Eve's Rib, page 4
“Aren’t they just darling?” Sharon said. The new mother lounged elegantly in a satin-padded basket that Sharon referred to as a “queening box.” Cuchulain’s litter nuzzled against her, eyes tightly closed and anxiously mewling.
Abbey had pleaded with Eve to bring home one of the kittens. But Eve could barely trust her with the dog, and she had never been the type of witch to take a familiar. They could be great for adding some extra oomph to a spell, but it was a tricky business. Janet had kept a hedgehog as a familiar, and she’d ended up blowing off one of its legs while trying to develop a charm to combat snoring. She’d fashioned a peg leg for it using a whittled piece of willow and a faux leather strap from an old high-heeled shoe. But the animal was never the same. A devoted member of PETA, Janet was devastated. Eve’s dog was too dumb to be a familiar, a result of poodle inbreeding. But cats were naturally attracted to magic. Eve couldn’t afford to bring that kind of trouble home.
“Come take a seat,” Sharon said as Eve poured herself some dark red Shiraz from the decanter on the sideboard. The only chair left in the living room full of women holding the same book was almost as uncomfortable as Eve’s mother’s. She sat down with her wine, trying to keep as upright as she could. But it was a losing battle. The woman next to her offered her a pillow from the sofa. Eve accepted it gratefully and put it behind her back.
“Poor you,” Sharon said, making her overly concerned face. “You always seem to have some kind of an injury.”
“I guess I’m just clumsy,” Eve said, trying to settle herself in the straight-backed chair.
“Yes,” said Sharon, picking up a kitten for a cuddle. “I suppose you are.”
The Patels had introduced themselves when Eve and Richard first arrived in the neighbourhood. They had moved not because they were looking for a newer, better home but because they wanted to escape their old one. In their first house, Eve had imagined Michael and Abbey growing up, having friends over as teenagers, their laughter and music flowing down from the second-floor loft where their bedrooms were. Close, but with a space of their own. But after the accident, Eve could no longer bear to look at the railing that ran along the hall in that second-floor loft. Michael had fallen from it when he was eight, smashing his head open on the first-floor hardwood. She’d run down the stairs taking them two at a time. But it had been too late for magic. Eve was holding him in her arms when he died. As his soul passed through her, all her powers latched on to him as she sought to keep him earthbound. And so, her essence had ridden piggyback with her son into the next realm. She’d howled as both her child and her fruitless abilities to save him were ripped away from her. She had been left powerless ever since, at least for all the things that mattered.
Sharon knew about the accident, but she didn’t know what really happened that day. No one but Eve and her daughter knew that.
Abbey and Selena ran down the stairs laughing, then shushed each other when they saw the grown-ups in the living room.
“We’re just getting some snacks, Mom.” With her thick black hair pulled back in a long glossy braid, Selena’s liquid amber eyes and full lips declared the richness of her background.
“That’s fine, dear. How is the studying going?”
“Wonderful,” Abbey replied formally. “We’re almost finished our poetry assignment.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Sharon said, mirroring back the same formality with just a touch of ice. She didn’t like that her own daughter hadn’t been given the chance to reply.
Once the two girls had their snacks, they ran back up the stairs again at a pace, as if the horrors of middle age in the living room might infect their good looks. Eve remembered what it was like to be that young. The power that came with puberty as you walked down the street with your newly minted curves, everyone looking, often as if you’d done something wrong. All beauty, it seemed, was met with a certain degree of distrust. Eve tried to follow the girls up the stairs with her mind’s eye, but her vision was too hazy from the Tylenol 3s.
“Well, I hated the book,” said Pauline Henderson, dipping a dark-brown cracker the consistency of cardboard into a richly whipped white dip. “And I loved his first book. But this one was just such a disappointment.”
Eve took a gulp of the bitter Shiraz. It was in one of those glasses with no stem that you could fit half a bottle in and convince yourself you were only a social drinker. On the side, written in gold letters, it advised, MAKE GOALS, SMASH, REPEAT. She couldn’t stand it when book club started like this. I hated the book. I loved the book. Where the hell did you go from there? Eve liked to discuss the issues or ideas the book raised. This one, for instance, examined a runner’s experience growing up in a developing nation. Eve used to run marathons herself. Well, at least half marathons. Although not as a Black man in a developing country.
“It’s like he had to finish the book quickly, so he just wrote the ending in five minutes and called it done,” said a friend of Pauline’s. She was new to the group. But Pauline and her were in high school together, just as Eve and Janet had been. Old friends. It was nice to have people in your life who knew you from when you were young. Janet used to come to book club, making the long drive from Chatsworth even after she’d moved away. But she got into a fight with Georgina Patterson two years ago about the territorial range of the gray jay and hadn’t come back since. Janet liked to say she was blacklisted from the club — a joke, because she had been the only Black one in it.
“Well, I wasn’t a big fan of the book either, I’m afraid,” Sharon Patel declared. “My Selena read it as well, and she thought the same way.” Sharon never missed an opportunity to tell them Selena had read the book too. She considered her daughter a girl with tastes beyond the teenage vampire novels of her peers. Eve found it curious that no matter what they read, Selena always felt the same way about the book as her mother. She couldn’t imagine Abbey feeling the same way about anything as her.
The women went around the room, each one chiming in as to whether they liked or did not like the book. At this rate, the discussion would be over in five minutes, which is what they all wanted anyway, so they could get to the real raison d’être of the evening, getting slightly smashed and trying to one-up one another.
“Did Abbey read the book?” Sharon asked, knocking Eve out of her cozy wine buzz. She shouldn’t be drinking while taking the Tylenol 3s, but not drinking wine at book club was tantamount to social treason. Besides, it made her feel so wonderfully mellow. She could barely feel her rib anymore.
“No,” Eve said. “She’s been really busy lately.”
“I can imagine. Selena says she’s been putting in a lot of extra hours studying. Has her eye on the Thompson scholarship.” Eve hadn’t heard of the Thompson scholarship, but she and Richard could use all the money they could get toward Abbey’s university. Abbey planned to be a doctor. That meant a full degree and then med school. Eve couldn’t even fathom the cost of that.
“It’s a shame when kids don’t have enough time to just be kids, isn’t it?” Sharon commented, taking a discreet sip of wine from a regular wineglass with a stem. “I’m so glad Selena has her basketball.”
“Abbey’s on the basketball team too,” Eve pointed out, feeling the need to defend her daughter. She thought of mentioning the debating club and the athletic council Abbey belonged to as well. But they didn’t sound “kids being kids” enough.
“Well, of course,” Sharon drawled, “I didn’t mean to say that Abbey wasn’t involved in other things.” But this was exactly what she’d meant. “I just was thinking how much pressure some kids can be under. But of course, with you at home, you have the time to give her the support she needs.”
Sharon Patel was often not at home. She was a classical cellist who performed out of town with her symphony-conducting husband. She’d missed half of the girls’ basketball games. Eve took both Abbey and Selena to practice most days. She and Richard had made the decision together that she should quit her software exec job after Michael’s death, to write and stay close to home so she could keep a better eye on things. The unspoken words between them being that she hadn’t been keeping an eye on things before.
“I mean, I don’t know how you do it, being at home all the time,” Sharon continued when all she got from Eve was a terse nod. “I think I’d go stir-crazy without my work. But of course, you have your writing, don’t you? It’s so nice to have a hobby.”
Eve swallowed down hard on the wine-tinged bile that came up in her throat. It made her hiccup, totally ruining the possibility of a classy retort.
Feeling the tenseness between the two women, Pauline Harrison started to rave about the crudités. “Honestly, Sharon, you must give me the recipe. This is positively delicious. And you even remembered the gluten-free crackers for me. You’re such a doll.”
Distracted from their standoff by the sudden focus on what was surely store-bought dip, Eve and Sharon backed off. Pauline and her friend got into a warm and friendly argument about what “vegan” was. Sharon smiled and explained that they were both wrong in their definitions. And so the night progressed.
Eve was starting to feel woozy from the meds and the wine. She focused on the cat stretched out so elegantly with her slick black kittens attached to multiple pink teats. Eve hadn’t been able to breastfeed Abbey. She’d been colicky, always struggling and spewing against Eve’s breasts. Michael had been no problem, latching on like a trooper, falling asleep in her arms afterward in a contented, passed-out milk-drunk. Eve stared down the cat in her comfy repose, so at ease with being a mother. Cuchulain didn’t have to watch out for the next disaster. She didn’t have to keep “a better eye on things.” The cat’s lids half closed in ecstasy as her milk let down and Eve couldn’t penetrate them to plant a suggestion. She didn’t want to hurt the animal, only make it stand up and piss in the queening box in an undignified way. She wondered if the Patels would have the cat fixed after this. Eve had been fixed, just a few years ago. The cat even had her beat reproductively.
Eve decided she would leave book club early to buy some cigarettes at the corner store. She’d smoke them on the back deck when she got home. She wanted to inhale the fire and the fury she felt at her own failings and blow them out into the atmosphere. All witches had a love-hate relationship with fires, dancing by them and dying in them equally throughout history. Every fire was linked sacredly to the First Flame, Nanny had taught Eve and Janet. And by this she had meant both the sun and its counterpart, the flaming core of the earth. Eve had given up cigarettes years ago. Mostly, anyway. But tonight, she craved the potency of that first heady hit of smoke she’d had as a teen, pulling into her lungs what felt like the cosmic dust of a forgotten star.
With the time she had left, she turned her attention to the bedroom upstairs where her daughter snacked and possibly studied with her friend. But images of the girls only came to her in blurry watercolours, sprawled out on the pastel rug of Selena’s room. She was about to give up, make her excuses and leave, when a vision dropped down from the ceiling and swayed in front of her face — a dark noose fashioned from a thick black leather belt. A quick gasp escaped from Eve’s mouth before she could think to hold it back.
“Are you okay?” the woman who’d given her the pillow asked.
Eve looked up and saw a slick dark shadow slowly spreading across the ceiling from where the belt had dropped. As Sharon turned to offer Pauline Henderson some more crudités, a drop of blood fell from it soundlessly into her glass of Shiraz.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Eve said. She blinked her eyes repeatedly to shake off her second sight. The noose curled back up into the ceiling like a recoiling snake. The pool of blood on the ceiling receded as if sucked in by a straw.
“Are you sure?”
“No, really, I am,” she assured them. The vision was probably some errant psychic energy she’d tapped into by accident in her hazy state. Such things had happened in the past. “It’s just my rib,” she explained.
“Poor you,” Sharon Patel said again.
The cat got up from her bed without even a planted thought from Eve. The tiny kittens were shaken off her nipples one by one as she stretched and stepped out of the box. A particularly tenacious one fell off onto the carpet at Sharon Patel’s perfectly pedicured bare feet. She picked it up and tossed its sleek body back in with the others, then excused herself to let the cat out the back door. The kittens writhed in the box blindly, their whole world having disappeared.
Eve pictured inhaling the sweet toxic chemicals of cigarette smoke into her lungs on the back deck, swallowed up in the darkness of the night with her eyes squeezed shut, blind to everyone and everything.
Five
Get this! I caught my mom SMOKING! Can you believe it? I mean, I know she used to smoke before she met my dad, but it is so incredibly low-class. Like those girls downtown in their shiny leggings and pilled sweaters, pushing cheap strollers with a butt sticking out of their mouths. I told her if she died of lung cancer I wasn’t coming to her funeral. She said she didn’t care if anyone came to her funeral, then maybe she’d get some peace. What a drama queen.
Selena and I worked on our next “Dear Old Funnel Head” note tonight in her room. We’ve been slipping the notes into Dylan Penske’s locker all week. They all start off with “Dear Old Funnel Head, how I wish that you were dead.” We write them on the back of a printout of Maddie Johnston’s infamous kiddie-porn sexting picture, so he won’t show them to anyone. And when I say write, I mean we cut out letters and words from the newspaper and paste them on the printout like old-school blackmail letters. Selena’s parents still get the Globe and Mail on Saturdays. What a bunch of backward peasants.
“Dear Old Funnel Head, how I wish that you were dead. In the night, I will come creeping, stab you ten times and watch the blood seeping.” That one was Selena’s. I wrote the follow-up.
“Of my quest for blood I will never tire, around your neck goes a piano wire.”
LMFAO! We watched Dylan from around the corner when he opened up that one, saw the way his face kind of crumpled up and he looked around the school hallway all nervous, like he got caught having a boner about me again. Honestly, it’s just a fucking joke. Who is going to take something like that seriously?
I suggested, “I’ll twist the knife and watch you quiver, then gut you out and eat your liver.” But Selena said it was too intense.
“Watch your step, this isn’t for fun. Don’t look now, I’ve got a gun.” That’s what Selena came up with. Beyond the fact that it is really sad poetry, I pointed out that neither of us had a gun. She got all upset about that, like I meant we would actually do the things we were threatening Funnel Head with. For fuck’s sake, like I said, it’s just a joke. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to think about realism. Then we spent twenty minutes trying to rhyme something with poison, but that is goddamn impossible.
We finally settled on, “I’ll bury you alive with the other asshats, and watch you being eaten by hungry rats.” Not perfect, but it’ll have to do. It was hard finding the word ass in the headlines. I had to take an article on gas prices, chop off the g and add an s to it.
When we were done, Selena told me she couldn’t go to Zanax, completely screwing me over. Her parents are going to be away, and it would have been perfect, but she has to stay home with her stupid cat. Honestly, what is she going to do, stare at that dumb animal with her kittens clamped onto her like barnacles all night? Disgusting.
That’s probably why I got so angry when I came home. I was already upset. It’s not my fault what happened. But with Mom sitting there in the dark on the back deck totally wasted on wine, poisoning herself with cigarettes and making jokes about her funeral, I felt like I had to do something. Save her from herself. I hadn’t meant to break the wineglass, just to take it away from her. She’d had enough to drink anyway. When I threw her glass against the deck railing, she didn’t even flinch. Just got up with her gross cigarette still in one hand and teetered over to try and pick up the pieces, bent over like an old lady because of her rib. She could barely stand up.
Somebody has to do something about her. I mean, I love her and everything, but I really don’t like her. It’s hard having to be the responsible one in a parent-child relationship. And Dad is useless. He doesn’t understand what she’s capable of.
That day, when Michael fell over the railing, I was there. I saw what happened. How it got all dark and the house shook, and that sound came out of Mom from somewhere else, somewhere deep, without a bottom. She thinks I don’t know these things, but I do. Like I know when she tries to see into my thoughts. I can feel her crawling around in my mind sometimes late at night, tickling my brain. But then I just throw up a mental picture of that day with Michael and she disappears, fast and furtive, like a thief. I guess all moms do this, although I’ve never heard the other girls complain about it. So, I keep it to myself. I figure my mom is probably worse about it than others. She’s embarrassing enough without me admitting to that. Anyway, I can handle the mind creeping, but the smoking is just fucked up.
I so have to get out of here. If I don’t get that Thompson scholarship, I’ll have to do something drastic. Who could stay in a place like this? I should call Social Services and tell them my mother is a drunk and trying to kill me with second-hand smoke. But they’d just put me in a group home with a bunch of freaks.
I’ve got to get away from my mom and her poison. Even if I can’t rhyme anything with it. And I’m buying a ticket to Zanax anyway. Fuck Selena. Fuck everyone, including that goddamn cat.
Six
