THE OLD SCHOOL BUS screeched to a stop. It always arrived at the same time, just after I’d gone to bed. It parked in front of Senhora Gloria’s bungalow across the street. Senhora Gloria was the neighbourhood gossip who saw and heard everything. She knew the details of all our lives, and what she didn’t know, she made up. She’d gossip with anyone who had big ears and was willing to listen. Senhora Rosa, who owned the neighbourhood variety store, had the biggest ears and an even bigger mouth. My mother would say those who talk of others always have something to hide themselves. If my mother felt frisky she’d add, the devil makes grit. I didn’t really care how awful Senhora Gloria was. It was Agnes, her fifteen-year-old daughter, who made my stomach churn hot and turned the spit in my mouth to dust.
From my bedroom window I could look onto Palmerston Avenue and stare at Senhora Gloria’s bungalow. Every morning I’d wait to catch a glimpse of Agnes brushing her hair on their front porch. She’d pull it like a rope over one shoulder as she bent over the railing. When she finished brushing, she would hold her hand up and wiggle her fingers, as if playing an imaginary piano, allowing strands of hair to sift into the flowerbed. She always looked clean and fresh, like the girls in those Kotex commercials, her brown hair shimmering in the sun, her cheeks peppered in pink. She had delicate features—almond eyes and a tiny nose—like the statue of Our Lady of Fátima. But unlike the Holy Mother, Agnes’s lips were plump and glossy. Her sides pinched in, her waist carved out, so that her hips swung side to side as she walked. She was perfection.
My mother’s name, which she hated, was Georgina, spelled in Portuguese with a J. Part of me knew she hated her name for the same reasons she didn’t want to mix with other Portuguese women like her, hunched over and picking worms all night. My mother closed our front door behind her. The lock clicked into place, a sound I had first heard the night Emanuel Jaques went missing. I pressed my forehead against the window screen, into the bulge that had formed over the years. I could feel my hair sticking up, electrically charged. It had rained all day. It was a hot rain, the kind that falls when the sun is out. Clinging to the night air was the smell of wet concrete.
I watched my mother walk down our front steps. Her thick hair was tucked underneath a kerchief, and she was dressed in a housedress, with a light sweater buttoned over it. It was too hot to wear a sweater, but it wasn’t proper for my mother to go out of the house with her arms bare. The laced hem of her slip touched my father’s rubber boots. She carried a plastic bag, no doubt stuffed with cornbread, a wedge of Queijo São Jorge, and some fruit, probably bruised or overripe. My mother never threw anything out. The food would have been wrapped tightly with napkins. The moon’s glow that filtered through the chestnut trees above fell onto her kerchief and face.
She turned around to close the gate behind her. Poncho, the neighbours’ golden Lab, had a habit of shitting on our grass, or worse, lifting his leg and peeing on the statue of Jesus that stood on our tiny lawn, inside an old upright bathtub. The tub was half buried on its end in the same spot it landed after it had been dropped from my window when we renovated the upstairs bathroom three years before. The ball-and-claw feet—spray-painted gold—pointed back toward the house. Inside the cavern stood Jesus holding his plump sacred heart. My father had glued down plastic flowers, so that it looked like Jesus was floating on a cloud of petals. At night Jesus looked like a rock star lit up by a row of Christmas lights clipped to the rim of the tub.
My eyes moved past my mother’s silhouette, across the street to the porch lights that drew the moths and mosquitoes close in a swarm. Men and women filed out of their homes, locking their doors behind them. They headed down their front paths and when they met at the accordion doors of the bus, they nodded politely before they lowered their kerchiefs or adjusted their hats over their foreheads, and stepped onto the bus.
My sister came into my room and stood beside me. She leaned against the window, her hair in a towel, wound like a turban, another towel wrapped tightly under her armpits. “You better go to bed,” she said, like she was in charge. She was sixteen and she had been acting like that a lot lately. Terri’s fingers were slender, curled as they were around the sill. But she was tough. She had my mother’s colouring: olive skin, chocolate eyes, brown hair, which was not as thick or as wavy as my mother’s. I was fair and had pale blue eyes that turned grey on sunny days.
Terri had shiny pink splotches on her shoulders. One was the shape of Africa, and the other one I couldn’t figure out.
“You got sunburned bad.”
“You wanna peel my back?”
“No.”
She reached up and peeled off some skin, rolled it into a ball, and flicked it at my face. “Tomorrow’s gonna be a busy day, twerp. Piggy’s coming home.” She nudged me with her Africa shoulder and smiled. The clock on my nightstand glowed 10:55.
It was an annual event—a matança do porco—the slaughter of the pig. Usually my family killed a pig in the fall, while we pickled peppers, jarred tomato sauce, and made wine. But this year, my father had received word from his sister, Maria de Jesus, that she was close to clearing her paperwork with the government and was coming from Portugal to live with us.
“Do you know anything about the kid that’s gone missing?” she said, her eyes searching the street below.
“He doesn’t live in our neighbourhood.”
“I know that, stupid. I’m just wondering what you’ve heard.”
“Not much. We’re going to look for him tomorrow.” Emanuel had last been seen by his brother and a friend on crowded Yonge Street, across from the new Eaton Centre, our first real mall, which spread across two full city blocks and sparkled like an enormous glass cage. That’s where we planned to start our search.
“The cops have been looking for two days and haven’t found him, but you and your little friends think you will. Good luck with that.”
My mother was on the bus now, sitting at the back in the same spot she always chose. She placed her temple against the window. I hoped she would look up to my bedroom window and smile. She was fond of telling me that the key to success was good teeth, white and straight. No matter if you were a man or a woman, a row of pretty teeth drew people in. When I would ask how she kept hers looking so bright, she’d say, “Drink and eat your food at room temperature,” revealing her row of Chiclets, sometimes tapping them with her nail.
As the worm-picker pulled away, I wondered where the bus would take them this time. What deal had been struck with which Portuguese security guard at which park or golf course? They moved around, picking the juiciest worms for bait shops across the city. A penny a worm. In addition to this work, my mother had decided to postpone her holiday and had agreed to take more shifts at the hospital to cover other people’s time off. Payments on my father’s dump truck kept coming due and jobs to dig basements had slowed down. We all have to work together, make sacrifices, my mother would whisper.
My father had gone to a meeting at St. Mary’s church hall only a couple of hours before to get an update on Emanuel’s disappearance and to help form a community watch group to search for him. From there, he would head to his night job cleaning the TD Bank on the corner of Queen and Euclid. Once that was done, he’d make his way to a bar, the dark one without a sign on the corner of Queen and Palmerston. It was a block away from our house and we called it the cellar because of the metal hatch on the sidewalk just outside the side door. Through the hatch they’d roll kegs down a ramp made of hundreds of little wheels. He’d have a beer, or maybe two. My mother would be home before him. He wouldn’t even know she’d been gone.