by Amy Spurway
Copyright © 2019 by Amy Spurway.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover illustration by Julie Scriver, based on a work by Potapov Alexander, Shutterstock.
Printed in Canada.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Spurway, Amy, 1976-, author
Crow / Amy Spurway.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77310-023-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77310-024-1 (Kindle).--
ISBN 978-1-77310-025-8 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8637.P88C76 2019 C813’.6 C2018-904590-6
C2018-904591-4
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous financial support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com
To the people who are my roots and wings.
A.S.
CONTENTS
1 The Dirt
2 The Dust
3 The Weight of the Earth
4 If You Can’t Take the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen Party
5 You’ll Wish Your Cake, Dough, Baby
6 Blood and Water
7 In Living and Dying Colour
8 Down Around the Roots
9 Look at That One, Making a Scene
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
1 THE DIRT
I come from a long line of lunatics and criminals. Crazies on one side of the family tree, crooks on the other, although the odd crazy has a touch of crook, and vice versa. I am the weary, bitter fruit — or perhaps the last nut — of this rotten old hybrid, with its twisted roots sunk deep in dysfunctional soil. Some even call it cursed, this family tree of mine. But if you ask me, that’s all a pile of superstitious bullshit. Like I said, we’re just a bunch of lunatics and criminals.
“Get your bony arse out of bed before I kick it out.” Mama clomps into my room at the crack of dawn, thumping a laundry basket full of wet clothes down at the foot of my bed and flinging the window wide open, like some kind of sunrise-loving lunatic. Threatening to kick my arse, like a criminal alarm clock with big, flat feet.
My mother, Effie Fortune, is the sanest, straightest one of the bunch. After all these years, I realize that threatening to kick my bony arse out of bed is her way of saying I love you. Mama’s the reason I came back to Cape Breton. Not that I had much choice.
I want to tell her that I had that same nightmare again. The one with the flock of birds that laugh at me and the tree that uproots itself to chase me across a swath of black and barren land. The monster branches grab me when I stumble, and squeeze the life out of me, while the birds all fly around cackling. The first time I had that bad dream was one week ago, when I still lived in Toronto. I woke up gasping and retching, and then I vomited all over my bed. Both of my arms dead as doorknobs, my head pounding, and my eyes unable to focus, it took me almost an hour to pull myself together enough to clean up the mess. In the end, I biffed the creamy satin bedding in the dumpster out behind my condo because I couldn’t stomach trying to wash it. Puke-covered designer sheets chucked in a dumpster. Of all the genuinely sad and jarring circumstances of late, that one foolish detail was somehow the final straw. I called Mama that night to say I was coming home.
So here I am.
When I try to speak now, all that comes out is a low groan, which Mama takes as the kind of willfully inarticulate protest she would’ve got from me when I last lived here as a lazy, melodramatic eighteen-year-old.
“You’ve been laying in that bed since you got here. Damn near a day and a half. It’s no good for you. And that laundry won’t hang itself.” She shoves the basket closer to my bed with her size-nine clodhopper.
Again, I open my mouth to say something, but Mama’s already hustling out the door and down the hall before any words make it out. But that’s all right. I didn’t come here to argue with my mother, even though a vestige of my saucy teenage self is alive and well, and on familiar turf. I came here so Mama could take care of me. So I could gather the strands of my life together and weave them into some kind of coherent story about who I was and where I came from, before it’s too late. Before I forget. Before I’m just a memory here.
See, I’m dying.
But where are my manners? We haven’t even been properly introduced! Just let me pull on my fancy pants, flatten my hair, and slide into my smooth, persuasive Multi-Level Marketing expert voice.
Good day. I’m Stacey Fortune, former manager of marketing communications for the Canadian division of Viva Rica! The Essence of Inspiration!
What’s that, you ask?
Viva Rica is a carefully crafted and ludicrously expensive blend of eighteen essential superfood extracts that supports and stimulates the flow of health and wealth to a handful of folks at the top of the company pyramid, by pushing highly sophisticated twenty-first-century brainwashing sales and recruitment bullshit through a dedicated network of wishful-thinking super juice junkies. We’d be proud to have you and your twenty closest friends join our rapidly growing global distribution family! The greatest journey starts with one small sip!
That’s the kind of marketing prowess that could have earned me the prestigious Viva Rica Juicy Details Award, which recognizes excellence in convincing desperate people that pawning off crates of fifty-dollars-a-bottle blueberry juice on their friends and family is their ticket to entrepreneurial bliss. Unfortunately, I lacked the kind of bubbly ambition that would have helped me float all the way to the top of the Viva Rica pyramid. Probably because I didn’t drink enough super juice. It gave me gut rot.
How about an introduction that’s a little more down to Earth? One where my pants are clean but not fancy, my hair is only a tad ratty, and my voice has just the faintest hint of a charming yet ambiguous East Coast accent.
Hihowareyataday, I’m Stacey Fortune. Up until two weeks ago, I was the picture of a strong, successful, independent urbanite woman. I had a mediocre career, an overpriced condo in downtown Toronto, and a hilarious story about how I empowered myself to blow gobs of money on stupid shit in the name of retail therapy after I gave my cheating fiancé the boot. Then I got diagnosed with three highly unpredictable — and certainly inoperable — brain tumours, which sporadically turn my limbs to Jell-O, my eyes to kaleidoscopes, and my head into a world of hurt. Now, I’m holed up in my mother’s small and scruffy trailer on small and scruffy Cape Breton Island, holding out little hope that the doctors in this Have-Not Hellhole can do much to stop me from morphing into a paralyzed bag of piss, drool, and babble before I unceremoniously croak.
Hair, pants, and tone be damned, let’s just cut to the chase.
Hi. I’m Stacey. But you can call me Crow. How ’bout bein’ nice to me. I’ll be dead soon.
A few pages in, and I just blew the ending of this story. That’s all right. It’s painfully predictable anyway. I really should have just written Girl gets tumours, girl loses mind, girl dies, the end on a sheet of loose-leaf, slapped it in a damn Duo-Tang folder and been done with it. But that is not the style of a masochistic narcissistic drama queen such as myself. Get comfy and get the tissues, dear.
This here is a proper Cape Breton tale of shame and woe. Grabs at the heart strings and tugs.
All the old dolls will click their tongues and say, “Yes, poor Crow Fortune. Deathly ill with the tumours smack dab in the middle of her brains. What a sin. So young. What, thirty-something was she? Makes ya wonder, don’t it. About them Fortunes and the . . . you know.”
Because nobody will come right out and say it. It’s always whispered every time something terrible happens to one of us. The . . . you know. The thing that makes us lunatics, or criminals, or both. The thing that cuts us down in the prime of our lives. The curse of the Poor Unfortunate Fortunes. They say it goes back generations. I say it’s a convenient cover for people who are prone to poor life choices, bad luck, and bouts of lunacy. Either way there’s a story here about me, about my people, about this place, and I need to be the one to tell it. If only to myself. Get this life of mine down on paper while I still can. That’s item number one on my bucket list. Or, my Fuck It List. Because fuck it, I’m dying, so I’ll say and do whatever I want now. But first, I better get those towels out on the clothesline before Mama has a conniption fit.
[…]
My feet are barely planted on the worn vinyl of my bedroom floor when my phone buzzes. A text message from my best friend, Allie, reads simply: Mom’s gone.
Allie’s mother, Reenie, is dead.
Reenie Walker had been dying in fits and starts ever since she was diagnosed with ALS when Allie was in tenth grade. One year later, the woman who built her family’s log cabin home with her own two hands couldn’t hold a teacup. Allie sold her beloved Shaggin’ Wagon to buy her mother a wheelchair van just before graduation. And while I was gallivanting around Toronto, pissing away my blueberry juice money on napkin rings to match the seasonal centrepieces on my dining-room table, Allie was a decade deep into being her mother’s full-time caregiver in a tiny Halifax apartment decorated with tubes, monitors, and forgotten dreams. Reenie lived far longer than anyone expected. I can’t tell if that was a blessing or a curse.
Oh honey. I’m so sorry. R U ok? I text back.
Which is stupid. Of course she’s okay. Allie Walker is always okay. She’s been preparing for her mother’s passing for years. Talking about it openly. Looking forward to the kind of freedom that would inevitably come once this hard, sad chapter of her life closed. Of course there will be grief. Guilt, too. It so happened that Reenie died on the only night in ten years Allie was away from her bedside. It was a quick jaunt to Boston, for her first real job interview since her mother got sick. A big medical research company was looking to hire a patient and family coordinator for a project in Nova Scotia. Allie applied on a whim and was shocked when they called her back. Even more shocked that the position came with flexibility, benefits, training, and a paycheque well beyond the pittance of her mother’s disability pension. So, Allie missed out on the last act of unflinching love that she’d been dutifully rehearsing in her head for years. The moment where she would hold her mother’s hand, kiss her on the forehead, and whisper, “I love you, Mom. You can let go now.” Instead, it was a home care nurse who didn’t know that everyone called her Reenie, and not Irene. But Allie is and will be okay. The woman’s a rock.
I’d be lying if I said I’m not relieved as Allie details her return and her plans to be back in Cape Breton for the foreseeable future. If there’s one person besides Mama I’d want by my side to hold my hand, kiss my forehead, and tell me it’s okay to let go, it is Allie. Allie understands the slow-motion betrayals of a sick body. Allie can stomach suffering. Allie will help me die.
My phone slips from my increasingly clumsy hand and into the pile of dank, dusty stuffed animals I shoved to the floor when I arrived thirty-six hours ago. I can’t be bothered to dig for it now because the morning cacophony of physical and sensory chaos has begun. The faded collage of magazine ads and rock god posters plastered on my bedroom wall becomes an amorphous blur. A jackhammer headache ramps up in jig time, and my stomach clenches into a wretched knot of nausea. I try to stand up in the beats between my head’s pounding and my gut’s lurching. With a spinning head and ringing ears, the first two tries don’t pan out so well, but the third time’s the charm. I’m on my unsteady pegs. Upright. Feeling like I might barf. Sorry Mama. That laundry is going to have to hang itself.
I teeter down the hall and into the kitchen, focusing on the repeating pattern of wheat sheaves and horseshoes on the linoleum floor to steady my balance. Through half-squinted eyes, I watch in the wobbling shadows as Mama’s thick, sturdy legs stride toward the phone mounted on the wall by the kitchen table, and it takes me a minute to realize that the phone has been ringing. Which goes to show how screwy my brain’s processing is and how loud my tinnitus gets, because Mama’s got the phone ringer volume set on stun. I see Mama’s lips move, but struggle to sync up her mouth with the words because of the lime-green squiggles and blushes of dusky red moving in sweeping circles around her head. More delightful distractions courtesy of the foreign invader in my sensory cortex. Another reminder that this body, this brain, these perceptions of mine are not to be trusted.
Speaking of things not to be trusted, it is Aunt Peggy on the phone. There is only one reason Peggy ever calls Mama. Probably the only reason Peggy ever calls anyone. She must have dirt. Peggy isn’t smart enough to be a real criminal, and she’s too lazy to be a proper lunatic. To compensate for those failures, she puts all she’s got into being a pogey-scammer, as well as a nasty, gossipy big mouth.
Mama fields Peg’s urgent dirt calls at all hours of the day and night. There was the three a.m., “Effie! They just arrested Boots Johnson on the DUI. Drunk as a skunk, down past the gas station in The Mines. He never was any good. I could tell by the smell of him!” And the crack of dawn, “Effie! Milly Pike’s house got broken into. Made off with all her OxyContin.” Then twenty minutes later, “Effie! Update! They found that little MacKeigan one, not Squirrel’s daughter, the other one. The one who don’t wear bras and always has her arse crack hanging out the back of her drawers. Face down in the field down behind that skater park with B&E gloves and an empty pill bottle. Tsk tsk tsk.”
As if Mama gives a damn.
Once my eyes adjust to the kitchen’s brightness, the swirls around Mama’s head slowly recede into an ordinary grey blur. There are tears swelling in her eyes. Despite my ringing ears and screaming headache, I can hear Peggy breathlessly spreading the details of Reenie Walker’s death, which she heard from Shirl Short, who heard from Cindy Grimes, who is sleeping with Allie Walker’s father. No doubt that old pack of hyenas will be itching to rip into the meaty saga of my upcoming demise, and Peggy will have the perfect excuse to throw herself a pity party in my name. Pfft. Over my dead body, Peggy Fortune. That’s another thing for my Fuck It List: to tell that one off, once and for all.
I want to start now. I open my mouth to yell, “Shut your trap, you gossipy old quiff!” at the nattering presence on the other end of the phone. But no words come out. Instead, I throw up all over the kitchen floor.
“Listen, Peg. Gotta go.” Mama smacks the phone and her soulless sister into silence. She sidesteps the puddle of vomit, puts her huge, gruff hands on either side of my throbbing head, and pulls me closer toward her for what I expect will be an awkward but tender peck on the cheek. Instead, she grips my skull a little too tight and sighs, “I’ll go get the Javex. That puke pile won’t clean itself.”
That’s why I came home. Because puke piles won’t clean themselves, and because I need my mother to help hold my head together while what’s left of my life falls apart.
While Mama is Javexing the bejesus out of the floor — as a hotel chambermaid of thirty-five years, she is professionally trained to Javex the bejesus out of anything — the phone rings again.
I stare at it, paralyzed by the terror of no call display. Should I pick it up? It’s Mama’s house, she should answer. What if it’s Peggy? Don’t wanna talk to her. What if people don’t know I’m home, or why? Wor
se yet, what if they do?
“Answer the goddamn phone, fool!” Mama yells.
I’m met with a velvety voice, punctuated by a crisp Indian accent. It’s my new neurologist at the hospital here. Dr. Parvati Divyaratna.
“Good morning, Stacey,” she says. “I am calling with good news.”
Dr. Divyaratna tells me that my medical file arrived from Toronto. The last MRI got some good, clear images of the tumours. Not only are they very photogenic, but their locations are also “clinically interesting.” And, an appointment opened up for ten thirty this morning because one of her other patients “came to the end of a long journey” last night.
“Who’s that?” Mama asks as I hang up.
“Dr. Divyaratna,” I say, proud of how easily her name rolls off my tongue.
“Oh, the Choco-Doc.”
“Jesus, Ma, don’t call her that.”
“G’wan it’s just a nickname. She’s dark and she’s sweet. Beats the hell out of what they used to call her.”
Which was the “Darkie Doctor,” since she was a young, brown-skinned physician tending to a slew of culturally cloistered old white people. Now she’s the Island’s only neurologist. Everyone’s terrified she’ll up and leave like so many have, so she’s downright revered. People bring her homemade bread and fresh-from-the-boat lobster. She never pays to have her car fixed or her driveway plowed. But they don’t call her the Choco-Doc to her face, now do they? A name like that’s only said in whispers, the same way folks refer to a local farming family as the Chickenshits. Everybody calls them that, but nobody ever says it right to them.
You’d think my mother would know better. They still call her Scruffy Effie behind her back, and she pretends she doesn’t know. My nickname is not a whispered-behind-my-back kind of thing. I’m forever Crow because I stole a piece of gaudy costume jewellery from the Bargain Store when I was five and a half years old, and Peggy caught me. She thought it was a riot, and couldn’t wait to tell the world: “That one, snatching the shiny things. Just like a little crow!” The story fell away as I got older, but the name stuck. So I embraced it. Even though it’s a reminder that I’m part criminal.