Belinda's Rings (27 page)

Belinda coughed. She had no words.

All this time, Prim said. Aren't you going to say anything?

Belinda let her eyes wander across the field. She focused on the furthest line of the horizon, where the wheat became a blonde fringe brushing against the grey sky. Her throat felt closed-off, filled with cement. She was thinking about how she had come to this place, her mind reeling through every event that had led up to this moment. She thought about her coincidences, how she treasured them. Stacked them up into golden towers and shut them away. She thought about the child's grave at Woodhenge, marking the centre like a bull's-eye.

Belinda? Prim said. What is it? Say something. Please.

Belinda looked at her sister, at the fleck of orange embedded like a searing ember in the green of her left iris.

A pocket of air left Belinda's lips, and her voice was free. She took a step backward.

You can't be here, she said. You have to leave.

15
Niches

MY LAST LETTER SAID
that Mum was going on a quest to find herself. I think Auntie Prim took that to mean Mum was on a quest to find
her
. I suppose it did sound like a pretty convenient coincidence that Mum happened to be traveling to England and even staying in the same county where Prim lived. She addressed her reply to both me and Mum, but luckily I always made sure to get to the mailbox before Mum got home from work. Auntie Prim's letter asked for our phone number and the name of the hotel Mum was going to be staying at, and at the end she wrote that she hoped she could visit Canada someday. She'd never asked about meeting us in any of the previous letters. It was like she had been waiting for me to give her the green light.

I never wrote back. I guess part of me started to feel guilty about going behind Mum's back. It had been fun at first. It was like a game. I hadn't been thinking of Prim as a real live person, let alone a person who shared some of the same genes as me. She was like a character out of a storybook. I could imagine her my own way, and that made her something I could believe in but also not take seriously. I imagined her with Mum's hair and eyes but without the wilted look on her face. She was always laughing and never tired, stressed, or angry. She was an architect, or a lawyer. She wore cool clothes. She was proud of her son, and she'd been there for every major event in his life. On his graduation day, they went skydiving together. She didn't have a husband because she didn't need one.

When it came down to it, writing to Prim was like writing to Santa Claus. Anyone who's ever written a letter to Santa knows that you get a letter back, written in Santa's curly handwriting. Of course, there's no doubt in your mind that the letter is real. But still, somewhere deep down, you don't actually believe that Santa is real. His letter is like evidence of some kind of magic.

It was the same way with Prim. Her letters seemed more real than she did. So when I thought about actually meeting her in person, I started to realize how disappointing it would be. No matter what, she couldn't possibly be the way I imagined her. And neither could my cousin Sebastian. As nonsensical as it sounds, I saw Prim and Mum as the same person. For me, Prim was Mum in a different life, maybe the way Mum would be if she'd never left England, never met Da, never had us. Prim was a way to imagine how the whole world could be completely different.

And at the same time, I wondered if Prim would be disappointed in me. Would she be expecting me to be a blonde-haired, green-eyed, mini-incarnation of Mum? I wasn't even sure if she knew anything about Da. I could just picture her coming out of the gate at the airport, seeing Mum and then seeing me, the look on her face. That look I've seen a thousand times before with the searching eyes and the slightly open mouth that makes me want to say Yes, we
are
together.

Truth is, I don't think Mum and Prim are really meant to see each other again. The more I think about it, the less believable it seems that they could exist in the same place at the same time. Any words they could think to say to each other would sound so stiff and awkward.
How have you been,
for the last thirty-odd years?
Just because they're sisters doesn't necessarily mean they have anything to talk about. Jess and I have a hard enough time talking to each other even though we see each other every day. It makes me realize how easily people can become strangers. The only good thing that came out of Squid and Wiley taking off was that Jess and I really had no choice but to talk. It was the only thing that kept us from losing our heads.

It had been past midnight when Wiley and Squid walked in the door. I'd spent the entire evening alone with Jess, talking about things we remembered from when we were kids as if we were about to take our last breaths, the whole time trying to pretend that Squid and Wiley hadn't been gone for more than sixteen hours. We talked about how Mum used to make us cover our eyes for the hoochy bits in movies, but we could hear all the kissing and breathing and knew what was happening anyway. Jess remembered that we used to cover our eyes with our headbands so our hands wouldn't have to do the work, and we'd tell Mum we were being Geordi from
Star Trek
but she didn't think it was funny. We talked about how on rainy days, we used to put on our matching rubber boots and walk down the street to the sewer grate because Jess told me that there were fairies living in the pipes and they only came out when it rained. We'd kneel over the grate with Jess holding an invisible fairy in her cupped palms, and I'd listen quietly for the soft hum of a fairy-song. And we talked about how Mum used to buy us a tub of white icing and a package of plain cupcakes every Halloween, and how mixing up the icing with food-colouring to make orange and green and black potions was always way more fun than decorating the cupcakes like Jack-o'-lanterns.

By midnight we had fallen asleep in the living room. I was woken up by a sound — a moaning sound. It was stretched and deep, like the sad underwater cry of a whale. I sprang up and saw Squid standing in front of the couch, and the next second Jess was on him, her arms wrapping him up like a bundle of laundry she didn't want to drop. She was moaning and sobbing in thick gulps, and even though I couldn't see Squid's face I knew by the way he was standing completely stiff that he had no idea what was going on.

Hi girls! Wiley called from the back door. He sang it out as if it was just a regular day, as if he were coming home from a long day at work all ready for a home-cooked supper. I heard the door swing shut behind him.

I had spent the whole day imagining myself at that moment, screaming and swearing at Wiley and tearing a strip right off him. What the hell did you think you were doing? I imagined myself saying. Do you have any fucking idea how scared we were? But when the moment finally came, those things sounded so lame and cliché. They sounded fake, like lines straight out of a movie script. Instead, I stood at the end of the hallway that led to the back door and stared at Wiley while he pulled off one rubber boot and then the other, not looking up. Each boot scattered a little shower of sand on the floor when he yanked it off.

Your mother call? he asked. Then he looked up and saw my face.

I wish you were dead, I said. I didn't yell it. I looked him straight in the eye and said it the way you would state a fact, like Cows eat grass. I don't know what possessed me to say that. It seemed like the meanest thing I could manage to say.

Hey, Wiley said. He frowned. He must have heard Jess's sobbing then because he said, Whoawhoawhoa, what's going on?

Are you serious? I said. I could feel sweat prickling my forehead.

Wiley blinked.

You left, I said. You didn't tell us where you were.

He looked at me like
Is that all?
Sorry, he said. I forgot. I thought you'd be at school all day anyway.

You couldn't have left a goddamn note? I yelled. But my voice sounded limp, as if the words had no air behind them. I felt drained. Listening to myself made me feel like a melodramatic teenage brat. And all of a sudden I couldn't figure out why I was so upset. I couldn't figure out how to put it into words.

We went to Sylvan Lake, Squid said. He and Jess had come up behind me, and Jess was smearing her wet cheeks.

We didn't know where you were, I said again. And the trunk was gone and we thought maybe you ran away or something.

It was a school day, Jess joined in. You were gone when we woke up. It looked like you were trying to sneak off.

Oh, Wiley said. Well, sorry. It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment type thing. Bill's parents have a place up by the lake and he got a last-minute gig at the Legion.

Jess and I stood silent.

Really, I'm sorry, Wiley said. I shoulda called.

We brought you some rock candy, Squid said.

That set Jess off. Rock candy? she screamed at Wiley. So giving us candy is supposed to make everything okay? She looked to me for some support, but I didn't say anything. I'd already given up.

No, Wiley said, that's not — Jesus! I didn't think there was a law against surprising my son with a day at the beach.

There's a law against kidnapping, Jess said. We were about to call the cops.

Wiley's face turned into a wince. He looked at Jess like she'd just stabbed him in the gut. Then he looked at me. I lowered my eyes to my feet.

What do you think I am? he said. His voice was quiet and sharp.

Jess stared him down hard. But behind her eyes I could see the faintest flicker, and I knew she was feeling the same way as me. Like a fraud.

Wiley sighed. And right then it was like an invisible hook came down and took hold of his disguise, the one made of all the little changes that had built up since Squid was born, and lifted it clear off his body. All that moodiness and irresponsibility and impulsiveness peeled off like a robe and floated away. For just a few minutes he was Old Wiley again, good Old Wiley, and he was older and wiser and knew more about life than we possibly could.

I'm his father, Wiley said. He didn't need to tell us that we weren't Squid's mothers.

It took me a long time to make sense of everything that happened in those couple of days. I barely slept that night 'cause I felt so frustrated, crying on and off and not knowing why. I felt angry. I was so mad that I had to keep stuffing my pillow in my mouth and biting down hard. I was mad that Squid had come back and I was just supposed to be relieved and happy, and everything was supposed to settle back to normal. I was mad that I had looked like the one who was wrong, and Wiley didn't have to admit to anything. I had felt so useless. But like most bad feelings people have, even the feelings that seem too awful to ever survive, they eventually blew over and became something in the past. A memory.

It seems like every time you revisit a memory it means something else, especially when you've been able to forget it for a while. It's like the things you experience in the meantime make the memory change. Just the other day we were talking about ecological feedback systems in Bio, and Mr. Ramsay brought up the subject of niches. We'd learned about niches before in Junior High, but I'd forgotten all about them. That turned out to be kind of a good thing though, 'cause I'd had it all wrong before. When we first learned about them in grade seven Science, I kept thinking that a niche was a place, like the African savannah or the Great Barrier Reef. I blame Mrs. Lambert for that. She was the one who told our class that the word niche comes from the French word ‘nicher,' which means to nest. So naturally I thought nesting had to do with the place an animal calls home. But then we learned about them again in grade nine and it seemed like niches actually had to do with the roles that organisms play in their environments, like how certain types of marine fungi exist so that certain types of fish can eat them, and those fish make it possible for other types of fish to exist, and on and on and on. I thought it was about how every ecosystem depends on a whole bunch of little components that stay in perfect symbiosis with each other, and how every component of that environment plays a crucial part in the great big circle of life. Take away a chunk of forest or wipe out a certain species of caterpillar and the whole cycle goes completely out of whack.

But it's actually a lot more complicated than that. The way I understand it now, niches are more about the ways that organisms make a place for themselves. It's about how they adapt themselves to fit into their worlds. If a certain species of phytoplankton goes extinct, another slightly different species might take the opportunity to increase its population tenfold so it can step in and fill the position. Or maybe not. I talked to Mr. Ramsay about it after class, and he told me that some biologists believe there are thousands upon thousands of vacant niches, left by organisms that have died out over the years. But other biologists think that niches are defined by the organisms that live in a given ecosystem, so the idea of a vacant niche is impossible. Once a species gets wiped out, the niche is gone too.

Really, I think it's just a matter of how you want to look at it. If it were true that vacant niches existed everywhere, then it'd mean that very few ecosystems, if any at all, would ever manage to reach a state of complete balance. There would always be a gap somewhere in the circle. If vacant niches didn't exist, then any gaps that appeared would just get closed up, and the circle would get a tiny bit smaller.

Now that I've thought about it, I think I'm okay with believing either scenario. It makes me feel better to know that no matter what, all organisms have to keep learning new ways to make up for what's missing. Eventually, they must get really good at pretending to be something they're not.

XV

THERE HAD ONLY BEEN
one other instant when Belinda had questioned her motives for going to England. It had happened as she was counting the money — the bills she'd saved from eighteen years' worth of birthday cards sent by her mother. It was just enough to pay her airfare. She considered the irony of rejecting her mother's money all these years, only to finally spend it on a flight back to Wiltshire. Suddenly she wondered why she had kept the money at all. She could have sent it back, or donated it to charity. But then she remembered that she hadn't wanted to begin an exchange with her mother; she didn't want to suggest her consent to maintaining their connection. And giving the money to charity felt wrong. Belinda felt it wasn't right for anyone to benefit from her mother's attempts to buy love.