He poured you another cup of tea, even sweeter than the last. He asked you more questions, and while you were answering, he pulled a pad of paper in front of him and picked up a thick pencil, and he started to draw.
You were puzzled, and you stopped talking.
He looked up and saw you staring at the paper. His lips tensed slightly. “It’s all right, Kaya. I’m just going to draw while we chat.” He looked at you and his face relaxed into a smile. “I’m drawing you, actually. See?”
And he turned the paper toward you, and you looked at the simple outline of head and shoulders.
“Now, you were telling me about that fort of yours. It’s mostly gone now, you say?”
It was hard to keep talking while he was so intent on the pencil in his hand, but whenever you paused, he asked another question, and eventually he put the paper down and turned his attention full on you once again, and you talked and talked and talked.
At one point he got up and went in search of something. When he came back, he pressed a tiny metal swan into your hand. “It’s pewter,” he said. It was a dark silvery colour, not white like a real swan, but it had all a real swan’s grace and beauty, and the tiny size to make it extra special.
“A swan,” you breathed, “like in the picture on Diana’s box.” It wasn’t quite as special as Diana’s box, but you pushed that thought away, ran your finger down the slope of the creature’s back.
“Swans are special,” he said, “just like you. You can keep it in your pocket. For comfort.” He crouched down and placed a hand on each of your upper arms. “Our little secret.” Then he looked at his watch. “Now, my dear, I think it’s time for you to go home. Or your mother will wonder where you’ve been.”
As you got up and walked toward the door, fingering the swan in your pocket, you glanced at the pad of paper on the table, longing to see what he had drawn, but he had flipped another page over top, and it didn’t seem polite to ask.
Off you went, home.
“Is that you, Kaya?” Mom called from the kitchen.
“Yes,” you said, your voice coming out as a squeak. You drew a breath. “Yes,” you called out, more forcefully.
“I don’t like you going off like that, without a word to anyone,” Mom continued, not setting foot outside the kitchen.
“Sorry, Mom,” you called back. “I’m going upstairs.”
And up you went, to your messy room, where you curled up in your safe, warm bed, put the tiny swan beside you on the pillow and thought and thought and thought.
It wasn’t long before you went back. And it was just as special as before. And like the other times, the moment came when he said that it was time to go. “I hope to see you again soon,” he said, and his smile reached right inside you. He wanted to see you! “And next time you come … which I hope will be soon … I’d like you to come to the sliding door there. See?”
He was pointing to the sliding door in the dining room. “You can come in from the lane and up onto the deck, and try the door. If it’s locked, I’m not home or I’m busy. If it’s open, you can just come right in!” His grin was broad and welcoming as he led you out onto the deck and pointed to the gap in the hedge that separated the garden from the lane.
A crackly feeling way down at the bottom of your spine sounded a warning. But it could not compete with the warmth, or even with the secrets themselves, which felt special, just for you.
Tomorrow, you were thinking, as you half galloped home. You’d come back tomorrow.
And you did. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Week after week. Month after month. Sometimes the sliding door was locked, and you wandered off, the tight ball of anticipation and fear that had gathered in your gut gradually crumbling, spreading thick poison everywhere. Sometimes he went away. Sometimes the door was locked but you would hear a hubbub from the front. You’d go round by the street and join the kids in the big toy cars.
One of those times, Diana was there, shrieking with laughter as she barrelled down the sidewalk in a go-kart. When she saw you, all her laughter drained away, and she left quickly.
Often, though, the door would slide open at your touch, your gut would clench as you entered. And he would be there. And he would smile and rise from his desk or the kitchen table or the big easy chair in front of the fireplace. Always, he would make you tea or juice and offer cookies. Always, you would sit and talk, and he would listen.
Sometimes the moment would come and he would say, “Time to go now.” And you would. Other times, he would glance at the basement stairs. And you would descend. Step. Step. Step. And you would go into that room. And, as best you could, you would do what Mr. G wanted. Over the years, he wanted more and more things. It was your job, you told yourself. He was kind to you. He listened. And he asked of you these … things. They were the least you could do. You prided yourself a little bit on your strength.
When you were upstairs, he never spoke of what happened in that room. The only connection between upstairs and down was the drawings. He liked to draw upstairs. And he liked to show you his drawings upstairs. The drawings of other children. Children from his trips. Children with no clothes. They looked happy in his drawings and glowed, like angels. And you told yourself that they were happy. And that you should be happy too.
You had been visiting Mr. Grimsby for years when Dad died, so it was natural to visit him, to tell him about it, and it was a relief to get out of the house, away from Mom, who went kind of manic, and Beth, who shut herself away in her room. Through the closed door, you could almost hear her munching away on cookies or something.
The morning after he died, you opened the front door and slipped out of the house. First, you tried the ravine. You had not been there in years, not since Grade Three. The fort was all gone, but the tree was still there. You squeezed yourself into its low-down bend, and swung your heels, scuffing at the dry dirt.
Harder and harder you swung them, smashing your feet into the stump, feeling the force in your legs, the solidity of the tree. For a moment—only one—you thought about going to see if Diana was home, but the two of you had grown apart long ago. You didn’t really talk to each other anymore. In the end, you freed yourself from the tree, dusted yourself off and set off to visit Mr. G. And he sat you down, gave you a sandwich and a glass of milk, and listened, really listened. He even got tears in his eyes just like that first time years before. And he never once glanced at the basement stairs.
He came to the funeral, with Jennifer. And sent you home later with those beautiful orange roses that Beth caught you with on the stairs.
After that, though, the sliding door was locked a lot of the time. And even when it wasn’t, Mr. Grimsby said “Time to go now” much more often. He hardly ever led you to the basement stairs, he listened to you with less attention and he snapped at you more. The locked door, the Time to go’s, the darting eyes, the nasty comments, all of that wounded, and you found yourself hoping for the one thing that told you that he wanted you, the basement. And that made you sick. That meant that you were sick. And the secret grew more and more unwieldy; it pushed at you; it threatened you; it spoke cruel words to you. Pervert, it called you. Slut.
The innocence of mothers and sisters and friends revolted you. Only the innocence of animals would do. You would come home from that locked door and walk into your house and fall to your knees as Sybilla bounded up to you. She filled your arms. Her fur enveloped your face. You breathed in dog. And—when you could find her—cat.
You were almost thirteen, just finishing Grade Seven, when it ended for good.
You were only eleven and a half when you first got your period, but you never mentioned that to Mr. G. It was personal, awkward and, well, kind of gross, so even though you told Mr. G absolutely everything else, and loved how he questioned you, drawing you out and listening to every word, you left out that one development and never went to his house when you had it.
Until one time.
It was only a few days until your bi
rthday, and as always, Mr. G asked you what you would like for a gift and what kind of cake you wanted.
Every year, you had asked for art supplies, which you kept at his house so the two of you could draw and paint together. He was gradually teaching you everything he knew. And you always picked a white cake with chocolate frosting, and Jennifer baked it.
This year you asked for a new angle brush and a tube of cerulean acrylic paint (your favourite blue). You sipped tea, ate two cookies. And as always, you watched his face for clues as to what was going to happen next. And that day, for the first time in months, he directed you toward the basement door. What you did not know was that your body was in the process of betraying you. Your period, which you had kept hidden for more than a year, was starting even as you walked down those stairs.
Five minutes later, he was flinging you to the floor and shouting, “Filthy little whore!”
He was gone from the room before you had even taken in what had happened. Bruised and humiliated, you straightened your skirt and fled up the stairs, taking in as you did so that he was at the basement sink, scrubbing his hand and arm as if he had just been subjected to radiation.
As you walked home, your belly squirming with a nasty mix of shame and cramps, you thought that you would never go back.
Your birthday passed. You were pretty sure that no art supplies had been purchased, no cake baked. Anyway, for five days you still had your period, and those three words echoed in your head, Filthy little whore.
But more days passed, and your teachers were unfair, Mom snapped at you, Beth ignored you and Michelle was never there. You longed for Mr. G’s listening ear. Besides, what had happened must have been a terrible mistake. He must have thought you did that on purpose, went there with your period. Maybe there was a way that you could apologize—kind of explain without really spelling it out.
Two weeks later, you went back.
You slipped through the narrow gap in the hedge off the lane as always. That day, you hesitated near the hedge, gazed at the tidy backyard and reflected on what an odd way this was to approach a person’s house. A sneaky way.
You felt your brow furrow, the skin over your cheekbones stiffen. This space—the gap in the thick hedge (that you now had to turn sideways to pass through), the raised gardens, the pebbled paths and the expanse of cement under the deck—had always troubled you. You had always had to force yourself to pass through the hedge, to cross the yard, to climb the wooden steps to the deck, to place your hand on the metal handle, to slide the door open, to push the curtain out of the way and step inside.
You had never liked it, but you had never questioned it either. This was the way Mr. G had told you to come to his house, so this was the way you came. But now, everything had changed.
The day before, you had walked along Fourteenth Avenue, nonchalant as could be, and seen that his car was parked right in front, that the curtains were open, so you knew he was still there. He only went away in the fall anyway, but you had wondered if after what had happened, he might go. Seeing his car and the open curtains reassured you that maybe it was all right.
Now, for the very first time in, what—five years?—you decided that if that door did not slide open for you, you were going to knock on it. So, you paused. You smoothed down your skirt. Then you squared your shoulders and you walked. Along one of the pebbled paths, up the wooden steps, across the deck shaded by the neighbours’ massive beech tree, its leaves changing colour.
Mr. G always complained about that tree, the shade it created, the mess when the leaves fell. More than once he had lopped off branches, and been indignant for weeks when the tree’s owners called the city.
“Branches hanging over my property are my property,” he would say, and you would nod and wait for the conversation to shift to something more interesting. You thought the tree was beautiful, and especially in early fall.
Heat pulsed through your chest as you reached out your hand to try the door. Locked. The heat pulsed again, radiating into your limbs, your throat. You pressed the side of your face against the door and listened, but you could not hear a sound. You raised your hand to knock, hesitated, and let it drop.
The window that looked into the kitchen above the sink was small, and high up, but you should be able to see in if you gripped the ledge with your fingers and pulled yourself up on your toes. On tiptoe, you made your way along the side of the house. Still on tiptoe, you grasped that ledge, and you looked. All that heat whooshed through you, top to bottom, almost sending you into a heap on the ground. He was there, sitting at the kitchen table. He was angled away from you, but you could see precisely what he was doing. He had a small easel set up on the kitchen table, a photo clipped to the top of it. You couldn’t see what was in the photo, but you could see the drawing, at least enough to get the idea. You’d seen plenty of his drawings before, after all. He was drawing the torso of a child. A girl, perhaps nine or ten years old. Naked.
You might have knocked then, or made any sound at all, and he would have looked. He would have come to the door and spoken words to you. You were pretty sure you would not have liked those words. You knew then, in that moment, what you had never allowed yourself to know over the course of the last year or more, when the door had been locked so often, when the visits had grown shorter.
You knew in that moment that Mr. G didn’t want you anymore. Mr. G had not wanted you in a long, long time.
So you let go of the ledge and settled back onto the flats of your feet and crept away, down the steps, along the pebble path. You took more care not to be seen slipping through the hedge into the lane than you ever had before. And the shame that filled you up was like vomit and liquid shit: it shot through your veins, reaching into your toes, your fingertips, your earlobes, oozing out of your pores; it filled your guts, backing up into your mouth and your nose. You felt it at the roots of your hair, in the beds of your nails. The tears that appeared on your face stank of it.
Most of all, you felt it in your crotch, your butt, your chest, all the places that were changing, hairs poking their way out through your skin where no hairs should be, fat gathering, shaping your body in ways that could not be hidden no matter how hard you tried to flatten yourself out and squeeze into the little-girl dresses that Mr. G liked so much.
There it is now. All of it, playing through your head, while all around you people know. No protection. No filter. Not even any privacy. You ease open the bathroom door and peer out toward the exit.
“Ready to go?” Raven asks.
You jump. Of course she’d be right there waiting. In her strong loving presence, your resistance slips away. For now.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Kaya
Detox is not worth writing about. Neither is treatment. You do everything, jump through all the hoops, obey all the rules. Except for one. You will not talk about Grimsby. You will not explain. Everyone else does. In group everyone tells their stories, everyone explains their troubles, the horrors that led them to the street, the beatings, the rapes, the neglect. And you listen and listen and listen. You tell yourself that if you hear one story like yours, just one, you’ll open up your mouth and tell.
But you don’t. You do not.
Your lips stay sealed. You concentrate on that seal, on the slight pressure of lip on lip, easy enough to break to drink, to eat, even, sometimes, to breathe. And it’s not as if you never speak. But not in group. Never in group.
In the end, they let you go home anyway. Mom and Beth pick you up, and try to chat with you on the drive, but you can only mumble in response. Their discomfort fills the car, and you wish, you wish for … Who? Your mind casts about for someone, anyone, to wish for. You come up with a single name, and it’s on a poster downtown. That person is gone. You know in your heart she is dead. And she couldn’t help you anyway. All she could say was Go home, which is precisely what you are doing right now.
Why does it have to be so hard?
In your head, thousands and thousand
s of times each day, the refrain repeats: You can always go back. They can’t make you stay. You can always, always go back.
Beth
At home, I grab Kaya’s suitcase, recovered somehow and probably full of vermin, from the car and carry it straight up the stairs. Kaya follows and Mom takes up the rear. I feel hope and fear well up.
“I hope you like what we did,” Mom says, filling the stairwell with chatter. “We cleaned up, and we painted too. We thought you should have a fresh start.”
I turn quickly in the bedroom, eager to catch Kaya’s face when she sees the warm colours, the brand new duvet cover, the cozy rug, the collection of framed photos. Mom and I worked hard on it for three weekends. Michelle and Diana helped for an afternoon. Jane and Samantha for another. Even Marlene came by, dropped off by her dad.
We used the photos to show the parts of Kaya’s life that were joyful, and the other stuff to create something fresh and new.
It’s been a strange journey, the last thirty days. I put everything into getting Kaya home, but the minute she entered treatment, it felt as if my job was over. I helped paint and decorate this room, sure, but everything hinges now on Kaya, on her recovery, on her staying power. I feel kind of empty a lot of the time. Empty and scared. If she relapses—I know we’re not supposed to say fails—what will that mean for me? I find myself wanting to scream that out a lot these days: What about me?
I guess I’m taking it one day at a time too. And I’m going without the ice cream. I do have my own project, on the side. And school, of course.
Anyway, just now, Kaya stands in that fresh, clean room, arms at her sides. Her smile is small, but it’s there. “Thanks, you guys,” she says.
Kaya
“Thanks, you guys,” you say. You even manage to smile at them. They are being kind. You know that. But you kind of wanted to crawl back into your nest, to snug down in the heap of bedding, or in the tangle of your old clothes.
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