“I’ll go with you to Vancouver, if you want.  I could take a Monday, Tuesday off.”

“What’s that?”

“If you want to go to Vancouver, I’m just saying if.”

“I can go by myself.”

“Okay.”  It was a foolish thing to suggest.

But a couple weeks later Charlotte and Jake were on the Greyhound together.  The bus was empty for it was summer and the middle of the week, and it seemed strange that they were even there together at all, so they didn’t talk for the most part.

The bus traveled along the slow highway that revealed itself bit by bit in deep curves and long bends. The last time Charlotte was on it had been her first time, when snow still covered the mountains and dusted the ditches.  What a different world now.

The plan was to get a room at a hostel, since hotels were too expensive at that time of year.  There was a place Jake knew where East Hastings met West, and it was usually filled with backpackers at that time of year, plus it was a sunny day.  They would spend one night, and visit a few places he thought his brother could be, search East Hastings and Main where the drug addicts queued up for sidewalk space, and cross their fingers for something.

“That last time I went down, Vince seemed to know some people on the street, not a good sign, you know,” Jake told Charlotte from across the bus aisle.  He shook his head and said, “My younger brother.”

Charlotte found herself disappearing in the high, plush seat. Jake thought she’d been a virgin when they first met, he’d told her late one night when they’d been drinking and laughing, and it seemed okay to say such a thing.  Charlotte knew the reason he thought it; still, she laughed in surprise and asked why.  Because she was timid, he’d said, and she laughed because it wasn’t true, because she’d been drinking, and because he was so sure. 

It was a beautiful day, warm but not too warm, and they wandered downtown for a while, pointed at shop windows, ate ice cream, and joined the crowd by the steam clock in Gastown where just metres away the alleys smelt like rotting vegetables, and the warm, sunny day did nothing to help.  The alleyways looked like movie sets, with the few men sifting through the dumpsters hardly real.  It was strange to imagine Jake’s brother living this way, someone close to someone she knew.

From a distance the Main and Hastings intersection looked like a line-up for concert tickets with hundreds of people drifting around in the middle of the week.  Cars drove by cautiously, the drivers wary of bodies wandering into the street.  It was more than just homelessness, more than just drugs; it seemed a world that got away.

Two policemen were walking down the sidewalk opposite them, and Charlotte felt a little safer, a little braver, and so she asked Jake how could they afford it. 

“It’s only about five dollars a hit.”

“Wow.”  It sounded too cheap and too small a cost.

She pointed to the police officers.  “Should we go ask them?  Find out the best way?”

A woman came up to Charlotte with hair matted to her forehead, hands out, fingers scraped, dirty and raw. 

“Come on,” Jake said.  “We got no spare change.”

Charlotte looked into the woman’s face and saw herself.  She waited for her to say something, but instead the woman shuffled away, stumbled over the curb and into the street.

They hurried past thinning addicts towards the policemen and red banners of Chinatown that hung on high pillars and across ostentatious archways.  Jake showed them his brother’s picture and asked what could be done.  One of the officer’s asked if a missing person’s report had been filed.

“My parents did back in February.”

“Well, I don’t think there’s much else can be done. We’ll keep our eyes open. Call the Mission, and see if you can join them tonight.  They set up a canteen at Hastings and Carell and give out free coffee.  A lot of people come out at night, a different crowd, but the same sort.  You could try that.”

Jake thanked the men and they went on their way.  “Do you want to check out Chinatown, now that we’re here?” he asked Charlotte.

“Sure,” Charlotte said, who was in no hurry to go back the way they came.

They wandered the red streets, looked into the barrels filled with dried animal parts for sale, bought sticky buns covered in sesame seeds, and went through shops that sold plastic toys and paper lanterns for pennies.  But for the purpose of their trip, it would’ve been a nice time.  It would’ve been easy to get on the bus and head back to Whistler; easy for Charlotte because she was just following and easy for Jake because he didn’t know what he’d find, if anything.

By they forged on, and late in the afternoon went to the Mission.  The people there were kind, and they took Vince’s picture, but said they weren’t sure.  The man who drove the canteen said he looked familiar, but he hadn’t been out the night before; maybe he’d seen the kid a couple times earlier that week.  He told them ,if they wanted to, they could come along and help serve the coffee while they looked.  It would be a better way to do it, safer than getting on the roads themselves.

That night the sidewalks, streets, and building fronts sounded off with fighting, crying, arguments and silence.  There were three men for every woman in line.  Some looked up, some didn’t, others said thank-you and chatted for a bit, a few scowled and spilt their drinks on the countertop.  Charlotte was waiting with a washcloth and cleaned it up quickly, so no one had to drag their Styrofoam cup through the spillage.

For the most part the three of them stayed quiet in the warm canteen, while John, the Mission volunteer, occasionally commented.  He said he hoped Jake found his brother, and hoped he had a plan if he did.  You can’t just go in and say you’re saved; it don’t work that way, not here.  Not if the kid don’t want to be.  There’s gotta be a plan in place.

A lot of the addicts didn’t sleep.  Instead, they went around the clock, stumbling along the east end sidewalks, yo-yoing the buses, catching a few minutes of that in-between state, like falling asleep at the wheel, only by leaning against a wall hidden between buildings.

John spoke quietly to Jake, and Jake listened, watched the line move, poured coffee or water for those who asked.  People were talking to themselves and Charlotte thought it was the drugs.  That was some of it, but not all, and she was surprised by her composure. 

John asked what Vince had.

“What’s that?” Jake turned to the man.

“I just assumed, but might be I’m wrong.  Most of these guys that come from good families, and I imagine yours must be good, most of these guys have a mental illness to start off with, you know, to get pulled into this world.  It’s a sad state, home can’t save them and the government doesn’t help.”

Jake didn’t say anything.  He knew there were schizophrenics and manics on the street, but Vince wasn’t that. Vince was better than that.  The light inside the canteen was white and the sidewalks were orange from streetlights that cast shadows into the crowds, the midnight crowd.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” John said.  “Most of these guys could be helped if they were on the right drugs, you know, on medication.  Some should be institutionalized.  It’d be a better life for them, you know?  Help every day, clean bed, warm room, things to do instead of stumbling on the streets.  A lot of these guys came from Meadowvale, but then the government decided to shut down all the institutions, get these guys back in the community through halfway homes.”  He shook his head.  It seemed an old conversation, an argument he’d had many times.

“I understand the thinking that this way could be a better life, but halfway homes don’t control them, and the community ain’t all good.  It was just easy pickings for the dealers. They knew what day of the month these guys got their government cheques and just swooped in.  Got themselves a new crop of addicts to deal to, and now they got nowhere.”

“My brother’s not crazy.  He used to get some real high highs and some real low lows, but that was it.”

John stretched out his arms and yawned.  He looked at Charlotte and gave her an encouraging nod.  “Hey, we all feel that way at times, Maybe he just found something to even it out.  For some it gets too much to take, and it’s a tough not everyone knows.”

Charlotte wasn’t keeping secrets as she wiped the counter and passed out the coffee that Jake poured and John brewed.  She watched her hands as they worked, and found something pleasing in the contrast of her stained fingers around the white, white cups.

“It got to be too much for my parents,” Jake said to all who were listening.  “They aren’t the type to handle change.  The mood swings were tough to take and they had their own troubles—don’t know how to adapt.  It’s worth a lot, adaptability.”

“It is,” John said.  “There’s no argument there.”

Jake didn’t feel lonely in that small space where Charlotte and John sat in witness of his fears, and it seemed possible to pull someone from it.  His heart was too big.  There was too much there to hurt.  Bad and good mixed on the concrete, touched the same sidewalk, and he could forgive his brother anything. 

If they could only climb into that old Pontiac Grand AM they had in high school, and the two of them just headed north and north, just drove north where the air got cleaner and the trees got higher, and if they could just drive like they did years earlier into the open. 

Charlotte of the fast pace, nervous Charlotte was hiding things, whatever they were. Charlotte of the fast pace handed coffee to a guy looking like Vince, but for the dirt on his face, the beard, and the long, greasy hair.  Nervous Charlotte passed this man, this boy a coffee in a Styrofoam cup.  This man, this boy, jostled by the old guy behind him, scowled and said back off.  The old guy was slow in his walk, and had white hair, wrinkled skin, and love and hate tattooed across his knuckles, one word per hand.  He too had been someone else, once. 

Jake felt the tears rise.  He’d never been a believer in a god.  Show him the strength to take on another life, Good Lord, take him down in a river to pray and show him the way. He got himself out of the canteen.  He pulled a body that needed to be washed to his own. He cried and said his brother’s name.  He cried and held his younger brother, couldn’t smell the smell that rose, cried and said he loved.  He saw his brother’s face.  His brother’s face, high, fallen, saw the recognition, eyes that were the same, eyes that swelled with shame. Take me to a river, they said.