She does not ask the question that has screamed itself forever in your head, the question you long to drown out any way you can. They have been stripping the means away from you: the drugs, the endless stream of men with their collection of needs and desires, some of them twisted, a few dangerous, most of them duller than dirty snow.
Why did you keep going back?
To be more precise, it is not the question that screams at you: it’s the answers. The answers that turn every atom of you into filth.
He didn’t make you, did he?
It must be all your fault.
You must have wanted it.
You must have liked it.
It felt good when he touched you, didn’t it?
The therapist does not ask. She just looks. She just sits there like a big person-shaped brick. Directing and redirecting. Asking about everything else, every single little thing. Until, at last, you break.
“That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it,” you scream, on your feet now. “It felt good. Yeah, sure. It felt good. It felt bad. It felt disgusting. It hurt.” And you stand, like an animal, on the far side of the room from the therapist, who sits and looks at you calmly, as if the world has not just collapsed on you both.
Not like a brick, more like a great big sponge, the therapist sits and looks at you and soaks up the horror of it, soaks it up without getting tainted by it. No, a sponge isn’t right either.
“He had to make you like it,” she says, once your breathing has slowed, once you are edging back toward your chair, “or you would never have gone back.”
You sink back onto your chair and stare at her. The truth of what she has just said, so obvious. He had to make you like it, or you would never have gone back. In that moment, the two parts join and become one. The tea, the toys, the roses, the stories. And what happened down in that basement room.
With that comes a glimmer. Mr. G was not kind. He was never, not for one single moment, kind.
EPILOGUE
Me (Kaya)
It’s strange looking back on all that now.
It’s not as if life got so perfect then. I still had all of it to deal with.
I even relapsed once, a month or two in. I took off downtown for a few days and used again and worked to pay for it. Everything. Mom called Raven and Raven found me, got me back in treatment. I’ll never forget that moment when she came up to me on the street. I was leaning against a wall, just gearing up to get money for my next fix, and there she was. Not one bit of judgment in her eyes. Just love, really. And understanding. All the toughness ran off me, just melted away, and I went. And in treatment that time, I talked.
Therapy was a bit different after that. Something had opened up inside me, even though it was still easier for me to write about stuff happening to “you” not “me.” She’s still trying to get me to write that I was sad, that I felt horror, but so far, it hasn’t worked. I can write the words, but they don’t mean anything. They don’t connect. So she lets me keep on writing you.
Diana started seeing her too. Diana and I don’t see each other much now, but we don’t have to hide from each other either. She and Michelle have connected, which is great for both of them, I guess, since Michelle and I don’t have a whole lot to say to each other anymore either. Marlene, though, has become a friend, though her mom and dad seem nervous around me.
And we, Marlene and I, I mean, have been coming up with a plan. I told her I thought her grandfather must have had other victims. I told her about all the drawings. We want to get our hands on them and see if we can find anybody else. There are a lot of obstacles … A lot. But at least we’re talking about it. There’s got to be something we can do, some way we can help those other girls.
We could start by talking to her mom and dad. She told me that she sat them down one day and got them talking, brought it all out in the open, the bath, what her mom thought about it, why her mom wouldn’t let her see her grandfather anymore.
“They don’t want to think about the other kids, though,” Marlene said, looking me in the eye, “but maybe if they thought of helping them instead of just feeling guilty …” She paused, still staring at me, so I finished for her.
“Maybe if they heard from me too.”
I could tell she knew that was tough for me to say. I’m not exactly keen on talking to Mr. G’s son about what happened to me. His granddaughter, I can totally handle—at least, I can now—but his son … I’ll do it, though, because now I know that talking and helping are two ways you make things better, even if the talking part hurts.
Like I said, almost a year has gone by now. I’ve been clean since that one time, though often I’m really white-knuckling it. I keep right on wanting to go back downtown. And I know that’s not good. I’ve stuck it out at home, though. I’m even going to school, most mornings.
In the afternoons, I stay home and I write. My own private version of home schooling, I guess. I hand my pages over to my therapist every couple of weeks, and she reads them and talks with me about them. It’s this story, of course. I’ve worked like a dog on it. I’m lucky I had that prison notebook tucked away. It made tough reading, but it gave me a start.
I didn’t write Beth’s parts, of course. She wrote them herself. She wrote sections and gave them to me. It kind of changed things for me to see how it all was from her point of view. We’re getting closer now, which is a big surprise and pretty great.
But she hasn’t read my parts yet. I’m going to give her the whole thing to read as soon as I’m done. I still have two more things to write about. Then I’ll print it out for her.
I’m working on something else for her too. Her birthday’s not till October, but I missed her last one, and I didn’t really have anything for her for Christmas either. I went and asked Mr. Holbrook if I could sign up for Metalwork 101 again and told him about my idea. I’m making her a mobile with some of that glass of hers (which I had to take without telling her). Making it balance is tricky, but when it does, and the glass, with thin wire circle holding it in place, sways when you touch it, it’s pretty satisfying. If she can hang it in the sun …
Right after her birthday, I’m going into a residential treatment program. Two weeks. I’m hoping that’ll help. It would be so easy to use again. Just once. That’s what I say to myself when I wake up in the night, shaking: I could feel that perfect escape just one more time and then quit for good after that. I remind myself about detox, how awful it was—both times—but a lot of the time, the memory of the release is a lot stronger than the memory of the pain. So, yeah, two weeks of treatment …
This morning, Beth and Mom and I went to the memorial for the missing women. I really went for Sarah, since I didn’t know any of the others. Beth and Mom went to be there for me. We snuck past all those TV cameras, but at the entrance, three women were burning sweetgrass in a great big shell and smudging everyone, sweeping a feather up and down near our bodies. I washed myself from head to toe with that smoke. I’ll bet I had ancestors who did that too. It was crazy. While I was doing it I cried and cried, and the woman with the feather just smiled a small smile. I felt something like a hairline crack forming right through my heart, and that smoke slipped in through that crack and flushed some of the black guck out of there.
I’ll have to tell my therapist about that.
At last I was finished, and I put my rings back on while Mom and Beth took their turns. They were a lot quicker than I was. Inside, we went up to the balcony. I thought we might be away from the crowd up there, but we weren’t. The whole place was jammed. Right to the rafters, Mom said.
Then, behind me, “Hey, Kaya.” It was Raven.
I looked at her and started to cry again, but this was different, not a hairline crack letting in healing smoke, but a grief too big, way, way too big, for anything. Raven climbed right over into my pew, and we cried together, the two of us. Once again, Mom and Beth waited patiently. Then the event began. Some of it was kind of religious and just washed over me, bu
t there was a time when anyone could get up and speak. The line snaked across the stage and down the central aisle. I listened and listened; every bit of me listened. And remembered. I looked over and saw tears on Beth’s and Mom’s faces. Not on Raven’s, though. She’d cried herself out, maybe.
After a bit, Raven went down and joined the line. For a moment I thought about following her. I didn’t, though. I was there to say a quiet goodbye, not just to Sarah, but to that whole terrible part of my life. I didn’t need a podium to do that.
I brought my hands together in my lap, fingertips touching. “Goodbye,” I whispered.
The park—one near our house, not downtown—was dark, lit only by the streetlights on Trimble Street. The grass was damp, the ground soft. I took off at a run, and when I reached the enormous swing-set I turned back. Beth was standing at the edge of the grass, probably unnerved by the dark and the clanking and whooshing of a kid practising on his skateboard at midnight.
“Come on!” I shouted, and she did—not running, though.
I grinned, kicked off my shoes and plunked myself onto a swing. Pumping my legs furiously, I reached for the sky with my toes.
Beth kept her shoes on. She shoved her small pink rabbit into her pocket, grabbed the chains on the swing beside mine and leaned back onto the seat. I swept past her, legs stretched out in front, hair flying. Beth had to work hard to catch up.
For long minutes we swung together, caught up in the motion, competing for the sky. The metal frame lurched. “Whoa,” we cried as our stomachs tried to push up our throats. Together, we slowed down.
For a while we drifted back and forth, feet held off the sand.
I could feel Beth struggling to speak. Finally, she pushed out the words. “Are you … going to stay home now, Kaya?”
I kept my eyes on the ground. “You’re my sister, not my mother,” I said. My voice was calm. Then I looked at Beth and smiled.
Beth pushed off sideways with a foot and snuck a hand into her pocket. With a grand flourish, she whisked that pink rabbit out of my hood. “But I can work miracles,” she said.
I grabbed the rabbit and laughed. “Save that for the stage,” I said.
“Sure,” Beth said. “As long as you’ll be there to watch.”
“You know I will,” I said.
AFTERWORD
My sister, Sarah de Vries, is one of the missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I have written about her and shared some of her writing in another book, Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss, which was published in 2003 and came out in a new edition in 2008. Not long after that, a woman came to me to tell me that a man in our neighbourhood sexually abused my sister for a number of years when Sarah was a little girl. I believed this woman because what she told me helped me make sense of so many things in Sarah’s life, and because she had reason to know.
It was shocking news, horrible to learn that Sarah had suffered in that way when she was a little girl, and that she never told us, to realize that her suffering began so much earlier than we knew. I found myself haunted by this new information, trying to take it in, to understand this new part of my sister’s experience, and her silence. Rabbit Ears arose from that haunting.
The story is fiction. Kaya is based on Sarah in many ways, but Kaya’s family is not Sarah’s, and Kaya’s experiences are drawn largely from my imagination. I struggled when I faced writing about her time downtown, until I realized that she could meet Sarah there. That’s what caused me to set the story back a little bit in time, to when Sarah was still alive. It was a joy, for me, writing Sarah to life. The scene on the swings in CRAB Park is drawn from a story a woman told me about her and Sarah. I changed its location. The memorial stone in CRAB Park is real, and was put in place in 1997. The corner, Princess and Hastings, is where my sister worked, and it is from that corner that she disappeared on April 14, 1998. The little grey house is also real. And I remember spilled pudding. And a scrawny kitten. And that glorious garden.
The story was always called Rabbit Ears. I liked the title. When I was working on revisions, I spoke to a Women’s Studies class and showed them an interview Sarah gave the CBC back in 1993. In the interview, she talks about being a heroin addict and advises viewers to stay away from the drug. She is eloquent, and I’m proud of her for giving that interview. I show it often.
This time, though, about halfway through, I noticed what looked like the tips of two ears on Sarah’s chest. I stared, hoping, hoping the camera would dip lower. At the end, I queried the class. Had I seen what I thought I had seen? I had. My sister had a Playboy Bunny tattooed on the top of her left breast. I had seen it before. Of course I had. But I had never thought about what the image was. My book is called Rabbit Ears because the older sister loves magic. I had no idea that it also draws its title from my sister’s tattoo. I came out of that Women’s Studies class feeling that Sarah had given me her blessing.
I wanted to tell a story about a girl who went through what my sister went through, but survived, a story about a girl who broke the silence that was holding her prisoner, a story about a group of girls who paid attention, who reached out. I believe in these possibilities for Kaya and for each one of us.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Sarah’s childhood friend for coming to me, for telling me about the abuse. I know how much courage that took, and I am forever grateful.
I thank Christianne Hayward and the teens and mothers at Christianne’s Lyceum for reading my manuscript and sharing your feedback. It was enormously helpful. Thank you also, Roberta.
I thank everyone who worked on the manuscript. Hadley Dyer, my editor at HarperCollins: you were thorough, thoughtful, kind and patient—everything a person hopes for in an editor and much that a person doesn’t dare dream of. Freelance editors Catharine Chen and Sophie Tupholme: you read the manuscript at a critical time and helped me to feel that I was on the right track. Allyson Latta, my copyeditor: I so appreciate your attention to detail and your personal touch. Production editor Maria Golikova, thank you for shepherding Beth and Kaya’s story so graciously. And Kelly Jones, proofreader, thank you for taking such care with that crucial last step.
I thank writing buddies Rachel Rose and Lori Shenher, and my friend Kerry Porth: your kind words helped me carry on and your suggestions made the book better. And I thank Raven for enthusiastically allowing me to use her name in this story.
I gratefully acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts for the grant that assissted in the writing of this book.
And I thank my husband, Roland, the first to read all my stories.
About the Author
MAGGIE DE VRIES’s previous novel, Hunger Journeys, won the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize and was called “historical fiction at its best” by CM magazine. She has written seven other works for young readers, as well as Missing Sarah, a memoir about her sister, a victim of serial killer Robert Pickton, which was a Governor General’s Award finalist. A former children’s book editor and a writer-in-residence for the Vancouver Public Library, she now focuses on her own writing and teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
PRAISE FOR HUNGER JOURNEYS
“De Vries has done a masterful job of creating a believable world peopled with characters whose loyalties are agonizingly divided between family, friends and nation.”
—Quill & Quire
Copyright
Rabbit Ears
Copyright © 2014 by Maggie de Vries.
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EPUB Edition FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN 9781443416641
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