Every Happy Family (18 page)

“You
are
siblings,” says Annie, envious, believing she and Les, not having grown up together, missed out on a primal level of bickering nastiness.

“Pour you a glass?” offers Kenneth.

“Thank you. Yes. Sure. But I've got some more things to bring in from the car.” She pauses to see if he might offer to help, but he disappears down the hall. “I'll just get those things,” she says to no one in particular and then Beau materializes beside her, glowing like some Greek god.

“Beau. Beau. Beau.” Hugging his warm, loaded muscles is like hugging life itself. “Look at you. You're massive. You're a wall. And you have hips like a girl!”

“And you are one hairless auntie.”

“Sibling solidarity.” She raises a fist. “Turns out I've got a teeny head on a growing body.” She forces a laugh, waits for him to contradict her, but he laughs too.

“You need a hand with something?” he asks.

“I've got gifts for the likes of you, but shit, I hope I made yours big enough. You should tell me whenever you moult and move up a size.”

“Is something in the oven?” Kenneth calls.

A shiny black bird, or bat, streaks down the front hall towards her. She ducks and it flies out the front door.

“Beau, tell me, did a bird just fly out of the house?”

“Did a bird what?”

“Here we go,” says Jill, helping Nancy out of the car, relieved to see that her mother's clothes are clean, her hair tastefully cut and styled. She's wearing the lavender blouse Jill brought her on her last visit and the colour looks great on her. And is that a hint of perfume? She kisses her mom's cheek which is floury soft to the touch.

“I've been here,” says Nancy, taking Jill's arm. “Jiggity jig.”

“Yes, you have.” Jill shuts the car door and reminds herself to bunch the wine bottles on the back counter by the fridge and the non-alcoholic drinks on the island, in clear view for Quinn.

“I don't trust that man who brought me here,” says Nancy.

“Of course not.” She should put on some background music, something cheerful but not too cheerful.

“He has long hair.”

“Isn't that silly.”

“Silly,” says Nancy, then stops and with an alert yet gentle smile looks right at her before saying, “Jilly.”

The recognition causes Jill to lean against the car for support.

“Hi, Mom.” Her mother's hazel eyes are pouched in wrinkles, the left one a cloudier shade of green. She squeezes Nancy's hand and Nancy squeezes back. Maybe upping her coffee intake
has
made a difference, thinks Jill, and she can't resist giving her mother another kiss.

Leaning on her cane for support, a trusty purse – whosever it is – dangling from her other hand, Nancy speed walks compared to Les.

“I have a green tree outside my room that I like,” says Nancy, stopping to lift her eyes to the oak.

Jill had specifically asked the facility for that room and is thrilled to hear Nancy speak positively about her living situation. She tells her mother,”Your tree's called an arbutus.”

“Arbutus,” repeats Nancy, then points at the flower box under the dining-room window.

“Geraniums,” says Jill.

“Geraniums.”

The moment whisks her back to those timeless afternoon walks with Quinn as a toddler and feeding him the precise terms for flora, never generics like flower or tree, and even the Latin when she could recall them. How she was convinced he was gifted if not a genius.

“I was on that big thing today,” says Nancy.

“The ferry?”

“The ferry.”

“Did you sit by the window?”

Inside the house the smoke detector lets loose its high-pitched scream and Nancy does a sharp U-turn back to the car.

The smoke has cleared, the burnt quiches sizzle in the garbage and Nancy, lured by Jill's promise of coffee, has finally come inside where Jill gets her settled in the recliner beside Les's. Trusting her mother will stay put for a while, Jill watches Nancy take a puckered sip of coffee then reach over and pat Les's hand at rest on his armrest. “It's good you could come,” Nancy says.

“You too, Nance,” says Les.

“The coffee here is very good.”

“Hope you like baked brie,” calls Annie from the kitchen. “With slivered almonds.”

“I do,” says Beau. He's brought out his laptop to show Les and Kenneth online footage of some of his best tackles and tries. Explains his modest salary again, how it's tied into team performance bonuses.

The candles, Jill thinks and hurries to position eight white candles along the mantel. She steps back to look at them, thinking Vivaldi's
Four Seasons
. Or would that be too much? She puts on Charlie Parker instead.

“Kenneth, after you guys are done there, I need you to scrape the barbeque for me please.”

“Put all your guests to work?” he says.

“You're family. Families pitch in.” She's gratified to see him flinch.

The phone rings and Annie, being quickest, picks up.

“It's Pema!” she practically screams.

Les gives a wave.

“Where is she?” asks Jill, her stomach gone fluttery. She wishes she'd answered the phone.

“She's stopping at Katie's for a shower and to get changed.”

“We do have running water here,” says Les.

“Why not come -? She just is,” says Annie. “But will be right over. He can't wait to see you, too.”

Beau stares at the phone in his aunt's hand then roughs up the front of his just-washed hair.

“Your dad and I finally look like siblings,” Annie says into the phone. “You'll see. Hey, Grammy's here, your uncle Kenneth. Hi everyone from Pema.” She squints into the yard but whatever creature it was or wasn't, is gone.

“Hiiiii,” calls Jill, signalling she wants to talk to Pema but Annie doesn't catch it, says, “See you soon, Doll,” and hangs up.

“I had a cat named Henna,” Nancy announces to the room. “She got run over.” She slides her hand across the air. “Vroom.” Wearing a mock-sad face, she pats Les's hand again. “You don't like cats, do you, dear?”

Les stares at her and Nancy stares back. Then, perhaps to mirror his oxygen tubes, she make the peace symbol and lays the tips of two fingers against her nostrils.

“Something to snack on,” Jill says and places a platter of veggies and bowl of pistachios on the coffee table. “I want to see those videos later,” she tells Beau as he shuts down the computer.

“Me too,” says Annie who has a camera that she holds out to Kenneth. “Will you do the honours, please? I want a picture of the skinheads. Oh yeah. We should be wearing biker jackets with silver-studded collars, leather chaps.” Pursing her lips, she pumps devil-horned hands in the air.

“What happens if you push that button?” says Beau as he reaches towards the mole on the side of her head.

She swipes his hand away and thrusts her face in his, making him laugh aloud. “You don't want to know, Cheeks.”

Jill can't help but feel a little outdone by her sister-in-law's ease around the kids, and her vivacity, however screwball.

Kenneth puts on his glasses to aim the camera. “Let's see here,” he says, his voice sounding so much like their father's.

He sure has aged, thinks Jill, taking in the half glasses riding his nose, the crow's feet, the deep vertical furrow dissecting his eyebrows. Their father had the same dark furrow and when she and Kenneth were kids, he called it his change purse and magically made pennies and dimes appear and disappear from it.

“Okay, you two,” says Kenneth. “Cheese time.” He points the camera.

Perched awkwardly on the arm of Les's chair, Annie touches her bald head to his, then jerks away as something streaks past Les's feet.

“Something wrong?” asks Les.

“Nada, nothing, no thing,” she says, resuming the pose and sprouting tears at his concern. No one cares about her as much as he does. No one. She reminds herself of her promise to Jill not to lose it and gives Les's head a kiss, his skin startlingly cool against her lips.

Like a slow-falling tree, Nancy leans sideways in her chair until her disembodied head is in the picture.

“Show me your teeth,” says Kenneth.

Nancy opens her mouth, Annie's smile trembles as she holds back from crying, Les sticks out the very tip of his tongue trying for a laugh from Beau but Beau's looking elsewhere. Kenneth takes the picture and then another.

“Okay, the barbeque, Kenneth. Please?” Jill says.

“Jill,” says Annie, “do you have a pair of sunglasses I can borrow? Just for tonight?”

Jill knows better than to ask why. “Sure.”

Voices recede and fade as Beau slips away and up the stairs, unconsciously counting the number of steps as he goes. “Lucky thirteen,” he mumbles before he recalls his old childhood habit, then wonders why he never counts the stairs on his way down.

The upstairs hall smells musty and unlived in. He walks towards the teak laundry hamper against the far wall that divides the doors to their two rooms, his and Pema's. The hamper was a prime hide-and-seek spot back in the day; he remembers burrowing beneath the dirty clothes, their tangy smell like moist dirt. He lifts the lid and lets it drop with a smack, the favourite old sound of a bullet in his back which he grabs as he stumbles –”Got me” – into Pema's room. He drops, theatrically, into her old desk chair which continues to spin in a circle. Stops himself to face the window that overlooks their cul-de-sac, imagines her pulling up on the street below. Takes a big breath in and blows it out.

Unlike his old room, which has been converted into the guest room, Pema's is exactly as it was: the same fake leather beanbag chair, same quilted duvet cover and lace curtains, same pictures and mementos covering the lilac walls like one giant collage. Every school picture, every vacation, every birthday and Christmas is recorded on her walls, and to wander through Pema's room is to cocoon oneself in the past. Pema's Facebook page had become the grown-up equivalent of the same, and sometimes he thinks she needs concrete proof she didn't dream up the events of her life.

He pulls open the top drawer just to feel the roll, hear the familiar wood on wood. Peers in and sees a notepad, her collection of animal erasers, cute pens and pencils. He'd like to see her at a distance first, in order to gauge his feelings. She'll have changed, no doubt, and reality is rarely as good as one's memory. Might not even look like her. Might have shaved her fucking head for all he knows, gone all Buddhist nun.

He picks up a single stubby purple pencil and writes on the pad: “I love you and want you more than you can know, Beau.” He shuts the drawer. She probably has a boyfriend. There was some Tibetan guy in her Facebook pictures, his arm around her waist in a possessive sort of hold. Opens it again and tears off the note, crumples it into his pocket.

He's had his share of girlfriends. Most recently Kendra, whom he dated for over a year. More like seven months, if you count being on tour. Kendra was South African, from Capetown, though her mother was Filipina. And like all the women he's attracted to, she looked more Asian than anything else. Black hair, dark eyes, caramel skin.

Sexy, funny, even athletic if dressage counts, Kendra came from money and was studying to be a horse veterinarian. His teammates were jealous as hell and always teasing him.
How much you paying her? Can't be the size of your pipe.
After the relationship broke up, two months ago now, the guys oozed sympathy. When he told them that he was the one who'd broken it off, they assumed he was lying and were even more sympathetic. He earned a lot of free beers that week.

He liked her. A lot. And she was totally into him. Women didn't get much better than Kendra, and he was starting to believe something was seriously wrong with him. A part of him felt that he wasn't good enough for her and he had too much pride to wait until she figured that out. A day after the breakup, he called his friend Satomi and told her his latest sad story. Satomi was studying art in Japan. She'd fallen in love with her calligraphy teacher, a woman ten years “wiser”, and they had moved in together, were contemplating having a baby. Satomi had, at least for now, found happiness. She was already making a name for herself. After the tsunami and nuclear disaster, surrealism was making a comeback, and Beau fully expected the painting he had of hers from high school, of a fat goldfish busting the buttons of its school uniform while swimming alongside a pale pod of naked humans, would be worth millions some day. Should ask Uncle Kenneth if he's heard of her work.

Beau told Satomi all about Kendra, how perfect she was and that as far as he could tell, she loved him unconditionally. “What's wrong with me?” he demanded.

“Nothing, Beau. Nothing's wrong with you. Maybe that's the problem,” she said. “Be more wrong. More of a fuck-up. Get foolish.”