Everyone thought Jasmine didn't remember anything. But she did. She remembered the sprinklers in the tremble park, and Mama in her green bikini, sneezing all the way home. And lots of other things, too. She remembered sitting beside her mother in the back seat of the car, and the hospital where they kept taking her back to show the doctor that she wasn't fixed yet. And she remembered Inner Beauty's stairs, how she was thinking about the glory of a fireman's life and the injustice of not being allowed to watch Agatha get her hair dyed. Jasmine hadn't known back then that she wanted to be an astronaut; she thought she was going to be a fireman, ever since she went on a field trip with her kindergarten class to the fire station to see the men sliding down poles from the ceiling, dressing in their shiny outfits, and turning on all the trucks' sirens and lights in preparation to save the day.
She'd been pushing her fire truck up the paisley walls and along the orange banister, but then she remembered she had to stay alone until she calmed down. Leaning against the wall, she counted to twenty in her head and kept going to thirty. She let her body go so limp her mouth even hung open; that's how calm she was. But then Jasmine noticed one of her feet wiggling in its shiny red fireman's boot, as if it had a life of its own, and she thought maybe she hadn't calmed down after all. The fire truck had definitely been in her hand before she tried to be calm, which was probably when she put it down, and then the door at the bottom of the stairs opened, and beautiful Marcy, with her perfect lips and nails, came in with a cup in her hand. And some time later, Jasmine was sitting in Marcy's aesthetics chair, having red sparkles dabbed around her eyes.
Firemen didn't usually wear sparkles, but Marcy was right when she said there was no reason Jasmine shouldn't be the first.
She didn't even notice her fire truck was missing until she and Agatha had already hugged Tam-Tam goodbye and were standing at the top of the stairs, ready to go home. They were holding hands; Jasmine was trying not to look at her sister's face with its new red lips and scary eyelashes. Agatha's hair made her look too different, but her hand felt the same, and Jasmine held it tightly. Their mother walked down the stairs ahead of them, and that's when Jasmine saw the truck, sitting on a stair almost halfway down, not far from the wall. She just didn't want to have done something wrong again; she thought her mother would walk past it without noticing. She was always doing something wrong, always being sent somewhere to calm down, and though she wanted to be good, like Agatha, she couldn't sit still and quiet for hours with a book in her hand. Within minutes, Jasmine always thought of a new idea, and soon she'd have accidentally done something bad again, like drawn a map of her veins all over her body in permanent marker or wrapped each of Dad's ties in toilet paper so she could give them to him as gifts. It was an accident â but then Mama looked back to talk to Agatha. She wasn't watching where she stepped; her foot, in its dainty lady-shoe, was on the truck's roof, and Jasmine knew instantly that not only had she done something wrong, she had ruined everything, done the very worst thing.
Mama must have been really mad at Jasmine about the fire truck on the stairs because, a year after her accident, she told everyone else she was leaving, and then she was gone. It was Jasmine's fire truck on the stairs â that's why all Virginia's books were red and why she never told Jasmine goodbye; that's why she kept the red paper birds, as a secret message; that's why she was spiteful and cruel, and why it had to stop.
Jasmine looked up at the clock; it was almost time. Agatha was still up in the window; Jasmine couldn't see her clearly but knew she was there. It felt amazing to have a real plan, already set in motion. That whole thing with the pimps had been so stupid; she'd realized it even on the bus, before she entered the Toronto terminal. The
terminal itself was plain and solid as a school cafeteria. She'd always known there were creatures that weren't quite solid, that exist past the tips of fingers, like celebrities, promising something beyond the mundane. But now she knew that when you see them for real, like that pimp in the mall or the God in Aunt Hilary's church, they fail to measure up. They become nothing. And J. Virginia Morgan was finally going to materialize, too. Hopefully Agatha would figure it out and show up in time to see Jasmine squash Virginia into the shit-stain she really was. Jasmine was doing it for Agatha as well, and for Tam-Tam, who was getting rid of all the stuff she didn't need anymore.
For Virginia's readers
, the American magazine said,
this is a familiar story: the oppressive closeness of her household compelled her to move in with a boyfriend when she was very young; and her first daughter was born nine months later, but not before the boyfriend left the country, never to be seen again. Three years later, she married, and eventually her second daughter was born. During those years, the future guru taught piano lessons, read in her free time and, as Virginia writes in
The Willing Amnesiac,
“existed rather than lived, in a monotonous routine remarkable only for its lack of any distinguishing features.”
There was no one else in Jasmine's lane, so she swam to the middle of the pool and then sank into the water to pull down the bottom of her bathing suit. With her hands on her knees, Jasmine rolled forward and pushed her bare ass into the air. It was her patented synchronized swimming move, which she'd done at least once in every pool she'd ever swum in. It was all a trick; it was all bullshit, and Jasmine wanted to moon the world.
“What a lot of people really crave,” Virginia says, “is to observe and contemplate suffering â like a child torturing an insect. Like a public execution. If people were really concerned about the Jewish Holocaust, they would be out in the world trying to stop the genocides that are happening today. Not rehashing the past. But anyway, I'm not interested in politics and history. That's really not my thing. I'm interested in people.”
She finishes her cigarette in silence and says, “Why do people find the past so much more interesting than the present? The past is nothing. It's gone. Why do you think you need to know about my family to know something about me? I'll tell you something. These questions you're asking won't tell you a thing about my work, because I have nothing to do with all that crap. Let's talk about something else. Ask me something else.”
In her latest book, the ironically titled
Accidents,
Virginia insists that most so-called accidents happen for a reason. “I think that when we feel cornered, we look for ways out. That's part of what I'm talking about in my book. We do whatever we can to make a change. Death is just the ultimate change.” She nods seriously. “People who attempt suicide don't really want to die. They just don't know how else to change their lives.”
“And your own accident?” I venture. “Your head injury?”
“Yes, well, I do think that happened because it was the only way I could change my life. But I don't remember the accident itself.”
“You can't remember that day at all?” I ask, having read as much in her first book.
“That's right.”
“Interview with the Amnesiac: J. Virginia Morgan
Would Rather Not Remember,”
American Dreams Magazine
J. Virginia Morgan writes that everything can change in a single moment â a breaking point. All she remembers of the day her life changed, the day she ripped herself free, is every possible shade of red filling her eyes and nose. That's why the cover of her first book is cherry red, the cover of her second magenta, and the third a dark rose. On each, J. Virginia Morgan's name is printed in dark burgundy.
I was seventeen and still living with Tam-Tam when her first book came out. At the public library downtown, where I often went to do my homework, Mama's adopted name glared in red from a shelf of new Canadian books. At first I thought it must have been a coincidence, someone else, but when I saw the author photo, I was seized with dizziness, and the stabbing pain I'd come to recognize as panic, rather than a heart attack, gripped my chest. I sat in a soft, upholstered chair near the window and waited for the spots to clear from my eyes, and then I looked at Virginia's photo again. She was still almost as thin as when she left, her hair had grown long and sleek, and now her nose was different, too, small and straight. I opened
The Willing Amnesiac
to the first page and read the first line:
I woke into a white room full of cut flowers, and my whole life slipped away like some epic, complex dream that leaves a formless uneasiness in the wake of its details.
Virginia. I thought she'd left and was gone forever, but here she was, for anyone to find. I read the whole book,
finishing it half an hour before the library closed for the night. Every word and every letter branded itself onto my brain.
It just takes one moment out of the ordinary, Virginia wrote, and then everything changes. One moment is the border between then and now, her and me, prehistory and real life.
“This is why she ran away,” said Steven. He was standing beside my computer desk, reading the e-mail I'd found when I got home from losing Jasmine and sneaking glances around my home. Piles of books at his feet. “This is my fault, Agatha,” he told me. “Not yours.”
“No kidding.”
“Well,” he said, ignoring my regression to adolescence after five minutes in his company, “let's go to the” â he checked the printout â “Mylette Hotel. It's in Yorkville? How far is that?”
“It's far,” I told him. “And it's rush hour.”
Steven looked back at my building as we crossed the street, but he didn't say anything. I had never seen the car he was driving; it was shiny and new, a red sedan.
“After Jasmine left,” said Steven, heading down Dundas Street, “I saw that she'd been reading about your mother online.”
“J. Virginia Morgan,” I corrected him. He looked at me. “She was reading about J. Virginia Morgan.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course, yes. I see what you mean. I didn't know that you girls knew about those books.”
“Of course we do, Steven.” I didn't want to look at his face, didn't want him looking at me either. Already he had bruised my sanctuary by seeing my home, my apartment and my street. My city. He had his own life, a new lease. Jasmine had once told me that Steven and Lara jogged together and went to the gym and that they cooked with only organic food. “We didn't know if
you
knew about those books,” I told him. “You could have said something.”
He didn't answer, just eased through a green light in silence. As we approached the point where the road forked, I told him to take College Street, but he stayed on Dundas and drove two blocks. Then
he said, “Agatha, I'm going to ask you to come back to Ottawa with me and Jasmine. Lara's mother has taken a turn for the worse.”
“I have a job,” I said. “I can't just leave.”
“You work in a store.” I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes. I could feel the tension building in the back of my neck and my shoulders. “Are you working on applications for grad schools yet?”
“A few, yes. That wouldn't be for almost a year.”
“Where are you applying?”
“Here and in the States. Why did you take Dundas? The traffic will be even worse closer to downtown. College is always better.”
“Please think about it,” said Steven. “Lara really needs her family right now.”
It was an old, familiar argument, and I didn't need to speak for Steven to know what I was thinking. That I wasn't Lara's family, was only her stepdaughter because Steven had adopted me at the last second. Once when I first moved to Toronto for school I had introduced him to my roommates as my former stepfather. He hadn't visited me since. That was around the time I'd written to Asher Acker; according to my online search, he was practising psychoanalysis in Sacramento, California, and I found his office address. I described Mama's accident and everything that had followed; I told him that I'd read the letter he wrote to Steven, that he'd been right when he predicted his bond with Mama and me would come back to haunt us. But he never wrote back.
“Look at this.” The street was getting more congested by the second.
“All right,” Steven told me. “I'm upset, too, Agatha.”
Jasmine was already in a room with J. Virginia Morgan; it was an uncanny thought, and my stomach clenched so painfully I had to open the window to get some air. It had never occurred to me to imagine or hope that Virginia would stop, to wish that loose thread unravelling from my family snipped and tied, its destructive path cut short. Her existence and the never-ending publication of her red books were my due, a reminder of what I'd done and even a reminder of how the world works, how it rebukes and conspires and torments us with cruel justice. For nine years, I'd tried to enumerate
all that led up to the accident and all that followed, and each time I was less sure at what point things began to go wrong. Sometimes I'd find it, the answer â when I should have said something different, made a different choice; but then the precise clarity of remorse would slip away again, leaving me feeling, with a relieved hiatus from my burden of responsibility, that I couldn't have saved her, that it would have happened anyway.
But when Jasmine wished our mother dead, she said it with such vehemence, such determination. She stared at those books on the Eternal Present bookshelf and took bloody aim, and I leapt to protect them, as though she were poised to desecrate something holy. And as I watched her from above, slicing through the University of Toronto pool, I saw how the momentum of her convictions carried her. I would never have dared, at her age, to take the bus to a city I didn't know, alone. Jasmine looked so sleek and childlike from above, a tiny, buoyant creature carving a fearless, if reckless, path. There was nothing above or below for her to hold on to, nothing at either side. She was so different from me. How had I let go of her small hand so easily, turned and fled, barely thinking of her life without me?