“I’m retailing them online.” She gave a small cough, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray at her feet. “You can have one of each.”
“You’re wasting your time. Her work won’t sell anymore.” My mother couldn’t fathom that the art world was fickle and that Viv was likely already a has-been.
She ignored my remark and passed me an audio cassette. “That’s a funny one,” she said. “Listen when you can.”
“Where’s the tape player?” I asked, looking around the room.
“I threw it away.”
I slid the cassette tape into my bag and went back up to the attic. I dragged a lamp with me into the crawl space, ducking to avoid the rafters. I sat on a ragged bath mat and began unrolling my father’s canvases, going slowly to prevent cracking.
While my sister’s compositions were disguises under-painted with hidden realities, my father’s combinations of seashell, ivory, cornsilk, and lace were images of a cold loneliness. Ashen government towers tainting the sky. Snowbanks trailing utility corridors in winter fields. A train passing through interminable spaces of white impasto. My father painted human solitude.
I chose one titled Estuary that depicted a large mass of still, open water. A canoeist paddled the shoreline. In the background was a row of storefronts and a hotel—a ghost town without dimensions, like a movie set. Above the scene my father included a soaring eagle, painted crudely, as if an afterthought.
I couldn’t tell who was in the boat. Probably Viv. In Bella Coola, Henry had rented a birchbark canoe that he and Viv took out a lot while I stayed at the public pool. Or maybe the canoe portrayed in my father’s painting was the one not used on any lake. Maybe it was the one we lost before reaching the valley floor.
I didn’t recognize any of the works in my sister’s stack. They were made after I’d been to Vancouver, and I was surprised to see she’d titled them. One painting stood out from the textured, geometric shapes. Myrtle and Leo was by far the smallest work, maybe six by eight inches. In it was a deep maroon oval with spindly bullets all around it, indicating motion. A vibrant coral orb floated above the oval.
I knew the story behind the painting. I was stunned that it had marked my sister enough for her to re-create it years later.
Myrtle was the neighbourhood mutt. A solidly built mastiff with a coat the colour of apricots, who didn’t belong to anyone and whom every house on the block took turns feeding.
Leo was a tabby kitten. The runt from a litter we found under our porch one spring. To appease us, Henry let us keep Leo when he took the rest of the brood to the Humane Society.
One day Viv and I brought Leo out to the park across the street. My sister moved back and forth on a swing, holding the kitten while I dangled a ribbon, which Leo kept pawing at and missing as the swing receded.
Our laughter increased when Myrtle appeared and Leo hissed. Myrtle lay down in the dirt a few feet away with his usual baleful expression, barely acknowledging us as Leo kept clawing at the ribbon. Then Leo fell from Viv’s upturned palm, landing on all fours in the dirt.
Myrtle bore his teeth and lunged at the kitten. The dog’s muscular neck swung from left to right with the kitten in his jaw before he released the animal like a rag doll. Leo tried dragging himself away, but his hind legs were crushed. Viv took a step toward the kitten and Myrtle growled at her. He tossed Leo in the air and knocked him around some more. Each time he clamped his jaws down on the kitten, we heard tiny bones being crushed like the sound of biting into a sandwich of crisp lettuce.
When Myrtle was finished with Leo, he came over and released the dead kitten from his muzzle. The body dropped at Viv’s feet. The dog wagged his tail and looked at us expectantly.
After Myrtle trotted away, my sister insisted we bury Leo. There was a pine tree near the swing set and we dug a hole. When we got home, Constance scolded us because our fingernails were so caked with dirt they wouldn’t come clean.
A week later, Viv told me we had to exhume Leo and bring him closer to home. She wanted to make a proper grave for him under the steps where he was born, so he’d be comforted by the scent of his mother and siblings.
We went to the pine tree and uncovered the small mound, repositioning soil until a foul odour hit us. Viv swiftly kicked the dirt back over the maggot-covered carcass. We decided to leave Leo where he was.
We disowned Myrtle after that. Whenever the dog approached, Viv would make as if to kick him or throw stones at him, even though her hands were empty.
* * *
BACK AT MY place, I sat among cardboard boxes I hadn’t unpacked with Viv’s and Henry’s paintings and paperweights. I played Chill with Satie and made poutine. I stood by the sink and ate in the dark, so I could spy into the neighbouring windows.
I watched the family in the brick house across the alley. It was as if all the light of the city were contained inside their home. The small boy practised piano in the living room beneath a warm, hive-like lantern. In the kitchen, the mother lit candles and stirred dinner in a large pot on the stove. The father was in the den, reclining in an easy chair, the room blue and flickering. I wondered if their minds were quiet. I wondered if they were happy.
I phoned Viv to say I’d moved and to give her my new number, but got no answer. A few weeks later she returned my call, reporting that she’d been in the hospital. “Pancreatitis. Don’t tell the Con,” she added. I hung up irritated and concerned. I didn’t tell her Liam was coming home. Yet I felt she was jinxing my plans, purposely dampening my excitement about his return with her bad news.
* * *
ON MY WAY to work, I wove through downtown toward the Château Laurier, which appeared before me like a hardened sand sculpture. Each morning I passed beneath a canopy of oaks in a park overlooking the river, and at the bottom of the incline was my glass edifice—its multifaceted dome and Great Hall and Maman, the thirty-foot-tall bronze spider balancing on the plaza like a black firework.
Maman guarded the Gallery like a humongous paranormal being. Tourists all wanted their picture taken with her, posing under her abdomen, leaning on a graceful leg. The sculptor, Louise Bourgeois, made Maman when she was really old. It moved me to think of this tiny, flinty lady with her blowtorch and goggles, welding the biggest homage she could achieve to her dead mother, who was a tapestry restorer.
Suspended from Maman’s underside was a wire-meshed sac of marble eggs. A hidden camera and loudspeaker above the Gallery’s entranceway was aimed at her. When kids got up to their pranks, climbing and groping Maman’s legs, or when visitors chained their bikes or dogs to her, a booming voice commanded them to step away from the spider.
Nearing the building, I sometimes got apocalyptic visions of the glassworks exploding and the city going up in flames. In the aftermath there would be no world left, but the monumental spider would still be standing. Other days I envisioned a great hand piercing through the clouds and flicking her like a mosquito off the earth’s skin.
More often, though, as the Gallery window washers dangled against the panes like newly hatched arachnids, and the Gatineau Hills shifted inside their pinks and purples, Maman towered over me and I was overwhelmed with a devotion I couldn’t rationalize. Then I descended through the parkade’s granite façade, cut square like a crypt, and made my way beneath sixty-five thousand works of art, following signage to the Curatorial Wing.
That day, over lunch, I told Raven about Viv.
“Pancreatitis at her age? Not good.” She looked down at her polka dot socks, shaking her head.
Raven’s dad was a drunk. She divulged this when we were students. She didn’t bring it up again, but that night at the bar Raven told me about the jugs of homebrew and how happy her dad was when he drank, and how good he was to her and her sister, at first.
When he wasn’t drinking, he got achy teeth. In abstinence his teeth bothered him so much he’d bite into glass rims until the glass broke in his mouth. My pop’s the glass chewer, Raven said.
Then she told
me how her mom stayed with him even when he was most unlovable. He drank anything—Listerine and Pepsi, rubbing alcohol and Kool-Aid, hand sanitizers. Over the holidays, Raven’s mom put ornamental bottles with potpourri floating in them throughout the house. He drank the decorative liquid until it debilitated him.
Once, he tried to cut down a tree while trashed and dropped the electric saw on his bare toes, losing half his foot. He drooled and became belligerent. He saw people outside their windows when there were none. He called Raven and her sister whores. He smacked them and locked them in their rooms. Then he went AWOL for three years.
After he was found dead in a ditch, Raven’s mom became a fanatic about keeping a clean house. She covered the furniture with sheets. She vacuumed twice a day and went through a gallon of bleach every week. Raven and her sister had to sleep with plastic on top of their mattresses. They couldn’t put toys down on the floor. They ate in the bathtub, and every time they got sick, their mom sent them away to her aunt’s.
“Viv had a lot of pressure on her as a kid,” I told Raven once she’d finished her sandwich. Her hair had grown out since university. She divided it into three parts and evaluated me as she plaited it.
“Spare me. From what you’ve told me, you were the neglected one.”
“I don’t get why she can’t quit.”
“Try to catch a river in your hands.” She pulled a compact from her purse and checked her eye makeup.
Across from us in the courtyard, a boy coloured on the cobblestones, working at a frenzied pace, gripping his chalks so hard they kept breaking. “What about wings?” his mother coaxed from the bench.
The jittery child added a flurry of plumage to the bodies. I thought of Viv’s bird sketches and how, later, she spread paint around dead birds that she then withdrew from the canvas, leaving negative imprints of life in their place.
TWENTY-THREE
THE GALLERY BORROWED A unicorn called The Child’s Dream. It was on loan from the artist. The fabled animal was set in a formaldehyde vitrine, framed in gold-plated steel. It also had a gold horn and golden hoofs.
To support the tank’s weight, a team pulled up the exhibition room’s hardwood planks and laid down a steel floor, then set the wood back in place. If the case leaked, the poisonous fumes could be fatal. An emergency shower was set up by the fire exit—a showerhead on a tile wall with a safety lock on the pull cord and a small drain in the floor—which visitors kept mistaking for a Duchamp.
Damien Hirst made The Child’s Dream. He was one of the richest artists alive, notorious for mixing taxonomy, myth, and spectacle and selling his creations for millions of dollars. Some offended critics purported that Hirst’s encased, rotting cow heads covered in flies crossed the line. Once, a cleaner thought his art was garbage and threw the whole thing out.
Before opening hours, I went to see the unicorn. I walked down a narrow corridor, listening to the echo of my steps as I approached the dream.
I had the room to myself. The preserving fluid magnified the unicorn’s features and the hair covering its slight body. Its coat was rumpled as though a hand had just passed through it and its mane seemed fixed in a breeze, each hair moving upward as if it had been given a jolt of electricity. Its lashes extended downward as if a butterfly had landed on the glass bottom of the tank, attracting the unicorn’s mournful gaze.
The snow-white foal was alive with an unsettling stillness and I waited for it to move. My memory of the unicorn on the Lake O’Hara mountainside came back to me.
Then the track lighting came on and the TVs and audio recordings from installations in adjacent rooms dispatched jarring, noisy voices, disrupting my reverie.
* * *
WHEN LIAM ARRIVED, I was bandaging a paper cut.
I looked up and there he was, leaning against the office door with a tree under one arm and a huge backpack at his feet.
He came in, sat down, and placed the potted tree with exposed roots between us. Then he reached across my desk and took my wrist and, raising my arm in front of him, examined my finger.
“What would happen if you got blood on the art?” His thumb was on my pulse.
I hesitated then said, “It would never happen.” From the moment the paper caused a stinging sensation to the moment the drop of blood surfaced, there was ample time to pull my hand away. It was an automatic reaction, like being burned.
I explained, half joking, that paper-cut emergencies were part of my training. He released my wrist and slid the bonsai toward me. “A gift from the smallest park in the world,” he said.
“How did you get in?” I asked, taking in his tan and laidback composure. There was a distance to his demeanour that was unfamiliar.
“Your friend swiped me through. The woman with plaid leggings.”
Raven would have been on the lookout for him. I’d told her he was coming.
I extracted the spare set of keys I’d had made the day before from my purse and tried to remain nonchalant. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks. It’s a drag my parents stayed in BC.” He pressed my hand into his, asked for directions to my apartment, and then left.
* * *
AFTER WORK, RAVEN drove me home. I asked her to go easy over bumps and not to break suddenly. “God, it’s a plant, Edith, not a child.” She adjusted her rear-view mirror. “So cruel, the way those are grown. Same principle as binding Japanese women’s feet. You sure he’s over your sister?” She stopped in front of my place, guzzling down the last of her coffee from her I Hate Cats travel mug.
“He’s staying with me, isn’t he?”
“Personally, I’d steer clear. Now scram.” She slapped my knee, gesturing for me to get out.
When I walked into the apartment, Liam was standing barefoot in the kitchen, stirring spaghetti sauce. “Hi. Hope you’re hungry.” He turned to me smiling, but he still seemed changed somehow. “I’ll be out of your hair soon. I already have leads on a condo.”
I’d set up the pullout and bought new sheets and towels. “It’s no hurry,” I said casually. “Stay as long as you want.”
I put the bonsai on top of the bookcase in my bedroom, near a window framed by vines. It was a flowering mock orange tree with thick, glossy leaves and creamy flowers and rough, cracked bark. I almost expected insect-sized birds to fly out of the foliage.
It would live fifty years if soaked and pruned with miniature utensils, producing leathery fruit called capsules, smaller than my pinky nail. The blossoms gave off a subtle fragrance. When I switched on my reading lamp, the tree cast itself onto my wall like a shadow puppet.
That night, Liam collapsed onto the fold-out early, while I was still washing dishes. I thought we’d be up talking for hours, but I let him sleep. I covered him with a blanket and knelt down next to him.
The muscles at his temples twitched. His eyes moved around rapidly beneath their lids, as if he was struggling to exit some unpleasant trance. I gently blew on his eyelashes and the movements ceased. I resisted putting my head on his chest as I watched him, absorbed by his abdomen moving up and down under his T-shirt. Then I accidentally fell asleep on the rug beside him, curled up like a dog. I awoke before he did and retreated to my room.
Those first few weeks, I slept with my bedroom door closed to give him some privacy, although I often sat on the other side with my ear to the wall, listening to his breathing.
After his arrival, my tasks, my days, my life no longer seemed mundane.
I felt happy. People looked at me differently. Even Raven noticed.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“I’m in love.”
“Infatuation ain’t love, my pet. Once you’ve tolerated the bullshit and the smells and annoying habits you can’t stand, get back to me.”
Liam and I started having lunch together. He’d bike over from campus and we’d sit in the open-air amphitheatre behind the Gallery, on the windy promontory above the river and the bridge between provinces. After eating, he’d tilt his hea
d back and close his eyes. Or he’d scope out the sculpture on the point, called One Hundred Foot Line—a ten-storey tapered spire that came out of the hill like a giant thorn and disappeared into the air.
One muggy afternoon, the metallic hum of cicadas caught his attention. The sun was too strong, so we sat on the grass, shaded by the Line. “Music from the bug that spends most of its life underground,” he said, biting into his apple.
I was aware that when cicadas emerged from the soil, they removed themselves from their shells. Every summer, Viv had collected them from trees and planted them around the house to scare Constance.
Other than the rare flashback, when I was with Liam entire days passed where I didn’t think about my sister. He didn’t bring up Viv either.
Alone at night, though, a succession of images associated with her involuntarily flashed through my mind while I slept. But these were dreams I tended to forget on waking.
TWENTY-FOUR
ON THE MORNING OF Liam’s birthday, I gave him a rock and a globe and wrote him a note that said, You Rock My World. He hugged me and told me I was sweet before clipping his bike helmet on and rushing out the door.
I avoided Raven at lunch that day and went to a lingerie shop, where I spent a hundred bucks on a black lace bra and bikini briefs.
Hurrying home from work, I showered and applied makeup. I curled my hair and put on the black dress I’d kept, meant for my father’s funeral but purchased several sizes too small by Constance. It didn’t fit me then, but it fit now.
I cued up some Nina Simone and poured bubbly in Dollarama flutes with wedding bells on them.
Liam whistled as he came through the door. “What’s all this?”
I offered him his drink and tipped my glass against his. “Happy Birthday.” I went on tiptoe to remove his bike helmet. Then I took his hand and led him to the bedroom.
He was confused. “Wait a sec…”
“Don’t worry,” I told him, trying to undo my dress. The zipper was caught in the lace.
The Gallery of Lost Species Page 11