I didn’t want to listen to their fighting. I went into the painting shed, but the space heater had short-circuited. It was late November and there was snow on the ground. I decided to walk over to the Coin Shoppe where at least it was warm and I’d get tea. My shift didn’t start until noon, but if it meant a few hours of free labour, Serena would let me in.
I took the alley entrance that connected to the downstairs kitchen, where Serena would hear my knocking. Peeking through the dusty window, I saw her drift by in a green bathrobe, her red hair piled loosely on top of her head like the Klimt woman from the Gallery.
She opened the kitchen cupboards in slow motion, as though she was still half asleep and dreaming. I didn’t want to frighten her. I waited for her to turn my way.
Standing on the tips of her toes, she retrieved mugs from the top shelf. She went over to the coffee machine and poured herself a cup, leaning against the yellow counter before taking a sip. Then she poured another cup. An arm reached out for it and I recognized the frayed sleeve.
My father appeared with his back turned to me. He put his cup on the counter and moved in too close to Serena. He took her cup and put it down. She pressed her hands against the counter’s edge and my father held her face and pulled it toward him.
My knees were buckling when Omar poked his head out of the annex window. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know. Why do you think you got the job?”
I stared up at his epileptic smirk. In that instant I despised Omar. I despised my father and my sister and my miserable mother. Most of all I despised Serena. I wanted to get away from them all.
“Of course I knew,” I told him. “And I changed my mind. I want in.” Constance had been making me put my earnings into an account I couldn’t withdraw from. With Omar’s scam, I’d have enough to leave them all behind me. Start fresh in another city, even.
“Cool.” He vanished a second then poked his head out again. “Don’t move.”
I waited around the corner, puffing on my inhaler. The chemicals irritated my throat and made my heart race. Omar came back to the window and flicked a piece of metal at me that landed in the mud. I picked it up and wiped it off on my jacket. The coin was too light. The thin skin of yellow gold on the surface wasn’t real. I rubbed its waxy sheen.
“Start with a Constantine coin. Cherrywood cabinet, back left. Code’s 4321.” The window thumped shut.
I stood there not moving as the wet snow turned to ice rain.
* * *
NEARING THE BOX stores a few blocks away, I thought about telling Con what I’d seen.
Earlier in the week, after a heated argument with Henry, she stormed down to the basement where I was sprawled under a quilt, immersed in Wuthering Heights. She told me to shove over, sinking into the couch. She’d interrupted Heathcliff on the moors, chasing after Catherine’s ghost.
Sometimes I’d catch her sorting through pictures of herself down in that dark space, where boxes of her old belongings were stored. Or I’d find her hiding out there, absorbed in films—on our second, outdated TV set that Henry and I had found Dumpster picking—as entire sunny days passed her by.
The period pieces were her favourite. The ones where a heroine tumbled off a horse and a hunt took place with foxes and hounds. There were bosoms and misconceptions, the most critical conversations taking place in snippets during quadrilles.
Constance adored dance scenes. Waltzes couldn’t leave concrete regret behind, she once told me. It was just the moment and then it was gone.
When I watched her watch these movies, I could almost feel her chest tightening at any sign of affection between the actors, as if the main hero was whispering kissss me straight to her. Filled with ennui, my mother wanted to place herself inside those screen sets. And I wondered if this was hardening her against us.
My father called to her in a gentle voice from the top of the stairs. She stood, composing herself and smoothing her hair and skirt, but before leaving, she turned to me. “Édith, there are no acts more selfish than those of a lonely person.”
“You mean a person in love,” I corrected her, not looking up from my book.
“Non,” she replied. “It’s loneliness that makes us terrible and hurtful human beings.”
* * *
NOW THAT MY loveless mother had driven my father away and turned Viv into a delinquent by pushing her in those abhorrent pageants until she rebelled, I’d have to resolve Viv’s mess myself. Then I could depart with a clear conscience, knowing I had done what I could to help my screwed-up sister get back on track.
Nick Angel was at the Cineplex arcade like I knew he would be. I approached him and said, “Leave my sister alone.” I was dripping wet from the rain.
He sniggered and didn’t stop his game of Robo Redux. “Whaaa?”
“I’ll pay you to break up with Viv.”
Nick studied me. His face was like Apollo’s coin face and it was hard for me to be menacing.
“Don’t talk to her again.”
“Your mom put you up to this?”
“She has a bright future and you’re destroying it.” I focused on his throat.
“She did put you up to this.”
“My mom doesn’t care.”
“So I hear.” He crossed his arms. “How much?”
“Three hundred.” I didn’t know what Omar would get for the coin, but he’d spot me if I needed a loan.
“Deal.” Nick’s muscular hand shook mine.
“Meet me here Saturday morning.”
“Okay,” he said, returning to his game and sliding a play card into the machine.
I went back to the Coin Shoppe for my shift. Serena reeked of patchouli. I couldn’t make eye contact. She offered me tea and I refused it even though I was numb from the cold.
When she went upstairs, I circulated around the cabinets until I found the Constantine coin. I switched off the alarm, coughing each time I pressed the button that made a beeping sound. Grabbing the coin, I replaced it with the one Omar had thrown down to me.
When my shift was over, I climbed the fire escape to Omar’s room.
“When do I get my money?”
“Chill. Meetings are Wednesdays.”
“How much?”
“Dunno. Maybe a thousand for that one. So four hundred for Grigg and three hundred each for you and me.”
“I need more.”
“You strike a deal with your sister’s dopehead boyfriend?”
“None of your business.”
“Tell you what. Have my cut this once. For a taste of the mahhhnaaaaaayyy…”
“Don’t be obnoxious.”
“Me? Then don’t be such a snot. I’m trying to help.” He barely missed my fingers as he slammed his window down.
* * *
THE NEXT SATURDAY, I met Nick Angel at the arcade. I’d tied the roll of bills Omar had given me with one of Viv’s hair ribbons.
“Here,” was all I said, surrendering the cash.
“Thanks,” Nick replied, clumsily grabbing the money and shoving it into his army pant pocket. “Later.”
That night, Viv went out. I pictured Nick breaking up with her in an unkind way, but when she got home she was unaffected. On Sunday night she came home late again. I knew she was high because of the skunk smell. She went straight to her room without so much as a hello to me.
I saw them together skipping classes that week, probably blowing all the money I’d forked out to Nick. When they came back to school, I ran through the tunnel into their building, watched and waited for them to part ways, then followed Nick to his locker and cornered him.
“What the hell?”
“Sorry,” he told me. “Your sister is persuasive.”
I pulled the other three hundred from my backpack and gave it to him. “Leave her alone. I mean it.” He didn’t look so evil anymore.
Just as Omar predicted, within a month Nick Angel overdosed. Viv came home hysterical. She made the movements to tear at her hair, but there was no
hair to pull at. She sobbed so hard we couldn’t understand what she was saying.
Nick had ignored her that week. She didn’t know why. She went over to his house. His combative father called her a Nazi and blamed her for his son’s hospitalization.
“Who is this boy?” Con asked me.
“No one. A druggie,” I told her.
Later, I went into Viv’s room to comfort her. “I did this to him,” she professed. “I made him sell exam answers out back. He somehow got some cash fast,” she said, wringing her hands. “He wanted to put it away for university. I got him to buy coke.”
Nick Angel’s freckly face popped into my mind when I closed my eyes. I couldn’t sleep. I’d been reading Macbeth and I was sure his ghost would haunt me if he died.
His parents wouldn’t let Viv visit him in the hospital, so I snuck into his room on her behalf. When he saw me, he went berserk, hollering that he never wanted to see me or Viv again.
As soon as he got out, his father shipped him away to a military academy. Viv was inconsolable and her grades started slipping. I didn’t mention Nick’s last words or how awkward it was to see him cry.
Omar said he would have gone that route regardless. That he would have found a way to OD with my money or without it. But I wasn’t convinced. What scared me was what I’d been capable of. And what Omar and I were capable of together.
* * *
WHEN MY FATHER asked me why I was quitting the Coin Shoppe, I said I was tired of watching Serena bring sleazy customers up to her room. Nothing was further from the truth. He was the only man I’d seen her with, but Henry’s pained expression satisfied me.
Lying in bed at night, I wondered if I’d led my father to Serena, or if he knew her already and wasn’t so much intent on my learning about coins as he was on seeing her. This possibility hurt the most.
My career as a thief consisted of stealing one gold coin. Since she was sleeping with my father, I owed Serena nothing. Omar didn’t ask for his money back and I didn’t offer. As far as I was concerned, he was partly responsible for what happened to Nick Angel anyway.
I still went to tell him goodbye once I announced to Serena that I was leaving. “My mom is such a witch,” he said as he leaned out the window, looking down on me as I crouched on the snow-covered fire escape.
“So is mine,” I told him. “I hope you get that medicine,” I added.
“I hope you get away from your family.”
“You too.”
“Yeah.”
I whistled “Somewhere over the rainbow” as a joke. Then we lapsed into silence. I got up and wiped the hard pieces of tar and ice from the back of my jeans. I put on my toque and mitts and extended an arm through the open window to shake Omar’s swift, dark hand. Instead, he pulled my mitten down a bit and kissed the inside of my wrist.
“See you around, songbird.”
SIXTEEN
LIAM CAME HOME FOR Christmas. When he visited us, he brought Viv a bracelet made from seashells. His gift to me was more thoughtful—a fossil of sardine-like fish on plaster. He pointed out the scales, bones, and teeth. I stored the Lake O’Hara rock in my closet, substituting it with this new treasure under my pillow.
He called Viv “Baldie” even though her hair was growing out. “Try this, Edith!” he said, patting the top of my sister’s head with one hand and rubbing her stomach with the other, then reversing the motions. I approached him and placed my hand on his hard abdomen. “No, use your own stomach,” he explained, pushing me away.
On Christmas Eve, while Constance and Henry were out shopping, the three of us spent the morning in the shed. From my father’s stool I observed Liam and Viv fabricate a kite from kraft paper and dowelling rods. I helped paint the aircraft in bold hues and abstract forms, my throat tightening when Viv guided Liam’s brush.
In the kitchen, I poured hot chocolate into a Thermos and toasted s’mores in the oven, wrapping them in foil to keep them warm. Then we loaded into Liam’s parents’ car and drove to the grounds of Rideau Hall.
We were like characters in a scene from a Russian novel inside that gentrified tundra. Especially Viv, in the raccoon fur and matching hat she’d liberated from Con’s closet. Henry had saved up for months to buy it for our mother, yet we never saw her wear it. She claimed it wasn’t soft enough.
The snow crunching underfoot, we took turns running through the white savannah and guiding the burst of colour into the air. The kite danced inside the drag and pull of the wind before it came crashing down, the wood dowels snapping and the paper tearing.
Next we went skating on the pond. Viv was as glamorous as Margaret Trudeau against the snow and ice, spinning around like a music box figurine.
We snapped photos with our father’s clunky Holga. The camera took terrible pictures that seemed old because of their poor quality. Printed, we looked like a dead family from another era.
* * *
LIAM’S VISIT HAD brought Viv back to life.
She straightened out when he returned to Alberta for school. Her grades improved and she didn’t come home past curfew. Constance let her have a land line in her room again and reinstalled her door. They were almost courteous to each other.
As my sister’s hair grew, she began styling and curling it. Every so often she’d ask me to snap shots of her in exotic poses, which I assumed she texted to Liam. I stopped sending him my own photos and letters, ashamed of my pudgy plainness.
Through winter and spring, my body changed. I wore baggy T-shirts to school. I grew an embarrassing fine moustache above my upper lip. Hairs grew everywhere—on my arms, my thighs, between my legs. I swiped wax strips from Constance’s cupboard. Each month I helped myself to Viv’s tampon supply since she didn’t need them—she was so rail-thin she didn’t get her period anymore. I stole a fleshycoloured training bra Viv had shoved at the back of her dresser once she’d switched to padded bras. She was three years older than me, but her chest was flatter than mine.
I listened to my sister whispering on the phone to Liam late into the night, through the thin wall separating our rooms. They weren’t compatible and her interest in him was a riddle to me. I concluded that, now that Nick was gone, she had nothing else to do.
Sometimes I still went to visit Omar. I tried not to ask if he’d seen my father there. When I passed by the kitchen window, I no longer looked inside.
In Omar’s room, we played cards and laughed our heads off watching porn on his computer, where slow-loading bodies moved sluggishly.
When I asked him for advice and told him about my plans for me and Liam, he suddenly developed aches and pains and made excuses not to see me. Then one day he had a seizure. Serena flew in, screaming for me to get out. “He’s faking it,” I told her, without knowing why I said it. The next time I knocked at his window, he didn’t answer, even though I knew he was inside.
* * *
A FEW WEEKS after the school year ended, Henry took us out west again, this time to British Columbia. My mother boycotted the holiday. She’d been in a terrible mood that spring. There were phone calls from the bank manager.
I didn’t want to stay home alone with Constance, but I also didn’t want to go on Henry’s dumb trip.
I’d grown conflicted when it came to my father. Since I’d found out about his affair with Serena, he’d gone down in my esteem, but I still adored him. And when Con or Viv were particularly cruel or dismissive, I still had the desire to protect him. In part, their behaviour made me understand why he’d done what he’d done.
Henry thought nature would be good for us. He went out and bought a canoe like Tom Thomson’s. He was infatuated with the artist and wouldn’t shut up about how he’d mysteriously drowned during a canoeing trip in 1917. He started repeating the story to us as soon as we hit the highway.
“We don’t care, Dad,” Viv told him. Nothing coming out of her mouth was nice anymore.
Our father had the hare-brained idea that we could take the canoe all the way to a place called B
ella Coola since there was a big river and channels leading to the Pacific Ocean near the community. He was into Native art and wanted to buy a mask there from a celebrated Nuxalk artist. So the three of us strapped the boat onto the station wagon and drove more than four thousand kilometres to the interior of British Columbia.
Viv wrote in her journal for the entire trip and it got on my nerves. I read Thomas Hardy the whole way there and didn’t speak much to either of them.
After six days in the car, on the last leg of the trip, we got to “the Hill,” which led to a village so disconnected from civilization it was as if it were under quarantine. The joke about Bella Coola was that World War II came and went without anyone there hearing about it.
The Hill consisted of a series of narrow switchbacks that had been hacked through the coastal mountains by the locals. Rusted car parts were scattered over the railing-less hillsides. Even without the canoe, it would have been a tricky descent at slow speed to the valley floor. Due to the bad road, Henry decided that we’d rent a canoe on the spot instead.
Viv helped our father slide the canoe off the rack. The plan was to leave it at the top of the incline and pick it up on the way home in two weeks. But my sister jostled the vessel too close to the crags. As she walked back to the car, we heard the scraping sound of fibreglass on gravel. The canoe went flying down the cliff, straight as a javelin, before smashing into the pines.
* * *
THE BACKYARD OF the house we rented was full of raspberry bushes. Our tongues were permanently stained and our arms scratched from the bristles. Bald eagles frequently swept down, snatching up feral cats in their talons.
While Henry waited for his mask to be carved, we went sightseeing. We saw the landmark rock the explorer Alexander Mackenzie wrote on in bear fat and vermilion, when he reached the Pacific Ocean. Nearby, hot springs ran through hoses into old tubs. A garter snake with a greenish-yellow stripe on its sable body slithered around the basins, where the overflowing water formed warm pools on the ground. When Viv lunged for the reptile, foam secreted from its tail, releasing musk. My flabbergasted sister dropped the writhing creature and jumped backwards as it flattened its head and struck at her.
The Gallery of Lost Species Page 7