VenCo(8)

The front door jingled merrily as she pushed out onto the wide, wet street, moving like a pinecone down a rain-swollen ravine. Everything? That was what she came up with? Everything was too much. Everything was not nearly enough.



Lucky let herself in and heated up a microwave dinner. Stella was downstairs at her pal Clermont’s house. Clermont was what Stella referred to as “a bachelor,” and what he referred to as “an old queer.” They’d recently taken up knitting together and spent long nights getting drunk, pretending to make gifts for the children’s hospital. Lucky fell asleep to the TV.

Like most nights, she dreamed of Arnya.

When Lucky was nine, her mother was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. She’d been sick for a while, but the day they took the bus to the hospital and sat in Dr. Sakamori’s green office and heard those oddly shaped words, her mother became sick in a profound way. At first she thought Dr. Sakamori was speaking Japanese, as he was apt to do when Lucky pestered him enough. She loved the way the harsh consonants became like toffee when rolled against his back teeth. But her mother understood the words as soon as she heard them. Lucky saw that much in the way her eyes grew wide, then closed in like an explosion played in reverse.

After that, Arnya stopped dancing in their apartment, giving in to the aches and knots that made her double over. She stopped combing her hair and lacing her shoes. She started a slow metamorphosis from a tall woman who liked to sing old bluegrass tunes on the fire escape with a thermos of gin into a hollow-boned bird, slowly melting into the upholstery of the easy chair.

Then, a week after Lucky turned ten, Arnya was gone. She’d been in the hospital for what seemed like forever, hooked up to machines that pumped, gurgled, and whispered into her body. Lucky was staying with her grandmother, who had supervised the packing of everything she and her mother owned into reinforced boxes from the liquor store.

After their apartment was cleaned out, it was rented to a Russian family. Lucky saw them the day they moved in. She rode her hand-me-down ten speed out to her old building every day after school for those first few months. She’d park just underneath the third-floor window and watch the Russian parents dance together across the living room floor, unsmiling, as if they were being forced to hold each other close and swing across the threadbare carpet. As if a man with a gun were sitting where her mother’s old easy chair had been, tapping his foot to the music and pointing the metal barrel at the swirling couple. The two blond boys would watch her without speaking, their stockinged feet dangling off the same fire escape where her mother had performed her bluegrass symphonies.

Each morning over the six months, from the time Dr. Sakamori spoke his strange words to the time her mother passed away, Lucky would wake up just after dawn and wait at the window, first at her own apartment and then at her grandmother’s. She wasn’t quite sure what she was waiting for, but she knew that something was on the way. She could smell it. It was like what glass would smell like if it had a scent, cold and hard. That was when she started writing, pages and pages of messy text, trying to pin it down, trying to understand.

When Stella brought her in to see her mother the day she died, there was only the stuttered coughing of the lung patients from down the hall and her grandmother’s soft sobs. Lucky broke from her embrace, went to the bed, and pulled back the sheet from her mother’s face. Before Stella grabbed her up, before the nurse pulled the pea-green sheet back up over the dead woman, Lucky heard what glass would sound like if it had a voice. It was pouring out of her mother’s nose, rolling across her mother’s lips—it was thick, deafening silence.



On Saturday morning, Lucky woke up on the couch with the TV still blaring. She hit the mute button and sat up, listening for her grandmother. Once she realized Stella’s basket of wool was gone, she relaxed; that meant she was downstairs at Clermont’s again, or maybe still.

Lucky got up to look out the window, sneezing twice on the way. “Fucking cat.”

Great, the rain had turned to snow. She decided to spend her day cleaning—there was nothing else to do. But first she’d escape the cat dander in the humid safety of the shower.

Getting out, she wiped the steam off the mirror and examined her face. Large hazel eyes, apparently so similar to her father’s she could have plucked them straight out of his head with her chubby baby fingers. Not that he’d been around to give her the chance.

Straight black eyelashes. Tiny freckles strewn across the bridge of her nose, a few slipping off onto the curves of her cheeks. Her mother had often lamented how few features they shared—Lucky looked nothing like her side of the family. Aryna would loudly proclaim, “Half-breeds, we may get forgotten, and we may argue too much with each other, but dammit, we look good, even standing still.”

She would have loved to feel that confidence, to see Arnya’s eyes looking back at her now, to see her mother’s signature smile in her own face. But there was only Lucky, small and unremarkable. She swiped her palm across the wet mirror and finished toweling off.

She threw on old clothes and got to work. There was cat hair everywhere, along with abandoned Froot Loops, Stella’s favourite cereal. Multicoloured hoops floated in the kitchen like tiny life preservers on a tile sea.

When she was done sweeping, she grabbed the wicker laundry basket from the bathroom and made her way through the apartment, picking up dirty clothes as she went. Then she grabbed the soap and dryer sheets and left the apartment.