I was Candace Derksen. We were Candace Derksen. Growing up in the North End of Winnipeg, any of us could have been Candace Derksen. But we weren’t. Only she was Candace Derksen, but her name would come to represent a definitive line in many of our childhoods.
Back in the 1980’s, Winnipeg’s North End was changing – the old families’ working-class immigrant families were dying or moving into nursing homes and their homes were being rented to the working poor or sold to young families; a mishmash between the seniors walking to the corner store every day and the barefoot kids running wild on the cool pavement. On Burrows Avenue, where I grew up, I remember the house a few doors down that always had their windows broken and strange cars coming and going from the place. At the corner was a boarded up old shop that had been turned into living spaces – the “house” my mother hurried me past on the way across the street to the school ground park. Four blocks away was the meeting hall for the Los Bravoes motorcycle gang; every time they would “parade” down the street, engines revving at a volume that made our windows shake, I would run outside to wave to them and was always so happy that they would eagerly wave back.
In those days, we played on the street, running back and forth to other kids’ houses, with particular rules set out by our parents. Some had to be home by dinner, others only when they heard their name hollered from the front step of their house. Some of us couldn’t cross the street to the corner store, to spend our allowances; other parents seemed to be fine with their kid crossing the two lanes of traffic, there and back.
Many of us walked to school – “patrols” on the watch at the corners to help us. I didn’t go to school in the neighbourhood and thus, didn’t have the walk. Instead, my mother drove me, in our little orange VW Rabbit, to the elementary school she and my aunt and my cousin had attended in the “better” part of the North End just a mile away.
The day Candace Derksen went missing all the kids in the city piled out of their respective schools at the sound of the final bell, scattering through the blocks as they hurried home. While I don’t remember the exact details of the weather on that day, I would lay bet that it was cold. Freezing in fact, because that was still the time when blizzards could give you four-feet of beautiful snow to play in while you slept cozy in your bed at night.
At first, there were murmurs in the house. A girl had gone missing, just across the river in Elmwood Where could she be? Did she get lost? Was she taken? This didn’t happen.
Then the news that the police thought she was abducted. Abducted. Taken. The warnings go out – this may not be an isolated incident.
And just like that, I felt hunted.
In those days, no one warned you about the dangers of strangers. We were told to be careful. We were reminded to watch our P’s and Q’s (whatever that meant) at birthday parties. We were told to come straight home.
It was our guts that taught us that when a man pulled up next to you in his car, while you’re skipping down the street that you ran. It was the adrenaline coursing through your young body as they leaned over the window, trying to get you to come closer, that you stepped back, shaking, and ran. It was your brain that kicked into overdrive each and every time it happened while you were outside playing that made you remember. You didn’t know what would or could have happened, your instinct just knew it wasn’t going to be good.
The murmurings continued on the playground. We were nine years old, some of us ten -- Candace was thirteen. She walked home from school – some of us did too. Talk of possible connections – someone was related to someone who may have known her. We began to draw parallels to our own lives to fill in the blanks that our parents weren’t telling us. Back then, no one implicitly told you things, it was all learned by hearsay from others who gained information.
The days stretched and we all waited for her to be discovered. Christmas break came and our connections were lost, isolating us from each other. Now, it was only me, sneaking peaks at the newspaper, listening to the news in between Christmas songs playing on the radio. Of course she would be back for Christmas. Of course she would walk into her family’s home on New Year’s Eve. My mind became obsessed and at prospect that she would be found somewhere, alive. At this point, death was still for the old. Kids didn’t die.
School started again and Candace wouldn’t be back in class, but we were and talk of her disappearance seemed to wane with everyone. Except me, who desperately continued to search for answers in the news. Filled with the ideals set out by my extensive Nancy Drew collection, I became convinced that one of us would find her. I started imagining scenarios where someone discovered her, hiding in her basement, or found her trapped in their old garage. I even dreamt about finding her, alive and safe, because my brain could not comprehend that there was any other way for this story to end.
I couldn’t find her. But someone did, in January 1985, bound and frozen in a shack just blocks away from her home.
“They found her.” Was all my mother said when she picked me up from school that day, not turning around as she drove us home. It was the same monotone she used when she told me about my uncle’s death from a self-inflicted gunshot and I knew that she wasn’t found alive.
“Oh.”
She turned on the radio and let the news do the rest of the talking, while I stared out the window, listening, and thinking, wondering what it was like to freeze to death, never comprehending that she was probably dead long before that happened.
I can’t remember if it was then or later that I heard the words for the first time – sexual assault. Sex. I recognized that word. Although we hadn’t yet learned about it in school (that was for the grade six students) I knew it from a book my mom gave me, that was now hidden under my bed. Assault. Beating, hurt. There was no way I was asking anyone what it actually meant, so instead I put together the pieces – whoever did this, hurt her with sex. All at once, my brain filled in the blanks. Sex wasn’t just for making babies – sex was a weapon. As my mind churned through every bit of information, I tried to comprehend why someone would do such a thing. Sex on my grandmother’s soap operas was beautiful and passionate. Sex in the book was technical and utilitarian. The fact that sex could be used to somehow inflict pain and suffering on another sent a terror through me that locked deep inside my soul.
Through the weeks that followed, Candace was with me at all times. In school we began talking about stranger-danger – the man who did this still out there, possibly looking for his next victim. Our parents seemed to keep a closer eye on us; our fences now being our boundaries. There was talk of “the buddy system” if you walked to school. If someone pulled up to us in a car, we were now told to run away.
In March I turned ten. I measured it against Candace. Three more years until thirteen. I would keep aging; she would be thirteen forever. The photo they used, and will continue to use up until this day, is one taken during picture day at school of her in a black and white baseball shirt, curly brown hair, smiling for the camera, set against an ugly grey-blue background that so many of us had in our photos.
Over the years, Candace stayed with me, sealed in my memories. When I moved to Alberta, at the age of twenty-one, thirteen-year old Candace came, warning me about the people I may meet. And they were there. The men were there, cruising Whyte Avenue, pulling up next to me, asking if I needed a ride. They were there when I was carrying groceries home, flashing me a Cheshire grin as they offered to help me up to my apartment. They were there, away from their cars, in restaurants and shopping malls, with that look on their faces that made my stomach turn and my brain say “run.”
In 2007, Winnipeg Police charged someone with her murder and I thought I would finally be free of Candace’s memory. I followed the story with renewed intensity and when he was convicted several years later, I was elated. Justice. There was justice again in this world. And then the conviction was overturned. A new trial was ordered and in 2017 the man was found “not guilty.” Reading the story online filled me with rage and Candace came back.
Now, I have a daughter who is six years old, and Candace is helping me raise her. We live in the suburbs – a very long way away from the North End, both geographically and economically. At her age, I was running around the neighbourhood; she plays with my supervision in our back yard or at the park where I walk with her and her older brother. I taught her what to do if someone tries to get her to go in their car. I told her to be wary of men with dogs, or kittens, or promises of anything. We’ve practiced kicking and punching someone if they try and pick her up and carry her off. She can raise her voice and say no to any adult as loud as she wants and doesn’t have to hug and kiss family members if she doesn’t want to.
But above all, I am teaching her to listen to that tickle in her belly and that voice in her head that tells you when you should turn and just run.
Because Candace told me to.
(c) Elvira Berezowsky, 2019
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