“Getting late, Tonya,” she announced. “Your mom’s upstairs saying good-bye. I think you’d better go find her.”
“Okay,” Tonya said.
“Say good-bye to Adam first.”
“Good-bye, Adam Joker!”
“Bye, Tonya SpongeBobWatcher.”
Tonya ran from the room giggling. Her summoner stayed behind. I said, “You know my name, but—”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Amanda. Amanda Mehta.” She put out her hand. I stood up and took it. “You’re Adam. Lisa told me you were down here keeping Tonya company. Sorry, I couldn’t resist having a look at the new guy.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, given that I’d probably never see Amanda Mehta again. I just smiled.
“Lisa said she already showed you around. But I bet you didn’t see the roof.”
“The roof?”
“Come on.” She tugged my hand. “I’ll show you. And maybe you can tell me what’s bothering you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Just come with me. Come on!”
What could I do but follow?
“What makes you think something’s bothering me?”
Amanda didn’t answer, just gave me a hold-your-horses look. She led me to one of bedrooms on the third floor, where a dormer window looked south over a wooded ravine. The window opened onto the part of the roof that connected the house to the garage. She climbed out deftly—obviously, she had done this before—then turned back and said, “You won’t fall. If you’re careful.”
So I stepped out onto the shingles. The slope was gentle enough that there was no real danger, but we were high enough to see across the backyard and over the ravine to the city—condo towers on Bloor Street, the headstone apartment slabs of the Cabbagetown district.
“Safest thing is to lie down,” Amanda said.
She stretched out with her head butting the low sill of the window. I did the same. “You know the house pretty well,” I said.
“I lived here for a few months.”
“Are you related to Lisa or—” I had forgotten the name of Lisa’s partner.
“Loretta. No, but they put me up when I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I finally got my own place last May.”
“They put you up because you’re a Tau?”
“Well, yeah. I’m not the only one they’ve helped out, and they liked having me here. Loretta inherited this place back in the eighties. The house is too big for them, really, so they’re always putting people up. It’s a place to go when you don’t have anywhere else to go. If you’re in the tranche. Or at least a Tau.”
“Must be nice.”
She gave me a searching look. “Of course it’s nice.”
“I think—”
“No, hush, be quiet a minute. Listen. I love the way it sounds out here. Don’t you?”
I would have said there was nothing to hear. But there was, once I paid attention. The tidal bass note of the city, the massed noise of air-conditioner compressors, car engines, high-rise ventilator fans. Plus animal sounds from the ravine and human voices from this or the neighboring house. Homely sounds that hovered over the dark backyard like phantom lights.
“And the way it feels,” Amanda said. “Late August, you know, even on a hot day you get that little chill after dark. The leaves on the trees sound different in the wind.” A wind came up as if she had commanded it. “This corner of the roof is completely private. No one can see you. But you can see the city.”
“That’s why you like it here?”
“One reason.” She unzipped a pocket on her vest and took out a glass pipe, unzipped another pocket, and extracted a tiny plastic bag. “Do you smoke?”
“Not often.”
“But you have smoked.”
“Sure.” In high school, in the back of a friend’s beat-up Ford Taurus, out at the quarry, and occasionally with Dex, my erstwhile roommate—more than occasionally if you count secondhand smoke.
She used her fingernails to pick apart a nugget of weed and fill the bowl. “So do you want to smoke now?”
“Lisa and, um, Loretta don’t mind?”
“They don’t like people smoking anything indoors, but if they weren’t so busy they might have joined us out here.”
I didn’t want to disappoint her. And how many chances would I have to smoke weed on the roof of a Rosedale mansion? So I took the pipe and the lighter and even managed to hold down a toke without coughing. At which point, in the ordinary course of things, I would have succumbed to my usual cannabis-induced self-consciousness; but for whatever reason I remained reasonably coherent—though the night seemed to inflate like a party balloon and the chorus of crickets became operatic in its complexity.
“So,” she said, “you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”
“Why does everyone say that? How do you know something’s bothering me?”
“You spent a half-hour watching TV with Tonya, for one thing.”
“I like Tonya.”
“Of course you do. She’s a sweetie. But she’s not a Tau.”
“You’re reading a lot into—”
“It’s also your body language, how you react when you shake hands with somebody, things like that.”
“You must have been watching me pretty closely.”
“It’s just tranche telepathy. I mean, that’s what people call it. It isn’t really telepathy, obviously. We read each other better than ordinary people. So we can tell you’re worried about something. You don’t have to tell me about it, but we’re tranchemates. Maybe I can help.”
I felt a little tingle when she called me her tranchemate, though it was the first time I had heard the word. Did she know that about me, too? Something in her smile suggested she did. We had quite a complex little silent conversation going on, in fact.
So I gave her a quick summary of the family curse. I told her about Grammy Fisk’s stroke, my awkward relationship with my father, the tuition money. I told her I had dropped out of my Sheridan courses and given notice at my apartment—I had to be out by the end of the month. No money and nowhere to go but back home. I had been curious about tonight’s meeting but I was embarrassed to admit that I’d never be back.
“Not worth worrying about, Adam. You’re a Tau, you’re welcome even for one night. But the thing about going back home—I gather you’d prefer to stay in Toronto?”
Before I came here for school I hadn’t given the city a second thought. I had wanted to study in New York City, but my father was convinced that even a brief exposure to Manhattan would turn me into a gay-marrying Democrat-voting liberal, and not even Grammy Fisk could overcome his objections. He had agreed to Toronto because he imagined Canada to be a well-mannered country, suspiciously socialistic but hardly radical. I had agreed because Sheridan offered world-class graphics and media curricula. Did I want to stay here? Sure. But no job, no work permit, no crib. She said, “You’re studying graphic design?”
“Was, before I dropped out.”
“So you should talk to Walter.”
“Who?”
“Walter Kohler. Lisa must have introduced you. Big guy? Six foot, two hundred fifty pounds, in his forties, wears a suit?”
I vaguely recalled such a person. He had smiled and shaken my hand, that was all.
Amanda tucked away her pipe and baggie. “Really, you need to talk to him.”
“Do I?”
“Walter used to work for one of the big ad agencies in town, but he’s starting his own business—come on, we’ll go see him.”
“What, now?”
“Of course now. Come on!” She practically vaulted back inside the dormer window. I was a little reluctant to leave the roof—it was a good place to be stoned: safe, scenic, undemanding—but I staggered after her.