My brother tells me that there’s a part of his life which is unaccounted for, vague, delivered to him in colourful versions. For one thing, he doesn’t know where he lived in his first few years, and he never thought to ask my mother.

Some details. Some of the first in the table of contents of this life. Back porch when we were nuclear. Mom, dad, older brother: white Omni in the garage. It’s got a cherry-red carpet interior and I like to sit inside, sweaty in this tin can heated by the sun’s rays, pretend I’m Laura Ingles from Little House on the Prairie. She’s got freckles and her rain-straight hair swings back and forth across her back when she runs—mine is too frizzy to swing. It bounces like a flat tennis ball. The Omni is my cracked wooden wagon and I can see the horses’ bums through the glare of the dirty windshield, tails swatting flies. Lawnmower down the road breaks the illusion.
Laura calls her father, Charles Ingles, Paw. And he calls her Half-Pint. He’s always got sweat stains in the armpits of his shirts. I’ve got a crush on Paw Ingles, except for the cleft in his chin.

Back porch: Irregularly shaped flagstone deck and a brown picnic table. Paint peeling. We can pick copper-coloured paint off the backs of our legs, because the sweat makes everything stick. This is after the back-yard meal of soft hot dogs, charred beef burgers, orange cheezies, watermelon. (Press the watermelon seeds to your forehead and give them the names of the boys you love. The last one to fall off is who you will marry.)
Grace, my mother, is sitting in a blue and white plastic deck chair, flipping through an automobile brochure. Slick automobiles slide oily across slick pages, black and silver mercury. I’m four years old, sitting in her lap and pulling at her moonstone necklace; a delicate silver chain secures the small, smoky-white stones in an upside-down pyramid that lays like a fine pencil tracing over the junction of her collar bones.
‘What’s that for?’ I ask, and bend the brochure towards my face. Grab at it and crinkle the lovely paper.
‘A new car for when you and me and John go away.’
‘Not dad too?’
‘Not dad too.’

My aunts say that when Grace met my dad, she was part of an ecumenical cult. Or, he caught her like a foul ball when she got out of it. They’re not sure. I have a plan at four years old. I will whisper into my parents’ ears, early in the morning. I will tell them to stay together. It’s supposed to be subliminal, so that when they wake up they will feel it viscerally; they’ll want to work things out. I know this at four, that my ghostlike subtlety is the key—make them think it’s their own idea.

This is the panic when Grace leaves the house in the mornings: it’s the same boxlike panic like when the subway stops moving in between stations, and then the lights flicker and the vibrations stop. We’ve got a babysitter named Leia; she’s big and Italian. Through glasses her eyes are like spoonfuls of jell-o and I don’t realize her accent is different than mine until I meet her again, more than ten years later, at Grace’s funeral. Leia makes peanut-butter-on-toast either “lake” or “mountains”. “Lake” means a swirl of the peanut butter with the knife. For “mountains”, she lifts the butter into sharp and jagged, minuscule peaks with the flat surface of the knife. Lakes taste better and I’m biting down into one as Grace tries to make her exit through the front door, without my knowledge.
‘I want to go with you!’ This is our daily struggle.
‘You have to stay with Leia, peanut. I have to go to work.’
‘Let me come too.’ I’m crying now, pulling hard on her arm so her purse slides off her shoulder and hits the floor. ‘I’m glue,’ I say. ‘I stick to you all day.’
And I attach myself to her like a barnacle: head to stomach, limb to limb, feet on feet. With my head in the darkness of her I can smell perfume, a leather belt, the vagina smell I recognise but can’t relate to yet. Tweed itches my cheek; I stick my hand in the pocket where there’s lint and pennies, a flattened piece of gum with the wrapper half worn off.
‘Oh no,’ she cries, ‘I’ve got something glued to me. Guess I’ll just have to keep it all day.’
Some days, I win, and I go to work at the Correctional Services of Canada with Grace, where she takes care of the ex-convicts. I’ve seen them, faded jeans and tattoos, greasy hair. Teeth missing. They’re old but look like little boys, waiting on the metal-framed government chairs. When they come into her office, Grace shoo’s me out, closes the tall door that reaches the ceiling. So I sharpen pencils in the electronic pencil sharpener, shred paper, eat lunch with the girls at Druxy’s Delicatessen. Coca Cola out of the can and salt out of a packet. Dill pickles.

Do pregnant women really crave dill pickles and ice cream?
There’s a picture of Grace in a rocking chair, in a white sun dress spotted with something red; the picture isn’t close enough to make out what the red spots actually are. She’s so beautiful; her stomach is a massive hill covered in red somethings, flowers perhaps? The sun comes through the window, through blue and green bottles on the window sill, and rests on us, curls up with us like a cat. That’s me in there, kicking, driving her to (maybe) eat dill pickles and ice cream.

At the Eaton Centre mall with Grace and my cousin who is very pregnant. Eating in the restaurant with the nautical theme. The pictures on the wall confuse the mood: one tallship, ripped headsails, rough, saturated wood, steely sky and white, torn sea. Waves like ragged peanut-butter mountains. Or a ketch in a blue bay, long, brown legs on deck, white sunlight.
I eat fish n’ chips, peel off the batter and slop it greasily on Grace’s plate. ‘What’s your baby’s name going to be?’ I ask.
My 16-year-old cousin bites her lower lip, looks at Grace.
‘She’s not going to keep this baby, honey.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Somebody else will take care of it.’
‘Why?’ I’m angry now, upset that I won’t get to hold this baby.
‘She’s not ready to have a baby.’ Grace holds my cousin’s hand when she says this.
And I think, if she’s not ready to have it, how are they going to get it out?

There’s this guy named Stew who has been coming over to our house, eating dinner with Grace and my dad and my brother and I. His skin is darker than ours, and he’s tall, and brings presents for John but not for me. One time it’s moccasin slippers. Another time it’s a soft suede pouch with tassels and beads stitched on like a rainbow. And one time even, Stew takes John for a week and John comes back with photographs of himself on a horse. Stew wears corduroy jeans and tucked-in plaid shirts. His tinted glasses cover half his face.
I’m sitting on the toilet, doing number 2, concentrating on the wallpaper. Small yellow daisies on beige background, marching along in rows that crisscross if you make your eyes go fuzzy. And if your eyes go really wonky, super fuzz, the daisies pop off the wall and you run through them, just like Laura Ingles on the Prairie.
Going with the door open is okay. Looking at the wallpaper and trying to figure out how Stew fits into my brother’s life. I Imagine John eating ice-cream at the Eaton Centre, sitting on the low brick wall that goes around the fountain—the fountain that only sprays sometimes. John is bouncing his small feet off the wall and maybe Stew walks over and gives him a penny to throw in the water, where the other coins wink patiently, like stars. So maybe that’s how they met, I think. And now they are friends; this is why John gets presents and I don’t.
I need to find out.
In the kitchen my father stands in front of the stove, stirring a pot with wieners in it because tonight we’re having cheesedogs. With real Cheeze Whiz. Grace sits on a stool by the stove and they’re talking and I just come right in and say it.
‘Who’s Stew and how come I don’t get presents?’
Grace looks at my father the way I once saw my cousin look at Grace, so I know that it’s his turn to talk.
‘Do I tell her or do you?’ my father says.
‘You.’
‘Stew is John’s dad. Your mom met Stew before she met me and they had John together.’
John is outside playing street hockey with a kid named Zack. I meet him on the porch and through titanic tears I tell him I know who Stew is. He kneels down beside me and tells me he’s still my brother and there’s no difference.

My brother John burdens a rage that is mostly dormant; it hibernates, sticks its slimy, rabid nose out of the hole only sometimes. It’s cultivated by the comings and goings of men. Years after we leave my father, we have a stepfather. A stepfather in a house stuck between Good Neighbours and a Bad Neighbour. Norman-Next-Door is the Bad Neighbour, and will save us, when Grace is almost dead, when John’s little beasty wakes up.
But tonight, I eat contraband raspberries off the bush that crawls through the fence from Norman-Next-Door’s yard into ours. My mother and stepfather chat in our backyard with the Good Neighbours, Don and Debra.
‘My parents couldn’t afford law school,’ says Grace. ‘So I didn’t go. There were five of us, right? What can you do?’
‘You wanted to be a lawyer?’ I ask. I pluck the deep red berries swiftly off the bush—have to snake my arm through a hole in the green chainlink, scraping my skin on hungry thorns. ‘How come you never told me that?’
‘You never asked.’ She bends over to scratch her tiny, bare ankle, and I pull at more berries, wipe the juice on the front of my cotton shorts.
They’re complaining about Norman, about how his house decreases the value of our house. A few months before this, my stepfather, Michael, wrote a letter to our council member, asking how to go about forcing Norman-Next-Door to fix up his house. He insisted, for one thing, that the porch was not even built to regulation. It’s a menace, he claimed.
Michael even put a copy of the letter in Norman’s mailbox, to give him fair warning.
Norman’s porch has no railing and is painted fluorescent orange. The rest of the house is electric blue and seems to lean on our sturdy grey-and-green like a drunk, even though we’re semi-detached. His porch and front lawn are like a storage space for what most people can’t get rid of in a garage sale. A huge, plastic sun hangs in front of his door, and hides half of his front window. A patch of garden, along the wooden base of the porch, is weed, and dead black, sticky stubs of what could have been a young lilac bush. Through the walls I hear the same music Grace listens to: Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, The Moody Blues. In winter, he shovels exactly half of the narrow walkway we share. Winter.

Christmas—me at 12: One night and I’m sleeping on the couch, because grandma is in my bed. Fleetwood Mac is seeping through the walls from Norman’s; Stevie Nicks sings Landslide. It’s late, maybe 2 a.m., and Grace and one of my aunts talk in the next room, the kitchen. The Christmas tree is on. The living room is lit with quick breaths of red, orange, green blue pink white, and I wish for snow in the morning.
Cigarette smoke sails snakily in from the kitchen, like on a tide. Grace and my aunt are drinking Carlsberg out of green bottles, talking about my brother, who is 16 now.
‘He told me he gets drunk occasionally,’ says Grace. ‘As long as I know when he’s doing it. Or who with.’
‘Oh, he’s a good kid.’
‘I bought him some condoms. I bought a whole box. Do you think that’s too much?’
‘No. Never too much.’
They laugh, smoke.
‘How do you get a witch pregnant?’ says Grace.
My aunt is already laughing like she knows the punch line.
Through a nasal, constricted laugh, Grace delivers: ‘You fuck her!’
Even my teeth are burning.