Girl in Shades (18 page)

“C'mon, Roger, enough of the naked guy. Let's get into the backyard.”

They hurried off and then it was just my father and me left. I ran into the kitchen and put ice cubes in a paper towel and put it on my father's forehead. He opened his eyes with the cold.

“Maya,” he said, dazed, his mouth formed into a scared grimace. “What happened? Where's your mother?”

“She's in the backyard, with everybody else.”

“Is she okay?” he blinked and took a breath, like he didn't quite know what was going on. For a second, he was hidden in a cool grey light that stuck to him.

“I think so. Mrs. Roughen's out there.”

“I can't believe she let these people in here.”

“Maybe they can help?”

“Yeah, they can help themselves to a lawsuit,” he said. “And Trudie Roughen too.” I helped him up to his feet and he went back up to his bedroom for some shorts and a T-shirt. We went into the backyard together.

People were lined up single-file in front of the entrance to the teepee, a line that curved like a snake around the yard, reaching to the back fence. The camera crew was set up on our back porch. The anchorwoman combed her hair nearby. The Native man was chanting words I didn't know beside the teepee. Chanting and stamping his white moccasins on the grass so that the hanging bits of feather danced in the air. As he chanted, he pushed out smoke from a small bowl, filling the air with a sweet kind of plant. He had red lines painted on his face and a circle of yellow and green around his body.

“Jesus Christ,” my father said. “What is this, some sort of freak show?”

Apparently, they thought that the “freak” was inside. One by one they would poke their heads into the teepee with their lips pursed and their eyebrows raised in anticipation. I could hear their thoughts, each overlapping onto the next:
It smells in here. What am I going to say? Is she contagious? Is she decent? Is she nuts?

Mrs. Roughen was the one to let them in when it was their turn. She stood at the entrance to the teepee like she was the gatekeeper of my mother. “Just wait a minute please, honey,” she said when I tried to pass her.

“Trudie, let her in, now,” my father said, a blue vein throbbing on his forehead.

“Sorry, Steven. Sure, yeah, go in, Maya. Just make it fast.” But Mrs. Roughen's inside thoughts told another story. From inside her head, I heard her call my father a self-absorbed asshole, a snag in the whole operation. I didn't know then what kind of operation she meant, but I hoped it was a kind of surgery that my mother was going to have.

“Hey, I was next!” someone shouted out, and Mrs. Roughen told them that they'd all get their turn to help save the baby through their prayers and good wishes.

My mother was sitting up in bed with her arms crossed. She was surrounded by three women and an older man who stood back by the window. One of the women, short, curly brown hair, glasses, and wide hips, was holding a shoebox filled with tiny bottles. Another taller woman was talking: “Mrs. Devine, the healing properties of essential aromatherapy oils are amazing if you just give them a chance,” she said while the third woman, thin, huge hoop earrings, neon bow in her ponytail, held one of the bottles in front of her nose. Mother gave a feeble “and so” look by hiding her lips inside her mouth.

“Just take a deep sniff. It's jasmine and peppermint. This'll give you the boost you need to fight the cancer and save your baby's life.”

“Sniff, Mother, sniff,” I said, running to the bed.

“Stay back, please,” the woman with hoops told me. “You'll upset one of the bottles.”

“Time's up!” Mrs. Roughen shouted from outside the teepee.

“We'll just leave these here,” the wide-hipped woman said, putting the box of oils on the chair beside the bed. The older man who had been watching nodded his head and walked with the woman out of the door.

I reached down to hold my mother's hand, warm fingers with her pulse tingling everywhere. She looked down at me and pulled her hand from mine. A tear gathered and slipped over her cheekbone.

I told all the people to leave, that she'd had enough. And one of them opened the flap so they could get out, letting in the voices and thoughts that had been creating a hum from outside the teepee.

I looked at Mother softly. “It's okay, Mother. We'll figure out a way to save the baby.” I was trying my best to be supportive — as much as a young girl could be of her own mother. But she had other demons circulating under her tightly stretched skin.

“There is no fucking baby!” she yelled.

“Stop it, Mother,” I said. “You know there is. Why would you say that?”

“Because there is no baby,” she moaned. “I made it all up — so deal with it.”

“I know you're lying. So stop.”

Then — and I hate to disrespect my mother's memory by adding this part — she slapped me. Hard. Across the cheek. And then she laid back on the bed.

Many hours have passed but I haven't fallen asleep. I only rest my eyes a bit by looking up from the page and out into the darkness of night. The wind badgers me to stop reading my mother's journal. “It's not private now that she's dead!” I scream towards the window from the bed — the words pound through my head and my stomach gallops around in my abdomen.

That's when I hear the knock from downstairs.

I swallow hard.

I cover my head with the duvet on my parents' bed. Sweat forms on my forehead. I breathe in and out like an ocean battering the sand.

Another knock from downstairs, pushier this time. A knock that screams, “I know you're in there!” I look at the clock, it's 2 a.m. Someone fumbles with the lock. My heart. A barrage of thoughts, overlapping, fighting for attention:
What day is it? What's wrong with me? My mother and an East Indian man? Is it true? Did Father know?

Who is downstairs?

A lot of thinking but I still don't move from the bed. I wrap the duvet around my face. Then I hear her voice, from out the window, louder than the knock that came through the house: “Maya, are you in there? Maya, it's Leah!”

“Aunt Leah?” The words are so quiet enough that only I can hear them. “Aunt Leah, I'm in here.” No louder that time, but more determined. I wipe my fingers across my sweaty forehead and suddenly long for the warm feeling that family brings.

I reach the front door in my socked feet and nightgown. The floor spins under my feet, the ceiling dips and circles above me. I turn the knob.

“Maya!” It's Aunt Leah, dressed in a black overcoat that reaches the floor, her eyes tired but frantic. She's not wearing glasses and she has pink eye shadow covering each lid. Sparks of orange and yellow are bouncing off her dark hair and reflecting into the night.

I fall to her feet.

Soon I am lying on the couch in the living room and Aunt Leah is holding my hand and kneeling beside me on the carpet. A facecloth is wet with ice and on my forehead. I open my eyes to look at her: “What are you doing here?” It is strange to be talking to someone from my family, face to face.

“Your father sent me, Maya — well, your grandmother made the final decision for me to come.” Her voice is stern but friendly and it invades my ears like a poker waking up the fire. “You know how she and your grandfather won't fly. They would rather die in a ten-car pile up than buckle themselves into a jetliner seat.” She blows out air and looks up at the ceiling for a moment. “Myself, I had to take the red-eye because it's cheaper.”

“But . . . why?” I sip water from a purple cup that Leah holds up to my lips.

“Maya, your dad called Grandma. He doesn't know what to do anymore. He feels that he's lost you.”

I shake my head and the tears come.

“Do you know where he is now, Maya?”

My words swim out like a prayer: “He's not really living here much anymore.”

“For how long?” She seems less surprised than I thought she'd be.

“He's been around, but I've been looking after myself for the most part. I haven't seen him much in the past week.”

“Maya, you don't deserve this, babe. I'm here to help, okay?”

“I'm just fine,” I say. “I've been managing just fine. I like having the house to myself.” I arch my back to sit up but lie back with the dizziness.

“I knew it.” She is standing now and pacing the living room in her Doc Martens, which make rubber clunks on the floor. In her head she is cursing my father, screaming inside. “What is he trying to prove?” she finally says out loud.

“Do you think he's coming back?”

She kneels back down beside me. “Maya, I'm sorry, we don't know. He didn't say he wasn't living here when he called, he just said he wanted someone to come get you. That it was all too much for him.”

“Does this have to do with Connie?”

“That woman he's seeing? I don't know, Maya, really.”

“What do we do now?”

“I'm going to take you home with me. You can't stay here by yourself anymore.”

“I can't?”

“You'll come with me to Toronto until your father figures things out.”

She takes me to the hospital, to Emergency, where I flirt with sleep for three hours on a stretcher in a hallway. Aunt Leah stands over me, holding my hand, stroking my forehead, making trips back and forth to the vending machine for Humpty Dumpty chips (she's had three bags so far) and Colt Cola. I can't eat. The room revolves around me and the molecules that make up my body seem to be spreading apart until there is nothing left of me. At the beginning of the fourth hour, when Aunt Leah has taken off her trench coat and stands over me in a pink tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of jeans that start exactly at her waist and stick tight to her legs all the way down, she speaks to me in a monotone: “Hang in there, kiddo, you can do this. At least you're not alone in a teepee.” She laughs, but I don't.

I fall back asleep not knowing for sure if I have even woken up.

Awake for sure now because I have to pee. It stings me from the inside.

“Leah, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay, My.” (She has started shortening my name and I hate it.) She holds her arm out so I can lift myself out of the hospital bed. I shuffle my socks across the shiny floor, with her following behind with my IV bag. She hands it over to me and waits outside the door when I go.

“I think I can manage this myself,” I yell at her through the door. I am not sure where my bitterness has come from, but sense that maybe it should be aimed at my father.

“Okay, My,” she says. “Be careful not to drop your arm or else blood will start coming up the tube.”

I only have the flu. At least that's what the doctors think. I am replacing my fluids. Aunt Leah has told them that my father is on vacation and she is babysitting. All I need is one night in hospital to be observed and get fluids.

At night, Leah goes back to my house and I sleep alone in the green room, with a tube coming out of the top of my hand feeding me a continual drink. There are two other beds in the room, empty beds. The nurse only checks on me every few hours, but I have a button to press if I need someone.

Is this how Mother felt when we left her here? Was she more frightened?

The room is dark except for lights over the other beds. Dark enough to sleep, but I can't. I wish I had remembered to bring the journal. I want to finish it. I want to hear what happened with my mother and Amar. I don't hate her for it.

Scratching.

Something is scratching at the window, trying to get in. It couldn't be a prairie dog — we're on the sixth floor.

More scratching and some banging, like a huge branch is hitting the window (but the trees don't grow this high).

The television up by the ceiling flips on. (I hadn't even noticed it until now.) Static with no sound, but inside my head:
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here
.

I flop onto my left side, close my eyes, and escape into the darkness on the underside of my eyelids.

“What do you want to eat?” Aunt Leah is looking into an empty fridge. “Looks like all I have to offer you are ketchup, olives — well, mostly pimentos — and a rotten cucumber.”

“I'm not really hungry yet.”

“You gotta eat something, My. The doctor wouldn't have let you out if he knew you weren't going to eat.”

“Pimentos then.”

“I'll go to the market and pick up a few things. We've got to eat for the next few days.”

“So what did he say when you told him what happened to me?” I ask. She had called my father at work that morning.

“He was worried. Upset. He didn't know you had been feeling sick. He wanted to come over, but I told him no. That you just needed space for now, that I would look after you.”

“It's not working out, me and him.”

“That's why I'm taking you to Toronto.”

“Why not Grandma and Grandpa?”

“They're getting older. They are finally enjoying things by the ocean. They don't need a kid there messing it all up.”

“How about my other grandmother then?”

Leah makes her lips into a small rose and looks away from me. She speaks without opening her mouth.

“Not gonna happen, sweetie. That lady is a bit too stuck in her ways I think. And a bit batty, don't you think?”

“I've only met her once, when she visited Mother.”

“It'll be great staying with me, you'll see. Just until things calm down with your father, and he comes to his senses. I know you're thirteen and all, but he can't just leave you here all the time to look after yourself.”

“What about my friends? I have two friends, Heather and Chauncey.”

“I can take you to say goodbye to them if you want?”

“Maybe.”

“My, think positive, okay? Did you know that positive thoughts create happy lives?”

“Please stop calling me that.”

“What?”

“My name is Maya.”

When she leaves for the store, I run back up to my parents' room and pull out my mother's journal. I had stuck it between the mattress and the box spring. I hold it in my hand for a minute, not sure I even want to know what more it has to tell me. I read from where I left off.

November 25
,
1972

I've told Steven I'd go to dinner with him tomorrow night at Roland's. I had to. He has become so damn suspicious, even though he doesn't know exactly about what. And can never know.

I haven't heard from Amar. Isn't it always the way? Haven't heard and I guess maybe it is for the best. I mean, what was I thinking? Older, Indian, a little bit strange. They should have me committed for even considering it.

The secret is that I still do — think about him, that is. And they are not always the purest of thoughts, if you catch my drift!

So, I'm having dinner with Steven at Roland's. Classy. I'll have to wear nylons. He's picking me up in his father's Plymouth Valiant. I'm preparing myself for a lot of ass-kissing if I ever want our relationship to be how it was. Do I? He's mad at me. Especially since I cancelled our study date to go on the picnic with Amar. He'll get over it though. He always does.