The Gallery of Lost Species

by Nina Berkhout

  I took the hard dirt off with a shoe polishing brush until I saw a profile coming through.

  The Roman legends were easy to read—they used our alphabet and the Latin words reminded me of English. Serena gave me a chart for the Greek coins that had short letters naming the city. Soon I recognized heads of gods, goddesses, and rulers appearing beneath the dirt. Constantine, Caesar, Nero. Diana the huntress in her miniskirt with bow and arrow, Zeus on his chariot, and Athena in her helmet, ready for war. My favourites were the coins depicting animals—lions, owls, dolphins, and octopuses. Each one’s picture and text was so much more understandable than the complicated books in my room.

  Once cleaned and no longer rough, I laid them like cookies on a baking tray that Serena then put into the oven at a low temperature for a half-hour to remove leftover water from the pores. Next we applied wax to the metals and buffed them, turning ugly lumps into shiny hoards.

  I photographed the obverse and reverse sides and Serena put them in plastic sleeves, inserting labels with minuscule descriptions and prices before sliding them into their display cases for selling.

  Omar came down often during my shifts. He was like a blue jay, visiting long enough to swipe a coin. When I caught him stealing for the third time, I aimed the camera at him and snapped as he sprang a vitrine open to pocket a medallion. Serena was upstairs on the phone, having a loud discussion in Romanian.

  “How can you steal from your own mother?”

  “Easy,” he replied, coming over so that he was within arm’s reach of the camera. He wore all black and smelled of basil.

  “She’ll catch you.” I thought of Constance and how nothing got past her.

  “No, she won’t. This is a front anyway.”

  “For what?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Haven’t you detected a lack of customers? She offers loans on the lowdown, dum-dum. Her interest rates aren’t as steep as Payday Loans next door.”

  I’d asked Serena why no one came in. I didn’t think twice when she explained that most of her sales were made by phone or online.

  “She’ll think it’s me stealing and fire me,” I said, irritated.

  “Take it easy. I’m replacing what I take with replicas.” Omar handed me an obol. “Real or not real?”

  “Real.”

  “Wrong. You can’t tell it’s a forgery and no one else can either.” Omar took the coin back. “Give me the camera.”

  “How come you don’t go to school?”

  “I’m home-schooled. I learn in two hours what you learn in seven. The rest of my days are free.” His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down on his thin neck. He wasn’t ugly. Behind his thick glasses, he had long eyelashes and the delicate features of a girl.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’m like this coin. My insides are a fraud, filled with lead.”

  I offered the camera. I didn’t want him to get frazzled and have a seizure. Omar popped the memory card out and passed it back to me.

  “That was half a day’s work.”

  “That sucks.” He grinned, obviously not sorry at all.

  * * *

  WHILE I SPENT my days at the Coin Shoppe or helping Constance purge Viv’s old duds to make way for new and more expensive accoutrements, Henry signed Viv up for art camp at the local community centre. I couldn’t complain. I knew I didn’t have the talent for the program.

  At camp, students picked themes from folded papers in a top hat. Viv’s subject was amusement parks. Every day she made a different painting: a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a roller coaster. Once home, she painted her darks darker. She would add herself to the scenes in pageant wear, camouflaged in among the balloons and cotton candy stands. Then she’d cover the whole canvas with a grey lacquer coating that dripped into thick lines like water going down a windowpane. The results were nocturnal carnivals where it was hard to make out the forms. After my sister finished a painting, she had no interest in it, and she let me put her assignments up among my clowns. She called my room the ragbag sideshow mausoleum.

  She and Constance avoided each other around the house. At mealtime, if Henry was still at work, Viv took her food out to the painting shed or she sat under the apple tree, balancing her plate on her knees. Mostly Con brought her supper to the living room, tuning in to one of her soaps. I started eating on the floor of my bedroom, where I could spread out my coins and buttons.

  At various times I’d catch one of them staring out at the pilfered garden that Constance hadn’t bothered to revive.

  Early mornings, before my sister was up, my mother would slide open the screen door and walk in the dewy grass, crouching here and there with her cup of coffee and her cigarette, poking her red fingernails into the soil and through sinewy leaves.

  I’d watch the birds fly away from her and high up into the trees in unison.

  TEN

  TOWARD THE END OF summer, we went to Lake Louise, Alberta. I was thirteen and this was the unforgettable trip where we visited Lake O’Hara and I saw the unicorn. It was unforgettable for another reason also. A reason named Liam Livingstone.

  It took five days to get there. As we drove in our station wagon through the unpopulated prairies, it felt as if we were the last inhabitants on earth, like passengers on a ship sailing through gold. Viv and Con were on speaking terms again, though they had little to say to each other. Theirs was a world I barely grasped. I stayed out of their snippy exchanges, reading my books on bullion and taking breaks to look out at the pastoral landscape. Part of me wanted us to stay together on that drive forever.

  * * *

  A BOY TOOK Con’s seat on the Parks bus. Or a young man, at eighteen, I suppose. Only when I think of him now do I see him as a kid; we were all kids back then. Even Vivienne, whose thin frame and regal composure aged her beyond her sixteen years.

  Viv focused her attention out the window as he gravitated to her, in the seat across from the one I occupied with Henry. Who could blame him, with her high cheekbones and long yellow braid and full lips. She was a replica of our mother, but with eyes set farther apart and of a more intense violet blue. For years I’d close my own eyes and pull on the skin at my temples, hoping I’d open them and they’d be like Viv’s.

  I watched the scene unfold, taking in his lanky body, his stubbly jawbone, his jeans and T-shirt and muddy sneakers.

  Constance called it coup de foudre. I’d read about love at first sight in Dante and in Romeo and Juliet as some kind of heart madness. I was nauseous and giddy. I knew I would marry him.

  “Hi. Is anyone sitting here?”

  Viv’s glance registered him as unexceptional. She pulled her paisley bag onto her lap and the boy slid in beside her.

  I sensed his eagerness as he looked at my sister. I sensed his racing pulse.

  “I’m glad I managed to get a spot,” he said, his voice unsteady.

  Viv sulked and returned her gaze to the window. The bus left the parking lot and he extracted a fossil from his knapsack, holding it out to my sister. Its surface was specked with flat white coils.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. “I collect ammonites!”

  He turned to me. “Get out of town.”

  “We are out of town. We’re from Ontario. I’m Edith.”

  When he laughed, I studied him—his intelligent, roguish grey eyes, the subtle dimples in his cheeks. “Hi, Edith, I’m Liam. And who’s this?” He beheld my sister once more.

  “That’s Viv. Don’t mind her rudeness.”

  Viv unglued herself from the window, swinging around to glare at me. “Edith! Mind your own business.” This brought her body closer to Liam’s. Chest to chest, inches away from each other.

  “Where are you from?” I continued.

  He didn’t hear me.

  I tapped him on the shoulder again. “Hey. Liam!”

  “Er—oh, Ottawa.”

  “Us too!”

  “But I go to sch
ool in Calgary.”

  “How come you’re alone?”

  “My uncle’s paying me to find rocks.”

  “Come hike with us!”

  “I don’t want to impose?” He stood and leaned over me to shake Henry’s hand. “Liam Livingstone,” he said. Once he got near enough, I smelled his bare arm—the scent of rain on dry earth.

  “The more the merrier,” our father said, hardly raising his head from his trail guide.

  Viv sighed and returned to her window.

  “Liam Livingstone?” I snorted. “That’s not your real name.”

  “Corny, I know. I come from a line of geologists.”

  My father pulled me by the ponytail. “Pipe down, Edith. Enjoy the scenery.”

  During the slow ascent up the fire road to Lake O’Hara, I sat on my heels, unable to stop observing them, the way I knew movie popcorn would make my stomach ache, and I kept shoving my fist into the bag, entranced by a flickering screen.

  Liam asked my sister about herself until her silky face opened up. By the end of the ride they were conversing with ease.

  “She has a boyfriend,” I said as we arrived at our destination. At school, Viv had new boyfriends every month.

  “Shut up, Edith!” Viv turned back and smiled at Liam.

  I told him about the Coin Shoppe. Viv joked about Omar being my boyfriend. She wasn’t acting like herself. “Your cheeks are red,” I said to her when we disembarked.

  Viv and Liam lagged behind while we tromped up the mountain. Each time laughter erupted, I slowed. “What’s so hilarious?”

  “Nothing, pipsqueak,” Viv said.

  “Mom wanted you to get her some of those for pressing.” I pointed to a high slope carpeted with blue and pink flowers. “It’s the least you could do after that stunt you pulled.”

  “What stunt?” Liam looked from me to Viv.

  “Ignore her,” my sister cut in. “She likes to invent.”

  When she started climbing, I approached Liam. “Why don’t you come back to Ontario and study the Canadian Shield?”

  “Maybe I’ll have reason to someday.” He winked at me then watched my sister, who was struggling to reach the flowers. “I’d better help,” he said, entrusting me with his knapsack and patting me on the head before he shot up the rock slide.

  I joined Henry, who was sitting on a boulder drinking coffee. That’s when the unicorn appeared on the mountainside opposite the slope that Viv and Liam climbed. Once Henry confirmed the sighting, I cried out and jumped around. I watched the legendary animal awhile. Then I turned my back on it so I could find Liam again.

  That day, my life became a book containing two chapters: the one prior to Liam and everything that came after, with Liam serving as the divider between my sister and me.

  They returned with heaps of blooms plucked from the alpine crest. Liam made quick work of braiding the stems for Viv.

  “She has a thousand crowns. Don’t inconvenience yourself,” I told him as he bunched what remained into a bouquet for me. Forget-me-nots.

  We passed waterfalls and twisted trees and meadows of heather and mossy creeks. I wanted to push my sister off a ridge. When we attained the snow-capped surrounding of Lake Oesa, Liam turned to Viv. “I just figured out the colour of your eyes. They’re lapis lazuli, the purple-blue stone.”

  My eyes were brown, almost black.

  He was unaware that I’d snapped his picture. Or had stolen one of the rocks he’d mined from his knapsack. I rubbed the rock’s coarse surface. It felt like glass slivers in my fingertips.

  He exchanged personal details with Vivienne, but this didn’t worry me. By the time we got home and Constance began preparations for my sister’s last year of pageantry, I was sure Viv had forgotten all about him.

  ELEVEN

  “WHY DON’T YOU COME to school?” I asked Omar in September. It was decided I would keep going to Serena’s twice a week.

  “Because children can be crew-elle,” he said, parodying his mother. “She won’t let me. Treats me like a pansy. She’s too scared to let me do anything.”

  In my fifth-grade class there had been a quiet girl named Elinore who had epilepsy. She wore lace-trimmed dresses and looked like a porcelain doll.

  When Elinore had her fits, it was as if she was possessed by a demon. She’d drop to the ground before anyone could catch her. A deep moaning would rise up from her throat while she convulsed and foamed at the mouth. Once, she hit her head on the metal edge of her desk. Blood clotted in her blond hair as our teacher rolled her onto her side to prevent choking, and stuck a pencil between her teeth so she wouldn’t bite down on her tongue.

  At recess, boys would writhe on the ground, mimicking Elinore. She left midway through the term. A rumour spread that she’d died.

  “What are the seizures like?” I asked him.

  “I check out when they come on.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “The headaches feel like knives behind my eyes.”

  “So you know when it’s going to happen?”

  “Flashing lights can bring them on. Otherwise it’s random.”

  He walked around the unlit store, browsing the vitrines through his thick glasses. When he stared at me straight on, I got shy.

  He deactivated the alarm panel at the back of a case, pulled a key out from under his baseball cap, and slid the door open.

  I took a puff from my inhaler. “Why do you steal?”

  “I’m saving for medicine in the States that’ll cure me.”

  “Your mom won’t get you that?”

  “She says it could leave me brain-dead.”

  Expertly, Omar slid his arm in and out of the display so rapidly I couldn’t tell what he’d taken. He came over with his hands in his pockets. His green sneakers made his feet seem enormous, jutting out from his scrawny legs like the shoes of the clowns I collected.

  He stuck his tongue out. On the tip of it there rested the smallest coin I’d ever seen.

  “Fish scales.”

  “Pardon?”

  “They’re called fish scales. For their size and their minnowy look.”

  “Where do you get the fakes from?”

  “My mom makes me go to group counselling. A bunch of epileptics sit in a circle and talk feelings. There’s this guy there, Grigg. He works in a casino and he’s a coin collector. He deals money to make money to buy money, haha!” Omar slapped his knee, searching my face for a reaction. “Anyway, he hit on my mom, but she saw he had an agenda. He was always eyeing the coins. So one day when he was in the shop and Mom was upstairs, I told him I’d get him what he wanted. I made copies of the cabinet keys while she was in one of her sleeping pill slumbers.” He gave me a sheepish look before going on. “Sometimes he’ll fake seizures, it’s hysterical. The rules are no more than two coins a week. He gives me replicas to replace what we take. He puts what I bring him in a safety deposit box at a bank and sells them at trade shows or to auction houses. You want in?”

  “I get paid already.”

  “Everyone needs more money.”

  “What you’re doing is lousy.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew my mom.”

  I went back to cleaning crude lumps.

  Omar picked one up. “I can’t make heads or tails of these,” he said. Then he pulled a pack of cigarillos out of his sleeve and waved it at me. “You want to go smoke a cigar out back?”

  “Buzz off,” I said, and he trudged out alone.

  * * *

  AT NIGHT IN my room, I examined the pictures of Liam I’d had printed without anybody knowing.

  Most were blurry. I’d snapped too fast in my fervour. What I ended up with were morsels of Liam—a leg moving forward on a rocky slope, an arm raised in the sky, his perfect ear and profile view. I smelled the photos and kissed them. I slid them under my pillow with the stolen glassy rock.

  I copied his address, finding it under a pile of drawings in Viv’s room. Viv would email, so I went for pen and pa
per. Each day after school I hurried to the mailbox. For every five times I wrote him, he’d send a short note back.

  Dear Edith,

  Sounds like your collection is coming along, keep it up! How’s your sister? I’ve been busy studying land formations in Drumheller. This postcard shows you some hoodoos, famous in this region.

  Liam

  Photographs and letters—the first secret I kept from my sister.

  TWELVE

  LIKE HOUDINI, VIV DISAPPEARED from the last pageant of her life.

  This was nothing new. My sister wandered at a young age, and as a kid Viv was in the habit of getting lost. After panicked searches, we’d find her asleep in a cardboard box in the garage or in the attic under a pile of clothes, or farther off, in a concrete pipe in the playground blocks away.

  Once, at Sears after closing time, Viv had the department store in lockdown for two hours before security found her concealed by a rack of vents in the hardware aisle. Another time, during the Santa Claus parade, she slipped from our mother’s grip. We tracked her down hours later, sitting on the curb of a deserted parking lot. Her arms were loaded up with bottles, which she’d been collecting to trade in for change to call home. She wiped her sticky hands on my snowsuit and Con was livid because her ski jacket smelled like beer.

  Her most impressive hideout took place in elementary school during the scratch-and-sniff sticker craze. Somehow Viv got hold of the most bankable of all stickers, the dry martini: a tipped and grinning martini glass with big eyes, containing a single olive.

  Stephanie, the most popular girl in school, offered to swap ten packs of smellies for Viv’s page of dry martinis. Viv refused. She offered her allowance for a month. She offered her lunches of Pop-Tarts and pudding and pizza. When she said she’d bring Viv a real martini, my sister agreed.

  The next day at lunch, some fourth-graders gathered behind the school. Stephanie extracted a jam jar of cloudy liquid from her purse. A gust of Pine-Sol hit the air as my sister pulled the dry martini sheet from her album.

  Viv sat on her knapsack, unscrewed the metal lid, and took a sip, spitting most of it out in the dirt. Stephanie and her friends squealed. Plugging her nose, Viv took another gulp then transmitted the jar to the boys, who’d formed a circle around her. Daphne and I watched from further back, leaning against the schoolyard fence.