Cricket in a Fist (35 page)

Putting out her own hand to stop mine, she said quietly, “Asher's not dead.”

“But I heard you say so.”

“No, we never said that. When you were ten? He came to Ottawa for some shrink conference and wanted to visit us. He wanted to meet you, and we said no. That must have been the conversation you heard.” I felt as disoriented as my mother looked. Jozef killed off once and for all, and Asher resuscitated after being dead and buried for almost six years.

“Your father used to sleep with prostitutes,” I said. “Tam-Tam told Asher, and Asher told Steven. They all kept that from you. Like you're some delicate flower that can't handle the truth. And meanwhile, you don't bother to protect me from one solitary thing. And you want to know what else I know about?” Mama shook her head. “Asher used to visit Tam-Tam when you weren't home, and he wanted to have sex with her. When she said no, he went for you.” I said to the pink door, “You're all assholes. Everyone.” Meeting Mama's expressionless face, I went on, “Helena slept with Swithin Bennett and didn't tell me. The boarding school guy. And he makes fun of her for it to his friends.”

Unmistakable sympathy flashed across Mama's face. “Pumpkin,” she started, reaching for my arm. “I know — ”

“No.” I pulled back. “You don't care. I wish I had a different mother. You're the worst mother in the world.”

“Ag?” I turned to see Minnie standing just inside the door. Someone had painted red sparkles around her eyes. Crossing her arms inside her cardigan and leaning her weight on one foot, she told me, “Cassandra says come get your hair washed out.”

Before grabbing my sister's hand on the way out of the room, I turned back to Mama, took Asher Acker's folded letter out of my back pocket and shoved it into her hand. “Agatha,” she started. I left the room before she had a chance to finish.

*

“So you didn't see her at all?” Steven said.

“I just want to be able to forget about her.” Jasmine was crying in the front seat, Steven's arm around her shoulders. He'd been standing, pacing beside his car when we left the hotel, and he hurried to meet us, checking around and behind us for ghostly figures of ex-wives. “I guess it was a fucking stupid plan,” Jasmine said. “Nothing I do ever works.” The sun was already setting and it was chilly; a brisk wind lifted dry brown leaves from the gutter. In the back seat, I buttoned my jacket and wrapped my scarf around my neck, up to my chin. Jasmine just groaned into Steven's shoulder. “Why do I have to be related to that freak?” she said. “And her fucking sophistry bullshit books.”

“But why did you ask for her forgiveness?” I said.

Jasmine ignored me. She was still angry about Steven, despite how obviously relieved she was to see him.

“You know why,” she said, finally, her voice muffled by Steven's sweater. I shook my head, and Steven said he didn't know why either.

“The accident. The fire truck.”

“No,” I said. “No, no.”

“Agatha,” said Steven. He handed me a box of tissues from the front seat, and my hands were shaking so badly, it was hard to hold them. “Sweetheart,” he said.

I choked on a sob as I tried to speak and broke into a coughing fit, still crying. Breathing hard, I waited until I was calm enough to speak. “It was my fault,” I said. “I was so mean to her that day. Right before she fell. Dad, I stole your letter from Asher Acker. The one that said all that stuff about Tam-Tam.” My voice was still shaking.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Dad. “That letter? I thought I lost that damn thing years ago. You read that?”

“I gave it to Mama,” I said. “Right before she fell.”

“What letter?” said Jasmine. “What stuff about Tam-Tam?”

“It was this horrible letter,” I said, blowing my nose. “From my other father to Dad. It said things about Mama and Tam-Tam that
were” — my voice cracked — “so, so mean. If I hadn't given her that letter, Mama and Steven would probably still be together.”

Jasmine turned around and stared at me, her face twitching almost comically. Then she lunged between the front seats and grabbed me by the hair on top of my head, pulling me towards her. I screamed in pain, trying to pry her fingers open. “Why didn't you tell me,” she howled, shaking me with each word. “This will never be over. You fucking psychopath! Why do you think you're too good to tell anyone anything? Why don't you love us anymore?”

Jasmine let go abruptly, crying out in pain herself, and then sat back, her eyes tearing, holding her wrist where Steven had grabbed it.

“Girls, that's enough.” Steven put his arm across the seat between us. “Please!” he said, as Jasmine moved toward me again, fists clenched.

“But Dad,” said Jasmine. “She made me smoke drugs.”

I gaped at this non sequitur of a betrayal, too shocked to keep crying, but Dad said, “Jasmine, please. Your sister's been doing her best. Ginny and I weren't going to stay together, Agatha, even if there was no accident.”

I sat back. “I know,” I said. And I did know. I felt my body go limp. “Why didn't you ever say that before?”

“I could have. I should have. I didn't know if it would make things better or worse. You should have told me you saw that idiot's letter. I should never have kept it. It was a piece of garbage, you know. But Agatha, there's no way anything in that letter came as a shock to your mother or changed anything for her. It couldn't have. We'd already grown apart. It was all ancient history.”

“But Tam-Tam?”

“That's right,” said Dad. “He claimed — I just don't know. I don't know if any of that was true. What he wrote — I'm sorry, Agatha, but he was the kind of person who said things just to get a reaction. You're nothing like him. Nothing.”

Jasmine leaned forward to rest her forehead against the dashboard. I smoothed my hair where my scalp was stinging.

“Agatha,” Jasmine said. “I'm sorry I pulled your hair.”

“That's okay, Jas.” I wedged myself between the seats to put my arm around her back.

“And I'm sorry I ran away when Bev's dying. Poor Lara. Does Lara hate me now?” I held her arm tightly. She had a home to go back to; my story was slipping away, everything I'd told myself for nine years.

Dad put his arm around her, too. “No. We both love you girls.”

I met his eyes in the mirror.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Look. Look! There she is.” My sister shook the hair out of her face, Dad and I each with an arm still on her back. We watched J. Virginia Morgan walk down the sidewalk from the front of the hotel, hands in the pockets of her brown leather jacket. She approached quickly, with a straight-backed, even pace, pulling out keys.

Ingo Bachmann once said that after a moment has happened, nothing can take it away again. “It'll always be true,” he said, “that we lay here under this tree on this day, and your hand was absent-mindedly pulling at the back of my shirt — no, don't stop. Agatha Winter and Ingo Bachmann. We don't need to engrave our names on any tree, because this moment is permanently engraved on every other moment that ever passed or that will ever come to be.”

“Yes,” I agreed, caught up in the Ingo Bachmann-ness of Ingo Bachmann. “Even if I saw you on the street ten years from now, and you didn't recognize me, or pretended not to see me, that couldn't undo this moment. But that means we can never take anything back, either.”

“Of course we can't,” said Ingo Bachmann.

And Virginia stepped past us. The setting sun shone on her face, making her squint. Her hair, long and slightly frizzy at the tips, shone a fake, shiny mahogany. I stared at her face as she went by. She looked like Jasmine, like my mama, as much as a cousin would. Her skin was smooth, her lips full. And she was tanned. Mama had always worn sunscreen and big, floppy hats; she'd burnt badly as a child and said it was impossible for her skin to get darker.

“Goodbye, strange lady,” Jasmine said as Virginia passed her window. She yelled, “It was an accident.”

Dad cowered, afraid this slender, tanned spectre might come too close, somehow touch him.

“Goodbye,” said Jasmine. “Goodbye.”

Dad stared at Virginia, and I watched his face in the mirror. “That's her,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus.
Jesus
. That's all? I never knew that woman.”

As Virginia opened the door of a new-looking black Saab, she turned and looked in our direction, and the wind blew her hair forward, over her shoulders. Her eyes were bright, reddish brown, and just for a moment, I thought I saw Mama turning from the stove, framed by paisley wallpaper, with a wooden spoon in her hand.
Agatha
, I heard her say.
Get off the counter. Get down from there.
I wondered if Dad was remembering Mama, too, maybe when they first met — back when she was the life of the party, his voluptuous young student, obsessed with Nietzsche and Spinoza, writing papers about parts of the brain and handing them in for him to grade.

Inside her car, Virginia fiddled with the mirror and put on glasses; Mama never had glasses. I'd met Virginia once before, eight years earlier. She'd already taken everything she wanted from the house before she told anyone she was planning to leave. I was the only one who'd watched her go; eleven floors up, I stood with a hand on my newly shaven head and watched her taxi drive off. Now we all watched together as Virginia reversed out of her parking space too quickly and stopped with a bit of a jolt before driving away.

I looked down at the shoebox in my hand. I opened it and pulled out the brightest of the faded red cranes, the others following. They dangled from the mustard yellow yarn like a mobile. It took Dad a moment to recognize them, and then he leaned to look closer. “Are those . . . ”

I nodded.

“Ginny used to make — do you girls know what those are?”

I opened my door and got out of the car. I hurried around to the back; the wind was blowing harder, and I pushed a strand of hair out of my mouth. After tying one end of the yarn securely to the car's
antenna, I tested my knot; the yarn was still strong, after a quarter of a century. I climbed back in the car.

“We know what they are,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jasmine said. “That's so cool.”

“Let's go,” I said. “You can both stay at my place, and we'll leave for Ottawa in the morning.”

“But your job?” said Dad.

“I'll tell them it's a family emergency. If they don't understand, I guess I'll have to find a new job.” I felt far less confident about this decision than I tried to sound. “I'm sure they'll understand. Okay, Dad?”

“Good girl,” he said. Jasmine and I turned to watch Mama's cranes out the back window as he pulled out onto Avenue Road. “We'll see if they hold together all the way home,” Dad said. “They're just paper, and this is a real wind.” We watched the red birds lift and flutter like a kite's tail in the sun's quickly fading crimson glow.

Eyes closed, I couldn't see or hear anything but the water against my head. If it weren't for the unforgiving porcelain behind my neck and the already cold drop of water sliding down behind my ear, I would have been perfectly comfortable. Cassandra rubbed my scalp, and I opened my eyes to see the underside of her chin, a line where beige face collided with white neck. I saw the backing of her nose ring inside her nostril. When Cassandra lifted her hands off my head, I saw that she was wearing latex gloves. She pulled them off and helped me sit up, then combed out my hair and blow-dried it before I followed her back to her station.

“Wow,” said Cassandra, and we both looked at me in the mirror. My hair was red as a crayon. In contrast, my eyebrows were almost white and my eyes bright grey, even through my glasses. “Wait right here,” Cassandra said. She came back with a box of makeup. “Take off those glasses and close your eyes.”

I hardly recognized my reflection when she was through, and not only because my glasses were off. Cassandra had given me red
false eyelashes that curled up like the spokes of a rake. Silvery-black liner surrounded my eyes, and my eyebrows were shaded a light reddish brown. My lips were as red as my hair. “You're going to look amazing tonight.”

I put on my glasses, and the lashes bumped them when I blinked. The costume was ruined now that I'd spilled my guts to Mama. It had lost all power, gone slack. I stared, deflated, at my absurdly brilliant head. I didn't even feel like dressing up and going to the dance anymore. Helena would be there with her volleyball friends, and I'd have to watch her glancing at Swithin while he ignored her. Ingo Bachmann would never go to a school dance. I only wanted to sit down with Mama and hear her explain herself. My anger had faded, and I was eager for the earnest discussion that comes after a fight.

“Enjoy it, babe,” said Cassandra. “That colour will start fading as soon as you shampoo.”

She'd turned me into someone else.

Mama was already in her coat when I got to the door, and Minnie wiggled her bum as I readjusted her in my arms. “You're getting heavy, Fireman Jeffrey,” I told her, making her giggle crazily. With a bit of a struggle, I disentangled her limbs from my body and set her on the floor, and she grabbed my hand. Mama kissed TamTam's cheeks, and I watched for any sign of change. Any indication that her mother had changed for her today, the way Mama changed for me when I read Asher Acker's letter. Instead of the usual air kiss, Mama's lips made unabashed contact with Tam-Tam's cheek, and she leaned forward to hold her mother in a close, weary hug. Surprised, Tam-Tam patted the middle of my mother's trench-coated back.

Mama stood at the top of the stairs, holding the door open, waiting for me and Minnie to go through. “Go ahead,” I said. Mama sighed and started down the staircase. I watched her back, her harried gait. Mama click-click-clicked on her high heels. Still walking, she turned to look back at us. Minnie's fire truck was on the next stair, and I realized Mama hadn't noticed it, that she was on a collision course. “He was right, in a way,” she called up to me.