Jesus Christ,” Lucy said. “I’ll go see Abba.”
“Really? You … will?”
“Only because we should have done it a long time ago.”
“Thank you, Lucy. That … means … so … m … uch.”
“I can’t believe that still works.”
“It’s … because … you have … a good … heart.”
“Too bad for me.”
“But y … ou’ll really … go?”
“Yes, yes. I just said I would. I’ll go as far as Abba,” Lucy said. Angie nodded. She pushed herself out of the white armchair and moved across the room, lowering herself onto Lucy’s chair, sitting half beside her sister and half on top of her. She turned herself sideways so she could hug Lucy.
“Watch my shirt.”
“This … means … so … much … to … me.”
“Careful with your nose. Here, blow. Everything’s going to be okay. There’s just one thing we’ll have to do first.”
“What is it?”
“We have to visit Mother.”
“Okay,” Angie said. “I’ll do it.”
In the kitchen the kettle began to whistle. This was a trick Lucy had been using since high school, to interrupt moments precisely like this one. It got louder and louder and higher in pitch. But Angie didn’t loosen her grip and Lucy did not try to break it.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING the Weird siblings ever did together was Rainytown. It was a city made entirely out of cardboard boxes that they built in the half-storey attic of their family’s cottage. It was a project they worked on every summer, whenever it rained. Two factors contributed significantly to its genesis: that it rained for seven straight days during the summer of 1994, and that several weeks earlier Kent had found numerous cardboard boxes, big and small, in a neighbour’s garbage.
Kent had dragged the boxes back to the cottage with the intention of playing girlbots. This was a game that Lucy and Abba were disinclined to join. It was forgotten until the grey dismal morning of the seventh day, when they looked outside and saw that the rain continued to fall. Lacking fresh ideas, they followed Kent up to the attic, where conflict began almost instantly.
“Hold on there, Kentucky,” Richard said, using the nickname he knew Kent hated. “I’m obviously the mad scientist since I can’t be a girlbot and I’m older than you.”
“That’s not fair!” Kent said. A small trickle of blood began to leak from his left nostril.
“Truth isn’t fair,” Richard said, invoking the expression that was the unofficial Weird family motto.
“You know that isn’t going to work with us,” Abba said. Kent’s nosebleed ceased.
“Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t be the mad scientist,” Lucy said. She began collecting boxes. Richard tried to pull them out of her hands. Fighting ensued. Their voices rose in volume and pitch and soon their mother’s head poked up into the crawl space.
What she saw disturbed her. Abba appeared to be crying, although it was hard to tell because of the box that covered her head. Angie was also in tears—but then again when wasn’t she?—because she couldn’t remove the Kleenex boxes that had been duct-taped to her feet. Lucy repeatedly hit Richard on the head with a long cardboard tube.
“Stop it,” their mother screamed. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
Nicola, who was not prone to losing it, looked at her children. She looked at the boxes scattered on the floor. “What are you people trying to do?” she asked.
“Make robots,” Kent truthfully answered.
“Robots? Surely the five of you can come up with something better than that. Something more …”
A silence followed. The sound of the rain striking the roof could be heard. Their mother’s eyes seemed to be focused on something quite far away. The silence captured their attention, and the look on Nicola’s face, wistful and sad, cracked their self-absorbed shells.
“More what?”
“Just more. Larger. A bigger scale,” Nicola said. “Not a mimic of some movie. Something original. Something that can be all your own …”
“Okay …”
“But like what?”
“What, Mom? Tell us!”
“Like a city!”
“That’s a great idea!”
“From Mom!”
“Why so surprised?”
“How should we start?”
“A town hall?”
“A TV station!”
“A motorcycle speedway!”
“You choose, Mom,” Richard said. “What would you start with?”
“A hair salon,” she said, instantly. “A beauty parlour.”
And so they got started. That very afternoon they designed and built the It’s About Time Hair Cutting Saloon, situated in what would become the heart of Rainytown, the first of many buildings to follow.
If it hadn’t been for Besnard there were many things Nicola would have done with her life. But after he vanished she didn’t do any of them. She didn’t even try. Two days after her husband’s crumpled Maserati was pulled from Georgian Bay, having apparently veered off the road and over a cliff, Nicola went into her bedroom. She closed the door. She did not come out.
The Weird siblings assumed that their mother was waiting for their father’s body to be found, just like they were. When the Maserati was towed out of the water, Besnard’s body had not come with it. It was thought that it had been swept away by the tide and that the same forces would soon push it back to shore. But two weeks later their father’s body had not been found and their mother had not come out of her room.
The meals she placed in the hallway went untouched, and Angie began to suspect that her mother was leaving the bedroom at night and making her own food. Angie set her alarm for 3:30 a.m. She crept downstairs, to the kitchen. To keep herself awake she brewed a pot of coffee. This was the first time she’d ever tried to do this. Angie took one sip and dumped the rest into the sink; it was the last coffee she ever tasted.
Angie sat at the kitchen table and waited. Without anything to keep her awake, she soon fell asleep. When she woke up her mother stood at the counter. Nicola wore a black
