Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen Read online

  “I’d better take you back in,” he sputters. “I wouldn’t want to be the first officer in B.C. history charged with decking an old dame in a wheelchair.”

  33

  Mr. Mussbacher is furious. If he was a cartoon, there’d be smoke coming out of his ears and nose.

  “You’ve done it,” he says. “You’ve screwed everything up. The Shadbolts were good to you. How could you do this to them? They want you to pack up your things and get out as soon as possible.”

  “Get out...to where?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  I try to pick a time when nobody’ll be home to go and get my stuff but, wouldn’t you know it, Shirl is home taking her holiday weeks, and the gremlins are there, too. They run over and grab my legs.

  “Tamara,” Lizzie yells. “Mom, it’s Tamara.”

  “Where’ve you been?” says Lyle.

  “Oh...you know. Vancouver. Seattle. Over the rainbow.”

  Shirl rushes into the living room.

  “Tamara! We were so worried about you. How could you do such a...such a thoughtless thing?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Using us!” Tears are welling in Shirl’s eyes. “Using that poor old woman! It might’ve killed her.”

  “I just came to get my things,” I say.

  “I don’t want Tamara to go.” Lyle is still hanging onto one of my pant legs.

  “She’s been bad!” Lizzie twirls around. “Hasn’t she, Mommy?”

  “You two go and watch TV. I want to talk to Tamara.”

  We go into the kitchen and sit at the table.

  “Herb and I decided we can’t take you back,” Shirl says. “There needs to be trust in a family.”

  “I know,” I say. “I don’t deserve to be taken back.”

  “Do you even want to?” She’s searching for Kleenexes.

  “Yes.” I surprise myself when I say this. But it’s true. I want it — my TV-less room, the gremlins, Herb showing me how to check engine fluids under the hood, Shirl hopelessly trying to put together low-carb meals.

  When I’ve got my things into three shopping bags and a cardboard box, Shirl insists on driving me back to the shelter, Lizzie and Lyle piling into the back seat of the Plymouth.

  “I shouldn’t be at the shelter too long,” I tell her. “Mr. Mussbacher says there’ll be a spot in one of the group homes probably next week.”

  “A group home.” Shirl says the words like they are daggers to her heart. I feel the same way but I keep my mouth shut.

  Three days later I’m playing Nintendo with a little girl who’s just come into the shelter on the weekend when Mr. Mussbacher shows up with Shirl and Herb.

  “You get an extra turn,” I say to Emma-Lee.

  Mr. Mussbacher takes us all into one of the shelter’s little meeting rooms. As he hunts for an extra chair, Herb and Shirl and I spend a few minutes not looking at each other. I can see, though, that Herb’s face is red like he’s embarrassed out of his mind, and Shirl is nervously turning a tissue into confetti.

  Back with a chair, Mr. Mussbacher drops into it and says, “I don’t know why, but the Shadbolts say they’re willing to take you back.”

  Now I do look at them. Maybe, somehow, we find our families. It just takes a few tries. Tears are starting to stream down Shirl’s face. Mine, too.

  “I don’t deserve it,” I say.

  “No,” Mr. Mussbacher says, “you don’t. But there are people in this world who aren’t quite as selfish as you are.”

  Mostly, for the half hour we meet, Mr. Mussbacher rakes me over the coals until even Shirl and Herb are ready to step in to shut him up. At the end of it all, I have to agree to go to group therapy for six months, to do five hours a week community service at the Sierra Sunset Seniors’ Lodge for that same amount of time, plus never miss a day of school for the rest of my life.

  Probably the worst of all this is the group therapy. There’s seven of us — two crystal meth addicts, one kid that’s into slicing bits of skin off himself (I think he’s trying to disappear), a girl who’s a compulsive shoplifter, a nymphomaniac, a boy who gets his kicks setting fires, and me, the pathological liar.

  “Actually,” I tell the group, “I’m not really a pathological liar. That’s someone who lies simply for the satisfaction of getting away with the lie, or to enjoy the special attention a lie might bring. Like lying to everyone and telling them you have cancer.”

  Dr. Gregorichuk, the group facilitator, nods at me to keep talking.

  “What I really am is an expedient liar. Someone who lies to get something important to herself. As a means to an end.”

  “That’s astute,” Dr. Gregorichuk says, “but is it any easier to recover from?”

  “Once a liar, always a liar,” Jerome the arsonist says.

  Hey, pal, thanks for the support. I think maybe I’ll make him a gift package of all the matchbooks Herb’s collected from different bars over the years. They’re sitting forgotten in a bag in the bottom drawer of the desk in my room, behind another stack of Eterno-Shine brochures.

  Christophe has called twice since I phoned and left a message with his mom in Kamloops. He says Brad has asked him to help with the school next summer, and that if I can come, they’ll let me start all over again — no extra tuition — since I missed over half the course.

  I love his voice on the phone. It’s the kind of voice that’s a perfect match for what you see in your mind. And what I see is Christophe’s beautiful body on the rocks on English Bay. Little drops of water across his chest and stomach, that GQ smile.

  I was dreading the hours I’d be putting in at the Seniors’ Lodge, but they’re not that bad. At first Mrs. Golinowski wouldn’t even talk to me, but after a couple of weeks of the deep freeze, she came up with this idea for me to produce a seniors’ fashion show. I have to say it beats laminating fall leaves for place mats and helping old ladies in and out of the washroom.

  The best part of being at the home, though, is getting to spend some time with the Miss Barclay. Her nephew, Byron, went and got her from the hospital in Vancouver the third week in September. I brought her some flowers to welcome her back.

  Red carnations.

  34

  She has one of those Safeway bouquets of carnations. Red.

  “Why, Tamara,” I say, “how thoughtful. Look, Byron, carnations.”

  He scowls at her.

  Later when she’s gotten me into my wheelchair and taken me down to the patio for a smoke, I tell her, “He’s mourning the Buick. I told him the insurance money was all his but I think he’d still like to put a good helping of arsenic in my cocoa.”

  “Cocoa!” Tamara snorts. “I’ve never seen you drink cocoa.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “But don’t ever let Byron near my flask of Courvoisier. Not that it’s easy to get these days. Eddie’s giving me the cold shoulder, and I think the Gollywatchit has a squad search my room every few days. I expect she thinks I’m into drug-running now.”

  “In two years,” Tamara offers, “I’ll be old enough to buy your booze and cigarillos.”

  She has a bag with her and she pulls out several small photos that have been framed with cardboard props at the back so they’ll stand up.

  “Oh, my!”

  “Here’s one of us all at the opera,” she says. “Remember when Ricardo asked that guy to take our picture? This one’s in Ricardo’s yard. This is my favorite one that Brad took when I had my Charlie Chaplin hat on. And in this one I have on a red sundress and I’m in the gazebo on English Bay.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” I say. “These will have a permanent place on my bureau. When I can’t sleep I’ll be able to turn my lamp on and see them. And remember — everything. Have you heard from Ricardo? Is that how you got the Seattle photos?”

  “When the Shadbolts let me go back with them, before school started, I was pretty well grounded. I started a letter to Ricardo and by the time I was finished, it cost three times th
e regular postage to send it. But he wrote me back and sent a bunch of photos. I’ll bring the rest the next time I come...”

  She’s chattering on about the news in Ricardo’s letter, but I drift away from the words, drift into the evening itself.

  There is something about September, I think, that makes us hang onto life the way the leaf of a prairie maple hangs, fragile and golden, onto its branch. All the powers of imminent winter cannot force it to let go until it is finally ready. Around us, there is the waning autumn sunlight and the smell of smoke in the air and the sound of birds — their clamorous honking as they head south.

  “You know, Tamara,” I say, “there’s a marvelous opera festival in the south. In Santa Fe. You haven’t really lived until you’ve listened to La Traviata in the opera house that opens onto the New Mexico hills.”

  “Is it far from L.A.?” She smiles her model smile at me.

  “You could probably drive it in a day or two.”

  She laughs and hugs her arms around her knees.

  Skinnybones.