One Year in Coal Harbor

by Polly Horvath

  “The restaurant bug,” said Bert.

  “And we need something to do. Macramé is nice but it don’t take up all your hours.”

  “And Evie loves feeding people.”

  “We got lots of ideas.”

  “Not that we’d change much really. We’d still serve everything on a waffle. But Evie’s got some new recipes.”

  “With mini marshmallows,” said Evie happily.

  “But not everything with mini marshmallows,” said Bert.

  “Because some folks don’t like them,” Evie said to me in amazement. “They don’t even like having to pick them out.”

  “And we want people to be happy there,” said Bert.

  “At least as happy as they were when Miss Bowzer ran it.”

  Nobody could have been as happy these days as Miss Bowzer unless it was Uncle Jack. We had the wedding for them in our backyard and Miss Bowzer, whom I was now supposed to call Kate, looked so beautiful I thought there could never be a more glowing bride. My mom and I got to help her make her dress, which was a lovely ivory simple thing. I don’t know what she reminded me of, a mermaid or an angel or something. I swear she had a little golden aura around her all through the ceremony and for the rest of the day. I asked my mom if she could see it and she said she could. Evie made the wedding cake, which of course was chock-full of mini marshmallows. Uncle Jack said it was his favorite kind, although as far as I knew neither he nor anyone else had ever tasted such a concoction. But it was such a day that if things there weren’t already your favorite, forevermore they would be.

  I was happy the day of the wedding, you couldn’t not be, we all were, glowing and golden and shining with it. And as usual I included Ked there, as if I carried him to events in my thoughts the way I used to drag my teddy bear along.

  After the wedding when everyone had gone and my mother and I were sitting together in the garden sharing one last piece of cake, I mentioned all this to her. That I brought him places in my mind. That he should have been here eating cake too. That some fates seemed so unfair, right from the start, and then, as for Ked, all the way through.

  “I hesitate to say this because I don’t think it’s something you understand until you’re much older,” said my mother, pausing and reconsidering, “if you understand it then. It’s something my mother said to me and I didn’t understand it, but now, as I get older, I begin to get inklings of what she meant. You know she died when I was sixteen, don’t you?”

  “From breast cancer,” I said. My mom didn’t talk about it much. Her mother died and left my mother with a younger sister and two younger brothers. My mother left home right after to find her stepfather, who had disappeared three years before. The older I got the more horrible my mother’s teenage years sounded, although she always claimed they weren’t horrible at all, just eventful. Only her mother dying was really terrible, she said.

  “Well, when she was dying I kept saying it wasn’t fair. She was such a wonderful person, everyone loved my mother. Well, most people did. She was such a beautiful poet and there was always a kind of awareness of the intrinsic sacredness in everything when you were with her. And it didn’t seem right that some of the people I thought were horrible and who hadn’t my mother’s great love of life were perfectly healthy and here she was dying from something dreadful. And she said that she had come round to see that everyone’s fates were beautiful. Even the ones that seemed most horrifying. That you had to be careful who you said this to because most people didn’t understand and if you said you thought some child dying had a beautiful fate, well, they thought you were crazy or some kind of a monster. But she said she could see it now. Even her fate had a kind of luminous beauty to it. Peculiarly and absolutely her own. That what we give back to life is our own unique experience of it. And I was angry because I didn’t want her to die and I didn’t want her to see leaving us kids as beautiful. But now as I get older and see a bigger picture, well, I think she was right. Maybe someday you’ll see that.”

  Or maybe not, I thought bitterly, but I didn’t say it out loud because I knew she was only trying to help.

  “Well, anyway,” she said. “Did you see the new room Kate decorated? She’s got the living room finished too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was there last week.”

  “When I was there yesterday,” my mother went on, “Jack was taking down all the platforms. The vegetarian war orphans didn’t do much of a cleanup when they left. He said it was the last touch in returning the forest to how it was before the logging. They’ve planted trees in a lot of the bare places.…”

  My mother droned on but I stopped listening when she said platform. I’d been so shell-shocked by the loss of Ked that I had forgotten the seer’s message to me the first time Ked met him. That I would be alone on a platform and it would be important. To be honest, I thought it was just the ravings of a disturbed mind. But I had been alone on a platform. That was where I was when they took Ked away.

  I thought about this for days and the more I thought about it, the more it disturbed me. I could think of no explanation for how the seer could have known about the platform. The only thing I could come up with was that he could see things. And then I wondered, If this was true, then was his dreamtown real? And could he see Ked now? Did he know where Ked was and if he was okay? I wanted to know but I was afraid. I was still afraid of the seer and afraid he might not see the truth but tell me something totally false, which I would then believe. Or what if he could see things but saw something that was worse than not knowing at all? So for a long time I put off going to The Girl on the Red Swing to talk to him.

  But one night I lay awake all night and was so tired during school the next day that I couldn’t think straight so I gave up and went over to The Girl on the Red Swing. Bert generally waited tables and Evie cooked. They both came over to say hello and beam at me but they looked a little nervous when I said I’d come to talk to the seer.

  “Do you want me to join you, honey?” asked Bert, even though all the tables were filled and the place was hopping.

  “No, it’s kind of private,” I said.

  “Well, okay. I’ll bring you a milk shake, shall I?”

  “No, it’s okay. I want to pay for the seer’s lunch, though, because I need to ask him some questions. I’ve got the money right here.” I handed it to him.

  Bert looked unhappy about the whole thing. As I stood by the booth he explained to the seer that his lunch was on me and the seer immediately ordered liver and onions. For a moment I had my doubts about him again. Anyone with extra powers should know that something like liver and onions is not going to go well on a waffle.

  I slid into the booth across from the seer, who didn’t seem surprised but looked at me blankly for a bit. I thought maybe he’d start the ball rolling by telling me things but he just put some more cream in his coffee and stirred it so slowly and contemplatively that for a second I wondered if that was where he saw his visions.

  Finally, when it was apparent he wasn’t going to say anything and maybe wasn’t even quite aware of my presence, I said, “I guess you know Ked has been gone awhile.”

  He continued to look at me blankly.

  “You remember Ked?” I said, prompting him.

  The seer shook his head no and I wanted to shriek, Well, do you remember all the MEALS he paid for? Then I figured maybe Ked had never told him his name so I described Ked to him. That didn’t seem to have any effect either and I was beginning to think I had been wrong and his ability to see visions was nonsense, as everyone had tried to tell me.

  But I tried again. “I thought maybe you’d seen him lately in your dreams.”

  Now I really felt stupid and desperate but the seer seemed to come awake at the mention of his dreams.

  “I see everything in my dreams. I see it all in my dreams. I see that boy you describe. Tall, hair over his eyes.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. And I thought about the first time I saw Ked and how vulnerable he looked a
nd I felt sad again.

  “I see him. On a big expanse, lots of snow. Snow and ice. Cold. Blue. Northern lights.”

  The Northwest Territories, I thought excitedly, he can see him. And then I realized that this described pretty much all of Canada.

  “I see him. I see him,” said the seer, giving his coffee another stir.

  “And is he okay?”

  “Sure he is.”

  “Does he seem happy? Does he have a friend? Is he alone?”

  The seer took a few minutes longer to answer, as if he were seeing it all as we talked.

  “He’s got animals with him. A dog. NO, two dogs. One small, fluffy. A cockapoo. One kind of wild. They go everywhere with him. They’re looking out for him. He can’t see them but they stay with him night and day.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed, starting to cry and standing up. “No wonder Ked liked talking to you.”

  I wanted to leave but Evie, who was standing in the doorway watching me, bustled over and made me sit in the kitchen until I could calm down.

  I didn’t want to fall apart and start sobbing but I couldn’t fight back the tears completely and a few made their way down my nose. Evie silently handed me a paper towel. I told her what the seer had said.

  “Do you think he’s crazy? I hope he’s not just crazy,” I said.

  Evie sat down on a stool and looked sober and older than any time I’d seen her. “I don’t know what to tell you, honey. On the odd days I think it takes more courage to think such things are crazy and on the even days I think it takes more courage to think they’re not.”

  She gave me a glass of milk and a cookie but I wasn’t hungry so I drank the milk and took the cookie with me as I slipped out the back kitchen door.

  I didn’t really know where to go after that. I finally ended up on Jackson Road, walking without thinking, feeling chilled and sleepless and stunned.

  I walked until I came to the B and B. Kate was knitting on the porch.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, not lifting her eyes from her work.

  So I told her what the seer had said and how I didn’t know what to believe. “I think Evie was right,” I said finally when Kate said nothing. “It can be a cruel world for the gentle creatures. You think you can take care of the ones within your reach but I don’t know what to do for the ones who get cancer or taken away, or almost but don’t quite make it across the street.”

  Kate said nothing and kept knitting and then I noticed that what she was knitting was booties. And we rocked and rocked the rest of the afternoon.

  Evie Finally Perfects Her

  Potato Marshmallow Recipe

  She certainly slipped it in under the wire but here it is. Bake a potato until done, then slice it open. Take out the white part and mash with a tablespoon of butter, some salt and pepper, half a teaspoon of cinnamon and eight mini marshmallows. Return the mashed whites to the potato skins and place back in a 400-degree oven for fifteen minutes.

  It was the exact number of mini marshmallows that had her stymied. Cooking seems easy until you come up against a problem like this.

  But Then Something Else Happened

  ALMOST A YEAR TO the day after I had first met Ked, Evie and Bert got a scare. In the middle of the night, someone pounded on their door.

  “At first we thought it was a ghost,” said Evie when they called to tell me.

  But it was Ked.

  My mom let me take the day off school and I went over to be with him. He was exhausted and stayed in bed telling Evie and me his strange story of stumbling through the forest after he realized his father wasn’t returning to the lake with the fishing tackle, and shivering and knowing he might die of exposure and being found by an Inuit on a snowmobile and living with the Inuits’ community, explaining to them he had no home. Finally, he said, he knew he couldn’t stay on—although they’d been kind and let him live there, no questions asked. He hated the cold and snow so he decided to go south again but he was afraid the RCMP would get him and just deliver him back to his father. I guessed his father getting drunk and forgetting him on the ice, where he might have died, had been the last straw. The Inuit took him by snowmobile to the highway and he hitchhiked with truckers to Vancouver. He tried to live on the Vancouver streets for a while but he couldn’t do it. So he came here.

  “I have to tell the sheriff,” said Evie when he was done.

  “What’s going to happen?” asked Ked.

  “I don’t know,” said Evie.

  “I can’t go back there,” he said.

  “No, of course not,” said Evie worriedly.

  By evening Ked was well enough to eat at The Girl on the Red Swing. Kate had told me that she and Uncle Jack were planning to announce Kate’s pregnancy that night, so the evening should have been very festive, but no matter how much we wanted to celebrate that and Ked’s miraculous return, no one could help thinking of all that had happened to him in the meantime. Nevertheless, we were having pie, six kinds, all with mini marshmallows—Evie had dyed them pink and blue—when the sheriff walked in. With him were an RCMP officer, a social worker and someone who could only have been Ked’s dad, even though he didn’t look like Ked at all. He was a short, scruffy, squirrelly-looking guy, and every ounce of skin he had showing seemed to be covered in tattoos. His eyes were narrow and he didn’t even greet Ked, just shuffled into a booth next to the social worker and looked sullen. There was complete silence as all of us except for Ked stared at him. I had a bite of pie almost to my mouth and I just sat stupidly holding it there. The social worker came over and took Ked to their booth, where they seemed to be questioning him and then his dad. This went on and on but they were speaking in such low voices that no one could hear what they were saying until suddenly Ked started to yell.

  “No!” he yelled. “No way!”

  I realized that in all the time I’d known him I’d never before seen him angry.

  His dad began to yell too. “You should see what it’s like to live with him. He steals, you know. He stole all the money I put under my mattress. That’s why I had to leave him out on the ice.”

  “Wait a second,” said the RCMP officer. “You left him there on purpose?”

  “He’s got to learn. He’s always been uncontrollable. When he was little I used to have to tie him to the radiator. It was the only way. It’s been a hard row to hoe being his father. He’s been taking my money for years.”

  “Because we don’t have food! We never have food. You don’t care because you’re always high!” yelled Ked.

  “You tied him to radiators?” said the social worker, who looked like she was suddenly in way over her head, unlike the RCMP officer, who looked weary, as if he wasn’t hearing anything he hadn’t heard a hundred times before.

  The social worker’s mouth opened and closed a few times before she finally came up with “Mr. Schneider, those are not good parenting skills.”

  I think all of us were feeling a little sick and then I felt I was floating above, watching, while Ked started to let loose. He was yelling things that would have had Eleanor’s mom covering my ears. But through this I saw something else strange; it was as if Ked’s anger were a ladder and with it he climbed down, down, down from the thin places. As if his anger were an affirmation that he was here too.

  “I won’t live with you,” yelled Ked. “I’m done!”

  “You got no choice, boy, and neither do I. They’re gonna make me take you. I’m the only family you got. Who else would want you?” said his father.

  Uncle Jack stood up. “I would,” he said.

  Kate, whose hands had been on her belly throughout this, like she was covering the unborn baby’s ears, stood too. “We would.”

  Then my dad stood up. This meant sliding out of the booth. “I would too.”

  My mother looked bemused for a moment, as it probably occurred to her that we only had two small bedrooms, but she stood too and said, “Yes, he’s ours.”

  “No, he’s ours,” said Evie,
and she ran on her little legs and pulled Ked out of the booth to his feet and wrapped her arms around him, her face in his solar plexus.

  “Darn right,” said Bert.

  “I would,” a low rumbling voice came quietly from the back of the restaurant, and the seer stood up on his unsteady arthritic old legs. “If I wasn’t so old, I would.”

  “Well, Ked,” said the social worker, getting all businesslike again and shuffling her papers. “We need to make some good choices now, don’t we?”

  Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing from there. Ked’s dad was arrested for failing to provide the necessities. Ked had to testify, which was pretty awful. He was, of course, going to live with Evie and Bert, who would start adoption procedures and were the ones to sit with him through his father’s trial.

  Having opened the tap to his anger and come down from the thin places, he wasn’t sweet and spacy all the time anymore. He was grumpy some days and angry a lot of the time. He got in fights sometimes at school. He told me he didn’t like cooking—that he had grown up cooking and caring for his dad and was sick of it. He still helped me with the cookbook, though. Bert encouraged him to join the ice hockey team at school. He seemed to enjoy it and I went to his games but I noticed he didn’t talk much to anyone there. He told Evie he didn’t like mini marshmallows but she didn’t care. She started using chocolate chips instead and brought cookies to all his games and always proudly pointed out to everyone how fierce he was on the ice.

  After a bit, some of the anger dropped away. It was almost as if after he found it, for a time it was the new toy. But when it started to go away he seemed a little lost.

  He was predictably pretty upset about Ruffian. Evie and Bert found a litter of cockapoos in Kelowna and she and Bert and Ked all drove there to bring one home. Ked named him Gretzky. We got into the habit of walking Gretzky and Mallomar together when he didn’t have hockey practice but Gretzky seemed more Evie and Bert’s dog than Ked’s.

  One day he asked me to tell him about the accident. So I told him everything, even my fit of pique.