Girl in Shades

by Allison Baggio

  “You don’t understand. No one ever talked about it . . . what was I supposed to do?”

  “How did you find out then?”

  “Mom explained it to me after I had returned from visiting you in Saskatoon that first time. I was obsessed with the fact that you didn’t look like anyone else in the family. I was jealous, I think. And so to shut me up, she told me what had happened. She said that your Grandma McCann told her and Dad at the hospital when you were born — saying they deserved to know.”

  “Did Father know who my real father was?”

  “Mom and Dad told him. I don’t think your parents ever talked about it after that point. They seemed to think that if you don’t talk about something, maybe it doesn’t really exist.”

  “You should have told me.” I stand up, my voice creating vapour in the cool air. “You are nothing but a big, fat liar.”

  I start to walk away and Aunt Leah stops me with her inner voice . . . Maya, please, no, what did I do? For fuck’s sake, it’s not my fault.

  I turn around and glare at her. And decide to use the best ammunition I have to fight back — what I heard her thinking a couple nights ago when she got home from her “perfume” job.

  “And by the way, I know about what you’re really doing when you go ‘out’! How do you think your parents would feel to hear that you are having sex with men for money?”

  I leave Aunt Leah shocked and speech/thought-less on the frozen concrete.

  I don’t get far down St. Clair. And then like magic, I see him walking towards me.

  He looks older. His hair is cut a little shorter and he’s wearing a navy blue pea coat, blowing into his bare hands as he steps off the streetcar.

  When he looks up and sees me, we both stop. I think my mouth hangs open, because I feel winter in my lungs.

  “Elijah,” I say.

  He smiles. A lopsided sort of smile like always.

  “Just the girl I was coming to see.”

  It turns out that my father called Mrs. Roughen and “suggested” that Elijah come see me at Aunt Leah’s — like I can’t make my own friends or something. I’m a bit angry with him for pretending to care at this point. But secretly, I’m so, so happy to see Elijah again.

  I tell him that I don’t want to go home. So instead, we go down to the Retro Café and have breakfast for lunch. I feel extremely grown up sitting with him in the booth. He tells me about how he and his mother have moved in with her new boyfriend, Conrad. He’s smoking a cigarette while he talks. The one nasty habit he says he still hasn’t been able to give up.

  He tells me that he thinks “city life is fucking awesome” and he would never want to go back to living in “a dried up place like Saskatoon.”

  I’m attracted to the gorgeous turquoise light I catch glimpses of around his head — it seems almost to be mixing with mine over the table. And at one point, I hear him think that I am looking cute, which makes me feel pretty good.

  Mostly I nod and smile, scrunching up my toes in my shoes when I don’t know what to say. I do remember to thank him for the bees. And to apologize for telling him I hated him after he did it. He says he always knew it wasn’t true.

  When I get back to the apartment, Aunt Leah is waiting for me.

  “Where have you been?” she asks, looking hurt, pulling her fingers through her long hair.

  “Just walking around,” I say. “I didn’t go far.”

  “Listen, Maya, about what you said . . .”

  “Forget it, really. Whatever you want to do.”

  “It’s not what you think. It’s just an escort service — I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. And I’m getting out of it, really.”

  “I said — whatever you want to do.”

  “I want to go back to school, Maya. To university . . . for something big. This will help me do it all on my own.”

  “Okay.” I’m feeling a bit sorry for her now, because I can hear her whimpering from inside. Who am I to tell her how to live?

  “But Maya, how did you find out?”

  “I just guessed.”

  I don’t tell her about the night when I heard her think it. She was sneaking in, not smelling of perfume, and I heard her think it clear through the dark air: I’ve got to stop doing this . . . that guy smelled like garlic. I’ve got to clean him off me right now.

  “I’m sorry, Maya.”

  “It has nothing to do with me,” I say. I go into Buffy’s blue room and hide my face in her pillow, inhaling the smell of her almond face cream.

  I wake to hands touching my face.

  “Maya, is that you? What are you doing in my bed?”

  “Sorry, Buffy,” I say. “I needed privacy.”

  “We all need that, now don’t we?” She puts her camera down on her desk with a clunk.

  “Did you take some good pictures today?”

  “You tell me.” She opens an envelope and spreads out photos around me on the bed. Pictures of the spray of a water fountain, a bird warming eggs in a nest, chocolate bars laid out on a table, and one of me.

  “That’s me!”

  “How does it look, describe it to me,” Buffy says.

  “Well, my eyes are closed.”

  “I took it when you were sleeping.”

  “My hair is messed up, and hanging a bit over my face. I have a pillow in a headlock.” She laughs and says she figured. “I look old, like a woman almost.”

  “We are practically women from the moment we come out.”

  She is sitting on the bed now, and hugs her knees up to her chest so that she looks like one small bony ball. Almost like I could pick her up and roll her down a hill if she would let me.

  I can hardly wait for Buffy to fall asleep that night so I can listen to her dream-thoughts. When they start up, I am surprised to hear my name woven within the sentences: Maya, you are not alone in anything you do.

  It’s like someone is talking to me through Buffy’s dreams.

  Don’t resist life. It’s what makes you, you.

  The words are confusing me. I have to know for sure if it is Buffy talking so I walk into her room and turn on the light in the hall. She is in her bed, without her glasses, and her eyes are closed.

  Everything that happens is for your higher good.

  Her lips aren’t moving.

  Four days later in the middle of the night, Buffy is shaking my shoulders awake. Her fingers are clammy on my skin.

  “Maya, get up! We have to go to the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s your Aunt Leah.”

  “She’s not really my aunt.”

  “Well, she’s hurt.”

  When we get there, Aunt Leah’s face is swollen, black with red bits, so I can hardly recognize her.

  “Aunt Leah?”

  “She can’t hear you, Maya. The doctor said that she’s still unconscious. How does she look?”

  “She looks terrible.” I stare at a quiet Aunt Leah. The only sound coming from her bed is beep, beep, beep. Buffy steps up to the bed, which comes almost up to her waist. She lowers her hand on Aunt Leah’s face and shudders.

  “Ouch, she’s banged up pretty good.” She reaches around herself for her camera.

  “You’re taking pictures? Buffy, you can’t.”

  “She may want to see these someday.”

  “But it’s so gruesome.”

  Buffy holds her arm straight out, fingers touching Aunt Leah’s nose and takes three steps backwards. Click, click, click.

  “Got enough yet?”

  “For now.”

  I hold Aunt Leah’s hand in mine. Her nails are painted fuchsia, her skin white; there is blood dried along her cuticles.

  “She really is an amazing woman,” Buffy says into the dim light of the hospital room.

  “
They always say that about someone who’s sick,” I say, my eyes swelling with tears.

  “But she really does the best she can. I’ve known that since I first came to see her about sharing the apartment. She’s a good friend to you too.” I look at Buffy, her head turned towards the corner of the room.

  “I can’t lose anyone else, Buffy.”

  “I know, Maya, no one can.”

  In two days, Aunt Leah is well enough to come back to the apartment. Aside from the black over her eye socket and a broken rib that hurts when she breathes, she looks the same.

  “Really girls, I can do it myself,” she says when Buffy and I hold out our arms to lift her out of the bed. But when she steps down, she grimaces and puts her hand to her chest.

  “You’re going to be just fine, Leah. You just need some rest is all.”

  Aunt Leah’s middle is wrapped in a thick bandage. I see it when she gets undressed, slides herself onto the couch and says, “That’s better.” She closes her eyes, and Buffy and I sit around her in kitchen chairs pulled into the living room.

  “Aunt Leah, what happened?” I say.

  “I slipped is all,” Aunt Leah says, opening her eyes. “I was coming out of the job centre and someone had puked or something on the sidewalk. If it wasn’t puke, it was some sort of chunky ice cream, or mushroom soup. Anyway, I was in such a hurry to get home that I stepped right into it. Stepped right in and my feet came out from under me. I landed on a hot dog cart. The guy had to jump out of the way. I cracked my rib on the corner of it and must have banged my eye into something else. God, I don’t remember anything after the slip.”

  “Leah, you were so lucky.”

  Buffy and I sit staring at Aunt Leah, me really seeing her and Buffy only pretending that she does.

  From her head she tells me the true story, almost like she knows I can hear it: He beat me up. This is the end of it, really it is.

  “Would you rather be burned or buried after you die?”

  Aunt Leah asks Buffy and me this when we’re all watching Another World in the living room, Aunt Leah on the couch, Buffy and I sprawled out on the floor creating a person arch around the tiny television. Twins Vicki and Marley are cat-fighting on the screen.

  “I guess burned,” Buffy says. “I think I was buried alive in a past life and the thought of it petrifies me.”

  “I’d be buried,” Aunt Leah says. “Back where I came from, no hot flames involved. What about you, Maya?”

  I remember my mother, lying in the box and being lowered into the ground, hiding her down there.

  “I want to be cremated too,” I say. “Burned.”

  The phone rings from beside me on the coffee table. I pick it up and say hello. Nothing. Tiny specs of static on the other end.

  “Who’s there, Maya?” Buffy asks.

  “Hello?” I say again. “No one’s there.” I hang up the receiver. Vicki has just called Marley a witch for stealing Jake away from her. Marley is crying, like it’s all too much for her.

  “Aunt Leah, did you know that Father sent Elijah to make sure I was okay?”

  “Who?”

  “Elijah. Mrs. Roughen’s son. From Saskatoon.”

  “No, I didn’t know that. Maybe you should call your dad yourself to let him know you’re okay.”

  “I like how things are now.”

  “She doesn’t have to call him,” Buffy says. “What he did, well, it was criminal.”

  “Thank you, Buffy,” I say.

  “You know, Maya, you really have to go to school soon,” Aunt Leah says.

  “Where?” I say.

  “We’ll find you a school around here. You have to finish grade eight.” She talks soft and slow so as to not upset her middle.

  The next week I start school at Winona Drive Public School, cold cement playground, only a fifteen minute walk from the apartment. I’m the only new girl in grade eight and it’s lonely at my desk among the thirty other kids in the class — all different kinds of kids. I feel very inner-city.

  The teacher, Mr. Pickle, starts the first class, English. They have been reading Shakespeare, The Tempest.

  Mr. Pickle adds to how uncomfortable I feel in this sea of new faces by asking me to read out loud to the class. My armpits start to sweat underneath the lime sweater Aunt Leah bought me, while all the little eyes burn gazes through my skull and hundreds of little thoughts express their boredom to themselves.

  “We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on; And our little life/ Is rounded with a sleep,” I read. My voice cracks when I say it and everyone laughs. I decide then that I have all the friends I need.

  “If you had the choice, would you rather be blind or deaf?” Aunt Leah asks me that night before Buffy gets home. She is lying on the couch again, even though she doesn’t need to be there anymore. She’s healed.

  “Blind,” I say on the next beat.

  “Yeah, but how can you know what’s going on if you can’t even see it?” Aunt Leah asks.

  “Buffy knows.” Her questions are starting to annoy me.

  “God, I can’t even imagine, Maya. Not being able to see. I would pick deaf for sure, although I’d miss music.”

  “I want my mother back,” I say then, not knowing where it came from, but maybe from realizing that my mother can’t see or hear where she is. My face contorts and tears dangle on my eyelashes.

  “Aw shucks, Maya. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Aunt Leah puts her arms around me but I push her away.

  “No, I just want things to go back to how they were. I want my parents back. I want my friends back. I want my house back.”

  “But Steven sold the house,” she says seriously. I can tell she is insulted that I pushed her away — red shoots out around her head, burning like electricity in the air, but I don’t care.

  “Typical,” I say.

  “You should call him, Maya.”

  “Nah.”

  When she gets home, Buffy suggests we hold a séance, to try and contact my mother.

  “You’ll see then that she’s still around you — that you’re never alone.”

  She lights candles and puts them on top of the television set, on the coffee table, on the end table, and over the fridge in the kitchen. Buffy, Aunt Leah, and I each sit cross-legged in a circle. I put my mother’s healing stones in the centre. “Yes, that’s good,” Buffy says when she feels them in her hand. “Things that your mother touched will help invoke her spirit.”

  We hold hands. We turn out all the lights. We close our eyes and Buffy chants my mother’s name: “Marigold, Marigold, Marigold.” After ten minutes, Aunt Leah sighs and says she is going to bed, that this is pointless and that “if Marigold wanted to come back to earth, she certainly wouldn’t waste her time in this crappy apartment.”

  “I’ll keep trying with you,” Buffy says when Aunt Leah leaves. “She’s out there somewhere. We just have to wait for her. You believe, don’t you?” I nod, because yes, I do believe in things that others can’t see; really I have no choice but to.

  “Buffy, sometimes I see and hear weird stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?” she asks. We are still holding hands.

  “Colour, light — around people’s heads.”

  “Those are their auras, Maya.” She says this like it’s no big deal at all, like for her all sight is only something she’s heard about. “I’ve heard that everyone has auras around them all the time. There are different levels to the body, you know, more than the physical part, that’s for sure.”

  “Sometimes, I hear stuff too.” This makes her take off her square glasses so I can see her foggy eyes. “What kind of stuff?”

  “What people are thinking. It comes when it feels like it, I can’t control it.” Buffy brings her lips together to hide her gaping mouth, and runs her flaky hand over the I see with my heart tattoo on her leg.r />
  “Describe it to me.”

  “It’s not an actual sound. But more like a feeling of a sound. I hear what people are thinking, inside my own mind, like it was me thinking it.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Sometimes it annoys me, but I’m used to it I guess. Sometimes it makes me laugh to hear what people think is important.”

  “Have you ever heard what I was thinking?”

  “Only when you’re sleeping. You tell me things.”

  Buffy says nothing, only holds three fingertips over her lips.

  “Who knows, maybe it’s not even real. Maybe I’m making it all up in my own imagination.”

  “It’s as real as anything else, Maya,” Buffy says. “You can never really be sure, I guess.”

  “Buffy, my father was not my real father.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I read my mother’s journal. My real father lives in India.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  And then, like thunder — bang! A smash against glass. I look down, the malachite stone is gone, like my mother had picked it up and thrown it against the window. “She’s here,” I say to Buffy; she squeezes my hand.

  We sit together in the dark for two more hours, and when nothing else happens, we fall asleep on the floor.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After the bees chased my mother’s fanfare away (an event that was written up in the Saskatoon Post with the headline “Woman’s Final Days Marred by Angry Swarm”), it seemed that there was nothing left to do but wait. So I waited. My mother waited. My father paced, and made phone calls, and went to work, and cooked himself hamburgers on the barbeque, and mowed the grass, and filtered out anyone who showed up at our front door.

  Until one morning, he let someone in.

  An older lady, with a black sweater fastened with a brooch over a tiny white T-shirt, glasses tucked into her palm, delicate folds of skin around her mouth, grey wisps of hair that must have fallen from her bun on the plane — she seemed to extend into the space around her head and torso. Grandmother McCann.