It’s because I get easily embarrassed by her. Grace was psychedelic before she was my mother. I know this from the things she says.
Watching Unsolved Mysteries: tonight, Unsolved Mysteries is featuring the ghost of an Ojibwa, Chief Pontotoc, who has been haunting an abandoned reserve. Left of centre on the tv screen, a guy in a blue button-down sits apprehensively in a high-backed armchair. He looks off to the right of the anonymous interviewer, dances his thumbs together in a doh-si-doh. He’s recalling, with an apparently high amount of angst, his incident... “one of the old Ojibwa reserves, off the 10th Concession, near Hintsown, and I was surveying the land at about five o’clock. There were lots of dead leaves still on the ground...”
The screen flips to a re-enactment and shows an actor walking knee-high through crisp, dead leaves, at dusk. A voice-over of the real guy: “and I see in the leaves, coming towards me, these footsteps, but nobody’s there, just the leaves shifting like there’s feet walking through them.”
I run into Grace’s room and she’s standing there in front of the mirror in a slip and bra. Sucks her stomach in. Clasps the soft flesh of her hips and pushes it back.
‘I’m a pear, she says, I’m turning into my mother.’ Grace looks at me, ‘you have such a nice body.’
‘On tv there’s a man who saw leaves moving like there’s a person walking, but there was no person there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This guy saw footsteps in the leaves, but no person.’
‘Acid flashback,’ she replies, and swings around to examine her butt.

A woman goes into Norman-Next-Door’s sometimes. She’s tanned, even in winter, and has frizzy brown-red hair. Wears long dresses in feline prints and when she walks up the walk her bangles clang together. Glitter falls off her face and out of her hair; she leaves a trail of it on the walkway. Scarves swim around her neck, her hips, through her hair. Tassels. Black shoes. I’m sure she has a wand tucked under her coat, or a pocket full of bones. She’s there
too, the night the Good Neighbours call the police on my brother while Norman-Next-Door invites him in, cools him off.

We’re serving backyard-summer dinner to the Good Neighbours. Ginantonics, butter-and-pepper asparagus in a yellow ceramic bowl, and caramelized onions on blackened burgers. Ella Fitzgerald swoons chocolately through speakers mounted on the outside of the house. They talk about their marigolds and laugh heartily after a few drinks. These are not Grace’s people. Debra is a caricature of the urban product. She’ll talk seriously about her living room set; she really means it when she says she had the most difficult time finding throw pillows to match the colour of the frames around her Mediterranean watercolour prints. She feels it’s Don’s job to mow the lawn, her job to water it. She wears spandex tights to her Saturday morning yoga classes, she laughs with her mouth closed. One night, when Debra and Don are away, Grace and I steal a bouquet of purple lilacs from their tree.

Who were Grace’s people? Stew was a cult brother; that’s how Grace met him. Maybe he even got her into it. Maybe, just before she got pregnant with John, she felt defenceless. Dropping tabs of LSD, subversive of the Christian doctrinations, and out of her mind on curiosity. Dripping wet with potential that collected and thrived in the divots and valleys of her body. Maybe she was out of control. And then she had my brother and for the first time, was in love. Everything else stopped.
There’s a year or two where they were alone, Grace and my brother John. That’s the bit of his life that remains obscure to him. She’s left Stew but stayed with the ecumenicalists. Maybe, a small apartment in Toronto. Above a laundry or Korean grocery on Queen Street. Maybe they are stuck in the Moss Park area where derelicts lay claim to the green City-of-Toronto benches, where they sleep stale and sweaty; she can see them through her window. The Sally Ann headquarters is not too far away and maybe sometimes she takes John there in a stroller. Lets him climb on the cast iron cannons that sleep in retirement on the front lawn, guns pointed toward Queen Street, to the east and west. If the Sally Ann would allow that kind of thing.
And perhaps a few blocks down, there’s a used book and antique shop, where dusty lamps shine jaundiced, thick light over the gold-lettered hardcovers in the window display and when you open the heavy wooden door a bell jingles and you trip on the bristly floor mat, and then you sneeze.
A place where silence has substance.
The old guy at the counter reads back issues of Reader’s Digest and looks up only briefly. Perhaps he smokes a cigarette, and the smoke hovers at the level of his face. Near the front window a dull, patchy cabinet, cloudy mirror speckled black, is draped with wine-coloured velour. Antique silver jewellery is displayed on its top surface: clunky, yellowed rings, a crucifix, clip-on earrings heavy with hard foliage and berries, a butterfly hair clip. Maybe a charm bracelet like the one Grace’s mother had, that now lives in the bottom of my own jewellery box. It’s got a green and silver four-leaf clover, a mini rocking chair, an idol of St. Christopher, a sombrero, bulbous heart, a London double-decker bus with little silver faces peering out. These all dangle eclectically off the charm chain, holding no cohesive meaning to anyone save the person who collected them in the first place. All anyone can do now is guess. Maybe it’s here where Grace bought her moonstone necklace; paid a relative fortune for it under the romantic influence of dim light, and dust, and the wise smell of old books.

Or maybe they live on the top floor of a house in Cabbagetown. They live in one of those tall, thin houses: red brick, white shutters on long, rectangular windows. She makes coffee in a percolator and smokes a cigarette—Rothman's Special, King Size—while he crawls along the linoleum. No, greasy hardwood. He’s got curly blond hair and wears his cousin’s old dresses. His skin is always dry and she has to rub Johnson and Johnson’s Baby Oil, out of the pink bottle, into his hands to keep him from sucking his fingers. (Years later she will tell me about the time when she had to stick her finger up his anus to dig the poop out, because he had impossible constipation. And she’ll tell me that you love your baby enough not to mind doing things like digging the crap out.)
She’s not 30 yet. Wears a waffled, red halter top; her shoulders are brown and shiny, freckly. Pleated shorts curve over her small pot belly, and she’s in bare feet. Round toes, stubby thumbs. Tiny, solid hands with strong creases across the tops, above her wrists. Straight, soft brown hair parted in the middle with the first cuts of silver. Smooth skin, moon face, doe eyes.
Grace is happy now, I think, in a satisfied kind of way. But then, the ecumenicalists go too far. They want to send John to Israel. My aunts have told me this. The ecumenicalists tell Grace that he is no longer hers, but rather God’s child, and she has no right to him anymore. She leaves the ecumenicalists, and meets my father. Then leaves him too.

Michael is neither the father of John nor I. He’s younger than Grace, and a carpenter. The first time he eats dinner at our house, Grace cooks Basmati rice and leg of lamb seasoned with rosemary. The new tastes, and dry skinny grains of rice, and the gamey smell of the lamb offend me, kill my appetite.
Next time, it’s a Saturday morning, a few weeks later; Michael wants to fix the loose drawers in the kitchen, brings a drill and a metal box in from the back seat of his white canopied flatbed. The sound of the drill interrupts my cartoons; I come into the kitchen and he’s knelt on the floor, legs splayed behind him. He’s pulled the drawers completely out of their casings and all our kitchen stuff is exposed. Mismatched silverware, fists of tinfoil, shish-ke-bob skewers, phone books and dish towels. Matches. Rusty scissors.
‘Hey there, want to help?’ He asks, swivelling around on his knees.
‘No, that’s okay,’ I say. ‘The Smurfs are on.’
When he concentrates, he breathes heavily through his nose.

Now, Grace is in hospice care at the Princess Margaret Hospital on University Avenue. Her day nurse is a cherub. She rubs Grace’s swollen hand after emptying her catheter and then waters the blood-red hibiscus, ups the morphine a little.
‘How does that feel, Grace?’
‘This is good shit,’ Grace says, slowly, on the exhale.
On the wall, a photo of our extended family beams across the room to the other white wall. A family baseball game, previous summer. Someone has stuck a pin through my stepfather’s head. They say he’s been spending time with a woman named Kelly. And now we are the wicked whisperers. Behind closed doors, narrow eyes and rigid hands cupped over flapping mouths, gossiping, filling in the holes.
Some fool lets John in on the rumour.
At home, I’m in bed, just slipping into that initial part of sleep when you don’t have to try anymore, to sleep. Michael is awake, sitting alone downstairs. And then the front door slams open, knob to wall, and my 19-year-old brother stumbles in, drunk and crying. It’s more like he pours himself into the house, displacing the environment that has settled here over the last few hours; like a catalyst he bubbles and ignites the whole enclosure. I can feel this from under my blanket. Can hear it in a lamp that gets thrown to the floor, the wall that gets punched with a fist. Blue sparks fly from my flannel nightgown as I kick my way out of the sheet and blanket. I run to the top of the stairs and collide with Michael, frantic.
‘Get out of the way!’ he yells, and bungles past me, away from John, who is slurring lunacy about this other woman, and what the fuck have they been doing?
I try to block John’s way but he doesn’t even see me, blood on his knuckles, saturated breath, he grips the banister above his head and throws his voice like a grenade through the railings at Grace’s bedroom door, pulling himself the rest of the way up the stairs.
‘I’ll kill you, you’re fucking dead!’ John pounds these words out on the door, pushes with his shoulder and falls into the room, on top of Michael.
‘Please, John!’ Michael is crying.
(And all this time, all this time, Grace is comatose, flying the morphine comet at the Princess Margaret. I think myself there. Head to stomach, limb to limb, feet on feet.)
John is up now, Michael is still on his knees and John’s got his hair in his fist and they’re just staring at each other, I can hear them both breathing, me at the bedroom door, thinking myself away. There’s someone downstairs.
‘I’ve called the police! What is happening here?’
It’s Don. He stands stupefied at the open front door. Striped terrycloth robe, shiny face. He surveys the room and I see it in his eyes’ reflection. A beehive-sized hole in the wall (still buzzing), a lamp on the floor with the lampshade ripped rolled to the other side of the room.
Don’s face is like the belly of a dead fish.
‘What the hell’s happening?’
My brother jostles back downstairs and falls drunk into the wall. There’s noise outside and then Norman-Next-Door pushes past Don and comes right in. It’s the first time I’ve looked at his face, and, for this moment, it seems important to take in the details. It’s kind, older than I thought. Crow’s feet like sunrays, small nose. He’s alertly awake, and huge in our house. Bald on top of his head but with long, brown hair hanging like a cape over his ears. A short beard, bright purple t-shirt and dare-to-be-so-short red shorts.
‘These kids need our help,’ he says to Don. ‘Are you going to help, or what?’
‘The police can help them,’ Don snorts.
‘Go,’ Norman says.
Don fiddles with the thick white ties of his robe, glances up the stairs and then looks at Norman-Next-Door. And he huffs. And he puffs. And he crosses the lawn back to his house.
Now Norman-Next-Door takes John by the elbow, pulls him out the door and around the wooden wall that divides our porches. I follow them into his home, through the mouth of the plastic sun. Shaking in my flannel nighty, bare feet. His house is like his store; there are things everywhere and it smells like patchouli, cigarettes and burnt garlic. The Grateful Dead bears march gleefully across a large mirror above a cold fireplace. They’re looking right at me, smiling like they’re wise as to how all of this is going to turn out. Norman-Next-Door sits us down on a jumpy purple couch. That woman is here, in a long and silky nightdress, sitting thin on a stool in the corner of the room. I want to call her a statue, but she is breathing, slowly, not judging us but observing everything. The frills on my nighty. John’s weak, shaking legs. John falls into himself, in the corner of the couch, rests his head in his bloody hands.
‘Maybe they need something to drink,’ she says to Norman-Next-Door. Her voice is low.
‘You want some coffee?’ He asks me. Outside, a car pulls up, a scream of blue and red rolls quickly through the room. Door slams. Unmistakable sound of walkie-talkie.
‘That’ll be the police,’ she says. ‘Better talk to them, Hans.’
God, his name’s not even Norman. He gets up from where he’s knelt down beside me, touches John’s head and goes through the room and opens the front door. Winter cold.
‘My name is Sadie,’ this woman says to me, leaning over slightly and I can see the top hint of her breasts. ‘Are you thirsty?’
I shake my head.
‘I’ll get you some water anyway.’ She’s up, and gone, and back handing me a pint glass of tap water. ‘Do you want to talk about what happened just now?’
Surprising myself, I do. What Happened Just Now is a rusty bike chain dragged from my throat, and I want to get it out. Spit rusty phlegm into my cup.
‘Where’s your mother now?’ she asks when I finish talking, and pulls the brass chain of a lamp; a bald bulb shines directly over her left ear and all she is now is a penumbra of frizzy hair, a hint of slowly moving facial features.
‘At the Princess Margaret.’
‘The Princess who?’
‘It’s a cancer hospital.’
‘Will she get better?’
‘She’s dying.’
‘Would you like to tell me about her?’
I would, but I can’t think of a thing to tell.
Norman-Next-Door, Hans, comes back in.
‘What did you tell them?’ Sadie asks him.
‘I told them there’s no problem.’
He sits down across from me. John is a rocking ball.

I know this for sure: right after we first leave my father Grace does find a suitable affordable Toyota within those impossible glossy pages. It’s blue. The three of us have just moved into a small house on a street called Gilmore and there are tall, skinny pines dancing in the backyard. They scratch the wind when it drives through, slowing it down and amplifying its journey. We also have a rhubarb bush (don’t eat the leaves because the leaves are poison), and before we even begin to unpack we sit out back, dipping the silver-maroon rods into brown sugar. Grace has bought buckets of white paint, new dishes, a fuzzy steel-grey couch, a couple of touch-tone telephones—our first. Maybe there’s one night when John and I are asleep upstairs. It’s winter now. We each have our own rooms, and sweat underneath flannel and cotton and down. Miami Vice crashes and bashes all over the tv screen and Grace eats popcorn out of a greasy red bowl that’s as big as her lap. Sunny and Crocket have just brought down another dope-dealing low life. Grace knows the sort. And she is sprawled, scratches her tummy and yawns like a lion so that you can see the silver filling at the back of her mouth. She’s got an afghan over one leg while the other lolls off the end of the couch. Pumps her toes lazily in thick socks. The furnace is cranked to where she likes it.