Cricket in a Fist (11 page)

Shortly after that Christmas, Jasmine had insisted on going to church one Sunday with her Catholic step-aunt, Hilary. Christians, Dad said, were much too focused on God and godly figures. “They're always looking for something bigger and better than the world we've been given.” As far as Jasmine knew, Dad didn't believe in God at all, and she knew he hadn't meant his description of Christianity as a compliment, but bigger and better appealed to Jasmine and she wanted to see it for herself.

The priest at Aunt Hilary's church talked, like a boring teacher, about a woman who found a wallet containing a winning lottery ticket. When she returned the wallet to its owner he gave her half the money. The preacher said the lost wallet with the winning ticket was a test from God, that the woman who found the wallet and the man who shared his winnings were inspired by the Good Book. It was clear to Jasmine, with a heavy, sickening disappointment, that if there was a God, he wouldn't give a damn about lottery tickets. A winning ticket, a lost wallet: those things happened because of chance and luck and even statistical probability, but they were not magical, spiritual or transcendent. Jasmine watched Aunt Hilary and the rest of the congregation take communion as if they were
eating a snack. No one's eyes rolled back in their heads when Christ's body touched their tongues and throats and settled into their bellies. She saw no sign of God in the church, felt no goose bumps at the back of her neck, witnessed no miracles of any kind, and she came away from the experience a confirmed non-believer. Dad and Lara had always told her religion was just superstition, and she saw now that it really was made up, tacked onto things in the fakest, most obvious ways.

The bus turned onto a residential street and stopped, and three business people got off. They lived here, in rows of identical houses, steps away from the highway. She tried to imagine it. There was no corner store nearby, even. Most people's lives were so boring, just like J. Virginia Morgan said. Life was so fucking boring. And now the world's latest promise of magic had failed to take effect in the way it was supposed to. Pimps were supposed to be different. They didn't squeeze through chimneys but came into the world through the public washrooms of bus stations and malls. They weren't depicted in stained glass, but in newspaper articles. They didn't leave presents under pillows or in stockings and they didn't care about naughty or nice. They divided children into lost and loved instead and scooped the lost ones into their clutches. They were bad men, a real danger. But what if it was true about that man in the mall? That he really was a pimp and those girls really were what Benna said they were? They hadn't even been pretty and they'd talked loudly, sounding stupid.

Jasmine knew the house was coming a moment before it came into view; she knew it with a physical jolt, like waking a second before the alarm clock goes off. It was a small wooden house on the corner, boarded up with thick, dark planks, out of place on a street featuring mostly aluminum siding. The haunted house. Abruptly, she could see her big sister, hair pulled back in a ponytail, pointing and squealing, “I saw something in there. I saw a ghost, Minnie, did you see it?” Agatha's best friend, Helena, had often been there, too, on the other side of Jasmine, smelling like suntan lotion. There'd often been a smell of chlorine, and always cherry Chap Stick. Cherry Chap Stick was the smell of Jasmine's mother.

And then everything was familiar, in a vague, gut-wrenching way. The corner of a certain light blue house disappearing behind shrubs, the bend of a particular maple tree. Some of the houses seemed new and were a relief to see. An entire development of identical townhouses covered a hill Jasmine was sure had been a vast yellow field of goldenrod that used to make Mama sneeze and sneeze whenever they drove past it. Jasmine remembered the tone and force of her mother's sneezes, and how it had always seemed as if Mama was annoyed with everyone in the car for letting the yellow field exist at all. As if Jasmine, Agatha and Dad had planted it there just to make Mama's life difficult. The distant past had been this close all along, a twenty-minute, two-dollar bus ride. It was the craziest thing, all of a sudden, the vivid memory of Mama turning in the front seat, her long hair falling over her shoulders, her crooked nose perfect on her face. With each stop, the bus crowd thinned out, and Jasmine waited to see her old street. It was called Chemin d'Arthur, she knew that, but she had no idea where it was in relation to other streets. She promised herself she'd e-mail Agatha about it, as soon as she got home, and concentrated on memorizing the name of each
chemin
and
rue
the bus passed, so she could figure out later how close she'd come.

As the route map had promised, the bus stopped in a transit station, turned around, and went back the same way it had come. Back past the eerily familiar streets, back past the Community Centre and the shopping centre, back through Hull. And then she remembered something else. Boulevard des trembles — there was a park coming up.
Parc des trembles
. The tremble park, she'd called it. She'd always thought it was called the tremble park because of the pool and the sprinklers and how, running across the concrete surface, jumping through freezing bursts of water, she'd always reached her mother's deck chair shaking with cold. “Don't touch me,” Mama would squeal. “Keep your clammy little hands to yourself.” Sometimes Agatha would run through the sprinklers, too, and sometimes she would sit beside Mama, reading a book of her own. Agatha must have been thirteen or fourteen — not much older
than Jasmine was now. She had seemed so big and old and acted as if she knew everything. And Jasmine had believed her.

The bus crossed the bridge back to Ottawa, and Jasmine thought of the magazine article she'd found online about J. Virginia Morgan.
The first time I see her in the arrivals lounge of the Tucson airport,
wrote the woman who got to meet her
, she looks like the kind of person who wouldn't forget anything. She is efficiency personified. She glances at me with my cardboard sign and bombards a path straight through the weary-looking travellers. Her hair is long, auburn, perfectly sleek and straight. Her makeup is immaculate, her beige linen suit unwrinkled, and she strides on black high heels, pulling a suitcase carelessly, as though it's light as a feather. Her appearance is next to miraculous considering she's just stepped off a plane.
Jasmine climbed off the bus and bombarded through the people clustered around the shelter, glancing, striding. Her hair didn't have that squashed look that it got from the bathing cap. Lara was smart. She would notice and ask, already knowing the truth, if Jasmine had had a good swim. She would ask why Jasmine was almost an hour late. They would figure it out — that she had been making secret plans, that they didn't know her anymore, that they were on the verge of losing her bodily and had already lost her in every other way.

She didn't even arrive home late enough to get in trouble. Her transgression had made no difference to anyone. Dad wasn't home yet, Bev was watching TV in the den, and Lara was chopping vegetables for dinner, still wearing her work clothes. She had folded her black cardigan over a chair and put her gold rings and bracelets on the table. She stood bare armed in the top that matched the cardigan, and her black hair was sleek against her head, clipped back with a big barrette. Jasmine leaned against the pine counter near the fridge while Lara shredded a head of lettuce into crinkly strips, then cupped her hands to place the food in a white china bowl. She wiped the cutting board with a cloth and picked up a red pepper, examining
it from every angle before putting it down in the middle of the board. It matched the colour of her short nails.

“Jas, could you please turn on the light?” Lara had been mad at Jasmine all week for setting a bundle of paper on fire in the bathtub and leaving permanent scorch marks. But now she was being nice. If it was nice not to even care that her child was late. As Jasmine flicked the switch, the kitchen's yellow walls and stainless steel appliances looked even more like a glossy magazine photograph. Lara wiped pepper juice from the cutting board and pushed sizzling tofu slices around the frying pan. She turned and looked at Jasmine leaning against the counter with her jacket on, backpack dangling from one hand. Lara's nose was shiny, makeup softened by the heat of the stove. She smiled briefly, eyes settling on Jasmine's yellow platform shoes. Shoes were forbidden in the kitchen. Lara hesitated, then turned away.

“Dinner in twenty minutes,” she said. “The table needs setting.”

“I just need to feed Sorbet.” Stepping out of her shoes by the back door, Jasmine stopped. Soon she would run away and would never see this house again, would never again take off her shoes and place them on this blue braided rug. Never again pass this bookcase with its cookbooks, photo albums and framed wedding pictures. She examined the photograph of the whole wedding party under a canopy of trees, Dad and Lara in the middle. Jasmine had been six, the flower girl. Her father and Lara married outside at the arboretum in springtime, when all the trees were in bloom, for the benefit of the photos. Lara's cousin, a Unitarian minister, performed the ceremony, and she agreed not to mention God or anything God-related. Jasmine could tell by looking at herself in those photos that she'd believed the party was for her. She looked pleased, as if everyone, her father and Lara included, were there just to see her in that frilly peach dress, carrying her bouquet. Agatha was in the photographs, too, standing off to the side of the kissing couple. At sixteen, she had short blue hair clipped into tufts with plastic children's barrettes, black-framed glasses and a blue dress that matched her hair. She was looking down and off to the side. At least Agatha had known what was happening, hadn't relished the
photographer and the guests, hadn't skipped and spun under those carefully placed trees, splashing mud up lacy white socks and chubby bare legs. Dignity: that's what Agatha had at the wedding. What Jasmine lacked.

It wasn't long after the wedding that Agatha ran away. Jasmine had known, somehow, that it was going to happen; she'd felt strongly that her sister was about to disappear and tried to keep a close watch on her, often opening her bedroom door and peeking in to make sure she was still there. One clue was that Agatha never properly unpacked when they moved into Dad and Lara's new house. Her room had been scattered with boxes and half-full suitcases the whole time. That was when her hair had grown back in from being shaved and she was always dying it different colours. She always looked pissed off or sad, and Jasmine was the only one who could cheer her up. She liked that she had the power to make her sister look happy again; but as soon as Jasmine stopped being funny or cute, Agatha looked pissed off or sad again, until one day she was so pissed off she left and didn't come back. Agatha didn't run away for long, but it was the beginning of the end, because she never actually moved back in. She went to live with Tam-Tam and then moved away for university.

Jasmine dumped her backpack in her room, then fed her gerbil, scratching him briefly between the ears. Sorbet was light beige, and Jasmine liked playing with him and training him to do acrobatics. She wasn't mean to him, though, like circus trainers are to their animals. She just played with him, and if he seemed tired or grumpy, she gave him some space. Jasmine needed some space sometimes, too, so she knew how he felt. She bombarded down the stairs, glanced at the unset dining table as she walked past, and pushed open the door to the
TV
room. “Watcha watching?” Bev didn't understand the concept of giving someone space. She was just
there
. She didn't turn away from the car commercial on the screen as Jasmine sat at the computer desk behind the couch to check her e-mail; on the television, a sleek blue vehicle raced up the side of a mountain. “My soaps,” said Bev.

There was nothing from Agatha. Jasmine had written to her
three times since she last heard back, and even though she desperately wanted to ask if her sister remembered the haunted house and the tremble park, if their mother had really sneezed, and where their old street was, she wasn't going to e-mail a fourth time. And Agatha still hadn't even commented about the J. Virginia Morgan website Jasmine had found, or about the interviews and articles. How could she not care — Agatha was the one who'd told Jasmine about J. Virginia Morgan in the first place. Maybe she regretted that now; maybe she wished she'd kept that incredibly important piece of information to herself. What a freak Agatha could be. Every now and then she'd open up and tell Jasmine a whole bunch of stuff about herself, usually when she was home and they stayed up late together, but then she'd clam up again, hardly ever calling and treating Jasmine like a little kid.

After checking J. Virginia Morgan's website, which just had a bunch of crap about upcoming workshops, Jasmine skimmed an e-mail from Mei — something about the book they were reading in English class — and then leaned back to glare at Bev's purplish dye job. It had been neglected for so long there were two inches of white at the top. The way she was sitting, Jasmine could see Bev's profile above her sparkly blue sweater, wrinkles collapsing her face towards her mouth. The room stank of cigarettes — it was so unbelievably disgusting that Dad and Lara let Bev smoke inside. And it was surprising. These were people who ran every morning before work, who did yoga and ate low-fat everything. But Bev was allowed to stink up the house and let herself rot. “It's too late to change her now,” Dad said. “She might as well do what she likes.”

But if Jasmine found out she was dying, she wouldn't waste her time watching TV and smoking cigarettes. She would make a list of things she wanted to do while there was still time. First she would find J. Virginia Morgan. Virginia would be sorry that Jasmine was dying and would want to get to know her, but Jasmine would tell her she didn't have time. Then she would swim the English Channel. She would go into space, even if it meant dying there. She would do anything it took to get on a rocket and go into orbit. She was determined to be an astronaut, and it filled her with panic to contemplate
failing in this goal, to think of spending the rest of her life stuck to the earth. Benna Hadrick, Jasmine knew, didn't believe in her dream. More and more, Jasmine found herself thinking that Benna was surprisingly, dismayingly lacking in imagination.