B07FRVD7VN

by Karen Foxlee

  “His mother died when he was young,” I said. “From drinking.”

  “I met his mother,” said my mother.

  We all sat down. I closed my eyes. The person I hated most was Peter Lenard Spink.

  “What have you been doing, Lenore?” said Mother. She didn’t say it angrily. She sounded tired and sad, that’s all. Here was another problem she had to solve. First it was a rock through a car window and now it was an entire make-believe family.

  I tried to speak. Really I did. My mouth was open but the words were lost.

  Davey put his big head in his hands and bellowed. I sobbed into my own. She put us to bed crying, both of us. We cried and cried until I felt hollow from crying. There was no trip to the hospital to see Mrs. Gaspar. Christmas Eve shone down on the street below us and a big snow came, a white spell cast over the whole city. We cried and we cried until we fell asleep.

  And overnight Davey grew an inch.

  Christmas Day

  7 years 5 months

  5’ 7”

  DECEMBER 1976

  I didn’t notice the inch. Nor did Mother. We woke early Christmas morning and looked out at the white streets and the pink sky. My heart hurt in a way I didn’t understand, an aching for something that wasn’t true at all. “Where does she live?” Mother whispered to me, beside me on the sofa.

  “On Fifth.” But I didn’t give her the address. I couldn’t bear that. Not yet.

  “We’ll have to tell someone,” whispered Mother. “Maybe she …”

  I shook my head and tears fell again, easily.

  Davey opened up his present: a walkie-talkie.

  “Are you kidding me?” he shouted with joy, as though yesterday hadn’t happened.

  I received a book. American Beetles, Volume 1. Mother had covered it with plastic like it was a schoolbook. I don’t know where she got it from. I didn’t know any bookstores with books like that. I shook my head slowly, trying not to drip tears on it.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Mother patted me on the back of the head.

  “What are we going to do, Lenny Spink?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We went to see Mrs. Gaspar. There were no buses, so we took a taxi through the empty white streets. It was the very same hospital that my mother caught the bus to all those years ago to have Davey, that perfect summer’s day. But now it was winter and the streets were filled with snow. Davey fogged up the taxi window.

  Davey had his walkie-talkie in his library bag. There was no way he’d part with it. He’d made me talk to him on it, unravel-ling the long thin cord and positioning me in the bathroom and then running back to our bedroom.

  “Lenny, come in Lenny,” his voice crackled through the speaker.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Say ‘Roger that’,” said Davey.

  “Roger that,” I said.

  “How you doing?” he asked.

  “Shut up,” I said into the speaker.

  In the hospital, lights blazed, doors shushed open and shut, our shoes squeaked conspicuously on the linoleum for miles. We passed room after room filled with sick people, trying not to look inside. We squeaked and squeaked and Davey said, “I don’t know if I like it here.”

  Mrs. Gaspar was causing trouble. She was arguing over her dinner which had no taste. She said, “Pah. It is sloppy. What is it?” She complained like she was in a hotel. The nurse had her eyebrows raised and arms crossed. They had no idea about Mrs. Gaspar. She just liked to argue for the sake of arguing. I thought she must be getting better.

  “David,” she cried when she saw Davey, and she clutched him down to her hospital-gown-clad bosom, where some food had dripped. Davey smiled there, all folded in two against her.

  But Mrs. Gaspar noticed Davey’s extra inch right away.

  “What is happening, Cyn-thi-a?” she cried. “He is growing more?”

  “No,” said Mother, “I don’t think so.”

  Mother looked Davey over, ignoring the inch where his ankles showed afresh. She refused to believe it.

  “Let me look at you,” said Mrs. Gaspar. “But Cyn-thi-a, is he bigger?”

  “Well, remember Professor Cole said a little was okay but not a lot.”

  “Mrs. Spink,” said Mrs. Gaspar slowly, but then she saw me and she lost her train of thought. She looked me up and down. She peered into my eyes, which I rolled to look at the ceiling. Tears started to fill them.

  “Lenora,” she said. “You are back?”

  I pretended to not know what she meant.

  Life is full of last times, so many of them you don’t even know they are happening. The last time you struggle to tie your shoelaces and the last time you keep a chafer bug in a matchbox. The last time your mother reads you a bedtime story and the last time you imagine the water going down the bath drain is a mini tornado. The last time your friend will have a mole on his face with five feelers.

  Mrs. Gaspar told us a dream in her hospital room.

  “Children,” she said solemnly, “you must hear what I say. I dreamed I went to my bedroom, to my very own bed and I noticed a lump in the middle.”

  “What was it?” said Davey. His eyes were open wide. His gap-toothed smile was expectant. “An animal?”

  “No, it was no creature,” said Mrs. Gaspar, stopping to adjust the oxygen tubes in her nostrils. “No, no, no.”

  I leaned against Mother where she was seated. She put her arm around my waist and squeezed.

  “I took the blanket like this,” said Mrs. Gaspar, illustrating, “and I pulled it back carefully.”

  “Were you scared?” whispered Davey.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Gaspar, “I was scared. Then what do you think I see, under the blanket? There, growing out of the middle of my bed, was a little tree.”

  “Are you kidding me?” cried Davey.

  “Hush, Davey!” cried Mother. “There are sick people.”

  “A little tree,” said Mrs. Gaspar, quietly, closing her eyes. “A little tree.”

  “What kind of tree?” I asked. I hoped it wasn’t a Christmas tree. That would be too weird.

  “It was like the elm tree. It had spreading branches. I knew I would have to give it water. The moon shone through my window on its leaves. I went to the kitchen to fetch some water and when I came back, it was bigger. It was growing up, up, up toward the ceiling.”

  I felt Mother’s hand tense upon my waist then, her whole body still, the way she was when there was mention of anything growing.

  “Up, up, up,” said Mrs. Gaspar softly. “The leaves touched the roof and they are rustling and then the roof begins to creaking.” “Then what happened?” Davey asked.

  “Then the orderly who is a big hairy man woke me up,” said Mrs. Gaspar.

  We all laughed with relief, Mrs. Gaspar and Mother and Davey and me. We sat around Mrs. Gaspar’s hospital bed and laughed and Mother’s hand relaxed on my waist and the nurse brought us hot chocolates and we didn’t know it was our last Christmas together.

  O:

  Oceans

  5’ 9”

  JANUARY 1977

  Davey and I were different. We didn’t talk so much at night. I didn’t say, If you could be a K or J, which would you be? He didn’t say, Definitely a J, Ks are too jagged and pointy. I didn’t say, I would be a K. Ks kick ass. He didn’t say, I’m going to tell Mother you said ass. That was the kind of thing we would have said BGAE.

  Before Great-Aunt Em.

  After Great-Aunt Em everything was different. Life was jangled up and changed. I was trying to get used to life AGAE but it was impossible to have an entire great-aunt, small and sparky and full of spittle, shivering like a plucked chicken, and then just clean forget about her.

  I closed my eyes and tried to wish her from ever existing. I pushed her away but my head filled up with ravines. They slid in; horses, dusty skirts, endless roads. Great-Aunt Em slid into my head, as a child, a young Spink wild as wild could be.
Great Aunt Em, who wasn’t my great aunt. I thought of her and I wanted the thoughts of her to dry up like water in a puddle but they wouldn’t dry. That puddle got deeper.

  I thought of her waiting in her chair. I thought of her missing me.

  AGAE in our bedroom at night we listened to the pigeons walking back and forth outside. The trucks and the sirens. Sometimes Davey whispered, “Why’d you do it?” to himself but so I could hear. Sometimes I whispered, “Shut up,” in return.

  He grew. I swear I heard him grow each night.

  Mother phoned Professor Cole’s receptionist and made an appointment. She pinned the time and date onto the corkboard.

  Davey dropped dimes into my empty jewellery box. One by one, eyeballing me. On top of the pristine unstuck sticker from Buffalo, Wyoming. I ignored him. As if we were going to Great Bear Lake. Still, I put my dimes in when he wasn’t looking. There were no more caramel kisses to buy.

  AGAE I thought I would stop feeling nervous but I was more nervous. With all my lies gone I felt empty and rattled. I told my mother. I worked up the courage and I went and stood beside her bed after Davey was asleep. I was wretched with grief.

  “That lady,” I said.

  “Yes, Lenny?”

  “I think someone’s got to help her.” I tried not to cry. I crumpled up my face trying.

  “I told the charity people at St. Vincent’s,” Mother said.

  “So they’re going to help her? Will they get her groceries?”

  “They’re going to check in on her,” said Mother.

  “She’s very old,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. Not anything, just looked at me. Not even a bad look. A look of exhaustion. A how’d-I-produce-such-a-rock-throwing-impostor-loving-child look.

  “She’ll be okay,” she said at last, and pulled me against her bony chest. “I promise you she’ll be okay.”

  I lay there awhile.

  I thought of bones. I thought of Great-Aunt Em’s mother, who wasn’t my great-grandmother, who died from a festering sore, and I thought of her buried somewhere in hard dirt in Wyoming; I thought of her as bones which seemed wrong but I couldn’t help it. I thought of her bones and then I thought of the bones of her mother even, who wasn’t my great-great-grandmother, buried somewhere else I didn’t even know. All these mothers, who used their soothing hands and fed their babies at their breasts. Who sometimes scolded and sometimes sang and sometimes danced, who told stories of their mothers before. Then I thought of my own mother and her stories of her mother, which were thin and threadbare, and how my own mother didn’t really have soothing hands but she was good at scolding, and then, when I was sure I didn’t actually love her, lying there against her chest, I imagined her as bones and just that thought made me sob and I squeezed my eyes shut and sobbed again.

  “Hush,” said my mother, quietly, and I swear she could read my mind. “Don’t think of it anymore.”

  The O issues arrived just as Mrs. Gaspar came home from the hospital. She was newly non-smoking with nervous hands. Annie Oakley, oats, oatmeal, ospreys. O contained oceans, which we divided up between us. Davey took the Arctic, I took the Southern. He took the Atlantic and I took the Pacific because the beetles were better there. We fought over the Indian. I hounded him over the Indian because it was rightfully mine, being home to Malaysia and the frog-legged leaf beetle, which was one of the strangest and most beautiful beetles in the world. I bullied him into handing over the Indian Ocean to me, until he put his head in his hands and cried.

  O contained the handy coloured tables on onions, owls, and office work.

  “That would be a good job for you,” said Mother, looking at the pictures of women with big hair typing in a row. “You are neat and methodical.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “Lenny is going to be a coleopterist,” said Davey.

  “Really, now?” said Mother.

  “I’m one hundred percent certain,” said Davey. His face was still puffy from where I’d made him relinquish all rights to the Indian Ocean and its seas. Even after all that, he stuck up for me. Even though he was still smarting from the disaster of Great-Aunt Em, he stuck up for me. Even though I kept changing my mind about running away to Great Bear Lake, he stuck up for me.

  “A coleopterist,” said Mother slowly.

  Everything was different. A bunch of flowers arrived. They were from Mr. King.

  P:

  Peregrine Falcons

  5’ 9”

  EARLY FEBRUARY 1977

  We’d gone to the counter at the Greyhound bus station on the way home after school. We asked the friendly woman how much a fare was to Saskatchewan. “To where?” she said, her look incredulous.

  “To Canada,” Davey said. She took out her fare schedule and her calculator and got us both as far as North Dakota for twenty-six dollars, one way.

  One way.

  “One way,” said Davey when we walked home from the station.

  “One way,” I said.

  In my jewellery box we had a grand total of three dollars eighty-seven. Davey re-counted it several times like the other twenty-two dollars and thirteen cents might miraculously appear. He held each coin up close to his eyes.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “Because I want to,” he said.

  But I saw he did the same with his Space Family Robinson comics too. He read them with his nose almost touching the page. He peered at osprey the same way. And opals. And peregrine falcon when that issue arrived.

  “‘A peregrine falcon is a raptor and the fastest bird in the world’,” he read, his eyes pressed to the page. He stopped and examined the picture. “‘The peregrine falcon can fly faster than two hundred miles per hour.’ Holy Batman!”

  “Why have you got your face so close to that page?” cried Mother.

  She could ignore the inches but not the fact he couldn’t see.

  “What do you mean, you can’t see? You only just got those glasses last year,” she cried.

  She took him back to the optometrist. She paid with some of her bus-fare money. We watched her take that money jar down from the top of the refrigerator like two hungry dogs watching a bone.

  The new glasses they made him were thick, with shiny metal frames. The optometrist looked nervous dealing with us. He said Mother really should be getting Davey back to see his specialist. “I don’t think this is all about Davey’s eyes,” he said.

  Mother said, “I’ve got my appointment, I just want him to see. He has to go to school.” She puffed herself up like a vicious parrot.

  Those big silver glasses made Davey’s blue eyes huge. He was as tall as a man standing there in his ankle-freezers and his shoes taped down at the ends. Leaning to one side. Smiling. He grew more. He grew every night. His feet slipped over the edge of his bed. His knees ached.

  The appointment reminder to see Professor Cole was pinned to the corkboard beside the refrigerator. It read March 2, 1977, but that was still weeks away. We eyeballed Mother’s bus money jar on top of the refrigerator. Every time I walked into the kitchen that money jar called to me.

  More flowers arrived from Mr. King. There wasn’t any apology, just the flowers and the name Harry written on a tiny little card.

  “Oh,” said Mother angrily. “Why’s he doing that?”

  But we saw her falter inside. She tried to hide it. She tried to hide it from us but we knew her, we knew all her small moods and her large ones too, her rain showers and storms.

  “I never once got flowers,” she said.

  Davey grew. The number of flowers grew. He left them on our mailbox in the foyer. They were the cheap sort, the ones he sold in his fruit shop. Sometimes they were half-dead. They were the flowers that didn’t sell. He left them on the floor near our mailbox like it was a shrine to some terrible accident.

  I said, “Ignore them.”

  “Hush now,” said Mother. “They’ll wilt there. They’ll leave a mess.”

  “Put the
m in the trash.”

  “Cyn-thi-a,” said Mrs. Gaspar when she saw the flowers in our apartment. “Please. Mrs. Spink.”

  And Mother did not speak to Mr. King, it’s true. She crossed the road to catch the number twenty-eight. But she took his flowers all the same. I saw her stare at them, thinking. They wilted. New ones arrived. Six bunches in two weeks.

  Davey ran his fingers over and over the Junior Sales Club prizes catalogue. All the prizes that would never be his. He imagined us going with the tent and the backpack and the sleeping bag. He imagined us looking at the mountains on the horizon through the shiny field glasses. In the end we had one blanket each. We practiced rolling up that one blanket with one change of clothes inside it. We each secured the roll with one belt. It seemed a terrible insult that I had to run away with a ballerina-covered bedspread. “The belts will come in handy,” I said, and Davey agreed. For what I was not sure.

  We stood in our room and looked at all our belongings that we could not take. Davey looked at his Sea-Monkey sludge. I looked at my bug catcher. I knew I’d have to write a note with instructions for how Mother should care for Charlie. It would be terrible for her. Not only would she find us gone but also we’d be replaced by a stick insect that she never knew about. Davey looked at his walkie talkie. I looked at my American Beetles Volume 1. Our sorrow clouded the air.

  I took the bus money from the jar on top of the refrigerator when Mother was in the shower. Davey held his belly like it hurt him, even that act of taking it down. I tipped its contents onto the table and the sound of the coins was so loud. He put his hands over his ears. He was such a baby. I counted out the money we needed. There was over fifty dollars in that jar. She mightn’t even miss the twenty-three gone. I took the money. I was the one who did it. I was a criminal already anyway.

  “I don’t think we should,” mouthed Davey, clutching at his heart.

  I shook my head.