Rabbit Ears (7 page)

You suck in deep on the cigarette as you turn into a lane. The ball of fabulousness in your gut softens. You feel a bit like puking. But on you go.

Beth

“I’m not leaving you home on your own,” Mom says. “You can stay with Jane or Samantha or come with me.”

“What about Kaya?”

“Kaya is gone.”

“But what if she comes home?”

Mom’s face is red and blotchy. She hacks at a carrot as if she were executing it. Veins stand out on the backs of her hands. “It’s been weeks, Beth. Weeks. I’ve been out looking. I’ve talked to the police. I don’t believe she’s coming home just now.”

Mom doesn’t know that. She can’t. But she isn’t cancelling her trip. She’s leaving the house locked and empty. Sybilla is with a friend till Sunday, Coco will have to fend for herself.

“I should stay home in case she comes,” I say, again. We have been having this same conversation over and over again for more than a week.

“No.”

I don’t say one word to her on the whole four-hour drive to Kamloops. She puts an audio book on, a mystery set in the Victorian period, but I can’t even stand to share sound waves with my mother. I plug myself into my own music, and sneak my way through an enormous bag of wine gums that I have hidden in my coat pocket.

Kaya is just a kid and she is lost. Mom is her mother and she is driving away. And I … I am a greedy pig. I finger the roll of fat around my middle, and think about how, when I look in the mirror, what pass for my breasts kind of sit on top of all that fat. Gross. I went on a diet once, before Dad died. I lost twelve pounds. He actually commented on how good I looked. But jelly beans and ice cream have appealed to me a lot more than counting calories since then.

The conference is at a lodge, a sprawling wooden structure, all logs and homespun tackiness. I pick the bed nearest the window, and plunk down my bag and myself.

“I’ll just hang out here,” I say, and Mom frowns and goes off to register for the conference on her own.

Why is she so upset? I’m here, aren’t I? And it’s not like I’m going to be going along with my mother to a bunch of sessions on childhood trauma and sexual abuse. If she’s angling for a career change, I don’t know why she doesn’t choose something a tad more cheerful.

The moment the door closes, though, I wish I were out there with her. I imagine the phone at home ringing and ringing with only Coco to hear it. Kaya trapped, bruised and bleeding, begging us to come to her. I curl up in a ball on the
bed. Where is Kaya right this minute? Is somebody hurting her?

I sit up, teeth gritted. How could Kaya go there anyway? And then go back? And not call? It’s not like Mom was beating her or anything. What’s her problem? And how can Mom drive away into the mountains and leave her daughter to her fate?

Later I follow Mom into the dining hall a little worried about how I’m going to get out again. There’s a speaker after dinner, but I’m sure not going to sit around and listen to somebody drone on and on about all the miseries of childhood. I’ve got enough of my own to deal with, thank you very much!

I’m happy to see that it’s a buffet, at least, and the food is good, though the man who slices the roast beef isn’t generous. The dessert table is huge, three massive cakes at its centre, one chocolate, one layered with whipped cream and fruit, and one a plain cheesecake with three choices of sauce.

I’m still in the middle of a slab of the chocolate cake when a hush falls over the room. A woman has appeared at the lectern. Behind her another woman, elegantly dressed, waits to be introduced.

Mom turns her chair around so she can see. Waiters float through the room pouring coffee and removing plates.

“Welcome to Kamloops,” the woman at the lectern says.

I put down my fork. “I’ll see you later,” I whisper in Mom’s ear, and get only a fraction of a nod in reply. Mom’s eyes stay trained on the front.

Sneaking out is awkward. Actually, it hardly qualifies as sneaking, since our table is in the middle of the room. I swear
every pair of eyes in the place passes over me as I creep by. I feel the outraged glare in some of them.

Outrage or no, in less than a minute I’m easing the heavy door closed behind me. Free! I gaze the length of the hall. Now what? The pool? No chance. The games room? There’s a fitness room too. Ha! There are books in my suitcase. And homework. And TV, of course. In the room, not the suitcase.

Kaya would go swimming. And maybe to the games room.

I wander in the general direction of our room, but the idea of being shut up in there by myself hurts. It actually hurts. In my head and my gut. In the end, I have no choice. Alone it is. Back in the room, I turn on the TV loud and find an old comedy from before I was born.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, the covers are over me, and the light and the TV have been turned off. I didn’t even hear Mom come in. I roll over and toss and turn for the rest of the night, still in my clothes, listening to Mom snore.

The next day passes as slowly as that first night, except that now I’m tired and extra grumpy. No matter what I do, I can’t stop thinking about Kaya, imagining her arriving at the house and finding it locked, realizing that her mother and her sister have abandoned her.

She’ll get in somehow, I realize at one point. And I smile. She will. We’ll get home to find a window at the back of the house broken and Kaya lounging in front of the TV. I feel a bit better after that.

Better, but still bored.

I actually squeeze myself into my swimsuit and swim six
lengths of the tiny pool, ready to leap out of the water and escape at the first sign of another human. After, I skip the shower and blow my chlorine-soaked hair into a frizzy cloud with the minuscule blow-dryer back in the room.

I go to the games room and try an old-fashioned pinball machine where every ball has a death wish. And finally I do what I really wanted to do all along. I buy a bottle of Coke and a bag of red Twizzlers and read and eat and drink for half an hour in bed. And it still isn’t even time for lunch.

In the afternoon, I concentrate on sleeping and hating my mother. Every time Kaya tries to get into my head, I toss her out.

At last the time comes for another dinner. Between naps I’ve been conjuring that dessert table in my mind. Maybe I’ll try the cheesecake tonight. With strawberry sauce. Maybe I’ll walk right out of there with my dessert in hand, so’s not to abandon half of it when the speaker starts. Either that or I’ll eat even faster than usual.

I’m working my way through my lasagna at a satisfactory pace when a young man on the other side of Mom speaks. I take another bite, and jump when Mom elbows me in the side.

“Ron is speaking to you,” she says sharply.

I swallow, raise my eyes and set my brain on playback. “So, a magician!” he has just said. “I think they had you in mind, young lady, when they booked tonight’s entertainment!”

I try to smile as I dig my fork into the next bite. A magician? Magicians are for little kids’ birthday parties. How old does he think I am?

Mom rescues me. “I’m exhausted,” she’s saying, “and tomorrow will be a long day with the drive home. I think I’m going to take a bath and read my book in bed.”

Lasagna gone, I head for the dessert table, which is awash in puddings tonight. Even better than cakes! I heap my plate with trifle, bread pudding and a small scoop of chocolate mousse. Back at the table, Mom eyes my choices.

“Are you sure you want all that, honey?”

I look up and catch that man, Ron, looking at me. Is that pity on his face? Humiliation licks at my lower back. I take a bite and let my teeth sink through the sweet, creamy bread. Perfect. I angle myself away from my judgmental mother and the sympathetic man and take another bite. Trifle this time.

Mom has taken a pretty healthy serving of dessert herself. She cleans her plate, gulps down a coffee, says good night to everyone at the table and pushes herself to her feet. “Are you all set, Beth?” she says.

I look up at her.

“You should stay,” the man says, “and watch the magician. He’s supposed to be very good.”

“Okay,” I say, surprising myself and Mom both.

It’s pretty embarrassing at first. The guy is in his fifties, probably, dressed in a tux with a red rose in the buttonhole, skinny, with longish grey hair and a longer-than-longish moustache. He plays to the crowd and the crowd is mostly women almost as old as he is. He picks out a jovial older man to be his assistant and the butt of his jokes, which are pretty rude, some of
them. My table is near the front, and at first I’m afraid that he’ll set eyes on me and try to draw me in somehow.

Then I get interested. He does stuff that doesn’t seem all that original, stuff with ropes, for instance—he even pulls a toy rabbit out of a hat—but I watch closely, looking for the tricks, sure that from so close I will be able to see them. And I can’t. Not once. I start to worry that the act is going to end.

He asks the man for a twenty-dollar bill, which the man hands over reluctantly. Hamming it up. The magician has chosen his assistant well. He tears a corner off the bill and asks the man to look at the two pieces and confirm that both have the same serial number. The magician leaves the larger portion of the bill with the man and tucks the tiny bit away. The trick continues, growing more and more complicated, until the magician pulls a lemon out of his pocket. The man examines the lemon and confirms it’s whole. “This lemon has not been tampered with,” he says, holding the lemon high in the air. Giggles ripple through the audience.

The magician takes a sharp knife and cuts into the lemon all the way round. He cuts a little deeper. Then he asks the man to hold one end while he holds the other. Together, they wiggle the lemon apart. The audience—and the man—gasp. Nestled in the heart of the lemon is a tightly rolled bit of paper, which turns out to be a quarter of a twenty-dollar bill with the same serial number as the one that the man handed over earlier.

The lemon trick is the magician’s grand finale, and after that people begin to go back to their rooms, but some stay and chat a bit, several gathered around the magician, asking him questions and thanking him. I edge closer, listening. He
isn’t going to share his secrets, of course. I know better than that. But a question is nagging at me. I listen, hoping someone else will ask. Hoping I’ll find out what I need to know without speaking to the magician myself.

But nobody does.

A voice in my ear makes me jump. “Glad you stayed?” the man asks, the same one who told me I should.

I positively beam at him as I nod.

“Interested in magic?” he asks.

Further nodding seems excessive. “Yes,” I say instead.

He leaves then, and soon the two stragglers leave as well and the magician begins gathering up his things. My chance is slipping away.

I breathe in courage, breathe out words: “How did you get involved in magic?”

He jumps, just like I did moments earlier, jumps and turns. “Oh, I didn’t see you there!” he says. “You startled me.” He shows no sign that he has heard my question.

I almost turn tail, as they say. But with his eyes on my face, I find myself drawing breath once again, and asking the question a second time.

His eyes turn away from me then, and I can see him plunging into his memories. “My uncle taught me a couple of tricks when I was a kid and I never looked back,” he says.

I stare at him. My eyes fix on his as my own memory overwhelms me: Mr. Duncan, Grade Four. I manage a smile. “Thank you, Mr. Jackson. I loved your show!”

And off I go to sneak into bed without waking Mom. I have a lot of thinking to do.

Beth

My memories lead me back and back, past Mr. Duncan and the magic tricks, all the way to the start of Grade Four, when I first realized something was wrong. That was two whole years after Dad was diagnosed. Before that, I just thought he went for treatments for some sickness, like when I got the flu or something.

I waited for him to get better. I asked him to play games with me or listen to me read as I learned how. He hardly ever said yes. And when he did let me read to him, he didn’t really listen. He sat in his big chair with his eyes closed. If I stopped to test him, his eyes would open after a few seconds and he would look over at me, and I would carry on. When I stopped altogether, he would nod and smile and say thank you. But he never commented on what I was reading or asked me questions about it. And Mom just never had time for it at all.

No one mentioned the word
cancer
. Not until a girl I hardly knew sidled up to me at school one day.

“I’m really sorry about your dad,” she said, stretching the word
dad
out long and sad.

I almost didn’t answer. I almost walked away. A cloud of dread rose inside me.

“Sorry why?” I said, even though I did not,
did not
, want to know the answer.

The girl’s eyes widened. “I don’t know. I guess I made a mistake …”

I watched her gather momentum for flight, and was surprised by what my arm did then, shooting out and grabbing the girl’s wrist, hard. She gave a loud squawk.

“Sorry
why
?” I said again.

“Let go of me.”

I let go. “Tell me,” I said.

The girl scrubbed at her bruised wrist and raised large, damp eyes to my face. Her lips quivered. “Cancer,” she said. She rubbed at her arm some more. “My mom says your dad’s going to die.”

Up until then, I wasn’t a bad student. I wasn’t brilliant, that’s for sure, but I wasn’t bad. After the girl spoke the
C
word, school changed.

At home, Dad seemed all right. Things went on the same, more or less, for the rest of the year.

But at school, the other kids just kind of drifted away. I saw them whispering about me; I felt their soft drifts of pity. When they came close, I saw the fear in their eyes and felt my own fear unfurl and send tendrils up my spine and into my
brain, along my veins and into my heart. School became the place where my dad was dying.

In January, the new teacher came: Mr. Duncan. He was new to the school, not just to our class, so he didn’t know about my dad. Or so I thought at the time. He smiled at me, and his smile was bright and kind. His expectations were high. When he found out that I still had not mastered parts of Grade Three math, he sat down with me to work out how I would get caught up.

Hope stirred in my heart. Maybe Dad wasn’t dying after all.

Then Mr. Duncan did the magic trick. It was a simple one, really. With cards. You had to take a card from the pack, and Mr. Duncan told you which card you had pulled. Every single time. The whole class surrounded him as he did it, watching from every angle. They examined the cards over and over again. They quizzed him mercilessly. But Mr. Duncan just smiled that bright smile and put the cards away until next time.

I had seen magic tricks on TV, but I had never seen anyone do one for real.

After the first time, I lay awake in bed, running through it in my mind: the teacher splaying out the cards, Ben hesitating and finally sliding one out, looking at it and holding it face down against his chest, the teacher putting the cards down in a stack and asking someone to cut the deck. After that, it was
hard to get the steps quite right, except for the last one, the one where Mr. Duncan said, the first time, “Is it the nine of hearts?” and Ben’s whole body gathered itself into a whoop of joy. “It is!” he said, flourishing the card so that the whole class could see.

And it was.

I knew it was just a trick. But it seemed like something else. It seemed like the magic of Narnia or Middle Earth. It seemed like Mr. Duncan had special powers. I dug an old deck of cards out of the games cupboard and set myself to learning how to shuffle.

Kaya hovered. “Can I try?” she begged.

“Your hands are too small,” I said. “You’d just drop them.”

Kaya stuck around long enough to watch me drop the cards myself, not once but three times.

“My hands aren’t that small,” she said at last.

I was about to tell her to find her own deck of cards, when the doorbell rang. It was Kaya’s friend Diana, collecting her to play in the ravine. Off they went.

“Beth, why don’t you go too?” Mom called from the kitchen.

Why would I hang out with a couple of little kids? Besides, I had work to do.

I should have been studying fractions instead of trying to master the art of the shuffle. I was going to be tested on Tuesday, my very own private test.

On Monday morning, Mr. Duncan stopped by my desk. “Have I got a deal for you!” he said jauntily.

I glanced around the room, but various projects were underway and no one seemed to be listening in. I managed a small smile. And waited.

“You have an important math test tomorrow,” Mr. Duncan said. “I’m going to set you up back there to do it.” He gestured toward a small round table under the window. “And I’d like to offer you a reward.”

I was curious now.

“If you pass the test, you will join the rest of the class in the Grade Four book.” He paused. I already knew about that. Mr. Duncan was leading up to something else. I guessed that if he had a drum set handy, he would ask for a drum roll, or perhaps he would beat one out himself. “If you pass the test, I will teach you the card trick I did last week.”

“Really?” I said. “Do you … do you think I could do it?”

“Of course you can, Beth. The question is, Can you pass the math test? I believe that you can. That’s why I’m making you this very special offer.” He smiled again, but there was a challenge in it this time. A
show me what you’re made of
kind of challenge.

I pulled the Grade Three math book out of my desk. Shuffling would have to wait.

The test the next day was tough. I spent an hour at that back table, working my way through two whole pages of questions, using up sheet after sheet of scrap paper, trying to
show my work and get the right answers. Getting the right answer didn’t matter much to Mr. Duncan if you didn’t show the steps, and they couldn’t just be scribbles either.

When I was done I looked over my work and shrank a little inside. It was smudged and scrinchy with lots scratched out. Oh well. It was over now. I put the messy pages into Mr. Duncan’s hands. He announced a free period and settled down to mark the test right then and there while the class erupted in excitement and organized itself into groups for games. I got my cards out of my desk and cut the deck in two. I hadn’t learned to do that flippy thing yet, where you divided and shuffled all in one long, smooth motion, but the shuffling itself was going pretty well. Not so many chunks of cards now.

I didn’t really notice that any time had gone by when Mr. Duncan pulled a chair up beside my desk. “You did it,” he said. “You got eleven out of twenty right. And you showed all your work!”

I looked at the paper Mr. Duncan had placed in front of me. So many Xs down the side of the paper, even though they were small. Mr. Duncan made his checks bigger than his Xs, but that didn’t make the wrong answers right. His hand lighted on my shoulder.

“You got five out of twenty on the last one, if you remember,” he said. “You figured out more than twice as many this time! I’ll meet you here after lunch when everyone’s outside, and we’ll do some magic.”

I sat perfectly still for a long moment after he stood up and told the class to return to their desks. I was caught in the glow of that light touch, those kind words, the anticipation of the session at lunch, and of what I would learn.

When I got home that day, Dad was in the den as usual; I could see him from the front hall. He didn’t turn his head. He never did. He never seemed to hear me enter over the TV, which filled the room with sound and glare all day and all night. I usually walked on by, into the kitchen looking for a snack. Today, though, I went and stood in the doorway.

He had a magazine open in his lap and he did not look up. On the TV, someone was talking on the deck of an enormous ship.

I took another step into the room. “Dad,” I said. “Dad.”

He heard me the second time.

I pulled the battered cards out of my pocket.

“Pick a card, any card.” I smiled as I said it, or tried to.

He smiled too, but his smile looked as stiff as mine felt. “What’s this?” he said.

“A trick,” I replied as I fanned the cards out in front of him. “Pick a card.”

His smile grew. His eyebrows crinkled together. He reached for the remote and silenced the man on the deck of that ship. “Don’t I get to cut the deck first?” he said.

My next breath filled my lungs right up, and I realized that I hadn’t been breathing. I let him cut the deck; I fanned the cards. He picked one. And my story sprang out of me then, long and joyous: the trick, the deal, the test, the eleven check marks down the side of the page, the Grade Four math book, the magic lesson. While I talked, I was reviewing the next steps of the trick in my mind. The story, I realized, was the perfect distraction, and distraction was the key.

“Are you holding the jack of clubs?” I said at last, tying the question to the story, making it the grand finale.

He was.

Kaya slipped into the room not long after that, and Mom followed soon after to find the three of us sharing milk and cookies. I watched my mother look for something wrong with the scene, and I saw her tiny huff of acceptance when she realized that Dad was fine. Better than fine.

Then, “Show them, Beth,” Dad said.

“I’ve got groceries to put away,” Mom said.

“Come on, Margaret. Five minutes.”

I flinched. I hated those exchanges between Mom and Dad, all sharp edges.

“Yes, show us!” Kaya said, spraying bits of cookie as she spoke.

And I did. I let Kaya pick the card. I prattled on a bit about how I had learned the trick, but I was nervous now, and it didn’t come out right. I tried to follow the steps as I talked, but in the end I knew I was guessing when I said, “Is it the six of clubs?”

Kaya’s face got sad, and my stomach turned over as I looked at the card face up in Kaya’s hand: the queen of hearts.

“Hmm,” Mom said. “More practice, I guess.” She was heading for the kitchen as she said it.

“You’ll get it, Beth,” Dad said quietly, tipping Kaya off his lap. “You only just learned it today.” He reached for the remote.

I shoved the cards into my pocket and went to my room, followed by my little sister. “Show me again,” Kaya said. “I’ll bet it works this time.”

“No,” I said shortly. “I’ve got homework.”

It wasn’t just the cards that showed up the holes in my life. The other kids shying away from me at school, Dad buried in his big chair, Mom, her whole body so tense she could have been made of stone, Kaya with her sad, crumpled face. It seemed as if Dad’s cancer swirled everyone off somewhere far, far away, leaving me alone at the centre of a vortex.

For an hour or two I had thought that the magic would close the gap. But soon, off they went, swirling away again. I was discouraged, but I still hoped. I still imagined. In fact, I loved the cards, even though I couldn’t make the trick work more than that one time.

Two weeks later, Mr. Duncan did another trick for the class. And the next day, he offered me another deal, science this time. I knew by then that Mr. Duncan was singling me out because of Dad. Or I was pretty sure. I didn’t like that idea much, but I did want to learn the new trick. I had practised the first one quite a bit since the failed attempt with Mom and Kaya, but it was hard to work the kinks out all alone, with no one to try the trick out on.

I passed the test and learned the trick (sort of), but it turned out that Mr. Duncan only knew two. There wouldn’t be a third. And the second trick was a lot harder than the first. I didn’t have the guts to try it out on anyone, not even Dad.

Slowly, hope faded. What was a magic trick or two in the face of the
C
word anyway? I put the cards away in a drawer, and didn’t shuffle another deck for a long, long time.

Dad lived for another five years, and the gaps and the hollows in our household grew and grew, even though he was in remission for a big part of that and he went back to work and everything.

He got sick again just as I started Grade Eight. Right around then, the girl who had told me about Dad’s cancer in Grade Four marched up to me one day in the hall. Another girl was behind her, almost shadowing her.

“My mom says your dad’s sick again,” Jane said. I knew her name by then, of course. We’d been in school together for four years. “Want to sit with us at lunch?”

“I’m Samantha,” the other girl said.

Samantha was new to the school and Jane had taken her on, like a pet. I was pet number two, I guess, a poor downtrodden creature who’d been rotting away all alone at the Humane Society.

I looked at them and considered Jane’s question. I couldn’t see any reason to say no.

“Sure,” I said.

That’s how I got to have friends.

I didn’t like Jane’s bossy ways, and often wished Samantha would stand up for herself, but it was kind of nice to have people to eat lunch with, and hang out with sometimes after school. Jane was always asking how Dad was doing. I didn’t tell her much, even though he did worse and worse all through Grade Eight. He died at the start of Grade Nine.

Within days of Dad’s death, Mom brought home a great big gangly collie puppy that she had bought all on her own without saying a word to Kaya or me first. Kaya fell in love with Sybilla instantly. They were always all wrapped up together on the couch or in her room. I couldn’t help feeling hurt that Mom went off and bought that dog all by herself, and that Sybilla loved Kaya so very, very much.

Another day, perhaps a month after Sybilla came home, I was on my way down the stairs, all dopey from a nap, when Mom and Kaya came in the front door. Kaya was alight in a way that I hadn’t seen for a long, long time. A kitten. She had a kitten in her arms. Behind her, Mom grinned.