Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it hard?”

  “Math is really hard. English and history are OK because I have a scribe to help with writing in English. Art is good. The teacher lets us listen to music while we paint. I’m learning French too.” She stirred her coffee.

  “And what about the other students? Made any friends?”

  “A couple.”

  “Cool kids?”

  “Cool-nice? Or Cool-cool?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Suvi doesn’t have a clique. I guess she’s too cool for one. But she wouldn’t call herself cool, you know?”

  “Totally. She sounds great.”

  That voice: prodding, weighing, colluding, approving. Was that the voice she’d carried in her head all these years? The what-would-Mama-say voice? Was that the same as a conscience or a memory? Or just one of the voices that crazy people were said to hear?

  “Why Toronto? Why didn’t you go back to Alberta?” Ana asked.

  “I didn’t have anyone left there. Everyone had gone south years ago.”

  “Why not Aylmer, then? Where Johan and Katherina live?”

  “How do you know about them?”

  “We went to see them. Papa knew you wouldn’t be there, but I think he hoped they would know how to find you.”

  Lena nodded. “You know, I’ve never met them. I knew that I had cousins in Ontario, which was better than nothing. But in the meantime, here I found a church, a community…”

  “First Light.”

  “Yeah, really close by. It’s kind of different from what I guess you’re used to. It’s more…relaxed. And diverse. Lots of immigrants go there. I volunteer to help them with their English. You should come with me some time.”

  “Sure.” Ana stirred her drink. “How did you do it? Practically, I mean. How did you get all this way? Flights are expensive.”

  “I worked as a cleaner in La Paz for a few months. Saved up enough to bribe a guy at the consulate to get me on a flight. He signed something saying I had a family emergency. Which, in a sense, it was.” Ana didn’t return her smile. “Look, Ani…” The woman across from her suddenly became a stranger again. She reached for Ana’s hand, then appeared to think better of it. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for…There are things I couldn’t control. I can’t apologize for things that weren’t my fault. That you can’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “Excuse me?” A grunt of disbelief. “Is this how the kids talk in Colony Felicidad now?”

  “We’re not in Colony Felicidad.”

  Her mother nodded, took a mouthful of coffee. “Fair enough. OK.”

  How did she compare to the women Ana had observed when they first arrived in the city, wondering who among them belonged to her? Probably, if Ana had seen Lena at a bus stop, or in the grocery store, she would have picked her as a promising prospect. Not beaten down, not a shadow, not a weirdo. Not a mother in mourning, either.

  Was she disappointed?

  “Do you remember that day at the lake?” Ana asked. “When you saved Isaac Buhler from drowning?”

  Lena paid for everything, of course. Because she was the adult, and because Ana had no change, only bus tokens. Eventually Ana found the words to ask where the money came from.

  “Do you work now?”

  “Monday to Thursday. In a law firm.”

  Ana frowned.

  “I know, right?” said Lena. “And the crazy thing is, it’s not just as a cleaner or something like that. I’m a legal secretary.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Like a secretary, but more specialized. It means I know words like habeas corpus and actus reus.” She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, rolled an elastic from her wrist. “One of the women who volunteer in the English program at church is married to a lawyer. He let me come in to do some filing a few hours a week. Then he suggested I think about training. It’s a small firm, but they sponsored me to do a community college course. One year in total, and I kept up the filing work in the meantime to buy food. Shared a room with another girl from church. I’ve had this job and my own place for, what…almost eight years now. Crazy!”

  “Yeah. Wow.” Ana bit off a piece of skin peeling from her fingernail. “Maybe I could see your office some time.”

  Lena’s face fell—only for an instant, as she looked away—but then she returned Ana’s look with a smile.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Do they know about me?”

  “They’re really nice people.” Lena rewound her scarf around her neck. “They don’t ask a lot of questions.”

  She made it home before her father, with time to spare, and the first thing she did was to set the water boiling for lunch. Food first, always. The hallmark of a normal, functioning household.

  When he came in, he turned the lock behind him before dropping the spare quarters in the tray by the front door. It was now a daily ritual. Ana judged by the clink of change that he may not even have made a phone call that morning.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” she called. Testing her voice before she’d have to look him in the eye.

  He came in and sat down at the table, running a hand through his hair.

  “Did you have a good morning?” she asked.

  “I sat in the Baptist church,” he said flatly. “It’s very peaceful in there when no one’s playing a guitar.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “And you? You saw Suvi?”

  “No, I stayed in.” Ana leaned into the steam, allowing it to moisten her cheeks. He mustn’t catch her blushing; he could read a lie a mile off. “I had a lot of schoolwork.”

  “I don’t understand the schools here. You do more work at home than you do with the teacher. You could read when you were seven. How much else can there be to learn?”

  There was no point trying to explain things like history and geography and French and biology and chemistry to him, even less so world religions or social studies or gym. Ana stirred the rice and turned the quick-cook casserole out of its paper tray, then set the plates on the table.

  “Please don’t say anything to him,” Lena had begged when they parted. “I’m not ready. I need to decide how to deal with this.”

  Apparently she had heard the receptionist at church asking one of the older members if they knew of a Helena and discovered that a message had been left on the notice board seeking a possible member of the congregation. But that had been during the summer, and there had been no follow-up. She had chalked it up to coincidence and banished it from her mind. “If I’d expected to hear from him, perhaps I would have paid more attention,” she said.

  Ana sat down opposite her father and nudged at her food with her fork while he ate hungrily. When he had finished, he brought his workbox down from a cabinet and laid out his latest project on the table. It was a double-sided puzzle. On one side was carved an image of their house in Colony Felicidad, the walls and roof and sky patterned with an intricate web of repeating shapes. On the other side was a simplified version of the subway map he’d studied at the bus stop down the street. Ana’s father had yet to travel on the subway, but the idea of it fascinated him.

  “You should do blocks next,” she said. “Six sides. Six puzzles.”

  Her father only grunted.

  “Two is enough for now,” he said.

  Lena had said she wanted to take Ana shopping, so they met the following Saturday outside a neon blue shop front in Kensington Market.

  “We can go in there if you want,” she said. “It’s secondhand stuff, but vintage, which means it’ll be stylish. If you don’t mind searching a bit, there are some good finds.”

  They quickly settled on a stack of jingling beaded bracelets and a silk scarf that Lena tied artfully around Ana’s neck. “Accent pieces,” she said. “Now we find a silhouette.”

  The silhouette turned out to be a thin gray turtleneck and black wool miniskirt. “Short on the bottom, covered up on top,”
said Lena. “Or vice versa. That’s how you avoid looking cheap. Next, shoes…”

  She had hardly stopped speaking since she’d arrived, coffee in hand, flustered and apologetic for being late.

  “You don’t need height, but ankle boots would be cute. Look at these.”

  Black suede boots with tassels and a gold heel were added to the stash, followed by a pair of pink moccasins at the cash register “because they’re totally impractical and I saw you stop to look at them twice.”

  “Suvi will either love them or think they’re crazy,” said Ana.

  “Sounds like win-win to me. I’m starving—what about you?”

  They turned onto a little street lined with Chinese restaurants, variety stores and Internet cafés. Every awning, sign and menu was covered in Chinese, apart from the Visa and Mastercard stickers taped to the windows. Lena steered her into a café where Ana collapsed into a chair, glad to escape the noise and swirl of the street. A minute later, her mother returned with two glasses filled with ice cubes swirling in cream. “Honey milk tea,” she said, “with tapioca bubbles.”

  It was almost sickeningly sweet, the jelly pearls slimy and slick in her throat.

  “How do you know about all this?” Ana asked, as Lena returned from the counter for a second time, sliding a plate of dumplings onto the table before snapping apart two chopsticks and jabbing one into a soft, sauce-speckled belly.

  “When I moved here, I found it too depressing trying to cook the old stuff on my own,” she said between mouthfuls. “So I ate out where it was cheap, and where there was life.” She nudged a dumpling toward Ana. “Let me guess: this is your first time eating Chinese food.”

  Ana looked directly at her mother. She could tell that Lena wanted it to be true, that she was eager to be the one to have given her this first experience, to have opened Ana’s eyes to a new and exciting thing.

  “Actually, no,” she said. “This guy at school got me dim sum once.”

  Lena blinked. Did she look wounded, or just surprised? But she recovered quickly, found a way once more to be the older, wiser one. “Oh?” she said, eyebrows rising. “A guy? Tell me.”

  “Just a guy. His name’s Tom.”

  “I see.”

  Ana felt her cheeks turn hot, took another gulp of the bubble tea in a bid to cool down.

  “It wasn’t a date. He’s a teacher. We’re just friends.”

  A mistake. Lena set the chopsticks on her plate and stiffened.

  “You went out for a meal with your teacher? With other kids?”

  “No, just us.”

  “What was he doing taking a fourteen-year-old girl out? You call him Tom?”

  “Obviously not. But it’s none of your business.” Ana set her glass down. “Can I have some water, please?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, Ani.”

  “Then don’t get on your high horse about some stupid dim sum. It’s not like he’s going to abduct me.” Purple ribbons tied to lampposts, trees, iron railings—is that what Lena thought would happen? “It’s not a problem. And even if it was, it’s not your problem.”

  “I’m your mother.”

  “As far as he’s concerned, you’re dead.” Too far. Take it back. “Never mind, OK?”

  “What do you mean, dead?”

  Ana rolled her eyes. “It’s easier to say that here. If I say my parents are divorced, people will think it’s weird that I live with my dad. You’d have to have done something really bad…”

  Silence. They hadn’t talked once about Papa yet. Or about Colony Felicidad, or anything to do with the last ten years.

  “Can I have some water, please?” Ana said.

  “Sure. I’ll get you a glass with the bill.”

  Farther down the street, they passed a young man taking photos of people with a Polaroid camera. There was a backdrop for posing against—on one side a Parisian music hall, on the other a beach—and a box of props: boas, floppy hats, plastic martini glasses, a cigarette holder, an umbrella, a beach ball. The sign on the sidewalk said $2 A PHOTO.

  “Uh-uh,” said Ana, noticing Lena pause over the sign. “No way.”

  “It’ll take two seconds,” said Lena. “It’ll be fun. And I want a photo with you.”

  “You can take one with your phone.”

  “The camera’s no good on my phone. Besides, I want something that will last.” She was already rummaging in her purse for the change. “Here,” she said, flagging the young man down. “Which one should we have, Ani, the music hall or the beach?”

  “I really don’t care.”

  “The beach, then. We can pretend it’s summer, right?”

  The young man fiddled idly with his camera while Lena bent over the props box. She handed Ana the beach ball and a sun hat and wound a boa around her own shoulders. “I’ll spin the parasol like this, and you throw the ball up on the count of three, OK?” she said.

  “Are you ready?” asked the young man.

  “Never been readier,” said Lena. “OK, Ana? One, two…three!”

  Lena loved it. She kept saying so, all the way back to the streetcar.

  “It’s surreal,” she said. “Like something Man Ray would have done.”

  “Who?”

  “I love that you’re not even looking at the camera, you’re watching the ball. Deadpan. The way you threw it straight up in the air, it’s like a Japanese lantern or a beach ball of Damocles hanging over you. And do I look committable, or what?”

  “It’s pretty weird.”

  “It IS pretty weird. We’re pretty weird. Look, is that your streetcar?”

  “I think so.”

  “I don’t want your father to start worrying. Catch this one now and we’ll sort out plans for next week by text, OK? Maybe we can catch an exhibition.”

  “Sure. Thanks for all this stuff. And for lunch.”

  “We had a great time. I had a great time, anyway—I hope you did. Here, keep this.” She slipped the photo into Ana’s bag, shaking her head as Ana began to protest. “No, I mean it. It’s yours.”

  Only later did Ana find herself thinking that perhaps Lena had wanted her to want the photo, all along.

  “Where did you get those clothes?” her father asked over dinner that night.

  “Suvi,” replied Ana. How stupid to have forgotten to take them off. Sometimes, Ana—

  “Tell her she can have the skirt back. And you don’t wear that jewelry outside of the house.”

  “Look at me—I’m Amy Winehouse!” Karen Spelberg leaned across the lab table, holding the beaker filled with baking soda over the Bunsen burner flame. She pressed a finger to one nostril and pretended to inhale the white powder.

  “Moron. You smoke that stuff. And you look more like Peaches Geldof anyway,” said one of her friends.

  “I thought that was heroin?”

  “Urgh! You guys. OK, Whitney Houston. And I-eee-yaiiiii…will always love yooooouuu…”

  “Philip Seymour Hoffman,” said Suvi under her breath. “You’ve got his figure.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Ana in a low voice, pushing the calculator across the table to Suvi.

  “No, I got the same answer. If we add 3.5 mg, then it will be—”

  “I mean Karen.”

  “She’s pretending to be a crackhead.”

  “You mean crazy?”

  “Jeez, Ana, did you grow up in a cave? Crack, you know? Cocaine? The drug? You, like, heat it up and smoke it. Or snort it.” Suvi checked the numbers against her worksheet, started erasing a few. “It’s what desperate junkies do, and super-rich celebrities. Doesn’t really matter. It messes you up, either way. If it doesn’t kill you.” She blew off the eraser grit, corrected the numbers. “It’s basically really, really stupid—kind of like someone else we know.”

  Ana bit her lip. Karen was now tearing off strips of her worksheet and fluttering them over the open flame, hand cupped over her mouth to control her laughter. Suvi rolled her eyes.

  “She’s
going to have to stay in over lunch to finish her lab. She won’t think it’s so funny, then.”

  How about a movie ? The Swimmer on at the Lihgtbox, Saturday 2pm. We can let Burt Lancaster do the talking.

  Ana must have read the text a hundred times, memorized the mixed-up letters in “Lightbox” and the extra space after “movie” until they appeared not as errors but inevitabilities. The message was so…casual. Two months ago, if someone had told Ana she’d be receiving messages like this from her mother, she would have laughed in disbelief.

  Wasn’t this what she’d wanted all along? Wasn’t this better than anything she’d dared to hope for? Then why did it make her feel as if she was clinging to a runaway train?

  She didn’t reply for two days.

  Sounds fun but can’t. Big math test on Monday—sorry.

  Within fifteen minutes, a reply:

  Understand. Next week?

  Ana deleted it and switched off her phone.

  Did you get my last msg? Wanted to know if nxt week good for u.

  I think so. Maybe Sunday afternoon.

  Great Lightbox at 2?

  OK

  Sorry, can’t do Sunday after all. School thing.

  Sorry again. Will txt soon.

  Ani, just say if you don’t want to meet up. L

  I do, just been really busy.

  Only if you’re sure. We could go see the Incas at the museum anytime. Your call.

  How’s Thursday? I get off school at 3.

  “Wait a minute…your dad doesn’t know?”

  Second lunch, an empty classroom. They sat on the high window ledge by the heater, feet propped on the back of two chairs. Candy wrappers littered the floor; on one of the desks, a half-eaten sandwich slumped next to a forgotten thermos decorated with anarchy As. Suvi pushed her sweatshirt hood off her head. “Still?”