She’d painted Thelma with a mournful cast to her face, and while Karen definitely hated Syd, she couldn’t hate her mom. Even back in Van she hadn’t blamed Thelma—she’d just needed to get out of harm’s way. She understood why her mom would want to get tipsy on Friday nights, forget everything for a few sweet hours, even her daughter, who it was ostensibly all for. The supervisor with his creepy surveillance, the landlord who didn’t fix the washing machines in the basement, the spiraling costs of gas and food and rent and insurance and fear.
“Relax, Thelma, just relax, I’m here. Take off your shoes, I’ll rub your feet for you.”
Karen felt ill, hearing Syd say that. But why should she deny her poor overworked mother a pleasure that, after all, Karen indulged in with Rick as often as she could?
Well, they used to, anyway. Nowadays Rick dove so much it had affected his libido.
“Darling, Karen hasn’t eaten,” Thelma said. “I’ll just run down to the corner and pick us up a bucket of chicken. And then we can pick up where we left off.”
Karen hated the taste of KFC, never mind that the cost of the bucket would’ve paid for a sack of organic brown rice Thelma could’ve made with vegetables: better tasting food that might just help to keep her encroaching cancer at bay. But who had the time, or the energy? It was Rick who had taught Karen about natural foods, how to make kombucha tea and grow herbs on the windowsill and sprout grains and pulses.
“Of course,” Syd said and grinned at Karen, meaningfully. She knew what was coming, and awful chicken was the least of it.
And just like the other times, she hadn’t told Syd to stop. She’d frozen. She couldn’t understand why; she hated herself for freezing. No, that was wrong: she actually had tried telling him to stop. He’d grinned at her, a grin with just the tiniest, shocking hint of menace in it.
There were footsteps outside in the hall. Syd stopped. Karen moved away from him and adjusted her clothes. He smiled, a weird mix of gratitude and again, menace.
Don’t tell. He didn’t have to say it out loud.
Thelma came in, looking happy to see them, but especially, it was unarguable, Syd. He got up and took the takeout bag from her and assembled food onto three plates. Thelma laughed and Syd kissed the top of her head. No, he buried his face in her hair and Karen watched in some horror as her mother melted, as if this was the one good thing that happened in her week. She’d never give it up. How could she?
Syd winked at Karen over her mother’s shoulder and said, “It smells delicious.”
“We’ll sit and eat, the three of us,” Thelma said happily, and Syd, serving the chicken, said, “I brought a movie over.”
The chicken smelled rotten.
Everything had smelled rotten for a long, long time.
The part that, oddly, creeped Karen out the most was that Syd didn’t even behave as if he were hiding anything. Maybe he thought it was normal, even fun, for the three of them to sit down together and watch the latest sex and violence thriller bordering on porn and eat chicken bred with no heads, right after he felt her up.
Did the chickens really have no heads? Karen wasn’t sure if it was true or Greenie apocrypha but it didn’t really matter. It could’ve been true; if it wasn’t true now, it would be soon.
It felt like it was true now.
She left without eating her chicken. She never told Thelma. She went to Rick’s. Her schoolbooks were all in her locker at the high school. She wore Rick’s clothes, and bought a few more at the St. Vincent de Paul, which was a lot cheaper than Value Village. She went on student assistance so she could help Rick pay his bills. He welcomed the windfall and spent a lot of it on art supplies. And Green.
Diving and phone calls were activities inimical to one another. And Karen wouldn’t have called her mother once they’d resurfaced; after diving, sleep always seemed of the utmost importance, leaving pesky to-dos like letting family know you’re safe to be left till morning. Anyway, Thelma wouldn’t have worried, not right away; she’d have known Karen was at Rick’s.
Problem was, she’d never called. And it was two years later.
Shit. No wonder Thelma was melancholic.
Karen picked up the store phone, looked at it.
Put it back. Shadow would hate it if she used long distance.
She left her painting to get up and re-arrange the crab in the window. It was slipping a little from its perch in a pink velvet Victorian armchair. If it fell forward to the floor it might break; papier mâché was hardly the hardiest of materials. Beautiful and rose-hued, the crab’s huge claws were painted with an eerie life-like verisimilitude. Light-shadows of waves floated across its back as though it were underwater, and prisms swirled in its eyes. Most visionary art was wall art painted on canvas and the fact that Rick’s was 3-D gained him an extra cachet. Even his early attempts back in Vancouver had been clearly better than average. It was why she’d crushed on him in the first place, more than his looks or his charm which were, truthfully, somewhat nonexistent. Karen had still been living at her mom’s, going to high school and hating her mom’s creepster boyfriend. Dropping in at the café where Rick worked part-time and hung his sea creatures had been her one solace. The dreamy oceanic peace in his work implied another world was possible, in a way nothing else ever had.
Rick hadn’t gone to Emily Carr. Green Lady, he used to tell her, earnestly mixing adhesive in their basement apartment, woke the neurons in his brain. He’d stay up all night studying and reading and making big slurries of smelly papier mâché. He spent their money on wire to make the armatures and flour to make glue. Karen wouldn’t have thought it possible to burn through a cheque buying flour, the cheapest of all possible supplies, and he probably wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for the infestation. One day when she went to close the big twenty-five kilo bag of flour Rick had left open, she was greeted by the tiny smiling faces of countless little white wriggling worms. She didn’t want to see what they turned into after they pupated, so she dumped the flour out in the alley, under the surprising winter-blooming hollyhocks, the uncollected pumpkins planted by forgetful guerrilla gardeners, caved in now and covered with the slightest dusting of snow.
Rick told her she was hallucinating.
“Hallucinating the faces, Rick, but not the worms.”
She remembered looking at his sculptures and wondering whether she should drop in on Thelma and ask if her mother could get her a job at the call centre. She could work in the evenings after school. It might work except she already got so tired. Algebra seemed especially strange when they’d dived the night before, never mind the regularly scheduled day-after exhaustion. Maybe if she’d had a nutritious breakfast more often, she could’ve concentrated. Maybe if Rick had cleaned up the apartment now and again.
And that smell. It had rained for months on end and Karen told Rick she thought the half-finished sculptures were rotting instead of drying out.
Smell pulled you back like nothing else. Was it just the Vancouver damp? Mould was supposed to be so very bad for you.
Mould. The smell had come from mould. But it wasn’t mould in the walls.
Gathering up the laundry after school one afternoon, she’d lost her footing and fallen into an unfinished orca sculpture, and the ghastly smell had suddenly been everywhere. Enveloping her, touching her, clothing her. The smell was like Syd’s hands. It gave her the same feeling of shocked humiliation, as though the mouldy whale was raping her, as Syd, technically, hadn’t. There’d been a knock at the door then; the landlord asking for the cheque.