“How do you know for sure, though?”
“I don’t.”
“Does she ever come out?”
“Sometimes.”
“For what?”
“To get food and go to the washroom.”
“What does she eat?”
“Crackers, fruit, water.”
“Can I see her?”
“No.”
“What is that red blob on the outside?”
Jackie’s blond pigtails curled into small balls at the ends. Her cheeks were white like milk with red splotches in the middle. Her nose was perpetually wrinkled in curiosity.
We met in grade four, when our teacher assigned us as partners for a project on the first moon landing. Then, when Jackie asked me to come shopping at a flea market with her mother, I agreed. Her mother even bought me a pair of earrings, small silver peace signs with pink borders, for my recently pierced ears. Her mother, at that time, still had some of her leftovers from her hippie days in the late ’60s — leather sandals, the flower she sometimes tucked behind her ear, the hugs she doled out like tissue. But as Jackie and I went from grade four to five, her mother decided to return to work as an insurance broker and most of her whimsical qualities disappeared. By the time we reached grade six she wore mostly lady-suits and was making a good business selling people back-up plans on their own deaths.
I had grown tired of all Jackie’s questions about my mother, realizing I had appeased her at first simply out of fear of losing my only friend. But I didn’t want to talk about my mother anymore, so I asked Jackie to leave.
“But I don’t want to go yet, I have another question,” she said. I could hear her taking mental notes in her head: Stays in teepee because she is dying. Only comes in to use bathroom and prepare food. Maya doesn’t know if she’s sad.
“Go home, Jackie. Now.”
Her round face dropped in surprise. “I told you, I don’t want—” I stood up and pulled her by the forearm towards the front door. “Owwww, that hurt!” she screamed.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore, and I don’t want to talk to you.”
Kicking Jackie out was the only retaliation I could find for her intruding into my mother’s situation. I hadn’t yet figured out how to get back at the people who peered over the fence, stopped my father to question him in the driveway, or those who had painted the teepee.
Jackie went to the door and slipped on her pink jelly shoes that had been waiting on the tile floor.
“You’ll regret this, Maya,” she said as she left. “You lost your one chance to be friends with me.” I only shrugged and closed the door behind her when she stomped off.
The afternoon that Jackie and I spent in my backyard, after my mother was vandalized, was the last one we spent together as friends. But shortly before dinnertime on that day, I met Elijah Roughen, thirteen-year-old son of Trudie Roughen who lived at two Emerald Crescent, right down the street from us. Even before my mother was sick, Mrs. Roughen had showed interest in my mother. There was a time, when I was around nine, that Mrs. Roughen had picked my mother up and they had gone to a craft show out by the river. My mother had returned with a macramé teapot cozy in the seven chakra colours and a mini dreamweaver for me to hang in my bedroom window — to catch nightmares, she had said.
Mrs. Roughen, she had told me, had bought only a knitted cover for the Kleenex box in her bathroom. “That Trudie is a strange woman,” she said, “but I guess it’s nice to get out.”
Mother was the one to tell me about Elijah, two years older than me. And how he was shy, but sensible (Mrs. Roughen’s words), and had many part-time activities that had earned him distinction, awards even — first place ribbon for horse jumping and all his swimming badges (yellow to white). This had all happened a few years ago, but lately, Mrs. Roughen worried about her son. He had turned coarser, gotten some new friends, stopped many of his activities. Mrs. Roughen hoped that with the right attention, he could still be salvaged. Mother warned me that Mrs. Roughen was hoping for me to be a good influence on Elijah, because I seemed quiet, studious, and square.
“You got her fooled, eh?” my mother said (as a joke, I think). “You’re a firecracker, my dear.” She looked down when she said it, like somehow, she only hoped.
Jackie had just left when Mrs. Roughen knocked on our door.
“Hello, Maya,” she sang when I opened the door. Blue eye shadow coated her eyelids and her thin eyebrows were plucked to within an inch of their lives. “I am here to talk with your mother. Now, I know that she is ill and that her new lifestyle alienates her a bit from myself and the rest of the ladies in the neighborhood, but nevertheless, I thought I should stop by.” When Mrs. Roughen said “lifestyle,” she created quotes on each side of her head with four of her manicured fingers, and her left eye seemed to wink. I tried to hear her thoughts but was met with a fuzzy wall of static.
“I hope you don’t mind I brought my son, Elijah.” Mrs. Roughen came through the door then and kicked off her heeled sandals. Elijah followed, his chin dropped in embarrassment, cradling a pineapple upside-down cake in his arms. His appearance contradicted itself. Although he wore a black Duran Duran T-shirt with a rip at the collar and a black leather wristband, and his dark hair peaked into tiny spikes on top of his head, every inch of him was thoroughly groomed — teeth gleaming white, no crust in the corners of his eyes, shiny skin that I could almost see myself in. He had wonderful eyes — brown and inviting. Nestled behind the brown was the soul of a kid who had seen stuff. He puffed his cheeks in a fake smile.
“Where should I put this?” he asked me.
“The kitchen, I guess.” I was unrehearsed at that sort of etiquette. He followed me into the kitchen. His mother peeked through the kitchen window at the teepee.
“So that’s it, is it?” said Mrs. Roughen, pointing. “Your mother is out there?”
“Yes.” I had grown tired of all the questioning.
“And she never comes in?”
“Sometimes.” I felt like I was repeating myself.
“Can I go out there?” She said this slowly, stretching out each vowel and consonant like she was painting them across a canvas.
“Let me tell her first.” I left both Elijah and Mrs. Roughen alone in the kitchen and ran out to my mother, who was sitting cross-legged on her mattress, eyes closed, sheet draped tightly over her shoulder.
“Mother?” I interrupted her. She opened her eyes slowly. “There is someone her to see you. Mrs. Roughen.”
“Why?” she asked, dropping her eyelids closed.
I shrugged.
“Tell her to come around, I guess.”
Mrs. Roughen inched round the side of the teepee and mimed a knock on the door flap.
“Come in, Trudie” was my mother’s response. Her voice came out even and smooth with an invisible period at the end of her sentence. Mrs. Roughen ducked into my mother’s air, in one complete swoop.
While she was inside, I stayed in the yard with Elijah. He dropped to the grass, lying back on his elbows and crossing his ripped jeans at the ankle. I could see his knees through the holes. I pushed my lips together and sat cross-legged beside him, my fingers interlaced in my lap. I watched the yellow light pulsing like tiny spotlights out from his chest. I can’t believe I let her drag me here, I heard him think. I could feel his emotions drift through my mind like a bubbling stream: hunger, boredom, frustration, and finally, an image of a male face with a handlebar moustache.
“My parents are splitting up,” he said like an axe through a log. “At least, I’m pretty sure they are. My dad screwed some other chick.” I flinched and thought how weird the sentence sounded coming out of his perfect Chicklet teeth. Open sky above us began to cloud over while I thought of what to say next. “Have you ever done it?” he asked. I grimaced. “Of course not, you’re probably too young anyway.”
“I’m only eleven,” I added in my defense. All I knew about sex at that time was what I had learned earlier in the year from a boring film at school about the menstrual cycle.
“Have you kissed someone at least?”
“Yes.” I studied the grass with intensity to avoid facing my lie.
“Hmm,” he snorted. “So you’re a virgin then, eh?”
“I guess.”
“Let’s go in the shed.”
“What?”
“I want to show you something.”
Going into the shed with a boy I had just met seemed extremely appealing then. It could have been an escape, a refuge. Maybe what awaited me inside my father’s shed was more brilliant than a dying mother in a teepee? Maybe just for a moment I could be normal again — an adventurous, risk-taking version of the normal me.
So I followed Elijah into the shed. He slapped the door shut behind us and we were left in only medium darkness, thanks to one small plastic-covered window letting a thin stream of light through. I backed up and stumbled over the foot of my father’s wheelbarrow (I had never seen him use it), and Elijah reached out his hand to touch the hoes, rakes, and shovels that hung from the ceiling. The smells of damp chipboard, grass clippings, and grease created a comforting bubble around the both of us. Then Elijah squeezed out a small box from the waistband of his pants — red, DuMaurier, half empty when he opened it.
“Want one?” he offered, pulling out a thin stick and placing it between his lips.
“No thanks.” I was let down by the cigarette, as if I was expecting a fancy lizard in a jar. He lit it with a match from his pocket, inhaled with a smacking sound and blew smoke into the air between us.
“My mom was pretty pissed when she found out about my dad.” His voice cracked on the word “dad.” “She threw her makeup bag at the wall in the bedroom and everything went flying: lipsticks, eye shadows, bottles of skin-coloured crap — it totally covered the white paint on the walls.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“She cracked one of her mirrors, which is supposed to be bad luck, but she didn’t seem to care much.” I knew Elijah was only thirteen, but he seemed to be aging in front of me as he spoke, grey hairs sprouting at his temples, wrinkles spreading out on his cheeks, the skin sagging under his chin. “It was the girl’s gym teacher from the school where he teaches. Maybe they did the nasty in the utility closet or some shit like that.” The walls of the shed felt like they were shrinking around us. My armpits grew wet and the thoughts in my head grew louder and more threatening.
She’s cute — this from inside his head, though I didn’t ask to hear it.
“Come here,” he said out loud, but instead he took two steps towards me. I replied with one tiny step in his direction.
“I know you are too much of a browner to smoke yourself, but if you lean forward, I’ll blow some of it into your mouth.”
“After you have inhaled it?”
“No, just from my mouth. No biggie.” His response sounded logical and I complied, leaning into him so that I could smell the seaside freshness of his underarm deodorant — the first time I had smelled a “man” close-up. And somehow at that moment, Elijah Roughen morphed into a flesh and bones version of the secret love who had followed me around since I first heard him sing, Corey Hart, finally here to rescue me from the chaos of my mother’s illness.
“You’re here,” I said with words that hovered before disappearing, but I still have no idea if Elijah said anything back. He probably just smirked and nodded, giving high fives to his ego. The dim room filled with light and I floated above the shed and back beside Corey in one swoop. And then again, and up and down so that the sky fell into my father’s shed, and my father’s shed floated into the sky. I squinted my eyes so that I hardly noticed when Corey filled my mouth with the gritty smoke, and it swam into my nose, my ears, my eyes.
And then he filled my mouth with something else from his face — slimy, wet, spongy, sticking me — I stuck out my tongue to meet it. My Corey, my saviour, my future.
Knuckles fell on the outside of the shed, creating a hollow echo.
“Oh, shit,” said Elijah.
“Maya, are you in there?” my father said from the other side. “Open up!” He knocked again, and I saw that Elijah had moved our old barbeque in front of the door and that it shook as my father pounded. I felt deceived and scowled at Elijah for it. I turned around and banged my head on a hanging lawnmower. Pain shot through my body.
“I’m here!” I said as tears sprang to my eyes. “Let me out of here!” I grabbed the dusty barbeque, toppled it onto its side and whacked open the door with my fingertips. There stood my father, stunned-face, in baggy jeans and an orange tie-dyed T-shirt, the one he wore for yardwork.
“Jesus Christ, Maya. What’s going on? Who’s this?”
“Elijah Roughen, sir. Trudie Roughen’s son. She’s in there with your wife right now.” Elijah held out his hand, but instead of taking it, my father said, “Were you two smoking in there?”
“Yes sir, Mr. Devine. But only me. I can assure you that your daughter is still very innocent.” Elijah had stamped out his cigarette on the floor of the shed and it still smoked when my father went inside. “Next time use an ashtray,” he told Elijah and then to me, while poking his head out the door, “Maya, your dinner is ready. Go inside and splash cold water on your face.” He had no other words for us — outside or inside.
When I got back from a dinner of burnt fish sticks and creamed corn from a can, Elijah was still waiting for his mother on the back deck, his feet up on a chair and his hands folded behind his head.
“I need a ride home,” he told me matter-of-factly as I passed him.
Mrs. Roughen came out of the teepee then. Around her head was a strange sort of light, violet and red sprinting around together, like she didn’t know what to feel. She asked me if she could use the bathroom inside.
I nodded.
Then, she walked by me, silently, but I heard inside her head. And like that, I knew what was going on, what had happened. Why she wanted Mother as her friend.
I think it all came down to this: she was comforted by the fact that someone’s life was more dreadful than her own.
And though my mother had never encouraged any of my supernatural abilities, I decided that this time I was going to tell her what I had heard — for her own good.
What I learned after that was that sometimes split-second decisions can change a lot of things.
Mother was on the bed with her knees hugged up to her chest, and she was looking out into nothing and biting the inside of her mouth like she had had enough of it all.
Maybe I wanted to impress her.
“Mrs. Roughen tried to kill herself last night,” I said. “On account of her husband breaking up with her because of some floozy in gym shorts.” I took a deep breath and continued. “She took a whole handful of blue pills with milk, but at the last minute she puked them all up into the sink.”
“What makes you say she tried to kill herself, Maya?” She looked surprised, more than I expected.
“She is relieved today that she didn’t do it. She thinks that in the light of day, things look better. She’s glad for what she does have. She could be dying, like you.”
“Did Elijah tell you that, Maya?” My mother’s dark-circled eyes were wide open, like she was trying to see inside my head.
“I heard her think it.”
Mother just stared at me, unflinching. “Maya, I’ve told you, don’t pay attention to that stuff. It’s not who you are.”
“But it’s real, Mother.”
“I know, Maya.” She was too weak to disagree with me as she usually did. She put her hand on mine.
Mrs. Roughen came back in fussing with her hair and blotting her freshly painted lips.
“As I was saying, Mari, yo
u’re going to get through all this just fine—”
My mother interrupted her. “Trudie, promise me you won’t hurt yourself, okay? Nothing stupid, no man is worth it.”
“Excuse me, Mari?” I think they had both forgotten I was there.
“I know about the pills, Trudie,” she said with a sigh, dropping her ear to her shoulder.
“But how? I mean, why would you say something like that?” Mrs. Roughen began pacing around the teepee, like she was trying to walk off the awkwardness.
“Just don’t do it, Trudie. I know what it feels like to get jerked around by someone who you thought could be the one for you. Trust me, you can go on without him.”
“Mari, how could you know about this?” Tears had flooded her eyes, purple spirals of light had swirled out from her head.
“Just try to pretend the whole thing never happened. Really.”
Mrs. Roughen’s face had dropped in shock; her chin was practically resting on her collar bone.
“Mari, I don’t know how you know all this. But I have to say, at the risk of making this all about me, that this is exactly what I need in my life right now.”
“You need what in your life, Trudie?”
“You have a gift. A gift that points to something more. Something bigger than this earth. Something to believe in.”
“I just wanted to tell you, Trudie. That’s it. It’s nothing more.”
“You are so brave, Mari,” she said, stroking my mother’s bare shoulder. “Could it be you already know what is in store for you? You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”
“Trudie, I don’t know what you’re—”
“Mari, please. Can you tell me more? I want to know exactly what life has in store for me.”
I looked at my mother, waiting for her to brush it off, or maybe even to tell the truth, but she didn’t. Instead, she took a long, slow breath, dragged her tongue across her teeth, and said, “You’ll meet someone, Trudie. A new boyfriend, with dark hair and broad shoulders, younger than you. You’ll be so happy together.” My mother looked to the left. She was making it all up.
That night, after Mrs. Roughen left, I refused to stay outside with my mother. She knew why. So, after Father had finished scrubbing the red mark off the side of the teepee, he went in to be with her. I opened the back door real late and thought I heard them laughing. He stayed there all night, and even until morning. It was the only time I remember him sleeping out there, and thinking back, I am pretty sure that was the night it happened.
Girl in Shades Page 7