Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  18.

  MEETING WITH EVERYBODY Tuesday sure was not the way I’d been planning on! That holiday Monday (only the day before) seemed like a hundred years ago, me and Dave driving home, singing. Me all happy, wound up to tell the girls about the town!

  If you’d’ve told me then that it would be months before I ever bothered to say a word to them about it!

  It was way in the last hours of night when we got home from the hospital. Thought about calling Marg or Sally. Couldn’t see waking them up. Josie couldn’t talk to them anyways.

  Dave says, “What about her family? Where the hell are they?”

  I had no idea.

  Dave said he had a thought on where to look for Brent. He went out.

  Josie had a mother living someplace and that frigging brother of hers that’s a lot older. The cops was trying to trace them down too, to notify them.

  Marg and Sally were in my kitchen by eight o’clock in the morning. It looked like Josie’s family was us. I called in to work. Told them I couldn’t come in, I had an emergency.

  The call from Dave come around eight-thirty. “I found Brent,” he says. “I’m going to tell the cops.”

  I says, “Good.”

  “Only, Rosie, when I do, it could go bad for me.”

  I didn’t think I could pump any more adrenaline than what I was already. New spurt shot through me like whiskey.

  “Why would it go bad for you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

  “Well, Jesus…!”

  “I love you, Rosie.”

  “Dave! What’s going on? Why will it go bad for you?”

  He wouldn’t say.

  I come all over frozen calm. Head crystal clear. I says, “Look,” I says, “Brent can’t do nothing more to her right now so there’s no tearing hurry to turn him in. Why don’t you come home here and tell me what is going on?”

  Took me a while to convince him.

  But he did come home. And then, of all times, finally, in the mud room, we had our talk about what the hell, exactly, Dave had to do with drug dealing. The girls were in the kitchen. Sally was working on the coffee and bacon. Breakfast smells were mixing with the coats and shoes smells in the mud room. We kept the door into the kitchen shut and talked low. Dave told me he’d got mixed up in trafficking—just weed—three years ago, when his mother was dying.

  He was getting his act together again now, he said. He was making enough in construction now. He hadn’t never been into it heavy. Hardly used at all. Just dealt. He come down here to this area, he said, when his mother was so sick. He’d got the idea that, if he could make some money, he could take her to the States for a new treatment he heard of. And that’s when he run into his old friend Brent again. And Brent had got him in on some stuff that he never should’ve, trying for the quick buck.

  Brent was always into it way more than what Dave was, and Brent was hiding now in a sugar shack way out behind a wood lot off of County Road 48.

  “So?”

  Well, so, on the way to this sugar shack where they sometimes hung out, there was a clearing in the woods and that was where the weed was growing. The young plants was just set out.

  “Maybe Brent won’t tell about you.”

  Dave didn’t have much hope on that.

  “Don’t tell them while he’s there. Wait till he’s somewheres else,” I says. I sound like I’m at work, talking to somebody with their furnace shooting fire.

  Dave’s in a state because he never done nothing about Brent before. He’s all in a hurry to run to the police. “I knew he was hitting her,” he says, “and I never done nothing! I’ve been sitting on my ass.”

  “Dave, you’ve been trying to talk him into going for help. What else could you have did?”

  “This never would’ve happened if I’d have only just blew the whistle on him a long time ago. We knew what he was doing to Josie lots of times before. I should have did something and this never would’ve happened!”

  “Dave, listen to me. What Brent went and done is not your fault. Josie would’ve had to charge him. Not you. I asked Frances at Group. That’s what she said. There wasn’t nothing you and me could do if Josie wouldn’t back us up. And she wouldn’t. I tried to get her to charge him lots of times. So did Frances and Meredith. She would not. The shrinks have some word for it.”

  “He’s been my friend so long, eh, and I always felt sorry for him. I felt too sorry for him, every time I thought about getting him in trouble over Josie. He’s had so much trouble. But now look. If I’d have did something sooner, none of this would’ve happened. I knew it and I done nothing.”

  “Would you listen to me? There was nothing you could’ve did!” I leaned my back against the kitchen doorframe. I’m with my face in my hands, trying to think.

  “I got to turn Brent in before he takes off. He needs locking up before he bashes the next woman.”

  “He’s not going to bash nobody else for a few minutes. We got to think this through.”

  “Did you see the way her arm was? It’s all my fault.”

  “Jesus Christ! Will you stop that! It’s not your fault! It’s not!”

  “I’m going to call now.”

  I can’t think no more. I says, “Please, can we just talk it over with Marg and Sally?”

  He don’t want to talk to them about none of it.

  I says, “Dave,” I says, “I can’t think. You can’t think. We need them to help us think. We got to think. They’re my only family I got. They’re my Intentional Sisters. Come and talk to them! Please! Come and talk to them.”

  He finally caved and we went into the kitchen.

  Sally sits us down at the table and tries to make us eat breakfast.

  Marg listens careful and comes up with the plan. “What we’ve got to do, we’ve got to go out there and clean that place up, and then you can call the cops,” she says. Marg got Dave calmed down a bit, talking to him in that even voice of hers that I love so dear in times of trouble.

  He was to go out to the patch. He wasn’t to even talk to Brent unless he come out of the shack. And if he did have to talk, say nothing about Josie. Not let on he knew nothing about that. He was just to tell Brent that he thought the growing was suspected. They had to rip out all the plants right away. We’d come with him and help.

  No. Dave didn’t want us around there.

  Okay. The rest of us were to drive out to a place Dave told us to meet him.

  So there’s Dave, no sleep, heading out to race the clock. Strip that place clean before Brent went anywhere and then get out of there and call.

  “But I’ll still be in shit because there’s this other guy in on it,” Dave says.

  We look at him.

  “Bad bugger.”

  So then it’s Marg figures out how to sweeten the bad bugger. She says for Dave to not just rip out the plants. He’s to dig them up, pack them in boxes and we’ll put them somewheres the guy can get them back from.

  “That’d take too long.”

  “We’ll help you.”

  He didn’t like it, but we didn’t see a choice.

  “And then,” Marg says, she says, “you tell the bad bugger where the stuff is hid like you’re the hero savin’ the day, and you tell him you seen a helicopter flying over that place yesterday and you risked your skin to go rescue all the plants and they’re all his now since this is making you nervous. ‘Nice knowing you,’ you says to him, and you get the frig away from him and hope for the best. See, and this way it’ll make sense to him when the cops show up today and you won’t get blamed for that neither.”

  We collected three shovels from two of our places.

  Marg shoves her foot down. “Giddy up,” she says. Old Chev takes off. Funny kind of a serious smile on Marg. She likes it when she’s got a plan.


  We took off out of town, found the corner Dave said, and were there waiting for him when he come roaring up, truck full of boxes from the LCBO. We let another truck go by and then, when nobody was around, followed Dave up a mud lane.

  We went at her. Step on the shovel with your foot, pull the little plant out easy with some dirt, lay it in a box, hop to the next one, do it again quick, drag the box along.

  “Where’s the shack?”

  “Over there.”

  “What’s he going to do if he sees us?”

  Marg can’t dig but she climbed up into the truck bed somehow, fat as she is, and we handed her the full boxes.

  That’s good soil, back in them hills, nice deep black earth. It ain’t hard to dig.

  A car come along, out on the county road. You don’t usually notice what a noise and commotion one car makes. But out there you sure do. You can hear it a long ways off. Gets louder and louder. Coming towards us. What if it’s the farmer who owns this woods? What are we going to do? We run into the woods except poor Marg, who only managed to heave down off of the truck and hide behind it. Awful lame hiding place.

  The car, out on the county road there, makes this burst and swish and pops from coming to going. Then you hear it a long time after, rumbling away. I stood up. Grabbed the shovel. Adrenaline just a-buzzing. Run back to the patch. I was digging like in fast forward.

  When we had it all dug out, we threw leaves and branches around, trying to make the patch look a bit more like nothing hadn’t went on around there.

  So Dave’s truck is full of that shit and he tells us to go get in Marg’s car and go home.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Call the cops and then I’ll take this stuff to a place. Meet you back home.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  But there was no way he’ll let me. So I go back to our apartment with Marg. I’m leaning over biting my knuckles, prayin’ worse than Sally.

  Takes four hundred years before Dave finally walks in. The other girls are asking him questions. I can’t talk. I’m trying to read the news off his face.

  He says he seen Ryan (the bad bugger). “I told him like you said, Marg.”

  “Did he go for it?”

  “Wanted to know why I was stupid enough to screw around out there if the cops were on their way. I let on I never thought of that and just wanted to save the plants. He thinks I’m retarded but I guess he believes me. Told him I didn’t want nothing more to do with it.”

  I’m like with relief pouring over me, but Dave sits down miserable. He don’t care nothing about all that commotion with the pot or whether the guy believes him or don’t.

  He says, “What if Josie don’t make it?”

  I can think but not feel. I says, “Well, if Brent’s went and murdered somebody…”

  Dave says, “You should’ve saw the way he was sitting there in a corner of that shack, leaned against the wall, looking at nothing. Didn’t care what I was doing out there today. He don’t care about nothing. He’s just sick sorry about what he done.”

  I could see Dave was thinking of Brent as a kid who used to whoop, swinging on the tires that Al put up for them, back on Lost Gold Lake. I knew it had took everything Dave had to call the cops on that poor kid, even though he’d grew up so rotten.

  “Do you know what that old jackass used to do to him?”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  But Dave has to say it anyways. He tells me exactly what Brent’s father used to do to the poor kid when him and Dave were boys back north. He come over to Dave’s just covered in—

  I says, “Dave! I’m sorry. I can’t listen to that! It’s too close to home.” Dave asked me exactly what I meant by that.

  After the others had went home, I finally told Dave how I got the scars I have. The boiler, eh, it got real hot. I told him my father held me against it. I didn’t say what for. Hadn’t never told Dave yet about the sex abuse part of the story.

  Josie come through her operation. But she wasn’t right. Just lay there all the time, saying hardly a word.

  Sally started sleeping all day. No new tablecloths.

  Marg was worried over how low Sally was. She went by the Queen’s Hotel one day and seen a blue box full of never-been-used housekeeping time sheets out for the garbage. They were even pink.

  Marg trots in and says, “Sally, you’re falling down on the job. Give me a bag till I go get them time sheets they’re throwing out.”

  Sally says, “Ah, Marg, who are we kidding?”

  Marg, she fished them out anyhow.

  Marg’s funny. Said she didn’t believe in this hotel nonsense. But she’d do a thing like that.

  I’m sitting by Josie’s bed the next week. Josie hasn’t said a word for days. All of a sudden Josie says to me, “Act hopeful.”

  I jump, like as if her dog said something.

  Marg and Tammy, they had somewheres to go on their walk every day now. The hospital.

  We got in trouble, before, over keeping Josie’s dog at our place. Darlene was the only one allowed pets in her building, so she was looking after Josie’s dog. (Her cat didn’t think too much of that.) Darlene tied up Josie’s dog to the bike rack, where Josie could see him and then went and wound up Josie’s bed so she could look at him.

  That dog give us some hope for Darlene because it made it so she had to go out every day. Like it or not. And get home every night too. And feel something.

  Summer come along. It got hot. Josie was just laying there. I used to go over after work and talk to her. What didn’t I tell Josie that summer, sitting by her bed? I told her all about my little Jenny, every cute thing she said, how she called the fireflies “star people” and claimed to know that they were visiting our world to get perfume from the milkweed plants in the ditch.

  I told her when Dave found a frog jelly mould. Him and Jenny made a lemon-lime frog and sat there poking it to make it quiver. Jenny says it’s the opposite of a poison dart frog that he’s been reading to her about in an Amazon adventure story. It’s an “antidote dart frog,” she says. It will heal you instead of killing you. It’s going to heal up Aunt Josie.

  Josie lay and listened to that, and her poor skin-and-bones face would get the softest smile.

  One day she said, “There’s hope.”

  I says, “Do you feel better?”

  But not another word out of her.

  Josie was weird enough before she got hurt so bad. But after that, Josie was something else. She’d lay there and lay there and never say a word. Then she’d come out with this stuff like, “There’s hope.” I wondered what hope she was thinking of. Maybe us helping Jenny.

  Josie lay right on the edges between life and death, looking down the long path of the times to come, where the kids will walk when we’re gone. And I’d sit with her by the hour and look at the slow summer dusk. I was growing, sitting there, just as sure as, out in the farm country, the corn was growing.

  The rest still didn’t even know I’d found Josie’s town. But to Josie, I never shut up about it. Told her how the stone in her town sparkles in the sun like it’s full of diamonds. Told her about running into the man who makes the furniture which is the right style for our hotel. I told her it was all bright and pretty in the picture-town in springtime, with the plants coming on. Told her about the fountain getting turned on and me making my three wishes. I talked to Josie like I was wandering through a dream, while she was laying there at the edge.

  I could hear myself starting to talk about plans. Told her I was thinking of talking to Al, see what he thought about the chances of a hotel up there. And Jan’s husband Tom, who runs a construction company. I told her that me and Sally were going to go up there one of these days and check things out, make a first step.

  “You got to get better,” I says to Josie one day, not expe
cting no answer. “You get better and we’ll take you to see your town. Oh, Josie, are you ever going to get better?”

  She opens mad eyes. “I’m not no fortune teller!”

  I had to laugh and give her a kiss.

  It was so great to see she had that much spunk back. I said to her what she’d been saying to me. I said, “There’s hope!”

  The cops called each one of us friends of Josie’s, looking for information on Brent. Tammy, she calls me up in a panic. “The police called me!”

  “They called here too.”

  Tammy says, “I hung up.”

  “You did?” I says. “What for?”

  “They asked me a lot of questions. I didn’t know what to tell them. I just hung up and called you.”

  I tried to tell her it was all right. Just answer whatever she knew. “And whatever you don’t know, just say you don’t know.”

  But Tammy said she’d better let her husband do the talking.

  “Your husband?” I says, “Tammy! You haven’t got him back?!”

  Oh no. But she was thinking she’d better, if the cops were going to be calling.

  I got hold of Marg and we went steaming over to Tammy’s and sat her down.

  Marg says, “Now look here,” she says, “you talked to the bank, right? You talked to the lawyer. Now you can talk to the police. You can do it,” Marg says, calm. “They just want to hear whatever you know about Josie’s Brent.”

  “I don’t know nothing about him!”

  “So then that’s what you tell them.”

  It took us till seven o’clock at night to get her to plug her phone back in. Then we sat there with her till it rang. And we sat there while she said her three word answers to the cops.

  When it was all done, Tammy was weak in the knees. But she hadn’t took back Asshole. So we toasted her for a brave woman. Clinked our plastic Diet Sprite bottles.

  Tuesday, she was still thinking about it, though. It was painful to sit there and listen to her.

  Meredith kept on at her, steady. “Tammy, do you think that it would be good for your children to take them back into an abusive situation?”