Girl in Shades (26 page)

“I get it, Buffy.” I drop my backpack to the floor, walk to the cross, and tickle my fingers across the flower petals.

“They do this in Mexico, put marigolds up to honour the dead. Sometimes they make a path from the deceased person's grave to the house, so that the spirit can find her way home for the celebration.”

Aunt Leah comes out of the bathroom, leaving a hushed toilet flush behind her. She has just returned from her new job at the CN Tower, where she travels up and down all day telling people that the tower was built in 1975 and is so many meters and so many feet tall. I know she's really there because I've seen her uniform — and they don't give one of those out to just anybody.

“What do you think, kiddo?” she asks me about the display.

“Let me show you the best part, Maya.” Buffy takes my hand again and walks me to the corner between the kitchen and the dining room. There, on a small card table covered with a black plastic table cloth, is my mother's journal and, placed beside it, a framed picture of a much younger version of my mother sitting on a pillow with her copy of the
Bhagavad Gita.
There is also another picture of a woman with a broad forehead, looking up to the sky with her arms wrapped around her like she was cold. Beside that picture is a package of cigarettes and a bingo dabber. In front of them both are four small statues, disembodied skeletons, and one of a full-length skeleton dressed in a baggy robe, its teeth parted, its eyes hollow.

“Where did you get this stuff?” I say, referring mostly to my mother's journal. I reach out to grab it, but Aunt Leah holds my hand back.

“From your bag, Maya. Don't worry, no one's going to read it. It's only to remember her by,” Aunt Leah says.

“And the picture of her?”

“I had it, Maya. I found it at Mom and Dad's house. In some of Steven's stuff. He must have taken it when they just started going out.”

“She looks so young,” I say. “And nice.”

Mother is standing outside in a summer dress that shows her arms. Her hair is blown over her eyes a bit and she is looking away, like someone has just called her name.

“She must have been just a bit older than you there,” Aunt Leah says. “I bought the frame myself.”

“Why didn't you ever show me before?” I say, mesmerized by the image of my mother as a teenager, before she met my real father, well before I was born.

“I don't know, I guess I never thought of it.”

“Isn't it beautiful, Maya?” Buffy says. “Almost makes me wish I could see it with my eyes for once.” She runs her palms over the dining room table until she holds her camera in her hands. She flops the strap around her neck, raises the camera, and snaps two times towards the altar. Then, she turns to me, strokes her fingers over my nose, and snaps two more times. “That's going to be a great picture.”

People start arriving at around 7:00. Some are dressed in their Halloween costumes from a few days ago (fairies, princesses, pumpkins, dirty maids), but most are in their normal clothes, some with leis of marigolds around their necks. They are mostly Buffy's friends from York, from the photography program and some of her other classes.

Buffy leans over to me when the chatter of voices in the room is high enough to block out most of my own thoughts: “I told them they didn't have to dress up. Did they?”

“No, not really,” I lied.

“A few of them though?”

“There are some costumes, but most people have marigold leis.”

“Good. It's not authentic if they're wearing Halloween costumes.”

Aunt Leah puts Michael Jackson's
Thriller
album on the stereo, and I nod my head to the music while people chat and drink red drinks with only a touch of rum. Buffy always seems to have a crowd of people around her, tall people with curly hair and long braids, and confident women who wave their hands in the air when they talk. I can barely see her from behind them, and if it weren't for her voice piping out, I wouldn't know if she was there at all.

Aunt Leah has invited only one friend. A skinny woman with purple eye shadow, teased bangs, and dark circles under her eyes. Her hair seems frazzled somehow, held back with a plastic headband, and she's wearing a red dress with the outline of her underwear showing.

By 9:00 the apartment is full, but Elijah is still not there. When I called him yesterday after school, he said, “I'll be there, little lady.” When he said it, it made me think about how young I must appear to him. And I wondered if he just feels sorry for me.

I stand in the corner sipping Kool-Aid and tuning in to various voices around me. These people don't mean what they say. Their voices are too loud and friendly to be real. Their laughs are forced, as if they are trying to convince themselves of something. No one has mentioned my mother's photo in the corner, or the one of Buffy's aunt. Someone is smoking one of the cigarettes from the pack beside Aunt Tippy's photo.

Elijah arrives right after Aunt Leah sets out the food: Mexican taco dip with three layers, cups of coffee, chocolate shaped like tiny skulls and witches. “I'm here,” he says when I open the door to see him standing there. He's wet, his hair dark and stuck to his forehead, his black T-shirt sticking to his ribs and showing the roundness of his shoulders. “I had to walk, and it started raining.” I close the door, realizing that the trickle I had been hearing was rain on the window, and not in my mind.

“You're not late. We have food. Are you hungry?”

“I guess a little bit,” Elijah says, making his way over to the dining room table and dipping four taco chips into the dip. “What's with the shrine?” He points to my mother's picture and shoves the crunchy mess into his mouth.

“This is a Day of the Dead party. It's supposed to invite my mother as the guest of honour.”

“Creepy,” he says. He pops two chocolate witches into his mouth. “Who's she?”

“That's my roommate Buffy's aunt. She was killed in a car crash.”

“Can I have one of those?” He reaches towards the cigarettes.

“No, you can't smoke those.” Elijah shrugs and settles himself against the wall.

“Do I smell someone new?” Buffy says, walking over to where Elijah and I stand. “You must be Elijah?” She reaches her hand out to touch his wet hair.

“Are you blind or something?” Elijah says.

“Elijah, stop it,” I say.

“More importantly . . . I'm Buffy. I'm Maya's roommate. I'm a photographer and a student.” Elijah nods in confusion.

“How do you see what you're taking a picture of?”

“She doesn't have to see, Elijah, she feels it.”

“Freaky.”

“I guess I'll let you two lovebirds be, then.” I'm glad that Buffy can't see me blush. I'm embarrassed that Elijah can.

“And now, you have to meet my Aunt Leah,” I say scanning the heads in the room. “Formally.”

He had met her one time already. It was when he dropped me off after we had made out for the first time on a bench in some park we were walking by. I was worried that my lips looked red and chapped. Aunt Leah had said hi and he just nodded and snuck off while she was asking me whether I had forgotten my key or not.

“So that's Elijah from Saskatoon,” she had said after. “Cute. Must be nice to have something from home.” And I had agreed — sometimes I felt like he was all I had.

My eyes stop on Aunt Leah. I think about how no one would ever have guessed what she used to be doing for a living. How she got beat up. How she has become my guardian. I think about how confident she looks as she chats with that skinny guy, in her velvet dress, thumbing the gold beads she's hung around her neck.

“That's her over there,” I say to Elijah.

“I know. I've met her before,” he says, though he hadn't, not really. We walk over. Aunt Leah shakes his hand and soon they are talking intimately. I go to get Elijah a Coke, and when I return, Aunt Leah has her hand on Elijah's shoulder and is scanning his face with her eyes as they talk.

“Here,” I say, handing Elijah the Coke. He nods his chin, his eyes squinted at Aunt Leah.

“Just think about it, Elijah,” Aunt Leah says to him, then leaves to refill the chip bowl with Doritos.

“Think about what?” I ask him when she's gone. We are leaning up against the wall side by side, our bodies touching.

“She wants me to try and get you to call your dad. But I'm not supposed to tell you about it.”

I am shocked. So shocked that I can see the candy-red blobs jumping off my own mid-section. “Why would she do that to me behind my back?” I ask myself out loud.

“I know,” Elijah says. “As far as I'm concerned, your dad deserves what he got. He left you pretty much alone in the house for like, months. You don't owe him anything.”

“I've been getting along just fine without him.”

“Totally,” he says with a grin.

Despite our combined resolve, I struggle with the growing intensity of my anger, which is still rising within me, quickening my breathing, making my mouth grow dry.

Aunt Leah walks by on her way back to the kitchen. I grab her by the arm.

“Stay out of my business,” I say to her. “I don't have to do anything I don't want to.” She looks from me to Elijah and back to me. Whitney Houston's “Greatest Love of All” pours out from the stereo.

“Maya, he's my brother,” she says, reaching for my arm. “I told him I would try. It's the least I can do. He feels bad about it all.”

“I don't care anymore,” I say. “He had his chance.”

“But he
is
your father.”

“He's not my father!” I scream. “Everyone knows my mom fucked some other guy.
He
's the actual keeper of my DNA.
He
's my father.”

Unfortunately for me, the song ends just before this last part. Whitney has just told me that learning to love myself is the greatest love of all. The room turns silent. We are all stuck in one tight ship of awkwardness.

Elijah breaks it up. “Yeah, so Maya. I better get going,” he says turning towards the door.
This shit is messed up
, I'm surprised to hear him think, though he is surrounded by a wonderfully warm mess of light the colour of green moss.

He opens the door and leaves. I don't say goodbye.

I feel dizzy. Like we are all suddenly on a huge merry-go-round and I'm the only one who wants to get off.

Other people start to leave, to slowly slip out of the room. The next words I hear are from inside Buffy's head:
She's just being honest
, she thinks.
It'll work out
.

Soon the lights are on. All the candles have gone out. Only me, Buffy, and Leah remain. Someone has stolen that package of cigarettes off the altar and the photo of my mother has fallen onto its side. Marigold petals are crushed on the floor.

“You sure know how to clear a room, kid,” Aunt Leah says. She walks down the hallway towards her room.

Buffy asks if I want to have a bath.

“Not right now.”

“The place must be a mess,” she says, trying to change the subject. She holds up her camera from where it hangs between her neck and balances it on top of her thin arms. She clicks randomly around the room, and then at me.

“Maybe you should go to bed now, Buffy.” And she does, leaving me alone in the living room, paper skulls torn up around me on the couch.

I wait for Buffy to sleep so I can listen to her thoughts. They aren't about me. She's worried about an upcoming exam and some photo she took that her teacher said is overexposed. But then I hear something that I may be making up within my own mind. It's Buffy's voice, but seems like it's coming from my mother.
Choose your actions carefully
, she says.
Guilt can cripple you
.

I lie down on the futon and close my eyes, but my confusion over all that has happened keeps me awake.

I say sorry to my mother out loud, softly. I say it over and over until I believe that it is how I feel.

I sleep long enough to have one short dream: I'm back at my house in Saskatoon, in the backyard. Only it's different than before. The sky is orange and the evergreens that used to line our fence have morphed into palm trees. I can hear ocean waves lapping up against the other side of our shed. There is no more teepee. And through the kitchen window I can see another family — mom, dad, girl, boy, matching blond hair on all of them, and blue eyes. I notice they are all made of wax, but are moving like normal people despite their stiff, animated faces. They eat spaghetti and laugh as the boy juggles bags of Doritos while smoking a cigarette. The mom is holding the dad's hand across the table. The girl's smile is wide enough to show her plastic teeth.

We are at Elijah's house; it's been two years since I first visited him there. I have my spine pressed out flat on the carpet of his bedroom. Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night
is grasped in my outstretched arms — I'm moving my lips over the words. He is sucking on a cigarette by the window, blowing smoke into the August air.

“So, I was thinking about how we could celebrate your sixteenth birthday,” he says between puffs. I drop the book, intrigued.

“How?”

He flicks the cigarette out the window and lands with his knees on either side of my waist.

He leans down and puts his lips on mine. Tiny suns light up in front of my eyes. I kiss him then pull my head away to say thank you. He pushes his pelvis closer to me, pinning me down by the groin.

“Elijah, really, stop.”

“What if we didn't?” he says.

We had never not stopped before. It was usually at about this point that I felt my mother in the room with us, pinching her lips and shaking her head from side to side as if to say,
he'll leave you
. As he covers my neck in needle-point kisses, I look for my mother. She isn't there, not that I can see, not that I can feel.

Elijah's head glows pumpkin orange above me.

“Maybe we could?” I say like a question as Elijah starts to take off my flowered summer shirt. Even though he has been my boyfriend for more than two years, there are things I haven't been ready to do. Things I haven't been ready for my mother to see. And now, my shorts are around my ankles and I can feel her
tsk
-ing inside my head.

“She's watching me!” I yelp. Elijah backs up a bit.

“Who's watching you?” He's got a pimple, red with a white point, at the corner of his mouth.

“My mother,” I say, embarrassed.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Maya? Dead people can't see things. They have no eyes.”

“It's just that I want to wait.”

“Okay,” he says, rolling off me, a lump in his jean shorts.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's fine, Maya. It's up to you. I don't mind getting blue balls again.”

“Is that really true?”

“Yes.” He stares at the ceiling like he wants it to open up and suck him away. I can hear Mrs. Roughen humming from the kitchen downstairs. Cooking, fixing, fiddling. She's making me a birthday dinner and cake. She's even invited Aunt Leah and Buffy over.

“What if we went in the closet?” Elijah says. “I'm sure that if your mother's spirit was here, she wouldn't be able to fit in the closet with us. It's very small and dark in there.” Somehow his logic makes sense.

“All right,” I say. “But only for kissing.”

“Sure, yeah, only that,” he says. He has already opened the closet door and is clearing out a stack of records piled up on the floor. He throws the two feather pillows from his bed into the corner and I follow him in. He clicks the door shut from the inside, leaving us in the hot dark.

“Stuffy in here,” I say. The cuffs of Elijah's hanging dress pants tickle my nose as I lie down on my back. His hands move across my front and I jump, with a sharp breath of closet air through my nose.

“Sorry, Maya, I didn't mean to scare you.”

We start kissing again. Kissing in the dark. For the first time I feel like we are truly alone. Alone with no one watching.

I put my hand down the front of his jean shorts.

And that's when the accident starts to happen. I start to emerge from myself in the darkness of the closet. I am not me. It's some other girl giving in to the ache inside her that she has tried to keep down.

“Am I hurting you?” I ask him, my hand moving.

“Oh no,” he says through a moan.

Like an invisible man, he moves himself on top of me in the dark. I push my shorts down. He stabs me between my legs.

Within five more minutes we have gone too far.

“What happened?” I ask when he is done.

“You know.” (Do I?) “We did it. I'm sorry.” He breathes quick like he just finished a race.

“Don't be sorry, Elijah,” I say, but I can feel my face not smiling.

The doorbell rings from downstairs and echoes through the walls.

“Shit, your aunt and Buffy are here for dinner.”

We shuffle around, finding underwear, pulling up shorts and me scooping up what's running down my legs.

“I need to go to the bathroom first.”

“I'll go down and see them.” Elijah pushes the door of the closet open.

Forgotten light attacks us and in the middle of it, my mother. I can't see her, but I can feel her there, sitting cross-legged on the bed, dressed in the hospital gown she died in. A lamp flickers on the night table. I start to cry.

“Elijah, she knows, she saw.” He is brushing his hair into place.

“Maya, she doesn't know. I told you. Dead people, no eyes. And besides, we were in the closet.” He pats me on the head and then turns and leaves the room. I hear Buffy talking from downstairs. Will she know too?

I stumble to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. Do I look different? Older? Is there a check mark on my forehead? Satisfied that I look pretty much the same, except for some red blotches on my cheeks, I run my fingers through my hair to pull out the tangles and go downstairs.

“Maya, happy birthday!” Aunt Leah says when she sees me.

“You already said that this morning,” I say.

“I know, but I wanted to say it again.”

“Happy birthday, Maya,” Buffy says sweetly, but I can't look at her. Luckily she can't tell.

Soon, we all sit down at the dining room table: me, Elijah, Aunt Leah, Buffy, and Conrad. He has been in the basement all day practising his magic and his forehead is sweaty.

“I swear I could eat a horse,” Conrad says, patting his thick hands on his large belly. “Bring it on, Trudie.” He rubs his fingertips from his temple to his neck, creating pink lines on his skin. I can see his chest hair poking out from under his T-shirt and the white from his scalp from under the strands sticking up on his head.

“So, Mr. Finn,” Buffy says.

“Call me Conrad,” he answers.

“Conrad, then. What is it you do?”

“Magic, my dear. I perform magic tricks. Y'know, card tricks, smoke from nowhere, rabbits from hats, ladies in half . . . the classic stuff.”

“And where do you do this, Conrad?” Buffy asks. “Where do you perform these, these magic tricks?”

“Festivals, birthday parties, wherever I'm needed. I also do a little busking in the Beaches, juggling and stuff.”

I try to imagine Conrad sweating under the summer sun while he juggles balls on the boardwalk by Lake Ontario. Who would watch?

“He works at a toilet paper plant,” Elijah says. Conrad fans his words away, trying to erase them.

“Only to make ends meet,” he says. “And of course I'm a manager there. Magic, however, is my true vocation. Nothing like showing people something that doesn't exist. That's me, Conrad Finn, Master of Illusion!”

“I'll have to take your word for it, Conrad,” Buffy says, smiling.

“In fact, I was hoping to get Maya involved in my act,” Conrad says. “She's said no, but my latest assistant has a bad case of the shingles and I've got a festival in Cabbagetown coming up. Maybe you could talk to her?” he says with a grin, trying not to look in my direction.

“I'm right here,” I say. “Why don't you just ask me?”

“Oh, okay then, Maya. Will you be my assistant in my magic show next week?”

“Next week?” Elijah says.

“Fine. I'll do it.”

“Really?” Conrad's surprised and rubs his elbows in excitement. “Wow, this is going to be really great!”

“I'll be there!” Aunt Leah says. “Wouldn't miss it!”

“Guess you're really in a giving mood today, Maya,” Elijah says.

I feel my face get hot. I look down at my fork.

Mrs. Roughen enters with the ham on a plate and places it in the centre of the table. She's got happy little sunbursts jumping around her head, and they are nice to watch. Conrad starts to cut strips of pink meat off and drop them directly into his mouth, licking his meaty fingers as he swallows. “I can't get it into me fast enough,” he says.

Elijah stares at me mischievously from across the table. His face so young and smooth compared to Conrad's. His lips are pouty, with a subtle smile, his head cocked to one side at me. I look down at the table again, but smile at our secret.

“Maya, are you okay?” Mrs. Roughen asks after she has put the yams and green beans on the table and filled everyone's glass with apple juice. “Your face is flushed. Do you feel all right?”

“Maybe a bit hot,” I say and she turns on the ceiling fan over the table. Then she places her warm hand on my forehead and pushes it in three different spots.

“You don't feel too hot, just red.”

“Maybe she's just embarrassed by all the birthday attention,” Aunt Leah says. “You know Maya, never wants any of the attention on herself.”

“Before we start eating,” Mrs. Roughen says, pushing Conrad's raised hand and fork down from his mouth. “I would just like to recognize someone who couldn't be with us today.”

My heart dribbles into my toes.

“Marigold Devine was a wonderful woman. And I am honoured to have the opportunity to celebrate the sweet sixteenth birthday of her beautiful daughter, Maya. May Mari rest in peace.”

Everyone raises their glasses of apple juice into the centre of the table, except me.

“I really think we should stop talking about my mother. I mean, we should get on with things, right?”

“Maya, Mrs. Roughen was just trying to be thoughtful,” Aunt Leah says.

“It's no problem, Leah. I can stop making reference to her, if it suits Maya best,” Mrs. Roughen says, fiddling with a large butterfly dangling from a gold chain around her neck.

“Suits me fine,” Conrad says as he piles mashed yams into the middle of his plate.

Then, I decide to go for it. To tell everyone what I have been thinking since Elijah and I started dating.

“I have an announcement to make,” I say, and Elijah's eyes grow wide. I hear snippets of
What could it be?
and
Is it something bad? Is she knocked-up?
from various minds around the table.

And from Elijah:
Don't tell them what I think you're going to tell them, Maya.
I tell him not to worry, but I'm not sure if he hears me.

“I think that I should move in here.” No one says anything. “I mean, it's been almost three years since I left Saskatoon. I don't need my father anymore. In fact, I don't want to ever see him again.”

“Don't say that, Maya,” Aunt Leah says.

“I should be able to live my own life now.”

“But Maya,” Buffy says. “I thought you liked living with Leah and I?”

I do like living with Aunt Leah and Buffy, but can't shake from my mind the thought of being part of a real family and having a new mother in Mrs. Roughen.

“I don't want to impose on you guys anymore, you're busy. Aunt Leah, you can't keep paying to support me. And it would be nice to have my own bedroom.”

“So, you would like Conrad and I to support you?” Mrs. Roughen says and I wonder if I have made a huge mistake. Have I ruined everything?

“My parents and her dad send cheques for her,” Aunt Leah says. “That helps a lot.”

Silence again. Elijah is smiling at me from the other side of the table.

“I say let the girl stay,” Conrad says, using his tongue to lick something from the corner of his mouth. “She and Eli seem to be getting along. She makes the kid smile, so why not?”

Mrs. Roughen erupts. “If it's all right with Leah, I would be delighted!” She stands up and hugs me from behind. “It's like I finally have the daughter I always wanted.”

After dinner, I blow out my sixteen candles while everyone watches. For presents, Mrs. Roughen gives me a silver chain with a heart pendant that she fastens around my neck. Elijah gives me a Wonder Woman comic. Not because I like comics but because he says I remind him of her.

Aunt Leah and Buffy give me a framed picture of the three of us with our arms around each other last Christmas Eve — Buffy had set the timer. Into the wooden frame are inscribed the words “The Three Musketeers,” which stirs up the icing in my stomach, leaving me with a sick feeling.

Back at the apartment, Buffy tells me they will miss me but that they are glad to see me making some of my own choices.

“Why would you want to hang around some old blind chick anyway?” Buffy says.

“I did. I mean, I do. I will still see you, Buffy.”

“I know. Thanks, kid.” She puts her tiny arms around my neck and hugs me. When she pulls away, there is a tear dripping down from under her glasses.

Buffy goes to bed and leaves me and Aunt Leah alone. Aunt Leah starts the conversation we have been having for years: “Maya, I still don't think you should give up on your father.”