No Story to Tell

by K J Steele

  This novel is dedicated to all those who have traveled this

  path with dignity and grace.

  You are our teachers.

  Thank you.

  ~ Acknowledgments ~

  They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, the same could be said for creating a book. It is, at times, a solitary act, but one greatly influenced by a multitude of people. This novel exists because of many people’s inspiration, encouragement, patience, and knowledge.

  I would like to thank Dona Sturmanis, my first writing teacher, who saw “veins of gold” in my early work and encouraged me forward. The Humber College Creative Writing program which was invaluable for me as a place to safely incubate and grow my fledgling endeavors. A heart-felt thank you goes to my mentor, Don Thomas, who woke me up to all the possibilities within.

  This novel, however, would not exist were it not for Peter Murphy, who so charmingly shoved me out of my comfort zone, and Lou Aronica who so graciously caught me.

  I am indebted to Fiction Studio Books for the opportunity to bring this amazing story to life.

  And, a special thank you to Victor, Carrie, Chantelle, and Cara, who have always supported me in my “writerly ways.” You have been the wings of my belief.

  ~ A Note from the Publisher ~

  I’m a fool for great characters. To me, a novel only truly comes alive if complex, identifiable figures populate it. I’m fond of stories and storytelling, but characters are what keep me turning pages.

  You’re going to meet some fascinating characters in No Story to Tell. Victoria is intriguing on so many levels. She’s stuck, she’s conflicted, she’s confounded, and yet at the same time she has a spirit that compels her, even when she feels most incapable of moving forward. Elliot is worldly and accomplished, and just far enough out of reach to keep us wanting to know more about him. Bobby, for all of his considerable faults, has enough wrinkles in his persona to make him matter to us. Even the secondary characters like Rose, Pearl, and Sam bring the novel surprising levels of humanity.

  If characters matter as much to you as they do to me, you’re going to feel very much at home with No Story to Tell. KJ Steele is a gifted writer on several levels. Her voice is sure, her ear for dialogue is sharp, and she paints vivid pictures with her descriptions. However, what she does best is fill her novel with people who seem very, very real. There’s someone in this novel with whom all of us can relate. To me, that makes for an extremely satisfying reading experience.

  I hope you enjoy No Story to Tell.

  Lou Aronica,

  Publisher,

  Fiction Studio Books

  ~ Chapter 1 ~

  “Won’t last the night. Be the lucky one to see the dawn,” the doctor had decreed, lowering his old owl head.

  But she had lived to see the dawn and thirty-seven more years full of dawns not experienced by the good doctor himself. Life is a cruel joker and her birth was the cruelest joke of all. She had been a slimy, baby-bird embarrassment that had slipped out unexpectedly after the main show. The doctor was appalled to have the pathetic thing slide into his hands and quickly passed it off to his nurse, who dutifully bandaged it up in mountainous folds of blankets. Not quite knowing what to do with the unfortunate mass, she’d plopped it into a bassinet and pushed it aside, while the doctor assured himself and the bewildered parents that mercifully the tiny thing was too weak to survive and would soon die.

  She did not die, however, but rather stubbornly held that gossamer thread of life until six days later fate, refusing to be outwitted, had delivered the other twin up in exchange. Her father had been livid, railing at the doctor to explain the actions of that bastard, fate, and his bitch dog, death. He insisted on a reversing of the facts, something . . . anything, to make life fair. But the doctor, the wisest man in their little town, could offer no more than a mute apology. The child had simply quit breathing and died in its sleep. The doctor sat like a great sagging Buddha; her father demanding a blessing, he offered up empty hands grasping for meaning they could not find.

  When it became clear that she would not die, they grudgingly took her home and gave her a name. The name was not hers really, but rather borrowed from her dead twin who now lay anonymously under six feet of earth and a cross dismissing him blankly as “Baby Stone.” For the few days of his life, his name had been Victor—victorious one. But he’d failed to live up to his namesake, life cutting him down before he’d even lived a week. The name was simply transferred to her, the booby prize. And so, at seven days old she became Victoria and, thus christened, continued to tremble on into life despite the predictions against her. And perhaps, she mused now looking at the black-and-white photos, just perhaps, in spite of them.

  The baby picture had not been taken of her but of her twin brother and was as close as she’d ever get to seeing herself as a newborn. She’d not been expected to live and therefore, in her parents’ minds, hadn’t really existed. Practical to a fault, they had been hardworking, hard-minded farm folks. No sense in wasting time on things that didn’t pay. Photographs chronicling her life hadn’t begun until she was just about a year old. By that time her parents had gotten past the disappointment of their loss and accepted the fact that she was there to stay.

  She’d never seen the pictures of her brother until after her parents’ deaths, and she’d inherited the job of rooting through the cobwebs of their lives. Her mother had buried the photos deep in the attic, away from Victoria’s prying eyes so there’d be no occasion for prying questions. It was dead and gone and done with. No sense dragging up things you couldn’t change. It was her mother’s signature phrase, one Victoria heard over and over again. Sooner or later it referred to almost all the things in her mother’s life.

  She looks closely now at the photograph which is tucked inside the frame of her dresser mirror. Off to the left side she can just see a fraction of another bassinet holding a bundle of blankets that she assumes must contain herself, inadvertently caught by the span of the camera. Or it could have just been another baby in the nursery. She tells herself it doesn’t matter. But it does.

  The mirror is a collage of pictures, so full of photographs one can hardly see themselves in the small circle of glass that still reflects outwardly. Several times over the years she had started to take them down, but she could never complete the job, the thought of condemning her family memories to the bottom of some drawer filling her with guilt. Beside the baby picture are her mother and father staring out from the last photo taken of them together. One can hardly describe them as together. Her father spreads out across his recliner, his leather face crumpled into a tight-lipped scowl, as if life were causing him great pain. Beside him rises his cane, hard and unyielding, a constant companion in his later years. Across from him cowers his wife, perched lightly on the sofa’s edge gazing foggily into the camera with skilled confusion.

  He died three weeks later, her mother waking to find him cold and stiff in the bed beside her. The doctor said he’d been dead for quite some time, and her mother had needed a sedative after realizing she’d slept soundly against his corpse for most of the night. She’d been almost giddy for the first few months after his death, but gradually a dull disillusionment settled over her as she realized that even in death he refused to leave her. It was a massive disappointment. She still felt his presence and heard his tyranny of criticisms roll through her head. Finding her few aspirations could not be extricated from under his dead disapproval, she’d finally relented and followed him to the grave.

  Below the photograph of her parents, Victoria’s own head emerges from her father’s feet. Glistening brown hair tugged into a severe bun crowns what others called an attractive face. She was young when the picture was taken by her dance teacher. One
could scarcely trace her to the feeble root she’d sprouted from. At seventeen, she smiled into life. Defied fate to hold her down. Bitterness touches her lips now as she looks into her own naive face so full of expectation. She looks at her young body, lithe willow wrapped in a green dress that fit like life itself. She envies her youth. Envies the luxurious optimism that only the uninitiated can possess.

  Auntie May’s words come clear to her. As a child they had made no sense, hopelessly twisted and wrong. But they speak truth to her now.

  “They said you’d be the lucky one iffin’ ya lived to see the dawn, Victoria, but I’m tellin’ ya the other one . . . now he is the lucky one, God’s truth. Gone straight home to the arms of Jesus. Oh yes, you’ll see you will. He’s the lucky one sure enough.”

  She had no picture of her Auntie May. An odd duck. That was how her mother had described her own sister. Two bricks short of a load. Victoria could only recall snatches of their moments spent together, and the rest she made up to suit herself, creating an aunt a little less bizarre and a lot more brazen, with a laugh free and clear as a mountain stream. But the truth was she’d been the town’s crazy lady, and before Victoria’s seventh birthday she’d been conveniently swept away.

  Overlapping her father’s recliner is a picture of her husband, Bobby, victorious hunter, resting one foot on the carcass of a deer, its frozen marble eyes fixed infinitely into a future they would not see. He was young then and still exuded all the charm and vitality of youth. She studies the smile frozen on his face, but it is not a smile. Even at such a young age he was pitted against an invisible enemy, and his kill, this conquest, was merely practice in annihilating his tormentor.

  Bobby’s rifle nuzzles against his slim hip like a lover, its metallic glint running harsh and unforgiving at the edge of the photo. Its echo runs parallel in her father’s cane. She shifts the photos, covering Bobby. Scarcely able to deal with one of their images, she has no strength for two.

  It’s ironic, she thinks, how she never wore the green dance dress again after the photo was taken. Never worn for the purpose it was created. Never really worn at all, it still hung somewhere in the back of her closet, brand new yet old, carefully hidden behind layers of cast-offs. Her father hadn’t exactly been opposed to the idea of her taking dance lessons. He simply did not care one way or the other. His only concern in the whole matter had been about the cost. He had refused outright to forward one cent toward it, and so Victoria had worked out an arrangement with her dance teacher, sacrificing three days after school and part of her weekends to look after her teacher’s four children in exchange for lessons. Her mother had enlisted her help with getting the dress. Or rather, she’d persuaded her to tell her father that it was a hand-me-down from her dance teacher.

  It wasn’t lying, her mother had explained. It was the only way they could get a new dress for the dance competition that was coming up in the city. And her mother had saved the money herself a bit at a time over the last nine months, pilfering it from her grocery allowance. It was an important competition. The biggest one of Victoria’s life, and if she danced well, really well, she had a chance at being offered an opportunity to dance in the city. She was a brilliant dancer. She knew it. Her teacher knew it. The whole damn town knew it. If anyone bore the chance of slogging free from the suctioning mud of Hinckly, it was her.

  For some inane reason her mother had assumed she would be allowed to accompany her daughter for the weekend and watch her compete. When she began making noises in that direction, however, her husband had glowered her into silence.

  “Whadda ya mean you’re going along? Whadda ya ;spect me to do? Ya think I’m gonna work all day an then come home an start fixen’ my own bloody supper? Bloody hell, woman . . . that what you bin thinkin? Huh? Ya thinking I’d be fixen’ my own supper? Well, ya never was much bloody good at thinkin’, was ya? Was ya? Was ya?”

  And he kept roaring at her until she began to shrink, shaking her curlered head vigorously and pleading with him to lower his voice. “No dear . . . course not. Don’t yell, dear. Please don’t yell, someone might hear. I’m sorry, don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking. I just plain wasn’t thinking.” And on and on it went, her pouring out slop and him devouring it to fuel his rage.

  Later that night a fight broke out. Victoria knew it would. They always started over anything and nothing. Potatoes mashed instead of boiled. Something said or not said. It didn’t matter what it was, it was as inevitable as the thunder after the lightning. But all that mattered to Victoria that June night when she was seventeen was that she’d had enough of his voice pounding into the floor of her upstairs room. The scene still ran across her mind’s eye in vivid colors and staccato, slow-motion images; the scent of lilacs floating preposterously through the air as her father lurched through the kitchen dragging her mother by his black belt looped tight around her throat.

  Victoria stood transfixed between time as the figures again performed before her, and again she wondered at the gleeful snarl on her father’s face, glittering excitement in his dark, green eyes. Her mother’s hair tumbled askew from blue and pink curlers as he hauled her, bawling like a bull into the living room. Strangled squawks emanated from the peach satin nightie that bumped along behind him, and Victoria remembered with disgust what had so repulsed her that night. The nightie had fallen down over one shoulder, and her mother’s breast had slipped out, saggy as a deflated pink balloon.

  She had been startled to hear her own voice, shrill and foreign shouting at them to stop.

  “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you both!”

  The bellowing abuse had abruptly ceased, her father fixing her with a genuinely shocked stare.

  “No, Poppy I’m sorry,” she’d cried out remorsefully. “I don’t hate you. I don’t. I love you, Poppy. You know I do.”

  She had not returned the look of her mother who lay on the floor hacking up phlegm.

  A stranger’s eyes lock with her own in the mirror, fixing her with a cold, critical stare. She is disturbed to see how time has altered her face. Shallow lines, dry riverbeds, travel to obscure destinations, each uninvited one making itself more and more at home. Though not deeply set, they offer an unwanted glimpse into the future. Hair whispered with silver falls forward around her face, and she peers out like a child from under a blanket.

  Turning away abruptly, she flows through the trailer into the living room in search of her car keys. Stepping over the dieffenbachia spread prostrate across the rust carpet, she adjusts the rabbit ears on top of the television in a futile attempt to clear the reception. She despises living in the trailer. Despises living on a farm that provides an abundance of nothing except dust. Some days the wind churned so furiously that the trailer simply disappeared, swallowed in it. And when the wind finally stopped, the dust settled back over everything like a dirty white death shroud.

  Bobby got really frustrated with her efforts to have houseplants. Said it was a plain waste of money trying to keep them alive in the sunless trailer. She knew that. She’d been trying for almost twenty years. But something in her couldn’t quit. Each time the space under the window sat empty, a raw unsettledness gnawed away at her until she filled its void with another glossy green offering.

  He used to laugh at her. Laugh at her and call her crazy. But over the years he’d quit laughing and now he didn’t say much of anything to her at all. Just looked past and mumbled how he didn’t understand her. He was right about that. He didn’t understand her. She couldn’t hold it against him though. How could she expect him to understand her when she didn’t even understand herself? She picked the limp plant up and sat down on the sofa. She could offer it no miraculous cure or healing touch, and when it fell back to the floor she didn’t try to stop it. Her attention was diverted by a pile of record albums stacked against the wall. Pushing the plant aside, she pulled the albums into her lap. Slowly she slid the top record free and traced the shiny circles with her finger. A thin scratch ran raggedly acr
oss its black face. Giselle. The collection had been a Christmas gift from her dance teacher, and this had been her favorite. The rest of the cases were empty. Bobby and his friends had decided one drunken night that they would make good discs for skeet shooting and had taken the whole collection outside where one of them had spun the records into the sky while the others opened fire with their shotguns. Even drunk, they were not bad shots and several of the albums were blown to smithereens. The few that landed safely were scratched beyond use on the gravel driveway. Somehow, this one had suffered only slight damage, and Bobby, feeling remorseful, had offered it back to her like a peace offering the next day, along with assurances that he would replace the others. But he never did replace them, and the incident was never spoken of again.

  She put the albums down and walked through the trailer searching for her keys, flutters beginning in her chest as her keys were nowhere to be found.

  “Damn you,” she exhaled quietly. Had he taken them again? Hid them from her as punishment for some supposed injustice? It wasn’t beyond him, although she used to believe his wide-eyed innocence as he claimed he hadn’t realized he’d thrown his coat over top of them or had them in his pocket. The sun had come out fighting that morning, and his plaid jacket hung unneeded in the porch. Her hand dove into the pocket, recoiling quickly as it collided with cold metal. Nerves jolted, she swore silently. How many times had she asked him to keep that thing in the case with the rest of his collection? He was proud of the gun, cherished it like a family heirloom, even though his father had picked it up at a yard sale for ten bucks and a pack of cigarettes.

  She reached in again, carefully, withdrew Bobby’s old Enfield revolver, dug out her keys and his Swiss Army knife. Replacing the gun, she walked back into the kitchen, opened the middle drawer and deposited the knife underneath the stack of dishtowels.