Chapter Three

If Mrs. Holmes frightened Karin to the core, Mr. Holmes positively froze her blood. He was a tall, balding man with a slicked down comb-over of what was left of his sandy brown hair, who stood more erect than Karin had ever seen anyone stand. It was as though a metal rod had been drilled through his head and down his spine—even when he ran. On Karin’s self-promoted role as neighbourhood sentinel positioned at her living room window, she would occasionally see Mr. Holmes leave Alaina’s house for his irregular and infrequent jog in his close-fitting red Adidas track suit. At those moments, his legs appeared to move independent of his body due to his knees erratically jerking unnecessarily high, while his back and head remained straight as a board.

“Look at that freak,” Karin’s teenaged brother Terry once said, after asking Karin what she was staring at. “He looks like John Cleese doing the goose step.”

“Who’s that?” Karin asked.

“Monty Python.”

“Huh?”

“Oh never mind. What a poofster…”

Karin shrugged as her brother left, and she continued to stare down the street, knowing that Mr. Holmes would be back soon. His jogs never lasted that long. When he came walking back home, it was as though he was still connected to a string that jerked him straight up and down, as though God Himself was his puppet master and had sucked all the breath out of him.

God was on Mr. Holmes’ side, Karin was sure of that. He was an elder in his church, almost like some sort of priest, it seemed—except the priests in their church weren’t called priests; they were other names that Karin wasn’t familiar with. Mr. Holmes played the organ and directed the choir so, regardless of what his formal title was, Karin imagined him to be at the centre of his church’s attention.

Karin knew Mr. Holmes was a music teacher, but she sensed that he had many other jobs and did other things with his music. She only knew for certain that, in addition to his church and choir duties, he taught piano in the basement of Alaina’s house.

The basement was Karin’s favourite place in Alaina’s house, second only to Alaina’s bedroom. Karin knew that Alaina wasn’t allowed to come over to her house—Alaina said it was because she wasn’t allowed to cross the street because of passing cars, but Karin believed it was more than that. Theirs was a quiet residential street in a small town of less than 30,000 residents, where one would only see the occasional vehicle idling home at a time when most households only had one vehicle, if that. Karin recognized that Mr. and Mrs. Holmes disliked her, but she also sensed how much Alaina’s parents simply didn’t trust Alaina to be free, to be out of their sight.

Karin didn’t mind. Compared to Alaina’s house, Karin’s was utterly devoid of kid-friendly items. Hers was a very utilitarian household run by earthy, practical, hard-working Germans. She had no benefit of hand-me-downs from her older siblings as any toys they had, which were few and far between in any event, were long gone, either destroyed or sold in one of the annual garage sales her parents held every April. Karin’s small bedroom was always tidy, with the only perceptible toy being one stuffed teddy bear—but even he was tucked away behind her pillow in his yearlong winter den, and kept out of sight.

Alaina’s room, on the other hand, was full of toys—fun toys, educational toys, all sorts of board games, puzzles, a chalkboard, music in the form of grooved, plastic disks whose spinning speed was controlled with a crank. “Edelweiss” could become a rollicking boat chase on the Danube or the saddest song known to man—or at least to two little girls.

But then there was the basement. Ah, the basement! Down the brocade-carpeted stairs, to a darkened corridor, and to the left, they’d open the door, and there it was—the music room.

One black grand piano sat in the middle of the room, in all its glory. Karin had never seen anything so beautiful the first time she laid her eyes and hands on it. It was shiny, smooth, and colossal. When Alaina played middle C, the room expanded around Karin as it breathed in the roundness of the tone.

“We can play with it, but don’t hit the keys too hard.”

Also in the room was an older, well-worn upright piano, a drum set, various other percussion instruments, a guitar and, behind a glass case, a violin.

But it was the grand piano that always drew Karin and Alaina in. Alternating between who played the high and low notes was who played the pedals underneath. Other times, the piano was a fort in the jungle and the drums sounded an approaching elephant, or a ship lost at sea in a booming thunderstorm.

In addition to the no-smashing of the keyboard rule, the most strictly enforced rule was that no one, not even Mrs. Holmes, was allowed in the music room, and not even in the basement at all, during Mr. Holmes’ private lessons.

Karin would see from her living room window an endless procession of boys and girls being dropped off and picked up by their parents, music books tucked under their arms. She knew that Alaina’s house—and Alaina herself—was off limits at these times. Karin had been accused of making too much noise, and even of getting Alaina too “wound up” and too “excited” while playing in Alaina’s room upstairs, far away from the music…

One day, while playing with Alaina in her room, Karin received one of the earliest shocks in her young life. Mr. Holmes invited her to stay for dinner.

“Uh, OK. I’ll go tell my mom.”

“Why don’t you just call?” he suggested, smiling down at her with an expression Karin did not entirely trust but dared not challenge.

So Karin did. It had been the first time Karin heard her mother’s voice in a phone receiver, and it sounded strange, hesitant. Karin was confused, and she felt sick to her stomach. She felt obliged to stay due to the extremely unusual welcoming extended by Alaina’s father, but also felt pulled to go home and remind her mother that she hadn’t abandoned her, that she would never allow herself to be adopted, like Alaina, by the Holmeses. She would later become familiar with this latter feeling. Guilt, it was called. And, although her mother gave her unenthusiastic permission, Karin wondered how she would have to pay for it later.

When Mrs. Holmes announced that dinner was ready, Karin, Alaina, and Mr. Holmes sat in the dining room while Mrs. Holmes brought in the dishes, one at a time. Karin wondered why they weren’t eating in the kitchen, as they did in her house, but realized that her house didn’t have an actual dining room to dine in. There was a definite foreignness about sitting in a room devoted solely to the act of eating. She looked at the small stained glass window, the only window of the room, and wondered what the point of it was—it was too high and too distorting to look through. Sitting with her back facing the living room, Karin felt a sense of claustrophobia, and she began to fidget. Mrs. Holmes’ frowns became more pronounced every time she’d deliver a dish.

Looking at the table, Karin was amazed at the number of forks and spoons and knives. She had no idea what the cylindrical cloth items were for. She picked hers up and then watched Alaina as she giggled, slid the ring off hers, and put the napkin on her lap.

In Karin’s house, she and her family ate at the small table in the kitchen, all five crammed around, rubbing elbows and bumping knees. It was, in all senses, a free-for-all as soon as the pots and bowls hit the table surface. At Alaina’s, she knew things would be different and didn’t know how to react as Mrs. Holmes brought the food in. She watched Alaina, nervously, for cues. After Mrs. Holmes sat down, the food dishes were passed around clockwise and methodically, one at a time. Karin was frightened to drop anything and, because she was so afraid, managed to drop a little bit of everything and seemed to hit the porcelain with the serving spoons louder than everyone else until Mrs. Holmes, scowling, took over the doling process for Karin’s plate.

With food on everyone’s plate, Karin dug in, since that’s what one did with food, but she immediately sensed that everyone stared at her—Mr. Holmes, in particular. With his chin resting on the knuckles of his interlaced fingers, he smiled at Karin.

“Didn’t we forget something?”

Karin sat there, with a mouthful of French fries. She looked at Alaina. Alaina also sat there with her fingers interlaced.

Karin put her fork down.

“You don’t say grace at your house?”

Karin swallowed and winced while the clot of half-chewed fried potato struggled to go down her throat.

Mrs. Holmes tsk-tsked loudly, then bowed her head.

Karin heard how blessed the food was and how thankful to God Mr. Holmes was for it. “And bless and forgive all those who do not recognize or acknowledge Thine Divinity. Amen.”

Karin knew the “amen” part—she said it plenty on Sundays in church. She wanted to say so, but remembered Mrs. Holmes’ previous chastisement of the mere mention of Jesus to Alaina.

Then she looked at the food, seemingly for the first time. She almost said, “What the hell is this?” as her father often did, jokingly, to tease her mother. But she knew this was no time for jokes and, with the exception of Alaina, this audience was not easily amused.

But there it was. Apart from the recognizable French fries, it was an alien assortment of what was passed off as nourishment. Next to a runny mound of green vomit sat what looked to Karin to be a fried piece of dough, much like the dessert her mother sometimes made—but her mother’s concoction would be coated with sugar and was much smaller than the large mystery fritter sitting before her.

How could this food be blessed? she wondered. And what was Mr. Holmes so thankful to God for? His God must also be of the punishing sort, as He was in her church, she intuited. Again, she wanted to point out the similarity, to convince them of a bond, that she and other Catholics were not so different from the Holmes clan after all, but her senses were overloaded by the strange taste and texture of the victuals.

Mrs. Holmes saw Karin’s pained expression.

“You don’t like mushy peas?”

“These are peas? Are they supposed to be mushy?”

Alaina giggled. Her parents shot her a simultaneous warning look. Karin stepped in to protect her young friend. Pointing with her fork at the fried mystery on her plate, she asked Mrs. Holmes to identify it.

“It’s fish and chips. You’ve never had it?”

Karin looked at her plate with increased confusion. She didn’t see any fish, the usual poached steak with the scaly skin that she had in her house, or chips for that matter—which, to Karin, were only those thin, crispy wafers she’d pull out of a plastic bag and couldn’t decide if she preferred the salt and vinegar variety better than the barbecue flavoured ones. “I’ve never had fish and chips like this before.”

Alaina giggled again.

“My mom always takes the bones out for me.”

Mr. Holmes smiled with half-closed eyes. “There are no bones in this fish.”

Karin’s eyes widened. “What kind of fish do these people eat?” she wondered. As she imagined what boneless fish looked like in the sea, she thought she should sample just a small amount of the mutant fish before committing herself to eating the whole thing. With her combined inexperience of handling a dinner knife and the hardened dough at the rounded edge that she hadn’t fully pierced with her fork before forcing the knife down into the plate, the fish jumped off her plate and plopped in front of Mrs. Holmes. Karin’s mouth dropped while Alaina couldn’t control her laughter.

Mrs. Holmes stabbed the piece of fish with her fork, shot up from her seat, leaned over the table and, with fierce alacrity, cut the crust and the entire fish into small, broken pieces. Karin watched in horror as the green vomit oozed all over her plate due to the violent shaking. Now everything was contaminated, and the toxicity of the so-called peas seeped into the one safe food—the chips that looked and tasted very much like French fries.

Mr. Holmes observed his wife with an unusual expression. It was the first time he had seen her remove her bottom from her chair in the middle of a meal without the intention of either getting more food or clearing the table. Her exasperation was clear, and climaxed when Karin asked for—and was abruptly denied—some ketchup.

Mr. Holmes, on the other hand, didn’t seem to Karin as though he wanted to banish her forever from Alaina’s life. No, his desire was more ominous. He wanted to convert her, to instil right thinking in the impressionable child.

“Karin, how would you like to join us at church on Sunday? Alaina keeps asking if you could come with us.”

“Oh yeah, can you, can you?” Alaina asked excitedly, clapping her hands.

Karin looked at her, then her father, her mother, and then at the runny green slop on her plate bleeding Martian blood into the alleged chips and freakish fish. She had the distinct impression that this was not a normal, run-of-the-mill invitation to a social outing but she could not formulate words in her brain to fully describe what that distinct impression was or why she felt so uneasy.

This became clearer to her when she later asked her parents for their permission.

When she tried to explain her parents’ lack of permission to a grinning Mr. and Mrs. Holmes, despite Alaina’s tears, she understood what her initial impression was trying to tell her: Mr. and Mrs. Holmes had set her up. They hadn’t really wanted her to join them at church—why, she was too dirty for their church. They only wanted to prove that point to Alaina.

Karin’s presence in the Holmes’ home decreased after that. Karin suddenly found that she had other things that she would rather do, like play with some of the other kids on the block, some of whom she also played with after catechism—in particular, her good friend Trisha whose parents were openly dysfunctional in the verbal abuse they unashamedly doled out on one another and, therefore, were far more appealing than the Holmeses—play time with Trisha meant play time was outside and as far away from over-bearing and ever-watchful parents as possible.

The last time Karin did play at Alaina’s, however, proved to be more eventful than Karin could have been prepared for—even if it took many years for her to fully understand what had taken place.