Aces by Ian Rogers Page B

noticeable lack of resentment. “Ever since the school mascot drowned himself.”
    “Right,” I said. “Because he thought he was a real shark.”
    Soelle shrugged. “That’s the rumour.”
    “Seems to be a lot of rumours at that high school,” I mentioned. “Most of them about you. Would it kill you to make some friends?”
    “I don’t need friends. Just my brother.”
    She gave me her NutraSweet grin: full of artificial sweetness.
    * * *
    I remember the day when I became an adult.
    It was four years ago. I was eighteen and Soelle was eleven. I’d just graduated from high school. My student co-op at the paper mill had turned into a full-time job. I drove a forklift. The hours were long, the work monotonous, but it was union and the pay was decent. I wondered if it was possible to do this kind of mindless labour for the next thirty or forty years without developing some sort of psychotic disorder. I was thinking about getting my own place and finding a girl to take back to it.
    One day I came home from work and found Soelle sitting on the porch swing. She was drinking an Orange Crush and reading one of her Anne of Green Gables books.
    “Mom and Dad are gone,” she said.
    “What do you mean they’re gone?”
    “They’re gone.” She took a sip of her drink. “I went out walking this morning, and when I came back they were gone.”
    I looked over at my car sitting in the driveway, parked behind my parents’ station wagon. “Where did they go?”
    “I don’t know,” Soelle said. “I thought they went visiting, but they haven’t come back.”
    “Well that’s it, then. They’ve just gone over to the Mullens’ or the Heaths’. They’ll be back.”
    Soelle lowered her book and gave me a patronizing look. “Mom and Dad haven’t gone visiting in years, Toby. Where have
you
been?”
    I was beginning to wonder that myself. I felt like I had been away much longer than seven hours. More like seven years.
    I left Soelle on the porch and checked the house from top to bottom. There was no sign of our parents. No sign that they had suddenly packed up and left, but no sign that they had been dragged out of the house by force, either. No sign of anything at all. It was like they had been ghosts haunting the place rather than flesh and blood people who had once lived here. My memories of them felt hazy already.
    I didn’t feel scared or frantic. I felt angry. I didn’t know why I felt that way, and that made me angrier. Where the hell could they have gone? Why would they leave me alone with Soelle?
    I called the police and they searched the house. They talked to the neighbours. They asked for phone numbers of our other relatives, but we didn’t have anyone we were close to.
    The police came to the same conclusion I had reached hours earlier: that our parents had left the house seemingly of their own volition, but with absolutely no evidence of having done so. Their belongings hadn’t been disturbed or removed and their luggage was still stacked in the crawl space. The neighbours didn’t recall seeing them leave the house, nor did they report seeing any unusual people in the area.
    Time passed. Days turned into weeks, and I kept waiting for a social worker from the Children’s Aid Society to come and take us away. Soelle and I would be placed in a province-run care facility until adequate foster homes could be found. They would try and keep us together, but there were no guarantees. We would eventually be passed off to different families. Over the next few years Soelle and I would exchange birthday cards, Christmas presents, the occasional letter, but eventually we’d drift apart until we finally forget we even had a brother or sister. It was stuff shitty made-for-TV melodramas are made of.
    But it didn’t happen. The social worker never showed up. I thought maybe Soelle and I had slipped through the cracks, as so many kids are supposed to do, if you believe the news magazine shows. The truth was much