Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  “Are you?” Lena shrugged and pulled her lip. “I’m not.”

  “You can’t change who you are inside.”

  “Maybe not. But that’s not to say that you don’t change.”

  Ana picked up a piece of gravel and tossed it at an empty flowerpot. It bounced off the rim and fell to the ground with a clatter. “Well, then—which you do you prefer?”

  “If it weren’t for missing you, I would say this Lena. Lena here. But it wasn’t always that simple. It took me a few years to be sure.”

  “So how am I supposed to be able to answer that question now?”

  “What does your gut tell you?”

  Ana picked up another piece of gravel, pressed its uneven points with her thumb. “I don’t know. I feel free here, but that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes…it’s weird.”

  Lena nodded. “Uh-huh…”

  “I like school sometimes. The idea that I can do anything when I graduate. I would never have that freedom at home. I like the library and the stores and being able to go places by myself.” Ana tossed the piece of gravel at the flowerpot. This time it landed soundlessly on the barren soil inside. “I feel like my life is moving forward here.”

  More nodding.

  “But then in other ways it feels less free. I miss the fields and being alone—I mean, properly alone, not just on my own but surrounded by strangers. Sometimes I think the things we learn here are really…artificial. Kids don’t learn to make as many decisions on their own. Their parents do so much for them…”

  “You think so?”

  “They grow up differently. In some ways, Suvi knows so much more than I do about…everything. But in other ways, she’s really young still.”

  “So, are the old ways better?”

  “Not better, just different.”

  “For you, I mean.”

  Ana picked up another piece of gravel.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. She let the gravel drop from her hand. “Maybe the things that are better are things you can take with you anywhere, though.”

  Lena bumped Ana’s knee with hers. “You might be on to something there.”

  “I should go. Suvi’s expecting me to stop by on my way home.”

  She told Suvi about the fight, about Mr. Peterson and how Mischa didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Leave him alone for a few days, and he’ll be fine. He doesn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him,” said Suvi. “It’s always like this.”

  “It isn’t fair.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  They’d walked across the bridge and through the ravine, not minding the time or where they were going. Before they knew it, they were on his street.

  “We can just walk by,” said Suvi. “He’s probably having dinner now, anyway. His parents are strict about that.”

  It was the hour when the insides of houses became visible: lighter inside than out. The huge sash curtains were still open in the bay window, and a lamp was lit on the piano in the parlor. An old man sat on the porch, the front door open beside him. Upstairs, a hand drew blinds on a bedroom window. There was a smell of soup, and a clatter of dishes, and above this the sound of music. An orchestra, a crooning voice.

  “Look,” said Suvi, stopping by a tree and pulling Ana close.

  Two figures were moving in the parlor: one tall and stooped, with cloud-shaped hair, the other small-boned and upright. A woman and a boy. They danced slowly, and as they turned, Ana could see the smile on the old lady’s face as Mischa said something to her. They covered the length of the room, skirting the piano, and as the music ended the old lady dropped a creaking curtsy.

  A voice interrupted the dancers; both figures turned and disappeared into the dining room at the back of the house.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” said Suvi. “We’d better go.”

  “It’s too late for you to still be out. You have school in the morning.”

  “I’m not still out. I’m home now.”

  “Don’t try to be clever.”

  “Perhaps I don’t want to risk coming home to some strange woman sitting on our sofa, just for you to say we’re going to be a family again. Perhaps I’d rather just skip all of that, you know?”

  “Enough,” said Papa. “That is enough, Ani.”

  “Stop telling me what to do.”

  “I will tell you, and you will listen!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am your father!”

  “You were a drug runner. What’s a couple of shots at a party and a walk through the ravine compared to selling cocaine?” Ana watched his expression fall, couldn’t stop herself from turning the knife. “Or killing a police officer?”

  Her father’s face turned gray. For a moment she thought perhaps he might lunge at her, or have a heart attack and keel over onto the floor. Then he just said, “Go to your room. Now. Before I do something I might regret.”

  Ana was happy to get out of there, but she didn’t go to her room. She ran out the front door and went straight to Suvi’s house.

  “Jesus,” said Suvi. “Crack?”

  Ana hadn’t planned to tell her—but as soon as she opened the door she’d started to cry, and once they were up in Suvi’s room everything came flooding out.

  “This is crazy,” Suvi said. “Like, holy shit. He killed someone? He was running drugs?”

  “I don’t think he knew that’s what it was. And he hadn’t meant to shoot. It was practically self-defence.”

  “OK. OK. We can work this out…” Suvi slid off her bed and began pacing up and down. “You could come and live here. Julie and Steve could, like, adopt you…”

  “But I’ve got parents. They’re just…”

  “Seriously messed up.”

  Ana fiddled with one of the tassels on Suvi’s bedspread. “Maybe I could move in with her.”

  “Lena? I thought things were weird between you.”

  “Suvi, there’s weird and there’s drug-running and murder weird.”

  “OK.” Suvi sat on the chair by her dressing table, backward, and leaned her chin on her elbows. “What will happen to him, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. If he goes back there, he could be arrested. But he doesn’t want to stay here. He’s kind of stuck.” Ana pulled a cushion onto her lap and doubled herself over it. “I can’t believe he lied for so long.”

  “He didn’t lie, though. He just didn’t tell you.” Suvi waited. “Like you didn’t tell me about Peterson.”

  “That’s completely different!”

  “OK, fine. But your dad’s not the only one. You haven’t told him that you found your mother, have you? You’ve kept that from him.” Suvi ignored the noise of exasperation that Ana made into the cushion. “Don’t kill me for saying this, but…I kind of feel sorry for him. You know?”

  She returned to the house the following morning, on the way to school, to collect her bag. Suvi waited on the curb.

  “Ani.” A voice from the kitchen. “Ani, please.”

  Her father’s eyes were ringed; his shoulders slumped. He wore the same clothes he’d had on the night before.

  “I’m going to be late for school. Isn’t that what you were worried about?”

  “This cannot go on. We have lost too much already.”

  Ana folded her arms.

  “I know what this is about,” he continued. “You’re unhappy. We should go back. I should never have brought you here—”

  “Wait a minute.” Ana uncrossed her arms. “You mean to say that after coming all this way, dragging me along with you, you want to take me back there?”

  “This is not our home.”

  “Neither is Colony Felicidad—not now, not after everything that happened with Gerhard Buhler. Even if the colony doesn’t give you up, the Bolivian police will throw you in jail for the rest of your life. And Suvi says Mama and I could go to jail too, as accessories to the crime—whatever that means. Because we know about it…about what you did.” Ana watched h
im dig a groove into the table with the sharp edge of a broken plastic pen, thought of him hunched there late at night with his paint tray and fine brushes. Diamonds and helixes and staircases leading nowhere. “We can’t live there, and now you don’t want to stay here. It’s almost like you’re trying to make our life impossible.”

  “I brought you here for your own safety.”

  “And now I want to stay.”

  He put his head in his hands, took a deep breath, and then looked up.

  “Who told you all of this? About Gerhard. About…” He swallowed.

  Ana bit her lip. He’s afraid of finding her too.

  “She did,” she said.

  “He wants us to go back.” Ana didn’t look at Lena. “Me and him.”

  “That’s insane. Go back to what, exactly?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No way. He can’t just parachute you into my life like this and then take off!”

  Ana pushed past her down the hallway, helped herself to a lemonade from the fridge.

  “Take off like you did, you mean?” she said.

  Lena followed her into the kitchen.

  “You know that’s not fair,” she said. She watched Ana sit down at the table. “There are ginger snaps in the cupboard,” she said.

  “No, thanks. I can’t stay for long, anyway.”

  Lena pulled out another chair.

  “You don’t seem particularly fazed by this idea,” she said. “This Bolivia thing.”

  “He doesn’t mean it. He can’t. There’s nothing for us to go back to. It would be suicide for him, and that would mean all sorts of trouble for me. We don’t have any money, anyway…”

  “So you don’t want to leave?” Lena stretched her arms across the table, taking Ana’s wrists in her hands. Ana recoiled. There was fear in her mother’s eyes.

  “I like my friends. I’ve only just begun to figure things out here…”

  “And what about me?”

  Suddenly her mother was transformed: a shell built of a thousand broken pieces. The slightest tap would set her crumbling. Ana set her glass on the table.

  “What do you mean? No, hold on.” She pushed the glass away. “Look, nothing has changed. We survived without you for ten years. You don’t need to worry about us.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant…oh God, this is going to sound so selfish…”

  Ana waited.

  “Just one thing,” said Lena. “One question. I need to know.”

  “You know what I realized?” Suvi collapsed backward into the mildewed beanbag chair, aiming a rubber band out the tree house window. It was the first time since the fall that it was warm enough for them to be up here again, and everything smelled a bit damp and neglected.

  “That there are ants coming out of that beanbag?” said Ana. Suvi glanced down to where she’d pointed at the split in the seam and flicked at one of the scurrying black dots before returning to fiddling with the elastic.

  “I realized that my attachment to my parents is based entirely on material stuff and advertising,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” said Mischa.

  “It means my mother and I have our best times when we’re out shopping together or going to movies or going out for sushi—basically, consuming stuff—and Steve and I have our best times together watching sports. As in, watching guys who get paid millions of dollars to hit a ball with a stick, and then stuffing our faces with overpriced processed meat in buns as long as your arm, which is why most North Americans are overweight, and staring at loads of ads for stuff we don’t need and making jokes about the guy who voices the razor commercials.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “What’s wrong is that I wouldn’t know how to talk to them otherwise. Like, if you sat me in an empty room with Julie, and there was no food and no TV and no shopping—what would we talk about? And Steve would be even worse. He’d, like, try to tell me about his childhood and impart some deep life lesson.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Ana.

  “But it never happens, right? We never talk about real stuff. I mean, we talk about kids starving in Africa and why politicians are sleazebags and the craziness that stores can’t just add taxes straight onto price tags…but we don’t talk about us.”

  “Why would you even want to?” said Mischa.

  Suvi shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel like I should.”

  Ana flicked open her Coke and teased the metal tab back and forth. When it had broken off she handed it to Suvi, who was collecting them to make a bracelet like one she’d seen a girl at school wearing.

  “Lena wanted to talk about us last night,” said Ana. “It was weird. In the end, she came right out and asked if I loved her.”

  “Oh my God. What did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t know.”

  “Ouch,” said Mischa.

  “How can you love someone you’ve only just met?” Ana protested.

  “Jessica Alvarez says she’s been in love with Mike Gibson since the first time she saw him at the book sale,” said Suvi. “They’ve been dating for five months now.”

  “That’s IN love,” said Ana. “That’s different.”

  “Your mother left you,” said Mischa. “She can’t expect you to love her. You earn it, right? By looking after your kids. And if you let them down, you have to earn it back.”

  “That’s kind of harsh,” said Suvi.

  “What’s harsh is the old people who live in my parents’ house and call me little Billy or little Joey or little Frank or whatever because their own kids never bring their grandchildren to visit.”

  “But some of them have dementia,” said Suvi. “That’s different.”

  “Yeah, but not all of them. Some of them are just fine, and they know that their kids never visit them.”

  “What would you do, Ana?” said Suvi. “If your mother was really old and dependent and stuff—would you visit her?”

  Ana rested the Coke can against her knee, enjoying the sensation of cool metal pressed against her first mosquito bite of the summer. “I don’t know,” she said. “She survived without me for long enough, so why not?”

  “But you like her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s a start.”

  At last, an agreement to meet. In the conference room at First Light: a tiny, carpeted seminar space in the basement that wasn’t booked for use for another two days.

  “So we’ll have all the time in the world,” Lena joked to Ana before they parted.

  “How was it?” Ana asked her father that evening. She waited until after he’d come in, gone upstairs, returned with hair freshly rinsed and combed. Bright-eyed, but silent.

  “Your mother has not changed,” he said.

  The next time, a week later, Lena came to their house. Ana observed her taking in the scuffed carpet, the mold patch on the bathroom ceiling, the cabinet door hanging off its hinge in the kitchen, with the same blandly interested smile that betrayed neither disgust nor pity.

  “May I see your room?” she asked Ana.

  “Of course—it’s right up this way.”

  Over nine months, the detritus of teenage life had cloaked her room in a veil of normality: clothes, books, upended book bag. No computer, no music, no posters—but the Polaroid of her with Lena was stuck to the window, next to some photo-booth snaps with Suvi and Mischa.

  “It’s nice.”

  “Does it smell to you? When we first moved here, I thought it smelled really weird.”

  “I don’t smell anything. Nothing bad, anyway. Deodorant, maybe?”

  “That’s OK, then.”

  “I guess we should go back down. Your father’s waiting.”

  “So those are the ribbons you mentioned,” Lena said, as Ana walked her to the front gate.

  Ana nodded. “There used to be a lot in front of school. Yesterday I counted three.”

  Her mother hesitated, and then she took
Ana in her arms and squeezed her so tightly Ana thought she might snap in two.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lena into her hair. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Lena invited them to dinner at her house the following night. After she had left, Ana realized that she must have registered the bare cupboards and scaled kettle in the kitchen, the cut-price chicken in the fridge and the bowl of Weetabix that her father had been snacking on when she’d arrived.

  “We have so much more to talk about,” her mother said on the doorstep as Ana handed over her jacket. So much more? Ana found herself thinking. More implied that they’d talked already, but her father had hardly said a thing, and all the conversation the night before had mainly been to do with Mrs. Fratelli and the saga of the broken furnace.

  A spicy-sweet smell welcomed them in Lena’s hallway: a primary layer of something smoky or barbecued, and over it the sizzle of chili, the frying of onion and garlic, the sweetness of fruit. The kitchen windows were completely steamed up and Lena glided from counter to counter gathering fistfuls of chopped parsley, half a lemon squeezed through her fingers, a bowl of diced almonds.

  “Help yourselves to drinks,” she said over her shoulder. “There’s juice and tea and water. The milk’s probably past its best.”

  Ana poured water for her father and herself. “Can I help?” she asked.

  “It’s all done. That’s the beauty of curry.”

  “Indian curry?”

  “I hope that’s OK?”

  Ana looked to her father. “We’ve never tried it before.”

  “I’m sure it will be delicious,” he said quickly.

  “I didn’t make it hot,” said Lena hurriedly. “The first one I ever tasted almost blew my head off, and it would have been the last if Sara hadn’t dragged me to this great little place on Gerrard Street and made me try some other dishes. Vegetable biryanis and saag paneer—that’s spinach with cheese—and popadoms. Oh, and the chutneys! Not so different from the pickles I used to make with Justina…” She trailed off, wiped her cheek with her arms. “You know, it’s crazy, but I spent most of today trying to talk myself out of it. ‘They’ll hate it; it’s totally unlike what we’d usually eat. Why make things harder when everything’s already complicated enough?’ ” Her voice was jokey, but she was watching Ana’s father with a worried intensity. “And then I thought, ‘Hang on, how long have they been here? And this food is amazing. It’s my favorite, actually. They’re brave; they’re adults’ ”—a look thrown at Ana—“ ‘they’ll cope.’ Better than that, I hope. It’s just a korma, the mildest kind. Like a lovely creamy stew. It’s the first thing I tried when I went back to that restaurant, and the first thing I made when I decided to try cooking something new.”