Tina’s mother weeps

Opinion

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This article was published 25/10/2014 (3975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tina Fontaine has become a never-ending story, even in the age of the 24-hour news cycle.

That’s because the slaying of the 15-year-old aboriginal runaway last summer has become the rallying symbol of another never-ending story; the national shame of our murdered and missing aboriginal women and girls.

But there is another Tina, with her own never-ending story.

The slain girl’s mother.

 

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“You look like your daughter.”

Tina Duck laughs nervously.

We are seated in a hotel restaurant, near the Main Street strip, where Tina and her protective younger sister, Samantha Green, have agreed to share her story. The meeting has been arranged by a man who, the day before, listened for three hours as Tina poured out her heart while the bartender poured the beer. She doesn’t know it, but it’s the second time I’ve seen her in person. The first time was at her daughter’s funeral, when little Tina’s father’s family was screaming at big Tina to go back home to Winnipeg and blaming big Tina for little Tina’s death.

Now, she wants to tell her side of the story.

“Talking about her hurts,” she says.

Her eyes are brimming, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

I glance down at something that suggests the kind of pain she has endured even before last August, when her daughter’s body was pulled from the Red River in a bag. There’s a series of slash-like scars on her left forearm.

So we start with big Tina and the origin of the scars that aren’t visible.

She was born 33 years ago, on the remote Bloodvein First Nation, the oldest of seven girls in a family of 12 children. By seven, she was in foster care. Five years later, she left.

“That’s when I met Tina’s father, Eugene Fontaine,” she says.

He was 24. She was 12.

By 14, she had had her first child, a boy. Little Tina followed, then another daughter.

By the time little Tina was four, big Tina was gone. She had met another man and left Eugene and his parents to raise the children.

Then, three years ago, Eugene was slain during a drinking binge.

Eventually, Tina began running from the pain; running to the city, and her mother’s North End home.

I ask if she thinks little Tina was trying to reconnect with her.

“Yeah,” she says. “I wanted that, too. I want that with all my kids, but two of them hate me right now.”

They hate her, she believes, because of the blame the Fontaine family has attached to her.

I ask big Tina how she feels about her daughter’s death, and being blamed.

Her eyes brim again.

“It hurts, she says again. “I can’t sleep.”

That’s why she’s ended up in the hotel bar.

“I drank to cope.”

She’s says she’s trying to get help; trying to get into the Behavioural Health Foundation to treat her addiction.

And the never-ending pain of the never-ending story.

She says she’s 25th on the waiting list.

Big Tina has two more younger children that she lost to Child and Family Services last spring and is hoping to get back if she can get sober and stable.

But there’s always the natural feeling of guilt about what happened to little Tina.

“How am I supposed to cope with it?”

It’s as if a piece of her is missing, she says.

“I miss my baby.”

She’s weeping again.

She’s scared, but not just for herself. She’s frightened for her 14-year-old daughter, little Tina’s little sister, and where this could lead her.

“I just don’t want anyone taking advantage of her. Do you know what I mean?”

I nod.

“I keep thinking what Tina went through.”

She says she went to the hospital where little Tina’s body was taken after being recovered from the river. “They didn’t want me to see her. They wouldn’t even let me see her.”

The hospital was trying to protect her. But there is no protecting her from what happened to little Tina.

“In my heart I know, like, maybe she is gone. But I haven’t seen her.

“A few times it feels like I heard her in the basement. I heard a little girl talk, but I couldn’t understand her. What she was saying. And I looked. And there was no one in the basement. It was all dark.”

So she looks at pictures she has placed on the wall.

“I look at the picture and I talk to her, yeah.”

I ask what she says to little Tina.

She’s begins weeping again. Then she answers: “Like, why?”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca