The Road Narrows As You Go (61 page)

Essa possessed a brassy, charismatic influence over Wendy from the start. Her love for the child was bone-deep and it was easy to convince herself she had been the one pregnant and in labour. It felt like it. She didn't know when the right time was to say something, so she never quite got around to telling Essa that her real mother was incarcerated in California. No more California—the baby was her world now. Now her world was brand new, softer than suede, with big brown eyes and light brown skin, ravenous and in charge.

Once she was weaned, Essa's diet consisted primarily of sweets. She loved treats and loathed real food. In a social situation she would throw a tantrum if anyone other than Wendy so much as spoke to her. Then in a remarkable adjustment she became a leader on the playground in gradeschool, a straight-A brown-noser, and obsessed with boys. Essa's big personality divided her classmates into friends and foes. Boys and girls vied for her attention or bullied her, there was no in-between.

Essa at four popped the lid off the maple syrup and gulped the bottle, ran naked around the house for hours and hours, and passed out into such a deep near-coma sleep Wendy called an ambulance.

Essa at five asked her mom, Does the actors get money for every time they're on TV?

Essa at nine wrote and directed her own play based on E.C. Segar's
Popeye
that she performed every recess for a week at her elementary school with an all-boy cast, except for herself in the role of Olive Oyl.

Essa at the age of eleven read all the
Brenda Ransom
novels in the bestselling series by the young adult author Susanna L. Massari.
Brenda Ransom Solves the Psycho Puzzle
,
Brenda Ransom Solves the Teen Cult Conspiracy
, and so on, hugely popular among her peers, the last generation of high school girls to not have e-mail addresses. Never occurred to Wendy to investigate the background of the reclusive author who had her daughter so obsessed. Brenda Ransom was an independently minded, bluehaired seventeen-year-old Californian who ran circles around her teachers, and stumbled into mystery after mystery. Essa began to model herself after the heroine: she dressed and acted like Brenda Ransom, repeating her credos—
Freedom has no shame! You snooze, you lose!
and so on—and set about turning her bedroom into an imaginary detective agency.

Essa was a sullen, introverted daughter who rarely spoke at home except to drolly mock her mother's absent-minded habits and neurotic attitudes, but at the same time she was an outgoing and vivacious friend or rival in the halls of high school and nearby shopping malls. Then
one evening near the end of grade eleven, when the cherry blossoms were out and kites took to the sky, she asked her mother if Tom could come for dinner. Tom was her first serious boyfriend. The other eleven ex-boyfriends were secrets Wendy never knew about. So this was kind of a big deal to Essa. Asking if he could come for dinner was a signal she was
serious
. Or maybe even
in love
. Could her mother handle that? Wendy said a dinner guest was fine by her, and steeled herself. She was going to make mushroom risotto and eyeball this so-called boyfriend right down to the DNA. After all, this was the year 2001, and advancements in the art of diagnosing a faker had improved greatly since Wendy was her daughter's age.

In the mid-nineties, when Essa was old enough to entertain herself for hours at a stretch, Wendy had found time to draw comics again. A good thing, too, because around then the trickle of royalties she counted on to pay bills was down to a drip—sometimes a half-year cheque arrived for as little as three cents. It meant a mother-daughter roadtrip to the Bay was required so Wendy could crack the lock on her self-storage unit and begin the task of separating out the rarities from the bulk of stuff, deciding what to keep, what to protect, and what to sell. Tens of thousands of dollars' worth of original drawings, rare books, comics, toys, and other memorabilia. She estimated her haul would cover expenses for two or three years. Not knowing what to do with the six film canisters containing the 35 mm reels for the final cut to
The Strays Summer Christmas Special
made the thought of them stacked there in the icebox belted to the seat next to Essa distract her for the whole drive home. The film canisters sat on the floor of her bedroom closet for the rest of Essa's summer vacation, gleaming in the dark like the armour scales off a dragon. That fall, when eBay launched, Wendy saw her opportunity.

The self-storage unit proved to be worth a great deal more than she originally figured, largely thanks to Hick Elmdales's collection of
near-priceless books. A decade later, she was still living off the shelves of No Manors.

It was Essa who convinced her to set up a website where she could post the comics she'd been drawing in her spare time. Pretty soon she was posting up to six strips a month, and in a matter of months she started to get hundreds of thousands of unique daily views, though she didn't know it. She was largely unaware of the extent of her readership or of the software that would count visits to her site. Her sense of her website's popularity came from the number of orders for
Orphans
merchandise (mugs, shirts, etcetera) she got through an online retailer she linked to, and that accounted for up to five thousand dollars a month, not bad. Everything about comics she used to do over the phone with Gabby and through contracts signed in septiplicate and original artwork shipped UPS was now done inside her home computer, with the help of her daughter in exchange for pocket cash. All the editing, printing, publishing was done in her drawing studio. She had no need for a travelling strip salesman to push her work on moribund newspapers, or an editor to plan her life, let alone a syndicate when she could lease a domain name for so cheap and design a page to present her comics exactly how she wanted them to look. Once in a while an editor at a syndicate would e-mail her with a friendly,
Hey, I'm a huge fan of Orphans—so funny! If you're ever interested in talking about the ins and outs and benefits of syndication, I'd love to tell you more. You're making one of my favourite online comics.

Orphans
didn't have a prescribed set of characters or concepts; instead it presented Wendy's most imaginative and unconnected short stories of no more than thirty pages, but more commonly three or four pages— weird, often disturbing comics with an autobiographical tinge. One early story depicts the inhabitants of the last land mass remaining on Earth after the big ice melt. The characters live in shanty homes on stilts to protect them from the tides that engulf most of their island every tide—it's not exactly funny material, but the characters are charming.

In another storyline, a gang of loitering teens behind a 7-Eleven pass the time playing games that are reminiscent of the ones we used to play at No Manors (comics that use wordplay for titles; Golden Era characters not in gloves; the result if two superheroes had children). There are moments of enlightened dialogue that make you laugh in admiration and poignant stories of heartfelt realism. There's an overarching sense of loneliness and guilt, or shame.

Not that the digital buzzer to Wendy's penthouse suite sounded in the least like the electric one at the front door of No Manors, but as soon as we arrived in the lobby, a wave of emotions rolled through us, transforming every sound, smell, and sight into vivid associations of our shared past. All of a sudden our reunion here in Victoria was conjuring powerful auditory hallucinations that were in effect like time travel, taking us from the year 2006 to the year 1981 when our identities were conceived.

We embraced, wept with nostalgia, and looked each other over. She blamed her grey hairs on a lack of sleep. If anything she'd lost weight. Her hips stuck out in the tight jeans and so did her breasts in the sweater, her arms were thin, and her legs tapered to tiny ankles, but maybe she was pretty and it was we who were expecting the girl who was always so attractive for going out of her way to make a clown of her fashion sense. Twenty years later and her neck craned out over her rolled shoulders, a returning-to-fetal posture that was the sure mark of a dedicated cartoonist. Permanent spinal deformation. She asked if we wanted anything to drink and brought us beer and homemade coconut Nanaimo bars (another flashback, almost as potent as flesh).

Wendy was sorry to learn Mark had been living with HIV after receiving a blood transfusion in the mid-nineties, and that Patrick was bankrupt and once again forced to live off the avails of the laundry hamper, and that she had missed Twyla's wedding to Blair Slobodchikoff in Golden Gate Park and she was just as sorry to hear about their divorce.
Discovering Blair was a compulsive philanderer ended the marriage after sixteen months, but Twyla remarried two years later. With this second guy she had a seven-year-old Sims video game prodigy named Jeff with whom they lived in Berkeley and she and her husband both worked as creative heads of businesses in the local animation industry surrounding Pixar.

We congratulated ourselves on the three point three (at last count) million views
The Strays Summer Christmas Special
had on YouTube, and remarked on the odd route it had taken to find its viewers. We told her about the offer we had to publish a kind of collective memoir of our experiences living at No Manors and that we hoped it would be a portrait of her especially, and, knowing us, she gave her approval. And she told us the story of her daughter, Essa.

After we were caught up on life, a silence fell upon us that seemed to beg a question. Although we didn't know the words to use to ask, they were hanging in the air. Wendy could sense it, she knew what we wanted to know and how to articulate the answer. She confessed something to us that afternoon. She said she was moved to tell us because we had come all this way to see her after almost twenty years, and she felt we deserved to know something of the truth after all this time.

I knew Frank wasn't on the level, she said. First time I met him at Coppola's restaurant with Gabby, I knew he was crooked. Just to see him. His face was all wrong. The toupée was nothing. His face was split down the middle, like a fault line running vertically down the middle of his face, so that one eye was squinted up a little higher than the other. In her memory, his nose looked broken to the left. The fault line split his smile in half to form more of a swaggery snarl. I was turned on just thinking about his secrets. When he asked me to open all those bank accounts at Solus, I played along. I played along when he took me on a trip to Central America to meet with factory managers and deposit large amounts of cash into offshore accounts. I played dumb. Because I loved him, I pretended not to notice. I was hooked. But I saw everything and I knew. His lie
turned me on. What else could it be that drew me to him? I loved him. And I loved being so close to his secret. I could taste the briny deep of his secrets on his skin even after his shower. I knew his secrets better than he did. I really think he was in denial about his crimes. I wanted to see what would happen to us, if he was smart enough to get away with it. He never said a word to me about his choices but it didn't matter, I knew before I signed with him what he was. He was bad and I was so tired of chasing good. Then one day I forced him to admit it. I had to hear him say it. I don't know why. I guess because I kept having these dreams of what my life would be like if I went to Chris Quiltain and the DA and spat out everything I knew. I wanted to test Frank. And I remember, he said he would tell me, but he couldn't say over the phone, so he would write it down. We were on the plane to D.C. to appear before the fucking subcommittee, and he wrote it on a piece of paper from my sketchbook:

I paid off Kravis to buy some stock. That's it. One time.

Another lie. But she even found something sweet in the lie, it was a white lie, a token of the truth, like a pair of earrings for his lover, and Wendy could wear this lie with pride.

That's okay, she told him and kissed his forehead. I understand.

She told us that after she read the note, Frank took it back from her and instead of tearing it to pieces he stuffed it in his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. What was I supposed to do? she said. I just took a deep breath and put my hands on his face and kissed him. I knew he wouldn't tell me the truth. How could he? It would put us both in greater danger. And what did it matter? I loved the liar. But then I caught him making out with Manila Convençion at the awards, and that was it, I'd had enough. I was shattered.

It's just you and your daughter here? we asked.

Someone else buzzed me a while ago, she said in an all-new tone of voice, drained of any apparent humour as she thought about it. Frank showed up at my old apartment unannounced five years ago, back in the
summer of 2001. The same evening my daughter Essa had invited her boyfriend over for dinner.

Students of relativity: Time's slowest minute can be found in prison. Time served in California's minimum-security facility bore down on Frank Fleecen's physical wellbeing with not as much sheer force as on his mental health, which got a pounding. It didn't show but he suffered greatly from the deprivation. His mental health was doubled over sobbing. Meanwhile his external self was a goddamn Doric column showing only a few chips and cracks in the face of it. He was used to making his own schedule and living by his own routine, eating what he wanted to and when, with three or four phones on the go at all times and dozens of tasks to delegate. The part of him that needed his desk and a cellular phone on his hip, who needed to operate at a racehorse's pace for twelve-fifteen hours a day or go mad, that part of him repented with excruciatingly swift deliverance.

Then she told us the strange story of the day he buzzed from the lobby of her building unannounced. The Frank she opened her door to was pretty much the same except for one very significant change—he was bald. Ditched the toupée. She caught her jaw dropping. His dome was immaculate. The naked pate exposed more than skull: everything about his face changed. Without a comical distraction above, the bare scalp brought out the squareness in his jawline and the penetrating lustre in his almost black eyes. And yet he was the same Frank, hairpiece or no—brooding Frank, with all the energy she remembered falling in love with against her better judgment. That unwavering stare of his that drilled straight through your pupils, right through your brain and out the other side of your head, not even looking at you but seeing your
wants
—she liked that. How he would hold your eyes with his gaze and talk until you said yes. She remembered the once most powerful man on Wall Street. How could she forget? For years she would be listening to some innocuous radio program in the afternoon and the name Frank Fleecen would come up, and sometimes even her old
name, in reference to some recent crime or boondoggle perpetrated upon an unsuspecting innocent public.