Girl in Shades

by Allison Baggio

  Once off the bus in New Delhi, I find my way back to Grandfather Raj’s guided only by the dim memory of my first visit there. I knock, three times, and finally let myself into the dimly lit house, learning soon that he’s sick in bed and hasn’t the strength to show enthusiasm at my return.

  I’m happy to find that my return plane ticket has been waiting for me while I have been living with Amar in Varanasi. And all it takes to arrange my flight back to Toronto is for me to bring Grandfather Raj his rotary dial in bed and prop his head up with my stained arm. Canada has been fading like a childhood dream: the people I knew there — Aunt Leah, Buffy, Elijah, Corey Hart. The things — school desks, streetcars, shopping malls, television, cleanliness. My last night in India progresses slowly, my body laid out on the floor of Grandfather Raj’s guest room (after growing discomfort from the softness of the bed), while he snores from his bedroom, sending rumbles through the stale air of the house.

  Aunt Leah is waiting for me when my plane lands in Toronto. When I called her to tell her I was coming home, her voice came back raspy and breathy, like she was a ghost on the other end. We hadn’t spoken since I left, but I had sent her letters and found a pile from her waiting for me at Grandfather Raj’s. She was back in school, studying theatre. She wanted to know when I was coming back.

  The first thing she does, after she hugs me, is tell me I stink and that I’m too skinny. Just like a mother would.

  “And what have you done to your hair?” she says, holding a dreadlock up in the air like she just peeled a leech off her foot. Her own hair is cut short, neat and tidy around her scalp and dyed a kind of plum colour. She looks like she’s lost weight.

  “They’re called dreadlocks,” I say. “They are all the Indian rage among those who don’t wash.”

  I squint my eyes. The shiny chrome and speckled carpet of the terminal is making me dizzy. Advertising boards assault me with their beautiful people and catchy slogans.

  “You told me you looked different, but I never would have imagined this!” She scans me up and down, scraping her lips with her teeth and shaking her head.

  “Can we go now?” I say, tired of being gawked at.

  “Maya, what happened to you over there?” She asks this with all seriousness and so I answer her with the same.

  “I threw up a lot, I slept outside, I smoked a hash pipe, and I met my real father.” Her eyes blink wide.

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s not really a fatherly type. He’s a sadhu — y’know, one of India’s wandering holy men — which means he doesn’t have a lot, nor does he want a lot, but that’s fine.”

  “Maya, you’re so different!”

  “It has been two years, Leah.”

  People stare at me as I walk with Aunt Leah through the airport. I guess it’s my crusty pink top that gapes open in the front, allowing the black letters of “Maya” to peek out from the skin on my chest. Maybe it’s the rings on my toes, or my hair, or maybe there’s something else different about me, something more important.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The apartment feels hollow without Buffy in it. Aunt Leah tells me that she’s married a deaf man and they have been away honeymooning in Africa for the last three weeks.

  “God, I wish you could have been at the wedding, Maya. It was so gorgeous.” Aunt Leah scrapes scrambled eggs onto my plate. It’s my third morning home — August 5, 1993.

  “Don’t they find it hard to communicate with each other?” I push the eggs to the corner of my plate, my stomach still a bit queasy.

  “Buffy holds his hands when he does sign language and she does it back to him. She’s getting quite good.” Aunt Leah twitters her fingers in front of her face. “And he knows how to speak to a certain extent, so that helps.”

  “Good for them.”

  “As she said during her wedding speech, with her ears and his eyes, they’re a complete set!”

  “Makes sense, I guess.”

  “Ben is such a sweet guy — you’d like him.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s a musician or something.”

  “No, he’s a photographer too. That’s why they’re in Africa, you know, photographing the world’s most powerful beasts. She finally has someone to give her some valid critiques of her work.”

  “I’m happy for her. How’s school going?”

  Aunt Leah stands and crosses her hands on her chest. “Maya, I love it. I have finally found my calling. The lights, the crowd.” She raises her hands towards the fixture over the dining room table. “I have found what makes me passionate. I am living my most authentic life.” She drops her head and swings her arms out behind her in a bow.

  Aunt Leah wants to become an actress. Last year, she enrolled herself in the dramatic arts program at Ryerson. She said the pretending she did in her previous jobs was what inspired her to get into acting. “Real world experience” is what she called it.

  I hold my hand out towards her, my mother’s healing stones in my palm.

  “Aunt Leah, I want you to have these.” She looks down at my hand.

  “But they were your mother’s,” she says.

  “I know. I don’t need them anymore.” She picks them up. “Keep them in your pocket for luck.” She closes her fingers around them and looks up at me.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asks, and I shrug. “He’s been calling. Steven. He still wants to see you, if you’re interested.” I shrug again. “Not to rush you or anything.”

  “I’ve got a good idea of the forgiveness I need to make. And to who.”

  “Elijah Roughen called too, looking for you.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him you went to see your father and he wanted me to tell you he was sorry.” I can’t tell her he’s engaged, she thinks.

  “I don’t care if he’s engaged,” I say, and she looks up with her eyebrows kissing her hairline. “I’m never getting married.”

  “Never say never,” Aunt Leah says, standing up to dump my uneaten eggs into the garbage bin.

  It takes me two weeks — a few days after the eighth anniversary of my mother’s death, and my own twentieth birthday — to ask Aunt Leah to call him. He’s in Toronto two days later.

  I’ve got the address of his hotel — the Comfort something — written on a little piece of paper she gave me, his room number scrawled underneath.

  Room 309. It all comes down to Room 309.

  I have no idea what I’m going to say when he opens the door. Years of pretending things didn’t exist have left me with a distinct fear of confrontation. And perhaps that’s why it’s taken me so long to agree to see him. Why I travelled to India to try and escape the memory of him.

  After taking the subway to Yonge Station — forced to stand amid the rush hour commuters, stuck under some guy’s sweaty armpit — I finally make it into the late afternoon sunlight and walk down Charles Street. Everyone around me seems to be going about their business — sweeping sidewalks, drinking coffee, arguing with each other. I see the mosaic of colours above their heads and absorb their collective inner complaints about the weather and the long work hours, and the pinch of their high heeled shoes. I want to tell them all to shut up, to toughen up because it could always be worse than this — it is worse than this, somewhere.

  The hallway outside his room smells like cigarette smoke has been slowly seeping out from under the doors for decades. To prepare mentally, I try to focus on all that my father went through: losing a wife, a daughter. And I think for a moment about the things he sacrificed to be there for Mother — and how he never told anyone her secret.

  I knock on the door. I lean over and fiddle with my toe ring while I wait for it to open.

  “Maya?”

  I look up, and for a tiny second, I almost believe that this female voice could belong to my father. But it’s not him, o
f course.

  “Maya, you’re here. Come in.”

  This voice and this face I remember distinctly from the time shortly after I lost my mother. Her skin is still soft and olive like an exotic porcelain doll’s. She’s got red, red lips and hoop earrings with diamonds on them. She’s wearing a black sundress that shows her cleavage. She’s more beautiful than I remember.

  “Connie, I told you I wanted to get the door.” This voice is my father’s. It echoes and is coming from what I assume is the bathroom.

  Then he comes to stand in front of me. Beside Connie.

  “Maya,” he says. “You’re all grown up now.”

  “Yup, seven years will do that. Just had my twentieth birthday — Aunt Leah made cupcakes.”

  “Leah’s been the best, hasn’t she?” he says, but he’s interrupted.

  “Well, I think you’re just gorgeous, my dear,” Connie says in her crisp Spanish accent. “Your eyes are beautiful. All you need to do is blow out that hair and you’d be all set.”

  “It doesn’t blow out,” I tell her. “These are knots.”

  “Well, boy cuts are really in right now.”

  “Connie, go get Hailey ready,” my father says, and she goes back into the bathroom. He has tears in his eyes. He’s got way more wrinkles than the last time I saw him and the grey has taken over all his hair. He’s wearing an aqua striped Ralph Lauren golf shirt and khaki pants that fall under his heels. His face is clean-shaven. His “Mari” tattoo is well covered — if it’s still there at all.

  “Who’s Hailey?” I say. I’m standing just inside the door now, and he has his arm reaching out as if he’s going to shut it behind me.

  “My daughter, Maya. Connie is my wife now, and three years ago we had a daughter.”

  “Hmmm, and you didn’t think to invite me to the wedding?” I say jokingly, but by the grey blobs showing up around my father’s face, I know that he is in no mood for jokes.

  “I would have,” he says seriously. “I would have invited you if we were, you know, in touch.” He coughs uncomfortably.

  “No matter.”

  Then I smile. And that, that tiny lifting of lip corners, is the extent of my own apology.

  He starts in on his.

  “Maya, I don’t know how to begin to say sorry for what I did. For so long I’ve wanted to make things right again between us, but I didn’t want to push you.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “I was just so shaken up back then, about everything that had happened, it was like I wasn’t myself anymore. I was walking around the world in a daze, and I had no idea what to do next.”

  “I think I felt the same way,” I say.

  “To leave you alone like that, it was unacceptable, but as foolish as it sounds now, I thought it was the best thing. I never felt like I was a proper father to you. I had so much hidden bitterness towards your mother.”

  I raise my eyebrows at him, but he doesn’t stop.

  “And when I saw you . . . I thought of him. Your biological father. It reminded me over and over what had happened, and after she died, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I just didn’t know what to do or say to make it all better.”

  “There was nothing you could have said—”

  “Quite honestly, I was selfish. Totally selfish.”

  I don’t disagree with him.

  “I also want you to know that I never stopped worrying about you. You probably didn’t know, but I checked on you most nights when you were sleeping, just stood at your doorway like an idiot half the time watching your little chest rise and fall and feeling more lost with each breath. I sat in my car and watched you go into school some mornings. I talked to your teacher to make sure you were doing okay.”

  “I felt you around me sometimes.”

  “It really was hard for me to lose our family.”

  “You’ve got a pretty nice family now,” I say. “You didn’t need me or Mother for that.”

  “Please don’t blame Connie for this, Maya.” He’s sweating at the temples. “She didn’t even know you were still around. She still thinks you were gone to live with your grandparents. Of course, she wouldn’t have let this stupidity go on.”

  “I don’t blame anyone,” I say. “I’ve learned one important thing in the last two years: it feels a lot lighter to just let go of everything.”

  “It’s just that when I lost your mother—”

  “When we lost her,” I say. “When we both lost her.”

  “Yes, when we lost her, it was a huge blow. All those years of waiting for things to get better with her, and then, well they got worse. They got as bad as they could be.”

  “Death doesn’t have to be sad,” I say, surprising myself and wondering about my own sincerity.

  “You’re brave, just like your mother was,” he says. “The truth is that I think I realized that your mother was never mine to lose.” His hair is slicked back off his face with some sort of gel. I smell citrus when he leans in to hug me.

  It is an awkward sort of hug — stiff and distant — but one that seems appropriate and long-awaited.

  Connie comes back into the room with a young child squirming in her arms. She has golden brown pigtails and wears an OshKosh jumper. A halo of purple light around her entire body seems to reach to the ceiling. She has my father’s eyes — serious blue eyes that question and consider.

  “Hailey, this is Maya,” Connie says. “Your big sister. She just returned from a long vacation to India. You know where the Taj Mahal is, don’t you, Hailey?” Connie turns to me. “She’s very smart.”

  Hailey runs from her mother and wraps herself around my father’s leg. He picks her up and nuzzles her hair, kisses her softly on the cheek. Now that’s a father.

  I take a step towards them. “Hello, Hailey,” I say in a whisper, feeling like I’ve entered some sort of time warp. That, or all the years are happening at once; maybe Hailey is actually me. Maybe Steven Devine is actually my father.

  He puts the little girl down and Connie grabs her by the hand.

  “We’ll wait for you in the lobby,” she says, leading Hailey out the door.

  “Bye, Maya,” Hailey says. I wonder where we’re going now, I hear her think.

  And from Connie’s head, just a little bit of humming that matches the apple-green streaks bouncing off her forehead. Warm green, like a real mother.

  “Does she know?” I ask him when the door has clicked behind them and we have sat together on the couch by the window.

  “Know what?”

  “That I’m not really your daughter.”

  “You are.”

  “Well, not really.”

  He rubs the flats of his fingers over his forehead and then scratches his head near his temple. “No, Maya, I haven’t gone into that with her.” His expression hangs limp like he has no strength to lift it. He studies my eyes for a reaction. He looks into me so hard that I have to look away. Then, I find myself smiling at how surreal the situation feels.

  “Pretty big secret to keep,” I say.

  “I guess I’ve gotten good at it.”

  I smile again and he grins and looks at his feet. There is a long pause between us. “I think I’m going to go home now,” I say to break it.

  “Maya, you’re welcome to stay longer.”

  “But Connie and Hailey are waiting.”

  “I don’t feel like I’ve apologized enough.”

  “It’s not bad, it’s not good. It’s just how it is,” I say. I stand up from the green acrylic loveseat and take a step towards the door. “And I accept your apology.”

  He leans over and hugs me again, a bit softer than the first time. “What are you going to do now, Maya?”

  I shrug my shoulders and bottom lip together. “Find my own home,” I guess.

  “Take care
of yourself,” he says. Don’t forget about me.

  “How could I?” I say, and he smiles.

  I turn and walk down the hall, the word “forgiveness” bouncing around in my brain. When I get home I tell Aunt Leah everything and she holds me in her arms. She doesn’t notice I’m not actually crying.

  The next day, I tell her I’m leaving.

  “But you just got back,” Aunt Leah says, her mouth open in shock.

  “I can’t be here. Not in the city with all these people around me. I feel suffocated, like the buildings are going to fall on me.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I’m going out to Peterborough. I’ll buy a tent, find some campground.” I don’t tell her about the cabin — it seems almost too intimate to mention aloud.

  “I don’t think you should do that. Winter’s coming . . . you can’t be out there on your own.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll find a job, lodging, whatever. I’ll figure it out just like I did in India. If there is one thing I learned out there, it’s that I don’t really need anyone but myself to get by.”

  She looked at me for a long time, like she was taking a mental picture of each curve of my face, each strand of my hair. “You’d better call and let me know what you’re doing. Otherwise, I’m coming out there for you.”

  “I will.”

  “And take warm socks and food and all that. Don’t be foolish.”

  She hugs me and I whisper “thank you” into the heat of her hair.

  I don’t fit in on the Greyhound to Peterborough. Everyone has baseball hats and T-shirts with beer logos on them. They say “fuck” a lot and talk loudly to each other over the seats. They munch on Doritos and throw the wrappers on the ground. The guy in front of me turns around and asks me if I want to get laid.

  “No, thank you” is my response. I clutch an empty notebook, a thick one that would fit notes for five courses. Everything I own is in a duffle bag at my feet: two pairs of pants, three pairs of underwear, a grey sweater Aunt Leah gave me for the trip, my mother’s journal, and a small Ziploc bag of almonds and cashews. The butterfly bracelets, now tarnished, are still on my wrists. I have a brand new blue-ink Bic pen tucked in the bag’s front pocket.