Greedy Little Eyes (29 page)

For the first four years of Dusty’s life the two of them “played house,” as Alice put it. She talked about
going back to school when Dusty started kindergarten. She kept a sketchbook, and as soon as Dusty could hold crayons, they would draw together for hours on end. Sometimes they’d go down Robson Street or to Stanley Park and draw strangers for money—caricatures or straight likenesses, Alice could get a face down either way. Dusty would draw her own version: blue hair on a potato head with trophy-handle ears and two teeth. The customer would shell over twenty-five bucks and leave clam-happy with both.

Then kindergarten happened. Dusty started school three months before her fifth birthday and suddenly, after a half-decade abstention, Alice turned on the television again and took to sitting and staring at the screen, eating junk food and phoning me at the store several times a day.

I tried to get her to come down to the shop again. I suggested she sketch women at the papermaking classes on her self-made paper. It would be both inspirational and a money-maker.

She should get out, I said, and meet people. She’d lost touch with all her friends.

She came once, had half a glass of Quills red, her foot tapping constantly, like a woodpecker’s beak, at the floor. She couldn’t concentrate enough to draw and didn’t want to make paper. Why did the world need more paper?

She left halfway through the class and the paper pupils looked relieved to see the back of her.

She couldn’t sleep at night either. My father worriedly told me that he often woke to her creaking up and down
the hall, or going down to the basement. She couldn’t seem to manage regular meals and her clothes hung loose and sloppy on her. Crying jags started up frequently. She was terrified of Dusty becoming infected by her sadness, and the idea of it drove her to the doctor.

She was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and armed with an anti-anxiety prescription as well as a benzodiazepine for emergencies.

Alice quieted down again, in a peculiar way.

It was summertime and as usual half of North America seemed to be ablaze. Forests everywhere were closed to hikers; planes whining overhead doused the flames. By this point, Alice was watching nothing but news: CNN, CBC, morning news, noon news, evening news. She’d phone me at work, telling me about the latest evacuations and deaths.

It must have been two o’clock one morning when I woke to the phone ringing. I picked up and heard her whispering in my ear.

“Spontaneous combustion,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I know now. The gasoline, I know what it was for.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Momma. She was using it to put out the fire.”

I thought of that David Bowie song about putting out a fire with gasoline.

“She wasn’t crazy,” my sister said. “She was a genius.”
Alice muffled the receiver and spoke to someone in the room—Dusty, presumably—then back into the phone. “I’ll explain so you understand. You know how they put out forest fires? They start another fire. It’s tricky: a second fire ahead of the first fire. There’s nothing left to burn when the original flame gets there. It’s like a person; it’s alive and it knows when there’s nothing left to eat so it tries to go back but it already ate that up too, you see? But it’s tricky. You never know what fire might try. See, she
tried
to stop her fire. She almost got away but it’s tricky. She got tricked.”

After I hung up the phone that night and fell back asleep, I was in the back seat of my mother’s car. She was driving. It was sunny and warm and my legs were bony and brown. Every now and then she would touch her rear-view mirror and smile at my reflection, her thick golden arms looking like dessert. I wished I could suckle them, climb underneath and curl up in the soft pits.

The sun was setting and my mother said we needed to get there before it did—that was the only way to put out the fire. I did up my seat belt.

“Not now, hon,” she said. “You’ve got to be ready.”

The seat belt was important. I was supposed to unbuckle it at the right moment, but how could we ever make it to the sun before it set?

Momma slapped the steering well. “No-no-no. Not yet, just wait,” she called toward the glare, and whoever was controlling it.

So orange it was red, the looming glow took up the whole of the windshield. We were nearly there and
Momma reached into the passenger side for the gas can.

“Hurry and open this up for us, sweetheart.”

I couldn’t get myself unbuckled now and Momma was losing her temper. “For god’s sake, drink it!” She twisted the cap with one hand while trying to steer with the other. The car was lit with neon sunlight. My mother bellowed at the rear-view mirror, “Drink it up! We’re here, we’re here!”

I woke up to more ringing beside my bed. It was Dusty calling.

When they found Georgia, she was in ribbons, punched halfway through the windshield. My mother’s body lay on the hood of her car, the nose of which was crushed against a gas pump, cracked now and spraying. Emergency vehicles had closed off the streets for fear there would be an explosion. Hers, fortunately, was the only car at the now-closed service station.

When I imagined it later, I saw it as lovely somehow, romantic: her flung body serene like that of a child dozing, her flesh soft and luminescent. There was no blood in my picture, just the street’s white lights radiating purity through the spritzing liquid as it fell gently over the scene.

At first it was thought that she had gone to fill up an emergency gasoline container for some future need, perhaps another driver stranded somewhere nearby, but as luck would have it, she had ended up at a station that
was already closed for the night. Perhaps in her rush to be a good Samaritan, she had somehow lost control of her vehicle, careening headlong into the pumps. But an accident investigation unearthed no witnesses, no breakdowns in the vicinity. Her own car’s tank almost full, the emergency gas can was now emptied all over the dashboard, thoroughly soaking the front and back seats.

There was a box of wooden matches sprayed across the passenger side, none used. The report would show the vehicle’s steering was solid and tight; the brakes were fine. There were no skid marks. Her final destination, it appeared, had been planned and purposeful.

Dusty played at the foot of the grassy slope with a visiting cocker spaniel. Alice and I sat up top, on the brown wool blanket from her bed, holding hands and staring down over the lawn and trees out back of the hospital.

Alice fidgeted with a bare foot in the grass. “I remember it was getting to be suppertime and I was going to take a bath and the next thing I remember is Daddy standing in my doorway.”

I waved down at Dusty, who grinned up at us now as she coaxed the dog to dance with her. “It was about four in the morning when she called,” I said. “I told her to go wake up Granddad.”

Alice closed her eyes, rested her chin on her knees. “I quit the happy pills. I was on so many, you know—there was, like, Buspar and Xanax and this one and that
one till they found the right thing. But I couldn’t stand it, not feeling anything. I’d’ve rather been miserable than nothing.”

Air pushed through my nose in what sounded like derision before I could decide if it actually was.

She looked at me. She had pulled her hair back in a band and it gave her a clean, studious appearance. “Okay.” She inhaled as if a confession were in the works. “It wasn’t bad at first when they found the right cocktail. I felt pretty good.” She rolled her neck a moment, getting out the kinks. “So I started taking extra. Then I got all jittery, like it was coke or something. And I liked that. Sort of. I liked having energy again. Then the heartburn started. Like hot coals through my chest, and by then I was taking, like, four times the dose and I thought, God, I’m always poisoning myself. Why can’t I just be normal? And I flushed them all down the toilet. Man, the heartburn after that!” She laughed half-heartedly.

My jaws hurt and I realized how clenched they were. “There was water coming under Dad’s door when Dusty woke him.”

Alice took another big breath and released it in quick little bursts, nodding. She stared down toward her daughter. “I keep seeing her little feet in the water on the bathroom floor, and I just want to—” She squeezed her eyes shut.

“You said you weren’t going to die like her and you weren’t going to get tricked, they were trying to trick you into swallowing fire.”

“Nice.” She turned to me and held my hand in her
lap like a prayer book. I could feel a prepared statement coming on.

“I’m going to do better, Angie. I have to. They said I could leave here, you know—but I’m scared if I don’t get straightened out, you’ll all get sick of my shit and ditch me. And Dusty will go with you.”

I opened my mouth wide and the crack of my lower jaw seemed extraordinarily loud. I wanted to crush her hand in mine. Break all the tiny bones apart.

“It’s okay.” I pulled away. “Dad and I have Dusty covered.”

I clasped my hands in my lap. Alice looked down at them, her expression wounded.

It was silent for a good minute or so.

“You can’t stand me.”

“I don’t want to stand,” I croaked. “I mean—” I scratched hard at my scalp for a second. “I’m sick of being the dependable one, guaranteed to stand up straight. I don’t get to just fall apart whenever the mood strikes.”

“I know,” she whispered.

We looked to the bottom of the slope. Dusty and the spaniel danced the cha-cha around below until it occurred to them to run through the sprinklers, back and forth.

“Dusty, come on, don’t do that,” I called.

My sister watched her, a blissful look on her face.

The dog’s people looked up just as Dusty and the spaniel loped toward them, wet to the skin now. The spaniel shook his dripping self all over the two on the
blanket and they screamed in protest. Dusty put both hands over her face and doubled over. When she took her hands down, her face was contorted and red. Tears ran as she raced back up the slope toward us.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the support of the BC Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Ledig House International Writers’ Residency and The Seaside Institute’s Escape to Create Residency.

Perhaps most of all I would like to thank my editor Anne Collins and Random House for continuing to believe in the power of the story, both long and short.

Publication History

“Make Yourself Feel Better” first appeared in
THIS Magazine
, and was recorded by Rattling Books for
EarLit Shorts
6, an audio short-fiction anthology.

“Clown Lessons” first appeared in
Toronto Life
.

“Greedy Little Eyes” first appeared as “Shiny as Film” in
Prism Magazine
.

“You’re Taking All the Fun Out of It” first appeared in
THIS Magazine
, and reprinted in the
Journey Prize Anthology.