He didn’t respond and looked mildly tormented when he took my bag and put his other arm around me, leading me to the parkade.
We drove into the midday sun. Liam put the visors down and reached across to pull some aviator glasses from the glove compartment, offering them to me.
I examined myself in the rear-view mirror. “Can I have these?”
He glanced at me then turned back to the road. “Very becoming. They’re all yours.”
We drove by a strip of old hotels and bars interspersed with junk shops and pizza and tattoo parlours. I thought of the Coin Shoppe.
At a red light, a shirtless man rapped his knuckles on my window, motioning for me to roll it down. Liam told me to ignore him.
He pulled up on a dilapidated street, indicating a camera on a nearby building when he noticed my confusion. “This whole neighbourhood’s under surveillance, it’s actually safe. Cops everywhere.”
Someone in a hoodie walked by, kicked a beer can, and punched the air. “This is the shadiest campus I’ve ever seen,” I said, half joking.
Unbuckling his seat belt, Liam managed a smile. “It’s not so bad. You’ll get used to it.”
We all thought they were living in student housing. But since Viv’s bursary included residency for just one boarder, she and Liam had decided to rent their own place. Their warehouse dwelling resembled the one they’d left in Chinatown, but this time it was in the Downtown Eastside. Because of its proximity to skid row, or the Great White Way as Viv called it, rent was cheap.
My sister greeted me at the door with a glass of red wine in one hand and a paintbrush in the other. A jazzy black woman’s voice carried through the empty room.
“Worm!” She hugged me, spilling her drink down the back of my blouse. Her collarbone jutted out from beneath her smock. I felt her spine and ribs when I held her. Her teeth were stained and her eyes shone.
“Geez, check you out.” She put her glass and brush down on a wood crate, grabbed me by the shoulders, and turned me around. We were almost the same height. “So the Con is totally starving you, that bitch.”
Viv pulled two more glasses from under the crate, pouring wine for Liam and me. She took a gulp from her goblet before refilling it to the rim. Pointing to an air mattress at the back of the room, she yelled, “Your bed! Hope you like it, we got it specially for you!”
Liam turned down the music.
“It’s perfect, Vee,” I told her.
Though damp and cold, the apartment had exceptional southern exposure. Half the space was taken up by Viv’s minuscule canvases, no larger than a regular-sized sheet of paper. Each one had its own hypnotic pull. The forms still came from life matter, but she didn’t title the oils anymore, she only numbered them.
The botched shapes mystified me. “I don’t get it. Can’t you say if this is a spoon or a vase?”
“Formulate your own interpretation.”
“That’s silly,” I told her, fuelled by the alcohol. “Can I have the one over there?” I pointed to a blue semicircle above a withered orange crown. I was jealous that she could turn common things over in her mind like that. I could never be so imaginative.
“Take what you want,” Viv said, cartwheeling across the loft with a cigarette dangling from her lips.
* * *
WE RENTED BIKES in Stanley Park. We drove to the north shore and took the Skyride up Grouse Mountain. We went on the ferry to Victoria and walked for hours on the beach.
We didn’t stick around their neighbourhood until the end of my stay, when Viv took us to a blues club and then to a squalid after-hours bar disguised as a diner. It felt unsafe in there. Deviants circulated to make deals, while at other tables people talked to themselves or walked around with soiled pants, eyeing handbags.
Liam and I ordered pancakes and coffee. Viv got a Coke bottle of dark rum with a pink straw. She seemed at home, sketching the roller skating waitresses in lines and swerves and talking to individuals Constance would have flagged as degenerates.
When we pushed the loft’s metal door open, dawn was coming in through the filthy windows. Liam went into the bedroom, partitioned off from the rest of the space by surrealist triptych panels Viv had made. I keeled over on the air mattress while my sister rifled through the cupboards and the fridge.
“Where’s the gin?” she sang out.
Liam emerged, toothbrush in his mouth. “You drank it last week.”
My sister frowned. She returned to the cupboard and stared at the shelves. Then she reached for a small bottle, which she uncapped and tipped back in quick sips, gasping after each swallow as if her throat burned.
I closed my eyes. The room was spinning. I overheard arguing in the bathroom. “I know you’re fucking him. That’s how you’re passing, wasted. Do you model for him too, is that how you got the A in studio?”
“I don’t have time for this, Liam. Back off.”
“Don’t lie to me, Vivienne.” Liam’s low, pleading voice drifted from me.
In the late afternoon, I awoke to a dead calm. I dragged myself to the kitchen and poured a mug of orange juice, then another. I ate some cereal over the sink and placed my empty bowl next to the empty bottle of vanilla.
Liam drove me to the airport that evening as the sun went down on the mountains and the sea, distilling them with whisky light. We didn’t talk on the drive. He pulled up at Departures without coming in with me, saying he had to get back to Viv.
He held my hand a moment. “We’ll miss your funny face.”
“I love you,” I told him. Then the traffic patrol was beside us, honking for Liam to move his vehicle.
“We love you too, bean. Take care of yourself.” He retreated inside the SUV and vanished into the sunset’s tawny flash.
I didn’t visit them again. They broke up a few months later.
I’ll miss you Edith, Liam wrote after he’d moved out. But life with your sister is like skipping rope on ice. I’m not cut out for it.
NINETEEN
SOMEWHERE AROUND MY SEVENTEENTH birthday, Henry acquired a sallow look. A supervisor from Complex I phoned to say he’d gone to the hospital with shoulder pain. By the time we got there, doctors had run tests and told him about a spot on his X-rays.
There was a CT scan and a biopsy. An operation took place that same week. The surgeon removed the tumour and a small part of his lung. Over the next four months he received a biweekly blast of chemotherapy that turned him into an emaciated version of himself.
Constance tried to quit smoking. My father sought answers, insisting he’d grown up in a house insulated with asbestos and that he’d been exposed to it his whole childhood, working with his father on the farm. He blamed painting with oils and smoking a pipe during his New York years. He blamed the polluted city and poor air in the Place du Portage buildings. He blamed everything but my mother.
Six months after his chemo and radiation, the chest pains came back. The coughing up blood. The wheezing. The cancer had metastasized from one lung to the other, blocking his airflow and slowly asphyxiating him while spreading into his bones, liver, and brain.
“I think the doctors gave me cancer hormones by mistake,” he reported after his last trip to the oncologist. “Crummy hoodwinkers.”
Every time I called Viv and asked her to come home, she stalled. It was almost Christmas.
“We could use your help.”
“I’d stress Con out.”
“Home care’s understaffed and she’s exhausted.”
“She doesn’t sleep anyway. What’s the difference?”
“He keeps asking to see you, Vee.”
“I have to wrap up my projects. Besides, flights are oversold until the New Year.”
“I’ll find you one.”
“Fucking hell, Edith. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I wrote to Liam, hoping it would prompt a call. He sent a card addressed to the three of us. It was embossed with white lilies and contained a formal message, as if my father was already
dead.
* * *
BEFORE HENRY STOPPED eating solids, he had a candy bar craving.
He had a penchant for generic candy bars. The ones in bright yellow wrappers. We discovered them all over the place—in the glove compartment, in the basement, in his shed. He liked them with a pear and club soda.
We were going stir-crazy by then. There was nothing to eat in the house and it was the nurse’s day off. Constance cut a bar into squares and put them in the oven. Within minutes, the pieces melted into thin biscuits that she peeled off the cookie sheet. The kitchen smelled like smoky toffee and peanuts. We put the wafers on a plate and brought them to the bedroom with sparkling water and a straw.
He was dozing, a Sotheby’s catalogue open on his legs. I moved it, knowing that anything touching his skin hurt him. Although we’d been turning him every two hours, he had painful bedsores and looked ninety years old.
His eyes grew large when she placed the tray in front of him. He managed a few bites. My mother and I had one too.
“Strange you never liked Oh Henry! bars,” Con said.
“Better than truffles,” my father replied. Minutes later he threw up.
We stayed in the room while he slept. The sound of the oxygen tank rhythmically giving off puffs of air lulled me.
“Forgive him, Édith. I encouraged it—I knew about Serena.”
I wanted to cover his ears, even if he was in one of his morphine-induced sleeps and wouldn’t wake for hours. When I stood to leave, she followed me out of the room.
“What are you talking about?”
“We needed money. She provided loans. I put us in debt with those pageants. Great debt. I tried the casino and racetracks. We lost more. I tried praying.”
So she’d been gambling and betting, those nights she got dressed up and Viv thought she was cheating on our father, attending pretend night classes. Still, I couldn’t listen to this.
“You turned a blind eye to Dad having an affair, just to get a loan? You knew the whole time?”
“I necessitated your father to borrow from her. What happened after that, I do not condone. But I am telling you that I am partially to blame.”
“Why are you protecting him?”
“Do not hate your father, Édith. Sois pas comme moi avec ma mère. Elle me hante.”
“You’re right. You should have forgiven your own mother before she died for whatever she did, which I can’t imagine was any worse than what you’ve done to us. But I’m not like you. I always felt sorry for Dad for having to put up with your undignified schemes. You should have divorced him ages ago and left us all alone.”
I didn’t forgive Henry for cheating on our family, but Con had driven him to it. If that red-headed temptress lured him in after she loaned my parents some money, it was because Con never showed him any love. She’d singlehandedly wrecked our family with those deranged pageants. Her tolerance of Henry’s infidelity also sickened me. They had both equally betrayed me.
“We had no choice.” She was tearful, but I knew she wouldn’t cry. She never did.
“Here’s a choice. How about getting off your ass and getting a job like the rest of us? Then none of this would have happened.”
I left her on the couch with Days of Our Lives blaring. I put on my boots and coat. Outside, I kicked the painting shed again and again until my feet were like two blocks of ice, feeling nothing.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY when I entered my father’s room, the nurse was sitting in the old rocking chair we’d dragged inside from the porch, knitting and reading a Harlequin. She rose when I approached her. “Have a seat, sugar. Won’t be long,” she said, dutifully closing the door behind her.
I leaned forward and picked up my father’s claw-like hand. His nails were long. A massive blue vein swelled where the IV drip was inserted.
Dipping a cotton swab in water and dabbing his lips, I thought of how little my parents had in common, and how my father would have done anything for my mother while in return she only ever seemed lukewarm with him. “She’s a remarkable woman,” he’d said about Constance a week earlier. “She didn’t choose me. I chose her. Don’t be too hard on her, Edith.”
When he opened his eyes, they were opaque. I waited for deathbed confessions. None came.
“Where is Vivienne?” he kept asking.
“She’s on her way, Dad.” I took puffs off my inhaler.
“I won’t die, will I?” was the last thing he said to me, looking over my shoulder to the wall.
* * *
HE DIED ON a bitterly cold day in January, a day when trees of frost appeared all around us like glass sculptures.
Viv flew home and stayed for three days. She wore jeans and a sweater ten times too big for her to the funeral. Whenever she moved her legs during the service, bottles clinked in the purse resting between her feet. She and Constance mirrored each other, my sister an untidy version of our impeccable mother staring straight ahead, unflinching.
After the service, someone touched my waist. Omar was taller than me now. He’d combed his hair and parted it to the side. He wore a suit that was too small for him, his arms and legs extending from the cheap navy fabric like plant stems.
Behind him, I could see Serena at the back of the room, in a tent of black. “Sorry. She demanded to be here,” he said.
“It’s good to see you,” I told him.
“You’re thinking it should have been my mom. Especially with those cigars.”
“Mine smokes more.” I watched my mother eyeing Serena. She maintained her poise and raised her chin a fraction.
Omar blinked at the floor before asking, “So what’s next for you?”
“School, I guess. You?”
“Omaha.”
“Why?”
“My aunt lives there.”
“What about the coins?”
“She’s selling the shop to Grigg. If you ever need a favour, he’s your man.” Omar pulled a token from his suit pocket and pressed it into my hand. “For luck.”
“Is it true your mom gave my parents money?”
“Yeah.” He flushed. “It was all business between them at first. But then, well, your mom’s plan backfired.”
I stared at Omar’s feet, mortified by my family. “At least you can get on those trial meds now.”
“Nah. Mom busted me.”
We said goodbye. When I hugged him, my head was level to his chest. Through the blue suit, his heart beat like a bird in his breast pocket.
After Omar walked away, I inspected the coin. It was blank on both sides. A medallion he’d probably shaped himself. A gold, flat disc as round as the sun.
* * *
AFTER MY FATHER died, it was like having a magnificent work torn from the walls. Suddenly, a rectangle of bright nothingness that had been hidden for decades came into view. Surrounding the rectangle was the rest of my life, unimaginably grey since its removal—something I hadn’t noticed until then.
In the months after his death, I dropped thirty pounds. Nobody recognized me. Constance bought me a new wardrobe and harassed me into applying to university.
Viv phoned once in a while, her voice distant. I told her I’d got into school in Calgary, but she didn’t seem to care. “Say hi to him for me,” was all she said.
I didn’t tell her that I’d decided to stay home with Con. Like the medallion I wore around my neck now, the knowledge was dear to me that Viv wasn’t even aware that Liam had left the country.
He had written to me from the Andes, where he was researching lapis lazuli. He hadn’t stayed in touch with her the way he had with me.
TWO
TWENTY
I MEMORIZED THE MESSAGE on the postcard, which I routinely pulled from my backpack to study. At first the archaic-looking script was hard to decipher, like hieroglyphics I had to decode. Lapis chunks of an impossible ultramarine here, the size of pickup trucks. Painters grind it down for pigments. Cleopatra used its powder on her eyes. Thinking of you. L.
The photograph was a forlorn scene of a dirt road winding through grey hills under a reddish-blue sky. It was the only piece of mail I’d received from Liam since his arrival in Ovalle, Chile, four months prior. He was thinking of me thousands of miles away. Or he’d thought about me momentarily—the date stamped across the postage sticker was five weeks old already.
I enrolled in museum studies at the local community college. Classifying objects was the one thing I knew how to do, as if a genetic predisposition landed me in a field populated by compulsive types lacking social skills.
I kept to myself at school until I met Raven. She was my partner for a conservation course in a white laboratory where rows of microscopes were arranged like soldiers. There, we learned methods for designing mounts and storage containers for tenuous objects such as paper and minerals.
Our teacher, Galina, who resembled Dr. Ruth, was in the middle of discussing the mechanics of stress and strain when Raven came flying in through the double doors, removing her cap and saluting Galina with a curtsy.
“Apologies, madame!”
“Nice of you to join us, Ravine. Take place and be quiet.” Galina checked her name off the list before continuing with strategies on how to counteract gravity.
Raven disappeared behind some lab coats and reappeared at my workstation. I sensed her assessing me as Galina scribbled diagrams on the board.
She took a square of paper from our stack of supplies, folded it again and again—sticking her tongue out in concentration—and produced a small origami flower that she slid over to me.
At break, she shoved the epoxy putty and mat board aside, pulled herself up onto the steel table, and retied the laces of her yellow high-tops.
“Hi, I’m Raven. Has anyone ever told you that you look like Nevertitty?”
“I think it’s Nefertiti.”
“Ya, whatserface.” Her smile revealed eye teeth that stuck out like fangs.
She was from Winnipeg and had that prairie frankness about her. She had spiky ebony hair and a sapphire nose stud that accentuated her brown skin and blueberry-black eyes. “Are those real?” I asked of her eyelashes.
The Gallery of Lost Species Page 9