Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  Mischa’s dad opened the car door, offered her his hand. “Here we are, Ana. Got your bag?”

  He followed her up to the front steps, hanging behind just a bit as her father edged aside to let her in.

  “Good night, Ana. Mr. Rempel.”

  Her father said nothing as she went upstairs. A long time seemed to pass before she heard the front door close.

  By the time she woke to his knock, the midday light was already glowing through the curtains.

  “Are you unwell?”

  She squirmed under the covers. Her head felt as if it might explode.

  “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “I have to go to Mrs. Fratelli’s. When I get back, I want the house spotless.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “The boy whose father drove you home last night—who is he?”

  “Mischa. He’s Suvi’s friend. A good boy.” She swallowed. Her stomach roiled. “His parents look after old people with no families.”

  “They’re Christians?”

  If she closed her eyes, the room would stop moving. “I think so. Yes.”

  “You’ll make something to take to them later today. To say thank you.” She listened to him shift his weight, considering her punishment. “Borscht. Make a nice big pot for our lunch too. Plenty of cabbage, yes? We’ll eat it together.”

  She stifled a belch, tasting bile.

  “Whatever happened last night will not happen again.” He moved toward the door. “I’ll be home in two hours.”

  Even from the far end of the hallway, Ana could sense that something was wrong. The girls were clustered around a locker next to the science lab, and instinctively she knew that it was hers.

  A few saw her approaching and whispered to the others. They’d been waiting for this moment. She was still ten, twelve steps away as the group scattered. Some went to their lockers; others brushed past her, maneuvering silent about-turns when they thought she wouldn’t notice.

  A couple of boys stood in her way, staring. She pushed by them, registering their faces reddening with glee and embarrassment.

  The front of her locker door had been covered with tampons taped haphazardly around a giant pink card daubed with red letters.

  CONGRATULATIONS ON BECOMING A WOMAN!

  “What the hell?”

  Ana heard Suvi’s voice as if over a bad phone line. She allowed herself to be shoved out of the way, watching wordlessly as her friend tore down the card and screwed it into a ball.

  Suvi turned on the cluster of girls, most of whom were now looking away. “Which one of you psycho bitches did this?” She snatched a handful of tampons and began cramming them into her bag.

  “It’s OK—”

  “It is NOT OK, Ana.” Suvi zipped her bag and flung it against the locker. “Where’s Karen Spelberg?”

  “She has math,” someone said.

  “I think I saw her in guidance.”

  “You’re all liars and cowards and pathetic bully minions,” hissed Suvi. “Come on, Ana.”

  She brushed roughly past Justin Cook, who had only just arrived, and muttered something under her breath. Ana watched Justin glance between them and the defaced locker and then laugh into the back of his hand. He didn’t seem to recognize her from the party.

  When they reached an empty stretch of corridor, Suvi stopped to drink from a water fountain.

  “Thanks for that,” said Ana.

  “You don’t have to thank me. But you should stand up for yourself more.”

  “They’d have wanted me to make a scene.” Ana took a gulp of water. “It’s not even true. I’ve had periods for two years.”

  “Karen Spelberg doesn’t care. She’s mean and dumb. She pulled that stunt on Josie Fu in grade seven. It was Josie’s fault for being half Chinese and half Danish and therefore drop-dead gorgeous and therefore Karen’s natural enemy.” Suvi shouldered her bag. “No points for originality, but it still gets a reaction. People here have short memories.”

  Colony Felicidad

  Some short memories…

  Picking stones with the little ones: Jonah and Benjamin Funk, Eva and Isaac Buhler, the twins Esther and Edith. Showing them how to sift through the dry soil and pick out the rocks and pebbles, just as Susanna had shown her years before, to clear the fields for planting. Hot work, sore backs, gritty nails, songs. Crickets trapped, trembling, on grass stalks. Afterward, lemonade under the tipu tree, whose roots grew thick and strong enough to upend a house.

  Watching Agatha Bartsch sneak a look at Susanna’s slate at school one morning. Catching Agatha’s eye as she started to copy her answer. Feeling her humiliation, measuring it, before turning back to her own work. Agatha would not be coming back to school in the new year, anyway.

  On Christmas Day, Agustín coming just before lunch with presents for the little ones: gourd rattles filled with rice. They chased each other around the table making a terrible noise until Susanna’s mother shooed them all outside.

  Her father, hunched over the dining table late at night with his paint tray and fine brushes. Sometimes he drew on cork, sometimes wood, cardboard when there was nothing else. Not pictures, but repeating patterns: diamonds and cubes and helixes and staircases that tricked the eye. Then he used a precision blade to cut the drawings into oddly shaped pieces. He gave some puzzles as gifts on birthdays. Mostly they stayed in a box on the dry sink.

  Toronto

  “WELL? ARE WE GOING to go in?”

  The bus ride hadn’t been as long as Ana had expected, and it had deposited them right outside the church. FIRST LIGHT MENNONITE CONGREGATION read the sign in arranged plastic letters. Easy.

  She sensed Suvi growing impatient beside her. “Where are the wagons and braids and stuff? I wanted to see me some wagons and braids!”

  “Oh, shush—I told you it’s not like that here.”

  “Ana, do you want to find your mother or don’t you?”

  It had been Suvi’s idea to come here. “It’s called casing the joint,” she’d told Ana. “If she’s at the church often enough, we can get a look at her without being recognized ourselves. Before you have to meet her for real, you know?”

  “She hasn’t even responded to my questions yet.”

  “All the more reason to check up on her.”

  They tried the front door, but it was locked. “Let’s see if there’s another door by those bike racks,” suggested Suvi.

  There was—but it too was locked. There was a note on the door. Hours: Monday–Friday, 8:30–6 p.m. And below this, Our Sunday services take place at the Danforth United Church. This location is open for day care and language classes only.

  Suvi groaned. “Dude. It didn’t say this on the website?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I’ve got a tournament tomorrow—”

  “My father will want me at church in the morning, anyway.”

  “You could ask him to try a new church?”

  “He’d get suspicious. There isn’t time this week…”

  “Next week, then?”

  “Maybe.”

  Miss G blinked at Ana, her small, wide-set eyes thoughtful behind her glasses. She looked like a kindly otter, thought Ana.

  “There’s no right answer,” she said at last. “And you can always change your mind. The exercise is to get you thinking, that’s all.”

  Ana stared at the four lines at the bottom of the page. Still blank, even after five minutes of Miss G trying to tease an answer out of her. At the top of the page were her answers to the multiple-choice questions they’d done in class that morning.

  “Let’s see…you like art. But you’re also good at problem solving. You say you’re very rational—I think I’d agree with that.” Miss G scrolled down the page with her pencil. “What about managing an art gallery? That could be cool.”

  Ana nodded.

  “Or teaching?”

  Ana nodded again, but this time she looked away. She shouldn’t be frustrated with Miss G. It
wasn’t her fault. In all her life until now, no one had ever asked Ana what she wanted to be. Back home, everyone just seemed to know what she would be: a daughter, a wife, a mother, a friend, a hard worker, a good Christian. How was she supposed to think of something to fill four lines about her desired career when everything she had counted on before—

  “It’s OK,” said Miss G. “Let’s leave this for now, and you can think about it.”

  Weird how you can be somewhere and the place you came from ceases to exist. Not really, but as good as. You know it’s still there, that the people there are still going about their lives, washing clothes and milking cows, that the air still smells of soy and sorghum, that at night you’d still be able to hear the pigs snoring from the Reimers’ barn—but really, you don’t believe it. And the longer you’re away, the harder you have to concentrate to summon up all of those things, to convince yourself that they’re still really there: happening, breathing, being.

  And you think for the longest time that you’re going to miss it, and you do…but as the days and weeks pass, you miss it mainly because you’re used to missing it. Missing it becomes something that you believe, rather than something that you actually do. After a little while, it’s more work to think about missing it than it is to just get on with life. The new place is what’s real, and the old place becomes a dream.

  Colony Felicidad

  “I don’t mean to gossip, but…” Susanna drew the thread along her tongue before spearing it through the eye of the needle. “I saw Agatha Bartsch with Jacob Wolfe in the orchard yesterday.”

  “Together?”

  A nod.

  “They’d better be careful. Remember when her father found out about David stealing those oranges?”

  Poor David. Agatha’s father had walloped him with his own hand, and David had fled to hide in the forest for the rest of the day, not even coming in for dinner.

  “I think they’re serious.”

  “Justina says the Albertan kids used to call it going steady.”

  “To hear her talk about it you’d think she’d gone to their high school.”

  “My grandmother called it a temple to sex, drugs and alcohol.”

  Susanna snorted. “She would.”

  We worked in silence for a while after that.

  “Speaking of David…” Susanna steadfastly avoided looking at me, steering the inside-out shirt under the sewing machine. “Has he brought you any more gifts lately?”

  A bright purple jay’s feather; the dried-out shell of a wasp’s nest; once, a yellow dorado he’d caught in the stream with Jacob Wolfe, still wet and glistening, its dead eyes bright.

  “He’ll have to ask my father first.”

  “Don’t try and be coy. You’re no good at it.”

  I looked at her. She was smiling. “As if your father would stop him. He’s a teddy bear in wolf’s clothing. And David’s a good boy.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I’m four months older than he is. I can remember when he still used to suck on his mother’s apron strings.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, I towered a full head and shoulders over him too.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, Anneli.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Well, you could do worse.”

  Toronto

  ANA SPENT THAT SUNDAY in her room reading Papillon. She had considered doing as Suvi suggested and asking her father to take her to First Light that morning—but he had been in such a good mood, and she hadn’t wanted to jeopardize it. They had made a few friends at the Baptist service, anyway; they would be missed if they didn’t turn up this week without explanation.

  The thin drizzle that grayed everything outside her window—people, cars, trees, sky—showed no sign of letting up. Ana didn’t mind. She liked the way rainy days gave her permission to hide from the world. There was no expectation in a rainy day, no pressure to be outside enjoying something just because everyone else did.

  Papillon wanted one thing: escape. So much so that he undertook such a series of wrongheaded, audacious, life-threatening risks, Ana couldn’t believe that he’d ever live to tell the tale. But he had.

  Strange, then, that when things finally seemed to be going his way—when he was living in secret with a village of pearl divers, happily married to a pair of sisters—he should decide that it was time to move on. And yet, if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been there to save some poor girl from shark-infested waters just a few chapters later.

  Ana lingered over the pearl divers, the sisters with their twin babies by the same father, the girl struggling in the ocean. There she was—and there, and there. How could Mr. Peterson have known? Had he too felt this strange sensation when he read the book? Or was this the way with all books?

  Escape: into another world, or into her own?

  The school holiday concert was less a concert than a series of skits and a rowdy sing-along. There were Christmas lights on the stage and draped around the piano, and a musical performance by some of the teachers dressed as elves that made the kids in the audience burst into hoots and applause. But there were other parts that Ana had more difficulty understanding: the lighting of a menorah, which she found beautiful (the story was from the Old Testament; she would ask her father about it when she got home), and a dance set by a group of statuesque girls in saris, with kohl-rimmed eyes and little plastic jewels stuck to their foreheads.

  “It’s like Aladdin,” she whispered to Suvi, who snorted and said, “Wrong country, dude.”

  Some of the older boys performed a rap about Kwanzaa while a slideshow behind them showed pictures of fruit and a candelabra like the menorah. They were boys that Ana used to be a little intimidated by. But now she found herself nodding to their beat, clapping along with everyone else for the final chorus.

  Starting in November, she’d saved a dollar from each week’s grocery budget for her father’s Christmas present. Added to the collected small change from whatever was returned to her at the cash register, Ana had $9.74 by the last day of school.

  She had survived the term. Earlier that week she had returned from the bathroom to geography to find that someone had written SKANK across the front of her agenda—on the other side of the classroom, Karen was winding her hair around a pencil and pursing her lips in a silent whistle—but there had been no more locker graffiti, and even Sean seemed to be running out of steam with the teasing. There had been whispers when Mr. Peterson asked Ana to stay behind after class one day—she had scored her first A on a test and he’d wanted to congratulate her—but Karen wasn’t in her class and so the whispers had no fuel to flame into rumors.

  Ana stopped in at Lenny’s Hardware on the way home, leaving Suvi to fiddle with the gum machine at the front of the store. Down to the third aisle, past rows of X-Acto knives and precision instruments. A wood-handled awl cost $6.99 plus tax.

  “You’re the only person I know who gets her dad a knife for Christmas,” said Suvi, popping a gumball into her mouth as they headed out.

  “It’s something he can use,” said Ana. With the last of the money she’d got a musical card that played “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

  “Wanna go to the toboggan hill? It’ll still be light for another half hour.”

  “I should stop at the library first. It’ll be closed this weekend. My last chance until after Christmas.”

  Suvi’s forehead crinkled. “Still hasn’t written back, huh? Why don’t we go back to that church once and for all and find out?”

  “It’s OK. It’s a busy time of year.” Ana pulled her toque down low over her eyes, trying to ignore the stinging in her nose. She had never felt coldness like this before. “For all I know, she could be on holiday.”

  Dear Ani,

  I’m so sorry. No Internet at home and our office has been relocating, so I’ve been off-line for a while.

  Ana frowned at the screen. Hadn’t she heard of using the library?

  You had some questions for me. I don’t blame you! K
ind of weird being asked, but of course you have every right. Here goes…

  1. The book must be the Shakespeare collection that was given to my parents on the way to Bolivia. Has your father really kept it all these years?

  2. The curtains in your bedroom were plain blue, no pattern that I can remember.

  3. My maiden name is Rempel, and my sister’s middle name is Christina.

  4. I think the watermelon incident happened when you were four and Maria told you that if you swallowed a watermelon seed, a watermelon would grow in your stomach. You were so upset you made yourself sick.

  Ana’s pulse thudded in her temples. And the gun in the lake? she thought. But of course she hadn’t asked about that. That would only scare her away. There would be plenty of time to ask the tricky questions.

  I hope that convinces you. I’m happy to answer more questions if you think of any.

  Maybe texting would be easier, though? Do you have a phone?

  We don’t have to talk yet if you’d rather not. My number is 647-496-0921.

  Love,

  Mama

  P.S. The pearls are yours.

  “You press here for numbers, and here to go back to letters. Then, ‘send.’ And if you want to switch off predictive text, you go here…wait, let me find it…”

  Ana craned her neck over Suvi’s shoulder as she fiddled with the purple Nokia.

  “OK, there. Your password is SUVIROX but you can change that if you want. The code’s 1234 to top up your credit.” Suvi handed her the cell. “I’ve put ten bucks on it already.”

  “You’re amazing. I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”

  “No sweat. The phone only cost a few bucks. It’s kind of a junky one, but it texts and makes calls. Call it my Christmas present to you. Now she can’t fob you off with excuses about not having Internet, right?”