Dark August

by Katie Tallo

  Gus sits back.

  Lets go of what she thinks she knows.

  And gets ready to listen to the stories and the secrets passed between two sisters.

  Lana and Lois.

  39

  Lois

  ONE THING I CAN TELL YOU ABOUT ELGIN IS THE PEOPLE IN that town were as small as it was. Small-minded and fearful. Always whispering about curses and the darkness they believed lived inside that little girl, Gracie. A bad seed, they called her. Hogwash, all of it. Something awful might have brought that baby into this world, but June Halladay loved that child and she was a good mother. No one to help her and a child to raise. Living in that big house with that wretch of a father, Kep Halladay. She did her best. Who could fault her for turning to the bottle? The small minds of Elgin, that’s who.

  “And little Gracie. Lois wrote about her often. About how none of the girls talked to her or held her hand when they skipped off to the water fountain. None of them giggled in her ear to make her laugh. She had no friends because she was wrong, and no one wanted a wrong friend. Lois shushed the girls if they made fun. She let wee Gracie sit in her office when her mother was late. And when June didn’t show up ’cause she was waylaid on some barstool, Lois took Gracie to the mortuary where Lois worked as a cosmetologist. Although on account of Ernie the mortician’s bad arthritis, Lois was really so much more than that. A jack-of-all-things charnel so to speak. She did most of the heavy lifting back then. Taught the child all about embalming and sewing skin and covering flesh with makeup. Even let Gracie insert the odd trocar or apply the occasional swipe of blush or eye shadow to a cadaver.”

  Gus has to ask.

  “What’s a trocar?”

  “Oh, it’s a surgical instrument used to draw fluids out of the body cavity.”

  Gus regrets asking. She tries not to gag as Lana goes on.

  “When Gracie was seven, they turned against her for good. All because of the rabbit incident. Gracie eventually told Lois what really happened.

  She was sitting in the grassy ditch, waiting for her mother. Waiting and worrying about walking into ballet class late. A rabbit hopped up. Her pink leotard was getting damp with dew. She knew the girls were going to point if her bum was wet. But she didn’t move for fear of scaring off the rabbit. The pair of them just sat there waiting and events unfolded as they sometimes do. Suddenly. Sadly. Turning life sideways. Lois couldn’t protect the little girl after that.”

  Lana swallows hard. Gus leans closer. Recalling how her mother shared this same desire. To protect Gracie. Seems Shannon and Lois had that in common. The little ballerina got inside both their hearts. The woman’s eyes glisten and her voice trembles as she goes on.

  “June had been in town, drinking at the local watering hole. She’d lost track of time. And when she sped home to pick up Gracie for dance class, she likely didn’t see her sitting there in the ditch. She didn’t see the rabbit dart out into the lane. A light thump was likely all that registered as she hit the brakes and saw her daughter stand up, distraught. June figured it was because she was late so she honked for her to get in. Gracie climbed in clutching the small bag she kept her ballet shoes in.

  “A few minutes later, June dropped Gracie in the parking lot of the academy. June never came inside anymore. It was two hours later when June found out what her daughter had done. Two hours of sitting in her car trying to sleep off the booze.

  “A few months earlier, June was drunk and hit a school bus and her father made the charges go away. Luckily none of the kids on the bus was hurt. A week after that she took out a fire hydrant. The senator made some more calls. June got a slap on the wrist for that hit-and-run. The same folks who turned their backs on her when she got pregnant now said June deserved to be thrown in jail.

  “People would spot her sitting in her car, passed out or staring into space. Sometimes talking to herself. Sometimes crying like a baby. They whispered that she was unstable. Unfit. Unwelcome. But what could they do? Kep Halladay was her father.”

  Gus recalls Renata Corrigan’s description of young June.

  Leggy and pretty with long yellow hair . . . joined the cheerleading squad and had lots of friends.

  How far and how fast June had fallen in her young life. Gus feels a crushing sadness for the young mother who tragically became the town joke seemingly overnight. Unwanted and unloved. Maybe a curse she’d carried with her from the day she was born.

  Lana clears her throat, bringing Gus back to the room. She’s getting to the nitty-gritty of her story and she wants her audience to pay attention. To bear witness, alongside her, to what truly happened.

  “So that day, June got back to the academy and everyone was outside waiting. Gracie was standing next to Lois. The other mothers were shielding their children behind their backs. June knew there was trouble. Gracie tried to go to June when she saw her, but Lois gently held her shoulder. She had no choice. June didn’t want to get out of the car, but she had to. Some of the mothers couldn’t hide their smirks. One particularly nasty piece of work had her hands on her hips and a gleeful look in her eye. June approached, and the moms circled. A wolf pack surrounding their prey. That’s when June saw the blood on Gracie’s dance shoes. She ran to her daughter and asked if she was hurt. Lois held up the plastic bag. Inside was a blood-soaked rabbit. ‘What the fuck?’ June said. That set off Penny Dickenson who said, ‘What did you just say in front of my child?’ And June repeated what she’d said, and the circle tightened. Penny wouldn’t let up. She called Gracie a freak. One of the other mothers chimed in and said the girl was just like her mother. Rotten to the core. Lois couldn’t find any words for June. They both knew Gracie wasn’t welcome anymore. She never really had been. June grabbed the plastic bag with the dead bunny and took Gracie’s hand. The circle parted and the two of them walked to their car and drove away.

  “The story of the dead rabbit wafted across town like cheap perfume. It eventually seeped into the nostrils of Kep Halladay. He was livid. He called June a drunken embarrassment. He’d never covered for her out of love. He didn’t care about June or Gracie. He did it to protect his reputation. To preserve his status as the head of one of the county’s most prominent founding families. But now, even June’s child was becoming a stain on his good name. The two of them were bad for business. Bad for his political aspirations.

  “Then one terrible Monday in September of 2002, one of Kep’s problems was taken care of.”

  Lana pauses. The memory catching in her throat. Gus knows the date. Knows what’s coming. She’s on the edge of her seat, eyes focused and intense, hands very still, heart racing. Lana finds her voice again.

  “Gracie was playing in the front seat of June’s car and someone had left the keys in the ignition. June had gone down to collect the mail from the box at the end of the lane. For seven years, she’d made the morning trek. Likely hoping that a letter might come from Todd.

  “When she was finally able to talk about that day, Gracie said she was pretending to be grown-up. Her grandfather had taught her how to turn the key in the ignition and shift the stick into drive. Her gangly legs made it so her feet could just reach the pedals. She liked that he wanted to teach her something. The car rolled down the hill. Gracie said she put the brake pedal flat to the floor like he’d shown her, but the car wouldn’t stop. I imagine June saw what was happening and ran to help her daughter. They think she tripped and went under the car. They found the car across the highway in the ditch. Gracie still in the driver’s seat. June under the car. She’d been dragged across the road. She was dead. One of Gracie’s legs was crushed. The doctors reset the bones, but she always walked with a limp after that.

  “Despite the death of Kep’s only daughter, nothing really changed. The show went on at Halladay House. The weekend parties with his bigwig friends continued. Then the boy who’d been billeting at the house disappeared. Gracie was eight. She almost seemed more upset by this than her mother’s death. He was her friend and he left her without s
aying goodbye. Before he disappeared, she would go on and on about how Henry was going to take her to Egypt on an archaeological dig. Once he was gone, Gracie was never the same. She barely spoke when she stopped by the mortuary.

  “Within a year, big oil made its debut in the county. Took only a few months for the farms to bubble over with toxic waste. Half the town hightailed it to higher ground, but Lois stayed. She couldn’t abandon her dance academy. Her life’s work. Her hometown. Even after she got those sores on her tongue and Edgar’s asthma turned into chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a part of her felt she couldn’t leave because of Gracie. Couldn’t leave that girl all alone up there with her grandfather and his cronies.

  “Then two years later the old man was gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth. It was the summer of 2006. I heard the news and my heart leapt. Little Gracie was free. What went on in that house didn’t matter anymore. It was done, along with Kep Halladay. Children’s Aid saw fit to let me foster the girl. Gracie was eleven when she came to live with me and Edgar. Didn’t want any more disruptions in her life so we stayed in Elgin. We were a family, the three of us. A family for seven years.”

  Gus is so caught up in Lana’s story that her brain only now faintly registers the shift that just happened. Lana leans back. Her robe falls open a little, exposing her thigh. Only for a split second before she can pull it closed. But in that second, Gus sees the large mottled scar on her leg.

  There’s a clank in the kitchen.

  A hand appears on the edge of the doorframe.

  “I’ll be there in a minute, love,” the woman calls out to the kitchen with a toss of her brown hair.

  Augusta slowly places her coffee mug on the side table next to her, hands shaking slightly. A realization slowly dawning. Then she looks into the eyes of the woman in front of her.

  A leg that’s been badly burned in a fire.

  A loved one hiding out in the kitchen.

  The pieces fall into place as Gus replays the subtle and unconscious shift that just took place in the story.

  The shift from “her” to “me.”

  Lana, no longer the storyteller.

  Her sister sitting in her place.

  She was there all along.

  Only it’s just now that Gus sees her for who she really is.

  “Lois?”

  The woman tucks a stray lock of brown hair into the loose bun piled on top of her head, looks up, and smiles.

  40

  Edgar

  SORRY, DEAR, I’M JUST SO USED TO BEING DEAD IT’S BECOME a habit. You see, Lana got some money from the gas company on account of me and Edgar being dead so we sort of had to stay dead. ’Course when we moved in with her and Roger, she shared every penny with us. What little there was. Then when Lana and Roger retired to Myrtle Beach last year, they wanted us to come along. What with my cancer meds and prescriptions and doctor appointments, I couldn’t afford to live stateside with no health insurance, so we worked it out. Lana and I do look alike. With a couple of pieces of my sister’s ID, I became Lana. No one’s the wiser. Lana doesn’t charge me hardly any rent to live here and winters we keep the heat low so the bills don’t get out of hand. A good old hot water bottle goes a long way to taking the chill off. We make do.”

  Gus smiles at Lois. Miss Greenaway. Alive and well. Sitting right in front of her. Despite having left everything behind that she held dear, despite having no way to go back home to Elgin, she makes the best of her circumstances. Seems it’s always been her way. To see the good in things and people. Like little Gracie and June.

  A floorboard winces in the kitchen.

  Someone else is waiting to reveal themselves. Gus thinks she might know who.

  “Edgar?”

  Lois smiles and shrugs.

  “My boy. My family. I’ve told my sister, Lana, that if I win the lottery, we’ll be down south in a heartbeat. Look out sandy beaches and sunsets, here we come.”

  Lois laughs and wiggles in her chair like she’s dancing the hula. Her robe parts slightly. Gus sees the scars. Tries to fit the pieces together.

  “I’m curious. Why did everyone in Elgin think you died in the fire?”

  “We disappeared without a trace. What else were they to think? They were all at the fair and our house was blown off the face of the earth by the blast. As luck would have it, we were at the edge of town on our morning walk when things went boom. We got showered with burning debris and a piece of hot plastic stuck to the side of my leg. We peeled it off and ran home to look for Gracie. But the house was flattened. She was gone. My car was parked around the corner, behind the dance academy. It was still in one piece, so we wasted no time. We didn’t stop driving until we got here to my sister’s place. That town wanted to be left alone. It wanted everyone gone. It just seemed easier to play dead and leave it all behind.”

  “Gracie was in the house?”

  “Poor lass. She’d just turned eighteen the day before. She didn’t want to come for our morning walk. She stayed behind. Something about a sore belly from too much birthday cake, but I knew better. That girl liked to be by herself. Alone with her thoughts. She didn’t really know how to be around other people. When we saw the house was gone, we knew she was gone with it. Gracie just wanted to be left alone. I suppose she got her wish in the end.”

  There’s another louder noise from the kitchen.

  “You spying on us, Edgar?”

  Lois peers toward the kitchen entryway. A cherub-faced man in his twenties is peeking around the kitchen doorframe. Wide-eyed, his round cheeks billowing as he chews. Gus gives him a little wave. He waves back.

  “You want to see Elgin before the fire? Edgar can show you.”

  Gus nods. Lois smiles at her son.

  “Can’t you, dollface?”

  Edgar giggles and disappears back into the kitchen. Lois rises and tightens her robe around her waist. She’s still lean. A dancer’s frame. Gus follows her through the kitchen. Peanut butter cookies sit cooling on a rack. She leads Gus down a small flight of stairs to a landing, out a back door, and into a small backyard. Edgar is already running across the yard toward a large shed in the back corner.

  “Don’t be shy, Eddie, my sweet. She’s a friend of Gracie’s.”

  Lois crosses the yard. Gus follows. Edgar has ducked inside the shed. Lois steps through the open door and waves a hand for Gus to come inside.

  “My Edgar has his gifts.”

  Gus steps inside. It’s dark. She’s praying she’s not just been lulled into a false sense of security and is about to enter some sort of kill room or improvised prison cell. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dark interior. There are no windows. There’s a large table in the center of the shed. A switch flips and the room is flooded with light. Edgar is standing right next to her. A network of interlacing strings of tiny lights crisscross the ceiling creating what looks like a magical starlit sky. Augusta’s mouth drops open. The sight in front of her takes her breath away.

  Edgar covers his mouth and stamps his feet. He’s happy she likes it.

  She can’t believe what she’s seeing.

  Stretched across a large table is an exact miniature replica of a town. Avenues lined with tiny trees, mini park benches, bus stops, street signs, mailboxes, fences, houses, a grocery store, a mortuary, a café. Even the dance academy is there. Miniature cars, bicycles, flowerpots, and fire hydrants dot the neighborhood. It’s an entire town, re-created down to the smallest of details. Dozens of tiny bulbs light up the insides of miniature streetlamps and tiny light fixtures attached to front porches. Through front windows, lamps can be seen glowing from the living rooms of houses.

  In one corner of the shed, there’s a workbench covered with woodworking tools, bits of scrap metal, wood, and colored glass. There’s a glue gun and a soldering torch. A set of saws, glass cutters, plyers, hammers, screws, and nails. It’s Edgar’s workshop. The town is Edgar’s creation.

  “It’s Elgin.”

  Gus whis
pers the words, knowing them to be true. She recognized the town the moment the lights came on. Only she’s never seen it as it once was. Lois nods from where she stands beside her son. She puts one hand proudly on Edgar’s shoulder. He moves away from her touch, crosses the room, and sits himself on a tall stool next to his workbench. He tucks his knees to his chest and bites his lip. He’s a big kid. Lois looks at Gus.

  “Elgin back in her heyday.”

  Gus lets her eyes wander down the streets.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  Gus imagines Edgar and Lois taking their morning walks past the shady trees. She locates the central square in the middle of town. A tavern, a small department store, a town hall, a community center, a real estate office, an RCMP field office. A hub of activity. All obliterated by the fire.

  But in Edgar’s model, it’s all intact. Nothing is blackened or charred or blown away. There’s no crater. He’s even built up the base of his model with clay, imitating the topography of the town. Its dips and valleys and the landscape beyond. At the north end of town, the houses thin, giving way to a valley of pastures. The far side of the valley rises to the highest point in Edgar’s model. A house sits on the hill.

  Halladay House.

  “Edgar wanted to include the house where Gracie grew up. To honor her. He knew it well. He played up there with Gracie when they were young. Till I had to put a stop to it. I couldn’t risk him being around the goings-on up there.”

  Gus walks to the far side of the model to take a closer look at Halladay House. It was quite something in its glory days. Velvet curtains in the windows. Bright yellow coat of paint on the siding. A grand driveway of interlocking stones edged with manicured shrubs. A slightly unkempt rose garden around back with winding paths, a stone bench, a trellis, and a pond. Gus peers into the windows of the once majestic, yet slightly creepy mansion.

  Edgar comes up beside her and leans in to see what she’s looking at. His cheek is almost touching hers.