Traplines

by Eden Robinson

  They drove me to my friend’s house. Paul put his eye patch on his chin so it wouldn’t bother him while he drove. I sat in the back, at peace with myself. In my mind I was seeing my foster parents at my funeral, standing grief-stricken at the open casket, gazing down at my calm face.

  When they let me off, I walked back home. I brought all Janet’s Midol and all Paul’s stomach pills upstairs to my bedroom, where I had already stashed two bottles of aspirin. I went back down to get three bottles of ginger ale and a large plastic tumbler.

  Then I wrote a poem for Paul and Janet. It was three pages long. At the time it seemed epic and moving, but now I squirm when I think about it. I’m glad I didn’t die. What a horrible piece of writing to be remembered by. It was something out of a soap opera: “My Darling Parents, I must leave / I know you will, but you must not grieve” sort of thing. I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t made everything rhyme.

  I emptied the aspirin into a cereal bowl. Deciding to get it all over with at once, I stuffed a handful into my mouth. God, the taste. Dusty, bitter aspirin crunched in my mouth like hard-shelled bugs. My gag reflex took over, and I lost about twenty aspirin on my quilt. I chugalugged three cups of ginger ale to get the taste out of my mouth, then went more slowly and swallowed the pills one by one.

  After the twenty-sixth aspirin, I stopped counting and concentrated on not throwing up. I didn’t have enough money to get more, and I didn’t want to waste anything. When I got to the bottom of the cereal bowl, I’d had enough. I’d also run out of ginger ale. Bile was leaking into my mouth. Much later, I discovered that overdosing on aspirin is one of the worst ways to go. Aspirin is toxic, but the amount needed to kill a grown adult is so high that the stomach usually bursts before toxicity kicks in.

  My last moments on earth. I didn’t know what to do with them. Nothing seemed appropriate. I lay on my bed and read People magazine. Farrah was seeing Ryan O’Neal. Some model was suing Elvis’s estate for palimony. Disco was dying. A Virginia woman was selling Belgian-chocolate-covered caramel apples at twelve dollars apiece to stars who said they had never tasted anything so wonderful.

  At midnight I heard the fireworks but was too tired to get out of bed. I drifted into sleep, my ears ringing so loud I could barely hear the party at our neighbor’s house next door.

  Some time during the night, I crawled to the bathroom at the end of the hall and vomited thin strings of yellow bile into the toilet.

  All the next week I wished I had died. My stomach could hold nothing down. Janet thought it was a stomach flu and got me a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol and some Pepto-Bismol. To this day, I can’t stand the taste of ginger ale.

  By some strange quirk of fate, Mama came for me not long after the SPCA took Picnic away. People had complained about Picnic’s affectionate behavior, and when Officer Wilkenson got involved, it was the end.

  Aunt Genna was weeping quietly upstairs in her bedroom when the doorbell rang. She was always telling me not to let strangers in, so when I saw the woman waiting on the steps, I just stared at her.

  “Auntie’s busy,” I said.

  The woman’s face was smooth and pale. “Lisa,” she said. “Don’t you remember me, baby?”

  I backed away, shaking my head.

  “Come here, baby, let me look at you,” she said, crouching down. “You’ve gotten so big. You remember how I used to sing to you? ‘A-hunting we will go’? Remember?”

  Her brown eyes were familiar. Her dark blond hair was highlighted by streaks that shone in the sunlight.

  “Aunt Genna doesn’t like me talking to strangers,” I said.

  Her face set in a grim expression and I knew who she was. She stood. “Where is your aunt?”

  “Upstairs,” I said.

  “Let me go talk to her. You wait right here, baby. When I come back, maybe we’ll go shopping. We can get some cotton candy. It used to be your favorite, didn’t it? Would you like that?”

  I nodded.

  “Stay right here,” the woman said as she walked by me, her blue summer dress swishing. “Right here, baby.”

  Her high heels clicked neatly as she went upstairs. I sat in the hallway, on Picnic’s high-backed chair. It still smelled of him, salty, like seaweed.

  Something thunked upstairs. I heard a dragging sound. Then the shower started. After endless minutes, the door to the bathroom creaked open. Mama’s high heels clicked across the floor again.

  “I’m back!” Mama said cheerfully, bouncing down the stairs. “Your aunt says we can go shopping if you want. She’s taking a bath.” Mama leaned down and whispered, “She wants to be alone.”

  She had my backpack over one shoulder. I jumped down from the chair. Mama held out her hand. I hesitated.

  “Coming?” she said.

  “I have to be back tonight,” I said. “I’m going to Jimmy’s birthday party.”

  “Well then,” she said. “Let’s go buy him a present.”

  She led me to her car. It was bright blue and she let me sit up front. I couldn’t see over the dashboard because she made me wear a seat belt. Aunt Genna’s house shrank as we drove away. I remember wondering if we were going to get another dog now that Picnic was gone. I remember looking down at Mama’s shoes and seeing little red flecks sprayed across the tips like a splatter paint I’d done in kindergarten. I remember Mama giving me a bad-tasting orange juice, and then I remember nothing.

  “Yuck,” I said. “I’m not touching it.”

  “No problem,” Amanda said. “I’ll do it.”

  Amanda was everyone’s favorite lab partner because she’d do absolutely anything, no matter how gross. We looked down at the body of a dead fetal pig that Amanda had chosen from the vat of formaldehyde. We were supposed to find its heart.

  “Oh, God,” I said, as Amanda made the first cut.

  For a moment, I was by the lake and Mama was smearing blood on my cheeks.

  “Now you’re a real woman,” she said. Goose bumps crawled up my back.

  “I don’t know how you can do that,” I said to Amanda.

  “Well, you put the knife flat against the skin. Then you press. Then you cut. It’s very simple. Want to try?”

  I shook my head and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Chickenshit,” Amanda said.

  “Better than being a ghoul,” I said.

  “Just my luck to get stuck with a wimp,” she muttered loud enough for me to hear as she poked around the pig’s jellied innards, looking for a small purple lump.

  I sat on my lab stool feeling stupid while Amanda hunched over the pig. Not all the chopping and dismemberment in the world could make her queasy. Mama would have liked her. She straightened up then and shoved the scalpel in my face, expecting me to take it from her.

  At that moment, I saw the scars on her wrists. When she noticed me staring, she pulled her sleeve down to cover them.

  “I slipped,” she said defensively. “And cut myself.”

  We faced each other, oblivious to the murmur of the class around us.

  “Don’t you say anything,” she said.

  Instead of answering, I unbuttoned the cuff of my blouse and rolled it up my arm. I turned my hand over so the palm was up.

  The second time I tried to commit suicide was when I was fifteen, a year after my attempt with the aspirin. This time I had done my homework. I knew exactly what I was going to do.

  I bought a straight-edged razor.

  Janet and Paul were off to the theater. I waved them good-bye cheerfully as they raced through the rain to the car.

  I closed the front door and listened to the house. Then I marched upstairs and put on my bikini. I ran a bath, putting in Sea Foam bubble bath and mango bath oil. I stepped into the tub, then lay back slowly, letting the water envelop me as I watched the bathroom fill with steam.

  The razor was cold in my hands, cold as a doctor’s stethoscope. I held it underwater to warm it up. Flexed my arms a few times. Inhaled several deep breath
s. Shut the water off. It dripped. There was no way I could die with the tap dripping, so I fiddled with that for a few minutes.

  Got out of the tub. Took a painkiller. Got back in the tub. Placed the razor in the crook of my elbow. Hands shaking. Pushed it down. It sank into my skin, the tip disappearing. I felt nothing at first. I pulled the razor toward my wrist, but halfway down my forearm the cut began to burn. I yanked the razor away.

  Blood welled in the cut. Little beads of blood. I hadn’t gone very deep, just enough for the skin to gape open slightly. Not enough to reach a vein or an artery.

  I was shaking so hard the bubbles in the tub were rippling. The wound felt like a huge paper cut. I clutched it, dropping the razor in the tub.

  “I can do it,” I said, groping for the razor.

  I put it back in the same place and pushed deeper. A thin stream of blood slithered across my arm and dripped into the tub. It burned, it burned.

  Paul and Janet came home and found me in front of the TV watching Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. It always makes me cry. So there I was, bawling as Paul and Janet came through the door. They sat on either side of the armchair and they hugged me.

  “What is it, honey?” Paul kissed my forehead.

  “No, really, I’m okay. It’s nothing.” I said.

  “You sure? You don’t look okay,” Janet said.

  I rested my head on her knees, making her dress wet. Paul and Janet said they wanted to know everything about me, but there were things that made them cringe. What would they do if I said, “I’m afraid Mama will find me and kill me”?

  “I’m such a marshmallow. I even cry at B.C. telephone commercials,” is what I said.

  Paul leaned over and smoothed my hair away from my face. “You know we love you, don’t you, Pumpkin?”

  He smelled of Old Spice and I felt like I was in a commercial. Everything would be perfect, I thought, if only Canada had the death penalty.

  In a tiny, grungy antique store in Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands I found the moose. Paul and Janet had brought me with them to a business convention. Since the finer points of Q-Base accounting bored me silly, I left the hotel and wandered into the store.

  Nature pictures and small portraits of sad-eyed Indian children cluttered the wall. The hunchbacked owner followed me everywhere I went, saying nothing. Not even hello. I was about to leave when I saw the moose.

  “How much is that?” I asked, reaching for it.

  “Don’t touch,” he grunted at me.

  “How much?” I said.

  “Twenty.”

  I handed him the twenty dollars, grabbed the picture, and left.

  “What on earth is that?” Janet asked when I got back. She was at the mirror, clipping on earrings.

  “Oh, nothing. Just a picture.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you were interested in art. Let me see.”

  “It’s just a tacky tourist picture. I’ll show it to you later.”

  “Here,” Janet said, taking the package from my hands and unwrapping it.

  “Careful.” I said.

  “Yes, yes.” Janet’s mouth fell open and she dropped the picture onto the bed. “Oh my God, that’s disgusting! Why on earth did you buy it? Take it back.”

  I picked up the picture and hugged it to my chest. She tried to pry it from me, but I clung to it tightly. Paul came in and Janet said, “Paul, get that disgusting thing out of here!”

  She made me show it to him and he laughed. “Looks very Dali,” he said.

  “It’s obscene.”

  “This from the woman who likes Pepsi in her milk.”

  “Paul, I’m serious,” she hissed.

  “Let her keep it,” Paul said. “What harm can it do?”

  Later I heard him whisper to her, “Jan, for God’s sake, you’re overreacting. Drop it, all right? All right?”

  I still have it, hanging in my bathroom. Except for the moose lying on its side, giving birth to a human baby, it’s a lovely picture. There are bright red cardinals in the fir trees, and the sun is beaming down on the lake in the left-hand corner. If you squint your eyes and look in the trees, you can see a woman in a blue dress holding a drawn bow.

  Amanda’s house was the kind I’d always wanted to live in. Lace curtains over the gabled windows, handmade rugs on the hardwood floors, soft floral chairs, and dark-red cherry furniture polished to a gleam.

  “You like it?” Amanda said, throwing her coat onto the brass coat stand. “I’ll trade you. You live in my house and I’ll live in yours.”

  “I’d kill to live here,” I said.

  Amanda scratched her head and looked at the living room as if it were a dump. “I’d kill to get out.”

  I followed her up the stairs to a large, airy room done in pale pink and white. I squealed, I really did, when I saw her canopied bed. Amanda wore a pained expression.

  “Isn’t it revolting?”

  “I love it!”

  “You do?”

  “It’s gorgeous!”

  She tossed her backpack into a corner chair. I flopped down on the bed. Amanda had tacked a large poster to the underside of her canopy—a naked man with a whip coming out of his butt like a tail.

  “It’s the only place Mother let me put it,” she explained. “Cute, huh?”

  Downstairs, a bass guitar thumped. A man shrieked some words, but I couldn’t make them out. Another guitar screeched, then a heavy, pulsating drumbeat vibrated the floor. Then it stopped.

  “Matthew,” Amanda said.

  “Matthew?”

  “My brother.”

  Amanda’s mother called us to dinner. Matthew was already heading out the door, wearing a kilt and white body makeup. His hair was dyed black and stood up like the spikes on a blowfish. When his mother wasn’t looking, he snatched a tiny butter knife with a pearl handle and put it down his kilt. He saw me watching him and winked as he left.

  “So where do your real parents come from?” Amanda’s mother said, pouring more wine into cut crystal glasses.

  There were only the four of us. We sat close together at one end of a long table. My face flushed. I was feeling tipsy.

  “Africa,” I said.

  Amanda’s mother raised an elegant eyebrow.

  “They were killed in an uprising.”

  She still looked disbelieving.

  “They were missionaries,” I added. I took a deep drink. “Doctors.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Mother,” Amanda said. “Leave her alone.”

  We were silent as the maid brought in a large white ceramic tureen. As she lifted the lid, the sweet, familiar smell of venison filled the room. I stared at my plate after she placed it in front of me.

  “Use the fork on the outside, dear,” Amanda’s mother said helpfully.

  But I was down by the lake. Mama was so proud of me. “Now you’re a woman,” she said. She handed me the heart after she wiped the blood onto my cheeks with her knife. I held it, not knowing what to do. It was as warm as a kitten.

  “I think you’d better eat something,” Amanda said.

  “Maybe we should take that glass, dear.”

  The water in the lake was cool and dark and flat as glass. The bones sank to the bottom after we’d sucked the marrow. Mama’s wet hair was flattened to her skull. She pried a tooth from the moose and gave it to me. I used to wear it around my neck.

  “I’m afraid,” I said. “She has a pattern, even if no one else can see it.”

  “Your stew is getting cold,” Amanda’s mother said.

  The coppery taste of raw blood filled my mouth. “I will not be her,” I said. “I will break the pattern.”

  Then I sprayed sour red wine across the crisp handwoven tablecloth that had been handed down to Amanda’s mother from her mother and her mother’s mother before that.

  After a long, shimmering silence, Amanda’s mother said, “I have a Persian carpet in the living room. Perhaps you’d like to shit on it.” Then she
stood, put her napkin on the table, and left.

  “Lisa,” Amanda said, clapping her hand on my shoulder. “You can come over for dinner anytime you want.”

  Mama loved to camp in the summer. She would wake me early, and we’d sit outside our tent and listen. My favorite place was in Banff. We camped by a turquoise lake. Mama made bacon and eggs and pancakes over a small fire. Everything tasted delicious. When we were in Banff, Mama was happy. She whistled all the time, even when she was going to the bathroom. Her cheeks were apple-red and dimpled up when she smiled. We hiked for hours, seeing other people only from a distance.

  “Imagine there’s no one else on earth,” she said once as she closed her eyes and opened her arms to embrace the mountains. “Oh, just imagine it.”

  When we broke camp, we’d travel until Mama felt the need to stop and settle down for a while. Then we would rent an apartment, Mama would find work, and I would go to school. I hated that part of it. I was always behind. I never knew anybody, and just as I started to make friends, Mama would decide it was time to leave. There was no arguing with her. The few times I tried, she gave me this look, strange and distant.

  I was eleven when we went through the Badlands of Alberta, and while I was dozing in the back, the car hit a bump and Mama’s scrapbook fell out of her backpack.

  I opened it. I was on the second page when Mama slammed on the brakes, reached back, and slapped me.

  “Didn’t I tell you never to touch that? Didn’t I? Give it to me now. Now, before you’re in even bigger trouble.”

  Mama used the scrapbook to start our fire that night, but it was too late. I had seen the clippings, I had seen the headlines, and I was beginning to remember.

  That night I dreamed of Aunt Genna showering in blood. Mama held me until I stopped trembling.

  “Rock of ages, cleft for me,” Mama sang softly, as she cradled me back and forth. “Let me hide myself in thee.”

  I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. Mama squeezed herself into the sleeping bag with me and zipped us up. I waited for her to say something about the scrapbook. As the night crawled by, I became afraid that she would never mention it, that I would wait and wait for something to happen. The waiting would be worse, far worse, than anything Mama could do to me.