The Robber Bride

  Not this face. It's a flat face with a dull shine on it, like the dead fish in the white enamel trays at the fish store. A fading light, silvery, like scales. She turns this face towards Karen; it's expressionless as a plate. Eyes of china. Suddenly Karen is framed in those eyes, a small pale girl sitting on a nubbly chair, a girl her mother has never seen before. Karen brings her two hands up to her mouth and breathes in, a gasp, the reverse of a scream.

  "Gloria. How're you feeling?" says Uncle Vern.

  Karen's mother's head swings towards him, a ponderous head, heavy. The hair on it is pulled back, held with clips. Karen's mother used to do her hair up in pincurls, and when she combed it out it would be wavy. This hair is plain and straight, and filmed over, as if it's been kept in a cupboard. Karen thinks about her grandmother's root cellar, with its smell of indoor earth and its rows of preserve bottles, bright berries glassed over, powdered with dust.

  "Fine," says Karen's mother, after a minute.

  "I can't stand it," says Aunt Vi. She dabs at her eyes with a hankie. Then, in a firmer voice: "Karen, aren't you going to give your mother a kiss?"

  Aunt Vi's questions are like orders. Karen slides off her chair and goes over to this woman. She doesn't put her arms around her, she doesn't touch her with her hands. She bends her body from the waist and places her lips against the woman's cheek. She hardly presses at all, but her mouth sinks in and down, on the cheek that is like cool rubber. She thinks of Pinky without a head, collapsing in the barnyard, becoming ham. Her mother has the texture of luncheon meat. She feels sick to her stomach.

  Her mother receives the kiss passively. Karen steps back. There is no red light around her mother now. Only a faint mauve-brown shimmer.

  In the car on the way home, Karen sits between Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern instead of in the back where she usually sits. Aunt Vi wipes at her eyes. Uncle Vern asks Karen if she wants an ice cream cone. She says no thank you, and he pats her knee.

  "I felt so bad, my own little sister; but I had to do it," Aunt Vi says, on the phone. "It was the third time, and what could I do? I don't know where she got them! Lucky the empty bottle was right there beside her so at least we could tell the doctor what she took. It's just a wonder we were in time. Something in her voice, I guess; well, it's not like I hadn't heard it before! When we got there she was out cold. She had bruises on her mouth for weeks, they had to pry it open to get the hose down, and today it was like you wouldn't of known her. I don't know - shock treatments, I guess. If that doesn't work, they'll have to do an operation." She says operation in that solemn voice, the voice she uses for saying grace, as if it's a holy word. She wants it, this operation, Karen can tell. If her mother has an operation, some of that holiness will rub off on Aunt Vi.

  Karen went to school, where she said little and did not make friends. She was not teased either, she was mostly ignored. She knew how to do that, make herself invisible. All she had to do was to suck in the light around her body; it was like sucking in her breath. When the teacher looked at her the look went right through, to whoever was sitting behind her. This way Karen hardly needed to be in the classroom at all. She let her hands do whatever was required: long rows of a's and b's, neat columns of numbers. She got gold stars for neatness. Her paper snowflake and her paper tulip were among the ten pinned up on the corkboard.

  Every week, then every two weeks, then every three, she went with her aunt and uncle to visit her mother. Her mother was in a different hospital now. "Your mother is very ill," Aunt Vi told her, but Karen didn't need to be told. She could see the illness spreading on her mother's skin, like the hairs on arms, gone out of control; like filaments of lightning, only very small and slow. Like grey mould spreading through bread. When her mother was veined through and through like that, then she would die. Nobody could stop her, because that was what she wanted to do.

  Karen thought about using her wishbone but she knew it wouldn't be any good. To make a wish work you had to really want it, and she didn't want this woman to stay alive. If she could have had her mother back the way she was before, during the good times, yes. But she knew this was impossible. There wasn't enough of that mother left. So she kept the wishbone in the hem of the curtain, checking once in a while to make sure it was still there.

  Karen sat in her room. Sometimes she banged her head softly against the wall, so she wouldn't have to think. Or she looked out the window a lot. Or she looked out the window at school. What she looked at was the sky. She thought about the summer. Maybe next summer her aunt and uncle would go on a vacation and she could be back at her grandmother's farm, gathering the eggs, picking yellow beans in the sun.

  On her eighth birthday Karen has a cake. Aunt Vi has baked it, and put sugar roses on it from the store, and eight candles. She asks Karen if she wants to have a little friend over, but Karen says no. So they eat the birthday dinner by themselves, the three of them, Oh Lord, bless this food to our use, Amen, and there are tuna and egg salad sandwiches, and peanut butter and jelly, and Aunt Vi says, "Isn't this nice," and then there is Neapolitan ice cream in three colours, white, pink, and brown. After that the cake. Aunt Vi lights the candles and tells Karen to blow them out and make a wish, but Karen just sits there, looking at the flames.

  "I don't think she's ever had a cake before," Aunt Vi says to Uncle Vern, and Uncle Vern says, "Poor little tyke," and ruffles Karen's hair. He does this often these days and Karen doesn't like it. Uncle Vern's hands have a heavy luminescence around them, thick like jelly, sticky, brown-green. Sometimes Karen examines her blonde hair in the mirror to see if any of it has come off.

  "Make a wish," says Uncle Vern heartily. "Wish for a bicycle!"

  "You have to close your eyes," says Aunt Vi.

  So to humour them Karen closes her eyes, and sees nothing but the sky, and opens her eyes again and obediently blows out the candles. Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern clap their hands, applauding, and Uncle Vern says, "Well, what do you know! Look what we have here!" and out of the kitchen he wheels a brand-new bicycle, bright red. It's decorated with pink ribbons and has a balloon tied to one handle. "What do you think of that?" says Uncle Vern eagerly.

  It's dusk; the smell of mowed grass comes in through the open window, the June bugs batter themselves against the screen. Karen looks at the bicycle, at its glinting spokes and chains and its two black wheels, and knows that her mother is dead.

  Her mother did not die for another three weeks, but it was the same thing, because sometimes (thinks Charis) there is a fold in time, like the way you fold the top bedsheet down to make a border, and if you stick a pin through at any spot, then the two pinholes are aligned, and that's the way it is when you foresee the future. There's nothing mysterious about it, any more than there is with a backwash in a lake or with harmony in music, two melodies going on at the same time. Memory is the same overlap, the same kind of pleat, only backwards.

  Or maybe the fold is not in time itself but in the mind of the person watching. In any case, Karen looks at the bicycle and sees her mother's death, and collapses onto the floor, crying, and Aunt Vi and Uncle Vern are baffled and then angry, and tell her she is a lucky girl, a lucky, ungrateful girl, and she can't explain.

  There was a funeral but not very many people came. A few teachers from her mother's old school, some friends of Aunt Vi's. Her grandmother wasn't there, but Karen didn't find that strange - her grandmother in the city would have been out of place. There was another reason as well - stroke, said Aunt Vi, and nursing home, in the tone of voice that was supposed to enlist other people's sympathy for her - but these words meant nothing to Karen and she didn't want to hear them, so she put them out of her mind. She had on a navy blue dress, which was the closest Aunt Vi could get to black, at short notice, although - she said on the phone - she should've seen it coming. Karen wasn't allowed to visit her mother's body in the coffin because Aunt Vi said it was too shocking a thing for a young child, but she knew anyway what it would look like. The same as alive, only more so.

/>   Uncle Vern and Aunt Vi have had part of their cellar re-done. They've had plasterboard put over the cement-block walls, linoleum with thick carpeting over it on the floor. They've made a rec room down there, rec not like wreck but like recreation. There's a bar with bar stools, and a set of chinese chequers for Karen, and a television set. It's the second television set they've bought; the first one is kept in the living room. Karen likes to watch the set in the rec room, out of everyone's way. She doesn't actually have to pay attention to what's in front of her on the screen; she can be by herself, inside her head, and no one will ask what she's doing.

  It's September, but outside, upstairs, it's still dry and hot. Karen sits on the carpet, in the rec room where it's cooler, in bare feet and shorts and a sleeveless top, watching Kukla, Fran & Ollie on TV. Kukla, Fran and Ollie are puppets, or two of them are. Overhead, Aunt Vi's shoes clack busily back and forth across the kitchen floor. Karen hugs her own knees, rocking gently. After a while she gets up and goes to the bar sink and runs herself a glass of water, and puts in an ice cube out of the little refrigerator, and sits back down on the rug.

  Uncle Vern comes down the stairs. He's been mowing the lawn. He is a deeper red than usual, and the smell of sweat encircles him, like the water drops when a wet dog shakes itself. He goes to the bar and gets out a beer, takes the cap off the bottle and drinks down half, and wipes his wet face with the towel beside the sink. Then he sits down on the sofa. The sofa is a sofa-bed, in case they have visitors, because Karen has the room that used to be the guest room. That room is still called "the guest room," although Karen is living in it. They don't have visitors, though.

  Karen gets up. She intends to go upstairs, because she knows what will happen next, but she isn't fast enough. "Come on," says Uncle Vern. He pats his huge, hairy knee, and Karen goes reluctantly towards him. He likes her to sit on his knee. He thinks it's fatherly. "You're our little girl now," he says fondly. But he isn't really fond of her, Karen knows that. She knows she is unsatisfactory to him, because she doesn't talk to him, she doesn't hug him, she doesn't smile enough. It's his smell she doesn't like. That, and his greeny-brown light.

  She sits on Uncle Vern's knee and he pulls her higher up onto his lap and encircles her with one of his red arms. With the other hand he strokes her leg. He often does this, she's used to it; but this time he moves his hand up higher, between her legs. Kukla, Fran and Ollie continue to talk in their made-up voices; Kukla is some sort of a dragon. Karen squirms a little, trying to move herself away from the enormous fingers, which are inside her shorts now, but the arm tightens around her stomach and Uncle Vern says into her ear, "Hold still!" He does not sound hearty, wheedling, the way he usually does; he sounds angry. He has both hands on her now, he rubs her back and forth across himself as if she's a washcloth; his sticky breath is all over her ear. "You like your old Uncle Vern, don't you?" he says furiously.

  "You two!" Aunt Vi calls gaily down the cellar stairs. "Supper-time! There's corn on the cob!"

  "Be right there!" Uncle Vern yells hoarsely, as if the words have been expelled from him by a kick in the stomach. He shoves one finger right up inside Karen, and groans as if he's been stabbed. He holds Karen against himself for another minute: the energy is leaking out of him and he needs a bandage. Then he lets her go.

  "Scamper upstairs," he tells her. He's trying for his fake voice, his uncle voice, but he hasn't got it back; his voice is desolate. "Tell your Auntie Vi I'll be up in a minute." Karen looks behind herself, to see if the back of her shorts is browny-green, but it isn't; only wet. Uncle Vern is wiping himself off with the bar towel.

  Uncle Vern lurks, he lies in wait. Karen evades him, but she can't evade him all the time. The strange thing is that Uncle Vern never comes looking for her when Aunt Vi isn't in the house. Maybe he likes the danger; or maybe he knows that with Aunt Vi there, Karen won't dare to make a sound. It's unclear how he knows this, or why this is so, but it's true. Karen's fear of Aunt Vi's finding out is greater than her fear of Uncle Vern's sausage fingers.

  Soon one finger isn't enough for him. He stands Karen in front of him, facing away so she can't see, a big knee holding her on either side, and puts his hands up under her pleated school skirts and slides her panties right down, shoving something hard in between her legs from behind. Or he uses two fingers, three. It hurts, but Karen knows that people who love you can do painful things to you, and she tries hard to believe that he does love her. He says he does. "Your old uncle loves you," he tells her, scraping his face against hers.

  When they are having dinner afterwards he laughs more, he talks louder, he tells jokes, he kisses Aunt Vi on the cheek. He brings them both presents: boxes of chocolates for Aunt Vi, stuffed animals for Karen. "You're just like our daughter," he says. Aunt Vi smiles thinly. Nobody can say they aren't doing the right thing.

  Karen loses her appetite: the effort of not thinking about Uncle Vern, both when he's there and when he isn't, is making her weak. She becomes thinner and paler, and Aunt Vi discusses her on the phone - "It's the loss of her mother, she's the quiet type but you can tell she feels it. She just mopes around. I wasn't expecting it to go on this long. She's almost ten!" She takes Karen to the doctor to see if she has anemia, but she doesn't.

  "Tell me what's wrong," says Aunt Vi. "It's better if you talk about it. You can tell me!" She has that solemn, avid look on her face, she's expecting to hear about Karen's mother. She urges and urges.

  "I don't like Uncle Vern touching me," says Karen finally.

  Aunt Vi's face goes slack, then hardens. "Touching you?" she says suspiciously. "What do you mean, touching?"

  "Touching," says Karen miserably. "Down there." She points. She knows already she's done a wrong, an unforgivable thing. Up to now Aunt Vi has been willing to tolerate her, even to put on a show of liking her. Not any more.

  Aunt Vi's lips are white, her eyes are sparkling dangerously. Karen looks down at the floor so as not to see. "You're exactly like your mother," says Aunt Vi. "A liar. I wouldn't be surprised if you went crazy, just like her. God knows it runs in the family! Don't you ever say such an evil thing about your uncle! He loves you like a daughter! Do you want to destroy him?" She starts to cry. "Pray to God to forgive you!" Then her face changes again. She wipes her eyes, she smiles. "We'll just forget you ever said that, dear," she says. "We'll both forget it. I know things have been hard on you. You never had a father."

  After that, what can be done? Nothing at all. Uncle Vern knows Karen has told. He is nicer than ever to Aunt Vi. He is even nice to Karen, in front of people; but sadly, as if he's forgiving her. When Aunt Vi isn't looking he stares across the dinner table at Karen, his eyes in his face of uncooked beef shining with triumph. You can't win this fight, he's telling her. She can hear the words as clearly as if he's spoken them. For the time being he's avoiding her, he no longer tracks her through the house, but he's waiting. He's itching to get his hands on her, but not with any pleading whispers. Now he won't ask if she likes him, now he's more like her mother used to be, before she would start screaming and reach for the broom handle. That ominous lull, that softness.

  Karen sleeps with her head under her pillow, because she doesn't want to hear or see; but she's sleepwalking again, more than ever. She wakes up in the living room, trying to get out through the French windows, or in the kitchen, shaking the back door handle. But Aunt Vi locks all the doors.

  Karen is sitting straight up in her bed, holding her pillow against her chest. Her heart is beating with terror. There's a man standing in her dark bedroom; it's Uncle Vern, she can see his face in the light that comes through from the hall, just before he eases the door shut. His eyes are open, but he's sleepwalking; he has his striped pyjamas on, he has a glazed look. Don't ever wake a person sleepwalking, said her grandmother. It breaks their journey.

  Uncle Vern sleepwalks quietly across the floor to Karen's bed. With him comes a smell of stale sweat and rancid meat. He kneels and the bed heaves like a boat, he pushes
and Karen falls backwards. "You're a little bastard, that's what you are," he whispers softly. "A sly little bastard." He's talking in his sleep.

  Then he falls on top of Karen and puts his slabby hand over her mouth, and splits her in two. He splits her in two right up the middle and her skin comes open like the dry skin of a cocoon, and Charis flies out. Her new body is light as a feather, light as air. There's no pain in it at all. She flies over to the window and in behind the curtain, and stays there, looking out through the cloth, right through the pattern of pink and orange roses. What she sees is a small pale girl, her face contorted and streaming, nose and eyes wet as if she's drowning - gasping for air, going under again, gasping. On top of her is a dark mass, worrying at her, like an animal eating another animal. Her entire body - because Charis can see right through things, through the sheets, through the flesh to the bone - her body is made of something slippery and yellow, like the fat in a gutted hen. Charis watches in amazement as the man grunts, as the small child wriggles and flails as if hooked through the neck. Charis doesn't know she is Charis, of course. She has no name yet.

  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."