The Gallery of Lost Species (6 page)

That afternoon, Henry took me to the Royal Ontario Museum. The rotunda's mosaic ceiling was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. It was made from a constellation of tiny squares of Venetian glass. Sea horses, falcons, dragons, and other mythical creatures sparkled in amber, turquoise, and bronze.

The main and upper floors were crammed with medieval garb and Asian sculptures. But my father led me down to the basement level, where there were hardly any visitors. There he showed me collections of Roman glass and ancient coins and, finally, paperweights. We sat on a bench facing the wall of domed tops, each one uniquely faceted, etched, and coloured.

In our quiet thinking time together, we shared a closeness that Con and Viv didn't have with each other or with us. The one thing I lacked, which Viv had in common with my father, was her talent with the paintbrush. Yet I made up for this with my wit and collecting sensibilities.

Henry and I were like bookends. We had the same appearance, personality, and interests. But our connection ran deeper than being carbon copies of one another. We were allied in our pact to create little asylums where we could—antique shops and museums being the perfect places to evade Con and Viv's feuds. And like bookends, we reinforced the pulpy novellas that made up our family library, preventing the unit from toppling over.

Plus, we couldn't get close with Viv or Con no matter how hard we tried. We had that in common too.

“Someday maybe you'll work in a place like this.”

“I'd like that.”

“Good, Boss. That's good to hear.”

“It would be pretty to see a clown juggling these, don't you think?”

My father smiled. Then he checked his watch and said it was time to go back to the circus.

*   *   *

W
E RETURNED TO
find Viv in the lobby, enveloped in a cloud of lacquer that Constance was spraying onto her hair and her shimmering fur-lined gown. She was the personification of stardust. The costume cost two thousand dollars.

Viv was covering her eyes and coughing.

“
Enough,
Constance.” Henry seized the can of hairspray from our mother. My sister smiled. She had her flipper in, so it was her phony smile. Her skin had gone from pasty to greenish.

Constance handed her some Pixy Stix. Without blinking, Viv tipped her head back and poured the contents from the straws into her mouth. Her eyes watered as she swallowed the powdered sugar. “I don't feel well,” she said.

Names were already being called for glitz-wear. Constance escorted Viv down the corridor and we wished her good luck. As I followed Henry back to our seats, a girl covered in peacock feathers whispered to me as she passed, “Your mom's demented.”

It was a packed house. Families came from across the country, hoping to win the lavish prizes, including electronics, canopy beds, scholarships, and cash. There were no seats left, so we stood against the wall by the stage. Behind the curtain, Viv's cramped feet were the only ones in pointe shoes.

“Number twenty-three, Vivienne!” chirped the announcer.

My sister came out smiling. Her flipper was so white, she looked like a girl in a toothpaste commercial. I waved to her as she floated back and forth across the stage, pausing every so often in a new pose until, midway through her act, she lurched forward as if the wind had been knocked out of her.

Viv threw up on her diaphanous dress and on the stage. She covered her mouth but kept vomiting. Terrified, she turned toward the curtain then back to the judges and the audience. Everyone stayed fixed in their seats. Even Constance froze backstage. Unassisted, my father rushed over, put his arms around her, and guided her offstage to the nearest washroom.

It was the first pageant where my sister left without a crown, or even a consolation prize.

Nobody talked the whole drive home. When Viv stormed to her room and slammed the door, my father said, “You've taken it too far, Constance. She's not a trained monkey. She's had enough.”

For a week, Viv stayed in bed with the flu. None of us spoke of Fairytale Faces again.

*   *   *

S
HORTLY AFTER, ON
one of those warm days when Constance forced us outside, I sat in the tree swing and watched my sister extract a pair of scissors from her pocket.

Other than Viv's pageants, our mother's only pleasure was gardening. In our postage-stamp yard there were unkempt beds and a rock garden that Con brought to life with flowers and the rich scents of herbs. She added window boxes around the house. She put a cement bird bath under the apple tree in the far corner by the painting shed, dangling feeders from the branches.

With her gleaming scissors, my sister cut the head off every bud in Constance's garden. Of all the yarrow, geraniums, and fringed bleeding hearts, the begonias and roses and daisies, she didn't miss a blossom.

Then she dragged the hose over to the wheelbarrow and filled it with water, throwing heads by the armful into the old receptacle.

“She's going to kill you, Vee,” I said, and this snapped Viv out of her trance. She looked at me then back at the wheelbarrow.

Constance was in the kitchen, buttering up a pageant co-ordinator on the phone. She materialized at the window with her bulky head of curlers, sucking on a cigarette and zeroing in on us to see what we were doing.

“Over here, Con! I made you flower soup!” Viv scooped a fistful of jewel-tone petals in her hand and threw them in the air.

Constance dropped the phone and flew through the patio door, tearing down the steps. Neighbours eyeballed her chasing my sister across the street in her bathrobe, the both of them barefoot. But Viv outran her and didn't come home until nightfall.

“Vivie
nne,
Vivi
eeeennnnne!
” our mother shrieked. She sounded like a wounded animal.

Later, there were similar episodes. So many they melted together like a stack of Polaroids left out in the sun too long.

NINE

I
ESCAPED TO THE
Coin Shoppe as much as possible.

Serena had me cleaning and photographing coins. It was dull, methodical work and I enjoyed her assembly-line approach to preparing lots for sale.

She ordered most of them from England. They arrived in dented boxes covered in stamps and stickers. After their initial scrub in soapy water, they went into a sodium carbonate solution that removed dirt and organic debris.

She taught me to pick at thick clay encrustations under a microscope, using dental instruments including diamond-tipped drill bits. My desk was coated in dust and I used my inhaler frequently. When Serena swept the powder onto the floor with a hand-held broom, I'd launch into a coughing fit.

While we soaked one lot for a week, we brushed and picked the next. The coins ranged from dime size to the size of a loonie, but thicker. None were exactly round and many were split at the edges.

I took the hard dirt off with a shoe polishing brush until I saw a profile coming through.

The Roman legends were easy to read—they used our alphabet and the Latin words reminded me of English. Serena gave me a chart for the Greek coins that had short letters naming the city. Soon I recognized heads of gods, goddesses, and rulers appearing beneath the dirt. Constantine, Caesar, Nero. Diana the huntress in her miniskirt with bow and arrow, Zeus on his chariot, and Athena in her helmet, ready for war. My favourites were the coins depicting animals—lions, owls, dolphins, and octopuses. Each one's picture and text was so much more understandable than the complicated books in my room.

Once cleaned and no longer rough, I laid them like cookies on a baking tray that Serena then put into the oven at a low temperature for a half-hour to remove leftover water from the pores. Next we applied wax to the metals and buffed them, turning ugly lumps into shiny hoards.

I photographed the obverse and reverse sides and Serena put them in plastic sleeves, inserting labels with minuscule descriptions and prices before sliding them into their display cases for selling.

Omar came down often during my shifts. He was like a blue jay, visiting long enough to swipe a coin. When I caught him stealing for the third time, I aimed the camera at him and snapped as he sprang a vitrine open to pocket a medallion. Serena was upstairs on the phone, having a loud discussion in Romanian.

“How can you steal from your own mother?”

“Easy,” he replied, coming over so that he was within arm's reach of the camera. He wore all black and smelled of basil.

“She'll catch you.” I thought of Constance and how nothing got past her.

“No, she won't. This is a front anyway.”

“For what?”

“If I told you, I'd have to kill you.”

“Go for it.”

“Haven't you detected a lack of customers? She offers loans on the lowdown, dum-dum. Her interest rates aren't as steep as Payday Loans next door.”

I'd asked Serena why no one came in. I didn't think twice when she explained that most of her sales were made by phone or online.

“She'll think it's me stealing and fire me,” I said, irritated.

“Take it easy. I'm replacing what I take with replicas.” Omar handed me an obol. “Real or not real?”

“Real.”

“Wrong. You can't tell it's a forgery and no one else can either.” Omar took the coin back. “Give me the camera.”

“How come you don't go to school?”

“I'm home-schooled. I learn in two hours what you learn in seven. The rest of my days are free.” His Adam's apple bobbed up and down on his thin neck. He wasn't ugly. Behind his thick glasses, he had long eyelashes and the delicate features of a girl.

“Why?” I asked.

“I'm like this coin. My insides are a fraud, filled with lead.”

I offered the camera. I didn't want him to get frazzled and have a seizure. Omar popped the memory card out and passed it back to me.

“That was half a day's work.”

“That sucks.” He grinned, obviously not sorry at all.

*   *   *

W
HILE
I
SPENT
my days at the Coin Shoppe or helping Constance purge Viv's old duds to make way for new and more expensive accoutrements, Henry signed Viv up for art camp at the local community centre. I couldn't complain. I knew I didn't have the talent for the program.

At camp, students picked themes from folded papers in a top hat. Viv's subject was amusement parks. Every day she made a different painting: a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a roller coaster. Once home, she painted her darks darker. She would add herself to the scenes in pageant wear, camouflaged in among the balloons and cotton candy stands. Then she'd cover the whole canvas with a grey lacquer coating that dripped into thick lines like water going down a windowpane. The results were nocturnal carnivals where it was hard to make out the forms. After my sister finished a painting, she had no interest in it, and she let me put her assignments up among my clowns. She called my room the ragbag sideshow mausoleum.

She and Constance avoided each other around the house. At mealtime, if Henry was still at work, Viv took her food out to the painting shed or she sat under the apple tree, balancing her plate on her knees. Mostly Con brought her supper to the living room, tuning in to one of her soaps. I started eating on the floor of my bedroom, where I could spread out my coins and buttons.

At various times I'd catch one of them staring out at the pilfered garden that Constance hadn't bothered to revive.

Early mornings, before my sister was up, my mother would slide open the screen door and walk in the dewy grass, crouching here and there with her cup of coffee and her cigarette, poking her red fingernails into the soil and through sinewy leaves.

I'd watch the birds fly away from her and high up into the trees in unison.

TEN

T
OWARD THE END OF
summer, we went to Lake Louise, Alberta. I was thirteen and this was the unforgettable trip where we visited Lake O'Hara and I saw the unicorn. It was unforgettable for another reason also. A reason named Liam Livingstone.

It took five days to get there. As we drove in our station wagon through the unpopulated prairies, it felt as if we were the last inhabitants on earth, like passengers on a ship sailing through gold. Viv and Con were on speaking terms again, though they had little to say to each other. Theirs was a world I barely grasped. I stayed out of their snippy exchanges, reading my books on bullion and taking breaks to look out at the pastoral landscape. Part of me wanted us to stay together on that drive forever.

*   *   *

A
BOY TOOK
Con's seat on the Parks bus. Or a young man, at eighteen, I suppose. Only when I think of him now do I see him as a kid; we were all kids back then. Even Vivienne, whose thin frame and regal composure aged her beyond her sixteen years.

Viv focused her attention out the window as he gravitated to her, in the seat across from the one I occupied with Henry. Who could blame him, with her high cheekbones and long yellow braid and full lips. She was a replica of our mother, but with eyes set farther apart and of a more intense violet blue. For years I'd close my own eyes and pull on the skin at my temples, hoping I'd open them and they'd be like Viv's.

I watched the scene unfold, taking in his lanky body, his stubbly jawbone, his jeans and T-shirt and muddy sneakers.

Constance called it
coup de foudre.
I'd read about love at first sight in Dante and in
Romeo and Juliet
as some kind of heart madness. I was nauseous and giddy. I knew I would marry him.

“Hi. Is anyone sitting here?”

Viv's glance registered him as unexceptional. She pulled her paisley bag onto her lap and the boy slid in beside her.

I sensed his eagerness as he looked at my sister. I sensed his racing pulse.

“I'm glad I managed to get a spot,” he said, his voice unsteady.