Rabbit Ears (16 page)

And me, I put on a show. I manage the card tricks all right. And get a small rush of pleasure when Kaya agrees to pull a card from the deck.

“Is it the nine of spades?” I ask soon after, and Kaya grins. She actually grins.

“Yes!” she says as she brandishes the card.

Maybe she remembers how I screwed up the same trick so many years before. Whether she does or not, I see gladness in her eyes today.

But the rabbit and the boxes, I just don’t have it down. Patter, yes. I have them all rocking in their chairs with laughter. But when it comes to the transfer, I lose my nerve. I know they will see. And I am not about to commit the ultimate sin of magician-ship: revealing the trick. So, I go with a rabbit that will not budge, a rabbit that has no wish to be part of a magic show.

In the end, the rabbit seeks solace in Kaya’s arms. And I gulp as Kaya clasps the small creature to her chest.

Kaya

They can’t all take two weeks off school, but every one of them stops in every single day, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs or threes, sometimes in the late afternoon, sometimes at night.

Every day, Beth walks you to the three o’clock meeting in a nearby church basement, and returns ninety minutes later to walk you home. The meetings get you down. Nobody there is really like you. No kids, for a start. And nobody has lived downtown. Plus, you’re pretty sure that nobody has ever traded sex for a fix. They all sit in their living rooms, comfy as anything, and drink good scotch … At least that’s what you believe for the first few days.

You do get up and talk once, since it is so clearly expected. You say the required words: “Hi. My name is Kaya and I’m an addict.” But you’re not about to tell these West Side folks about turning tricks on the Downtown Eastside, or about heroin, or about what that man did to you three blocks away from this very church. You’re not about to tell them any of that.

On the first Thursday, Mom takes the afternoon off from work so that she can drive you downtown to meet with Raven, just the two of you. You’ve been looking forward to it all week, a chance to feel truly, completely understood and at home. But Raven sits back in her chair, watches and listens as you talk and talk. Her face remains clear as you tell her about those rich-people meetings, how nobody there could possibly understand you. She offers no mm-hmms, no nods of understanding. All she says once she’s listened for a bit is “How do you know? Did you try?”

You whine on a bit more after that, but the word
bluster
comes to mind, the realization overwhelming you. You can see in Raven’s face that she is simply letting you wind down like one of those old-fashioned toys, a key slowly revolving in its back.

At the end she hugs you, looks into your eyes and says, “You’re doing great, Kaya. Keep it up.” When you ask if you can come see her again the next week, she pauses. Then she shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says. “Down the road, sure, if you still want to, but for now, stick with the program. It’s a good one.”

Mom is right outside in the car. She drives you straight to your meeting. “Beth will be here to pick you up after,” she says, giving you her version of a hug.

You give a small squeeze back. You like Raven’s style of hugging better, but at least Mom is trying.

In the meeting you look around. What would Raven see? You have no idea, but this time when you look, you see how crumpled some of the people look, and not just their clothes or uncombed hair or smudged makeup, but them. Several look as if they have been crying for weeks, and one looks as if she’ll soon have her fingers gnawed down to the knuckle. Despite this, you see them chatting with one another, reaching out. As you look around the room, three people meet your eyes and make the effort to smile at you. You cast your mind back over the past four days and remember the stories. You glossed over them then, but now you replay them for yourself. You remember the friendliness. And you remember how you have snubbed every single person who tried to talk to you. But still they smile.

You straighten in your chair. You mentally place Raven behind your right shoulder. Then you surprise yourself by placing Beth behind your left. You turn your head and smile at one neighbour in the circle. Then you turn it the other way and smile at the other one.

The meeting begins. People talk. You listen as best you can. Your turn comes.

“Hi,” you say, and you feel tears burbling up as you say it, ugly tears. “My name is Kaya and I’m a heroin addict. I want to tell you …” And you do. You tell. You say the big bits, one after the other. It only takes a minute. Less, really. You stop. Someone places a box of tissues in your lap, and you cry through the whole rest of the meeting, quietly, since other people are telling their stories now.

At the end of the meeting you collect yourself, put the tissue box with the others on the side table and say goodbye to three people on the way out. You discover real empathy in their eyes. You hope they can see it in yours.

“We’re going swimming,” Beth says on Saturday. You don’t argue.

And when you step inside the doors at the pool and smell the chlorine, you have to fight the tears that try to get out of you. It’s been a long time since you smelled that smell. You don’t wait for Beth; you don’t bother locking up your stuff or digging your towel out of your bag. You just head on through, winding an elastic around your hair. A ten-second shower, a shallow dive off the side of the pool, and you’re in.

You head for the bottom, and turn and look up when you get there, eyes wide, taking it all in. You see legs, bodies, and the shifty enclosed space above the water. No moon here. Still, it’s fabulous!

You have no idea how long you spend like that, coming
up now and again for a breath, but when you return to the side at last, you stop and stare. Those girls are following you everywhere! They are all there in a row, sitting on the side of the pool, feet in the water.

“We thought they’d have to come and drag you out with a net,” Marlene says.

“The lifeguard says no diving off the side,” Beth adds.

Samantha and Michelle are talking to each other, paying no attention. Diana looks a bit tentative, but she slides into the water, grimacing as it passes her waist and then her chest.

“I’m going to go swim properly,” Jane says as she hoists herself to her feet and heads for the lanes.

You swim up to Diana and poke her in the arm. “Come under with me,” you say.

And she looks at you, treading water hard as she considers. Is that a tiny smile on her face? You look into her eyes. Yes!

She squeezes those eyes shut, then tips forward and kicks herself down deep. You follow.

Swimming is the best part of those first weeks. And painting. You paint a lot, big paintings, ugly ones. Painting, you are determined, is going to belong to you, not to that man.

Therapy’s the worst. Or the hardest. In therapy there’s nowhere to hide. You sit, the two of you, on your straight-backed chairs, knees facing. And she directs. And redirects. You watch her face for cues, for horror, for pity, but she is solid as a brick.

She does not ask the question that has screamed itself forever in your head, the question you long to drown out any way you can. They have been stripping the means away from you: the drugs, the endless stream of men with their collection of needs and desires, some of them twisted, a few dangerous, most of them duller than dirty snow.

Why did you keep going back?

To be more precise, it is not the question that screams at you: it’s the answers. The answers that turn every atom of you into filth.

He didn’t make you, did he?

It must be all your fault
.

You must have wanted it
.

You must have liked it
.

It felt good when he touched you, didn’t it?

The therapist does not ask. She just looks. She just sits there like a big person-shaped brick. Directing and redirecting. Asking about everything else, every single little thing. Until, at last, you break.

“That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it,” you scream, on your feet now. “It felt good. Yeah, sure. It felt good. It felt bad. It felt disgusting. It hurt.” And you stand, like an animal, on the far side of the room from the therapist, who sits and looks at you calmly, as if the world has not just collapsed on you both.

Not like a brick, more like a great big sponge, the therapist sits and looks at you and soaks up the horror of it, soaks it up without getting tainted by it. No, a sponge isn’t right either.

“He had to make you like it,” she says, once your breathing
has slowed, once you are edging back toward your chair, “or you would never have gone back.”

You sink back onto your chair and stare at her. The truth of what she has just said, so obvious.
He had to make you like it, or you would never have gone back
. In that moment, the two parts join and become one. The tea, the toys, the roses, the stories. And what happened down in that basement room.

With that comes a glimmer. Mr. G was not kind. He was never, not for one single moment, kind.

Me (Kaya)

It’s strange looking back on all that now.

It’s not as if life got so perfect then. I still had all of it to deal with.

I even relapsed once, a month or two in. I took off downtown for a few days and used again and worked to pay for it. Everything. Mom called Raven and Raven found me, got me back in treatment. I’ll never forget that moment when she came up to me on the street. I was leaning against a wall, just gearing up to get money for my next fix, and there she was. Not one bit of judgment in her eyes. Just love, really. And understanding. All the toughness ran off me, just melted away, and I went. And in treatment that time, I talked.

Therapy was a bit different after that. Something had opened up inside me, even though it was still easier for me to write about stuff happening to “you” not “me.” She’s still trying to get me to write that
I
was sad, that
I
felt horror, but so far, it hasn’t worked. I can write the words, but they don’t mean anything. They don’t connect. So she lets me keep on writing
you
.

Diana started seeing her too. Diana and I don’t see each other much now, but we don’t have to hide from each other either. She and Michelle have connected, which is great for both of them, I guess, since Michelle and I don’t have a whole lot to say to each other anymore either. Marlene, though, has become a friend, though her mom and dad seem nervous around me.

And we, Marlene and I, I mean, have been coming up with a plan. I told her I thought her grandfather must have had other victims. I told her about all the drawings. We want to get our hands on them and see if we can find anybody else. There are a lot of obstacles … A lot. But at least we’re talking about it. There’s got to be something we can do, some way we can help those other girls.

We could start by talking to her mom and dad. She told me that she sat them down one day and got them talking, brought it all out in the open, the bath, what her mom thought about it, why her mom wouldn’t let her see her grandfather anymore.

“They don’t want to think about the other kids, though,” Marlene said, looking me in the eye, “but maybe if they thought of helping them instead of just feeling guilty …” She paused, still staring at me, so I finished for her.

“Maybe if they heard from me too.”

I could tell she knew that was tough for me to say. I’m not exactly keen on talking to Mr. G’s son about what happened to me. His granddaughter, I can totally handle—at least, I can now—but his son … I’ll do it, though, because now I know that talking and helping are two ways you make things better, even if the talking part hurts.

Like I said, almost a year has gone by now. I’ve been clean since that one time, though often I’m really white-knuckling it. I keep right on wanting to go back downtown. And I know that’s not good. I’ve stuck it out at home, though. I’m even going to school, most mornings.

In the afternoons, I stay home and I write. My own private version of home schooling, I guess. I hand my pages over to my therapist every couple of weeks, and she reads them and talks with me about them. It’s this story, of course. I’ve worked like a dog on it. I’m lucky I had that prison notebook tucked away. It made tough reading, but it gave me a start.

I didn’t write Beth’s parts, of course. She wrote them herself. She wrote sections and gave them to me. It kind of changed things for me to see how it all was from her point of view. We’re getting closer now, which is a big surprise and pretty great.

But she hasn’t read my parts yet. I’m going to give her the whole thing to read as soon as I’m done. I still have two more things to write about. Then I’ll print it out for her.

I’m working on something else for her too. Her birthday’s not till October, but I missed her last one, and I didn’t really have anything for her for Christmas either. I went and asked Mr. Holbrook if I could sign up for Metalwork 101 again and told him about my idea. I’m making her a mobile with some of that glass of hers (which I had to take without telling her). Making it balance is tricky, but when it does, and the glass, with thin wire circle holding it in place, sways when
you touch it, it’s pretty satisfying. If she can hang it in the sun …

Right after her birthday, I’m going into a residential treatment program. Two weeks. I’m hoping that’ll help. It would be so easy to use again. Just once. That’s what I say to myself when I wake up in the night, shaking: I could feel that perfect escape just one more time and then quit for good after that. I remind myself about detox, how awful it was—both times—but a lot of the time, the memory of the release is a lot stronger than the memory of the pain. So, yeah, two weeks of treatment …

This morning, Beth and Mom and I went to the memorial for the missing women. I really went for Sarah, since I didn’t know any of the others. Beth and Mom went to be there for me. We snuck past all those TV cameras, but at the entrance, three women were burning sweetgrass in a great big shell and smudging everyone, sweeping a feather up and down near our bodies. I washed myself from head to toe with that smoke. I’ll bet I had ancestors who did that too. It was crazy. While I was doing it I cried and cried, and the woman with the feather just smiled a small smile. I felt something like a hairline crack forming right through my heart, and that smoke slipped in through that crack and flushed some of the black guck out of there.

I’ll have to tell my therapist about that.

At last I was finished, and I put my rings back on while Mom and Beth took their turns. They were a lot quicker than
I was. Inside, we went up to the balcony. I thought we might be away from the crowd up there, but we weren’t. The whole place was jammed. Right to the rafters, Mom said.

Then, behind me, “Hey, Kaya.” It was Raven.

I looked at her and started to cry again, but this was different, not a hairline crack letting in healing smoke, but a grief too big, way, way too big, for anything. Raven climbed right over into my pew, and we cried together, the two of us. Once again, Mom and Beth waited patiently. Then the event began. Some of it was kind of religious and just washed over me, but there was a time when anyone could get up and speak. The line snaked across the stage and down the central aisle. I listened and listened; every bit of me listened. And remembered. I looked over and saw tears on Beth’s and Mom’s faces. Not on Raven’s, though. She’d cried herself out, maybe.

After a bit, Raven went down and joined the line. For a moment I thought about following her. I didn’t, though. I was there to say a quiet goodbye, not just to Sarah, but to that whole terrible part of my life. I didn’t need a podium to do that.

I brought my hands together in my lap, fingertips touching. “Goodbye,” I whispered.

The park—one near our house, not downtown—was dark, lit only by the streetlights on Trimble Street. The grass was damp, the ground soft. I took off at a run, and when I reached the enormous swing-set I turned back. Beth was
standing at the edge of the grass, probably unnerved by the dark and the clanking and whooshing of a kid practising on his skateboard at midnight.

“Come on!” I shouted, and she did—not running, though.

I grinned, kicked off my shoes and plunked myself onto a swing. Pumping my legs furiously, I reached for the sky with my toes.

Beth kept her shoes on. She shoved her small pink rabbit into her pocket, grabbed the chains on the swing beside mine and leaned back onto the seat. I swept past her, legs stretched out in front, hair flying. Beth had to work hard to catch up.

For long minutes we swung together, caught up in the motion, competing for the sky. The metal frame lurched. “Whoa,” we cried as our stomachs tried to push up our throats. Together, we slowed down.

For a while we drifted back and forth, feet held off the sand.

I could feel Beth struggling to speak. Finally, she pushed out the words. “Are you … going to stay home now, Kaya?”

I kept my eyes on the ground. “You’re my sister, not my mother,” I said. My voice was calm. Then I looked at Beth and smiled.

Beth pushed off sideways with a foot and snuck a hand into her pocket. With a grand flourish, she whisked that pink rabbit out of my hood. “But I can work miracles,” she said.

I grabbed the rabbit and laughed. “Save that for the stage,” I said.

“Sure,” Beth said. “As long as you’ll be there to watch.”

“You know I will,” I said.