Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  “I’ve only met her twice. The first time was too soon, and she asked me not to say anything.”

  “You spent a whole day with her at Kensington Market. He must know something’s up.”

  “I told him I was with you.”

  “Dude, that’s not always going to work.” Suvi gulped down her Coke. “He’s looking for her too, remember. What if he finds her? Are you going to pretend you’ve never met?”

  Ana shrugged.

  “OK, it’s not for me to say. This whole thing is crazy.” Suvi pulled her sleeves over her hands. “I wish this school would invest in some decent heating.”

  “Do you want my gloves?”

  “Ana, Hello Kitty is for six-year-olds and hot, ironic-cool Japanese girls. I hate to break it to you, but you are neither. Next time Lena takes you shopping, get her to buy you some normal gloves, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Let me see the picture again.” Ana unzipped the outer pocket of her bag and handed her the Polaroid. “She looks really young, doesn’t she?”

  “She’s thirty-four.”

  “How’d she get to be so cool?” Suvi’s nose crinkled. “I mean, no offense, but compared to you…”

  “She’s lived here for a decade. Her church is much more liberal. She has a smartphone and she goes to movies. And she was born here too. Bolivia was never really her home.”

  “You don’t seem that excited, Ana. This is a big deal!”

  “I am excited. But not in the way I thought I would be. She’s just a person, you know? Not perfect. Not awful. She’s really nice. But…it’s as though something’s missing.”

  “She’s keeping her guard up too?”

  “Maybe. Maybe she’s scared of frightening me off.” Ana frowned. “But then she says things like ‘I’m your mother’…and she hasn’t even been around for the last ten years…”

  “She’s figuring it out too,” said Suvi. “How to be a mother, I mean. Like you’re figuring out how to be a daughter.” Suvi started to crush her Coke can.

  “I suppose.” Next to Ana was a pile of worksheets left behind by a previous class. Word searches, probably brought in by a substitute teacher. Ana reached for the pile and arranged them in order of completeness. Firecracker, spaceship, mountain, mystery.

  “Hey, you could try to re-introduce them! Like, as if it were an accident, only not. In an Italian restaurant. Have you seen The Parent Trap?” Suvi tapped the can against her knee. “Of course you haven’t. But it could totally work.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re seeing her when? Do you think I could tag along? Follow you at a distance?”

  “No way. It’s weird enough as it is.”

  “Fine.” Screwed-up chip packets skittered across one of the desks as the door opened and a grade ten class began to filter in. “But text me when you have a second, OK? I want details.”

  Capacocha was the Inca term for human sacrifice. Ceremonies were conducted at times of crisis or mourning and involved children between the ages of six and fifteen. Young victims were favored as they were valued for their spiritual purity and physical health. In recent years, archaeologists have discovered several burial sites in the Andean mountains where the victims’ bodies have been almost perfectly preserved thanks to the extreme cold and dry air.

  The bracelets could have hung on a display in any one of the stores in Kensington Market: aquamarine beads laced onto a black leather thong, chevron earrings dangling with cowry shells. Ana pressed her nose to the glass, imagining their cool weight against her skin.

  In preparation for the pilgrimage that would preface a sacrifice, the children were fattened on a diet rich in maize and meat. Then they would be presented to the emperor in Cuzco dressed in elaborate costumes and fine jewelry. Over a hundred such ornaments were found with the children at one burial site, of which several are displayed here.

  Ana peered at the photograph of the dead girl’s body. Her legs were crossed, torso doubled over so that her hair, still braided, fell across her leathered face.

  Sacrifices took place on high mountaintops where the thin air could be difficult to breathe. For this reason, the victims were fed coca leaves on the climb to ensure that they reached the ceremonial site alive. A sedative drink was delivered to minimize pain and panic before the victim was strangled or killed with a blow to the head.

  Ana pulled away from the display and looked around for her mother. There she was, across the room, studying a string fringed with dozens of knotted cords, like a mop spread flat. Ana turned back to the display of the girl, the jewelry and the pile of dried green leaves.

  The coca plant was believed to have magical properties and was frequently used in religious ceremonies, as well as for healing purposes and as an anesthetic. It remains popular to this day, both chewed raw and as the basis for the refined powder that makes cocaine.

  Colony Felicidad

  We weren’t supposed to know about the King of Cocaine. Only Susanna and I knew, and Maria, who told us because Agustín had told her. The King’s real name was Roberto Suárez Goméz. His ancestors had been rubber barons who enslaved and brutalized the Caripuña people on the Madeira River a hundred years earlier, during the rubber boom. Nowadays, rubber was old hat. Nowadays, if you wanted to get rich, it was all about cocaine.

  Peasants had grown coca for thousands of years, mainly for chewing. Then in the 1970s, a powder made from coca leaves became a fashionable drug all around the world. Suárez bought the airplanes and built the airstrips necessary to export cocaine from Bolivia to Paraguay and beyond, and in doing so he became super rich. Because he had family members in high positions in Bolivia’s fascist military government, he not only was never persecuted for growing a massive illegal drug trade, he received military protection too. Although he made no secret of living the high life, he also gave a lot of money to charity: developing the poorest regions in the country, building hospitals, introducing safe drinking water and electricity to isolated communities, that sort of thing. The coca producers who worked for him became a part of La Corporación; the way they saw it, they weren’t being exploited in the least. Suárez even offered to pay off all of Bolivia’s foreign debt—at the time, about $3 billion—if the Americans would drop trafficking charges against him. (They didn’t.)

  In the end, of course, things didn’t work out so well for him. The government changed, and he was jailed in 1988 for eight years. I think he died not long after that. But the craze for cocaine that he’d helped to feed just kept getting bigger and bigger.

  According to Agustín, tourists who came to Bolivia for backpacking holidays often paid up to 150 Bolivianos for a single gram of cocaine. That’s about $20, which seems like quite a lot for a quarter of a teaspoon of something, no matter what it is.

  Toronto

  “DID YOU EVER GO to Moth?”

  Lena had been reading the note about the quipa, but now she straightened, turning with a quizzical look to Ana.

  “Moth? I never went, no. Why do you ask?”

  “There was a bus that used to go that way. I just always wondered about it.”

  “Moth.” Lena turned the word over in her mouth. “I’m pretty sure your father made a trip there, way back when. Maybe a couple of times when you were a baby.” She switched her bag onto her other shoulder as they made their way into the next room.

  “Why’d he go there?”

  “Business, I guess. Not something I asked about.” They had reached a display map of Peru. “Now there’s somewhere I’d like to visit. Wouldn’t that be something? The Inca Trail? How much do you think it would cost?”

  Ana shook her head.

  “Anything’s possible,” said Lena, moving away from the map. “Maybe one day we’ll go.”

  “Did you ever get the postcards I sent you?” Lena’s fork hovered over her salad. The sounds of clattering dishes and chatter resonated through the cafeteria, a contrast to the hush of the gallery rooms upstairs. “The ones with old-fash
ioned book covers on them? The Snow Queen? Peter and Wendy? There were others too…”

  Ana forced herself to swallow her mouthful of tuna sandwich. She nodded.

  “Yeah,” she said. “King Arthur.”

  Lena’s face lit up. “That’s right! Oh, I’m glad. I was afraid your father…”

  Ana let her mother’s sentence peter out. She did not have the stomach to explain that Papa had never said the postcards came from Toronto. He’d never said where they came from, period. The books they depicted were not the sorts of books that were read in Colony Felicidad. Ana was allowed to look at them by special request; the rest of the time, they stayed locked on the top shelf of the dry sink.

  “For every postcard I sent you, I bought the actual book for myself. I liked to look at their spines all lined up and think of you looking at the postcards in your room.”

  It had never occurred to Ana to feel sorry for her mother. Now, for the first time, something in Lena’s voice touched her.

  “I liked the one about King Arthur,” Ana said. “With the sunset.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s a good one. Funny, I always thought of it as the sun rising.” Lena picked through the remaining salad leaves, the tough stems and tickling curls that were hard to chew. “On nights when I can’t sleep, when I end up watching the sunrise, it makes me feel hopeful in the same way. Because it’s not a sad picture, is it? There’s too much light. Sad is the hours before the light—the blue hours.”

  When she was younger, and thought of her mother—she’d had to make a conscious effort to think of her because no one spoke of her and she remembered so little—Ana imagined her as fearless, indefatigable. Free to write her dreams into life. Now, hearing her talk of sleepless nights and the blue hours before dawn, she saw in a flash what Lena must have suffered: the loneliness of being without a family, without a community, without a history.

  “You know, when I saw little kids playing at the park in the summer, I’d always see you. The little girls around four, five—because that was how I remembered you. Of course, I’d notice older kids and wonder how you were turning out, what you looked like, what your voice would sound like…but it was seeing the little ones that hurt the most. Seeing them with their mothers: eating, crying, having their hair tied back, arguing. The little blond ones especially, but even the ones that didn’t look like you. Chinese, Latino, black, whatever. When you’ve had a child, you start to notice your own child in others…”

  “A girl called Faith Watson went missing about a year ago,” said Ana. “From the neighborhood where we’re staying. There are still purple ribbons all up and down the streets.”

  “My God…” Her mother’s hand went to her mouth; she shook her head soundlessly. Then, “Her poor parents…”

  The woman in front of her looked suddenly very small, and Ana bristled with an uncomfortable feeling of pity.

  “Why didn’t you take me with you?” she asked.

  “I tried to,” Lena said. “I got as far as Santa Cruz with you, don’t you remember? We waited at the bus stop for hours. Berthold Reimer drove by and saw us and thought we’d been left behind after the market. He offered to bring us back, and there was no way I could say no without causing a scene.” She speared a tomato and twisted it in a pool of balsamic vinegar. “On the way home, I thought about what it was going to be like for us. A single mother with no friends, no work, alone in a big foreign city. What would I do with you? It was too dangerous. Better to wait, and send for you when things were more stable.”

  “But you never did.”

  “Things never were. Not stable enough, I mean.”

  “You seem pretty OK now.”

  “I am, now that you’re here. I wish I’d seen that sooner.”

  “So why did you leave?”

  They were walking back to the station. It was easier to ask questions like this, without needing to look her in the eye. The conversation could stop, and they could just keep walking.

  “There are some things…” Lena stepped aside to allow a woman pushing a stroller to pass. “Some things that aren’t for me to tell you. Things to ask your father.”

  “That’s not fair. You know I can’t. And besides, it was you who left.”

  “I never felt as if I belonged there. I remembered Canada. I hated the heat, the bugs, the crankiness of the grown-ups when Justina and I were little and they were afraid. And I wanted something…more. I’d always had my doubts, you know. About all those rules, about why we were there. When you were born, that feeling only grew stronger.” She shrugged. “Remember, my own father had his falling-out with the ministers over the Penner case—our family didn’t exactly have a great history of blending in.”

  “But you had me. And Papa. And Justina. Something must have happened—” Ana jumped, startled by a car horn. Even after all this time in the city, busy roads still set her on edge. She watched a white car jerk in reverse and speed off down another street, and a second later the stopped traffic began to flow again. She turned back to her mother. “It all happened so suddenly.”

  “The reasons were complicated. Your father played a part.” Lena stopped. “It had nothing to do with you, Ani. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know that. You’re saying it was his.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “What did he do that was so bad? He hit you?”

  “Of course not. Your father would never—”

  “Well, then?” Ana forced herself to say it quickly. “You were in love with someone else?”

  Lena let out a yelp of laughter. “If only! Look out—” They waited for a bus to turn the corner, its rectangular frame pivoting awkwardly around them.

  “There was no one else,” she said, as they crossed the street. “Not in that sense.”

  “How then?”

  “Your father’s friends…”

  “Frank Reimer?”

  “No, not in the colony.” She pulled her hood up as the wind whipped off the water, flinging her hair about her face. “I don’t want to get into it, Ani. It’s not my story.”

  “You can’t say that.” Ana’s words were snatched by the wind, lifted high above them, flung out to the lake. “You hurt him too. He didn’t ask for this.”

  “I didn’t ask for what he did, either. There’s too much to go back to…” They had reached the station; she fumbled in her wallet for a token. “One day, we’ll talk about it. Not now.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Suvi’s.” As usual. “It’s Friday night.”

  “It’s late.”

  “I’ll be back by ten, I promise.”

  “I’ll come and get you.”

  “Ten thirty, then. Please. We have to finish a project for school. It’s due on Monday and…and Suvi’s too busy to work on it this weekend.”

  “Ten thirty at her front door. I don’t want to have to knock.”

  “The dance ends at eleven.”

  “I’ll have to leave by ten. You don’t have to come.”

  “Obviously I’ll come. You can’t just go back to my place and sit on the front step on your own—it’s freezing.” Suvi leaned closer to the mirror. In the girls’ bathroom, cubicle doors slammed open and shut and bodies jostled for space at the counter by the sinks. “You’ll still have two hours. That’s not bad.” She winked at Ana’s reflection. “Time for a slow dance, at least.”

  “With who?”

  “Search me. Justin Cook?”

  “Don’t joke.”

  Despite the Winter Wonderland theme, few people had bothered with costumes. A few girls turned up with sparkly white tutus and frosted tiaras, but to Ana’s eye most people looked dressed for summer: the girls in strapless tops and short skirts, the boys in baggy trousers and T-shirts. Suvi had brought Ana clothes to change into: skinny jeans that kept sliding down her hips and one of Julie’s yoga tops, cropped, with a purposely torn neckline and a print of a 1940s bombshell blowing a kiss.

  “No one will recognize yo
u,” Suvi said. For once, she was wearing a dress—spaghetti straps and a pouffed skirt—but with Converse.

  “You look nice.”

  “You too. Come on—we’ll get something to drink first. No way can we be the first ones in.”

  Basketball championship pennants flared blue and green and red by a revolving spotlight that roved over the concrete walls, sprung floors and a sea of heads in the sweaty darkness. A hissing dry ice machine spewed clouds at the front of the gym, and on the floor beside the DJ and his decks. The same throbbing beat ran through a succession of songs, wailing electronic voice after voice. Kids skulked along the sidelines, clustered around the drinks table at the back. A troupe of older boys crowded the DJ, bouncing and jostling each other.

  “I’m going in,” shouted Suvi, and Ana nodded. They found Mischa standing halfway down the gym with another boy, heads bobbing to the music, occasionally shouting in one ear, pointing at someone and grinning.

  “Slow dance next,” mouthed Mischa to Ana. Then he leaned closer and said, “You want me to hook you up with Sam? You guys have chem together.”

  Ana shook her head. At least it was dark enough that he wouldn’t see the panic burning up her cheeks and throat.

  “Come on, Ana!”

  “No, I need a drink first. See you outside?”

  It was already only a few degrees above freezing, and compared to the heat of the gym the night breeze felt soft and cool. One of the English teachers stood by the coat check inside the front vestibule and waved Ana out. “You can’t bring that back in with you,” she said, pointing to the plastic cup in Ana’s hand.

  “OK,” said Ana.

  “Don’t you have a jacket?”

  “I’m boiling. I’m just going out for some air.”

  “Knock yourself out,” sniffed the teacher, even as she put out an arm to stop a group of boys from going in with their backpacks. Ana slipped outside past them and made her way to the bench at the foot of the front steps.