Girl in Shades (22 page)

Bye, Mari, Mrs. Devine said from the living room.

I left them all there. I left them all and walked home.

Mother was curled on the kitchen floor in a mess of broken dishes and slopped food. I know she's alive because I could see her back rising and falling. I went upstairs.

It's amazing to me that one mistake could cause so much upset.

December 28, 1972

I'm engaged to Steven.

Yes, I know it's pretty unbelievable — one, that he would ask, and two, that I would accept. But he did and I did.

On Boxing Day he showed up at my door. Mother was locked in her room and I was flipping through channels, wrapped gifts still laid out around my feet. I was feeling nauseated and had been sucking the salt off saltine crackers for about an hour when he knocked.

I opened the back door right away. He was wet because it had been snowing a sort of slush and apparently he hadn't cared to use an umbrella or cover himself up in any way. He didn't say anything when he saw me, just held one of my hands with his, and put his other one on my belly.

I smiled tentatively, like I didn't know yet what it meant.

Marigold, I love you, he said.

Thanks, Steven.

And my love for you is enough to get over this.

It is? I said.

I want you to marry me, Marigold (he was on his knee by that time). I don't have a ring, but I have something else to show you how serious I am.

He took off his jacket and lifted up his shirt. I started to wonder then if he had been drinking. And there, on his bare chest, over his heart, was my name — Mari — tattooed on his skin.

I reached out to touch it, still bloody and scabbing and gasped, Steven, what did you do?

It's for you. It's all for you. I will help you through this.

I kissed him soft on the lips, but not before I said yes, because well, there really wasn't any other answer to give. I need a father for my baby. I need someone to support me when I drop out of school. I need to find a way to make my mother proud of me again. I guess it doesn't matter that I am sort of in love with someone else. A phantom.

This afternoon, with Buffy out developing photos and Aunt Leah getting the groceries, I sat on Buffy's bed and read the rest of my mother's journal.

And now I know.

It's a lot to learn at one time. My father is not my father. And somewhere, maybe in India, lives the real man who made my mother pregnant the first time.

I get up from Buffy's bed and go back into the living room, stuffing the notebook back into the picnic basket beside my couch. I know I have to get out of here.

Tripping over my boots, I leave the apartment and exit onto St. Clair Avenue. Noise. Cars are blowing smoke into my face. Honking. The sky is criss-crossed with thick black wires, and a streetcar rattles by. I zip up my white parka and pull down my scratchy wool hat over my ears.

I don't know which way to walk. I sit on the front step of Aunt Leah's building, looking west towards Oakwood Avenue. I'm still not sure if I believe that instead of having one missing father, I actually have two. There's a video store across the street with a sign flashing the word “
OPEN
” in pink. Open, open, open. It's imprinting on my eyeballs. I shift my gaze to watch a family of three walk by in front of me. They are black and dressed in clothes that seem like they were purchased at the Goodwill, but assembled in a fashionable sort of way. The father is tall and broad, walking with arms crossed over his winter jacket. He's wearing some large gold rings on his meaty fingers and doesn't seem to care what his wife and daughter are doing behind him. The woman has an afro and is pulling a little girl in a pink coat down the street, annoyed that she wants to stop and pick up pebbles or look at my suede boots.

“Yoo-hoo, Maya!”

I see Aunt Leah getting out of a brown car across the street. She waves, turns to say goodbye to the person in the car and walks in my direction.

“Hey, Maya darling, what's shaking?” She is wearing a long skirt and platform heels and no jacket. She has huge hoop earrings in her ears.

“Where're the groceries?”

“Changed my mind, I thought maybe it would be best if we went together. I have no idea what you like to eat.”

“I know about my father.”

“Know what?” She cocks her head like she's got water stuck in her ear.

“That he's not. My father, that is.”

“Don't be ridiculous, of course he is.” She sits down beside me on the stoop, her legs stretched out and crossed under her long skirt, her arms wrapped around her.

“Why did you lie to me?” I say this quietly to avoid the ugliness in the words.

“What?”

“I know he's not my father. I read my mother's journal. My real father is some dude who walked out on her. I am even more of an orphan than I thought.”

“Where did you get it?” She is looking across the street now, into the video store where there is one kid doing nothing behind a counter.

“I found it in Mother's closet. You're not my real aunt.”

“You will always be my niece.”

“So it's true!” I point at her, my finger almost touching her eyeball.

“Maya, I only wanted to protect you and your family.”

“How was that protecting us?”

“It was a web of lies with different layers, and I was not going to be the one to bust them all open.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“You don't understand. No one ever talked about it . . . what was I supposed to do?”

“How did you find out then?”

“Mom explained it to me after I had returned from visiting you in Saskatoon that first time. I was obsessed with the fact that you didn't look like anyone else in the family. I was jealous, I think. And so to shut me up, she told me what had happened. She said that your Grandma McCann told her and Dad at the hospital when you were born — saying they deserved to know.”

“Did Father know who my real father was?”

“Mom and Dad told him. I don't think your parents ever talked about it after that point. They seemed to think that if you don't talk about something, maybe it doesn't really exist.”

“You should have told me.” I stand up, my voice creating vapour in the cool air. “You are nothing but a big, fat liar.”

I start to walk away and Aunt Leah stops me with her inner voice . . .
Maya, please, no, what did I do? For fuck's sake, it's not my fault
.

I turn around and glare at her. And decide to use the best ammunition I have to fight back — what I heard her thinking a couple nights ago when she got home from her “perfume” job.

“And by the way, I know about what you're really doing when you go ‘out'! How do you think your parents would feel to hear that you are having sex with men for money?”

I leave Aunt Leah shocked and speech/thought-less on the frozen concrete.

I don't get far down St. Clair. And then like magic, I see him walking towards me.

He looks older. His hair is cut a little shorter and he's wearing a navy blue pea coat, blowing into his bare hands as he steps off the streetcar.

When he looks up and sees me, we both stop. I think my mouth hangs open, because I feel winter in my lungs.

“Elijah,” I say.

He smiles. A lopsided sort of smile like always.

“Just the girl I was coming to see.”

It turns out that my father called Mrs. Roughen and “suggested” that Elijah come see me at Aunt Leah's — like I can't make my own friends or something. I'm a bit angry with him for pretending to care at this point. But secretly, I'm so, so happy to see Elijah again.

I tell him that I don't want to go home. So instead, we go down to the Retro Café and have breakfast for lunch. I feel extremely grown up sitting with him in the booth. He tells me about how he and his mother have moved in with her new boyfriend, Conrad. He's smoking a cigarette while he talks. The one nasty habit he says he still hasn't been able to give up.

He tells me that he thinks “city life is fucking awesome” and he would never want to go back to living in “a dried up place like Saskatoon.”

I'm attracted to the gorgeous turquoise light I catch glimpses of around his head — it seems almost to be mixing with mine over the table. And at one point, I hear him think that I am looking cute, which makes me feel pretty good.

Mostly I nod and smile, scrunching up my toes in my shoes when I don't know what to say. I do remember to thank him for the bees. And to apologize for telling him I hated him after he did it. He says he always knew it wasn't true.

When I get back to the apartment, Aunt Leah is waiting for me.

“Where have you been?” she asks, looking hurt, pulling her fingers through her long hair.

“Just walking around,” I say. “I didn't go far.”

“Listen, Maya, about what you said . . .”

“Forget it, really. Whatever you want to do.”

“It's not what you think. It's just an escort service — I don't have to do anything I don't want to. And I'm getting out of it, really.”

“I said — whatever you want to do.”

“I want to go back to school, Maya. To university . . . for something big. This will help me do it all on my own.”

“Okay.” I'm feeling a bit sorry for her now, because I can hear her whimpering from inside. Who am I to tell her how to live?

“But Maya, how did you find out?”

“I just guessed.”

I don't tell her about the night when I heard her think it. She was sneaking in, not smelling of perfume, and I heard her think it clear through the dark air:
I've got to stop doing this . . . that guy smelled like garlic. I've got to clean him off me right now
.

“I'm sorry, Maya.”

“It has nothing to do with me,” I say. I go into Buffy's blue room and hide my face in her pillow, inhaling the smell of her almond face cream.

I wake to hands touching my face.

“Maya, is that you? What are you doing in my bed?”

“Sorry, Buffy,” I say. “I needed privacy.”

“We all need that, now don't we?” She puts her camera down on her desk with a clunk.

“Did you take some good pictures today?”

“You tell me.” She opens an envelope and spreads out photos around me on the bed. Pictures of the spray of a water fountain, a bird warming eggs in a nest, chocolate bars laid out on a table, and one of me.

“That's me!”

“How does it look, describe it to me,” Buffy says.

“Well, my eyes are closed.”

“I took it when you were sleeping.”

“My hair is messed up, and hanging a bit over my face. I have a pillow in a headlock.” She laughs and says she figured. “I look old, like a woman almost.”

“We are practically women from the moment we come out.”

She is sitting on the bed now, and hugs her knees up to her chest so that she looks like one small bony ball. Almost like I could pick her up and roll her down a hill if she would let me.

I can hardly wait for Buffy to fall asleep that night so I can listen to her dream-thoughts. When they start up, I am surprised to hear my name woven within the sentences:
Maya, you are not alone in anything you do
.

It's like someone is talking to me through Buffy's dreams.

Don't resist life. It's what makes you, you
.

The words are confusing me. I have to know for sure if it is Buffy talking so I walk into her room and turn on the light in the hall. She is in her bed, without her glasses, and her eyes are closed.

Everything that happens is for your higher good.

Her lips aren't moving.

Four days later in the middle of the night, Buffy is shaking my shoulders awake. Her fingers are clammy on my skin.

“Maya, get up! We have to go to the hospital.”

“Why?”

“It's your Aunt Leah.”

“She's not really my aunt.”

“Well, she's hurt.”