I'd phoned Dad as I watched her and tried to persuade him to turn back. He said it was impossible. “She'd have to go to school,” he said, as Jasmine backstroked. Although I was high above her, seated comfortably on a sofa, I was sure she was looking straight at me and my cell phone, suspicious and sad, knowing I was turning her in. “Think this through,” he told me. “You'd have to cook for her. You're twenty-four years old.”
“Maybe she could just stay for a while.”
“I'm almost there,” he said. “I'll see you in less than two hours, and we'll all talk.”
“She'll hate me,” I sighed. “More than she does already.”
Steven turned off his cell phone after I called him from the pool, so when I realized Jasmine was missing, I had no way to reach him. I took the subway and streetcar all the way back to my apartment, where we'd planned to meet â where he was planning to ambush Jasmine and take her back home. And as he drove me down Dundas,
I knew he was right. I'd felt so competent and caring, watching her from above. I had already bought her a V8, just like I used to, for when she came out of the locker room clean and hungry. But she hadn't come to Toronto to live with me in a one-room apartment while I worked at Eternal Present and she started high school. She hadn't come for me at all; it was all about J. Virginia Morgan and her workshop, all about the one person who didn't care about her. It wouldn't have worked anyway. I couldn't make her get up in the mornings, punish her for skipping school and worry about what she chose to wear. I couldn't be the one to go to her parent-teacher interviews to discuss her problems, which promised to be many.
I looked at Steven carefully. His hair was slightly shaggy, and he was clean-shaven. I wondered why he'd kept his beard for so long; he had a strong jawline, a handsome face. He was only in his late forties, and I thought, not for the first time, of how his marriage to Mama must have seemed in retrospect. A youthful mess, a foolish misunderstanding. Now, with Lara, he was living his real life.
We shared the house in Aylmer for almost twelve years, Dad, Mama and I, and finally Jasmine, too, and during that time, our personalities burrowed into all the small places no vacuum cleaner can reach. We trampled our birthday parties into the carpets and painted over our arguments, fusing them to the walls. And maybe it was when we moved downtown that we began to snip whatever ties held us together. Time shifts the contents of a house like the earth; what was topsoil when we moved in transformed slowly into the mulchy bottom layer of long unopened desk drawers, the far-back of closet shelves too high for even Dad to reach without standing on a chair. We turned up our comfortable mess all the way to its murky underside. We cleaned out the whole place â emptied every cranny, excavated forgotten scraps of paper, gathering shoeboxes from their shadowy hiding places and exposing their contents to the light of day. Mama, Dad and I filled the hallways of our house with garbage bags. Even Minnie organized her drawings, put her crayons and
coloured pencils away, sharpening each one before placing it carefully in its box. I examined and discarded outmoded clothes, old birthday cards, the sweater I'd planned to make in the sixth-grade “knitterbockers” club that had never progressed past a cuff hanging from a needle. I filled garbage bags with gifts from clueless relatives.
For all the garbage bags I filled haphazardly, I also packed two boxes with neatly stacked relics. Mama, I discovered much later, packed boxes of journals, photographs and old clothes, a collection of my childhood drawings, a string of red origami cranes. She put these boxes in the guest room closet at our new apartment, closed the door and didn't open it until after her accident. J. Virginia Morgan warns against clutter of any kind. Never shove something out of sight. Instead, get rid of it. If you want something out of mind, she writes, its continued and hidden existence can only do you harm. She writes that, in her house, she never places an object on top of another in such a way that one is hidden. All her cupboards are made of glass.
If you have anything to hide, dig it up. Not to polish it and admire it and show it off, but to get rid of it once and for all.
Dad didn't have a big office in the new downtown apartment, so he took a carload of boxes to his office at the university. A year later, they were still unpacked in a corner, and one early October weekend when I was fifteen, he offered me a hundred dollars to organize his office. I had nothing to do, because Helena was away with the volleyball team, so I agreed. All day, while he was in the lab, I shelved books, organizing by subject before alphabetizing. Dad's office had floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall. I wondered how it could be that I was more like Dad than Mama and resolved for the thousandth time that I would never get married or have children; I would never sit around chopping vegetables and doing laundry when I could be sitting in an office, surrounded by books, writing and publishing great insights.
Other than his books and neatly Duo-Tanged articles, Dad had packed one large shoebox, secured with a flimsy piece of tape. I came across it in the late morning, on top of a journal about narcolepsy. I could see from the logo that the box had once contained winter boots. I pulled up the lid and peered inside. And there it was,
right on top. A thick, dilapidated envelope with Dad's name in the middle and another man's initials in the top left-hand corner: A.A. A.A's handwriting was heavy, in black ink on off-white paper. I closed the box and held it shut, then opened it again. Took out the envelope and held it in both hands. Pressing it to my face, I smelled only old paper that had been kept for years in a small space. I opened the envelope and looked inside, unfolded the old, plain beige stationery. I read and reread the signature.
A letter from my biological father to Dad. If only I'd had the self-help wisdom at my disposal, the foresight to do what Dad should have done twelve years earlier â to light a match and put an end to it. But I had to know. I wanted to see his handwriting, feel the way he formed sentences, to find something familiar that had made its way into my own blood. I put the letter in my bag and tucked the resealed box behind a row of books on one of Dad's shelves, where such boxes always go. I read the letter twice while eating eggplant curry in a café down the street. I was strangely calm when Dad drove me home that night, still calm at school on Monday. I reread the letter in the library at lunchtime, on the bus ride home, just as, long ago, Asher Acker read and reread Mama's covert postcard. And though I was calm, a virus had entered my bloodstream. I could feel it circulating, spreading, the symptoms beginning almost imperceptibly, like an itch in the back of my throat. I watched Mama standing in the apartment's stark white kitchen, yellow apron around her wide waist. All the appliances were shiny and science-fiction inspired, no wood anywhere; Mama was lumpy and larva-like, out of her element. Ballooning inside me, I felt a heady recklessness, a growing, giddy disregard for any consequences. I thought of the little girl who could set fire to things with her eyes, and I stared at my mama, waiting for the flames.
I had left my family for six years, and everything had changed while I was gone. Even Tam-Tam had stopped managing Inner Beauty, and now she was moving. Selling the salon, Jasmine said.
“Jasmine says Tam-Tam has a boyfriend.”
“Oh,” Dad said. “Victor? He's not her boyfriend, exactly.”
“
What
? How do you know?”
“I phone Tamar once a month at least, to see how she's doing.” He glanced over at me. “I always thought highly of her; I still do.”
“Of Tam-Tam? I thought you never even liked her.” I'd been sure he and Tam-Tam never spoke again after the day Mama left.
Steven kept his eyes on the road. “I always liked her. You know, my parents were always so normal; when I met Tamar, it was like seeing a whole different way of doing things. I liked it. I still do. She's an incredibly strong woman.” I tried to recall a single instance during my childhood when Steven and Tam-Tam had seemed to connect. “She'd love to hear from you, Aga. I'm sure she'd be thrilled to tell you about the salon and Victor and everything else.”
“Who
is
Victor?” We were passing Bathurst already, and my hands were starting to shake. It occurred to me that I could jump out of the car and run. I could change my identity and move to a different city; no one would ever find me. I didn't really have any friends who'd notice I was gone.
“Victor,” Dad said. “It's a remarkable story, actually. He owns a restaurant in the Byward Market and his late wife used to have her hair done at the salon.” Jasmine had already told me that much. “It turns out that he's from Amsterdam, the same neighbourhood as Tam-Tam. He came to Ottawa about ten years after her and Oma Esther. His family was friends with the people who hid Tamar during the war.” I stared at him, and Steven nodded. “The parents have both died, but Tamar spoke with the daughter. Femke something â a different surname from the one Tamar remembered; she'd been married twice. They were living in Montreal all this time.”
“No way,” I said. “That's incredible. I mean, I remember TamTam talking about her. That's just incredible. Did she tell you anything about it? What was it like talking to her?”
“It is incredible, you're right. She said they had a long talk. And she and Victor have become quite close friends. They spend a lot of
time together. Dinner, plays. Your grandmother spent a lot of time alone, for a long time.”
“But all her friends from the salon?”
“Those were clients and employees. They tend to come and go.”
Suddenly, beside Dad in the car, I was desperate to see TamTam, to see the salon again, at least once, before it was gone. Inner Beauty had always been a part of my life. In my earliest memories, I spun in the royal blue vinyl and chrome chairs, examined my head from every angle in the mirrors and leafed through the sample binders, colours and colours of dyes, polishes and shadows.
The Saturday two weeks after I found Asher Acker's letter, I wore my bright yellow rain slicker, prepared for the forecasted rain. It was Halloween. Since we'd moved downtown, it was only a ten-minute drive to Inner Beauty, and there was no longer any excuse to get out of occasional visits. As far as I was concerned, I'd grown up far past cute, but Tam-Tam's ladies still pressed their red lips onto my cheeks, then rubbed at the marks they'd left, long red nails leaving half-moon indentations in my skin. The morning was staticky and grey, thunder rumbling a long way off. I watched the dark clouds through the living room window of our eleventh-floor apartment and laced my newly bought army boots. I'd wanted them for months, but until a few days earlier, Helena had me convinced they would look stupid. They were polished black and steel-toed, indestructible enough to carry me fearlessly into my new, Helena-less life. Minnie had new boots, too, red rubber, with a matching rain hat. Four years old, she was chubby and wide-eyed, and everything made her laugh. The TV, the tone of jokes she couldn't possibly have understood. She laughed loudly with her mouth wide open, fell off chairs to roll around on the floor. Her round cheeks got the worst of it at TamTam's, her effortless charm mercifully diverting attention away from me.
We took the elevator down to the lobby of our building, and Minnie was a fireman in her gumboots. For her Halloween costume, she'd have a plastic hose as well. “Firefighter,” Mama tried to correct her. “You don't need a penis to fight a fire.” But when she went to
the rescue, Minnie was a man. Her name, she insisted, was Fireman Jeff. My mother was wearing a trench coat over her tucked-in grey blouse and a wrinkled black skirt that was too tight at the shin-length hem. She completed the ensemble with a blazer that wasn't the same fabric or quite the same shade of black as the skirt. Mama only put on makeup for Tam-Tam or if she was going to a university function with Dad. The lipstick and eyeliner didn't settle properly onto her face but sat like a slightly skewed superimposition. She went down to the parking lot to get the car, and I waited in the lobby with my sister. Red plastic fire engine in hand, Minnie saved me. We ran out of the building together, me leaning on her shoulder. “There!” she breathed. “You're okay now, lady. Try not to be scared. I'm going back in for the cat.” She shaded her eyes against imaginary flames and puffed up with courage, but Mama pulled up and called out to us through the car window.
Languid in the front seat beside my mother, I turned to join my sister in a car song: “When you slide into first and you feel something burst . . . ” My voice, I was sure, was lower than usual; there was something slower and softer about me. A constant, sleepy ache through my whole body. I had willed my life into the realm of the extraordinary, into the wiry arms of the pariah of grade ten history class. For the last month, when it was too cold to lie in the grass by the canal, we'd been meeting inside the school. Mr. Meyers always sighed and nodded, waving me away, when I asked to go to the washroom. My grades had been getting progressively worse this year, a drastic change from last year. More than a few minutes away from class would arouse suspicion, but each meeting under the gym-building stairs progressed from the last. Just the day before, Ingo Bachmann had pushed my back against the wall, his thigh between my legs. It was enough to last all weekend, all through Monday, until my next history class on Tuesday. I replayed every touch. The memory of his gangly long fingers pushed Helena's betrayal out of my head, overwhelmed even thoughts of two fathers. Ingo Bachmann and I kissed with mouths grotesquely open, gluttony and lust in one.
We crossed Mackenzie King Bridge along with all the buses. Mama glanced nervously at the hordes of Saturday shoppers entering and leaving the Bay, Minnie crooning, “When you slide into home and your pants are full of foam . . .”
“
Please
,” Mama said, just as I joined my sister in the song's final uproarious cry, “Diarrhea!” Mama hated it when Minnie acted this way, twitching with an energy bigger than her body. Mama and Dad had explained to me that I mustn't get my sister too worked up; that we needed to keep her calm by maintaining an “atmosphere of serenity.” I knew how Mama felt, but I didn't care. Minnie squirmed in her seatbelt, rubbing the back of her carefully combed head against vinyl. She'd have the makings of a large dreadlock by the time the car stopped. I grinned at her between the seats, and she pushed her fire truck back and forth on her lap, opened her mouth to start her siren noise, then glanced in Mama's direction and pressed her lips together with a superhuman effort to stay quiet.