Chapter 1: Winnie the Pooh Part 2
Tara, Ontario, Canada, July 1988
Ring ring ring.
Indy, fifteen, choked down one more raw wiener. She was rehearsing for the Phil Donahue Show and staring at the army-green wall phone on the kitchen wall.
Chew chew chew. Ring ring ring.
The phone hadn’t stopped ringing all morning.
Until today, it had been improbable for Indy to let the phone finish even one ring. The possibility of letting it get to even a second ring had been petrifying just days ago. Her stepfather, Dana (certainly a girl’s name), promised to rip the phone out of the wall whenever he heard it ring. His constant threat carried such force Indy grew a superhuman instinct for answering the phone.
Indy could not live without that phone safely on the wall. It was her lifeline to Tammy. She’d wait until 8 o’clock (7:30 was Dana’s bed time) to call Tammy. They would conspire in dulcet undetectable undertones about escaping their Tara prisons and plot futures of world travel. First stop: America!
Phone answering had been Indy’s only religion.
It was no longer.
Today it was not impossible to let the phone ring twice or even, as it was now, to let it ring repeatedly forhours.
But this had been a week of impossibilities.
She massaged another hot dog out of the Schneider’s shrink-wrap. She was sitting at the burgundy dining table inherited from her grandmother, and this compounded all the oddness because she had not sat and eaten at it, or any dining table, in three years. She always ate on a TV tray. Chew chew chew. Mr. Donahue, how do I explain the sheer horror?
Ring ring ring.
At least the ringing filled the empty space left by the silenced fridge. Dana had resc
