of vile actions I didn’t even know about yet. I was used to being groped and prodded by adults, but I couldn’t so much as talk to a boy my own age.
Girls who thought about boys all the time were bad, sinister, wretched wenches. Since I did wonder about boys quite a bit, I suspected my parents were right. I must be bad. I must have the sinister worm of evil in me. Oddly I took a shine to that thought. It was a romantic notion: the seeds of insurrection neatly planted, the way it was in one of the characters in the books I’d read. If I was bad, then I’d need accomplices. That was when I started befriending the bad boys at school.
I was fascinated with a classmate named Raymond, a short, well-tanned French boy who could barely speak French. In fact, he couldn’t speak English all that well, either. He would often stutter when he was forced to read in class. He always wore light-coloured T-shirts, black jeans, and boots—never shoes or sneakers—and usually his clothes were too small for his stocky frame. I figured he bought them at the Salvation Army discount store because I knew firsthand how hard it was to find just the right size there. Immediately I empathized with his dilemma.
Raymond lived with religious foster parents. He never did well in school and was picked on by most of the teachers and the other kids, probably because he was so emotionally numb. He wouldn’t cry even when the principal strapped him for not answering a question. He told me he never even cried when his stepmother whipped him across the back with a belt and locked him in his room without supper.
I believed him and began to revere his suffering. He needed to be saved. He was in pain. I thought he was just about the bravest boy I’d ever met. I tried to help him learn how to spell so the teacher would stop calling him a dummy in class, but he never seemed to get the hang of it. He had a hard time pronouncing certain words and found it difficult to concentrate. Today he would be diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder or a learning disability. Back then he was just rebellious and incorrigible. His teachers told him he didn’t want to learn, but they never saw how hard he tried when he was with me, or how honest tears would float in his eyes when he couldn’t distinguish a b from a d. And he was so eager to please me.
I promised never to tell.
Raymond grew up with the tough-guy image clenched in every muscle of his body but also in his heart. He hated the world. When we were in school, we were constantly warned about him. Everyone said he’d come to no good. And I guess, in their own narrow-minded way, they were right.
Raymond was twenty-five when his body was discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario. Rumour was he’d been dumped after being killed by a rebel biker gang. I never found out for sure how he died. When I heard the news, all I remembered was the curly-haired guy who loved red cars, tabby cats, and the colour black. He was the one who gave me my first bouquet of flowers when I was only thirteen—daisies, bluebells, and buttercups—with a note that read: “To my best freind. Love, Raymond.”
One of the most difficult consequences of my family’s born-again values was the effect they had on my ambition. My dreams to become a professional writer or veterinarian or both were dashed. My father was a talented poet who had been dubbed the Bard of Oromocto by local media. His poetry and children’s stories had been published in local newspapers and, as a tourism project, the Women’s Institute had put together a collection of his poems in a book called The Wake of Silence.
“Crusoe Complex” was one of my favourites. The words helped explain the pained expression I so often witnessed in my father’s eyes:
Heart is a lonely island ringed by reefs
And washed by endless tide
Love is a bridge to other islands
A brotherhood to lesser loneliness.
My island has no bridges,
The bitter tides are flotsam-filled
And reefs around my island are a cage.
Jim Coulter often read my father’s poems on CFNB Radio, but Dad knew he’d never make any real money writing poetry no matter how much he dreamed about it, so I guess he was determined to save me from the same unrequited dreams. He was quick to say, “Put that foolishness out of your head.” I was a female. Females were supposed to learn all the devotions required to be a good wife. “Never mind that career nonsense,” he insisted with a fierceness that seemed much too severe to suit the situation.
He discouraged me from viewing writing as a career, but his objections came too late. I had already fallen in love with the recognition I’d received at school for my writing abilities. It was the only area of my life where I felt some measure of confidence. When I won a provincial essay contest at the age of twelve, my mind was made up. I would be a writer and I would make money at it.
My father discouraged me from learning about things usually considered the sole preoccupation of men—like cars. I asked him one day to show me, as he had my brothers, how to fix the fan belt in our car. He had no time for it. I cursed him twenty years later when I sat on the side of a deserted highway on my way home from St. Stephen trying to picture what little information I had been able to glean of the fan-belt installation before I was instructed to go help my mother and leave the fan belts to the men.
I was always at the top of my class in school. My marks hovered in the nineties. Sometimes I would even bring home papers with a proud 100 circled in red marker. But no one was particularly impressed except Grammie Mills. Whenever I wrote and told her about my marks, she’d always write back to let me know how proud she was of me.
Only if my grades slipped a point or two did I receive any feedback. Then it would be something like: What happened there? Didn’t you study? Had your mind on those boys again, didn’t you?
I had a hard time pretending my life was normal. Sexual abuse had forced me to be a fragmented woman long before I was even an adolescent, and the secret was making me sicker every day My strict parents would never have believed I was innocent. If I confessed, it would be my fault. If I opened my mouth, it would all be my fault, my creation, my doing. My father was always suspicious of my dealings with the opposite sex. He’d often accuse me of sneaking away to meet a boy when I’d only been sitting in the woods by myself, wondering about my solitude and admiring the stillness.
Eventually the accusations got to me. The craziness in my head got to me. The life of misunderstanding and loneliness got to me. The part of me that was labouring to come to life just gave up. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I thought maybe I could drown myself, but we didn’t live handy to any suitably deep river or lake and I was terrified of water, anyway. I had heard that my greatgrandfather had shot himself, but I didn’t know how to use a gun. So I just started praying for an end when I went to bed at night.
“Please, God, don’t let me wake up in the morning. I don’t want to wake up anymore.” I begged for God to take me so that my eyes would never witness daylight again. I would eventually drift off into the semblance of my hoped-for disappearance, but in the morning my eyes would open to the reality of yet another day.
Having grown up in a predominately morbid household, it was an easy transition to become preoccupied with fantasizing about death. How wonderful and peaceful it would be. How empty and weightless. How innocent and graceful.
But I continued living. After a while, I just stopped praying altogether
If
