The Relatives Read online

  Also by Camilla Gibb

  Mouthing the Words

  The Petty Details of So-and-so’s Life

  Sweetness in the Belly

  The Beauty of Humanity Movement

  This Is Happy

  Copyright © 2021 Camilla Gibb

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The relatives / Camilla Gibb.

  Names: Gibb, Camilla, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020032151X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200321528 | ISBN 9780385678094 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385678100 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8563.I2437 R44 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

  Cover and book design: Lisa Jager

  Cover/title page art: AVNphotolab/Getty Images

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Camilla Gibb

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Lila

  Adam

  Tess

  Lila

  Adam

  Tess

  Adam

  Lila

  Adam

  Tess

  Adam

  Lila

  Tess

  Sofie

  Lila

  Acknowledgements

  LILA

  JACQUI PRESSES a manila file into my hands for the third time in four months. The label is simply marked “Robin.” I know she thinks it will do me good to take the case on, but she also knows me well enough not to say it. We have been working together now for more than a decade—I interned here during my social work training and two years later, after my first job ended in disaster, Jacqui offered me an opportunity to redeem myself under her supervision. She is a mentor and a friend—I was even maid of honour at her wedding to Solomon, a second one for each of them, last year.

  I slap the folder against my palm and smile. Jacqui knows I have run out of excuses.

  Robin was referred to us in the spring by the Children’s Aid Society, the way most children come into our services. Our team provides mental health assessment and treatment in cases where the police are involved. This case is a particular mystery. In April, the police found a girl wandering in her pyjamas in High Park. A dental exam suggested she was about eleven. She didn’t speak then and hasn’t spoken in the five months since. No one has reported her missing or come forward to claim her.

  It was Jacqui who, after her initial psychiatric assessment, gave Robin her name. Jacqui would oversee the case, reporting back to Children’s Aid, prescribing medication if necessary, and work in consultation with a social worker on an overall treatment plan. The social worker would be the one directly responsible for executing the plan, the front-line worker charged with the delicate work of establishing a relationship with Robin and liaising with the various parties involved.

  When Jacqui first came to me with Robin’s case, I was working with a young man who, after several months in a methadone program, had decided to lay charges against his former hockey coach. I knew he would need a lot of additional support once he went public with his story and insisted I couldn’t take on another case when I needed to be available not only to him, but to any other former players who might come forward as a consequence. While this was true, and while I have seen many disturbing things over the years, what is even truer is that my reluctance to work with children has almost developed into an aversion.

  Jacqui assigned another social worker to the case, at least for a time. When she approached me with the file again a couple of months later I said I would consider it, but then my mother, with her mild dementia and osteoporotic hips, fell down several flights of stairs in her building one early July morning. Why she was in the stairwell at all, I will never know—perhaps she never knew either. She smashed her head against the concrete landing and died of a brain haemorrhage shortly after.

  It had all happened so suddenly that it wasn’t until after the funeral that I really broke down. Jacqui was on call that weekend, and had received a page to go in to the hospital. Solomon came to help me clear the bigger pieces of furniture out of my mother’s condo. He and I heaved and shifted a couch inch by inch into the service elevator, taking it down to the trash.

  On subsequent weekends I went back alone to sort through her papers, clothes, the smaller things. Her bathrobe was still hanging behind her bedroom door. My mother was a complicated woman with dark moods and agoraphobic periods, but her bathrobe, still smelling of the lavender lotion she rubbed into her skin, was a remnant of the more tender part of her.

  I lifted her bathrobe from the hook and put it on, the sleeves far too short, the belt running around my ribcage rather than my waist. I went into the kitchen then to make myself a cup of tea. The first cupboard I opened contained ten cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a box of saltines. The second held the tea bags and a box of Sifto salt. I knew in that moment that I had to go back to AA.

  I scheduled subsequent trips to her condo around meetings I never quite managed to get to. Every Saturday for weeks, all I did was go up to her unit and sit on the faded Persian rug. I couldn’t bring myself to touch anything. Eventually I brought a bottle of vodka with me. I drank that entire thing, not even bothering with a glass. I passed out on the carpet, waking at some point in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was. I woke up again later to the distant sound of a radio and ran to throw up in the bathtub.

  Not long after that, the concierge waved me over. “A few people have been inquiring about when you might sell,” he said.

  “Who says I’m selling?” I asked.

  “It’s not a rental unit,” he said.

  “I’m not renting it to anyone.”

  “The board doesn’t allow units to sit empty.”

  “I’m paying the fees.”

  “It’s just that you can’t hold a unit for investment purposes.”

  I burst into tears.

  A woman in her early seventies walked into the lobby just then, an ancient cocker spaniel with gummy eyes snuffling behind her. “Vlad,” she snapped at the concierge. “What has this thug said to upset you, huh?” she asked me.

  I was a mess by this point, spluttering out some kind of explanation, wiping my nose on my sleeve.

  “Ah,” she said, a hedge of eyebrow rising above her glasses, “so you’re the daughter?”

  I nodded at the woman with the dog. “Forgive me,” the woman said, lowering her eyebrows and patting my forearm. “HaMakom yenachem et’chem b’toch shar avay’lay Tzion vee’Yerushalayim.”

  * * *

  —

  I put the file into my briefcase and take a cab home at the end of the day, the prospect of leaving the evidence of someone’s trauma on a bus just too sad. As I climb the fire escape at the back of my building a train shudders by on the elevated track twenty feet behind me. I need to move, I say to myself, as I say to myself almost every day. I’m not supposed to be almost forty, single, and living in a shitty apartment. It was a temporary move, a way of extricating myself quickly from Michael, but I’ve been here now for nearly two years.

  I met Michael six years ago, in AA. I started going to meetings after losing my first job—not immediately, but after the night I woke up in the field of my old high school, face-down on the track, no memory of how I’d ended up there, unable to find my shoes or my bra. I’d certainly been going to meetings long enough to know that dating anyone in the group was against all the rules.

  Three months in, though, about the time Michael and I first talked about having sex, we decided we were fine to share a bottle of wine over dinner. Just one. And only with dinner. I can tell you that every single glass he poured, I measured against mine. If we were going to share a bottle, I was going to have my half. If he went to the bathroom, I quickly topped up my glass. I started stopping at a bar after work to get some vodka into my system before I got home. Before long, we were gulping down wine, in competition, and of course a bottle lasted only twenty minutes and what were we going to do then? It was only seven p.m.; why, the wine shop on the corner was still open, better get the two-litre jug this time, you know, just thinking ahead, saving you a trip tomorrow. But there’s never a tomorrow when you’re drinking to go black. I had to stop before the light went out for good.

  I plant myself on the couch and pull Robin’s file out of my briefcase. The first picture I come across was taken on May 16th. Just her face: grey eyes looking away from the camera, chin jutting out. Her hair is an indeterminate brown halo. Her skin is so pale it is almost translucent, like egg white.

  The initial medical report identifies rickets as the likely cause of the bowing of her lower legs. She’s being treated for vitamin D d
eficiency, giardiasis, pinworm and anemia. The rest of the report reads like an autopsy. No semen in her vagina. No saliva other than her own. A list of fibres found on her body including bark, hay and bird feathers and a note about traces of raccoon feces found in her hair.

  Her hearing is normal and she has suffered no damage to her vocal cords. The police had played a recording of a woman’s voice speaking in a dozen different languages but she showed no signs of comprehension. The report concludes that from a medical standpoint, her mutism may be a consequence of head injury, brain damage, or cognitive disability, or related to autism or a learning or sensory processing disorder.

  Jacqui takes an entirely different approach. In her notes, she writes that while some children stop speaking entirely in response to a traumatic incident, in most cases, mutism is selective and related to a high degree of social anxiety. A child might speak quite confidently at home but remain silent at school, for instance. If that is the case, Robin may well speak in an environment where she is comfortable.

  Melanie, the social worker who has been working with Robin for the past three months, doesn’t appear to have put Robin at ease. She had started with a number of standard play-based aptitude tests—shape and pattern recognition, logic puzzles, counting. Apparently Robin had whacked the various plastic primary-coloured shapes into their corresponding holes then hurled the whole box at a wall. Good for you, I think. I’d be insulted as well.

  But that wasn’t Melanie’s assessment. Erratic expressions of anger, she wrote in Robin’s file, followed by oppositional disorder? in brackets, implying Robin was refusing rather than unable to speak. On the basis of Melanie’s assessment, Robin has been offered a place in a Section 23 school, for kids unable to participate in a regular classroom, but they don’t have room for her until January. In an ideal world, we’d help her find some way to communicate before that, which gives us just over four months. Thus far she has remained silent with everyone involved in her care.

  In a photo taken this summer, Robin’s hair is brushed and trimmed and pulled back in a ponytail. She is wearing a white shirt. She gazes away from the camera, same grey eyes and translucent skin, her chin softer this time, but the overall effect still haunting.

  I put down the file and walk to the front window to pull the curtains closed. It has started to rain; smokers huddle under the awning of the bar across the street. If they were to look up they’d see me in outline, a black shape at a third-storey window, a woman without a face.

  There is a photo among my mother’s things, one I wish she’d never kept, of the girl they adopted in 1975. The defiance in the girl’s face is painful—a futile attempt to deny her vulnerability. She is only three years old; whatever memories she had then would be lost, at least consciously, to later experiences. It would be the unconscious that would haunt her.

  Hazel and Victor, who had both lost their parents to the Holocaust, were in their late thirties when they adopted me. The rabbi at their synagogue had approached them. My mother, a young Romanian Jewish refugee known to the Rabbi, had died. It was only at the end of his life that Victor was willing to share some of the more difficult aspects of my mother’s story. She had apparently arrived in Canada as a pregnant teen. There was no indication of who my father might have been. Two years after I was born she had taken her own life.

  I likely hadn’t formed a secure attachment in those first years with my biological mother, a teenager on her own in a foreign country who didn’t want a baby—didn’t want a baby so much that she didn’t even want her own life. I am reminded of a video we watched in my first-year psych class. Those rhesus monkeys who’d been separated from their mothers—even when they were reintroduced to a social group they had remained withdrawn, despondent. They would always be disconnected, feel unsafe in some very fundamental way.

  I have seen this in other children. I have felt it in them. I recognized it in Izzie the first time I met her. It was my very first year on the job and I told myself: Whatever the feelings this evokes in you, this is what you signed up for. You have the tools and the training to do this.

  The goal was to provide Izzie and her father with the support and communication skills needed to develop and maintain a relationship. Chris was new to her life—when her mother had a near-fatal overdose, rather than letting his daughter go into care, he’d stepped up. Chris had been granted custody and Lori was in long-term rehab. With Chris’s consent, I had called Lori to introduce myself. There was the likelihood that I would be asked to help her and Izzie in the rebuilding of their relationship once, and if, she successfully completed her program.

  When I met her, Izzie was an anxious six-year-old who would only go to sleep in Chris’s truck. We got her to try sleeping in the apartment on weeknights, and she’d been managing to do this more nights than not, when she suddenly started refusing to get out of the truck to go to school in the mornings.

  I suggested Chris talk to her teacher, the principal, try and find out whether something had happened, whether she was being bullied at school. I knew that Izzie didn’t have any friends and that Chris took her straight to her classroom in the mornings rather than letting her play in the schoolyard. I’d been encouraging him to talk to other parents, try and cultivate some sense of community that could lead to friendships and play dates in the future, work to normalize things for his daughter socially as much as he could.

  But he couldn’t get Izzie out of the truck that week. And he couldn’t leave her in the truck so that he could go into the school to talk to her teacher. He’d had to take her to work with him. After three days of this, both he and his boss were losing patience.

  So I offered to try.

  While this was technically beyond the boundaries of my job, I met them outside Izzie’s school at 8:30 the following Monday morning. I opened the door of Chris’s Chevy and slid into the cab beside Izzie, who was still wearing her pyjamas.

  “Had breakfast?” I asked.

  “Cheerios,” she said, pointing to a mug on the dashboard.

  “Will you be okay here with me while your dad goes in to talk to your teacher?” I asked.

  She nodded and Chris sighed. “See you in a bit, kiddo,” he said.

  “Something happen at school?” I asked, as we watched Chris walk through the front door of the school.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why don’t you want to go?”

  “Recess.”

  “You don’t like recess? Is someone being mean to you?”

  “I saw her.”

  “You saw who?”

  “Her.”

  “You mean your mom? You saw your mom at recess?”

  “Outside the fence.”

  “Did she talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “How did it make you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, starting to cry. “Dad will be mad.”

  “He won’t be mad at you, Izzie.”

  “She’ll be mad.”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong, sweetheart. She isn’t supposed to be here. She’s supposed to be in her program, right? She’s still got a few more months.”

  Izzie had her chin to her chest.

  “You know what I used to love?” I said. “Indoor recess. You know, like when it’s raining.”

  “Yeah,” she said, lifting her head. “We do crafts.”

  “What if we suggest indoor recess for the next little while?”

  She seemed to think that was a good idea. “Maybe we should get inside before the bell goes so we have a chance to talk to your teacher.”

  “But I’m in my PJs,” she said.

  “I’m sure your dad put some clothes in your backpack.” I reached for her bag on the floor and placed it on her lap.

  She unzipped her backpack and out came jeans, a pink sweatshirt and a soft lunch box adorned with a sparkly Ariel.

  She held on to my forearm with both of her hands as we walked into the school that day. After she’d changed in the girls’ bathroom and I’d talked to her teacher, she turned to me and said: “Can you come tomorrow?”