Until I Find You

When the announcement on the museum loudspeaker informed them that some of the mammal displays were experiencing a temporary loss of electrical power, the children knew this was only the first chapter. “Don’t panic,” the voice on the loudspeaker said, while Miss Wurtz dissolved into sobs. “The power will be restored in no time.” The ultraviolet lights in the bat habitat were still on; in fact, they were the only lights that were on, which was exactly the case in Emma’s story.

In Emma’s version, inexplicably, the defenseless children had no recourse but to crawl into the bat cave and sleep with the bats. Emma advised them to be aware of a crucial difference between the alleged “sucking habits” of the vampire bat and those of the giant fruit bat. The kids had to keep their eyes tightly closed at all times, or the ultraviolet light would somehow blind them; and while they slept, or only pretended to sleep, the children were told to pay close attention to the exact location of the hot, moist breath they would certainly feel before long.

If they felt the breath against their throats, that indicated the vampire; the kids were instructed to swat the bat away and protect their throats with both hands. (In Emma’s own words: “Just go nuts.”) If, however, the aforementioned hot, moist breath was detected in the area of their navels—well, that was the area of interest of the despicable giant fruit bat. It would heat the children’s stomachs with its breath before licking the salt out of their belly buttons with its raspy tongue; while this sensation might be unpleasant, the children’s injuries would be slight. In the case of a fruit bat, the kids were to lie still. In the first place, the giant fruit bat was too big to swat away—and, according to Emma, fruit bats only became truly dangerous when they were startled.

“But what would a startled fruit bat do?” Jack remembered Jimmy Bacon asking.

“Better not tell him, Emma,” Charlotte Barford said.

The conclusion to Emma’s tale of the kindergartners’ abandonment in the bat habitat was nerve-wracking. When you consider that most of the children were too frightened to fall asleep, they surely knew that Emma Oastler and Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were breathing on them—not the bats. Nevertheless, the kids responded as instructed. The kindergartners having their navels breathed on kept still. In the many retellings of the tale, Jack learned to distinguish the not-so-subtle differences between Charlotte’s and Wendy’s and Emma’s tongues. Their tongues were not raspy; indeed, discounting future nightmares, the children’s injuries were slight. And they responded with appropriate zeal to the neck-breathing tactics of the vampire bat—in short, the kids went nuts, covering their throats and screaming while they swatted away.

“Time to wake up, Jack,” Emma (or Charlotte or Wendy) always said. But he never went to sleep.

Charlotte Barford was a big girl, a grade-six virtual woman in the mold of Emma Oastler. Wendy Holton, on the other hand, was a feral-looking waif. If you overlooked the evidence of puberty-related troubles in the dark circles under Wendy’s eyes—and her swollen, bitten lips—she could have passed for nine. Her smaller size and childlike physique didn’t diminish Wendy’s navel-licking capacity; her fruit-bat imitation was more aggressive than Emma’s, more invasive than Charlotte’s. (In keeping with her melon-size knees, Charlotte Barford’s tongue was too broad and thick to fit in Jack’s navel—even the tip.)

Did Miss Sinclair ever return to her kindergarten class and find the children refreshed from their naps? Did she mistake how alert they looked for their being well rested? The kids were relieved, of course, and no doubt looked it; that they’d survived another of Emma Oastler’s sleepy-time tales, both the not- falling-asleep part and the always creative manner in which they were woken up, gave them thankful expressions.

Another classic among Emma’s nap-time stories, and a close rival to her tale of the kindergartners’ abandonment in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, was her saga of the squeezed child. It was a tale with three different endings, but it began, as Emma’s stories always did: “You’ve had a bad day, and you’re very tired.”

Jack napped between Gordon and Caroline French, brother-and-sister twins who had to be separated because they despised each other. Another set of twins in Miss Sinclair’s kindergarten class, Heather and Patsy Booth, were identical girls who couldn’t bear to be separated. When one of them was sick, the other one stayed home to grieve—or perhaps to wait her turn to be sick as well. When the Booth twins napped, they overlapped their rubber mats and wrapped themselves in the same blanket—possibly to simulate their former occupancy of the same uterus.

Both sets of twins became agitated, but in different ways, during the telling of the squeezed-child tale. The identical Booth girls sucked their shared blanket; they emitted a wet humming sound, which in turn upset Jimmy Bacon, who commenced to moan. The agitation of Gordon and Caroline French, the boy-girl twins on either side of Jack, was more physical in nature and came in unexpected bursts of frenzied, seemingly pointless activity. Under their separate blankets, the French twins thumped their heels on their rubber mats, their stiff legs drumming out of sync; as startling as this was, it was more disturbing when they stopped. The French twins stopped kicking so abruptly, it was as if they’d died of a shared disease—in spite of their enforced separation from each other.

The three possible conclusions to Emma Oastler’s squeezed-child story had the kindergartners enthralled. “For three of you,” Emma always said, “your bad day just got worse.” Sudden heel-thumping from the French twins, which was quickly followed by their as-sudden deaths; identical blanket-sucking sounds intermingled with humming from the Booth twins; dire moaning from Jimmy Bacon. “One of you is spending the night with your divorced dad,” Emma went on. “He has just passed out from too much sex.” (Jack hated this part.)

Maureen Yap, a nervous girl whose father was Chinese, once interrupted Emma by asking: “What is too much sex?”

“Nothing you’ll ever have,” Emma answered dismissively.

Another time, when Jack asked Emma the same question, Emma said: “You’ll know soon enough, Jack.”

Jack shuddered under his blanket. He was relying on his flawed understanding of his mom’s conversation in Amsterdam with Saskia and Els. If you looked sexy, Els had said, men thought you could give them good advice. Sex, therefore, was related to advice-giving; like advice, Jack guessed, sex could be good or bad. If the divorced dad in Emma Oastler’s story had passed out from too much sex, Jack suspected this was the worst kind.

“Your dad has had bad girlfriends before,” Emma continued, “but this one is just a kid. A skinny, tough kid,” Emma added. “She’s as tough as a stick, her fists are as hard as stones, and she hates you. You get in her way. She could have even more sex with your dad if you weren’t around. After your dad passes out, she grinds her fists against your temples—you think she’s going to crush your head!”

The French twins were flutter-kicking, as if on cue; more blanket-sucking, humming, and moaning. “Meanwhile,” Emma always said, “one of you has a single mother who’s passed out, too.” (Jack really hated this part.)

“Too much sex again!” Maureen Yap usually cried.

“Bad sex?” Jack sometimes asked.

“A bad boyfriend,” Emma informed the kindergartners. “One of the biggest bad boyfriends in the world. When your mother passes out, he comes and lies on top of you—he covers your face with his bare stomach.”

“How do you breathe?” Grant Porter, a moron, always asked.

“That’s the problem,” Emma usually answered. “Maybe you can’t.” Unprecedented, out-of-sync heel- drumming from the French twins; soggy-blanket noises from the Booth twins; moans, approximating suffocation, from Jimmy Bacon.

“But what about your mother who has a girlfriend?” Emma asked. (Jack hated this part most of all.) “She has bigger breasts than all your mothers. She has harder breasts than all your dads’ youngest girlfriends. She has bionic breasts,” Emma said. “Like they have bones inside them—they’re that big and hard.” The very idea of breasts with bones inside them would, years later, still wake Jack Burns from a sound sleep—not that any of the kindergartners slept a wink during the squeezed-child saga. “Which of these poor kids are you?” Emma asked every time.

“I don’t wanna be anybody!” Maureen Yap predictably cried.

“I especially don’t want to be trying to breathe with the bad boyfriend’s big belly on my face,” Grant Porter usually made a point of saying.