Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (11 page)

He doesn't realize she's not a real marmot, but he can sum up a legal argument as if reciting a nursery rhyme. Nina wonders, not for the first time, whether the child is some kind of idiot savant.

The guy shows the boy how to wield the nanchukas, holding one wooden stick firmly in his fist while deftly manipulating the one on the other end of the connecting chain. The boy makes a feeble pass at twirling the weapon, while the guy carves the air with the kirpan.

“Careful,” he says. “I've kunked myself more than once and my head's probably a lot thicker than yours.”

Dwayne, Darrin, Dork? Nina has lived beside him for eight years and still can never remember his name.

It should be mentioned that the mountain has not swallowed a single sentient being. The disappearances never occur when anyone is at home. The mountain has an uncanny sense of timing. The nanny will have just rounded the corner with the twins when she remembers she should have packed the rain cover for the stroller. She turns back. I was only gone for a minute, she'll say later, looking heavenward, crossing herself over and over as if she has a nervous tic.

Cockatiels, cats, dogs, hamsters, boa constrictors, and, once, a miniature goat—all manner of bewildered pets have been recovered at the scenes of the disappearances. The only human witness, a girl of four who had been left to play in the sandbox while her older sister took care of business with the boy next door, has been rendered mute. When asked to explain what happened, she forms a cup with her hands and smiles beatifically. The experts say post-traumatic stress disorder, while her mother insists her ADHD has been cured.

Does anyone remember that aggrieved musician of Hamelin Town? Can anyone besides this enraptured girl hear his cunning tune?

Honey Fortunata is turning onto the Caulfeild exit off the Upper Levels when her cellphone rings—no “La Macarena,” no Beethoven's Fifth, for Honey is not a person who indulges in whimsy. As she listens to the voice at the other end, Honey's lip begins to tremble so hard she has to press two fingers to her mouth to still it. The house on Decourcy, the one she was just about to close on, has joined the ranks of the disappeared.

Honey snaps shut her cell and pulls over. She takes increasingly shallow breaths and watches as her commission on $7.4 million does this funny thing. It sprouts wings, white, downy ones like a Catholic schoolgirl's version of an angel, and flits up and out of the Hummer, right through the windshield as if the glass were permeable, then hovers for a moment above the gleaming hood before tumbling up into the unnaturally clear sky, along with Honey's chances of buying back her sister's life.

A clear, operatic soprano sings out, startling the silence. Honey fumbles with the stereo, but the music is not coming from the speakers. For the first time in her life a thing very much like the chokehold of fear closes around her throat. The aria is coming from the Virgin Mary on the dashboard—her voice like a young Jessye Norman singing “Ave Maria.” What look to be real tears trickle from the icon's painted blue eyes and Honey finds that she, too, is crying.

Nina wakes from what must have been a catnap; there's still some light coming through the ground-level windows. Her head is muzzy, the inside of the mascot suit a moist cave, no doubt incubating new single-cell life forms by now. The TV is on,
The Simpsons
in perpetual rerun just ending—Lisa has saved Springfield again and wears yet another medal bestowed by the mayor. As the boy sits static in front of the set, the evening news leads with a missing-child story.

Dan's face is slack, a spent stocking. Please don't hurt our son. But Patricia. She looks straight at Nina and threatens to rip her entrails out. Not so much in words but in an understanding that passes between them like a kind of heat. Patricia's teeth now a serval cat's, a guttural hiss issuing from deep in her throat. Nina's striated flesh already clings to Patricia's yellowed incisors and she's crunching down on her bones as if they're pretzels. Muscles roll like small ball bearings under the skin of her jaws.

“I never knew my dad was such a good actor!” the boy says with evident admiration. “But Mom … ” He sighs and shrugs his shoulders, palms turned up, like a badly mugging child star, Jonathan Lipnicki maybe, without the owlish glasses. Nina has told him his parents had been enlisted by Miss Peach to go along with the pretend kidnapping in order to bring media attention to the marmot cause.

“You have a very nice burrow here, you know!” he tells her as he waits patiently in front of the TV for any word about the official class animal.

Nina rummages through the cupboards, looking for something a child might want to eat. Clumsy paws knock a large jar of pickled beets to the floor. Glass pierces beet flesh, vivid purplish-red juice spills everywhere. “Fuck!”

The boy looks up from his vigil on the floor. “You're not really a marmot, are you?”

She tries to whistle through her teeth. He's informed her— more than once already—that the Vancouver Island marmot has a singular whistle when it's in distress.

Nina sits down on the floor across from the boy and twists off the mascot head, the frigid basement air hitting her face and neck, skin instantly congealing, skin shrink-wrapping her bones as it dries. “You're not really a child, are you?”

On the news there's a story about another one of those disappeared houses and an aerial shot of the North Shore starting to look as unpopulated as it did back in the 1950s, or so the reporter says, in a way that implies this is somehow a bad thing.

The boy lifts the marmot head from Nina's lap and plops it onto his own head.

Years later, when Nina looks back on all of this, which will be less often than you might think, it's not the feral hatred in Patricia's eyes or Dan's crumpled sock-puppet face that she remembers, but this, a boy's small hands gripping the matted plush of the marmot head to keep it from toppling off, his breath amplified inside the cave of the mesh skull, and inside her own skull the echo of the insistent plink, plink, plink from the bathtub faucet that never stops dripping, the grunts of her neighbour through the thin walls as he hurtles exotic weapons at an unseen enemy, her mother's laughter, jostling Nina's head as it lay in her lap, when the nun held up the Nazis' distributor cap and said, “Reverend Mother, I have sinned,” while the cathode glaze of the late-night movie washed over them, mother and daughter, the bowl holding the crumbled remains of ripple chips on the coffee table, and the Family von Trapp escaping, yet again, over the Alps to Switzerland, to asylum, to a type of freedom in neutrality, and Nina, then only seven, maybe eight, not really thinking, not knowing, that maybe life would never get better than this.

The boy exudes such calm despite his proclivity to exclamation. Maybe all children are like this in private. She could surround herself with more children. She could be like that old woman who keeps hundreds of cats who will feast on her body when she dies, scrapping over the choice bits, the desiccated liver, tender, swollen kidneys ballooning up around her spine, her heart like a dime, cold and thin.

Then, a muffled “Pee-yoo! It really stinks in here!”

On the news, an impeccably dressed woman with long, dark hair curtaining her face falls to her hands and knees, scrabbling at the earth with her bare hands, flinging hunks of sod through the air and keening while onlookers watch from a safe distance beyond the gaping hole in the ground. A huge vehicle, like the ones U.S. soldiers used during Desert Storm, is parked behind her, engine still thrumming, door ajar, a red, white, and blue RE/MAX sign on its side. Somewhere, someone is cocking a rifle. Somewhere, someone is singing a haunting aria.

It's about the things you want. Don't let anyone tell you differently. It's about the things you can't have.

Is it so terrible to want what you can't have? Can someone tell Nina that? Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh? Anyone?

THE ADOPTED CHINESE DAUGHTERS' REBELLION

This much we know. Across the playing fields just east of the Jericho Beach Youth Hostel they hobbled, some of them holding hands, Mei Li and Xiao Yu for sure, yes, they would have been holding hands—fingers threaded together in a tight weave, like a waterproof basket made of reeds bobbing along an irrigation canal, a baby girl wrapped in newspaper mewling inside. The other girls hurried alongside them. Mei Ming would have started singing; she was the musical one, the one with
that voice
, as we often heard the mothers of the other girls grudgingly admit.

They stopped halfway across the field. We can tell you that. The moon that night was a fat crescent, like a window on an outhouse door in a
New Yorker
cartoon. Their strange footprints must have shimmered in the fresh snow.
A herd of deer
, an early-morning dog walker might have thought,
how odd
.

How much odder the truth.

A number of the girls appear to have eaten chocolate bars, miniature Caramilks no doubt left over from Halloween, the wrappers casually tossed near the second baseline of the ball diamond. One of them smoked a cigarette, a Matinée Extra Mild, the butt found lightly rimmed in marzipan-scented Lip Smacker where the footprints abruptly ended. Another wrote
Up yours
in the snow, not with swaggering piss the way a boy would have, but by clumsily dragging her small heel. (
Not my daughter
, Frank de Rocherer insisted the next morning, stamping his slipper-clad foot—in their panic most of the parents hadn't thought to get dressed. As if that mattered now, which daughter smoked, which daughter was profane, which daughters had insatiable sweet tooths.)

From a distance, if you approached the snowy field from the west, their footprints looked like a series of brushstrokes forming a long-necked bird.
A crane
, Myra Nagle insisted, and soon that's what it was, a crane rising skyward. A most auspicious symbol, we have since learned.

Of course we weren't there to witness all this. We can only imagine. Conjecture, you understand. And if it hadn't been for the snowfall, a rare Christmas Eve snowfall in the coastal city, we wouldn't have anything to go on at all.

THE YEAR OF THE STORK

We watched, those of us who were too old, too divorced, too medicated (too selfish, some said, too
lazy
) to have adopted Chinese daughters. We watched some dozen years ago as couples living on our cul-de-sac disappeared into the smog-cloaked air of Guangdong Province—one of the most polluted places on earth, where the clang and clatter of an almost desperate progress hearkened back to Dickensian England— and returned with tiny, clear-eyed girls whose provenance was a mystery, known only to the hollow-armed mothers who had forsaken them, and whose only forms of identification, besides the
Resident alien
stamps beside their names in their new passports, were the ragged pieces of rice paper, marked with their footprints in red ink, that their new parents framed behind glass and hung above their cribs in white bedrooms overlooking the ocean, as if to say,
Watch your step
.

We're making it sound as if all this happened seamlessly. In fact, ethical debates stormed through our cul-de-sac for an entire summer on the issue of bringing children into a world beset by woe, when more than a continent away dark-haired babies lay on greying sheets, their futures rapidly fraying at the edges.

We know most of the men cheerfully submitted to vasectomies. “Too much information,” we'd say if we met them while hauling our blue boxes to the curb and they jocularly pointed out—although not before noting (once again) that we hadn't flattened our cans—that they'd spent the previous evening parked in front of the Discovery Channel sitting on a bag of frozen peas, adding that it was the least they could do to help save wear and tear on the planet. Or, as prematurely grey, ponytailed Gary Forsythe put it, making a peace sign and then scissoring his fingers much too close to our faces,
Snip snip
. The women were also aggressive about birth control, although even Carol Fawcett's closest friends admitted they found her opting for a full hysterectomy a little, well, “show-offy, don't you think?”