Born Weird

“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 pantsuit, heels and a small string of pearls. She was making a loaf of sandwiches. Angie watched her butter twelve slices of bread. She set down the knife and opened the refrigerator. The light from inside shone on her carefully styled hair. She took out a jar of pickles and strained to open it.

“At least I know you’re eating,” Angie said. Her mother didn’t seem to hear her. She continued trying to open the pickle jar. “I said, it’s good to know that you’re eating!”

Frustrated, Nicola set the unopened jar on the counter. Angie went over to the cutlery drawer. She took out a knife and tapped the lid of the pickle jar in a circle. Then she set the jar back on the counter and put the knife back in the drawer. As she returned to her seat at the table, Nicola made another attempt to open the jar.

“Hey? Mom?”

“Yes!” Nicola said as the lid popped open. She fished out four pickles, sliced them and put them on the buttered bread. She got a tomato from the refrigerator. Angie took it off the counter. She held it in her hand. Her mother went back to the refrigerator and took another tomato out of the crisper.

“Please don’t do this,” Angie said. “Don’t do this to us.”

Nicola sliced the tomato. She put her pieces of bread together, stacked all the sandwiches on a dinner plate and carried the stack towards the kitchen doorway. Angie got up and stood in front of her mother. Nicola stopped. The sandwiches wobbled. For the briefest moment Angie was sure that her mother recognized her and that everything was going to be okay. But then the look of recognition disappeared. It went away so quickly that Angie couldn’t tell whether she’d caught her mother off guard and seen through her act, or if the look hadn’t really been there in the first place. Keeping the plate level Nicola bent forwards at the waist. She leaned down until she and Angie were eye to eye.

“Are you staying here too? It’s such a beautiful hotel,” Nicola said.

Not being recognized by her mother was unsettling, yet what troubled Angie even more was how much confidence and joy there was in Nicola’s voice. Emotions it had not conveyed for as long as Angie could remember.

“What’s your name?” Nicola asked.

“Please. Mom? Don’t?”

“Well, whoever you are,” she said and she lifted her left hand, extended her index finger and dabbed Angie on the nose, “you’re as cute as a bug!”

Angie looked at the floor. She watched her mother’s shoes as they stepped around her. She did not turn around as Nicola Weird left the room and climbed the stairs and stopped being her mom forever.

ANGIE WAS SURPRISED WHEN Lucy handed her a pillow and a sheet. “Wait,” she said. “I have to sleep on a couch and I have to make it up? This is no way to treat a guest.”

“You’re not a guest, you’re family,” Lucy said. Angie started to cry. Lucy turned out the light.