Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  Perdita (Latin: “the lost girl”) was the daughter of Leontes, King of Sicilia, and his wife Hermione. She was born in a prison where her father had sent her mother because he wrongly believed she had been unfaithful to him. He commanded one of his men to leave the infant on the seacoast to perish, but the servant took pity on the child and let her live, to be raised by a lowly shepherd. Sixteen years later, and now a beautiful young woman, Perdita remained unaware of her royal heritage. Prince Florizel fell in love with her, but because his father disapproved of the match they fled together to Sicilia, where her true identity was revealed and Perdita was reunited with her parents.

  “Why didn’t you stop her?” Papa had asked Ana once, in the heat of an argument the source of which Ana could no longer remember. “She had been sleeping in your bed. Any other child would have woken up or made a sound. We could have stopped her. You could have stopped her.”

  Ana stared at the computer screen. The results of a previous search were still open in another tab. “Kalahari ecosystem.” Apparently, tribesmen in the Kalahari used something called the persistence method to hunt kudu. It meant they ran after their prey, but at a steady pace rather than a sprint, so that in effect they could run for days until the kudu had to give up.

  Perhaps Ana could outrun her mother.

  The next time Ana visited the Women’s Center, a different lady was sitting at the reception counter. She beamed at Ana, showing teeth dotted with multi-colored braces.

  “I left a note for someone,” Ana said. “In case she came in. Helena Rempel? Or Doerksen. She might be called Lena.”

  The receptionist squinted at Ana, then something in her head seemed to click.

  “Oh, right!” she said. “You’re the girl…”

  Ana felt her stomach leap.

  The receptionist fiddled about after something in a drawer. She pulled out the paper with Ana’s address written on it.

  “This is you?” she said, pointing. Her nails sparkled with purple glitter polish.

  “Yes,” whispered Ana, her mouth suddenly dry.

  The receptionist nodded.

  “Becca told me,” she said. “I’m afraid no one’s come in by that name. I’ll totally pass this on if she does, though.”

  She smiled cheerily at Ana as though she’d just said something wonderfully helpful. Ana swallowed.

  “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “No problem. Any time!”

  “Hey,” said Suvi, as Ana opened her front door. “Look who I brought.”

  On the step next to her stood a boy their age. He looked up through a curtain of dirty-blond hair, shoving his hands in his pockets and pulling them out again. He wore white tennis shoes with no socks and a braided cotton anklet.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Mischa.”

  “Hi,” said Ana. “Ana.”

  “You guys want to get popsicles?”

  After stopping at the corner store, they carried on to the baseball field. There was a huge expanse of flat, mown lawn, and a steep flight of concrete steps cutting through the ravine up to the main road. This is what counts for nature here, thought Ana. It wasn’t as though the city lacked green space—there were parks and playgrounds and patches of forest with creaking wooden walkways; and parks crisscrossed with bike paths, studded with splash pads and water fountains and covered garbage bins; and empty lots with long grass and ticks and Lyme disease—but it was all managed. Someone had always cut the grass or weeded the concrete. There were no orchards, no fields so vast that you could run for hours with the dogs weaving ahead and behind you, where the corn grew tall enough to swallow you up—

  “Mischa lives on the other side of the river,” said Suvi. “He used to live next door to me, but then his grandma died and left his folks lots of money so they upgraded to a nicer ‘hood.’ ”

  “Your ‘hood’s not not nice.”

  “Yeah, but the houses in yours are huge. We’ll go there next time, OK, Ana?”

  “Jo.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah…yeah.”

  They climbed halfway up the bleachers and Suvi lay down with her legs hooked, upside-down, over the next step.

  “Any adventures at your cottage this summer, Meesh?”

  “Our septic tank blocked a few times. Grumpy got fed up with my lame-ass attempts at water-skiing after, like, twenty minutes.”

  “Other kids?”

  “I met a guy who was staying in the place three houses down. From Ottawa. Grade ten.”

  “Ooh. Get his number?”

  Ana watched Mischa’s ears turn bright red as he bit off the end of his popsicle, dripping purple droplets onto the wooden bleacher. “Yeah.”

  “Sweet. Hey, Jerome is still lifeguarding at the pool. He wasn’t there when I went with Ana, but I think he may just have been sick or something.”

  “Sick of you drooling over him.”

  “Shut up.” Suvi poked her orange-stained tongue at him. “You have to make me sound cool in front of Ana. You can’t come back and shatter my image, OK?”

  Mischa grinned, rolling his eyes at Ana. “Whatever.”

  “Ana, I was telling him about how you used to live in Bolivia. Hey, so you speak Spanish? No offense or anything—is that what’s going on with your accent?”

  Ana licked the popsicle stick dry, shaking her head. “No, Low German,” she said. She would have preferred just to listen to them talk instead, to make herself invisible.

  “Is that what they speak there?”

  “Just some people. Certain groups. My grandparents and mother were born in Canada, though. So they always spoke English, as well as German.”

  “Not, like, German-from-the-war kind of groups, though, right?” said Mischa. “My grandfather told me how loads of Nazis escaped to South America. War criminals and stuff.”

  “Jesus, Mischa—are you asking her if she’s a Nazi?”

  “A Nazi?” The word meant nothing to Ana. Which war were they even talking about?

  “No, no!” This time, he blushed right down to his neck. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “It’s OK,” said Ana. She decided to try again. “It’s a Christian community.”

  “Like a cult?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “What’s it called, then?”

  “Mennonites?” said Suvi, dropping her popsicle stick through a gap in the bleacher. “Like the Amish? Wagons and beards and headscarves and six wives and stuff?”

  “The Amish don’t get six wives,” said Mischa.

  “Neither do Mennonites,” said Ana.

  They wanted to know why, if her grandparents and her parents came from Canada, they had ended up in Bolivia. Ana explained that in the 1960s some of them started to get annoyed because the government wanted them to send their children to English-language schools and show them films about sex education.

  “The first place my grandparents’ community tried in Bolivia was in the middle of the desert,” she said. “All they could see were scrub trees and thornbushes. My father’s mother cried at the sight of all that empty space. They didn’t even have clean drinking water. They stayed for a few days and most of them got dysentery and had to be taken back to the first camp they’d stopped at, near the border. There was a big fight with some of the elders, but eventually they all agreed to build the new community in the jungle instead. It was just as isolated as the desert, but things grew there.”

  They lived in a house with one wall dividing them from cows and chickens, and they set themselves to work clearing the rainforest and planting in unfamiliar soil. It was hotter than anything they’d ever experienced and the work was harder than usual because the land was so different from what they were used to farming, and the elders wouldn’t bend the rules about not using modern equipment. In the end, some of the families returned to Canada—but Ana’s paternal grandparents stayed on. Later, her mother’s family moved there too.

  “They kept their Canadian passports, though,” she said.
“Just in case.”

  “In case of what?” said Suvi.

  Ana turned the popsicle stick over between her fingers, laid it flat. Picked it up again. “I don’t know,” she said at last.

  The others seemed to accept this. Mischa said his parents were expecting him home for dinner, so they parted at the train tracks and Suvi waved good-bye to Ana outside her house. Only Ana heard in her answer a resonating question, which burrowed deep in her mind late into the evening.

  Colony Felicidad

  Susanna’s mother used to tell us children never to talk to people outside the colony, in case we were kidnapped.

  “The cities and towns are the Devil’s playground,” she would say.

  “No one would want to kidnap Isaac,” Susanna told me many times. “Or Maria. She talks too much.”

  “What about Eva?”

  It was easy to imagine the Devil wanting Eva: plump, pink and golden, giggling Eva. Susanna angled her head, conceding this as a possibility.

  “That’s why we watch out for each other,” she said. “That’s why we’re lucky to live here.”

  Toronto

  ANA REMEMBERED THAT CONVERSATION with Susanna like it was a dream.

  She couldn’t ask Suvi what she thought. Suvi was nice, but Ana hardly knew her and Suvi wouldn’t understand. The idea that cities and towns were places of sin wasn’t something that Suvi would get. She’d probably want to tell Ana about all the perverted stuff that happened behind closed doors in the sunny suburbs.

  Perhaps this was all part of it, though; perhaps Suvi herself was part of some larger plan to lure Ana away from everything she had been taught. As soon as she formed the thought, Ana rejected it as ridiculous.

  That was the problem. If Ana started to question everything she had been taught in the colony, she might eventually have to ask why she and her parents had ever lived there in the first place. Doubting thoughts were the Devil’s temptations.

  Did she believe that, still?

  If she didn’t, had the Devil won?

  “Are there other places like this?” Ana asked the receptionist. It was the older one again, the one called Becca. “Around the city, I mean.”

  “Um…” Becca seemed to weigh her words. “Yes. Lots. Do you have reason to believe she might be in this area?”

  “I don’t know.” Ana felt her eyes start to burn. Of course I don’t. I don’t even know if she’s in Toronto…

  “Would you like me to give you some addresses? We have a sister branch in the Junction, and I’ve heard really good things about a new center on Kennedy—”

  Ana shook her head. Her cheeks were beginning to ache with the effort of not crying in front of this woman.

  “It’s kind of hard for me to get around. There’s probably no point.”

  Becca pursed her lips together.

  “I’ll send a few emails,” she said. “Put her name out there and see if anyone comes back to me. I can’t promise anything, though.”

  The purple ribbons had been there ever since they’d arrived. Tied around every streetlight, every tree, attached to front gates and bicycle racks for several blocks up and down their street, and all along both main roads to the north and south. At first Ana had wondered at their meaning, then she had grown used to them. Only when Suvi stopped one day to adjust one that had started to loosen and slump, bedraggled by summer storms, did Ana think to ask why they were there.

  “For Faith Watson,” came the reply. “The missing girl.”

  Ana felt something skim her shoulders, trailing ice down her spine. “Who?” she said.

  “She used to live around here. Her parents and her brother still do. She’s been missing since, like, forever.” Suvi tugged the bow tight and flared the crinkled paper loops. “She’s older than us, but still in high school. Sixteen or seventeen, I guess. Really pretty.”

  “What happened?”

  Suvi tipped her head with an exasperated sigh. “If we knew, then she wouldn’t be missing, would she?”

  “There must be something.”

  “Loads of people phoned the police with tips when it happened. There was a kind of creepy security video of a guy in a van cruising around the neighborhood a few days before she went. I guess it didn’t lead to anything, though—that was last spring.”

  They carried on, and eventually Suvi started saying how much she wanted to go to the new gelato place that had opened nearby, the one that did all those crazy flavors. “Bacon and blue cheese,” she grimaced. “Artichoke and mustard. Beer, even…” But as she chatted on about the difference between ice cream and frozen custard, Ana found herself counting the purple ribbons that they passed, each one looking more forlorn than the last. What would Faith Watson think if she could see them, if she was here? Assuming she was even alive.

  What must her family feel, seeing them now, listless and discolored? At what point did they stop being a sign of hope and become instead a painful reminder that Faith was still missing? Ana tried to imagine a purple ribbon tied around the tipu tree in Colony Felicidad. Or perhaps a red ribbon, because tipu trees bleed when they’re cut—the resin oozes like ox’s blood.

  “I should go home,” she said.

  Suvi stopped and gave her a funny look. “Are you OK?”

  Ana nodded. “I forgot I promised my father I’d make a nice dinner tonight.”

  “We’re halfway to Buck’s Scoop now.”

  “Some other time, I promise.”

  “OK, whatever. Hey, I’ll still pick you up on the way to Meesh’s place tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  Tonight, she would bring Colony Felicidad here. For an evening, they could be home again.

  Justina and Maria and Susanna had always helped her with the cooking. They had shared meals with her to serve to her father, and they passed on their recipes and kitchen secrets. Preparing meals was a social time, and Ana had been the child: observing, learning, listening.

  Now, of course, things were different. Perhaps because things were different, Ana decided to make something she had not made before: her aunt’s beef and cheese empanadas.

  Hoping to conserve oil, Ana greased the pan as thinly as she dared. Bad idea. Within moments half of the beef had burnt on the bottom, which meant adding more potatoes to make up for the lost mince. Still, after half an hour the kitchen had filled with all the right aromas, and Ana poured the contents of the pan into a bowl to set while she got on with the pastry.

  When her dough crumbled, she added water and kept kneading. More water. Before she had time to notice what was happening, she found her fingers poking through a sticky, stringy mess. By now there was no flour left, so nothing left to do but roll the dough into discs as best she could. She left the big ball of dough under a damp towel, just as her aunt always did. There was no lack of moisture, but going through the motions made Ana feel that she was doing something right. Steeling her resolve, she spooned a dollop of filling onto one disc. At least everything still smelled pretty much as it was supposed to.

  The discs were too thin, though, and too sticky; without exception, each one tore as she stuffed it. In the end, Ana could only fill each pocket with the tiniest bit of beef filling in order for them to hold together, before twisting the edges to make a seal.

  Six o’clock: half an hour before her father would be home. In her haste, Ana didn’t wait for the oil to heat properly before dropping in the first empanada. It sank to the bottom and took several minutes to float to the surface. When she finally managed to fish it out of the pot it was an oily, soggy mess.

  Nineteen to go, Ana told herself.

  The plate she set before her father was a far cry from what she had imagined. Instead of crispy, golden empanadas, the best she had managed was a pile of pasty, slick lumps piled like a stack of tumors in an oily puddle.

  “Empanadas,” said her father, spearing one with his fork. Ana watched as he sliced it open, took a bite. He pulled his lip, rolled his head. “They’re good,” he said.
>
  They were not good. There were too many potatoes, so the filling was starchy and bland. The pastry was slippery, the smell of oil overpowering. As she forced mouthful after mouthful, Ana felt the tears begin to build behind her eyes.

  “They’re awful,” she said.

  “They’re not,” he told her. “Look, we are eating them.”

  Only because it would be a waste not to, she thought. Only because the one thing worse than eating them would be having to look at that pile of disgusting dough balls for a second longer.

  Later that night, Ana listened to the sound of her father tiptoeing downstairs…the rustle of bread being pulled from its bag…the fridge door opening…a knife slicing cheese on the linoleum counter.

  Of course he’s still hungry, she thought, as her own stomach clenched and gurgled. She felt a stab of annoyance and briefly considered going into the kitchen and catching him red-handed. Dinner wasn’t good enough?

  Dinner had been awful. Awful because she didn’t have the first idea how to be a housewife here. How to be anything here.

  It was a relief to cry, to allow the waves of hurt and humiliation and helplessness pour into her pillow until it was soaked. At the sound of the kitchen light being switched off, Ana held her breath, listening to her father climb the stairs and return to his room. After another moment, a door shut.

  Crying seemed pointless in this darkness and silence; she was too alone even for self-pity. And so she stared into the gathering darkness, feeling herself harden with resolve. No more fancy cooking. No more attempts to make it better for him, either. Things were different now.