Silent Girl (17 page)

“The reason I asked about baseball,” Mira said, tripping over the words in a haste to reinsert herself, “is that Matty's into T-ball and Anthony has been kicked up to the majors. The regular season was over by the time I moved in. I was planning to give them a good work-out between games next summer.” Rhonda had said to go for an Oscar, but first you had to win the part.

Angel gave Mira a look. Mira gave her one back that said, What? and swallowed the rest of her drink.

“Mira throws like a boy,” Anthony said to Charles.

“Correction. I'm a girl, so I throw like a girl.”

“If all goes as p-p-planned,” Charles said, “We'll be taaaking the boys to the Oakland games. Season t-t-tickets.”

We.

“Boo, Oakland, boo,” Anthony said.

“That's rude,” Angel said, giving him a stern look. “You'll get to see the Twins when they play Oakland.”

“Neat,” Matty said.

Anthony narrowed his eyes.

“So, Charles,” Mira said, her mouth starting to feel mushy. “I'm curious. Why marry now, after all those carefree bachelor years?”

Angel stood abruptly, throwing Mira a cautionary look. “I'd better check on dinner. Time to wash up, boys.”

“Huh?” Matty said. Something new. The boys furrowed their brows and looked at Mira. She grinned and nodded towards the bathroom. They stood and slunk away.

Mira turned back to Charles. “Well?”

He slid off the couch and onto the floor next to her. “Mmmay I confide?” he asked in almost a whisper. “All mmmy life I have been afraid to taake a risk. Afraid to mmmake a mistake. I wwwant to d-d-do something worthwhile bee-fore it's too late. Adopt the b-b-boys. Give them my nnname.”

Mira wondered what was wrong with the name they had, but she was touched by his candour. She felt singled out and trusted. It made her believe he really
had
gotten the apron and napkins just for her.
I wish I could remember you.

“Will you light the candles, Charles?” Angel said from the edge of the kitchen. Had she overheard?

Charles struggled to his feet. “Cer-er-tainly. Have they been lit beee-fore?”

“No, they're brand new.”

“Then why don't I taaake them into the hallway and b-b-burn them for a mmmoment?”

“Whatever for?”

He explained it was good manners to burn a new candle briefly in advance of a dinner party so the offensive smell of first snuffing would be out of the house when guests arrived. Since Mira was already there, he could accomplish the same objective by pre-lighting the candles in the hallway.

“How interesting,” Angel said. “Mira, will the smell of new candles offend your senses?”

Mira stood with a grunt. “Hell, no. I'll even go out in the hallway and burn them with you, Charles.” He lit the candles where they were and gave Mira a rueful smile.

“So mmmany p-p-points of protocol I learned helping my p-p-parents entertain,” he said. “I mmmistakenly assume others know them, as wwwell.”

Angel squeezed his arm and said, “It's okay. Even after all these years, we have lots to learn about each other.”

The boys came back and took their chairs. “What's the yucky stuff in the rice?” Matty asked. Anthony snickered.

“Honestly,” Angel said. She picked up a bottle of wine from the table. “A gift from Charles for you and me,” she told Mira, filling their glasses. Charles was having water, the boys something orange.

“Then I shall have to make a toast,” Mira said. Angel's eyes widened.

“To all the lives we've ever lived,” Mira said, lifting her glass, “and all we ever will.” She took a big sip.

Angel smiled. “Lovely.”

“Hear, hear,” Charles said.

Anthony said, “I don't get it.”

They tucked into the meal, almost every bite punctuated by Charles exclaiming how exquisite it was. Mira had never seen anyone hold silverware that way. He didn't shift his fork from his left to his right hand once.

“Which one of us went over the mountain first, do you suppose?” she said, looking to Angel and Charles in turn.

Charles gave her a questioning smile.

Angel said, “Pardon?”

“Just thinking about something Rhonda said. The Alps? Odelayheehee,” she sang.

The boys laughed but Angel looked perplexed, even a little annoyed.

“Guess you had to be there,” Mira said. She smiled at the boys sitting across from her. Her heart felt empty and full at the same time. People kept slipping out of her hands.

“Don't pick up the asparagus with your fingers, Matty,” Angel said.

Mira got up, walked around to Matty's place and cut his asparagus into small pieces.

“He has to learn to do that on his own,” Angel said, an edge to her voice.

Mira returned to her chair, replaced her napkin on her lap and locked eyes with Angel. “Do you enjoy robbing me of everything?”

Angel looked shattered. Charles coughed and Anthony said, “What?”

Mira studied her plate until the boulder in her throat crumbled. “I really miss my brother,” she said and stood. “Sorry for spoiling your evening.” She made it to the door quickly and stepped into the hallway. Angel was right behind her.

“Tell me what's happening. I'm tense, I know. Sorry if I took it out on you. Should I walk you upstairs?”

Mira stood facing the wall opposite Angel's door. “I'm fine. It's not your fault we fell off the mountain, you know. I should have paid more attention.”

Angel stepped closer and let out a long, slow breath Mira felt on her neck. “Mira, I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Of course you don't and that's what's so hard to bear. We go through all these lives together then move on. A curtain drops across our memories each time, like we never existed before.”

Angel put her hands on Mira's shoulders. “Sweetie, you will always exist for me.”

They would both say later they didn't know how it happened. As Mira turned around, their faces were only inches apart. Angel's breath had a fruity smell. Her mouth was as soft as fresh bread. It was a light kiss at first but accompanied by tremors of recognition. Mira was surprised she didn't want to kick herself around the block later. Angel would say she felt little bubbles of Mira's consciousness for hours.

Angel called early the next morning. “I told him I won't leave you.”

“What did he say?”

“That his house is more than big enough.”

The Snow People: 30-46 AGM

I sprang not / more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child / than in first seeing he had proved himself a / man.

—Volumnia in
Coriolanus

SELANNA
THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE GREAT MIGRATION

To the child in my womb I say: the blood passing between your heart and mine comes from the very first Snow People, two lovers who defied an ancient taboo and ate the liver of a polar bear. It should have killed them. Instead, it turned their skin and hair as white as the great bear's fur and their eyes the colour of a glacial lake. The lovers had seven children, all with the same white skin and hair, all but one with the same startling eyes. For thousands of years, the lovers' white-skinned, white-haired descendants worshipped The Land and survived on what it bestowed until even the winter ice began to thin and fewer of the fish they caught and fewer of the animals they hunted passed their way. One year the ice refused to return, and water swallowed The Land. The Snows loaded up their boats and began the Great Migration south. After many seasons, they landed on an island populated by people the Snows called Rainbows in a republic called New Columbia. The Rainbows took their boats away and the Snows could no longer hunt and fish. They could no longer worship The Land.

30
AGM
. The sun was everywhere that May afternoon, gloating at its triumph over months of relentless rain. Gruzumi and I flowed out of the Village to collect with the others, like storm water, at the edge of the nature reserve – an undulation of alabaster bodies, most in mismatched clothes worn to softness, everything too short. We must have numbered a thousand. No more polite tugging on sleeves for promises of small gains. We were ready, at last, to reclaim the dignity of our elders.

Ada, as my mother insisted I call her, had stayed behind. “You'll earn us nothing but trouble, acting so big,” she said earlier that day, leaning on the doorpost of the bedroom we shared, arms folded across her parrot-coloured blouse. Watching me step into the jumpsuit she'd made of black denim and striped cotton cadged from the recycling centre where she worked. No ill-fitting clothes for Adawalinda's daughter.

“You refuse to see all they do for us,” she said. “They could put us on the street tomorrow, cancel our jobs, let us starve.”

“You refuse to see their ignorance,” I said, tucking my long, straight hair behind my ears in a way I knew she found too severe. I felt more powerful than she could imagine, bound to a mission I could not yet name. Reasoning with her was pointless.

“They'll drop you from the program,” she said, lifting her dyed eyebrows into cartoonish frowns. “You can't have it both ways.”

“I don't care,” I said, which wasn't true. I was one of few Snows admitted into the Sustainable Skills teaching program. Like my grandmother, Aaka Elin, I could tell you which plants healed, which ones poisoned. In less than two years, I would finish my training and explain to my students why mackerel swam in our waters but salmon no longer did, how evening primrose seeds could ease pain, that each part of a dandelion was useful. My students. They populated my inner world already. I'd spawned their need for me and mine for them.

“We wouldn't starve,” I told Ada on my way out the door.

The Rainbows didn't resent us at first. Visiting scientists needed meeting rooms, hotel beds, and restaurant meals while they tried to decode our genes. We attracted journalists and tourists who filled the streets almost year-round until I was six, before fuel surcharges kept away all but the wealthy and shut the ferries down. Some looked in shadowy doorways for Snows who didn't mind trading on curiosity about the colour of the hair between their legs. Others tugged at our heads, convinced we wore wigs. If they stroked my head, I'd purr loudly to embarrass them. I stared openly at the many shades of their hair and skin, the pink of their fingernails. Aaka Earth had decorated them from her full palette. Except for our eyes, we merited only a single hue.

“Never mind,” Ada would say. “How boring if all butterflies looked alike.” She was happy for the cash tourists paid to be photographed next to us, our bodies rising heads above theirs, like Douglas firs among Jack Pines. She spent it on deep red lipstick when there was still lipstick to buy.

“How do you tell each other apart?” tourists would ask.

I could spot Gruzumi a block away, that hip-rolling, unhurried walk I counted on to calm me. My hands, alone, would have known him by the mole on the back of his neck, where his long braid began, and the smooth strip of his spine where it ended, by the cool, metal disk encircling a hole in his earlobe big enough for my pinky to go through.

Arms around each other's waists, he and I burrowed into the crowd. Advised by an underground legal association, our Elder Council instructed us through red bullhorns that flashed in the sun:
Courage, Snows. Stand firm for justice, but don't resist arrest. Don't talk back.

“The hell we won't,” Gruzumi said.

Yeah. I pulled his face down and kissed his soft, pale mouth, brushed my nose across the strip of white fuzz edging his upper lip. He was my heart, pumping conviction into my veins as potent as any hallucinogenic fungus. I craved him more than justice.

In rows of locked arms, the sea of us flooded the streets leading to Parliament. At its last session before summer recess, New Columbia would vote on legalizing a long-standing practice: restricting us to government jobs that paid in credits instead of cash, credits we could use only for Village housing and in government stores. When the bill was proposed, we sent petitions and delegations to Parliament members. The Elder Council wrote letters to neighbouring republic Prairie Shield, asking it to intervene. Its silence on the matter led the more impatient of us to propose sit-ins and roadblocks, though we'd never tried them before, never stood up for ourselves even once. The Council's pitiful concession was a peaceful march. Snows couldn't vote. How would our mere presence persuade even a single politician to act on our behalf?

An honour guard of various ages led the way, hoisting placards that read
Bill 82: You Know It's Wrong
and
Snow Rights Are Human Rights.
Although our route had been well-publicized, a few microcars collected behind us, beeping their toy-like horns, expecting us to give way. I flipped them a mental finger. Snows weren't entitled to fuel rations, weren't supposed to travel beyond the electric shuttle range.

“Get out and walk, you bastards!” Gruzumi shouted.

A few cowards called out for him to shut up, to not make trouble.

In answer, I began chanting, “Bastards, bastards.” Others joined in, and the chant morphed into “Faster, faster.” It rolled across the crowd, gathering intensity and pulling us forward as if we were kites on the verge of lifting. The sky was a deep blue and the sun so brilliant it whitewashed the ground and painted our shadows in giant dark spikes. Oh to lie naked with Gruzumi under a billion suns! I felt giddy from all that light and sky; buoyant from having Right on our side.

A few “snow flakes” – what some Rainbows called those sympathetic to our cause – joined the march. Hostile others stood along the route holding their own placards:
What more do you want? Send the bloodless giants back.
In another age, we might have been as sacred as white tigers or stags. The white butterflies as prized as the swallowtails, coppers, and blues.

Half a dozen police flanked our march in air scooters that whined as they hovered and gargled when they flew back and forth. Hundreds more, on foot and in riot gear, waited at the Parliament buildings. They formed a living fence across the entrance: silent, black sentries with praying mantis heads. Others were posted across the street in front of the nine-metre high seawall that held back the steadily encroaching ocean.

Gruzumi's low, deep moan gave voice to my fears. We often saw police in such numbers on the library's holovision, but the images came from faraway lands where refugees from drought or violent storms amassed at border crossings, desperate for food and shelter. “How lucky we are,” Ada would say for my benefit when we watched those images together, her mouth puckered like a doll's. “Handed so much without a struggle.”

The unexpected sight of that many police made the crowd buckle. People called out, “What should we do?” Some turned in retreat. But the bullhorns urged us to proceed with the plan to occupy the Parliament grounds. Most of us did, spreading over the grass like a stain, keeping a wary distance from the police. Another people's song rose up from our throng:
Keep on a-walkin', keep on a-talkin', marching up to freedom land.
I could see the words enter Gruzumi's back and strengthen his resolve. We added our voices to the chorus that grew so sonorous I imagined it reaching the mainland. Then a rhythmic rumbling began, like winter rain pounding every gutter on every roof in the city.

“Sit, sit!” voices around us shouted. “They won't hurt us if we sit down!” The crowd began collapsing in surges like stricken tents. Once all of us were down on the grass, I could see that the rumbling came from the police who marched towards us, steadily, slowly, beating their shields with batons. They made no announcements, no request to disperse, just rained down on their shields. The noise rose up through the earth and into my legs and hips. I wrapped my arms around Gruzumi and closed my eyes, willing the sound to stop. It did, and Snows at the front started screaming.

Gruzumi stood and pulled me up beside him. The police were swinging their batons, connecting with heads and backs. People had their hands up but still the police hit them as they waded through the crowd. We were far enough back to escape, and many around us rose and headed for the street, yelling for others to get out of their way, stepping on the hands of those still sitting as though stupefied.

“Stop!” Gruzumi shouted, waving his arms. “We outnumber them. If we run towards them, we can beat them back.” Yes, but how many had heard?

“Beat them back, beat them back,” I shouted over and over. The idea caught hold with others who tried to help turn the tide of retreating bodies, but we were too few. We grabbed hands and threaded our way upstream. I took the lead, lowering my head and stiffening my body to force us through. As we got nearer the screaming, it intensified. Then, a crackling and the smell of burnt toast.

“Sela, no!” Gruzumi said. He saw the dancing blue lightning before I did and tried to pull me back. It was as if foot-long knives ripped me apart. I fell on my face and went into convulsions. My jaw shook so hard I was sure my teeth would shatter. Struck, too, Gruzumi fell beside me. I felt his spasms through the ground. Even as the knife-like pain gave way to a fire burning inside me, I was aware of him and thankful we would die together.

By the time we pulled ourselves up on trembling arms and knees, the sun had painted the sky with purple and yellow streaks. Moaning bodies lay nearby. A stench assaulted my nose. I lowered my head and looked between my legs. Like a helpless infant, I had soiled myself.

“Can't take you anywhere,” Gruzumi said. I tried to laugh for his sake. We rolled onto our backs and wept up into the bruised sky. When our tears were spent and we could speak again, we promised ourselves to each other for as long as forever would last.

“What have you done to us?” Ada said, when I returned to the Village. Emotion exposed the blood vessels under her cheeks. “Did they take down your code?”

Stamped on a metal tag around my neck was D-121782: building D, unit 12, resident 1782 in the Good Neighbour Village.

“No,” I said, hurrying past her to our small washroom.

She pursued me. “What's that stink? What did you sit in? You've ruined that outfit.”

I switched on the hydro, cupped my hands and scooped water into my mouth, trying to flush away the chemical taste at the back of my throat. That and my shameful smell made me want to retch.

“I'm disappointed in you,” she shouted through the bathroom door.

Ada had been living my future since I entered university. “When we're teaching,” she'd say, “we'll buy a sewing machine.” Teachers received more purchasing credits than most. She made all our clothes, fusing a discarded skirt to a sweater, a sleeveless shell to a pair of pants, hand stitching them – every item an original, each with a story to tell. She dreamed of selling her designs to Rainbows. Adawalinda's Revivals, she would call them. I wanted her to be more than a beggar. But I wanted her to dream for us all.

I stripped and squatted over the toilet to clean myself. Gruzumi had gone off to prepare his parents. How to tell Ada he and I couldn't bear to be apart now, each afraid the other would disappear. Snows didn't get married as Rainbows did. We just decided to stay together. If I had my own room, Gruzumi could have moved in with us, but he wouldn't have fit into Ada's world of two.

“We're like orphaned sisters,” she would say as we mopped up after storms or foraged in the dark during the rolling blackouts. Her father and brothers had perished during the Great Migration, leaving only her and Aaka Elin, whose body rejected the island diet for good when I was twelve. Ada had never lived with a man as an adult, not even the one who fathered me in
11 AGM
when she was seventeen. Rumour held he was a tourist she met while telling fortunes down at the harbour, but she wouldn't talk about him and there was little Rainbow in me except for a few freckles – not unusual for a Snow – and a patch of pink skin on my right hip. I often wondered if the part of me that didn't understand her came from my father.