Beth
“I’m not leaving you home on your own,” Mom says. “You can stay with Jane or Samantha or come with me.”
“What about Kaya?”
“Kaya is gone.”
“But what if she comes home?”
Mom’s face is red and blotchy. She hacks at a carrot as if she were executing it. Veins stand out on the backs of her hands. “It’s been weeks, Beth. Weeks. I’ve been out looking. I’ve talked to the police. I don’t believe she’s coming home just now.”
Mom doesn’t know that. She can’t. But she isn’t cancelling her trip. She’s leaving the house locked and empty. Sybilla is with a friend till Sunday, Coco will have to fend for herself.
“I should stay home in case she comes,” I say, again. We have been having this same conversation over and over again for more than a week.
“No.”
I don’t say one word to her on the whole four-hour drive to Kamloops. She puts an audio book on, a mystery set in the Victorian period, but I can’t even stand to share sound waves with my mother. I plug myself into my own music, and sneak my way through an enormous bag of wine gums that I have hidden in my coat pocket.
Kaya is just a kid and she is lost. Mom is her mother and she is driving away. And I … I am a greedy pig. I finger the roll of fat around my middle, and think about how, when I look in the mirror, what pass for my breasts kind of sit on top of all that fat. Gross. I went on a diet once, before Dad died. I lost twelve pounds. He actually commented on how good I looked. But jelly beans and ice cream have appealed to me a lot more than counting calories since then.
The conference is at a lodge, a sprawling wooden structure, all logs and homespun tackiness. I pick the bed nearest the window, and plunk down my bag and myself.
“I’ll just hang out here,” I say, and Mom frowns and goes off to register for the conference on her own.
Why is she so upset? I’m here, aren’t I? And it’s not like I’m going to be going along with my mother to a bunch of sessions on childhood trauma and sexual abuse. If she’s angling for a career change, I don’t know why she doesn’t choose something a tad more cheerful.
The moment the door closes, though, I wish I were out there with her. I imagine the phone at home ringing and ringing with only Coco to hear it. Kaya trapped, bruised and bleeding, begging us to come to her. I curl up in a ball on the bed. Where is Kaya right this minute? Is somebody hurting her?
I sit up, teeth gritted. How could Kaya go there anyway? And then go back? And not call? It’s not like Mom was beating her or anything. What’s her problem? And how can Mom drive away into the mountains and leave her daughter to her fate?
Later I follow Mom into the dining hall a little worried about how I’m going to get out again. There’s a speaker after dinner, but I’m sure not going to sit around and listen to somebody drone on and on about all the miseries of childhood. I’ve got enough of my own to deal with, thank you very much!
I’m happy to see that it’s a buffet, at least, and the food is good, though the man who slices the roast beef isn’t generous. The dessert table is huge, three massive cakes at its centre, one chocolate, one layered with whipped cream and fruit, and one a plain cheesecake with three choices of sauce.
I’m still in the middle of a slab of the chocolate cake when a hush falls over the room. A woman has appeared at the lectern. Behind her another woman, elegantly dressed, waits to be introduced.
Mom turns her chair around so she can see. Waiters float through the room pouring coffee and removing plates.
“Welcome to Kamloops,” the woman at the lectern says.
I put down my fork. “I’ll see you later,” I whisper in Mom’s ear, and get only a fraction of a nod in reply. Mom’s eyes stay trained on the front.
Sneaking out is awkward. Actually, it hardly qualifies as sneaking, since our table is in the middle of the room. I swear every pair of eyes in the place passes over me as I creep by. I feel the outraged glare in some of them.
Outrage or no, in less than a minute I’m easing the heavy door closed behind me. Free! I gaze the length of the hall. Now what? The pool? No chance. The games room? There’s a fitness room too. Ha! There are books in my suitcase. And homework. And TV, of course. In the room, not the suitcase.
Kaya would go swimming. And maybe to the games room.
I wander in the general direction of our room, but the idea of being shut up in there by myself hurts. It actually hurts. In my head and my gut. In the end, I have no choice. Alone it is. Back in the room, I turn on the TV loud and find an old comedy from before I was born.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, the covers are over me, and the light and the TV have been turned off. I didn’t even hear Mom come in. I roll over and toss and turn for the rest of the night, still in my clothes, listening to Mom snore.
The next day passes as slowly as that first night, except that now I’m tired and extra grumpy. No matter what I do, I can’t stop thinking about Kaya, imagining her arriving at the house and finding it locked, realizing that her mother and her sister have abandoned her.
She’ll get in somehow, I realize at one point. And I smile. She will. We’ll get home to find a window at the back of the house broken and Kaya lounging in front of the TV. I feel a bit better after that.
Better, but still bored.
I actually squeeze myself into my swimsuit and swim six lengths of the tiny pool, ready to leap out of the water and escape at the first sign of another human. After, I skip the shower and blow my chlorine-soaked hair into a frizzy cloud with the minuscule blow-dryer back in the room.
I go to the games room and try an old-fashioned pinball machine where every ball has a death wish. And finally I do what I really wanted to do all along. I buy a bottle of Coke and a bag of red Twizzlers and read and eat and drink for half an hour in bed. And it still isn’t even time for lunch.
In the afternoon, I concentrate on sleeping and hating my mother. Every time Kaya tries to get into my head, I toss her out.
At last the time comes for another dinner. Between naps I’ve been conjuring that dessert table in my mind. Maybe I’ll try the cheesecake tonight. With strawberry sauce. Maybe I’ll walk right out of there with my dessert in hand, so’s not to abandon half of it when the speaker starts. Either that or I’ll eat even faster than usual.
I’m working my way through my lasagna at a satisfactory pace when a young man on the other side of Mom speaks. I take another bite, and jump when Mom elbows me in the side.
“Ron is speaking to you,” she says sharply.
I swallow, raise my eyes and set my brain on playback. “So, a magician!” he has just said. “I think they had you in mind, young lady, when they booked tonight’s entertainment!”
I try to smile as I dig my fork into the next bite. A magician? Magicians are for little kids’ birthday parties. How old does he think I am?
Mom rescues me. “I’m exhausted,” she’s saying, “and tomorrow will be a long day with the drive home. I think I’m going to take a bath and read my book in bed.”
Lasagna gone, I head for the dessert table, which is awash in puddings tonight. Even better than cakes! I heap my plate with trifle, bread pudding and a small scoop of chocolate mousse. Back at the table, Mom eyes my choices.
“Are you sure you want all that, honey?”
I look up and catch that man, Ron, looking at me. Is that pity on his face? Humiliation licks at my lower back. I take a bite and let my teeth sink through the sweet, creamy bread. Perfect. I angle myself away from my judgmental mother and the sympathetic man and take another bite. Trifle this time.
Mom has taken a pretty healthy serving of dessert herself. She cleans her plate, gulps down a coffee, says good night to everyone at the table and pushes herself to her feet. “Are you all set, Beth?” she says.
I look up at her.
“You should stay,” the man says, “and watch the magician. He’s supposed to be very good.”
“Okay,” I say, surprising myself and Mom both.
It’s pretty embarrassing at first. The guy is in his fifties, probably, dressed in a tux with a red rose in the buttonhole, skinny, with longish grey hair and a longer-than-longish moustache. He plays to the crowd and the crowd is mostly women almost as old as he is. He picks out a jovial older man to be his assistant and the butt of his jokes, which are pretty rude, some of them. My table is near the front, and at first I’m afraid that he’ll set eyes on me and try to draw me in somehow.
Then I get interested. He does stuff that doesn’t seem all that original, stuff with ropes, for instance—he even pulls a toy rabbit out of a hat—but I watch closely, looking for the tricks, sure that from so close I will be able to see them. And I can’t. Not once. I start to worry that the act is going to end.
He asks the man for a twenty-dollar bill, which the man hands over reluctantly. Hamming it up. The magician has chosen his assistant well. He tears a corner off the bill and asks the man to look at the two pieces and confirm that both have the same serial number. The magician leaves the larger portion of the bill with the man and tucks the tiny bit away. The trick continues, growing more and more complicated, until the magician pulls a lemon out of his pocket. The man examines the lemon and confirms it’s whole. “This lemon has not been tampered with,” he says, holding the lemon high in the air. Giggles ripple through the audience.
The magician takes a sharp knife and cuts into the lemon all the way round. He cuts a little deeper. Then he asks the man to hold one end while he holds the other. Together, they wiggle the lemon apart. The audience—and the man—gasp. Nestled in the heart of the lemon is a tightly rolled bit of paper, which turns out to be a quarter of a twenty-dollar bill with the same serial number as the one that the man handed over earlier.
The lemon trick is the magician’s grand finale, and after that people begin to go back to their rooms, but some stay and chat a bit, several gathered around the magician, asking him questions and thanking him. I edge closer, listening. He isn’t going to share his secrets, of course. I know better than that. But a question is nagging at me. I listen, hoping someone else will ask. Hoping I’ll find out what I need to know without speaking to the magician myself.
But nobody does.
A voice in my ear makes me jump. “Glad you stayed?” the man asks, the same one who told me I should.
I positively beam at him as I nod.
“Interested in magic?” he asks.
Further nodding seems excessive. “Yes,” I say instead.
He leaves then, and soon the two stragglers leave as well and the magician begins gathering up his things. My chance is slipping away.
I breathe in courage, breathe out words: “How did you get involved in magic?”
He jumps, just like I did moments earlier, jumps and turns. “Oh, I didn’t see you there!” he says. “You startled me.” He shows no sign that he has heard my question.
I almost turn tail, as they say. But with his eyes on my face, I find myself drawing breath once again, and asking the question a second time.
His eyes turn away from me then, and I can see him plunging into his memories. “My uncle taught me a couple of tricks when I was a kid and I never looked back,” he says.
I stare at him. My eyes fix on his as my own memory overwhelms me: Mr. Duncan, Grade Four. I manage a smile. “Thank you, Mr. Jackson. I loved your show!”
And off I go to sneak into bed without waking Mom. I have a lot of thinking to do.