I USED TO HAVE a lot of bad dreams — ones about killers coming through my window in the dead of night to stab me to death. I could feel the knife slicing through my belly button, my intestines squirting. I would wake up in a cold sweat just like they do in movies, and the whole house would be dead silent. I’d always wake up just before the moment I was going to die, so the silence really did feel like death. For a while I’d lie there, listening to my drumming heartbeat and fanning my sweaty chest with my shirt. Eventually I’d calm myself down enough to go to Mum’s room and tell her I’d had a nightmare, and she’d take me back to my room and read me a story to make me forget about it.
But one time, instead of reading to me from one of my books, Mum told me her own story. It was about a little girl who found an abandoned kitten in an old shed. She loved the kitten oh so dearly, and every night she’d give the kitten a saucer of milk to drink. Her parents were so poor that they could only afford to give the girl one glass of milk a day, but she preferred to give it to the kitten and go without. What she didn’t know was that milk is actually bad for kittens when it’s not from their mothers. So the kitten got really sick and died. The little girl wouldn’t tell anybody about the kitten dying because she felt like it was her fault, she’d been a bad Mum. So she made a bed for the body using a tin tea box, and to make it more comfy and cozy she lined the box with goose feathers plucked from her pillow. She made it look like the kitten was curled up and sleeping.
Nobody ever found out about the kitten dying. The little girl kept the box under her bed until the kitten’s belly started to cave in and its fur looked stiff and matted, and her Mum kept asking what on earth is that smell in here? Her Mum had forgotten that she had the kitten. No one else had remembered this friend she had loved so much. It had been too small a thing to notice.
I know, it’s not the kind of story that you’d think would make a kid feel better after a nightmare. But for some reason, it made me feel good and safe. It made me feel like dying was just something that happened to everyone and everything. You can’t control it, so why bother worrying?
Of course I begged and begged Mum for a kitten for weeks after, told her I would make sure it didn’t tear up the carpet or pee in the house plants, I’d watch it every minute and clean its litter box every day. Absolutely not, was all she said. When I told her she needed to give me one good reason she said, I hate cats.
I gave Da the same spiel and he gave in without a fight when I told him Mum had said No, flat-out. Da named the cat Sally. She was all black with one white paw, and Jess and I helped him pick her out from the SPCA. It was just after we moved into the townhouse with Mum, and at that time Da was making sure he saw us every single weekend. It got really boring ’cause there was never anything to do at Da’s house, and it wasn’t like our home anymore so it felt weird just doing nothing. The place was freezing all the time, and Da hadn’t bothered to buy any more furniture or decorations to replace the stuff that Mum had taken. Too expensive, he’d said. Does she know how much they charge for curtains these days?
You could still see the indents in the carpet where the armchairs had stood, and there was a perfect rectangle on the dining room wall that was a shade darker than the rest because Mum’s Thomas Kinkade print had hung there for so long. I never wanted to take off my socks when I was there even though I used to go around barefoot all the time when I lived there. I feel bad about it now ’cause it was obvious that Da noticed. He’d stock his kitchen with things that Mum would never buy like liquorice allsorts and mangoes and canned spaghetti. But he never seemed to get that neither of us really liked any of those things anyway. Whenever we asked when he was going to drive us home, he’d duck into the kitchen and come out with a treat, Look what I’ve got! We pretended to be excited, rubbing our tummies and licking our lips. It didn’t feel like there was any other option.
When we went to visit Da the weekend after we brought Sally home, it looked like he hadn’t cleaned her litter box even once. She had started to poop on the concrete floor in the basement instead. Da said he guessed we were going to have to come over more often to look after our cat. He only kept her for a couple more weeks after that. He told us he had to give her away to a woman he knew at work because he couldn’t even watch TV anymore — the cat had started to climb up on his lap and dig its claws into his thighs every time he sat on the couch. We saw it happen the first time and it was hilarious to watch, Da’s feet up on the coffee table and Sally jumping up and walking across his legs like a bridge, Da’s whole body frozen stiff ’cause he was too afraid to touch her or even shoo her away. Sally’s claws digdigdigging into his jeans and Da yelling at us, Get it — aw! Shit — get the cat OFF!
After he gave Sally away, Mum called him up and told him he couldn’t just get rid of our pets without asking us. Jess had come home crying and saying she never wanted to see Da again. Da told Mum he thought we wouldn’t notice Sally was gone since we were barely ever there, and anyway, she was costing him too much money on top of his child support payments. Mum called him a selfish miser.
To smooth over the Sally fiasco, Da got into renting James Bond videos and enticing us over with movie nights. We watched the whole series from Sean Connery to Timothy Dalton, Da’s favourite. We always got to watch them on the TV in Da’s bedroom. For some reason it was more fun to lie in bed with Da while we watched movies and ate popcorn than to do it on the couch in the living room. He’d spread his arms out so we could use them as pillows, me on one side and Jess on the other, and by the time the movie was halfway through we’d both be asleep. But after we got through Licence to Kill and there weren’t any more Bond movies, it wasn’t fun anymore. Da tried to get us to lie in his bed with him on the nights we were sleeping over, but we told him we couldn’t fall asleep, it was more comfy to sleep in our own rooms.
When we got back to Mum’s, Jess would tell her everything that Da had said and done like she’d been working undercover.
And then, she’d said, he wanted us to sleep in his bed with him again. Does he think we’re like, five?
He needs a girlfriend, Mum said, as if having a girlfriend would solve all Da’s problems. As if having a boyfriend or a girlfriend ever made anybody feel less lonely.
He still does that thing you hate, Jess went on. The thing with his belt. Da had this ritual every day after work when he was changing out of his dress pants. He’d stand in front of the closet dangling his belt by the tail end, and he’d try to jerk the buckle so that it would jump up, loop around, and tie the belt into a knot. Sometimes he’d stand there forever, just jerking the belt over and over, jing-jing, jing-jing, watching the buckle flail in the air and then drop back down. It drove Mum totally batty to watch him concentrating so hard on looping a strip of leather into a knot while she waited to hear about his day at work. She asked him if he expected a goddamn fireworks display on the day he finally did it.
What’s really funny is, I think Da and Wiley are pretty similar in a lot of ways. Seems like neither of them ever wanted Mum to be a wife. When Mum and Da were married, Mum would pay the bills at the bank, wash the laundry, schedule events on the fridge calendar, and make sure all of us were fed three times a day plus afternoon snack, tucked in at night and kissed sweet dreams. Of course, that’s the only way that Mum would have it. It was different for a short time when Wiley first moved in, but before you could say abracadabra Mum was paying Wiley’s bills, washing his laundry, scheduling his piano lessons, and feeding him his three meals, all four food groups. Switcheroo, just like that.
But I’ll be the first to admit that Mum has always done way more than her fair share of the responsible adult stuff. When New Wiley showed up on the scene, I started helping out a lot more. There was one day I was vacuuming the whole house and I thought Mum would be so happy when she came home to see a clean floor. I even tried to scrub out some of the stains in the carpet that always made her sigh when the afternoon sun lit them up. When I heard the garage door opening I moved to a spot where I could be seen from the back door. I wanted Mum to walk in and see me scrubbing away. I wanted to see the big smile spread across her face. But when the door opened it was Wiley. He walked in with his shoes on.
Hey! I yelled. I’m cleaning the floor here?
He stopped and quickly heeled off his shoes, leaving them in a jumble in the middle of the hall. Then he brushed past me without saying a word. He looked like he was rushing to get something.
Where’ve you been? I called after him. Weren’t you s’posed to have students coming today?
Nope, he called back as he raced up the stairs. Got some important business to attend to!
I knew right away that Mum wasn’t going to be happy about whatever he was doing. And right on cue she walked in the back door.
Hi, she said. I thought I saw Wiley driving up . . . Then she smiled. You’re cleaning? she said. Isn’t that a nice surprise.
She looked down at Wiley’s shoes. I could tell she was trying to hold back a grimace.
Wiley came pounding down the stairs, tucking his wallet in his back pocket. He beamed when he saw Mum.
I did it! he said. I finally bit the bullet and did it!
Did what? Mum said, looking at him like he was a rattlesnake ready to attack.
Bought a new synth! Wiley said, throwing his fists up in the air as if he’d just conquered the world.
What, Mum said. Her voice was dark and deep. You bought what?
I was still kneeling on the floor, watching Mum’s face go pink. I didn’t dare move.
Now I know I already have one, Wiley explained, but the technology’s come a long way in the last three years. If me and the guys are gonna get our band up off the ground, we need state-of the-art.
Are you joking? Mum said. You can’t be serious. Don’t those things cost thousands of dollars? Her voice quivered.
It’s okay, Wiley said. Think of it as an investment. We’ll get it all back once the band makes it big.
Mum asked me to leave the room then. She asked me to go out to the backyard and pick the dead heads off the petunias. I left the rag I was using and the carpet cleaner sitting on the floor where they were and went straight out the door.
Mum had spent a lot of time planting the garden that year, and I hadn’t really noticed how lush it was and how much work it must have been until that day. It was the middle of the summer and all the flowers were in bloom, a quilt of pinks and purples and greens and yellows. There were a lot of shriveled petunia heads to pluck. I started picking at one end of the garden, gathering them in my palm, and every so often I’d catch a snippet of Mum and Wiley’s fight. I heard Mum saying, What do you expect me to do? Wiley yelled back, Support me! Believe in me!
I didn’t blame Mum for not believing in him. I wouldn’t either. And that got me thinking about how much Mum had resting on her shoulders. When things went wrong in our family, it was always Mum who fixed them. I remember wondering, as I sat on the porch steps and arranged my dead head collection into a neat little pile, how long it would be before Mum got tired of being a mother to everyone.