I WAS ON MY WAY TO SCHOOL. PIGEONS SHIFTED back and forth from one foot to the other, like old ladies with bags of heavy groceries in either hand. I was dressed up for class. I had a vinyl jacket with a horse on it and a pink dress shirt with a butterfly collar. I had a grey skirt and Wallabees. I thought I looked like the most no-nonsense girl on the planet.
I walked by a store that sold religious statues mostly to put in your front lawn. They were all crowded in the window. Some were on boxes and chairs in the back row. They were like people watching a parade. I felt peaceful looking at them. It was like they had all gathered to look at me and that the world just had to be full of grace.
I turned when I heard a car honk its horn. Nicolas leaned way out the window in order to talk to me as he was driving. He had on a polyester shirt with a print of buildings on it with the suit jacket he’d bought at the Salvation Army. His jacket was completely covered in cat hair.
“Hey, can you come check out this house with me?”
“No, you can see perfectly well that I’m busy.”
“I want to see something. What, are you a snob now? You think that you’re too good to spend the afternoon with me? I’m sorry, does Miss Boulevard Saint-Laurent have some sort of contractual obligation to fulfill? Will they take your plastic tiara away? Your free coupon for a meal at le Palais de Bombay? Have you used up your discount coupons for the amusement park? You know they sell those tiaras five for a dollar at the pharmacy.”
Nicolas suddenly drove the car up onto the sidewalk, trying to run me over. I jumped backwards, sticking my hands out in front of me as if to stop the car. I was startled.
“Get in the car, Nouschka,” he said.
I took off running down the street. He jumped out of the car, which was half on the sidewalk, and ran after me. I was screaming at people who I passed on the street for them to call the police. Naturally nobody did anything. They knew to keep out of it. He grabbed me from behind.
I screamed and he held me against the wall. He was wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms with sharks on them. He was dragging me back to the car. One of my shoes came off. I was going to miss my class now.
My purse flipped upside down and my cue cards for my oral report spilled out and fell all over the ground. He wouldn’t let me pick them up. I picked one out of a puddle with the tips of my fingers. When I bent down, he grabbed me from behind. This really enraged me.
“Why don’t you help me?” I asked people passing by.
A man slowed down as he was passing us. He had a concerned look on his face, and he seemed to be thinking about stepping in.
“Don’t try and interfere with me, sir, or you and she and everyone will end up dead. She’s my sister. You don’t want to get involved in this. It’s been going on since we were born.”
The man walked away, looking over his shoulder every few seconds. He was out of our hair, but then a police officer pulled over in front of our car. Nicolas was playing with fire because he was on probation for demanding that a librarian hand over the money she had collected in fines that day. We both sort of stopped moving as the officer came up to us. He was middle-aged, with greying hair, barrel-chested and intimidating. He didn’t faze Nicolas in the least.
“Officer, she’s mentally ill. You see, we were born as Siamese twins and I got the brain. I have to make all the decisions for both of us, on account of her faculties being so deficient.”
“I’m a writer,” I said in my defence. Even though I hadn’t written a word.
“I don’t care what either of you are,” said the officer. “You’re going to knock it right off.”
The officer grabbed Nicolas by the shoulder, firmly. Nicolas let go of me and swung around to face the officer.
“She won a beauty pageant and it went to her head. She couldn’t handle success. She expected us to bring her breakfast in bed after that.”
“I’m sick of you bringing up that contest. Are you jealous?”
“Jealous! Officer, after she won there was a criminal investigation. It just didn’t make sense.”
“You two look familiar to me,” he said.
“You saw him at the zoo,” I said. “He reminds you of someone from the monkey exhibition.”
“Are you two Étienne Tremblay’s kids?”
We both stopped horsing around.
“I used to love you guys on television,” he said.
He went and picked up my Wallabee and handed it to me. We smiled uneasily. We both walked over to Nicolas’s car and got in it. We pulled away from the curb, Nicolas waving to the police officer to show that we were respectable and upstanding citizens.
As the gears shifted, so too did our spirits. It was amazing how fast our moods changed at that age. Two minutes before, I had wanted to kill Nicolas, and now we were two thieves on the lam who had outsmarted the law once again! But I was still slightly depressed and couldn’t really feel good about being in the car.
We headed over the highway to the west side of town. The car picked up speed. I was worried; it felt like the bottom might fall right out. It was probably better easing down narrow rickety east-end streets, where you had to stop every couple minutes for a passing alley cat.
We turned off the highway and drove into a residential neighbourhood, down a street that was covered in huge trees that came together over the road and blocked out the sun.
There were identical houses on either side of the street. All the lawns were clean and all the cars were new. We parked in front of a red and orange brick house with light blue shutters. He was quiet finally. We just sat and looked at it. I was afraid to ask. I figured he was casing the place for some sort of robbery. In which case, sitting in front of it in broad daylight in the crappiest car in the city didn’t seem like the most brilliant idea. Nicolas’s knees were bouncing up and down and he was fluttering his fingers up and down on the steering wheel.
“What the hell are we doing here?” I asked.
“Forget it,” he said. “I can’t say it because it’s something you ought to know about gradually. The shock of it might turn your hair grey.”
“What? Say it or I’ll kill you.”
“I found our mother.”
“Lily Sainte-Marie!”
“Noëlle Renaud.”
I was suddenly afraid. I did not want our world turned upside down. I did not want to have any actual information about our mother.
“Oh, Nicolas. Leave her alone.”
“I think we should meet her.”
“You just go and stare at her every day?”
“Hey, you’ve got to stalk somebody.”
“No, actually. You don’t. I don’t want to see her. I feel lousy. I don’t even feel like myself. I feel shitty all of a sudden. It’s like I have stomach cancer. I just want to go home. I feel like I’m disappearing. Oh, my stomach. Nicolas! Drive me back home. I don’t feel well at all.”
He put his hand over my mouth while looking straight ahead. It was five-thirty and she was coming home from work. She was dressed in a beige suit and comfortable white pumps. Her hair was dyed light brown and she wore her bangs in her face. She had nothing in common with Étienne.
We got out of the car. She saw us. We could tell from the look on her face that she knew exactly who we were. She looked uncomfortable. She looked nervous. Actually, she looked terrified. We were both quiet. We didn’t even want to speak for fear that she would disappear. We got quiet the way you get quiet when you see an animal emerge from out of the woods. You know that the minute it notices your presence, it’s going to bolt.
“Hello,” she said. “Wow. What are you doing here?”
“We wanted to just say hello,” Nicolas said softly.
“Hello,” she said. “Do you live around here?”
“No.”
“You two look so much like Étienne.”
We just nodded. Lily looked around her. She looked up, as if to see if there was a helicopter up above that was going to lower a ladder down to her. We had probably popped up again and again in her dreams. But now, lo and behold, here we were on her lawn. I guess it was natural that she was befuddled.
“It was a long time ago. I was younger than the two of you are now,” she said, almost as if to herself.
We nodded again. We all just stood there. She wasn’t making any effort with us. She probably had rehearsed a million things to say to us. She must have. She probably had a soliloquy prepared. But she couldn’t think of it right now for the life of her. I knew that Nicolas had said her name was Noëlle, but I couldn’t help but think of her as Lily. That’s what I had called her in my head for my whole life. Not Mother.
“Do you want to come in?” Lily asked.
Her house was very orderly. There were flowers on the curtains and on the tablecloth. Everything was new and had been bought at stores. Nothing had ever been dragged out of the garbage. We sat down around the kitchen table. All the chairs matched. She made some coffee. Nicolas and I felt painfully out of place. We were like kids who were showing up on the first day at a new school. She poured us all cups of coffee and set them down in front of us.
“How did you go about finding me?”
We didn’t say anything. Lily looked at us and straightened up, gathering courage. She decided to launch into her defence.
“You have to understand what life was like for me when I got pregnant. Everybody in my town looked down on me. They treated me like I was so, so ugly. I just sat in my room, crying all the time. I was afraid of my father. The looks he would give me were so awful. I didn’t even like going down to the kitchen because my dad would give me such a look. Sometimes he would slap me hard across my face.”
She paused. We just stared at her, startled. She couldn’t really do anything but continue.
“I couldn’t go to school because all the boys made fun of me. They didn’t believe that it was Étienne Tremblay who got me pregnant. They used to say that the school janitor was the father. Can you imagine that? Children are so cruel.”
She raised her cup to her lips and it was shaking.
“My mother and I took the bus to Montréal to meet your grandparents. I left you two with them. They were very, very nice. My mother took me to go and get an ice cream cone by Avenue Atwater. It was so beautiful and exciting to me. All those people going by and all the windows. We stopped by a toy store and we saw all these dollhouses and train sets that moved around and little plastic trees. Oh, I had never seen anything like that in Val-des-Loups.”
There was something horrific about the idea of her having an ice cream cone after having given us up. I just wanted it to end. I didn’t want to hear her story. It had never occurred to us that she would see herself as the sad one in this story. Sure, sure, sure. She was the loneliest, most pathetic fourteen-year-old on the whole planet. But we had been listening to Étienne’s excuses our whole life. The last thing that we expected somehow was another excuse. Although an excuse, of course, was exactly what we were going to get.
“You had much better outfits than I ever had as a kid. I remember this little black coat you had on once on TV, Nouschka. You had a daisy in the lapel. It was so beautiful. You looked like your father. Lucky for you two. He was a handsome man when he was younger. You were smart like him, too. The things that would come out of your mouths!”
Nicolas and I immediately shot a knowing, wary glance at one another. She had loved us on television. The same way that everybody had loved us, which was the same thing as not loving us at all. We had had enough of that type of affection. What we needed was a love that was able to shine a light on who exactly we were, so that we could be people offstage. Then we would be able to be real. Then we would be able to grow up. Then we wouldn’t be joined at the hip. This woman only knew what everybody knew about us. Of course she loved our persona. It was designed to be loved.
I wanted her to be proud of things that nobody but a mother could be proud of. I had wanted her to be proud of a story that I had written about a swan. I had wanted her to be thrilled when I dove off the high diving board. She should have been there to cheer when I learned my multiplication table. And I had wanted to be commended for giving the flea-ridden cat a bath all by myself. Those were the things that actually built character. They taught you that ordinary life was meaningful and made sense.
You could tell that she was a bit star-struck. We looked down on people that were star-struck. We couldn’t help it. How could we not look down on people when they were looking up at us?
“I never, never would have been able to get to Montréal if it weren’t for the two of you. After I went back to Val-des-Loups, all I could think about was getting back to the city. I was only seventeen when I came here to live. I looked after children for a while. But you know, that always made me sad. Now I work as a secretary. We sell accessories for used car lots. The little flags that go around them and those big blow-up snowmen flopping around in the parking lot.”
She turned abruptly and reached into her bag that was on her chair and pulled out a binder, as if it would somehow save her from the topic of this conversation. It was filled with before and after photographs of parking lots where there could have been pictures of us as children. She closed it, knowing that she had to get on with her story.
“This is how I met my husband, actually. He owns one of these car lots. He’s very successful. He does very well for himself. He’s very conventional. He’s very good.” She paused. “I never told my husband about you. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it. But I can’t tell him now. He thinks that he was the first person that I had ever been with. That was very important to him. I really never thought that any man would ever love me. But he does. You can’t tell someone a secret after you have kept it a secret for this long. He would think that I was a liar. He thinks that I’m a good person. It would change everything. He’s a really good man. I’ve been happy with him. It was hard after Étienne Tremblay.”
I noticed that she said our father’s first and last name when talking about him. Even though she had had two children with him, they were not on familiar terms.
In an odd way, although we had dropped in on her, she was more prepared then we were. She had never come looking for us, but she knew that we would come anyways. She had been waiting.
I looked around. There were photos of children all over the fridge. Lily blushed when she saw me noticing them. This had never even occurred to me as a possibility. She had other children. Of course, her husband and children were real people with feelings. Not like us. She reached out for a second but then brought her hand back. Her hand was shaking. You could tell that she was restraining herself and that her instinct was to reach out and touch people who were suffering.
She was holding back because she wanted to protect her husband and kids. That wasn’t fair, was it? She was choosing sides. At least we knew with absolute certainty that Étienne was incapable of loving anybody. He treated everybody else with as little regard as he treated us.
I looked at Nicolas. He usually slouched and crossed and uncrossed his legs when he was in a chair, but now he was sitting perfectly straight. He had beads of sweat on his brow, and his eyes looked almost black because his pupils were dilated. I don’t think that I had ever seen him look that ill at ease.
Lily had been a nanny. She had given cookies to kids who weren’t even hers. She ran around playgrounds putting Band-Aids on all the knees of all the children in the world. She was essentially sweet to every kid except us. This was going too far. I felt like picking up the kitchen table and throwing it across the room. Just so that she would know that I was a real person. Just to make it clear to her that Nicolas and I experienced unhappiness too.
Everyone thought that we had it better. Even when we were being dragged up to the guillotine, they would be envying our velvet jackets that we had picked up at the Salvation Army. They wouldn’t think very much about the part about us getting our heads cut off. Imagine if she saw our living room? What would she think of it?
Lily, or whatever her name was, was starting to cry. But people cry for all sorts of reasons. They cry when they are startled. They cry when they are afraid. They cry to get out of things. People cried crummy alligator tears over their drinks. We were very, very suspicious of tears, having grown up on Boulevard Saint-Laurent.
She would never be our mother. We wanted to go back in time and tell her about nightmares, and about socks that were itchy, and about how spelling tests were unjust, and about how canned soup was creepy, and about how we felt scared first thing in the morning. We would never get that.
“Can you remember anything about us?” Nicolas asked.
His voice was very low and choked up and didn’t sound like his at all. He was asking for a story about us before we could remember. We wanted something more than Loulou’s absurd mythology. Most of his stories of us involved times when we were constipated and he had to give us castor oil. I don’t know what Nicolas was thinking, though, as she had spent next to no time at all with us.
“Do you want to know which one of you was born first?” she asked.
“No!” we both said at the same time.
We didn’t want that. We didn’t want there to be any sort of difference between us. We didn’t want one to be older or to have any advantage over the other. It was absolutely necessary that we be in exactly the same boat.
I realized that it was time to go. There was no need to drag out this painful meeting any longer. As soon as Nicolas saw me starting to stand up, he followed. He practically knocked the chair over, he was so eager to leave with me.
Noëlle walked us to the door. We stepped outside it and stood there, looking at her. We weren’t sure what we were supposed to do. It was customary to kiss twice upon parting in Montréal. Sometimes when I left a bar, I would go around kissing people I hadn’t even spoken to or been introduced to during the night. What was a kiss other than a promise that the two of you would meet again and again?
She stayed inside the house. We waited, but she did not make a gesture; she didn’t move at all. Her not kissing us meant that she definitely did not want us to come back. We nodded and turned and went on our way.
We sat in the car outside her house. A family got out of their car across the street. They unloaded their grocery bags and carried them into the house. The whole family was pitching in.
“How do people live like that?” Nicolas said. He lit a cigarette.
It took me a few minutes to be able to say something. I knew that I was going to get crazy. I wanted to enjoy the blank numbness as long as I could. But then it came bursting out.
“You brought me out here without any warning just to set me off. You wanted to get me hysterical. You wanted me to get as hysterical as you do.”
“Well, you never get worked up about it because you know that I’m going to be doing all the working up for the two of us. I mean, that isn’t exactly fair either, is it?”
“You’re being selfish. You just force me to go along with your stupid, stupid plans. What was the point of coming out here?”
“We had to get it over with, I guess. But I don’t know, Nouschka. It was like I thought that maybe, possibly, something magical would happen. Sometimes I’ve thought about how I would tell her about all the lousy things that happened to us and about how lonely and unhappy she made me. And then she would just crumple up and die. Instead she just sort of made me feel shitty. Did she make you feel shitty?”
I didn’t say anything. We were quiet on the ride back. This was almost impossible for the two of us to do. Talking to each other was like breathing. By talking we were able to keep track of every one of the other’s thoughts. For once I didn’t know what to say. I felt ashamed. The silence was terrible. We looked ahead.
“How did you know how to find her?” I asked.
“Adam gave me this address.”
“Adam? Are you serious? How would Adam know?”
Nicolas pulled the car over. He turned toward me, preparing me.
“It’s funny but I’d been thinking for a long time about hiring a detective to find her. But I didn’t know whether detectives actually existed or whether they were just fictional, like in TV shows. But then a year or so ago I was talking to Laurence and he said that his cousin was a private detective.”
“How much did he charge you?”
“I don’t know. I never got around to paying him. He smelled like an old ashtray. He’s friends with a lawyer who was able to pull our adoption papers. Or something. He gave me this old address where Noëlle used to work. I went and knocked on the door. Adam answered. That’s how I met Adam. She’d looked after him. Anyways, Adam didn’t know. I just told him later that I had been knocking on his door with the intention of robbing his house, which of course impressed him. You know how Adam is.”
“She’s the nanny he was telling us about? They watched us on TV together!”
I suddenly hated the two of them. Neither had loved me. They had sat next to each other on the sofa, cherishing my little black beret.
“She raised Adam! Adam of all people! I find that infuriating. I find that so impossibly weird. I can’t even imagine it. I feel lousy about myself even picturing it. I can’t believe that she put muffins and juice boxes into paper bags and wrote his name on them and gave them to him to take to school for lunch. And she took him to the zoo. And she put bandages on his knees. And she read him storybooks and kissed him before he went to sleep. Disgusting,” I said. “I’m finished with Adam.”
“Why take it out on Adam?”
“I’m breaking up with him as soon as we get home.”
“I had nothing to do with it. Look, I gave up a very long time ago trying to get you to not fuck my friends. What was I supposed to say—don’t fuck him?”
“No, you were supposed to tell me who he was.”
“You got weird whenever I would bring up our mother. You would say, ‘Laisse faire, laisse faire, laisse faire. Don’t bother me with that.’ You never would have let me do this. I couldn’t tell you. Because you wouldn’t let me do it. I had to.”
“You’re a pimp.”
“Are you crazy? Did you hear what you just called me?”
“You’re a low-life. A degenerate.”
“Ah, stop taking this all out on me.”
“It’s because I want you to realize why what you did is so creepy.”
“I know. I know. But I couldn’t get enough of him. When he told us stories about our mother, it made my heart beat so crazily and it made the blood rush through my heart. And it made me feel like shit. Like I was being poisoned. It’s not my fault he fell in love with you.”
I stopped yelling at him. I realized he couldn’t help it. Our mother had been driving him mad our whole lives. He had had to find some way to get close to her. He could never let anything go once he got it into his head.
Now I understood the feeling that there was something that wasn’t quite right about me and Adam. I was revolted that my sex life was somehow involved in one of Nicolas’s schemes. There had never been any boundaries between Nicolas and me. Now he had created one by virtue of stepping over it.