The Gallery of Lost Species (15 page)

Once, he tried to cut down a tree while trashed and dropped the electric saw on his bare toes, losing half his foot. He drooled and became belligerent. He saw people outside their windows when there were none. He called Raven and her sister whores. He smacked them and locked them in their rooms. Then he went
AWOL
for three years.

After he was found dead in a ditch, Raven's mom became a fanatic about keeping a clean house. She covered the furniture with sheets. She vacuumed twice a day and went through a gallon of bleach every week. Raven and her sister had to sleep with plastic on top of their mattresses. They couldn't put toys down on the floor. They ate in the bathtub, and every time they got sick, their mom sent them away to her aunt's.

“Viv had a lot of pressure on her as a kid,” I told Raven once she'd finished her sandwich. Her hair had grown out since university. She divided it into three parts and evaluated me as she plaited it.

“Spare me. From what you've told me, you were the neglected one.”

“I don't get why she can't quit.”

“Try to catch a river in your hands.” She pulled a compact from her purse and checked her eye makeup.

Across from us in the courtyard, a boy coloured on the cobblestones, working at a frenzied pace, gripping his chalks so hard they kept breaking. “What about wings?” his mother coaxed from the bench.

The jittery child added a flurry of plumage to the bodies. I thought of Viv's bird sketches and how, later, she spread paint around dead birds that she then withdrew from the canvas, leaving negative imprints of life in their place.

TWENTY-THREE

T
HE
G
ALLERY BORROWED A
unicorn called
The Child's Dream.
It was on loan from the artist. The fabled animal was set in a formaldehyde vitrine, framed in gold-plated steel. It also had a gold horn and golden hoofs.

To support the tank's weight, a team pulled up the exhibition room's hardwood planks and laid down a steel floor, then set the wood back in place. If the case leaked, the poisonous fumes could be fatal. An emergency shower was set up by the fire exit—a showerhead on a tile wall with a safety lock on the pull cord and a small drain in the floor—which visitors kept mistaking for a Duchamp.

Damien Hirst made
The Child's Dream.
He was one of the richest artists alive, notorious for mixing taxonomy, myth, and spectacle and selling his creations for millions of dollars. Some offended critics purported that Hirst's encased, rotting cow heads covered in flies crossed the line. Once, a cleaner thought his art was garbage and threw the whole thing out.

Before opening hours, I went to see the unicorn. I walked down a narrow corridor, listening to the echo of my steps as I approached the dream.

I had the room to myself. The preserving fluid magnified the unicorn's features and the hair covering its slight body. Its coat was rumpled as though a hand had just passed through it and its mane seemed fixed in a breeze, each hair moving upward as if it had been given a jolt of electricity. Its lashes extended downward as if a butterfly had landed on the glass bottom of the tank, attracting the unicorn's mournful gaze.

The snow-white foal was alive with an unsettling stillness and I waited for it to move. My memory of the unicorn on the Lake O'Hara mountainside came back to me.

Then the track lighting came on and the TVs and audio recordings from installations in adjacent rooms dispatched jarring, noisy voices, disrupting my reverie.

*   *   *

W
HEN
L
IAM ARRIVED
, I was bandaging a paper cut.

I looked up and there he was, leaning against the office door with a tree under one arm and a huge backpack at his feet.

He came in, sat down, and placed the potted tree with exposed roots between us. Then he reached across my desk and took my wrist and, raising my arm in front of him, examined my finger.

“What would happen if you got blood on the art?” His thumb was on my pulse.

I hesitated then said, “It would never happen.” From the moment the paper caused a stinging sensation to the moment the drop of blood surfaced, there was ample time to pull my hand away. It was an automatic reaction, like being burned.

I explained, half joking, that paper-cut emergencies were part of my training. He released my wrist and slid the bonsai toward me. “A gift from the smallest park in the world,” he said.

“How did you get in?” I asked, taking in his tan and laidback composure. There was a distance to his demeanour that was unfamiliar.

“Your friend swiped me through. The woman with plaid leggings.”

Raven would have been on the lookout for him. I'd told her he was coming.

I extracted the spare set of keys I'd had made the day before from my purse and tried to remain nonchalant. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks. It's a drag my parents stayed in BC.” He pressed my hand into his, asked for directions to my apartment, and then left.

*   *   *

A
FTER WORK
, R
AVEN
drove me home. I asked her to go easy over bumps and not to break suddenly. “God, it's a plant, Edith, not a child.” She adjusted her rear-view mirror. “So cruel, the way those are grown. Same principle as binding Japanese women's feet. You sure he's over your sister?” She stopped in front of my place, guzzling down the last of her coffee from her I Hate Cats travel mug.

“He's staying with me, isn't he?”

“Personally, I'd steer clear. Now scram.” She slapped my knee, gesturing for me to get out.

When I walked into the apartment, Liam was standing barefoot in the kitchen, stirring spaghetti sauce. “Hi. Hope you're hungry.” He turned to me smiling, but he still seemed changed somehow. “I'll be out of your hair soon. I already have leads on a condo.”

I'd set up the pullout and bought new sheets and towels. “It's no hurry,” I said casually. “Stay as long as you want.”

I put the bonsai on top of the bookcase in my bedroom, near a window framed by vines. It was a flowering mock orange tree with thick, glossy leaves and creamy flowers and rough, cracked bark. I almost expected insect-sized birds to fly out of the foliage.

It would live fifty years if soaked and pruned with miniature utensils, producing leathery fruit called capsules, smaller than my pinky nail. The blossoms gave off a subtle fragrance. When I switched on my reading lamp, the tree cast itself onto my wall like a shadow puppet.

That night, Liam collapsed onto the fold-out early, while I was still washing dishes. I thought we'd be up talking for hours, but I let him sleep. I covered him with a blanket and knelt down next to him.

The muscles at his temples twitched. His eyes moved around rapidly beneath their lids, as if he was struggling to exit some unpleasant trance. I gently blew on his eyelashes and the movements ceased. I resisted putting my head on his chest as I watched him, absorbed by his abdomen moving up and down under his T-shirt. Then I accidentally fell asleep on the rug beside him, curled up like a dog. I awoke before he did and retreated to my room.

Those first few weeks, I slept with my bedroom door closed to give him some privacy, although I often sat on the other side with my ear to the wall, listening to his breathing.

After his arrival, my tasks, my days, my life no longer seemed mundane.

I felt happy. People looked at me differently. Even Raven noticed.

“What the hell's wrong with you?”

“I'm in love.”

“Infatuation ain't love, my pet. Once you've tolerated the bullshit and the smells and annoying habits you can't stand, get back to me.”

Liam and I started having lunch together. He'd bike over from campus and we'd sit in the open-air amphitheatre behind the Gallery, on the windy promontory above the river and the bridge between provinces. After eating, he'd tilt his head back and close his eyes. Or he'd scope out the sculpture on the point, called
One Hundred Foot Line
—a ten-storey tapered spire that came out of the hill like a giant thorn and disappeared into the air.

One muggy afternoon, the metallic hum of cicadas caught his attention. The sun was too strong, so we sat on the grass, shaded by the
Line.
“Music from the bug that spends most of its life underground,” he said, biting into his apple.

I was aware that when cicadas emerged from the soil, they removed themselves from their shells. Every summer, Viv had collected them from trees and planted them around the house to scare Constance.

Other than the rare flashback, when I was with Liam entire days passed where I didn't think about my sister. He didn't bring up Viv either.

Alone at night, though, a succession of images associated with her involuntarily flashed through my mind while I slept. But these were dreams I tended to forget on waking.

TWENTY-FOUR

O
N THE MORNING OF
Liam's birthday, I gave him a rock and a globe and wrote him a note that said,
You Rock My World.
He hugged me and told me I was sweet before clipping his bike helmet on and rushing out the door.

I avoided Raven at lunch that day and went to a lingerie shop, where I spent a hundred bucks on a black lace bra and bikini briefs.

Hurrying home from work, I showered and applied makeup. I curled my hair and put on the black dress I'd kept, meant for my father's funeral but purchased several sizes too small by Constance. It didn't fit me then, but it fit now.

I cued up some Nina Simone and poured bubbly in Dollarama flutes with wedding bells on them.

Liam whistled as he came through the door. “What's all this?”

I offered him his drink and tipped my glass against his. “Happy Birthday.” I went on tiptoe to remove his bike helmet. Then I took his hand and led him to the bedroom.

He was confused. “Wait a sec…”

“Don't worry,” I told him, trying to undo my dress. The zipper was caught in the lace.

“Edith, I don't think…” He stepped back.

“It's fine,” I cajoled.

“Seriously. We can't do this.” He kissed me then pulled away. “It's too weird.”

But I was already undressing. Suddenly, his expression changed. He got a strange look in his eyes as he watched me remove my clothes. Then he stepped toward me and kissed me on my neck and chest.

“When did you get so hot?” he said, then, “Tell me what you want.”

I figured it was obvious what I wanted. “You,” I told him, returning his kisses.

He pushed me onto the bed. Within a few minutes, it was over.

He passed me a towel and asked if I wanted to use the bathroom. I said no, so he got up, a bit too quickly, I thought. While he showered, I changed the sheets so he wouldn't see the blood.

It wasn't what I'd anticipated, but that didn't matter. After years of waiting, I'd finally walked the tightrope from fantasy to reality.

*   *   *

F
ROM THAT DAY
on, he slept in my bed. Usually he dozed off long before me with a book still in his hands. Occasionally, in the middle of the night, he'd reach for me in the dark. We didn't talk about what was happening between us. I based how he felt about me on those carnal nights.

We fell into a routine like a married couple. Each day I'd prepare his coffee, toast, and egg, sitting calm beside him as he ate and reviewed his teaching notes. He gave me a peck on the nose goodbye, then it was my turn to get ready for work. We met for lunch less and less, but we still came home around the same time.

Liam was the one to make dinner each night and I was the one to clean up. Afterwards, he'd study his rocks, spreading them out on the table and examining them with his magnifying glass, or he'd grade papers and I'd lie on the couch pretending to read, observing him and daydreaming about the trips we'd take and what our children would look like.

We drank tea and went for evening walks in the autumn. I stitched his socks and shirts and learned basic cooking skills.

After a few months, Liam stopped mentioning the place he was going to buy. Like a gambler on a winning streak with my rabbit foot charm, I couldn't believe my luck. I was on top of the world.

If there was a nagging feeling that some emotional element was missing, I brushed it off my shoulder like a feather. If I was tempted by rashness in our quiet domestic bliss, thinking how I wanted to suck on his fingers, pull his hair, or slap him, I restrained myself for fear of scaring him off.

But I began serving wine with meals and keeping beer in the fridge, noticing that after a drink or two he relaxed. With a couple of beers he'd let me run him a bath and wash his body after a tiring day. He'd welcome a massage in bed and was more affectionate with me. These were the moments I lived for.

TWENTY-FIVE

O
NE NIGHT
, L
IAM CALLED
to say he had to work late. I thought it would be romantic if I brought him a picnic. I packed deli sandwiches, candles, strawberries, and Chardonnay. I put on a white dress I knew he liked, and dabbed the Chanel No. 5 I'd just bought behind my ears.

I was freezing cold as I walked to the campus. My dress was for summer, which was long since over. Then it started raining. Within minutes, the blue dye from the jean jacket I held over my head was dripping onto my dress as I tried to hail a cab.

The Earth Sciences building was deserted. Inside, I passed vacant auditoriums and lecture halls before entering the faculty corridor. I found a washroom and tried reshaping my ratty hair and removing the streaks of makeup running down my cheeks. Wringing my jacket out, I put it back on over my ruined dress.

I'd never actually been to Liam's office. One door was open at the end of the hall, with brightness ricocheting from it. I took a few squeaking steps then removed my shoes to approach more quietly.

As I got closer, I heard the flirtatious voices of girls. “We need to find you a wife, Professor Livingstone!” one said coyly. “It's no wonder your shirts and ties clash,” the other giggled. A young male interjected then with, “Leave him alone, Brianna.”