The problem with people is that they so rarely fulfill my intentions for them. And I meant it before, when I said the sensitive kids turn out the weirdest. They need large amounts of supervision and guidance.
Charlie was one of the softest boys that ever descended from heaven. From infancy, he gazed with adoration at his mother, who was a goddess in his eyes. Throughout childhood, he voluntarily rubbed her feet and brought her food. No matter how terribly his siblings treated him, he complacently forgot. Eventually Bonnie and Keanan stopped trying to hurt him because he responded with such docility; he held an easy, neutral territory between the two older children.
Charlie was so sweet that Marisol thought she didn’t have to watch him. She gave him absolute free reign; she talked about his gentleness at length to everyone around her, never spanked him. There were certain things, certain behaviours that, to the mother, were inconceivable when it came to Charlie. If ever a sibling got hurt, it couldn’t have been Charlie’ fault. If ever a nasty plan came to light, it couldn’t have been Charlie who hatched it.
This was largely my doing, I confess. I’d put images of him into Marisol’s head. This is what this child will be like, I’d told her. This is his nature. She duly subscribed to those newborn notions, and what is cemented early is doubly difficult to undo.
Nobody watched Charlie, not even I. Nobody watched him develop a sweetness so misty it clouded over his sly ideas. Nobody noticed how carefully, quietly, surreptitiously his hands covered over his mistakes. Nobody saw his eyes sidle sideways. Nobody caught the wobbling development of his moral senses. Nobody stayed up to observe him entering Ellen’s room at night, even when the sleepwalking was common knowledge.
Certainly, nobody paid attention when Charlie took Georgie’s drill and bored a ¾-inch hole in the wall behind the guinea pig cage – the wall of Ellen’s new bedroom. Nobody watched as he took a pin and poked numerous holes in the movie star poster that Ellen, upon noticing the hole, had placed over it.
It was as if Charlie, and all his actions, existed in secret.
Ellen, meanwhile, was living a life of hugely pubescent proportions. The flame in her heart spread to her limbs, to her fingers and thighs and toes and the nape of her neck, wildfire. Thanks to the padlock, she slept and spent whole evenings in the nude, prancing around her room, singing, dreaming, imagining what she might want to do with the movie star boy on her wall once she was seventeen. She was intrepid in discovering the things her body could accomplish.
The parents failed to wonder why their eleven-year-old daughter spent entire days and nights alone in her bedroom. She was out of sight, not bothering them with her ceaseless chatter and endless loud observations. She was not looking at them with her queer eyes, thinking who knows what. After a long, cold, comfortless winter, they were enjoying a light and easy spring; they were getting laid. When the short, thin birch trees were just unfolding their light green buds, Georgie and Marisol went and renewed their vows before both the Pentecostal and Mennonite ministers. This time, they gazed at each other with real intent. They were learning compromise, and how to love one another.
One moist evening, still too chilly for anyone except Keanan to spend all hours outdoors, Ellen decided to reorganize her closet. Summer was coming; there were short shorts and frilly dresses to pull out of dusty boxes, combinations to try on, dancing and dreaming to do.
She started to take off her clothes, then stopped.
Ellen skipped to the large laundry room adjacent to her bedroom. Her summer boxes were under the stairs, beside Leander’s cage. She opened and closed the door with a bang. Rounding the corner, she found Charlie crouched among the boxes, rummaging.
“What are you doing in my boxes?” Ellen demanded. She frowned.
“Just looking for my old teddy bear,” he mumbled. He looked up at her with shiny hazel eyes.
“But this is my stuff.” She leaned on Leander’s cage, staring at her brother. Her hand dropped casually into the cage and Leander scuttled to her, purring. Ellen’s fingers stirred his fur gently. Her face was happy. A warm glow flickered from her heart, enveloping her neck and chin, washing her face in light.
“I know, I thought, maybe –” said Charlie.
“Your stuff is on that side of the laundry room.” She put her other hand in the cage and picked up Leander, who chuckled merrily. “Mwah – ” she gave the guinea pig a big kiss on the head. One hand cupped his bottom while the other held him to her chest.
“I couldn’t find it there, so I thought I’d look in these . . . It’s not here, though.” He stood up, scratched his head thoughtfully, put one foot out of the jumble of boxes and then the other.
“Your fly is down, Charlie!” Ellen giggled.
The way her voice rang out in the cool, clean-scented laundry room pricked my ears. Their voices became faint.
All I could see was one dim bulb hanging from the ceiling – the washer and dryer – the small, enclosed half-bathroom – the guinea pig’s cage – and beside it all, only one thin wall in between, my Ellen’s bedroom . . . cozy, bright, alive, special.
“Well anyway,” came her voice, young and blunt, “stay out of my stuff.”
“There’s nothing I’d want.”
Back in her room, Ellen knelt down to rummage in the summer boxes. She peeled off her clothing and tried on a few things. Much of it no longer fit her, but one favourite dress was still long enough to wear. She sashayed across her room, stopping at the movie star poster.
The glossy, black and white image of a young man stared down at Ellen. He was the latest hunka hunka burnin’ love to hit all the North American romantic comedies. I created him to be beautiful and make women swoon. Ellen loved the liquid dark eyes, the pout of his lips, the smooth cut of his chin, his toned forearms, his way of leaning toward her.
With all my might, I drew Ellen toward the poster. See, I whispered, see.
She came forward, breathing.
First she came because of the movie star boy, wanting to pretend she was his. She gazed up into his eyes, imagining his languorous look was reserved for her alone.
She came forward, heart flickering.
She came forward, eyes narrowing.
There were, amidst the careful wrinkles of the movie star’s white t-shirt, several perforations. Ellen counted twelve little pin-pricks before tearing down the poster – all pretence abandoned – to confirm the reason for the perforations. A hole through the drywall, about the size of a ¾-inch drill bit.
Something rustled on the other side of it.
I saw them both then, boy and girl on either side, staring at each other.
It was as if two sides of humanity stood at war, aggressor and victim, breathing, sweating, their bodies the same yet so different, so unequal and opposed. I saw what people do to one another out of ignorance, desire, and the inheritance of pain.
During the nine or ten steps it took her to get to the laundry room, Ellen revisited the revelations and circumstances of her budding pubescence, the number of hours she’d spent in her new bedroom glorying in her mind’s fantasies, and everything in between.
Charlie reached the laundry room door at the same time as she did.
Ellen looked at him. It seemed as if his eyes had scales on them; they looked reptilian. He was silent, seemingly gentle, but underneath the softness lurked something unutterable and sneaky and horrid.
She had spent her childhood holding hands with this person, playing, running, confiding, make-believing, experimenting. He was the closest person to her. He was her friend; he’d defended her and kept her secrets, loaned his toys to her, let her punch him when she was mad. Even his bouts of sleepwalking, he hadn’t been able to help it then (she thought).
“Whatcha doin’?” Ellen said bluntly. It came out childishly near to bawling.
“Nothing.” He stared at her. His nostrils flared.
She wheeled around to run up the stairs. He reached out his hand and tried to grab her arm.
“Ellen –”
She turned back to face him. Peeling his fingers from her arm, she took his hand in her own as if, for a moment, she was going to hold it tenderly. Then she flung it down like a dirty insect.
She hissed: “Don’t. Touch. Me.”
Fire blazed up in her cool glass eyes, but they didn’t melt one bit. She ran upstairs.
I expected her to go directly to the mother first. But little Ellen has always been full of surprises. She went to the front door and shoved her feet into her running shoes. She grabbed her jacket.
Before Charlie had made his own way upstairs, she was gone.
The early spring wind sliced across Ellen’s arms, legs, face and neck, but she didn’t notice. Running through the back yard, she crossed the threshold of weeds that separated her home from the Slimes. Down a steep hill, past a thicket of narrow poplars, the leaves just beginning to twinkle, her feet thumped as she ran, her arms wrapped loosely around her torso.
She stopped and looked back, afraid. Charlie might be following her. What a pig. No, worse. He was a disgusting, strange, scary, unnatural creature. She understood now that there was something wrong with her brother, and something wrong with her, too.
But there was no one to whom she could say it.
He wasn’t following her. Thank God.
Ellen shuddered.
He was so, so ugly. He’d been ugly as a slinking panther, of course, but even more so with these reptilian scales over his eyes. She absolutely couldn’t trust him, and yet . . . She remembered their childhood. They’d banded together against bigger siblings and raging parents. They’d shared stolen snacks, told forbidden stories. He’d shown her deep compassion whenever she cried about an argument at school or a lost friendship. How could he stand there, deliberately watching her while she was naked? What had he seen? And who was it he saw, besides the young sister he loved so tenderly?
Ellen started up running again; her whole body felt coated with his gaze. She wanted to leave her house behind completely. Her legs wove through the stiff blond grass poking up from the melting snow.
Every summer she had come to the Slimes with a bucket, collecting tadpoles and minnows from the marsh. Now she looked in that direction and saw the bulrushes were barely up to her knee, and there was still a crust of ice at the water’s edge. She wanted to be further away even than the marsh.
Ellen pressed on toward the woods. Last summer she’d ventured into this fringe of trees bringing only a sandwich and a notebook. She had trekked through the bush, taking notes on the mosses and mushrooms, drawing pictures and rudimentary maps, feeling like an explorer. It was a quiet pine forest without any trails; to its east stretched the highway going out of town.
Now, she stood at its edge, her knees quivering. Dusk was approaching. A chill came down like a shadow. Ellen glanced behind her again; she could just barely see the warm lights of the Romper house flickering across the Slimes, about a kilometre away. She fancied she saw the dark figure of her brother strolling toward her.
It wasn’t him, but the fancy caused her to shudder and duck into the woods, running for her life.