“Okay.”
I knew the drill, or at least I was supposed to. Mom wasn’t usually big on preparing for the future, but a few days after we’d moved into the forest, she’d stood in front of me and placed her hands on my shoulders. She only did that if she was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear, and with my mother, it was never “I’m very disappointed in you for such-and-such, so you won’t be getting any dessert tonight,” it was more along the lines of “The cops have found our pot plants again, so we need to get out of here pronto.”
I braced for the worst. But instead, she just asked me a question. “So, sweetheart, tell me. Which way is the lake from here?”
I pointed down the creek. It was easy, because when Mom and I had left Karl’s camp, we’d headed for the lake and then followed a creek into the woods, so we wouldn’t get lost.
“Good. So let’s say, for example, that something happened to me. What would you do?”
“Wait for you to come back.”
“Right. Except imagine I couldn’t. Let’s say you waited a few hours, and I didn’t show up.”
“You mean, like, because you were dead?”
She stared at me for a few seconds. “Yes. That’s the only reason I wouldn’t return. You know that, right?”
I nodded. This was just survival talk, and I’d heard it my whole life, especially from Papa Dick. “Then I’d go back to Karl’s camp.”
“Yes. Along the creek to the waterfall, over the boulders and through the thick wall of brush, the same way we came. Right?”
“Right.”
“And if you see a bear or a cougar when I’m not around—what do you do?”
“Don’t look in its eyes. Walk away backwards but not fast. Play dead if he comes after me.”
“And? How do you play dead?”
“On my tummy. Arms covering my head. And don’t move, don’t even breathe, and don’t make a sound.”
“Right. Okay, good.”
Yes. We had had that chat just a few weeks ago. But now that it was real, I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to do. How long should I wait for her to get back? And then should I run back to Karl’s camp? Or walk back? And anyway, it was dark outside, so how was I supposed to find my way?
“Arms over your head,” Mom whisper-shouted, and then I remembered: play dead.
I did as she said, and I could have sworn there was a growl right beside my head. I heard Mom unzipping the door, and I peeked under my arm at her. She had her rifle in one hand and our frying pan in the other. Suddenly she ran out the door, banging them together.
“Go away! Get out of here! Scram!” she yelled at the top of her lungs.
I heard a grunt, and then I knew it was a bear for sure. I squeezed my eyes shut. Mom’s footsteps were running away from me. She was still shouting, and there was some serious thrashing going on. I pulled my shoulders up even closer to my ears, burying my head in my sleeping bag. Papa Dick had told me once that in all his years in the wilderness, he had never been attacked by a wild animal. They were much more afraid of us than we were of them, he always said, but in that moment, I found his words hard to believe. A bullet rang out, and then everything went quiet.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I popped my head up and scrambled out of the tent. Mom was standing about two canoe-lengths away from me, looking into the trees. I rushed toward her.
“Is he gone? Is he gone?”
Mom nodded, still breathing hard. “Yes,” she said. “He’s gone.”
“Will he come back?”
She put her arm around my shoulders. “I don’t think so. I think it worked. I think I made him believe I was the boss.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know. The boss of this territory. He needs to believe that, or he’ll try to push me out.”
“Push you out how?”
“By killing me, of course.”
I nodded. “But he didn’t. He’s gone now.”
Mom took my hand. Over to the east, I could see the first rays of sunrise. She pulled me back toward the tent.
“Come on, let’s get some rest. Then we’ll go hunting in the morning, okay?”
“Okay. How many bullets do you have left?”
“Two.”
“That’s not very much.”
“I know. But we’re lucky I didn’t have to use them. That bear was big.”
“How big?” I asked, lying down beside her in my sleeping bag.
“Huge.” She smiled, wrapping her arms around me. “But not nearly as huge as my love for you.”
I smiled in the dark. I knew Mom loved me, of course, but tonight there was another feeling I hadn’t had very often. I felt protected by her.
Chapter 6
2007
Halifax
I glanced at my watch; it was almost time. Stupidly I actually felt nervous, as if I were hosting some grand dinner party rather than Monday morning playgroup. I walked into the living room to survey my set-up. Chairs lined up in a semicircle, toys at the ready, juice boxes and snacks on the table. Coffee, tea and muffins set out for the adults. As a final touch, I slipped in a CD of nursery rhymes.
We’d been in Halifax for seven months, and I’d decided it was time to make some friends. Ever since I had been able to make my own life choices, I’d given friends a much bigger role in my life than family, and many of those relationships I’d maintained since early adulthood. I was still close to women I’d modelled with in Europe, despite our having dispersed all over the world. And in leaving Vancouver, I’d also left behind several close friendships I’d formed over my seven years there. Given my manic work and parenting schedule, I hadn’t had much time to miss them, but whenever one of them called to check in, I appreciated their carefully worded support of my decision to move here—always enquiring, yet never questioning. Of course it was no mystery why I placed so much value on friendships: during my nomadic childhood I’d had so few. Despite my longing to fit in, I was always too tall, too weird-smelling, too poorly dressed, too eager to please. And now here I was again, six years old at my first day of school. Just like everyone else feels sometimes, I reminded myself. I wasn’t the only person in the world who felt like an outsider.
I pulled the door open with a smile, and they streamed in with their charges: mother of one, nanny of three, mother of two, nanny of two. I’d only met these women once or twice before, but I already envied every single one of them—the nannies for their sense of purpose, the mothers for their contented choice to stay at home with their children. I was neither and both—a mother who worked from home with a toddler at her feet. As if on cue, Avery let out a shriek and threw himself on the floor in protest of sharing his Fisher-Price workbench. A plastic socket wrench skidded across the floor and landed at my feet.
“Everything’s in the living room, if you can get past the demon who just possessed my child,” I said to the ladies, inwardly cringing at my tone. With this first social attempt on new ground, I recognized that my standard MO was fully back in motion: art-direct my life to make it look perfect, and then, knowing full well how intimidating it appeared from the outside, make up for it by being the self-deprecating friend who was always more interested in talking about them than herself. It was a survival mechanism, but it was also very handy, because it kept people from knowing the truth about me, both present and past. I just need to get through this, I thought. If I can just appear happy and capable until I actually am, then I can afford to let my real self show.
“My goodness, your house is gorgeous,” one of the moms said as she stirred sugar into her tea. “So, you moved here from . . .”
“Vancouver.”
“Right. What brought you out east?”
I pushed aside the memory of James and me sitting on our sofa back in Vancouver, making a decision that I’d forgotten how to rationalize. “Oh, we just . . . you know, needed a change of pace,” I replied with a breezy smile.
She nodded as if such a thing w
ere perfectly understandable and scanned the food table. “And you’re at home with your son, then?”
“Yes. I mean, I work, too, but I do it from home.”
“How convenient! What is it that you do?”
“I have . . . a design company,” I said vaguely, not wanting to get into the details of the business that was currently sucking the life out of me. “But what about you?”
I smiled and nodded while she talked, switching my attention between her and Avery. I could see him in the living room, gleefully vrooming a HotWheels car up and down one of the nanny’s legs. Clearly he didn’t give a crap about whom he impressed. It occurred to me that there was a lot I could learn from my young son.
Just as playgroup was ending, James came out of his office. He greeted the women awkwardly, a lone father in a sea of females.
Eventually the moms and nannies straggled out the door, and I started cleaning up. “Coffee?” I asked James, and he nodded.
As I handed him the mug, I imagined for just a moment that we were a normal couple, one that squabbled about things like who took the last cup of coffee or whose in-laws to spend Christmas with, and then laughed at how petty their arguments were in the big, wonderful picture of their life. We could have had that, I thought. At one time, we really could have.
As I watched my husband wander back down the hall and close the door between us, I thought about a day several years before. James and I had taken the ferry over to the Gulf Island I’d lived on as a child. Part of my reason for going there had been curiosity—would returning to the scene of some of my darkest moments help cure the nearly constant depression that plagued me?—but I also had an ulterior motive. I was thirty-four and in the midst of my baby yearning, and I thought that maybe showing James a bit of who I was as a child would make him more receptive to the idea of having one himself.
After giving James the tour of my old school, the leech-infested lake I used to swim in and the beach I spent hours playing on below our first cottage, I took him to see one last place—the house I’d been living in when I was molested by Mom’s boyfriend Barry. As we pulled into the driveway, the first thing I saw was his old El Ranchero, rusted out and propped up on wooden blocks. But when I saw the house, I was certain we had the wrong place.
“There’s moss on the roof,” I said in shock, though my observation wouldn’t mean anything to my husband. When I lived there, the roof had been bare plywood. Then I realized: of course it had moss on it—that was almost thirty years ago.
“Aren’t you going to see if he’s there?” James asked, and I shook my head.
Instead I stared at the front door, daring it to open. Was Barry in there looking out at our car? What would I say if he came outside? Would he recognize me? I tried to tell myself I didn’t care one way or another. Everything was different now—I was an adult, my life had turned out pretty well, I had a loving husband. Yes. A husband who deserved to know a thing or two about my past.
I took a deep breath and turned toward James, and I told him what had happened in that house between Barry and me. He listened, said some sympathetic words, and then he told me about a friend of his whose story was more horrific than mine. I sat perfectly still and quiet beside him, almost jealous that his friend’s story was flashier. It occured to me how twisted it was for me to feel that way—that if abuse was worse than dysfunction, then being raped was worse than being molested and being beaten was worse than being neglected. I was once again registering on the low end of the scale in my own mind.
As we drove down the hill again, I thought of the other husband I’d told my story to a decade earlier. From him I’d had a completely different response, one that had caused me to push him away and ultimately leave him. Two husbands, two strikes, I thought, and I vowed to never tell any partner, present or future, anything about my childhood again. I had finally come to understand something: those who knew the truth about me hurt me the most, because they made me feel like my pain was insignificant.
1977
Gulf Islands, British Columbia
The wind tugged wildly at my hair as I rode down the hill. Left bend, right bend, straight, another left bend and I was at the pond. I shot past it, pedalling furiously toward the little silver trailer at the edge of the woods. I prayed he would be home. I had run out of the house to escape Mom and Barry having sex, and if Art wasn’t around, I wouldn’t have anything to do except catch minnows in the pond. And I was really craving a Fluff sandwich.
It was a warm August morning, and I was seven years old. Nearly two years had passed since Shyla was shot, and I never thought about her anymore. I hardly ever thought about Karl either. He and Mom had broken up not long after we moved here. There were plenty of other things for me to think about now—like school, my friends and Mom’s new boyfriend, Barry, whom we’d moved in with a couple of months ago. Living with Barry wasn’t so bad. Even if he and Mom were always screwing, at least Mom was happy. And Barry hardly even glanced my way, except to tell me to clean up my corner sometimes. The house was a single room with their bed in the middle and mine in one corner, though Barry liked to remind Mom that he had big plans for walls and a toilet and a refrigerator and shingles on the roof someday. For now I called it the “half-finished house,” because that’s what it was—just a plywood frame with some electric wires running through it and pink insulation stuffed in the walls. But at least I knew the cops couldn’t come and roll this house up and take it away, the way they took our tent in Lake Minnewanka when they busted Karl for stealing it.
“Ding dong!” I said loudly at Art’s front door. It was the way I always greeted him, because he didn’t have a doorbell. Art had told me that fancy houses had doorbells. I didn’t tell him that not only had I never had one, but I’d only just recently experienced walls.
“Doll!” he said as he opened the door, his wrinkly face crinkling into a smile.
Art was ancient. At least ninety, I was pretty sure, and barely any taller than me. I’d been visiting him ever since I moved into the half-finished house, and he was always happy to drive me to the lake so I could go swimming, or give me a snack of the most heavenly junk food I’d ever eaten. Actually, the only junk food I’d ever eaten. Mom would have killed me if she knew.
I walked into Art’s tiny trailer and took a seat at his kitchen table. I loved how Art’s home was full of little secrets, like the living room wall that slid open to reveal shelves and the second bed that pulled out from under his mattress. For when his granddaughter came to visit, he told me, though she never seemed to.
I smiled as Art opened a cupboard and took out a loaf of Wonder Bread. He spread a slice with Fluff in a perfect white cloud and pushed the plate across to me along with my napkin. This was the only thing I didn’t like about visiting Art: he always gave me the exact same cloth napkin, and he never seemed to wash it. I could see smears of food on it from my last visit. I put my hands under the table and sneakily wiped them off on my shorts instead.
“So how’s my beautiful doll doing today?”
I beamed. Art always had a compliment for me that made me feel all warm inside. “Pretty good. I was going to go to the lake today, but I . . . uh, left the house too fast to remember my swimsuit.”
“Is that so? Well, maybe Art should just buy you a new one. Then you’ll always have one here, just in case. Hmm?”
“Really? You mean—you’d buy me a swimsuit?”
“Of course! I’m going to Victoria tomorrow, to see my granddaughter. I’ll pick one up for you then.”
“Wow. Thank you!”
I slid off my chair. For some reason, the thought of Art buying me a swimsuit made me feel shy. I excused myself and walked to the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I loved that Art had a real bathroom. At home we did our business in a porta-potty out back behind the house. As I sat on the toilet, my eyes fell on a book lying on a pile of magazines. The cover was kind of strange. A girl about my age was running away from the camera wearing nothing but a hat
. I picked up the book and opened it. Page after page showed pictures of naked children. I leafed through it, wondering why anyone would want to look at kids’ bodies, which were boring and all looked pretty much the same compared to grown-ups’. Personally I couldn’t wait to get boobs like Mom. I put the book back and flushed the toilet.
“Um, I should get going,” I said when I returned to the kitchen, stuffing the rest of the sandwich into my mouth. I headed for the door, still chewing.
Art hurried after me, limping on the bum leg that he’d told me a hundred times had gotten pulverized in some war.
“So soon? I thought we could play Yahtzee.”
“Yeah, just . . .” I stopped at the door and shrugged, wondering what to say. I didn’t want to hurt Art’s feelings, but that book had weirded me out a bit. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said, turning away.
“You mean the day after. I’m not here—”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.” I ran down the steps, got on my bike and sped away. “Bye!” I pedalled furiously, knowing I could make it about a quarter of the way up the hill to home if I got enough speed up.
After I turned into our driveway, I propped my bike against a tree trunk and walked toward the house cautiously, listening for screwing sounds. All was silent, so I opened the front door. Barry was nowhere to be seen, and Mom was sitting naked on her bed eating scrambled eggs. Her long boobs swayed above the plate. I sat down beside her. Not only had the half-finished house not made it past the framing stage yet, we also didn’t have much furniture.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Mom said between bites. “Did you go for a bike ride?”
“Yeah. I went to see Art-from-down-the-hill.” I always called him that, because if I just said “Art,” she never remembered who he was.
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