Blood Secrets

by Nadine McInnis

“Where did you get that?”

  “From Mariko.”

  “Well, give it back! I don’t want Jonah seeing it.”

  “Mom, these were the lucky ones, with graves and plaques, and the people around them digging down into the permafrost so they wouldn’t be forgotten. Don’t you wonder about the rest? The ones without the graves?”

  “No, I don’t. Dead and buried,” I say, trying to sound certain.

  “Not buried. Don’t you want to know what happened to them? What they had to do to stay alive?”

  “No. I’m taking Jonah now. Put that book away and answer the door.”

  I replenish Jonah’s costume in the bathroom, wrapping him in more toilet paper. He asks this time for the ends to hang down.

  “My ghost is trailing behind me, like a shadow,” he tells me swishing from side to side, and the lengths of toilet paper drift on currents of air from his movement.

  “Don’t say that.”

  He stops swishing and looks at me with incomprehension.

  “I’m just superstitious,” I say, kissing him. He’s delighted by the lipstick we dab to redden the whiteness. He wants lipstick on his lips, and I put some on myself as well and kiss him again, loudly on one cheek, leaving my mark there as we head out into the night.

  “There, now you’re Mommy’s mummy,” I say and he laughs. We complete the block in record time because his legs are that much longer than last year. And like last year, he can’t be coaxed up the driveway to the house where recorded whale song is blaring out of speakers near the front door. The wailing, clicking, hysterical underwater laughter makes him cling to my side, saying, “I don’t want to hear the wild voices. Mommy, it’s too wild.” After that, he loses his enthusiasm and stops every ten feet to rifle around in his bag of candy, which is growing heavy, though he won’t let me carry it for him.

  We keep to the edges, but coming down the street, right in the middle, is a tall girl, unconcerned with traffic that might come up behind her. She is wearing a long white dress and has silver tinsel tied throughout her long hair and attached to her shoulders and along her arms. The wind picks up her silver hair and blows it around her face as we pass.

  So this is what happens, I think, recognizing her foolhardy willingness to take on the world, even as it rushes up dangerously from behind. Norah’s harsh judgment of the Franklin expedition tells me that she already thinks she can do better.

  “I swear it’s colder since that girl passed by,” I tell Jonah. “Let’s go home.”

  IAN IS HOME and Norah is not. Ian tells me she left with her new friend, Mariko, their faces blackened with burnt cork, but little else in the way of costumes. He laughs. I can smell the singed smell of old wine cork still hanging in the kitchen.

  “Did you think it was wise to let her go out with Mariko?”

  He looks puzzled when I tell him that I don’t think Mariko is a very good influence and maybe we should discourage the friendship while we still can. I’ve remembered where I heard her name before.

  “She’s the girl whose father was found frozen last winter. Remember? The man who committed suicide by the river? Her mother lost it after that, so the girl just comes and goes.”

  “Poor kid. Sounds like she could use a harbour in the storm,” he says. But I remember something else.

  “She was in a fight last summer in the park. She was the girl who hit the older boy in the nose and drew blood. Remember that gang of kids egging things on? That was her, in the middle of it.”

  He laughs. “So why did she punch the kid in the nose?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” I say.

  Instead of making him averse, however, I see when Mariko and Norah return with their pillowcases full of loot that Ian is intrigued. He watches Mariko slip out of the dark suit jacket he lent her for her hobo costume, a voluptuous little shrug.

  After Mariko leaves, I hear him downstairs asking Norah about the fight last summer, whether that was her friend. I ease down the top three stairs to hear their conversation.

  “Yes, but they were making fun of her,” Norah answers, a little evasive.

  “Why would they do that? She seems like a sweet girl. And she’s so pretty.”

  “I love her long hair,” Norah says, sounding smitten. “I wish my hair was long like hers. She never gets it cut because her mother’s sick, you know. She has to rest all the time and can’t take her anywhere.” After a pause, she says, “They were teasing Mariko about it.”

  “About her long hair?”

  “No, about her mother being sick.”

  “Why would they care?”

  Norah sighs in a slightly exasperated way and says, “Because they could see the Christmas tree through the window with its needles all brown and they thought it was weird.”

  “That is a little weird, for July,” he says.

  “I know. Mariko threw it out after that. I helped her. We dragged it into the woods when no one was looking. And we found a fort some boys built.”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Mariko and Norah are already there at the kitchen table when I arrive home with Jonah. They have made colour copies on the scanner of the photos of the open graves from the Franklin expedition and have them spread around on the table where we’re going to eat, in clear view. Norah quickly flips over the ones she showed me yesterday of the men in their coffins before Jonah has his boots off, but photos of the gravesite itself are left face up. I catch sight of the most desolate, lifeless landscape I could ever imagine: small grey stones, drift ice and water so weirdly chemically blue, it looks as though it could burn the flesh right off your bones. The graves are all oriented the same direction, not towards inland mountains or sea, but looking down the endless ugly beach, disturbed only by the gravel mounds of larger stones holding the dead down, intact.

  “What did I tell you yesterday, Norah,” I say. I say nothing to Mariko.

  “Mom, we are being careful. Jonah wasn’t even here!”

  That night, I don’t sleep easily. I see a man dressed in a good overcoat and tie flattening the snow before taking off his shoes and lying down. I see the slow removal of clothing, skin against snow. I see the fixed discoloured faces of those open graves of the Franklin expedition. I can’t get the images out of my mind and I’m exhausted by morning.

  MARIKO STILL DOESN’T SPEAK to me directly, never meets my eye, but she does seem more girlish. I can see what Norah sees in her. There’s a mischievous quality to her, a springy energy in her body, a readiness to laugh that is surprising, given the circumstances of her life. I take the girls to the video store on the weekend. Mariko keeps Norah between herself and me, doesn’t look me in the eye. I’m surprised to notice that she’s my height, breathing a higher, more energized layer of oxygen than my still childlike daughter. Their project must be completed and handed in, although I don’t ask. The Franklin expedition is suddenly off-limits as a topic of conversation. We finally agree 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I haven’t seen since I was their age. Norah is dubious about the choice, thinks it’s hopelessly old-fashioned, but goes along with me to keep peace. Mariko reads the back of the video and says, “Wicked.” So that’s where Norah got that word. Norah decides to be happy about the choice.

  I wait for them to go downstairs to the den with popcorn, Mariko dashing ahead of Norah. Then I head out the door, straight through the backyard, past the boundary line of our housing development to the place Jonah described to me at breakfast. A place in the forest they’ve taken him to without my permission. His directions are surprisingly accurate. I ease myself down and up a dirt trench that will be a new sewer system and cross a ravine, then enter the trees. Their branches are bare, tangled and dark above me. Here and there tree limbs are punctuated with clumps of leaves and branches—crows’ nests. Now you can see what they’ve been up to when they were hidden away all summer. Light reaches the ground like something unhealthy, charged with bright radiation. The leaves underfoot are not quite as crisp and pungent as they were ev
en a week ago. They are starting to freeze and crumble unpleasantly under my feet.

  I move down into a basin of trees, mostly oak and poplar, and see the bright green slash on the opposite slope. As I draw closer, the unnatural green turns out to be a piece of astroturf covering plywood that forms the roof of a bunker-like fort. It is quite sophisticated, with a long rectangular opening for spying or gun barrels, obviously built with care and planning. Jonah told me they were given the fort by some boys, and remembering last summer’s fight in the park, I wonder what Mariko had to do to seize control of this prime piece of real estate. I’m already thinking of it as hers. I have to squat to enter, steel myself against the musty odour of damp earth, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then things come into focus.

  The fort is neat and organized. Set upon a low plank table propped up with concrete blocks is china in a floral pattern, far too good to be offered up for play, candles in pottery holders. Beside the table is a Tupperware box weighed down with Seventeen magazines. Inside is a cache of food: chips, tins of luncheon meat, crackers and canned soft drinks. I also find some of my old lipsticks and compacts, and a travelling mirror. There’s a little whisk and dustpan leaning against the earth wall. All is innocent, except for the candles, which I’ve tried to discourage Norah from lighting in her room. A fire would turn this small underground space into a crematorium.

  I lift a man’s dark overcoat from the floor in the corner and catch my breath when I see a Ouija board underneath. Set down in the centre of the board are house keys on a gold key chain, a man’s red silk neck tie and a photograph. It’s a graduation shot, the man is smiling widely, triumphant. The matte is embossed with the words University of Waterloo, Doctorate of Mathematics, probably a foreign student here on scholarship, a family’s pride and joy. He doesn’t look much older than Mariko. I’ve caught a sense of him on his coat, intimate and lightly scented with aftershave. These objects may be all of him she has now. I don’t know what to do. For a moment, I’m frozen, but I leave them where I found them.

  When I get home, I can hear their laughter travelling through the registers of the house. Gales of laughter, winding up into near hysteria so that Norah’s voice, or is it Mariko’s, is a high cry. Far below the high pitch of their voices is another voice, deep in tone, a blurred drunken sound. Terrifying, that slow motion man’s voice saying something over and over I can’t distinguish. I take my shoes off and slip down the stairs, listen at the closed door of the den. There is definitely a man’s voice, buried at short intervals by the uncontrollable laughter of the two girls.

  “I can feel it,” he’s saying. “I can feel it.” He repeats the same line in an insinuating voice slowing down. I open the door quickly. The room smells strange, something chemical with a sickening hint of banana burning the hairs inside my nose. They are rewinding the video, playing it, and rewinding it again.

  “What is that strong smell?” I ask, surprising them. Norah suddenly pauses the video, cutting the sound. They are each holding an open bottle of nail polish in their hands: one purple, one blue. Their feet are bare and the toenails on each foot have been painted alternating colours. These macabre shades are a far cry from the strawberry pink Norah puts on her fingernails for special occasions.

  “Where did you get this nail polish?”

  “It’s Mariko’s. What’s wrong?” Norah looks alarmed.

  “Your pupils look dilated.” I open the window high up on the wall and an icy blast slaps me in the face. I inhale and wait, my hands on the sill near my shoulders, trying to decide what to do. But I wait a moment too long. When I turn around, they are gone, and then I hear them talking to Ian upstairs, at first quietly, but then Norah’s voice returns to normal and I hear her laugh like a girl. Ian is cajoling her about something and I leave them to it, go through the door to the garage.

  My hands are cold. I forgot my gloves inside and don’t want to go back in, not yet, while my heart is still beating too fast. I stand on the edge of the lunar circle on the front lawn, which is suddenly more difficult to see. Just in the last few days, the grass has changed from green to a smoky grey.

  When I come inside, Jonah is sitting on Mariko’s lap, and she’s reading him a story. It’s his favourite, Sitting Ducks, about alligators that run a duck factory. I move around in the kitchen, trying to keep busy as I listen. She pauses between words, nuzzling into his neck as she reads. “The alligator acted … friendly, but all the while he was thinking … what a delicious meal the duck would make when properly … fattened,” she’s saying. Jonah knows where the switch takes place, when the alligator becomes a friend of the little duck. She says, “Look at this picture, Jonah. It’s so cute.” They have turned to the page with the duck and the alligator curled up in bed together.

  Mariko asks, “Do you ever get scared in your bed at night?” I can hear the loneliness in her voice, and it makes me feel suddenly ashamed. Jonah must hear it too. He turns and puts his arms around her neck.

  “Wait till you find out what happens, Mariko. The ducks all fly south,” he tells her.

  “Oh, that’s good. I’d fly south if I could. Especially to get away from hungry alligators.” And she tickles him.

  IAN TURNS AWAY from me in his sleep. I touch his bare shoulder, but he doesn’t move. Either he is lying awake in the dark, as I am, or he is beyond me and cannot feel my hand. The faint, far-off sound of the girls’ voices rises through the ductwork, preventing me from falling asleep, and once the wave of sleepiness has passed, something else keeps me lying here, staring up at the blades of the ceiling fan, still and slightly warped, like the propellers of a boat. Pushing darkness down over my face.

  The house is quiet now, but I get up to pace the hallway, back and forth, without turning on the light. Then I ease down to the kitchen. I don’t plan to move on towards the basement stairs, then I do, stepping quietly from one stair to the next so that the girls don’t hear me. The door of the den is open and I look inside.

  They are side by side, asleep on the pullout bed. I ease closer till I’m standing over them. I can make out the curtain of Mariko’s hair falling across her face, Norah’s slender hand hanging over the edge of the bed, the length of her bare arm. She seems to be tucked down and curled against Mariko. I can smell an unfamiliar smell, the smell of a stranger, and the sweet essence of Norah too. Once my eyes adjust to the different kind of darkness in the basement, I see that the two of them have at least some space between them. Norah is wearing a T-shirt instead of pajamas, something she’s never done before. Mariko, too, is wearing one of Norah’s oversize T-shirts, I think the violet one, but it’s hard to tell. Everything has neutralized to shades of grey and black.

  Mariko starts to breathe more quickly, almost an anxious pant. I back away quickly, fearing that she senses my presence in the room. She settles again and I take just one minute more to look at Norah, who is sleeping with the otherworldly peace of a girl in a fairy tale. I’ll be watching from a distance now as her prettiness matures into something more potent.

  Ian must have known that I didn’t sleep much because he leaves me in bed in the morning. I do sleep a little, drifting in and out as the house comes to life and the smells of breakfast cooking, a full company kind of breakfast, smoky bacon, eggs, toast, ease in under the door. The voices downstairs are animated. Ian is obviously going to some effort to welcome this girl. I pretend I’m asleep when he opens the door. I feel him approach the bed, then withdraw. Then, I hear the laughter and high spirits lift again downstairs. He’s laughing along with the girls at something uproarious.

  Norah sees me and calls out, “Mom. Wait till you see Jonah. He—,” but I interrupt her.

  “Norah, your voice is going right through my head. I have a splitting headache.”

  “Wait a minute. There’s getting up on the wrong side of the bed and then there’s getting up on—,” Ian says. I hear the jocularity in his voice, the confident, cajoling tone.

  “Shut up, Ian. Just shut up.�
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  Then there is silence. Mariko, still wearing Norah’s T-shirt over her black jeans, keeps her eyes down. Norah has her arms across her chest, and is biting her lip, face turned to the wall. Jonah shuffles over to me. I haven’t noticed until now that he’s wrapped himself in layers of toilet paper, wrapped it thickly around his legs, arms and torso in a crude replica of his Halloween costume. He must have used every roll he could find in the bathroom. It is particularly thick around his middle, but it has slipped down and hangs from him in the back like a dirty diaper. The ends of the roll are dangling from his arms and dragging behind him. Lengths of toilet paper break off with every step. He’s shredding before my eyes.

  “Mom, I want my ghost cup.” When Jonah is sick or afraid, he wants the cup that he had when he was a toddler, with the two handles and weight in the base. He calls it his ghost cup because he thinks it’s spooky the way it always bounces back into an upright position no matter how you hold it down. This is a sure sign that I’ve upset him, but I can’t soothe him now.

  “Jonah, you’re too old for that cup and you’re too old to be making such a mess. Whose idea was it for you to waste all this toilet paper?” He starts to cry.

  “I just want to be alone right now,” I say. Jonah looks at me, frightened. Then I can hear him snuffling in the hall. Mariko and Norah leave next, taking the stairs to the basement. Ian starts towards the hallway where Jonah is but he stops for one moment, face close to mine. He’s menacing and quiet.

  “You’re really losing it. I’m going to talk to our son now, then I’m going to talk to our daughter. Then it will be your turn.”

  I’m tired, my head feels thick, and there’s an undercurrent of nausea that threatens to grow stronger. I turn the front burner of the stove on high, fill the kettle at the sink, hold back the curtain to look out the window at the front lawn. Good, I think, the two circles of damage done by the grubs haven’t grown any larger. Even overnight, the chemicals seem to be working. Perhaps Tylenol can do the same for my head, tightening now with strengthening concentric circles of pain.