Return of the Trickster by Eden Robinson (ebook voice reader TXT) 📗

jump into hell, Jared thought. But he smiled, felt the fakeness of it, let it collapse. Still, if it got him out of the hospital, he was happy to pretend that he’d ended up naked and dehydrated in the basement of his mom’s old house because he’d fallen off the wagon in a big way. His dad asked him if he needed help dressing.

“No,” Jared said.

“Okay.” Phil put a plastic grocery bag of clothes and a pair of polished black dress shoes on the bed near Jared’s feet. “I’m going to grab a coffee from Timmy’s. Want anything, kiddo?”

“Sure,” Jared said. “Double-double, please.”

“I’ll be back,” his dad said. “Thanks, doc.”

“My duty, Mr. Martin.” Once he was gone, the doctor said, “You’re a very lucky young man.”

The doctor’s face tweaked something in his memory. “Do I know you?”

“Your mother and her boyfriend brought you into emergency a few years ago after a camping accident. I stitched you up.”

Ah, the fancy doc who’d stitched up his otter bites after one of them’d lured him out of the house by pretending to be his girlfriend and trapped him in a cave. “You wore a tux. You’d been at your daughter’s wedding.”

“Luck only lasts so long,” the doctor said.

“Unless it’s bad luck,” Jared said. “That shit has no expiry date.”

The doctor sighed. “You haven’t changed at all.”

—

Phil had left him new underwear still in its packaging, a pair of black slacks, a white shirt with short sleeves and a black windbreaker that had seen better days. His feet flopped around sockless in the stiff dress shoes. Jared grimaced when he finished dressing. Now he was his dad’s mini-me, which struck him as creepier than free-roaming organs or having a mental chat with your sperm donor. But it was either this or walk out of the hospital naked.

What a weird, long dream, he thought.

Phil came back with two coffees, one of which Jared gratefully accepted. As they left, they passed a couple of cops chatting with the staff at the nursing station. The floor near the emergency exit was sprayed with blood. Phil led him out the automatic doors to a newer, blue Honda Civic.

When his dad started the car, the radio blared a holy roller in the middle of a rapturous sermon. His dad turned the volume down.

Maybe this isn’t a dream, Jared thought. Maybe I came back to a different universe.

His friend and math and physics tutor, Dent, had tried to explain the multiverse to him, but Jared hadn’t really been paying attention back then. Something about every decision you make splits the world down separate paths and births a new universe or alternate realities. He couldn’t keep it straight, but dragging a pack of coy wolves and an ogress to another universe, and then being eaten and resurrected until he escaped, had made Jared a believer. In their spotty phone calls, Phil had never mentioned becoming religious, so, obviously, he’d mistakenly come back to a universe where organs wanted to roam free and his dad was a Bible-thumper.

Jared said, “You seem…different.”

His dad side-eyed him. “I wasn’t expecting judgment from you.”

“I meant you look good. Healthy.”

“Your gran’s not a big fan.”

“Yeah?”

“The good Lord gave us all gifts,” Phil said. “Mother’s temper has a greater purpose. In time, I will be enlightened.”

“Did you try to convert her?”

Phil frowned at the rain-slick road ahead of them. “Ever wonder which sin snark falls under? My money’s on pride.”

“Hey.”

“Your aunt Mave is looking for you. She phoned a few times.”

Jared closed his eyes.

“Have you told your mother you’re staying with Mave in Vancouver while you go to school?”

“She’s the one who gave me Mave’s address.”

“Surely, the end is nigh,” his dad said.

—

Phil lived in Terrace, a small city that was a forty-five-minute drive from the Kitimat hospital. The highway was black, a tunnel of evergreen trees punctuated by the headlights of oncoming traffic. They drove up mountains, along a river, and then made the steep climb up Airport Hill. Jared dozed for most of the trip. After he parked, his dad shook his shoulder to wake him and led him into the townhouse, which still looked rundown but was so scrubbed clean it sparkled. There was a white doily under the small TV, which his dad turned on as soon as he walked in, and suddenly a tall man in a navy suit was talking about the healing power of forgiveness, its ability to transform your life.

“Amen!” his dad said, nodding.

Jared immediately wanted to text his mom. She’d really appreciate this turn of events. But he’d dropped his phone in the alley where he’d shed his clothes, after her psychopath ex-boyfriend, David, tried to set him on fire after dumping booze all over him. And then his life had gone full Trickster, all weird and deadly. Jared’s snark went untexted and he felt alone. More alone. As alone as you could feel sitting on the couch beside the guy who’d raised you, who had suddenly morphed into someone new.

Maybe this was how his mom had felt when Jared joined Alcoholics Anonymous at the end of grade ten. As though the person you’d known all your life had been taken over by aliens and what you were left with was the physical shell that looked like the person you knew but the insides were all strange.

“If you need to rest,” his dad said, “you can sleep in Destiny’s old room.”

“Thanks,” Jared said.

“I owe you so much, and not just the money. You were there in my darkest hour. Love you, son.” His dad pulled him in for a hug.

Jared gripped him back, fighting the emotional crap.

The front door opened and Jared pulled away from his dad, who patted him on the shoulder. Jared’s stepmother, Shirley, came in with a small bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and two boxes of fries. She plunked them on the coffee table and handed them packets of ketchup. What had annoyed his mom more than anything about their breakup was that