Greedy Little Eyes (25 page)

Alice had been increasingly moody lately. I wondered if her impending high school graduation had caused this, fear of committing to more school or work. During these dark withdrawals of hers she was not terribly verbal, but she often left her sketchbooks lying around for me to see.

Tarry-eyed sinister gremlins now loomed large and
menacing over her fairies. Meanwhile the fairies themselves had slimmed down, become bony and shrouded, their wings wrapped like a bat’s around their shoulders. And Alice kept herself covered too; suddenly she avoided changing clothes in front of me. The one time I walked in on her, I saw a ladder of purple striations up the backs of her thighs.

“What happened to you?”

She jumped and pulled a sheet off the bed to hold in front of her.

Glancing over her shoulder at her legs, she said, “I sat out on my friend’s fire escape for a cigarette and the steps left marks on me. Weird, eh? Guess I’m not getting enough vitamins.”

It looked more like she’d been struck with wire or something. Repeatedly.

“You smoking these days?”

She rolled her eyes. “Once in a blue moon.”

“What friend is this, anyway? Have I met her?”

“Do you
mind
?” she said with forced levity, indicating that she wanted to get dressed, and shoved me out her door.

Not long after, she didn’t come home for five nights running. Calling only once during the hours when she knew no one would be around, she left a message that she was sleeping over at a friend’s. The school phoned; she hadn’t been showing up there either. Our father was incensed that she had not left a phone number, but all he could do was quietly fume and try to wheedle from me what I knew.

“I’m not her mother,” I snapped, and immediately regretted it.

Alice reappeared as suddenly as she had vanished. I was at the store and had just gone in back to make myself coffee. When I came back out, a teenaged girl jerked her hand from the display case. I knew she had been feeling around in back of the fine art pens looking for a way in.

Straightening now, she gave me an exaggerated cocky grin like something out of
West Side Story
. Rock ’n’ roll scrawny, she was older than I had first thought, though it was hard to tell with the way her papery skin clung to her mean little face bones and wiry arms. Her hair was dead-cat black, cut into punky layers. Sand-coloured roots showed here and there. She wore a studded belt on her slack black jeans and the sleeves to her denim jacket were rolled to show tattooed bands of thorn and vine on either wrist.

“Can I help you?” I asked her.

She looked to another girl who was stooping over the sample books, gazing down at the deckle-edged sheets of paper from the Bloom series.

Alice.

“Hey.” My sister smiled wanly. “This paper is
beautiful
.” Her finger traced the feathery edges.

I gravitated to clean precise lines myself and these pages with their wispy uncertain perimeters agitated me on some level every time I looked at them.

“Hey, stranger,” I said as I took her in. “Where the hell have you been?”

I hadn’t expected the heavy smudges of black eyeliner, incongruous with her gold curls, though her hair was dark with grease as if she hadn’t bathed in days. Her lips were oddly pale. There was a yellowing olive patch on her jawbone, what looked like the tail end of a bruise.

She glanced sleepily at the self-styled Joan Jett, and with a start I realized they were together.

Alice’s eyes wandered back to me. She was stoned. “This is my friend, Roni. Roni, this is Angela.”

“Roni?” I repeated.

“Yeah” came her nasal reply. She gave a sharp nod. “What’s up?”

She possessed what was, to my ear, the voice of a rat, and not one from
Charlotte’s Web
. She glanced furtively at the hand-tooled Italian leather journals near her and then back at my sister.

Alice let the petal-infused page in her fingers drop, then drifted toward me and draped her arms around my neck. I watched Roni through Alice’s lank, stale curls.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever,” she said. “I miss you.”

She smelled funny. Not like herself.

“You haven’t been around much.” I had the peculiar sensation that I should remain as still as possible, let her inhale, as though my familial essence were some kind of smelling salts.

She had done this with Momma when she was small. They had held each other tight and breathed in deeply whenever some particularly dark ghoul seized them.

Over Alice’s shoulder, I caught Roni snapping up the smallest of the leather journals and slipping it into the front pocket of her jeans, then stuffing her hands deep to conceal the bulk of it.

The boldness of her move made me jump as though I’d stepped on something cold and raw. My sister eased away and looked back at Roni, then at me. It was the expression in Alice’s eyes that confused me. Something like expectation. Or perhaps
need
was more apt; she looked as though she were pleading.

I stepped back, words tripping in my throat. I didn’t know what Alice wanted.

My sister’s pal had distanced herself from the journals and was now leisurely appraising the moleskin notebooks.

“Roni,” I said evenly.

She turned her head as though I’d pulled her from deep thought. “Hey, what’s up?”

I made my way toward her, ambling as casually as she had. “Thinking of picking up a leather journal?”

“Oh.” She gave a snort of regretful hardship, glancing back at the display. “Na, too rich for my blood.”

It took all my strength at that moment not to seek out Alice’s gaze. “Maybe you were just distracted, then,” I whispered, nodding to her pocket.

She gave a shrug and shook her head as though I weren’t making much sense.

I am rarely as flabbergasted by anything as I am by unscrupulousness. I would go so far as to say I’m oddly impressed by it, the complete sense of entitlement that
accompanies a person with no ethics.

The way Roni’s hard little frame seemed to twitch made me glad I had my father’s height. I reached out, and just then both her hands flew from her pockets to fend me off.

“Easy,” I cautioned. “Your collar was flipped under.”

She touched her denim lapel, and pulled it out. Smoothing it flat, she glanced down to see the small leather book now half exposed. In a hushed squawk, she said, “Fuck you.”

“Excuse me?”

“
Fuck. You
,” she clarified, her voice level again.

She looked to Alice now and I did the same.

Without lifting her chin, Alice stared up at the ceiling. I wondered what she was hoping for at that moment, whether she wanted to be taken up bodily, or wanted help to come down.

“
What
!” Roni bawled. “I fuckin’ did it for
you
!”

My sister’s eyes dropped miserably.

“Fine.” Roni glared and added, “Take it,” as she threw the book to the floor. “I don’t give a shit.”

Alice didn’t say anything. So I did.

“This isn’t working out, Roni.”

“Shut your face,” she spat. She gave Alice an imploring look. “Are you just going to stand there?”

Alice remained mute.

“You are so pathetic.” Roni set her jaw. “Come on, let’s go.”

My sister shook her head almost imperceptibly.

“Alice. Now.”

Alice’s foot inched forward.

I set my hands on my hips.

Roni eyed me. “Alice!” she mewled, this time with something akin to fear. “This is total bullshit.” She made it to the door this time before she turned back. “You—” She jabbed a finger at my sister once. “Don’t you dare come to my place again or I’ll fuckin’—” Her voice cracked. She turned and, as she ran out the door, punched at the nearest window. The pane snapped, leaving a coin-shaped crack.

I was suddenly aware of the trembling in my limbs. “Nice thing to drag into my store, Alice.”

She scrunched her eyes shut and then opened them on me.

I paced from one side of the room to the other. “Next time, do your own dirty work.”

She nodded gloomily, walked to the window and spread her hands against the glass. The pane sighed under her fingers, and from the point of Roni’s impact a crack veined its way up through the glass, splitting Alice’s view.

Following the success of my papermaking classes I became manager of Quills, and now had my very own part-time underling to boss around. I had talked the owner into having “Quills’” red and white bottled at the local winemaking shop at a cost of three bucks a bottle. One glass per student could be incorporated
into the price of a class at a 500-percent markup and still look like a deal.

Alice, meanwhile, had graduated high school and no longer showed interest in Emily Carr College. Fascinated by the rose petals, grass blades and glitter infused in our designer paper, she took up papermaking classes with my well-heeled wine drinkers, and, true to form, the concoctions she came up with were mesmerizing for both their visual splendour and tactile allure. Several of her classmates bought up whatever she created.

“I’m thinking I might buy the shop.”

“What shop?” I asked, staring at our father over dinner.

“Quills,” he said mildly, but his eyes were giddy.

He looked at Alice.

I looked at Alice.

“I’ve been thinking for some time about investing in my own business, a family business. I had considered picking up some kind of franchise, but why do that if the whole family is going to be working down there anyway. It’d make sense to just buy Quills.”

He clearly expected a grateful reception.

“The whole family isn’t working there,” I said quietly. “Alice takes classes.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Well”—he swallowed—“uh, she’s making paper that’s better than anything the store can order.”

My father and sister watched me expectantly.

“Alice is good at whatever she does,” I said.

“You really are, Alice,” Daddy gushed. “Your mother was like that but she didn’t throw herself into a thing the way you do. You know, we could expand and make a little gallery in the back. It’d be a great showcase for those fairies of yours.”

My sister beamed. “Oh my god! Angie, what do you think? Wouldn’t it be fun! And we could be together all the time and—”

“Quills isn’t for sale.” I forced as much calm matter-of-factness into my tone as I could muster, but my chest had tightened.

“I ran into your boss,” my father explained. “She says you’ve really made this business into a decent little profit maker, Angela. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to sell the place but now, after what
you’ve
done with it …”

Something in my expression caused Alice’s face to fall. “Maybe Angie doesn’t want to work in a paper shop forever, Dad. She might want to go back to school and learn to be a business tycoon.”

My father glanced at me, surprised. “I don’t know why you’d want to do that.” He cut into his pork chop, forked a bite into his mouth and chewed as he looked at me.

I shifted my eyes to my plate, but I could feel him watching me.

“You’ve already got a flare for commerce, sweetheart. All they teach you at school is how to be a bean counter.”

Soon after, my father put his savings together with a small loan against the house and bought the store I’d been managing for two years.

Alice promptly lost interest in papermaking.

Daddy commenced pilfering stock from Quills to bring home to her as encouragement. He drew up plans to expand the shop, build the small gallery where Alice could show her work; I would curate. We could bring in other local artists too. He called a family meeting to hammer out the details, but Alice couldn’t make it.

She had gotten a job waiting tables in a Spanish restaurant over on South Cambie and had started dating Joaquin, a young Latin guitar player. A part-time waiter, Joaquin also played accompaniment for his sister, Emilia, who danced flamenco Tuesday and Thursday nights for the dinner crowd.

Alice bought a guitar and took lessons from Joaquin. She saw flamenco as her new true calling.

One night after dinner, she sat on the hearth and played us a piece. She was good, as usual.