The man sits up, his hand over his heart, gasping for air now himself. “There,” he says, as if he’s completed something: a task. “Shut up now I didn’t hurt you. Shut up! You keep your dirty little mouth shut about this or I’ll kill you!” Then he groans, the way he does in the bathroom in the mornings. “Oh God, I don’t know what got into me!”
The small girl is rolling over onto her side. As Charis watches, she leans over and vomits onto the floor, onto the man’s feet. Charis knows why. It’s because that brown-green light is inside her body now, thick and sticky, like goose turds. It came out of Uncle Vern and went into Karen, and she has to get it out.
The door opens Aunt Vi is standing there, in her nightgown. “What is it, what’s going on?” she says.
“I heard her in here,” says Uncle Vern. “She was calling—I think she’s got the stomach flu:”
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” says Aunt Vi: “You should’ve had sense enough to take her into the bathroom. I’ll get the floor cloth. Karen, are you going to do that again?”
Karen has no speech, because Charis has taken all the words with her. Karen opens her mouth, and Charis is sucked back, it’s as if she’s being vacuumed into their shared throat. “Yes,” she says.
After the third time Karen knows she is trapped. All she can do is split in two; all she can do is turn into Charis, and float out of her body and watch Karen, left behind with no words, flailing and sobbing. She will have to go on like this forever because Aunt Vi will never hear her, no matter what she says. She would like to take an axe and chop Uncle Vern’s head off, and Aunt Vi’s too, as if they were chickens; she would watch the grey smoke of their lives twist up out of them. But she knows she could never kill anything. She isn’t hard enough.
She takes the wishbone out of the hem of her curtain and closes her eyes, and holds both stems of the wishbone, and pulls. What she wishes for is her grandmother. Her grandmother is far away now, almost like a story she was told once; she can hardly believe she once lived at such a place as the farm, or even that there is such a place. But she wishes anyway, and when she opens her eyes her grandmother is there, coming right into her room through the closed door, wearing her overalls and frowning a little, and smiling also. She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There’s a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen’s, cool grains of dry rice. Then she’s like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she’s only a swirl in the air, and then she’s gone.
But some of her power stays there, in Karen’s hands. Her healing power, her killing power. Not enough to get Karen out of the trap, but enough to keep her alive. She looks at her hands and sees a trace of blue.
What she has to do is wait. She must wait like a stone, until it’s time. So this is what she does. As soon as Uncle Vern touches her she splits in two, and the rest of the time she waits.
Her grandmother is dead, or dead to this life, though Karen has seen her and she knows there isn’t any death really. The Bible arrives in a large box, addressed to Karen, and Karen puts it in her suitcase under her bed, ready for when she can leave. Her grandmother has left her the farm, but because Karen’s not old enough she can’t have it or even go there, although she wants to. Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi are her guardians. They are in control.
When she grows breasts and hair under her arms and on her legs and between them, and has her first period, Uncle Vern leaves her alone. There is a space between them, but it isn’t like an absence. It’s a presence, transparent but thicker than air. Uncle Vern is afraid of her now, he’s afraid of what she’s going to do or say; he’s afraid of what she remembers, he’s afraid of being judged. Maybe it’s because her eyes are no longer timid, no longer vacant or beseeching. Her eyes are stone. When she looks at him with her stone eyes it’s as if she’s reaching in through his ribs and squeezing his heart so it almost stops. He says he has a heart condition, he takes pills for it, but they both know it’s a thing she’s doing to him. Every time she looks at him she feels loathing, and a deep nausea. She’s disgusted with him, but also with her body, because it still has his dirt inside it. She must think of ways to get clean inside.
When she feels those things she has to seal them off. She has to or else she will be destroyed. She splits herself in two and stays with the cooler part, the clearer part of herself. She has a name for this part now: she is Charis. She picked the hint for her new name out of the Bible, with a pin: “The greatest of these is Charity.” Charity is better than Faith and Hope. She can use this new name only to herself, of course. Everyone else still calls her Karen.
Charis is more serene than Karen, because the bad things have stayed behind, with small Karen. She’s polite to her aunt, but remote: One day, when she is over eighteen, she asks the two of them what they have done with her grandmother’s money. Her uncle says he’s invested it for her and she can have all of it when she’s twenty-one, and meanwhile some of it can be used for her education. Aunt Vi acts as if this is an act of great generosity, as if the money belongs to them and they’re giving it away. But nevertheless they’re both relieved when she goes to university and moves into McClung Hall. Aunt Vi is nervous of her because of her stony eyes; as for Uncle Vern, he doesn’t know what she remembers. He hopes she’s forgotten it all, but he isn’t sure.
She remembers everything, or rather Karen does; but Karen is in storage. Charis only remembers when she takes Karen out, from the suitcase under her bed where she has put her. She doesn’t do this often. Karen is still little, but Charis is growing up.
Charis turned twenty-one; but nothing was said about her grandmother’s money. She didn’t care. She wouldn’t take money from them anyway, because even though it was really her own money it had been in their hands, it was dirty She wouldn’t be able to get it anyway without a fight.
She didn’t want to fight. Instead she wanted to go away somewhere else, and as soon as she felt ready she simply dropped out of sight. Out of their sight. It wasn’t so hard when you knew no one would come looking for you. She left university before finishing—she was flunking her courses anyway, because they failed to hold her attention—and went travelling. She hitchhiked, she took buses. She worked as a waitress, she worked in an office. For a while she was in an ashram on the West Coast, for a while she stayed on a communal farm in Saskatchewan. She did various things.
Once she went back to the farm, her grandmother’s farm; she wanted to see it. But it wasn’t a—farm any more, it was a subdivision. Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish; and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.
When she was twenty-six she dumped her old name. A lot of people were changing their names, then, because names were not just labels, they were also containers. Karen was a leather bag, a grey one. Charis collected everything she didn’t want and shoved it into this name, this leather bag, and tied it shut. She threw away as many of the old wounds and poisons as she could. She kept only the things about herself that she liked or needed.
She did all of this inside her head, because the events there are just as real as the events anywhere else. Still inside her head, she walked to the shore of Lake Ontario and sank the leather bag into the water.