Shoulder the Sky. Lesley Choyce

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

      Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

       J. Kirk Howard, President

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      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Special thanks to Julia Swan for early editorial suggestions, Barry Jowett for his enthusiasm and editorial work, Jennifer Bergeron for copy-editing, and Malcolm M. Ross for suggesting the title, which is borrowed from a poem by A.E. Houseman.

      This book is dedicated to my friend Luigi Costanzo, and all other professionals who work with troubled kids.

      CHAPTER ONE

      I’m sure I had problems even before she died — my mother, that is. After her death, everyone seemed to think that my biggest problem was that I didn’t have any problems. Life went on as normal for me without any really obvious changes. That’s why I went to see Dave, a psychiatrist unlike any other shrink around. Unconventional is probably the word that fits.

      Dave encouraged me to write my story, and now that it’s done, I don’t mind that you are reading this. I originally meant to show only Dave and no one else, but then I figured, what the heck. So, if you are reading this now, I don’t feel it’s like an invasion of privacy or anything.

      There’s probably not going to be much here that is all that secret. All you will find out is what happened, what I really thought, what I felt, and what I imagined. I better admit up front, though, that I had holes in my memory. Like holes in socks or black holes in deep space. Like missing pages from a book or scenes snipped out of a movie.

      Also, I should tell you that, in a sense, there were three versions of me. There was the regular, not-too-interesting private me: Martin Emerson. Then there was the enigmatic public persona of me that was created for the Internet at Emerso.com. Even though it ends in com, I never sold stuff. The site was very successful. I wrote about anything that went through my head. I also gave advice for free to anyone who wanted to hear what I had to say. People in the real world knew me as Martin Emerson. On the web, I somehow evolved into Emerso. People who visited my site didn’t know I was only sixteen years old. They believed I was older and smarter than I really was. More on that later.

      Then there was the no-name Martin, Martin number three. This version couldn’t remember parts of the past and sometimes couldn’t remember where he was the night before. I didn’t have too many clues about exactly who he was or what he was up to. Not until we left for Alaska.

      Anyway, Dave always wanted me to write something about my mother and my father, so I’ll start there. If I get going about website stuff again, tell me to shut up.

      My mother was creative. She made paintings of places that looked completely different from where we lived. My father thought they looked like Asia, but I always thought they were alien landscapes: the deserts of Mars, maybe, or swirling gassy places on Jupiter. But my father was pretty sure it was Asia. My sister, Lilly, always said she hated my mother’s paintings. Until my mother died, that is, and then Lilly put many of the paintings in her room — the ones that were finished. The unfinished ones, my father tried to complete, and that didn’t turn out well at all.

      My mother once told me that painting is just another way of keeping a diary. This didn’t help explain the alien/Asian landscape paintings, but maybe it fits in with Dave’s idea about me keeping a journal.

      For a long time after my mom’s death I called my father the Invisible Man. Sometimes you could see him when he moved through rooms or went out the door. You could see him clearly when he was behind the wheel of the van, backing too quickly out the driveway. But most of the time he was invisible. Or not there at all.

      My very first posting on Emerso.com went like this.