by Karen Grose
“It rained almost every afternoon, so I was stuck inside a lot.”
“Okay, so tell me about that.”
“Once, after the thunder thumping stopped—”
“The what?”
Heat climbed into Greta’s face. “That’s what I called thunder when I was a kid. Anyway, after one of the big storms, I remember my mom calling me from the kitchen to see if I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies.”
“The oven? In that heat?” the detective asked. “Brave woman.”
“Usually I jumped at stuff like that, but I’d been upstairs trying on her make-up and I was trying to sneak outside without her seeing me, so when she came around the kitchen corner, I pulled my sun hat over my face and tapped on my cheek, pretending to think about her question.”
“Uh-oh,” the detective said, “dead giveaway.”
Greta ignored her comment. “My rain boots were by the front door—they were red, I think. I tried to squeeze by but I couldn’t. She asked me where I’d been.”
“I have kids. Grandkids. Let me guess,” Detective Perez said, “you said nowhere.”
Should she tell the detective to just stop? She opened her mouth and then closed it. Why bother to piss her off?
“My mom cupped her hand around my chin and—”
“Your pink cheeks and lips said it all?”
She nodded. “I remember telling her it was pretty. Pretty something, she said. Then she told me my dad would have a fit. I don’t remember what I did. Maybe crossed my arms or stuck out my tongue. I do remember saying so what? She said it wasn’t nice and when I responded that it was him who wasn’t nice, she told me not to say that again because he was my father.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“I dunno. I was maybe four. I probably resented it. Resented him.”
“Your father.”
“Yeah. She made me go and take it all off.”
Greta remembered how she’d stomped her foot hard on the floor, stuck out her bottom lip, and climbed the wooden steps to the stool in front of her mother’s dresser mirror. Why wouldn’t her father think she was beautiful? She looked like the ladies he watched on TV. Then she heard a noise outside; it was enough to make her wipe her face as quickly as she could. The stairs creaked and her mother flew around the corner, grabbing Greta’s face to inspect it.
Downstairs, a door slammed. Her father was home.
FIVE
“I take it your father was strict?” Detective Perez said.
“You have no idea.”
“Mine was, too.”
“Did you hate him?”
“Of course not.” She paused. “Do you hate your father?”
Greta dug her nails into the arms of the chair. The detective would ramble on anyway, so she wasn’t giving her the satisfaction of a response.
“How old are you, Greta?”
“Nearly nineteen.”
“I don’t think kids recognize it growing up—I sure didn’t—but what I thought were my father’s stupid rules back then have a lot to do with where I’m sitting now.” Her face softened. “Maybe one day you’ll see that, too.”
Greta opened her mouth but no words came out.
Detective Perez waved a hand around her office. Near the door, a trench coat hung loose from a peg in the wall. Beneath it, a brown leather glove on the floor. To the right, a thick book and a pile of files sat on a table. Above, a corkboard stuck on the wall filled with cue cards; yellow, pink and blue, with the words Open, Pending and Conviction, the column underneath the third the longest.
“Is his there?” Greta said, searching for her fathers.
Detective Perez pointed. “Yes. Since the call came in last night.”
It was on the left, the only one under yellow.
The detective clasped her hands and leaned in. “When my father was in one of his moods, my brother and I used to take off downstairs for the day to get out of his hair. I bet you and your siblings did something like that, too, right?”
Greta dragged a hand down her face. The detective knew nothing about her.
It’d been easy to stay out of his way. By the time she woke up, Ian had already left for work, so it surprised her one morning when she found him sat at their kitchen table.
She looked up from her Rice Krispies. Dark stubble dotted his chin and he was in his blue pajamas. “Aren’t you supposed to be gone?”
“I live here.”
“Are you sick?”
He didn’t respond.
“’Cause normally you look nicer.” She was thinking of the suit and tie he came home in each night.
Ian leaned across the table. “Shut up,” he spat.
She froze. Her mother froze. No one moved a muscle. She’d clearly crossed a line. Help me, Mom, she thought. Someone has to help me. She tried to make herself as small as she could.
Her mother shifted her eyes in her direction. “Get your father some cereal.”
She didn’t need to be told twice. Off her chair in a shot, she grabbed a box from the cupboard and plunked it in front of him.
His dark eyes bore into her. “Again.”
She repeated the action of setting down the cereal box ten times softly because she knew what was expected.
His caterpillar eyebrows lifted. “No bowl?”
She winced as he reached across the table and took hers. Fists in balls, she’d sat glaring at his ugly old pajamas as he ate, and then ate three more bowls in quick succession, just to prove he could. He slurped up the milk before shoving it back across the table. She’d caught it before it crashed to the floor.
After he’d left the kitchen, her mother wiped her hands on a dishtowel and rushed to hug her. Greta pushed her away; it wasn’t the first time she’d been left hungry. Was it three times now? Four? She hadn’t forgotten; she’d lost track.
At the front door, she found her rain boots and pulled them on. One didn’t fit, and when she dug around the bottom of the toe, she pulled out an apple the size of her fist. Her mother? Then, like every morning, she ran, mud sucking at her boots, to play up the laneway.
When Greta looked back up, Detective Perez was staring at her over the top of her glasses.
“What is it?” she said. “Did you remember something?”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
“I guess I did. I went outside, I mean. To get out of his hair.”
“That’s it?”
She nodded.
“You’re eighteen now, and the make-up incident was when you were four? Hang on…” She scribbled on the page. “Must have been”—She looked up—“2003?”
“How would I know?”
“Anything else from that summer?”
Greta looked at the carpet. She picked at a nail. “Maybe. Give me a second to think.”
By midday, the temperature had soared and the canopy of trees stilled, thick with heat. She’d wandered back to the cabin to find her parents huddled together in the main room. The TV flickered on the plastic wrapped over the furniture, and she’d eyed the wooden cross above them on the wall. It was shaped like a T.
“Good afternoon,” the man on the TV said. “Today’s top story is the same as yesterday. Thursday August fourteenth is another sweltering hot day across Canada.”
Sweat ran in lines down her face; the room so hot it was hard to breathe. She retraced her steps and stopped halfway back along the hallway in front of the framed photographs on the wall. She counted seven. One with the three of them, but she didn’t know where it had been taken. One of her mom laughing in a green sundress, standing next to Greta holding Bunny outside the cabin. One of Greta as a baby. She lifted her hand to the side of her head. Where was Scar? She stepped forward and peered at the photo more closely. It wasn’t there, but her baby head was so fat it filled the whole frame. That was funny. Another showed Mom and Ian standing with other people she didn’t recognize. Ian’s face was red, turned away from her mother, who was talking to another m
an. She looked sad. Maybe she got a sunburn that day, too? The last three photos were all of Ian. She frowned and took a step back. It wasn’t fair. First, in a boat. Wait… Was he wearing red underwear? His hairy legs were stuck out and he was smiling at the camera, a fish in his hands, not seeming to care the boat was half sinking. Next, on the back patio outside the cabin; his body squished into a chair. He was laughing, and a bottle dangled from his fingers—the same one he drank from that made him fall down. After he finished it, he probably put his chin to his chest and slept there because that was what usually happened. The last was a close-up. Smiling again? She didn’t understand why he smiled in pictures but not in real life. Was that what photographs were for?
In the background, the man on the television prattled on. “The summer heatwave continues to wreak havoc across North America. Fields are tinder-dry and lightning storms have been recorded in most provinces. In Ontario, residents are being asked to preserve power.”
Greta stiffened. She raised her hand, like she was in class. “There was a blackout. My mom told me something like fifty million people lost power.”
Detective Perez turned to her computer. “The blackout?” Hunched forward, her fingers flew across the keyboard. Her face brightened. “2003. I knew it. That, my dear— ”
My dear?
“…was one crazy week.”
As Detective Perez leaned back and launched into a full account of the events, Greta thought back, only able to recall bits and pieces.
“So let’s talk about that,” the detective said after she’d finished. “Did you lose power, too?”
“It didn’t go out right away, but when my mom said it might, I remember being really scared.”
“Of what?”
She paused. “The dark.”
She’d hated the dark. Just the thought of the sounds that came through her bedroom walls at night made her neck damp. She prayed for the times her parents laughed and grunted, and for the silence afterwards that lulled her to sleep. But they were rare. Most nights they argued. Loud voices, in words she hadn’t understood. Her mother whispered no—often. Then there would be a sharp intake of breath. Sometimes a crash and a shattering noise. Greta would wonder what had broken. The lamp? Maybe the dresser? The pictures on the bedside table?
The detective interrupted her thoughts. “You were scared of the dark when you were little?”
Her eyes narrowed. Wasn’t every kid? From the detective’s reaction, she guessed not.
“I guess after the blackout, you didn’t have to worry, right?”
Was that what the detective believed? Her parents’ fighting wasn’t confined to the night. Ian’s announcement about Kindergarten had hung in the air for weeks, floating in the kitchen like a hot air balloon, sinking downwards a little each day. He had refused to discuss it, and her mother had continued to fret. Greta, however, had prayed for school and for their anger to be at a greater distance. Every time she did, her heart had thumped like it would explode. Right out of her shirt, right there at the table. All over the walls and the floor. But in the weeks after the bacon incident, she’d made more sense of her surroundings and was sure of two things: one, her opinions didn’t matter, and second, if she made a scene, it was of no benefit to anyone—least of all her. She knew full well: a big ugly mess meant consequences. So, when darkness came, she’d kept her prayers to herself; her own little secret, trapped between the four walls of her bedroom.
Greta rubbed her hands along her upper arms.
“You cold?” the detective said.
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Then nothing.”
Detective Perez eyed her, questioningly. “If you are, tell me. This building… There’s something about it. Some days…”
Greta crossed her arms over her chest. Whatever. She didn’t have the energy to listen to Detective Perez any longer. She was done. Trust? She wasn’t feeling it. And though it’d only been once, she’d felt no guilt at all when she had looked her straight in the eyes and lied.
SIX
D etective Perez stopped mid-sentence. “You’re not giving me a lot to work with here, you know…” she said, tight lipped. “Want some advice? You need to start talking.”
Greta leaned forward to examine the notebook. Her summary, written in small block letters, didn’t yet fill a quarter of the page—probably because she couldn’t get a word in edgewise if she’d tried. She gritted her teeth to keep from swearing.
The detective put her glasses on her desk. “Cat got your tongue?”
Greta looked at her. She had half a mind to tell the detective about the kitten she’d wanted as a kid. It was a few years after her accident. She’d named it Yeshi from the moment it peaked its tiny pink nose out from the cardboard box in the front window of the pet store. Unwilling to pay for it, Ian had laughed. A few weeks later, when she spotted another abandoned on the side of the road, she’d pointed it out to him. Late for church, he’d sped by, but on the way home, when the truck slowed in its general location, her hopes rose. The wheels swerved. Then a thump. She’d gasped. That day, she convinced herself she saw it through the cracks of her fingers out of the window, back arched, head darting, paws hugging the earth. Had she? Heartbroken, she’d pestered her mother for a dog.
“No chance of that,” she’d said. “I’m allergic.”
Greta had arranged her pout into a smile. “Then sleep outside.”
Her mother had laughed as she sat down at the kitchen table.
“Do you know my new teacher is a lady?”
Her mother had nodded and chopped up the tomato into the salad.
“Who has a moustache?”
“It’s six o’clock, Greta. The table is supposed to be set. Get on it.”
She remembered how she’d groaned. “Why do you always get so mad when I’m late?”
“Your selective listening pisses me off and I’m sick of telling you to do things on time.”
“So start yelling at me earlier.”
Her mother had shaken her head in frustration as she’d sliced into cucumber. “Shit.” A bright red stream trickled from the tip of her finger.
“Ohh. You said a bad word.” Greta had said, jumping down from her chair.
“Sorry. Quick, get me a band aid.”
She found one in the box under the sink and stood beside her mother, watching her wrap it around her finger. Then she lowered her voice. “Shit.”
Silence.
“Shi-i-i-i-t,” she repeated.
No response.
“Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit,” she said, for as long as she could hold it.
“Stop it. I apologized.”
“Why were swear words invented if you’re not supposed to use them?”
Her mother threw her hands in the air. “Good grief, you’re relentless. You exhaust me.”
Greta had sulked, trying her best to get her eyes to glisten. Aware from the looks she’d been receiving lately that not everyone craved answers to questions like she did, she was disappointed her mother seemed to have joined the team.
Her mother had looked at her then and said, “There are days, my dear, that I understand why some animals eat their young.”
Greta had sat still, unsure if what her mother said was true. Were there really animals that ate their own babies? When she scanned her face, her mother had grinned back. She didn’t deny it.
“Come on, Greta. Giddy-up,” Detective Perez said, drawing her thoughts back into the room. “It’s like pulling teeth.” She reached for the mouse and wiggled it on the desk. “Why Ravensworth?” She squinted at the screen. “It’s way further north than I first realized.”
She scowled but didn’t argue. Had the detective listened, she’d have known this a half-hour ago. Was it going to take her that long to figure out the truth about her father?
“You have family up there?”
“Not my mother.”
“Then your father?”
Legs wrapped arou
nd the chair, the blank page staring back at her on the desk, Greta’s stomach tightened. “I—”
“Let me guess… You don’t know? Or you don’t remember? Because they’re two different things.”
“God. What’s up with you? You don’t have to get like that. It’s simple. I got a concussion.”
Detective Perez’ expression darkened. “That makes you avoid answering questions?”
Words hovered unspoken in the space between them. Could the detective not see she was struggling? The things she wanted to remember she couldn’t and the things she’d tried so hard to forget just kept coming.
“No. By the end of the summer, I started remembering a lot. Being sweaty. My parents yelling. The smell of the junk my mom rubbed on my scar. Oh, and the day she pulled my stitches out.” She waited for Detective Perez to finish writing before ploughing on. “I even remember after one of my parents’ really ugly fights, I woke up outside in the woods in the middle of the night. I was alone. I was soaking wet. I had bruises. And then these nasty red welts on my legs. But I had no idea how I got there. Wait… Hang on. That can’t be right. My bedroom door squeaked. The sound still gives me the creeps. And I couldn’t have opened it because they locked my bedroom door from the outside at night, and—” She looked up. The detective was staring at her, her page half-filled, fingers tight to her earring. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You asked me to tell you something so I did.”
Detective Perez lowered her hand. “What’s the second thing?”
“Huh?”
“You said, ‘first of all’….”
“Oh, that one’s different. That one’s more like a voice in my head. Rules are rules to be followed, it says. And then I get these goose bumps and there’s warm and sticky on my nose. I get trapped, you know, held down, and something’s in my face. I don’t know what but it tickles and sticks and tastes like a penny. Long story short.” She checked to see if the page was full. It was. “I’m not sure if it’s real or a—”