Oh, My Darling

by Shaena Lambert

  The boy laid a hand on Muriel’s thigh. “I am very sorry about your son,” he said. “I am, you know. I really am.”

  Now they were pulled over in front of a dilapidated pink house on Heatley Street, and Muriel was crying. She was crying because this boy had such wise eyes. His words were stupid. His gestures were stupid, but his eyes were very kind. She cried because of her dream, which kept coming back to her in fragments, and because Alex was her second child, and because it had been so long since a boy had flicked the radio on beside her, or bobbed his head to classic rock, or rested his runner on the glove compartment.

  She wiped her eyes and stared out at a hydrangea bush with sepia pom-poms.

  “Tell me,” the boy said gently. Where had he learned to be so kind?

  She told him bits and pieces from her storehouse of grief. How they had listened to the doctor, who had prescribed medication. And how when Alex was fifteen, experimental child that he was, he started snorting that medication with his friends. How within a year Muriel and Pan were locking Alex out of the house because he was dealing in all kinds of drugs—E, K, M (an alphabet of terror)—buying, selling, railing, snorting it—and stealing things from them to support his habit, like an entire stereo system, and Pan’s stamp collection. How one night Alex had tried all the windows, and then leapt down from the roof, breaking the stems of the rose bushes, and run down the broad boulevard to meet friends at the beach, where, in a clearing in the bramble patch, he had taken a heroic dose of mixed drugs and floated out of his body. How he had said to his friends, before he lost consciousness, that he could see every bunny in the patch. She always pictured him, when she relived this, as floating at tree level, lit up with milky brightness, like the moon.

  There was more underneath, too, that she didn’t say, but which the boy seemed to understand: that their first child, Morgan, had been so easy, and their third child, Arabella, had been easy; but their second child, the one everyone said was supposed to feel small and sandwiched, he had cried for hours as a baby, and he wouldn’t take the nipple, and as a toddler if you gave him a toy car to play with, he drove it up your leg. It was never enough that he should have fun; he had to bother you. He radiated darkness, that was what she had felt at times. He was called by other gods. He had disorders, that was what the doctor said. And in the end it was a relief to classify what was going on, to say, He is a boy with disorders. But she will never forgive Pan for agreeing so readily to the medication. And someday soon she will leave Pan, and perhaps this is the first stage (she doesn’t say this, but the boy understands). She wants this to be the first step into another land, though in fact she knows Pan is not to blame. It is just that Pan never rose fully to the occasion, he wasn’t present enough, he didn’t pay attention; and neither did she, not really, not fully. They both had Attention Deficit Disorder. And now Pan wants things to be normal, if they can be. They even have a plan to take Arabella to Europe this summer. But none of them know yet that there will be no Europe. She will blast them to pieces. She will burn their fields.

  This was what she didn’t tell the boy, but what he understood anyway.

  He said, “Come here. Let me hug you.” (Oh God! The corniness!) But she turned to him and let herself relax into his woollen arms, and to her astonishment she felt at home. It was as if she were sixteen again, being embraced by a boy in a car. And to her further astonishment, she felt his lips on her hair.

  He said, “You’re beautiful. You really are. Do you know that?”

  And she wanted to say, No. She wanted to say, I should be killed. I locked my own son out of the house. I heard him rattle the window. Instead she sat up, got a Kleenex pack from the glove compartment, and blew her nose.

  “Go and get your things,” she said.

  “You are a beautiful human being.”

  He got out and loped to the concrete stairs leading to the house, then he turned and came back and knocked on her window. When she unrolled it, he leaned in, stroked her cheek, and kissed her tenderly near the corner of her eye. A sizzle of electricity leapt from his lips to her skin.

  “You never told me your name. Mine’s Simon.”

  She heard herself say her name. Then the boy—Simon—turned and took the concrete stairs two at a time, giving the stone lion by the gate a friendly tap on the head.

  Once he was gone, Muriel blew her nose again and checked her face in the mirror (a disaster). She felt a tingling in her skin, a kind of exultant but very ordinary arrival: the molecules of the world aligning themselves as they did after crying. On the kitchen counter, at home, a chicken was thawing on a plate, but here she was on Heatley Street. She could feel his kiss at the corner of her eye. He must have tasted her tears.

  What are you doing? Muriel said to herself, and as though to punctuate the thought, a flock of crows crossed the upper windshield, like black leaves.

  Somewhere between returning the mirror to its proper angle and returning the Kleenex pack to the glove compartment, she caught sight of the boy’s bag on the floor. He had not taken it with him. She leaned over and looked up at the house. Flimsy gate, some pampas grass beside the stone lion. The boy was nowhere in sight. She tugged the bag onto her lap—it was the size and weight of a cat—slipped the antler bone from its loop, and opened the mouth wide. Yes, this was where the seminal reek was coming from—hops, oolichan, a sex smell. She searched the satchel with quick, practised fingers: pamphlets, wallet, ancient Hacky Sack, implement for crushing bud, glass pipe, package of saltines, Blistex—ah! Her fingernails brushed something small and glass, wedged in the corner among cracker crumbs. A ping of recognition.

  But then the boy was there again.

  He was opening the hatchback door, thrusting in a box piled high with a sleeping bag, knitting needles, an espresso maker. He flipped a duffle bag from his back, dumped it beside the box.

  “Muriel, Muriel.” He got in on the passenger side and glanced down. His satchel was back on the floor at his feet. “Thank you for stopping.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “But would you mind if we made one final stop? I have to drop this stuff at my friend Drew’s. It’s on the way.” His blue-green-flecked eyes blinked once.

  “Not at all,” she said.

  “After that we’ll see the crows.”

  Muriel felt white sheets of anger and humiliation pouring from her forehead, over her eyebrows, down the front of her body. She turned the key. “It would be a lot of work hauling that stuff on the bus.” She saw what his game was. Crows, my ass: she was helping him move house. He must have picked her out the moment he saw her—someone motherly and useful, the sort of woman who buys expensive kale.

  “So where do we go now?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Right.”

  The last of the afternoon light had given way to the wild, ruddy blush of setting sun. They drove quickly east, taking Prior to Clark, Clark to Hastings. Grain elevators heaved into view. They passed the House of Steaks, then the Black Rook Bakery. (Look. He pointed to the sign. I told you we’d see crows.)

  Night was coming out of the ground. They passed under blue-limbed trees, then the steel and boards of the roller coaster in the grounds of the PNE. The boy reached for the radio button. Bob Marley filled the car, but Muriel used the steering wheel button to turn it down.

  “You don’t have to drive so fast. We can still get there in time.” He reached behind and snapped on his seat belt. Then he took a piece of paper from his pocket and peered at it. It was the back of the crow leaflet.

  “I thought you knew how to get there.”

  “Everything’s different in a car.”

  They drove under the Trans-Canada Highway, into what looked like the used car capital of the world. Everywhere, suddenly, there were rusted Wonder Bread trucks parked beside the road.

  “Are we close, Simon?”

  “We’
re close.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Pause.

  “Simon—do you have any idea where we’re going?”

  He laughed. “All right. I was so bagged I slept through the ride. But I know what I’m doing. Trust me.”

  She could see the glossy strangeness of a SkyTrain terminal through the scrim of leafless trees. He gestured to the right, and she pulled onto a sloping road, bumping over potholes, passing through an area of spartan bungalows, some with windows lit, some dark.

  “Turn here,” he said abruptly, and they did, pulling up to park in front of a small stucco house. A basement light was on.

  “I’ll be right back.” He unloaded his box and bag quickly, taking them around the side, and Muriel was left alone.

  Directly ahead of her, in the intersection’s roundabout, was a community garden filled with the ragged stems of daisies. Winter interest—that was what you called those skinny, lonely looking flowers. Through the window crack she smelled pigs and old leaves.

  Later Muriel will think about why she did what she did next. She will be in recovery mode, her entire body laced with contrition, and she will think, How could I have? And why? But it will never be all that easy to understand.

  Later—six months later—she and Pan will decide not to take Arabella to Europe but to take her to Morocco, a place Muriel has always wanted to visit. And after Morocco, the March break after that, they will go to Mexico, the Baja Peninsula, where they will help build houses for impoverished tomato pickers, putting Pan’s contracting skills to good use. In Mexico, under a hot, pink sun, she will touch Pan again, like a blind person feeling her way across an alien, familiar landscape. The days will open up again, letting more and more light in, whether she wants them to or not.

  She will go about her ordinary day—buying groceries, baking cookies—but all at once she will remember being parked half a mile farther along the rutted road, beside a Wonder Bread truck with cracked windows, the light of the Costco sign filling the windshield with ghostly light. She will remember how Simon undid the pearly snaps of her blouse, and pulled down her jeans, and how they both looked down at her little bush with its needy edges, its dark frill. She will remember how her gums felt, perfect and bony, and all her teeth, and how, after they were done, he said hush and look—and they both looked out at the sign for BC Fasteners, and the barbed- wire fence strangely spangled by small black bodies, gabbling and sighing. Already she was saying sorry, whispering sorry, and these sounds were not so different from the birds.

  But for now she is in the car, parked in front of the stucco house. She bends quickly to the satchel and feels inside, her hand knowing the shape of the thing, pulling it out. A glass vial the size of a thimble, powder inside. She stares down at it. Her nostril hairs stand up and bitter saliva builds in her mouth. She unscrews the lid, and there it is—the acrid smell that has terrorized her life. A smell like lightning. And Alexander is hovering above her, darkly perfect, watching as she takes out her purse and rolls a twenty. Interested—yes, he is interested, and even slightly afraid, to see her coming after him in this way.

  Little Bird

  Though my father has been dead for seven years, sometimes I imagine him clear as life, entering the dressing room at the Ex’n’Pop bar, on Mansteinstrasse, in Schöneberg. The space isn’t large, but Father manages to squeeze onto the vinyl chair between the vanity and the broken pinball machine (which Ulf, the manager, in all his wisdom, has chosen to store in the dressing room forever).

  “Rudy.” Father’s vegetarian eyes are full of remorse. “Mutti and I have spoken.” He looks at my headdress on the glass-topped table, and the tubes of rouge and greasepaint. “Your mother is worried about you, son.” He smells of buckskin and bananas, the inside of his old rucksack. “Voglein,” he whispers. Little bird. “We want you to come home.”

  Yet, when he says home, the word meant to convey the most meaning, he glances down, not wanting to meet my eyes. Even as a ghost he is a liar: a rift of falsity, deep as his nature, has lingered into death.

  There was no “home,” and he knows it. There were only provisional rental houses—the pink house in Brazil, the white one in Cane Vale, Barbados, where Mutti threw scalding water on a foot-long centipede she found crawling across the wall of the carport. At night the stars splashed the sky with incomprehensible patterns.

  I remember Father once turning to Mutti (this was late at night, on the back veranda overlooking the cane field). “Lotte,” he said, “I couldn’t find my way home following these stars.” Mutti, as ever, looked cool and monotone in a silk blouse and drawstring trousers. She was a slender woman with hips like a boy’s, monkey-ish hands with wrinkled palms, and perfect nails. Her dark hair was pulled into a chignon so tight it tugged at the tips of her eyebrows. Father pointed out the Southern Cross, then put his head in his hands, exhausted by the gin and tonics, the evening playing Troccas, a game he did not care for, and now this last insult, this blanket of unintelligible stars.

  As a Wandervogel, you see, a scout in the German youth movement, Father had found his way to Lapland and back. With his friends Klaus (the cloddish one) and Jutta (who had sewn the flag they carried), and others whose names I now forget, he had camped out using spruce boughs for a bed, explored the woods cradling the river Elbe, and travelled all the way to Finland, hitching rides with strangers, walking for miles, riding freight trains. At night he had been reassured by the familiar pattern of constellations set in place to guide young German wanderers: Orion, with his waist girdled in diamonds, Ursa Major, Castor and Pollux.

  We were on the run through most of my childhood—fleeing Germany for Argentina, shedding Argentina for Paraguay, escaping to Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, working our way in hasty, unnerving flights up the body of South America. I tried to explain this to my boyfriend, Peter, one day, describing the garden in Brazil and the weeping fig tree, Ficus benjamina, with roots that rose above the ground like the legs of a giant insect. He kissed my temple where the veins show. (I am blond, with delicate shoulder blades, slender arms, a tracery of veins visible beneath my skin.) “So you do have some good memories,” he said. Peter distrusts the outré and sensational; his nature is to calm things down. “Yes, dear,” I said, “ever so many.” Peter plays tennis semi-professionally: he understands practically nothing.

  But he does like a story. And so he cozied up, just as I used to with Mutti when she described the white ladies of the forest, and the princes and queens of her native Saxony. I told Peter about our pink house in Rio, the wall clothed in bougainvillea, the water dripping from the lion’s head. At siesta time, with the shutters closed, I could hear the servants’ laughter drift across the courtyard.

  But soon the story took its inevitable sorry turn: Mutti was weeping, Father ordering the maid to pack our things. There were scenes. Mutti was exhausted, and what kind of life was this for a child. Mutti stormed off to consult the Troccas deck, but to no avail.

  You are probably dying to ask: What did your father do? What set your family spinning into the Southern Hemisphere? What was this albatross slung around your necks? I sometimes think that there was not a time when I didn’t know, but that is not the case. When I was five I didn’t know. Those were the days of childhood immortality, when the very idea of death was unknown, and time was vast and uncharted, not measured into hours and half-hours. Father told me that the Easter Bunny followed us from Buenos Aires, searching me out with his basket of cream-filled eggs. He held me on his shoes and danced me around the kitchen table. He got down next to me, brown eyes beaming with kindness, and sang me a song about cheese mites. Looking into my face, seeing my belief in him, what a relief I must have been!

  He was brimful of vitality, a great believer in the importance of roughage. (He even mixed sawdust with his camp food during the war, a teaspoon at a time, to stay regular.) He had lost his hair from the tight helmet he had to wear every day (yet another terri
fying consequence of war), but this meant I had a good view of his ears, which he could wriggle by moving a muscle in each temple. Most importantly, he showed me his trick of springing onto his hands, then walking about as though his palms were the soles of his feet. He spent hours holding my feet against his chest, teaching me to root my palms into the ground, find my centre of balance. “You’ll kill the child,” Mutti said. “He’ll break his neck.” But as you can see, that didn’t happen. Father and I were wonders to ourselves with this art, displayed on the beach or on a park lawn, of leaping onto our hands and walking side by side, upside down.

  Yet the other thing was there too. It expressed itself as an absence beneath my ribs, a need to go to the bathroom—what I felt the time I got sunstroke: the stink of diarrhea in my bedroom, fig pods clacking against the shutters, and my parents’ voices, disembodied. They might have been in my head, they were that close, Father’s whispers beating back Mutti’s, whose voice, lower pitched, was like waves on the beach, not the crashing ones at dusk, but the medium ones on a sandy shore.

  “We’re all tired, Heinrich.”

  More lapping.

  Then Mutti: “I wish to God we had stayed.”

  I could imagine her standing over Father, his head in his palms, vanquished. For a while, even as a grown-up, this image made me terribly sad, until I realized that if Father had been painted naked in this pose by a kitsch Romantic painter, he would have been the picture of biblical sorrow—Job sobs in grief over his trials. That’s what I mean about Father’s streak of dishonesty: it inhabited even the poses he struck to represent guilt.

  In Barbados we lived in a new suburb called Cane Vale, just three houses built so far, on a plateau overlooking a cane field. It was about a mile from Oistins Beach. While the rains lashed down, the plateau was covered in a copperlike sheen, and the village boys didn’t bring their animals to graze. Then the rainy season ended, and I walked out the door, past the steaming flower beds and onto the school bus, where, to my amazement, one Sanford Fortescu, with downy blossom of cheek and pouting lips of a Botticelli angel, invited me to his house after school.