Free Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt Page A

us both more wine. The fact that I had got away with something gave me new momentum. I began to tease myselfwith the new what ifs. Then and there I soldered the links of my new chains.
    Charlotte had been on the debating team at her high school, already arguing at sixteen for free-market values. Her skills were most clearly employed in opposition to her parents. She was a stroppy teenager, but not a stereotype. She could turn on the charm, help about the house, and show compassion and generosity at one moment, then, wham, a door would slam, her temper flare and an argument erupt. She’d confront me on the restrictions I’d implement—no television on school nights, a curfew of eleven o’clock on the weekend—by planting herself in front of me and not moving. She was like a cowboy in a western, standing her ground, hands in her pockets as though poised over holsters. I usually held my own, insisting, for example, that attending a party in a town an hour’s drive away was out of the question, but at times I capitulated merely on account of her physical presence—the woman emerging from the child, the unfeminine woman I had not expected; the commanding, demanding woman who made everyone else, including her mother and her older brother, seem so much weaker.
    On one October afternoon, I had come home from work early, the commute from the city to Stayner easier than normal, so I decided to pick Charlotte and Sasha up from school to save them the bus ride.
    “Can I drive?” Charlotte asked me, coming around to my side of the car as I pulled up to the curb where theyhad been waiting for the bus. Seventeen, she had recently got her beginner’s licence.
    “Not today, get in the other side,” I said, in a cheerful enough tone.
    “Dad …” she whined and stood her ground. “Why not?”
    “Because I said so,” I snapped, sounding the gong on my parenting skills. “You haven’t done much on the highway; there’s too much traffic today,” I added, trying harder.
    “I’ve done highway,” she said, with a smirk that told me she’d driven on it with others. “All my friends in Toronto have been driving for a year. They do the Don Valley, the 401, all of it. We’re complete hicks up here, Dad.” She continued to stand at my door, waiting for me to back down.
    “Nope,” I said, and started to roll up the window. Defeated, Charlotte turned on her heels in a huff and got in the back seat, letting Sasha, for once, ride shotgun.
    “I’m moving back to Toronto,” Charlotte said, as she pulled the back door shut.
    Sasha was giddy with her day’s activities: drama class, the soccer team, and the upcoming auditions for the musical. She talked without breathing for the next ten minutes, as though this exceptional placement up front gave her a unique chance to get it all out, and as if, since the episode with the ecstasy, she was still trying to make up for disappointing us.
    “Dad!” Charlotte called out from the back seat, just as I was preparing to change lanes to turn off the highway.
    “What?” I asked, slowing down and looking in my rear-view mirror, worried that something was wrong.
    “Since when do you go to Fallucci’s?”
    A spike ran up my chest.
    “What are you talking about?” I could see Charlotte in the mirror looking down at something in her hands. My throat went tight. She looked up, caught my eye in the mirror and sat forward.
    “Matches?” she asked, all Valley-girl squawky.
    “What?” I said stupidly, looking back at the road, changing a lane and signalling to turn right.
    “Fancy place, Fallucci’s. Rick’s parents go to Toronto once a month especially. His uncle owns it.”
    I pulled onto the two-lane highway that would take us to our sideroad. I felt sick.
    “You been there?” she said in a way that wasn’t a question. A subtle debating team tactic.
    “No.”
    “Where did these matches come from then?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t know.” That tone of voice again. I