Rabbit Ears (15 page)

When you were upstairs, he never spoke of what happened in that room. The only connection between upstairs and down was the drawings. He liked to draw upstairs. And he liked to show you his drawings upstairs. The drawings of other children. Children from his trips. Children with no
clothes. They looked happy in his drawings and glowed, like angels. And you told yourself that they were happy. And that you should be happy too.

You had been visiting Mr. Grimsby for years when Dad died, so it was natural to visit him, to tell him about it, and it was a relief to get out of the house, away from Mom, who went kind of manic, and Beth, who shut herself away in her room. Through the closed door, you could almost hear her munching away on cookies or something.

The morning after he died, you opened the front door and slipped out of the house. First, you tried the ravine. You had not been there in years, not since Grade Three. The fort was all gone, but the tree was still there. You squeezed yourself into its low-down bend, and swung your heels, scuffing at the dry dirt.

Harder and harder you swung them, smashing your feet into the stump, feeling the force in your legs, the solidity of the tree. For a moment—only one—you thought about going to see if Diana was home, but the two of you had grown apart long ago. You didn’t really talk to each other anymore. In the end, you freed yourself from the tree, dusted yourself off and set off to visit Mr. G. And he sat you down, gave you a sandwich and a glass of milk, and listened, really listened. He even got tears in his eyes just like that first time years before. And he never once glanced at the basement stairs.

He came to the funeral, with Jennifer. And sent you home later with those beautiful orange roses that Beth caught you with on the stairs.

After that, though, the sliding door was locked a lot of the time. And even when it wasn’t, Mr. Grimsby said “Time to go now” much more often. He hardly ever led you to the basement stairs, he listened to you with less attention and he snapped at you more. The locked door, the
Time to go
’s, the darting eyes, the nasty comments, all of that wounded, and you found yourself hoping for the one thing that told you that he wanted you, the basement. And that made you sick. That meant that you
were
sick. And the secret grew more and more unwieldy; it pushed at you; it threatened you; it spoke cruel words to you.
Pervert
, it called you.
Slut
.

The innocence of mothers and sisters and friends revolted you. Only the innocence of animals would do. You would come home from that locked door and walk into your house and fall to your knees as Sybilla bounded up to you. She filled your arms. Her fur enveloped your face. You breathed in dog. And—when you could find her—cat.

You were almost thirteen, just finishing Grade Seven, when it ended for good.

You were only eleven and a half when you first got your period, but you never mentioned that to Mr. G. It was personal, awkward and, well, kind of gross, so even though you told Mr. G absolutely everything else, and loved how he questioned you, drawing you out and listening to every
word, you left out that one development and never went to his house when you had it.

Until one time.

It was only a few days until your birthday, and as always, Mr. G asked you what you would like for a gift and what kind of cake you wanted.

Every year, you had asked for art supplies, which you kept at his house so the two of you could draw and paint together. He was gradually teaching you everything he knew. And you always picked a white cake with chocolate frosting, and Jennifer baked it.

This year you asked for a new angle brush and a tube of cerulean acrylic paint (your favourite blue). You sipped tea, ate two cookies. And as always, you watched his face for clues as to what was going to happen next. And that day, for the first time in months, he directed you toward the basement door. What you did not know was that your body was in the process of betraying you. Your period, which you had kept hidden for more than a year, was starting even as you walked down those stairs.

Five minutes later, he was flinging you to the floor and shouting, “Filthy little whore!”

He was gone from the room before you had even taken in what had happened. Bruised and humiliated, you straightened your skirt and fled up the stairs, taking in as you did so that he was at the basement sink, scrubbing his hand and arm as if he had just been subjected to radiation.

As you walked home, your belly squirming with a nasty mix of shame and cramps, you thought that you would never go back.

Your birthday passed. You were pretty sure that no art supplies had been purchased, no cake baked. Anyway, for five days you still had your period, and those three words echoed in your head,
Filthy little whore
.

But more days passed, and your teachers were unfair, Mom snapped at you, Beth ignored you and Michelle was never there. You longed for Mr. G’s listening ear. Besides, what had happened must have been a terrible mistake. He must have thought you did that on purpose, went there with your period. Maybe there was a way that you could apologize—kind of explain without really spelling it out.

Two weeks later, you went back.

You slipped through the narrow gap in the hedge off the lane as always. That day, you hesitated near the hedge, gazed at the tidy backyard and reflected on what an odd way this was to approach a person’s house. A sneaky way.

You felt your brow furrow, the skin over your cheekbones stiffen. This space—the gap in the thick hedge (that you now had to turn sideways to pass through), the raised gardens, the pebbled paths and the expanse of cement under the deck—had always troubled you. You had always had to force yourself to pass through the hedge, to cross the yard, to climb the wooden steps to the deck, to place your hand on the metal handle, to slide the door open, to push the curtain out of the way and step inside.

You had never liked it, but you had never questioned it either. This was the way Mr. G had told you to come to his
house, so this was the way you came. But now, everything had changed.

The day before, you had walked along Fourteenth Avenue, nonchalant as could be, and seen that his car was parked right in front, that the curtains were open, so you knew he was still there. He only went away in the fall anyway, but you had wondered if after what had happened, he might go. Seeing his car and the open curtains reassured you that maybe it was all right.

Now, for the very first time in, what—five years?—you decided that if that door did not slide open for you, you were going to knock on it. So, you paused. You smoothed down your skirt. Then you squared your shoulders and you walked. Along one of the pebbled paths, up the wooden steps, across the deck shaded by the neighbours’ massive beech tree, its leaves changing colour.

Mr. G always complained about that tree, the shade it created, the mess when the leaves fell. More than once he had lopped off branches, and been indignant for weeks when the tree’s owners called the city.

“Branches hanging over my property are my property,” he would say, and you would nod and wait for the conversation to shift to something more interesting. You thought the tree was beautiful, and especially in early fall.

Heat pulsed through your chest as you reached out your hand to try the door. Locked. The heat pulsed again, radiating into your limbs, your throat. You pressed the side of your face against the door and listened, but you could not hear a sound. You raised your hand to knock, hesitated, and let it drop.

The window that looked into the kitchen above the sink was small, and high up, but you should be able to see in if you gripped the ledge with your fingers and pulled yourself up on your toes. On tiptoe, you made your way along the side of the house. Still on tiptoe, you grasped that ledge, and you looked. All that heat whooshed through you, top to bottom, almost sending you into a heap on the ground. He was there, sitting at the kitchen table. He was angled away from you, but you could see precisely what he was doing. He had a small easel set up on the kitchen table, a photo clipped to the top of it. You couldn’t see what was in the photo, but you could see the drawing, at least enough to get the idea. You’d seen plenty of his drawings before, after all. He was drawing the torso of a child. A girl, perhaps nine or ten years old. Naked.

You might have knocked then, or made any sound at all, and he would have looked. He would have come to the door and spoken words to you. You were pretty sure you would not have liked those words. You knew then, in that moment, what you had never allowed yourself to know over the course of the last year or more, when the door had been locked so often, when the visits had grown shorter.

You knew in that moment that Mr. G didn’t want you anymore. Mr. G had not wanted you in a long, long time.

So you let go of the ledge and settled back onto the flats of your feet and crept away, down the steps, along the pebble path. You took more care not to be seen slipping through the hedge into the lane than you ever had before. And the shame that filled you up was like vomit and liquid shit: it shot through your veins, reaching into your toes, your fingertips, your earlobes, oozing out of your pores; it filled your guts,
backing up into your mouth and your nose. You felt it at the roots of your hair, in the beds of your nails. The tears that appeared on your face stank of it.

Most of all, you felt it in your crotch, your butt, your chest, all the places that were changing, hairs poking their way out through your skin where no hairs should be, fat gathering, shaping your body in ways that could not be hidden no matter how hard you tried to flatten yourself out and squeeze into the little-girl dresses that Mr. G liked so much.

There it is now. All of it, playing through your head, while all around you people
know
. No protection. No filter. Not even any privacy. You ease open the bathroom door and peer out toward the exit.

“Ready to go?” Raven asks.

You jump. Of course she’d be right there waiting. In her strong loving presence, your resistance slips away. For now.

Kaya

Detox is not worth writing about. Neither is treatment. You do everything, jump through all the hoops, obey all the rules. Except for one. You will not talk about Grimsby. You will not explain. Everyone else does. In group everyone tells their stories, everyone explains their troubles, the horrors that led them to the street, the beatings, the rapes, the neglect. And you listen and listen and listen. You tell yourself that if you hear one story like yours, just one, you’ll open up your mouth and tell.

But you don’t. You
do not
.

Your lips stay sealed. You concentrate on that seal, on the slight pressure of lip on lip, easy enough to break to drink, to eat, even, sometimes, to breathe. And it’s not as if you never speak. But not in group. Never in group.

In the end, they let you go home anyway. Mom and Beth pick you up, and try to chat with you on the drive, but you can only mumble in response. Their discomfort fills the car, and you wish, you wish for … Who? Your mind casts about
for someone, anyone, to wish for. You come up with a single name, and it’s on a poster downtown. That person is gone. You know in your heart she is dead. And she couldn’t help you anyway. All she could say was
Go home
, which is precisely what you are doing right now.

Why does it have to be so hard?

In your head, thousands and thousands of times each day, the refrain repeats:
You can always go back. They can’t make you stay. You can always, always go back
.

Beth

At home, I grab Kaya’s suitcase, recovered somehow and probably full of vermin, from the car and carry it straight up the stairs. Kaya follows and Mom takes up the rear. I feel hope and fear well up.

“I hope you like what we did,” Mom says, filling the stairwell with chatter. “We cleaned up, and we painted too. We thought you should have a fresh start.”

I turn quickly in the bedroom, eager to catch Kaya’s face when she sees the warm colours, the brand new duvet cover, the cozy rug, the collection of framed photos. Mom and I worked hard on it for three weekends. Michelle and Diana helped for an afternoon. Jane and Samantha for another. Even Marlene came by, dropped off by her dad.

We used the photos to show the parts of Kaya’s life that were joyful, and the other stuff to create something fresh and new.

It’s been a strange journey, the last thirty days. I put
everything into getting Kaya home, but the minute she entered treatment, it felt as if my job was over. I helped paint and decorate this room, sure, but everything hinges now on Kaya, on her recovery, on her staying power. I feel kind of empty a lot of the time. Empty and scared. If she relapses—I know we’re not supposed to say
fails
—what will that mean for me? I find myself wanting to scream that out a lot these days:
What about me
?

I guess I’m taking it one day at a time too. And I’m going without the ice cream. I do have my own project, on the side. And school, of course.

Anyway, just now, Kaya stands in that fresh, clean room, arms at her sides. Her smile is small, but it’s there. “Thanks, you guys,” she says.

Kaya

“Thanks, you guys,” you say. You even manage to smile at them. They are being kind. You know that. But you kind of wanted to crawl back into your nest, to snug down in the heap of bedding, or in the tangle of your old clothes.

You smile and smile until they go, until they leave you to settle yourself, but when they are gone, you are too exhausted to begin.

The next day, Mom comes into your room without knocking and sits right down on your bed. “I’m going to work,” she
says, “but Beth is staying home with you. She’s got permission to miss two whole weeks.”

You grunt and roll over, but Mom’s not done. “Your alarm’s set for eight, honey,” she says. “Remember, no sleeping the days away. And Beth will walk you to your meeting this afternoon.”

Your grunt’s a groan this time. Mom squeezes your shoulder through the duvet, and then leaves. You don’t plan to sleep the day away, but on your first morning back in your own room, you’d like to be free to relax. In your last moment of consciousness, you reach out and turn off the alarm. Sleep takes you away.

You’re furious when another hand grasps your shoulder, when a perky voice calls out, “Wake up, Kaya. Wake up! It’s ten past eight.”

It’s pretty gutsy of her; you’ll give her that. But it makes you mad just the same. You roll onto your back, wrenching your shoulder from Beth’s grasp. “I know what time it is, all right? Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”

You hear Beth breathe in courage. “You have to get up, Kaya. You’re not allowed to sleep past eight. Remember?”

Your eyes are open now, your elbows pulled under you, propping you up. “And what business is that of yours?”

“I’m your helper. Remember? I have to get you up.”

You glare.

“And besides, everybody’s coming over.”

Your lower jaw falls. “What? Who?”

“You’ll see. Now, get up!” She smiles slightly and her brow quirks. “Or should I send them up here?”

That does it. You are up.

You take your time, though, getting ready, going through the clothes in your closet, each item so familiar yet so strange. You’re not sure you can bear to put these clothes on; the girl who once wore them does not exist anymore.

You see it then, and stop. Slightly crooked on the hanger, badly wrinkled and obviously well worn, the summer dress—the little girl’s dress—its splashy pattern still bright, its skirt still full. More than a year ago, you crumpled that dress into the back corner of your closet, shoved it behind heaps of clothes and other junk. Away.

Now, it has returned.

You drop your hands to your knees and double over.

Mr. G liked that dress. It was his favourite, actually, so you wore it a lot back then. It’s sleeveless with a high neck and a full skirt, covered in oversized flowers. Mr. Grimsby said they were roses, but you could never see how he knew that. They were just big blobs of colour, really.

Anyway, he liked it, so you wore it. You wore it down those basement steps quite a few times, and Mr. G always took special care with it, which was not true with all your clothes. It was tight across the chest and through the shoulders that last summer, and your knees stuck out the bottom, but you kept squeezing yourself into it.

“What are you wearing that old thing for?” Mom said once. “It’s a little girl’s dress, not a teenager’s.”

She had jumped at the venom in your response. How you hated those words:
little girl
. And, even worse,
teenager
.

You can still remember the feel of the cotton skirt
clutched in your hands as you turned away from the kitchen window that day, after watching Mr. G draw one of his naked pictures. Now, as you wait for the nausea to pass, you take in for the first time that the children in those photographs, those drawings—the little girls from faraway countries that Mr. Grimsby so loved to draw—are real. Suddenly you really get it.

You get that he did it to them too, that he made them do things, that he hurt them. That he was kind to them and made them trust him and then he betrayed them.

And you realize that there must be other girls right here. Maybe there was even another girl after you, an eight- or nine-year-old who’s out there right now, hurt and confused and scared.

The nausea is not going to pass. You sink to your knees. It’s probably never going to pass—

“What are you doing?”

You start, which results in a sort of tumble sideways off your knees and onto your butt. You scramble to your feet and find yourself fact to face with the monster’s granddaughter. Marlene.

“Hey,” she says. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” you say. “Did you just walk into my room?”

“I knocked,” she says, “but nobody answered. And you’re supposed to be downstairs.”

“I don’t even know you,” you say.

She harrumphs or grunts or some strange thing. “Listen,” she says. “I have to tell you something. My mom wouldn’t let me near Grandpa, not after I was six. I never understood why. I loved visiting him … All those toys and things. He
was so much fun. And then one day, no more visits. I kind of remember her and Dad yelling about it. But she would not change her mind. After that, I only ever saw him at big family parties. And she kept a close eye on me.”

You back your way up to your bed as you listen, and plunk down into a sitting position. Stare. She stands stiff as she talks, taking a deep breath at the end of every sentence. She sort of runs out of steam at one point, and you wait, ready now to see it through. Ready now to hear.

“Well, since I saw you outside the church, I’ve been thinking and thinking, and I realized that I remember something.” Her face is stony now, like she doesn’t want to say it. “It was a bath. I was six, I guess, and he got me to help in the garden, and I was all muddy and he gave me a bath. I don’t think it felt weird to me, really, though I know now it was. But then Mom showed up at the house. She charged into the bathroom and took over. I was still kind of muddy, but she whisked me out of that tub and into my clothes and out of that house. I was crying because she was in such a hurry that she was kind of rough, and I didn’t understand.”

You look up at her, understanding very well. Too well.

“And that was the last time I ever went to Grandpa’s house,” she says.

You’re not sure what to do with yourself when she falls silent, and neither is she. After a minute, you say, “I need to get dressed. I’ll see you down there, okay?”

She nods. Her feet make hollow clumping noises on the stairs.

It takes you a minute to move. Then you rise off the bed and yank on a pair of stretchy pants, pull a T-shirt over your head, go to your closet again, rip that dress off the hanger and head downstairs.

They’re all sitting around in the living room, and they look like a bunch of startled rabbits when you walk in. All six pairs of eyes jump to the clutch of fabric in your hand.

You stand there, at a full stop.

“What have you got that for?” Beth asks. “That dress is way too small for you.”

You feel your body sway, tears coming up from way down deep. Scary tears.

Diana stands. “I think she wore it to see him,” she says.

Beth marches up to you then, blazing with fury. She grabs the dress out of your hand, walks straight to the fireplace and tosses it onto the heap of ash. “We need to destroy this,” she says.

Nobody questions her, not even you. You watch them rushing around as if a little fire could erase everything that has happened to you. You want to reach inside all their grey wrinkly brains and snatch up their nasty thoughts and burn them instead of the dress. They mustn’t think about
that
. But they are. That’s why they’re here. That’s why Beth rushes off to the basement to find kerosene or some other flammable liquid. That’s why Michelle is rooting around on the mantel looking for one of those long lighters or some extra-long matches, so that no one lights herself on fire along with the dress. That’s why Marlene and Diana and Samantha and Jane are making a neat semicircle of dining room chairs around the fireplace.

A ritual is taking shape. And it is all because they know about
that
.

Beth emerges from the basement with a dusty bottle of something called methyl hydrate. For fondue, she says. She douses the dress with it. Michelle holds the lighter out to you. You back away from her.

Marlene steps forward. “We’ll light it together,” she says, “all three of us.” She means her and Diana and you. The three “victims” in the room. Diana is trembling a bit too, but she steps forward, places her hand over Marlene’s.

You shake your head violently and drop onto a chair. “Go ahead,” you manage to say in a scratchy whisper. “I’ll just watch.”

Marlene and Diana press the button and the flame that shoots from the lighter senses the flammable liquid before it quite reaches the fabric, whooshes and envelops the heap of dress. You think of ants swarming over a carcass. Marlene and Diana sit down and all of you watch the fire consume the dress.

After a while you are staring at a crinkly, smoking mess. It smells bad. You look around the room and see all eyes, six pairs, on you. You shove yourself to your feet and turn away.

Beth

I’m confused when I see what Kaya is holding in her hand. It’s so familiar, that dress. Kaya wore it and wore it, long after she had grown out of it. Mom told her to stop, but never went so far as to take the dress away. I am the one who
found it wadded up in the back of the closet, smoothed out the wrinkles and put it on a hanger. I imagined how pleased Kaya would be to see it again, even though she definitely wouldn’t be able to squeeze into it now.

When Kaya starts to cry, though, and Diana says what she does, I hardly know what I’m doing until I’m standing in front of the fireplace with the methyl hydrate.

Now, the thing is done.

Jane says, “I’m going to make tea,” and heads for the kitchen as if this were a grown-ups’ bridge party.

Samantha meets my eyes, and somehow I know what to do, how to pull us all back from the brink. At least, I know how to try.

I feel a warm, strong place in my gut and send the words straight out from there. “Let’s go into the dining room,” I say. “Bring your chairs.”

They look kind of startled, but seem willing enough to pick up their chairs and follow me. Jane arrives from the kitchen with a tray of cups and spoons.

I dash up to my room and fetch my “magic boxes.” No time to think about the fact that no human outside my family has seen me perform a trick since I was eight years old, no time to take in how crazy it is to offer up a deck of cards in a house that still smells of a little girl’s dress burned to ash.

When I get back, we rearrange the room: the table against one wall, the chairs out for an audience of six. On the table I un-stack the two boxes, pull out my trusty deck of cards, several large scarves and my favourite stuffed animal, a small pink rabbit with long silky ears.

Jane serves tea. Kaya sits off-centre, flanked by Michelle
and Diana. Her hands are clasped in her lap, and she looks at me as if the contents of her head and heart went up the chimney along with the smoke. Samantha sits behind her, beaming that kindness of hers to all of us.