Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  WHEN WE GOT BACK home I made myself a new stepping stone. I got a pink piece of paper to be like the rock back north. I wrote I can dream. I smeared it with glue and shook out silver sparkles all over it.

  Dave, he sits at the kitchen table, eating Shreddies, watching me there with the magic markers, glue, glitter, and kid scissors that I keep for Jenny.

  “You got the whole thing there,” he says. “Rock, paper, scissors.”

  I’m down on my knees, setting out all my stepping stones in a row, leaving a good space between them so they’ll come closer to reaching all the way across the room, door to stove, so I can marry Dave soon. He laughs at this rule I’ve made, that we can’t get married until my stepping stones go all the way across the room. But he gets it. He knows I want him to marry a healed-up person. And I want to be a healed-up person when I make them big promises to him.

  “Dave?” I says. “Do you ever think of moving back north?”

  Dave makes a low, wanting sound, right from his chest. I expect him to grab my ass. But it’s not that kind of wanting. He’s staring out the window. What he’s wanting is home. He wants the north, his own folks, the way they live back there. He could’ve talked all day and never told me plainer than what he said there, just with that Mmmm.

  “Group are talking about trying to move up there,” I says.

  Dave’s eyes light up for a flash. Then he says, “Well but how could we? What about Jenny? And we got our jobs here. And Josie.”

  That was always the worst of Josie. She’s what you might call a big picture person. Never hands you none of the little hows and what abouts. It was a jigsaw puzzle, that big picture of hers. Sometimes parts of it would snap together sudden, like what happened there with Sally and the waitress job and Dave’s dad. That all fit together nice. But then we’re looking at a dozen other bits and pieces of all this, wondering.

  Now, Sally might have put her hand to the plough, but she had not cleaned out her apartment. And you know Sally. She collects stuff. We started out considerate.

  By the second week of trying to help her pack, we’re giving her junk away behind her back.

  “Think she’d ever miss this?” Marg’s holding up something with hooks on it, out of the back of the hall closet.

  “What is it?” Tammy says.

  They didn’t have a clue so they give it to the mission.

  Whenever Sally raised a fuss, Marg told her she’d feel better for it after. “It’s like taking a good dump,” Marg says. “Your place here is bound right up. Go on back to them jam jars.”

  Sally has been squirreling stuff in jam jars since the world began. You can’t take and toss the whole shit load of them because the odd one’s got something in it that matters. Nobody can sort those but her.

  She turned out one of them jars and it had a toy animal in it, the kind they used to give out free in tea, years ago. It’s covered in that greasy dust you get in a kitchen. Marg’s laughing, “How many times have you moved this treasure? Look, the tail’s even broke off of it.”

  I’m about to laugh too.

  I stop. I’m looking at the thing. I says, “What is that? A cow?”

  Sally says, “Yeah, looks like it.” She can’t remember where she got it. A funny feeling that I know pretty well by now comes over me. I tell them Josie’s talked about a broken toy cow. Something to do with Meredith.

  So then we all stand there looking at the little dusty cow in the palm of Sally’s long narrow hand. Are we supposed to take it for some kind of a sign?

  “Maybe Josie would want us to bring Meredith in on everything?” That’s Tammy. Her eyes get big.

  “We could use somebody with an education,” Marg says.

  “Yeah,” I says, “maybe. But then again maybe this tea bags cow don’t mean blank all.”

  We can’t have Sally getting the idea she can’t throw nothing out. If every little stupid thing she ever kept in a jar is some omen, we’ll be standing here till we’re old ladies.

  “You’re the one told us,” Darlene says to me. She’s mad because she wants somebody to tell her if this cow is nothing or something. She don’t like the question hanging there.

  I says, “Josie never knows what nothing means, half the time, neither. She just sees things. Keeps in mind what she sees. Sometimes things add up. Okay, so we’ve saw the cow here. Let’s keep it in mind and keep on going.”

  And I thought to myself, if this means something, we’ll see it again.

  I felt like I was starting to get the hang of living from picture to picture, always knowing that the world was bigger than me, that there was lots I could figure out and lots I couldn’t.

  Marg, she had the most trouble that way. She didn’t do too good with the jar that had either a piece of junk or some big clue about Meredith in it.

  She keeps on coming back to it all afternoon. “Do you think we’re supposed to tell Meredith all about the hotel? That could be what’s meant.”

  Now, I have a lot of time for Marg. Out of all them, she grates on my nerves about the least. But I’m telling you, at one point there, I finally drop a stack of magazines on the table, so brisk the dust flies up out of them. I look at Marg and I tell her, pretty short, “We don’t know, okay?” Of course, I’m sorry right after.

  “It’s all right Rose,” Marg says. “We’re all trying to think like Josie, now we don’t have her with us. That’s just more of a stretch for some of us than what it is for others.”

  “Josie’s still with us.”

  “Not the same.”

  The next jar had a blonde curl in it, from Sally’s little girl that drowned. Marg hands her a clean tea towel. We all stand there and watch her wrap up that jar to bring with her.

  Moving can only do so much, eh. There’s stuff you’re going to carry with you.

  It done Sally good to get pried loose from some of the most useless crap she’d been holding onto. But she wouldn’t let us throw out nothing that had to do with the hotel. Dave, he tramped up and down her four flights of stairs there, carrying all them boxes of Do Not Disturb signs and “tell us how we done” forms. She had to take her pink paint and her little tin cans full of plants she’s been starting in the windowsill. Those were going to grow into flowers, for to plant on the terrace of the hotel. Never mind that we don’t have no terrace, not to mention no hotel.

  Faith, according to Sally, will move mountains.

  Dave took off his ball cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his shirt sleeve. Said it wasn’t faith that was moving this mountain. Her tablecloths and napkins was in a pile halfway to the roof. We packed them up in garbage bags and Dave found room for them all in the truck.

  Dave don’t like a lot of junk around. He’s cheerful over the throw-out pile. “A couple of moves,” he says, “are as good as a fire.”

  So anyways, we finally got Sally moved.

  Then there was the rest of us left looking at each other, waiting for a sign.

  No sign come along during Brent’s trial.

  Josie, she was still in the hospital, laying there, saying pretty near nothing. Nobody seemed to be able to tell us what was going to happen to her. We’d go and take turns sitting with her.

  We were all she had, too. Her mother was ashamed of her because she got her name in the paper, and her brother called her a bitch for bringing the cops into it.

  I said to Josie’s brother, the only time I ever talked to him, I says, “She never called the cops. It was the hospital done it. She crawled into the hall and the neighbour called the ambulance.”

  “She shouldn’t have made Brent mad at her. Then he wouldn’t have hit her.” That was his frigging opinion.

  By the time our part in the court business was over, the whole next fall and winter had been used up.

  I was burned out. My head was full of pictures nobody needs. How exac
tly he done it with the kitchen chair, clobbering her over the left side of her face and then, when she’d fell, over the back, smashing in her ribs, puncturing her right lung, crushing her kidney. Trauma to this and injury to that. That was all we’d been listening to. Fractures. Complex fractures. Impact. Damage to the elbow. Permanent impairment of quality of life. Severe concussion. Blow to the skull. Repeated, brutal blows to the back. Damage to the spine. Oh my God! What a time. I’m not even going to tell yous about it.

  We were all sick that fall and winter. We kept catching cold. We’d sit there on Tuesday nights, the ones that was left, blowing our nose, listening to Meredith try to help us. I didn’t get one stepping stone in all them months. Nothing shifted.

  And on top of that, there was poor little Jenny. She was crying every time I left her. I thought maybe that was some kind of progress. Better than staring out after me, too stunned to cry, like she always done at first. But, God, it was hard to leave her with strangers and her crying her heart out! The foster family was good people, as far as I could see. But Jenny, she kept saying that Timothy (the rabbit) wanted to come with me.

  When I think back, I think, Jesus, why did I leave her there all that winter? But, at that time, I didn’t see I had a choice. I was working. Who would look after her at my place? I went to see her as much as I could, and took her out places.

  The first nice Saturday in March, when our part in the court case was over and done with, me and Dave got Jenny and walked down to see the ducks coming through on their way north.

  This was our second spring doing that. Jenny was about to turn six. She said that looking at ducks in the spring was our tradition.

  She’s got binoculars dragging down her neck that Dave’s Uncle Pete had in the navy. They weigh a ton and hang down to her knees. She likes them though. Won’t let us carry them.

  “So now them three over there, are they greater scaup or lesser scaup?” Dave’s teaching her how to know that by the shape of the ducks’ heads, even if the light’s not good enough to see the colour.

  “Silly!” she sets him straight. “They’re mergansers.”

  “Dave’s got to get up earlier in the morning if he wants to fool you, don’t he, eh?” Dave says. He thinks she’s the smartest kid.

  She is real smart. Mind you, she likes Dave’s jokes.

  “How do you get down off a horse?” he says to her.

  She smiles up at him. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t,” he says. “You get down off a duck.”

  She wants to laugh, but he has to explain to her about eiderdown, that you get off a duck. Then she laughs.

  Dave will shoot duck in the fall. But he has a feeling for them too. That might seem funny to any of yous that ain’t familiar with hunting. I know Meredith had a hard time with it. But them guys that are outdoors a lot, right from when they were young, some of them seems to fit into things just right. Same as wolves do and other hunters.

  Anyways, I watch the two of them, Jenny with her pigtails flying in the March wind. Him and Jenny climbing down to the shore for a closer look.

  It’s the first time in ages I had any thoughts of cavemen. I think, Dave’s like man was to start with. He ain’t out of place in the world.

  I watched them ducks, the way they pop their rear ends up and disappear.

  I thought, we’re going to duck! I seen us like a bunch of little ducks, mooning and making a dive. Out of harm’s way. Diving down to the bottom of the lake, where our lost gold was laying on the sand.

  That’s the type of thoughts I was thinking—picturing more than real thinking—while I watched Dave and Jenny go down to the water. It was bright blue and boy did it sparkle! Them floating birds was all out there, hundreds of them, playing in it, bobbing like corks, paddling with their rubber feet.

  I don’t get how they can swim around in that ice water, but Dave says they don’t mind.

  “Lord love them!” I said. It just come out that way. I was thinking of how froze you’d think their feet would be.

  But of course Dave and Jenny, they die laughing. Lord love a duck! I’ll never hear the end of that.

  Sunday morning me and Jenny are making pancakes. Dave’s reading a book about some people that are crossing Africa on foot. He tells us whenever anything happens. “They’re at this swamp place, and you got to watch you don’t sink down. You got to step on the mossy knolls.”

  “What’s a knoll?” That’s me.

  Him and Jenny already know. They looked it up another time. “Near as we can make out, it’s a bump.”

  “Why don’t they say ‘bump’?” I crack an egg.

  Jenny’s got no patience with the way I am about fancy words. She loves them.

  She’s got the wooden spoon there, stirring up the batter. I tell her, “It don’t matter if you leave a few knolls in that.”

  Her and Dave laugh at me.

  I think about what talk is and how it matters. Jenny, she’s picking up a whole new way of talking. Living with them foster family people, she sounds the way they sound. That’s going to make her whole life different. It’s going to let her do things nobody’d hire me for, the way I talk.

  Me and Dave, we took Jenny back to the foster home on Sunday night.

  Dave was sitting in the front room at our place, after. Looking at the wall. He hates prying her little hands off his arm when it’s time to go. Hates to hear her cry. It’s getting worse the more she loves him. And the more he loves her.

  I says, “Are you going to see what they’re doing in Africa there, whether they step on whatever it was?”

  He says, “She don’t want me to read ahead.”

  I go sit beside him, put my arms around him.

  He says, “That shithead fooling with her!”

  “It’s not like it hurt her once,” I says, “and was over and done with. It keeps right on hurting her every day. It’ll hurt her when she’s my age!”

  Dave, he had no idea how common this was. Thought a sex offender was like some weirdo you read about in a huge big city where nobody’s got any morals. He thought this Ian prize of my sister’s was the worst criminal in the province. Couldn’t believe he’d been right here where we lived. He ought to be electrocuted and then hanged, to suit Dave, and then have a truck drove over him backwards and forwards, and buried head down in a dump.

  “Well,” I says, “but it ain’t rare. I know.”

  “What?”

  “It happens, Dave.”

  “It’s the most sickest thing I ever heard of, messing with a little wee girl! I hope I never meet that fucker when I’ve got a gun!” Then he looks at me. “What do you mean, you know?”

  I was thinking of telling him about myself. Dave, he knew we was all going to Group for to get help. He knew it was on account of troubles in the past and the present time. But that’s alls he knew. I hadn’t ever said what exact same trouble was at the root of it for every one of us. I wasn’t at that bright yellow Don’t Keep No Secrets stepping stone yet. Lost my nerve. “Well it does happen. Not infrequent,” was alls I said.

  “What? In like Los Angeles?”

  “Here, too.”

  “No, it don’t.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you telling me? There’s a lot of guys around here go doing a thing like that?”

  I know it already bust Dave’s world that Brent, who he’d grew up with, would beat a woman half to death with a kitchen chair.

  He kept shaking his head, all winter, saying, “I never thought he’d turn around and act just like his old man.”

  “That’s how it works, Dave.”

  “He never would’ve wanted to turn out like his old man.”

  I told him that our own town and every town was full of people like my sister Sandra’s boyfriend, Ian, that will take advantage of little kids to get their rocks
off. I hedged around telling him exactly how I happened to know that.

  Poor Dave. It was like I was trying to tell him the town was half things from outer space that only look like people.

  I says, “That’s the facts, Dave. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” he says. “You in the public works department?”

  “I’m not apologizing. I just feel bad telling you this shit.”

  Dave, he took care of himself his own way. “There can’t be many will beat up women and go after kids,” he said. And that’s what he kept on thinking.

  21.

  NOW HERE WE WERE in spring again. Josie’d been laid up for ten months, four in the hospital and then in the home where they moved her to. I went up to see her on a sunny Saturday afternoon late in March. Wheeled her down to the sunroom.

  Josie still don’t say much, but she’s perking up some and you can see she likes to hear about all our friends and what’s new. I tell her, “Marg got kicked out of AA.”

  Well Josie, she chuckled. First one out of her in all this time.

  “Yeah,” I says. “I guess somebody let it out that she don’t drink nothing but chocolate milk.

  “Tammy’s young Meghan got two As and three Bs. Used to be failing. Meredith says she’s got more emotional stability now.”

  Josie smiled.

  “Darlene says your dog says you’re getting better.”

  Josie smiles again. This is a good visit.

  “You’re going to have to fight to get that dog back from her now, you know. She’s like in love. Says she don’t need the internet guy, or even pills, long as she’s got your hound.”

  It’s a bit hard to keep talking to Josie when she don’t say hardly nothing herself, but she’s sitting up looking at me. Different to when she was just laying there with her eyes shut and I’d ramble on like talking to myself. I don’t know if I should talk to her about the bigger stuff now. I don’t know if anybody told her that Brent got ten years.

  I don’t know if she wants to hear the things I used to tell her before, the worries that are on my mind, like how Jenny’s doing. And my sister’s fucking wedding in two months. I don’t know if I should tell her that Dave’s cousin-in-law, Tom, has offered Dave a job.