Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  First, I went to where I thought the sound came from, to the stairwell. But drywall dust was coming out of Gorman’s workshop, lit by a bright beam of light, and I could hear a motor. I poked my head in and realized there was—amidst heaps of broken beams and drywall and desk and crumbling plaster—a Jeep. Its front end jutting in where a wall had once been.

  I was shocked to find Christy outside on our lawn, leaning in the driver’s side and fiddling with something. She was sobbing, shaking all over, sniffling great big snotty breaths. When I went over to her, I realized she was trying to shut off her high beams, but was instead turning her wipers on and off. The hood of her truck was crumpled and the bumper was off, steam hissing out from the engine block. Great big swatches of grass were stripped down to wet earth leading up to the crash site. The house really did look like it had tried to eat a sport-utility vehicle.

  I wasn’t mad. I didn’t even think about being upset, because I was so happy to help. I went to her and took her by the hand and brought her out of the driver’s side. I turned off her truck, took the keys and her into the house. She kept sort of blubbering and trying to apologize, but I wouldn’t let her. I made her lie on the couch while I checked her over. I found a lump on her forehead and put ice cubes in a cloth for it. I got her a glass of water. I held her hand while she tried to come to terms with what she had just done.

  She said it was because a bunny had run out in front of her. That was her word. Bunny.

  “It’s just an accident,” I kept saying. “It’s really okay.”

  She kept shaking her head no and trying to explain herself between sobs.

  I shushed her, and brushed her hair, and kept the cloth pressed firmly on her injury. Her eyes were very blue. She was beautiful, but it was hard to see because she looked so tired, so worn out. There must have been a time when nobody could have missed it.

  I don’t have words to describe what was going on. I can’t say I fell in love with her, because I didn’t, but it was something close to it. Later, I thought of her driving into the house as some magical twist of fate that brought us together. That it was a freak accident that had to happen so that we could be brought together and I could help her. She seemed so pathetic and helpless that I really, truly felt like she needed me. Sometimes the opportunity to be good to someone is as powerful as love. It might even be stronger.

  When she was on the couch, she talked about how she’d been up all night with the oldest girl, who had vomited twelve times, and how the twins had gotten sick too, but kept it a secret so as to not be a bother. This, she said, was the kind of children they were. Instead, they had taken turns vomiting in a dresser, two times each, and timed it so that Christy was in the bathroom with the other girl when they did it. So she had spent all morning cleaning and looking after the one girl, only to find out, after she found a puddle forming at the base of the lowest drawer, that she had three times the work to do now. She had stepped out on a half-hour’s sleep to get some cleaning supplies when she found herself inside her Jeep, inside our house.

  This is why I wasn’t allowed to call an ambulance or take her to the hospital. Her children were still at home, alone. Her husband was working nights and wouldn’t be back until noon. This is how I ended up walking her up the road with an arm around her, and making a spectacle out of us. Because of how the neighbourhood was laid out, and because of how the neighbourhood worked, this act was likely seen before the crash was. So to the Pietres, who were always watching, it probably appeared as through Christy and I were marching, hand in hand, up over the hill into her little tower. It appeared as though we were together in some way, or as if I were on her side now.

  And I really, truly was.

  ***

  Gorman’s workshop was annihilated.

  Structurally, the house was more or less fine, and insurance fixed all of it inside of two quick weeks, but Gorman’s workbench, shelves, cabinets, and mounted drafting table were all destroyed. Even after we got money for it, even after the insurance people sent in contractors who fixed the structure itself, he never bothered to set things back up the way they had been.

  He was, like me, an artist, and made all kinds of different work. Line drawings, sculptures, little clay scenes. He’d been a bit of a big deal at the end of the ’80s and had a relatively painless fizzling-out in the 1990s. Recently, he’d been making model replicas of houses he’d lived in, trying to remember the details, the layout, the geography. Then he’d photograph the facsimile, trying his hardest to get the lighting just right, so that the only signal that you weren’t looking at something real was just the smallest clue: a brush stroke on a surface that would be proportionately gigantic if it were real, a toy cat, cartoonish and plump, hidden in an otherwise completely real-looking shrub. A pickup truck in the driveway with its hood up, a screw as big as its wheel set nearby. It was a trick that told you it was a trick. He told me he was looking forward to having people walk by them, thinking they were boring photographs of houses. This was his dream. To have his incredible work go unnoticed.

  All of the photo shoots were finished except one, modelled after the house we were currently living in. It wasn’t lost on either of us that the miniature representation of the house was destroyed alongside a portion of the real thing. I thought this was wonderful, and suggested that he might collect and photograph the remnants of our wrecked home as his final piece. Or reassemble the model and put a toy truck through the thing.

  He said maybe.

  But after the crash, all the raw materials, the fully and partially formed pieces of the model, the paints and foams and miniature trees and cars and windows and roof shingles, all of it was swept up to one side of the wall and left there. Later, he put it into a garbage bag in the corner, where it remained. It was a bit heartbreaking. He’d had the career I had always wanted and, between the advertising firm he’d built (and sold) and his real estate, Gorman didn’t need to make anything. He still worked on projects because it was what he did, but he was sixty-eight, and slowing down. It already took a lot out of him to make these projects, so it must’ve been too much to have to start all over again. I didn’t ask why he had given up on it. I felt it was personal. And, besides, it had been years since I had made anything myself.

  But it was also true that, by then, I was compromised. He was a secondary concern. Just days later, my number-one concern was Christy, and her children, who had by then taken control of my mind and body, invaded my life. Soon she was dropping her girls off to me almost every morning and my worry for Gorman’s art practice went away completely. The girls usually came from about nine or ten to maybe one or two in the afternoon, when Christy came back from the gym. These were my most productive hours of the day, and they belonged to them now. This went on for about three years straight.

  I loved them almost immediately. There was maybe a twenty-minute adjustment period, when I was first asked to look after them and we were not yet introduced. The twins, Clara and Jessica, were young, only four years old, and shy. The older girl, Coady, was not. When I met her, she shook my hand and said How do you do?, something I hadn’t heard since I was a girl, something so old-fashioned and sweet sounding, and she looked right in my eye when she did it. I was impressed. Then she got on her hands and knees and began to bark. Then the other two joined in, reluctantly, and there was a short while where this lanky seven-year-old and her two plump, blonde sisters crawled around my living room, pretending to be animals, and I stood watching, unsure of what to do.

  Then Coady came to me and stood upright on her knees with her hands tucked in at her chest like a begging dog, and barked. I fed her a piece of bacon from my breakfast, and she ate it like it was a Milk-Bone. The other two followed suit, looking at me with shining blue eyes as I fed them pieces of toast from my hand, and that was it. I loved them completely.

  Coady later explained that they’d had a dog who died and their mother wouldn’t let them have ano
ther, so she sometimes pretended she was one. She had a dog name for herself—Sand Dollar—but the other girls had none, she said, because they were just strays. This was their relationship. Coady was interested in whatever she was interested in, and the other two were interested in her. If she were drawing, she would be fixated on her paper, her eyes bulging, her sharp teeth sticking out, clamped down on her lip, and the other two would be desperate to have a look at what she was doing.

  One time I watched Coady produce what looked like a pom-pom with eyes and two long lines coming from its middle, ending in paddle-shaped flippers. The other two kept demanding a closer look at it, and to know what exactly it was. Coady continually moved the drawing out of their reach and covered it with her hands until finally both girls began crying out of frustration. This, I guess, is what she wanted, because once they started sobbing, she abandoned the sheet of paper and went and did something else. They took it to me, and asked me to identify it.

  “Looks like a jellyfish,” I said. “Or something made-up.”

  Armed with this new information, they wiped their faces and ran to the dining room for a verdict from their sister. The answer that came from the other room was, No it’s not a jellyfish, and a moment later, I don’t have to tell, I don’t have to say what it is.

  Later, when we were all outside watching Gorman chop firewood—something he shouldn’t be doing at all but did on his good days, whenever he had some—Coady leaned in and told me what the drawing was.

  “It’s a picture of a feeling I get,” she whispered, right as a log split and clattered down in two and Gorman let out his usual dry cough.

  “Like an emotion?” I asked.

  “A feeling,” she whispered carefully. Then she pressed her fingers into her stomach, which, in some way, did explain it. “So big that it comes in from the sky.”

  But then the other two saw how closely Coady and I had just spoken to one another and immediately knew I had been told the secret. One of them—I forget who—demanded that I come clean:

  “You have to tell us,” she said. “We have to know it.”

  When I smiled and said I didn’t know, one of them held her own face and shrieked, while the other felt her own stomach—the spot where Coady had pointed to herself only moments before—balled up a fist and punched herself. Then both of them were wailing and when I told them to stop, it only got worse. Gorman, still holding his axe, demanded to know what this was all about. When they explained it to him, he shook his head at them and smiled.

  “Well, I don’t know what the secret drawing is either,” he said, “so you girls and I are on the same team.”

  This didn’t have the desired effect.

  “No!” One of them shrieked.

  Then the other one hit herself again, this time turning her fist and aiming high, right at her own cheek. I got to her and stopped her before she did it a second time, and heard Coady laughing. I looked over my shoulder and saw her open mouth, her sharp little teeth and eyes shining, a greater joy than I’d ever seen on her face. It had been so long since I’d been around children, or been one myself. I forgot that they were capable of these kinds of things.

  When Christy would show up in her sweats to pick them up, none of this kind of acting out was conceivable. Instead, all three of the girls would change. They fell quiet and got a faraway look in their eyes. Stopped looking at her or me, or each other. At first, I assumed this was because they had been having fun with us and were somehow embarrassed or shy, or wanted to keep their lives with us separate from their lives with mom. I recalled feeling the same sorts of things at their age, thinking that keeping things to myself made me a grown-up.

  The more I saw it, though, the more I understood that something must be wrong at home, or with Christy herself. Maybe it was something small, or something hereditary, some behavioural strangeness or trouble passed on from her to them. But every time I had a thought like this, I’d think:

  Who are you to judge them?

  ***

  One of the first strange things I saw Christy do was go on our computer and search for something called Name That Mean Spirit.

  She was over, and her kids were playing in the backyard, but she hadn’t asked to use the computer. She had just slid a chair over and opened it up. She also didn’t know I was there, so when I watched her type it in, and read it out loud—innocently—she closed the window, and the computer, and turned around, offended.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t,” she said, standing up, staring at me. She was so much bigger than me.

  “What is Name That Mean Spirit?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, then went to find her girls.

  By this point we’d been friends for months (and I really would have used that word to describe us) but I didn’t know much about her, really. I’d never seen her act that way, and had never seen so quick a change in her. I didn’t know, emotionally, what kind of person she was, or how she would react if I tried to figure out why any of this had upset her. I didn’t know if she’d get angrier, or apologize and explain, or be driven away altogether.

  So I left her be, but I thought about Name That Mean Spirit for a long time. I thought about it daily. What did that mean? It sounded like a game show or a punk band. There was something upsetting about it, both to her and to me. It was like I had caught her in communion with some kind of other world, and I had glimpsed the real Christy, just for a moment. It made me wonder about her and how her brain worked, what things she spent her day thinking and worrying about.

  I thought of the phrase, and used it whenever I saw more strangeness, whenever there was behaviour from her that I couldn’t explain. It would echo in me, like a mantra, when I saw her break social rules, like when I started to notice her wearing my clothes, my earrings, and my makeup, despite having never been invited upstairs. I’d look at my own peacock green eye shadow on her eyelids, something I hadn’t worn in years, and which Christy had shown up to my house without, and think:

  Name That Mean Spirit.

  I’d watch her leave wearing my spring jacket, having left hers on the coat rack in a kind of wordless exchange, and ask myself to Name That Mean Spirit again. I’d enter the living room and see her on the toilet across the hall with door ajar, and think to myself, in explanation: She’s naming that mean spirit! This was before I was told the story of how she got here.

  When I think about what she did to make me love her, I think of these three things: driving into my house, giving me her girls, and telling me about her past. That last one was the killing blow, the part that brought me over to her side completely, to where she could do no wrong, and where I would give up trying to explain her motivations altogether. I think she even knew the exact perfect time to deploy it, because our heart-to-heart came not long after my feelings of frustration with her behaviour had grown stronger than ever, and I was complaining about her to my husband on the regular. I think a person like her can sense when they are overstaying their welcome, when things are strained. They understand when to put forward something like this, to dredge up some sympathy in you, so that you can have it on the ready. To apply it to yourself when you hurt, or when you needed a balm for an injury she caused.

  So she told me, over wine and beer and cigarettes (I hadn’t smoked since the ’90s) that she’d had a hard life. These were also her words, an understatement so powerful it was laughable. This was after I’d gotten tipsy and red-cheeked and told her my pathetic little life story, starting with my mother’s difficult immigration, a hardship which I had always claimed as my own even though I had nothing to do with it, my struggles to establish a painting career despite being with a man ten times more successful, our inability to reproduce, and a couple of personal health scares that turned out to be nothing. She listened patiently, nodding when she needed to, patting me on the leg, and smiling comfortingly.


  When I was done, she began telling me her story. It didn’t matter that I was so much older than her, her story was just longer, sadder. Crazier. This was the first time I thought that maybe she had experienced more than I ever would.

  She started by saying that her mother’s boyfriend used to molest her, then opened her mouth and told me that all of her top teeth were fake. At first I thought these two stories were related somehow. Then she popped the denture out of her gums with her tongue and showed it to me. She had little grey stumps left over from where she said she had smoked her teeth into oblivion through clouds of crack cocaine. She had been a stripper, then a hooker. For years.

  She explained that she had been sold to some kind of criminal—what she called a drug lord—who let his friends have their way with her. Told me that she had escaped with her daughter after stealing a car and detoxing on the drive from Alberta to Ontario. That she met Dan after passing out in traffic and ending up in the hospital where he was doing his residency. They had stayed in touch through her rehabilitation and later got married, and had the twins. This was why the girls looked so different, she said. Coady wasn’t his.

  There were other parts of the story, too. Impossible, cinematic things that I allowed to slide off from the core structure of her narrative. Parts that she said too fast, that made too little sense, that she lobbed at me one after another until I felt buried by them. About fleeing real violence, about revenge against pets by petty criminals, about smuggling and trafficking and weirder incidents that I ignored. All of that stuff was pushed away immediately. Any facts that would have moved me towards questioning her were folded up and put away, like I might sort them out later.

  Despite this, the story made me cry, both in front of her and in front of Gorman later on, several times. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About being bought and sold, about molestation, about the course a life destroyed takes almost automatically. When finally I had come to terms with all of it, and I could think about it without weeping, and with only a twinge of pain in my stomach, my transformation was complete.