The Devil You Know: A Novel (5 page)

I was David’s babysitter for a little over a year, starting about a year or so after Lianne disappeared. I was in seventh grade and David was in the fifth. That’s not much of an age difference, but his mother didn’t think he was old enough to be home alone yet. David was an only child and I was an only child and it’s my understanding that those kinds of parents either worry about you too much or too little.

In those days David really did whatever I said. If I said, You know what’s cool? We should make shoes out of cardboard and walk downtown. We should draw a game of hopscotch onto the bathroom floor with the paint from your paint-by-numbers. We should make Chef Boyardee ravioli on apple-juice can stoves in the backyard. We should make potato-chip-peanut-butter sandwiches with sweet pickles on the side. Then David would totally want to do those things. We didn’t go to the same school and neither of us had any brothers or sisters. How was he to know I wasn’t on the cutting edge of pop culture?

David’s mother had blond hair and a chunky body, but she wore a lot of headbands and did aerobics in the basement. Sometimes she called me over just to take David to McDonald’s so she could be alone in the house. She had a husband, Graham, who’d set the
whole thing up. I guess he got to chatting my mom up in line at the grocery store one day and when he found out she had a daughter, voilà, I got the job. My mother didn’t normally allow me to babysit for strangers. I looked on it as a reprieve from the post-Lianne lockdown. Graham Patton was never there when I arrived, but he came back with David’s mother late at night and offered to drive me home, even though I only lived a few blocks away. He said he didn’t want me walking home in the dark.

The fathers always drove you home and they were the ones you knew the least. The whole world tells you to never get into a stranger’s car—unless you’re babysitting his ten-year-old. I climbed into Graham Patton’s station wagon with my fuzzy white winter coat wrapped around my chest and zipped, and he gave me five or ten dollars in my hand. He had a brown beard. He drove along making small talk, trying to get me chatting.

Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing at school, Evie?

He had a weird, repetitive way of using my name. Six or seven times per car ride.

Hi there, Evie. You look like you’re ready to go home, Evie. Well, Evie, was Santa good to you? Did you get just what you asked for?

Maybe he was trying to show that he knew who I was. In the small space of the moving car, it felt intimate, like a hand against the back of my neck. A hard thing to articulate.

David said his father was a teacher at a high school in the east end. He taught industrial arts but he was really a photographer. He offered to take my picture more than once, which was appealing enough for a girl my age, but then one time I overheard my mother make a snide and raucous joke about Graham Patton getting the ninth-grade girls to sit pretty for the photographer. He and David’s mother split up a long time ago now.

If I ever have kids, I’ll tell my husband just to shut the fuck up in the car with the babysitter: she’s probably afraid of him.

I
wasn’t afraid of my own father. My dad is a pretty decent guy. He cooks and does the laundry and stuff. He’s a dentist but he works for the public health clinic, fixing teeth for little kids or old people with no money. You could say he didn’t get into it for the money. Most of his patients don’t speak any English. He doesn’t golf: he’s more of a canoeing-type dentist, if you know what I mean. He’s spry. He has a wiry look, and most but not all of his hair. In the fall he still climbs up the side of the house to put on the storm windows and he can hold himself there pretty easily with one hand while he does the work with the other. So he’s doing well enough for a man just shy of his fifties. He’s got a few deep lines in his face that make it richer when he frowns or laughs.

When I was little, my mother stayed home to look after me. She was the kind of mother who made peanut-butter-and-sprouts sandwiches. Instead of jam. We always had jars of fermenting yogurt in the stairwell to the basement, covered over with cloth and elastic bands. I had a playroom and another room down there, a crawlspace art room where I was allowed to paint on anything, walls, floor, ceiling, whatever. Other kids liked my house because of stuff like that and despite the weird food. When I was six I went over to my friend Melissa’s for dinner. Her parents had a TV on the kitchen counter and we ate Velveeta-stuffed hotdogs. The cheese came already right inside the hotdog. They were like smoky miracles.

I didn’t have grandparents around because my father was from Vancouver. My mother’s family was all up north. She grew up in a place called Chapleau that was full of French people and lumberjacks. Near Quebec but not in it. She lived up there in the woods like Laura Ingalls, only with parents who were crazy. She told stories about them like she was the lost sister of the Brothers Grimm. They were hungry most of the time because there were six kids, which is why she only ever wanted one child: so she could feed that one kid peanut butter and sprouts and be generally sane.

Her family had a garden and they’d tent over the vegetables because the season was short, she said. So the tent helped keep the
ground warm for long enough to get at least a few green things, beans and snap peas. Carrots and turnips and potatoes you could have without much work.

She had four sisters and a brother who was the youngest, and all the girls looked after him. He didn’t have his own bed because he was an accidental baby and there was no more room, so he took turns sleeping in the sisters’ beds every night. The brother’s name was Sully. He died when he was six and my mother was ten because he had pneumonia and the weather was too bad to get any doctors or for the father to get into town for medicine. The next year her oldest sister went through the ice with her boyfriend, on his Ski-Doo. The sister was sixteen and should already have known better, but not much to do out there in wintertime. People drink.

Her parents had wicked fights.

Her father came out of the woods with whatever he’d managed to shoot. Mostly it was birds but sometimes it was rabbits, and if you didn’t want to eat it they beat the shit out of you, because that’s all there was to it.

My mother, mostly, she said. My father was always sorry if he hit you. Later on, he was sorry.

When he fought with her mother sometimes he hit her, too, and then locked himself in the car. To keep away from her. He had three copies of
Guns & Ammo Magazine
and an old
Auto Trader
that he kept in the glove compartment so he could switch gears from fighting. Her mother chased him out there, so he locked the door to keep himself inside the car and her out.

One time she was out there in her nightgown, my mother said, and just her slippers on in all this snow, and she takes a chunk of firewood and smashes in the headlights of the car while he’s in there.

And my father’s sitting there, doing the
Guns & Ammo
crossword or whatever. He was whistling.

When she was sixteen my mother moved down to Toronto by hitching a ride with her teacher. I don’t know if the teacher knew she was running away. Maybe he did. Maybe he thought it couldn’t be
worse. When I was a kid I thought all teachers were nice and he was just doing her a favor and driving her someplace like grown-ups do. Now I figure she must have had some trade worked out with him.

She lived in bad places. She lived in one place with about ten other kids. Two rooms plus a kitchen.

I got to sleep on a real bed, on legs, she said, with three other girls, because I paid ten bucks extra a month. In the middle of the night someone would flip on the light switch and the whole floor was moving, like a wave. It was cockroaches. There were other kids who had to sleep on the floor with them. For ten bucks less.

I can’t imagine my mother living like this. Once a June bug got into the house and she had to lay a sheet of paper over top of it before she could step down, so that she didn’t have to watch her own foot coming down on the thing. It succumbed to a loud and crunchy death and my mother stood there, wringing her hands. She walked away, leaving the paper stuck to the floor.

W
hen Lianne died I think we all went into shock in our own way, and my dad’s way was to stop touching me or holding my hand when we walked down the street, something he would have always done before. Or, at least, that’s the before that I remember. Something about having to explain that grown men do this stuff to little girls, or having to think about it every day, or watching me comb the papers and get more and more informed. Something about that must have upset him, or made him afraid he’d upset me. I still wanted to sit on his lap, but I didn’t want to. Part of that was just me getting older. That divided feeling you get at that age, what other people think of as normal growing up. It’s easy to pathologize it.

My mother seized up, too, but in a different way. She needed a lot more things after Lianne happened. Her hand was always on my shoulder. Whether this was new anxiety, or tied to her own childhood, or just because I was an only child, felt unclear.

In the last few years she seems more herself again. More like
the peanut-butter-and-sprouts version than the wanders-out-of-an-alley version. She’s got a vegetable garden and it’s a thing she spends time on. When I was small we always had chives and snap peas at least. I’d hide out in the garden, crouching down and eating them off the vine before breakfast, then come into the house with pea-green fingers, my breath smelling mysteriously of onions.

Who can eat chives before breakfast? my mother said.

Fat cabbages, but their hearts split and filled up with jellied moth larvae. We never ate one. I notice in the new garden she hasn’t bothered with these, leaning to black-eyed Susans and daylilies, pretty things that grow regardless, whether or not anyone is watching them. She grew those cabbages for years.

M
y mother and I left the flea market and walked along Front Street in the sunshine. I had the new trench coat draped over my arm and I folded it over and wrapped the sweater around it. To keep things from getting wrinkled, I guess, although I only had the grocery bag to carry it all in anyway. My mother had her bike helmet clipped to the side of her purse and it smacked against her hip every time she took a long step forward.

You want a Jewish brunch? she said. Sometimes after the flea we break up the long uphill ride by market hopping. St. Lawrence to Kensington, which is pretty close to where I live now, anyway. We’ll go into the Free Times for blintzes if it strikes us.

I shook my head.

Cold lemonade? she said. Free samples at Global Cheese?

My mother strapped the helmet around her chin.

Put yours on, she said. My own helmet was locked against my bike and I reached down and unhooked the U-lock and slid it carefully into a slot on the back rack. We coasted west on Wellington before climbing the hill at Spadina. I had the bag of clothes in my front basket and it bounced up and threatened to make a break for it every time I hit a crack in the pavement. My purse hung across
my body and by the time we got to the top I had a thick band of sweat under the strap, from my shoulder to my hip. February thaw.