The Lives of Desperate Girls

by MacKenzie Common

  Before, Helen had just been a blurry photo, a crime scene, a shared school building. But as Pat talked I could feel the image I had of Helen deepen and flush with detail. I could imagine her as a kid, keeping Bobby and the other cousins in line. I could see her sitting in the hospital with her father, impressed by the professional people who eased his pain. I saw a girl who was special to the people who knew her, but invisible to and overlooked by the rest of the world.

  It would have been so much easier if she’d been a terrible person.

  “I wish I had met her,” I murmured. Pat smiled wistfully.

  “You would have liked her. She was shy, but there was so much good there. She had a doll that looked like you when she was a little girl, and I can remember her telling me that someday she wanted blond hair just like it. One time, she even tried to color her hair yellow with a highlighter!” Pat said, a laugh escaping her lips.

  “That’s funny,” I said. We fell into silence, and I could feel pressure building inside my head. I knew I needed to tell her what I had found out from Leslie. She deserved to know everything about her daughter, but it seemed unimaginably cruel to tell a mother that the police were no longer investigating her daughter’s murder.

  “This is really hard to tell you, but you have a right to know. I…uh…met someone who works at the police station recently. She said they don’t have any leads and are…putting the case on the back burner,” I said, choking the words out.

  Pat flinched and stared down at the table. Her shoulders slumped and she gave a great, shuddering sigh, as if trying to stop herself from crying.

  “Let me guess, they’re focusing on the missing white girl?” she asked, and then cringed. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jenny. I know that’s your friend, I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” I interrupted. “I find it weird as well. I mean, this is a murder and they’re doing nothing!” I said in frustration. I was slamming up against a major limitation in life: how the people who care the most about something almost never have any power over it.

  Pat sighed and pushed her wire-rimmed glasses up, exposing dents where they had rested on her fleshy cheeks.

  “That’s what you don’t understand. You trust the police because you know if you needed them, they would help you. We don’t see them like that.”

  “How do you see them?” I asked.

  “Cops are always there to arrest a Native but never there to protect one,” Pat said matter-of-factly, as if I had asked her the weather forecast.

  “But surely…” I paused, not sure how to force all of my roiling frustration into words. I knew almost nothing about politics and history, but my gut told me I was feeling around the edges of a grave injustice, something I didn’t quite understand.

  “Jenny, you seem like a nice girl. But why are you here? I understand that you lost a friend, but why come talk to me?” Pat asked, not unkindly. She was examining me from across the table. I swallowed hard. That was the million-dollar question. Why was I doing any of this?

  “When your daughter passed away,” I began, feeing queasy about using such a gentle term for an inherently violent death, “I think it made me notice some of the stuff that had always been there, the ugly side of this town. Now, I just want to know the truth.”

  A long silence passed. I began to regret how selfish my words seemed. Here I was, bothering a grieving mother with my petty thoughts about how the death of her daughter, a person I had never even met, had made me feel bad. Pat took her glasses off and rubbed her face hard with the heel of her hand. Then she put them back on and looked right at me, her dark eyes steady as they met mine.

  “You know, I was in a residential school,” she said quietly. “They told my parents that by law they had to send my sister and me to St. Mary’s, but my parents wanted us to stay with them, to grow up learning about hunting and camping on the trapline. When the police took us away, my mother fell to the ground and wept. I was six years old and it was the first time I saw my mother afraid.”

  “Do you mean St. Mary’s Mother House?” I asked. “The convent by the lake?”

  “Yeah. We were kept there. The nuns were our teachers. On the first day, my sister and I were told we couldn’t speak Anishnabe, only English. We were told that our beliefs about the Creator were wrong and that our parents had raised us to be useless Indians. It was a terrible school. They beat us constantly, and we were always cold and hungry. I felt ashamed all of the time, terribly ashamed of who I was and how bad I must be to end up at such a school.”

  She took a deep breath before she continued. “My sister was always weaker than me. She died of pneumonia the first winter we were at the school. No one gave us warm clothing. When she died, my father came to the school. He told them that they had killed one of his daughters and he wanted the other one back. They refused. They told him he was an unfit parent and that I was better off without him. My father begged but they wouldn’t listen, so he asked for the body of his other daughter back. They refused him that as well. I saw him at the gate of the school; I wasn’t allowed to go down and see him. He waved and I waved back, but it was hard to see him so broken. They took everything from him and he was never the same.”

  “But why wouldn’t they give him his daughter’s body?” I asked, feeling like I was going to throw up. I couldn’t believe this was Pat’s life story, that all of this had happened in Thunder Creek.

  “Because each school had to account to their religious leaders, they had to keep records of the souls they had saved, and those records were used to allocate funding. If a child was buried at the Catholic school, the church got to count them as a soul saved. At the residential school, we were all just numbers, and a dead Indian was worth just as much as a live one.”

  I felt tears gather in my eyes but I blinked them back. I didn’t feel I had a right to cry.

  “Did you ever tell anyone about this?” I asked, imagining Pat in a courtroom or a police station, forcing people to atone.

  “Who would I tell? The people who care don’t need to hear it because it happened to them too. We couldn’t go to the cops. The police were the ones who made sure we went to residential school. The police would have caught us and brought us back if we ran away. They didn’t care what happened at the school or who died, because we were Native. And we knew it could always be worse. Have you ever heard of a starlight tour?” Pat asked. She was speaking rapidly now, and I got the sense that she had suppressed these words for too long, aching to let them free.

  “No. Is it a Native tradition?” I asked.

  Pat laughed mirthlessly. “Far from it. It’s what cops do in the Prairies. They pick up Natives in the winter, especially if they’re drunk, and drive them out to the edge of town, take their jackets and leave them to freeze to death. The last one I heard about was three or four years ago.”

  “Why? Why would they do that?” I whispered. Pat shrugged.

  “Probably the same reason Americans had slaves and Nazis killed Jews—because they don’t see us as people, and they don’t believe we deserve to live in the first place.”

  “And that’s why you think the cops stopped looking for Helen’s murderer?” I asked hesitantly, afraid to even mention her name out loud. The righteous fire in Pat’s face immediately disappeared. She looked like an old woman, her features blurred and worn down by a life of hardship.

  “They didn’t investigate why my sister died. Why would I expect them to do anything for my daughter?” she whispered, her eyes brimming with tears. “Someone took my daughter on her own starlight tour that night. And she didn’t deserve it. My daughter was a beautiful person and she didn’t deserve to be treated like trash.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “She didn’t.”

  We sat there in silence in the tiny kitchen. The ticking of the wall clock seemed to fill the space between us as feathers of snow fell past the window. There wasn’t anything else to say.

  —

  The road out of the reserve took me down
the highway and then along the shores of Fisher Lake. Eventually, I saw the iron silhouette of the St. Mary’s cross looming above the treetops. I felt a chill as the three-story brick building emerged from the woods. In the flurries of snow by the gate, I could almost see the figure of Pat’s father begging for his daughters, one dead, one living.

  I had been in St. Mary’s countless times. Chloe and I had done children’s plays there. I was always a chorus member, but Chloe was a born star. When we were young, the bigger parts always went to the preteens. But Chloe would manage to transform her few lines of dialogue into something so wonderful that even the lead actresses would covet her part.

  The play practices were in the evenings, and sometimes Chloe and I would sneak away to explore when we weren’t needed. We would climb stone staircases bathed in the jaundiced light cast by dusty bulbs. Or we would sneak into the little chapel and inspect old storage rooms stacked with school desks. Or run down shadowy hallways hung with wooden crucifixes and terrify each other by telling ghost stories about the people who might have died there. The sick irony of that last memory was now palpable.

  No one had ever told me that St. Mary’s was a residential school. I didn’t know much about residential schools at all; the topic had been barely covered in history class. I knew that Native kids had been taken against their will and that the goal was to eliminate their culture by “killing the Indian within the child.” It all seemed so hypocritical. We had been taught that Canada promoted human rights both at home and abroad. That was true except when it came to Natives.

  It seemed like you were still allowed to be racist against Natives; you just had to practice a different kind of prejudice. The new racism lay in a shoddy investigation, a buried newspaper article and a willingness to move on without any sort of resolution. Maybe the message from our history had never changed. Maybe even now a Native life wasn’t worth the same as a white person’s. The death of one was a sad inconvenience, the other an unjustifiable tragedy.

  As I watched the tower of St. Mary’s recede in my rearview mirror, I felt a deep sense of shame. I had helped raise money for the convent’s new roof as a child. I had skipped over the short sections on residential schools in my history textbook. But it was more than that. I felt ashamed that little Aboriginal girls grew up in their homeland wanting blond hair like mine, blue eyes like mine, pale skin like mine. I thought of Helen trying to color her hair yellow with a marker and felt sick.

  Chapter Eighteen

  March 6, 2006

  I spent the weekend alone, watching TV and trying to make sense of everything I’d talked about with Pat. I was walking down the hallway on Monday when someone tapped my shoulder. I whirled around, expecting to find Tom standing there ready to apologize and carry on. I would have taken him back in an instant; the fight we had already seemed insignificant. Instead, my heart sank when I saw it was Joseph Pitreault.

  Joseph was Thunder Creek’s very own official nerd. He and Liam McAllister always had the best grades in school. Everyone loved Liam because he wore his success with an easy comfort that belied the effort required to be an academic and athletic star. But Joseph committed the cardinal teenage sin of letting people know how much he cared. Unlike Liam, Joseph had never learned to hide his ambition, and it gave him a slimy, grasping air. He had been the boy in elementary school who snatched the test out of your hands to compare scores. Now, Joseph made no secret of the fact that he was going to overachieve his way out of this school and into a top university. I’d seen Joseph corner teachers in the hallway to talk extra credit. I almost felt embarrassed for him when I heard those same teachers make snide remarks to their colleagues once he’d left.

  “Hey, Jenny,” Joseph said, clutching the handle of his generic laptop bag. He glanced at his watch. Clearly, the inefficiency of small talk was silently destroying him.

  “Uh, hey, Joseph,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Well, as you probably know, I’m head of the yearbook this year…”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said. Joseph paused, as if waiting for me to congratulate him on this great achievement, but he continued when I remained silent.

  “Anyways, we’ll be adding a page to the yearbook honoring Chloe. We have pictures from her parents and some stuff from the drama club. Since you were her best friend, we were hoping that you would write something. We don’t have much room. Maybe a haiku or one of those acrostic poems with her name?”

  “Like what? Her name has five letters,” I said flatly. “That would be kind of a shitty poem.”

  “You can write whatever you want,” Joseph said, checking his watch again. “Just keep it under a hundred words, and I’ll need it by next Monday.”

  “What about Helen?” I asked. Joseph frowned. “You know, the girl who was murdered? Does she get a page?”

  “Yeah, we’re going to put something in there,” he said dismissively, waving his hand. “We can’t afford another page, not after the Spirit Day costumes were so good this year. But maybe we could Photoshop a frame around her school picture and write ‘In memory of’ on it.”

  “Why can’t Chloe share a page with Helen?” I asked. “Just get rid of my writing and put some stuff about Helen in.”

  Joseph frowned, his body all but vibrating with stress. He had clearly thought this would be a thirty-second errand, and I was stubbornly running over time. It irked me how seriously he was taking the yearbook. If high school was mostly meaningless, then surely the memorializing of it must be even more trivial. Then again, it was easy to mock the yearbook when I was never going to be voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” I only prayed that I wouldn’t be named “Most Likely to Organize Their Sock Drawer on a Friday Night,” the unofficial Loser of the Year award at our school.

  “We have nothing on Helen,” Joseph said through gritted teeth. “Chloe starred in all those plays; she had a real presence in the school. Helen didn’t appear to be in any clubs or sports. I combed through three years of yearbook files and I can’t even find a picture of her other than her class photo.”

  “So, you’re punishing her for not being a joiner?” I asked, perversely enjoying the way Joseph’s face was turning tomato-red. I was pretty sure my new bad attitude had also disqualified me from “Most Likely to Be a Walmart Greeter,” an admittedly dubious honor. “She gets murdered and she doesn’t even get a memorial from her own school’s yearbook?”

  “Yes,” Joseph said shortly. “How can we remember someone that no one even noticed in the first place?”

  “That sounds like a question better suited for the head of the yearbook,” I said, turning to leave. “Oh, and Joseph?”

  “Yes, Jenny?”

  “The only way I’ll ever write you a poem is if I can find a rhyme for ‘Fuck you, Joseph.’ You’re the genius—let me know if you come up with one.”

  I left him standing there with his jaw hanging open. It was one of the only moments from my eleventh grade year that I actually wish had ended up in the yearbook.

  —

  After blowing off Joseph, I realized I could no longer stand to be fighting with Tom. I barely talked to anyone, and I noticed how close I was to being totally alone. I spent the day at school in a trance. My ideas about Helen were growing stagnant in my head because I couldn’t trust anyone else enough to talk about them. I missed the secret life Tom and I had shared.

  Was it love? I didn’t know. I had been told by a host of teen romance novels that my life would be inexplicably changed when I met my first love. He was supposed to somehow fill the cracks in my personality like mortar and provoke dramatic pronouncements about eternity. I didn’t really feel that, but I did find Tom pushing out the other thoughts in my head. I liked to daydream about things we could do together someday, concerts down south, road trips out west. They were pipe dreams, but they filled me with a jittery kind of excitement. I needed to make up with him.

  I started to hunt for Tom between classes. His truck was in the parking lot but he wasn’
t at his locker and I didn’t know his schedule. It was a strange feeling to roam around the school between classes, looking for one person in a sea of students.

  I finally spotted him at lunchtime on Tuesday. He was outside smoking with a few friends at the curb. It was an intimidating group of guys all dressed in black. Socially, Tom was hard to categorize. The people he hung out with were mostly punks or hard-core partiers. They were the people who made the pastel preps nervous by showing up at parties with goateed friends long out of high school.

  Tom saw me before everyone else. He exhaled a ribbon of smoke as he watched me walk over. I saw a flicker of a smile and I knew in that moment that he had missed me too. I suddenly felt better than I had in days, a warm flush washing over me.

  “Hey, guys, this is my friend Jenny, she’s a grade below,” he said, shifting over so I could join the boys.

  A guy with three rings in his eyebrow waved at me, and another with a shaved head offered me a cigarette. I declined. I had never smoked before, and I certainly wasn’t going to try it in the cold light of day. Nice girls usually only smoked at parties. They waited until everyone was so drunk that no one would remember how trashy they looked.

  Still, it was strangely exciting to stand out here in the smoking area with underage guys flagrantly breaking the law. Their confidence somehow prevented anyone from challenging them. It made me wonder what other rules were capable of flexing if you pushed against them.

  “Hey. Good to meet you all,” I said.

  “How did you guys meet?” Eyebrow Rings asked me. He was smiling encouragingly. These guys didn’t seem particularly intimidating, and I felt guilty for judging them without ever talking to them.

  “Uh…pretty much like this,” I said. I made eye contact with Tom across the group and smiled. He smiled back, his dark eyes shining from beneath his bangs.

  “And here I thought you were going to say chess club,” Eyebrow Rings said, jokingly punching Tom on the shoulder.