“We have a sculpture made out of these,” I said about the chairs. “It’s called Shapeshifter.”
“Bizarre.”
“It’s the skeleton of a whale suspended from a ceiling.”
“Pourquoi?”
“A statement on consumerism. How we contaminate nature.”
“Ah bon.” She sipped her coffee and lit a cigarette, drawing heavily on it before letting it burn away in the ashtray.
When Mira hopped on my mother’s foot, she lifted her onto her knee, unsnapped the barrette, and ran her fingers through the tangled fringe impeding the dog’s vision. Mira sneezed. Her matted coat, once silky, was coming out in Con’s hands as she combed her.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Alopecia.” My mother kissed Mira on the nose.
“Why are her eyes so gunky?”
“Oh, leave her, Édith! She has allergies.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket, licked the tip, and wiped the inner corners of Mira’s eyes. “Alors. Tell me how you celebrated your birthday.”
Liam left days prior to my twenty-first birthday. Neither he nor Viv called.
I lied to my mother about a dinner party. In reality, my day passed without incident, most of it spent in storage. At lunch, Raven brought down a cake and gave me a gift card for a facial, and some green and black checkered tights. She also brought me a book called The Unabridged History of Unicorns. She’d noticed I’d been spending my lunch hours in the Child’s Dream gallery.
“I had a party,” I told Constance.
“Wonderful!” She dropped Mira onto the green turf. “En passant, we’re moving.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“We found a home in Naples.”
“Italy? Great.”
“Naples, Florida. Near Sawgrass Mills.”
“Where?”
“It’s one of the largest malls in America! A short drive through the Everglades and you’re there.”
“Wow.”
“Houses are so sheep là-bas. Pierre is finalizing. We’ll keep his place here for our pied-à-terre. Tu vas adorer ça, chérie.”
But I knew I wouldn’t be taking many trips to Florida just as I knew she wouldn’t come back once she left for that sunny, harmless state.
I looked out to the War Museum, immovable in its open field like a cement casket. If I visited Constance once a year and she lived until eighty, I would see her thirty more times. If I visited twice a year, sixty. That was two months. Even if she lived until ninety, we’d have a maximum of eighty visits, and chances were I would visit on average 1.5 times per year, which brought us back down to sixty. Two months remaining with my mother.
* * *
I LEFT HER brewing another pot of coffee and went to the aesthetician’s for my facial. Jacinda, a perky girl with pigtails and sparkling eyeshadow, lathered creams and pastes on me in a dimly lit room. She rubbed my temples, snapping her gum and chatting above the New Age music. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy the experience. Lying there with all that sludge on my face brought to mind the time Viv wanted to make my plaster positive but, because of my cowardice, we’d ended up creating my sister’s death mask instead.
Afterwards, Jacinda handed me a binder and suggested I flip through it. She endorsed Vajazzling: the act of applying jewels to a woman’s nether regions for aesthetic purposes. “It’s all the rage,” she told me as I turned the pages, scanning images of intertwined hearts, flowers, and butterflies.
The butterflies got me thinking about the sarcophagus we had at work—Pavane for a Dead Princess—a limestone vessel with a glass lid, lined with silk on which an assortment of butterflies were pinned. The specimens were meant to investigate mortality and transformation and the notion of the soul. It was unnerving, seeing those classified wings in their final resting place.
Then each butterfly had to be removed and fumigated because, as it turned out, the silk lining was infested with moth cocoons. When the moths hatched and started eating the butterflies, the conservators dismantled the display.
I began reminiscing about Liam, and the time he took me to a butterfly exhibit at the campus greenhouse. He told me to wear red that day. Inside, hundreds of exotic butterflies fluttered around us, drawn to my maraschino top. It was humid and I fanned myself with a pamphlet as he led me off the walking path, away from the visitors, to a wall covered in flowers covered in butterflies. I stared in amazement.
Liam told me then that butterflies have taste buds on their feet. When starving, they feed on incredibly low concentrations of sugar diluted in water. He said that their sensitivity to sweetness was more developed than that of our own tongues, and that some species after drinking fermented dew can’t fly away for days.
Before I left the spa, Jacinda asked if I wanted to book a Vajazzle consult. When I gave her the seafoam dress my mother had bought for me, she hugged me.
TWENTY-NINE
IT WAS WEEKS BEFORE I noticed the missing paperweights. I’d been saving up to have a cabinet custom-made. When I went to retrieve them from the linen closet, I found the empty box.
There were twenty-seven weights. Viv must have stowed them away in her coat and in her enormous handbag, accustomed to toting large quantities of glass.
Did she pawn them or did she launch them over a bridge? Did she sell them to buy more, full bottles, or did she find a body of water and wade into it, pulled down by the frozen landscapes? I preferred to think she traded them in to an antiques dealer and used the few thousand dollars to move to Mexico, maybe to one of those inland artist communities where living was still cheap.
All I had left was the millefiori—“a thousand flowers” in Italian—that I kept on my office desk. Within its crystalline dome there were cross-sections of moulded glass rods, stretched and sliced like hard candy to form a multicoloured carpet. The rod faces had flowers on them. There was a silhouette of a dancing devil inside the largest, middle rod, which had fascinated me as a child.
Henry was convinced the paperweight came from the St. Louis factory in France. If there had been an identifier on the bottom and if the glass had no yellow cast or air bubbles, it would have been valuable. Instead, it was deeply flawed and worthless.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY at lunch, I dropped the millefiori into my cardigan pocket, grabbed my purse, and roamed through the Canadiana galleries. I thought about how Henry likely came here on his lunch breaks too, before his years on night shift. He probably stood in the exact same spot I was standing in now, in front of The Jack Pine by Tom Thomson.
Pictured was a dark green, solitary tree on a rocky shore, its threadbare branches deformed against the yellows, cobalts, and carnelians of water and hills and sunset. It was my father’s favourite work. We sold laser reproductions, mugs, serviettes, T-shirts, and magnets of it in the gift shop. I bought Liam the Jack Pine hotpot holder after we’d planned to go camping in Algonquin Park, but I never saw him use it.
In the same room was The Tangled Garden. This painting, which soothed my mother all those years ago, had the opposite effect on me. The closer I got to it, the more I felt as though I was suffocating. It wasn’t a lithe garden. It was the tumultuous garden of all summer endings. Where cyclopean sunflower heads drooped and other flowers lost their petals in the shadows, surrounding the viewer in vibrant mayhem. There was no sky, no air. I passed it as quickly as possible, puffing on my inhaler and detouring through the Hirst room on my way back to the office.
Nobody was in there. I approached the vitrine, searching for air bubbles in the formaldehyde—those signs of imperfection my father had trained me to seek out when examining hand-blown glass. But there were no bubbles in the blue liquid.
I sat on the visitors’ bench and pulled the millefiori orb from my pocket. I put the paperweight to my eye like a monocle, transforming the unicorn into a blurred, indistinct form.
I was slowly making my way through the book Raven had given me for my birthday, reading about how the unicorn popped up in histo
rical accounts from different parts of the world that couldn’t have communicated with each other.
The Greek unicorn was a wild ass with a white body, a red head, blue eyes, and a multicoloured horn that resided in insurmountable mountains. Persia’s unicorn was a three-legged donkey with six eyes and protective powers. The medieval unicorn was a chaste, fierce white horse with a goat’s beard. Knights hunted it, using maidens as bait to slaughter the animal.
But there was no physical evidence for unicorns and no one could procure a horn, so the Church Council forbade using it as an allegory. When the Vikings caught on, they harpooned narwhals from the North Sea for their tusks, throwing in triumphant stories about entrapping the unicorn. Tales spread about the horn’s cure-all properties—it could rid people of ulcers and blindness, it could cure melancholia and it could remedy gout. The powder was the most expensive apothecary ingredient. Kings and popes carried horn bits around in pouches to ward off the plague. Royalty wouldn’t eat without it, using it to detect poisons in food and drink.
People didn’t care about the animal’s existence; all they wanted was the horn. Demand was so high that any shrewd salesman could make a fortune selling unicorn cups and amulets carved from elephant ivory.
Then a beached narwhal was found along the coast of Norfolk. When a zoologist proved the tusk was one and the same as a unicorn horn—also called an alicorn—realists banished the animal to the realm of legends.
Peng Lau, my neighbourhood herbalist, claimed to sell alicorn powder to “heal grievous wounds.” Along his walls were hundreds of neatly arranged jars and drawers lined up like counters on an abacus.
When I purchased ginger capsules for my colds or prescriptions consisting of twigs, seaweed, and roots to correct what Peng called my yin-yang imbalance, I’d point at random and ask, “What’s inside there, Peng?” It was a game between us. “Wondrous remedy for what ail, lady,” he would answer, handing me a paper bag so light it could have been empty.
Peng said unicorns were like angels. They brought you back from the dead.
THIRTY
THE WINTER MONTHS BLENDED together like an unremarkable pastel drawing. I used my inhaler more and more.
Only at the Gallery did I experience moments of contentment. Alone with my documents damaged by sunlight, moisture, and insects, I was almost tranquil.
Yet while locating, organizing, and cataloguing, I increasingly perceived disfiguring brown blemishes manifesting on artifacts. The papers I touched were discoloured and brittle and on the verge of crumbling. There was nothing I could do when I found an archival work eating away at itself, acidity overtaking its pores like an unkillable beast.
Constance checked in periodically from Florida, asking after Viv.
“Is it church people she’s with?”
“You mean the mission. It’s possible, I guess.”
I listened to my mother tapping her acrylic nails on the countertop. I pictured her in her paradise surrounded by palms, standing in a bright kitchen in her gossamer blue dress. Soon she’d be picking up a rag to wipe spotless the surfaces around her, scrubbing harder and harder as her shoulders inched upward.
Not once did she ask me to go find Viv and not once did I volunteer to do it. Exchanging trivialities, we always said goodbye jovially, as if neither of us had a care in the world.
At the end of winter, crocuses stuck out of the ground like candied flames.
I still hadn’t heard from Liam.
* * *
IN MAY, WHEN the phone rang at two o’clock in the morning, enough time had passed that I knew it wasn’t him. Still, my pulse was heavy in my throat when I reached for the receiver.
“I’m in North Bay. Can you pick me up?”
“I’m sleeping.”
“Please, Edith. I need to get out of here.”
“Take a bus.”
“I’m at the station. I don’t have enough for a ticket.”
I hung up wishing I hadn’t answered. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t, so I made tea and stood at the window—the one from where I’d watched Viv and Liam together on the steps. That day felt like a century ago now.
As the light changed outside, the earth and trees appeared lifeless. Then there came a blood-red sunrise and I got this prescient feeling, so I packed my bag and drove the four hours to get her, calling in sick to work when I was halfway there.
When I pulled up at the bus station, Viv was on the curb with the same duffle bag she’d left home with seven years earlier. I opened the trunk and she came around to throw in her bag, awkwardly wrapping her arms around me.
“Hey, Worm.”
“Hey.”
I forced myself to look at her. There was no trace of the puffy face and yellow eyes that struck me when I’d seen her half a year ago. She’d gained weight, and as she walked over to the passenger’s side, I noticed her old lady’s gait had lessened. Her hair was shampooed and her jeans and T-shirt were clean. She was nearly pretty again.
Before picking her up, I’d debated what to do with her. She told me she would regain tenancy of her apartment on Monday. I didn’t want her staying with me or at Constance’s even though she was in Florida. I decided to go to Algonquin Park with her, which was roughly on the route home anyway. At the city limits I’d stopped off at a twenty-four-hour Walmart for a stove, fleece jackets, a cooler, and a flashlight. I still had sleeping bags and a tent in the back of the car from when Liam and I had planned a camping trip the previous fall. Like his empty coffee cup by the kitchen sink, I hadn’t had the heart to remove these from the trunk yet.
Viv slept for most of the drive. From time to time I’d glance over at her. She was a replica of our mother, not just physically—the long neck, the fair skin—but in how she moved unconsciously and in the flinching and sighs, as if she was bored by her dreams but couldn’t be bothered to wake up. And like our mother, when she was awake, she stared out the window, chain-smoking.
“You’re asking for a heart attack.”
“Me and the Con have good genes.”
We picked up some groceries then drove to Canoe Lake, where Tom Thomson drowned. We’d visited the area often with Henry when we were growing up.
The lake was still. At the edge of the dock, Viv gazed out to where anglers cast their fishing lines. “Flashback central,” she said, stepping on her cigarette. I put the butt in my jean pocket.
We drove on to one of the open campgrounds—most of them were still closed this early in the season—choosing a spot with a narrow entry onto another lake. Before unpacking the gear, we went down to the water, pushing branches aside on the overgrown, muddy path. Minerals gave the lake a teal hue and through the pines there were gleams of hills—yellows, blues, and pinks, which I hoped might inspire my sister. But Viv remained uninterested and we climbed back to our site after only a few minutes.
We struggled with the tent. I laid a plastic tablecloth out on the picnic table, then bowls and spoons and condiments. I walked to the pump and filled a jar with water, picked some flowering weeds, and placed the bouquet on the table. I heated soup and tea on the stove while Viv went looking for more wood.
It got dark fast. Viv kindled the logs with fuel and newspaper, and rolled some tree stumps over for seats. We ate smokies and stared into the flames. If I looked from the fire to my sister quickly, her eyes looked like two gold coins.
“How are things at the art gallery?” she finally asked.
“Someday they’ll want your work, Vee.”
“Fat chance.”
“Where did you store your paintings?”
“Garbage.”
She poked at the embers, opened a bag of marshmallows, and stuck three onto her branch.
“Ever hear about that marshmallow-eating contest?”
“A kid choked to death.”
“Mhmm.” Her marshmallows blackened and caught fire.
“Have you been in touch with him?” I asked.
“Nah.”
“Is he wh
y you moved back?”
“Nope.” She tossed her stick into the pit and rubbed her legs, massaging them with force.
“You don’t care, then.”
“About what?”
“Liam. That I love him.”
“I figured as much.”
“We’re taking a break. But I think he feels the same way.” It was a relief to get my feelings out into the open.
“Good for you.”
“And we might make a life together. Like, something everlasting.”
“Do what you want, Edith.” My sister looked back into the flames without a word.
I knew she’d never cared for Liam the way I did and I didn’t expect my confession would upset her. I wasn’t seeking my sister’s approval, yet I wanted her to be happy for me. Her indifference hurt.
* * *
WE ROSE EARLY, easing ourselves onto the dew-covered stumps, drinking coffee as the sun spread its light across the ground like spilled sangria. Viv gulped her coffee; she gulped everything.
At the docks, we rented a canoe. “Remember Bella Coola?” I ventured.
“Of course. Did that thing ever fly down the mountain.” She laughed for the first time.
We paddled in silence, our skin damp and shining. We found a flat rock and anchored there. We made cushions from our towels and I opened the mini cooler containing vegetables, sandwiches, and juice.
Viv rolled up her jeans and shirt sleeves. There were what looked like burn marks on her shoulders and behind her knees. Small circles like fish scale coins, red and blistering.
“Jesus, Vivienne. Are those needle marks?”
“No, little one.” She tried to placate me. “These are old. I’ve got it under control.”
We ate staring out at the lake and across the water, to an area where trees had been razed to make way for an RV park.
“Dad would have hated that,” I said.
My sister only nodded.
“You know, Mom’s not the one who cheated,” I went on.
“I don’t want to know.”
“What went down is different from what you think.”
The Gallery of Lost Species Page 14