The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  “Shh,” Uncle Stash said. “It’s all right, Rose. Girls. Shh.”

  Though I don’t believe in such things, I thought I saw something like radiant heat, or a wisp of smoke, rise up from Aunt Lovey’s body and hover over Uncle Stash before dissipating. I imagined the wisp was her soul remaining briefly to say, “I love you. Good-bye.” I think it kissed my cheek.

  I held Ruby tightly, as she clung to me, not trembling, or sad, or even afraid. We were none of the things you’d think we’d have been. We were quiet and present. We were strong. In the distance, we could hear the sound of the truck starting up in the driveway at Merkels’ cottage.

  “That’s Sherman,” Uncle Stash whispered to Aunt Lovey’s broken body. “He’s coming now. It’s okay, he’s coming.”

  Uncle Stash turned to look at Ruby and me in the backseat. His voice was quiet, unwavering. “Sherman will take care of the farm. You understand?”

  Ruby and I paused before we answered, pondering what he meant, because we knew he meant more than he’d said.

  “Yes,” Ruby and I said together.

  “Yes,” Uncle Stash said. And then again, this time to Aunt Lovey, “Yes.”

  Ruby and I watched Uncle Stash arrange Aunt Lovey’s body against the berry-stained seat. He tried several times to put her floppy head right and, when finally he did, pressed his cheek to hers. There was no space, no hint of light, between Aunt Lovey’s skull and Uncle Stash’s. I was pondering their conjoinment, when Scruffy began to bark for the first time since the accident. We heard Sherman Merkel’s truck peel over the ruts in the road and finally stop at the spot where we’d crashed.

  I have some vague memory of Ruby and me standing in the mud outside the Mercury, while Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash were still inside, Mr. Merkel using a sensible tone, trying to lure Uncle Stash away. The car didn’t look so bad—a smashed front fender, a slightly bent frame, and I understood why Mr. Merkel had been so shocked when he looked inside. I don’t think he’d expected to see anyone dead.

  In the days that followed, I found myself wishing that Mr. Merkel hadn’t pulled Uncle Stash from the wreckage of the car. In spite of their imperfect union, their different interests and language and culture, Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey shared an essential vein and should never have been separated. After the funeral Uncle Stash spoke only a little. He would not eat at all. He stared at the dark bedroom wall, waiting. If Uncle Stash had remained in Aunt Lovey’s embrace after the crash, I think he could have willed himself to death instantly. Instead, it took a week. Some people will understand that Ruby and I were relieved to find him gone one morning. How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul.

  It’s Ruby.

  I feel like I need to apologize every time I write that I haven’t written more. Or that I haven’t written longer. Or better. Do real writers do that when they write?

  This isn’t even technically my book, but if it got turned down because my part is so shittily written, then I would feel really bad.

  Still eight weeks till Christmas, but there was already a tree up in Dr. Singh’s office. A real tree that smelled like pine. Made me think of Christmas at the farm. Rose and I haven’t bothered with a Christmas tree since we moved. There’s no room to have a decent tree, and I can’t stand the little artificial tree that sits on a table that we’ve got in a closet somewhere. My opinion is, Why bother?

  Our Christmas shopping is done. We got Nick to take us out to Ridgetown last month, and we bought books for everyone on our list and signed the books with personal sayings. Parting thoughts, I guess. I was feeling a little sentimental when I was signing to Roz and Nonna, but I don’t think I wrote anything stupid or embarrassing.

  Dr. Singh was blown away by the stool thing Nick made and the way Nick adapted it for us. I swear to God I think Nick Todino blushed when Rose started telling Dr. Singh about some of the metal craft Nick has in Nonna’s garage, even though she hasn’t really seen any of the stuff he’s done over the last few weeks.

  I love Toronto. Nick drove us down Yonge Street after our appointment yesterday. The lights were pretty magical. There was a movie shooting at the Royal York Hotel on Front Street. There was a fat Santa and a bunch of kid extras, and two beautiful actors in love, and they were all dancing to some Motown song. Then snow started to fall, fake snow from this giant machine with a crane and a fan, but it looked good. If you framed it with your fingers, blocked out the lights and the camera and the bald director, the scene looked almost real. I’m sure it will be heartwarming in the movie.

  Nick parked so we could watch the movie shoot for a while, which was very nice of him because he seemed bored. Of course Rose couldn’t see what was going on, but she didn’t complain about stopping. I described what was happening, and Rose tried to sound excited, but she is not as good an actor as me. (I might have tried to go in for musical comedy, singing and acting.)

  Dr. Singh can’t do anything about Rose’s blindness, which we already knew, but Rose doesn’t blame me for asking Nick to take us to see him. I guess I was just hoping for a miracle. Maybe she was too.

  Rose reminded me of Aunt Lovey when she was trying to be optimistic. She can make out shapes, and light and dark. And all these years writing on her computer have made her fingers remember the keys. She can finish her book. That’s really important to her.

  The light has been bothering Rose. Especially lamplight. Nick replaced all our lights with soft low-watt bulbs, but it’s still too bright for Rose. The television gives her a terrible headache, so we haven’t turned it on in a while. (No hockey this year because of the lockout, but I bet Rose would have suffered the television if her Red Wings had been playing.) We don’t put the lights on at all in the evenings. Just candles. Rose says we’re living like our old-maid cousins in Slovakia. When Nick comes over in the evenings, which he insists on doing every night now to tuck us in like babies, he teases Rose about the candles and asks her if she’s trying to get romantic with him.

  Rose is still writing every day, for hours at a time, slower than she was writing when she first started losing her sight. She’s kept her failing vision a secret for a long time. From me anyway.

  We have been talking a lot about the past. And laughing a lot. Both of us are a little punchy, like when you’re really, really tired and everything seems funny. Like when we were kids and couldn’t fall asleep, and Aunt Lovey would stomp down the stairs and she’d be really seriously mad at us for still being awake, but we’d just burst out laughing the second she walked out of the room. Rose feels like the best, best friend lately. I don’t know if that’s because of her blindness or the way dying has changed us.

  Nick drove us to London last week to the archaeology museum. If you go there and think that you’re lost in suburbia, don’t worry, you’re in the right place. The museum is at the end of an eighties subdivision and it seems totally out of place. But this is the site where, five hundred years ago, a group of Native people made a home. It’s not that they chose a weird place for the museum—it’s the actual site of an ancient village. But life goes on and rises up around the past. We were the only car in the parking lot, which was great. A huge relief because this meant we were gonna be able to hang out with Errol Osler and not be stared at by school groups and have to answer a thousand questions. (Not to be bitchy, but sometimes we’re just not in the mood.)

  The outdoor part of the museum, the longhouse (my favorite part), is closed for the season, and normally that isn’t a problem because Errol Osler lets us in with the key, but when we got inside we discovered that Errol’s on a trip to China. There’s a graduate student working there, but he didn’t know where the key was. At least, he said he didn’t know where the key was. The graduate student had a name tag with the word Gideon, which is an unusual name. Nick asked the guy where he got his name. You could tell the guy was trying to be polite. At first he said he got the name from his father, who was insane, and then he laughed at his joke, which was not really a joke. He said his mother
named him after her grandfather, no big story, but he gets asked about his name a lot and it kind of drives him crazy. I understood just how he felt. But Nick looked insulted. Gideon is a guy our age, just a little taller than Rose and me, with a very slight build, like a girl.

  Later, Rose said Gideon was a whisper of a man, which I thought was a good, but sort of insulting, description. What man would want to be a whisper? I didn’t realize then that she couldn’t really see him. He was just a dark blur to her. I asked her what kind of man Nick would be if she thought Gideon, the graduate student, was a whisper. She took a breath like she was going to say something, and of course I thought she’d say Nick was a shout, then she didn’t say anything. And I waited and she went back to her computer. I think she’s having little seizures. Dr. Singh said she might.

  This graduate student knew about Rose and me because he had grown up in Glencoe, which is a small town where the train still stops, just about halfway between London and Chatham. Gideon even called us by the right names, which you’d think everyone would because I do not look like a Rose, and my sister does not look like a Ruby, but there you go. He made a remark about the stool Nick made, which I think Nick took the wrong way.

  And then Gideon really set Nick off by saying he should have angle parked. There’s a huge sign in the parking lot that says you have to angle park, but there was no one else in the lot, so Nick didn’t angle park. Nick said he was not going back out to angle park his goddamn car in a goddamned empty lot. Then he called Gideon professor, which I don’t think he liked.

  I was trying to be a peacemaker and I asked Gideon if we could go out to the longhouse, because Errol always let us out there during off-season. That’s when he said he didn’t know where the key was kept. But Nick didn’t believe him. And Nick was getting steamed, so Rose started talking to Gideon and asking him questions, and it turns out Gideon is related to a historian from Baldoon County and he’s a writer himself, and he’s writing a book about the Neutral Indians along the Thames River.

  How’s that for bingo?

  It’s not like Rose to blurt things out. I’m more the blurter. She usually has more self-control. But she blurted out that she was writing her autobiography and had been wishing she could meet another writer. So Rose and this complete stranger, whose face it turns out she couldn’t even see, started talking about writing, which you can imagine was pretty boring. I shared a look with Nick, which was funny because Nick and I just don’t share looks. But we did. And his look said he was bored too. And jealous. I know I was not reading that wrong.

  Once Gideon and Rose had talked for a while about things they had in common—like not knowing other writers—and once they had shared how hard it is to work in a vacuum, they didn’t have much left to say. So that’s when I started talking about the farm and told Gideon about the Indian camp, and about all my finds in the fields, and the collection at the Leaford Museum, which he’d heard about but hadn’t seen, because he’s been living in Nova Scotia. He has only found flints and fish-bone pins and pottery shards in his excavations. Never found an effigy pipe. Never found a bone sucking tube. He was listening to me like I was some expert, which made me want to be some expert. Maybe I’m not intellectually lazy after all. Maybe I’m just lonely for someone with similar interests. So the four of us, Nick and Rose and me and Gideon, walked around this big empty museum together, Rosie and me using the stool, with Nick and Rose whispering about something I couldn’t hear, and Gideon and me talking like a pair of university types. I felt about ten feet tall.

  After we got home and Nick was gone, Rose made some joke about our double date with Gideon and Nick and we laughed so hard, these giant snorting laughs. But like I always do, I started worrying that the aneurysm was going to burst. We kept on laughing anyway. We haven’t laughed like that in a long, long time. Since the squirrel in the kitchen, I think. It felt good. At some point, while we were still laughing, I stopped worrying that the aneurysm might burst and started hoping it would.

  I didn’t know last week that Rose couldn’t see the artifacts at the archaeology museum. She hadn’t told me she’d gone blind. I asked her point-blank if she told Nick before she told me. She says she did not, but I’m not sure I believe her. For the past few weeks Nick has been staying until after I fall asleep. Rose says they’re just talking.

  Rose was getting tired when we were walking around the museum, so Nick helped us into a room and arranged some chairs so we could sit down. Gideon went to get water from the staff room. I couldn’t see exactly, but I would have sworn I caught Nick reaching out to hold my sister’s left hand. I felt her face flush with blood. And her heart started to beat faster. She claims, because I asked her, that Nick did not hold her hand. And that there’s nothing going on. But when I think about it, in the last few weeks I’ve felt her blush more than once. And I’ve felt her heart racing when Nick is close by.

  When we were getting ready to leave, Gideon gave Rose and me each a spirit stone that he scoffed from the gift shop. Mine had the whale for courage, and Rose’s had the ram for wisdom. (Or have I got that wrong?) Then Gideon asked me, nervous, like as if he was asking for a date, if it would be possible for him to see the old farm on Rural Route One, and if I could take him on a tour and show him where I found stuff. I told him I would try to get a hold of that lady from the Historical Society to open up the Leaford Museum where my collection is, but who knows.

  Rose says I answered yes too fast about him visiting Leaford. He’s coming on the bus next week. Nick grumbled about it, but he’s gonna pick Gideon up at the bus stop in Chatham and drive us all out to the farm together.

  I’ve been thinking we’re going to spoil everyone’s Christmas if we die too close to the holidays.

  Rose would kill me if she knew I just wrote that.

  Love Poems

  I have written many poems. I thought one or two of them were good. I don’t know anymore. A long time ago I wrote a poem about a kiss. It wasn’t one of my best. Not a line from the first draft survived, hardly a word comes to mind. It’s no longer stored on my computer hard drive. I altered it. Deleted it. Then rewrote it completely, and deleted it again. Then another attempt, and another, and another, jettisoned to some unredeemable place. I thought the poem could not return, but it did, like a rash, appearing one day in my handwriting on a yellow legal pad at my wrist. I’ve returned to the poem in my mind, over and over through the years, until it’s become an enemy and something I want to conquer. I’ve suspected that my struggle with the poem is due to the fact that I’m obsessed by the act of kissing, because I’ve never been kissed myself. Maybe I’ve pressured the kiss with my reverence. Maybe a kiss is just a kiss.

  Tonight, after Ruby fell asleep, I asked Nick to kiss me.

  If you had told me a day ago, or even the very second before I blurted it out, that I was going to ask Nick Todino to kiss me, I would have said you were crazy. But there it was, out of my mouth and hanging in the air.

  “Will you kiss me, Nick?”

  I didn’t give him a chance to answer, needing first to explain that the request was for purely artistic reasons. I wanted to experience the kiss, to know the sensation of a mouth pressed to mine, so I could return to my poem and ask it for surrender. I explained to Nick that he should think of the kiss as a favor for a friend. I told him I didn’t expect, or necessarily want, a romantic, or passionate, or even sexual kiss. (You and I know this is not the whole truth.)

  Nick didn’t answer. My heart began to thud when I realized my mistake. Nick would not kiss me. How could I think he would? Now I’d ruined everything. (Of course I heard echoes of Ruby asking Frankie Foyle to kiss her and loathed drawing the parallel.)

  I reached out to take Nick’s hand, but he pulled away. He didn’t leave the room, though, which I found odd. I could feel Ruby asleep beside me and was glad she didn’t know what I’d done, how I’d humiliated myself.

  “Nick,” I ventured.

  He said nothing.

  “
Nick?”

  He paused a moment more, then stood and walked toward the door. I heard the light snap off and shivered involuntarily, sensing, tensing, in the dark. Still another pause, and then footsteps, not receding down the hallway as I’d supposed, but returning to the bed. I was afraid Nick might shout at me. Or kill me in some psychotic rage that I’d triggered with my unseemly request. (I still don’t know what he went to prison for!)

  “Nick,” I began again, but he made a shh sound and put his hand gently over mine. I didn’t say another word. I didn’t want to ruin whatever fantasy he was composing of who I’d be, if he bent to kiss me. He leaned in and I felt the rush of air as he swooped over me to look at Ruby. To make sure that my sister was not just pretending to be asleep. He moved back toward my face and hovered there for a moment. I don’t know if his eyes were open. I assume they were not.

  The kiss was not as I’d written in my poem, not at all as I thought it would be. Not starry. Not sweet. He tasted salty. Smelled of meat. Ham. And it was not the sensation of heat I felt but fire, surely, where his lips touched mine, thirty-seven times in all, on my chin, nuzzling my soft cheek, that spot near my hairline below my ear. He left burn scars where he kissed me. Raised scars I can feel today with my fingertips. Whoever Nick was imagining me to be (I know he wasn’t kissing me), I must have been beautiful and very sexy. I must have had long, silky hair and heaving breasts and a sumptuous mouth, because he desired me (whoever I was in his fantasy). That fact was undeniable.

  He kissed me, over and over, warm lips pressed to warm lips, tongues meeting, then just lips again, gentle sucking of lower lip, then licking of upper, no grinding of groins, no concentric circles, and yet, after a time of this sublime kissing, I found myself in the grip of a most surprising quake. (I read somewhere, when I was a teenager, that the French call an orgasm “le petit mort”—the little death. I asked Aunt Lovey, who I thought, being a French descendant and a nurse and a reader, would understand the metaphor on every level, but she’d bristled. “Well, French Canadians do not call it that.”) I wanted to tell Nick, because I thought he’d be pleased, but I was too afraid to break his reverie and still wanted his mouth on mine.