Every Happy Family (11 page)

A hesitant pause.

“I'm not dangerous. I'm on this damn medication and can't sleep.” He pulls his shirt away from his skin. “Makes me sweat. Excuse me.”

He hears her breath let go.

“Where do you live?” she demands.

“Fifteen-eighty Thurston.”

“Beau's house?”

“You know Beau?”

“You're his dad?”

“Yeah. How do you know Beau?”

“We were in school together, before he went private.” She talks fast, each word tailgating the next. “He doesn't know me from garbage but I've always known him.”

Okay. “Now it's your turn to tell me who you are and why –”

“I think maybe I used to be in love with your son.”

Les strains to see a face but can only make out one pantleg and high-top runner. “He's not as perfect as you might think.”

“I don't. I think he's kind of mean and egotistical but that's just to cover up the hate-on he has for himself.”

Les laughs under his breath. “I've often thought he was hard on himself. Worried I didn't spend enough one-on-one time with him.”

She huffs. “It's
always
about the parents.”

“Fair enough.” He gazes through the dark, homeward, thinking he could sleep now. Wants to lie down anyway. Stangely, it doesn't seem all that special that he's talking intimately about his family with someone up a tree in the middle of the night. “You haven't told me why –”

“What are you sick with?”

“I'm battling cancer.” He likes that word
battling
, the noble implication of a good side. “Why are you up a tree?”

“I had something I needed to tell it.”

He can't think of a response.

“You think that sounds stupid.”

“No, no, not at all.” He's glad she can't see his face.

“I have a book by this Ecuadorian shaman. Indigenous peoples, you know, have a connection with the natural world that we've lost.”

“You and my sister Annie would get along famously.”

“There are three steps.”

“Steps?” Clearly she needs someone to talk to besides a tree.

“You can talk to a rock, the wind, a flower, a bug, whatever. The first step, and you have to be sincere,” she says, pausing to send home the point, “is introducing yourself and then letting, say, the tree, introduce itself.”

He looks at the tree trunk, tries not to imagine a cartoon mouth and eyes.

“Then you give the tree something you no longer need like depression, fear, anger, unrequited love.”

“Wait a second,” he says. “Don't you think that's a bit selfish? To dump your problems on some poor unsuspecting tree.”

She groans with impatience. “That's the problem. We humans think we're the big cheese sandwich and the tree some poor unsuspecting retard.”

If his politically correct wife heard her use that word. “Okay.”

“Nature can take it. Taxo says Nature likes it, because when we give up our crap, we get closer to our true nature, which is Nature with a capital N. And then neither the tree nor we are as alone.”

“No shortage of leafy friends around here,” he tries.

“You should do it sometime,” she says.

“I will,” he promises, starting to enjoy this disembodied conversation.

“So what's cancer like?” she asks in the same tone one would use to ask the time.

The thought comes right out of his mouth. “It's like having someone sit on your shoulder and whisper ‘you're sick, you're sick, you're sick' in your ear while you're trying to think about something else. You're only half there, half present to your life and can't commit to anything because you don't know what you're up against tomorrow.” He hadn't verbalized it before, but it's true.

“It's called obsssesssive.” She draws out the s in a kind of sexy drawl. “Just say STOP.” She's mocking someone. Her therapist?

“You're absolutely right. I shouldn't indulge those thoughts.”

“The scariest part's getting back to my house.”

“Oh.” He's having trouble keeping up. “Youuu want me to watch you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Move so I can get down.”

Les moves and a girl drops out of the tree. Dressed in dark clothes, a thief's hooded jacket, fear or maybe embarrassment propels her across the lawn. She's all knees and elbows, a fleeing insect. Reaching her house, she slips inside the front door. This is followed by a clunk of a deadbolt. He didn't see her face. Pema might know her. He starts to put his jacket back on, his hot flash having passed without him noticing. He looks again at the tree, whose dark surfaces shimmer like a charcoal drawing. Takes a couple of steps forward.

“Hi,” he says, suddenly shy. “I give you...my fear...of dying.” His arms, he sees, are flung out wide, his stomach going sideways at what he holds and is truly trying to give. He waits, for what, he doesn't know, then laughs. The girl never told him the third step.

Walking home, he thinks what a bizarrely eventful night it's been. Annie would blame it on the moon conjunct with Saturn squared with Venus or some such thing. In any case, he'll have a story to tell Jill tomorrow. Passing another large oak, he glances upward. Are there other owly teenage girls perched inside other trees? For all he knows Pema's up a tree right now, relaying
her
troubles to the poor stiff.

Random encounters with strangers. Is family any different? He'd have to say that Pema, oddly enough, feels more knowable to him, more familiar, than either of his sons whatever that's about. He turns down his street. Thinks of Faye and feels glad, despite what happened or didn't happen, that he got to meet her. Really, the woman did the best she knew how with a bad situation. It's really all any of us can do.

He eases into bed so as not to wake Jill. As soon as his head meets the pillow, his thoughts race to next month's checkup, the monstrous industry of cancer cells, dividing and multiplying, starved of oxygen and – Stop.

I'll come back, he tells himself. Or I'll die. It's really not up to me.

He rolls over and wraps his arm around Jill. When she moans and starts to pull away, he doesn't let her.

Sons

It's one in the morning on a Friday night and Les thinks he's alone when he steps quietly into the kitchen only to startle himself and his son. “Whoa. You still up?”

“Studying for an exam.” Quinn is in the middle of topping up his glass with orange juice.

“Juice, the healthy choice. We drank coffee in my cram-exam days.”

Quinn smiles briefly, glances at the floor and sips his juice. Les wants to throw his arms around this cerebral son of his, tell him he should be out partying, finding himself a new girl. Here are the keys to the car, money for a six-pack, no hard stuff. Don't tell Mom.

“You're up late,” says Quinn.

“A little discomfort from the operation. Keeping me awake.” A simple hernia operation was what they'd told the kids. The kids had worries of their own and didn't need his. Besides, his prostate cancer may already be a moot point.

Quinn nods then takes a sip. “That's a drag.”

“Just a muscle ache.”

“Okay good. Well, I should get back to it.”

Les appreciates his son's concern and has to ask, “So how're you doing?”

“I'm fine.” Quinn's cheeks light up as if embarrassed by the question.

Les wants to say something fatherly, something helpful. Since meeting Faye, he's determined to be there for his children. From the utensil jug, he slips out the spatula designed to look like an Imperial Stormtrooper's helmet that Quinn gave him for Father's Day a couple of years back. It came with a matching Darth Vader that Beau somehow managed to break. “I love this spatch,” he says, tapping it on the counter. “Lot of fish in the sea, ya know.”

“Don't worry about me.” Quinn downs his juice and sticks the glass in the dishwasher.

“Personally and pathetically, I found it hard to get over one fish until the next fish came along. And you know, the next fish is usually bigger and better because you've learned shit about fish from the first one.”

This gets not only a smile but a chuckle. Now he can let his sad diligent son escape back to his books.

Brainiac kid'll be rolling in dough one day, thinks Les as he watches him go, women swimming all over him.

The liquor cupboard door is partly open and Les goes to close it. Peeks inside and sees the top is missing from the vodka bottle. He checks around but doesn't see it anywhere. A twinge in his groin makes him flinch.

Les knocks first then opens the door. Doesn't say anything, just raises the bottle.

Quinn's eyes widen for a telltale second, then return to his book. “What's up?”

“Can't find the top for this.”

“Oh yeah?” He squints at his book as if to delete Les from his peripheral vision.

Les leans against the door jamb, tips the open bottle to his mouth and drinks. A darting glance from Quinn. For no good reason, an old incident comes to mind. “I haven't told anyone this story ever, but when I was thirteen, I burned down the small woods in back of my middle school.” Quinn's eyes are up. “It was a really dry summer. Didn't take much. Roaring flames fifty feet high. Pockets of sap exploding. Boom. Boom. It was very very cool.” He can picture it perfectly. “I never felt so alive. Firemen came with axes, hoses. No one was hurt and no one got blamed.” Les laughs. “Now that I'm all grown-up I'm reduced to setting fire to desserts.”

Quinn points to his own eyebrows, long since grown back after the cheese flambé incident.

“Yeah,” says Les and starts to close Quinn's door.

“Dad?” Quinn doesn't look up and barely pauses in his typing. “I'll look for that top.”

Les pauses in the doorway until he sees nothing more is forthcoming. “Thanks,” he says, and closes the door softly as breathing, lest a sound ruin the perfection of the moment.

Two Months Later

PEMA

Pema follows Les and the meander of people into the next room of the Tibet exhibit where, penned in by braided rope and a whispering mill of people, four maroon-robed monks kneel over a low table. She recognizes a guy from Beau's old rugby team leaning against the wall to her left. Matt? Cute, in a jock sort of way; she rates him a seven point five. She steps closer to the rope to see what everyone's ogling. At snail speed, the monks shake primary-coloured sand out of ornate silver straws creating some sort of design.

“Is this, like, Tibetan busking?” she asks Les.

“Kind of, I guess,” he says with a laugh. “It's called a sand mandala.”

Though it was a sincere question, any time she makes her dad laugh a small explosion of light – part happiness, part victory – goes off in her stomach.

Behind the hard-at-work monks, picture windows reveal a Japanese garden with Tibetan prayer flags flapping overhead, strung zigzag, the way Dad does the Christmas lights over the back patio.

“Be a shame if there's an earthquake?” whispers Les, nodding at the monks.

Pema smiles up at him. “Or one of them sneezes.”

Already two feet in diameter, the sand mandala is divided into coloured quadrants, not a single particle of one colour mixing with another. The monks, she guesses, are in their early twenties, with the exception of one who's maybe forty. Their shaved heads and flat faces remind her of gingerbread men. She takes a picture of them with her phone and then one of herself. Sends them to Katie with the text:
truth. do I look like a gingerbread man?

Non-Asians are always mistaking her for Chinese and she doesn't correct them. Sometime she says she's Chinese because it's simpler. Her boyfriend, Cody, thought at first that she was from the Philippines.

“Who're you talking to?” asks Les.

She leans all her weight back against Les and holds up her phone to read Katie's message
i would happily kill you if that meant i could look like you.

Pema smiles and texts back:
liar. mall later – check out shoes for prom.
Cody is in grade twelve which means she – a grade eleven – gets to go to his prom.

“Don't think modern technology is allowed in here,” whispers Les.

Blue, medium heel,
she finishes and sends. Wonders if she should change her purple highlights to blue for the prom. Or a silver blue.

Pema agreed to go to the exhibit only because her parents had promised brunch after at the gallery's Café Cezanne, which was rumoured to have excellent French toast. Jill had planned to come along but ended up having a department meeting. She was going to catch up with them at the café. “We have something to discuss with you,” she'd said on her way out the door, her tone an eight and a half – meaning hovering between serious and grim. Gauging her mother's tone helps Pema know what to expect and prepare for. Could be her grades, which have taken a dive since she's missed so many morning classes. Which is Beau's fault for not being there to wake her up.

Her phone trembles. Katie texts:
my mom has blue heels you could borrow.

Patent leather?

Just leather.

Maybe. Bored, need French toast,
she sends, just before Les slips the exhibit's brochure between her phone and face and reads: “‘The mandala's four colours symbolize the four emotional patterns of envy, hate, pride and greed.'” Her dad's breath smells of his morning mocha espresso. “‘Each of us has a dominant emotional pattern that is our entrance or gate to the spiritual path or mandala.'” He lowers the brochure. “See, each quadrant has a gate?”

Ornate little gates open on each side like the start of a maze. One monk pauses in his painting to scratch at his bum, not so discreetly. Worms, thinks Pema. She'd had two types of worms when she arrived from Nepal and can still remember how the nervy itch made her head swim. Her phone goes off and she ducks out from under Les's arm.

Olivia says you gotta order The Masterpiece.

What's –

“Come on, Pema. Let's be here while we're here,” says Les.

The slight irritation in his voice shames her and she quickly types
that?
, snaps her phone closed and hooks her arm around his. “Read,” she says determined to only half listen. Anything Tibetan makes her think about her birth mother who she understands is poor and probably sick – she's seen enough homeless people here in Victoria to know those things go together – if, that is, she's even still alive.

“North is envy and represented by green. That makes sense. East is hate, represented in blue.”

Last year, Jill took her to a talk by a Tibetan lama who picked his nose. Over Christmas, Les rented not one but two sleep-inducing Tibetan movies with subtitles.

“South is pride, represented by yellow. West is greed, represented by –”

“Greed.” Pema raises her hand picturing her bedroom.

“Red.”

Too sentimental to throw anything out, she has a lot of stuff. Every sports participation ribbon, photo, stuffed animal, poster, the smallest memento from the smallest occasion, she not only keeps but displays. Every surface and wall is pretty much splattered with memories. The exact opposite of Beau's room, even when he lived at home.

Last night, Beau had called her “needy.” Rhymes with greedy. Actually it was “stupidly needy.” Freaked out by a horror flick she'd gone to with her friends, she'd forced him to stay up on Skype until she fell asleep.

The older monk points to a part of the sand painting and says something in Tibetan and one of the others responds.

“Did you understand any of that?” asks Les.

“No,” she sneers, though somehow she believes the younger monk said “Yes, I will.”

“Bet you'd get it back though. If you were around it.”

“Bet if these guys had a choice of being here or at the mall, they'd choose the mall,” she says and Les snorts – not quite a laugh – plops his palms on her shoulders and steers her through the crowd towards the next room. “You come from a fascinating culture, you know.” His hands squeeze her shoulders a little too hard.

“Ow,” she says, but he doesn't let go.

“It's something to be proud of.”

“My culture,” she repeats and shrugs his hands loose. They've been watching bald guys in dresses paint with sand, and before that they saw trumpets made from human thigh bones and baby-sized skulls turned into bowls.

Through the far doorway she glimpses the clothing section and wonders if Aunt Annie has some cotton lace she could tack to the cuffs of her purple jacket. And around the lapels. Dye it grey to match her jeans.

“Dad?”

“Question?”

“Have you heard of a dish at this café called The Masterpiece?”

During Pema's first couple of years in Canada, whenever a babysitter was needed, Jill hired a Tibetan woman named Tsogyal in order for Pema to have a chance to use her native tongue.

In her soft-spoken Tibetan, Tsogyal told Pema things she already knew. “You are a lucky girl to have been able to come here.” “Your name means Lotus and represents something beautiful growing out of mud and muck.” “You have such pretty black hair.”

Pema wasn't interested in Tsogyal or in speaking Tibetan. She was too intent on decoding the strange but wonderful food, the cars and who sat in what seat, the TV set and all its important confusion, and the secret sounds erupting from the exciting boy who was the same size as her.

“Do you have a favourite colour?” Tsogyal asked as she and Beau drew pictures at the kitchen table.

“Monster,” Beau would yell as if Pema were deaf, thrusting his picture under her nose.

She'd plug her ears and shake her head at him, point to his drawing and repeat, “Mon-ster.”

He'd growl and shove the paper against her face, but not too hard. When he laughed, she laughed too and then it was as if they were speaking the same language.

Tired of drawing, Beau would dump a bucket of tiny coloured bricks at her feet.

“Would you like to build something?” said Tsogyal in Tibetan. “A house?”

“Lego,” Beau roared.

When he gave her one word at a time, she could repeat it. But when he strung them together in long necklaces, her shrug would draw disappointment on his face. She didn't care about disappointing Tsogyal, but this boy's disappointment felt like her own.

“I don't know,” she learned to say and “What what?” so Beau would try again and she might catch the important words, hoard them like treasure. And when she became certain of the meaning and sound, she'd give him the words back and watch him smile as if he'd done it, not her. When Beau's face was happy, it reminded her of the cutest of puppies. When big brother Quinn's face was happy, it still looked worried.

Two giant metal cylinders covered in what looks like Tibetan Braille stand in the entrance to the Thangka Room. A staff woman, short with cloudy grey hair, is encouraging everyone to “Have a go.”

“Spinning the prayer wheel accumulates merit and virtuous karma,” she broadcasts, “ensuring a favored birth in your next life.”

“What about this life?” Pema whispers.

Les puts a finger to his lips.

Pema steps up and gives the dirty-grey cylinder a hard whirl. Expecting the metal to be cold to the touch, she's grossed out to find it warm.

“Clockwise,” corrects the woman.

“What?”

“You're supposed to spin it clockwise.”

“Or what happens?” she asks.

The woman's eyes cross before she looks away and encourages the next person in line.

“I have to use the washroom,” Pema tells Les. “‘Cause how many jabillion hands have touched that wheel thing over the centuries?”

Les gently pushes the back of her head in the direction of the washrooms. “Hurry up.”

Her parents blame her germ phobia on the unsanitary conditions of the refugee camp where she was raised, where washing hands was a religion. Or so she was told. She has zero memories of her birth mother or of Nepal, as if it truly was another lifetime. Jill had made a photo album of her adoption trip and every photo of the refugee camp is slightly hazy as though the camera lens was covered in grime. In contrast, all the pictures on the plane and of Pema's “homecoming” are bright and clear, the world suddenly come into focus. There was only one photo of her birth mother because apparently she'd refused to have her picture taken, something about it stealing her soul. Though Pema doesn't remember doing it, apparently she tore that picture up and flushed it down the toilet.

She angles her hand underneath the soap dispenser to make it auto-pump soft pink foam, and again for a double helping. Inhales its watermelon scent. The pictures taken on the airplane show her on Les's lap, wailing, and asleep in her seat with her mouth slung open. Most of the pictures are of her arrival.

Her first memory – not just a picture memory – is of seeing her new home, towering green trees hiding a white two-storey palace with yellow window boxes spilling the most beautiful red flowers. There are pictures of Auntie Annie wearing a tie-dyed turban, of Quinn, seven, smiling dutifully for the camera, and Beau, three, scowling. Another shows Grammy Nan, making a sad face as she sits in a chair and holds crying Pema's hands in both of hers. In one picture a beautiful cake covered in snow-white icing and edible orange and yellow flowers is in front of her, her face scrunched and crying. Her favourite picture is of Beau pushing cake into her wailing mouth to get her to shut up already. Beau was the only one who wasn't cautious around her, who didn't pretend to love her. She trusted him instantly.

Pema finds Les in front of a painting of a naked white woman with three eyes, straddling the lap of a naked blue man, also three eyed, who's holding a sword in one hand and what looks like flaming molded Jell-O in the other. She leans her head against his shoulder, wraps her arms around his elbow.

“The union of male and female deities represents the indivisibility of form and space,” he reads.

“Like whatever that means.”

“Well, it's interesting when you think about it,” he says.

“Mind if I go see the clothes?”

He sighs and shakes his head, making her feel dumb. She slips her arms from his. Jill sometimes makes her feel dumb, and Quinn, but never Dad. It's a new feeling and she doesn't like it.

“I'm interested in fashion like Auntie Annie,” she says, defensive. “I want to see the clothes.”

“That's fine, Sweetheart,” he says, his tone softening. “I'll meet you there.”

Two headless mannequins wear sleeveless wraparound dresses the colour of dirt over a yellow shirt with flared sleeves. A plaque reads:
These everyday chubas are made of cotton and wool.
The word chuba she does remember. Her phone vibrates against her thigh and she reaches for it when Les comes up behind her.

“You had a chuba just like that one,” he says.

“I did?” She doesn't remember that chuba and loves hearing stories from when she was small and new and an object of so much careful attention. When she was the luckiest girl in the world.

“Brown with white stitching. But you left that behind because your birth mother had a fancy silk one made for your departure, though she couldn't afford it.” He pauses as if to let this information sink in. “It was a very pretty sky blue and you wore that thing every day for months. You knew how you wanted it tied and if Jill –”

“If Jill or you tried to help, I smacked your hands away,” she says.

“Didn't want your chuba messed with,” he finishes. “When we finally got you into shorts and a T-shirt, you never touched it again. Though didn't Auntie Annie re-make it into a regular dress?”

Her sixth birthday, all eyes on her as she opened Auntie Annie's box. “It's an old dress made into a new dress,” her aunt had explained before passing it over. When Pema saw the watery flash of blue silk, she shut the box again and Beau said, “She's gonna blow.” And she did, unable to explain why it embarrassed her to see her old chuba again after believing it had gone safely away to the Salvation Army.