by Michael Rowe
“Yes, Dad. I understand.” I did, too. What had seemed like a great idea this morning in the swamp now seemed to be a portentous responsibility.
“Jamie?”
“Yes, Dad?”
“I want you to know something.” He took my chin in his hand and squeezed it very gently. “I know Camp Manitou was hard for you.”
“Dad, it—”
“Jamie, listen to me, I know what it was like. I’ve been to camp. I saw it in your eyes on Parents’ Day when we had that talk. I recognized that look. I know you were putting on a brave face for me, and I know why you were doing it, too. I know you wanted your mother and I to be proud of you. Well, we are proud. I just wanted you to know that. That’s one of the reasons why I thought you should keep Manitou. You showed me that you could be responsible this summer, and I’m going to trust you now.
My eyes filled with tears, but I was smiling for the first time since I could remember. “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”
“I love you, too, sport.” His own eyes were slick when he ruffled my hair. “Good,” he said. “Now then let’s go find that old terrarium of mine. Nobody should have to live in a paper bag as long as Manitou did this afternoon. Or our kitchen sink, either.”
Dinner that night was a humourless affair, though less tense than the car ride had been.
After my father and I had set up the terrarium, and filled it with water that would need to be changed daily until we were able to install a filtration system—as well as moss and small gravel rocks for him to rest on—we put Manitou inside.
“I think that’ll do it,” my father said. “Now I think we need to take a ride to the pet store and pick up some turtle pellets. Then maybe we should stop at the library and check out some books on turtle care so you’ll know how to take care of him properly.”
At the pet store, my father found a paperback book on the care of reptiles and amphibians. I found one specifically on the care of turtles. My father shrugged his shoulders and bought them both. In the car afterwards, my father and I didn’t say much to each other, but that didn’t mean we weren’t communicating.
When I think back today, that ride home from the pet store was one of the happiest moments of my childhood, full of promise. In retrospect, the wonder of that moment made everything that was to come later all the more cruel.
When we got home, my mother had come out of the bedroom and was cooking dinner. Without turning, she said, “Dinner in fifteen minutes, you two. And wash your hands, for heaven’s sake. I know you’ve been handling that filthy thing.”
My mother clearly still resented her edict about the turtle having been overridden by my father, but she was less angry than she had been in the car. Sustaining that level of ire over a long period of time wasn’t impossible for her, but it drained her in the same way that leaving a battery outside in sub-zero temperatures would drain its energy. In order to conserve the status quo, my mother must have realized she would have to dial her anger down.
Not for the first time, I looked between my father and my mother at the dining table and wondered why they had ever married in the first place, since she clearly didn’t really seem to even like him and he seemed to put up with her out of a sense of loyalty to something other than his love for her.
But in those days, in the early 1970s, divorce was something shameful that “other” people did, the sort of “other” people that people like my family and I had only heard of, but didn’t really know. A boy in my class at Buena Vista Public School, Tommy Marx, had divorced parents, a distinction he wore like an affronting port-wine stain birthmark. To the rest of us, Tommy never seemed completely clean.
The wife was usually to blame, in popular divorce lore. Even if the husband was the cause of it, it was because of her deficiency in performing her role as a wife and mother. And she passed along her disgrace to her children by alchemical transmutation.
While I had on occasion overheard my mother and her friends refer to divorced men as “cads,” or “bounders,” whenever the topic of a divorced woman came up, their mouths would set in obdurate lines, their eyes managing to communicate both pity and a kind of flinty resentment that one of their own sex would have let down the team so badly by falling so low. They used the term “broken home,” which I found horribly vivid, picturing, as I did, an actual smashed house: shattered walls, jagged spikes of timber beams strewn as though from a great height, deadly shards of glass, rusty nails, everything pointed and lethal—all of it the woman’s fault, a failure at the only thing that really mattered in a woman’s life.
Still, when I pictured my parents divorcing—something I did with increasing frequency as time went on—I imagined a world composed of my father and me alone, a world which was, if not always joyful, at least always even-tempered and full of simmering love and acceptance. For that, I would have gladly worn the port-wine stain of being the child of a broken home. In those fantasies, my mother was always living somewhere else and my father and I formed a universe of two.
“Mom, is it okay if Hank comes over after dinner so I can introduce her to Manitou?”
It seemed politic to ask permission from my mother rather than my father this time. Even though there was always a better chance of her saying no, I’d been the recipient of enough bounty from my father today that she would forbid me almost anything at this point, just on principle. I waited, resigned to that outcome.
To my surprise, she said, “Yes, Jamie, that would be fine. But she can’t stay too late. It’s been a long day for you, and for your father and I because of you. And please don’t make too much noise. I have a headache. You can play in your room. Do we understand each other, young man?”
“Thanks, Mom.” I began to push my chair back in preparation to leave the table. “May I be excused?”
My mother sighed deeply and theatrically, and reached for the pack of cigarettes and the lighter she always kept on the buffet table. She smiled wanly. “You didn’t even finish your dinner, Jamie. I can see how glad you are to see me, and how glad you are that I put in all that work to make your favourite dinner to welcome you back home. Oh well, I should be used to that by now. No one in this house appreciates what I do.”
Two years before, when I was seven, my mother complained about all the work she did for my father and me, and how no one appreciated the sacrifices she’d endured for our benefit. I’d made the mistake of suggesting to her that if she didn’t like housework, she could get a job and hire someone else to do the cooking and cleaning.
I’d thought it was a brilliant idea: in my mind I pictured something glamorous, like being a secretary, or working as a reporter for a newspaper, like Brenda Starr did in the comic strips that came to the house every Saturday in the Citizen. I expected a beatific smile and an enthusiastic hug in appreciation for my ingenuity in solving her problem for her. What I’d gotten instead was a spanking, and I was sent to bed without any dinner.
I looked down at the half-eaten plate of spaghetti, the sauce for which I knew she prepared in bulk, then stored in the deep freeze. I also knew there were frozen strawberries from the supermarket in the fridge for dessert. “Mom, it was so good!” I said it with as much enthusiasm and sincerity as I could muster. “Thanks! That was the best dinner I’ve had in weeks! The food at Camp Manitou was—”
She cut me off sharply, moving her hands in a brushing-away motion as though she were shooing away an overly familiar dog. “Go on, Jamie, go call your friend Lucinda. Make sure it’s okay with her mother she comes over. And remember what I told you about noise.” She looked meaningfully at my father, who stared at some point in the middle-distance but said nothing. “Your father and I have things to talk about.”
Hank tapped on the glass wall of the terrarium. “What’s he doing in there? He’s not even moving.” She was about to tap again, but I reached out and took her hand.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “You’ll scare him. Just let him g
et used to his new home. The book says they need time to acclimatize.” I pointed to the paperback on my dresser: So You’re a Turtle Owner Now! How to Take Care of Your Newest Family Member! On the cover were two blond children; the boy crew cut and ruddy-cheeked, the girl blue-eyed and pigtailed. They were both smiling at a pet painted turtle that looked sicklier, greener, and less vivid than Manitou. It was sunning itself on a rock in their backyard.
Hank frowned. “Acclima-what?”
“Acclimatize. It means ‘get used to.’ He needs to get used to his new home.” I had told Hank the entire story of how Manitou had come to live with me and she was impressed. “He’s had a rough day, so I want him to calm down.”
“Calm down?” Hank looked doubtful. “He’s not moving at all in there. He’s calm all right. Are you sure he’s even alive?”
“Of course he’s alive.” I tried to sound scornful, but I still reached in to the tank with my finger and gave him a little nudge. He moved a few more paces, then stopped, head retracting back into his shell. Manitou had clearly had enough of everyone, including me. “See? He’s moving just fine. Geeze, Hank.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “I wish I had a turtle. When our cat died, my mom said no more animals, period. Me, I’d love a turtle. Or a snake.”
“A snake would be cool,” I admitted. “But not as cool as this turtle. Maybe if you grew your hair long, your mom would let you get a snake.”
“I’d rather eat worms than grow my hair long.”
“You’re right, Hank” I said loyally. “You wouldn’t even look like you anymore.”
“Hey, do you want to take him to the greenbelt tomorrow afternoon? We could see if he wants to play down by the creek. It would be just like home for him. Bet he’d like that a lot.”
“Sure,” I said. “But my dad and I are going to build him an outdoor terrarium tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to put chicken wire around the sides and the top so he can sun himself outside during the day until it starts getting really cold.”
“Yeah, well. Aren’t you afraid someone will steal him out there?”
“Who would steal a turtle?”
“I dunno,” Hank admitted. “Maybe no one. Probably no one. You’re right. You guys have a fence anyway, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked out the window. The sun was going down behind our house. Long shadows reached across the lawn from the edge of the property where the low slats of the redwood fence around the yard were planted. Since Manitou was my first pet, I had never given any thought whatsoever to the notion of a fence as anything except something to keep me in the yard. It looked high to me, but who knew? I loved Hank, but I resented her just then for putting that fear in me. “It’s pretty high, too.”
“You’re right,” she said again. “Anyway, I gotta get home. I’ll meet you in the greenbelt.” She wiggled her fingers at the terrarium. Hank was a good friend—I’d asked her not to tap on the walls of Manitou’s new home and she’d listened to me. “Bye, Manitou.” Hank saluted the turtle. “See you tomorrow.”
After Hank left, I felt very tired. My mother had been right—it had been a very, very long day, and it was catching up with me now.
When I’d taken a shower, put on the clean pyjamas my mother had tucked under my pillow, and said goodnight to my parents, I went back downstairs to my room. Before I closed the door, I waited a moment till I was sure my parents were engrossed in their reading—the Citizen for my father, my mother flipping through Family Circle.
When I was sure they wouldn’t come downstairs, I closed the door and turned off my bedside lamp. The only illumination in the room now trickled in weakly through the cedar hedges bordering our yard and the neighbour’s from the pole-mounted floodlights around his aboveground swimming pool.
I took off my clothes and sat naked on the bed cross-legged. I stared into the vertical mirror on my wall. In the light of the candle I’d placed on my night table, the image in the mirror was shadow-shaped and ambiguous of gender. I bowed my head as though in prayer, then closed my eyes and whispered: “Come on out, Amanda. Come and talk to me. It’s me, Jamie. I’m home.”
I felt rather than heard the sigh, and I sensed rather than felt the movement in the air. When I opened my eyes again, I saw my own face in the shadows of the mirror. But it wasn’t really my face. It looked like my face—the same nose, the same mouth, the same prepubescent brow-ridge, and the same pale skin, tanned now from three weeks outdoors at Camp Manitou. It was my face the way an artist of incomparable genius might have replicated it on canvas. The same dark hair as mine, though there was admittedly a suggestion of moving shadows behind the head, as though it were longer hair, a girl’s hair.
Yes, the head, not my head, for by now who, or what, was looking back at me through the glass wasn’t me anymore. The eyes were my eyes, but not my eyes.
I felt my lips form the words Amanda spoke in the mirror using my voice. I felt my larynx move, but it was her voice I heard.
Jamie, I missed you. Why did you go away?
“I was at camp, Amanda,” I replied. “I told you I had to go. I didn’t want to. You know that.”
You left me alone here. I was alone for three weeks.
“I hated it, Amanda. They put me in a cabin with five other boys. They were mean to me. They beat me up and made me cry every night. Once, they even put a dead animal in my bed. Why didn’t you come to visit me?”
I heard genuine regret in my friend’s voice. No mirror.
“Not in the cabin, no,” I said. I hated the whiny sound of my own voice, but my pique didn’t allow me to stop pressing. “But there were mirrors in the washroom. You could’ve come then. You could’ve come at night. But you didn’t.”
I don’t live in those mirrors. I live in this one. I felt gentle pressure on my neck as my head turned towards the terrarium. You brought home a turtle. Why did you do that?
“I don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Everyone keeps asking me that. I guess I just wanted to. He’s beautiful. I named him Manitou, after the camp. He’s the only good thing that came out of me being there.”
Do you like him better than you like me?
“Amanda, he’s a turtle. You’re my secret friend. Who do you think I like better?”
I don’t know. Do you like Hank better than you like me? You talked to her tonight before you talked to me. Which one of us did you miss more?
“You, Amanda. Only you. Always you.”
Good. You beat up that boy on the bus, didn’t you?
“How did you know about that?”
My secret. Mine.
“No, really, Amanda, how did you know? Did you see it?” I remembered the sudden impression of clouds in the driver’s rear-view mirror before I blacked out and came to, seconds later with John Prince’s red hair in my fist and his blood spattered on my shirt. “Did you use the mirror over the driver’s seat? Did you help me?”
My secret. You beat him up pretty badly. He deserved it.
“Amanda, tell me if that was you. It didn’t feel like me. I never beat anyone up in my life. I really hurt him. I didn’t want to beat him up; I just wanted him to give Manitou back to me. I didn’t want what happened to happen. Tell me, please. Was it you? I won’t be mad. Because you just got through telling me that you could only live in this mirror, in my bedroom.”
My secret, she said again. A pause, then: I could have killed him, you know.
I was suddenly very cold in spite of the humid night and parents who didn’t believe in air-conditioning. “What? What did you say?”
I said, ‘You could have killed him, you know.’
“That’s not what you said, Amanda.”
Isn’t it? What do you think I said?
“Why are you being like this? Why are you scaring me? We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Yes, we’re friends. But you left me alone here. You’re not a ver
y good friend anymore, Jamie. I don’t like to be alone. I’m always alone.
“It was only three weeks.” My stomach contracted and I felt moisture gather under my arms. “And I told you I didn’t want to go to the stupid camp. My parents made me go. It was horrible. I missed being home. I missed you, especially.”
Liar. You’re a liar, Jamie.
“Goodnight, Amanda. I’m going to blow out the candle and turn on the light now. I want you to leave. I want to go to sleep now. Goodnight, Amanda. Go away.”
Don’t turn on the light yet, Jamie. Let’s play. Let’s take your turtle out of the terrarium and play with him. It’s dark. Your parents think you’re asleep. They won’t come down to your room. We can have some fun with him. No one will know.
This new hint of gleeful savagery in the voice terrified me. “I’m going to turn on the light now, Amanda.”
Don’t. I’m not ready to leave yet. You’ll be sorry.
In the dark, I flailed for the switch to my bedside lamp. When the yellow light flooded my room, the only image in the mirror was my own: wild-eyed and pale, a terrified, naked nine-year-old boy whose chest rose and fell in rapid bursts.
I looked around my room, checking to see if anything had shifted or changed. Everything seemed in its place: the sheet and coverlet on my bed were still turned down, the window was still open just enough to admit whatever pathetic breeze might manage to navigate the humid night.
I hurried over to Manitou’s terrarium on the table by the window, fearful of what I might find inside, or rather not find inside. But Manitou was there, exactly as he was supposed to be, apparently asleep beside the smooth rock we’d brought home from the creek at the greenbelt, thinking it might make him less homesick for the paradise I’d stolen from him.
Impulsively I tore the sheet off my bed and thumbtacked it to the wall over the mirror, covering it. If my mother noticed this at all over the next week (and she must have) she never let on. Since my return from Camp Manitou, her attitude toward me had grown increasingly distant, as though we had decided by mutual consent to stay out of each other’s way.