Black Rabbit and Other Stories (6 page)

She pushed aside a green plastic alligator on the edge of the sink, and it clattered into the bathtub. She started brushing out her tangled, bleach-scorched hair but gave up after several painful tugs. So, she looked like hell. What else was new? Not that she needed to get dressed up for anyone—her ex-husband was doing time in Kingston Penitentiary. She had almost lost the girls because of that fucker, bringing contraband home, not to mention all the blow. But Chris never owned up to any of his crimes; not even to punching out Wendy in front of the girls on their third birthday. He blamed the booze for that, or was it the cocaine?

She opened her tea-stained bathrobe, glanced at her arms, then retied the belt. She still had a soft spot for Chris, no matter how she tried to hate the man. She'd even gone up to Kingston for visits. He had abused her, fucked around, taken away her youth—but he had fathered those triplets and they were nothing short of life to Wendy. And Chris was cool; no one could short him on that. Not a big talker. He did most of his talking with cool baby blues and narrow hips. Any time he and Wendy showed up to a function or a bar the ladies eyed her with envy. People said he looked like Patrick Swayze, but Wendy thought Chris had it all over Swayze. Yeah, Chris was very cool. He'd stand in a room wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, sucking on a beer, blonde hair all crazy, and he looked cool, exuded cool, and he knew it. She wondered how cool he felt sitting in his prison cell.

She opened the medicine cabinet and removed a plastic vial full of Percodans. They helped dull the aches and pains. Connor had scored this batch for less than a fin a pop. He was good for that, the kid. Technically, this breached her court orders, but if no one knew, no one could rat her out. She downed four pills with a gulp of tap water. The doctor had ordered her to eat better and to exercise. She chuckled at the last suggestion. Exercise.

In the kitchen Doris had Deb by the hair. The third sister watched with an impish smile.

“Let go of her fucking hair!” Wendy yelled, but half-heartedly, she didn't want them crying again.

Doris let go, but not before Deb's chin started quivering. Wendy
grabbed three lollipops from a canister on the counter and handed a red one to Deb. The other girls, offered yellow lollipops, demanded red ones. Some remained in the canister but Wendy refused to budge this time. The girls had to learn to take what they were given. Life offered few handouts. She ordered them out of the kitchen. “March?” she cried, but the Percodans had come on, smoothing the fray in her nerves and filling her chest with a numbing, radiating warmth that took her breath away.

She stretched out on the chesterfield and watched a muted television show with pregnant women shouting at skinny, goateed men who looked sheepish, broke, and stupid. Why do women fall for scum like that? Wendy wondered just before she dozed off. She dreamed she rode a horse across the countryside, a tiny pinto, with ink-blot markings. It kept looking back at her with sad brown eyes as they clopped over the green terrain. Then the terrain gave way, the pinto dissolved. One of the girls had mounted her. Doris. She jumped up and down on Wendy's thighs. Wendy grabbed her hand and squeezed until she stopped.

“That hurt, Mommy.”

“Did not, now get off me.”

“Mommy, I'm hungry.”

“We're hungry, too!” chimed the others, floating around the chesterfield.

For a moment Wendy couldn't tell them apart. That happened once in a while. They aped each other on purpose to confuse her. She rarely dressed them the same for that reason.

She found hot dogs in the refrigerator, a carton of milk, and not much else. She needed groceries but hated leaving the house. People stared at her and the girls like they were from Mars. When triplets had shown up on Wendy's ultrasound, she demanded to know their sex. She would have terminated the pregnancy had they all been boys. She liked males fine, but three boys would have killed her. As it was, three girls were doing a pretty good job.

As she put a pot of water on the stove, she thought of her dream. She had ridden horses before, but didn't enjoy it. She thought horses
were stupid, too highly-strung. Once, while riding an old mare in Virgil, they came upon a tiny creek, and the horse freaked out and threw her. She landed on a big rock and wrecked her back. Later the trainer admitted that running water spooked the beast. What a fucked up thing. She had never dreamed of horses before. She wondered what it meant.

While the hot dogs boiled away, the girls sat at the kitchen table rubbing crayons over colouring books and nibbling cheese-sticks with expired due dates. Seeing no mold, Wendy figured the cheese-sticks were fine. Just then the doorbell rang. The girls jumped up and raced to the door, almost trampling Tatters, one of two Siamese cats sharing the flat with the humans. Max, hiding somewhere, only ventured out at night. Tatters raised her head and wailed. The cats were bizarre, but they had cost Chris a grand, and had grown on Wendy.

When she opened the door a big man stood there with a clipboard and a poised silver pen. Sunglasses hid his eyes. At first she mistook him for a traveling salesman or a canvasser—he looked too buffed to be a Jehovah's Witness. Swarthy, with big arms and broad shoulders, he cut quite a figure. His white shirt seemed just-pressed despite the humid weather, his black silk tie clipped with a red-jeweled silver bar. The man smiled and nodded.

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Felix Torres, I'm with the Ministry of Child and Youth Services.” He glanced at the sheet on the clipboard. “Is this Connor Kovach's residence?”

Wendy nodded. “Yeah, but he hasn't been around.”

“Connor's probation officer referred him to me for cognitive programming. Anger management, anti-criminogenic thinking, and so on. I'm here for an intake.”

These words came at Wendy in a whirring, incomprehensible stream. She didn't know what to say. The guy's smile started creeping her out, the teeth too white or something.

Felix glanced at the clipboard again. “Legal guardian listed as a Wendy Smith.”

“That's me,”she said, involuntarily touching her hair. “I'm the aunt. His father's sister.”

“Okay,” he said, winking at the triplets huddled around Wendy.

“Girls,” she said sharply.

They squealed and retreated.

Felix continued smiling. “I understand Connor has no contact with his father.”

“No, and his mum's in rehab at Collingwood 'til October. Connor never calls or anything. They aren't close like that.” Ashamed to admit this, Wendy looked down at her small, bare feet—a further embarrassment—chewed up like meat from years of bad shoes,.

Felix frowned and ticked off a box on the sheet with his shiny pen. “This program falls under the umbrella of extra-judicial measures—initiated recently as a consequence of the revised Youth Criminal Justice Act.”

Again, the man's words whirred by in a stream of guttural gasps and clicks that made no sense. But she noticed that Felix wore no wedding band, and warmly smiled at him, so handsome in his way, so strong and sure, and he returned the smile.

Ronnie came by in the morning, screaming about being killed, that they were going to kill him. He stared right through Wendy as he screamed, waking up the girls, who scrambled from the bedroom to the bathroom in their pink pajamas. Twitching and drooling, Ronnie looked deranged, likely fucked up on crack cocaine. Crack fries the central nervous system, triggering frenzies and hallucinations. Wendy knew all about that. She'd had her time with crack.

“Just keep your voice down,” she whispered. She hated Ronnie barging in whenever he felt like it, the fucking tool. She hated all these weak and stupid men. Her father was the same. An asshole through and through. If not for Mom, the family would have ended up on the street. As it was, working all kinds of nasty jobs, never saying no to anything, no matter how degrading, she eked out enough for bare necessities, while Dad drank beer and porked their slutty neighbours whenever he could get it up.

Tears welled in Ronnie's ruined eyes. “Listen—listen to me. If they come here—no, don't say anything. Say you haven't seen me.”

Wendy glanced down the hall and saw Doris's head pop out of the bathroom. Not Doris—Deb the little bitch, playing games again, grimacing like Doris did when something scared her. Deb didn't scare so easy. Wendy laughed, almost proud of how clever they were. But she'd call Deb on it later and see what the little lady had to say for herself.

“Tell them you haven't seen me,” Ronnie said. “I don't want you involved.”

She felt like kicking him in the nuts for saying that. “What's going on, Ronnie?”

Elbows together, he cringed. “They'll fucking kill me!” He rocked on his heels, wheezed, his asthma acting up. Luckily, he had a puffer and took a few hits. But while this relieved the chest congestion it did nothing for his state of mind.

Wendy seized his arm. “Get it together for a sec, man. Who the fuck is going to kill you? Ronnie, look at me. Look at me.”

He turned up his face with wide, terrified eyes, tilting his head as if appealing to her humanity. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He mumbled something, then abruptly bolted for the door. She heard it open and slam shut. A car engine turned over. Tires squealed. Then she heard nothing but the girls bawling in the bathroom, and the cats bawling in the hall.

After that night, Ronnie disappeared. He left Wendy with no money to care for Connor, no forwarding address, nothing. A week passed and he didn't call. He didn't even send a postcard like that time he split to Vancouver for a month. Wendy still remembered that card, a shot of mountains, oceans, and whales. Was it really like that there? She doubted Ronnie was checking out whales this time.

Ronnie was hard to love, maybe harder to like. When he first presented Kim to her, Wendy almost shit herself. Kim was a looker,
Ronnie no Romeo. It all made more sense when she learned of Kim's love of cocaine.

Connor called one afternoon.

“Auntie Wen,” he said. “Is my old man around?”

“Nah. This guy came here looking for you. This Felix dude. Says you have to call him right away. He left a card. Sounded like he meant business.”

“Whatever. Tell him to smoke my bone next time you talk to him. Fucking fag.”

“He's just doing his job, Connor.” Wendy wanted to hang up. “Your old man stopped by a few days ago and I haven't seen or heard from him since.”

“He was supposed to leave some money.”

“He left nothing.”

“That motherfucker.” Connor hung up.

That just about summed up everything. Late for her methadone fix, Wendy had a hint of the bugs. The bugs used to plague her when she was using hard. Got so bad she started carving up her arms. She butchered her left arm, cutting right into the bone. The doctors warned they'd have to amputate it from the shoulder if she continued cutting. But the arm healed on its own. Wendy considered it divine intervention. She went to rehab after that, cleaned herself up as much as she could.

When the girls first saw the scars they cried and cried and hugged her. Wendy told them they were old wounds, healed over now. They didn't need to worry. Took some convincing, but they came around. After that, whenever she exposed the arms, they'd gently mock her. Look at Miss Alligator! Doris would cry and the other two would join in a taunt.

Miss Alligator! Miss Alligator! Mom-my is Miss Alligator!

The plastic alligator in the bathroom entered the scene only after Doris first made the comparison. It didn't bother Wendy, though sometimes it did. As for Connor—fuck him if he was jammed up. She had her own problems. In the bathroom she popped four Percodans. Fuck everyone, she thought.

She promised to take the girls shopping for new school clothes. Cash-strapped and maxed out on her only credit card, she worried about keeping that promise; if she bought the girls nothing, they'd be bummed out. She dressed them up in matching white outfits with pink lace trim, white socks, and white shoes. She tied pink bows in their hair—Doris complained that it hurt—and looked at them. Pretty as dolls. Sometimes after a fix she had trouble keeping up. But they knew the routine, and behaved on Wendy's “medicine” appointments.

Not far from her flat, near Silver City, the clinic skirted a cluster of squalid tenements and skeletal factories. The overcast sky pressed on Wendy's temples. Then the Percodans came on and she flowed across an intersection with the girls trailing her like cotton candy faeries. A man in a silver Buick with a grey beard and bullet-grey eyes rolled down his window and yelled an obscenity. Happened all the time. Maybe the way she dressed or looked provoked it, or maybe something deeper tagged her. They never ever let her forget who she was. Never.

“Mommy, what did that man say?” Donna asked.

Wendy said nothing and led the girls to the clinic. Junkies crowded the entrance. Many knew the girls by name and traded greetings perfunctorily. The nurse in the bulletproof dispensing booth, a pleasant, ruddy lady called Cheryl, always shot out of her seat when she saw the girls, and handed them granola bars. The girls despised granola bars but took them graciously, and saved them in a shoe box for—as they put it—another rainy day.

That they had lived through many rainy days, and expected more, broke Wendy's heart. So unfair. But what was fair? She neared the glass shaking in her shoes. The nurse gave her the juice in a small plastic cup. Wendy drank it down while a security guard joked with the triplets. Old and kindly, a hint of the molester shaded his profile. You couldn't trust anyone these days. Simple as that.

On their way out, Wendy noticed a wall calendar with a picture of a pinto—the bloody source of the dream horse. What a disappointment. Outside she lit a cigarette. She smoked less than ever these days. Her uncle Norm had just died of lung cancer. He looked freakish after a
lung removal, wheezing like a torn accordion. Probably better to die of an overdose than go out like that. But after a fix she loved a smoke. You smoked it slow and felt every fibre of tobacco and paper crackling and burning and sending its dark whisper through your body. The girls watched, rapt. She had caught them once with cigarettes in the bathroom; they had dropped the matches in the toilet bowl and never lit up. She beat them for an hour after that, bursting Donna's eardrum. Boy, did she howl. She howled so loud at the hospital they never got around to asking her how she hurt the ear; Wendy told them she fell from a swing. The other girls confirmed this.