Girl in Shades (24 page)

We sit together in the dark for two more hours, and when nothing else happens, we fall asleep on the floor.

After the bees chased my mother's fanfare away (an event that was written up in the
Saskatoon Post
with the headline “Woman's Final Days Marred by Angry Swarm”), it seemed that there was nothing left to do but wait. So I waited. My mother waited. My father paced, and made phone calls, and went to work, and cooked himself hamburgers on the barbeque, and mowed the grass, and filtered out anyone who showed up at our front door.

Until one morning, he let someone in.

An older lady, with a black sweater fastened with a brooch over a tiny white T-shirt, glasses tucked into her palm, delicate folds of skin around her mouth, grey wisps of hair that must have fallen from her bun on the plane — she seemed to extend into the space around her head and torso. Grandmother McCann.

My mother was reading and I was playing solitaire, my kings and queens laid out on the floor of the teepee. I had helped my mother into the house only once that morning, to use the toilet. The thinness of her body as she squatted on the toilet seat made me feel relieved when she settled back into the padding of her bed. We had all the flaps open, and two fans blowing summer air through the space. I brought her ice chips from the refrigerator, which she traced over the outline of her features to cool off.

“Mother, what are you doing here?” My own mother said this when she saw hers standing at the opening of the teepee, her body framed by the outside world.

“Marigold, I swear, it's absolutely stagnant in here.” Grandmother McCann put her small brown suitcase down and immediately started to lift the window and door flaps back further and aim the fans in new directions.

“What do you want?” Mother said, her words written on an imaginary white flag waving in front of her eyes.

“And the décor is completely depressing. You couldn't have dressed it up a bit?” Grandma McCann reached into her bag, took out a Bible and placed it on my mother's small table. “That's better,” she said, standing back to examine it.

“Maya, this is your Grandmother McCann,” my mother said, and I looked at the old woman standing above me.

“Well, of course she remembers me,” Grandma McCann said, reaching down to tap her index finger on my bare shoulder. “I helped look after her the first months of her life.”

“We've been here more than ten years, Mother.”

It was true. I hadn't seen her since I was a baby and it was hard to be sure about that because I had no memory of it.

“Whether you like it or not, I'm here for you now, Marigold. For both of you.” She sat down on the corner of the bed and put her hand on my mother's stomach.

“Who told you?” Mother said, shifting her mother's hand.

“There was an article in the
Toronto Star
, dear. About the people sleeping outside your home trying to help you. About your quest to save your unborn child. I booked my flight as soon as I heard.”

“So it wasn't enough to visit because I had cancer?” My mother was sitting up then, not yelling exactly, but speaking louder than she had all week. My father's voice came in from just outside the door.

“Everything all right in there, Marigold?”

“It's fine, Steven.”

“Marigold, I never knew you had a sort of . . . what do they call it, sixth sense?”

“I don't, Mother. It was just a misunderstanding.”

I turned to the wall and rolled my eyes.
So she admits it
, I thought.

It was quiet then between us. Three generations creating a triangle on the ground — my mother, my grandmother (the woman my own mother would never become), and me (the young girl my little sister would never be able to grow into). I imagined her scratching at the inside of my mother's stomach, trying to get out. Or taking really deep breaths to try to be ready in time. I decided to be the biggest one of us all.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Grandmother McCann,” I said as I shook her warm hand. “I have heard virtually nothing about you.”

“She's a cheeky one isn't she, Marigold?”

“Mother please . . . this is not the time.”

“It is nice to make your acquaintance as well, Maya Devine.”

She took her hand back, folded her arms, and wiped her fingers under her armpit.

The heat turned so intense when my grandmother was visiting that we had to move my mother's bed out of the teepee and into the open yard so she could catch some air. I slept beside her in the bed in my sleeping bag. Grandmother McCann protested for almost half an hour when she learned about mother sleeping outside. “For goodness' sake, just come in the house, Marigold. You're acting like a crazy woman,” she said, but my mother insisted and eventually Grandmother McCann settled into my own bed for the night.

“Grandmother McCann doesn't seem to like me very much,” I said to my mother when we had settled down for the night.

“It's not about you, really. She just has certain things she can't get past.”

“Like the fact that we moved to Saskatoon?”

“We had to move, Maya. We needed a new start.”

“But why?”

“It doesn't matter anymore. People do the best they can, Maya. Just remember that. People do the best they can . . .” her voice faded out and I rested my head into the crook of her neck.

While my mother wheezed in her slumber, I stared at the stars coating the sky. One particular star seemed to reach out to me. It wasn't round like the others. No, it had points and was brighter than the rest. When I smiled at it, it swelled up, until it seemed to be sitting in the yard, almost touching me. I opened my eyes wider with excitement as its glow rippled warmth into my whole body, guiding me into sleep.

“There is a young woman at the front door for you, Maya,” Grandmother McCann announced the next morning. I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom sink, examining the braids my grandmother had weaved on either side of my head after my shower.

“Who is it?”

“I don't know, but she would like to speak to you.”

I pounded down the stairs to see her standing at the front door, leaning onto one hip. Jackie. I hadn't seen her since the day my mother's teepee had been vandalized.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Where's your new best friend Diane?”

“Summer camp,” Jackie said. She was holding something wrap-ped in tin foil. “My mother asked me to bring you this. It's a banana loaf.” I took the silver brick of cake in my hand and looked at her.

“Why?”

“As some sort of peace offering, I guess. I saw your mom on TV.” She was looking at the door frame above my head and fiddling with the jelly bracelets on her wrist. “And she, I mean I, realized that life was too short to be at odds with those whom we once called friends.” I stood, baffled by her strange language. I raised the loaf to my nose and took a sniff; it smelled good enough.

“Thank you, Jackie,” I said. She continued talking.

“And that you don't need me as your enemy because soon you won't even have a mother or a brother or sister.”

That was enough. I swung my arm over me and hurled the banana loaf at her head. It hit her above her left eyebrow and fell to the ground with a thud.

“I told you before — just go away,” I screamed. “I don't want to talk to anyone right now.”

She put her hand to her face and slapped me with the other one.

“You are a sucky loser! And your mother's a freak!”

I kicked her between the legs with a bare foot and she charged me, landing on top of me inside the door, swatting at my head.

“What on earth is going on here?” Grandma McCann stood behind us, grabbed Jackie, and attempted to separate us. “Let up there, I'm an old woman.” Finally Jackie was on her feet, and Grandma McCann helped me up beside her.

“She deserved it!” Jackie said.

“No one deserves that kind of treatment, young lady. I suggest you run along home now and tell your mother what you have done. And have an extra long chat with Jesus before you go to sleep tonight. You better hope he's going to forgive you for this.”

Jackie turned and walked away, her yellow summer top ripped at the collar, her rolled up jean shorts sagging around the bottoms. “What was that about, Maya?” Grandma McCann asked when Jackie was gone.

“She said mean things about Mother.”

“Everyone is entitled to an opinion,” she said leaning down over the front step, unwrapping the silver package, and bringing it to her nose. “Ah, look, banana loaf.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“More for me then. Come, let's take this out to your mother.” She put her hand on my shoulder and for some reason, I reached up to hold it. For some other reason, she looked down at me and smiled, making space so I could see her crooked teeth.

Like the many well-wishers who had lit candles on the street in front of our house, Grandmother McCann had come with a miracle cure for my mother's condition too. Prayer. And she forced her into it. Literally put her down on her knees beside her bed, opened the Bible, and asked her to read it out loud for us all to hear. It was just after lunch and the sun was heating up the outside of the teepee like a grey sidewalk.

“Mother, I don't want to pray. I feel too weak to be out of bed right now.”

“Marigold, you are never too weak for Jesus. He lifts you up when you need him. Now come on, read, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want —'”

“I'm serious, Eleanor. I don't need this.”

Grandma McCann closed the book. “What did you call me?”

“Your name, Mother. I called you Eleanor, your name.”

“Never call me that again. I will always be Mother to you.” She opened the Bible again. “Maybe you would like to pick the passage. Whatever you are drawn to.”

“Mother reads the
Bhagavad Gita
instead,” I said then.

“The what?”

“Never mind. Never mind what I read. I read the Bible like you.”

“Of course you do,” Grandma McCann said. She changed the subject by deciding that my mother needed to take a bath. “The water will cleanse her soul and get rid of the guilt that has been building up.”

“What guilt might you be referring to?” my mother said in response.

“That is between you and Jesus, Marigold.”

We carried her into the bathroom and I started to unbutton her while Grandmother McCann ran the water into the tub. Tumbling water echoed through the hollow room.

“Maya, I can undress myself,” she said. But her arms had trembled as she slipped them out from under her shirt and slid her cotton shorts down over her knees and onto the floor.

“I'll add some bubbles,” Grandma McCann said, pouring out a dusty pink bottle that had been stashed under the sink (my father had given it to me for Christmas when I was five). Soon, white lavender clouds filled the bathtub and my mother slipped her fragile bones between them and into the water.

While she soaked, my grandmother and I talked.

“So Maya, who was that girl this morning?”

“We used to be friends.”

“And you're not anymore?”

“She turned into a bitch.”

“Language, Maya!”

“Sorry, she turned into a really not nice person. She keeps intruding with Mother.”

“Have you tried everything to make up with her?”

“I don't want us to make up.”

“Maya, one thing you will learn in life. It is very important to have friends. People you can confide in.”

“But I have Mother.” I looked down at the tub, shocked to see only bubbles. My mother's face had slipped underneath.

“Marigold!” my grandmother screamed, reaching underneath. My mother came up, gasping for air, slapping the water with her hands so it splashed up around us. We lifted her out of the tub, onto the pink bathmat, and wrapped her in a towel. Grandma McCann rubbed her shoulders while she shook. “There, there, Mari. You are going to be okay. You must have just fallen asleep is all.” And then I heard it, from inside my grandmother's head:
My poor baby girl. You have made such a mess of your life.

I shunned her for the rest of the day.

Death does funny things to people; for my grandmother, it seemed to make her busy. Over the next week (one of my mother's last), she scrubbed the toilet several times a day, almost like she had forgotten it was already done. She did laundry the second the clothes hit the hamper, got groceries, and made my father and me dinner every night. It was after one of those dinners that she bought her ticket home. I was listening from the living room as Grandmother McCann sat with my father at the kitchen table. He was eating roast beef, mashed potatoes, and baby carrots. She had made it all for him. He was still wearing his tie, having just gotten in from work, and it was hanging untied around his neck like a skinny scarf. I noticed that he wasn't wearing his wedding ring — that's when I left the room and heard them talking: