He didn’t hesitate. “Before the year is through, I’m sorry to say. She is beyond the point of return.”
I nodded resignedly, as he looked down at my chart again.
“And I see here . . . another death, although this one is more metaphorical. The death of a long-held dream or a vital relationship. A divorce or separation, perhaps? Are you attached?”
“Yes. We’re having problems.”
He nodded again. “It is all but over. Your spirits are highly incompatible. I see another man in your future, and you will be very happy together. And children—I see children. This man will be your soul mate, for lack of a better term.”
It was a nice thought, but the last thing on my mind right now was a new relationship. “What about work? Career, I mean? I’m running a business right now, but it’s not going well.”
“It is not your true calling.”
“No. It never was.”
“There is a very strong creative streak in you. But it’s raw. Unsharpened, if you will. Acting—? No, writing. Are you a writer?”
“Well, I’m trying to be,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound too pathetically eager. “I mean, I’ve been writing this book, a memoir about my childhood, but it seems I don’t have much of a talent for it. It got rejected by forty-five literary agents.” I paused nervously and then plunged in again. “But I just finished another draft. It’s so much better than the first one, almost like a new book!”
He nodded. “I truly hope it works out for you. But I must tell you that I think your talent needs time to develop. A few years.”
“A few years? But—I need to get it published now! It’s my only chance to make enough money to leave my marriage! And I have a son to think about . . .”
“You will need to make do in other ways for now. Serve in a restaurant, work in a shop, but know your time is coming.” He looked me straight in the eye. “There are many, many people who come to me wanting to be artists, Cea. Most do not have the chart to support it. But the lines I see here are so powerful, so clearly geared toward your success as a writer, I swear to you I’ve only seen this a few other times in my four decades of reading.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. But I also see a long-running theme of powerlessness in your life. Does that ring true for you?”
“You could say that. My mother . . . she made a lot of bad choices when I was growing up. I was always trying to make her see her mistakes, get us on a better path, but she was too focused on her own needs. I felt like I had no power over my own life. That’s why I started modelling so young—to escape.”
He nodded. “Keep writing. Hone your craft. But don’t give up. I say this to you specifically because I’ve noticed that people who’ve experienced a lot of powerlessness often give up before they should. They doubt themselves and their abilities.”
“Okay,” I said with a bright smile. “I won’t give up, I promise.”
“Excellent. Now, I see you reaching your goal of publication in”— he peered down at my chart again—“2012.”
I felt like I’d been punched. “In 2012? But that’s five years from now!”
“Indeed. At that point, your writing will have reached the skill level necessary for success. From then on, your chart clears to welcome mostly sunny days. Never again will your life be as difficult as it has been these past six years. One more year of hardship, one and a half at most. You’re almost there. Hang in there, have faith, and you will prevail.”
I felt like crying. “But . . . I was just about to start looking for an agent again . . .”
“I can only tell you what I see here. But please, prove me wrong. I would love nothing more.”
I gave him a soldiering-on smile and thanked him. As I waited in the reception room for Dad to pick me up, Guthrie’s words echoed in my head: have faith. For the first time in my life, I actually found myself wishing I did have a faith to lean on. Though I disliked religion intensely, I’d always straddled the line of believing in something that I couldn’t quite name. Spirituality was a subject I gave a lot of thought to, perhaps because my family hadn’t. After all, my entire childhood’s teachings on God had been one conversation I’d had with my grandfather at age five.
“What’s God?” I’d asked him, after hearing one of the summer visitors’ kids talk about praying.
“A doctrine created by folks desperate to find meaning in their lives,” he replied, and that had been that.
Nature had been my grandparents’ religion, and astrology had been my mother’s. That I couldn’t pinpoint my own beliefs frustrated me—because to so many, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world.
1982
Calgary
When I was in sixth grade, a teenage girl who lived half a block away from me was raped. I remember coming home from school and seeing three police cars with flashing lights in front of her house. I didn’t know the girl, but I went to school with the son of the people who lived next door to her. I found him in the small crowd gathered on the sidewalk and stood beside him, both of us trying to make sense of what we were seeing.
It was the kind of rape that you heard about in the news: the middle of the day, a teenager at home alone—apparently she’d been sick so hadn’t been school—a broken window and a brandished knife. I watched as her front door opened and two medics escorted her to a waiting ambulance. She had a blanket over her shoulders, and her hair swung like a dark sheet in front of her face. What struck me the most was her posture. She was hunched over like an old lady, her eyes cast down at the sidewalk. At first I wondered why she was walking like that, and then it occurred to me: she was ashamed. Curling her body inward, as if doing so could protect her already violated private parts. It stirred something in me.
That night at home, for the first time ever, I wished we had a TV. I hadn’t had a television in my whole life and had only noticed its absence since moving to the city a few years before. Despite my schoolmates’ daily talk of Diff’rent Strokes and The Dukes of Hazzard, I’d never wished for one. But tonight I wanted to see the report on the news about the girl down the street who had been raped. I wanted details.
When I told Mom that night, she gazed at me steadily for a moment. “Raped? What do you mean?”
“I mean some guy broke into this girl’s house today and raped her. And now I’m kind of scared, because what if he comes back? Looking for someone else to rape, I mean? And I’m, like, at home by myself all the time . . .”
“Mm. Yes,” Mom said, moving toward the back door and turning the flimsy safety lock on the knob. “There, all safe now,” she declared. “And anyway, sweetie, don’t worry. I’m here to protect you.”
I nodded stiffly.
But the next night, Mom didn’t come home from being out with Sam until after midnight. I lay in my bed, unable to sleep. It wasn’t just that I was afraid of someone breaking into the house. Lately there was a blackness that seemed to shadow my every thought. It felt dark, hopeless, almost like a physical presence, like nothing in the world could ever make me happy again. Sometimes it would lift for a while, but it always settled back in—especially when I felt powerless to change my circumstances or make my mother see reason, which was almost all the time. I was twelve years old, and I understood all too well that I was at the mercy of her choices until I could escape them. If only, I thought, I could find a way to do so without waiting until I’d finished school.
The front door opened. I heard Mom’s voice, and then long strides crossing the hardwood floor behind her. A moment later, opera music blared from our cheap Hitachi stereo system. Great, I thought—he was here. I pictured him sending my mother to the kitchen to make him something to eat, which she would scurry along obediently to do, and weighed the potential price of reminding her of her duty to protect me from lurking dangers outside: a confrontation with Sam.
I got out of bed, pulled my door open and entered the kitchen. Mom was at the sink peeling potatoes, the only food Sam ever see
med to eat. I guessed there was always hope he’d drop dead of malnutrition.
“Mom,” I said, looking pointedly at the clock as I leaned against the counter. “Did you forget what I told you yesterday? About a rapist being on the loose? That lock on our door wouldn’t keep out a two-year-old.”
“Of course I didn’t forget. I’m home, aren’t I?”
I shook my head in disbelief, but she kept her eyes glued to her task. I looked at what she was wearing: a blazer and skirt with nylons. “Nice outfit,” I said, looking for a jab. “Very proper.”
“Shush,” she replied tightly.
I shook my head again and went to the fridge. My mother’s willingness to become whoever her current lover wanted her to be had always boggled my mind, but with Sam she’d really pulled out all the stops. Everything about her changed when he walked in the door—clothing, musical taste, manners, even values. It did occur to me that this other person she became was more like the “normal” mother I would have liked to have, but that it was a big put-on just made me feel all the more distant from her.
One year before, Sam hadn’t walked into my life but rather crept into it under cover of night. I’d hear him walk in the front door after dark, or see Mom talking furtively on the phone, or occasionally see his retreating back when he left before dawn. Eventually, after I’d inquired into his identity several times, I found myself sitting in an Italian restaurant with the two of them. I’d only been out for dinner a few times in my life, so I noticed everything—the candles glowing in the yellow-tinted glass holders, the words on the menu that I’d never seen before. Mom seemed nervous, picking up her fork and then dropping it again. I ate buttered dinner rolls and spinach cannelloni and said nothing.
After we had finished eating, Sam lit a cigarette and grinned at me. “So. Your mother tells me you are in fifth grade. Do you enjoy school?”
I shrugged. “Sure, I guess.” I kept my eyes down, unable to meet his. I knew that no matter how nice he was to me, I would never be able to like or respect him. And without a doubt, my feelings were far from opaque.
Beside me, Mom dropped the potatoes into a pot of water and walked away, her nylons swishing together. I opened the fridge and reached for the orange juice. Just then I heard Sam’s footsteps approaching from the living room. I grabbed a glass and poured the juice too quickly, splashing it onto the counter.
“You should be more careful. Your mother has better things to do than clean up after you,” Sam said.
A hundred retorts came to mind, but, of course, I couldn’t say any of them. Plain and simple, I was a prisoner of my mother’s taste in men and her eagerness to please them. I returned to my bedroom, closing the door hard behind me.
Back in my bed, I tried to banish the anxiety that had washed over me, but it was little use. My mother was lost to me, I was stuck under her roof, and now there was a rapist on the loose to worry about. I flipped onto my back and gazed at the ceiling as my mind drifted backwards. I thought about the warning my teacher had issued our class the year before about the dangerous man, the one who had scared the little girl. I thought about walking through the park that day, standing in the snow and almost daring him to find me. And that’s when I got the idea.
“I have a surprise for you,” Carleigh said to me, smiling big. “It’s about this summer. You know that camp I went to last year? Well, guess what. My grandmother has paid for us both to go this year. Isn’t that awesome?”
“Wow, really? That’s so amazing,” I replied with a smile I didn’t feel.
Carleigh was my best friend, the first girl who had talked to me when I started the new school in fifth grade and, truth be told, my only real friend. I’d always been the follower to her leader, and happily so. I would have done anything for her. She was more popular, more outgoing and a whole lot more normal than I was. I could talk to her about my mother and Sam and even count on her to make me laugh about them. But ever since I’d broken open my lie several weeks ago about being raped, our friendship had shifted. Now Carleigh was the one who would to do anything for me.
She wanted details, of course, and I had supplied them. It had happened in the schoolyard of the school I’d gone to the year before, I said. A drifter, some random guy that parents were all warning their kids about. Walk in pairs, they said, and stay away from parks and wooded areas. I had obeyed until one day when I’d left school a little late with no one to accompany me. Beyond that, the details got a little sketchy.
“So then you’re not, like, a virgin anymore, right?” she asked, and I hesitated.
“Well, I think I still am technically, since I didn’t want him to do it, you know?”
“Oh. Yeah, of course.” She took her bolo bat from her back pocket and started smacking the ball, whack whack whack. “So . . . was he cute at least?” she asked finally. Whack whack whack.
I looked down as if I were traumatized by the memory of it. “Um, sort of,” I replied, and then I backtracked. “I mean . . . I don’t really remember what he looked like and stuff. He, like, pushed my face into the ground, so I sort of couldn’t see him.”
“Wow. That’s, like, totally harsh.”
“Yeah.” I brightened, hoping to change the topic. “You want to go for a Slurpee?”
“Sure.” She switched the position of her bolo bat and whacked it upward as we walked. “Anyway, so my grandma, she thought this would be really good for you, because you get all cleansed by Jesus and stuff—”
“Wait a minute. You told her?”
“Of course not! I just told her it would be awesome if you came. And it’s really rad at this camp. You get to ride horses and—”
“Horses?” I scoffed. “I don’t know how to ride a horse. And besides, I don’t even like them.”
“How can you not like horses? Everyone likes horses.”
“Not me,” I said. What flashed through my mind was a vision of Apache, lying on his side with blood oozing from the hole in his head. I whipped my own bolo bat from my back pocket. Whack whack whack.
“You’re probably just scared, that’s all. The first time I—”
“Not scared. Just don’t like them.”
“Well, okay, whatever. Geez, touchy much?” Carleigh gave me a perplexed look.
“Sorry,” I said, meaning it. I was always nice, agreeable, smiling, grateful to even have a friend. What was wrong with me?
“It’s okay. Anyway, my grandma’s even going to pay for it, ’cause she knows your mom can’t afford it.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t just the horse thing that had put me off but the mention of Jesus. Though I would never have admitted it to my best friend, I wasn’t even entirely sure who Jesus was, or what God was all about, for that matter. The only time I’d heard Mom mention their names was when she was cursing, so until recently, my knowledge had been limited to one Sunday school visit a couple years ago. A friend had brought me, and we sat in the church basement, colouring in pictures of three guys carrying presents for the newborn baby, while the teacher read from the Bible. Her words swam around me like puzzle pieces I had no hope of fitting together. After she finished reading, she gave us a quiz, and for the first time in a classroom, I had no answers. I just didn’t get it. I gathered that Jesus was a real living person, but his dad was a spirit who lived in the sky and who no one had ever seen. I didn’t understand how someone invisible could have a real live baby, and plus I was confused about the whole Mary thing. I knew very well how babies were made, and I thought that if I was walking around with my new husband, and I suddenly found out I was pregnant with some other guy’s baby, I’d be pretty ticked, and I figured my husband would be too. And if God had that kind of power, then why couldn’t he just go and find his own wife up in heaven and get her pregnant and then send her down to earth? Why did he have to go and use someone else’s wife?
One year ago, my answers had miraculously shown up in the form of a tiny red Bible handed out by a visitor to our school. I kept it under
my pillow, so Mom wouldn’t find it, and committed myself to reading two pages every single night. I was a good student, so after I finished reading, I would review in my head what I’d learned and try to relate it to my own experience, but my mind would drift as I stared at my model collage. I’d made it shortly after we moved into this house, using a large and ornate frame I’d found in a back alley and filling it with images of the current hot models: Carol Alt, Iman, Kim Alexis. It didn’t take much for me to admit that staring at those photos and imagining my future filled me with a lot more rapture than Jesus ever could.
After six months, I finally gave up and stuffed the tiny Bible into the bottom of my drawer. But even if I was unable to understand what it was all about, there was one thing I was pretty certain of: normal people believed in God.
“Sure, that sounds great. Thanks,” I said to Carleigh. “It’ll be awesome.”
I stood with my feet solidly planted on the ground, placed the arrow on the withers and raised my bow. It was all I could do not to laugh at my target. Hijinks at Circle Square Ranch were not much tolerated, but someone had drawn a picture of Satan, complete with horns and a pitchfork, on the paper target. I held my bow arm steady and let the arrow fly. It hit the bull’s-eye with a loud thunk. The girls around me stopped talking, but I kept my face expressionless. It was my second bull’s-eye in a row, and I had one more turn. I took five steps backwards and fired again. Thunk, right into the centre. There was a smattering of grudging applause, and a counsellor stepped forward to present me with the gold medal.
“Congratulations,” she said with a tight smile. “Right through Satan’s heart. Jesus is celebrating with you.”
I grinned back at her. It was the last day of camp, and this moment represented the single highlight of the past seven days.
Over the last week, the darkness had plagued me worse than ever. Every fear I’d had about going to this camp had been realized. Right off the bat, Carleigh and I had been placed in different cabins, leaving me the lone Jesus ignoramus in a sea of fervent believers. Though I’d tried to be friendly, not a single girl—or counsellor, for that matter—seemed to want anything to do with me. It was as if I were doused in a perfume called Doubt that repelled everyone. Much of our day was devoted to Bible study and talk of mortal sin, during which I would smile and nod pleasantly and contribute exactly nothing. Our evenings were spent in the dining hall listening to lectures about the evils of makeup and Self magazine, followed by the screech of records being played backwards to reveal mostly illegible lyrics that the counsellors insisted were satanic. And, of course, the best was saved for last—cautionary tales of girls and women who had engaged in premarital sex and whose souls were marked to burn in hell for eternity. All I could think about was my mother, who was likely at that very moment screwing her married lover. Despite all Mom’s shortcomings, I had a hard time believing she was hell-bound.
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