I turned around in a farm lane and drove right back there to her. I shut the door of her room behind me. “Okay, you know, don’t you?”
She looks at me, steady.
“What do you want me to do?”
She keeps looking at me.
“Damn it, Josie! I can’t help it!”
She keeps looking at me.
“It’s the way I am. It’s my weak spot.”
She don’t say nothing.
“Good luck is wasted on me!”
Josie wants to show me the tulips picture again, holding it out to me, looking at me with them eyes.
I’m ashamed to say that I took a swipe at the picture. Knocked it onto the floor and steamed out.
Dave’s asleep that Friday night. I’m laying there sweating for Jack and worrying over treating Josie like that. In the dark, I can see yellow tulips.
Last time she showed me them bright flowers, Josie was trying to get me to be honest with Dave about Dirk. No secrets. That’s what she was up to again now. It was her little code. She was pushing me to tell somebody.
Well I tossed and turned. I fretted and fumed. I got all tangled up trying to think my way around it. Couldn’t think straight.
Then I stopped. I didn’t have to think! Just use the plan.
Now, see, this is important. Plan ahead for what you’re going to do the next time your spiral stairs loops back around. No use saying they won’t. You need a plan. When you’re on the sane side of your circle, whatever it may be, you got to make up a plan for what you’re going to do next time you’re insane.
I had the plan me and Dave had worked out when we got back together. You get tempted, you tell somebody.
Last thing I wanted to do, mind you, was tell anybody. So frigging embarrassing. I would’ve rather been shown on TV picking my nose.
Jack was still at the dropping by stage. Paying compliments. And I was still in the “cream your drawers” stage. So private. Nobody’s business.
But I got up the next morning. Didn’t pay no attention to my own feeling. Didn’t pay no attention to the worming-out thoughts in my brain. Just got dressed, drove into town, marched right straight up to Marg’s, and banged on the door.
I’m sitting at her kitchen table fooling with a piece of paper, folding it and unfolding it.
“I met Jan up street,” Marg says. “She tells me Jenny seems to be coming along pretty good.”
“Yeah,” I says. “She’s doing awesome.”
There was this big long silence. I’m making a fan out of the piece of paper.
Marg says, “I got a new bedspread. Tammy don’t like the pattern. Puts her in mind of fried eggs.”
I’m not getting up to go look at the eggs bedspread. I’m sitting there flattening out my fan, folding it a different way.
Marg says, “Rose,” she says, “what’s the matter?”
God, I hated to say! Me and some guy again. Marg won’t believe I am this bad, this stupid! Maybe I won’t tell her. Maybe I can get through it on my own. Nothing’s really happened yet. Maybe I’ll just be on my way.
No! No thinking! I’m not fit for thinking right now. Just do the plan like I promised I’d do if I ever got into this type of a mess again.
I looked at my foot in a brown sock, rubbed it around on Marg’s floor. And I come out with the facts.
Then I hear the famous, calm, Marg emergency voice, saying, “You’re doing good to tell.”
Never said I was bad or stupid. Just helped me plan out the next move.
Next time Jack come bumping up our lane in his truck, I was to just nod to him through the window. Show him I was on the phone. Point for him to go ahead and get whatever he needed out of the shed. Let on I was real busy with the phone.
That’s what I done, too. I was on the phone because I dialled it the minute that black truck turned into our lane. What I was talking about was him. Telling Marg, one minute at a time, just what I was going through.
“Okay, here he comes. I can hear his truck in the lane.”
Marg was saying, “Good girl!”
This is what we’d fixed up to do. She was my help line.
“He’s parking by the pump. Oh, Marg, I’m weak in the knees. I’m weak, Marg! He’s waving to me….”
“Give him a little wave back, same as you would anybody,” Marg says. “You’re not so weak, Rose. Think back on all the strong things you’ve did. Tell me about them.”
“I found a decent job and quit Ken?”
“Yes, you did.”
He’s hanging around waiting for me to finish. I tell Marg when he signals to me to come outside.
“I can’t do this, Marg. I got to go. Bye.”
“Wait. Hold on. Keep talking to me. Tell me more strong things you done.”
“I want to go out.”
“Tell me what you done when you caught that guy with Jenny.”
“Got the police.”
“And you kept him there talking until they come. I always think how strong you were, Rose, to sit there talking with him till the cops come. Now, you’re in that good house, that you’re fixing up there with Dave. That’s your home. Right? That’s what you really want. Your married home with your good man. Your little girl. If you’re strong enough to talk about cheese and pickles with a child molester to keep him busy till the police come, you’re strong enough to stand there now and talk to me and let this Jack be a mistake that you don’t make.”
I stood there listening to Marg. And looking at Jack.
When I didn’t go out, he come to the door.
“He’s knocking! I can’t stand here and leave him knocking!”
Marg tells me that what they had her do, in the hospital, when she was a little girl that couldn’t breathe right, was they had her count her breaths.
“I can hear this one nice nurse yet. ‘You’re going to keep breathing, Margie. Count your breaths, Margie. One, two, three, four.’”
So Marg gets me counting the knocks on my door, thinking of her in her favourite place when she was little, where they didn’t beat her or screw her but stood by her through her panic times and kept her breathing.
That’s how we got the Marg we love today, standing by, so kind and calm, in panic times.
“Eighteen,” I says to her when he’s finally pissed off and marching to his truck.
Marg, she babysat me like that every step of the way. When I wanted to go looking for him, I went to Marg’s instead. Whenever he come by, I got on the phone to Marg.
I moaned to her that I was just as hopeless a idiot as ever and nothing hadn’t did me no good or taught me nothing.
But Marg says to me, “Nope.” She says, “You’ve broke the abuse pattern now. You’re not keeping things a secret, the way you had to do with your dad and you always done, from then on, with every Tom’s Harry Dick.”
It was true. The pattern was broke. Just the fact of not keeping it secret made enough of a crack in it, let enough steam out, so that, in a while, I cooled down!
Jack buggered off. Nothing had happened. It was all over.
Nice bright Saturday morning around that time, I dropped off Jenny at a little friend’s house for a birthday party. Driving back home, new snow glowing white on all the trees, I was singing in the car. So proud I hadn’t caved. So glad and relieved and grateful and proud! Got home. Headed for my special drawer. Something had sure shifted. Figured I’d make a new stepping stone. Sun fell on the piece of Tammy’s blue curtain material that was in there with my stepping stones. Picked it up and run it through my fingers. Put it in my pocket.
I’m thinking, thank God! I’m better now! I done it! I beat that old pattern! Thank God! I got nothing to be ashamed of this time. Haven’t screwed up! I was trying to figure out what the new stepping stone would be. Couldn’t sit still. Went dancing back outdoors. Drove bac
k out the driveway. It’s so nice, eh, when there’s a fresh snow and the sun comes out. Didn’t know where I was going. Turned left on the township road. Me all by myself there, rolling along, singing. Even singing, I still felt bottled up. More wanted out of me. I’m thinking, oh thank God I didn’t screw up! Thank God!
Wound up at the church. Reverend Watters come out of his office. Hadn’t saw him since the wedding. I asked if I could go upstairs and thank God.
Ministers must be like Pam at the shelter, eh, trained not to faint. He just smiled and said, “By all means.”
I open the door to the holy room there and peek in. With the lake froze, the colours from the windows are laying still, pools of coloured light on the floor. Red, blue, green, gold. I creep in, creaking the door. It shuts behind me with a soft kind of a thud. Nice old smell in there, wood and hymn books.
I was busting to talk to Whatever it is that brings us around and around, gives us another new day and another new day. You screw up fifty times, and yet there it comes, sure as morning: chance number fifty-one.
Sally calls it grace. Me, I wouldn’t know what to call it.
Alls I know is my heart was straining at the seams. All the times I’d screwed up! How weak and shameful and stunned I had acted! And yet I had been gave another chance! And this time I’d won! I’d did it!
I was getting choked up. Put my hand in my pocket for a tissue and come across my swatch of violet blue. Took it out. Unfolded it.
Squatted down and lay it in a pool of yellow gold light. Smoothed it out on the red carpet. Boy, in that light, did that deep blue ever glow rich! New stepping stone. Never wrote nothing on it, though. I don’t know the word for what that is.
But I know the feeling. I stood on the new stone in the patch of gold with my feet lit up. Felt like my full heart busted open with like a squirt of relief and what gushed out was some church thing of Sally’s. I said to the quietness in that place, I said, “Mercy is new every morning!”
39.
NEVER TOLD SALLY I done that. She’d have been all over me, trying to pry me away from my pancakes on Sundays and win me for the Lord. Whatever may be between me and Whatever, I figure it’s none of Sally’s business.
She’s got enough to do, working on her boyfriend, Tao. She’s trying to win him for the Lord. He just smiles at her so you couldn’t guess what he’s thinking, and tells her he’s a Taoist, like forty generations of his folks before him.
Well, we were on track for to build the hotel. We were up a couple of million bucks. And I had done good with a temptation instead of doing bad. Which one of them things do you think I was happiest for?
Let’s put it this way. If I hadn’t of managed to control my stupid self, none of the rest of what was going on wouldn’t have did me much good, would it?
Josie smiled at me when I come in to see her. Give me the old high beams. I took the wrapper off a pot of yellow tulips I brought her, set it in her windowsill.
The only remark she said that day, she said, “The hardware man.”
I says, “Not now, Josie. I told you.”
I put two new white cotton undershirts into her dresser drawer (Josie has trouble keeping warm). I says, “That guy don’t like women. Sally’s got her little Chinese fellow. You know that. They sit and play cards now the water’s froze. Argue over what kind of a hand it is that moves the hands of time. They’re two peas in a pod.”
Josie, she didn’t say nothing, just smiled at me, at the tulips, at the snow falling on the pine trees and tall rocks outside.
Three guesses who had the most to say about the plans we got into that winter. I says to Dave, I says, “You can’t let a six-year-old design a hotel.”
But Dave, he grins. He says she’s got more good ideas than the architect.
I says, “It don’t need a turret.”
But Dave says, “Where else is a princess going to stand and look out over the lake from, and watch her ships come in, if she don’t have a turret, eh Jenny wren?”
“And let’s make a drawbridge,” she says.
They played at this hotel thing like it was another one of their Jell-O projects. I couldn’t always tell when they were pulling my leg.
Dave and Al even tried to buy Macaulay’s Point for a building lot because Jenny said it was the right place for her castle. Old Macaulay wouldn’t sell. Liked his shack. Said his great-great-grandfather built her, in the year of confederation.
They offered him way high.
I says, “For frig’s sakes, that’s a waste of money. Another lot will do as well.”
Anyways, he still wouldn’t sell. So they give up and started dickering for another piece, pretty near as nice, further along the shore.
You never seen a kid change like what Jenny done in that first year with us. From the lost little soul with the white face, standing there watching me leave her at the foster home, to this here spunky little item she was most of the time now. For me and Dave, and Al too, she was the point and the joy of just about everything we done.
Of course she had her low times.
Her shrink told us that there’d be lasting effects from Jenny’s traumas. We weren’t to look for miracles. A child that has went through what happened to Jenny is going to have a lot of healing to do.
I knew that by now, if I knew anything. But knowing it did not make it easy to watch.
Dave, he wanted her happy all the time. Couldn’t stand it when she’d sit in the rocking chair staring. Or when she’d crouch on the stairs with her stuffed rabbit, weird look in her eyes, pulling its long ears through her fingers, over and over and over.
Dave wanted to go cheer her up.
But I says, “Leave her be. She’s grieving her losses.”
Timothy, the stuffed rabbit, he was a help. Jenny talked for him. Got him to tell me things.
The rabbit told me, “Jenny’s extremely sad.”
“Did she say what’s on her mind?”
“Jenny wants to see her mommy immediately.”
“You tell Jenny that’s the same as anybody would feel, in her shoes. You tell her she wouldn’t be a normal human person if she didn’t never miss her mommy.”
I told the rabbit to tell Jenny she couldn’t see her mommy and I knew that hurt.
I got out my red I can stand pain stepping stone and let Jenny stand on it. She hunched over, held her stomach, and she started to scream.
I stand there, helpless, wondering, should I call Sandra? Or should I call Marion, the shrink? Tell her how bad Jenny’s missing her mom? I know what she’d say. Her and the case worker already told me Jenny was not to see Sandra. Not until after she’d fully attached to me and Dave, made the break with her past. It would retraumatize her, they said.
I’m trying to hang on and remember: she’s just feeling the pain. She needs to feel that pain. The first stepping stone. The worst one. Pain.
Too bad the worst one is first. But that’s what I’m here to tell yous. It gets easier. Stand the pain. Just put up with it and don’t run away from it and don’t do nothing to blank it out and you are on your way, pretty soon, to better times ahead.
Jenny is in pain, and Dave comes running in the house to see who’s getting murdered. Jenny’s bent over screaming like torture.
He tries to hold her. She yanks away, screaming. Terrible.
Dave takes a fit. Starts yelling. My sister and her bleeping boyfriend should have to stand here and see what they’ve did to this child.
I give him a look, as much as to say, yeah, I know, honey, but shut up.
He starts banging around the house, fit to be tied. She’s clutching at her little gut, these like knife-edge screams after screams tearing her open. He’s slamming doors, growling. Don’t know what to do with himself.
I yell at him, “Dave!” I says, “For God’s sakes!”
So he goes s
torming out of the house. Cuts down the red maple, working like ten men. (It was shading out the garden anyways.) Chops up Sandra and her frigging dickhead boyfriend into stove lengths.
Jenny, she screamed so I thought she’d turn herself inside out. Drowning out the noise of the chainsaw. Then she’s just crying. Puts her face against me. After a while, we went and sat in the chair and I rocked her.
“I want my mommy. I want to go home.”
“I know, sweetheart. You can’t go home. I know it hurts.”
Soon as she was feeling better, the sun bust through for Dave too.
She went through some rough times. She felt her pain, and she grieved. Later on, she raged. Pounded the stuffing out of good old Timothy rabbit there, a few times, threw him down the stairs, flailed him with a skipping rope, told him he was a mean, mean mommy.
I watched her, step by step. Sewed the rabbit back together. Was I ever glad I knew them steps! Knew each step was okay. Kept telling her it was okay.
It’s okay to feel pain. Okay to feel anger at the ones that have did you wrong. Okay to be sad for what’s lost and gone. Okay to scream and cry and get it all out.
Sooner or later I’d always see her, pigtails jumping, riding by the window on Dave’s shoulders. Or she’d be bumping along in the truck with him, heading off someplace, with a happy face. Or running after him up the lane or out to the shed. And Dave, he’d be looking relieved as if somebody finally just moved a truck that had been parked on his foot.
I said to him, “Davey, she’s doing good. The first few steps is the hard ones. She’ll be on to the happier stepping stones pretty soon.”
We loved her the best we knew how, good days and bad. And, on the whole, I could see it was going all right.
“This being parents ain’t so hard, is it?” I says to Dave one day. “It’s a wonder so many people can’t seem to do it worth a shit.”
“Oh, I think most people do it good enough,” Dave says. “Except for two certain ones I could mention.”
You can’t convince Dave that there’s more than about two people on the earth like what Sandra and Ian are. He just wouldn’t be able to take in that there’s this frigging avalanche, little kids bent double, all over the place, with this same pain.
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