The Gallery of Lost Species (18 page)

I rubbed my eyes and surveyed him. He was visibly baffled. “She's the way she is now because of
you,
” I told him, trying not to slur. “You destroyed her life and mine!”

He detached his keys from the ring and placed them on the table. “I was going to stay the night, but I'll go.”

“You're dead inside like your rocks. You can't feel anything.”

I didn't resist when he reached out to slide my arms through the straps, pulling the dress back up over my shoulders. “Get some sleep,” he told me. He rolled his bike to the door, closing it tactfully behind him.

I rose early with a migraine. I staggered to the bathroom for Aspirin and removed the shard from my heel with tweezers. Then I lay in the dark for an hour before getting up for juice. Nothing quenched my dehydration. I wondered how Viv could drink so much, but then Raven had said real drinkers didn't ever get hangovers. Instead, they woke up wanting more.

I wrote a long letter to Liam that I deleted. The email I eventually sent simply said,
I'm sorry. I love you.
Part of me believed that was all it would take.

I never heard back. I thought he'd return, but he didn't.

TWENTY-EIGHT

O
N THE SEVENTEENTH FLOOR
of Sunset Towers, the door flew open and my mother drew me into her cloud of rosewater perfume while Mira yipped at my ankles. I pushed the dog away with my foot.

“Where is your sister?” She glanced down the hall.

“No idea.”

This was a lie. I'd seen Viv hanging out at the Lafayette since she'd left my place. The drinking tavern was a few blocks from the Gallery on a seedy corner in the Market. From the sidewalk the scent of warm hops emanated over vendors' stalls of strawberries and tomatoes. Getting produce there on my lunch break, I'd gone by the Laff and spotted my sister inside at least a half-dozen times, sitting on the vinyl bench against the wall. I never went in. Instead, I rushed by, hoping Viv wouldn't see me.

“Ah.” Con's face dropped. She recovered with a radiant smile. “Next time!”

I eased myself onto the peach couch in the living room and slipped off my shoes, running my toes along the shag rug. Mira hopped into my lap, turning circles before settling. A children's barrette secured the dog's hair in a spurt between her ears.

My mother was tanned and thin. Her new hairstyle, an upsweep of blond and grey tints in a loose chignon, suited her, showing off her dancer's neck.

“And how is Liam?” she called out.

“Gone.”

“Non! Le maudit.”

She came over to the couch and sat down beside me. When I stifled a sob, she took my hands in hers.

“
En amour,
it is better to be with someone who loves you more than you love them,” she said with conviction.

Suitcases were stacked beneath the pearly mantelpiece cluttered with framed pictures. My eyes fell on the blackand-white shot of a voluptuous Constance on Henry's lap in a smoky Greenwich Village café. She kept these old ones up like artifacts among those of her and Pierre on beaches and in yacht clubs. Maybe at a certain age widowers incited each other to display their past selves. This was me in my other life. Look what I did. Look what I had.

There was a picture of me and Viv up there too, from when we were maybe four and seven. Lodged into the rocking chair on the porch, wearing cowboy hats our father found at a yard sale. We wore those hats until the straw dried up and crumbled.

There was also a shot of my teenaged sister on the mantel, in the backyard assembling an easel. In it, Viv was deep in concentration, kneeling in the grass with her chin on her knee and pieces of wood all around her. Our father's shadow projected along the pavement. There was a strong breeze that day. You could see it in the way the uncut grass bent, and the striped curtains from my bedroom blew like signalling flags. I lay on the bed reading. Through my open window I heard our father say, “You have a gift, Vivienne, use it.” They didn't see me peek out, as Constance put her arm around my sister. From then on I waited for my parents to tell me what my gift was, but that day never came.

“Did you have a nice birthday?” my mother asked, tearing open a suitcase and flinging a seafoam dress at me. The garment hovered in the air before landing on Mira.

I set it aside and followed her into the kitchen. She popped frozen waffles into the toaster, opened a can of mandarins, and pulled Cool Whip from the fridge.

We brought our plates into the solarium with a view to the river and the copper Parliament rooftops. The Gallery dispersed white light, clear and colourless like a diamond on the horizon. We sat in her universal plastic chairs, eating without talking while Mira nibbled on the potted herbs.

“We have a sculpture made out of these,” I said about the chairs. “It's called
Shapeshifter.
”

“Bizarre.”

“It's the skeleton of a whale suspended from a ceiling.”

“Pourquoi?”

“A statement on consumerism. How we contaminate nature.”

“Ah bon.”
She sipped her coffee and lit a cigarette, drawing heavily on it before letting it burn away in the ashtray.

When Mira hopped on my mother's foot, she lifted her onto her knee, unsnapped the barrette, and ran her fingers through the tangled fringe impeding the dog's vision. Mira sneezed. Her matted coat, once silky, was coming out in Con's hands as she combed her.

“What's wrong with her?”

“Alopecia.” My mother kissed Mira on the nose.

“Why are her eyes so gunky?”

“Oh, leave her, Édith! She has allergies.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket, licked the tip, and wiped the inner corners of Mira's eyes. “
Alors.
Tell me how you celebrated your birthday.”

Liam left days prior to my twenty-first birthday. Neither he nor Viv called.

I lied to my mother about a dinner party. In reality, my day passed without incident, most of it spent in storage. At lunch, Raven brought down a cake and gave me a gift card for a facial, and some green and black checkered tights. She also brought me a book called
The Unabridged History of Unicorns.
She'd noticed I'd been spending my lunch hours in the
Child's Dream
gallery.

“I had a party,” I told Constance.

“Wonderful!” She dropped Mira onto the green turf. “
En passant,
we're moving.”

“I don't blame you.”

“We found a home in Naples.”

“Italy? Great.”

“Naples, Florida. Near Sawgrass Mills.”

“Where?”

“It's one of the largest malls in America! A short drive through the Everglades and you're there.”

“Wow.”

“Houses are so sheep
là-bas.
Pierre is finalizing. We'll keep his place here for our
pied-à-terre. Tu vas adorer ça,
chérie.
”

But I knew I wouldn't be taking many trips to Florida just as I knew she wouldn't come back once she left for that sunny, harmless state.

I looked out to the War Museum, immovable in its open field like a cement casket. If I visited Constance once a year and she lived until eighty, I would see her thirty more times. If I visited twice a year, sixty. That was two months. Even if she lived until ninety, we'd have a maximum of eighty visits, and chances were I would visit on average 1.5 times per year, which brought us back down to sixty. Two months remaining with my mother.

*   *   *

I
LEFT HER
brewing another pot of coffee and went to the aesthetician's for my facial. Jacinda, a perky girl with pigtails and sparkling eyeshadow, lathered creams and pastes on me in a dimly lit room. She rubbed my temples, snapping her gum and chatting above the New Age music. Unfortunately, I couldn't enjoy the experience. Lying there with all that sludge on my face brought to mind the time Viv wanted to make my plaster positive but, because of my cowardice, we'd ended up creating my sister's death mask instead.

Afterwards, Jacinda handed me a binder and suggested I flip through it. She endorsed Vajazzling: the act of applying jewels to a woman's nether regions for aesthetic purposes. “It's all the rage,” she told me as I turned the pages, scanning images of intertwined hearts, flowers, and butterflies.

The butterflies got me thinking about the sarcophagus we had at work—
Pavane for a Dead Princess
—a limestone vessel with a glass lid, lined with silk on which an assortment of butterflies were pinned. The specimens were meant to investigate mortality and transformation and the notion of the soul. It was unnerving, seeing those classified wings in their final resting place.

Then each butterfly had to be removed and fumigated because, as it turned out, the silk lining was infested with moth cocoons. When the moths hatched and started eating the butterflies, the conservators dismantled the display.

I began reminiscing about Liam, and the time he took me to a butterfly exhibit at the campus greenhouse. He told me to wear red that day. Inside, hundreds of exotic butterflies fluttered around us, drawn to my maraschino top. It was humid and I fanned myself with a pamphlet as he led me off the walking path, away from the visitors, to a wall covered in flowers covered in butterflies. I stared in amazement.

Liam told me then that butterflies have taste buds on their feet. When starving, they feed on incredibly low concentrations of sugar diluted in water. He said that their sensitivity to sweetness was more developed than that of our own tongues, and that some species after drinking fermented dew can't fly away for days.

Before I left the spa, Jacinda asked if I wanted to book a Vajazzle consult. When I gave her the seafoam dress my mother had bought for me, she hugged me.

TWENTY-NINE

I
T WAS WEEKS BEFORE
I noticed the missing paperweights. I'd been saving up to have a cabinet custom-made. When I went to retrieve them from the linen closet, I found the empty box.

There were twenty-seven weights. Viv must have stowed them away in her coat and in her enormous handbag, accustomed to toting large quantities of glass.

Did she pawn them or did she launch them over a bridge? Did she sell them to buy more, full bottles, or did she find a body of water and wade into it, pulled down by the frozen landscapes? I preferred to think she traded them in to an antiques dealer and used the few thousand dollars to move to Mexico, maybe to one of those inland artist communities where living was still cheap.

All I had left was the
millefiori
—“a thousand flowers” in Italian—that I kept on my office desk. Within its crystalline dome there were cross-sections of moulded glass rods, stretched and sliced like hard candy to form a multicoloured carpet. The rod faces had flowers on them. There was a silhouette of a dancing devil inside the largest, middle rod, which had fascinated me as a child.

Henry was convinced the paperweight came from the St. Louis factory in France. If there had been an identifier on the bottom and if the glass had no yellow cast or air bubbles, it would have been valuable. Instead, it was deeply flawed and worthless.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT DAY
at lunch, I dropped the millefiori into my cardigan pocket, grabbed my purse, and roamed through the Canadiana galleries. I thought about how Henry likely came here on his lunch breaks too, before his years on night shift. He probably stood in the exact same spot I was standing in now, in front of
The Jack Pine
by Tom Thomson.

Pictured was a dark green, solitary tree on a rocky shore, its threadbare branches deformed against the yellows, cobalts, and carnelians of water and hills and sunset. It was my father's favourite work. We sold laser reproductions, mugs, serviettes, T-shirts, and magnets of it in the gift shop. I bought Liam the
Jack Pine
hotpot holder after we'd planned to go camping in Algonquin Park, but I never saw him use it.

In the same room was
The Tangled Garden.
This painting, which soothed my mother all those years ago, had the opposite effect on me. The closer I got to it, the more I felt as though I was suffocating. It wasn't a lithe garden. It was the tumultuous garden of all summer endings. Where cyclopean sunflower heads drooped and other flowers lost their petals in the shadows, surrounding the viewer in vibrant mayhem. There was no sky, no air. I passed it as quickly as possible, puffing on my inhaler and detouring through the Hirst room on my way back to the office.

Nobody was in there. I approached the vitrine, searching for air bubbles in the formaldehyde—those signs of imperfection my father had trained me to seek out when examining hand-blown glass. But there were no bubbles in the blue liquid.

I sat on the visitors' bench and pulled the
millefiori
orb from my pocket. I put the paperweight to my eye like a monocle, transforming the unicorn into a blurred, indistinct form.

I was slowly making my way through the book Raven had given me for my birthday, reading about how the unicorn popped up in historical accounts from different parts of the world that couldn't have communicated with each other.

The Greek unicorn was a wild ass with a white body, a red head, blue eyes, and a multicoloured horn that resided in insurmountable mountains. Persia's unicorn was a three-legged donkey with six eyes and protective powers. The medieval unicorn was a chaste, fierce white horse with a goat's beard. Knights hunted it, using maidens as bait to slaughter the animal.

But there was no physical evidence for unicorns and no one could procure a horn, so the Church Council forbade using it as an allegory. When the Vikings caught on, they harpooned narwhals from the North Sea for their tusks, throwing in triumphant stories about entrapping the unicorn. Tales spread about the horn's cure-all properties—it could rid people of ulcers and blindness, it could cure melancholia and it could remedy gout. The powder was the most expensive apothecary ingredient. Kings and popes carried horn bits around in pouches to ward off the plague. Royalty wouldn't eat without it, using it to detect poisons in food and drink.