Girl in Shades

by Allison Baggio

  “But Father won’t like it. Plus, I don’t think she wants to see anyone now.”

  “We have to, Maya, the story has been on the news. People want to help, that’s all. We should let them have that.”

  But Mrs. Roughen’s thoughts told me something different. She was thinking about herself — if she looked pretty enough, how she might get interviewed on the news herself, how people might care what she had to say, that she might even meet a new husband out of the whole thing (she didn’t want to be too hopeful in case she got disappointed, but maybe).

  “I want nothing to do with this!” I screamed, and sat on the floor.

  Mrs. Roughen dressed Mother in a robe from her closet, a shiny pink one that zipped up at the front and had a lace collar. Mother only mumbled and looked annoyed while she did it. Her limbs hung heavy like she had already died and her sounds were only little bits of trapped air escaping.

  I did have to help carry her back out to the teepee, because I knew that’s where she wanted to be.

  We got her back into bed, sitting up with her hands crossed in her lap. Mrs. Roughen spread a sheet over her legs and tied back the teepee windows to let air through, August air rich with hot asphalt and lawn clippings.

  It was eleven in the morning. My father was still in bed.

  I still did not want Mother to be visited. To be exploited.

  “They may have ideas about how to help,” Mrs. Roughen said, trying to convince me. Which did make sense, I guess.

  Eventually, I helped her push the buffet out of the way of the door. It squeaked on the hardwood. “For all we know, they could help make a miracle happen.” She squeezed my hand. Her fingers were moist and slippery.

  She had me there. I wanted to help. I wanted my mother back. I wanted to start being a kid again, and a big sister. To have my family.

  Mrs. Roughen decided to let them in one at a time, and in pairs if they were related.

  “Please remove your shoes, walk straight through the house, through the back door, and you can visit her in the teepee in the backyard. Donations are appreciated. You have ten minutes. Maya will show you where.”

  “Thank you,” said the first girl, with a pained smile. She was about twenty-five, wearing a short jean skirt, black T-shirt, and a yellow bandana to hold back her long hair. She held a tiny velvet bag by a string.

  The girl had purple around her that radiated out from her head and shoulders like heat on a highway.

  “This way,” Mrs. Roughen said, walking towards the back door.

  “Thank you,” the girl said again. I closed the front door and locked it. And I didn’t let the girl see my mother alone. I followed her out back to the teepee, and watched with all the suspicion an eleven-year-old girl could muster.

  The girl squatted beside my mother’s bed. My mother sat up staring, her hands still folded in her lap.

  “She’s not talking today,” I said. “It’s sort of a vow of silence kind of thing.”

  “It’s okay,” the girl said and turned towards my mother. “Mrs. Devine, my name is Alisha. I wanted to give you something that I think could help you.” She opened her tiny velvet bag and took out two eye-sized rocks, one white, one green, turned my mother’s hand around and dropped them in her palm. “These are quartz and malachite. They will help you heal your blockages and in your healing.”

  “How can they do that?” I said.

  “By emitting vibrations that will align her again with the divine light energy,” Alisha said, folding my mother’s fingers over the stones.

  “And that will help her get better, save the baby?”

  “If she believes in it,” Alisha said, looking back at me stoically, her blue eyes reaching out to light up the pale air in the teepee.

  My mother threw the rocks with one quick snap across the teepee.

  I followed the path of the stones, knelt down, and picked them up.

  “Thanks,” I said to Alisha, and she put her arm on my shoulder.

  Next, my father’s voice erupted from the house like thunder on a still evening: “Trudie, what the hell?!”

  “I think you should go now,” I said to Alisha. “My father is awake.” She gave my mother a sideways pitying glance and followed me back into the house.

  My father stood in only his underwear, the pudgy parts of his belly sticking out, his “Mari” tattoo swimming in his chest hair. Mrs. Roughen stood across from him in the entrance to the house.

  “Thank you for letting me visit your wife, Mr. Devine,” Alisha said slipping into her shoes, her voice remaining calm.

  “Get out” was all he said in return.

  “Don’t be mean!” I shouted. “She gave mother something really cool!”

  “Maya, shut up.” He swung his arm to push me onto the first step leading upstairs. At the same time, Alisha opened the front door to leave and Mrs. Roughen came into the foyer: “Steven, I know you’re upset, but listen . . .”

  The door opened again.

  My father was knocked to the floor by the crowd of people pushing their way into the house. He knocked his head on the banister I was clutching.

  All the visitors pushed through the door: limping old ladies, bouncy fat women, a Native man with feathers around his head.

  “Slowly,” Mrs. Roughen said. “You’ll all get a chance to bring your good wishes to Marigold.” She was rushing them along, pushing them into the backyard before my father came to.

  A cameraman came through the door and began to film my father, lying on his back with his arms hurled out to the sides.

  “Stop taking pictures of him!” I said, pulling the man’s arm. A woman stood in front of my father and spoke into a microphone: “I’m at Marigold Devine’s home, where a dangerous mob has stormed the house and attacked Marigold Devine’s husband, leaving him unconscious. Stacey Nixon reporting.”

  The cameraman leaned down towards my father’s face and I kicked him in the shin.

  “Ouch! You little brat,” he said.

  “C’mon, Roger, enough of the naked guy. Let’s get into the backyard.”

  They hurried off and then it was just my father and me left. I ran into the kitchen and put ice cubes in a paper towel and put it on my father’s forehead. He opened his eyes with the cold.

  “Maya,” he said, dazed, his mouth formed into a scared grimace. “What happened? Where’s your mother?”

  “She’s in the backyard, with everybody else.”

  “Is she okay?” he blinked and took a breath, like he didn’t quite know what was going on. For a second, he was hidden in a cool grey light that stuck to him.

  “I think so. Mrs. Roughen’s out there.”

  “I can’t believe she let these people in here.”

  “Maybe they can help?”

  “Yeah, they can help themselves to a lawsuit,” he said. “And Trudie Roughen too.” I helped him up to his feet and he went back up to his bedroom for some shorts and a T-shirt. We went into the backyard together.

  People were lined up single-file in front of the entrance to the teepee, a line that curved like a snake around the yard, reaching to the back fence. The camera crew was set up on our back porch. The anchorwoman combed her hair nearby. The Native man was chanting words I didn’t know beside the teepee. Chanting and stamping his white moccasins on the grass so that the hanging bits of feather danced in the air. As he chanted, he pushed out smoke from a small bowl, filling the air with a sweet kind of plant. He had red lines painted on his face and a circle of yellow and green around his body.

  “Jesus Christ,” my father said. “What is this, some sort of freak show?”

  Apparently, they thought that the “freak” was inside. One by one they would poke their heads into the teepee with their lips pursed and their eyebrows raised in anticipation. I could hear their thoughts, each overlapping onto the next: It
smells in here. What am I going to say? Is she contagious? Is she decent? Is she nuts?

  Mrs. Roughen was the one to let them in when it was their turn. She stood at the entrance to the teepee like she was the gatekeeper of my mother. “Just wait a minute please, honey,” she said when I tried to pass her.

  “Trudie, let her in, now,” my father said, a blue vein throbbing on his forehead.

  “Sorry, Steven. Sure, yeah, go in, Maya. Just make it fast.” But Mrs. Roughen’s inside thoughts told another story. From inside her head, I heard her call my father a self-absorbed asshole, a snag in the whole operation. I didn’t know then what kind of operation she meant, but I hoped it was a kind of surgery that my mother was going to have.

  “Hey, I was next!” someone shouted out, and Mrs. Roughen told them that they’d all get their turn to help save the baby through their prayers and good wishes.

  My mother was sitting up in bed with her arms crossed. She was surrounded by three women and an older man who stood back by the window. One of the women, short, curly brown hair, glasses, and wide hips, was holding a shoebox filled with tiny bottles. Another taller woman was talking: “Mrs. Devine, the healing properties of essential aromatherapy oils are amazing if you just give them a chance,” she said while the third woman, thin, huge hoop earrings, neon bow in her ponytail, held one of the bottles in front of her nose. Mother gave a feeble “and so” look by hiding her lips inside her mouth.

  “Just take a deep sniff. It’s jasmine and peppermint. This’ll give you the boost you need to fight the cancer and save your baby’s life.”

  “Sniff, Mother, sniff,” I said, running to the bed.

  “Stay back, please,” the woman with hoops told me. “You’ll upset one of the bottles.”

  “Time’s up!” Mrs. Roughen shouted from outside the teepee.

  “We’ll just leave these here,” the wide-hipped woman said, putting the box of oils on the chair beside the bed. The older man who had been watching nodded his head and walked with the woman out of the door.

  I reached down to hold my mother’s hand, warm fingers with her pulse tingling everywhere. She looked down at me and pulled her hand from mine. A tear gathered and slipped over her cheekbone.

  I told all the people to leave, that she’d had enough. And one of them opened the flap so they could get out, letting in the voices and thoughts that had been creating a hum from outside the teepee.

  I looked at Mother softly. “It’s okay, Mother. We’ll figure out a way to save the baby.” I was trying my best to be supportive — as much as a young girl could be of her own mother. But she had other demons circulating under her tightly stretched skin.

  “There is no fucking baby!” she yelled.

  “Stop it, Mother,” I said. “You know there is. Why would you say that?”

  “Because there is no baby,” she moaned. “I made it all up — so deal with it.”

  “I know you’re lying. So stop.”

  Then — and I hate to disrespect my mother’s memory by adding this part — she slapped me. Hard. Across the cheek. And then she laid back on the bed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Many hours have passed but I haven’t fallen asleep. I only rest my eyes a bit by looking up from the page and out into the darkness of night. The wind badgers me to stop reading my mother’s journal. “It’s not private now that she’s dead!” I scream towards the window from the bed — the words pound through my head and my stomach gallops around in my abdomen.

  That’s when I hear the knock from downstairs.

  I swallow hard.

  I cover my head with the duvet on my parents’ bed. Sweat forms on my forehead. I breathe in and out like an ocean battering the sand.

  Another knock from downstairs, pushier this time. A knock that screams, “I know you’re in there!” I look at the clock, it’s 2 a.m. Someone fumbles with the lock. My heart. A barrage of thoughts, overlapping, fighting for attention: What day is it? What’s wrong with me? My mother and an East Indian man? Is it true? Did Father know?

  Who is downstairs?

  A lot of thinking but I still don’t move from the bed. I wrap the duvet around my face. Then I hear her voice, from out the window, louder than the knock that came through the house: “Maya, are you in there? Maya, it’s Leah!”

  “Aunt Leah?” The words are so quiet enough that only I can hear them. “Aunt Leah, I’m in here.” No louder that time, but more determined. I wipe my fingers across my sweaty forehead and suddenly long for the warm feeling that family brings.

  I reach the front door in my socked feet and nightgown. The floor spins under my feet, the ceiling dips and circles above me. I turn the knob.

  “Maya!” It’s Aunt Leah, dressed in a black overcoat that reaches the floor, her eyes tired but frantic. She’s not wearing glasses and she has pink eye shadow covering each lid. Sparks of orange and yellow are bouncing off her dark hair and reflecting into the night.

  I fall to her feet.

  Soon I am lying on the couch in the living room and Aunt Leah is holding my hand and kneeling beside me on the carpet. A facecloth is wet with ice and on my forehead. I open my eyes to look at her: “What are you doing here?” It is strange to be talking to someone from my family, face to face.

  “Your father sent me, Maya — well, your grandmother made the final decision for me to come.” Her voice is stern but friendly and it invades my ears like a poker waking up the fire. “You know how she and your grandfather won’t fly. They would rather die in a ten-car pile up than buckle themselves into a jetliner seat.” She blows out air and looks up at the ceiling for a moment. “Myself, I had to take the red-eye because it’s cheaper.”

  “But . . . why?” I sip water from a purple cup that Leah holds up to my lips.

  “Maya, your dad called Grandma. He doesn’t know what to do anymore. He feels that he’s lost you.”

  I shake my head and the tears come.

  “Do you know where he is now, Maya?”

  My words swim out like a prayer: “He’s not really living here much anymore.”

  “For how long?” She seems less surprised than I thought she’d be.

  “He’s been around, but I’ve been looking after myself for the most part. I haven’t seen him much in the past week.”

  “Maya, you don’t deserve this, babe. I’m here to help, okay?”

  “I’m just fine,” I say. “I’ve been managing just fine. I like having the house to myself.” I arch my back to sit up but lie back with the dizziness.

  “I knew it.” She is standing now and pacing the living room in her Doc Martens, which make rubber clunks on the floor. In her head she is cursing my father, screaming inside. “What is he trying to prove?” she finally says out loud.

  “Do you think he’s coming back?”

  She kneels back down beside me. “Maya, I’m sorry, we don’t know. He didn’t say he wasn’t living here when he called, he just said he wanted someone to come get you. That it was all too much for him.”

  “Does this have to do with Connie?”

  “That woman he’s seeing? I don’t know, Maya, really.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “I’m going to take you home with me. You can’t stay here by yourself anymore.”

  “I can’t?”

  “You’ll come with me to Toronto until your father figures things out.”

  She takes me to the hospital, to Emergency, where I flirt with sleep for three hours on a stretcher in a hallway. Aunt Leah stands over me, holding my hand, stroking my forehead, making trips back and forth to the vending machine for Humpty Dumpty chips (she’s had three bags so far) and Colt Cola. I can’t eat. The room revolves around me and the molecules that make up my body seem to be spreading apart until there is nothing left of me. At the beginning of the fourth hour, when Aunt Leah has taken off her trench c
oat and stands over me in a pink tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of jeans that start exactly at her waist and stick tight to her legs all the way down, she speaks to me in a monotone: “Hang in there, kiddo, you can do this. At least you’re not alone in a teepee.” She laughs, but I don’t.

  I fall back asleep not knowing for sure if I have even woken up.

  Awake for sure now because I have to pee. It stings me from the inside.

  “Leah, I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Okay, My.” (She has started shortening my name and I hate it.) She holds her arm out so I can lift myself out of the hospital bed. I shuffle my socks across the shiny floor, with her following behind with my IV bag. She hands it over to me and waits outside the door when I go.

  “I think I can manage this myself,” I yell at her through the door. I am not sure where my bitterness has come from, but sense that maybe it should be aimed at my father.

  “Okay, My,” she says. “Be careful not to drop your arm or else blood will start coming up the tube.”

  I only have the flu. At least that’s what the doctors think. I am replacing my fluids. Aunt Leah has told them that my father is on vacation and she is babysitting. All I need is one night in hospital to be observed and get fluids.

  At night, Leah goes back to my house and I sleep alone in the green room, with a tube coming out of the top of my hand feeding me a continual drink. There are two other beds in the room, empty beds. The nurse only checks on me every few hours, but I have a button to press if I need someone.

  Is this how Mother felt when we left her here? Was she more frightened?

  The room is dark except for lights over the other beds. Dark enough to sleep, but I can’t. I wish I had remembered to bring the journal. I want to finish it. I want to hear what happened with my mother and Amar. I don’t hate her for it.

  Scratching.

  Something is scratching at the window, trying to get in. It couldn’t be a prairie dog — we’re on the sixth floor.

  More scratching and some banging, like a huge branch is hitting the window (but the trees don’t grow this high).