“You think so?”
“How old are you again?”
“I’ll be seventeen in two weeks.”
“And how old is he?”
“So do you think it’s too…I don’t know,
eager
for a girl to ask a guy out? Or should I just ask? Or is that too pushy?”
Willa looks at me helplessly and I try, once again, to sell Elise on the idea of the Order of St. Clare. “You’d make a really cute nun,” I tell her.
She stamps her foot. “I am not a frigid lesbian!”
“Elise!” Mom scolds her. “Why don’t you give Willa a tour of the rest of the house?” Mom says to me. She’s just trying to break Elise and I up so I’ll stop torturing her. “I’m sure she’s sick of the kitchen.”
“Oh, never.” Willa grins. It’s weird.
“Come on.” I get off the island stool and lead the way through the rest of the ground floor. “The bedrooms and the library are on the second floor.”
“You have a
library
?” She says it like I’ve just informed her that we have a dungeon.
“Yeah, it’s sort of an all-purpose office space with lots of bookshelves.”
“Can I see it?”
I’m leading the way upstairs when Willa stops on the third step and grabs my sleeve. Something outside has her attention. When I step down to look through the window I see Eric and Celeste in the backyard, making a snowman.
“Is that his girlfriend?” she asks.
I snort. Right, like those two would ever date. “Of course not. That’s Celeste. She’s down from Ottawa for the weekend.”
“Is she your cousin or something?”
“Nah, she and Eric have been friends since kindergarten. Lord knows why.”
“But they aren’t dating?” Willa cocks her head to the side like the situation is somehow puzzling. What’s so complicated about it? It’s just Eric and Celeste, best friends, building a lopsided snowman with tits.
“She has a boyfriend in Ottawa.”
Willa smirks. “That’s nice.”
“She’s not.” Celeste and I have never gotten along. She thinks of herself as assertive, but in reality she’s an aggressive harpy, which explains her entourage of frenemies back home. Celeste is one of those girls that other girls love to hate. She’s got so much going for her: amazing body, brains to go with it, popularity, an affluent family, and a boyfriend that completes the image of upper-middle class perfection—key word being ‘image.’ Celeste has an empty life, but she still likes to rub it in everyone’s faces.
I take Willa up to the library and she immediately gravitates towards the bookshelves. Eric’s homework lies abandoned on one of the desks.
“Wow, it’s really organized,” she says of the shelves. All the books are grouped by subject: medicine, architecture, fiction, music, art,
etc.
Willa pulls down
The Canterbury Tales
. I don’t think that book has been opened since Mom completed her English requirement as an undergrad.
“Do you like Chaucer?” she asks me. Until she mentioned his name, I had no idea who wrote the book.
“He’s okay.”
“You seem like
The Miller’s Tale
type.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think you’d get the most pleasure out of laughing at those characters’ stupidity and hedonism.”
“I’m only an asshole from nine to five, you know.”
“This totally is your kind of humor.” She starts reading aloud from the book and I don’t catch a word.
“Is that written in Elvish?”
Willa just smiles and shelves the book. “The cookies will be done soon.”
Monday
Last summer my first round of chemo turned me into a night owl. Between fatigue and nausea I felt best between midnight and four a.m., and Mom and me ended up sitting awake a lot, drinking tea and talking. She’s been a chronic insomniac for years. She used to take sleeping pills for it, but she stopped when she had kids because she wouldn’t wake up if we cried in the night. She had only been back on the drug for a few years when I got sick and she immediately quit again. She was terrified that something would go wrong in the night and no one would be able to wake her up. Sometimes she still takes them on the nights that Dad is home, but if he’s on call or on night shift she goes without and stays awake.
We would sit in the kitchen—the farthest room from the bedrooms—and talk about stuff. She told me about how she almost switched her major from Architecture to Women’s Studies as an undergrad.
“Give me a break,” she said when I expressed my disgust. “I was young and idealistic. I grew up in the seventies, for crying out loud.”
She told me about deciding to study for her Masters right before she got married, because she wanted to keep at least one area of her life open for new possibilities.
“I thought you and Dad got married when you were already working?” They were living in Ottawa at the time and Mom worked for Simons & Co.—I knew that for a fact—and she had done her Masters in Toronto.
“Mmm-hmm.” She sipped her tea. “I meant my first marriage.” That was the first time that she ever mentioned being with anyone other than my dad. I couldn’t picture it.
“We met through mutual friends,” she said with a smile I couldn’t read. “We started dating, and we dated some more, and the rest just sort of…happened. We were happy together, but the love was shallow.”
“How old were you?”
“I was twenty-four.”
“And then what happened?”
“Well, marriage is difficult,” she said vaguely. Mom got up to pour herself another mug of tea and when she came back to the table she told me that her first husband—she didn’t call him by name—had wanted her to drop out of grad school and get a full time job.
“I was only working part time, you see. And when I got pregnant he hounded me day and night to stop working and stay home. He had it in his head that he could boss me around now that we were married.”
The latter half of her explanation was lost on me. I was hung up on the part where she got pregnant.
“Let’s not tell your brother and sister about this conversation, all right?” she said when I asked about it. “My first husband and I had a little boy about two years after we got married.” I scrambled to do the mental math. Given her age, that would have been three years before Eric was born. It floored me that I had a sibling that I never knew about, old enough to have finished university, possibly living in Toronto with his dad.
“He doesn’t live in Toronto,” Mom corrected me. “He’s buried in Oakville, though.” In less than three minutes she had informed me of the existence of a brother and then of his death. She said his name had been Eliot, and that he had died of SIDS just two months after being born, and the day after his burial she had filed for divorce.
“I celebrated you guys’ second birthdays with such relief,” she said. “I’d gotten you through infancy in one piece. I just didn’t know that there were bigger problems waiting to come along.” She reached over and ran a hand through my thinning hair.
“I’m sorry, Mom.” She acted like she hadn’t heard me.
*
Before I leave for school, I make Mom’s favorite breakfast and leave it on her desk with a cup of coffee. She always gets up, goes into her office, and works for an hour or two before considering food or a shower. Today, she’s getting taken care of.
Today’s her firstborn’s birthday. She doesn’t know I know. It took me awhile to find out, going through online records of marriage licenses to find out her first married name, and then through birth announcements in the newspaper archives. There was even a picture. Eliot was a pretty cute kid. I think. All newborns look the same to me: round and pink and flat-nosed.
“What are you sucking up to Mom for?” Elise asks with a shrewd look as we get into the car to go to school.
“Nothing. Just a feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“That she’s going to have a hard day.”
“What did you do, Jem?”
“Nothing.”
“Whatever you did wrong, Mom’s gonna find it. She has a sixth sense for bullshit,” Eric says. He doesn’t say it like a warning, more like he’s gleefully anticipating my head on a platter by dinnertime.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Yeah right.”
Tuesday
It’s a blissfully sunny day in Smiths Falls, and unseasonably warm to boot. The sunshine perks everybody up and the warm weather means t-shirts for the optimists. I don’t hold out hope that the sunshine will last until noon.
Willa shows up to school in a warm-weather skirt and tee—all black, of course, except for her forearm-length purple gloves. It’s sort of weird to see her shins and arms.
“Aren’t you hot in that?” she asks.
“No.” Long sleeves work well for me in all climates, at least until I look human again.
Willa gets a lot of compliments on her outfit over lunch, both from the girls and from Elwood and Joey Moore. They both have dirty fantasies about the easy access that skirt offers written all over their faces. Just shoot me.
Then Willa reintroduces the topic of getting a group together to go skating. The rink is open for public skating tonight. Chris immediately accepts the invite.
“I’ll pick you up at four,” she says. I hate the way that sounds.
“Mind if I tag along?”
Willa shrugs. “Whatever.”
Whatever? Maybe that’s her polite way of telling me to piss off. Nah, she’s probably willing to say that to my face. Willa is blunt like that. Still, ‘whatever’ is so dismissive…
“If you don’t want me to go, I won’t.” The other people at the table look down at their plates. They all secretly want to exclude me anyway. This excursion is no different—Chris is going, which means Diane will go to see him break a limb (ideally all four) and Paige will tag along to worship him. Hannah might come, and Brian follows her around like a puppy. So where does Cancer Boy fit in?
“Don’t be so sensitive, Harper,” Willa tells me. “It’s narcissistic and boring.”
See? She really is that blunt.
Shut up.
*
After school, I ride back to the Kirk house with Willa. I’ll carpool with her and Chris to the rink.
“Do you skate much?” she says as we drive to Chris’s house.
“No, I’ll probably end up watching. Do me a favor and make sure Elwood bruises something, okay?”
Willa rolls her eyes. “Designated Pessimist; got it.” I’m annoyed that she didn’t explicitly promise that Elwood would end up injured.
Willa’s car doesn’t have a back seat, so when Chris gets in I have to slide over to the middle of the bench, which worsens Chris’ mood. He has designs on Willa, and doesn’t like Cancer Boy getting in the way.
You really need to stop referring to yourself in the third person. It’s narcissistic and boring.
At least she doesn’t like him back.
Chris starts to talk about some TV show that neither of us has heard of, so Willa turns on the stereo the second he pauses for breath. Her car is so old that the sound system only plays cassettes and radio. “She’s So Cold” by the Rolling Stones comes on. Perfect.
“You know this song?” Willa says when she sees me grinning. We both start to sing along with the chorus. Elwood doesn’t know the words. That dipshit. He tries to talk during the instrumental bridge and Willa turns up the volume and drums on the steering wheel. This chick is awesome when she’s annoying someone who isn’t me.
Chris is good and pissed by the time we arrive at the rink. Paige’s mom’s car is already here, and Willa recognizes her friend from Port Elmsley’s truck. We go our separate ways in the lobby—Chris to the changing benches, and Willa and I to the skate rental counter. Willa gets a pair of boy’s hockey skates.
“Are figure skates a threat to your masculinity?” I ask as she pays the clerk. Willa gives me the eye.
“They squeeze the
balls
of my feet.” She takes her skates away to the benches before I have a chance to return the riposte. I’ll get her back later.
Hannah and Paige are already on the ice, skating slow laps. They’re talking to Luke and two of his friends. I’m sure I met them that night at Joey’s house, but their names escape me. They’re flirting with the girls, but not having much luck. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking. Misery loves company.
Neither Willa nor Elwood wait for me to finish lacing my skates, but at least Willa tosses me a “See you out there.” She does a quick warm-up lap and skates over to Luke for a hello hug. I’d hate to be Elwood right now—cold-shouldered by the chick he wants to move on and supplanted by Cancer Boy and a sixteen-year-old. Maybe he’ll get struck by lightning, too.
I follow them into the ice. It feels indecently cold in here, so I push through a lap to warm up. It’s still really freaking cold. I catch up to Willa and her friends, who have broken off into two groups: those that want a slow, leisurely skate, and those that want to race. I stick with the slow pokes, but eventually they all get into the racing spirit until it’s just Hannah and me.
“You don’t have to stay with me. I’m not very good at this,” she says. Hannah has had a few stumbles so far, but she hasn’t fallen down. She seems to think that I’m skating with her out of pity, and I don’t tell her that it’s only because I’m in no condition to be tearing around a rink.
“You’re doing great.” I give her my arm to steady her. Hannah’s hand feels awfully light on my elbow, like she doesn’t want to touch me too forcefully. She doesn’t look at me either, but that could be because she’s focused on staying upright on her skates.
As we glide along slowly, something occurs to me: no one is staring. It’s been months since I could go out in public without getting curious looks from strangers. But every skater I pass looks at me and finds nothing out of the ordinary. When everyone is bundled up in a cold rink, my hat doesn’t stand out so much. I seem normal, unless the other patrons look closely enough to notice my lack of eyebrows, not that any of them do.
“Cold?” Hannah can feel me shivering.
“One more lap.” I’m not ready to let go of my pretend normalcy yet. Up ahead of us, Elwood sneaks up on Paige and grabs her around the waist. He fails to see the six-year-old in front of her, though, and they both fall down in an attempt to avoid bumping the kid. Elwood lands on his shoulder and lies there whining and crying like a baby. That’s going to make it really hard for Paige to worship him.