Falling (8 page)

Damian, you can’t blame me for what happened.

Damian gave the hood another bang.

It was an accident, said Trevor. What happened to Lisa was an accident. He wiped a white sleeve across his face. Shit, he went on. I can’t stop crying. Okay, if you’re going to hit me, watch out for my left shoulder. I’ve got a rotator cuff thing going on – it’s from hockey.

I could beat you to a pulp, said Damian, bending over the hood and stretching his arms out flat on it. But I have to go back in there. His voice was muffled. Fucking shit.

Fucking shit, agreed Trevor.

No, you’re the fucking shit.

I thought you were.

Damian stepped back from the truck, laughing. You’re the fucking shit. Got that? You’re the fucking shit. He drew himself up and stopped laughing abruptly. I have to go.

See you, said Trevor. Fucking shit.

Damian went inside. He walked down the hall, past the funeral director, who nodded solemnly at him, but he stopped at the threshold of the viewing salon where his mother was now sitting on the floor with her head in his father’s lap. Her feet, without shoes, were twisted underneath her, and they seemed all the more vulnerable because they weren’t naked, but clad in stockings, which were
reinforced over the toes. There was a little hole by her baby toe, ringed with nail polish so it wouldn’t run. Her face was turned away from Damian, but he could see she was crying helplessly. There was no sound. His father was touching her, soothing her.

It was possible that he’d never seen his parents together like this – his father had left when Damian was young. He thought briefly of the morning his father had gone away: that grey day with the wet snow falling. The colour of the taxi in that whiteness. It didn’t matter how many times he’d seen him after that, there was always the finality of that morning. His father loved him, but that didn’t make up for it.

Now he could see that his father loved his mother too, but it was all wrong. His mother was sprawled on the floor, in her black dress and jacket, and her stocking-clad feet, with one arm clutching her ex-husband’s leg, as if she were trying to hold on to wreckage from a boat. The two of them had been brought back together, but not for long, and Damian knew this as well as anyone. He watched as his father lifted his hand to make the same gesture over and over, putting his hand down slowly, tenderly, on his mother’s head to stroke her hair. She’d had it done that morning at the hairdresser’s, but it was all disarranged across his father’s lap, shimmering under the light.

It was a private moment between his parents, one that Damian should not have witnessed. Beside them was the casket, and in it was their daughter, cold as winter. Cold as January after a storm, when there was a glaze of ice over each stone on the beach. Cold as the white, frothy tide coming in and going out, restlessly.

Damian had kissed Lisa’s forehead earlier and he knew.

Over to one side, beneath a chair, were two black
patent leather shoes. One was upright, and the other had fallen over. It was his mother’s shoes that made Damian lean against the wall and cry.

Damian went up Clifton Hill, under the bright lights of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! He passed Rock Stars of the Ages Wax Museum, and Don’t Pay More Souvenirs, where T-shirts were ghosts in the window. Tits Up For Jesus. Cry When You Bite My Onion. Great Balls of Fire – Got ’Em, Flaunt ’Em. Just beyond the souvenir shop was a
3-D
creature with antennae and large lime-green eyes, glaring above the sign for Alien Terrors: A Close Encounter with Creatures from Mars.

He saw Elvis, then, just past Alien Terrors. There he was, all alone. He looked like someone who’d just got out of bed for a glass of milk, except that he was standing on the sidewalk in bare feet, in the greenish glow from the sign. When a car went by, the driver honked at him, but Elvis didn’t move. His pyjama top rippled out in the wind.

Hey,
retard!
someone yelled.

No harm had come to him. The sheep and ducks emblazoned on his pyjamas had protected him, as if they were magical symbols to ward off evil.

Elvis, said Damian softly.

Elvis looked around at him and turned back to the tattoo parlour window across the street from where he stood. The window was filled with light, and a young woman stood inside. She was slender, with glossy dark hair, and one brown shoulder showing where her wide-necked T-shirt had slipped a little. Her hair was caught up on top of her head with what might have been a large clothespin.
She had silvery bangles on her wrists, and the bangles moved as she worked on something, but whatever she was doing displeased her, because she frowned and tightened her mouth. She was drawing. Then she stopped, stepping back. She moved the pencil back and forth between her lips as she looked at the drawing.

Around her, on the walls, were hundreds of small pictures arranged in rows. Kittens, cats, puppies, dogs, guitars, mushrooms, hearts and arrows, motorcycles. Roses budding and roses blooming and roses in tiny wreaths. Smiling lips, pursed lips, open lips with the tip of a tongue showing. Angels. Devils. I love you. A cross, a flaming cross, three small crosses. Waves. A little boat. Noah and the ark. A wall of lions, tigers, zebras, Panda bears.

She flung the pencil on the table, but it jumped and rolled to the floor. Taking off her apron, she put it on the back of a chair and slung a drawstring bag over her shoulder. It was as though she were on a stage, Damian thought, and now she was going to speak to the audience. She looked out the window, though the glass must have been a square of darkness to her, and it seemed to Damian that he could predict how she would walk through the beaded curtain and part it exactly as she did, with one hand, going to the invisible back door where she would flick off the lights, as if she knew people were watching. Damian and Elvis both stood staring into the darkness, until Damian realized they were waiting for something. They were waiting for her to come back onstage.

Damian put his hand on Elvis’s arm. Let’s go, he said.

When Elvis didn’t move, he took his hand. His skin was soft and pliant, unexpectedly pliant. And it was larger than Damian’s own hand. If Elvis wanted to, he could crush it. It
made him think of how Elvis had held the gun, as if he’d meant it.

Okay, said Elvis, allowing himself to be led away. Okay.

It was on the back streets that Damian noticed the moonlight again. It fell on parked cars, on street signs, on a Dumpster, on a small plaster boy fishing on someone’s front lawn, flickering in and out of the pachysandra that grew thickly around the base of a group of birches.

They wouldn’t let me in, said Elvis.

Who? asked Damian.

They asked me how old I was. Then they asked me if I had any money. You’re supposed to have money if you go to the casino. I looked inside, though.

Damian imagined Elvis at the casino, looking in at the potted plants and marble floor, his breath making plumes on the glass.

You wouldn’t have liked it, Elvis.

They told me it was past my bedtime. The men said it was past my bedtime and they said things about my pyjamas. Elvis turned to Damian, his eyes glistening. They laughed about my pyjamas.

EVERY NIGHT BEFORE ELVIS
went to sleep he kissed Shania Twain, who smiled on his pillowcase. Once he’d said goodnight to Shania, he pulled a photograph out from under the pillow. There was a white crease across it, but the woman in it, though faded, could still be seen. Her long red hair fell over her shoulders. She wore a man’s black leather jacket, and she was leaning against a motorcycle. In her arms was a baby, snugly wrapped in a blanket. There was a doll-sized knitted cap on its head. The woman wasn’t looking down at the baby; she was looking directly at the camera, or she seemed to be looking directly at the camera, but she wore sunglasses so it was hard to tell. Elvis kissed the photograph twice. He kissed the woman on her sunglasses and he kissed the baby on its knitted cap. Then he slid it back under the pillow. On the back of the photograph, in a small, rounded script, were the words:

TO HELL WITH IT
, Jasmine thought, tossing the pencil. She took off her apron and picked up her bag. When she looked out the window all she could see was her own reflection, a girl who was a bit on the skinny side, except for her hips, which she’d never liked. Hair in need of washing, twisted up on top of her head and held with a clip. Her grandmother’s bangles on her wrist. But she looked like a nine-year-old, with or without bangles. Jasmine, who had been Sandra Blakeney, from Lanigan, Saskatchewan, on her way to Somewhere Else, preferably New York City, in the United States of America, before she went on to France, Italy, and Spain, was stranded for the moment in a tattoo parlour in Niagara Falls, Ontario, until she could make enough money to go Somewhere Else.

As for the drawing, she could tell herself it was fine, but it wasn’t; she couldn’t do foreshortening worth beans. The dragon was all right, but she couldn’t do the motorcycle. A drawing for a tattoo, the guy had said. His name was Jordan, he told Tarah, and what he wanted was a dragon sitting on a Kawasaki motorcycle, with the bike shown from the front, not the side.

Jasmine had said she’d try to help Tarah out, because the drawing had to be done by the following morning. But it wasn’t working. Why couldn’t Jordan get a flash of a Panda bear? Why did it have to be a dragon on a Kawasaki?

In grade three, Jasmine’s teacher had said that her trees looked like sponges. The teacher had been a jolly woman with red hair and large hands; she’d said the trees looked like sponges, and then she’d smiled. She didn’t have to say anything about the sky or the clouds. After the teacher went up the row, Sandra-not-yet-Jasmine looked at her trees. She liked them. She didn’t care what Mrs. Jewett said.

She’d gone home after school and yanked out all the hair from the head of her hand-me-down doll. It had been her sister Shirl’s doll.

What kind of a girl
are
you? asked her mother when she found Sandra and the doll and the yanked-out hair.

What kind of a girl was she?

One who’d left Lanigan before it was really spring, on a bus that went down the highway past fields that were not yet green, not even close, because it was always cold in Lanigan, and the cold went deep into the sky and the fields and the trees and the driveways and the cars and the houses and the people in the houses. Of course, that wasn’t entirely fair, because the heat of summer went deep into everything too, later on, but it was early spring when she left, and the world was grey-green. It was as flat as if someone had taken an iron to it and pressed it down.

One who’d saved a fortune cookie (from the Full Moon Chinese Restaurant in Saskatoon, while waiting for the bus that went via Winnipeg to Toronto) that read, in small green lettering:
Good fortune and great happiness will come your way very soon
.

One who had phoned home to tell her parents she’d left for a year and to wish her luck: a wish that went unwished. Her mother told her there’d be hell to pay and to come right home, what was she thinking, going off like that at the age of eighteen to live on the streets like some hussy, like some tramp?

One who was scared to leave Canada, in the end, and had got off the bus at the last possible place before crossing the border between Ontario and New York State.

One who found a place to rent after a bad night in the bus terminal, walking from one basement apartment to another before she found Tarah, who saved her life, because she needed someone to share The Dump on Stanley Street.

One who got a job in the Lundy’s Lane Historical Museum by giving the impression she was bright and perky. Of course, it helped that she was majoring in Canadian history at – at the University of Toronto.

One who’d been in Niagara Falls, Ontario, for five weeks and two days.

One who couldn’t draw motorcycles.

That was what kind of girl she was, if anyone wanted to know, but no one did.

She switched off the lights and went out the side door into the alley, making sure the door was locked behind her. She glanced down the alley to Clifton Street as she unlocked her bicycle, and it was then that she noticed the man in pyjamas. He was on the other side of the street. He was staring at her. No, he wasn’t staring at her; he was staring into the window of the Ornamental Hand. One side of his face was green because of the light from Alien Terrors. His feet were bare, and this was the strangest part
of it, because why would a person go outside without shoes? He was a nutcase, that’s what he was. A car went by, and his pyjama top swelled out as it passed. She had a sudden, eerie thought that he must have been watching her.

A blond-haired man took his hand and spoke to him; she saw how they turned slowly, like people in hospitals when they’d come to the end of a long hall. It could have been an old-fashioned, complicated dance they were doing, with one leading the other. The blond man was tall and lanky, with a braid down his back, and the other was solidly built, with tufts of hair standing up on his head. The streetlight turned their hair to silver, but neither of them was old. There was something about the way the tall one took his time, as if this was the kind of thing people did all the time, at midnight, on Clifton Hill, in Niagara Falls, Ontario; they could have been moving in a dream.

Once, on such a night, her father had woken her.

Wake up, Sandy, he’d said, tapping her on the shoulder.

She woke, frightened to see him standing over her. She’d been only seven. He whispered to her to come with him and she’d climbed down the ladder from her bunkbed. He got Shirl up too, but it was harder to wake her, because Shirl was sixteen and didn’t see why they had to go outside. It was
dumb
. But she came anyway. They’d gone to the back door and he’d suggested they put on their rubber boots. Sandra rubbed her eyes, feeling weary, but then he took them outside, into the wide, dark prairie night, and she woke up. The night had been soft as the black velvet collar on her mother’s red dress, the one that hung in the closet upstairs, all zipped up in a plastic case because she didn’t want moths to get into it.