My sister, Sarah de Vries, is one of the missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I have written about her and shared some of her writing in another book, Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss, which was published in 2003 and came out in a new edition in 2008. Not long after that, a woman came to me to tell me that a man in our neighbourhood sexually abused my sister for a number of years when Sarah was a little girl. I believed this woman because what she told me helped me make sense of so many things in Sarah’s life, and because she had reason to know.
It was shocking news, horrible to learn that Sarah had suffered in that way when she was a little girl, and that she never told us, to realize that her suffering began so much earlier than we knew. I found myself haunted by this new information, trying to take it in, to understand this new part of my sister’s experience, and her silence. Rabbit Ears arose from that haunting.
The story is fiction. Kaya is based on Sarah in many ways, but Kaya’s family is not Sarah’s, and Kaya’s experiences are drawn largely from my imagination. I struggled when I faced writing about her time downtown, until I realized that she could meet Sarah there. That’s what caused me to set the story back a little bit in time, to when Sarah was still alive. It was a joy, for me, writing Sarah to life. The scene on the swings in CRAB Park is drawn from a story a woman told me about her and Sarah. I changed its location. The memorial stone in CRAB Park is real, and was put in place in 1997. The corner, Princess and Hastings, is where my sister worked, and it is from that corner that she disappeared on April 14, 1998. The little grey house is also real. And I remember spilled pudding. And a scrawny kitten. And that glorious garden.
The story was always called Rabbit Ears. I liked the title. When I was working on revisions, I spoke to a Women’s Studies class and showed them an interview Sarah gave the CBC back in 1993. In the interview, she talks about being a heroin addict and advises viewers to stay away from the drug. She is eloquent, and I’m proud of her for giving that interview. I show it often.
This time, though, about halfway through, I noticed what looked like the tips of two ears on Sarah’s chest. I stared, hoping, hoping the camera would dip lower. At the end, I queried the class. Had I seen what I thought I had seen? I had. My sister had a Playboy Bunny tattooed on the top of her left breast. I had seen it before. Of course I had. But I had never thought about what the image was. My book is called Rabbit Ears because the older sister loves magic. I had no idea that it also draws its title from my sister’s tattoo. I came out of that Women’s Studies class feeling that Sarah had given me her blessing.
I wanted to tell a story about a girl who went through what my sister went through, but survived, a story about a girl who broke the silence that was holding her prisoner, a story about a group of girls who paid attention, who reached out. I believe in these possibilities for Kaya and for each one of us.