As She Grows (34 page)

When Ms. Crawl leaves the room I explain to Aunt Sharon that she’s really a bitch. “She just acts nice in front of you,” I say.

“I can tell,” she smiles. “Annoyed the hell out of me in just five minutes.” She lifts up a large brown paper bag that was resting on the ground beside her. “I brought just a few things, things I heard are useful for the hospital. Of course, I wouldn’t know.” She pulls out a yellow nightie wrapped in clear plastic, some slippers, a toothbrush, and a housecoat with rabbits on it.

“Thanks,” I say, picking up the nightie package and studying it. “Can I?” She reaches out to touch my belly.

“Sure.”

She pokes her finger in a little and then flattens her hands against my shirt. “So tight,” she says. “Does she kick?”

“Sometimes,” I say, watching her mesmerized eyes.“Her foot is here—” I lead her hand just below my belly button and hold it firmly to the slight bulge. Her eyes widen. I never understood why Aunt Sharon didn’t have kids. She’d make a good mother, with her pie-making and everything.

“That’s incredible!” she says, her eyes tearing up. “Isn’t that amazing.”

“Yeah, it’s cool,” I say, just to make her feel good.

We both sit down and she starts talking, nervous talk, all fast and breathless. She tells me about how busy she is at work, how she’s hardly ever home anymore. I mention Elsie’s broken arm, but she quickly changes the subject and talks about this party she’s having at her apartment, where women come to her house and buy Tupperware.

“You hate Elsie?” I ask her, interrupting.

Aunt Sharon opens her mouth to answer but then stops herself. “Jesus, the questions you ask.” She takes out a cigarette and starts to light it. I’m in shock. I can’t believe she smokes. Aunt Sharon never smoked. I can’t believe she even has cigarettes on her.

“What are you doing?” I yell.

“What?” She looks at me and then looks down at her body, taking a quick survey to see what the panic is about.

“You’re smoking!”

“Oh,” she laughs, and continues to light her cigarette. “Sometimes I do. Every now and then.”

“I can’t believe it,” I say, astonished.

“It’s not so strange, is it?” she asks, taking a deep drag. She looks so natural, like she’s been doing it for years. But it seems so wrong for her to be smoking.

“You can’t smoke in here,” I say. “Ms. Crawl will kill you.”

“Ms. Crawl can kiss my ass,” she says, and I’m happy with this new side of Aunt Sharon.

“I asked you if you hated Elsie,” I remind her.

“I know.”

I wait for her to tell me about all the bad things Elsie has done to her. And then I could tell her all the bad things. And we could share in this whole I-hate-Elsie session.

“It doesn’t help you to know what I think. You’re not me.” A responsible adult answer. She disappoints me. I thought she’d have more bite.

“But do you love her?”

She laughs a little, her shoulders bobbing up and down. Only it’s not a happy laugh. She looks off, beyond me. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Well, if you had to say something you hate about her, what would it be?”

“You’ve been watching too many talk shows,” she jokes, taking another drag. She turns her head to look out the window, like she’s deep in thought. I lick my lips, anticipating her juicy answer. I imagine her hateful answers gooing out of her mouth like venom. A mix of cursing and tragedy. And then she finally replies,
“She gave me a life I can’t crawl out of, I guess.” I wait for a few minutes, but that’s all she says. And I’m left in confusion as Aunt Sharon finishes her cigarette in silence. Because it always seemed to me that Aunt Sharon was doing just fine in her life.

I read that babies can sometimes sense when you’re dreaming. This thought terrifies me. Blood rushes to my face as if I have just been caught in a lie. Having access to my body is one thing, but my mind?
How much do you know?

Do you know about the bloody babies that look like dead puppies? Have you seen my pale hands reach down to push you back inside while the faceless doctor sews me tight with what looks like yellow wool? Do you remember me giving birth in a subway washroom stall and then just watching you crawl away, leaving a slimy trail of goo and blood behind?

And now I wonder, When you kick my stomach, are you really kicking
at
me? And are you clutching that umbilical cord not because you’re playing with it, but because you feel the need to hang onto something? Like if you let go, you’d be thought to extinction?

It’s four in the morning. I am startled awake by my own thoughts. I sneak downstairs and carefully make my way down the back hallway. I tiptoe, hop, and zigzag a complex trail of quiet footing along the old hardwood floors. Step in the wrong spot and even the slightest creak will alert Staff on the night shift to my presence. Within a few weeks of living here, all residents have figured out how to avoid these landmines of sound.

I lean up against the wall and rest the phone on my belly. Music from a cheap radio mixed with the tap-tapping of a computer keyboard filter out from underneath the office door down the hall. I dial Elsie’s number. The phone rings forever before she finally rips it off the hook.

“What the hell?” Elsie yells groggily into the phone. “Someone better be dead and bloody to call this late!”

My voice is small. “Who’s my father?” “Snow?”

I take a deep breath so she can’t hear me shaking. “Who’s my father?”

“Jesus Christ,” she snaps. “I’m not getting into that now. It’s too late.”

“I want to know. I need to know. Now,” I command.

“I told you. He was some guy your mom hooked up with. I don’t know who. She didn’t tell me. Now, I’m going to sleep.” And she hangs up.

My heart pounds in my chest. I immediately call back, letting it ring and ring and ring until I’m sure Elsie has pulled the plug from the wall. I stand there for what seems like hours before I leave the receiver on the table, its distant ghostly ring resonating down the hallway behind me.

When I wake in the morning, I call Aunt Sharon at work. I tell her I need to speak to her: “Today. Now.”

She doesn’t ask me what’s wrong. She simply says we can meet at eleven, outside Licks in the Beaches, down the road from her office. “We’ll have a morning ice-cream,” she says cheerily.

I arrive at the restaurant where Aunt Sharon and I are to meet an hour early. I pace up and down the street, staring into store windows and moving out of rich people’s way. At the corner a man with worn plaid trousers and a stained shirt passes me a flyer, our pinkies touch, and I pull my hand away. The shock of soft, warm skin under the dull-green paper sends tingly shivers down into my stomach. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed. I continue walking, staring down at the paper claiming “Canada’s Best Mattress Sale” and think about all the hands I touched today: the woman who gave me change when I bought my gum; the man who held the door open for me; the bus driver who passed me my transfer. I think of how it’s even possible I can feel so alone, when I’m surrounded by so many people.

When I get sick of being bumped and jarred, I find a doorway and slump my bloated body slowly down to the ground. Some older guy with dreadlocks and a Marley T-shirt passes by and asks me if I’m selling. I figure he means selling my body, so I tell him to fuck off, but then a few minutes later I realize he may have only been talking about weed and I feel bad for being so harsh. I slip off my shoes and study the imprints that run deep and red into my skin and someone tosses a loonie at my feet.

At eleven o’ clock, I head over to Licks. Aunt Sharon is waiting on the bench outside the door. She buys me a mint-chocolatechip ice-cream cone and orders herself a double-scoop rockyroad waffle cone. “So good to get out of the office,” she says, oblivious to my face of stone. “We should do this more often.” She leads me down through the park and onto the boardwalk. I walk
slowly, breathing heavy, my lungs squished inside my own body. I am quiet and unresponsive, trying my best to get her to ask me what’s wrong, but she doesn’t. Instead, she’s annoyingly upbeat. I’d swear she was being happy on purpose.

While Aunt Sharon points out seagulls, cute dogs, and interesting cloud formations, I rehearse my words about a thousand times in my head. My heart races, my lips are dry. It’s as if I’m standing at the edge of a cold pool, psyching myself up to jump into something I know will take my breath away. But it isn’t until we are at the entrance to Aunt Sharon’s office, her hand on the door, that I finally spit it out.

“I need to know who my father is,” I say.

“Jesus Christ.” She brings her hand up to her forehead and squeezes tight, as if she’s suddenly sprung a migraine. And it starts to make me angry that she thinks this is such a big hassle to her. Like I’m this annoyance in her day. She exhales deeply and shakes her head. “You need to talk to Elsie.”

“She won’t tell me anything. I asked her last night.”

“What did she say?”

“He was a fling. Some guy she didn’t know.”

“I don’t like this, Snow.” Aunt Sharon fiddles with the ring on her finger, nervously twisting it around and around.“I don’t think this makes things better.”

“It’s not going to make anything worse. It can’t get much worse. If I know the truth, I can go from there. I mean, was he in jail? A murderer or something? A priest? Her teacher? A perverted school janitor? A—”

“It was Mitch,” she says, cutting me off. She stares at me intensely, waiting to see what I’ll do.

I feel like life just whipped out its hand and slapped me hard in the face. “What?” I say, even though I’ve heard her.

“This isn’t good, Snow. I told you.” Aunt Sharon’s eyes dart around her, as if the helicopters are going to appear on the horizon and she’ll be gunned down by secret agents. She’s said too much.

I start to feel sick to my stomach. A rush of memories speed through me. I think of all the times Mitch has been in the apartment. I see him on the couch, I see him at the kitchen table drinking a beer, I see him standing at the bathroom counter shaving. I see him hovering over my face, that night he was in my room. “Did he rape her?” I ask, preparing myself for the worst.

She turns to me with a disgusted look on her face. “Rape her? God, no. I think she loved him.” My jaw drops as the whole world slips out from underneath me and I’m left alone, feet dangling in the air. I have no idea what’s real anymore.

Aunt Sharon silently motions for me to follow her. We go into the building and through to the stairwell. I lean up against the metal railing while Aunt Sharon sits on the concrete steps. Her voice is dry and bare in the hollow stairwell. I collect her words like bread crumbs marking a trail back to my beginning.

She tells me that a couple of years after their father left Elsie, Mitch moved in. Mitch was younger than Elsie, about thirty at the time. My mom was fourteen. She and Aunt Sharon liked him because he partied with them and didn’t pull the man-of-the-house crap that Elsie’s other boyfriends did. But since Aunt Sharon moved out a few months before Mitch arrived, it was really only my mother who got to spend much time with him. She says Mitch and my mom got along really well, like friends, and that used to make Elsie mad. Everyone had a feeling they were sleeping together but no one knew for sure. And then, one day, my mother announced at a Christmas family gathering that she was pregnant with Mitch’s kid. She said it in front of everyone and
Elsie flipped her lid, almost killing her. Some great-uncle I’ve never even heard of had to split up the fight. My mom was sent to the hospital with a fractured skull, two missing teeth, and a broken nose. She never went home again.

“And after that?” I ask.

“Mitch disappeared. I don’t know if he saw your mom during the pregnancy. He’s the one who brought you to Elsie a few months after you were born. I saw him at your mom’s funeral and never again after that, until Jed left. You were about six then.”

“Why would Elsie let him come back?”

“You think Elsie could ever survive on her own? Who do you think paid your rent?”

“Fuck off,” I say in disbelief.

“What did you think? Jesus, Snow. For someone so eager to know the truth, you certainly have your head in a cloud. Elsie can’t afford that place, never could. She spends all her cash on booze. Besides that, she’s so pathetic, she still loves him.”