Summary
At the end of this school year, Lisamarie passes and is allowed to go to high school. Jimmy wins a swimming scholarship. Frank almost asks Lisa to the graduation dance, but doesn’t have the courage. Lisa goes to the dance with Cheese and Pooch. Frank goes with another girl, Julie, and appears the next day to Lisa and Cheese with hickeys on his neck. Lisa asks Pooch one summer night about his father, who committed suicide many years before. They discuss what happens to people after they die.
Lisa’s mother catches her out late and smoking cigarettes, and she angrily takes her back home. Her parents ground her and demand she stops smoking, telling her about how harmful it is. When Lisamarie points out that her father smokes, her mother says he will quit too, and her father says that her mother has to quit coffee then. Quitting proves to be a challenge for both of them. Ma-ma-oo tells Lisa how tobacco smoke used to be considered something sacred and now is used like “it’s nothing.” She vows to quit and is allowed to leave the house again. Lisa hangs out with Cheese and he asks her to date him. She laughs at the prospect, and he offers that it will help make Frank jealous, as everyone knows she likes him, which makes her defensive.
While at her brother’s swim competition in Terrace, Lisamarie goes into the city to explore and sees her cousin Erica being followed by a car of three white guys, who are lewdly catcalling her. Lisa approaches the car to protect her cousin, screaming at the guys and calling them cowards. The men angrily leap out of the car to snatch her when another large white man comes up from behind Lisa and commands them to drive away, which they do. Afterwards, everyone warns her that she should not try to pick fights like that. As an “Indian girl,” it is more risky, as assaulters usually get away with hurting Native people without punishment.
Aunt Trudy, Josh, and Tab return from Vancouver and spend a week at Lisa’s house. Early one morning, the little man appears in Lisa’s bedroom and she goes downstairs to get away from him and talks to Aunt Trudy for awhile. That night, she goes to a party with Pooch. Cheese is there and gives her a beer to drink. As she leaves the party, she feels woozy, as if on a drug, and her memory becomes choppy. She is raped by someone, who we can infer to be Cheese, and it feels very dreamlike to her. When she returns home, she is not able to articulate to Tab what happened to her. The little man is there in her room again, and Lisa tells him not to come back, as he “couldn’t stop it.”
Lisa is outside one night trying to destroy the clothes she was wearing the night she was raped. She hears her name being called and doesn’t know where it is coming from. In a bush, Lisa hears a slithering sound. It turns out to be a crab. The crab leads her to an area where there is a horrible smell and she finds the corpse of a small animal. She hears her name being called again and then she hears a whispering voice saying that “we can hurt him for you” if she brings them meat. Lisa tells herself this is her overactive imagination.
Lisa goes on a trip to the Kitlope with Ma-ma-oo on the first anniversary of Mick’s death. On the beach one night, Lisa hears the sound of footsteps on the sand and is startled. Ma-ma-oo tells her it’s just ghosts and not to be scared. Lisa witnesses a falling star and makes a wish. Now, when she has dreams she sees things “in double exposure;” the spirit world and the real world. She starts to regularly sleepwalk, where she often sees ghosts. Concerned, Gladys and Al bring Lisa to the hospital to be evaluated. Lisa sees ghosts in the hospital while she has blood and spinal fluid taken.
Her parents take Lisa to talk to a psychologist at the hospital named Doris Jenkins. Right away, Lisa can see a fleshless spirit attached to Ms. Jenkins, whispering things in her ear, which disturbs Lisa. They talk and Ms. Jenkins suggests to Lisa that her belief in ghosts may be a result of experiencing the death of loved ones. This is ironic to Lisa, because she not only knows that she sees ghosts but she is looking at one on Ms. Jenkins. The ghost on the psychologist drifts onto Lisa and starts to whisper into her ear, influencing her to say what Ms. Jenkins wants to hear, such as that her belief in ghosts is just to get attention. Lisa has the sensation that this spirit is “feeding” on her and showing her disturbing images, like Uncle Mick’s corpse. Later that night, Lisa longs for the ghost to feed on her again, even though she knows it is wrong.
After continually getting poor grades, Lisamarie’s teachers suggest she takes modified classes. Her parents are worried she won’t get into a good university and are very upset when she suggests she will work in the cannery with Tab. Her parents tell her she is “goofing off.” Lisa wants to work there because she thinks it will allow her to be independent as an almost-16 year old.
Lisa goes to a birthday party with Erica, where the beautiful and popular Adelaine Jones, nicknamed Karaoke, gets into a violent fight with the birthday girl and her boyfriend. In home economics class, Erica and Lismarie make a cake explode by adding too much baking soda. Lisa gets sent to the principal’s office to find out that Ma-ma-oo has had a stroke. She now appreciates the little man’s visits and can’t believe he did not show up to warn her. Ma-ma-oo bounces back to health quickly.
One day, the village fire alarm goes off. The fire is at Ma-ma-oo’s house. Her entire house has burned down and Ma-ma-oo has died. She has left all her money to Lisamarie; hundreds of thousands of dollars. The family uses it to pay bills and invests the rest in a trust fund for Lisa, but she doesn’t care, still mourning and feeling guilty that if she had listened to her intuition, she could have saved her grandmother.
Analysis
Throughout these pages we watch Lisamarie become a teenager and deal with the slew of challenges as she grapples with violence, death, and her intensifying psychic gifts. As she gets older, it seems like her dreams and visions take a more and more sinister turn; perhaps partly due to her various traumatic experiences. Overwhelmed, Lisa has difficulty in applying herself in school or knowing what she wants for the future besides to be independent from her parents.
In the scene after Lisa is raped and she is destroying her clothes, she has a strange encounter with spirit voices that confirms there is certainly a ghostly presence that seems to follow her around. She finds a corpse that we can infer to be her kitten Alexis and we can suddenly realize how the spirits might have played a part in Alexis’s death, as they echo the messages from when Lisa was using the Ouija board earlier in the story. There is the sense that the kitten has been sacrificed by the spirits as a result of Lisa messing with voodoo. Eden Robertson has created a world where things that sometimes first appear to be nonsensical and superstitious (like the spells or the cryptic messages of the Ouija board) actually have a grand and dangerous power.
In this part of the novel, the reader witnesses Lisa grapple with the challenge of not knowing who to trust. Although the red-haired little man once provided a sense of comfort, Lisa becomes disillusioned with him as she realizes that he can only warn her about tragic events but not prevent them, such as her assault. The spirit voices she hears right after she is raped tell her they can take revenge on her attacker, yet they also have somehow been involved in the death of her kitten. And the world of humans is not that much more reliable. Someone who Lisa had considered her friend drugs and rapes her. Then there is the psychologist, Ms. Jenkins, who intends to help, yet Lisa has a hard time taking her seriously; after all, she is being fed thoughts by a ghostly attachment. Through being opened up to the spiritual world, Lisa now sees what others cannot and do not want to see—which is both a blessing and a curse.
In this way, the theme of the dual nature of life continues to be explored. As Ma-ma-oo has told Lisa, the spirits are neither good nor bad; it more so depends on how one approaches them. This is reiterated when Ma-ma-oo finds out that Lisa smokes cigarettes. In Haisla tradition, tobacco is actually a sacred medicine, yet when abused it becomes a poison. Almost every character in the novel engages in some sort of self-poisoning as a means of dealing with collective trauma, whether it be through alcohol, television, or violence. The common denominator is the desire to numb oneself from pain, as we see when Lisamarie feels strangely comforted by Ms. Jenkins’ spirit attachment feeding off of her. By giving up a piece of one’s soul, the characters become like ghosts, stuck somewhere in between life and death.
We see Lisamarie really come alive when she is motivated by a sense of justice, such as when she fiercely defends her cousin Erica from potential kidnappers, risking herself in order to enact what she knows to be righteous. For Lisa, it is unconscionable to allow evil to go unchecked. In this way, we see how the spirit of her Uncle Mick, who also considered himself to be a warrior, lives through her.
We can also see Lisamarie come alive in her interactions with her closest living companion, Ma-ma-oo. Ma-ma-oo is someone who Lisa can confide in and who lets her speak her mind freely instead of scolding her all the time, like her parents do. The death of Ma-ma-oo and Lisa’s failure to save her grandmother by using her “gifts” is catastrophic for Lisa. Perhaps the death of her grandmother will help Lisa come to peace with her spiritual powers as she begins to see that by suppressing or ignoring them, it does more harm than good. At the same time, it is not quite fair for Lisa to blame herself for not saving her grandmother when the spirit messages have been so unreliable in the past.
