by Amy Spurway
If I were inclined to believe that the almighty Universe is preoccupied with sending middle-aged, lower-middle-class white ladies divine cosmic messages about what they should or should not be doing with their existence, I might interpret the events of late as a series of none too subtle signs that my plan to live and die on this island was, in fact, a bad one.
You made your bed, now lie in it! I can almost hear Mama say. Almost. Except I can’t hear anything over the rumble of the rig coming up the driveway.
[…]
Dulcie Cooper is almost a hundred years old, but she plows her old car up the dark, snow-drifted road like a reckless seventeen-year-old, and wobbles her old bones up the walkway, carrying a pan of squares, a quart of milk, and an envelope from the Drummond Presbyterian Ladies’ Auxiliary. I don’t know much about Dulcie Cooper except that she’s old as dirt and drives like a nut. I didn’t know there was a Drummond Presbyterian Ladies’ Auxiliary. And I’m not going to eat the squares. But I do need milk for tea, and when I open the envelope, I nearly shit. Inside, there’s two thousand dollars, cash. Which, as I realize all too quickly, is enough for a one-way first-class ticket back to Toronto. The Universe is not whispering to me. It’s screaming like a banshee.
I’m supposed to invite Dulcie Cooper in and make her some tea, I think. But I don’t. I stand there in the middle of the walkway with the milk and the squares and the envelope in hand, until she leaves. It’s nine o’clock at night, and I just want this dizzying, surreal day to be over. As Dulcie’s car clatters down the driveway, I drop back into my moulded seat in the snowbank.
I think about freezing to death. How easy it would be to do, right here, right now, if I just let my exhausted body fall asleep in the snow. I close my eyes, nestling a little deeper into the chill and the darkness. Until the lights of another rig come flooding up the driveway. Dammit. I’m trying to die here.
Moments later, Willy Gimp is standing in front of me, looking at me like I’m six slices short a whole roll of baloney. A blood-orange and baby-blue fuzzball is poufed out all around his pained, tired face. There’s a bottle of wine tucked under his bad arm and a gagger of a joint sandwiched between the band of his Nirvana ball cap and his right ear. I can’t decide if I want to kiss him or kick him in the balls. So I just sit in the snowbank and cry. Mama is gone. Willy is here. And I can’t drink that wine or smoke that spliff with him, and I should probably tell him why. But first, that bastard has some explaining to do.
Sure enough, Chrissy Parsons got back into the drugs, and it was all Gimp’s fault. He gave her an ounce of weed to help her get through the vicious DTs she’d been having ever since she quit drinking. She started drinking to help her quit the OxyContin. She started the OxyContin to help her quit the gambling. And she started the gambling when she quit drinking the last time. The weed scheme was her ticket to hell because instead of just smoking it alone to ease the detox like she planned, she ended up attracting the keen-nosed attention of her upstairs neighbour, Weasel Tobin. The two of them were puffing their brains out in her grimy little basement apartment down The Mines when Weasel got an idea. What if they traded some of Willy Gimp’s weed for something a little crystal meth-ier? Thus, Chrissy Parsons’s highway to hell was paved with Willy Gimp’s good intentions and Weasel Tobin’s bad ideas, and she was on the meth and out turning tricks behind the Pott’s Coffee on the highway.
Until her brother Cracker came banging on Willy Gimp’s door. Cracker Parsons owns a shady construction company, and he has the strongest, toughest, most loyal guys on the Island working for him. He has a half-dozen dirty cops in his pocket. And he is a nutbar. So when Cracker Parsons comes round to say that he noticed you left some old gas cans and oily rags out behind your garage that could catch fire, and that he heard you gave his sister Chrissy drugs even though you knew better, well, you’ll do whatever you can to get Cracker Parsons’s sister out of the trouble he figures you helped get her into. Even if that means pretending to get back together with her for a bit. And pretending you were the one who got her pregnant. And taking her to the hospital when she has a miscarriage. And splitting the cost of getting her into a two-month residential rehab centre down on the Mainland. Then you can sleep again. Your garage won’t mysteriously burn to the ground. And the cops won’t hear your name or Chrissy Parsons’s name when they bust Weasel Tobin and everybody else who didn’t help Cracker get his sister off the streets and off the drugs.
“Sorry I didn’t say something sooner,” Willy sighs. “I couldn’t. People talk. Sure you don’t want a puff?” he asks, holding the joint out to me, as I sit curled up on the couch, underneath the one and only blanket that Mama ever managed to knit. “Or a sip?”
“About that,” I mumble, fiddling with a piece of unravelling yarn in the middle of a grey-scale granny square.
“Weed’s good for when you get the chemo and radiation. You won’t feel as sick. I can hook ya up.”
I reach over and snatch the joint from his hand and take a slow, deep drag. Just one. Just enough to give me the guts to say the words out loud for the first time.
“I’m pregnant.”
He plucks the joint from my hand and gives me a wild glare as he stomps to the door and tosses it into the snow. By the time he sits back down, his face is frozen somewhere between laughing and crying, while iridescent orbs and little gold sparks float and flutter around the brim of his ball cap.
“Well then.” He clears his throat and straightens his hat, like he knows it might be knocked askew by the cascading sparks and bubbles. “Maybe this is just the kick in the arse the two of us need. Maybe this is a sign —”
“If you say ‘from the Universe’ I’ll puck you in the junk.” The only blanket Mama ever knit weighs heavy on my lap, my belly. I have successfully picked apart an entire granny square, and absently tied all the loose yarn up into one big knot.
“No, I was going to say maybe this is a sign that we need to grow up and stop pissing our lives away on what doesn’t matter,” he says, taking off his hat and setting it on his lap as a shield, just in case.
Without the hat on, I can see gold sparks popping out from the middle of Gimp’s forehead, while the clear orbs shoot straight out from the top of his noggin, like one of those shitty dollar store automatic bubble makers made for kids too lazy to use their own air and effort for entertainment. I decide there’s no way my kid will ever have one of those stupid things. You want bubbles, baby? Blow them yourself. From your head. Like your Daddy does.
“What do you want to do?” he says softly.
“Build a time machine and go back to the day I figured it was okay to skip getting my Depo shot. That seems like a reasonable first step.” I stare at the yarn knot and roll it tighter so I don’t have to look at him.
“Crow, this is kinda serious.”
“No shit. Look, I don’t know. I just found out, my mother is dead, and I’m not.” A lump rises in my throat. My eyes squeeze shut, trying to lock up the tears.
His hand reaches to give me a caress of comfort, but I push it away.
“Everybody just fucks off right when I need them most. I always end up dealing with everything on my own.” My voice, my face are contorting to accommodate my mess of tears.
“Want me to stay with you tonight?”
“No.”
I catch myself imagining what Dave would do in response to such self-pity. Leap from the couch, throw his hands in the air, make a smart, snide comment about my self-centredness, and slam the door on the way out. Then he’d show up an hour later with a dozen red roses, chocolate brioche, and a bottle of acai berry juice pressed by the feet of Trinidadian Hindu yogis, and a million hollow words to validate my pity party.
Willy Gimp just hauls in a silent, steady breath and hugs me close, until I stop sobbing and ranting about how awful everything and everyone in my life has always been. When I fall into a drained silence, he quietly struggles to hoist himself off the couch because his bad leg is asleep and his bad arm
has sunk too deep in the cushion to give him any decent traction. He drops his Nirvana hat on the floor six times while his unreliable limbs wrestle with his puffy coat. He kisses me on the forehead, shuffles to the door, and before closing it behind him with the utmost care, he looks back at me with his soft, spent wonder of a smile.
“Want to know what I remember most about your mother? Her ‘pity party’ song. She’d come into the garage, and the two of us would get to chatting. The second I’d start bitching about something, she’d grab my bad hand, give it a squeeze and then” — his voice drops to a gravelly sing-song — “‘Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. Guess I’ll eat some worms. Big fat slimy ones, gross and greasy grimy ones, chubby little grubby little worms.’ Made me roar every time.”
I sit there sniffling and snotting into the tightly clutched corner of my blanket.
“If I was you, I’d eat some of Flossie Baker’s ham and a few of them squares instead. There’s more rock-solid love for you here than you think, Crow. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Whatever,” I sulk.
He blows me a kiss and a few extra shiny bubbles.
As his truck rumbles off, my fingers twitch and my heart inches up into my throat as I touch the little call back button on the screen of my phone. I’m staring at the digits of Dave’s number as they pop up on the screen, when, without so much as a knock, Peggy barrels through the door with Mossy in tow. My shaky finger taps the end call button just before it starts to ring.
“Here,” Peg says, “Mossy’s gonna stay with you tonight.”
“Look, I can —”
“Ain’t got time to argue. Charlotte’s back to the hospital, and the baby’s asleep in the car. Don’t be so contrary all your life, take a day off.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need anything from you people.”
And right on cue, the room starts to swirl and spin. My head throbs, my limbs twitch, and my ears are assaulted by thunderous clangs, clatters, and grinding sounds. My vision blurs and my stomach lurches and then I throw up all over the floor, just barely missing the blanket on my lap.
“Mossy, clean that up and get her settled for the night, wouldja?” Peggy directs. “We know where your mother kept the Javex, and we know how to make a proper cup of tea. And Mossy here sleeps with his eyes open, don’t ya, Moss?”
But Mossy doesn’t answer. He’s already boiling water for tea and rummaging for the Javex.
[…]
I look at Char’s baby, sleeping soundly in the back seat of Peggy’s car on the drive into Town, Town for my appointment. I look at Mossy, sitting next to Daktari, an amused smile plastered on his face as he stares at the smear of trees that zips past his window as the car cruises along the monotonous highway. I look at Peg, her eyes watching the road as it rolls out before us, her head swaying to the smooth cryptic croon of Leonard Cohen and his jazzy pop-a-sophical backup singers. And I decide it’s all a little too peaceful. Time to officially get out in front of the story of my own stupidity before somebody hears or says something, and the whole thing is out of my control. Before Peggy officially figures it out.
“I gotta tell you something,” I say slowly, carefully. “I’m —”
“Pregnant? I know,” Peggy says. Casual as all hell.
Mossy giggles.
“I’m not stupid,” Peggy says, glancing at me sideways. “You’re barfing your guts up. You’re starting to show. But I knew before that. Like I said the day of your mother’s funeral, you smell like petrichor.”
“Pregnant women smell like mud puddles?”
“No, petrichor. There’s a difference. Mud puddles are more stagnant and mucky smelling. You smell like a mud puddle when you start bottling up feelings. Or like sour milk.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Am I?”
No, she’s not. In fact, she’s radiating an intensely un-crazy teal halo, strewn with soft violet wisps. Peggy’s nose. It knows.
“Now ask ol’ Mossy how he knew,” Peggy orders.
Mossy sits there, still staring out the window, grinning like the idiot everybody always pretends he is.
“C’mon Moss, spit it out. Tell Crow how you knew she was having a baby.” Peggy cocks her head to the side, articulating each word in a half-shout.
“Answered da phone when the doctor called,” Mossy says, the inner edges of his thick lips smacking together, cushioning the space between words. He giggles again.
“Smarten up, ya clown,” Peggy says. “Tell Crow about the colours.”
“Ohh,” Mossy gasps. “The feels are the thoughts in colours, and babies makes the rainbows.”
“Oh g’wan ya cryptic bastard!” Peggy groans as she flicks off the cassette deck, making me wonder if she’s talking to Mossy or Leonard Cohen. She glances at me again. “How long have you been seeing stuff? Auras, or whatever the New Age hippy crystal rubbers call them.”
“Well, with the tumours and —”
“It’s not the tumours, Crow. It’s like Mossy said. Emotions are colourful thoughts, and you two can see them. All this stuff, it’s in the family.”
“Right. The cursed Fortunes.”
“I beg your pardon,” she says, a sharp indignation in her voice. “You wanna see cursed? Look at the poor Willy Nilly Gilligans. Dozens of them all over the place, not one with an IQ over sixty-five. Or the Bonk-Headed Blacketts from Down the Point, who all look like they got beat with an ugly stick. Even the babies. Or your father’s people, with their cold little hearts full of nothing but want and spite. Now that, Crow, dear, is cursed. The senses, these ways, have been passed down through the ages to people who’ve earned them the hard way. Not a curse. A blessing. If you learn to use ’em right.”
An audible snort of skepticism escapes from my throat.
“Scoff all you want,” Peggy says. “But it’s true. Once you know what’s what, you have a choice. Use it, or lose it. Your aunt Janice? She lost it. Couldn’t make good meaning of what she heard, lost her mind in all the static, and died trying to make it stop. Same with Melly and Cecil. Or Gordie, being an angry drunk, or Audrey and her fanatical Bible thumping. If the stubborn bastards would just pay attention to what’s right in front of them without getting all worked up, we’d all be better off. Now you and Mossy, you can see what people’s minds are made of. Their true colours, and the shape of their lives. And once you got a clear bead on them, and what it all means, you figure out how to use it. For ill, nil, or goodwill. There’s power there.”
“What about you?” I wait for a plume of murky pink hypocritical do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do to puff up from her head.
“I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got,” she says, hands gripping the steering wheel tighter. “You know how you can’t smell the hum of your own armpits? Well I couldn’t smell my own hurt for the longest time. I used to watch my mother coo and coddle you, and I’d listen to Effie gripe about the trials and tribulations of motherhood, and you know what I’d smell? Warm cinnamon rolls with this hint of some other spice I could never quite place. Made me feel like a little beggar outside the bakery with my face pressed up against the window, drooling at the cozy sweetness just out of my reach. After a while, that smell made me sick. But your mother, she inspired me.”
“What was Mama’s freak show party trick, then?” I choke a little as I say her name out loud.
“You really don’t know, do you?” Peggy says, as a host of incredulous purple curls spring from around her head and tickle the corners of her mouth into a soft smile. “What your mother did for people around here? Her, a first responder. Volunteer firefighter. Visiting the hurt and the sick and the dying at the friggin’ hospital all them years, even though she was already spread thinner than the margarine at Lent. Didn’t you ever notice those hands of hers? Or what she did with them every time you fell down and scraped your knee when you were little?”
She’d put her hand on it for a few minutes, before she’d even get a Band-Aid or peroxide.
“How
’d she break up fights between your big galoot uncles?”
She’d grab them by the ear, and they’d stop without another word.
“What did she try to do to that head of yours after you moved home?”
She’d pat it like I was a friggin’ puppy, every chance she got.
“Effie could lay hands on people,” Peg says with a sad hush in her voice.
“Like reiki?”
“Lord, no!” Peggy huffs. “Effie’s gift was more than that New Age energy jazz. She healed people, Crow. Didn’t just make them feel better. Her hands did something special, but there was a part that she never let on. She absorbed the hurts. Physical, but sometimes mental, too. Those newspapers you burned in your little bonfire? She saved those because there were stories there, people she helped who went on to live good lives. She needed reminders of that because her hands, her whole body, didn’t know what to do with the pain she took besides hold it. All gifts have a price tag. Christ, I wish she —” Peggy pumps the brakes hard as we merge off the highway and onto the main drag in Town, Town. A dusty little band of blue bricks begins to compact itself in front of her mouth.
Every time Mama dropped me at Peggy’s while she went to visit some random old biddy on the road just to “be a good neighbour,” I rolled my eyes. Every time I couldn’t have the car because she was volunteering at the hospital or had to rush to a first responder call or had to go “give someone a hand,” I huffed. And every time I curled up on my mother’s lap with a skinned knee or a broken heart, and she’d hold me tight, I just assumed that I was strong and tough and able to will away the bulk of my hurt. All the while, Scruffy Effie Fortune was quietly, thanklessly, willingly taking on the burden of other people’s wounds. Mine included. And for the first time since I heard the words “brain tumours” in the aftermath of my Toronto subway seizure scene, something that isn’t overwhelming terror masquerading as Fuck It Bucket List, spit-in-yer-eye bravado washes over me. A wave of hope. Maybe, just maybe, Mama’s hands healed me.