Belinda's Rings

  So they just float around in their dead bodies, like ghosts? Grace asked. Waiting until they can get into heaven?

  I don’t know, Belinda replied, truthfully. She could see how waiting for an absolution that might never come could be torturous.

  13 Mean Streak

  PEOPLE THINK I LOOK innocent ’cause I’ve got Da’s round cheeks and Mum’s big eyes. When I was little Mum cut my hair short and I looked like one of those monkey toys that crashes a pair of cymbals when you wind it up. In fact, I can still make the best monkey face you’ve ever seen in your life. All I gotta do is pull out my ears and puff my cheeks and voilà: it’s like chimps on parade.

  But I can be a real bitch when I feel like it. Up until a few years ago, I cheated at board games all the time. When we still lived with Da we had this neighbour named Chelsea who would come over to play games, and she wasn’t exactly the brightest crayon in the box. Or at least I was pretty sure I was smarter than her even though she was a year older than me. We played Scrabble and I just made up words like BICZA and told her they were real, and I acted like such a smarty-pants snob that she believed me. The funny thing was that she didn’t care about losing. She just kept giggling and spelling out lame words like IT and GO and saying things like I’m so bad at this game! and I’m so dumb! Yeah, you are, I would say back, acting annoyed at her for losing all the time. She went to my school and nobody really liked her, so I told people that she peed her pants all the time. It wasn’t exactly a lie; she did pee her pants once when she was at my house. She’d been wearing purple leggings and there was a big eggplant splotch on her butt, but she didn’t even do anything about it. She just pretended it wasn’t there. The reason I know I have a mean streak is that even when I think about it now, I don’t feel sorry for Chelsea. She just grosses me out.

  The other mean thing I do is make fun of Jess’s mole. She has this big mole on her left cheek beside her nose. It sticks out like a blob of chocolate pudding and it grows two little tiny hairs on it. I know she’s really self-conscious about it ’cause she’s always trying to hide it with her hand when she talks to people she doesn’t know, and when she gets pictures taken she tries to turn her head to the side. A couple of years ago she asked Mum if she could get it removed, and Mum told her she’d need plastic surgery and it would probably cost hundreds of dollars. After that she started plucking out the little hairs with Mum’s tweezers. It’s pretty pathetic, actually. But sometimes I get in these moods where absolutely everything Jess says is obnoxious, and as she’s talking to me I’m staring at the mole thinking about how ugly it is and how much I hate that mole, and meanwhile Jess has stopped talking and she’s looking at me and waiting for me to say something. Sorry? I say. Your mole was staring at me.

  If she cries it makes me even more pissed, ’cause then I have to deal with Mum’s do you enjoy making people miserable? lecture. And I just have to sit there and let her lay into me ’cause I can’t very well say, Yes, I actually do sort of enjoy it.

  But as mean as that is, I still think the meanest thing I ever did in my life was spank Squid. Spank is the word that Mum uses, but if spanking is a little whap on the bum like the ones Mum and Jess both gave him, then what I did was something else altogether.

  He was two years old, terrible twos as they say. I used to call it tornado twos in Squid’s case. Even when we put up his baby gate in the door to the kitchen so he couldn’t run too far, one of us would be trailing behind him pretty much everywhere he went with a wad of paper towels and a garbage bag. I was only eleven but I felt old. When I followed him around I dragged my feet like they weighed a hundred pounds, and when I scrubbed the jam or spilled juice or soft-boiled egg off the floor I grunted and groaned like an old maid. And that was just on a regular day. That particular day he’d eaten a huge bowl of macaroni-and-cheese that had little pieces of hot dog mixed into it, and he had the orange sauce all around his mouth like someone had tried to paint a sun on his face. He saw me coming with the dishcloth and scooted off into the living room, and he ran around and around in circles trying to sing “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer. He was obsessed with that song at the time. Since he was only two he couldn’t quite say it right. Cantukis! Cantukis! he kept yelling. I was so tired of running after him that I was just shuffling around, swatting at him like a sloth and trying to get his arm. Of course, as soon as I caught him he puked his lunch out on the carpet, pure KD orange smoothie with rubbery red floaties.

  It was a Saturday, and Mum and Jess had gone out shopping for the whole day. That was back when Wiley still taught piano lessons, and since Saturday was always his busiest day he wasn’t around either. I like to tell myself I was set up. It was common knowledge that anyone who was stuck in the house watching tornado Squid for more than a few hours at a time would be ready to have a conniption by the end of it. Truth is, no one else would have handled it the way I did. I know it’s just an excuse.

  So anyway, I looked at the puke and this big gasp came out of my mouth. Squid thought that was pretty funny. But I kept my cool, for the most part. I picked him right up, carried him to the bathroom and started filling the tub. While the water was running full-blast I yanked off his clothes so hard that I ripped one of the buttons off his overalls. You might think it was pretty harsh of me not to be worried when he just puked up his lunch, but he was still giggling away and his arms were flapping so much I could barely get his shirt off. See, Squid has always had this problem where he doesn’t get it when people are mad. It’s like he doesn’t know the difference between kinda ticked off and ready to explode; you could be foaming at the mouth and he’d still think it was some kind of game. Besides, there I was getting him ready for a bath and he always loved baths. It was like I was rewarding him.

  As soon as the tub was full I shut it off and gave him a look. A warning look. It was the look I always gave him before putting him in the bath, and both of us knew it meant don’t even think about splashing. For a second we stared at each other and everything seemed eerily silent and intense. A drop of water dripped from the tap with an echoey bloop, as if it were the exclamation mark on the end of my warning.

  And so I plonked him into the tub. He sat quietly while I added some soap to the water and swished it around. I thought he had calmed down by then, so I knelt down and cupped some water over his shoulders. But he’d only been waiting for the bubbles. I saw that huge cheeky smile of his and it looked even huger than usual with the orange sauce all around it.

  And then he started splashing. Arms thrashing and legs kicking, water flying out of the tub and landing splatsplatsplat all over me and the floor. Our tub had sliding glass doors and I flung them shut. There were pools of water on the floor, soaking into my socks and the bath mat. A clenching feeling lodged itself in my belly, pulling tight like my insides were turning to rock. My jeans were sopped and my hair was dripping. And still Squid kept splashing away. Usually he would stop splashing when I closed the doors ’cause it wasn’t fun for him anymore when I wasn’t watching him. But that day he kept on going. He was squealing and laughing and I was screaming STOP! STOP NOW! STOP IT! at the top of my lungs. If anyone else were listening they would have thought I was being murdered the way I was screaming. But Squid’s laughter was piercing, like a devilish little song that was mocking me, humiliating me. He was splashing so hard that foam and water were coming over the glass door like rain. I may have been on the outside, but I felt trapped. I was trapped in a bathysphere, far below the surface, the water rushing in through punctures, fissures in the glass. I started sobbing but it didn’t make a difference. The water kept pummeling the glass doors and trickling back down into the tub. STOP IT! PLEASE! I screamed, and Squid only laughed and splashed more. I stood there holding out my hands and crying while more water came splattering down and little rivers spilled out the cracks at the bottom of the door, and all of a sudden I wished I would die. I imagined the room filling up with soapy water, my head going under and the water filling my nose and throat. Th
ick, lukewarm hands of water ramming fists down into my lungs. Squid’s thrashing became the sound of my own arms fighting and the water pulling me down, sucking all the air out of my body. And then I saw myself floating on an ocean, so small you could mistake me for a dead fish. My skin was the grey of a dirty tin can.

  At that point I wasn’t even mad at Squid anymore. I was mad that he was so much stronger than me. He was two years old and I felt completely helpless.

  Next thing I knew I reached in and pulled him out of the tub by his wrist. His skin was wet so he slipped a bit and one of his legs hit the edge of the tub on the way out. It made a big thunk but Squid didn’t even cry. I dragged him into his bedroom and threw him on his bed, and he lay there, naked and skinny and shivering, looking at me like I was a meteor about to land right on top of him. And when I flipped him over and my hand came down on his wet bum, it sounded like a big fat encyclopedia being clapped shut. I felt him hold his breath. And then I hit him again. And again. Somehow, it didn’t feel like I was hitting my brother. He was just a thing I hated, like Jess’s mole. When I was done I left him lying on the bed and slammed the door. By the time I got to my room I was shaking so bad I couldn’t stand. I had to sit on the edge of my bed and put my head between my knees, and my legs were bouncing up and down uncontrollably like marionettes. Squid was bawling but I didn’t even hear him. All I could think about was the day in the supermarket with Mum, his evil little grin, when I was a stranger and he was not my brother. It seemed like eons had passed since then.

  That was about the time that Mum and Jess got home. I heard Mum’s feet racing up the stairs and Jess’s going up after her, two steps at a time. What happened? Mum kept yelling. Where’s Grace? Instead of feeling worried I felt relieved. Now that Mum was home I knew Squid would be safe.

  But in the end it turned out that the worst part of the whole thing was the way Mum acted. She didn’t ask me if I enjoyed making people miserable. She didn’t yell at me. She didn’t even look at me. Instead, she came into my room and told me in a very quiet voice that I wasn’t allowed to look after Squid by myself anymore.

  I nodded and my eyes filled up with tears. Mum turned around like she was going to leave, but then she came towards me and tried to slap me on the face. I cringed and she ended up slapping my forehead, where my hair was sticking to the sweat.

  If you ever hit my child again, she said, pointing a finger at my nose. But she didn’t finish. Instead, she said, That’s called abuse, Grace. You are an abusive person. There was spit flying out of her mouth and it landed on my face.

  The bruise on Squid’s leg where he hit the tub was green and black the next day. I didn’t even try to look at his bum, but Jess told me you could see the marks of my fingers. I don’t know if Mum told everyone to keep it a secret, but nobody ever talked about it again or asked me about what happened. I didn’t even have to say sorry to Squid. I guess it would have been stupid to say sorry. Sorry is what people say when they hurt someone’s feelings or use a swear word. It doesn’t really mean anything.

  It’s funny: ever since then I’ve felt like if anything really awful ever happened to Squid, it would be my fault. When Mum first told us she was going on a trip to England without us, I felt like I’d eaten a sackful of gravel. I didn’t know it then, but looking back I think it was ’cause deep down I knew something bad was going to happen.

  On Monday morning, almost a week after Mum had left, I woke up late for school. I’d jolted awake, the way you do when your body suddenly realizes you were supposed to be up a long time ago. My alarm clock was blinking 12:00. The sun was already pouring through the cracks in my blinds and I jumped out of bed and had my toothbrush in my mouth before I could even open my eyes.

  Squi? I called out, my mouth full of toothpaste. Squi, ge uh, Squi! I bent down and spit in the sink, and when I came back up Jess was standing in the hallway looking at me. She had the bottom of her pajama shirt all balled up in her fists.

  Suddenly I realized that Wiley’s big green travel trunk — the one that had been sitting in the hall outside my room since he’d tried to break it open — had disappeared.

  Wiley’s gone, Jess said. And he took Squid with him.

  XIII

  WHEN BELINDA WAS PREGNANT with Sebastian, Wiley had a pet potato. The potato had been the last one in the bag, and it had been sitting in a dark corner of the pantry for weeks because someone had shoved a new bag in front of it — one of Belinda’s pet peeves. Wiley had found it one day rummaging around for snack food. The lone potato had flourished in its dark hiding place. A sheaf of long, bone-coloured arms sprouted from one end, gnarled like twigs. Wiley placed it on a saucer in a pool of tepid water and gave it a spot above the fireplace, alongside the African violet and a framed wedding photo.

  By the time Belinda arrived home from work that day, Wiley had gotten Grace fascinated by the potato as well. Grace presented the saucer to her mother like a birthday cake.

  We named it Squid, Grace had said. Doesn’t it look like one?

  Mmmhmm, Belinda agreed. She felt herself recoiling as though it were indeed a slimy, writhing sea creature. The sprouts did look like tentacles, the way they furled from the end of the potato, their curled ends reaching out as if poised to cinch unsuspecting prey. The knobs along them were bulbous and vaguely purple, reminiscent of a squid’s suction cups. Just looking at the potato, monstrous with its maladroit limbs, sent shivers up the back of her neck.

  Belinda had protested at first. That thing is hideous, she told them. It’s going to rot. But Wiley begged and whined to keep it just a little longer, to see how long the sprouts would grow. Of course Grace had joined in, jumping up and down and pulling on Belinda’s sleeves. She was eight years old at the time, and Wiley’s biggest fan. Belinda found it difficult to reject anything that supported their bonding. And so the potato lived. The arms grew and grew, longer, whiter, stiffer. They dangled off the mantel, small green leaves blossoming from their knobs. The growth of Belinda’s rounding belly was barely noticeable in comparison. And even though Wiley continued to ignore the other house plants, he fussed over his potato, kept it watered and noted its progress, moved it around to shadowed regions of the house if it didn’t seem happy enough. Belinda reckoned it was his way of nesting. While she painted the baby’s nursery and folded tiny sleepers into drawers, Wiley practiced his nurturing instinct on the potato. She joked about it, first in a lighthearted way, but later with a tinge of jealousy.

  How’s your baby doing? she’d ask him when she caught him peering at the mantel. He’d joke along, attend to the potato and stroke its sprouts, cooing You happy there, little Squid? For some reason, this drove her wild. As the potato grew, she found it more and more grotesque. The sight of Wiley poking the skin or fingering the stiff sprouts repulsed her. It was as though he were touching something vile and diseased, like the innards of a dead animal. She told herself it was hormones.

  But when she went on maternity leave she’d had to spend full days alone with the potato, and the first three had been too much. On the fourth day she snatched it from the wet saucer and the grip of her hand squashed the supple flesh. She’d had to snap off the sprouts to fit them in the garbage. The sound was crisp, like snap peas cracking between teeth. The thought of the severed sprouts, bunched and bent into a warped loop inside the garbage bin, made Belinda shudder.

  This was the first thought that came to Belinda’s mind as she stood on the shallow incline at the edge of the field and gazed over the long, curving chain of circles laid in the wheat before her. A coiling arm, each circle like a razor-edged suction cup. A tentacle. Its length stretched hundreds of feet into the horizon, beyond the furthest point they could see.

  Lord almighty, Rich said.

  Gorgeous, just gorgeous, Sampson whispered. She’s a beaut.

  You’re telling me, Rich replied, grinning open-mouthed like a puppet. It’s a Julia, eh Marshall? Another Julia set!

  It appears that way, doesn’t it? Dr. Longfel
low said, placing his hands on his hips. Monika stood next to him, taking pictures with a camera that sported a long, expensive-looking lens.

  On first glace, he continued, it looks quite authentic. He smiled to himself and sniffed the air as though it were fresh and not muggy.

  Don’t get ahead of yourself, Marshall, Monika said. She lowered her camera and fixed a condescending stare on Dr. Longfellow. We haven’t yet stepped into the bloody thing.

  Hold on, there’s two of ’em! Sampson said, pointing to the south. The others looked over in unison like a flock of curious seagulls. To Belinda’s right, she could see the curve of another arm leading off to the south. It was an unusually clear day, and the wind pulsed across the field in bold strokes as if liberated by the cloudless sky. With the wind blowing waves over the grass surrounding the circles, Belinda could swear the arms were moving.

  Three, Monika said, directing her lens to the east.

  Three Julia sets! Rich cried, reeling. Belinda could hear his breathing, shallow and clipped. His eyes were wide and gleaming as he flipped to a fresh page of his journal and jotted notes.

  She was familiar with the original Julia set. It was a formation that had appeared the previous summer. The aerial photo showed a snail-shell spiral drawn with a beaded string of circles, larger around the centre and progressively smaller towards the tail end. The large circles were flanked on either side by mirrored sets of smaller circles. According to reports, the formation had appeared in broad daylight, less than a mile away from Stonehenge, but no one had actually witnessed it happening. The farmer had visited the untouched field that morning, and a mere forty-five minutes later, a small plane had flown over and the crop circle was there. Cereologists had named it the Julia set for its resemblance to a fractal of the same name, discovered by a French physicist named Gaston Julia. Belinda had found his biography at the library, and learned that he had lost his nose in the Second World War. She couldn’t remember anything about the fractal; it had all been mathematical jargon. She could only remember the portrait of Gaston Julia, wearing a leather strap over his unsightly missing nose.