Oh, My Darling

by Shaena Lambert

  And Jane stands with a skein of wool around her forearms while Miss Shapiro winds it into a ball.

  By three o’clock Miss Shapiro is gone.

  Outside the sky has turned a darker blue. At the edge of the school parking lot boys are throwing each other into a juniper bush, calling each other homo, which allows Jane to slip by. Night hovers in the distance, hours away still, but Jane begins to hurry, kicking a pebble with the arch of her left foot and then her right, making sure that the stone touches her shoe seam each time. A limousine is parked in the church lot, and Jane feels a wash of terror remembering the rhyme:

  If you should see a hearse go by

  Then you will be the next to die.

  But there is nothing to be alarmed about.

  Hurry. Kick the pebble. Hurry. Wait. She passes her Italian neighbour’s place, with its chicken coop, then the bramble-covered vacant lot, the big rock at the corner sprayed with the words Fuck the dogs. On she goes, up the driveway. She doesn’t realize yet how easy it will be to escape; that one day a solution will arrive, along with long legs, training, marathons—the secret being simply to keep moving, to outrun them. For now, all she can do is take hold of the front doorknob, push the door open, and then call out once.

  Jane’s mother fumbles with the bedroom door, then floats down the hallway. She plants a kiss on Jane’s cheek with burning lips.

  “How was your day?” The spark in her mother’s eyes has been snuffed, and her hair is a static mess, as though brushing had confused her and she’d stopped halfway through. And yet her half-smile as she asks this question is sly. Yes it is. Slyly gleeful at having escaped them. Like Miss Shapiro she has fled, leaving only this sepulchral, loose-haired, vodka-imbibing presence.

  “I’m calling Dad,” Jane spits at her mother.

  “No, don’t. Please don’t.” Gretchen sits down heavily on the bottom stair and begins to weep.

  Jane turns to stare at her. How can this happen? (And happen so often—each time taking Jane completely by surprise.) How can her mother—Gretchen the Lonely—Gretchen the Beautiful—turn into this weeping troll at the bottom of the stairs?

  What makes oblivion so worth it?

  1968. Gretchen showers noisily, banging against the shower stall. Then she comes upstairs in a clean, floor-length caftan. She sits in her chair by the fireplace, hotly washed and scrubbed, as though for sacrifice.

  At last Jane hears her father’s MG rev up the driveway. His car door slams, his key scratches the front door latch, his briefcase makes a muffled thud on the parquet floor.

  From her place in the kitchen, Jane can see both her father grimly mounting the stairs, and her mother sitting with her ankles crossed, staring at the charred bits of log in the fireplace. Her father crosses the rug to stand in front of her. He shakes his head, a jitter, almost a tic.

  He says, “Please, Gretchen.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

  “No.” He shakes his head again, his face reddens, and he sits on the hearth stone. Then, as though that were not far enough, he slides to his knees and places his face in her lap. There is no sound, except for the refrigerator, which whirrs and stills. The part in his hair has turned pink.

  Gretchen looks out at him from the vast field of her loneliness (she is crossing a moor at twilight, she is alone), and then she reaches down to stroke the back of his head.

  Crow Ride

  Muriel was given the leaflet at Whole Foods. Not inside the doors, where Swiss chard was mounded high in a Christmas display. Outside. Beside the peonies from Chile, a dollar a stem.

  A young man with dreadlocked hair danced toward her. His hands, yellow from grime (or was it natural dye?), contrasted sharply with the sleeves of his woollen sweater. He produced a flyer from his satchel, flicked it inside her comfort zone, and flashed her a smile.

  Surprisingly bright teeth.

  “Crow ride?”

  Muriel tried to sidestep him, but he boxed her in against the peonies, blood maroon and seashell pink. They must have travelled on ice for thousands of miles only to land in this cold harbour, this rain-forest mist. Up close the man smelled of the brine in feta cheese. How old was he? Twenty. Twenty-two at most.

  She said, “I don’t know what that means.”

  Again that grin. He pointed to the flyer. “We bike to where all the crows roost at sunset.”

  She asked him where they roosted and he gestured east. At Still Creek, he said. Beyond the outskirts of Vancouver, in Burnaby. Costco had built a big-box store there, so this group—the crow-riders—was protesting. He had a sharp, almost goatlike chin, and a fleshy mouth, and surprisingly clear, interested eyes, though she suspected that he had contempt for them all—all the middle-aged Whole Foods shoppers. She had an urge to reach out and touch one of his dirty-blond dreads with the pads of her fingertips. They were frowzy and inviting, like strands of rope.

  “You should come.”

  “Crow ride.” She sounded the words, and then gave him a bright, false smile she regretted instantly. “I’ll think about it.”

  Muriel went from cooler to shelf, placing mandarin oranges and sugar and flour in her buggy. She would bake cookies for Arabella, her twelve-year-old daughter, and for Pan, her husband, leaving them on a plate on the counter, an offering of Christmas cheer. Pan would come home from work, shower away the fine gold dust from the construction site, then grab a cookie and drive Arabella to dance class. She—Muriel—would be at her step class and when she got home, Pan would already be in the basement, working with his lathe.

  Muriel caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the spinach. Medium-length hair and that kind of thin, sad face you see on older women. She hoped that the boy wouldn’t be there when she left the store, to see her paper bags so stuffed (she had forgotten her cloth ones). When she came out, he was gone.

  It was only when she was in the kitchen unpacking the groceries and something black shook the phone wire outside the window—a squirrel—that the words crow ride formed again in her mind. She went to the computer and Googled “crows”:

  Crow flights

  Crow intelligence

  Crow ride

  A picture of bare-limbed trees. She clicked “enlarge,” and black flecks darkened the sky. Still Creek at Dusk, the caption said. At first glance the trees looked cankered, but these knobs, on branch tips and tree crotches, on every limb and joint, were, in fact, the roosting crows.

  Muriel put some ground turkey on to fry, then stood with the wooden spoon in her hand considering her granite counters. They had been constructed to ward off dread. But dread had arrived anyway. Perhaps she and Pan had even coaxed it into being by installing such solid, immaculate countertops, and the pullout drawer for spices, and the two nooks—computer and breakfast. This kitchen had been their dream, and God had smote them for it. One of the things God was good at: smiting you for getting your priorities wrong, for basking in the glow of maple-stained floors, faucets that didn’t drip, the look of a stainless-steel bowl holding three Anjou pears.

  Their teenage son, Alexander, had died of a drug overdose while they were finishing the baseboards—Pan thinning the shellac to brush the wood with its third and final coat.

  That night she dreamt Alexander was sitting on the blanket box at the end of the upstairs hallway. She came toward him tentatively, floorboards creaking under her feet. Behind him the window was open, and she realized this was how he must have gotten in. His fine dark hair, which showed the bones of his head, stuck up as though pulled by a static comb.

  She knelt to look into his eyes. He met her gaze with a kind of watchful compassion, as though he saw right into her, but it was up to her, now, how things would go.

  You’re back, she whispered.

  Don’t tell Dad.

  He crossed his legs, then picked a speck of tobacco from his teeth and flicked it away. Wh
ere had he been? Under the ground? In some dark place? His acid-washed jeans smelled fermented, vinegar-like. They would have to be cleaned, that was what she thought next, and that brought other thoughts, even as she knelt in front of him: how they could have a proper Christmas now. Morgan would come back from university, and all three children would tumble down the stairs on Christmas morning and sit by the tree. Even as she composed this picture she felt a streak of misgiving, and when she glanced back at Alexander, silver coins covered his eyes. They were the size of dimes, but ancient, the imprint rubbed from them as though they’d been run over by a train. Muriel cried out and tried to peel one away, but the coin was attached, and tearing at it seemed to be leaving a hole in his iris. You have to take your Adderall, she kept saying. You have to take it, Alex. If you don’t, this happens. But Alex didn’t seem to care whether he could see or not. He rocked back and forth, moving his head to the heavy rock coming from his earphones, smiling inside his blindness.

  The next afternoon, around three o’clock, Muriel put her bike on the car and returned to the store. The boy was there, though the peonies were gone, replaced by buckets of twiggy branches covered in berries. His sweater was heavy with raindrops. A Rasta hat covered his dreads.

  She said, “I’d like to go on the crow ride.”

  He met her eyes. He didn’t seem as nice as the day before; perhaps the rain was getting to him. He said, “It only happens once a month.” Today he was giving out flyers for an arts cooperative. Hand-stitched pillows.

  Who pays you to do this? she wanted to ask, but instead she apologized; she had thought the crow ride happened every night. “Maybe I’ll come next month,” she said. The doors opened, releasing her into the spruce-scented store.

  She was picking out cheeses, her hand on a Saran-wrapped triangle of Port Salut, when she smelled him behind her, hops and sweat. “Oh!” She wheeled around. “We meet again.”

  He had appeared so suddenly, she thought he might be about to hurt her; but instead he smiled gently, then placed his yellowed palm over her hand—the one grasping the bar of the buggy—and closed his eyelids. There they stood, swaying slightly, she with the cheese in her hand, drenched with embarrassment at this New Age silliness, he with his long nose, chiselled lips, prominent freckled cheekbones.

  Then he opened his eyes and winked. Or did he? It was so quick she wasn’t sure she’d seen right. It was as though he, too, couldn’t quite believe the schlocky gesture.

  “I can take you there,” he said. “Still Creek.”

  “Now why would you do that?”

  “You should see them for yourself.”

  Above the coolers, in the ventilation system, she heard a bat-squeak of warning. She looked carefully into his eyes, and he nodded slightly, returning her gaze, as though to say, I know what you want.

  “Besides,” he added, “you seem like a nice person. You have a car, right?”

  The trees of December were shorn of their leaves, great limbs brushing the sky. Muriel turned onto Fourth Avenue and they drove past lululemon, travel stores, a Thai fusion restaurant. All this had once been a hippy strip—varnished counters and stained glass, organic cheese and manna breads. That era was gone, and all that was left was this boy, transported here in his hippy garb.

  Muriel noticed that the rain had stopped. All at once a streetlight flicked on, followed by another and then another, all down Fourth Avenue. There was only an hour of light left in the sky. In ten days it would be the shortest day of the year. And then what?

  “Just keep heading east.”

  “On Fourth?”

  “Why not?”

  He turned and gave her that smile, and again she had the sense of being exposed, as by a camera flash. She pictured herself from his point of view—her tucked-in blouse and high-waisted jeans, her neatly combed hair and horsey face. She had put her ski jacket in the back seat, and now she wished she had its protective covering.

  “Did you go to high school around here?”

  “I’m travelling, actually. I’m a travelling man.” He began to tap his index fingers against his legs, then noticed and stopped.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Back east. Peterborough.”

  They were moving faster now, through a district that had once been warehouses but was now all cream concrete and aqua glass condominiums. She asked what he was doing in Vancouver and he said he had been going to university, but he’d dropped out after a semester and now things were much clearer.

  “I’m liberated,” he said. “But also hungry.”

  Muriel pictured an exasperated father. A doting, worried mother.

  “So you make money by giving out those flyers.”

  “I work for a business that charities hire.” Most of the charities were big, like Oxfam or Red Cross, but he and some of the other canvassers gave out pamphlets for local groups too. Like Crow Ride. It was all legit, he said, though it didn’t pay much. He beat a rhythm on the thigh of his jeans. Hit the cymbals. “And I steal things.”

  At first she thought she hadn’t heard right: he said it the way someone else might say, And I have a paper route.

  “Where do you steal from?”

  He shrugged. “Whole Foods. 7-Eleven. And then you can always scrounge from the dumpsters. Did you know the curry house on Commercial Drive gives away all their curry at the end of the day?”

  There was a pause as this information sank in.

  “You look sad,” he said. “Am I making you sad?”

  She shook her head.

  The Science Centre glittered in the afternoon mist like a Christmas bauble. The boy crossed his legs and began to pick at a hole in the thigh of his jeans. She caught a glimpse of faded pink long underwear. He reached forward, fingering the dial of the radio.

  “Can we?”

  “Sure.”

  He found the classic-rock station with no trouble and Mick Jagger filled the car, singing the words star fucker over and over.

  The boy leaned back, ankle on knee, foot waving to the music. A host of tics and buzzes emanated from his body. Did he do drugs? Yes, he probably did, and she realized she had known this already. There was a type, and he was it. He was also clearly used to being driven around by a mother.

  She said, “My son died of a drug overdose” at the same time that the young man said, “I just need to make one stop.”

  They let each other’s statements sink in.

  “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “That’s rough.”

  “Where would you like to stop?”

  “It’s pretty much on the way.”

  “Just say where.”

  “You can turn here.”

  She executed a left turn on Main Street.

  “This will only take a second.”

  He had been couch-surfing at his friend Zoe’s house, he said. But the sad truth was he had to pick his stuff up by the end of the day or she was going to throw it in the dumpster. “She has a hate-on for me right now.” This was because he had slept with her friend Maggie. Maggie and he had just had this thing, this dynamism. It was impossible to resist. And now Zoe was screaming at him all the time. “Fuck.”

  “Sounds difficult.”

  “It’s like I have this jagged piece of glass stuck right here.” He touched his chest.

  There was silence.

  “And all I want to do is travel to Baja. I have this idea I could skateboard to Baja—I’d be the first person in the world to do it. I’ve heard the light down there is really different.” Full stop.

  Slowly his mind seemed to circle around to her again. “I’m sorry about your son,” he said.

  She shook her head. Too late, selfish boy. Too late.

  “It’s just”—he tucked one foot under his thigh and turned to look straight at her—“it’s out of my experience, even to have a son. And when s
omething is way out of my experience I get distanced. I’m sorry.”

  She nodded tersely.

  “I feel this prickly confusion all over me. And it’s like I’m a thousand miles up and I’m staring at the world. And then I think, just as it becomes fucking unbearable, maybe I’m enlightened, maybe this is what enlightenment is, seeing everything from on top, you know, and from a huge distance.” There was a pause, and then he added, “Or maybe I’m just an asshole. You turn at the next right.”

  This last was so transactional, her anger must have registered on her face.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” he said.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Nothing.

  “I shouldn’t have said that, about being distanced. I was trying to be honest, but sometimes honesty—”

  “I just want to see the crows and get back by dinner.”

  They slipped under the viaduct and into China-town. They were closer to the port now, the sea almost washing under them. They passed the Ga Cheong Herbal Medicine Company, bins mounded with iridescent fish slivers. A golden cat waved its arm up and down. Hello and welcome, it said. Hello and welcome.

  “What drug?” he asked gently.

  Despite her anger, she heard herself say the word, ecstasy. Always so full of promise, that name. It was a mix of drugs, actually—E, ketamine, OxyContin, plus his own medication—but she didn’t want to give the boy any more than this.

  He sat with his hands palms upward, back straight, breathing deeply, as though calming himself against the onslaught of something: the onslaught of her, no doubt, and all the unwanted stuff she had opened in him, about distance and compassion—and death. Again she smelled that odour he emitted: hops and cheese and something deeper and riper, like truffle oil. She said, “This isn’t a particularly great way to get to Burnaby.”

  They were in the heart of the Downtown Eastside now. They drove quickly past a skinny prostitute with caved-in cheeks, a condition, she happened to know, that was caused by grinding your teeth. Caused, in turn, by crystal meth. At the corner of Main and Hastings, another prostitute veered up to rap on the window, then saw Muriel and turned away, muttering.