“Mother, are you all right?” I asked.
“Just fine,” and she came back in with a fake smile, like she thought she was fooling us. But that night she told us to leave her at seven, because she needed time to think. And I knew she was upset because thinking was the exact thing you should do to feel more miserable.
In my bedroom I plotted a way to keep my younger sister alive. I imagined it was as simple as planting her in the garden and watching her come up with the carrots and zucchini. Or mixing up the parts of her in a petri dish and keeping it under my bed until she sprouted.
Then I remembered — Corey Hart. A rock star like him, with number one hits, with his picture in the paper and interviews on TV, would be able to help me find a way to save my mother and sister. It was worth a shot. I took a blank pad of lined foolscap out of my desk drawer and began to carve the words with a sharpened pencil:
Dear Mr. Hart:
I have looked up to you for a long time (many months) and I know that because of your good singing voice and engaging personality, you will be able to help me with a problem I am having.
My mother is due to have my baby sister in about nine months. I’m sure you can understand how nice it will be to have a sister because you have four siblings yourself. (I read it in my father’s copy of the Saskatoon Sun.) There is one small problem. The doctor told my mother that she is going to die and I think it might happen before the baby can be born. Please help me, Corey. I need to find a way to help my mother live and my baby sister keep growing. I was thinking maybe you could raise money at your concert, and then we could hire the best doctors in Canada to find a way to do it. I think that might work but if you have other ideas, I would take them into consideration.
With sincerity,
Maya Devine
Age 11
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
I signed my name in flowing circles to the bottom of the page, tucked the note into an envelope, wrote “Corey Hart, Montreal, Quebec” on the outside, and dropped it into the mailbox at the end of the street.
Chapter Twelve
Cancer ate my mother from the inside out. And at the same time, it ate my baby sister. This is how I used to think about it when it was happening.
Long hours were spent between my mother and father when they were deciding what to do about my mother’s pregnancy. At least I think they were deciding. But sometimes, I would peek through the plastic window of the teepee and see them there together. My father stroking her hair, and she with her eyelids glued open in a shocked stare. Like she was made of wax. Wax that was melting.
I never heard back from Corey Hart, although I imagined a million times how his eyes would have looked when he read my letter: soft, sympathetic, caring. Maybe he wanted to help, but didn’t know how — which I could understand because the problem itself was big enough to stump anyone.
At the time when my mother was refusing to see anyone, Mrs. Roughen showed up at the front door.
“Oh, dear. I just wanted to bring your mother some chocolate mousse cake that I made. Don’t worry, I brought my own plates and silverware” was what Mrs. Roughen told me at the door. “Is there any chance that I could bring it out to her?”
“You can try, Mrs. Roughen. But she hasn’t been feeling well.”
I led Mrs. Roughen through the house and onto our back lawn.
“Elijah told me he saw you at school.” She was clutching a Tupperware container, two paper plates, and plastic forks and had a camera dangling from her wrist. “Perhaps someday you two could be friends. He’s a wonderful boy.”
“We’re just so different,” I told her.
“How do you mean, Maya?” She looked hurt.
I remembered the shed, but said, “It’s just that I’m in grade six and he’s in grade eight. When you’re my age, that’s years apart.”
She laughed like she was pushing it out and trying to show only what a joyful and good-humoured person she was. She laughed too long to be true.
We stood outside the door of the teepee. I could hear my mother breathing and moaning from the inside: Pain, pain, why, make it stop. Fuck it all.
“You can go in. But I am going to come with you this time.”
“Oh, but I brought only two plates.”
“I don’t need any cake.”
“All right then.”
She followed me into the teepee. Dark space even though it was day. Air that had been hanging instead of circulating, air that wanted to get out. My mother was curled on her cot with her hands resting on the soft part of her stomach.
“Marigold? Marigold, it’s me, Trudie.”
Waxy stare from the bed.
“Marigold, I brought you some chocolate mousse cake. I thought we could eat it. It’s been so long since we got together, and I wanted to let you know how good I’ve been doing about the separation. I really have started to see what you said, that I need to start paying attention to the more important parts of life — like Elijah, for example.”
She put the plates down beside my mother on the bed and started to spoon out chocolate mousse from the Tupperware container. My mother remained stoic, like a trapped bird in a cage who has flapped its wings against every side and sees no way to be free.
I don’t say anything. Mrs. Roughen did all the talking and eating. She bit brown off the end of her plastic fork while maroon pulsated around her puffy hairdo.
“Mari, I have to tell you, this mousse cake is wonderful. I can understand if you don’t feel like eating it. Why, your body must be going through such a battle right now. I know how you must be feeling.”
“No, you don’t.” A cold and stiff version of my mother’s voice.
“What did you say?”
“She said, ‘No, you don’t,’ Mrs. Roughen. You don’t know how she is feeling.”
“I suppose you’re right, Maya. I could never know unless I myself was feeling it. Which I’m not, but Lord knows I have had my own trials lately. What with the separation from Mr. Roughen and Elijah’s issues. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a smart and handsome young man, you can attest to that, Maya, but there is something troubling him. I can feel it more and more. We talk less and less.”
Neither my mother nor I responded. So Mrs. Roughen picked up the camera that had been dangling on her wrist.
“Mari, I was wondering if you would mind if Maya took a picture of the two of us?”
Three of them, I thought.
“I would like to have a photo to remember you by. To keep in a frame on my piano so that when people come over—”
“Am I your dying friend, Trudie?” My mother again.
“Excuse me, Marigold?”
“Do you like to have me here, wasting away, so that you can come visit me when you are feeling low or bring your friends to see me, like some sort of lonely zoo lion?”
“No, of course not.” But I could tell Mrs. Roughen was frazzled. Caught off guard.
“I think you do. I think that you are so busy trying to create some sort of perfect picture of yourself. Your son, your marriage, your home, and now you have added me to the list. Your poor fading friend who you visit when it suits you, who you show off to publicize your compassionate nature.” Mother sat up then and pulled her shoulder blades back.
“Mari, I can assure you that you are mistaken. Why are you being so cruel to me?” Mrs. Roughen’s eyes had filled with tears and mine had as well. I wished they would all just be quiet.
“Get out, Trudie.”
“Pardon me?”
“Get out!” Mother screamed the words the second time she said them and at the same time, she hurled her plate of mousse cake across the teepee so that it squashed against the far wall and created a chocolate stain as it dripped to the ground.
“Why, Mari? Why are you saying these things? I thought we were friends.”
“I guess you were wrong.”
“Mother, stop it,” I blurted out without being able to stop myself.
“Maya, you leave me alone too. Things are too complicated.”
“Grow up, Mother!”
“Leave me alone!” She gritted her teeth together and squinted her eyes. I wondered then if this was what death was like. Anger, terror, frustration. Horrible like we all imagined. Was my mother already dead? Had something terrible and evil taken over her body to usher her out?
Mrs. Roughen and I went back into the house. She was dabbing mascara tears with a white Kleenex and in her mind, she was cursing my mother for making her feel like a fool.
When my father got home I told him Mother was dead. This made him run to the backyard, wringing his hands.
“She’s not dead,” he called up to me later. “She’s just sad.” Still, he slept inside the house that night and left her out there alone.
For four days after, she did nothing but rock herself on the floor. Pathetic, really.
I decided to go back to school on the fifth day. The principal and the staff in the administrative office were understanding, looking at me with cocked heads and smiles that hid their lips. “There’s only one more week of school,” they said, reassuring me. “You can stay home with your mother if you like.”
But I sat through final classes. No one around me, not even my teacher Mrs. Baby, had a face, only a smooth white mask where a face should be. Mrs. Baby’s voice came out like music from a radio when the dial is just off a station, hollow and fuzzy. I learned nothing, and in a flash, school was finished.
“So your mom went off on my mom, eh?” This voice came from behind a tree. A tree that for a minute I thought was a person, a person with leaves for hair, talking to me with green branches for lips. Elijah came around so I could see him. I was walking home from the school on the last day, past the trees that lined the corner of the schoolyard.
“It’s not your mother’s fault.”
“I was hoping it was. It’s cool to give my mom a talking to. God knows she’s always on my back.” Elijah was wearing a black bracelet that snapped closed and had shiny studs lining the edges. His lips were wet like they were leaking something and his brown eyes grabbed me and pulled me into their warmth. The skin on his face stretched out smooth and white, like I would slip on it if I was small enough.
“She’s having a baby,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true because she would probably never have it.
“Brutal,” he said back to me, which made me wonder why I told him in the first place. “I guess that kid is doomed either way.”
“It’s probably going to be a girl and no, she’s probably not going to get to grow long enough to live. Unless there is some sort of miracle.” My legs started to weaken until I was on my bare knees. I flopped forward, feeling my nose in the dirt.
“Hey, what’s happening to you?”
“If I needed you to, would you help me commit suicide?” My voice rose up muffled.
“Suicide?”
“Yes, do you know the best way to do it? Have you heard?”
“Whoa, girl, I am not going to kill you. Smarten up.”
“You don’t have to do it to me. I was just wondering, if I was to decide to do it, which is the best way to do it? What would hurt the least?”
“If it was me, I would put the car on in the garage, with the windows down a little.”
“My father would never let me drive his car. I wouldn’t even know how to turn it on.” My lips were kissing the dust then and I could taste each speck, dirty and grimy on the tip of my tongue.
“I guess pills then, if you can get them.” He put his palm on the back of my head, like I have seen my father do to my mother. Through his palm came a luscious band of energy that filled me up, made me whole again. I was buzzing with light. “You are not going to do anything to yourself though. I won’t let you.”
I pushed myself up to my knees and then reached out to hug him, because I could, because he was the only one there. No tears fell, only the darkness inside my body that was falling back into the earth. He was kneeling on his acid wash jeans.
“Ohhhhh, lovers. Watch out for her, she has cooties!” Destiny had put Jackie in our path again at that moment. In ours.
“Screw off, moron!”
Jackie skulked at Elijah’s outburst and I began to giggle, spitting dirt from my mouth, my shoulders dancing on their own.
“You okay?” he said.
“I will be. Thanks.”
“Catch ya later then.” Elijah stood over me. I could barely see him because of the green light swirling across his body. He disappeared back behind the trees. My only comfort then were pine cones and branches reaching down to where I sat on the ground, but never getting close enough to touch.
My mother’s screaming episodes started getting more frequent as she travelled through what my father called “her down time.” She yelled at me because the water I brought her was too warm, she called my father an idiot three times in one afternoon. I worried about what my baby sister was thinking, from inside. Did she think my mother was crazy? Did her ears hurt? Did she want to get out?
During this time, early July, she moved back into the house, saying she was too weak to be outside anymore. Instead, she wrapped herself in her red duvet with the suns and moons on it, and slept days away like they didn’t exist for her anymore. I checked on her teepee at least once a day. Swept the tarp on the floor clean of the dirt I just brought in on my shoes, dusted the empty table, added a wildflower to the bud vase Mrs. Roughen had brought, made sure that no squirrels had curled up on her cot.
Thinking back, I’m not sure why I did all that cleaning. It’s not like she noticed, or cared, or like I wanted her to either. I just thought it was important, with the summer weather, to keep things moving inside. I would not listen when my father suggested we take the teepee down. I yelled at him, saying, “Mother was right, you are an idiot!” But later on, I crept into the kitchen where he sat at the table and asked him if she would ever be back.
He told me, that yes, she may have a bit of life left in her yet. That we just had to be patient.
Chapter Thirteen
Our silence continues for most of a week. My father is the one to break it, although I already know what he’s going to say because I’ve been listening to him plan it in his head.
We are in the kitchen. I’m scrubbing a plate, but not like I really mean to get it clean. I’m just trying to focus on something else while he makes his after-dinner coffee.
“I would like Connie to live here with us.”
I don’t say anything, still.
“I know it seems sudden, but I guess you are old enough to know that we are in a relationship with each other now. It’s gotten serious, and well, I think we need to make the next step.”
I can hardly hear what my father is saying on account of his jumbled up thoughts pounding out from his head to mine. God, I’m such a wimp, fucking loser, tell her, don’t ask her. I have to close my eyes just to hear his actual words.
“What about Mother?” I answer finally. He looks confused, as if to say, She’s dead remember? “So you can’t even mourn her death for a year before getting some other woman?”
“Maya . . .” He looks like he is thinking about how to answer. His mind is silent and there is red light weaving its way around his head and across his heart. “You know I cared for your mother.” Hair has fallen onto his forehead, and he’s continually brushing it away with his fingertips — like a woman would.
“You have some way of showing it, really.”
“This has nothing to do with your mother.”
He leaves to go upstairs before I can tell him again that there is no way I will let that bitch live in our house. He leaves a trail of yellow behind him that cascades down his back and brushes the floor before di
sappearing.
The next evening she is there. Connie. Sitting at our dinner table with her sinister raven hair, her perked up boobs, and her bangs teased towards the ceiling. She holds her cutlery like she’s trying to show off her manicured nails. My father has cooked dinner — fish and peas and French fries browned in the oven. I eat, but I am not saying anything about it — or anything at all.
“So, how was school today, Maya?” my father asks me, like there is no strange woman sitting at our table mashing up tiny vegetables with pinched lips.
I only glare at him as my answer.
Then from inside Connie: God and Jesus this is uncomfortable. This food tastes terrible.
“Did you learn anything new or whatever?” my father asks in a final attempt. I decide it’s time to talk.
“Why don’t you just tell him you don’t like the food?” I say. Connie looks horrified, her penciled eyebrows up near her hairline. “You can totally tell anyway by the way you’re eating it.”
“You don’t like it, honey?” (My father to Connie.)
“Steven, she’s just making trouble is all. It’s wonderful.” She slowly lowers her cleavage onto the table (gross) and strokes my father’s arm with her long red nails. He seems satisfied.
When Father is getting the vanilla ice cream, Connie turns to glare at me. Just like her lunatic mother, she thinks.
Screw you, I mouth to her and leave the table.
Connie does not come back for another dinner. Instead, my father starts spending most of the evenings at her apartment downtown. He sends a babysitter over for the first little while — this teenage girl named Katie, who talks constantly about her boyfriend, Dan, and how he’s going to join the military next September. Katie stays from after school to bedtime. We eat dinner together. Eventually, I get bored of her and one day tell her that my father has changed his mind — that he doesn’t want her to come anymore. She agrees without much convincing, takes the money he’s left on the dining room table, and leaves early.
Girl in Shades Page 10
