The Truth Commission (6 page)

Unfortunately, he's not so skilled in the areas of common sense or practicality. That's not me being critical. That's experience talking. We are the proud owners of four vacuums, thanks to the charms of hyper-persuasive salespeople. We also have every cutting device known to humanity. In fact, our combined vacuum and knife holdings are worth serious money. I don't even want to think what would happen to my dad if he had enough money to invest in a pyramid scheme.

One of my favorite writers is Flannery O'Connor—the way she turns the gimlet eye on various kinds of human frailty and stupidity and writes about scammers and serial killers and people with heads like cabbages. Flannery O'C didn't shy away from even the sharpest truths. She would have had a field day with my parents. That said, she probably would have been kinder about them than my sister is in the Diana Chronicles.

If anyone really pressed my mother and father to do some full-contact parenting of my sister, they'd get completely overwhelmed and probably just buy another vacuum. I think Sylvia knew that, because she looked to me for answers.

“I know Keira's working,” I said. “She's in the closet practically every day.” I didn't add that she also spent entire days MIA.

Sylvia's face brightened. “That's great news.” She handed me her card, just like she did every time she visited.
39
“Where there's work, there's hope.”

I wasn't so sure, but I smiled reassuringly anyway. It was the least I could do.

Bedtime Stories

That night, hours after Sylvia left and I'd gone to bed, Keira woke me up again.

“Norm,” whispered Keira. “Are you awake? You want to talk?”

She didn't wait for me to answer. She slipped out of the closet and into my room, a mummy-shaped lump moving on whispering nylon feet.

“Come in,” I whispered, although she was already on my bed. My sister is very small.

“What did Sylvia say?” she asked.

I rolled onto my back and stared into the dark above my bed. “She just wanted to know how you are.”

“That's so sweet. I just don't feel ready to talk to her. There's so much to deal with.”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

Keira lay down and I drew up my feet.

“Our last talk really helped me,” said my sister. “It helped me to realize that what happened wasn't my fault.”

“Of course not,” I said. The mattress beneath me grew warmer. I read somewhere that if you put a frog in a hot pan, it will jump out. If you turn the heat up slowly, it will keep trying to adjust until it dies. As Keira resumed her story, my skin prickled in protest. I wondered how much heat I could stand.

My emotions turned end over end. Anxiety about what she was about to say got tangled up with happiness that she was talking to me, just like in the old days when she used to take me into her confidence. When I was a kid, I loved listening to my sister. Whenever I caught sight of her out in public, I felt a pride so sharp, it was painful. People paid attention to Keira, and she had this way of not noticing. Specialness was a particulate cloud that seemed to float around her.

One summer when we were both in grade school, my parents signed us up for an art camp. Keira was with the oldest kids. I was with the youngest. Our groups met in different rooms so I didn't get to see her very often, but news of the extraordinary girl in the Picasso Blues spread even to us little ones in the Da Vinci Squad. The other campers talked about her in hushed voices. The camp leaders did, too.

“Keira Pale is your sister?” asked the Da Vinci Squad's head counselor, a thin, faux-hawked college student home for the summer from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

I nodded, feeling lucky that Keira was, in some way, mine.

“That must be intense,” he said. “Living with a genuine prodigy.”

I didn't know what a prodigy was, but I loved the sound of the word and whispered it over and over to myself.

I even got a little bit popular at camp, a completely new experience, because everyone wanted to know all about my sister.

“Is it true she taught
herself
to draw like that?”

“Is it true that her first cartoon was published in the newspaper when she was only ten?”

“Yes,” I said proudly. “It's all true.”

“I love her hair,” sighed one boy. “It's like a painting.”

“I love her voice,” said a girl with too many braids in her fine hair. “It's totally fascinating.”

My sister's hair, which rose in a teeming mass,
did
look like a painting. As for her voice, people were always surprised that a body as small as hers could produce a voice with such a deep and intimate rasp. She always sounded like she was telling a secret. And her enormous brown eyes seemed to see things other eyes didn't.

The best was when she actually spoke to you. She would sidle up and say, “What's
your
favorite shade of green?” You'd want to give her the impression that you'd spent a lot of time considering the issue. No matter what your answer—the green of arbutus leaves, the green of your favorite gym shorts—she'd sigh and say, “Yes!” like she agreed with you absolutely. She made everyone feel like they'd just inspired her.

What a thing to inspire a real artist! A prodigy!

When Keira started working on the Chronicles, she was fourteen and I was eleven. I knew she'd been paying close attention to what went on at home. Even closer than before. I could not have been more excited. I told everyone that my sister was working on her own book-length comic, and that me and my parents were
in it
!

Then came the fateful day when I met myself in graphic novel form. Keira left neatly hand-bound photocopies of
Diana: Queen of Two Worlds
on each of our breakfast plates. My dad is very big on making us all a full breakfast—at least he was until that morning.

“Don't read it when I'm around,” she told us. “It will make me feel funny.” Then she wandered away.

My parents and I grinned at one another, waited until she'd left, and then opened our copies in unison.

It took about two pages for me to realize what I was reading and another page or two for the impact of it to sink in. We looked like idiots. It was like my sister had held up a hideousness magnifier to each of us and then drew what she saw.

She showed us doing silly things. Being shallow. And when the action moved to Vermeer, the alternate universe, we looked and acted like monsters.

Once I started breathing again, I looked at my parents. The color was gone from my mom's face, and my dad looked stricken, almost the same way he had when they told us they might be separating while they worked things out. Think: deer hit by an arrow from a crossbow.

I ran to the mirror to check to see whether I really did look like a flabby, dead-eyed fish with a mouth that hung open when I listened. I was so upset, I could barely see. I came back to the table and stared at the pages again, swamped with humiliation and shame at how I'd been portrayed. Maybe the right word is
betrayed
.

I waited for one of my parents to object. Maybe my dad would say that he wasn't a failure or a creep. My mom would protest that she wasn't a neurotic basket case who called the suicide hotline over every piece of burnt toast and that in another universe she wouldn't be a psychopathic power-monger with the morals of a Norway rat.

But no.

“This is . . . remarkable,” said my dad after a long, long pause.

At his words a little color came back into my mom's blanched face. “My goodness,” she said. Then, never afraid to be repetitive, she added, “This is so good. She is just . . . so good.”

I blinked as though someone had deliberately placed a piece of sawdust in my eye with a pair of tweezers.

“What?” I said.

“My God,” said my father. “This is going to be a sensation. A comic set in two universes! Wow!”

“I always knew,” said my mother, not bothering to say what, exactly, she always knew.

“I don't think . . .” My voice trailed off when I realized my parents were staring at me. “We look like that,” I finished.

My father, Mr. Kindly from the Produce Section, nodded at me in a way that was the opposite of affirming. “It's art, Normandy,” he said. “Those characters aren't us.”

My sister was using her talent to turn us into a joke. My parents could see it, too, but they were going to make the best of the situation. Just like they always did. No matter what the cost. “But they look like us. They do the things we—”

“I only wish people had supported my creativity when I was younger,” said my mother.

“Agreed,” said my dad. “It's what parents do with talented kids.”
40

Before I could say anything else, the front door opened and Keira reentered the house.

“Shhh,” said my mother. “She's coming. This is a vulnerable time for her. Just let her know how good it is.”

And that morning, over cold pancakes, my mother and father told Keira that she was brilliant. Keira seemed to take in what they had to say. She accepted their effusive praise and listened with a stillness that was hungry but strangely detached.

When she was tired of their compliments, she turned to me.

“Norm? What do you think?”

My copy of the comic lay in my lap. I was afraid to get syrup on it.

“It's unbelievable,” I said. “Are you going to show this to people?”

Keira cocked her head a little. “Well, yeah.”

“Of course,” said my dad. “She's got to get it out there.”

“
Everyone
has to see this,” said my mother. “Talent runs deep in this family.”

I thought of the fun-house images of us heading into the world. Our worst, ugliest, most ridiculous selves in our smallest, weakest moments. But I couldn't say anything.

The rest of the story is pretty much history. People loved the books. They thought my parents and I were “great sports” about the whole thing. With each new accolade my sister, once my idol, moved even further away. “Genius must be allowed to flower,” said my parents. What they didn't say was that apparently the subjects of genius could only flop helplessly around and try not to look too stupid. And even with all that, I missed her.

So when Keira came into my room to pick up the story where it had left off as though no time had passed, how could I refuse?

“He was the best teacher I ever had. So talented.”

She shifted in her mummy bag and I stayed still.

“Can we put on a lamp?” she asked. “This will be easier to talk about in the light.”

I clicked on the lamp.

In the stretched-out silences between her sentences, our breathing was loud, out of sync.

Despite what I've told you, which I realize makes her seem completely cruel and insensitive, I will say again that I don't think my sister set out to do harm with the Chronicles. Her brain just naturally used what was near at hand and turned it into art. It's what artists do.

And, like other extraordinary artists, she's got the self-protection instincts of a freshly hatched robin. It sometimes pains me to think of her out in the world that way, open and exposed to every sensation, every experience.

“He was good to talk to. Really smart. Not much older than me. We started talking in the studio after class. Like, when everyone else was gone.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Then we texted. Talked on the phone.”

Part of what makes Keira's stories so popular is that she tells them in such a way that you always think something important is about to happen. They feel dramatic, even when they aren't. Her sense of timing works well on the page. In life, it's sort of painful.

The bed beneath me turned to quicksand.

I waited and listened and the details dripped out as though from a dislodged IV.

“He never treated me any different in class. But we had a strong connection. Our approach to our work was really similar,” she said.

“And?”

“That was it, at first. He was so open and honest. Most people don't understand what it's like to be consumed by the artistic process.”

My hands were clenched into fists under the light summer duvet.

“His art wasn't going great. I know how that feels.”

I doubted that, but didn't say so.

“Your teacher was writing you personal messages?” I asked, hating how conventional I sounded. “Did you report him?”

“Of course not,” she said. “We were just talking. But then he asked if I wanted to go hiking with him.” She sighed and shifted, and her sleeping bag rustled in the dark. “I guess I shouldn't have said yes.”

There was something in her voice. A vulnerability I hadn't heard for a long time. She sounded like the old Keira. The one who used to ask me about the color green.

Before I could figure out a response, my sister got up and took her excruciating timing back to her own room. She left the next morning and didn't come home for three days.