Between the Stacks

Chapter 25

"You're a cheater!" Wesley said, with far more vehemence than I would have expected. "You're just starting. You need to find an A."

"How am I the cheater?" I asked. I tried to sound aghast. "You had a head start, and you didn't even tell me the rules!"

"You're a smart cookie. Anyways, thanks for giving me that C."

With that, we were off on a breakneck pace to get to the end of the alphabet. We argued over the legitimacy of using the same word for two letters - we decided it was cheating - and we couldn't reuse a word if someone else had already called it.

After leaving Cherryhill behind us, we struggled when the highway cut through forested areas. On one hand, trees are great. On the other hand, they sucked at providing letters to win the game.

"P," I said, when we finally passed a Popeye's.

"Ugh," Wesley groaned. "Welcome to Q, the hardest letter to find." He'd been stuck on the letter for the past ten minutes.

"I'm hoping we come across a BBQ place," I said. "I'm not sure where else we'd find a Q, other than a miraculous license plate."

"Quebec," Wesley said. "My aunt and uncle would take me there in the summer. I think the alphabet game was designed to get me to look forward to the trip, because then I would at least find a Q. It worked on seven-year-old me."

I imagined a miniature version of the man who sat beside me. I wanted to know more about him. "You mentioned your aunt and uncle before."

Before: that was the night of karaoke and the kiss and the weird feelings that sat in my stomach like carbonated pop. He said he'd grown up in Toronto since he was two.

"They raised me," he said. "My parents died."

The sentence was said casually, but it hit me like a brick to the chest. How had I not known? Why had I even brought up this topic? How was he functioning?

"I'm so sorry," I said. "I know you must hear that a lot. But I'm so, so sorry."

"It is how it is." It sounded like a mantra. Then he looked over at me. "My aunt and uncle did their best with having a toddler thrown on them. I acted out a lot as a kid. I finally went to therapy in high school, but it wasn't really accepted like it is these days. I'm still with the same therapist now, actually. We have phone appointments."

"I didn't know." What a paltry thing to say in the face of so much loss. For a moment I listened to the rhythm of the road beneath us, trying to find a way to say what I felt. I wanted to grab his hand and give him a hug and never let go. But I didn't do any of that. I just said, "That's awful."

Sometimes words aren't good enough.

No matter how many people said I'm so sorry in the wake of Alex's death, it was never enough. Nothing could ever be enough. Even if someone - anyone - had sat with me and cried and screamed with me, it wouldn't have been enough to fill that ragged hole in my heart.

"I'm sure it was the same way with your brother. All the 'what if' moments, right? But the story goes way back. Way, way back. You probably don't want to hear it."

This was another side of Wesley. At first, I'd thought of him as a smarmy jerk. Then he became someone who passionately loved his job. Then he was someone who knew how to listen, followed shortly by someone who knew all the right places to kiss me near the bathroom in a dingy bar.

Wesley was a prism, one with a multitude of shining facets.

"I do," I said quietly. "I do want the story."

"Really?" He seemed surprised, and my heart hurt a little. Who wouldn't want to hear his story?"

"Really."

He cleared his throat. "My family on my mom's side had been in British Columbia for ages. It goes back to my great-grandparents. They moved from Japan as part of a gold rush, or so the family lore says. Anyways, things went okay as they could - considering what people at the time had to deal with. Dysentery. Getting run over by horses. Lots of racism."

He switched lanes and continued. "Then a little thing called World War II happened. My family, including my grandparents, were rounded up in the internment camps."

"The what?"

"The Japanese internment camps in British Columbia. It was a thing. It's not really talked about." He angrily tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. "People were forced from their homes into these awful camps. Don't forget, these were Canadian citizens - not that it should make a difference. People had everything stolen... their houses, their property, anything the government could get its hands on. And then, at the end of the war, the Prime Minister said that Japanese people either had to move east of the Rockies, or get deported to Japan."

"Oh my God." I couldn't believe I hadn't learned this in school.

"My grandparents were deported. And don't forget, Japan was devastated by the war at the time, and my family had lived in Canada for ages. It was rough. But as terrible as it was, when my mom was growing up, she heard about how awfully the country had treated her family. So she vowed she would never live here, even when her sister immigrated."

Her sister - I wondered if that was the aunt who had raised Wesley.

"After my parents died, my aunt and uncle agreed to take me in. They did a great job despite, you know, having a two-year-old thrust on them. But I can't help but wonder about the what if moments. What if my parents had moved to Canada with my aunt and uncle - would they be alive? What if my grandparents weren't deported in the first place? When does one thing cause a catastrophic chain reaction?"

I noticed he didn't mention how his parents had died. I didn't ask.

"All that to say," Wesley said. "I understand. About Alex. And I know our stories are different - you remember Alex, and I don't remember my parents at all - but there's still something missing. Something that can't be fixed."

"I'm so sorry," I repeated. "About it all. I know those words are dumb and they don't help-"

"It's okay. I know what you mean." Wesley looked like he was about to say something else, but he didn't get the chance.

A terrible shriek of metal, squealing brakes, and Wesley swearing were the last things I heard before the car from behind ran into us.