Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  Jude emerged from the lake and trotted up from the beach. He stood at the porch door and yelped.

  “No way. Not until you shake,” Verna told him.

  “About what?” Romy persisted.

  “About nothing. None of your business. A long time ago. Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Verna replied. “Shake, Jude! Shake! Come on, boy!”

  Romy shrugged, unwillingly relinquishing that particular line of inquiry. “What should I call you. You’re the only one I have — aunt, that is.”

  Verna winced. “How about ‘Verna’?”

  “How about Auntie Verna?”

  “I guess,” said Verna, distracted by the dog, now pawing insistently at the door and yelping. “Jude! You heard me. Shake! Shake!” She half stood and imitated shaking. Jude stared confusedly at her. She sat back down.

  “I just checked out of the Birches,” Romy informed her. “God knows where Dad is these days. Well, actually, he’s out in B.C. On some island with Nora. On Salt Spring Island with Nora. That’s his new wife. It’s disgusting. He’s all old and fat and she’s like twenty-six years old — only five years older than me! I haven’t heard from him in months. Well, two weeks at any rate. He’s busy. He’s happy. I’m going to have a baby brother or sister in late August. Whoopee. So I took the train into Toronto and I looked up Grandfather in the phone book — see! I didn’t have any problem finding him — and I went to his house. That’s when I found out about Mom. The lady next door told me he had died and that you had come up here to scatter his and Mom’s ashes. Mrs. Somebody.”

  “Mrs. Rothman,” Verna supplied the name. Standing, she crossed to the door and let Jude in.

  “She looked Jewish.”

  “Who did?”

  “Mrs. Rothman …”

  “Jude!” squawked Verna.

  But it was too late. Jude was shaking.

  “Damn, it, Jude!” Verna protested.

  “You got Mom’s cremains all wet!” cried Romy.

  “Oh, shit!” said Verna. “Don’t worry,” she told Romy, “They’re in a plastic bag. Inside the box, I mean.”

  “Stupid dog!” Romy complained. Then, after a moment during which the two women wiped up, “Don’t you want to know why I was in the Birches?”

  “I don’t know.” Verna was distracted. All this talk about Fern. She had come here to divest herself of the past — of the cottage itself, of Bob, of Donald, and, especially, of Fern. Instead, she seemed to have walked into a time warp in which all three of them were vying for her attention. And now this — a niece. “What’s the Birches?”

  “It’s in Guelph. It’s like rehab. An addiction treatment facility.”

  Verna turned to look at her. “You’re a drug addict?”

  Romy shook her head. “Nope. I’m an anorexic. It’s what they call a process addiction.”

  Verna peered at her. Of course! That explained the downy hair that carpeted her bony face, the visibly swollen glands. “You look like an anorexic.”

  “Well, thanks,” said Romy huffily. “You don’t look so hot yourself.”

  Verna took a few moments to absorb this information. Then, surprising herself, she said, “I’m an alcoholic. I think. A highly functional one, mind you.” And how not, she asked herself. In the several years leading up to Bob’s death, she had felt that she was just going through the motions. It was as if everything was swathed in cotton batting. How could she have not been glum? And bitter. Let’s not forget bitter! But mostly bored. And just a little tipsy. Not that anybody noticed. It was remarkable what you could get away with, what people would not notice. Then again, she had never let herself get sloppy. She kept a tight rein on things, on herself. Well, maybe not so much now.

  Romy shook her head. “Thanks for sharing, but that won’t work for me. Too many calories in alcohol.”

  “There are always diet mixers,” Verna pointed out. “Vodka and diet tonic. Rum and Diet Coke.”

  “I never thought of that!” Romy seemed faintly intrigued.

  “So, are you cured?”

  Romy shrugged. “Maybe. Sort of. A little.”

  “Because, if you don’t mind me saying so, I’d guess no. You look pretty sick to me. Sort of like the walking dead, actually.”

  Romy shrugged. “I got fed up with it. Everybody watching you like a hawk. Silly group meetings. All those snacks.”

  “And your father…?”

  “Oh, he’ll be pissed when he hears, but he won’t cut me off. If that’s what you mean. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”

  “I see,” said Verna, wondering what she should be doing under the circumstances. Should she call Paul? Probably. On the other hand, the girl was twenty-one, presumably capable of rattling around on her own recognizance. Did she really want to get involved in a struggle between her former brother-in-law and her obviously problematic niece? They sat for another few minutes, saying nothing, rocking, then Verna remembered. “I was a bed wetter. For years and years. Age seven to ten. God, I’d forgotten that! Every frigging night. I couldn’t have sleepovers. I couldn’t go to sleepovers. That’s probably why I’m such a disaster. I wasn’t socialized properly. Like a bad dog.”

  “And I,” said Romy ruefully, “was a biter.”

  When Winonah came down from the roof, they had soup for lunch. Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, several cans of which had over-wintered in the pantry. They would have had barley, beef, and vegetable — Donald’s penchant for preparedness meant that the shelves of his pantry were piled high with canned goods and supplies. As it turned out, however, Romy was a vegetarian. They would have made the soup with milk instead of water, however, as it also turned out, Romy was lactose-intolerant.

  Winonah had taken an evident dislike to Romy, which Romy reciprocated. After watching the girl idly trail her spoon through the soup, back and forth, back and forth, in a figure eight, the handywoman pushed herself back from the table and said, “If you’re just going to play with that soup, you could have at least let us mix it with milk!”

  Romy looked at Winonah, cocked her head, and licked the spoon. The gesture was both insolent and defiant. Verna noted that the girl’s head looked too big from her emaciated body. She resembled one of those lolling bobble-head dolls.

  “You’re a picky eater,” Winonah grumbled.

  “I’m not a picky eater. I’m an anorexic.”

  “Anorexics are just glorified picky eaters.”

  “Are not!”

  “Are so!” said Winonah. “Any minute now you’ll be telling us you have Sprue. ‘Guess what, Auntie Verna, I have Sprue!’ Because Sprue would fit right in with that list of yours, eh? Wouldn’t it?”

  “What list?” Romy turned to Verna. “What’s Sprue, Auntie Verna?”

  “That list of what you can and cannot eat,” Winonah told her. “And she’s not telling you what Sprue is, because, if she does, you’d get it, eh, and then we’d all starve to death!”

  Romy turned to Verna. “Auntie Verna,” she repeated, “what’s Sprue?”

  Verna winced. “I don’t know!” The word “Auntie” coming out of Romy’s mouth made her squirm. Set her teeth on edge somehow. “Something to do with gluten. Could you call me ‘Aunt Verna?’ ‘Auntie’ sounds, well …”

  “Affectionate,” Winonah finished the sentence for her. She turned back to Romy. “Do you eat fish?” she asked. “Because some vegetarians eat fish. I guess they haven’t noticed that a fish isn’t a vegetable, eh? Too weak from hunger to tell the difference.”

  “I don’t eat anything with eyeballs,” Romy defended herself. “Fish have eyeballs.”

  “What about the fish that live at the bottom of the ocean where there’s no light? They don’t have eyes. Would you eat them?”

  “Do they have eye buds?” Romy asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “Because I don’t eat anything with eye balls or eye buds.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything with eye buds,” Ve
rna reflected. “Not that I was aware of.”

  “Worms!” Winonah said. “Eh? What about worms?”

  “Worms?” Romy looked to Verna for assistance.

  “Worms don’t have eyes,” Verna said. “They do have photoreceptors.”

  Winonah turned to her. “How do you know that?”

  Verna shrugged. How did she know that? “I come from a long line of naturalists?” It’s not that she had looked or anything.

  The handywoman turned back to Romy. “So, worms don’t have eyes. Would you eat worms?”

  But Romy held her ground. “I don’t eat anything with eye balls or eye buds or photoreceptors.”

  Winonah eyed her. “What you don’t eat is anything. Period.”

  “You could be a little nicer to me,” Romy pointed out. “I just found out my mother is dead.”

  “Kitchi Manitou has given his people all this good food to eat and what do you do? Turn up your nose. You should be grateful. You know what my granny had to eat at No-Talking-Indian School?”

  Romy turned to Verna. “Itchy who? What’s she talking about?”

  “The Great Spirit,” replied Verna. “Winonah’s grandmother went to residential school.”

  “She had to eat green liver and rusty bacon and meat boiled in the laundry pot so that it tasted of soap and mush with grasshopper legs in it and mouse droppings!” said Winonah. “That’s what she had to eat.”

  “So your grandma’s school cafeteria sucked,” said Romy. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  Verna decided to change the subject. “I’m assuming you’ll want to stay the night,” she said to Romy. “Do you have a suitcase?”

  “In her car.” Romy pointed a bony finger at Winonah.

  “It’s unlocked,” said Winonah. “If you’re not going to eat that soup, pass it over.”

  “What’s her problem?” Romy asked Verna.

  “Children starving,” Verna speculated. “Third-world countries. Soup kitchens.”

  “Whatever!” Romy fumed. “At least I don’t look like a beach ball.” She looked pointedly at the round Winonah.

  “Is there a reason all the doors are shut?” Romy asked. She and Verna stood at the head of the stairs.

  “Didn’t you ever see the Mickey Mouse Show?” Verna asked. Then, remembering that her niece was born in the 1980s, “Oh, sorry. I guess not. No. No reason. Well, yes. Privacy?”

  “But you’re the only one here.”

  “Yeah, and …?”

  “I like doors to be open,” Romy informed her. “So I can see what’s behind them.”

  “Ah, well, that’s where we differ, you and I,” said Verna. “I prefer not to know what’s behind them. So what’ll it be? You could stay in my old room, if you wanted. Or your mom’s …”

  Apparently her attempt at nonchalance failed to fool Romy. The girl looked at her with eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Where are you staying?”

  “In your grandfather’s room.”

  “And why is that?”

  “There were sheets on the bed.”

  “There weren’t sheets on your bed?”

  “No. But I could find some. Probably.”

  “I thought you said you were a bed-wetter?”

  Verna winced. What had prompted her to tell the girl that? Donald had known, of course, and Fern and Bob, because Fern told Bob. And, also of course, everyone that Fern and Bob had told. Lest we forget! Just one of the many reasons why Verna had been angry … was angry with Fern. “It’s a new mattress … or it was a new mattress forty years ago. I was fourteen. I’d stopped wetting the bed by then!”

  Romy wasn’t buying it. “And are there sheets on my mother’s bed?” she asked.

  Verna shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Did you look?”

  “No,” Verna admitted. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t actually been in her room. Yet,” she added.

  “Why? What’s wrong with her room?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with her room.”

  “Then why haven’t you been in it?”

  “I just haven’t gotten around to it.”

  “What else have you been doing?”

  “Unpacking,” said Verna. “Napping.”

  “I want to see her room,” Romy insisted.

  “Fine. Go ahead. Be my guest.”

  Romy sized up the door. She swallowed. “I want you to come with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she died in that room.”

  “Exactly!”

  “What do you mean, ‘Exactly’?”

  “Exactly the reason I haven’t gone into her room yet. She died in there. You may be her daughter, but I’m her sister, her twin sister for crying out loud, and she died in there. It freaks me out, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Then we can both go in together.”

  “Or we could do it later. For example, we could do it tomorrow. When you’ve had a good rest. When you’ve come to terms with the fact that she is … you know.”

  Romy reflected on this. “It won’t be any easier tomorrow.”

  “But some terrible accident might befall us during the night,” Verna argued, “and kill us and then we wouldn’t have to ever open the door.”

  “Are you expecting a terrible accident to happen to us? Is there something you know that I don’t?”

  “Of course not. But that’s the thing. You don’t know. You never know. Your Uncle Bob’s SUV got creamed by a train. I didn’t see that one coming. And that’s only one example.”

  “Really?” Romy was amazed. “By a train?”

  Verna nodded solemnly. Two years ago, a passenger train on its way to Montreal had plowed into Bob’s new Ford Escape at an intersection. This particular intersection was legendary: like a bloodthirsty Aztec deity, it seemed to require periodic human sacrifice. Concerned citizens had been circulating petitions calling for gates or warning lights for years. Verna had even signed one once. Still nothing was done to halt the carnage, and, over the decades, the deadly crossing claimed a baker’s dozen lives. The lives in question belonged, for the most part, to drunken teenagers or to the aimless homeless seeking direction. With the advent of cellphones, however, a whole new class of victim emerged. Train 75 had caught Bob mid-harangue on his Nokia; he had been chewing out his admin assistant, Maureen, when suddenly …

  “How could you not know a train was about to hit you?” Verna had asked Maureen as she was cleaning out Bob’s desk at the ministry. “I mean, it’s not like they sneak up on you or anything.”

  “There was a lot of static on the phone,” Maureen told her.

  “How much static can there be?”

  Verna suspected that Bob’s demise was almost as great a relief to Maureen as it was to her. Not that the poor woman would ever have owned up to it. In fact, Verna had to give the admin assistant high marks for her excellent impersonation of someone reeling from the shock of losing a beloved boss. Even then, a full ten days after they had managed to scrape what remained of Bob from the mangled Escape and the blunt nose of the train (not much), Maureen was still making a show of grief. Inside she must be singing a Te Deum, Verna thought, watching carefully as Maureen dabbed at red eyes with a wad of gray Kleenex. She must be thinking, Hallelujah and thank you, Jesus! The son of a bitch is dead! For Bob’s replacement, poor, sweet Peter Orser, was ever so much nicer than Bob had ever been. That’s when Verna had asked her what Bob’s last words had been. After all, she had been the one talking to him when he died; it seemed like a reasonable question. “What were his last words, Maureen? Other, I mean, than, ‘Aaaaghhh!’” The look on Maureen’s face! But then the assistant had glanced from side to side to make sure no one else could hear, leaned toward Verna and hissed, “‘Fucking bitch!’ Those were his last words! ‘Fucking bitch!’”

  “I’m so, so sorry, Auntie Verna,” Romy apologized now.

  “Aunt Verna. Don’t be,” said Verna. �
�Best thing that ever happened to me.” And it had been. One moment she had been contemplating divorce and the inevitable financial fallout of that. The next she had found herself the sole beneficiary of mortgage insurance, Bob’s term life insurance, his pension, his RRSP, the Cocoa Beach condo, and a modest, but tidy estate.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “In that case, did you have to identify the body? What did it look like?”

  “You mean, did I have to identify, ‘the smithereens’?” Verna asked. “Because that was pretty much what was left of him. Oh, and his wedding ring and his U of T ring. And a few odd teeth.”

  “Ooh,” said Romy. Then, undeterred, “Come on now. Open the door.”

  Verna sighed. She shut her eyes. She took a deep breath. She took the door knob in hand. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  Romy set her clothes-hanger shoulders and swallowed visibly, her Adam’s apple goiter huge in contrast to her stringy neck. “I’m sure!”

  Verna closed her eyes, turned the handle to the left, and pulled.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again.

  Again, nothing.

  She rattled it and tried again.

  A third time: nothing.

  Astounded, she turned to Romy. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “It’s locked!”

  “What do you mean: it’s locked?” Winonah asked.

  “As in ‘you can’t open it; because it’s locked’,” explained Verna. Now all three women were standing in front of Fern’s door.

  “It can’t be locked,” Winonah said. “Who would have locked it? It’s stuck, eh? The wood’s probably swollen. You just have to give it some muscle …” Planting her feet, the handywoman took hold of the door knob, twisted it one way, then the other, and yanked with all her might. Then she kicked the door once for good measure and tried the door knob again. No luck. “Okay,” she conceded. “It’s locked.”

  “Who?” Verna wondered. “Who would have locked it?”

  “And why?” asked Romy.

  “It’s an old lock,” said Winonah. “That means what we’re looking for is a skeleton key.”

  “A skeleton key?” Romy was intrigued. “What’s a skeleton key? Does it have a skull or something on it?”