Rabbit Ears

by Maggie De Vries

  I look for signs of life. Nothing. The house looks abandoned, and the yellow tape cordons off the path as well as the yard. I reach the corner, cross and start down the sidewalk on the same side as the house.

  Two years ago, the front yard was littered with toys, the rose bushes were covered in blooms, the grass was green and those boys were having a gas.

  I pause in front of the house and peer at the lawn, at the path. I still don’t see any blood.

  I’m lifting the police tape and stepping onto that path when a car comes around the corner. I pay no attention until it speeds up and draws to the curb right behind me, facing the wrong way and screeching just a bit as the driver applies the brakes. The driver is a man and he is out of the car and after me, but I’ve already dropped the tape and taken off at top speed. This can’t be happening. Again!

  “You kids make me sick,” he shouts, “coming around here peering into corners.”

  “Dad!” Another voice—a girl’s.

  I slow down and glance over my shoulder.

  His daughter’s in the car, but she has the window open and she’s leaning out. “Dad!” She almost screams this time. “I’m going to call the police,” the man shouts, but at least he has given up the chase. “Can’t you people give my father some privacy?”

  I’ve never read the obituary section before, but on Tuesday morning I slip out of bed while Mom is still sleeping, ease open the front door, grab the paper and take it up to my room. Whatever happens, I don’t want Mom to start thinking what I’m thinking. Not yet.

  There it is, right at the top.

  Alan Grimsby: 1919–1998

  Survived by his loving companion of forty-three years, Jennifer Ainsworth, and his four children, David, Adrian, Cedric, and Charlotte, and seven grandchildren.

  The funeral will be held at St. Anselm’s Anglican Church, Saturday, October 3, at 11 a.m.

  That’s only four days from today. I read and reread, but find few clues. It makes no mention of how he died. No bullet to the brain here. And it says nothing about his life either. Except.

  Four children. Which was the shouting man with the daughter?

  And what about that “loving companion”?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Beth

  The days that follow pass somehow. Mom goes off in the car every evening, looking, and comes home late every night, exhausted and alone. She calls the Missing Persons Department every day, and learns nothing. We eat what we can scrape together, or order pizza. I spend what’s left of my babysitting stash on candy to get me through the long lonely evenings, and I master three new card tricks while I’m eating it. I avoid Jane and Samantha and skip classes, or doze in the back row.

  I feel like I’m trapped inside a tunnel. I’ve decided to go to that funeral, and in the meantime all I can do is shuffle along in the dark. Ideas float into my head, but I hustle them out again. I could talk to Mom, or knock on the door of that house or go downtown myself. But every one of those ideas scares the hell out of me. The funeral scares me too. But I know I can do it. Until then, I’m mastering a really complicated trick shuffle.

  On Thursday, Michelle corners me at the end of the hall. “Where’s Kaya?” she says.

  I can’t find it in me to be friendly with this annoying girl, but I do tell her the truth. “Gone,” I say. “She ran away last weekend.”

  Michelle opens her mouth to ask another question, and I cut her short. “Listen, that’s all I know. Okay?”

  Michelle wanders off looking crushed, and I walk straight out the front door of the school. If I hurry, I can make it home in time for the perfect trio: Häagen-Dazs ice cream (Chocolate Chocolate Chip), the next card trick in my book and my favourite soap (All My Children).

  Saturday comes eventually, and Mom’s at work, so I don’t need an excuse for going out at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning in a black skirt and nylons. I have to take a bus to get to the church, but I still make it there twenty minutes before the service. My second funeral, I think, and I push the memories of funeral number one far, far away.

  I take the program from the tall man in black who stands in the doorway, waiting to see if he will ask who I am, but he does not. Other people are coming along behind me and the entranceway is full of people milling about. I’m on the lookout for the shouting son, though I hope he didn’t get a good-enough look at me to recognize me here in such different clothes. As it turns out, I hear him before I see him.

  “What is this? A circus?”

  I freeze and peer through the crowd. It’s easy to pick out who is talking because everyone has turned to look. I can only see part of him, but the woman he is addressing is so tall that her pale, pointy face and her smooth dark hair with its tidy line of white roots rise above the crowd. The loving companion. Jennifer Ainsworth.

  The loving companion has a strangely serene smile on her face, as if this man’s discomfort gives her great pleasure. “No, David,” she says slowly, pacing herself. “This is a funeral. Your father’s funeral.”

  “And you had to invite the whole world.”

  “Lower your voice, David. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  She stops pitching her voice to the crowd after that, and I hear no more from her, but I hear one more petulant comment from the son. “But I don’t want them here,” he says.

  I turn away and enter the rapidly filling sanctuary. Who are all these people? I wonder, and feel a flash of sympathy for that angry man, sharing his father’s funeral with all these strangers. I slip into the back pew. I have a reason for being here, I tell myself, though the man certainly would not approve that reason, and he wouldn’t like it if he connected me with the girl on the sidewalk the other day. Straightening my back against the hard wood, I look around.

  There’s music, but it’s only coming from the organ, I realize, and nobody’s listening. There’s a certain murmuring quality to the crowd, a “we’re at the funeral of a man who shot himself” sort of murmuring, though it feels respectful enough. A bit sad, maybe, just as you’d expect.

  I turn my gaze to the far side of the church and, to my surprise, it falls upon those boys, the ones I’d seen riding the toy car, Paul and Dave. I stare. And realize quickly that they are not the only ones. Over the next minute or two, I count seven boys, teenaged and younger; four of them (including Paul and Dave) I recognize from school. They’re not in a pack like usual; they are in tidy family groups, sitting between moms and dads, hair neatly combed, shoulders square, jacketed. The boys are not jostling and talking. They are silent, waiting.

  Clearly Paul and Dave were not the only ones to hang out with Mr. Grimsby. Boys only, though, I notice.

  I don’t like the thoughts that come to me, so I turn to the folded paper in my lap. The program or whatever you call it. I open it and smooth it across my thighs. Alan Samuel Grimsby, I read. Grim indeed, I am thinking, when I’m startled by a body thrusting itself into the pew right next to me.

  It’s a girl, younger than me, with a familiar face. From the neighbourhood, for sure. Why does she look so terrified? Like a rabbit cornered by a wolverine. And the name comes to me.

  Diana.

  “I think you know my sister,” I say. “Didn’t you and Kaya—?”

  But I don’t get a chance to finish the question.

  “I’m sorry. I, uh, I think I see …” the girl stammers, and rushes from her seat.

  A strange darkness runs through me. Something is very, very wrong, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is.

  The service starts soon after, but I find it hard to pay attention at first. Diana is perched at the end of a pew three rows up, and I’m watching the back of her head. Her neck has a tilt to it that is not quite right. Tears gather in the back of my nose.

  The priest drones on. The congregation stands. The congregation sits. The congregation prays. The priest warns us all away from a life of sin, offers up a clean, pure path to heaven. Suggests Alan Samuel Grimsby is currently on that very path. I hold in a
snort and wonder about the church’s position on suicide. Not to mention whatever else …

  From what the priest says, it sounds like the ashes in the urn up there at the front came from the body of a man who died peacefully at the end of a long life, well lived. Around me, people listen, heads bowed or eyes trained politely on the speaker. No one seems bothered by the lie. Except for me. And Diana, I’m guessing.

  Lies, I should say.

  Then the loving companion gets up, and every head in the room straightens. She weeps as she speaks. “I still remember the first time I came to the house in Montreal,” she says, and has to stop to blow her nose before she can continue. “The toys! He was an antiques dealer back then, but he had such a love for the toys that I don’t know how many he ever sold. He brought them home instead. The kids loved them. Just loved them.” Another long sniff. “I see others here who enjoyed Alan’s kindness and generosity, even as an old man.” She looks at Paul and Dave and the rest. “He loved the children. Always did.”

  I watch her looking at the boys, exulting in the goodness of the man she is remembering, her part in his good works. I feel as if I am seeing right inside her skull.

  Then I see her see Diana.

  And even from the back, I see Diana being seen.

  Diana shrinks down in the pew as if she would fold her shoulders together and disappear. And the loving companion stops talking abruptly. Grief takes her over completely. At least it looks like grief.

  The angry son rises in the front row and strides toward the pulpit. His hand is on her elbow. The priest stands behind them, looking nervous. The angry son pulls at the loving companion’s arm, and everyone hears when he hisses, “That’s enough, Jennifer. Sit down.”

  But she has something else to say, through her tears, right into the microphone so everyone can hear. “You’re the one who did it to him, David,” she cries, “forbidding an old man his grandchildren.”

  He hustles her out then, and everyone can hear their shouting voices, though we can’t make out any more words. I look around for those poor deprived grandchildren, maybe including the girl who shouted “Dad” from the car window, but I don’t think they’re here. Diana remains folded up in her seat.

  The priest steps up and continues where he left off. He has nothing to say about what has just happened in his church.

  As the service ends and the organ music ushers everyone to their feet, I slip into the foyer ahead of the crowd, make my way outside and wait there, determined. Diana has something to tell and I am going to drag it out of her. I push those folded shoulders—that frightened face—out of my mind. Somebody’s got to put words to this.

  I peer in the door and see the family members all in a row: the receiving line. The loving companion is nowhere in sight.

  I hated the receiving line at Dad’s funeral. I loathed standing next to Mom, the whispered words, the scratchy, perfumed hugs, the sympathy, thick and clotted, like sour milk. I hated Kaya all spread out drawing swans in a corner, off the hook as always.

  A voice at my elbow. “You just skulk around everywhere, don’t you.”

  It’s the girl from the angry son’s car. She’s tall, skinny, with beady, deep-set eyes and an oversized mouth. She’s not just the girl from the car. She’s from school too, I realize, just as she draws back and says, “I know you. You’re that girl who hangs out at the end of the hall.”

  “My name’s Beth,” I say.

  “Marlene,” the girl says. Then, “Why were you lurking around outside my grandfather’s house that day?”

  Grandfather. Formal.

  I don’t like the word lurking but have no answer. My mouth is probably hanging open like a fish’s. That’s when I see Diana leave the church. She does not pause, she does not look. She strides through the scattered bodies, and she’s gone.

  Marlene follows my gaze. “Hey! She goes to our school too, doesn’t she?” She does an exaggerated double take. Paul and Dave are following two sets of parents into the parking lot. “And so do they. What’s going on? What were you all doing in there?” Her initial bluster is gone. She seems to have trouble getting the next sentence out. “I wasn’t even in there.”

  I wonder if Marlene is going to cry. I kind of hope she does, actually. She’s ignorant and bossy. She deserves to cry.

  Your grandfather hurt my sister, I think, trying the words on. I imagine the words as sound, vibrating Marlene’s eardrums, reaching her brain. What if I shouted them out? What if they could vibrate every eardrum around?

  Your grandfather hurt my sister.

  My mouth opens. Words come out. “He had that big toy car,” I say. “And I think he had other stuff too. A lot of kids hung out there and played with that stuff.”

  Marlene looks at me and I can tell that she’s not satisfied. “What about you?” she says. “Are you here because you liked to play in my grandfather’s toy car?”

  The angry son comes out then. “Marlene,” he calls before he reaches the bottom step, “get in the car. We’re going.”

  The loving companion, who has appeared from somewhere, is reaching for him, trying to pull him back. “But, the reception,” she says. Then her gaze lights on me. “Get out of here!” she shouts, the words bursting out through a sob. “I can’t take another minute of you girls. Not one more minute. If it wasn’t for you …”

  After a terrifying moment, my limbs thaw and I lumber off, past the bus stop and along the boulevard toward home. I keep up the pace until I’m over the rise and out of sight.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Beth

  On the very last day of Dad’s life, Mom dragged Kaya and me to his bedside in the hospital. Kaya held Dad’s hand. I didn’t want to go near him. He was unconscious and twitchy and his skin was thin and his bones stuck out. There was a smell. And all those tubes.

  Mom sort of hovered, but not in a loving way exactly. Nurses came and went and were kind. Dad made big groaning sounds twice, and shifted in the bed. Once he swore loudly and Mom pushed the button on his morphine dispenser. I would have liked a morphine dispenser of my own that day.

  Then Mom was standing over the bed, arms crossed on her chest, tears pouring down her face in a way that I had not known that tears could pour, especially Mom’s. “Your father’s dying, Beth,” she said through gritted teeth. “Get over here and say goodbye.”

  Kaya was sitting quietly on a chair pulled up right beside the bed, bent over with her head on the sheet and her arms reached out holding Dad’s hand. She was murmuring something, something strange most likely. And she was ignoring both of us.

  I forced myself to cross the room and stand up against the bed. Kaya did not look up. I let an arm reach out and hover above the sheet near Dad’s knee. I let it brush the cotton, the merest whiff of a touch.

  “Goodbye, Dad,” I murmured.

  Mom made a humphing sound through her tears.

  After that, there were hours more to get through.

  I slept through a lot of it, in a big chair in the corner, and left the room as often as I could to get stuff from the vending machine. Once Kaya and I went together to the cafeteria and ate burgers and fries off heavy china.

  We stayed the night, which was weird and terrible. Kaya slept in the second bed in the room, which wasn’t occupied. I slept as best I could in that big chair. And Mom just kind of stood, at least at first. I jolted awake at one point to the sight of her lying full-length along the edge of Dad’s bed, her head in the crook of his neck, her arm across his chest. I closed my eyes, tight, and opened them again. She was murmuring something. I drifted back to sleep, thinking. That was probably the one and only time I ever saw Mom touch Dad except for a shoulder hug or peck on the cheek or lips sometimes, or the necessary touching of the last year when Dad was really sick. Maybe there had been something between them once, long ago. Maybe I was seeing the leftovers from that.

  I must have slept for a long time. The next time I woke, I stayed still, watching Mom through my eyelashes, afraid to
move. She was still stretched out on the bed with Dad, but now she was asleep.

  At last Kaya rolled over, sat up, brought her hands to her face and said, “Mom?”

  Mom was up and off that bed in an instant, like a teenager caught making out with her boyfriend on the couch.

  She collected herself quickly, turning back to Dad on the bed. She touched his face, his neck, and took a great, heaving breath.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  Kaya let out a sob and ran to her, and Mom let her press up against her and cry. She even laid an arm across Kaya’s back. But she did not hug her. I got up out of the chair and went and stood looking down at my father.

  He’s dead, I thought.

  To me, Dad’s funeral was just as awful as Mr. Grimsby’s, even though there was no yelling, and there were no crazy people like that loving companion and the angry son. No mysterious granddaughter waited outside either. Dad’s funeral was just family and friends gathered together, sad but polite, a few rituals, a song, maybe two.

  I wore a dark blue outfit that I pulled out of the back of my closet. Too tight. Scratchy. A perfect match for how I was feeling. Kaya emerged in pink and purple, all floaty looking. I remembered that Dad had commented on that very outfit just a month ago, told her she looked like a princess or something. He’d hate the bunchy blue thing I was wearing, I thought, if he even noticed. I bit back a snarky comment.

  She had a small bag over her shoulder with paper sticking out the top.

  “You’re bringing that?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I glared at her, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Oh well. At least it ruined her outfit. And maybe Mom would say something.

  At the funeral home, a very serious man I had never seen before led us to the front row. I sat beside Mom and stared at the urn, which was on a white tablecloth on a table up front, beside where the minister—was he actually a minister?—stood.