The Family Took Shape Read online

  She wasn’t sure where people like that, the man in the mall, the man outside the shoe store, came from. It was possible that their fathers and mothers and sisters had died. A career, her mother and Lala Aunty kept saying, as they looked at Ravi’s drawings. They even talked about art school, about galleries and studios and shows. Mira had stopped showing anybody her own drawings after she’d shown her mother a painting she had done of a frog, using the perspective and shading tech-niques Mrs. Heinz had taught her, and her mother had said, “Pretty, Mira,” and put it up on the fridge, then opened the fridge to get out the chutney, as though frogs were pretty, as though it didn’t matter if you smudged chutney all over them. Career — the word made no sense in relation to her brother. She tried to picture him wearing a suit, or answering a telephone in a professional voice like the secretaries at school: “Hello, this is Ravi Acharya, how can I help you?” or “Acharya here, how may I direct your call.” She would probably have to choose his clothes for him and buy him an answering machine. She knew that it would be her responsibility to make sure Ravi didn’t turn into a strange man in the mall, or a strange man outside the hospital. She would have to take care of him forever.

  Taking care of him was what she should have been doing all those times when she saw the bully chase him. It had started weeks ago. On this Monday morning, when their mother gave Ravi the red drawing portfolio to carry with him, Mira knew it was a bad idea. He didn’t even put it in his bag, just held it out in the open. She was about to tell him to put it in his bag, when the boy ambled up the street to their school bus stop after Ravi and Mira’s mother had dropped them off. He wasn’t large, but he was certainly bigger than Mira; she didn’t think she could be blamed. Ravi dwarfed him, actually, but the boy looked mean, he had a mean face, he smirked, his freckled skin twisting as he spat out taunts, leaned his face in to Ravi’s and drew back suddenly, then imitated his nervous gestures, pulled at Ravi’s shirt and slapped at his sides. Ravi began to run. “Ravi, the bus is coming!” Mira said, falteringly, dropping her purple book bag and picking it up again.

  When the bus arrived, her brother was so far away she couldn’t see him. “My brother is over there,” she said to the driver.

  “He’s late,” the driver said. She didn’t bother waiting. Mira took a seat, purposely on the side away from where she could look for her brother. He would go home, she figured. It wasn’t like he learned anything at school. She felt the cold brass house key against her skin, its string around her neck. At recess, she saw that the bully had gotten a ride to school. He was there playing tetherball, beating the ball with his fist, whipping it in a violent circle.

  Mira spent the day picturing what Ravi might be doing: wandering the neighbourhood, stopping on sidewalks in front of other people’s houses to put his hand to his mouth and stare, as he did sometimes, at something nobody else could identify; eating the raspberries from the raggedy bush in the neighbour’s unfenced yard; napping on their own back porch, under the monstrous face of their garden’s single sunflower.

  The bus dropped her off at the end of the day, and she expected to find her brother there outside the house — at least it wasn’t winter yet — but he wasn’t there on the front porch, or in the backyard either. Even then, she didn’t call her mother.

  Bullies, Bees, and Spiders

  “WE’LL LEAVE NO stone unturned,” Lala Aunty’s husband said reassuringly to no one in particular, as their small search party — Mira, her mother, and Lala Aunty’s husband — left to walk around the dark neighbourhood. Lala Aunty stayed home in case anyone called. Mira thought it was an odd expression to use, hollow, compared with the seriousness of the situation, and because they were leaving stones unturned, many, in fact. She eyed every stone she passed with suspicion, thinking that, though Ravi would never have been able to fit under one, turning them all over might reveal some new truths. If they walked around the whole neighbourhood, or the whole city of Richmond Hill, and turned every single stone, would the city look any different when morning came? Would those other Richmond Hill residents, inside their houses now, fami-lies intact, open their front doors in the morning and gasp at how different the city looked, now that every stone had been turned? Everything would look darker, bluer, damper, flatter, once the undersides of stones had been revealed.

  “Did he leave here after you two came home?” her mother had asked her.

  “No, he didn’t go to school today,” Mira responded.

  “He didn’t go? What do you mean he didn’t go?” Her mother took her arm and shook it and brought her face close. “Where did he go?”

  “There’s a boy,” Mira said. “Who chases him. He chased him down the street and Ravi missed the bus.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you tell anybody? What’s the matter with you?” Her mother had kept shaking her arm and then tossed it away from her.

  “I told the bus driver,” Mira whispered.

  Though Ravi wouldn’t fit behind a stone, he might fit behind a tree. There was one fat tree in front of each house, and some-times there were skinny fruit trees. She checked both. Her shadow stretched out and overlapped the shadows of the trees. Every time she saw leaves and branches moving, she thought she might find Ravi standing behind them, his hands clasped together with one finger tap-tap-tapping.

  Lala Aunty’s husband held Mira’s hand. “I can take Mira home,” he suggested, after they’d been around the block. “She can wait with Lala?” But Mira’s mother said no, and they kept walking. They knocked on the doors of the several neigh- bours they knew, but nobody had seen him. In one of the houses, Mira could see Jeopardy playing on the tv, and the two teenage sons watching. “Jakarta,” said one teenager. “Wrong,” said the other. In another house, she heard chair legs creaking over a floor and fork-and-knife noises coming from an unseen kitchen. She imagined they were eating sausages with mushroom sauce and frozen vegetables, which was what she’d had the one time she’d been invited to dinner at a non-Indian friend’s house. It was not unlike Halloween, though of course she had no costume, and instead of asking for candy they were asking for her brother. “Did Ravi happen to come by here?” her mother would ask. After the third neighbour had said a very apologetic no, her mother had persisted. “But he knows your house,” she said. “He likes the brick driveway. He likes walking on it.” Her mother leaned against the door jamb and began crying.

  “I’m sorry, we haven’t seen him,” the woman said. “I can come with you? Let me … let me get my jacket. Should we take the car?”

  They got in the neighbour woman’s car. Mira sat in back with her mother and looked out the window. They drove very slowly around the small streets and then went out on to Elgin Mills and Yonge. People were in flux here, moving along on the shiny streets — it had freshly rained and the car lights narrowed and widened as they drove past. People waited for buses, climbed on the buses and hooked their hands into the rubber loops on the bus ceilings; people entered and exited video stores with the flat plastic dvd boxes under their arms; people coughed as they walked into and out of walk-in clinics, tucked their keys into pockets and purses as they ran up to and through the automatic doors of convenience stores. It was like Where’s Waldo? Mira had one of the books at home and had looked through the others at the dentist’s office. Like a spread in Where’s Waldo?, the people faced in every direction, each concerned with only himself, engaging in his own hilarity or tragedy. Those scenes were chaos — colourful and chaotic, with distant, small faces, items spilled. Everybody looked like Waldo and everybody looked like Ravi. She wished there weren’t so many Indian people in Richmond Hill. “There he is!” she said, pointing, but it turned out to be a grown man.

  In the Tim Hortons parking lot, high school students stood in groups, eating out of paper bags and kicking garbage around. Mira’s mother asked the neighbour woman to stop the car in the lot, and then she took a photo of Ravi from her purse and went to show i
t around. She was still wearing her work clothes — a light grey skirt suit with a green Indian-style blouse inside — but she had changed her shoes to sneakers. She shivered next to the teenagers in their black jackets; she waved the photo in front of them. How could she hope for them to recognize Ravi if she didn’t hold the photo still?

  Mira’s mother got back in the car. “Should we go back and call the police?” asked Lala Aunty’s husband, gently. The neighbour woman dropped them back to their house.

  “You’ll find him. I’m sure he’s just gone to a friend’s house,” she said. The woman had no idea about Ravi, Mira thought.

  “I told you, should have called the police right as soon as you found him missing,” said Lala Aunty said when they went in the house.

  Found him missing, the phrase echoed at Mira and she cata-logued it for later. She sat on the shadowy ledge of carpet that curved above the staircase and swung her legs until her legs got tired. They waited. Eventually the doorbell rang.

  “Is your son Ravi?” she asked Mira’s mother, who had removed her blazer and was clutching her own shoulders in the cool air that came through the doorway. “I have him — he’s in the car. He came to my house and we tried calling the number he gave —” Mira jumped off her ledge and hopped down the stairs and peered around her mother. Ravi was in the car. He got out when he saw Mira and her mother, and came up slowly. He knew he was in trouble.

  “Oh, he must have inverted the digits,” said Mira’s mother, making an absent inverting motion with her hands, then pulling Ravi against her, tightly petting his hair.

  “Well, glad he got home safe …” the woman trailed off.

  “Come and have coffee,” called Lala Aunty over all of their heads, but the woman politely declined and headed back to her car.

  “Why did the stupid woman take so long to ask him where he lived?” Lala Aunty asked after the woman was gone.

  Then they ate ice cream as though it were a birthday party. Mira didn’t want the ice cream, but she took it anyway, letting it melt before she ate it, so it became the consistency of milk, and so it was more like a punishment.

  “You can show your drawings tomorrow,” their mother said to Ravi. He shook his head.

  “No?”

  “No,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

  She went to his backpack and unzipped it. She pulled out the portfolio and looked at it, turning it over slowly. The papers were streaked with dried mud, the colours smeared. Some of the pages were torn and still damp.

  “Did that boy do this?” their mother asked Ravi. She turned to Mira, her mouth contorting, about to speak, but she didn’t say anything.

  “BEES ARE ATTRACTED to applesauce,” said Lucy Chin.

  Mira knew only to be afraid.

  “And perfume,” the girl continued. “Are you wearing perfume?”

  “No, I never wear perfume,” said Mira. It was a lie, because her mother sprayed Charlie White on her almost every morning, and brushed it into her hair. Lucy Chin was the bus driver’s daughter, and Mira had decided to keep as many secrets from her as possible.

  Mira had been there when the conversation took place between her mother and Lucy Chin’s mother, the bus stopped at the bus stop, her mother inside the bus leaning forward on one heeled foot, the driver sitting in her seat, her hand waiting to shift gears, thirty kids, the engine running under them all.

  “Will you keep an eye on that awful boy?” her mother had said to the bus driver. Awful, was that what he was? It was unusual to see her mother in the context of the bus.

  “Sure of course, I didn’t realize anything like that was going on.” There was a line of cars behind them, stopped for the bus’s stop sign. The driver waved them around.

  “It’s that I can’t keep being late in the mornings, and I don’t get home til five.” Boring, boring Mom-talk.

  “What about their babysitter?”

  “No babysitter, they take care of themselves.” Like cacti. Like self-cleaning ovens. Why did her mother say that? Didn’t she know they were too young to stay at home alone?

  “They’re a little young for that, aren’t they? You know, I can watch them, if they stay on the bus with me until the end of the route. Lucy will be there, too, that’s my daughter.” No, no, Mira thought, and this was before she even knew Lucy Chin. It might have been the first time she’d heard words and felt dread, the first inkling that a single sentence from her mother or another mother could so drastically change her routine. After school was when she searched the kitchen for the most delicious foods, when she ate Joe Louis cream-filled cakes right from their wrappers without even using a plate. After school, she hammered together old paint stir sticks, with the smallest nails from her father’s kit, to construct fantastic wooden alli-gators. After school, she went on cleaning binges, folded all the towels in the hallway closet and organized them by colour, and then said nothing about them, hoping to witness the moment when her mother opened the closet door.

  And now, nearly a year later, she didn’t find it easy keeping secrets from Lucy Chin because she attended school with her, and Brownie meetings, took morning and afternoon bus rides with her, ate lunch and dinner with her. Mira began to eat strange breakfasts, asking her mother for Indian foods with names Lucy wouldn’t be able to pronounce. Lucy had slept over at Mira’s house one time, and had inspected what Mira kept under her bed (The Monster at the End of This Book, an extra blanket, pipe cleaners, wooden alligators), and peered under the comforter to note the colour of her sheets (blue). After that, Mira changed the sheets and put more things under the bed, so if Lucy ever told anybody about these intimate details of Mira’s life, she would be wrong.

  “Let’s do a test,” suggested Lucy Chin. Morning recess had just started. Children still streamed out of the steel double doors, wearing baseball gloves and holding skipping ropes. The two girls crouched together on the four-by-fours that bordered the playground sand. Mira wished she had eaten her applesauce faster.

  “I don’t know if we have time,” said Mira, not curious about the test’s design. She scanned the school property for teachers. If she saw a yard monitor holding a garbage bag, she would run to help clean up. She would claim she wanted to win more class points for the monthly school prize. Lucy would abandon her for the playground, to swing on the monkey bars or the rings, her legs bending like hinges, the ground beneath her sharp and white with small pebbles, her face as cold as the metal under her curled hands. Mira would pick up trash at the teacher’s side, even the grape juice boxes that leaked over her and whose smell made her want to retch.

  “There’s time,” said Lucy, taking Mira’s applesauce from her. “Hold your arms out.”

  Mira extended her arms and rolled up her sleeves as Lucy instructed. Lucy took the plastic spoon and began to spread a thin layer of applesauce over Mira’s arms. It formed sticky stripes over the soft hairs. She put more on Mira’s neck and then on her face.

  “Go stand over there,” said Lucy, pointing at a secluded area under where the school building’s roof jutted out. The bee corner. There must have been a hidden hive under the roof that the janitors had not yet removed, because bees waited there, as if for a secret meeting, forming palpable electricity in the surrounding air.

  “Are those really bees, or are they yellow jackets, or wasps?” Mira asked, stalling. Four of the fifteen recess minutes had passed.

  “I told you they were bees,” said Lucy. She placed one hand on Mira’s back, careful not to get applesauce on herself, and pushed Mira hard towards the bees.

  Mira looked around again for the teacher, but he must have been confiscating a tennis ball or blowing a whistle at somebody or clearing up a traffic jam on the slide. The area was deserted; all the other children had disappeared to the playground or the back field. She dragged herself over to the shady corner, slowly, careful not to jostle the bees that socialized on the wall ledge,
careful not to open her mouth. When the bees began to land on her, Mira tried to think of what it felt like — marbles rolling over her skin, or a roaming cat’s paw. By thinking of these, of the visceral, immediate feelings, she could almost ignore her fear. She considered how she must look, standing alone there. If enough bees covered her body, colouring her in a constant moving pattern of opaque black and yellow, she might look like a campfire, with a girl instead of kindling. For a moment, she felt a terrible urge to stop, drop, and roll. Logic kept her from doing this. She didn’t want the bee bodies crushed under her, into her. So she stood there, waiting the eleven intermi-nable minutes for the recess bell to ring, standing and waiting, like a girl on fire, a girl aflame, watching Lucy Chin watching her, watching Lucy Chin licking the applesauce spoon.

  UNTIL SHE MET Lucy Chin, Mira thought bullies had to be boys. They needed to be taller than you, so you’d have to stand on your toes to spit in their eyes. After meeting Lucy Chin, she practised the spitting while brushing her teeth, but in the times when she was close enough to Lucy’s face, her saliva failed her. She knew that after spitting, there wouldn’t be anywhere to run where Lucy Chin couldn’t find her. Even if she made it out of the classroom or the school grounds or Lucy’s house and somehow into her own house, locking all the doors behind her, she would still have to see her the next day. Lucy Chin’s mother held four part-time jobs, including driving the school bus. Lucy always sat two seats from the front, where her mother couldn’t hear what she whispered to Mira, but could still offer a certain protection.