The Gallery of Lost Species (7 page)

Viv sulked and returned her gaze to the window. The bus left the parking lot and he extracted a fossil from his knapsack, holding it out to my sister. Its surface was specked with flat white coils.

I tapped him on the shoulder. “I collect ammonites!”

He turned to me. “Get out of town.”

“We
are
out of town. We're from Ontario. I'm Edith.”

When he laughed, I studied him—his intelligent, roguish grey eyes, the subtle dimples in his cheeks. “Hi, Edith, I'm Liam. And who's this?” He beheld my sister once more.

“That's Viv. Don't mind her rudeness.”

Viv unglued herself from the window, swinging around to glare at me. “
Edith!
Mind your own business.” This brought her body closer to Liam's. Chest to chest, inches away from each other.

“Where are you from?” I continued.

He didn't hear me.

I tapped him on the shoulder again. “
Hey.
Liam!”

“Er—oh, Ottawa.”

“Us too!”

“But I go to school in Calgary.”

“How come you're alone?”

“My uncle's paying me to find rocks.”

“Come hike with us!”

“I don't want to impose?” He stood and leaned over me to shake Henry's hand. “Liam Livingstone,” he said. Once he got near enough, I smelled his bare arm—the scent of rain on dry earth.

“The more the merrier,” our father said, hardly raising his head from his trail guide.

Viv sighed and returned to her window.

“Liam
Livingstone?
” I snorted. “That's not your
real
name.”

“Corny, I know. I come from a line of geologists.”

My father pulled me by the ponytail. “Pipe down, Edith. Enjoy the scenery.”

During the slow ascent up the fire road to Lake O'Hara, I sat on my heels, unable to stop observing them, the way I knew movie popcorn would make my stomach ache, and I kept shoving my fist into the bag, entranced by a flickering screen.

Liam asked my sister about herself until her silky face opened up. By the end of the ride they were conversing with ease.

“She has a boyfriend,” I said as we arrived at our destination. At school, Viv had new boyfriends every month.

“Shut
up,
Edith!” Viv turned back and smiled at Liam.

I told him about the Coin Shoppe. Viv joked about Omar being my boyfriend. She wasn't acting like herself. “Your cheeks are red,” I said to her when we disembarked.

Viv and Liam lagged behind while we tromped up the mountain. Each time laughter erupted, I slowed. “
What's
so hilarious?”

“Nothing, pipsqueak,” Viv said.

“Mom wanted you to get her some of those for pressing.” I pointed to a high slope carpeted with blue and pink flowers. “It's the least you could do after that stunt you pulled.”

“What stunt?” Liam looked from me to Viv.

“Ignore her,” my sister cut in. “She likes to invent.”

When she started climbing, I approached Liam. “Why don't you come back to Ontario and study the Canadian Shield?”

“Maybe I'll have reason to someday.” He winked at me then watched my sister, who was struggling to reach the flowers. “I'd better help,” he said, entrusting me with his knapsack and patting me on the head before he shot up the rock slide.

I joined Henry, who was sitting on a boulder drinking coffee. That's when the unicorn appeared on the mountainside opposite the slope that Viv and Liam climbed. Once Henry confirmed the sighting, I cried out and jumped around. I watched the legendary animal awhile. Then I turned my back on it so I could find Liam again.

That day, my life became a book containing two chapters: the one prior to Liam and everything that came after, with Liam serving as the divider between my sister and me.

They returned with heaps of blooms plucked from the alpine crest. Liam made quick work of braiding the stems for Viv.

“She has a thousand crowns. Don't inconvenience yourself,” I told him as he bunched what remained into a bouquet for me. Forget-me-nots.

We passed waterfalls and twisted trees and meadows of heather and mossy creeks. I wanted to push my sister off a ridge. When we attained the snow-capped surrounding of Lake Oesa, Liam turned to Viv. “I just figured out the colour of your eyes. They're lapis lazuli, the purple-blue stone.”

My eyes were brown, almost black.

He was unaware that I'd snapped his picture. Or had stolen one of the rocks he'd mined from his knapsack. I rubbed the rock's coarse surface. It felt like glass slivers in my fingertips.

He exchanged personal details with Vivienne, but this didn't worry me. By the time we got home and Constance began preparations for my sister's last year of pageantry, I was sure Viv had forgotten all about him.

ELEVEN

“W
HY DON'T YOU COME
to school?” I asked Omar in September. It was decided I would keep going to Serena's twice a week.

“Because children can be
crew-elle,
” he said, parodying his mother. “She won't let me. Treats me like a pansy. She's too scared to let me do anything.”

In my fifth-grade class there had been a quiet girl named Elinore who had epilepsy. She wore lace-trimmed dresses and looked like a porcelain doll.

When Elinore had her fits, it was as if she was possessed by a demon. She'd drop to the ground before anyone could catch her. A deep moaning would rise up from her throat while she convulsed and foamed at the mouth. Once, she hit her head on the metal edge of her desk. Blood clotted in her blond hair as our teacher rolled her onto her side to prevent choking, and stuck a pencil between her teeth so she wouldn't bite down on her tongue.

At recess, boys would writhe on the ground, mimicking Elinore. She left midway through the term. A rumour spread that she'd died.

“What are the seizures like?” I asked him.

“I check out when they come on.”

“Does it hurt?”

“The headaches feel like knives behind my eyes.”

“So you know when it's going to happen?”

“Flashing lights can bring them on. Otherwise it's random.”

He walked around the unlit store, browsing the vitrines through his thick glasses. When he stared at me straight on, I got shy.

He deactivated the alarm panel at the back of a case, pulled a key out from under his baseball cap, and slid the door open.

I took a puff from my inhaler. “Why do you steal?”

“I'm saving for medicine in the States that'll cure me.”

“Your mom won't get you that?”

“She says it could leave me brain-dead.”

Expertly, Omar slid his arm in and out of the display so rapidly I couldn't tell what he'd taken. He came over with his hands in his pockets. His green sneakers made his feet seem enormous, jutting out from his scrawny legs like the shoes of the clowns I collected.

He stuck his tongue out. On the tip of it there rested the smallest coin I'd ever seen.

“Fish scales.”

“Pardon?”

“They're called fish scales. For their size and their minnowy look.”

“Where do you get the fakes from?”

“My mom makes me go to group counselling. A bunch of epileptics sit in a circle and talk feelings. There's this guy there, Grigg. He works in a casino and he's a coin collector. He deals money to make money to buy money, haha!” Omar slapped his knee, searching my face for a reaction. “Anyway, he hit on my mom, but she saw he had an agenda. He was always eyeing the coins. So one day when he was in the shop and Mom was upstairs, I told him I'd get him what he wanted. I made copies of the cabinet keys while she was in one of her sleeping pill slumbers.” He gave me a sheepish look before going on. “Sometimes he'll fake seizures, it's hysterical. The rules are no more than two coins a week. He gives me replicas to replace what we take. He puts what I bring him in a safety deposit box at a bank and sells them at trade shows or to auction houses. You want in?”

“I get paid already.”

“Everyone needs more money.”

“What you're doing is lousy.”

“You wouldn't say that if you knew my mom.”

I went back to cleaning crude lumps.

Omar picked one up. “I can't make heads or tails of these,” he said. Then he pulled a pack of cigarillos out of his sleeve and waved it at me. “You want to go smoke a cigar out back?”

“Buzz off,” I said, and he trudged out alone.

*   *   *

A
T NIGHT IN
my room, I examined the pictures of Liam I'd had printed without anybody knowing.

Most were blurry. I'd snapped too fast in my fervour. What I ended up with were morsels of Liam—a leg moving forward on a rocky slope, an arm raised in the sky, his perfect ear and profile view. I smelled the photos and kissed them. I slid them under my pillow with the stolen glassy rock.

I copied his address, finding it under a pile of drawings in Viv's room. Viv would email, so I went for pen and paper. Each day after school I hurried to the mailbox. For every five times I wrote him, he'd send a short note back.

Dear Edith,

Sounds like your collection is coming along, keep it up! How's your sister? I've been busy studying land formations in Drumheller. This postcard shows you some hoodoos, famous in this region.

Liam

Photographs and letters—the first secret I kept from my sister.

TWELVE

L
IKE
H
OUDINI
, V
IV DISAPPEARED
from the last pageant of her life.

This was nothing new. My sister wandered at a young age, and as a kid Viv was in the habit of getting lost. After panicked searches, we'd find her asleep in a cardboard box in the garage or in the attic under a pile of clothes, or farther off, in a concrete pipe in the playground blocks away.

Once, at Sears after closing time, Viv had the department store in lockdown for two hours before security found her concealed by a rack of vents in the hardware aisle. Another time, during the Santa Claus parade, she slipped from our mother's grip. We tracked her down hours later, sitting on the curb of a deserted parking lot. Her arms were loaded up with bottles, which she'd been collecting to trade in for change to call home. She wiped her sticky hands on my snowsuit and Con was livid because her ski jacket smelled like beer.

Her most impressive hideout took place in elementary school during the scratch-and-sniff sticker craze. Somehow Viv got hold of the most bankable of all stickers, the dry martini: a tipped and grinning martini glass with big eyes, containing a single olive.

Stephanie, the most popular girl in school, offered to swap ten packs of smellies for Viv's page of dry martinis. Viv refused. She offered her allowance for a month. She offered her lunches of Pop-Tarts and pudding and pizza. When she said she'd bring Viv a real martini, my sister agreed.

The next day at lunch, some fourth-graders gathered behind the school. Stephanie extracted a jam jar of cloudy liquid from her purse. A gust of Pine-Sol hit the air as my sister pulled the dry martini sheet from her album.

Viv sat on her knapsack, unscrewed the metal lid, and took a sip, spitting most of it out in the dirt. Stephanie and her friends squealed. Plugging her nose, Viv took another gulp then transmitted the jar to the boys, who'd formed a circle around her. Daphne and I watched from further back, leaning against the schoolyard fence.

Miss Rogers, who was on outside duty that week, and who also happened to be Viv's teacher, caught on as the bell rang. She broke up the group and dragged Viv by the hood to the infirmary, where she passed out. When our mother got there, Viv woke up and vomited on Con's pink patent shoes. Both girls were suspended for a week.

That was the year Miss Rogers told my parents she thought Viv had psychological issues. Her concerns were based on the smelly sticker incident and the annual poetry contest.

Each spring, students had to write a poem for English class. A jury of teachers chose the winners, which were read out loud at assembly. My rhyming couplet about bubbles and kittens went unnoticed. Viv's poem was more troubling:
“The monster my mother / crawled out / from under the bed / and crept inside my head / through my ears.”

“What's this rubbish, Vivienne?” Constance shook the scrap of paper in front of her after she'd met with Miss Rogers. “Where did you copy this from?”

When Viv went back to the elementary school after her suspension, her fourth-grade classmates teased her and called her Sauceface and Wino. She hid every lunch hour so she'd be left alone. Then came the twenty-four-hour stretch when she went missing. Police roped off the premises and scoured the neighbourhood. News crews converged near the flagpole, waiting for the principal to answer questions about pedophiles. My parents were frantic and we stayed up through the night with an inspector and his assistant. They discussed tapping our phone in case we received a kidnapper's ransom call.

The next afternoon, a maintenance worker found Viv in the school's subterranean boiler room, which was no longer in use. Nobody ventured down there. Everyone believed the underground tunnels were inhabited by the ghosts of students who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Even the boys cowered from the space.

Viv lay unscathed on a blanket near the entrance duct, eating Twinkies, reading
Rolling Stone
magazine with a flashlight. The only thing Con said after she set eyes on my sister and before she turned and walked off was,
“Cette fille sera ma mort.
” She was already looking away from Viv and the rest of us, speaking to no one in particular, to the dark air and the tomb-like walls.

*   *   *

T
HE
G
RAND
S
UPREME
Prize for the Island of Dreams pageant was a trip for the winner and her family to Hawaii. Constance wanted it badly.