On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light Read online

  “What kind of name is Harriet anyway? I mean, it’s, like, an old lady name.”

  “It’s my father’s mother’s name. And my grandfather’s name is Irwin. My parents named us after them thinking it would make them forgive them for eloping. They’re rich, and my parents keep hoping they’ll give them money, or drop dead and leave them money. But they’ll never die.”

  “Everybody dies.”

  “Not mean and cheap people, they live till a hundred. Look at Mrs. Butts.” Mrs. Butts lives next door in 712 and sends Harriet on errands for a quarter. She’s fat, eighty-two, humpbacked and addicted to painkillers and sleeping pills. When she wants Harriet to do something, she smiles and puts on a nice little old lady voice, but if Harriet brings back Minute Maid orange juice with, instead of without, pulp, or beef-flavoured, instead of chicken-flavoured, Temptations for her cats, Mrs. Butts turns into a mean junkie.

  The word among the seniors at the Shangrila is that Harriet will go down to Hung Best Convenience for a quarter. Mr. Shotlander in 506 has her picking up the paper on Fridays for the TV listings, and Harriet suspects she’s underpriced herself, but at least the errands get her away from Gennedy.

  What she can’t understand about her mother shacking up with Gennedy is why Lynne has to be with somebody in the first place. Harriet prefers to be by herself than with anybody. Around people she feels bound in one of Gran’s pressure stockings. She also doesn’t understand why Gran is nice to her but mean to her mother, even though Lynne cleared the junk out of her house when Gran was evicted for health violations after Grandpa died. Lynne furnished Gran’s new place with nice things from IKEA, but still Gran complains about her: Where’d that know-it-all mother of yours put my muffin tins? Where’d that high-and-mighty mother of yours put my electric frying pan?

  It seems to Harriet people are better off by themselves and not caged together in apartments and houses. When she escapes to the back woods ranger cabin she won’t have to talk to anybody. Lost Coin Lake is isolated from road and canoe routes, and the marshy shoreline is unsuitable for swimming. Nobody goes there. This makes it perfect.

  Two

  In the lobby, the seniors congregate under the broken chandelier. Propped up on the shabby, leatherette furniture they discuss the weather, physical ailments and lottery losses. When they see Harriet, they dig in their pockets and purses for quarters. She carefully writes the individual orders on Post-its and puts them, with the cash, in Ziploc baggies, one per customer. She prints the amount of cash they give her in big numbers on the Post-it, because often they insist they gave her a twenty when they gave her a ten.

  Mr. Pungartnik nudges Harriet towards the dusty plastic palm and pushes a twenty at her. “Export A’s,” he whispers. Mrs. Pungartnik tries to dye Mr. Pungartnik’s hair auburn, but it turns out orange.

  “I can’t buy you cigarettes, Mr. Pungartnik. I’m only eleven.”

  “I’ll give you a buck.”

  “Mr. Hung won’t sell me cigarettes until I’m eighteen.”

  “Tell him it’s for me.”

  Mrs. Pungartnik dyes her hair too, which also turns out orange. She stomps up and pinches Harriet’s arm. “Is my husband trying to get you to buy him cigarettes?” She has a cast in one eye and consequently looks as though she’s looking away even when she’s staring right at you. “Don’t buy him cigarettes.” She wags an arthritic finger at Harriet. “No matter what he pays you, understand? That’s assisting suicide, you could go to jail for that, you hear me? Jail.”

  “What do you want me alive for, anyway?” Mr. Pungartnik demands. “My pension?” He holds his fifty-year-old transistor radio against his ear to block out Mrs. Pungartnik.

  On the sidewalk outside Hung Best Convenience, Mr. Hung practices his golf swing. He can never take time off to play golf but practices his swing anyway. After they’ve filled the seniors’ orders, Mr. Hung offers Harriet an Orange Crush. He often gives her day-old muffins, dented chocolate bars, crumbling date squares, but an Orange Crush with no best-before date is unprecedented. His generosity baffles Harriet because he doesn’t seem to like her, never feigns interest the way other adults do. The Hungs had a dry cleaning business, but the chemicals made his wife sick. Their math-brain son studies engineering and never helps out at the store. Harriet does because she enjoys wrapping Mrs. Hung’s baked goods in Saran Wrap and setting out the buckets of flowers. And Mr. Hung always saves the best cardboard and packaging for Harriet’s mixed-media projects.

  He arches his back with his hands on his hips.

  “Is your back hurting?” She pops the tab on the Orange Crush.

  Mr. Hung works sixteen-hour days, seven days a week when Mrs. Hung’s lung condition makes her too sick to mind the store. Harriet thinks it would be better for his back if he worked at the bank. “They even have stools now,” she told him, “for the tellers.” Mr. Hung didn’t respond, which didn’t bother Harriet. Most people talk too much.

  She sucks on her straw. “Is it true they put cats in Chinese food?”

  “Only at very best restaurants.”

  “It’s just meat, I guess. I mean what’s the difference between a cat and a chicken.”

  “Both good in dumpling.”

  She’s never sure when Mr. Hung’s joking. Most people introduce jokes with nervous titters or smiles. Mr. Hung stays poker-faced, which means Harriet isn’t obliged to laugh at his jokes, if they are jokes. Gennedy gets cranky when he thinks he’s being funny and no one’s laughing. Am I the only one with a sense of humour around here?

  Mr. Hung has never admitted if it bothers him that the seniors joke about how he is hung. Mr. Shotlander frequently croaks, “Hey, Harry, go on down to Hung Best, or is he hung worst, and get me some barbecue chips.” Harriet tries to respect the seniors but she won’t tolerate them making fun of Mr. Hung. “He’d knock you flat in an IQ test,” she told Mr. Shotlander.

  “That Chinaman?” Mr. Shotlander was tugging up his polyester trousers. His pants constantly fall down because belts give him tummy trouble. Mr. Chubak wears suspenders and advises Mr. Shotlander to do the same, but he refuses. What am I, a farmer?

  When Harriet asked Lynne why there are so many old people in the Shangrila, Lynne said, “That’s what you get with low-cost housing. Seniors and single mothers.”

  “You’re not a single mother. You live with Gennedy.”

  “It’s not official.” Gennedy tapped his index finger against his nose to indicate that their living arrangements were top secret.

  “If anybody official-looking asks about Gennedy,” Lynne said, “just say he’s your uncle.”

  “So it’s okay to live with your brother but not your boyfriend?”

  “Bunny, just mind your own business for once, okay? On the books I’m a single mom. That’s how we get financial aid.”

  “Doesn’t he pay rent?”

  “I help out,” Gennedy said. “That’s a little different.”

  “And your asshole father with his sterile so-called intellectual is not making his payments.”

  Harriet hopes that someone official-looking will demand to inspect the apartment and discover Gennedy, preferably in his tightie whities. She imagines the official-looking person taking him away in cuffs.

  Mr. Hung offers her a bag of damaged Doritos then spits.

  “Why do you spit?” Harriet tears open the packet.

  “Everybody in China spit. Good for lung.”

  She crunches a Dorito. “Do you know what a capybara is?”

  Mr. Hung inspects the bananas, collecting the rotten ones for Mrs. Hung’s muffins. “Capybara. Animal?”

  “It’s the world’s largest rodent.”

  “Good for Chinese food.”

  Harriet decides he’s joking. “I should get back to the seniors.”

  They complain if she made substitutions. Mr. Chubak, gripping his red suspen
ders, insists he asked for Alfonso Tango Gelato when he asked for Mango Tango, but Harriet calmly sets them straight, one baggy at a time. In the elevator she counts her quarters. She’s made $2.75.

  Lynne and Gennedy are having their usual how-can-a-criminal-lawyer-be-broke argument. They’re not watching Irwin. He’s scraping toothpaste out of his slippers with his fingers and laughing. “Haarreee, look, I got toothpaste in my slippers.”

  When Irwin was a year old he couldn’t sit up or crawl, but he could laugh. Dwarf quintuplets shared the ICU with him during one of his continuous EEG monitoring stays and one of the dwarves could laugh too. Staring at the dwarves, Lynne whispered to Harriet, “Look how lucky we are.” Meaning, at least Irwin wasn’t a dwarf. But the doctors weren’t sure if Irwin would live, or walk, and Harriet didn’t see how not being a dwarf when you might not live or walk was something to celebrate. She admired the dwarves. They didn’t have stretched heads or unformed ears. They were just tiny, resembling crabby old men, except for the one who laughed all the time. Harriet filled a sketchbook with dwarf drawings, but it was impossible to capture what was really going on beneath the skin of the laughing dwarf, or Irwin; it was as though they were under some kind of spell. She’s concluded that the water sloshing around Irwin’s brain and bloating his skull insulates him, preventing him from noticing how mean and unfunny people are, enabling him to laugh. He holds up his slipper. “See, toothpaste. How did that get there?”

  “Beats me.” She closes her door with the NO ENTRY sign on it and stands at her easel. Her portrait of Gennedy has been irking her all day. The beak is not right, nor is the left talon. She has painted many portraits of Gennedy, although no one knows they’re Gennedy. No one looks at her paintings anymore, anyway. Before Irwin was born, Lynne referred to Harriet as “my little artist” and bought her art supplies for her birthday. Now she buys her girly clothes displaying brand names. Harriet removes any sewn labels with nail scissors, sometimes tearing the fabric. “Most girls would kill for those labels,” Lynne cries. “Why do you have to be so difficult?” Difficult is a word she often uses to describe Harriet. “She’s a difficult child” or “She can be difficult.”

  What Lynne doesn’t know yet is that Harriet has taken scissors to her People and Us Weekly magazines, cutting off Jennifer Aniston’s head and gluing it on Angelina’s neck, and gluing Angelina’s head on Brad’s body. She put Brad’s head on Obama and Obama’s head on Lady Gaga, and Lady Gaga’s head on George Clooney. She put George’s head on Kate Middleton’s neck but then couldn’t decide what to do with Kate’s head. In the “Who wore it best?” feature, Kate was in a gaudy orange dress beside a shot of Madonna in the same gaudy orange dress. Harriet trashed the original Kate head then cut out the one on the gaudy orange dress, as well as Madonna’s, and switched them. She performed this surgery in front of Irwin, who she was supposed to be watching in case he seized. Irwin loves it when Harriet cuts up Lynne’s magazines: his eyes bulge and he bounces, laughing and pulling on his deformed ears. Actually, they look almost normal now—slightly Spockish—but Lynne asks the barber to go easy around them, allowing hair to cover their tips.

  Her mother knocks on her door. “Come have dinner.”

  It’s the proportion of Gennedy’s left talon that is particularly bothersome, and the light on his beak. Harriet refers again to the photo of the bald eagle in her Majestic Birds book, trying to figure out what she’s done wrong. She has always painted with loose, underhand strokes, starting from shadow, which makes rendering talons and beaks challenging. At school, Yannick Picard draws with a tight grip and gets A-pluses from Mrs. Elrind for his artwork because he starts with a recognizable outline of his subject then fills it in. Yannick Picard, in Harriet’s opinion, isn’t actually seeing what he’s drawing, just drawing what he thinks he’s seeing. In the same way people decide they are looking at a house because they are familiar with things that look more or less like houses. This is what enables people like Yannick Picard and Mrs. Elrind to say that the particular house they are looking at is a big house, an ugly house, an old house, but when Harriet paints and draws she has no conditioned responses to her subjects, and begins with the shapes she actually sees. She observes how light interrupts her subject and curves into shadows. Sometimes the shadows look like hamsters, or the African continent, or a sleeping cat without a tail. She stays focused on each shape, one after the other, until the subject emerges from the shadows. It seems to her people rarely understand shadows; they forget that they’re part of the light. She has always drawn this way, upsetting Mrs. Elrind who gives her C-minuses.

  Gennedy pushes the bowl of carrots at her even though he knows she doesn’t like boiled carrots. “So what did you get up to today?” he booms. When Gennedy first started hanging around, Harriet asked her mother why he talked so loud. Her mother said, “It’s the litigator in him.” Harriet looked up litigator, disappointed to learn it bore no relation to alligator.

  All year Harriet endures Gennedy demanding, “How was school today?” And all summer, before Uma’s infertility treatments meant there was no money for day camp, Gennedy would ask, “How was camp today?” Harriet hated camp with its organized games and crafts, ADHD boys and disinterested counsellors on cells. She is free this summer to make escape money, and has stopped rolling her coins for deposit but instead changes them into bills she can hide in her art books. She has been staking out the bank, making note of the tellers’ shifts, to work out a system for withdrawing the remainder of her balance. The ATMs are in plain sight of the tellers but if Harriet makes $20 withdrawals when ladies who don’t know her are working, she should, by October, have enough cash to escape. She is determined to get to Algonquin for the fall colours.

  Gennedy raps his knuckles on the table. “Knock, knock, who’s there?”

  Irwin guffaws, spewing chewed carrot. “I’m here.”

  “Not you, champ. I’m trying to engage your sis in conversation.”

  “Knock knock, who’s there?” Irwin giggles, bouncing.

  Lynne wipes up Irwin’s spewed carrot with a napkin. “Harry, please answer Gennedy.”

  “What was his question?”

  “He asked what you did today.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Gennedy booms. “You were out all day—you must have done something. I hope you weren’t garbage-picking. Mr. Shotlander saw you climbing out of the dumpster again yesterday.”

  “Mr. Shotlander should mind his own business.” Harriet will have to blackmail the old buzzard, tell him she won’t pick up his TV listings if he keeps informing on her.

  “I wish you’d stop doing that, bunny.” Lynne cuts up Irwin’s fish sticks. “Dumpster diving is dangerous, and what happens if you can’t climb out?”

  “I don’t go in if I can’t get out. I use Mr. Hung’s milk crates. It’s easy.”

  Gennedy shakes his head and snorts. “All so you can glue garbage on cardboard. Unbelievable.”

  “Look at your hands, Harriet,” her mother says. “I mean, seriously, baby, there’s paint and glue under your nails, and in the cracks of your skin. It’s not healthy. Lord knows what’s in those tubes. Not to mention the glue. Please tell me you’re not sniffing the glue.”

  Gennedy spoons more carrots onto Harriet’s plate even though she hasn’t eaten any. “Why don’t you go outside and play in the park like other kids? It’s summer, for chrissake, get out in the sun. When I was a kid, you couldn’t pay me to stay indoors.”

  Gennedy and Lynne have this idea that Harriet will meet nice kids in the park, even though cigarette butts, syringes and used condoms litter the patchy grass.

  “Bunny, did you talk to one person your age today?”

  “Just Darcy.” If she admits she was at Darcy’s watching YouTube, Gennedy won’t let her go there.

  “Who’s Darcy?” Lynne spends days away from home doing bookkeeping for dubious businesses that
pay cash, so she’s not up to speed regarding Harriet’s social life.

  “Darcy,” Gennedy announces, “is the new girl on the block. Moved in four floors down. I’ve chatted with her mother in the laundry room. Apparently Darcy is sexually active.”

  “So?” Harriet helps herself to another fish stick.

  “She’s twelve.”

  “Lots of people are sexually active at twelve,” Harriet says.

  “Am I really hearing this?” Lynne grips her forehead.

  Irwin bounces. “What’s sexshally active?”

  “Can we take a time out here?” Gennedy booms. He frequently says this, like anybody cares. All Harriet wants are time outs.

  They eat listening to Gennedy chomp like a horse and scrape his plate with his fork to clean up every scrap of food so nothing’s wasted. Leaving the carrots on her plate, Harriet pushes her chair back. “May I be excused?”

  Gennedy’s cloven hoof isn’t giving off the right feeling either. Harriet will have to let the talon and the hoof dry for a week, paint over them and start again. Or burn the painting, although Mr. Shotlander is bound to rat on her. He caught her burning some mixed media behind the building and immediately reported the incident to Gennedy, who took Harriet’s glue gun away.

  She tries some blending on his beak to fix the light problem and digs around in her box for Chromatic Black. She’s running out of blacks, as well as Burnt and Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Indian Red and Raw Sienna. The big tubes cost $10.95 plus tax, and she has to buy bus tickets to get to and from the store. Buying the smaller and therefore cheaper tubes of dark oils ends up costing more as her paintings are primarily dark except for the occasional accent of a burning tongue, a gaping wound or a gouged eyeball.

  Her mother pushes open her door, despite the NO ENTRY sign, and waves the People and Us Weekly magazines. “Why do you do this?”

  “Why do you read them?”

  “Oh, is that what this is about? You disapprove of my reading material? How would you feel if I came into your room and cut up your stuff? It’s disrespectful. That’s just like your father.” She frequently accuses Harriet of being just like her father, and her father frequently accuses Harriet of being just like her mother. They both make it sound as though resembling the person they married, and swore not to leave until death did them part, is the worst thing that could happen to Harriet.