Cricket in a Fist (29 page)

“What are they about?” Jasmine said. “The other women's books?”

“Mostly just the usual things.” Agatha didn't open her eyes. “Love. God. Money. Some big solution for all your problems.”

Love. On Bev's favourite show, people were always falling in and out of love. Falling in love with one person and then accidentally falling in love with someone else and leaving the first standing alone with a ring box in his hand, eyebrows twitching with humiliation and anger. Even though it kept happening, the square-jawed doctors and police officers were always surprised. Lara hated these shows but sometimes watched them anyway, just to spend time with Bev. Jasmine's real mother used to watch soaps, too; she remembered the almost painful boredom she'd felt when Agatha wasn't home, and instead of playing, her mother sat on the brown corduroy couch watching the television as if it was telling her something important. The concerned, patently grown-up expressions on all the characters' faces during their endless, intense conversations about the incomprehensible intricacies of daily life. It was so boring.

“Why don't you have a boyfriend?” Jasmine said.

“I just don't right now,” Agatha said. “I was seeing someone for a few months, but we broke up.”

“Did he dump you?”

“No. Well, no.” Agatha leaned back, wrapping a green and brown crocheted shawl from the back of the chair around her shoulders. “I broke up with him, actually.”

Jasmine recognized the shawl. It used to be at Tam-Tam's house,
on Agatha's bed. Esther's old bed. Jasmine crawled over to sit at Agatha's feet and touched the fabric. “Why?”

“I just knew what would happen. He told me I was going to have an interesting life. We were lying on the bed” — she waved her hand toward the bed on the other side of the bookcases that she and Jasmine had been sharing — “and he sort of leaned over me and said, ‘You're going to have a really interesting life.'”

Jasmine agreed; that was awful. “So you just dumped him?” She realized she'd started picking little bits of lint off Agatha's sock and pressing them together into a ball. She placed the lint-ball on her sister's knee and set to work on the other sock.

“Yup,” Agatha said.

“Did you cry?”

Agatha shrugged. “I cried for about an hour. The next day, I felt better. I guess there's nothing worse than ending up with the wrong person, you know?” Jasmine asked where they met. “On the bus. The bus back from Ottawa in the spring.”

“Did you love him?”

Agatha said she didn't, but then said, “Maybe. I could have, if he'd love me back, I guess. Oh, I guess I didn't. He claimed he loved me after about two weeks. But he didn't. Believe me.” Agatha stopped and leaned her head to one side, narrowing her eyes like she was trying to see inside Jasmine's brain. “Do you love someone, Min?” Jasmine looked down at her hands and shook her head. “Someone you shouldn't, maybe?” Agatha prompted. “Sometimes it really hurts, I know. Loving the wrong person.”

“Have you ever loved the wrong person?”

“I've liked people a lot, and felt like I loved them at the time. And it's always been the wrong person. Jasmine, you can tell me if you want. Is it someone at school? An older guy? Someone really — weird? Your teacher or something?”

“No!” Jasmine abandoned Agatha's sock. “God! Stop staring at me like that.” There really were shadows under Agatha's eyes; along with her long blond hair and bright grey eyes, they had always made her look tired and mysterious, like she knew terrible things and was hardly able to stand it.

“Remember when you ran away?” Jasmine said. “Where did you go?”

“Oh God. That was so pathetic, Min.” Agatha shook her head and fell silent. She always did that, as if she was thinking the rest of the story but forgetting to say it out loud. But then she went on, “To this guy's house. This grungy little apartment near the 7-Eleven on Beechwood. He looked completely baffled when I showed up at his house. I thought he was my boyfriend, but I guess that was news to him.” Jasmine asked what it was like staying there, and Agatha shrugged. “Well, I was only there for two days. There wasn't any toilet paper.”

“What did you use?”

“I used my underwear and then threw it in the garbage.” She grinned.

“No way.”

“Way!”

“Did you do drugs?”

Agatha looked at Jasmine oddly. “Why? Do you do drugs, ever?”

Jasmine shook her head. “I drank schnapps a bunch of times. A lot of it, like half a mickey. I
would
do drugs. I don't care. I want to. I just don't know where to get them.” Agatha stood up and told her to wait, then went into the kitchen, Esther's shawl still around her shoulders, and came back with a skinny little cigarette.

“This,” she said, “is a joint. If we smoke it together, will you promise not to do any other drugs? Anything other than pot?” Jasmine stared at her. “Well? Just have one or two tokes. Puffs.” Jasmine made Agatha promise there was no tobacco in the joint before she smoked it. She hated tobacco, unless it was in Grandpa Winter's pipe. She knew it wasn't logical, but there was something pretty nice about Grandpa Winter's pipe, clenched between his teeth. It wasn't gross like Bev's cigarettes.

“Come sit on the sofa,” Agatha said.

When Jasmine stopped coughing, she and Agatha both leaned back and sat in silence for about a million years. The sofa was unbelievably comfortable, like sitting in a huge teddy bear's lap. When Jasmine was little, she'd often fantasized about owning such
a teddy bear chair. Wrapped in the crocheted shawl, Agatha looked like a little girl in an old-fashioned painting. She'd always looked as if she belonged in a dark library and seemed out of place playing in the park or riding a bike. Toronto suited her, even though it wasn't what Jasmine had expected. “Everything here grinds along like a dirty machine,” Jasmine said, her voice echoing strangely through her head. It was true. The subway and the streetcar, the way everything rattled.

“Our parents used to smoke pot all the time, you know,” Agatha said.

“How do you know? Your eyes are all shiny.”

“Your eyes are like two big shiny balls.” Agatha leaned close and grinned like a crazy person. “Where are you going?”

“To look in the mirror.”

“No!” Agatha grabbed Jasmine's legs and wrestled her back onto the sofa, pinning her down. “Don't,” Agatha said, her whole weight on Jasmine's back. “It'll freak you out.” Jasmine laughed, Agatha's hair tickling the side of her face.

“How do you know?” Jasmine said.

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know, uh, that thing I was asking you about before.”

“What?”

Jasmine laughed. “Would you get off me, you freak? Okay, how do you know, how do you know — oh yeah, how do you know our parents used to smoke pot?”

“They
did
?” Agatha sat back and opened her eyes wide. “No
way
.” Jasmine put a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes tight, then curled into a fetal position, pressing her hands to her ears. She needed her brain to slow down. Benna said she'd smoked before, but Jasmine realized she didn't believe it anymore. She leaned back into the sofa. Benna probably wouldn't even have an interesting life. Virginia wrote that the opposite of love was indifference. Sud-denly, it no longer mattered. Probably that was what it felt like for Jasmine and Agatha's mother to stop loving her own husband and children. It was too bad Jasmine had confided in Benna about so much, but
at least Benna hadn't seemed to understand the details of what Jasmine was saying, or its importance. Benna was stupid. That was the way life worked. You love the wrong person. You love an idiot.

Agatha stood up. “Let's go get Thai food.”

As she always did while swimming, Jasmine took the time to ask herself some vital questions. Why had she run away? According to Dad, you don't always know why you did something until a long time later. That's what he said when Jasmine asked him, one time, why he married her real mother. The reasons Jasmine ran away were that she was mad because Bev was always smoking in the house and Dad let her, and also she wanted to find her real mother, who was the most selfish person on the planet. And because Benna took off after Jasmine kissed her, so going back to school would be a nightmare. Benna wouldn't be her friend anymore, and everyone would say Jasmine was a lezzie. Agatha was so lucky to be twenty-four years old and not fourteen, so she didn't have to go to school with Benna and a bunch of other faggots. Also, Jasmine told herself, she ran away because Agatha ran away, and their real mother ran away, and they both went to Toronto. So Jasmine went to Toronto, too. It's not that fucking hard to go to Toronto. Anyone can do that.

Agatha had always been like that, all of a sudden taking charge and making everything fun and crazy. Like when she made Helena microwave that grasshopper, or how she used to convince Jasmine that different places were haunted, like the wooden house in Aylmer and the stairs between Tam-Tam's office and the kitchen downstairs.

“I love riding around on the subway,” Agatha had told Jasmine, after they bought food at a little Thai takeout restaurant near her place.

Jasmine loved doing that, too, on buses. This little similarity made her want to hug Agatha and maybe cry, but she pushed the feeling away. The subway was underground a lot, which meant you couldn't see anything out the window. Just darkness and your own
reflection. Jasmine waited for the parts when the train went outside. But, Agatha said, it's the other people that are interesting. The kinds of people that ride around in the middle of the night. “Who are they?” Agatha whispered in a way that sent shivers through Jasmine's body. “Where are they going?” She pointed out a couple of girls, one dressed all in black with chains attached to her pants and the other wearing purple pants with a pink shirt. They were holding grocery bags. “I bet those are cousins,” Agatha whispered, pointing with a chopstick. “They're both allergic to sunlight, so their parents send them out for groceries at night. But they can't stand each other.”

“They're alone in the world except for each other,” Jasmine added.

“You never know,” said Agatha, “who you might see. Once I ran into an old friend from camp. Or, look, maybe that guy over there is your future husband. There might be someone you're supposed to see, so you have to go places where there are people and wait for the ones that're yours.”

“That's crazy.” Jasmine swallowed a mouthful of delicious, greasy pad thai. “Why is this so good? This is the best food I ever ate. Why are you laughing like that? What's so funny?” Jasmine laughed herself and almost choked, trying to swallow another bite. “Maybe that guy is your future
murderer
,” she whispered, and Agatha giggled in horror.

“Hey there, ladies. Ladies.” Jasmine looked around to see a man sitting on the long seat across from them. He wore a red baseball cap and had a large, bloody gauze bandage wrapped around his knee. “Ladies,” he said. “You girls all alone?”

“Your knee's bleeding, sir,” said Jasmine, and Agatha laughed out loud.

“My sister's right,” Agatha said. “You should listen to her. You should go to a doctor, buddy.”

“Ohh,” he said. “Sisters. But what are two young sisters doing here? Where's your momma?” Agatha leaned around, so Jasmine could see her face but he couldn't. Her cheeks were red from laughing. “Where's your momma,” he said again.

“She went crazy,” Jasmine said. “She doesn't love us anymore.”
Agatha leaned her forehead against Jasmine's shoulder, shaking her head.

“You tell her she should keep an eye on her two young girls. This world's a bad place.”

“Okay,” said Jasmine. “Thanks for the warning.”

“This world's a bad place,” the man said again. “You girls want to come with me? You need some help, a place to stay until your momma comes back?”

The subway pulled to a stop, and Agatha grabbed Jasmine's hand. “No thanks,” Jasmine said, as Agatha dragged her off the train. “She's not coming back. We're wayward waifs,” she yelled over her shoulder. Agatha pulled her, running, down the platform and into another car just before the doors closed.

“These seats are the colour of goulash,” Jasmine said, as they sat down again. They were alone. “Like tomato sauce and sour cream mixed together. Our mother used to do that, remember? Oma Esther's goulash?” Agatha nodded slowly as the train gained speed. “Aga,” Jasmine said. “Why wouldn't you write back to me? Why didn't you tell me about the books and the articles, that you already knew all this stuff? Why did you keep it a secret?”

“I don't know,” Agatha said. Jasmine waited, but Agatha just shook her head. “I'm sorry, I don't know.” She looked up as the train stopped. “This is the end of the line.” But the train started again, eased into the pitch-black tunnel, and was filled with a low, moaning metallic wail that went on for so long that Jasmine covered her ears. She closed her eyes; the subway car was shaking. Finally, the sound stopped, and the train pulled into the station. The same station, Jasmine saw, but now they were on the other side of the platform and facing the other way. She hadn't felt the train turning around at all, and this fact struck her as horrible — that in the dark she couldn't even detect a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Agatha touched Jasmine's cheek with the tips of her fingers.

Jasmine lay awake for a long time after they got home. She used to sleep with Agatha all the time, first after their mother's accident and then at Tam-Tam's house. No matter how different Agatha
looked, she was still the same, so skinny and warm. She smelled mildly like a combination of spaghetti sauce and flowers, and, Jasmine noticed, staring up close, the expression on her face said she would punch anyone who woke her up. She slept so soundly that it was pretty much impossible to wake her anyway. One morning, in Esther's old bed, Jasmine had sat on her sister's chest and pulled her eyes open by the lashes. In a split second, Agatha grabbed Jasmine under the arms to toss her aside with superhuman strength. And then she put her arm around Jasmine and just kept sleeping.