Miriam Toews - Irma Voth

Uh-huh, said Aggie.

And it made me so mad, I said. That she was so happy about leaving. And she made me promise not to tell Dad.

So you promised you wouldn’t? said Aggie.

Yeah, I said.

But then you did, said Aggie.

I know, I said. Yeah.

And then Dad went after her in his truck which is what you wanted him to do, said Aggie.

Yeah, I said, but to bring her home.

You shouldn’t have told him, said Aggie.

And then he came home and told Mom he couldn’t find her, I said. He put the truck in the garage and just waited around for a day or two for it to snow hard and then he told the cops that she had been upset about a fight with her boyfriend and had run off onto the road into the blizzard and still hadn’t come home. So they went looking for her and found her body in the ditch. They said she had been hit by a car or a truck.

Dad said well, it must have been the boyfriend who hit her, and the cops said okay, who’s her boyfriend and Dad said he had never met him and didn’t know his name. He told the cops that Katie had been upset before she left and he had asked her what was wrong and she had said she and her boyfriend had had a fight. So then the cops said oh, okay, we’ll ask around in the community. We’ll talk to some of her friends to see if we can get some information and Dad said yes, thank you, that would be good. The cop asked Dad if he had a photograph of Katie and he said no. The cop said no photographs? And Dad said no again. He said our families don’t have photographs.

A couple of days later the cops came back to our house and said that nobody in the community knew who her boyfriend was. Maybe it was a boy from the city, said Dad. And the cops said maybe. Then they said maybe it wasn’t her boyfriend who hit her. And Dad said maybe not. He said maybe it was a trucker or a farmer in the area who had thought that he had hit a deer or a dog and had just kept going. Dad said the snow had been blinding that night and it would have been impossible for anyone to have seen her especially in the dark. The cops asked Mom and Dad some questions. They asked them why they thought Katie was running in the dark in a snowstorm wearing a light jean jacket and runners. Dad said she was upset about the fight with her boyfriend, he had already told them that. They said yes, but the fight must have happened earlier that day or even before that and why had she waited until so long after the fact to run off into the night. That didn’t fit with their knowledge of human psychology and impulsive behaviour. Dad said well, he had thought that she had been talking to him over the phone that evening so the fight may have occurred over the phone immediately before she took off. The cops said well, they had contacted the Manitoba telephone system and there was no record of any phone activity that evening at all. None. Well, said Dad, the fight may have occurred earlier but Katie may have taken some time to work herself into a frenzy and then made the rash decision to run off into the night. Maybe, said the cop. Then he said that the autopsy had indicated that Katie’s body had been in the ditch for longer than just that evening. Maybe two or even three days. Dad said that didn’t make any sense at all and questioned the reliability of science. The cops asked Dad if maybe he had got the day wrong. They wondered if Katie had gone missing two or three days earlier, when the weather had been exceptionally clear and sunny and anybody driving down the road would have been able to have seen a running girl on the shoulder. Dad said no, he would have noticed if she’d been gone all that time, obviously. Then the cops were quiet for a second and asked Mom and Dad if they could talk to me alone.

Mom and Dad went outside into the yard and the cop asked me what kind of a girl Katie was. I said she was a fun girl. He asked me if she had had a boyfriend. I said yes. I was lying. The cop asked me if I knew who the boyfriend was. I said no, I had never met him. The cop said but she talked about him? I said yes, she did sometimes, not often. Then the cop made me tell him what she had said about her boyfriend and I said all she said was that he was funny and easygoing and made her laugh and liked her a lot. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t know anything about what boyfriends might be like. The cop asked me where he was from and I said I didn’t know. Maybe the city. The cop asked me how Katie would have met a boy from the city when we were living so far away from it and she didn’t have a driver’s licence. I told the cop I didn’t know. Then I thought of something and I told the cop that Katie had told me that her boyfriend had a really bad temper. That sometimes she’d say something or do something, anything, like tap the dashboard of his car with her foot, and he’d fly off the handle. He was really violent.

The cop said well, first he was funny and easygoing and now he’s violent? I told the cop that he was both of those things, according to Katie. The cop asked me if she had ever called him by his name or had always spoken of him as her boyfriend this and her boyfriend that. I said yes, that she had never called him by his name. The cop said okay, can you tell me if there was any fighting between your dad and Katie? I said no, never. They asked me if any of the things she did ever made him angry and I said no, not at all. They asked me if I was sure about that. They said it was normal for fathers to sometimes become exasperated with their teenage daughters, to yell at them, or to forbid them from doing certain things. I didn’t say anything. They asked me again if Katie had ever made Dad mad and I said no, never. Then the cops left and Mom and Dad came back into the kitchen. Mom went to take care of you and the boys, you were in the other room, and Dad asked me what I had said to the cops. I told him and he said that was fine. Then the next day we were on our way to Mexico.

Aggie came out of the bathroom and took off her shirt. She put on a different one. Yeah, she said. That’s when Mom told me about the boyfriend. When she came into the room where me and the boys were playing. She lied to me too. Then Aggie took that shirt off and put the other one back on. She took Chocolate Mint Lip Gloss and taped it to the wall beside the door. Then she walked out.

I found a blue emergency candle in the washroom cupboard and lit it and stuck it into an empty jar and brought it to the bed and set it there under Aggie’s art. For the next hour or two I watched over Katie as she kicked out the walls around her. Finally around midnight or one in the morning Aggie came back and squeezed into bed next to me and Ximena and fell asleep in her clothes. In the morning I got up before she did. I got ready for work and then I woke her up for school.

After that Aggie painted a giant mural on brown paper and hung it over our bed. It was our family praying and holding hands around the table in our old kitchen in Canada. Katie’s body was lying in the centre of the table and there were other regular dishes of food with spoons in them and steam coming up. All our eyes were closed except for our father’s and he was staring straight at me. She painted a mural of a police lineup with three girls, herself, me and Ximena, looking out at the camera, dirty and dishevelled and lost.

I asked Aggie if we could take those murals off the walls and put them in the closet. Why? she said. You don’t want to be reminded of the fact that you’re the daughter of a killer? I told her I was sorry for telling her the truth and she told me never to lie to her again.

NOEHMI AND I WERE WORKING on the play. Well, all I really did was read my lines into a digital tape recorder over and over in different ways until she was happy with the way they sounded. I’ll play yourself to you, she said. I listened to myself. I’m the memory of a doomed man, I thought. I couldn’t save him. We sat in the darkness of the courtyard late at night after Aggie and Ximena and Natalie and Hubertus were asleep.