Web of Angels (25 page)

Uh oh. Uh oh. A daughter was here
. Ally looked down, watching from under lowered lids. The daughter watched too. Nina could ride a bike and skate and wash her own hair and paint it. She could add numbers and minus them. She was good. A weird little inside girl was not supposed to be out with the son or daughters. Franky meowed. Long squeaky meow.

“Meow!” Ally imitated the kitten. The daughter laughed. It made sparkles like the lights in a faraway sky. “He smells good,” she said, offering Franky.

Nina took him and held him to her face, nuzzling the soft fur. “I wish he was my present. You’re lucky.”

“Uh huh.” She smiled fast.
Bye-bye. You are a good girl. A big is coming!
And the daughter smiled back, squinting as the light switch flipped on.

“Nina, why are you up?” Callisto’s voice was different, the usual hoarseness stripped away with her clothes this afternoon. It was now slightly deeper than Sharon’s, and creamy. She studied her daughter’s face, looking for fear, for edginess, but there was only a curious smile, fading. “You should be asleep. You’ll be tired tomorrow.”

“I forgot this.” Nina held out a notebook. “You have to sign my homework.”

Depositing the kitten beside the laptop, Callisto fetched a pen from the junk drawer. On the open page, next to the word
playing
, written out five times, she scrawled the body’s initials, SAL. Sharon Alyssa Lewis.

“Why did you write with your left hand?” Nina asked.

“I like to sometimes.”

“I’m going to try it. Can you go upstairs with me, Mommy? I think there’s maybe spiders.”

Through the glass doors, opened to let in the spring breeze, Callisto could see Dan’s car, the birch tree, the shed with the basketball net nailed to it, the iron and glass patio table, all in wondrous shades and shapes of black, now familiar, not long ago strange. Callisto held out her hand to her daughter, who had grown in her body and been born without her knowledge. Her daughter took it, walking confidently back to bed with no fear of darkness as long as her mothers walked with her like the thousand-armed goddess of mercy, left-handed and right-handed.

M
ayfest was always held in Christie Pits on the last weekend of May. Standing where the glue factory had been, now Hope Market, you could hear the barkers’ cries:
Hit the bull’s eye and win a dinner at Magee’s—only five tickets
and
Dunk the principal—fifteen tickets
. In the bowl of the park there were booths. Hand-crafted jewellery of silver, beads, tiger’s eye, papier mâché, silk jackets, silk bags, leather bags, quilted bags, crafts made of wood, art made of metal, toys used and new, books by local authors: a children’s poet, two novelists, including Bonnie Yoon, and a historian on hand to sign. And food: pizza, ice cream, home-baked treats of every kind, Cajun corn on the cob, hot dogs, burgers, every kind of drink that could rot your teeth. There was an inflated castle, an inflated basketball court, and inflated rock climbing with a chute to slide down. Information booths: the boys and girls club, street safety with a real police car to climb inside, insurance advice from a man well-practised in latching onto uninterested passersby, the Committee for Youth display, Amy’s booth on Caring for Your Pet with rabbits, a
guinea pig, and a lizard. The silent-auction table organized by Sofia. Their next-door neighbour was bidding.

“There’s your afghan, Mom!” Nina said. “Maybe Mrs. Agostino wants it for her porch chair. It’d keep her warm.” She was holding her mom’s hand as her brother scanned the hillside for his friends. He was heading toward the tae kwon do demonstration on the crest of the hill in the basketball court (in winter the ice rink). Just outside the fence was the clubhouse that had sported a swastika on the roof when their zaidey was a boy. It was Mayfest and though there was a haze in the air and rain in the forecast, nothing could dampen their joy.

“Come on, Nina. Let’s beat Dad!” Her mom ran down the hill, laughing as Dan followed, jogging with Emmie on his shoulders, who slapped his head, shouting,
Faster, faster
.

At the bottom of the hill, Lyssa collapsed onto the grass, but she didn’t stay there long. The castle needed exploring and the girls were pulling her up by the hands to line up and buy tickets, looking for people they knew, calling to their friends. She took a turn with them at dunking the principal and missed, got them roasted corn, looked for her sister-in-law but couldn’t find her, clapped as Nina tried to do a cartwheel.
Way to go! Awesome!
Emmie was sitting in the police car, chatting with the officers. They stood next to a poster of the Christie Pits riot: blurry men in white shirts, several women in long dresses, colour unknown, balls of light reflecting off the camera’s flash. The names of police officers who’d been called to quell the riot were listed alphabetically. Lyssa read through them all in case there was a mistake.

“There’s no Amos Edwards,” she said to Dan.

“Rick’s grandfather? Huh. I wonder why.”

“Maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe he wasn’t even a cop.” Lyssa was looking up the hill to where Cathy was pushing the stroller along the path toward her parents’ booth. “Can I leave the kids with you?”

“Sure.” Dan lifted his camera and snapped a shot of the stilt walkers. Then he followed his wife’s glance. “You’re going to try to talk to her again?”

“Yup.”

“And get upset again? You’ve done your best. There’s nothing more you can do.”

“Ha! Watch me,” Lyssa said, waving as she jogged backward, nearly bumping into a woman handing over a credit card at the next table.

The Committee for Youth information booth consisted of a table, an easel with a sign on it, a backboard with blown up photographs and big, bold terrifying statistics: every year a million people committed suicide around the world, more than died in wars; the most common method was firearms; annually eight out of every hundred thousand teens died this way. Pamphlets were printed with the logo that Dan had designed, CFY coming out of cupped hands in embossed gold, and in smaller black letters below,
IN MEMORY OF HEATHER EDWARDS
. People were crowding around the table, reading pamphlets, signing up for the e-mail list, giving donations by cheque, by credit card, taking their receipts from Rick. He marked the amount on the large drawing of a thermometer, mercury rising ever
higher. Standing to one side, Lyssa leaned against a cottonwood tree, waiting.

Debra wore her white doctor’s coat, a stethoscope around her neck. “It’s your turn,” she was saying to a child who was getting impatient, putting the earpieces into the girl’s ears, the drum against her chest.

“I hear it!” The kid was about six, chubby, rapt as Debra explained how the sounds were produced when different heart valves closed against the reverse flow of blood.

Rick kept rubbing his chin as if to rub away the grey of his beard. “It took you long enough,” he said, pointing at his watch as Cathy reached the booth, putting the stroller with the sleeping baby in it behind the table.

“Sorry, Dad.” She wore white shorts and a polka-dot shirt gathered under the bust, bangs newly cut across her forehead, a light fringe of gold.

“Hey, can I borrow Cathy?” Lyssa asked. “I need her opinion.”

“Just a moment.” Debra put down her stethoscope, ignoring the kids’
awws
and
When’s my turn?
She came around the table, standing close to Lyssa beneath the cottonwood tree. She wore a new, ambery perfume. “Cathy hasn’t been herself lately. She even threatened to call children’s services. Where would she get an idea like that?” She peered at Lyssa suspiciously. Her lipstick was red, her face pale.

“Wow.” There were shouts from inside and Lyssa crossed her arms, balancing on one foot, pressing the other into the trunk of the tree. She wasn’t going to run. The others had tried and failed. It was her turn now.

“After Heather died the police had to look over the scene.” Debra made quotation marks around “scene” with her fingers. “You can’t imagine how it feels to have strangers come into your house and walk around as if they own it.” She came in close. Her perfume was thick, her pale eyelashes dotted with mascara. “Nobody will ever do that to me again.”

“No kidding,” Lyssa said, running through possible answers faster than she’d have guessed possible, throwing each useless one aside until, Bingo, there it was. Just what she needed. “I know what you mean—awful,” she said.

“Pardon?” Suspicion faded to puzzlement.

“I called social services when I was nine.”

“No! Why?” Debra asked.

“I was upset so I called. The social worker asked what I was doing out of school.”

On a winter’s day in grade four, with no warning, Lyssa had been pushed forward. She’d had no idea of what had been happening on the outside. All she knew was that Sharon was gone and she was lying on the ground in the schoolyard, surrounded by a circle of kids pointing, elbowing each other, shrieking with laughter and shouting
butt-head, stinky-butt, fart-face
. Her coat had been open, her panties around her ankles. The kids had been holding projects, the solar system, a tepee made of paper and Popsicle sticks, the girls’ knees red between their socks and skirts. The Plasticine model of a volcano on a sheet of cardboard had been put on the snow near one of the boys, who was empty-handed and laughing the hardest. He must have been the one who’d pulled her panties down. She’d kicked off the panties, got to her
feet and, holding up her dress, peed on his volcano. As the teacher on duty had moved toward her, she’d run, intending to make the most of this unexpected gift of time. With nobody home, she could look up the phone number in the front of the white pages. Not that she would say any of this to Debra except for the end result.

“What did you tell the social worker?” Debra asked.

“Oh, I tried to say something was going on at home, but all they did was talk to my parents and tell them I was skipping school. Naturally I was punished.”

Her parents had ordered her to stay in her room for a week, so sure of themselves they hadn’t even locked her in. But the ice rink was at the end of the road. There was a fence and a field and then the railroad tracks. Every day after her parents left for work, she’d gone there to skate, using up Sharon’s allowance to rent skates and buy cups of cocoa. The old man in the snack bar had put marshmallows in it. He’d looked over his glasses, unsmiling, and he hadn’t asked Lyssa how come she wasn’t in school. He’d just given her free marshmallows, had said that the french fries were on special, half price, and had taken her money. The man had had grey hair in a ponytail, he’d worn wire-rimmed glasses and a big greasy apron. He’d sat on a stool and read newspapers. He’d never even said,
I’ve done something for you so now you do something for me
. It was this kindness that had kept her from walking in front of a car. On the ice she’d fallen and she’d got up. Falling on ice had hurt less than her other bruises. The snow had been white, the sky had been white. Nothing stained. Nothing stank.

“While I was skipping school, I learned to skate,” Lyssa told Debra. “If I was a boy they’d have sent me away to military school.”

Debra nodded sympathetically. “We need to get away and make a new start. Usually we just go up to the cottage on weekends, but this year we’re planning to spend the whole summer up there. We can put our house up for sale and stay at the cottage until we locate something permanent. Given that it’s winterized, there’s no rush.”

“So far?”

“It would be a long commute for Rick, but doable.”

“When?” Lyssa glanced over at Cathy, who was standing near the stroller. She was close enough to hear the conversation between Lyssa and her mom, though she looked as if she wasn’t paying any attention, staring past them, a bored expression on her face.

“As soon as Cathy’s exams are over,” Debra said.

This was it then. They were running out of time. “Hey, Cathy,” Lyssa said. “I want to pick out something new at the clothing boutique. I’m done with this beige look. Totally done. But I don’t know what would look good on me. Come with me and tell me what you think.”

“Can I, Mom?” Cathy asked. She spoke like any kid eager to get out of babysitting for a while. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, the rims red and sore. On the palm of her left hand was a dime-shaped scar, which looked nothing like a stovetop burn, but a lot like the wrong end of a cigarette.

“Don’t be too long,” Debra replied. She smiled pleasantly, like any mom giving in.

As Lyssa pushed her way through the lines of people waiting to get books signed, Bonnie Yoon waved and she waved back. She guided Cathy past the inflatable castle and the cotton candy booth where Dan would soon be getting pink for Emmie and blue for Nina, both bags containing the same spun sugar mixed with dye. She stopped at the table of teddy bears and remained long enough to pay for one in a kilt and put it in the backpack. Then she was off again, past the wooden toys and past the beaded purses, past the metal art and past the mugs and T-shirts, stopping finally at the clothing boutique that was out of sight of the Committee for Youth. There were racks of clothes of mixed styles and sizes. Lyssa stood before them, wondering what to do next.

“Try this. Very nice with your hair,” the Chinese saleswoman said, holding out a jacket. “It fit nice. You have good figure.”

“Me?” Lyssa rolled her eyes at Cathy. “Sure I’ll try it. Why not?” She took the jacket from the saleswoman and shrugged it on.

Laura Anderson was in front of the mirror, trying on a jacket that was the exact shade of her blue pumps, pointy-toed and stiletto heeled, miraculously not sinking into the grass. “I need something longer to cover my hips, but that jacket works for you,” she said.

“What do you think?” Lyssa asked.

Cathy was gazing at her critically. “You look like somebody’s mother,” she said. “Here.” She pulled a jacket off a hanger. Faux leather with a diagonal zipper and a ruffled border at the waist. “Try these.” Faded jeans, back pockets
embroidered, low on the hips. “And these.” She picked up some bangles from the table, and eyed the display of earrings.