by Julie Paul
The idea cut a slash through the surface and it held. This snow was perfect! They would build an igloo and keep Russell safe, like Snow White in her glass coffin, until someone better came along to save him.
He knew that, in the morning, life would return to this corner of the city the way the songbirds and forest animals had surrounded Snow White’s resting place. The mobile canteen would bring hot coffee and donuts, sandwiches and hotdogs for the dockworkers. Then, from somewhere in the back of his slowly clearing mind, another way out came to him: the Mission to Seafarers.
Once upon a time, his Uncle Ed had volunteered with them, on a Christian crusade to help the needy, and they had a chapter here in Hamilton, probably within a block or two of where they stood. His uncle had told Jack stories about the men who’d been out at sea on merchant vessels, how they’d come to him desperate for a decent place to eat and to treat medical emergencies like jock itch and lice—some of them had been away from home for years. After a prayer or two, he’d helped them out as best as he could, directing these seafarers to the closest mall or hospital before their ships left Lake Ontario, bound for open sea once more. If they could do that for complete strangers, surely they would help a local man, even if he hadn’t come by sea.
Jack told Joshua and Barbara the idea, and either the booze was wearing off or they were bored, because they both agreed it was brilliant. How had he ended up with two people so amenable to his wacky plans?
“Let’s get to work,” he said, and got them rolling the heavy snow into balls.
“I thought igloos were made from cubes,” the poet said.
“We’re working with fresh snow,” Jack said. “We can’t afford to be shapist.”
They worked, unsteadily. Slowly. But soon enough, something was taking shape.
Joshua cried, “We have done a glorious deed!” once the walls around Russell were complete. All of them were soaked, and panting, with cheeks as red as baboon butts.
“Wait,” Jack said. “We’re not done yet.”
He unfolded the blue tarp they’d brought and together they laid it over the top of the snow walls, then secured it with more snowballs as best as they could; snow on plastic was not a match made in heaven. Still, once they were finished, they stood back from the creation and felt a glow burning from within, and it wasn’t from the exertion alone. Or that was how Jack felt, at least. Maybe a Christian glow—a pre-rescue glow.
“He won’t be missed,” Barbara said.
Jack turned to her, aghast. “Wow,” he said. “That’s quite the statement.”
“No, I mean now, with the blue roof. I was worried he might get plowed under in the night.” She swatted his arm. “As if I’d say a thing like that.”
They stood in the snow, falling less intensely now, and Jack reached for her hand. “Of course not,” he said. “Thank you.”
She squeezed his fingers and they stopped talking, listening to the light sizzle of flakes hitting the tarp.
The moment was broken by the poet’s watch alarm beeping.
“Time to—get up?” Jack asked.
“I’m on a routine,” Joshua said. “I wake myself up in the early morning to catch dreams for poems.”
“Oh boy,” Barbara said. “We’d better get you to bed then.”
“No, no,” he said. “This is golden. Gold. Or at least straw to be spun.” He began turning around in circles, chanting Rumpelstiltskin.
“Let’s go,” Jack said. “Russell’s sleeping.”
“And that means we can sleep too,” Barbara said, yawning and wrapping her arms around Jack.
Their apartment would be quiet, their dreams uninterrupted, their gathered warmth sustainable for hours and hours. But then, Barbara would leave him.
They should stay with Russell, shouldn’t they? Make sure he was okay. And what was wrong with a little more snow fun? It was okay to enjoy it, Jack realized, like Barbara and Joshua had. Why was he always so hung up on doing something? Could he not just take a damn moment and simply notice what was around him? Appreciate it all? Just live?
That was where the trouble lay—Barbara had helped him to live in the moment, and that had gotten him nowhere but here, about to lose her. About to be alone again. And just like light could trick a person, mirages and reflections, shadows and blinding beams, his “keep busy” program had fooled him. It had worked, oh yeah—after his plunge, Jack had done a one-eighty, pushed his way through classes he’d been failing, rose slowly to the top, stayed out of his father’s way, tried not to think of his brother and how he missed him, focusing instead on his own kind of escape.
Russell was just another project, another thing to fix and check off his list.
Barbara needed to go, and he couldn’t stop her. Her area of expertise was found nowhere near Hamilton, Ontario, where the land—fertile and once able to feed the province—was nearly all buried beneath concrete and asphalt.
But maybe, if he made himself as desirable as possible, she might migrate north again, when conditions permitted. Or he could visit her in the sun, if invited. Maybe he’d even look up his brother, who’d been sending cryptic postcards for years, waves and palm trees on them, with no return address.
“Let’s make a snowman first!” Jack cried. “To watch over Russell.” This was perfect snowman snow, and no time to waste it.
//// Little Stars
David and I were still awake at three AM. The moon wasn’t full, that wasn’t the reason, but the Perseids were doing their August trick, showering meteors like streaks of sleep dust from the sandman, mocking us.
I reached over and belted myself in with David’s arm, even though it was hot in our room. I needed the comforting.
Until yesterday, when I’d taken her to a small lake outside of town, our daughter, Anna, hadn’t worn summer clothes once. I thought it was about breasts, one growing faster than the other, or maybe because of her belly, but from what I could tell, Anna had become more proportionate as she’d grown taller.
I hadn’t been all that worried: she hadn’t stopped eating or gone berserk with exercise the way my friend’s daughter had the year before; she wasn’t sneaking out, getting older guys to boot liquor for parties. Until yesterday, I’d just put it down to fashion.
Beneath the safety strap of my husband’s arm, I cried. I was at a complete and utter loss.
Then he said, “Shhhh. Listen.”
An owl hooted, just outside the window. It hooted again, sending its quiet plea into the darkness.
“Cool,” he said. Cool, at a time like this? “We should go find it.”
But it was cool. Our city street was lined with trees, but no owls had come a-calling before.
“We’ll never find it,” I said.
Then I heard Anna’s bed creak. I removed David’s arm and sat up.
“She’s heard it too,” I said. “Let’s go.”
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Yesterday—a hundred years ago—we’d been the only swimmers at the lake.
“Now will you take your layers off?” I begged Anna, from the water. “No one can see you here.”
To my surprise, Anna stepped out of her jeans and pulled off her hoody. There she stood, my pale, beautiful girl in a black bikini, hugging herself as if she’d never been hugged before.
“Come in!” I cried. “It’s nearly bath water.”
Anna walked to the edge and yelped when the water hit her feet, but she didn’t run. Instead, she took a few steps and dove right in. When she surfaced, she was both a new person and my long-hidden daughter, dark hair smoothed against her skull, generous smile bigger than it’d been in weeks.
“Happy now?” she asked me. Smiling still.
Was I happy! We swam for twenty minutes, alone in that small lake, floating and laughing like we’d always done before da
ring to climb onto the private raft at the other side.
It was when Anna lifted herself onto the floating dock that I saw them: her inner arms, laddered with cuts—no, scars—at least twenty per limb. Whiter than her white skin, they seemed mostly healed. But I knew what they were—had been schooled on this latest trend, never thinking I’d have to face it. Still, I asked all the same. “What happened to your arms?”
“Oh, I keep scraping them on my dresser drawers,” Anna said. Then, with a face as pink as lemonade, she flopped onto her belly and changed the subject to her job-search troubles.
There had been more than scrapes or lines. There were hashtags. Asterisks. Little stars to mark the spaces.
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Searching for an owl in the darkness seemed better than lying there sleepless, making a list of dangerous items around the house. Would we have to go through the babyproofing again, only locks instead of elastics on the cupboards? Knives were obvious, but what about forks? The can opener, the sharp edge of the old peeler?
Already I’d mentally locked away anything that might turn into a weapon. Boxcutters, scissors, staples. Nail clippers, frameless mirrors, even Q-tips: maybe they were as dangerous as those commercials showed, that sharp stick beneath the soft tip, hidden until damage was done.
What had I missed? What signs had I filed under “normal teenaged behaviour”? That day when Anna wanted to wear high heels to school and I’d said no. Or the day Anna flipped out because there was no cereal in the house—had she begun it then? Or maybe it was the day the boy she liked said he only wanted to be friends. Or during her first period, two months ago, or after failing the math test? What about us forbidding her from bringing home the girl who’d punched her mother in the face?
Where had I failed?
Because he was into anthropology, David tried to get me to see it another way when I started crying yesterday, once Anna was out of sight.
“Maybe it’s the new rite of passage,” he’d said. “The modern way to mark this time of insanity.” When that didn’t make me feel better, he continued. “Scarification was huge in certain cultures. And I don’t think she has a death wish.”
I’d jumped when he said that. “But what if she cuts too deep?” I asked. “What if it’s a step?”
His only answer had come as a thick embrace. It wasn’t much comfort—our daughter was the one who needed arms around her. If only I could wrap Anna in a sling again, wear her all day long, put her to sleep between us the way I had for her first two years. Despite so many warnings about over-coddling, that had never been a mistake.
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Now Anna’s door was opening. She, too, had been summoned.
“Did you hear?” Anna whispered, from our doorway.
“Yes,” I whispered back. “Let’s go find it.”
What the bird would tell us was anyone’s guess, but we needed to get closer, to confirm that it wasn’t all in our heads or just a ringtone we were hearing.
An owl ringtone. Who, who who who?
The three of us descended to the front door and walked out into the night. Clouds had rolled in, blocking out any chance of seeing meteor showers. The owl called again. It was such a deliberate cry—no chatter or gossipy nature to it, no demanding plea. The owl had no competition in the night sky; there was a confidence in its calls.
It was just like my grandfather, delivering the readings at Mass when I was a child. No matter how odd the story—water to wine, hands into Jesus’s gaping wounds—or how impossible the instructions, any doubters became instant believers when he read. His voice demanded good posture, a clear head, a pure heart. This. Is the Word. Of the Lord. The amen that followed was nearly evangelical in enthusiasm, nearly tipping over into sacrilege for the subdued Catholic Church.
Yet despite this early exposure, I’d given Anna nothing to believe in—beyond herself and a mostly beautiful world beyond the door. At Anna’s age, I’d gone to a Catholic school, knew good from bad, heaven from hell, how to sing a hundred hymns. When I’d recited the prayer before Communion—Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed—it had felt like renewal, like another chance at getting it right.
But the Church didn’t always make a person this warm and fuzzy. Maybe Anna’s cutting was as Catholic as you could get: self-flagellation. Maybe the anorexics were the modern-day dervishes, shunning the body and the pleasures of the flesh for some bigger plan. If that were true, then bulimia was religious too. Sinning, punishment, forgiveness at the toilet-as-confessional.
It was too late to give Anna a taste of ceremony or a new look at religion; David and I had both gone AWOL on church before we’d even met. Was it unfair of us to keep this away from Anna? Had she missed out?
The owl called again. David cocked his head, pointed to the tamarack tree at the edge of the front lawn. We shuffled over to stand beneath it, and it hooted once more.
“Mom,” Anna said. “Doesn’t it scare off its food, making all that noise?”
I didn’t know the first thing about owls. My hand itched to find the mouse, to Google it. But I’d been on the computer all day, looking up case histories of cutters, clogging the search engine with questions to cover up the ones I could not ask: What is so bad about this life we’ve given you? Where did we go wrong?
“Maybe it isn’t hunting right now,” I said. “Maybe it just needs to talk.”
Each low hoot vibrated softly in my chest as the three of us stood there, listening. After a minute, we heard a distant reply. The owl—our owl—seemed to compress itself into a tight ball of brown and white feathers before launching into the air on its massive wings. Then all we saw was the shape of it vanishing into the cloudy night, closer to whatever stars might be falling beyond.
A question had been asked, and an answer had lifted itself out of the darkness.
//// Manifest
The girl, Carolina, sat on the couch, knitting up a storm. The wool she’d been using for weeks was a deep, thunderous grey, so it seemed that she was knitting, and becoming, a landmass—a geological disaster waiting to happen. Evacuations would begin when the eruptions did, yet no one knew the data. No one could make any educated guesses about when this girl would blow.
Rules in a family were only obvious when you held that family up to a mirror. Jen should have made ground rules, but she wasn’t a rule-maker. She simply lived a particular way, and her husband and son followed her lead. Now, here, as of three weeks ago, their mirror had shown up as Carolina, daughter of her husband, Ben. (Yes, Jen and Ben. It was a terrible joke).
Carolina was here with them in Vancouver because she was eighteen, finished high school, and got booted out of her mother’s house in Regina at the beginning of the summer. She hadn’t visited in seven years, through no fault of Ben’s, and now she was here, in their condo, trying to figure out her next step. Jen and Ben and little Cody were a step. Stepmother Jen had to repeat this to herself: just one little step, one plank in the staircase. It had better be a long staircase.
“We don’t knit in this house.” Jen had fantasized saying this for weeks now.
Oops, she just said it.
Carolina looked up, nodded once, kept clicking her needles. The woollen mass kept growing, and now covered her bare legs as far down as her knees. Of course she took Jen’s statement as observation, not commandment.
Jen’s blood was boiling. Because of the knitting, yes, but also from the infernal silence overpowering the noise of the needles, the weirdness and lassitude that exuded from the girl on her couch. That was Jen’s couch! A private place, now inhabited by a squatter! In every waking, non-interacting moment—even in her sleep—the girl was a lump.
Maybe that was it, the root of her anger: Jen was afraid. Silence and laziness had long been the enemies, and she’d tried to befriend the
m, but she was a doer, and so was Ben, and Cody—well, a young boy never really stopped. Now these entities were here, mocking her, right in front of her face. If she were a religious person, she might have been able to call upon the ideas of virtue and sin, but she wasn’t, and any attempt at asking the only religious person she knew—Ben’s mother, Kathy, who lived a few neighbourhoods away, near Queen Elizabeth Park—for guidance, had just left her simmering with frustration, for all Kathy offered was a benign smile and an offer to offer the suffering up to Jesus, a tit for tat kind of thing.
And Ben wasn’t all that helpful, either.
“Well, at least she’s knitting,” he said. “That’s something.”
But making what, Jen wanted to know. Was that sludgy thing going to turn into something?
Jen had to create a plan of attack. Instead of relaxing on the balcony in the precious sunshine, perhaps she would make a list, go through each room, imagine scenarios that she would not tolerate from Carolina, a sort of babyproofing like she’d done when Cody began to crawl.
Tambourines and shakers and a couple of sand blocks, left over from Kindermusik, lived in a basket beneath the bookshelf.
It was there that Jen’s list began: no music before nine AM or after eleven at night. Of course, Carolina hadn’t touched any of them.
“Do you play an instrument?” Jen asked, while she pretended to do a deep dusting of the room. “Or what about singing?”
Carolina shook her head, then actually said something. “My mother made me take ukulele.”
“It’s good for the brain,” Jen said, although she hated the plinky, childish sound of the thing because it reminded her of a bad trip she’d taken to Maui with her first husband, who’d gotten so wasted he peed off their balcony and got them kicked out of the resort.
“No comment,” Carolina said.
No comment? She’d said no comment? What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“Ha,” Jen said, which meant nothing at all. A laugh lie. Total BS. She picked up her pace and dusted her escape out into the front hall.