Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  Sandra’s screaming at me. She says, “Just because the kid is a sleaze, I’m never supposed to have a husband?”

  I finally just hang up.

  Dave comes into the kitchen. Asks me under his breath, “What’s this about marrying?”

  I tell him the latest.

  He shakes his head in wonder.

  I get it, though. I can figure this out now. Sandra blames herself for what she done with our father. Same as I used to. That’s what’s at the bottom of this. That’s how come she’s blaming Jenny. If Sandra could see that it wasn’t her own fault with Dad, she’d see that it’s not Jenny’s fault with Ian. It’s never the little kid’s fault.

  I could see now why Meredith was so keen on getting us to figure out whose fault was what.

  I made the call to Children’s Aid.

  Ian, he got arrested for breaking his restraining order, and Jenny, she got took away from Sandra.

  They said her mother was not fit. Put Jenny in a foster home.

  I was there every day they’d let me visit her.

  Jenny had the idea that she was being punished. Poor little soul! She was away from home, staying with these people she didn’t know because she was bad. That’s what she thought. I couldn’t convince her different.

  She waited for me. Little white face looking out of the window as soon as I turned on to Shourds Street.

  I used to sit in the people’s rocking chair in their front room there and rock Jenny. I told her she was not a bad girl. She was a good girl, good as gold, good as gold, good as gold.

  “Timothy Rabbit, you tell her.”

  When it was time to go, the foster mother had to pry Jenny off of my leg. She used to stand there in the window, her and Timothy. Didn’t even cry. I’d wave. Blow kisses. But she just stood there, holding her rabbit, like her mother used to.

  Tuesday, I’m about ready for therapy. Marg’s already there. She says, “How you doing, Rose?”

  “Oh, Marg,” I says.

  Tammy and Sally come in together. They sit down, quiet.

  “Rose’s upset over her niece,” Marg says. She fills them in.

  Was I ever glad of them women! Being in a group’s a good thing, eh. There’s nothing like people that know about a mixed-up life when you’re in one yourself.

  Tammy says that, someday, her kids and Jenny are all going to be playing together, safe, in the back room of our hotel. The “Lost Gold Room,” as Josie calls it. The special room in the back for people like us.

  It makes me cry, for some reason. I’ve gotten through this week without much tears. But that does it. These three sad women in the beige waiting room, sitting on plastic chairs. Their faces lit up so soft and bright, daydreaming of happy times ahead for the kids in some sweet, safe golden room.

  Darlene crawls in after the meeting starts, heaving out big sighs so Meredith has to stop the whole thing and ask her what’s wrong. Nothing particular. She tells us about the Russian guy she met on the internet.

  Hope to Christ she don’t marry him, sight unseen, and let him set up his eastern bloc organized crime headquarters in her apartment, or whatever he’s got in mind to do. I wouldn’t put it past her.

  We check in around the circle.

  Tammy’s got her own place for next month. Her and the kids are moving out of the shelter. The people there have been helping her get her disability payments so she figures she can manage. She’s used to living humble. Don’t need a car.

  We’re all holding our breath because the big thing is: can she stop herself from going back to Asshole the first time she runs into any problems? She’s so used to him telling her what to do. It’s all right while she’s at the shelter with other people to look after her. We’ll see.

  Sally says her and Josie are doing good over at the Queen’s Hotel there.

  Marg says she can’t sleep sometimes, thinking about her old man being in jail.

  Meredith tells Marg that her father, being rather elderly, and being convicted of a sex-related crime, will be held separately from the more dangerous inmates.

  Then it’s my turn, and I tell about my new job at McIlveen’s. There’s just me in the office, looking after all the stock and the appointments and the billing and the emergencies. I like it there. People are nice. The guys come in and eat lunch and kid with me. Nobody’s hitting on me.

  They can’t believe how calm I am, talking to people who the water’s pouring through their dining room ceilings onto their china cabinets or there’s fire shooting out of their hot water heaters.

  Me, I’m right at home in them situations. You could say I’ve been living in fire and flood my whole life. So I’m on the phone there, and I tell people to go get the baking soda or the bucket, talk them through shutting off the power or the tap. I locate our nearest guys and get them over to the address. There’s no word you can say to me that ain’t been said before, and I don’t panic.

  They tell me I’m doing good.

  “This is all very encouraging,” Meredith says. But she gives me a look. She seen that I’d been bawling in the waiting room. Likely figures Dave has finally heaved a hammer through my window.

  I tell what I was crying about.

  Meredith says that it’s very common for women such as my sister who have been sexually abused, themselves, as children, to allow their own children to be abused.

  “What? Why?”

  You’d think we’d be the ones would know better.

  “It’s to do with boundaries,” Meredith says. (What Dave would call “goddamn limits.”)

  I was pleased I could follow her. I’m getting better at translating shrink talk into English.

  Sandra needed to work on her boundaries (which in regular English means set some goddamn limits on what kind of horse shit she’ll put up with).

  Meredith says that the issue is rooted in self-worth problems.

  What ain’t?

  By this point in Group, most of them had said something about how their self-worth problems got started. Sally said about her Mr. Mullen. Marg had told about her father in the laundry room. Josie had told about her brother, who looked like the underpants ad guy, when he was twenty and she was five. Tammy had said about the restaurant man that bought see-through shirts for her and her little sister. I hadn’t said nothing yet.

  Nobody was pushing me, though. In Group, you take a step to the next stepping stone when you’re good and ready.

  Marg got the Question of the Week. It’s getting so I could make up them questions myself. Marg could too.

  Her brains are going, my father’s in jail because that’s where he needs to be.

  But her shoulders are still beside her ears.

  We carry our problems in our bodies, they tell us at Group. We got to wake up to what our body’s telling us, help it let go of troubles. That’s why Frances sometimes will talk right to your body. She’ll ask your toes to relax. Then the balls of your feet. Then the arches. And she works her way right up you. Did yous try that yet? Where are you sitting reading this? Are you hanging off the couch sideways, hurting your back? Is your shoulders tight? Did yous need a stretch break? How’s the old butt doing?

  I just wish Jenny wasn’t going to have to go through all this, step by step.

  Walking home, that night in March, with the wind a bit warm and smelling like good, black earth, I thought about her all the way. I was going to help her. She would not have to wait till she was my age to take the first step. I’d see she got healed up long before she ever had a kid of her own.

  I says to Dave when I got home, I says, “Me and Jenny are going to stop that stinking horse shit getting passed down through time.”

  I told him my plans. I was never going to quit now. I was going to find out every single bit of information anybody needs to know on this topic. I was going to do every frigging step and s
heet and exercise. I was going to get so patched up and sewed back together I’d be like a new quilt. I was bound and bent that Jenny was going to, too.

  And you know what Dave says to that?

  He says, “Rose,” he says, “I love you.”

  13.

  JOSIE COME IN THAT WEEK to see me at my new work. It’s just around the corner from Main, but it’s the last business on the street. All houses as you go on south from here. I got a big window looking out on the driveway, where the guys are coming and going with their vans. There’s a door next to the window, where they come in with their paperwork for me, and a friendly word. There’s a window in the south wall too that looks out at the neighbours’ yard. They got a bird feeder and some trees. Makes it nice, eh. The old lady there tells me the names of the different birds. I’m starting to learn them. I talk to her over the fence, coming and going. On the north side is the door going into the shop. They can back the vans right in there. Where I work is a plain room, concrete floor. Nothing fancy. But I like it. It’s roomy. Roof’s high. There’s a good amount of daylight. You don’t feel boxed in, like what I always done in my little corner at the old job.

  You just take abuse out of a situation, eh. And it’s a different world.

  Josie takes a look around. Says it’s just like the plumbing and heating place in the town.

  “What town?”

  The daydream town. Okay.

  I show her around the shop. We got inventory in here, parts and supplies, on shelves. Rolls of different hose, copper pipe, eight grades of black pipe, welding rods. There’s a smell of new things. I’m in charge of making sure we keep everything in stock. There’s Fred in there getting ready to go out on a call. He’s mainly going to check a furnace, but I remind him to take sump pump hose because the people said theirs might’ve sprung a pinhole leak. They’re not sure if it’s that or their basement’s leaking. They’re in one of them old houses with a cellar like Count Dracula’s, by the sounds of it. That’s another thing I know all about, from my “background.” Cellars.

  Fred, the plumber there, he grins at Josie. Tells her he don’t know how the place ever run before they had Rose.

  It’s lunchtime. Me and Josie go to the Times Square Restaurant. Josie tells me there really is a plumbing and heating place in the picture.

  I says, “Quit it.”

  But there’s Josie digging in her purse, and I’m looking at the light orange slice of tomato laying beside my grilled cheese. I’m thinking, please, I don’t want to see a plumbing and heating place show up by magic in that picture, where there never was one before.

  Of course there it is. Josie puts her finger on it. It’s one of the store fronts if you look careful.

  I says, “Why don’t I just sit here and you tell me everything that’s going to happen, the rest of our life! Just read it off your magic picture there. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  Josie says, “Why are you mad?”

  I says, “Because, if you’re some kind of a frigging fortune teller and you’ve got the whole future right handy there in your macramé purse, why don’t you never tell me what’s going to happen next? I worked for fucking Ken for two and a half years! I never knew there was a plumbing and heating place in this town where I could go to. Or in that town. Or wherever the hell we are.”

  Josie, she just sits and looks at her burger. She’s sorry I’m pissed off, but there’s nothing she could’ve did different.

  She says, “I don’t usually know what a picture means until after, when I see it real. It wouldn’t have did no good if I had of said to you, ‘Beware of bratwurst.’ I didn’t know what the big sausage was till you told me about the boss.”

  I said, “Ken wasn’t your fault.”

  She said, “I wish you’d have told me what you were going through.”

  “Too ashamed.”

  Josie nods. She knows what that’s about. She sits and nibbles at a couple of crumbs on the edge of her food.

  “Darlene’s got that guy coming from overseas, eh?”

  “Did she tell you that or did you dream it?”

  Josie’s not sure.

  I says, “You still off the booze?”

  Yup. She’s going out to AA. Her and Marg.

  “Marg? I never knew Marg drank.”

  “She don’t,” Josie says, “but she likes to go to the meetings. Loves them little chocolate doughnut centres they get in.”

  “Marg goes to AA for the doughnut holes?”

  “Yeah, well, more for the company. She says it’s more interesting conversation than what you hear at the Lions’ bingo.”

  “Marg’s got nothing to put in.”

  “She says she drinks. How are they going to know different?”

  I had to laugh.

  Josie says, “It’s fun for her. She makes stuff up just to try how it sounds.”

  “You get everybody making stuff up!”

  I had rice pudding and a tea. Then I had to go back to work, see whose toilet was shooting sludge now.

  Josie, she didn’t have to go in to work at the Queen’s till four o’clock so she walked me back to work. We’d stepped out to cross the corner before she finally told me. “I’ve took Brent back.”

  I stopped in the road to look at her. I point my finger at her. “Is he treating you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she says. But it don’t sound so convincing.

  “Is he treating you good in this here real town where we’re living and breathing? Or is that in some made-up happy town that’s all in your head?”

  We’re still standing on the yellow line. Cars sailing by on either side.

  “Josie!” I’m fed up. She won’t answer me.

  I grab her arm, and we run for the sidewalk. It’s time I was back. “Give me a straight answer! Is that man treating you good or is he not?”

  No answer.

  “Are you nuts? What did you take him back for, when you had him all nice and kicked out?”

  “He come around whining so pitiful.”

  “There should be a dog catcher!”

  Josie half smiled. “Shut him in the mud room? Give him a dish of water?”

  There’s Darlene the next Tuesday telling us about Ivan who’s coming over. Ivan, he’s “handsome for looking,” according to himself on the email. He “admires womans.” He “has much exciting” to meet Darlene. Wants to come over here and get married.

  Of course Meredith, she’s sweating, trying to get Darlene to think about how good of an idea it’s likely to turn out, if you go and marry some guy you never seen in your life, that you don’t know nothing about.

  Darlene gets this shy smile like a six-year-old. Rolls her eyes at Meredith. Says she’s very happy. She’s in love. Her life is going to be happy now. Why don’t Meredith yell at her?

  Darlene’s never filled out one sheet. Don’t know shit about her own life. She’s where the people in Dave’s adventure books are normally at. Out of food, out of fuel, one foot hanging out in space over a hole in the mountain. Wall of fire on one side, flood on the other. Only difference is the people in Dave’s books don’t seem to run out of brains.

  I used to be just as bad. All them guys I went through? I was generally waltzing over the edge of some cliff.

  Your life changes when you take a look at it. You feel yourself smarten up. It quits seeming like just some bad luck used to make you act like a frigging idiot.

  See, when I think about it careful, I know I never used judgement about no man before Dave. When I used to get mixed up with one after another, I was like what Sandra’s like. And Darlene. I never asked myself one sensible question such as “How does this guy treat people (including me)?”

  I was off somewheres else, desperate for anything that could numb my pain and—in a dim light—look like love.

  Ev
erybody yaps about following your heart. I’m here to say: use your brains, too.

  Tammy, she moved into her own place. Sally went and measured for to make drapes. She can see a nice soft shade of salmon for the front room, Sally says, and she’s going to help Tammy sew café style curtains, in maybe a raspberry colour, for the kitchen.

  I says, “Look out, Tammy! Sal’s trying to make the whole place pink on you.”

  Meredith walks in. Asks Tammy what her own favourite colour is.

  Tammy, she looks blank. So that’s her Question for the Week: “What’s your favourite colour, Tammy?”

  Back before Christmas, I would’ve turned up my nose at that question. Hasn’t Tammy got more important things to figure out? But now I see Meredith’s trying to get her to listen to herself. For a change. You can bet Asshole don’t care what Tammy’s favourite colour is! If she can start listening to herself about what colour in a drape looks good to her, there’s a hope she can start listening to herself about what else feels good to her. And what don’t.

  I can see that that’s what helped me out where Dave’s concerned. I started noticing them little things like when he asked me my opinion, asked permission to look at my paper, asked what I wanted to do. It felt so nice.

  Me taking notice of them things, taking notice how I felt about them, that was all new. That was how I started to have any judgement.

  Darlene says her and Ivan just fixed it up today.

  “Josie told me last week,” I says.

  “Did she say if it’s going to turn out lucky?”

  I lost my temper. “Use your frigging brain! How lucky does it look like it’s going to turn out?”

  Later, I got what Dave calls a “stairs idea” (what you think of, on your way downstairs, that you should’ve said). I should’ve said Josie seen a Russian wolfhound eating her alive. Fangs dripping blood.

  The exercise that night was about what Meredith calls Coping Mechanisms. What that is, is it’s whatever you done to survive your traumas. And whatever you done ever since, to keep from feeling the pain of your traumas.