The Gallery of Lost Species (14 page)

I found Raven a job in the membership sales department. It was temporary, while she and Zach settled in and he moved up the ranks in Foreign Affairs. Then she'd open her massage place.

“I went to school to make cold calls and you're no better off with your data entry,” she repeated on our outings.

We had lunch together weekly. Since buying a house, Raven was consumed with decorating. One day it was an ecru bed in a bag, the next it was a chenille pillow. Heading for the department store, we often stopped in the ByWard Market's stone courtyard, where windowsills were covered in nails glinting in the sun to ward off pigeons.

We ate our sandwiches on a bench then strolled down Sussex Drive past exclusive boutiques—the children's clothing shop with its chaotic display boasting
designer swaddles! beanie pods!
and the haute couture bridal shop where daughters of government leaders and the city's prominent businessmen shopped.

Dresses of twill and silk floated in the window front on headless mannequins. I pressed my face against the glass, thinking of my future with Liam. A chandelier hung above a few gowns dangling from a rack like exquisite skinned animals. Two ethereal women with pearls and kinky tresses turned away.

*   *   *

F
INALLY A POSTCARD
arrived.

It was a picture of a blue stone mask. Liam's note said that he was coming home for a university job in Earth Sciences. He was going to arrive in a month and wanted me to help him find a place to live.

I'd been thinking of moving as well. Constance was selling the house and buying a condo where, she'd not so subtly told me, there wasn't much room.

I wrote back saying that he could stay with me and then I rushed to find a downtown rental. I secured an apartment on the main floor of a turn-of-the-century house with crown moulding and hardwood floors so uneven I had to prop slats under the furniture. It wasn't unusual to hear the plumbing in the units above and beneath me, and the steaming radiators clanked as though someone was taking a hammer to them. But there was a garden, big windows, and stained glass. My father would have liked the original light fixtures.

It was mine and I was finally on my own. I stood at the window holding the postcard and waited for Liam.

TWENTY-TWO

W
HEN
I
HELPED
C
ONSTANCE
pack up the house, I found Henry's white scenes rolled in the attic like obsolete maps, covered in dust and cobwebs.

She was selling our home for next to nothing and could easily have doubled the price. Our once-sketchy neighbourhood had been gentrified, its main street lined with pet groomers and gourmet food shops—but she didn't care. Con wanted to move on.

“Forget the past. Swim forward like a shark. That's how to survive,
ma fille.
”

Beside the neglected rolls, there were more paintings on an old flat-top trunk. Ones that were stretched and tacked onto wooden frames, stacked neatly beneath a clear tarp. I tore off the sheet of plastic. From each of my sister's small works there dangled, like an earring, an exorbitant price tag from one Vancouver gallery or another.

“He wanted to encourage her. Not my idea.” My mother sat on the floor in her kelly green jogging suit, a matching kerchief tied around her head. Mirabelle, the teacup Yorkie she bought after my father's death, was asleep in her lap. Letters surrounded her, and as Con leaned against the couch, she glanced at the piles of envelopes, setting a few aside and throwing others into the garbage bag beside her.

“
Dad
bought them? Viv said she had clients!”

“Your father used different names. She didn't ask her agent who purchased. She wasn't interested.”

“But who's been buying lately?”

“He left them a sum to continue.
Mais
 … I'm sure that's gone.”

“How could he afford it?”

“Second mortgage.”

“What about the debts—”

“I told you”—she cut me off—“who helped us pay those off. I don't want to discuss it again.” She picked a yellow mailer from the floor with my father's handwriting on it, pulled the papers out, leafed through them, and tossed them in the garbage bag.

“Then why is she so broke she can't fly home for a visit?”

“We helped her get a name, a reputation,” my mother replied, avoiding my question.

“Who wrote those newspaper reviews?”

“One teacher in particular was very fond of her. He had journalist friends.”

I remembered the fight between Viv and Liam on my last night there. “She wouldn't forgive you, if she knew,” I told her.

My mother stood up without removing Mira from her lap. The dog dropped to the floor like a duster. She went over to the mantel that held my father's ashes, picked up the brown urn, and examined it thoughtfully before pressing it against my abdomen.

“I don't know where to spread them.” She sat down on the floor again, lit a cigarette, and opened another letter. Mira crossed under the path of smoke and hopped back onto her legs.

“What did you do with Dad's collections, his memorabilia?”

“I gave all that to the junk collectors. The diabetes foundation didn't want anything.”

“What about my purple chair? My clowns and Viv's carnival scenes?”

“I saved you the glass balls.
Prends la Buick.
” Her red '96 Buick Century was over ten years old. She'd recently bought herself a Lincoln Town Car.

I felt my hostility rising. “I want the paintings.”

“I'm retailing them online.” She gave a small cough, tapping her cigarette into the ashtray at her feet. “You can have one of each.”

“You're wasting your time. Her work won't sell anymore.” My mother couldn't fathom that the art world was fickle and that Viv was likely already a has-been.

She ignored my remark and passed me an audio cassette. “That's a funny one,” she said. “Listen when you can.”

“Where's the tape player?” I asked, looking around the room.

“I threw it away.”

I slid the cassette tape into my bag and went back up to the attic. I dragged a lamp with me into the crawl space, ducking to avoid the rafters. I sat on a ragged bath mat and began unrolling my father's canvases, going slowly to prevent cracking.

While my sister's compositions were disguises under-painted with hidden realities, my father's combinations of seashell, ivory, cornsilk, and lace were images of a cold loneliness. Ashen government towers tainting the sky. Snowbanks trailing utility corridors in winter fields. A train passing through interminable spaces of white impasto. My father painted human solitude.

I chose one titled
Estuary
that depicted a large mass of still, open water. A canoeist paddled the shoreline. In the background was a row of storefronts and a hotel—a ghost town without dimensions, like a movie set. Above the scene my father included a soaring eagle, painted crudely, as if an afterthought.

I couldn't tell who was in the boat. Probably Viv. In Bella Coola, Henry had rented a birchbark canoe that he and Viv took out a lot while I stayed at the public pool. Or maybe the canoe portrayed in my father's painting was the one not used on any lake. Maybe it was the one we lost before reaching the valley floor.

I didn't recognize any of the works in my sister's stack. They were made after I'd been to Vancouver, and I was surprised to see she'd titled them. One painting stood out from the textured, geometric shapes.
Myrtle and Leo
was by far the smallest work, maybe six by eight inches. In it was a deep maroon oval with spindly bullets all around it, indicating motion. A vibrant coral orb floated above the oval.

I knew the story behind the painting. I was stunned that it had marked my sister enough for her to re-create it years later.

Myrtle was the neighbourhood mutt. A solidly built mastiff with a coat the colour of apricots, who didn't belong to anyone and whom every house on the block took turns feeding.

Leo was a tabby kitten. The runt from a litter we found under our porch one spring. To appease us, Henry let us keep Leo when he took the rest of the brood to the Humane Society.

One day Viv and I brought Leo out to the park across the street. My sister moved back and forth on a swing, holding the kitten while I dangled a ribbon, which Leo kept pawing at and missing as the swing receded.

Our laughter increased when Myrtle appeared and Leo hissed. Myrtle lay down in the dirt a few feet away with his usual baleful expression, barely acknowledging us as Leo kept clawing at the ribbon. Then Leo fell from Viv's upturned palm, landing on all fours in the dirt.

Myrtle bore his teeth and lunged at the kitten. The dog's muscular neck swung from left to right with the kitten in his jaw before he released the animal like a rag doll. Leo tried dragging himself away, but his hind legs were crushed. Viv took a step toward the kitten and Myrtle growled at her. He tossed Leo in the air and knocked him around some more. Each time he clamped his jaws down on the kitten, we heard tiny bones being crushed like the sound of biting into a sandwich of crisp lettuce.

When Myrtle was finished with Leo, he came over and released the dead kitten from his muzzle. The body dropped at Viv's feet. The dog wagged his tail and looked at us expectantly.

After Myrtle trotted away, my sister insisted we bury Leo. There was a pine tree near the swing set and we dug a hole. When we got home, Constance scolded us because our fingernails were so caked with dirt they wouldn't come clean.

A week later, Viv told me we had to exhume Leo and bring him closer to home. She wanted to make a proper grave for him under the steps where he was born, so he'd be comforted by the scent of his mother and siblings.

We went to the pine tree and uncovered the small mound, repositioning soil until a foul odour hit us. Viv swiftly kicked the dirt back over the maggot-covered carcass. We decided to leave Leo where he was.

We disowned Myrtle after that. Whenever the dog approached, Viv would make as if to kick him or throw stones at him, even though her hands were empty.

*   *   *

B
ACK AT MY
place, I sat among cardboard boxes I hadn't unpacked with Viv's and Henry's paintings and paperweights. I played
Chill with Satie
and made poutine. I stood by the sink and ate in the dark, so I could spy into the neighbouring windows.

I watched the family in the brick house across the alley. It was as if all the light of the city were contained inside their home. The small boy practised piano in the living room beneath a warm, hive-like lantern. In the kitchen, the mother lit candles and stirred dinner in a large pot on the stove. The father was in the den, reclining in an easy chair, the room blue and flickering. I wondered if their minds were quiet. I wondered if they were happy.

I phoned Viv to say I'd moved and to give her my new number, but got no answer. A few weeks later she returned my call, reporting that she'd been in the hospital. “Pancreatitis. Don't tell the Con,” she added. I hung up irritated and concerned. I didn't tell her Liam was coming home. Yet I felt she was jinxing my plans, purposely dampening my excitement about his return with her bad news.

*   *   *

O
N MY WAY
to work, I wove through downtown toward the Château Laurier, which appeared before me like a hardened sand sculpture. Each morning I passed beneath a canopy of oaks in a park overlooking the river, and at the bottom of the incline was my glass edifice—its multifaceted dome and Great Hall and
Maman,
the thirty-foot-tall bronze spider balancing on the plaza like a black firework.

Maman
guarded the Gallery like a humongous paranormal being. Tourists all wanted their picture taken with her, posing under her abdomen, leaning on a graceful leg. The sculptor, Louise Bourgeois, made
Maman
when she was really old. It moved me to think of this tiny, flinty lady with her blowtorch and goggles, welding the biggest homage she could achieve to her dead mother, who was a tapestry restorer.

Suspended from
Maman
's underside was a wire-meshed sac of marble eggs. A hidden camera and loudspeaker above the Gallery's entranceway was aimed at her. When kids got up to their pranks, climbing and groping
Maman
's legs, or when visitors chained their bikes or dogs to her, a booming voice commanded them to step away from the spider.

Nearing the building, I sometimes got apocalyptic visions of the glassworks exploding and the city going up in flames. In the aftermath there would be no world left, but the monumental spider would still be standing. Other days I envisioned a great hand piercing through the clouds and flicking her like a mosquito off the earth's skin.

More often, though, as the Gallery window washers dangled against the panes like newly hatched arachnids, and the Gatineau Hills shifted inside their pinks and purples,
Maman
towered over me and I was overwhelmed with a devotion I couldn't rationalize. Then I descended through the parkade's granite façade, cut square like a crypt, and made my way beneath sixty-five thousand works of art, following signage to the Curatorial Wing.

That day, over lunch, I told Raven about Viv.

“Pancreatitis at her age? Not good.” She looked down at her polka dot socks, shaking her head.

Raven's dad was a drunk. She divulged this when we were students. She didn't bring it up again, but that night at the bar Raven told me about the jugs of homebrew and how happy her dad was when he drank, and how good he was to her and her sister, at first.

When he wasn't drinking, he got achy teeth. In abstinence his teeth bothered him so much he'd bite into glass rims until the glass broke in his mouth. My pop's the glass chewer, Raven said.

Then she told me how her mom stayed with him even when he was most unlovable. He drank anything—Listerine and Pepsi, rubbing alcohol and Kool-Aid, hand sanitizers. Over the holidays, Raven's mom put ornamental bottles with potpourri floating in them throughout the house. He drank the decorative liquid until it debilitated him.