Chapter 18
When I get into my apartment, I close the door behind me and, with the lights still off, bury my face into my coatrack, thinking about the night with the tiny bit of perspective I gathered as I walked up the stairs.
I just had, arguably, the best official first date of my life, with a man so hot he gives me repeated heart palpitations.
Not only that, but I also got a medical school interview, and the weird old building I inherited is potentially worth enough that if I did get into medical school, I might actually be able to go and move within reasonable dating distance of the aforementioned heart-palpitating man.
If I’m willing to sign a deal that would almost definitely screw over my entire town in some way.
It all feels too complicated. Too intricate.
It’s a precarious tower of blocks where if one slips, it could send the entire structure to the ground.
I hate how most of this feels so out of my control.
Reeve. My interview. Even the dance hall still feels like a wild card.
I still have no more answers on why Kitty left it to me.
She obviously knew it was valuable and that Reeve’s company was interested in buying it.
I wish I could talk to her. Ask her what she was thinking and what the hell she wants me to do.
But I can’t.
At least, not the Kitty I once knew.
I walk to my bed, open the nightstand drawer, and stare at Kitty’s diary. All three times I read it previously, I ended up in one of my weird dreams. Perhaps tonight, I can make it happen? Catapult myself into a past I’m not sure actually existed. But this time, I can demand answers.
I open it to the entry where I left off.
It is a very lengthy pros and cons list with Beau’s name on top of one side and Knots’s name on the other.
I laugh a little at how well I predicted the criteria.
Beau: handsome face, Knots: wonderful dancer.
I skim through more of the same: Beau: sophisticated and worldly, Knots: funny and kind, until I reach the last entry under Beau, and it makes my breath catch: I could leave and never look back. I could be the person I’m meant to be.
That phrase never look back reminds me of something I once read. A phrase written in a diary in a similar teenage scribble—but the diary in my memory belonged not to Kitty but to my mother.
I was twelve or thirteen when I found it, at home by myself one night, snooping around my mother’s closet more out of boredom than anything else.
The diary was in a box with a few of her other childhood things that she took from Gigi’s house before she sold it.
I spent the next week reading it with a flashlight under the covers of my bed on the nights when my mom was out late and I was scared of the dark and the weird muffled yelling that always came from the condo above us.
It wasn’t the usual entries you’d expect from a preteen.
No angsty love letters about her crushes or angry venting about a fight she had with a friend.
Her entries were all about wanting to leave West Lake.
I hate it here. I will never be like Grandma Gigi, doing the same stupid things day after day.
As soon as I can, I’m going to leave and never come back.
I memorized that passage, wanting to understand her but never quite fully comprehending why she hated our home so much.
So it’s my mother who occupies my thoughts as my eyelids begin to droop and I slip toward sleep.
But when I awaken a little while later, in that hazy state that isn’t quite a dream but also isn’t fully awake, it’s not my mother but Kitty St. Clair beside me.
We’re on a bus.
It’s dusk outside. And quiet inside. Kitty’s head is pressed against the window, but I can see, from the reflection in the glass, that her eyes are open.
“What’s happening this time?” I whisper.
Kitty lifts her head at the sound of my voice. “Oh good, you’re awake. I think we must be almost there.”
She points to something outside the window. I follow the direction of her finger to an outcropping of buildings in the distance.
“Can you remind me where ‘there’ is again?”
Kitty lets out a long, dramatic sigh. “Honestly, Dot. Sometimes, I can’t tell if you’re telling a joke or being serious. It’s Toronto.”
I can count the number of times I have been to Toronto on one hand.
Once with my mom and one of her boyfriends when I was little.
Then, a grade twelve field trip to a Blue Jays game.
Then, twice more with Zoe, who was dating a guy she met who lived in Etobicoke until she decided that long-distance relationships were a form of self-inflicted torture because absence only made her heart think about the orgasms she wasn’t having.
She dumped the guy at the Greyhound bus station at the end of one of our weekend visits, declaring from then on that she was going after only “local dick.” Neither of us has been back to Toronto since—until now.
I know the area south of the Eaton Centre well enough to identify it, and yet the closer we get to the core, the more I realize it’s not the same city of my youth.
The streets are still covered with large bricked apartment buildings and office towers.
But they aren’t quite as tall, and there are fewer than I remember.
The skyline is missing notable landmarks, too.
There’s no CN Tower or SkyDome, but as our bus pulls up in front of Union Station with its imposing stone columns, I do recognize the iconic green roof of the Royal York Hotel across the street.
“So, are we running away?” I ask Kitty, who is checking and rechecking the contents of her purse.
“Can you imagine?” Kitty pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to me. “Beau said that we are to go into the hotel and ask the concierge to call this number, and then he will come down to fetch us and take us to his cousin’s house.”
“Ah, so we are back on Team Beau again?”
Kitty rolls her eyes. “What on earth are you talking about now?”
I shake my head. “Sorry, what I meant to ask is what happened to you and Knots? I thought you were super into him, and now…well, now we’re on a bus.”
“I don’t know why you keep asking me this.
” Kitty flushes pink. “I told you, Knots and I aren’t officially going steady yet.
Beau invited me to visit, and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to get a taste of city life.
Get out of West Lake for once. See if Toronto is right for us. If we could picture ourselves here.”
This, at least, is something I can relate to.
If I get into med school, I will have to move here to Toronto for at least two years to attend my foundational classes and labs.
Then, when I move to the clinical part of the program, I could theoretically be assigned to a placement anywhere in Ontario for another two years. Not to mention residency after that.
“It’s busy,” I say as we step off the bus and onto Front Street.
“What is?” Kitty looks around.
“The city. It’s busy. Too many cars. Lots of noise. And people.”
As if to illustrate my point, one of those people comes flying by on a bicycle so close that Kitty shrieks.
Once the bike has passed and Kitty has taken a safe step back from the road, she removes her hand from over her heart and uses it to brush back her curls. “Well, I happen to like people.”
She smiles past me at the bus driver unloading luggage from a storage compartment below the bus.
When he pulls out two small canvas suitcases, she calls to him, “Yoo-hoo! Those belong to us,” to which he responds by stopping his unloading job to bring them over, setting them down at our feet with a “You be safe now, girls.”
Kitty eyes me as she reaches for one of the handles, as if she’s just presented irrefutable proof to her point: that she likes people, and people, in turn, like her back.
I pick up the other suitcase and follow her as she crosses the street toward the hotel.
“It’s also expensive,” I call out after her, not quite ready to drop my side of the argument. “Way more expensive than West Lake.”
Kitty stops on the sidewalk. “Well, Beau has lots of money.”
I shake my head. “Fine, but what if, in the future, Beau decides he’s not interested anymore? What then?”
Kitty glares at me like it’s a preposterous thought to consider. “Why are you being so negative? The glass doesn’t have to be half-empty all of the time, you know. Sometimes it’s half-full with room for opportunity.”
“I’m not being negative,” I argue back, wondering how this figment of my imagination has pegged me so accurately. “I just…recognize how much I’ve been served in this aforementioned glass. Maybe I’ve learned there’s no point in asking for more.”
Kitty stops on the steps and turns to face me. The way she carries herself with her shoulders pressed back and that determined set of her jaw makes her look so much older than eighteen.
“Then that’s the difference between us, Dot. You can be happy in the life you were handed. But when I am an old woman, ready to die in my bed, I want to know that I chose my life—I didn’t settle for it.”
With that, she turns and marches toward the hotel entrance, leaving me speechless on the steps.
That felt harsh, even for Kitty.
Despite the fact that I am already in a weirdly vivid dream, I close my eyes and, in a very Inception -y way, picture Kitty as an old woman in her last days and wonder what she thought about her life.
I remember her playing gin rummy with Mrs. Hail against Mr. McNaught and Mr. Minard.
After being dealt her hand, she picked up her cards and sighed.
“These simply won’t do,” she said, shuffling the cards.
Mrs. Hail made a comment. Something about cards being like your lot in life and how you play what you get.