Karen went to school, where she said little and did not make friends. She was not teased either, she was mostly ignored. She knew how to do that, make herself invisible. All she had to do was to suck in the light around her body; it was like sucking in her breath. When the teacher looked at her the look went right through, to whoever was sitting behind her. This way
Karen hardly needed to be in the classroom at all. She let her hands do whatever was required: long rows of a’s and b’s, neat columns of numbers. She got gold stars for neatness. Her paper snowflake and her paper tulip were among the ten pinned up on the corkboard.
Every week, then every two weeks, then every three, she went with her aunt and uncle to visit her mother. Her mother was in a different hospital now. “Your mother is very ill,” Aunt Vi told her, but Karen didn’t need to be told. She could see the illness spreading on her mother’s skin, like the hairs on arms, gone out of control; like filaments of lightning, only very small and slow. Like grey mould spreading through bread. When her mother was veined through and through like that, then she would die. Nobody could stop her, because that was what she wanted to do.
Karen thought about using her wishbone but she knew it wouldn’t be any good. To make awish work you had to really want it, and she didn’t want this woman to stay alive. If she could have had her mother back the way she was before, during the good times, yes. But she knew this was impossible. There wasn’t enough of that mother left. So she kept the wishbone in the hem of the curtain, checking once in a while to make sure it was still there.
Karen sat in her room. Sometimes she banged her head softly against the wall, so she wouldn’t have to think. Or she looked out the window a lot. Or she looked out the window at school. What she looked at was the sky. She thought about the summer. Maybe next summer her aunt and uncle would go on a vacation and she could be back at her grandmother’s farm, gathering the eggs, picking yellow beans in the sun.
On her eighth birthday Karen has a cake. Aunt Vi has baked it, and put sugar roses on it from the store, and eight candles. She asks Karen if she wants to have a little friend over, but Karen says no. So they eat the birthday dinner by themselves, the three of them, Oh Lord, bless this food to our use, Amen, and there are tuna and egg salad sandwiches, and peanut butter and jelly, and Aunt Vi says, “Isn’t this nice,” and then there is Neapolitan ice cream in three colours, white, pink, and brown. After that the cake. Aunt Vi lights the candles and tells Karen to blow them out and make a wish, but Karen just sits there, looking at the flames.
“I don’t think she’s ever had a cake before,” Aunt Vi says to Uncle Vern, and Uncle Vern says, “Poor little tyke’” and ruffles Karen’s hair. He does this often these days and Karen doesn’t like it. Uncle Vern’s hands have a heavy luminescence around them, thick like jelly, sticky, brown-green. Sometimes Karen examines her blonde hair in the mirror to see if any of it has come off.
“Make a wish,” says Uncle Vern heartily. “Wish for a bicycle!”
“You have to close your eyes,” says Aunt Vi.
So to humour them Karen closes her eyes, and sees nothing but the sky, and opens her eyes again and obediently blows out the candles. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern clap their hands, applauding, and Uncle Vern says, “Well, what do you know! Look what we have here!” and out of the kitchen he wheels a brandnew bicycle, bright red. It’s decorated with pink ribbons and has a balloon tied to one handle. “What do you think of that?” says Uncle Vern eagerly.
It’s dusk; the smell of mowed grass comes in through the open window, the June bugs batter themselves against the screen. Karen looks at the bicycle, at its glinting spokes and chains and its two black wheels, and knows that her mother is dead.
Her mother did not die for another three weeks, but it was the same thing, because sometimes (thinks Charis) there is a fold in time, like the way you fold the top bedsheet down to make a border, and if you stick a pin through at any spot, then the two pinholes are aligned, and that’s the way it is when you foresee the future. There’s nothing mysterious about it, any more than there is with a backwash in a lake or with harmony in music, two melodies going on at the same time. Memory is the same overlap, the same kind of pleat, only backwards.
Or maybe the fold is not in time itself but in the mind of the person watching. In any case, Karen looks at the bicycle and sees her mother’s death, and collapses onto the floor, crying, and Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are baffled and then angry, and tell her she is a lucky girl; a lucky, ungrateful girl, and she can’t explain.
There was a funeral but not very many people came. A few teachers from her mother’s old school, some friends of Aunt Vi’s. Her grandmother wasn’t there, but Karen didn’t find that strange—her grandmother in the city would have been out of place. There was another reason as well—stroke, said Aunt Vi, and nursing home, in the tone of voice that was supposed to enlist other people’s sympathy for her—but these words meant nothing to Karen and she didn’t want to hear them, so she put them out of her mind. She had on a navy blue dress, which was the closest Aunt Vi could get to black, at short notice, although—she said on the phone—she should’ve seen it coming. Karen wasn’t allowed to visit her mother’s body in the coffin because Aunt Vi said it was too shocking a thing for a young child, but she knew anyway what it would look like. The same as alive, only more so.
Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi have had part of their cellar re-done. They’ve had plasterboard put over the cement-block walls, linoleum with thick carpeting over it on the floor. They’ve made a rec room down there, rec not like wreck but like recreation. There’s a bar with bar stools, and a set of chinese chequers for Karen, and a television set. It’s the second television set they’ve bought; the first one is kept in the living room. Karen likes to watch the set in the rec room, out of everyone’s way. She doesn’t actually have to pay attention to what’s in front of her on the screen; she can be by herself, inside her head, and no one will ask what she’s doing.
It’s September, but outside, upstairs, it’s still dry and hot. Karen sits on the carpet, in the rec room where it’s cooler, in bare feet and shorts and a sleeveless top, watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie on TV Kukla, Fran and Ollie are puppets, or two of them are. Overhead, Aunt Vi’s shoes clack busily back and forth across the kitchen floor. Karen hugs her own knees, rocking gently. After a while she gets up and goes to the bar sink and runs herself a glass of water, and puts in an ice cube out of the little refrigerator, and sits back down on the rug.
Uncle Uern comes down the stairs. He’s been mowing the lawn. He is a deeper red than usual, and the smell of sweat encircles him, like the water drops when a wet dog shakes itself. He goes to the bar and gets out a beer, takes the cap off the bottle and drinks down half, and wipes his wet face with the towel beside the sink. Then he sits down on the sofa. The sofa is a sofa-bed, in case they have visitors, because Karen has the room that used to be the guest room. That room is still called “the guest room,” although Karen is living in it. They don’t have visitors, though.