You smile and smile until they go, until they leave you to settle yourself, but when they are gone, you are too exhausted to begin.
The next day, Mom comes into your room without knocking and sits right down on your bed. “I’m going to work,” she says, “but Beth is staying home with you. She’s got permission to miss two whole weeks.”
You grunt and roll over, but Mom’s not done. “Your alarm’s set for eight, honey,” she says. “Remember, no sleeping the days away. And Beth will walk you to your meeting this afternoon.”
Your grunt’s a groan this time. Mom squeezes your shoulder through the duvet, and then leaves. You don’t plan to sleep the day away, but on your first morning back in your own room, you’d like to be free to relax. In your last moment of consciousness, you reach out and turn off the alarm. Sleep takes you away.
You’re furious when another hand grasps your shoulder, when a perky voice calls out, “Wake up, Kaya. Wake up! It’s ten past eight.”
It’s pretty gutsy of her; you’ll give her that. But it makes you mad just the same. You roll onto your back, wrenching your shoulder from Beth’s grasp. “I know what time it is, all right? Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”
You hear Beth breathe in courage. “You have to get up, Kaya. You’re not allowed to sleep past eight. Remember?”
Your eyes are open now, your elbows pulled under you, propping you up. “And what business is that of yours?”
“I’m your helper. Remember? I have to get you up.”
You glare.
“And besides, everybody’s coming over.”
Your lower jaw falls. “What? Who?”
“You’ll see. Now, get up!” She smiles slightly and her brow quirks. “Or should I send them up here?”
That does it. You are up.
You take your time, though, getting ready, going through the clothes in your closet, each item so familiar yet so strange. You’re not sure you can bear to put these clothes on; the girl who once wore them does not exist anymore.
You see it then, and stop. Slightly crooked on the hanger, badly wrinkled and obviously well worn, the summer dress—the little girl’s dress—its splashy pattern still bright, its skirt still full. More than a year ago, you crumpled that dress into the back corner of your closet, shoved it behind heaps of clothes and other junk. Away.
Now, it has returned.
You drop your hands to your knees and double over.
Mr. G liked that dress. It was his favourite, actually, so you wore it a lot back then. It’s sleeveless with a high neck and a full skirt, covered in oversized flowers. Mr. Grimsby said they were roses, but you could never see how he knew that. They were just big blobs of colour, really.
Anyway, he liked it, so you wore it. You wore it down those basement steps quite a few times, and Mr. G always took special care with it, which was not true with all your clothes. It was tight across the chest and through the shoulders that last summer, and your knees stuck out the bottom, but you kept squeezing yourself into it.
“What are you wearing that old thing for?” Mom said once. “It’s a little girl’s dress, not a teenager’s.”
She had jumped at the venom in your response. How you hated those words: little girl. And, even worse, teenager.
You can still remember the feel of the cotton skirt clutched in your hands as you turned away from the kitchen window that day, after watching Mr. G draw one of his naked pictures. Now, as you wait for the nausea to pass, you take in for the first time that the children in those photographs, those drawings—the little girls from faraway countries that Mr. Grimsby so loved to draw—are real. Suddenly you really get it.
You get that he did it to them too, that he made them do things, that he hurt them. That he was kind to them and made them trust him and then he betrayed them.
And you realize that there must be other girls right here. Maybe there was even another girl after you, an eight- or nine-year-old who’s out there right now, hurt and confused and scared.
The nausea is not going to pass. You sink to your knees. It’s probably never going to pass—
“What are you doing?”
You start, which results in a sort of tumble sideways off your knees and onto your butt. You scramble to your feet and find yourself fact to face with the monster’s granddaughter. Marlene.
“Hey,” she says. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” you say. “Did you just walk into my room?”
“I knocked,” she says, “but nobody answered. And you’re supposed to be downstairs.”
“I don’t even know you,” you say.
She harrumphs or grunts or some strange thing. “Listen,” she says. “I have to tell you something. My mom wouldn’t let me near Grandpa, not after I was six. I never understood why. I loved visiting him … All those toys and things. He was so much fun. And then one day, no more visits. I kind of remember her and Dad yelling about it. But she would not change her mind. After that, I only ever saw him at big family parties. And she kept a close eye on me.”
You back your way up to your bed as you listen, and plunk down into a sitting position. Stare. She stands stiff as she talks, taking a deep breath at the end of every sentence. She sort of runs out of steam at one point, and you wait, ready now to see it through. Ready now to hear.
“Well, since I saw you outside the church, I’ve been thinking and thinking, and I realized that I remember something.” Her face is stony now, like she doesn’t want to say it. “It was a bath. I was six, I guess, and he got me to help in the garden, and I was all muddy and he gave me a bath. I don’t think it felt weird to me, really, though I know now it was. But then Mom showed up at the house. She charged into the bathroom and took over. I was still kind of muddy, but she whisked me out of that tub and into my clothes and out of that house. I was crying because she was in such a hurry that she was kind of rough, and I didn’t understand.”
You look up at her, understanding very well. Too well.
“And that was the last time I ever went to Grandpa’s house,” she says.
You’re not sure what to do with yourself when she falls silent, and neither is she. After a minute, you say, “I need to get dressed. I’ll see you down there, okay?”
She nods. Her feet make hollow clumping noises on the stairs.
It takes you a minute to move. Then you rise off the bed and yank on a pair of stretchy pants, pull a T-shirt over your head, go to your closet again, rip that dress off the hanger and head downstairs.
They’re all sitting around in the living room, and they look like a bunch of startled rabbits when you walk in. All six pairs of eyes jump to the clutch of fabric in your hand.
You stand there, at a full stop.
“What have you got that for?” Beth asks. “That dress is way too small for you.”
You feel your body sway, tears coming up from way down deep. Scary tears.
Diana stands. “I think she wore it to see him,” she says.
Beth marches up to you then, blazing with fury. She grabs the dress out of your hand, walks straight to the fireplace and tosses it onto the heap of ash. “We need to destroy this,” she says.
Nobody questions her, not even you. You watch them rushing around as if a little fire could erase everything that has happened to you. You want to reach inside all their grey wrinkly brains and snatch up their nasty thoughts and burn them instead of the dress. They mustn’t think about that. But they are. That’s why they’re here. That’s why Beth rushes off to the basement to find kerosene or some other flammable liquid. That’s why Michelle is rooting around on the mantel looking for one of those long lighters or some extra-long matches, so that no one lights herself on fire along with the dress. That’s why Marlene and Diana and Samantha and Jane are making a neat semicircle of dining room chairs around the fireplace.
A ritual is taking shape. And it is all because they know about that.
Beth emerges from the basement with a dusty bottle of somet
hing called methyl hydrate. For fondue, she says. She douses the dress with it. Michelle holds the lighter out to you. You back away from her.
Marlene steps forward. “We’ll light it together,” she says, “all three of us.” She means her and Diana and you. The three “victims” in the room. Diana is trembling a bit too, but she steps forward, places her hand over Marlene’s.
You shake your head violently and drop onto a chair. “Go ahead,” you manage to say in a scratchy whisper. “I’ll just watch.”
Marlene and Diana press the button and the flame that shoots from the lighter senses the flammable liquid before it quite reaches the fabric, whooshes and envelops the heap of dress. You think of ants swarming over a carcass. Marlene and Diana sit down and all of you watch the fire consume the dress.
After a while you are staring at a crinkly, smoking mess. It smells bad. You look around the room and see all eyes, six pairs, on you. You shove yourself to your feet and turn away.
Beth
I’m confused when I see what Kaya is holding in her hand. It’s so familiar, that dress. Kaya wore it and wore it, long after she had grown out of it. Mom told her to stop, but never went so far as to take the dress away. I am the one who found it wadded up in the back of the closet, smoothed out the wrinkles and put it on a hanger. I imagined how pleased Kaya would be to see it again, even though she definitely wouldn’t be able to squeeze into it now.
When Kaya starts to cry, though, and Diana says what she does, I hardly know what I’m doing until I’m standing in front of the fireplace with the methyl hydrate.
Now, the thing is done.
Jane says, “I’m going to make tea,” and heads for the kitchen as if this were a grown-ups’ bridge party.
Samantha meets my eyes, and somehow I know what to do, how to pull us all back from the brink. At least, I know how to try.
I feel a warm, strong place in my gut and send the words straight out from there. “Let’s go into the dining room,” I say. “Bring your chairs.”
They look kind of startled, but seem willing enough to pick up their chairs and follow me. Jane arrives from the kitchen with a tray of cups and spoons.
I dash up to my room and fetch my “magic boxes.” No time to think about the fact that no human outside my family has seen me perform a trick since I was eight years old, no time to take in how crazy it is to offer up a deck of cards in a house that still smells of a little girl’s dress burned to ash.
When I get back, we rearrange the room: the table against one wall, the chairs out for an audience of six. On the table I un-stack the two boxes, pull out my trusty deck of cards, several large scarves and my favourite stuffed animal, a small pink rabbit with long silky ears.
Jane serves tea. Kaya sits off-centre, flanked by Michelle and Diana. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and she looks at me as if the contents of her head and heart went up the chimney along with the smoke. Samantha sits behind her, beaming that kindness of hers to all of us.
And me, I put on a show. I manage the card tricks all right. And get a small rush of pleasure when Kaya agrees to pull a card from the deck.
“Is it the nine of spades?” I ask soon after, and Kaya grins. She actually grins.
“Yes!” she says as she brandishes the card.
Maybe she remembers how I screwed up the same trick so many years before. Whether she does or not, I see gladness in her eyes today.
But the rabbit and the boxes, I just don’t have it down. Patter, yes. I have them all rocking in their chairs with laughter. But when it comes to the transfer, I lose my nerve. I know they will see. And I am not about to commit the ultimate sin of magician-ship: revealing the trick. So, I go with a rabbit that will not budge, a rabbit that has no wish to be part of a magic show.
In the end, the rabbit seeks solace in Kaya’s arms. And I gulp as Kaya clasps the small creature to her chest.
Kaya
They can’t all take two weeks off school, but every one of them stops in every single day, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs or threes, sometimes in the late afternoon, sometimes at night.
Every day, Beth walks you to the three o’clock meeting in a nearby church basement, and returns ninety minutes later to walk you home. The meetings get you down. Nobody there is really like you. No kids, for a start. And nobody has lived downtown. Plus, you’re pretty sure that nobody has ever traded sex for a fix. They all sit in their living rooms, comfy as anything, and drink good scotch … At least that’s what you believe for the first few days.
You do get up and talk once, since it is so clearly expected. You say the required words: “Hi. My name is Kaya and I’m an addict.” But you’re not about to tell these West Side folks about turning tricks on the Downtown Eastside, or about heroin, or about what that man did to you three blocks away from this very church. You’re not about to tell them any of that.
On the first Thursday, Mom takes the afternoon off from work so that she can drive you downtown to meet with Raven, just the two of you. You’ve been looking forward to it all week, a chance to feel truly, completely understood and at home. But Raven sits back in her chair, watches and listens as you talk and talk. Her face remains clear as you tell her about those rich-people meetings, how nobody there could possibly understand you. She offers no mm-hmms, no nods of understanding. All she says once she’s listened for a bit is “How do you know? Did you try?”
You whine on a bit more after that, but the word bluster comes to mind, the realization overwhelming you. You can see in Raven’s face that she is simply letting you wind down like one of those old-fashioned toys, a key slowly revolving in its back.
At the end she hugs you, looks into your eyes and says, “You’re doing great, Kaya. Keep it up.” When you ask if you can come see her again the next week, she pauses. Then she shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says. “Down the road, sure, if you still want to, but for now, stick with the program. It’s a good one.”
Mom is right outside in the car. She drives you straight to your meeting. “Beth will be here to pick you up after,” she says, giving you her version of a hug.
You give a small squeeze back. You like Raven’s style of hugging better, but at least Mom is trying.
In the meeting you look around. What would Raven see? You have no idea, but this time when you look, you see how crumpled some of the people look, and not just their clothes or uncombed hair or smudged makeup, but them. Several look as if they have been crying for weeks, and one looks as if she’ll soon have her fingers gnawed down to the knuckle. Despite this, you see them chatting with one another, reaching out. As you look around the room, three people meet your eyes and make the effort to smile at you. You cast your mind back over the past four days and remember the stories. You glossed over them then, but now you replay them for yourself. You remember the friendliness. And you remember how you have snubbed every single person who tried to talk to you. But still they smile.
You straighten in your chair. You mentally place Raven behind your right shoulder. Then you surprise yourself by placing Beth behind your left. You turn your head and smile at one neighbour in the circle. Then you turn it the other way and smile at the other one.
The meeting begins. People talk. You listen as best you can. Your turn comes.
“Hi,” you say, and you feel tears burbling up as you say it, ugly tears. “My name is Kaya and I’m a heroin addict. I want to tell you …” And you do. You tell. You say the big bits, one after the other. It only takes a minute. Less, really. You stop. Someone places a box of tissues in your lap, and you cry through the whole rest of the meeting, quietly, since other people are telling their stories now.
At the end of the meeting you collect yourself, put the tissue box with the others on the side table and say goodbye to three people on the way out. You discover real empathy in their eyes. You hope they can see it in yours.
“We’re going swimming,” Beth says on Saturday. You don’t argue.
And when you st
ep inside the doors at the pool and smell the chlorine, you have to fight the tears that try to get out of you. It’s been a long time since you smelled that smell. You don’t wait for Beth; you don’t bother locking up your stuff or digging your towel out of your bag. You just head on through, winding an elastic around your hair. A ten-second shower, a shallow dive off the side of the pool, and you’re in.
You head for the bottom, and turn and look up when you get there, eyes wide, taking it all in. You see legs, bodies, and the shifty enclosed space above the water. No moon here. Still, it’s fabulous!
You have no idea how long you spend like that, coming up now and again for a breath, but when you return to the side at last, you stop and stare. Those girls are following you everywhere! They are all there in a row, sitting on the side of the pool, feet in the water.
“We thought they’d have to come and drag you out with a net,” Marlene says.
“The lifeguard says no diving off the side,” Beth adds.
Samantha and Michelle are talking to each other, paying no attention. Diana looks a bit tentative, but she slides into the water, grimacing as it passes her waist and then her chest.
“I’m going to go swim properly,” Jane says as she hoists herself to her feet and heads for the lanes.
You swim up to Diana and poke her in the arm. “Come under with me,” you say.
And she looks at you, treading water hard as she considers. Is that a tiny smile on her face? You look into her eyes. Yes!
She squeezes those eyes shut, then tips forward and kicks herself down deep. You follow.
Swimming is the best part of those first weeks. And painting. You paint a lot, big paintings, ugly ones. Painting, you are determined, is going to belong to you, not to that man.
Therapy’s the worst. Or the hardest. In therapy there’s nowhere to hide. You sit, the two of you, on your straight-backed chairs, knees facing. And she directs. And redirects. You watch her face for cues, for horror, for pity, but she is solid as a brick.
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