“I think I need to go and stay with Spirit for a while,” Maris told Ray about a week after she’d arrived in Vancouver. “It’s not that I don’t like staying here, I do, but I feel trapped. No, that’s not the right word. I feel like I could get stuck because it’s too easy. Being here. Hanging out with you. Am I saying this really badly?”
“Yes,” said Ray, “but I get it. You think that your basic lazy, uninspired, torpid” — torpid? thought Maris — “nature will take over and consume you like a giant octopus and you’ll be enmeshed in the tentacles of indolence forever. Am I close?”
“Whoa,” said Maris. “You’re, like, so right on, brother. I’m just blown away by, like, your total clarity. It’s awesome, man.”
“Shut up. So when are you leaving?”
“In a couple of days, I guess. I’ve been to every movie, every gallery, and every department store in Vancouver, so I’ve pretty much covered the local culture. But tomorrow’s Thursday and CSI is on. It’s the second part of a two-parter, so I have to see how it ends.”
“Clearly, you have your priorities straight.”
“Yes. Speaking of which, I’ve been here a week and haven’t even phoned Spirit. Do you think she’ll be offended?”
“Offended?” said Ray, raising his eyebrows as high as he could. “No, Terra will be offended that you didn’t call. Mom will be deeply hurt, as only a mother can be, that her firstborn hasn’t had the sensitivity, let alone the courtesy, to phone the person who gave her life.”
“Since when did Spirit care about courtesy?”
“Okay, maybe I went a bit too far. But she might just wish you had thought to call as soon as your feet touched Canadian soil.” He handed her the phone. “Speed dial three,” he said.
“What?” she said. “Your mother is number three? Not number one?”
“Shut up and phone her. My private life is none of your business.”
Maris hit speed dial and punched in the number three. Her mother answered after four rings.
“Hi, Spirit,” said Maris. “It’s me.”
“Maris? Where are you? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, yes, everything’s fine. I’m in Vancouver, staying with Ray. I’ve been here a couple of days getting over the jet lag.” She shot a look at Ray that said, Don’t you ever tell her I’ve been here for a week …
He put up his hands and called out, “Hi, Mom. I’m taking good care of her.”
“When are you coming to see me, Maris?” Spirit asked.
“I thought I’d come up in a couple of days, if that’s all right. Maybe Friday morning?”
“That’s good,” said Spirit. “Have you phoned your sister?”
“Um, no, not yet,” said Maris. “I’ll call her today. Promise.”
“Good. See you Friday.”
“Okay. Bye.” Maris hung up the phone and handed it to Ray. “Whew,” she said. “That went well.”
“A couple of days,” said Ray. “You know there’s a special place in hell for people who lie to their mother.”
“Get a life,” said Maris. “As if you never did.”
“Only once,” he said, “and that was a long time ago.”
“Oh, really,” she said. “And that was when you told her what?”
Ray hesitated. He looked down at the ground. “I told her — you promise you won’t bring this up again?” Maris nodded. “I told her Dad asked me to live with him and Shirley and I said no.”
He looked up at Maris and waited.
“You did not,” she said.
“Did so.”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want her to think he hated us.”
“But he didn’t hate us.”
“Spirit thought he did. Well, maybe not hate. But that he didn’t want to be bothered with us anymore. He wanted a new life with Shirley and he wanted us to sort of disappear.”
“I think that was Shirley,” said Maris. “She never wanted us. But I think Dad was okay with it, at first, at least.” Did Ray know that Arthur had tried to get Spirit to let Maris come and live with him and Shirley and go to school? It hadn’t happened, of course. Spirit had vetoed it, and so Arthur had started the allowance thing, putting money into bank accounts for the kids’ education. Ray had been so young at the time. Maybe he didn’t know any of it. If that’s true then it’s kind of sad, Maris thought, that he’d felt compelled to make up a story like that to tell his mother. Ray was the only boy. Maybe he’d taken his father’s behaviour as rejection.
“Did you really believe that?” she asked him.
“Of course not,” he said. “I told you it was a lie.”
“So you thought you had to defend Dad. You know how complicated that is, psychologically?”
“You mean, like, youngest child, a boy, at that, is abandoned by same-sex parent at a critical age, therefore sending young male child into a perpetual spiral of negative sense of self, damaging said child’s ability to mature and sustain relationships, and resulting in unrealistic expectations and ending in misery, despair, and drug addiction?”
“You forgot the part about homosexuality.”
“Oh, yeah. And indulging in homosexual fantasies with unattainable, impossibly beautiful, and hot young men.”
“That sounds about right. Are you over yourself yet?”
“Oh, I am so over myself that I don’t even look in the mirror anymore.”
“Well, I can see why,” said Maris.
“Listen. I can’t believe we’re as well adjusted as we are,” he told her.
“We?” she said.
“Well, me and Terra.” They both laughed. He handed her the phone again.
Maris looked at him expectantly. “She’s not on speed dial?”
Ray scrunched up his face in a pained expression. “I ran out of numbers,” he said. “But I’ve got it written down somewhere.” He went over to his desk and started lifting up stacks of paper and books.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got it in my book.” She pulled out a red notebook covered in embroidered Chinese silk and started leafing through it. When she found the number, she dialled and waited. “Please be the machine,” she said under her breath.
But Ray heard her and shook his head. “Ah, the ties that bind,” he said.
She was about to hang up when Terra picked up the phone.
“Hi, Terra. It’s me, Maris.”
Ray listened as she exchanged pleasantries with their sister for a few minutes then hung up.
“Well?” he said.
“She wanted me to come for a visit but I told her I was going to see Spirit, so she suggested that she organize a family weekend at Spirit’s place. She’s going to call you about it.”
“Sounds like fun,” said Ray. “I can’t wait.”