Rabbit Ears (11 page)

It takes her a moment. She’s definitely thinking now. And she’s getting mad. “It was at the funeral,” she says. “He gave them to me there.”

She knows I know she’s lying.

“Why are you hassling me about some stupid roses from Dad’s funeral?” she says, and shoves past me, almost stepping on me to get to her room. I follow her and listen at the door and hear banging, as if she’s drumming her feet on the floor, and great heaving sobs. I want to go in there. I do. I’m too scared, though. What’s happening is too big for me. Way too big.

The next morning, Kaya is gone, suitcase and all.

It’s me who realizes it, me who nudges open the door to the empty room, who examines the nest of a bed and judges it un-slept-in, who looks in the closet for Kaya’s special suitcase covered in tapestry farm animals and finds it missing.

“She left in the night,” I say, frantic and breathless from my rapid journey from bedroom to kitchen. “She’s gone. So’s her suitcase.”

Mom kind of collapses against the kitchen counter, and I watch her dissolve, all tears and confusion. My own body straightens, its shaking stilled.

“We should call the police,” I say.

“She never took her suitcase before,” Mom says.

I hand her the phone.

“You go off to school now, honey,” Mom says after she hangs up. She’s got herself under control. “I’m going to talk to the officer who’s coming over. Then I’m going to take a drive downtown. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find her, pop her in the car and bring her on home.”

Mom is taking action like moms are supposed to. I breathe deep, swallow my misery and head upstairs. One thing for sure: I am not going to school.

I walk along the sidewalk on the other side of the street and try not to look like I’m looking. The house with the taped-off front yard is kind of grungy looking, old stucco, overgrown bushes, dead lawn. Someone’s done some sort of gardening since I was here two days ago, though. Pretty extreme gardening,
actually. There’s a heap of stuff on the lawn, and all the way along the path a row of short stalks stick out of the ground. Every one of the rose bushes has been cut down. That’s where he shot himself, I think, and I look for signs of blood even though I know I won’t see it from across the street.

I look for signs of life. Nothing. The house looks abandoned, and the yellow tape cordons off the path as well as the yard. I reach the corner, cross and start down the sidewalk on the same side as the house.

Two years ago, the front yard was littered with toys, the rose bushes were covered in blooms, the grass was green and those boys were having a gas.

I pause in front of the house and peer at the lawn, at the path. I still don’t see any blood.

I’m lifting the police tape and stepping onto that path when a car comes around the corner. I pay no attention until it speeds up and draws to the curb right behind me, facing the wrong way and screeching just a bit as the driver applies the brakes. The driver is a man and he is out of the car and after me, but I’ve already dropped the tape and taken off at top speed. This can’t be happening. Again!

“You kids make me sick,” he shouts, “coming around here peering into corners.”

“Dad!” Another voice—a girl’s.

I slow down and glance over my shoulder.

His daughter’s in the car, but she has the window open and she’s leaning out. “Dad!” She almost screams this time. “I’m going to call the police,” the man shouts, but at least he has given up the chase. “Can’t you people give my father some privacy?”

I’ve never read the obituary section before, but on Tuesday morning I slip out of bed while Mom is still sleeping, ease open the front door, grab the paper and take it up to my room. Whatever happens, I don’t want Mom to start thinking what I’m thinking. Not yet.

There it is, right at the top.

Alan Grimsby: 1919–1998

Survived by his loving companion of forty-three years, Jennifer Ainsworth, and his four children, David, Adrian, Cedric, and Charlotte, and seven grandchildren
.

The funeral will be held at St. Anselm’s Anglican Church, Saturday, October 3, at 11 a.m
.

That’s only four days from today. I read and reread, but find few clues. It makes no mention of how he died. No bullet to the brain here. And it says nothing about his life either. Except.

Four children. Which was the shouting man with the daughter?

And what about that “loving companion”?

Beth

The days that follow pass somehow. Mom goes off in the car every evening, looking, and comes home late every night, exhausted and alone. She calls the Missing Persons Department every day, and learns nothing. We eat what we can scrape together, or order pizza. I spend what’s left of my babysitting stash on candy to get me through the long lonely evenings, and I master three new card tricks while I’m eating it. I avoid Jane and Samantha and skip classes, or doze in the back row.

I feel like I’m trapped inside a tunnel. I’ve decided to go to that funeral, and in the meantime all I can do is shuffle along in the dark. Ideas float into my head, but I hustle them out again. I could talk to Mom, or knock on the door of that house or go downtown myself. But every one of those ideas scares the hell out of me. The funeral scares me too. But I know I can do it. Until then, I’m mastering a really complicated trick shuffle.

On Thursday, Michelle corners me at the end of the hall. “Where’s Kaya?” she says.

I can’t find it in me to be friendly with this annoying girl, but I do tell her the truth. “Gone,” I say. “She ran away last weekend.”

Michelle opens her mouth to ask another question, and I cut her short. “Listen, that’s all I know. Okay?”

Michelle wanders off looking crushed, and I walk straight out the front door of the school. If I hurry, I can make it home in time for the perfect trio: Häagen-Dazs ice cream (Chocolate Chocolate Chip), the next card trick in my book and my favourite soap (
All
My Children
).

Saturday comes eventually, and Mom’s at work, so I don’t need an excuse for going out at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning in a black skirt and nylons. I have to take a bus to get to the church, but I still make it there twenty minutes before the service. My second funeral, I think, and I push the memories of funeral number one far, far away.

I take the program from the tall man in black who stands in the doorway, waiting to see if he will ask who I am, but he does not. Other people are coming along behind me and the entranceway is full of people milling about. I’m on the lookout for the shouting son, though I hope he didn’t get a good-enough look at me to recognize me here in such different clothes. As it turns out, I hear him before I see him.

“What is this? A circus?”

I freeze and peer through the crowd. It’s easy to pick out who is talking because everyone has turned to look. I can only see part of him, but the woman he is addressing is so
tall that her pale, pointy face and her smooth dark hair with its tidy line of white roots rise above the crowd. The loving companion. Jennifer Ainsworth.

The loving companion has a strangely serene smile on her face, as if this man’s discomfort gives her great pleasure. “No, David,” she says slowly, pacing herself. “This is a funeral. Your father’s funeral.”

“And you had to invite the whole world.”

“Lower your voice, David. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

She stops pitching her voice to the crowd after that, and I hear no more from her, but I hear one more petulant comment from the son. “But I don’t want them here,” he says.

I turn away and enter the rapidly filling sanctuary. Who are all these people? I wonder, and feel a flash of sympathy for that angry man, sharing his father’s funeral with all these strangers. I slip into the back pew. I have a reason for being here, I tell myself, though the man certainly would not approve that reason, and he wouldn’t like it if he connected me with the girl on the sidewalk the other day. Straightening my back against the hard wood, I look around.

There’s music, but it’s only coming from the organ, I realize, and nobody’s listening. There’s a certain murmuring quality to the crowd, a “we’re at the funeral of a man who shot himself” sort of murmuring, though it feels respectful enough. A bit sad, maybe, just as you’d expect.

I turn my gaze to the far side of the church and, to my surprise, it falls upon those boys, the ones I’d seen riding the toy car, Paul and Dave. I stare. And realize quickly that they are not the only ones. Over the next minute or two,
I count seven boys, teenaged and younger; four of them (including Paul and Dave) I recognize from school. They’re not in a pack like usual; they are in tidy family groups, sitting between moms and dads, hair neatly combed, shoulders square, jacketed. The boys are not jostling and talking. They are silent, waiting.

Clearly Paul and Dave were not the only ones to hang out with Mr. Grimsby. Boys only, though, I notice.

I don’t like the thoughts that come to me, so I turn to the folded paper in my lap. The program or whatever you call it. I open it and smooth it across my thighs.
Alan Samuel Grimsby
, I read.
Grim
indeed, I am thinking, when I’m startled by a body thrusting itself into the pew right next to me.

It’s a girl, younger than me, with a familiar face. From the neighbourhood, for sure. Why does she look so terrified? Like a rabbit cornered by a wolverine. And the name comes to me.

Diana.

“I think you know my sister,” I say. “Didn’t you and Kaya—?”

But I don’t get a chance to finish the question.

“I’m sorry. I, uh, I think I see …” the girl stammers, and rushes from her seat.

A strange darkness runs through me. Something is very, very wrong, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is.

The service starts soon after, but I find it hard to pay attention at first. Diana is perched at the end of a pew three rows
up, and I’m watching the back of her head. Her neck has a tilt to it that is not quite right. Tears gather in the back of my nose.

The priest drones on. The congregation stands. The congregation sits. The congregation prays. The priest warns us all away from a life of sin, offers up a clean, pure path to heaven. Suggests Alan Samuel Grimsby is currently on that very path. I hold in a snort and wonder about the church’s position on suicide. Not to mention whatever else …

From what the priest says, it sounds like the ashes in the urn up there at the front came from the body of a man who died peacefully at the end of a long life, well lived. Around me, people listen, heads bowed or eyes trained politely on the speaker. No one seems bothered by the lie. Except for me. And Diana, I’m guessing.

Lies
, I should say.

Then the loving companion gets up, and every head in the room straightens. She weeps as she speaks. “I still remember the first time I came to the house in Montreal,” she says, and has to stop to blow her nose before she can continue. “The toys! He was an antiques dealer back then, but he had such a love for the toys that I don’t know how many he ever sold. He brought them home instead. The kids loved them. Just loved them.” Another long sniff. “I see others here who enjoyed Alan’s kindness and generosity, even as an old man.” She looks at Paul and Dave and the rest. “He loved the children. Always did.”

I watch her looking at the boys, exulting in the goodness of the man she is remembering, her part in his good works. I feel as if I am seeing right inside her skull.

Then I see her see Diana.

And even from the back, I see Diana being seen.

Diana shrinks down in the pew as if she would fold her shoulders together and disappear. And the loving companion stops talking abruptly. Grief takes her over completely. At least it looks like grief.

The angry son rises in the front row and strides toward the pulpit. His hand is on her elbow. The priest stands behind them, looking nervous. The angry son pulls at the loving companion’s arm, and everyone hears when he hisses, “That’s enough, Jennifer. Sit down.”

But she has something else to say, through her tears, right into the microphone so everyone can hear. “You’re the one who did it to him, David,” she cries, “forbidding an old man his grandchildren.”

He hustles her out then, and everyone can hear their shouting voices, though we can’t make out any more words. I look around for those poor deprived grandchildren, maybe including the girl who shouted “Dad” from the car window, but I don’t think they’re here. Diana remains folded up in her seat.

The priest steps up and continues where he left off. He has nothing to say about what has just happened in his church.

As the service ends and the organ music ushers everyone to their feet, I slip into the foyer ahead of the crowd, make my way outside and wait there, determined. Diana has something to tell and I am going to drag it out of her. I push those folded shoulders—that frightened face—out of my mind. Somebody’s got to put words to this.

I peer in the door and see the family members all in a row: the receiving line. The loving companion is nowhere in sight.

I hated the receiving line at Dad’s funeral. I loathed standing next to Mom, the whispered words, the scratchy, perfumed hugs, the sympathy, thick and clotted, like sour milk. I hated Kaya all spread out drawing swans in a corner, off the hook as always.

A voice at my elbow. “You just skulk around everywhere, don’t you.”

It’s the girl from the angry son’s car. She’s tall, skinny, with beady, deep-set eyes and an oversized mouth. She’s not just the girl from the car. She’s from school too, I realize, just as she draws back and says, “I know you. You’re that girl who hangs out at the end of the hall.”

“My name’s Beth,” I say.

“Marlene,” the girl says. Then, “Why were you lurking around outside my grandfather’s house that day?”

Grandfather
. Formal.

I don’t like the word
lurking
but have no answer. My mouth is probably hanging open like a fish’s. That’s when I see Diana leave the church. She does not pause, she does not look. She strides through the scattered bodies, and she’s gone.

Marlene follows my gaze. “Hey! She goes to our school too, doesn’t she?” She does an exaggerated double take. Paul and Dave are following two sets of parents into the parking lot. “And so do they. What’s going on? What were you all doing in there?” Her initial bluster is gone. She seems to have trouble getting the next sentence out. “
I
wasn’t even in there.”

I wonder if Marlene is going to cry. I kind of hope she does, actually. She’s ignorant and bossy. She
deserves
to cry.

Your grandfather hurt my sister, I think, trying the words on. I imagine the words as sound, vibrating Marlene’s eardrums, reaching her brain. What if I shouted them out? What if they could vibrate every eardrum around?

Your grandfather hurt my sister
.

My mouth opens. Words come out. “He had that big toy car,” I say. “And I think he had other stuff too. A lot of kids hung out there and played with that stuff.”

Marlene looks at me and I can tell that she’s not satisfied. “What about you?” she says. “Are you here because you liked to play in my grandfather’s toy car?”

The angry son comes out then. “Marlene,” he calls before he reaches the bottom step, “get in the car. We’re going.”

The loving companion, who has appeared from somewhere, is reaching for him, trying to pull him back. “But, the reception,” she says. Then her gaze lights on me. “Get out of here!” she shouts, the words bursting out through a sob. “I can’t take another minute of you girls. Not one more minute. If it wasn’t for you …”

After a terrifying moment, my limbs thaw and I lumber off, past the bus stop and along the boulevard toward home. I keep up the pace until I’m over the rise and out of sight.