The Gallery of Lost Species (10 page)

In the kitchen, I poured hot chocolate into a Thermos and toasted s'mores in the oven, wrapping them in foil to keep them warm. Then we loaded into Liam's parents' car and drove to the grounds of Rideau Hall.

We were like characters in a scene from a Russian novel inside that gentrified tundra. Especially Viv, in the raccoon fur and matching hat she'd liberated from Con's closet. Henry had saved up for months to buy it for our mother, yet we never saw her wear it. She claimed it wasn't soft enough.

The snow crunching underfoot, we took turns running through the white savannah and guiding the burst of colour into the air. The kite danced inside the drag and pull of the wind before it came crashing down, the wood dowels snapping and the paper tearing.

Next we went skating on the pond. Viv was as glamorous as Margaret Trudeau against the snow and ice, spinning around like a music box figurine.

We snapped photos with our father's clunky Holga. The camera took terrible pictures that seemed old because of their poor quality. Printed, we looked like a dead family from another era.

*   *   *

L
IAM'S VISIT HAD
brought Viv back to life.

She straightened out when he returned to Alberta for school. Her grades improved and she didn't come home past curfew. Constance let her have a land line in her room again and reinstalled her door. They were almost courteous to each other.

As my sister's hair grew, she began styling and curling it. Every so often she'd ask me to snap shots of her in exotic poses, which I assumed she texted to Liam. I stopped sending him my own photos and letters, ashamed of my pudgy plainness.

Through winter and spring, my body changed. I wore baggy T-shirts to school. I grew an embarrassing fine moustache above my upper lip. Hairs grew everywhere—on my arms, my thighs, between my legs. I swiped wax strips from Constance's cupboard. Each month I helped myself to Viv's tampon supply since she didn't need them—she was so rail-thin she didn't get her period anymore. I stole a fleshycoloured training bra Viv had shoved at the back of her dresser once she'd switched to padded bras. She was three years older than me, but her chest was flatter than mine.

I listened to my sister whispering on the phone to Liam late into the night, through the thin wall separating our rooms. They weren't compatible and her interest in him was a riddle to me. I concluded that, now that Nick was gone, she had nothing else to do.

Sometimes I still went to visit Omar. I tried not to ask if he'd seen my father there. When I passed by the kitchen window, I no longer looked inside.

In Omar's room, we played cards and laughed our heads off watching porn on his computer, where slow-loading bodies moved sluggishly.

When I asked him for advice and told him about my plans for me and Liam, he suddenly developed aches and pains and made excuses not to see me. Then one day he had a seizure. Serena flew in, screaming for me to get out. “He's faking it,” I told her, without knowing why I said it. The next time I knocked at his window, he didn't answer, even though I knew he was inside.

*   *   *

A
FEW WEEKS
after the school year ended, Henry took us out west again, this time to British Columbia. My mother boycotted the holiday. She'd been in a terrible mood that spring. There were phone calls from the bank manager.

I didn't want to stay home alone with Constance, but I also didn't want to go on Henry's dumb trip.

I'd grown conflicted when it came to my father. Since I'd found out about his affair with Serena, he'd gone down in my esteem, but I still adored him. And when Con or Viv were particularly cruel or dismissive, I still had the desire to protect him. In part, their behaviour made me understand why he'd done what he'd done.

Henry thought nature would be good for us. He went out and bought a canoe like Tom Thomson's. He was infatuated with the artist and wouldn't shut up about how he'd mysteriously drowned during a canoeing trip in 1917. He started repeating the story to us as soon as we hit the highway.

“We don't care, Dad,” Viv told him. Nothing coming out of her mouth was nice anymore.

Our father had the hare-brained idea that we could take the canoe all the way to a place called Bella Coola since there was a big river and channels leading to the Pacific Ocean near the community. He was into Native art and wanted to buy a mask there from a celebrated Nuxalk artist. So the three of us strapped the boat onto the station wagon and drove more than four thousand kilometres to the interior of British Columbia.

Viv wrote in her journal for the entire trip and it got on my nerves. I read Thomas Hardy the whole way there and didn't speak much to either of them.

After six days in the car, on the last leg of the trip, we got to “the Hill,” which led to a village so disconnected from civilization it was as if it were under quarantine. The joke about Bella Coola was that World War II came and went without anyone there hearing about it.

The Hill consisted of a series of narrow switchbacks that had been hacked through the coastal mountains by the locals. Rusted car parts were scattered over the railing-less hillsides. Even without the canoe, it would have been a tricky descent at slow speed to the valley floor. Due to the bad road, Henry decided that we'd rent a canoe on the spot instead.

Viv helped our father slide the canoe off the rack. The plan was to leave it at the top of the incline and pick it up on the way home in two weeks. But my sister jostled the vessel too close to the crags. As she walked back to the car, we heard the scraping sound of fibreglass on gravel. The canoe went flying down the cliff, straight as a javelin, before smashing into the pines.

*   *   *

T
HE BACKYARD OF
the house we rented was full of raspberry bushes. Our tongues were permanently stained and our arms scratched from the bristles. Bald eagles frequently swept down, snatching up feral cats in their talons.

While Henry waited for his mask to be carved, we went sightseeing. We saw the landmark rock the explorer Alexander Mackenzie wrote on in bear fat and vermilion, when he reached the Pacific Ocean. Nearby, hot springs ran through hoses into old tubs. A garter snake with a greenish-yellow stripe on its sable body slithered around the basins, where the overflowing water formed warm pools on the ground. When Viv lunged for the reptile, foam secreted from its tail, releasing musk. My flabbergasted sister dropped the writhing creature and jumped backwards as it flattened its head and struck at her.

On the days our father was painting, Viv and I hung out at the local swimming pool. A lifeguard named Tammy invited us to a bonfire. At the party, I sipped on the same lukewarm bottle of Budweiser all night while Viv pounded them back. Then she put the moves on Tammy's boyfriend and got into a scrap with some Native kids. One of the older girls called Viv a skank, pulled a knife, and nicked her on the cheek.

Blood gushed down her jawline and neck, making the cut seem worse than it was. I gave Viv my favourite blue sweater to press against her skin as we rushed through the pitch-black town to the house. She threw my sweater into the garbage as soon as we got there.

It was the middle of the night and Henry was enraged because we'd snuck out the window. We sped to the region's small hospital to get Viv's face stitched. As we sat in the waiting room, a man was wheeled in on a stretcher, lying on his stomach. He'd been mauled in the rear by a grizzly at a logging camp. My still-drunk sister found it priceless.

The next day was our last. At the general store, Henry bought me rabbit fur moccasins and made me choose porcupine quill earrings for Constance. Viv didn't want anything and waited outside, her hands shoved deep into her jean pockets, her swollen cheek covered with a white bandage. Henry got her a T-shirt printed with
I survived the Bella Coola highway! You can too!
And then we began the long journey back.

We had two spare tires in the trunk and we used them both to get up the steep slope out of there. When we got home and unpacked the mask from its crate, there was a split straight through the middle. It had cracked in transport, presumably on our way back up the Hill.

Our mother had a conniption when she saw Viv's cut face. She called Viv a nitwit and a disgrace, even as she reached for a French skin balm in the kitchen drawer to rub on my sister's cheek.

As for the mask, Con was relieved. The second she laid eyes on it, she said it spooked her. Viv suggested to Henry—who sat at the table with his broken sculpture, appearing defeated—that we drive back to Bella Coola for a refund. She'd had fun with those kids, she told him.

I made an album commemorating the long voyage. The best shot was one of Viv standing in a bear trap with a dangling elk carcass. She'd completely disregarded the Do Not Enter Or Touch sign. In my doodly writing, I captioned it
Sis Entrapped.

Viv was determined to see a grizzly that summer, even after we returned home. Eventually our father took us to the municipal dump to catch black bears on digicam. The bears moved like shadows through the mound of metal and glass. Viv was seventeen, I was fourteen. That was our last big road trip together.

SEVENTEEN

I
N THE FALL
, V
IV
dropped out of her final year of high school. She said she was bored.

“How well do we ever know our children?” Henry slammed his fist on the table, knocking over the salt and pepper shakers. I heard them roll and smash on the floor.

“How well do we ever know our
parents?
” my sister retorted. I was listening to it all from my bedroom.

“Don't be such a scaredy-cat, Vivienne,” Con said.

“I'm not. I don't agree with the system.”

“I hardly got a job with my diploma, you can't be an artist without graduating. You'll regret this,” Henry seethed. Then came the sound of my parents stomping outside after Viv.

“Keep going to school to do what? Clean people's trash like
you?
” My sister's voice carried loud enough for the whole neighbourhood to hear.

I reached the porch in time to see Constance shrugging her shoulders at Henry. “She'll be back,” my mother said, easing herself into the rocking chair. Viv's figure was already diminishing down the street as she marched away in her paint-encrusted boots and plaid blouse, her army duffle on her back.

“Where are you going, Vee?” I had asked while she shoved clothes into her bag.

“Yukon. Whitehorse for starters.”

“Why?”

“To see the northern lights and paint gold.”

“You mean pan.”

“I'll paint it.”

“You tell Dad?”

She didn't answer, testing a Zippo.

“Can I come?”

“No, Worm.”

“You'll hurt his feelings. He wanted to take us there.”

“But he didn't, did he.” She turned to me, raising an earringed eyebrow.

*   *   *

D
ESPITE HER ROMANTIC
vision, Viv wound up five minutes from home. She moved into a cheap industrial loft in Chinatown, above a pho restaurant. She would stay until she saved enough to buy a used car and go north, she told us.

She'd sold enough paintings on the side at school—mostly of superheroes and vampires—to cover her first month's rent. She took a job at a greasy spoon that offered all-day breakfast and at night she painted on cardboard from boxes left out on the curb. Often her pictures carried fishy odours and she sold small ones at craft fairs.

Once a week, my parents and I dropped off bags of food. Initially, Con refused to go. “If she wants to live by herself, she can feed herself,” she insisted, examining her nails.

But my father had softened after Viv's departure. “You left home at seventeen too. Wouldn't you have appreciated some help from your parents?”

“I got nothing from my parents.
Rien.
”

Henry threw tubes of paint and brushes in among the loaves of bread and tins of tuna. We rarely stayed longer than an hour. It was humiliating to watch him go on praising Viv's work in strained conversations when you could see she didn't want us there.

Our voices echoed in the steel loft. A futon was set up in one corner and a metal utility table in another, with two hard grey chairs pushed against it. On the table was the deluxe iMac with designing software Henry bought Viv on credit, despite Con's fury at the expenditure. At the back of the room, a mustard yellow General Electric fridge emitted a steady, low hum. There was a counter next to the fridge but no kitchen sink, so Viv washed her dishes in the shower down the hall.

Otherwise the space contained only my sister's paintings, carelessly scattered across the floor like the flyers that littered the parking lot behind her building.

She reinvented common objects: a lone egg on a shelf, a battered shoe in the gutter, an umbrella wet and drooping like a wilted flower. The way she portrayed these plain things, it felt as though we were being shown their soul.

When Constance walked around the bare quarters, glancing here and there at the piles of cardboard, her lips thinned and her eyes went glossy, but she didn't say a word.

*   *   *

L
IAM TRANSFERRED UNIVERSITIES
and drove out in early January, at the coldest time of the year. He arrived full of stories about black ice and ditch rescues along the TransCanada Highway. His parents had since moved to BC and Viv said he could stay with her.

He phoned once he got close to the city. Viv was working and gave me the keys, asking me to meet him to let him in. When he pulled up along the busy street, I was afraid he wouldn't remember me. He'd spent the summer excavating in South America. It had been more than a year since we'd seen each other.

He got out of an
SUV
that looked like it had come from an auto wrecking yard, and stood for a few seconds in his puffy down coat and Sorels. He seemed younger and less intimidating to me now. I was catching up to him.