“ARE MY GLASSES all that anyone notices about me?” Clara asks on the way home.
“I thought the pictures were good. I can’t believe Tony made them up so fast.”
“I’m getting contacts next year when my mom gets promoted and we get benefits. I’m not always going to have these stupid things,” she says.
“Come on, Clara. It’s for the presentation. It’s not like you have to be X-ray Woman for the rest of your life.”
“I bet you wouldn’t mind being Creative Woman for the rest of yours. Bet Tony draws himself as Creative Man.” She makes smooching noises at me.
“Stop it,” I say, pushing at her. She steps back a little too fast and turns down Raglan without waving.
“Hey,” I yell after her. “I’m going to ask tonight about staying over at your place tomorrow, okay?” She nods.
I start jogging. I can’t wait to tell Dad and Leon that the group picked my idea.
The leaves crunch like cornflakes under my feet. I love fall. I love the way the air smells like it’s been scrubbed and rinsed with cold water.
When I get home Leon is sitting at the kitchen table staring into his cup of tea with his hand on his chin. I sneak up behind him and put my hands over his ears.
“Hi, Gwen,” he says. I clap my hands back and forth over his ears. He sits up and starts humming to the rhythm of my hands on his ears. “Howww wassss schoool tooodaaayyayay?” I sit down and grab his tea. The cup slides from his hand without a fight.
“Clara says Tony has a crush on me, but I’m not the least bit interested in him. Marcia wants him. You should see — she’s all over him. She can have him. He acts like he’s the automatic leader of everyone because he’s tall. I showed him up today in art class, though. Thanks to you and that card.”
“What card?” says Leon. He seems half here.
“Melon. Melony. You gave me the best idea for the mural. I did superheroes. Here.” I pull the concept picture I did out of my bag and pass it to him. “We don’t need it anymore because we’re using Tony’s pictures. He drew me as Creative Woman, for some reason. It was a pretty good picture. But the idea was still mine. I mean, I borrowed it from you but it was my idea for the mural.” Leon’s eyes go dewy and droopy. He leans over and kisses me on the head.
“Thanks, Gwen. This is great. Can I have it?”
“Yeah.. .are you all right?” He gets up and walks over to the counter. He picks up something and my throat goes dry. He turns around and hands me a postcard.
“This came for you today. I tried not to read it, but I couldn’t help myself.” He’s still got his arm dangling in the air with the postcard at the end of it.
“Did you tell Dad?” I manage to spit out. Leon shakes his head.
I snatch the thing out of his hand and run upstairs to the bathroom. Breathing hard, I lock the door, sit down in the bathtub and close the curtain.
It’s a picture of Beauty and the Beast from EuroDisney. Which one am I supposed to be? I want to turn it over, but I don’t want to turn it over. I can’t believe Leon read it. I slam my fist against the side of the tub. It makes a small, cold thud.
I turn the postcard over.
Dear Gwen,
I looked up at the calendar and realized we are halfway through September already and you must be back in school. This summer’s been so lovely, I thought it would last forever. But, of course, you have school and that’s the most important thing. You’re so smart, I bet grade 7 will be a breeze. Anyway, you don’t need a visit here mucking it up. Maybe Christmas, huh? My roommate will be out of town then so we could have the place to ourselves. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Love Mom
I get up and listen at the bathroom door. I open the door, go to my room and hide under the covers.
I thought I was staying inside the rules of the spell, but I must have broken it. I broke it when I told Clara I had a secret admirer. I broke it by forgetting to do it that night. I broke it by letting Leon move in. I broke it by having friends.
Maybe wanting other things was enough to break the connection. I should have wanted her and nothing else.
I plunge my head under the pillows and wipe my nose on the sheet underneath. She must have felt me breaking the connection. Why would she want a greedy teenager to come live with her and ruin things with her new boyfriend?
How can she think I’m starting grade seven? She doesn’t even know how old I am.
I sit up, grab the postcard and fling it at the door. It hits Leon in the head.
“Get out,” I yell.
“No, I want to talk to you.” He picks up the card. I pull the duvet over my head. He sits and tugs at the duvet.
“That isn’t the first thing you’ve got from her, is it?” I don’t answer. “I know it’s not. You can tell.”
“You shouldn’t have read it. It’s none of your business.” I pull at the duvet cover until it threatens to tear.
“Are you going to tell your dad?” he asks, putting one hand on the edge of the duvet so that I can’t pull at it so hard. I shake my head.
“Don’t you tell him, either. Promise?” He doesn’t answer. “I don’t want him to know. Please, Leon? If he knows, he’ll want to do something and...I don’t want them to stop coming. This is the sixth one, okay? And she’s never called or anything. She’s not going to do anything. They don’t make any difference anyhow. Only to me.”
“Six? She’s sent six letters to you without your dad finding out?”
“Not letters. Postcards. I don’t even have her address,” I hiss. I can see the steam rising in his face. He never liked her. “Please, Leon, promise you won’t tell him.”
“Why not?” He stands up and starts pacing the room. “Why shouldn’t he know? You’re his daughter. We’re the ones who take care of you. We’re the ones who are here every day. We’re the ones who take you camping and buy you clothes and make sure you brush your teeth...and love you. Don’t you think we have a right to know about this?” His voice is getting angrier by the minute.
“They’re mine. She sent them to me!”
“Yeah,” he says. “You’re right. A postcard from Disney World is worth so much more than five years of giving a shit every single day, Gwen.”
Then we both hear the downstairs door open. It must be Dad.
“Promise me,” I say quickly. He stands there huffing with his hands on his hips. “Come on, Leon. She’s never going to do anything anyway.” I hear footsteps on the stairs. I beg Leon with my eyes. The footsteps are coming straight down the hallway toward my room.
Leon scoots over to the bed. Dad pops his head in. He’s smiling. He likes it when me and Melon pretend to get along.
“What’s going on here?” he asks. I give Leon a kick.
“Nothing,” he says in a way that implies that something is definitely going on. “Girl talk. Someone has a crush on Gwen.” I kick him again.
“Who?”
“No one, Dad.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot,” Leon says, giving me a wink. “No one has a crush on Gwen. Right? Especially not Tony.”
“LEON!”
“Oops. Did I let something spill? So sorry. I’m not like you. I can’t keep a secret for long.” Dad beams cluelessly on, like a dog ready to play.
“I was thinking of ordering from that Cambodian place. Who’s in?” he says. I stand up on the bed, bounce off and make for the door.
“Here, I’ll look up the number for you.” I make my way past him and run down the stairs to the kitchen. My hands are still shaking as I flip through the Yellow Pages.
We got through dinner without Leon saying anything. He did watch me like a hawk the whole time, though, as if he had Clara’s x-ray eyes and was shooting beams at me to make me tell. Dad thought he was trying to get me to talk about Tony.
“Leon wants to know what this Tony looks like,” Dad said.
“He looks like none of your business.”
“We know one thing,” Dad said.
“What?”
“He’s got good taste.”
I dropped my fork on my plate and reached for the hot sauce.
“Stop acting touched by an angel, Dad.”
“Yeah, Kevin. Don’t act so touched,” Leon pitched in. I was about to tell him to shut up when he turned his rays on me again. That’s when I knew he wouldn’t tell.
He’s saving it. I’m on the hook.
Now I’m sitting on my bed, turning over the postcards and wondering about my mother. She’s a ghost in my life. It wasn’t just the dream in the ghost room that made her a ghost. It’s this way she has of haunting me with the postcards and through the portraits of us all over the house. The ones I told Anisha Dad painted. I couldn’t tell her the truth about them.
I can hardly look at them, because she’s in them. She’s gone but her eyes are everywhere. Dad thinks he’s doing me a favor keeping them up. She took all the photographs. I used to think that was because she wanted to remember me. Then, after a while I began to think she took them because she wanted me to forget her. I hardly remember the real her anymore.
I remember a long, soft face with a sharp nose, frizzy blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, fine fingers on white hands, pointy knees and the smell of those menthol cigarettes she was always trying to give up.
I remember holding onto her purse while we walked along Princess Street. Icicles made small frozen mountains on the sidewalk with holes in the top big enough for my pinky finger. No time to stop. She walked so quickly, whole neighborhoods whizzed by as I skipped to try to keep up with her. I used to put on her tall boots and see how fast I could run up and down the stairs. Down to the hall and then back up to her room.
The ghost room. I remember the dried petals from old roses on the bureau beside the clock that had to be wound. “Where’s the key for the clock?” she said. I had lost it behind the radiator. She was angry that time. Her crying in the kitchen. “Don’t look at me,” she said. The locked bathroom door with the phone cord leading into it.
Every year I lose a little more and have to make stuff up. I’m not sure anymore what’s real about these memories and what’s not.
That’s why I can’t tell Dad. If I told him about the postcards he would want to do something. He’d want to find her and if he did — if he found her and made the ghost of her come real — she might run again. And then all I’d have are the portraits Leon did of us.
The portraits. That’s how Dad met Leon. It’s funny that it was Mom’s idea to hire him.
I mean, she couldn’t have known what was going to happen when she picked Leon to do the paintings.
I pull at the corners of the postcards until fibers of paper fray onto my fingers. My mother. My mother my. Mother. Moth hair. “North, East, South, West. Who is the one who you love the best. Not me. Not me.”
I lie back with the postcards on my chest right under my nose. I breathe in the smell of them, flat and empty. Moth hair.
I close my eyes and try to picture hers, but dream of Clara’s instead. I dream Clara sees right through a ghost me with her x-ray eyes. Then, using her superpowers, she turns me from transparent to real. In the dream, it takes five years for her powers to work and I wait, with my yellow hands over my closed eyes.