Wolv

2 - Two days to freedom

    After about half an hour, I'd driven across the city of Winnipeg, and I pulled into my mom's driveway. Her house was in a better neighborhood, and was in much better shape than my dad's. Its also fifty years newer, I thought.

    I stepped in the front door and found a note on the table, scrawled out in her handwriting.

    "Humfrey, Phillip called me in to a meeting up in Brandon. I'll be home by Tuesday. Have fun at school!" I read the note and smiled to myself, crumpling it into a ball. I walked over to the trash and dropped the paper into the bin, watching it float down gently into a pile of waste. I jogged up the stairs to my room, and hit my pillow hard, exhausted.

    My mother was something of a character. She worked for some kind of "law firm," owned by one Phillip Meyers. My mom was off every weekend with him, at some conference, meeting, or whatever else she could think of. All of the "reasons" she'd give me for leaving the house only sounded like excuses to get away with the man--honestly, I suspected that they had been sleeping together for months already.

    The truth is, she never was really home. Sure, she might be home physically, but she didn't pay attention to me at all. I'd been done school for a month already, and had been working full time at a supermarket down the road. I'd told her all this, but she hadn't really been listening. She was always preoccupied with herself; running off to days-long shopping sprees, heading out to "meetings" with Phillip, or just plain disappearing without explanation. She was a bit of an absentee parent.

    And that didn't bother me.

    I mean, it had at first, years ago, when I was much younger. But I'd learned pretty quickly after my dad's accident that I was going to have to be self sufficient. That I would have to raise myself. As the years went by, and as she became more and more distant, I'd come to realize that when she'd stormed out of my dad's house, bitterly rejecting the idea of maintaining the family on her own, that she had been talking about me.

   She didn't want to raise me alone; she didn't want to bear the burden of rearing a child who had a birth defect--one on his face, no less--by herself. Even though I'd only been twelve at the time of their break-up, I'd never forgotten those last few words that she'd shouted at my father.

   "You know what? I just don't care anymore."

   Those words stung all the more once her apathy towards her child become apparent. She'd become distant and overwhelmingly  shallow, feigning interest in my daily life, only to forget everything I'd told her by the end of the day. Doctors appointments were nerve-wracking and intimidating; Mom had been tapping away on her phone when I'd been told I was going to need surgery on my jaw to repair my cleft, completely unaware of the terror her son had been feeling. She didn't hug me close and tell me that everything was going to be fine, even if it really wasn't; she didn't ask the surgeon any questions, and she certainly hadn't asked me how I felt about it.

   She'd just nodded, murmuring "uh-huh" every now and then, all the while transfixed by the little screen in front of her. When she'd finally looked up, she'd reached over and carelessly tousled my hair. "Oh, that doesn't sound too bad, does it Humfrey?  You'll look so much better once it's all done, sweetheart! "  My fifteen-year-old heart had felt like it'd been sliced in two. Did I really look that bad? Did my own mother really feel that way about me?

   The two people in my life who were supposed to be the most fixed objects in existence, had ceased to be my parents, and had simply become adults--nothing more. I'd been left to fend for myself.

   And I had!

   I'd tried to be the best I could be. I'd gone through a year of University already, studying several different Native languages with the hopes of eventually landing a job up north, far away. I'd tried to be everything my parents weren't; I'd tried to be better than they were. I desperately didn't want them to define me; the thought of becoming a drunken child-beater or an apathetic slob terrified me, and I was gonna do everything in my power to make something of myself.