Girl in Shades (25 page)

“Eleanor, I have to say this dinner is like nothing I have ever had,” my father said.

“Not since your own mother made it for you, I'm sure. How is Frances?”

“Mom and Dad are fine. They retired out to PEI years ago. Well, you know that.”

“I have a vague recollection, yes. And your younger sister . . . what was her name?”

“Leah. Leah's doing okay. She's with them. Trying to decide between universities right now.”

“Marvellous. I'm sure she'll have a wonderful future.”

Then the conversation turned to me. I heard it myself from the floor of the living room, tilting my head towards the kitchen to make sure I didn't miss any (they thought I was with Mother in the backyard).

“And Maya,” Grandmother McCann said. “Do you expect that Maya will be able to attend university some day?”

“I don't see why not, Eleanor, if she chooses to. Why?”

“No reason, Steven. It's just that, who knows what kind of genes she's carrying around.”

Silence from the kitchen. And then my father: “Eleanor, I would appreciate it if you would never make such a comment about my daughter again. You're lucky we're letting you near her at all.” (He spoke in a harsh whisper and she answered back in the same, which may be one of the reasons I was able to block the conversation out in later years. Like if it happens in a whisper, there might be more of a chance that it didn't happen at all.)

“Steven, I can assure you I meant no disrespect. You know I'm sorry for all that, I wasn't in my right mind back then — the heartache I've carried. You certainly didn't have to leave and make it worse.”

A pause. My father is thinking that he hates this woman.

“I can assure you, Maya will be fine. We've made sure of it.”

“And have her looks posed any sort of problems in school?”

“Excuse me, her looks?”

“Yes, the coloured skin. That's most definitely not from anyone in our family.”

“No, Eleanor, her skin colour has not posed any problems. Thank you for your concern.” My father's voice was getting louder, and I thought I heard a piece of cutlery drop onto his plate. I took a step back from where I knelt on the carpeting.

“I know it's uncomfortable, but I had to address it. After all, I told you from the beginning it would not be smooth sailing, raising that child.”

“She is my child, Eleanor!” This was said very loudly, and was followed by my father's plate crashing to the ground and bits of carrots and gravy flying around the room and into where I was in the living room. My father stormed out to the backyard and my grandmother stayed at the table. I walked in a few minutes later to find her dabbing the corner of her eyes with a Kleenex.

“What's wrong with Father?” I asked her.

“He's haunted by the past is all, Maya. As we all are. As you will be one day.” She crossed her thin legs at the ankle and showed her bravery by tucking a grey strand of hair behind her ear. I started to pick up the pieces of carrots that had flown from my father's plate into the living room, placing them one by one into the palm of my hand.

The back door opened and in came my mother, limping in on the arm of her husband.

She walked to where Grandmother Eleanor sat on the couch, lifted and dropped her shoulders in one heavy breath and said: “Mother, I thank you for cutting through all your past misgivings about my family to come and be with me at the final stages of my illness. But I'm afraid I must ask you to leave now. I will no doubt see you in heaven one day.”

My grandmother cried real tears then, which she tried to soak up with the side of her hand. Her light was a very murky grey and close to her body. She started to whisper like a mother to her little girl: “But Marigold, I love you. You're my daughter.” And when she said it, I saw splotches of pink around her face, which told me that she really meant it. I suppose she was just doing the best she could.

I couldn't get past the two words that had come from my mother's mouth. Those two words that sounded so irreversible: final stages.

The next night, Grandmother McCann took the red-eye flight back to Toronto. She left my father meals for four nights, arranged in Tupperware in the freezer.

Elijah takes me on the St. Clair streetcar down a street with tall trees and to his house. It's a half-house, connected to another, ancient, brick, painted red with a wooden front porch in need of repair. We walk through the front door, and there behind the kitchen counter, is Mrs. Roughen: she's dressed in a purple sweatshirt, her hair hanging limply on her shoulders, no jewellery.

“Hi, Mrs. Roughen.” I slip off my worn penny loafers and hold my backpack close in front of my chest for protection.

“Well, I never, in all my life . . . Maya! Let me look at you.”

I just smile, trying to forget about how she used my mother in an attempt to become someone important, and trying to remember how sad she really was, and how she tried to listen when Mother needed someone to talk to.

She comes out from behind the counter. Her hands are covered in flour but she puts them on my shoulders anyway. “A little skinny and you need a trim.” She holds my split ends up to the light. “But you look good, Maya. It's great to see you.” Mrs. Roughen has tears in her eyes. She wraps her arms around me and hugs. “You remind me a lot of your mother,” she says from over my shoulder.

“Okay, lay off, Mom. She's not some sort of specimen,” Elijah says.

It is the first time I have come to Elijah's house.

It is the seventh time we have met up since that first day at the Retro Café nine months ago.

It is the first time I have seen him since summer ended and he and Mrs. Roughen returned from her boyfriend's cottage in Muskoka.

“We're just going upstairs for a while, Mom,” Elijah says.

I follow Elijah up the narrow wooden staircase, stopping at a picture on the wall of a chubby man in a blue tuxedo, holding a white rabbit in the air.

“It's my mother's boyfriend, Conrad,” Elijah says. “He's a magician.” We reach the top of the stairs, which are covered in green carpeting that's been worn down. “This is his house, so I guess we're lucky to have it. We were living in a crappy basement before — it's all we could afford with my mom's job at the flower shop.”

“I like this place,” I say, stepping over an empty laundry basket in the middle of the hallway.

“Come into my room.”

“Let me guess, you've got something to show me?”

“Not unless you ask nicely,” he says, laughing.

Elijah's room is bare except a mattress on the floor with a blue comforter, a small wooden desk without a chair, and a
Joshua Tree
poster on the wall. He sits down on the bed.

“Remember that time we kissed in the shed?” he says.

“Yeah, you kissed me.” I stand by the door, pinching my elbows with my fingertips.

“Want to try again? You can kiss me this time.”

“I don't think so,” I say.

“I'll sit here and you can do it. I won't move.” My feet take a step towards him without my permission. “C'mon, do it as a thank-you . . . for the bees that day.”

“That really was crazy, Elijah. Someone could have had a reaction or something.”

“I like to live dangerously,” he says, his mouth curling up just a bit in one corner.

“Still . . . it was nuts.”

“Boo!” he springs forward, pushing his hands into the bed.

“Stop it.”

“Sorry. Seriously, I won't bite. Not unless you want me to.” He bounces his eyebrows up and down.

“Just a small one then.” I lean my head forward again, closer to his face so I can smell cherry Chapstick on his lips. I place a small peck on his cheek, and pull away.

“That wasn't so hard was it?” he says smiling.

He puts his arm around my shoulder and strokes my hair, sending flutters down my neck and back. “You're very beautiful, Maya.”

I don't know what to say, and luckily, I am saved by a knock at the door.

Thump, thump.

I hear a frenzied voice:
What's going on in there? This is my house. Who is he with? I'll just check. I'll just see. Maybe she'll work in the act?

“What is that guy talking about?” I exclaim to Elijah.

“Who, me?” Elijah looks confused. “I just said you were beautiful.”

“No . . . I meant . . .”

Thump, thump.

Elijah gets up and opens the door.

“Conrad,” he says.

I stick out my neck to see a balding, short, slightly pudgy man standing in the hallway with his hands in the pockets of his too-tight acid wash jeans. He's got his lips pursed together in an innocent smile, turquoise streaks shooting from his neck.

“Just checking if everything's a-okay,” he says.

“What do you want, Conrad?”

The man steps into Elijah's room.

“So this is the Maya I've heard so much about?” I nod. “You are a beauty, aren't you?” The man rubs his cheek with his palm, around and around.

“This is my mom's boyfriend, Maya. Conrad.” Conrad reaches out his hand to me and I shake it. Sweaty. He smiles, though, in a friendly way.

“What act did you mean?” I ask.

“Pardon me?” he says.

“Oh, I meant . . . Elijah says you perform magic?”

“Well, only in my free time,” he says, his face swelling red. “It's a hobby really, for the fun of it. Mostly parties and charity functions.”

“Conrad works in a toilet paper factory.”

“Is the manager of a toilet paper making facility, Eli,” Conrad says to Elijah, tapping him on the shoulder gently. Elijah rolls his eyes. “Anyway, kids, I just wanted to say hi. Guess I'll go and watch the news with Trudie.”

“Bye, Conrad,” I say. He has a certain chaotic charm to him, like a father who would be really easy to talk to.

“Nice to meet you, Maya.” He trips on the carpet on the way out the door, saying oops out loud and
fuck
in his mind.

“He's a little bit of a freak,” Elijah says after he leaves. I laugh and look down at the floor, wondering what comes next.

“So can I kiss you now?” Elijah asks. “For real?”

I make a snort with my nose, like he's made a joke, but I can hear him getting frustrated inside with me.

Later, we have dinner downstairs with Mrs. Roughen and Conrad. She has cooked a roast beef. “Special for your visit,” she says to me when I sit down.

We sit. And everyone eyes me for a while. Up and down, around and around while I pick at my carrots with a fork and chew on my bottom lip. Then finally, Mrs. Roughen speaks again: “So Maya, how have you been
doing
?”

“I'm fine,” I say and it feels untrue, because I can feel how utterly thrilled Mrs. Roughen is to finally have another boyfriend. Now that is
fine
. And Conrad, he seems to care about what she says, and his thoughts (which are fast-paced and frantic most of the time) seem to calm down when she speaks.

“Is it hard?” she continued. “You know, without your mother.”

“God, Mom!” Elijah says. “Give it a rest!”

“Sorry, honey.” She tries to change the subject. “And how is your father doing? I heard that he has a new girlfriend as well.”

My throat tightens. Pounding in my ears.

“Maya, honey, you're going so red.”

“Mom, just leave her alone. She doesn't keep in touch with her dad, okay?”

“Oh gosh, I'm sorry, Maya,” Mrs. Roughen says. “I just thought that since he called Elijah . . .”

Pounding, pounding
in my ears, from somewhere.

Conrad starts thinking loudly —
Magic rules. Number 1: Perform a trick only after you've perfected it.

“Don't you think it's important that you keep a good relationship with your father though, Maya? He's all the close family you have left.”

Number 2: Never let them see you sweat.

“I've got my Aunt Leah,” I manage to squeak out without tearing up.

“You're making her upset,” Elijah says. “Her dad left her alone — he's a jerk.”

Number 3: Keep your secrets to yourself.

“It's just that I really don't feel like talking about it.”

“And why should you?” Conrad says. “You've got other things to concentrate on now.” He smiles at me and shows the rot forming along the sides of his bottom teeth. He looks at me with sympathy, almost like a father would. Only this is no family dinner. This family is unreal in every respect.

After dinner, Elijah brings me home.

“I'm sorry,” he says again. “You know how my mom can be.”

“It's okay.” And I mean it.

He kisses me on the doorstep of Aunt Leah's apartment building before I go up. A long, deep kiss that tastes like smoke and leaves us both breathless.

On November 2nd, a Monday, Buffy decides to throw a Day of the Dead party in our apartment. Leah complains that it should be a Halloween party and that no one will show up, but Buffy insists.

“I'm one-quarter Mexican on my Dad's side,” Buffy says. “I should be celebrating Day of the Dead and not Halloween.”

“Buffy, hate to tell you this, but you're white as a ghost, and you have red hair,” Leah says.

“Okay, maybe I'm only a quarter of a quarter Mexican, but still. This is a great way to honour Maya's mother and my aunt Ti-Ti.” Buffy's Aunt Tippy had died three years ago in a car accident on the Bloor Street Bridge. They found her car stopped in the middle one morning, the door open, windshield intact and her body on the highway below. They figure she must have lost control, opened the door to escape, and been flung over the railing by another car. At least that's the story that Buffy tells.

“You can throw the party, Buff, but no one's going to come.”

“Sure they will, Leah. Maya's boyfriend is coming.” Leah looks at me. I sit cross-legged on the living room floor, weaving a thread from the carpet between my bare toes.

“So, he's your boyfriend now, is he?” Aunt Leah says.

“I don't know, maybe. Kind of.”

“So it's serious?” Aunt Leah raises her voice when she says this, stretching the “serious” out for what seems like a minute. I shrug my shoulders.

“It's her own business, Leah.” Buffy turns towards me. “You'll bring him to the party though, won't you?”

“I guess. If he's not busy.”

“Good. So I'll get it all set up. All I need to know is what your mother really liked to do when she was alive.”

Aunt Leah and I turn our heads towards one another, our eyebrows raised.

“She liked to read,” I say finally. “The
Bhagavad Gita
, she tried to read that millions of times. I have her copy in my bedroom.”

“Great. Anything else?” Buffy asks.

“She slept a lot.” When Aunt Leah says this, I pinch my lips at her, hiding all of my front teeth underneath. “What? She did sleep a lot, Maya. I'm not lying.”

“Fine, I'll use a pillow on the altar,” Buffy says.

“She didn't use a pillow much,” I say. “Not in the teepee anyway.”

“Don't worry, Maya, I'll think of something perfect. It'll be great.”

By Monday evening, our apartment has been transformed into something else. Something different. Aunt Leah ends up helping Buffy with the decorations, partly because Buffy can't see how things look and partly because she is too short to reach up over the door and to the upper parts of the wall.

I come home after school to see it for the first time.

The outside of the door is covered in paper skeletons that Buffy got on sale at Kmart, and when I turn the knob and push in, my eyes adjust to the light of white candles burning from little glass jars, some of them with an outline of Jesus on them, along the windowsill. I close the door and in front of my face I see it — a giant cross made of flowers strung up over the living room window that looks out to a brick wall. Buffy comes into the room and grabs my hand to know it's me.

“Marigolds!” Buffy says. “Can you believe how perfect? It's a cross made out of marigold flowers.” I don't say anything; she can't see how my mouth is hanging open. “Get it, Maya? Marigolds. Your mother's name was Marigold.”