Encore Edie
Authors: Annabel Lyon
PUFFIN CANADA
ENCORE EDIE
Encore Edie
is
ANNABEL LYON’S
fifth book, and a sequel to her first novel for young people,
All-Season Edie
. Her first novel for adults,
The Golden Mean
, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Lyon lives in New Westminster, British Columbia, with her husband and two children.
Also by Annabel Lyon
For children
All-Season Edie
For adults
Oxygen
The Best Thing for You
The Golden Mean
PUFFIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2011
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Annabel Lyon, 2011
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Lyon, Annabel, 1971–
Encore Edie / Annabel Lyon.
ISBN 978-0-14-317741-8
I. Title.
PS8573.Y62E43 2011 jC813’.6 C2010-905823-2
Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
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For Sophie and Caleb
and for Mark
my best bro
Contents
Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered
Lush Life
“I’m a fool for you,” Dad sings along to the CD. He sings to Mom into the microphone of his thumb with an intense look that makes her laugh. While the CD moans on, I catch Dexter’s eye and pretend to stick my finger down my throat.
“What’s wrong, Edie?” Dexter says sweetly, and I can’t get the finger out before our parents see. I’m thirteen (today!), Dexter is fifteen, and sometimes we’re allies but more often we’re enemies, like those knights in Elizabethan times, the ones with the white roses and the ones with the red, like on the front of my
Collected Shakespeare Volume III: The Histories and Non-Dramatic Poetry
. The first volume,
The Comedies
, has a guy with a donkey’s head, some fairies, and a bearded guy in a big starry cloak glowering at an enormous book.
Volume II: The Tragedies
is my favourite. It has the dressed-in-black guy, and the hunchbacked guy, and the crazy-looking red-haired woman, and the old guy sadly
patting the head of a boy with bells on his hat. Hamlet, Iago, Lady Macbeth, King Lear.
“Cake in my molars,” I say quickly.
“Cake in my mo-o-lars,” Dad sings along to the CD.
“Like, please stop,” Dexter says.
“I love this one,” I say. “Like, shut up.”
On the table in front of me are the remains of my birthday: cards, wrapping paper, half a cheesecake, books, a stuffed giraffe, a T-shirt, a mug with
Edith
on it, and the case for the CD we’re listening to. My family recently returned from our annual holiday at the cabin on the lake, and while we were driving there, Dad tuned in to a jazz station while Mom slept and Dexter iPodded, and after a while I said, “I like this,” and Dad said, “I do, too,” and he remembered and went out and bought me a CD of someone named Sarah Vaughan singing songs from eighty years ago, and that was his present to me. Usually he just signs his name under Mom’s on the cards. I get the feeling he approves very much of me liking jazz, and is Encouraging Me, which I usually resist, but I like the CD. I’m looking forward to listening to it again, alone in my room, in bed with the earphones, where I can concentrate.
The books are from Mom. The mug is from Grandma. The giraffe is from my cousin and arrived in the mail in an envelope warped by too much taping. It has enormous eyelashes and giggles from a recording inside its body if you tickle its horns. It’s for a three-year-old.
“Ellie told me Merry chose it specially for you,” Mom says. Ellie is Mom’s younger sister. Merry has something called Down syndrome, which makes her short and pudgy, with tiny ears and stubby fingers and eyes like pods, and worst of all, it makes her slow. She goes to a special school and makes lopsided crafts and can barely read and doesn’t understand jokes and loves me and Dexter more than anyone in the world. That’s what Merry told her mom, who told our mom, who told us. “Aw,” Dexter said. “Huh,” I said.
“Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart that’s sorry yet for thee.” That’s what King Lear says to
his
Fool. Auntie Ellie and Merry live in Montreal, so we don’t see them very often. Once, the summer I was nine, Auntie Ellie and Merry flew out for a visit, and the next year each family drove to Winnipeg, where we camped together for a week and then turned around and went home again. Since then it’s just been letters and presents, and very occasionally a video Auntie Ellie makes of the two of them blowing kisses into the camera and clowning around, and then Merry studiously working on some craft while Auntie Ellie explains what she’s doing in a voice-over. “Those are pretty sequins!” we’ll hear Auntie Ellie say, and Merry will say, “Uh.” Merry’s dad is Not In The Picture, as Mom and Dad put it, and hasn’t been since Merry was a baby, which is, Mom always adds, making her raisin face, Just As Well.
Don’t get me wrong—I like Merry well enough. She’s all right; she’s harmless. I just can’t imagine her life
very well, and—if I’m being honest—I don’t really want to try.
Forget the giraffe, though. The T-shirt is from my sister, and true to form, Dex gave me the best gift of all. It’s black, not previously an Edie-colour, and has silver dragons on the sleeves, and is stretchy, and fits a little closer to the body than I’m used to, which makes me feel self-conscious and grown-up at the same time. It is, Dex says, a yoga top.
“I want a yoga top,” Dad says now, because I’ve picked the shirt up again and am stroking it and admiring the dragons for the seventeenth time. He stands on one leg, the other foot tucked behind his knee, and holds his arms over his head like a ballerina, and wobbles. “Fragrant-blossomof-tranquility pose,” he says. We ignore him.
“I want a look at that giraffe,” Mom says brightly, because she always acts super-interested in Merry and super-impressed by everything she does.
I push the giraffe and the remains of the envelope it came in across the table.
“Cute,” Mom says. Then she frowns. “Did you see there’s a letter in here as well?”
“Is there?” I don’t look up from the shirt.
“It’s for me, anyway.” Mom turns the envelope over. “From Auntie Ellie.”
“You have to hand-wash it, that’s the only thing,” Dexter says. “It’s delicate.”
I nod seriously. I’ve never owned delicate clothes before.
Old Edie wants to make a joke about this, but Teen Edie (as of today!) is feeling kind of pleased and confused and embarrassed and excited all together, and thinks she should maybe just shut up and listen for once. Next week Dexter and I will be going back to school, the same school for the first time in years, and I know Dexter is really, really trying to be nice because she’s really, really hoping I won’t do anything Old Edie–like to embarrass her. Teen Edie is kind of hoping the same thing. I skipped kindergarten way back when I was tiny because I could already read. The kids in my old school always made fun of me for being the youngest in my class, but I’m really, really hoping this year they’ll stop. High school. High school!
Dad is now down on the floor on one knee with the other leg out to the side, a hand on the small of his back and the other pointing to something straight in front of him, and wobbling, and grimacing a little. “Warrior-with-old-hockey-injury pose,” he says.
“Oh my god!” Mom says.
“Thank you,” Dad says.
“Oh, shush,” Mom says. She jumps up. “I have to call Ellie right now! She’s thinking of moving to Vancouver!”
“Wow!” Dexter says.
“What?” I say.
“When?” Dad says.
Mom laughs. She’s looking all around her for the portable phone. “This month! You know Ellie.” (This is addressed to
Dad.) “She decides something and she has to do it the same day. She never could wait for anything.”
“Why?” I say.
Mom squints at the letter again. “She got a job?” she says, obviously paraphrasing. “Or knows someone who might be able to get her a job? She’s not really clear about that. But she said Merry’s old school is closing and since it’ll be a big change getting her settled somewhere else anyway, this might be the best time for a move, and get all the changes over with at once.”