Silent Girl

by Tricia Dower

No time to run back and phone. She pulled her robe up to cover her mouth and looked at what faced her. A wall of yellow and orange flames, beautiful in a way, compelling. She imagined her mind, not the fire, illuminating the scene, leaving all around it in darkness. Imagined being swallowed up by the burning light. It felt mystical and right. If there was a God, he’d accept her in place of Spencer. She stepped closer and closer, testing the heat and her resolve.

  “Trudy, wait!” Jack shouted, sprinting toward her and pointing. Spencer was coming around the corner of the cabin, taking long, purposeful strides. A taller, leaner version of Dave in parka and jeans. A miracle.

  She ran to him, fell on her knees and clutched his legs. If she’d been forced to choose between Jack and Spencer at that moment, the decision would have been easy. She turned her head to the side to wipe her tears on his pants. Saw the gas can hanging from his hand and looked up. “You did this?”

  His back was to the fire. She couldn’t see his face. “You need the occasional purging fire,” he said. “Textbook farming.” He dropped the can at her side, walked to his car and drove off.

  She watched the Mazda turn into a speck on the main road, listened to the thrumming in her ears then got up off her knees.

  Jack came up beside her. “Want me to go after him?”

  She shook her head and turned back to the fire. Bits of ruffled curtain fluttered out of a shattered window, childish dollhouse curtains. Her mother had sewn them from blue and white Delft-patterned cotton as a wedding surprise.

  “I never wanted that cabin,” she said. “I wanted to live in an apartment above the hardware store, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. It hurt that he didn’t trust me to know what I wanted.”

  Neighbours started arriving at dawn. She escaped into the house, leaving Jack to make excuses for her. They’d believe she was too upset to talk even though she wasn’t. She was weary enough to sleep for days, but calm and even hopeful. She and Spencer had been growing apart for years. As painful as their confrontation had been, she saw it as a way for them to start over. A purging, as Spencer had said. She shouldn’t have left him so much to Dave, should have seen that, like her, he needed a lot of rope.

  The county fire department inspector came out around noon. The blaze had been seen for kilometres. As they stood outside the charred cabin, Jack told the inspector he’d left the wood stove untended and flammable supplies nearby. She hadn’t asked him to lie, but she didn’t contradict him. No sense making it even harder for Spencer to come back. The cabin wasn’t insured. No one could accuse them of fraud.

  She called the university to be sure Spencer had returned. Tried his cell phone and the residence several times a day but he hung up when he heard her voice. She made the seven-hour drive to Saskatoon, but he refused to see her. Jack urged her to sell, but she insisted Spencer would come around eventually. He just had to. He was too much like her to let go so easily. Too drawn to possibilities, to the redemption of spring.

  She still hadn’t heard from him when the first calf arrived, hip-locked and dead. They needed the tractor to pull it out of the mother.

  Cocktails with Charles

  Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.

  —Olivia to Viola in Twelfth Night

  IT WASN’T EXACTLY THE WALDORF-ASTORIA. PERVERTS WOULD steal your underwear if you didn’t stay through all the cycles. But the laundry room was bereft of a chair, so Mira sat barefoot and crossed-legged on the sorting table on a sweltering August day in 1975, wearing only the lightest of halter tops and her brother’s swim trunks. The smell of fabric softener cloyed the air. Sweat pooled between her breasts and turned her short, black hair into frizzy ringlets.

  The door opened with a kick. A pixie of a woman glided across the linoleum floor, toes out like a ballerina, carrying a yellow plastic basket. Mira was just as short, but this woman couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She looked lost inside a lavender shift that fell from puny shoulders to ankles Mira could easily have gotten a hand around. Her wispy hair was the colour of pumpkin pie.

  “Holy Toledo,” the pixie said in a surprisingly grown-up voice. “You’d think they could spring for a fan.” She set the basket on the floor, pulled out a towel, and propped the door open with it.

  “You mean this isn’t the sauna?”

  “Oh, you’re gonna be fun.” The pixie’s smile dove clear down into Mira’s forlorn heart. “I’m Angel Alfredsson from 103.”

  “Mira Hakala, 422. I’ve been in for three weeks. The judge gave me life.”

  Angel’s laugh made Mira think improbably of sleigh bells and deep, cool snow.

  “It is like a cell in here,” Angel said. “A window would’ve been nice.”

  “Don’t mind me,” Mira said, aware of a sudden lifting of her mood. “It’s just that I left a doorman, exercise room, and pool in Edina.”

  “Ah. Did you see that Guindon cartoon in the paper?” Angel said, stuffing a washing machine. “The one where the woman says: ‘You don’t move to Edina, you achieve Edina.’”

  “No, I didn’t.” Shit. She’d come across as a snob. The buzzer on the dryer went off. Her thighs made a sucking sound as she slid off the table.

  “Dippity darned,” Angel said, studying a sock. “My big guy must go looking for mud.”

  “Your husband?” Mira opened the dryer and groaned. She’d left a Kleenex in a pocket.

  “No, no, no, my number one son Anthony. He’s nine. Matthew is six.” Angel held up a small Minnesota Twins jersey. “They’re huge fans.”

  “Me, too, even if the team is limping right now. You alone with the kids?” Mira snuck her brother’s underwear into a duffel bag. Tissue snowed onto the floor. She looked around for a broom or a dustpan.

  “Alas, I am. You?”

  “Just my echo, my shadow, and me.”

  “Brenda Lee. Or was it the Ink Spots? My mother loved the Ink Spots.”

  Mira’s mother had been almost certifiable over the Harmonicats, made them take “mouth organ” lessons. As if she and Marko weren’t weird enough. “Does your mother live close?” Mira hand-swept the tissue bits and put them in the garbage can. The room had one of those, at least.

  “Possibly. She’s in the Mid-Causal Plane, I think. She and my dad. They disengaged together, five years ago on New Year’s Eve.”

  Mira had no idea what Angel was talking about, but it was fun. “My parents are in matching urns in a box I haven’t unpacked yet,” she said, getting into the spirit. “They’re more an accent than the main decorating event.”

  Angel pressed her fingers against her eyes.

  “You okay?” Mira asked.

  “Yes. Just trying to see you with my inner eyes. Trying to get past that crooked smile you’re hiding behind.”

  A nut case. A beautiful, nervy nut case. Mira stuffed the rest of her clothes unfolded into her bag and said, “See ya.”

  Back in her apartment she dropped the bag on the floor and smiled into the hall closet mirror. Definitely crooked. Marko’s wasn’t. She’d gotten so used to looking into his face and seeing her own, she often missed the less than obvious differences between them. She padded to the living room and stood crucifix-style in front of the whining air conditioner. Tried to picture Angel stopping by for a beer. She’d be swallowed up by the black leather couch and loveseat, the humongous glass and chrome tables. Marko had chosen them. From conception until four months ago, they had never lived apart, refused to sleep in separate rooms until they were fifteen. M&M, they called themselves. She was the peanut one: hard on the outside and the inside, with only a thin layer for anyone to get in. Anyone else, that is. For twenty-eight years, Marko had always been there.

  She found the box she was looking for in the stack against the living room wall, dug through the bubble wrap and pulled out three urns. She couldn’t h
ave told Angel about Marko after the bit about their parents. It would have made her seem pathetic.

  She took a shower, slipped on a pair of Marko’s jockeys and got into his bed. Hers was the one she had dumped in the move. She curled up facing the clock radio and took the cool of the sheets into her skin. It wasn’t even eight, but she didn’t know what to do with herself in the evenings anymore.

  It had been Marko’s idea to get the red and black Boss 351 Mustang. It looked all wrong in the parking lot of the new place, Mira realized later that week, when Angel pulled up beside her in a rusting Pontiac with an ailing muffler. Mira slunk down in her seat but – what was she thinking? – it was a convertible. Angel stepped from her car and looked over, shading her eyes from the last of the sun. The buttons on her yellow blouse lay perfectly straight on her boyish chest. At fifteen, Mira had tried starving herself to look like that, trying to look like Marko, actually. She stopped when her parents said she’d end up in a psycho ward and never see him again.

  “You just getting home from work, too?” Angel asked. Mira gave her a little wave and climbed out of the Mustang. Angel looked even more fragile in the open air. How could babies have travelled through those tiny hips?

  Angel opened the door to the back seat where two boys, book-ended by assorted boxes, were fighting over a rubber arm. The bigger one looked out at Mira with Marko’s – and her own – heavy-lidded eyes. Her legs went spongy.

  Angel grabbed the arm as the boys tumbled out. “Quieten down, now,” she told them to no effect.

  They headed for a dusty piece of playground.

  Angel turned to Mira. “I demonstrate venipuncture and injections, among other things. I’d still be nursing if I could get decent shifts but, alas, I’m stuck peddling medical supplies. My trunk and back seat overfloweth.”

  Angel couldn’t be seriously mental if someone trusted her with needles. “I’m in sales, too,” Mira said.

  “I just knew you were a kindred spirit. What do you sell?”

  “Time and image,” Mira said, parroting the instructor of the course she had passed to move out of Typing. Then, feeling like an idiot for trying to impress Angel, she said, “Advertising. On The Good Neighbor station. A new job for me.”

  “Time and image,” Angel said, almost reverently. A tiny gold stud in her earlobe flashed in the sun like a beacon. “Rhonda would love that.” Angel explained that Rhonda was a spiritual guide, no longer stuck in the physical world. “She comes through a woman named Jackie.”

  “Like a radio signal?”

  “Sort of. She uses Jackie’s vocal chords. Only men came through the channellers I tried before. So, I said to myself, women can’t speak after they disengage? Too busy sweeping up cosmic dust?”

  Mira laughed and Angel’s little bow-shaped mouth laughed back. She pulled a card from her purse and handed it to Mira. Unleash Your Creative Powers with Rhonda. “Study group every Tuesday night. Ten dollars. Want to go with me next week?”

  Ten bucks for an evening with Angel. “Sure,” Mira said.

  They took Angel’s car. It smelled of mildew and Angel’s princess-sweet cologne. Mira stuck her hand out the window and pushed against the wind. The August heat and noisy muffler brought back the summer after high-school graduation when her parents took a rowboat out on a lake and drowned. A rowboat, for God’s sake. How embarrassing was that? After the funeral, Marko put bricks in the trunk of their father’s Galaxie for a cool, low look and gave the exhaust a monster death rattle. They drove around the city, radio blasting, laughing and crying and holding hands.

  “Minneapolis has the world’s worst weather,” Angel said.

  “Yeah,” Mira said, “just when you think hell couldn’t be any hotter, hell freezes over.”

  “Ha! You’re good for me, Lady. I need to laugh. I created the most awful day for myself. Late for two appointments, late collecting the boys. Anthony was cross with me. Matty was starving; he’s always starving. I had dinner on their plates in a record six minutes. Carrot sticks, instant mashed potatoes, and minute steak – which takes longer than a minute to cook, incidentally, just like it takes almost two minutes to play the ‘Minute Waltz.’ Anyway, it still wasn’t fast enough. I should be home with them. Rhonda would say: ‘Why create the need for guilt?’” Angel’s slender fingers measured an inch of air. “I’m this close to marrying Charles.”

  Mira felt a surprising stab of disappointment but made the obligatory inquiry.

  “I’ve known him since I was eight. My first piano teacher. He was one of the family when my parents were alive, over at our house every holiday, every Sunday afternoon. My mother felt sorry for him. We’ve talked about marriage off and on, but just in fun, or at least I thought so. For goodness sake, we’ve never even kissed, except on the cheek. Then last week, out of the blue, he asked me to seriously consider it.”

  “He was teaching piano when you were eight? He must be a lot older than you.”

  “Twenty years this time. Irrelevant, really, considering how many lives we’ve had together.”

  “Come again?”

  “I shouldn’t say had. According to Rhonda, there’s no past, present, or future. That means Charles and I are living this wild, simultaneous existence in ancient Cathay, Mayan Mexico, fifth- century Ireland, the Alps in six hundred something, Elizabethan England, Australia in the twenty-second century, a planet our telescopes can’t see, and here, of course.”

  Mira wanted to laugh but Angel sounded convinced. “How do you know all this?”

  “From study group and a woman who does past life regression. I stopped going after she brought me out of hypnosis by saying,” – she dropped her voice an octave – “‘you are back in the twentieth century where you are a very attractive woman.’ Why did she have to say that?”

  Mira had never met anyone who actually believed in that stuff. It was a pick-up line in a bar – Say, didn’t I know you in a past life? “Maybe she didn’t want to leave you stranded as Quasimodo,” she said. “Were you ever Quasimodo?”

  “I doubt it. Only a few of my lives are as men. Rhonda says I need to release more of my animus so I can coach my sons into manhood. If I marry Charles, I won’t have to worry about that. How about you? Anyone special in your life?”

  “No.” Marko had fixed her up with different guys from time to time but they always turned out to be horny creeps. She’d know when the right one came along, he said, but the right one never came along for him, either.

  Jackie’s apartment was on the second floor of a building along a dodgy section of Lake Street. If this was a scam, she wasn’t spending her riches on lavish digs. Two men on the dark side of fifty – one with a grey ponytail – and a woman who shouldn’t have been wearing a sleeveless dress were already there, looking chummy on a long brown tweed couch. They stood to hug Angel. She and Mira took worn out mustard-coloured armchairs opposite the couch. Jackie sat across the room in a La-Z-Boy, smiling like a Tupperware party hostess. Angel handed her ten bucks to a man behind a small table fiddling with a tape recorder and Mira did the same. Two tall oscillating fans made a rhythmic buzz as they shoved hot air around.

  “It’s time,” Jackie said. “Would our newcomer like to say a few words?”

  Mira declined. She didn’t want to tip off any so-called spirit. Wanted to see what it came up with on its own.

  After Jackie reminded them she’d be slipping into a trance, she closed her eyes. Nothing happened for several minutes. Mira kept her eyes on Angel who sat on the edge of her chair like a hopeful child. Finally, a different voice arrived – through Jackie’s nose, it sounded like.

  “Everybody comfy, everybody’s tukhes on a soft seat?”

  “Yes, Rhonda,” the regulars said in unison.

  “Good. May you have only things to smile about this evening. Who’s first?”

  “If I may?�
� Angel said.

  “Certainly.”

  “I’ve been asked to seriously consider a marriage proposal,” Angel said. The woman in the sleeveless dress gave a little whoop. Mira slid down in her chair.

  “Hu ha,” Rhonda said. “Who’s asking? Name and location, please.”

  “You know who it is.”

  “Humour me.”

  “Charles Stammler. Capitola, California.”

  A long pause followed. Mira wondered if Jackie had fallen asleep.

  “Aha, okay, I have him. A mentsch, a good soul. Ready to take on a leading role at last. You’ve written many scripts with this one.”

  “That’s part of the attraction. I never have to explain myself to Charles and he’s incredibly dependable. I can’t tell you how many times he’s rescued me. When my parents went bankrupt and killed themselves … after my husband left me pregnant with our second child.”

  Suicide. Abandonment. Mira’s story wasn’t half as impressive.

  “I meant in more realities than this one,” Rhonda said. “If your world didn’t go so meshuge over time, you’d realize a thousand years are like yesterday. He has always been with you and, sometimes, you’ve done the rescuing. So what’s the problem?”

  “It feels too easy,” Angel said.

  “Why create the belief that life must be difficult?”

  “I haven’t proved I can make it on my own yet. I can’t pay my bills on time and I’ve got zero savings for a house or the boys’ education. Marrying Charles would solve all that, but – don’t laugh – you know what stops me? Wondering what Gloria Steinem would say.”

  “Does Gloria pay half the rent, roast you a chicken now and again, baby-sit?”

  Angel laughed. “No.”

  “You think from fasting you’ll get rich?”

  “No, but that’s not all. Charles has a weak heart. I don’t know how long he’ll live.”

  “So, maybe the contract calls for him to disengage first. People come, people go.”