Mitochondrial Curiosities of Marcels 1 to 19 (5 page)

On Saturday morning, Joan remembered I existed and sat on my bed to say
meatloaf
. ‘I'm making meatloaf tonight.'

‘Joan, relax.'

‘Acting like him is not going to bring him back,' she said. ‘Time to get up.' Joan can't stand stillness, especially in people. She leaned down to pull on some wool that was tangled in other wool and clothes and lifted the whole thing. ‘How can you live like this?'

Paige stood in the door, so contained she looked varnished. ‘Mom, I need a ride.'

Joan ignored her, so we're talking desperate to make me move. She went for a new wad of clothing. ‘After all, it wasn't a complete surprise, we knew he had a bad heart, we knew it was a matter of time.'

Whereupon Paige twittered and tapped because her needs are always more important than anyone else's. ‘Mom, I have to be there at 10, at 10, at 10, Mom, and it's 9:48?'

Here's where Joan generally said,
Calm down, Paige, I'm coming
. This time, she stood, up, grabbed Paige's Virgin Mary statue and batted a crumpled Kleenex off the dresser with it. Holy blaspheme. ‘You know what, you two?' she said. ‘I need time to process too.'

‘Wow. Because you haven't been so far?' But it didn't matter what I said, because Paige detonated. ‘Hello? Correction? Inner-city people are waiting for my help? People neeeeeeeed me.' The way Paige said
need
made me think of major organs being sliced open.

Before she left the room, Joan pointed at Grandma Giles' photo and said, ‘You're going to Grandma's. Get packed.'

‘Relax!' I yelled back at Paige. ‘They'll be there next week.'

‘Mom! Not me, I'm not going, I'm not – '

‘Paige, please.' Joan's voice sounded underwater. ‘I need the house to myself for a couple of days.'

‘What did
I
do?' Paige wailed like Joan had abandoned her on a mountaintop, then unleashed in my direction. ‘Stop looking at me, stop smiling, don't you dare touch my hair products.'

‘As if, Paige.'

‘I know you want something,' she screamed. How tragically true. So I packed and she bellowed.

And now we're finally passing the last stretch of big-box stores, almost on the highway. The balloon milkshake on top of Wendy's is the only break from poles and boxes. Ugly ugly ugly.

Okay, Dad, seriously. According to Jojo Bunting, Spiritual Guide for your second wife, my school counsellor, and now me, you can de finitely hear me. Seriously. Anyway, if you heard Rita, not that she wasn't lying, you can hear me. ‘I know you're around,' I whisper against the window. And not just because of Step Three, ‘Connecting to your Spiritual Guide.' There's Dadness in the air. It's like someone phoning and you know who it is and they haven't said hello yet. I can maybe almost hear your voice, Leonard. Maybe you're waiting for me to get to Timbley for some reason.

‘
OMG
, Leonard,' I say out loud. Look. Our own flesh and blood, making mitosis flashcards for herself on a Saturday morning. Paige does this porcupinesque thing with her hatred, shoots it out in all directions. It should be an Olympic event. Really, I feel hatred pierce my chest sixteen bus rows away from her. And I still haven't recovered from the first blast at close range this morning, when we were standing in the bus-station lineup and she said, ‘I fail to believe that you'd deprive poor people.'

‘You fail to believe? You cannot be fourteen and say
fail to believe
,' I said, trying to funny her up a percentage point. But she seized, completely seized, as in stared at her biology textbook like
it might otherwise mutate, and acupuncted me with hatred. This caused serious brain injury. How else could I have said what I said next: ‘
GMAB
, Paige, as if it's about
them
.'

We're never satisfied 'til you are
says the side of the truck driving beside us in the next lane. Everything's misty in that afterlife kind of way. For sure, spirits are zooming through the bare trees and following the sign to merge. You can practically see them trying to pass each other, trying not to look competitive, like bicyclists in the river valley. What would be great, Dad, is if you could make
Mulhurst, Next Exit
say
Don't worry, Dree, I'm here
. That would be excellent, but, frankly, any kind of sign will work. The silent thing really sucks.

Oh, right. Abundant universe. No prob. Look. Hay bales. Way to go, hay, with adding colour to the landscape even if you're brown. And bales, excellent uniform roundness. Plus, actually, a nice family memory. Really, we had this happy moment on our way to Pigeon Lake once. I said, ‘Hey, I love those hay bales, they look like erasers on top of brand-new pencils.' Leonard said, ‘You must use really big pencils.' Joan said, ‘Haha, very funny, you two. Oh look, Paige is sleeping.'

Remembering makes me even more tired, weighs me down so I feel nothing but heavy. Finally, from far away, I hear his voice. There he is, calling me, looking around, and I yell, ‘Leonard! Dad, Dad!' He sees me too, he waves one hand like crazy and uses the other to carry something, a big garment bag he can hardly wait to show me. ‘Dreebee, look at this,' he says when he's close. ‘It's got pockets for everything.' And he unfolds the bag to show me rows of zippered compartments. He has index cards and cds, and he has stamps and his swim pass, elastic bands and paper clips. Finally he says, ‘Dree, what's wrong?'

‘Dad. Dad,' I say, ‘you're dead.' It's worse than telling him, ‘No, I'm not going to Crescent Falls with you and Rita because I'd
rather work at Booster Juice.' That time, he said, ‘Well, it's your choice.' Now he drops the bag and says, ‘Oh Dree, Dree, I am so sorry.' His voice is low and shaky. ‘It's okay, Dad. I mean, it's not your fault, but the special account, Dad, the special account – '

Bam. My head bounces from window to windowsill to seat. Someone's pulling my toes, dislocating them, actually. I hold my head as the dream evaporates. ‘Wake up,' says Paige. ‘You were talking.' I still cannot speak. ‘I could hear you all the way to my seat,' she whispers, shoving my legs over and squeezing into the aisle seat. ‘People were looking.'

‘My head,' I moan.

‘I didn't mean to. You were practically shouting, “Over here, Leonard, over here.” How embarrassing.'

I press my hand over the key, still there under my sweater.

‘What's wrong? What?'

‘I was communing with our dead father.'

‘I fail to believe he would talk only to you, even if he did like you better, anyway.'

‘He did not.' I hold my head. ‘Is my forehead swelling?'

‘No. Well, excuse me for caring.'

‘Really, I think you ruptured something.'

‘As if.'

‘My sixth chakra could be leaking.'

‘Stop it. What did he say?'

‘Nothing.'

‘I knew it.' With that, Paige does one of her military pivots and goes back to her seat. I press both hands against my forehead in case chi is spurting out. Lame, but if chi is real I can't afford to lose any more of it.

Oh, oh yeah. I just got Step Five, ‘The Divine Offering.'
So
obvious. A chakra device for Jojo Bunting. I'll use the red wool
conveniently in my bag although possibly the red wool has been fatally infected by rejection. Can a Divine Offering still be divine if it's made from tainted material? I sit up and reconnect with
nyrrrrrrrr
.
Listen up, Dad. I need to make a critically important life-altering decision
.

Clearly, I would never have knitted Telinda Roberts a scarf out of said red wool, except Telinda was part of Santini's let's- find-Dree-a-peer-group mission because Telinda lusted after Zow, head anarchist. Really. And I thought anarchists liked red and would be thankful for a little floral embellishment. But no. At Telinda's b-day party to which everyone knew I was pity-invited, Telinda got forty-dollar organic hemp Che Guevera T-shirts and picked up my scarf like she was holding a dead rodent by the tail. I called you, Dad, to say, ‘I'm dying, pick me up.' And you didn't come and I was irreparably damaged. You never knew how grisly, truly grisly, my adolescence has been. From then on, I was such a total outcast that even Santini gave up on peers.

Ha ha. Cast out by a knitting project.

Exactly. And then, Dad, just before I ran screaming to the bus stop which was six blocks away and meant waiting twenty minutes and transferring twice, Amanda Sills tucked her perfect hair behind her perfect little ears and whispered, ‘God,' to Gabby. ‘God, what's
she
doing here?'

Our future politicians. That's what Leonard always said after heinous peer-group tales.

Whatever, Dad. Should I use the red wool or not?

Nothing.

Forget it. Red is not the right colour for divine anyway. It should be indigo. Leonard, what if I go to the hospital you used to work in? Can you figure out how to talk to me from there?

Nothing.

The bus stops in front of Liquidation World which is clearly enough said, and we step into the magical land of Timbley, Alberta. Paige yanks on my sleeve as we get off the bus. The train station used to be here and the grain elevator was down the street. I'm not exactly Ms. 4-h. I've never even touched a cow. But the grain elevator? That's when the world started to end. The Timbley grain elevator crumpled, and a week later, so did our family unit. We were in the crowd, Leonard and I. Two tractor things clawed at the grain elevator, this guy beside me kept taking off his glasses and wiping his face, and everything was quiet except for
kathunk, kathunk
. Finally the whole thing folded in on itself, all slow-motion, dust covering everybody. I coughed like crazy and Leonard said, ‘Dreebee, I'll be back in a few minutes.' He went into the hotel, meaning at least four hours. I walked to Grandma's, and we watched
Murder, She Wrote
, Paige on the floor getting her hair brushed by Joan, me and Grandma winding wool. The back door opened but Leonard didn't come into the living room and we didn't say anything to him or each other. That was the last time Grandma and Leonard were in the same house.

Thinking about Leonard is like painting a picture in reverse. I take something away every time I remember him – another place he'll never be, another thing he'll never say. If I could see the hole where the grain elevator used to be, there must be blanks in the air or the energetic web or whatever the hell Jojo Bunting calls it where Leonard was once.

Paige pulls on my sleeve, again, still mad but not crazed. Some guy in the parking lot is talking to her from his truck – the kind of jacked-up, big black truck that should say
how insecure am I
on the licence plate. Driver guy yells something repulsive and totally cliché and I give him a behind-the-back finger as we walk away.

‘Paige, I'm in trouble,' I say. Her eyes widen and she gasps dramatically. Oh. She thinks I'm pregnant. For a second, I let her,
if only because, wow, she thinks it's possible. She rolls up her sleeves, a good sign, and ignores truck-driver moron who pulls a U-ie to yell more obscenities and further establish his manhood. That helps us focus, except then there's intense honking and I have to look. ‘
OMG
, humans are so over,' I say.

‘I am not participating in your nihilism.' Paige picks up her pace.

‘I am not a nihilist – look at these people, the whole traffic thing, can't you see it?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘We're going down.' She marches off and I exert myself to keep up. ‘Paige, that wasn't it.'

‘I hope Grandma reduced her dietary fat.'

‘Seriously, my issue is worse.'

‘Correction? She has diabetes and problems with her thyroid.'

We walk silently for a block, past Eve's Dentures and the bank, and hey, Jerry's Fish & Tackle Shop is gone, and in its place? A miracle. Even Paige is impressed by the sign. ‘Haha,' she says. A row of four fluffy sheep smile at us. In small letters underneath, the sign says
4Ewe Wool Shoppe
. The sheep encourage me. Also, the shop maybe means that anything's possible, so I take a big breath and go for it. I make small adjustments, as in Dad had two special accounts, one for you, one for me, and I borrowed ‘a bit' from Joan's credit card. Paige nods through the whole thing. Maybe she is a saint.

‘So, Paige …'

‘Please, God, don't let her ask for my money.' Paige holds the cross around her neck and looks up.

I hold the key. ‘Jesus would want you to help family first.'

‘I fail to believe you even know what mitochondria are,' she says.

‘Powerhouses, Paige. Mitochondria are to cells what you are to me.'

‘You are so screwed,' she says.

According to my research, being spiritually successful, as in rich, is all about having open chakras. These are invisible energy centres, and they can get blocked or they can leak. When that happens with the head chakras, as in the top two (
highly
spiritual, so more money), what you want is
grounding
. And what can be more grounded than rocks and socks?

1. Take two socks and overlap toe sections.