The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  It was after two o’clock in the morning when we pulled onto Rural Route One on our return from Eastern Europe. Ruby was fast asleep, but I was recording for the future, the way writers do, all that had happened in Grozovo, elaborating and extrapolating, and already altering a few of the minor details. Driving through Baldoon County’s familiar darkness, where the sky was high and filthy with stars, Aunt Lovey glanced in the direction of Merkels’ cottage. “Something’s wrong,” she said. Then, as if she’d just heard a cry for help, “Turn in, hon. Turn in to Merkels’.”

  Uncle Stash yanked on the steering wheel, adrenaline coursing through his veins as he snaked up the lane that veered sharply up a second road to Merkels’ driveway, wondering why our neighbors’ house was lit up like a Christmas tree. Sherman Merkel came racing out the door when he heard our car. He didn’t question why we were back from Slovakia nearly a week early.

  “She’s in there doubled over,” he said, breathless. “Truck went dead,” he added by way of explanation. “I been waiting for the ambulance, but I don’t think they can find the house.”

  It could be hard to find a country house in the daytime if you didn’t know where you were going. (Now every house has a post out front with a number on it for quick ID in emergencies, but ten years ago there was nothing for the driver to see.) In the night it could be impossible to find a cottage like Merkels’, set back so far from the road and beyond a thicket of trees. And especially because the Merkels’ access lane was not the same as ours.

  “How long you been waiting?” Aunt Lovey asked as she hurried out of the car and rushed toward the house.

  “Half an hour. More. I don’t know. I called three times.”

  I didn’t hear any more as Uncle Stash pulled the car door shut. From the car, Uncle Stash and I watched shadows moving in front of the windows. Neither of us spoke, but we must have been thinking the same thing: how fortunate that we’d driven by when we did.

  The door opened and Mrs. Merkel, looking whiter and thinner and taller than when I’d seen her last, staggered through it. Aunt Lovey and Mr. Merkel held her steady as she pressed a blood-soaked towel between her bandy legs.

  “I need the car, Stash,” Aunt Lovey said, taking charge. “Sherman’s gonna drive us in. You wait here with the girls. I’ll get Cathy settled at the hospital and come back to take you home.”

  Uncle Stash nodded, climbing out of the driver’s seat to allow Mr. Merkel the spot, and hurried to help us out of the backseat.

  “Ruby,” I said, “wake up. We’re at Merkels’.”

  “I’m awake. Is Mrs. Merkel going to die?”

  Uncle Stash held my arm, guiding Ruby and me through the deep snow to the slippery front porch. Given that we had seen Mrs. Merkel with the blood-soaked towel, we were not surprised to open the front door to find a circular pattern of blood near Mr. Merkel’s farm boots and a trail of blood drops leading down the small hall to the kitchen at the back of the house. Like animals, we followed the trail and found, on one of the kitchen chairs, a fair quantity of blood. If you were skilled in crime-scene investigation, you might have known how long the blood had been on the chair by the way it had soaked into the cracked wooden seat. There was a cup of tea in front of the bloody chair. Steaming tea, which suggested it had just been made. Mrs. Merkel was practical, and she’d learned in the cruelest way a person can that panicking wouldn’t change a goddamn thing. So she’d asked Sherman to make tea while she slowly bled to death at the kitchen table.

  There was movement behind the long curtains that hid the canning. A scuttling on the floor. Uncle Stash reached for the broom beside the fridge. “Little kurva prick,” he said, striding toward the fluttering curtain. If he’d been able to kill a mouse in that moment he might have felt some relief from his disappointment, or guilt, or fear, or whatever he may have been feeling.

  “You’ll wreck her sheers!” Ruby shrieked when he raised the broom. And, thank God, Ruby stopped Uncle Stash from swatting at the curtains, because it wasn’t a mouse who bounded from behind the drapes but a little puppy. A little mutt with huge brown eyes. Uncle Stash picked the puppy up by the scruff of his wiry little neck, asking, “What we gonna do with you?”

  “We have to take him home!” Ruby cried.

  “That’s fine,” Uncle Stash said.

  “He’s too little to stay in the barn!”

  “All right,” Uncle Stash said.

  “He can stay in our room!” Ruby whined, not quite realizing that Uncle Stash wasn’t fighting her about taking the dog home.

  We didn’t rise when we heard the car in the driveway several hours later. “Fibroid the size of a cantaloupe,” Aunt Lovey said when she opened the door.

  I don’t pretend to understand what happened between Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey and Mrs. Merkel. But I’ll never forget Aunt Lovey’s compassion in that moment, the way she dropped her coat and went to him, shielding him with her arms, and kissed the tears from his red cheeks. “She’s gonna be fine,” she said. Then, “You.”

  The little pup, who was curled up asleep on my lap, woke from his nap and, seeing Aunt Lovey, jumped down to the floor and trotted over to heel at her stocking feet. She looked down. “Cute. Real cute,” she said sarcastically.

  “We’re taking him home, Aunt Lovey,” Ruby said.

  Aunt Lovey puckered her lips but didn’t say a word.

  It was morning by the time we arrived at the house, and a brighter day than I’d seen before, with the sky high and blue, and the sun glinting off the flat crusted snow so the fields looked like silver lakes. I hated the crows for landing, strutting around on my illusion. We weren’t expected back until the following week, and with Mrs. Merkel bleeding from her uterus, Mr. Merkel hadn’t plowed yet or shoveled a path to our door, and the farm was hardly recognizable, so completely covered in snow. It seemed, with all that had happened, that we’d been gone for years instead of days.

  Each winter our country road froze and heaved, shifting and lifting the earth into a patchwork of valleys and ruts. Uncle Stash bumped the car over the ruts but could not pull into our driveway, where the snow had drifted. So he stopped in the middle of the road and we abandoned the car with the keys in the ignition in case Mr. Merkel (or the county plow guys) came by and needed to move it. We understood we were supposed to walk the rest of the way to the house and didn’t think to question or complain. Aunt Lovey tucked the little puppy (whom Ruby and I called Scruffy) into her coat and held him there against her breast, like a precious sleeping infant, as she trampled the unspoiled snow.

  We hadn’t slept well in days, and in the last day not at all, but none of us was ready to retire. Aunt Lovey busied herself with the puppy, holding him to her neck as she warmed a can of chunky beef soup for his lunch. (I could not bear to watch Aunt Lovey loving that dog. It wasn’t just incongruous to see her with the animal, it was embarrassing the way she treated the thing like a baby. And yes, I was insanely jealous of their instant amity.) Uncle Stash, though Aunt Lovey had begged him not to, found the shovel and his toque and went out to clear a path in the snow. Ruby turned on the television, and I opened my computer to write a letter to Taylor, which began by describing our trip to Slovakia and ended with a tidal wave of regret that I never knew her, and she’d never know me.

  In the days that followed, it became clear that Scruffy had eyes only for Aunt Lovey, who did nothing to dissuade his attachment and, in fact, encouraged it, feeding the animal from her plate at the table and letting him sleep on a towel at the foot of her bed. Aunt Lovey had transformed overnight from an animal-liker into a Scruffy-lover. When she thought no one could hear, she called the pup Baby. I think she let him suck her thumb. When Uncle Stash said he was jealous that the dog was taking all her affection, Aunt Lovey just laughed and said, “Well, it’s only for a couple of weeks.”

  Much as Ruby and I hated Aunt Lovey’s attention to the dog, it was the barking that really drove us crazy. Hush up, Scruffy! Hush up! We must have said it a million tim
es. Scruffy was like a baby, barking whenever Aunt Lovey left the room. Barking at the crows from the window in the den. Barking to be let outside to pee, then peeing on the floor just to show he was boss. Near the end of the second week, we were eager to get rid of the dog, to have Aunt Lovey to ourselves again and a little peace and quiet.

  I overheard Mr. Merkel tell Aunt Lovey that his wife had asked to have her fibroid pickled. Where she’d put that jar up, I didn’t care to wonder. Ruby thought it was disgusting that Mrs. Merkel wanted to keep her tumor, but I understood her fascination. I wondered if Mrs. Merkel wanted to examine her fibroid to prove to herself that it did not have hair or teeth or eyes, and was not another child of whom she’d been robbed.

  There were complications from the hysterectomy. On the day she was to have been released, Mrs. Merkel had another hemorrhage. It was winter and a slow time on the farm, so Mr. Merkel spent his days at his wife’s bedside, reading aloud from books borrowed from the library or just sitting there saying nothing at all. Uncle Stash brought plastic tubs of macaroni salad from the grocery store, and the two men talked about the Red Wings and their hopes for the Tigers’ draft. Aunt Lovey cut her volunteer hours to spend more time with the dog. I was writing a flurry of poems then, so who else but Aunt Lovey was gonna walk the damn dog? Sherman Merkel’d made a big deal of thanking Ruby and me for looking after Scruffy, and we never let on it was really Aunt Lovey who’d grown attached.

  By spring, Mrs. Merkel was out of the hospital and recovering back in the cottage, but was too feeble to care for the energetic pup, and by then she must have known it wasn’t her dog anyway. To Ruby’s and my exasperation, Mr. Merkel asked Aunt Lovey to keep Scruffy for a while, which we knew meant indefinitely, and there’d be no end to his infernal barking.

  Ruby pointed out to me then that, however indirectly, she and I had saved Cathy Merkel’s life, for if we hadn’t gone with Cousin Jerzy that night in Grozovo, we might not have caused all the trouble in the village, and Uncle Stash might have found the home he was searching for and would not have used the snowstorm as an excuse to leave early. We would have stayed in Slovakia, and Cathy Merkel would have bled to death at her kitchen table. We wondered if we might elicit gratitude or further scorn from Mrs. Merkel if she knew. I thought the odds were even.

  However indirectly, I think Ruby and I did save Cathy Merkel’s life. But if we’re responsible for saving Mrs. Merkel, aren’t we equally responsible for all that happened because she lived?

  “All that happened” started with a puddle of pee. Not the first puddle of dog pee on the kitchen floor during Scruffy’s protracted stay (Aunt Lovey constantly had the ammonia out to clean what she called piddle) and not the last. It was spring. The lilacs bloomed a week early, and Aunt Lovey had gone out to gather an armful of the fragrant deep purple ones, because Uncle Stash liked those best. She was arranging them in the milk-glass vase passed down from Verbeena, and hadn’t paid attention to Scruffy’s barking, and hadn’t noticed him piddle on the old linoleum floor. Aunt Lovey called us in for dinner, and walking through the door, Uncle Stash slipped in the pee. He fell forward instead of back, taking his full body weight on his right knee. I could smell the sickening-sweet purple lilacs when Ruby and I pushed through the door and found Uncle Stash on the floor, howling in pain.

  The kneecap was fractured, tendons torn, ligaments damaged. Uncle Stash would never recover from the fall. He couldn’t take a step without a cane and got vertigo when he walked on wet grass. He couldn’t conquer three stairs, forget a whole flight, and, the worst of it, being it was his right knee that was injured, he could no longer drive a car.

  “Take away a man’s car. Cut off his chuj. It’s the same,” Uncle Stash told Aunt Lovey when he thought Ruby and I couldn’t hear. “Such a nice drive, that Merc.” (Uncle Stash had just finished retooling a used Mercury Marquis and had driven it only a handful of times.)

  Later, Ruby and I had watched Uncle Stash at the long pine table, addressing a letter to Cousin Marek. I asked if he’d mentioned his misfortune with the pee, and the knee, and Dr. Ruttle saying he can’t drive anymore. Ruby said the Slovak Relations would probably blame us for his bad luck. Uncle Stash laughed about that, then let his head fall into his hands and wouldn’t look at Ruby and me. I was confused by his weakness, not just his physical failure but his lack of ambition. He was the strongest person and the bravest man. How could he fold like that, just because he couldn’t drive a car? Ruby reached out to touch his arm and said, “Aunt Lovey cut fresh asparagus for dinner.”

  Uncle Stash looked up. I thought he might regard us, shaken by the enormity of our challenge, and realize that his own was quietly bearable. (You see that kind of thing on TV all the time.) He didn’t, though. Instead, he smiled at Ruby, tolerating her pity, and said, “You don’t understand what it means to drive car, Ruby. You don’t understand.”

  Ruby and I knew, before it was said, that we could not spend another season at the farmhouse, before the stairs, and the wet grass, and the getting from here to there became too great a burden on our crippled Uncle Stash. Aunt Lovey announced one day, shortly before our birthday, that it was time to move to the bungalow. She’d said it simply, but with such an air of finality that the idea took my breath away. Move to the bungalow.

  I knew that, one day, Ruby and I would live in the bungalow. I imagined us there, like Zuza and Velika, the spinster sisters of Chippewa Drive. I never thought Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey would live there with us. I never imagined our lives would play out this way.

  “There’ll be all kinds of benefits to being in the city. You just wait and see,” Aunt Lovey said.

  “Okay.” I hadn’t meant to sound sullen.

  “I hope you’re not going to sulk about it, Rose. Not everything is about you.”

  (An aside: If we’d known this would be our final year in the farmhouse, what would we all have done differently? Aunt Lovey might have spent more time at the long pine table. Smelled the flowers more deeply and more often. Eaten more just-picked tomatoes and corn. Trampled longer through the bergamot with Scruffy at her heels, feeling like the young mother she never was. And Ruby? That’s easy. She would have wanted more time in the fields looking for her arrowheads and bone sucking tubes. Uncle Stash would have taken more photographs. There must have been an angle or two that he’d missed. Some interpretation of the farm that was his alone. What would I have done differently? I would have listened more intently to the hum of the earth, observed more closely her rotation. Tried harder to find Larry Merkel’s bones.)

  There was no discussion of bringing Scruffy to the bungalow. Scruffy was a chaser: crows, cars, squirrels. He was a country dog and could never have survived the confinements of Chippewa Drive. So he was returned to Mrs. Merkel in an uneasy reunion, like a philandering husband skulking back to his wife. We left them on the bridge over the creek, barking and waving. Aunt Lovey was dry-eyed walking through the field on the way back to the Mercury, a composure I credited to all her years as a nurse.

  That was the last time we saw Mrs. Merkel, with or without the dog.

  Rose was feverish last night. We’re not sure why. She took some medication and the fever was gone this morning, so we don’t think it’s brain related. Probably just something she ate. She’s lost her sense of smell, and she’s been craving the weirdest things lately. She doesn’t seem to be able to tell when something’s gone bad. For the last few weeks she’s been craving caraway bread. Probably because of writing about Slovakia.

  Rose hasn’t been herself. She has been unusually talkative. I’m normally the talkative one, but I’ve been quiet lately and I don’t really like how we’ve reversed our roles. It’s just that Nick seems to be around all the time now, and they have a lot in common. I don’t have much in common with Nick. Actually, I find him sort of annoying, though I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that annoys me. Of course I’m jealous that Rose is paying so much attention to Nick. It’s not romantic attention. He’s old and
not Rose’s type. Anyway, I’m pretty sure he has a girlfriend in Windsor. The cowboy boots on Saturday nights are a dead giveaway.

  Rose and Nick talk about books. Listening to Nick, you’d think he had read every book ever written. Guess a stint in the can makes you literary. He was in the Kingston Penitentiary. I assume Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash knew why Nick was in jail. Nonna must have known. Nonna must have told them, but they never told Rose and me. Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey never met Nick. He didn’t come around to care for Nonna until after they’d passed. Nick’s boy, Ryan, has spent some time in Kingston too. Nick didn’t even raise him, but he ended up a criminal.

  Nick and Rose talk about sports too, which I prefer to the discussions about books and authors, which make them sound pretentious. At least when they discuss sports, they have passion and original opinions.

  It seems in some ways that Nick is filling the place of Uncle Stash. Maybe that’s what I don’t like about him. Maybe that’s what I’m jealous about. Because Nick can fill that place for Rose. But not for me.

  Nick and Rose talk about Nonna too. And sometimes I join in those conversations. Nonna’s on the waiting list to get into the care home near Rondeau. The place is on a cliff near the water and it looks like a mansion. Lots of windows and a view of the lake.

  Nick came over last night and the two of them went on and on about the World Series, as if they never talked about it before. I’ve never been a big baseball fan, and I wouldn’t admit it to Rose, but I liked watching the World Series this year. Especially the American League Championship between the Yankees and the BoSox. The BoSox haven’t won a World Series since the team was cursed by a fan way back in the old days when the owners sold Babe Ruth. Uncle Stash would have loved this series. He would have sat there with Rosie, drinking peevos and slamming his fist on the table. He’d have been shaking his head and just admiring the hell out of the BoSox pitcher who played with a messed-up ankle. He would have jumped out of his seat watching the Sox do what no team has ever done before, which is to come from behind when they’re down three-zip. Everybody believed the Sox were cursed. I don’t even care about baseball and I believed it. Rose believed. Uncle Stash sure believed.