Maxine visited me in the night. She wanted me to read her Where the Wild Things Are. “The night Max wore her wolf suit,” I began, changing the pronoun. She leaned against me, her thumb in her mouth, hair brushing my cheek. This is what happiness feels like, I thought. I breathed her in. She smelled like salt and peaches.
And pancakes. Why pancakes?
I opened my eyes. Ferdinand was on my pillow, inches from my face, purring. I could hear clattering from the kitchen. Suddenly the pancake smell made sense.
Maxine had been gone for two years and three months. In another year she’d be dead longer than she’d been alive. But in my dreams she was still so real. Waking from them was always a crushing letdown. Like someone had put lead weights on my chest.
Dad poked his head into my room. He was in his ratty terry-cloth bathrobe, a gift from my mom on their first-year anniversary. “Calling all tall people, breakfast is served!” Dad likes to joke that he and I are “vertically gifted.” He is six foot four. My mom is a mere five foot five. I land right between the two of them.
I forced myself to smile. “There in a minute.”
Saturday mornings, my dad is at his best. We don’t see much of him during the week because he works a lot, way more than he did when Maxine was alive. But Saturday mornings, he steps up his game. So I forced my sadness inward and climbed out of bed, determined to step up my game, too.
I padded into the kitchen in my penguin onesie. Mom was already at the table, wearing her plaid pajama bottoms and her WHAT WOULD ALICE MUNRO DO? T-shirt. She was drinking a mug of coffee and reading the news on her iPad. Stanley was on her lap. “Hey, Tula,” she said. I bent down and gave her a hug.
Dad joined us at the table, a plate of pancakes in one hand, a bowl of diced fruit in the other.
“Great pancakes,” I said, digging in.
“Thanks. I put blueberries in them.”
“Maxine loved blueberries,” Mom said. “Remember she called them boo-bears?” Dad’s neck stiffened, so I jumped in.
“How were things at work this week?”
“Good,” he said. “Busy.”
“Good.”
“And you? School?”
“Good.”
Silence. Dad stood up. “My feet are cold. Be right back.”
After he’d left the room, Mom said, “I almost forgot. You’ll never guess who I ran into outside the SkyTrain station yesterday.”
“Who?”
“Rachel’s mom.”
My stomach lurched.
“She said she wished you girls would try to work things out—”
Dad reappeared in the doorway. When he spoke, his voice was eerily calm. “There is a turd in my slipper.”
I wish I could say this was a rare occurrence. But Anne of Green Gables is a chronic stealth pooper. If she’s unhappy—and a lot of things seem to make her unhappy—she will leave a turd under a cushion, or a blanket, or the couch.
“Just tip it into the toilet and flush it,” said Mom.
I knew this was the wrong answer. Dad’s jaw clenched. “Here you go again. Showing a complete lack of regard for the humans living here—”
“I’ll clean it up!” I leapt up from the table. I got rid of the poop and tossed Dad’s slippers into the laundry. Then I cleared up and washed all the dishes even though Dad said he could do it, and I vacuumed up all the clumps of cat fur in the living room. I sprayed all surfaces with antibacterial spray and changed the litter boxes. It was part of my strategy: think ahead to things my parents might argue about, and try to fix them before they did.
There were days when trying to act like a normal family was exhausting.
When we were around ten years old, Rachel and I went through a Laura Ingalls Wilder phase. We devoured all the books in the Little House on the Prairie set. We wished we could be a part of that family. For a while our crafting got seriously farmstead; we stitched a lot of wall samplers and made loads of beeswax candles. And we constantly bugged our parents to take us to Fort Langley so we could see how the pioneers lived.
We even made bonnets. And wore them.
But while I loved Ma and Pa Ingalls, I knew my own parents were pretty cool too. They’d both gotten master’s degrees from University of British Columbia, where they met. Mom’s was in children’s literature, Dad’s in musicology. After they graduated, people weren’t exactly beating down the door to hire them. So they took what little savings they had and opened a used bookstore/recordshop in Kitsilano.
That was the year before I was born, around the time people were starting to order their books online or download them to e-readers, and years after anyone bought records or even owned record players. But Mom searched for first editions, and Dad bought stock at yard sales and flea markets for dirt cheap since so many people were trying to get rid of the stuff he was trying to sell.
For a while, they did okay. They created a niche market for collectors. They saved enough to put a down payment on the Comox Street apartment. My childhood was full of books and music and crafting and laughter, and if you ask me, that is a childhood worth having. “We aren’t rich in money, but we’re rich in love,” Mom liked to say.
By the time Mom discovered she was pregnant with Maxine, things had taken a turn. They still had their die-hard customers, but it was harder to compete with online shopping. Then their landlord announced that he’d sold the whole block to a developer. Two years later the mom-and-pop shops were all gone, replaced with condos and chain stores. Dad took a job at an insurance firm. Mom started working at the bookstore in Burnaby. They filled our apartment and storage locker with leftover stock.
But Mom still read to me every night, Dad still played his music all the time, and we danced like goofballs, first the three of us, then the four of us.
Then Maxine died, and Dad stopped playing his records. We sold the apartment on Comox because none of us could stand being there. Scene of the crime and all that.
We moved into the Arcadia. Just the three of us and our invisible zeppelin full of grief.
Maxine’s death had shown me that dangers lurk around every corner. So even if my grief and guilt made it hard for me to get out of bed, I knew I needed to do what I could to keep my parents together and safe. And I had to keep myself safe, too, even if I sometimes wished I was dead.
Because I’m it.
I’m the only child my parents have left.
Shortly after breakfast Dad got dressed in his jeans and beloved Nina Simone T-shirt and left for the office. “A lot of extra paperwork.” As always.
I headed out a while later, shopping list in hand. “You’re taking on all the household chores as a way of doing penance,” Carol Polachuk had said in one of our last sessions, looking pleased with herself. Like I could possibly think that running errands and scrubbing toilets could make up for killing my sister.
It was a rare sunny January day, so I didn’t go directly to the supermarket. Instead I took a long walk through the West End. I did a mental count of the transgressions I saw:
4 jaywalkers.
9 cyclists without helmets.
15 people listening to music on headphones, oblivious to their surroundings.
6 people texting while walking, 1 of whom almost got hit by a bus.
8 drivers talking on cell phones, in spite of the fact that it is AGAINST THE LAW.
2 of said drivers barreling right through a crosswalk while a pedestrian was waiting to cross.
Either they were stupid, or they were optimists. Most likely both. “I will outlive you all,” I muttered under my breath.
I walked all the way to Burrard and Georgia, looping around the Vancouver Art Gallery, and heading back along Alberni. Michael’s Arts and Crafts was up ahead. I crossed to the other side of the street to avoid it.
That store had been my and Rachel’s mecca. We would spend entire Saturday mornings roaming the aisles, finding materials to make Ugly dolls, friendship bracelets, earrings, felt slippers, and Scrabble tile coasters. Then we’d go back to my place or hers and spend all weekend together, crafting, reading, and gossiping.
Now weekends dragged on forever.
I’d tried to compose an email to her recently. Dear Rachel: I’m so sorry for everything. I miss you like stink. Please, can we talk? But I couldn’t bring myself to hit Send. I deleted it.
I walked to Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. It had been one of Maxine’s favorite spots. She loved feeding the ducks and sticking her ladybug boots into the shallow water.
A lot of people were out enjoying the sunshine, but I still slipped my keys between my knuckles before I joined the dirt path around the lagoon. I found an empty bench and sat down. I let myself cry. Sometimes the pain was physical, like someone had driven over me with a steamroller and left me flattened like in a cartoon.
After an hour or so I got up and continued along the path. A man was sitting on a bench up ahead. It looked like my dad.
It was my dad. He was gazing into the middle distance. I was pretty sure he’d chosen this spot for the same reason I had.
“Dad. Hi.”
His eyes took a moment to focus. “Oh. Hi.”
“I thought you were at work.”
“I was. Just thought I’d get in a walk before heading home.”
I moved his briefcase so I could sit beside him. It was surprisingly light, like it was a prop. Like maybe he hadn’t been at the office at all.
Instinctively I slipped my mittened hand into his. He squeezed it tight for a moment.
Then he let go.
He never says it. He doesn’t have to.
I know he blames me.
Dad helped me shop. We got back to the Arcadia about an hour later. He pushed the button for the elevator. I headed for the stairs. “You should walk up with me.”
“I’ve told you before, I’m not enabling your phobias.”
“They are not phobias! Google elevator deaths. You’ll never get in an elevator again.”
“Which is why I won’t Google it.” He took the bags from me as the elevator arrived. I ran up the stairs two at a time, trying to beat him. But he was already opening our apartment door when I emerged from the stairwell, out of breath.
Mom shot into the foyer when she heard us. “Petula! I was just about to text you.”
“Why?”
She tilted her head toward the living room. “You have company. The boy you’re doing the English assignment with?”
No. Nonononononono.
She added in a whisper, “He’s awfully cute!”