Irma Voth (24 page)

And it made me so mad, I said. That she was so happy about leaving. And she made me promise not to tell Dad.

So you promised you wouldn’t? said Aggie.

Yeah, I said.

But then you did, said Aggie.

I know, I said. Yeah.

And then Dad went after her in his truck which is what you wanted him to do, said Aggie.

Yeah, I said, but to bring her home.

You shouldn’t have told him, said Aggie.

And then he came home and told Mom he couldn’t find her, I said. He put the truck in the garage and just waited around for a day or two for it to snow hard and then he told the cops that she had been upset about a fight with her boyfriend and had run off onto the road into the blizzard and still hadn’t come home. So they went looking for
her and found her body in the ditch. They said she had been hit by a car or a truck.

Dad said well, it must have been the boyfriend who hit her, and the cops said okay, who’s her boyfriend and Dad said he had never met him and didn’t know his name. He told the cops that Katie had been upset before she left and he had asked her what was wrong and she had said she and her boyfriend had had a fight. So then the cops said oh, okay, we’ll ask around in the community. We’ll talk to some of her friends to see if we can get some information and Dad said yes, thank you, that would be good. The cop asked Dad if he had a photograph of Katie and he said no. The cop said no photographs? And Dad said no again. He said our families don’t have photographs.

A couple of days later the cops came back to our house and said that nobody in the community knew who her boyfriend was. Maybe it was a boy from the city, said Dad. And the cops said maybe. Then they said maybe it wasn’t her boyfriend who hit her. And Dad said maybe not. He said maybe it was a trucker or a farmer in the area who had thought that he had hit a deer or a dog and had just kept going. Dad said the snow had been blinding that night and it would have been impossible for anyone to have seen her especially in the dark. The cops asked Mom and Dad some questions. They asked them why they thought Katie was running in the dark in a snowstorm wearing a light jean jacket and runners. Dad said she was upset about the fight with her boyfriend, he had already told them that. They said yes, but the fight must have happened earlier that day or even before that and why had she waited until so long
after the fact to run off into the night. That didn’t fit with their knowledge of human psychology and impulsive behaviour. Dad said well, he had thought that she had been talking to him over the phone that evening so the fight may have occurred over the phone immediately before she took off. The cops said well, they had contacted the Manitoba telephone system and there was no record of any phone activity that evening at all. None. Well, said Dad, the fight may have occurred earlier but Katie may have taken some time to work herself into a frenzy and then made the rash decision to run off into the night. Maybe, said the cop. Then he said that the autopsy had indicated that Katie’s body had been in the ditch for longer than just that evening. Maybe two or even three days. Dad said that didn’t make any sense at all and questioned the reliability of science. The cops asked Dad if maybe he had got the day wrong. They wondered if Katie had gone missing two or three days earlier, when the weather had been exceptionally clear and sunny and anybody driving down the road would have been able to have seen a running girl on the shoulder. Dad said no, he would have noticed if she’d been gone all that time, obviously. Then the cops were quiet for a second and asked Mom and Dad if they could talk to me alone.

Mom and Dad went outside into the yard and the cop asked me what kind of a girl Katie was. I said she was a fun girl. He asked me if she had had a boyfriend. I said yes. I was lying. The cop asked me if I knew who the boyfriend was. I said no, I had never met him. The cop said but she talked about him? I said yes, she did sometimes, not often. Then the cop made me tell him what she had said about her
boyfriend and I said all she said was that he was funny and easygoing and made her laugh and liked her a lot. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know anything about what boyfriends might be like. The cop asked me where he was from and I said I didn’t know. Maybe the city. The cop asked me how Katie would have met a boy from the city when we were living so far away from it and she didn’t have a driver’s licence. I told the cop I didn’t know. Then I thought of something and I told the cop that Katie had told me that her boyfriend had a really bad temper. That sometimes she’d say something or do something, anything, like tap the dashboard of his car with her foot, and he’d fly off the handle. He was really violent.

The cop said well, first he was funny and easygoing and now he’s violent? I told the cop that he was both of those things, according to Katie. The cop asked me if she had ever called him by his name or had always spoken of him as her boyfriend this and her boyfriend that. I said yes, that she had never called him by his name. The cop said okay, can you tell me if there was any fighting between your dad and Katie? I said no, never. They asked me if any of the things she did ever made him angry and I said no, not at all. They asked me if I was sure about that. They said it was normal for fathers to sometimes become exasperated with their teenage daughters, to yell at them, or to forbid them from doing certain things. I didn’t say anything. They asked me again if Katie had ever made Dad mad and I said no, never. Then the cops left and Mom and Dad came back into the kitchen. Mom went to take care of you and the boys, you were in the other room, and Dad asked me what
I had said to the cops. I told him and he said that was fine. Then the next day we were on our way to Mexico.

Aggie came out of the bathroom and took off her shirt. She put on a different one. Yeah, she said. That’s when Mom told me about the boyfriend. When she came into the room where me and the boys were playing. She lied to me too. Then Aggie took that shirt off and put the other one back on. She took
Chocolate Mint Lip Gloss
and taped it to the wall beside the door. Then she walked out.

I found a blue emergency candle in the washroom cupboard and lit it and stuck it into an empty jar and brought it to the bed and set it there under Aggie’s art. For the next hour or two I watched over Katie as she kicked out the walls around her. Finally around midnight or one in the morning Aggie came back and squeezed into bed next to me and Ximena and fell asleep in her clothes. In the morning I got up before she did. I got ready for work and then I woke her up for school.

After that Aggie painted a giant mural on brown paper and hung it over our bed. It was our family praying and holding hands around the table in our old kitchen in Canada. Katie’s body was lying in the centre of the table and there were other regular dishes of food with spoons in them and steam coming up. All our eyes were closed except for our father’s and he was staring straight at me. She painted a mural of a police lineup with three girls, herself, me and
Ximena, looking out at the camera, dirty and dishevelled and lost.

I asked Aggie if we could take those murals off the walls and put them in the closet. Why? she said. You don’t want to be reminded of the fact that you’re the daughter of a killer? I told her I was sorry for telling her the truth and she told me never to lie to her again.

ELEVEN

NOEHMI AND I WERE WORKING
on the play. Well, all I really did was read my lines into a digital tape recorder over and over in different ways until she was happy with the way they sounded. I’ll play yourself to you, she said. I listened to myself. I’m the memory of a doomed man, I thought. I couldn’t save him. We sat in the darkness of the courtyard late at night after Aggie and Ximena and Natalie and Hubertus were asleep.

One more time, said Noehmi. Can you say it in a softer voice? Almost a whisper. Remember, your voice is being heard by a man dying of thirst and shame.

If you work hard, I whispered. If you want something badly enough. If you believe in yourself and never give up …

That’s good, said Noehmi. But just try it with a bit more of a pause in between the sentences.

Okay, I said. If you work hard. If you want something badly enough. If you believe in yourself and never give up … I asked Noehmi if she thought it was true, what I was saying.

I don’t know, she said. Do you?

I don’t know, I said.

But it’s the kind of thing a grade school teacher tells a kid, right? said Noehmi. It’s a cliché and it’s meant to be ironic in this context. Like, look where he is, right?

But he remembers it, I said.

Yeah, said Noehmi. For some reason it’s one of the things he remembers.

Because he had a crush on her?

Yeah, said Noehmi. Sort of, that’s a part of it. I don’t know. She was just that person in his life who felt he had something to offer to the world.

When we were finished it was too late for Noehmi to go home so I got her a rollaway cot out of the shed and we hauled that upstairs to our room and she slept over and in the morning Natalie and Hubertus were so happy to see her that they made breakfast for all of us and I got to postpone going to work for a while. Dupont came to pick Noehmi up and I tried not to stare at them while they kissed. I tried not
to notice how their lips met and opened and how they held each other close and casually in a loving embrace. They left and then Natalie asked me if I had noticed that Aggie seemed to be in a really bad mood.

Yeah, I said. She’ll get over it. It’s her age, I think.

Yeah, said Natalie. All those hormones.

Yeah, I said. And everything changing.

Yeah, said Natalie. Or not.

Yeah, I said.

Later that evening, when Aggie finally came home from school, which I think she was skipping with Israel these days mostly to hang out in Parque México with a pack of dogs, she told me that she was going to call the cops to tell them that our father was a murderer.

Aggie, I said. You are not.

Yeah, I am, she said. That’s what normal people do.

What cops are you gonna call? I said. Cops in Chihuahua? In Canada?

Cops right here in D.F., she said.

They won’t care, I said. They’ll just laugh at you and tell you to stop bugging them.

Then in Chihuahua, said Aggie.

Same thing, I said. They won’t believe you. Or even if they do they won’t give a shit.

Fine, then in Canada, said Aggie.

Don’t you think they already know? I said. Why would we have left for Mexico right after they came to talk to us if Dad didn’t have something to hide?

So, she said. Now they can come and find him. We’ll tell them where he is.

Aggie, I said, it doesn’t work that way.

And then Mom and the boys can come and live with us in Mexico City and we can get a real house to live in instead of a hotel room.

It’s not that simple, I said. The cops in Chihuahua would have to want to co-operate with the cops in Canada and they won’t. They won’t care and besides Dad has his own story.

You don’t care about justice? said Aggie. You don’t care about the truth? Don’t you care about Katie? How do you know Dad isn’t gonna kill someone else?

Well, I said. That’s why we’re fucking here! I didn’t tell you the truth to make you all mad and do stupid things. I told you the truth because you had done up the room with the stars and the wind and I wanted to give you something in return. I told you the truth because I wanted you to stop hoping that Katie would somehow come back home and now I wish I hadn’t.

I knew Katie wasn’t going to come back home, said Aggie. Do you think I’m an idiot? Do you think I thought she could find us in the fucking desert?

Yeah, but that’s not because we were lost, it’s because she’s dead! I said.

I know! said Aggie. I just thought maybe she wasn’t. I thought maybe she was still in Vancouver.

Not
still
in Vancouver, I said. She never made it to fucking Vancouver!

Fine! said Aggie. Then just still alive, okay?

I know! I said. And that’s why I wanted you to know the truth!

So okay, fine! said Aggie. Now I know the truth and I have to call the cops because that’s what people do when they find out that someone has been murdered. Were you aware of that?

Do you know what would happen if you called the cops? I said. Then they’d know where you are and they’d be on Dad’s side because he’d give them some money and they’d call you a mischief-making runaway and they’d take you and Ximena back home and that would be the end of it except for Dad beating the shit out of you and probably out of Mom for lying to him about Ximena being dead and I would never see you again and it wouldn’t bring Katie back to life and you’d be dead inside forever! So, go ahead and make the call. Here, use my cell.

I threw my cellphone at her and missed. It hit the wall and a piece of it flew off and then the battery fell out of it. Ximena woke up and started laughing at us and jumping hard in her crib so that it rolled on its little wheels from one end of the room to the other. The people in the room below us banged on their ceiling. Aggie picked up the pieces of my phone and reassembled it and gave it back to me. I held it in my hand like an injured bird, tenderly. Aggie went and lifted Ximena out of her crib and changed her soaking diaper. I put my phone down on the bed and went into the bathroom to wash my face. I stood on the toilet and looked through the tiny barred window out at Mexico City. I couldn’t see the end of it, the horizon where the sky met the earth, but I could remember clearly where it was. I could
remember my father sobbing in the barn three days after we moved to Chihuahua. My mother had asked me to find him and tell him that supper was ready and I stood in the doorway of the barn and watched him cry, he was sitting on a bale and he had taken off his hat and he hadn’t seen me in the darkness and then I cleared my throat and told him we were eating and he looked up at me and he said Irma, why did you tell me she was leaving? Why did you do that?

The next morning I was cleaning the big room on the second floor, the one that looked into the courtyard and not out towards the city, and I noticed an open newspaper lying on the floor beside the bed. There was a photograph of Diego Nolasco and the article was about the Mexico City premiere of his new movie
Campo Siete
. I looked at his picture and smiled hello, how are you? Then I ran upstairs to my room and got my notebook and ran back down and copied all the information. I folded the paper and put it on top of the little table by the window. It had never occurred to me that one day Diego’s movie would be finished and available for the world to see. It hadn’t occurred to me that all that energy, all that running around, all that waiting and all that anguish could result in one coherent song. I don’t know why I thought of Diego’s movie as a song. I had nothing else to compare it to, I guess, besides the Bible. The story hadn’t made any sense to me, not really. It was all so chaotic and haphazard, like a dream with missing pieces, and rushed and then delayed and then right and then wrong
and then broke and then euphoric and the skies weren’t perfect and then they were and the real tears were fake and the fake tears were real and everyone was fighting and angry and having sex with each other and getting arrested and making threats and freezing at night and burning in the day and starving and stoned and exhausted and confused and sick and lonely and terrified. I wanted to see it. The idea alone of seeing
Campo Siete
obsessed and exhausted me.