by Trilby Kent
Text copyright © 2016 by Trilby Kent
Tundra Books, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kent, Trilby, author
Once, in a town called Moth / Trilby Kent.
ISBN 978-1-101-91811-1 (bound)
I. Title.
PS8571.E644O53 2016 jC813′.54 C2015-905759-0
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Tundra Books of Northern New York, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955120
Ebook ISBN 9781101918135
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Edited by Samantha Swenson
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Leah Springate
Cover image: (braid) © Christy Elle Photography/Getty Images; (quilt) Tammy Venable/Shutterstock
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Toronto
Colony Felicidad
Toronto
Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Colony Felicidad
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Acknowledgements
Other People’s Words
for Clea
…I know
With the dawn
That you will be gone,
But tonight you belong to me
Yesterday, we left Colony Felicidad for good. Left Justina and the chickens and the boys’ dungarees hanging from the clothesline. Left the little girls playing under the tipu tree. Left Susanna wrapping tortillas in paper in the bakery, listening to the ticking of the frozen clock that only counts the seconds between 1:42 and 1:43. Left the dogs scratching in the sun, snapping at flies. Left the rows of slate tablets in the schoolhouse, left the cows staring mournfully beyond the wire fence, left Agustín in his pickup loaded with barrels of diesel.
We are at the airport in Santa Cruz now, Papa and I, and tomorrow we will be in Canada.
I still don’t know why.
Toronto
THE HOUSE WAS SMALL: a clapboard box on a square, weed-strewn lot fringed by a green wire fence. The owner was an elderly Italian woman called Mrs. Fratelli who lived on the other side of town in Little Portugal. Ana didn’t know how her father had found Mrs. Fratelli or the house; she only knew that the rent was cheap and that he paid half of it in kind, by rebuilding the front porch and traveling across town a few times a week to do odd jobs for Mrs. Fratelli and her neighbors.
The neighborhood was not quite as shabby as the house. It was what people in these Canadian cities described as “up and coming.” Children played in front gardens, old men smoked and read the newspaper in camping chairs, and fancy cars sometimes got keyed at night. Ana had never seen so many houses so close together. Why, in this enormous country, did they have to huddle against each other like this, as though space was running out? Perhaps for warmth: the winters here were cold, she knew.
Inside, the house was dark in shades of brown and yellow. Yellow linoleum in the kitchen, brown trim in the front room. A narrow staircase with a stained beige carpet fraying on the sides. Upstairs, a bathroom with a shower and toilet with a permanent brown stain seeping down the pipe. Two bedrooms: her father’s at the back, with a bed and built-in closet (only one of the doors opened); Ana’s room had just enough space for a single bed and a nightstand with a mirror, but it looked out onto the street and got the most light in the entire house.
There was little furniture. The two beds and nightstand, a table and four folding chairs in the kitchen, and a squashed, faded sofa in the front room. There was a barbecue lid on the back porch, but no barbecue. A broom but no dustpan. A few mugs in the kitchen cupboard—one white with a cartoon dog and SNOOPY written in bubble letters; two blue pottery ones with brown speckles in the glaze that looked like mold—and a pack of paper plates. That was it.
“Stay inside, and don’t answer the door to anybody,” Papa said on the first day, as he went out to buy food. So Ana had sat on her bed and looked out the window at the street, where people walked dogs and children rode scooters and cars parked and locked and pulled away again.
By the third day, Papa had drawn Ana a map of the neighborhood. There was a supermarket a few blocks away, and a pay phone on the corner for emergencies. “It’s safe,” he told her. “You need fresh air and sun and exercise. Don’t talk to anyone, though, and stay within these four streets.”
By the second week, she was going out every day, walking up and down the two streets running parallel to their own and tracing the perimeter up to Danforth Avenue and back down to the park. She wandered the aisles in the supermarket and stood in front of the freezer to cool down when the humidity outside got too much.
“If anyone asks, remember that you’re Ana now,” her father said. “Not Anneli.”
He had given her sweatpants to wear at the airport and bought jeans for himself. Her dress and his overalls were bundled into a plastic bag and left at the bottom of the wardrobe.
“When Mrs. Fratelli pays me, I’ll buy us some good clothes,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
Colony Felicidad
When I was little, sometimes I’d narrate what I was doing as if I were a character in a book: Anneli is making breakfast. She breaks an egg into the frying pan, and then she remembers that the butter needs to be taken out. The slap of a jump rope hitting the dusty ground means that Eva is playing behind their house. Anneli remembers the frying pan and lifts a fork from the drawer…
Thinking about myself like that meant the story could change. Anneli could change. The past, and the present…and the future too.
But, of course, it was just a game. I liked it that way.
I once asked Susanna where she would have grown up if her grandparents hadn’t lived in a colony, and if they hadn’t left Canada to start a new life with other Mennonites in Bolivia.
“In a city,” I said. “Which city would they have gone to?”
“They wouldn’t have. They only knew what it was
like to live on a farm.”
“I know, but if. What was the nearest city?”
Susanna paused in her kneading, her hands ghostly with flour, and pushed a strand of hair from her face with one shoulder.
“Edmonton,” she said.
“Where’s that?”
“North of Calgary. It’s on a river.”
“So, just like here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you ever wish you’d grown up there instead?” I asked her.
“What difference would it make?”
“It would change everything.”
“But I wouldn’t know that. Neither would you.”
That last bit was meant to shut me up, and it did. Sometimes it’s just not worth trying to get someone else to wonder about the things you do. Susanna had enough on her mind, what with her sister being pregnant and no one else knowing.
“Maria will start showing soon,” I said. “What’s she going to do then?”
Susanna slapped the dough hard upon the table.
“That’s not for you to worry about, Anneli,” she said. “It’s not your life.”
Toronto
ON THE DAYS WHEN he wasn’t working for Mrs. Fratelli, Ana’s father went out with a pocketful of quarters for the pay phone by the bus stop. Ana didn’t know who he called. Sometimes he was only gone for a few minutes; other times, an hour or more. She tried not to think about what it would mean if he never came back.
One afternoon, a few seconds after she heard the front door close, he came up to her room and placed a plastic bag on her bed.
“I wasn’t sure of your size,” he said. He took out six cans of Jumbo Beef Chili and a pack of toilet paper and nudged what remained in the bag toward her. “There should be enough to see you through the next little while. We can always go back once we’re a bit more settled.”
She waited until he’d left before pulling out the clothes folded haphazardly inside the bag, which had the words EXPRESS PHARMA-CARE printed in red letters on it. It should have been funny, interpreting his attempts at a normal teenage wardrobe only with a modesty factor of one hundred. There were a pair of blue jeans, baggy and shapeless, and two sweatshirts (Camp Kawinpasset ’96 said one; Miller’s U-Haul said the other). Beneath these, a white button-up collar shirt with green paisley-patterned stripes. Two turtlenecks: one pink, one purple. A pair of black, Velcro shoes. A three-pack of socks that Ana could already tell were too small. The clothes didn’t look new—he must have bought them secondhand.
The jeans fit better than she’d expected. Even though she had to roll the cuffs—she was tall, but not that tall—and would need a belt to keep them from gaping at the back, they could have been worse. The denim felt hard and heavy around her legs, like a cast, and made a starchy noise when she walked. The purple turtleneck clung to her waist and chest, but that didn’t matter: no one would see it under the Camp Kawinpasset sweatshirt. The shoes fit and were comfortable. Ana unrolled the cuffs of her jeans so that they covered the Velcro straps. Then she stood on the bed and regarded herself in the dressing table mirror.
At least it’s less obvious than the dress.
Her father looked up as she entered the kitchen. “Well,” he said. “Well.”
“I thought I’d go for a walk.”
“Dinner will be ready soon.” He looked her up and down again. “Don’t talk to strangers.”
I don’t know anyone here, she thought. Everyone’s a stranger. You might as well say, “Don’t talk to anyone.”
Instead she said, “I’ll just be five minutes. To the end of the street and back.”
The sky was the color of sour milk, streaked with airplane trails, crosshatched with telephone wires and streetcar lines. It was as if someone had stretched an enormous sheet of chicken wire overhead.
There were hardly any people on the street, and yet there was noise. The distant growl of a highway, the hum of idling cars on the main strip, the creak and sigh of tree branches, the squawking laughter of children playing, unseen, in a laneway between the houses. The houses were lined up close, closing the gaps between them with gates and fences like clasped hands.
Ana stood at the corner feeling that she should want to cross the road. Something stopped her. She thought of her father back in the kitchen, imagined him opening the front door and walking off down the street in the other direction, away from her, untraceable. Her heart thrummed. Instinctively, she turned and swiftly retraced her steps.
He was still in the kitchen when she returned, and she felt her entire body slacken with relief.
“That was quick,” he said.
How am I to be today?
It depended on her father’s mood. That much, at least, hadn’t changed. Most days, it was easiest to be invisible. Neutral. Cook, clean, pray. To make it more interesting, she would pretend to be a housewife, a mother with responsibilities. A make-believe life. But then there were mornings when her father’s eyes glittered with mischief under that heavy, glooming brow. On those days, she could be more free: loving, lively. She could ask questions.
“Why are we here?”
Her father didn’t turn around. From somewhere behind those broad, hunched shoulders, she heard him say, “To see her again.”
“Who?” A foolish question, which he ignored. “Why here, though? Why not her cousin’s farm? Where there are other people like us.”
“Because she’s not on the farm. I’ve contacted them already. She’s probably here.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.” When he turned around again, the sparkle had left his eyes: they were dark, like the reflection of drifting clouds in pond water.
“When will we see her?”
“Soon.”
The next time she asked, again he said, “Soon.”
After the third time, Ana stopped asking him. Instead, the question turned outward: past her, past them, past the house and the street. Silently interrogating every stranger she passed on the sidewalk, every shopper waiting in line, every averted gaze at the bus stop.
When will I see you? When?
And how will I know?
Help me to see her. Open my eyes so that I’ll recognize her.
Open his heart so that he’ll forgive her.
Please. Please. Please.
When they had finished the six cans of Jumbo Beef Chili, Ana asked her father if she could buy provisions for the next week.
“We have fifteen dollars,” he told her.
No treats, he meant. He could have eaten Jumbo Beef Chili for a month. One night he had brought home a cardboard box with hot grease stains seeping through the bottom, and they had eaten a circle of soggy bread covered in melted cheese and a red paste. Another night he had brought home dinner for two in a plastic container, only for Ana to realize that it was just half cooked and needed a machine they didn’t have to heat it through. In the end she had dumped it all into a pot and warmed it on the stove top, with moderate success. But she had begun to crave apples, peas and cucumbers. Avocado. The crunch of lettuce or even cabbage.
There was a supermarket down the main road, past the convenience store where her father had found the tins of Jumbo Beef Chili, past a playground and a garage and a row of stores with faded clapboard signage. Ana listened to the cars as she walked, trying to distinguish the ones that would come rumbling past her from the ones that roared up and down the main road. Buses sounded different: the rhythmic rumble and screech as they slowed down, the clatter of doors opening and clapping shut, the beeping of a wheelchair ramp being lowered. All of these noises were new to her. Streetcars spoke with a low metallic hum, a bell like the one on Isaac’s bike back home.
In Bolivian cities, the traffic could be overwhelming, too: the cars overstuffed and falling apart, belching fumes, the roads shared with bicycles and wagons and pedestrians and sometimes livestock. Noisy, pungent chaos. Here, what startled Ana more was the efficiency of it all: the markings on the road, the coordinated s
treetlights. She had watched several cars come to a four-way stop and take turns, one by one, to make the crossing. Is that normal? she’d found herself wondering. Is there a code for who gets to go first? The noise and motion seemed choreographed in a way that could only be possible if everyone followed the same rules. But how did they know the rules in the first place?
Inside the store, the linoleum was scratched and the dingy lights gave everything a yellow cast. Ana rummaged through a large wire bin filled with boxes dotted with red REDUCED stickers and wondered how angry her father would be if she brought home a pack of Twinkies.
She dropped a head of broccoli into the basket; some carrots, two tomatoes. There was a small, dark lettuce on the shelf next to the prepared salads labeled bok choy; she sniffed it, pressed the leaves between her fingers, put it back.
Eggs, potatoes, a can of corn, an onion. That would do for a pot of soup. She found some chicken that had been reduced to two dollars; the boneless meat had squashed down into a corner of the container, pooling red juice. If they were careful, they could eat reasonably well for three, four days.
In the bread aisle, she lingered over a pack of flour tortillas. They were large and golden and perfectly uniform. The packaging showed a grinning man in a sombrero. Ana thought of the paper parcels stacked in the tortilleria at Colony Felicidad, of Susanna’s hands, sticky with corn-flour dough, and the sparkle of salt.
The lady at the checkout counter didn’t look up as she scanned Ana’s items, punched a code into her machine and turned the display reader so that Ana could read the amount. Ana had already inhaled to say “hello,” feeling slightly giddy at the thought of speaking to someone, exchanging a few words, just so that she could remember how. When she saw that this wasn’t going to happen, she swallowed instead, kicking herself for being so naive. People didn’t talk here, not to strangers. Statistically, that made sense: there were more people, so more strangers. In Colony Felicidad, there were no strangers: always a “hello” at the very least, and more likely questions about yourself, your family, any time you saw someone for the first time in more than a few days. Nor would she be greeted simply by name but by a host of pet names, familiar names, secret names. Baby Bird, Miloh’s girl, Sweet Ani. The lady at the checkout counter certainly didn’t know any of those.
