Cricket in a Fist Read online

  As the route map had promised, the bus stopped in a transit station, turned around, and went back the same way it had come. Back past the eerily familiar streets, back past the Community Centre and the shopping centre, back through Hull. And then she remembered something else. Boulevard des trembles — there was a park coming up. Parc des trembles. The tremble park, she’d called it. She’d always thought it was called the tremble park because of the pool and the sprinklers and how, running across the concrete surface, jumping through freezing bursts of water, she’d always reached her mother’s deck chair shaking with cold. “Don’t touch me,” Mama would squeal. “Keep your clammy little hands to yourself.” Sometimes Agatha would run through the sprinklers, too, and sometimes she would sit beside Mama, reading a book of her own. Agatha must have been thirteen or fourteen — not much older than Jasmine was now. She had seemed so big and old and acted as if she knew everything. And Jasmine had believed her.

  The bus crossed the bridge back to Ottawa, and Jasmine thought of the magazine article she’d found online about J. Virginia Morgan. The first time I see her in the arrivals lounge of the Tucson airport, wrote the woman who got to meet her, she looks like the kind of person who wouldn’t forget anything. She is efficiency personified. She glances at me with my cardboard sign and bombards a path straight through the weary-looking travellers. Her hair is long, auburn, perfectly sleek and straight. Her makeup is immaculate, her beige linen suit unwrinkled, and she strides on black high heels, pulling a suitcase carelessly, as though it’s light as a feather. Her appearance is next to miraculous considering she’s just stepped off a plane. Jasmine climbed off the bus and bombarded through the people clustered around the shelter, glancing, striding. Her hair didn’t have that squashed look that it got from the bathing cap. Lara was smart. She would notice and ask, already knowing the truth, if Jasmine had had a good swim. She would ask why Jasmine was almost an hour late. They would figure it out — that she had been making secret plans, that they didn’t know her anymore, that they were on the verge of losing her bodily and had already lost her in every other way.

  She didn’t even arrive home late enough to get in trouble. Her transgression had made no difference to anyone. Dad wasn’t home yet, Bev was watching TV in the den, and Lara was chopping vegetables for dinner, still wearing her work clothes. She had folded her black cardigan over a chair and put her gold rings and bracelets on the table. She stood bare armed in the top that matched the cardigan, and her black hair was sleek against her head, clipped back with a big barrette. Jasmine leaned against the pine counter near the fridge while Lara shredded a head of lettuce into crinkly strips, then cupped her hands to place the food in a white china bowl. She wiped the cutting board with a cloth and picked up a red pepper, examining it from every angle before putting it down in the middle of the board. It matched the colour of her short nails.

  “Jas, could you please turn on the light?” Lara had been mad at Jasmine all week for setting a bundle of paper on fire in the bathtub and leaving permanent scorch marks. But now she was being nice. If it was nice not to even care that her child was late. As Jasmine flicked the switch, the kitchen’s yellow walls and stainless steel appliances looked even more like a glossy magazine photograph. Lara wiped pepper juice from the cutting board and pushed sizzling tofu slices around the frying pan. She turned and looked at Jasmine leaning against the counter with her jacket on, backpack dangling from one hand. Lara’s nose was shiny, makeup softened by the heat of the stove. She smiled briefly, eyes settling on Jasmine’s yellow platform shoes. Shoes were forbidden in the kitchen. Lara hesitated, then turned away.

  “Dinner in twenty minutes,” she said. “The table needs setting.”

  “I just need to feed Sorbet.” Stepping out of her shoes by the back door, Jasmine stopped. Soon she would run away and would never see this house again, would never again take off her shoes and place them on this blue braided rug. Never again pass this bookcase with its cookbooks, photo albums and framed wedding pictures. She examined the photograph of the whole wedding party under a canopy of trees, Dad and Lara in the middle. Jasmine had been six, the flower girl. Her father and Lara married outside at the arboretum in springtime, when all the trees were in bloom, for the benefit of the photos. Lara’s cousin, a Unitarian minister, performed the ceremony, and she agreed not to mention God or anything God-related. Jasmine could tell by looking at herself in those photos that she’d believed the party was for her. She looked pleased, as if everyone, her father and Lara included, were there just to see her in that frilly peach dress, carrying her bouquet. Agatha was in the photographs, too, standing off to the side of the kissing couple. At sixteen, she had short blue hair clipped into tufts with plastic children’s barrettes, black-framed glasses and a blue dress that matched her hair. She was looking down and off to the side. At least Agatha had known what was happening, hadn’t relished the photographer and the guests, hadn’t skipped and spun under those carefully placed trees, splashing mud up lacy white socks and chubby bare legs. Dignity: that’s what Agatha had at the wedding. What Jasmine lacked.

  It wasn’t long after the wedding that Agatha ran away. Jasmine had known, somehow, that it was going to happen; she’d felt strongly that her sister was about to disappear and tried to keep a close watch on her, often opening her bedroom door and peeking in to make sure she was still there. One clue was that Agatha never properly unpacked when they moved into Dad and Lara’s new house. Her room had been scattered with boxes and half-full suitcases the whole time. That was when her hair had grown back in from being shaved and she was always dying it different colours. She always looked pissed off or sad, and Jasmine was the only one who could cheer her up. She liked that she had the power to make her sister look happy again; but as soon as Jasmine stopped being funny or cute, Agatha looked pissed off or sad again, until one day she was so pissed off she left and didn’t come back. Agatha didn’t run away for long, but it was the beginning of the end, because she never actually moved back in. She went to live with Tam-Tam and then moved away for university.

  Jasmine dumped her backpack in her room, then fed her gerbil, scratching him briefly between the ears. Sorbet was light beige, and Jasmine liked playing with him and training him to do acrobatics. She wasn’t mean to him, though, like circus trainers are to their animals. She just played with him, and if he seemed tired or grumpy, she gave him some space. Jasmine needed some space sometimes, too, so she knew how he felt. She bombarded down the stairs, glanced at the unset dining table as she walked past, and pushed open the door to the TV room. “Watcha watching?” Bev didn’t understand the concept of giving someone space. She was just there. She didn’t turn away from the car commercial on the screen as Jasmine sat at the computer desk behind the couch to check her e-mail; on the television, a sleek blue vehicle raced up the side of a mountain. “My soaps,” said Bev.

  There was nothing from Agatha. Jasmine had written to her three times since she last heard back, and even though she desperately wanted to ask if her sister remembered the haunted house and the tremble park, if their mother had really sneezed, and where their old street was, she wasn’t going to e-mail a fourth time. And Agatha still hadn’t even commented about the J. Virginia Morgan website Jasmine had found, or about the interviews and articles. How could she not care — Agatha was the one who’d told Jasmine about J. Virginia Morgan in the first place. Maybe she regretted that now; maybe she wished she’d kept that incredibly important piece of information to herself. What a freak Agatha could be. Every now and then she’d open up and tell Jasmine a whole bunch of stuff about herself, usually when she was home and they stayed up late together, but then she’d clam up again, hardly ever calling and treating Jasmine like a little kid.

  After checking J. Virginia Morgan’s website, which just had a bunch of crap about upcoming workshops, Jasmine skimmed an e-mail from Mei — something about the book they were reading in English class — and then leaned back to glare at Bev’s purplish dye job.
It had been neglected for so long there were two inches of white at the top. The way she was sitting, Jasmine could see Bev’s profile above her sparkly blue sweater, wrinkles collapsing her face towards her mouth. The room stank of cigarettes — it was so unbelievably disgusting that Dad and Lara let Bev smoke inside. And it was surprising. These were people who ran every morning before work, who did yoga and ate low-fat everything. But Bev was allowed to stink up the house and let herself rot. “It’s too late to change her now,” Dad said. “She might as well do what she likes.”

  But if Jasmine found out she was dying, she wouldn’t waste her time watching TV and smoking cigarettes. She would make a list of things she wanted to do while there was still time. First she would find J. Virginia Morgan. Virginia would be sorry that Jasmine was dying and would want to get to know her, but Jasmine would tell her she didn’t have time. Then she would swim the English Channel. She would go into space, even if it meant dying there. She would do anything it took to get on a rocket and go into orbit. She was determined to be an astronaut, and it filled her with panic to contemplate failing in this goal, to think of spending the rest of her life stuck to the earth. Benna Hadrick, Jasmine knew, didn’t believe in her dream. More and more, Jasmine found herself thinking that Benna was surprisingly, dismayingly lacking in imagination.

  Jasmine heard her father talking to Lara in the kitchen and left the computer to find him already setting the table. She trailed him, putting napkins beside the forks, straightening the placemats, until he put his arm around her shoulder to kiss the top of her head. “How’s my little fish? Did you finish your Halloween costume?” She nodded, sad for him. She hoped he would choose a flattering photo for the milk cartons.

  “I used to love Halloween,” said Lara, placing dishes of food on the table. She called for Bev. “Remember how I used to love Halloween, Mom?” she said, as they all sat down. Bev nodded noncommittally. “Mom,” Lara said, “did you see the costume Jas made for tomorrow?”

  Bev looked at her blankly. “No,” she said after a painfully long pause, “I never did.”

  “Steven,” said Lara, “did I ever tell you about the time my sister and I dressed as the twins from The Shining?”

  “I think so,” said Dad. Lara’s laugh, brittle and too loud, faded into a tense smile. Jasmine thought of a quote from Virginia Morgan’s website — it was from her new book, Accidents. Virginia Morgan’s writing always had some embarrassing parts and a lot of incomprehensible parts, but, after reading passages a few times, Jasmine could usually figure out what they were supposed to mean. The quotation said: Watch closely and you’ll begin to see people as actors rehearsing well-learned scenes understood only technically. For so long, I, too, was posed in an exaggerated, pathetically earnest attempt to emulate real life. Dad reached over to squeeze Lara’s hand and kept holding it as Bev said, “I brought my girls to Vegas one year. For Halloween. I had the wildest costume. I was a cigarette girl, and men kept mistaking me for a real cigarette girl. Remember, Lara?”

  “Yes,” said Lara. “Well, no. Hil and I were too young to go to the party so you left us behind in the hotel room. We got drunk on those little bottles of booze, and Hilary threw up in the bathtub.”

  “Did she?” Bev frowned. “Well, that was before she started all this God business. I will never understand what happened to that girl.” Dad met Jasmine’s eyes, smiled sympathetically and winked. He shoved the peas toward her and nodded for her to take some. Jasmine grimaced and, helping herself to half a spoonful, told herself she would never eat peas when she was a sex slave.

  “Jas,” said Dad, “did I tell you I might get to put some of my guys on a shuttle? To test the effects of weightlessness on spatial memory.”

  “Really? Would you send Edgar?” Edgar was currently Jasmine’s favourite of her father’s rats. He was sleek and brown, and he was always bumping into things. She was allowed to hold him sometimes, and she’d run her finger over the scar behind his ears, where no hair grew. She’d had a huge fight with Dad when she was in grade five and figured out that the surgeries he did on his rats weren’t performed for the sake of their well-being.

  “What’s the point of being vegetarian,” she’d howled. After a series of long talks, she uneasily accepted his claim that the rats didn’t mind, that they had a good life and served the higher good. That he chose to avoid meat “precisely to atone for the necessary sacrifices I make in the course of my work.” And, he pointed out, “I’m responsible for far less suffering and death among animals than the average person is.” She still had pangs of worry over it, but Dad’s arguments were, as always, hard to disagree with.

  “Well,” Dad said, “it’s a long process. Edgar will likely be pretty elderly before the project goes through. What do you think, though? My guys get to be astronauts. Pretty neat, huh, baby?” Jasmine nodded. Sometimes her father seemed so gullible and innocent, so sweet and fascinated by his work, that it made her squirm with frustration, love and guilt. She could see that Lara felt the same way, raising her eyebrows when he talked endlessly about a new neurological study, an outlandish hypothesis posed by a promising student. It was almost Halloween. Why did everyone pretend they didn’t remember anything? Did Dad really think that if he didn’t bring it up, no one would think about it?

  “Edgar’s so lucky,” said Jasmine.

  *

  It was raining the next morning, so Lara drove Jasmine to school. “Why didn’t you wear your costume?” she asked, stopping near the gate. The concrete schoolyard was full of kids trying to protect their Halloween makeup under umbrellas.

  “I’m in grade eight,” said Jasmine. “I’m fourteen, almost.”

  “So is Mei.” There was Mei, in her black cloak and witch hat, huddled under the school’s side awning, reading a book.

  “Oh God. Mei.”

  “And Megan.” Megan, dressed as a gypsy, was sharing an umbrella near the basketball nets with a tall ghoul. Lara said that everyone was dressed up, and as far as Jasmine could see, she was right. She didn’t need Lara to remind her of all the hours she’d spent constructing her papier-mâché astronaut helmet before she realized just how embarrassing and childish it would be to wear it in public.

  “That’s okay,” said Lara. “Maybe you’ll use the costume for something else.”

  “Maybe.” Jasmine sighed.

  They stayed in the car for another two minutes until the bell rang, then Jasmine kissed Lara on the cheek and ran for the door, down to the basement to her locker, and checked to see if the rain had smudged her eyeliner. She rubbed under each eye with a fingertip. Down the hall, she saw Benna pull off a long, black, stretchy dress, shove it in her locker and secure bunny ears to her head. A cowboy swaggered over and grinned while Benna made bunny paws and hop-hop-hopped, put one hand on her hip and smiled.

  Jasmine turned away quickly to hang up her jacket so she could look up in mock surprise when Benna arrived breathlessly at her side. “Oh my God.” Benna squeezed herself between Jasmine and the locker mirror. “I’m so embarrassed. This is my cousin’s Playboy Bunny T-shirt.” Hand on hips, she swivelled to show Jasmine her costume. The short white T-shirt with the bunny logo covered the top half of a black ballet leotard. On her legs, Benna wore only pink stockings, and there was a pink cotton-tail sewn to her leotard’s bum. “Ryan said I was sexy,” said Benna, glowing with exalted mortification. She was sexy. She was so beautiful and sexy it made Jasmine’s stomach hurt.

  “I might put on my costume at lunch, Benna,” said Jasmine. She always said Benna’s name when speaking to her. Sometimes she said the name under her breath when she was lying in bed at night. “Benna. Benna Hadrick.” She had recently persuaded Benna to confess her middle name, too, and had been sworn to secrecy.

  Benna Caraway Hadrick, mid-September, had been untouchable, unreachable, had been standing beside Jasmine at the sink during recess, circling her eyes with dark liner. This was the closest Jasmine had ever come to the too-old-for-her-age, up-to-no-good
queen of grade eight; Benna’s sexy underwear was clearly visible above her studded belt. Standing beside Benna at the mirror, Jasmine grimaced at her own reflection. She’d parted her hair on the side because it said in one of Tam-Tam’s old-fashioned magazines that a side part distracts attention from a prominent nose. Her grandmother kept baskets full of fashion magazines, the latest ones and the big, matte-paged kind from the sixties and seventies, and Jasmine often read them out of boredom when she visited. The magazine was right. Jasmine’s mother used to wear her hair parted in the middle, and it made her nose look huge. Jasmine knew about this because she used to sleep over every weekend when Agatha lived at Tam-Tam’s house, and one time they found an old driver’s licence of their mother’s at the back of a drawer. Jasmine still had it. None of the old albums had photos of their mother; anyone flipping through them would have thought Dad was a single parent until he met Lara.

  Putting one hand over the middle of her face, Jasmine looked herself in the eyes. As far as she could see, her eyes and her long hair, both the same reddish brown, were the only attractive features she had left. During the summer, not only had she got her period, which stopped her from swimming for five days every month, but her body had expanded, relentless and itchy, leaving her about a foot taller and her breasts two cup-sizes larger. The bump in the middle of her nose seemed to be getting bumpier. If Lara had been her real mother, Jasmine might have been dark haired and rosy cheeked, with big black eyes. She might have had a small, straight nose. Benna Hadrick was adjusting the safety pin that held the shoulder of her black T-shirt together, and Jasmine felt the unmistakable pre-nosebleed ache under her eyes, the iron taste at the back of her throat.