“Olechka is a kindergarten teacher,” says Birch. “She’s been very active in her local community for years, and is about to welcome her first child.”
Rosemary seems just as wrong-footed as the rest of us. But she gathers her wits far quicker than I can. She asks Odessa some questions about her work and her life, and I can only stare at my friend. Why are you doing this? Is this a joke? Is there going to be some subversive turnaround, some prank to embarrass Birch?
But she just sits there, smiling, talking about being an expectant mother and how excited she is to fill Edmonton with new life and joy.
Soon, Rosemary recovers from her shock and realizes that she let Kastevoros Birch and Odessa Steps hijack her show. She interrupts Odessa.
“So let me get this straight: River Runson has agreed to step aside and name Olechka Stepanchuk in their place?”
Odessa nods sympathetically, knits her brow. Her voice is buttery soft.
“Adam Truman is going through a lot of soul-searching right now, and this is the worst possible time to have such an enormous responsibility thrust upon him. He’s not able to—”
There’s a crackle of static and the screen sizzles to black. I look around and see that René is standing behind me, pointing a remote at the TV.
“What are you doing? Put it back on!”
“No,” he says.
“Put it back on. I need to see.” My voice trembles. “I need to see when she embarrasses Birch. It’s a joke. Don’t you understand? It’s a piece of her performance artwork. She’s mocking them, we just haven’t got to the big reveal yet. Put it back on!”
René shakes his head. I lunge at him, try to claw the remote out of his hands.
“Put it back on you asshole! We’ll miss it!”
“River.”
“PUT IT BACK ON! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? GIVE ME THE FUCKING REMOTE!”
I almost twist the remote from René’s hands. He snatches it back from me, throws it down and it shatters on the floor.
“WHY DID YOU DO THAT?”
“River, listen. I’m sorry. I know she’s your friend but she’s—”
“She’s pulling a prank. It has to be a prank. It’s artwork, that’s her thing. She’s crazy and unexpected sometimes but she’s my friend. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. She’d never do it.”
René comes towards me, arms spread, and I feel the familiar panic shoot up my neck from the base of my spine. I stumble back. No. This isn’t happening. It’s a prank. He’ll see.
I race through the mall, pushing through the crowd, ignoring the gazes of a hundred people who probably want to come and fill me up with more misery. My mind is spinning in circles. I can’t control my thoughts. But my feet carry me back to a safe place.
Down in the whale, in the dim red light, I feel the tears starting to flow. I haven’t cried in so long. In six months, or six years, or more. I never let myself cry. I never let myself really feel anything. But now the dam breaks. She betrayed you. For fame. For nothing. For a moment in the limelight. My tears leave stinging tracks on my face and my sobs echo through the whale and there’s no Melting Queen to come and comfort me.
{12}
The Melting Queen shall brook no rival
“Anechka, she always has many stories to tell.”
Ludlow Spetnik sips his tea and looks off into the distance across the dining hall, staring into the thick fog of his memories. I focus my eyes over his shoulder, at the sliding doors which lead out to the care home’s parking lot.
“Brilliant stories, crazy stories from my Anechka! Impossible stories. But they have truth, this I know. I doubt her, I think ‘surely this one is too much to be believed!’ And sure enough I find some proof that shows it is so.”
He looks down at his hands and toys with the monogrammed handkerchief in his lap. He becomes absorbed in working his fingers over the tiny pink roses sewn into the cloth.
“And they were always true?” I ask, repeating myself for the tenth or eleventh time. We’ve cycled through the same conversation so many times that I know exactly what I have to say. He looks up at me, seems surprised to see a person sitting here across from him.
“Anechka’s stories?” I prompt.
His face lights up and he gives a dry chuckle. His laugh ignites a series of coughs.
“You say Anechka! To you she is Anna. To me she is Anechka.”
“But Anna told stories,” I continue.
“Anna, yes. Anechka, she told the most amazing stories. Places she goes and peoples she meets and dangers she finds her ways out of, always. And all the fellows she goes with! They call her Anechka, Anyutka.”
He chuckles, looks down and sees the mug of tea in his hand, takes a sip.
“I never call her my Anechka,” he says. “I never say, ‘look here, I own this Anna.’ We never marry—marriage no good for Anechka. So I never say ‘you are mine, doll.’”
He grins at me as if this is the most topical cultural reference, sure to impress. I can’t help but crack up at his awful attempt at some sort of Humphrey-Bogart-in-Casablanca, 1940s American accent. The skin arounds his eyes crinkles with joy at my laughter and I feel a pang of guilt. I didn’t expect to like him so much.
“Maybe this is why she stays with me until the end, and not with any others. I think sometimes, ‘Ludlow, maybe there are no others, and she tells you stories to make you jealous!’”
He lifts his eyebrows and gives me a wide-eyed grin.
“Even if there were no others, they were real to her,” he says. “And they became real to me too. She tells me about this Jack, the Painter, and comes back with portraits he makes for her. And this Joe, the Dentist, who likes that she bites him as they make love.”
He settles a weighty gaze on me. He doesn’t blink.
“And then there is me. Nothing special about Ludlow. But I think I am Ludlow the Listener. Maybe she tells the others all her stories too. But I don’t think this is so.”
He finishes his tea and looks at my face for a minute, frowning. I can never hide the masculinity of my features, nor do I fully want to, and today they are festooned with feminine flourishes, a sculpted eyebrow and a painted lip. I’ve unwoven my hair crown, and it tumbles around my shoulders. I wonder if Odessa’s grandfather thinks I’m a man or a woman.
But Ludlow Spetnik is probably just trying to remember if he knows me or not.
“Maybe there were no others,” he repeats, looking down at the table. “Maybe she believes in them but they aren’t real, and she convinces me because she is convinced.”
He looks up at me again and the dark cloud blows away off his face. He smiles.
“But it does not matter. I love her and her stories. I let her go away and I hope she comes back and she does, always. I forgive her when she hurts me. That’s when you know you love: when you forgive anything.”
The sliding doors open and I hold my breath. But it’s only an elderly woman returning from the farmers’ market, pushing a walker with bundles of leeks and chives in its basket.
“No,” I say, waiting for Odessa to appear. “Sometimes you can love someone and still not be able to forgive them.”
“I think your mind, it will change when you have love,” says the old man, struggling to rip open the plastic seal on his butterscotch pudding. “When you find one who is worth love, then you will forgive them anything.”
I take the butterscotch pudding and open it for him. The door slides open again and I turn my eyes expectantly to the entrance. I’ve been sitting here all morning, having the same few conversations over and over with this old man, waiting for Odessa to get here and see me with her grandfather. She’ll freeze, and she’ll feel fear, and she’ll feel violated. She’ll understand how I felt when she chose the spotlight over our friendship. I’m not proud of myself for stooping to her level, but it’s the only way I can think to get through to her. I have intruded on her safe ground, interfered with the one person she might actually care about. And just for a second, bef
ore our inevitable confrontation, her face will show a real emotion, not a manufactured one.
Over the past week, Odessa has become the Queen of Lies. Immediately after Birch’s grand announcement, ECHO flooded the city with images of their usurper Melting Queen. Her smiling face is everywhere: beaming from billboards, flashing her perfect white teeth on the front page of the Bulletin, smirking on the sides of buses and taxis.
ECHO publishes ludicrous facts about her accomplishments. She’s donated no less than three kidneys to dying children. She rescued a two-legged dog from drowning in the river. She pulled a pregnant woman from a burning car.
Even worse are their propaganda videos, which play at every commercial break and bounce around social media ceaselessly. Odessa speaks sanctimoniously into the camera, unspooling lie upon lie. She builds up an immaculate image of herself as the perfect Melting Queen and me as the defective, offensive parody.
“I’m a fifth-generation Edmontonian, born and raised,” she says, standing between two actors who’ve been hired to play her parents. “My mother is a nurse and my father works for an oil sands developer.”
“We’re expecting our first child,” she says, standing in the arms of a handsome young man who’s been hired to play her husband. “I know it’s cliché, but we had the classic high-school-sweethearts story.”
“I’m proud of my Ukrainian heritage,” she says, standing in front of a billowing blue-and-yellow flag. “My ancestors were farmers, and lived off the land of Alberta.”
“Adam Truman wants to spend millions of taxpayer dollars building a pointless fountain,” she says, standing in front of the Legislature fountains. “He thinks that Edmonton needs to copy Rome or Paris in order to be a great city.” The images of falling water are intercut with slow-motion footage of my meltdown at the coronation, tinted red. The attack ad is almost comically bad, almost a parody of itself. But judging by the comments, people are lapping it up.
“I think that Edmonton needs to be a great version of Edmonton, not a poor copy of any other city,” says Odessa, wearing an orange safety vest and helping a construction crew fill in some potholes. “I’m proud to be an Edmontonian, and I’ll be proud to raise my children here.”
“I’m honoured to carry on the tradition of brave women who served this city,” she says, walking along the hall of Melting Queen portraits. “Women who carved out a place for the female voice in a man’s world, who weren’t afraid to do what is right rather than what is popular, who heard the cries of their people and offered their firm but gentle support in a way that only a mother can.”
She stands before the Spring Throne, surrounded by a group of women with a rainbow of skin tones. The casual viewer, unversed in local history, would probably assume that these actors are the former Melting Queens. Odessa holds a random baby in her arms, and her cheeks burn with passion as her eyes bore into the camera.
“Never Send a Man to do a Woman’s Job,” she says with melodramatic flair.
#NeverSendAMan hovers on the screen for a few seconds, followed by “Vote Yes on August 31.” The video has been shared over 15,000 times.
The city has been split in two. A great divide. Everyone is picking a side. No one seems to have officially organized it, but the two rival factions have each claimed one of the Melting Queen’s colours, dividing into the Pinks and the Greens. Odessa’s supporters wear pink in an explicit celebration of her gender. My supporters are little green thorns in the rose-choked landscape, with felt patches on their arms and brave hearts.
The Greens still come up and talk to me, seeking comfort, sharing their stories. But now the Pinks are here to shout them down, threaten me with violence. I thought things were getting better. For the shortest of periods, it felt like Edmonton was ready to give a great collective shrug to the issue of my gender identity. But my detractors were just lurking in the shadows, waiting for a figurehead to rally around. Now, their anger has been legitimized. They know they’ll be shamed by the politically correct, ivory tower, outraged-by-everything brigade. But they have strength in numbers now, and they feel comfortable claiming the moral high ground.
The people who come up to me offering support and seeking solace find themselves surrounded by jeering crowds. Some are driven by a primal urge to defend me, and fight off my enemies. I try to defuse dozens of fights, but I always end up having to flee the scene to escape escalating violence. After a couple days, I stop going out. It’s not worth risking people’s safety. Better to be out of sight, even if I can’t be out of mind.
I thought that Kaseema might jump ship, abandon me for Odessa. My rival is the ideal Melting Queen: pregnant, popular, perfect with crowds. But Kaseema stays by my side with Clodagh, immediately organizing a counter-campaign.
We move our base of operations into Clodagh’s house, and Kaseema starts recruiting volunteers to campaign for me. They scurry around, making signs and pamphlets and phone calls, stopping me every so often to give me a hug or a word of encouragement—which inevitably leads to me comforting them in the spare bedroom while they sob out their miseries.
Clodagh has been fighting valiantly to continue work on the fountain, but nobody seems to care about our glorious project anymore. Not when Odessa is everywhere, drawing attention to a thousand injustices: the women’s shelter that had its funding slashed; the families whose children are getting sick from industrial pesticides; the workers who’ve been laid off following the candy factory closure while the CEO got a $20 million bonus. She’s on the front lines, fighting for the people, and everyone is slowly but surely falling in love with her brave words and beautiful face.
But it’s not her face that I see come through the care home’s doors, breaking me out of my thoughts. Now that Sander Fray has woken up to the world and eaten half the city, he’s full of vitality and vigour. I haven’t seen him since we moved to Clodagh’s house. I wonder if he’s tracked me down, come to make peace in our triad. If he thinks he’s here to engineer a reconciliation, he’s in for a letdown.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, eyes shining. Much like Edmonton, Sander has been fully restored to the radiant beauty of his summer self.
“What are you doing here?” I snap. He shrinks back and I feel instantly guilty. He’s not Odessa. I shouldn’t treat him like this just because he’s my closest substitute for her. I sigh and shake my head and run my fingers through my limp orange hair.
“I’m sorry, Sander. I’m here to confront Odessa and force her to tell me the truth after all these lies. She’s done some insane things in the past—like that time she broke her rib when that giant vulva sculpture she was building out of porn magazines in Churchill Square collapsed on top of her, or all those times she was arrested for public nudity during her Asking For It project—but this is on a whole other level. This isn’t something that we’re going to rescue her from. This isn’t something she can just walk away from.”
“I’m on your side,” says Sander. “I can understand why part of her thinks this is a good idea, but I know that she’s going to regret this. I tried to talk to her, but she won’t answer my calls. I left her a bunch of voicemails, though.”
“It looks like she’s found herself some new friends,” I say bitterly.
Ludlow Spetnik twists around in his wheelchair and looks up at Sander.
“Who is this bright boy? Come sit here and I will make us tea.”
Sander hesitates a moment, then takes the chair beside Ludlow Spetnik, who shoves a plate of biscuits towards him.
“I don’t think you fully understand her motives,” says Sander, beginning what I’m sure will be a long apologist essay explaining Odessa’s choices. But he doesn’t get a chance to continue, because the next thing I know, Odessa Steps enters and breezes up to the table.
“Hello Papa,” she coos as she drapes her hands across her grandfather’s shoulders and leans down and kisses his cheek. She doesn’t seem at all scared or shamed or threatened by me.
“Ah, Alina!”
/> Ludlow Spetnik raises his hand and pats Odessa’s. She gives him a warm smile which only brightens when she turns her gaze on me.
“You are done your lunch, yes?” she says to her grandfather.
“I am talking with this strange lady,” whispers Ludlow loudly, gesturing at me. “I am telling her stories of your Mama.”
“He’s been telling me about your grandmother,” I say. “Apparently she made up countless lies about herself. I guess it runs in the family.”
Odessa laughs as she sits in the remaining chair.
“Papa,” she says through her wide smile, “this one used to be my good friend, but now we are in a fight. They have something I want. They had a chance to do something great, but they threw it all away. So now I have to take up the torch, and do what they failed to do.”
Ludlow looks between me and his granddaughter, his bushy white eyebrows drawn in concern.
“If she is friend, you two, you must not be fighting. You share.”
“What if it’s not something that can be shared, Papa?”
“Then one of you will have it and one of you will not have it. The one who cares more for her friend will let her friend have it. She will be happy for her friend! This is a true friend who does this.”
I skewer Odessa with my most disgusted look.
“Even your own grandfather tells you to drop this. To stop all your lies.”
She gives me an infuriating, patronizing smile.
“Ugh, lighten up, River. Of course I’m telling lies! I love lying. You know this. I do it all the time. So does everyone. So do you. Lies are how we create our identities. We’re all just playing characters, putting on masks and projecting certain images of ourselves into the world. You’re just playing River Runson, and he’s just playing Sander Fray, and now I’m playing Olechka Stepanchuk.”
She leans forward, invading my personal space. I can feel her body heat and smell the scent of her grandfather’s musty cologne. Her grey eyes drill into mine. Her platinum blonde wig is aggressively bright. She smirks as if we’re sharing an inside joke.
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