Uma strides towards them, shaking out her hands the way she does after she’s been working on her laptop. “Hello, Madeleine.”
“Who’re you?”
“She’s my dad’s girlfriend.”
“You gotta be kidding,” Mads says.
“You met her at Irwin’s birthday party,” Harriet reminds her. “She’s come to pick us up. I thought you were lost.”
“I’m never lost. Where’d you go?”
“Madeleine,” Uma interjects, “it would appear that you were leaving without Harriet.”
“We’re not going anywhere now.”
“Harriet, let’s go.”
“I want to stay with Gran.”
“Out of the question. You’ll talk it over with your father when he gets home.”
“But you said you don’t want me staying with you because of your eggs.”
“I’ve got eggs,” Mads says.
“I want you safe, Harriet. You are not safe with an old man who backs into school buses and an old woman who deserts you in the Scarborough Town Centre.”
“I didn’t desert her.”
“If you say so. Let’s go, Hal.”
Harriet waits for Gran to insist she stay with her, but Mads has her eye on an old duffer behind the wheel of an antique Jaguar. He rolls down his window and asks what’s going on. Mads adjusts her turquoise cap, sidles over to him in her high-heels, and leans in the window kicking her leg back the way she does when she wants eligibles to notice her legs.
“Harriet,” Uma warns, “the Rover’s still running. All we need is for it to get stolen.”
Uma cooks rigatoni primavera. Her laptop sits on the kitchen table. “Is it all right if I use your computer?” Harriet asks.
“Go ahead.” One of the good things about Uma is that she lets Harriet use her Mac. Trent gets hysterical if Harriet touches his because client information is on it and Irwin corrupted thirty-six files. “But I’m not Irwin,” Harriet argued.
“We’re all dependant on this tool, Hal. It’s not a toy.”
Harriet eats the noodles and vegetables with gusto. She enjoys Uma’s cooking because she uses fresh ingredients from the farmers’ market, although Harriet doesn’t like fennel, leeks or the weird greens Uma puts in her salads. Trent does: that’s how they met—they were both searching for arugula and radicchio when Irwin had the seizure.
Uma holds the pepper grinder over Harriet’s plate.
“No thank you.”
“Are you worried about your brother?”
“Not really.”
“He’ll pull through.” Uma offers Harriet a wedge of Parmesan and a cheese grater, another good thing about Uma. At home they eat tasteless Parmesan from a can. “What do you need the Mac for?”
“Photos of reptiles. I want to paint one. I like this one.” She turns the screen towards Uma.
“The Tarentola gigas,” Uma reads. “Wonderful.” She often says “wonderful” but never as though she means it.
Harriet points at the reptile. “See his hands and feet. Four digits on each.”
Uma grates Parmesan over her rigatoni. “Harriet, there’s something you need to understand.”
“It’s a tiny lizard, but fat. I want to paint a fat one.” She tries to look busy with her noodles to avoid hearing what she needs to understand.
“You know my parents were killed by a transport truck when I was nineteen?”
“Yes.” Trent told her the truck was transporting fuel and that Uma’s parents burned alive, belted into their seats. “That’s why you get to live in this house,” Harriet says, “because it belonged to your parents.” Harriet lost her house in the crash of 2008. When she works in the bank, she will buy her own house that nobody can take away from her.
“Actually, I tried to sell the house, even had some offers, but I couldn’t do it. It’s all I have left of my parents.”
“It’s a nice house.” It has a big front yard with trees and flowering shrubs. If Harriet hears the woodpecker, she scoots under the huge oak and watches the bird hammering away at the bark. She tried to draw him but couldn’t get the neck right.
“It contains a lot of memories,” Uma says. “But no parents. Harriet . . .” She leans over the table and gently closes the laptop. “Did Trent ever tell you I had a brother?”
“No.” Harriet tries to imagine a male Uma.
“My brother drowned trying to save me from drowning. He was fifteen. I was your age. It took him four days to die in the hospital. Do you know what my parents said to me? They said, ‘We told you not to swim to the rock.’ Then they stopped talking to me.”
“Forever?” Harriet would love it if her parents would stop talking to her forever.
“After the funeral they started saying the necessary day-to-day things but, no, it took a year before conversation flowed easily between us.”
It never occurred to Harriet that she could drown Irwin. It would be difficult because Lynne buckles him into life jackets. She pushes some leek slices to the side of her plate and grates more Parmesan on her noodles.
“My parents stopped speaking to me, Harriet. Can you imagine how isolating that would be for a little girl?”
Harriet spears a rigatoni with her fork. “Why weren’t you wearing a life jacket?”
“I was a kid. I wanted to swim to the rock like my big brother.”
“What was his name?”
“Otto.”
“Where was the rock?’
“In a quarry where we swam when we visited my grandparents.” Uma sits very still, looking a bit like a baboon, and Harriet tries to memorize the shapes of the shadows on her face.
“What I’m trying to make you understand, Hal, is I identify with the isolation you feel when your brother is in the hospital. All the love and attention is turned on Irwin and that must be very painful for you. You can’t help but resent that.”
Harriet forks zucchini slices into her mouth, and then a mushroom. She knows if she doesn’t say anything, Uma will go on explaining things.
“What you need to understand is that you have two parents who love you very much, they just don’t always show it because your brother’s condition is all-consuming.”
“My father doesn’t visit my brother.”
“He doesn’t like to visit your brother when your mother is present and, as you know, she is always there. What you have to understand is that we’re all under a great deal of stress right now. Your father is trying to support two households while getting T. Baggs Consultants off the ground. Your mother claims to be unemployable due to her mental health and your brother’s condition, and Gennedy, well, I’m not sure what the problem is there. The point is . . .”
“You could work.”
Uma sits straighter and tucks her baboonish chin into her neck. “I do work, Harriet. I work very hard.”
“I mean for money. You could get a job to help pay for infertility treatment. You could work as a greeter at Walmart. Mr. Bhanmattie got a job as a greeter and he has no retail experience. Then Dad would be able to pay us what he used to.”
“Since when do you know how much your father pays?”
“I don’t. I just know Mum’s always complaining he’s not making his payments. And when he does, it’s not what the court ordered.”
“It’s very difficult to make regular payments when you go freelance.”
“Mum says he shouldn’t have gone freelance. If he’d kept his job, your fertility drugs would be covered by insurance.”
“How wonderful that she keeps you so well informed.” Uma tosses the salad with sharp, convulsive movements. Shreds of weird greens tumble on the table.
“It just seems to me,” Harriet says, “if your thesis stresses you out, and my father’s work stresses him out, maybe you should be doing something else.”
> “One day, Harriet, you will grow up to discover that the path of least resistance is not always the most rewarding.”
“What’s rewarding about your path?”
Uma jerks her head as if a fly has landed on her nose. “I really don’t need this right now.” She starts to clear the dishes even though Harriet hasn’t had any salad, not that she wants any.
Harriet eats an olive. “Trying to have a baby when you’re stressed out all the time doesn’t make any sense. Babies are stressful. My great-grandmother had eight and it killed her.”
Uma, dishrag in hand, begins to tear up. Her tendency to start crying for no good reason irritates Harriet because suddenly everybody has to pay attention to Uma and tell her it’s okay to cry. Not Harriet. “If I was stressed out all the time, no way would I have a baby.”
“You can’t possibly understand. You’re a child.”
“I could understand if you had a good reason.”
Uma wipes her eyes. “It’s impossible to explain.”
“Which means you don’t have a good reason. A good reason wouldn’t be impossible to explain.”
Uma turns on her, her face almost as red as Mrs. Elrind’s. “I want my own family, Harriet. I lost my family. All I have is Trent. You have two parents, two stepparents, three grandparents and a little brother. I have no one.” She leans against the counter as though she needs it to stand.
“My family is nothing but trouble.” This what Mrs. Butts says about Harriet when she buys Minute Maid orange juice with pulp, or beef-flavoured Temptations for her cats instead of chicken.
Uma, red-eyed, stares at her as though eels are coming out of Harriet’s mouth. “I can’t believe you said that. Please go upstairs until your father gets home.”
“Can I take the Mac?”
“No!”
In Uma’s old room, Harriet opens the box of acrylics her father bought her and begins her portrait of Captain Elrind the Tarentola gigas. She prefers the translucency of oils to the flatness of acrylics but her parents think oils are toxic. She closes her eyes, remembering the shapes of the shadows on Mr. Elrind’s scaly hands. Below, Uma slams drawers and cabinets, and Harriet wonders what this is doing to her hormone levels. As she mixes reds, browns and yellows, visualizing the Tarentola gigas’ eight fingers and eight toes, she tries to think of ways to drown Irwin. It would have to look like an accident. But then she could have his room—it has better light than hers—and use it as a studio until she gets to Lost Coin Lake. She called Greyhound and a child’s one-way fare to Mattawa, including tax, is $84.73. This is more than she budgeted for. She’ll need at least $400 for supplies. She plans to arrive the day after Thanksgiving, when Algonquin closes the backwoods cabins for the season, making her break-in easier.
Shadows start to take shape in her mind, and she touches her brush to the plywood.
Uma must have liked violet because everything in her old room is painted violet, except the buttercup yellow walls. A poster of a bare-chested nineties rock star with a mushroom cut and high-waisted pants is on one wall, and two photos of Uma with her parents. Harriet has studied these carefully. Now that she knows Uma drowned her brother, they make more sense. In the photos Uma stands slightly apart from them, almost as though they’re strangers. The parents look surprised, and Harriet would like to know who took the shot, and what they did to surprise the parents. Uma doesn’t look surprised in the photos, just worried—the way she always looks. It’s as though she thinks worrying will bring her brother and parents back to life. Harriet doesn’t understand why Uma doesn’t move on. Mindy in 408 says she has to move on every time her ex beats her up. Harriet has sat with her on the fire stairs and listened while Mindy, sucking hard on cigarettes and holding ice packs over her bruises, insisted she would move on. She never does though, and Boyd comes back and beats her up again.
It’s hard to imagine what Uma and Trent’s baby would look like. Nobody seems concerned that it might have a stretched head like Irwin; they say his condition is congenital, which Harriet looked up and learned means nonhereditary. Still, what kind of baby would grow from a rotting egg and middle-aged sperm?
Just before her breakdown, Lynne did in-home pregnancy tests whenever her period was late. She and Gennedy tried to get pregnant for over a year. Harriet knew this because they discussed it with her and Irwin at the DQ. “Bunny, how would you feel about a little sister or brother?’
“I already have one,” Harriet said.
“Wowee wowee.” Irwin bounced on his stool. “I want a little brother. Boys only!”
“Gennedy loves you guys but he’s always wanted a child of his own. I’d like to give him one.” She made it sound as if she could wrap a child up and hand it to him. “Harriet? How would you feel about that?”
Harriet knew it didn’t matter what she felt, so she shrugged and spooned more of her Blizzard. For months she heard them humping more than usual through her bedroom wall. Gennedy became super friendly and bought Nintendo games that held no interest for Harriet. “Harreee . . .” Irwin would call, “come check this out, this is soooo cooool!” When he traded five Nintendo games for Voytek Bialkowski’s giant pencil, Gennedy shouted at him. Harriet had never heard him shout at Irwin before. “No trading at school, understand? Do you know how much those cost? Jesus fucking Christ, how could you be so stupid? What the fuck do you want a giant pencil for anyway? A giant pencil costs a buck. Who is this Voytek Bialkowski kid? I’m calling his parents.” Gennedy turned on Harriet. “Do you know this Voytek kid?”
“No.” Of course she knew him. He was famous for swindling the kindergartners.
“Why don’t you ever look out for your brother? Jesus fucking Christ. From now on, we’re following a strict no-trading policy, understand?” Irwin, trembling from the Gennedy assault, nodded slowly, looking like E.T. After Boyd beats up Mindy, sometimes she asks Harriet to watch E.T. with her because she watched it as a little kid and it makes her feel safe. The only criminal lawyer in history that’s broke contacted the school regarding the giant pencil swindle and hounded Voytek Bialkowski’s parents until he eventually got the games back. But Irwin didn’t want to play them anymore. A week later he got an infection in his tubing and had to go to the hospital. When he returned home, stick thin with a fresh surgical wound on his abdomen, Lynne stopped going out except to buy cigarettes to smoke on the balcony. Harriet no longer heard them humping through the wall.
Her father has returned and she can hear him and Uma having a heated discussion downstairs. He always starts out taking Harriet’s side but in the end caves to Uma. With Lynne he would storm out and she’d shout after him, “That’s good, just walk away from it. That’s real constructive.” Gran calls Trent “a spineless no-goodnik.” When Irwin was in the incubator with a collapsed lung, Trent found excuses to avoid the hospital. In those days Harriet was keen to visit Irwin because she believed he would turn into a normal baby brother. “When will he come out of the plastic box?” she kept asking, but no one would give her a straight answer. She stood on the footstool beside the incubator and talked to him about what fun they would have when he got better. She even told him about the Americana, convinced that this would give him a reason to live. When he was four months old, he started to breathe on his own. Lynne phoned Trent in tears and he came to the hospital right away. Harriet remembers her parents clinging to each other as though they were in a hurricane. When Irwin stopped breathing again, the doctors asked Lynne and Trent if they wanted Irwin back on the ventilator, or if they should let nature take its course. “Save him!” Lynne wailed. “Save my baby, you fuckers, or I’ll sue your asses.” They didn’t do hand compressions and break Irwin’s ribs because his heart and kidneys were functioning. Still, it seems to Harriet, the situation wasn’t that different from the hydrocephalic baby’s whose parents insisted the medical team keep resuscitating her, forcing her to die a torturous death.
After L
ynne screamed at the doctors, nobody in the ward was nice to them. The nurses no longer called Irwin a miracle baby. When he turned six months, they wanted him out of there. Trent bought a car seat and a wedge of foam he cut into a U shape to support Irwin’s ballooning head. The foam was bigger than Irwin. It was becoming undeniable to Harriet that her brother would never turn into a normal baby. In public places, she kept her distance from him and her parents.
At home Irwin watched her. Lynne laid him on a sheep shearling mat on the floor wherever she was because he couldn’t go anywhere. While other babies rolled around and crawled, he just lay there. If Harriet came into the room, she felt Irwin’s eyes fix on her. She tried not to look at him because sometimes he’d smile goofily and she’d start hoping he’d get better, even though experience had taught her that he wouldn’t. He still can’t hold his swollen head up properly. It always lists to one side.
With a fine brush, she paints the suspicious eyes of Captain Elrind the Tarentola gigas.
Six
Her father knocks on the door. “Hal?”
She runs to him. He lifts her up and she wraps her legs around his waist, pressing her forehead into his neck. It smells of bike sweat but she doesn’t care.
“It’s okay, Hal. He’s still in status epilepticus.”
She knows this means Irwin is hooked up to the IV and still being monitored. “Did you go see him?”
“I did. Lynne’s holding up pretty well although she’s not too happy Gran lost you.”
“She didn’t lose me.”
“She’s old, Hal. With a few screws loose. Anyway, what happened here with Uma?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? Because she’s pretty upset.”
“Why?”
“Well, I was hoping you could fill me in a little.”
Harriet knows he’ll pretend to listen to her side of the story but, after she spills her guts, he’ll still blame her. She won’t play this game. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light Page 6