tears off my face and thought about things that weren’t going to make me cry. Like a warm bed, and a hot shower—good things to look forward to. But the more I thought about home, the more I realized that nobody would understand what happened to Tracy McPherson unless they had been where she had been. And I had been where she had been, and that meant I had an idea of who Tracy was, or at least, what she was feeling.
“Everything will work out. You got to see someone’s mistake, and now you get to learn from it. That’s why we can’t take life for granted. All the bad things that happen, that we regret and make us sad when we torment ourselves thinking about them—those things are important because they make the good things worth it. Your whole life is valuable. That’s how I see it, anyway.”
“It’s just hard remembering things that have happened…not just at New Horizons obviously, but in my past. I know I can change if I want to, but wanting to change and actually doing it are pretty different.”
“That’s good that you’re realizing that.” Officer Marks smiled.
I thought about the night I had gone to the ER. The night Dad had yelled at me with paper curtains surrounding us. He was afraid of me because only desperate people thought about death and dying and getting away. It was the night he realized that I seriously needed help. It had to be hard to know your daughter was beyond your control.
“What did you say to that old man to get him in the car?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Officer Marks asked.
“Why did he just get in the car with you? He seemed pretty calm. I’m surprised you didn’t scare him.”
“I listened to what he had to say, and then I told him I would take him back to his mother.”
“And where would that be?”
“He lives with his sister, down the street. We take him home all the time. He’s harmless. I’m always happy to help him out. I just don’t want him to get hurt wandering off like that.”
“So why didn’t you tell him you were taking him to his sister’s?”
“What good would that do?”
I didn’t know what to say. But Officer Marks was right. As long as the old man was safe, happy, and not hurting anyone, what was the point of telling him that he was wrong, or that his mother was dead, or that he had Alzheimer's? It would scare anybody hearing that for the first time. That’s what Alzheimer's seems to be—hearing things for the first time, all the time.
Maybe I didn’t want to forget my life. I didn’t want it erased like that. I didn’t want to be confused. I just needed a change.
I wasn’t much of a pop drinker. My thing was iced tea. I sipped on my iced tea as I walked up to the police station. Officer Marks held the door for me, and when I entered, there was Dad sitting near a desk, waiting for me.
“Hi Val.” He stood up. His eyes were red, and he had probably been crying.
I walked over to him and kept the straw in my mouth. I sipped on my drink until I heard the ice suction at the bottom. I shook it to get anything else up the straw. But there was nothing there.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
And then he hugged me. He reached out and put his arms around me. It felt good to be held like that. I put my arms around him, just to reciprocate the feeling, and waited for him to release me.
“I wish you would’ve waited for me,” he said. His face was on top of my shoulder. I could feel him shaking. “Instead of running away.”
I pulled away. “Well, I didn’t know you were coming. I thought I was stuck here.”
Officer Marks pointed at a seat. I didn’t sit down.
“Well, you could use a shower,” Dad said. He had a small smile on his face. His eyes trailed over me, and it was turning into awkward, small talk. At least it was him instead of Mum. If I saw her face anytime soon, I would cry. I didn’t want her to see this side of me. But she knew about my sadness, and I didn’t want to burden her with having a depressed daughter. She didn’t deserve that.
There was dried mud across my arms and there wasn’t one spec of white left on my shirt. If I released my hair out of the elastic, it would probably break off it was so dry and crunchy.
“You scared us, Val.”
“You and Mum?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Well, I couldn’t take it anymore. There are a lot of messed up people in that program. And I was mixed up with them.”
“I’m glad you’re okay.” He wiped his face. “I heard about everything that happened.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so relieved. When the police station got the call about a girl in uniform walking on the side of the road, I was hoping it was you.”
I imagined that the lady with the Dalmation had ratted us out. I hoped her dog died. I hoped her customers hated her pictures. And then, once I calmed down, I hoped she did well. Because I guess I needed to be found.
“But you’re a hero too,” Officer Marks said.
I laughed. “And why’s that?”
“You found that man.”
“I didn’t find him. He just sat down next to me and we talked.”
“That was good of you to talk to him. You did good,” Officer Marks said. “It could’ve been a lot worse. And he was safe.”
I did good. I had done nothing but recognize that an old man was delirious, not all there, and I had called someone else to deal with him. Because I wasn’t someone who knew what to do. I couldn’t give him the help he needed, so I sat and listened to him while the real help was on the way.