Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  “Okay,” Allan said. “I’m sorry.”

  Her husband, who was standing behind the girls at the sink, digging under his nails with his Swiss Army knife, looked to her. The girls did too, and then they looked at their father.

  “Get out of here,” he said to them.

  “We’re not done,” the eldest replied.

  “Go outside,” he said. He took the dishtowel from the youngest and pulled the oldest’s hands from the water. “Now.”

  “Hold on,” Maggie said to Allan, then turned to her husband. “It’s fine.”

  But the girls were already getting their coats, pulling on their boots. They stopped and looked at her, trying to figure out which order to obey. It was winter and they didn’t want to go.

  “Go,” Michael said, and they went.

  Then, putting the dishtowel over his shoulder ceremoniously, he dragged over the stool that sat in the corner of the kitchen and sat on it, in full view of her.

  Maggie maintained eye contact her husband, and resumed her call with Allan.

  She told him what she had managed to keep contained inside herself, the colonies of worry that she felt spreading inside her like an infection. She told him she was concerned about him. That her stomach hurt when she thought his name. She drew up the thoughts which weren’t even questions. The things she knew he didn’t want to hear from her, the things that would have kept him from opening up to her in the first place. The thoughts that weren’t cool whatsoever:

  You’re not going to look good forever.

  You aren’t happy, are you?

  Maybe this is dangerous for you.

  This was the one, she explained, that she couldn’t stop thinking.

  “Dangerous,” Allan said. “That’s interesting.”

  The danger she thought of for him wasn’t physical, not even viral or bacteriological. She told him, with a hand on the wall, that she was talking about his happiness and his well-being.

  “I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” he said. “I don’t think you understand.”

  “The first time you called—the first one of these—you were sad! You cried! Because of that woman with the suits!”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “You did.”

  “I really didn’t,” Allan said. “But listen, if you don’t want to talk like this, we don’t have to.”

  “I want to talk you out of this!” she said.

  Allan made a sound. It wasn’t a laugh, but it was in the vicinity of one.

  “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’m really—this really helps people.”

  Then she spoke without thinking. Spoke without any kindness for her little brother:

  “Like you helped those kids?” she asked.

  He said nothing. Maggie didn’t either. They listened to each other breathing.

  Her first feeling, the one which she’d had immediately, came back to her. The one that had been bothering her. The one that she had been hurting herself with. Not a question, or even a suggestion. A command, which had been stuck in her:

  “You should stop,” she said.

  He did laugh this time.

  “I mean it. It’s not good to live like this, and you’re—you’re fucking yourself up.”

  Allan considered it. She was annoyed at how calm he was. She had raised her voice. She was angry, but wasn’t sure over what, exactly.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t think so, though. I shouldn’t have been bothering you with this. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s too late for that!” Maggie said.

  “It was selfish. I can see that I’m being unfair.”

  His willingness to accept blame made her anger grow. Some part of her wanted him to fight back. That he was calm about this was somehow insulting.

  “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” she asked. “Is this it?”

  “Yes,” he said, and hung up.

  In the quiet that followed, under her husband’s gaze, Maggie had to reveal that her brother had ended the call. Then, after she hung up, he made a get on with it gesture with his hand. Exhausted and trembling, she told him all of it while he sat on the stool and listened to her, smoothing out the dishtowel with his hand, crossing and uncrossing his legs, putting his hands behind his head, raising his eyebrows when it got good, nodding as if it all made sense, even when it was at its most unbelievable. At the end, wavering at the edge of tears, she asked what he thought, and he took a deep breath. It wasn’t a good breath. It was the kind he took when he was anticipating giving or receiving an injury.

  “Maggie,” he said. “I’m sorry to say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “You’re in the wrong.”

  And before she could react he was up, off the stool, and working on the dishes.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” he said. “He’s—he’s whatever, but there’s nothing you can do. And it doesn’t sound so bad, actually.”

  She stood in the hallway to the kitchen, speechless.

  With his hands in the water, he shrugged his shoulders.

  “Sorry.”

  ***

  Six weeks went by before he called again.

  At first, she was unrepentant. The first Sunday, everyone waited for the phone to ring, but Maggie knew it wouldn’t. She ate her waffles and bacon feeling, for the first time in months, relief, and renamed it, in her mind, as a kind of victory. She was back in her sweatpants again. He didn’t call the following week, either. For nearly a month, she managed not to think about it, or him, and when her mother asked about Allan, she said, proudly, for the first time ever, that she hadn’t spoken to him.

  “Oh my God,” her mother replied. “Why?”

  “He’s got a lot going on,” she said.

  She smiled when she said it, feeling as though this was the end of it, her coy, knowing final word on the entire ordeal. But immediately afterwards, she felt panicked. Somehow saying it out loud had made it worse, made it tangible. She wasn’t happy with how things had gone at all, she saw. She had won nothing, and imagined Allan, diminished somehow, without her.

  The one she kept thinking about was his homelessness. Strangely, all the rest could be pushed away. The job, the love affair with the neighbour, the scandal, they were accepted the moment she heard them. They were gross, upsetting, and weird, but they made sense. It was this other one, the one she got so little detail about, the one she was quick to push aside, that stayed with her. He said he had stayed with a group of men in downtown Vancouver, sleeping in a collection of tents underneath the balconies of some building that was set to be demolished.

  Now that it was months later, and the calls were over, she knew that this was the single most painful thing he had told her. She lived only four hours away, and would have come and got him without question. She would have kept it a secret. She would have done anything for him. He must have known this. That he hadn’t done this hurt more than anything else she had learned.

  When she imagined it, she saw him the way he was when he was thirteen and wracked with horrible allergies. When he was itchy and his body could swell, sometimes two or three sizes bigger than it should be, and hives that started as red bumps the size of peas would grow, over the course of the day, to the size gumballs in random places over his body, then join together at the afflicted area, and the whole section of him—his stomach, his calf, his thigh, or, the very worst, around his mouth and chin—would balloon, stretching him painfully taut. When he took Benadryl, they would recede into large, raised patches that looked like ravioli. She was out of the house when she heard about them from Frank, who called him ‘The Ravioli Kid” and dubbed this period of time, later on, “The Summer of the Raviolis,” which was funny enough that she had laughed.

  Then, when she was home from college, visiting after midt
erms, she had seen it. It was so bad that Allan had hidden himself away in his room, wearing gloves and a turtleneck unrolled up over his mouth. His lips were so swollen they had split, and she could see dampness seeping through the fabric. She understood that it wasn’t funny in the least, and that he really had been suffering deeply, while she was away.

  This was the boy she imagined in some squalid tent city, his body inflamed and oozing, lying on pavement, being stepped over, being ignored. Sometimes he was in the street, run over. Sometimes his insides were on the outside.

  By the time she had decided that her husband was right, and that Allan was right, she also understood that there was something undeniably cruel about what she had done. This came to her fully when she thought about not only the dead pedestrian, but her own pregnant stomach in her winter coat, looming over him, and then Allan and his raviolis. These thoughts came to her in the right sequence while sitting at her computer, trying to find a yoga video she had lost track of. It was then that she thought about what he had said about the old women, that some of them weren’t long for the world. She thought about those slow children of his, in the dirty corridor, and with their hot dogs. The answer was in there, in between these thoughts, somehow. Something about enormous, impossible-to-conceive-of pain, like the man must have felt when he was shorn in two, and all the distance in between that and the kind of tenderness that Allan had tried to deliver. She couldn’t have explained what it was, but she had an answer, suddenly, too messy to unravel, about being alive and being dead, and being kind, too.

  Soon she was struggling worse than when he was calling, crying when she was on her own: driving to work, at work, on her way to pick up the girls from this or that. The solution, of course, was just to contact him. But she wouldn’t. It was a small failure, but one she couldn’t overcome. She could apologize, she could forgive him and even herself. She could make do with whatever new relationship they might have. But she couldn’t be the one to do it, and she didn’t know why.

  When he called, it was spring.

  He said that he was really, really sorry to have to ask her something like this, but he said she was his only hope. There was no tension for her in his voice. He wasn’t speaking carefully, he was forceful, even loud. He spoke to her as though not a single thing had changed between them.

  When she realized this, Maggie took in a sharp breath to steady herself.

  “There’s literally no one else in the world I could ask this of,” he said.

  “I can do it,” she said. She said it before his sentence was even finished.

  She heard Allan exhale.

  Then she heard another sound. The echo of a woman’s voice, reverberating strangely, loudly. An overhead announcement.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  Then there was another sigh and a long silence, the kind she used to get before he started confessing. But Maggie would not be cowed by him.

  “Allan, what’s going on?”

  “I’m at the airport,” he said. “Are you going to do this, or not? I can just pay—I don’t know—I can get a cleaning service to just throw everything out.”

  She thought about her answer carefully before speaking. This was an apology, after all.

  “I really do actually want to know,” she said.

  This newest story was shorter than all the others, but it was also more precise. Simpler, too.

  “There’s a woman I’ve been seeing, and now she’s in trouble, so I’m going to go help her.”

  “Is it the one woman?” Maggie asked, unable to remember her name.

  “It’s the one woman,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “That’s very good, Allan.”

  “Okay,” he said, and exhaled again.

  “Do I need to go today?”

  “It’s no rush. I’ve got someone looking after my lizard for now.”

  “You have a lizard?”

  “It’s not mine. Well, it is now. I can get Dr. Doug to keep him for a while, though.”

  She sensed worry in his voice. Was it about the lizard?

  “Who’s Dr. Doug?” she asked. “Does he want the lizard?”

  “He’s who I go bowling with. The naturopath. If you do it before the thirty-first, that’s all I need. And I can give you money for gas, and, uh, shit, boxes. And, I guess I’m gonna call a self-storage place now.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “We’ll keep them in the basement.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I love you, Allan.”

  For a moment, he thought his anger would return. She thought he was remembering her betrayal, filling himself with the memory of it. She braced herself.

  Then he sputtered a response.

  “Oh my God, Maggie, I love you too. I love you more than anybody,” he said.

  And there was real cheer in his voice, real, sincere joy, and gratitude. A lightness, a playfulness that she hadn’t heard since he began calling her. Evidence, of a kind, that things really were okay, that this really did hold meaning for him. That things really would be all right. Suddenly, she wanted to do more for him, to undo everything else.

  Care for his lizard.

  “What kind of lizard is it?” Maggie asked.

  “It’s a kind of gecko,” he said. “Her name is Lydia.”

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “Tell your friend not to worry.”

  “Thank you, Maggie.”

  He hung up without saying goodbye, like he used to, and Maggie smiled brightly, standing in the hallway. She hung up. Inside her, in her stomach, she felt something. First a tingle, and then a cascading warmth, from her esophagus down into her deeper gut, where something was happening.

  Her youngest, who was doing the dishes on her own because the other one was at a friend’s house, looked at Maggie. One of her mother’s hands was on the phone and the other was over her eyes. Her shoulders were rising and falling but from underneath her hand, Emma could see that her mother’s mouth was twisted into a smile, a wide one. The older one would have known to come to her, to embrace her, but this one didn’t.

  “What’s wrong now?” Emma asked.

  Her face was without emotion. This was the limit of her empathy, Maggie saw.

  “Nothing,” Maggie replied. “You’re getting a lizard.”

  I

  This story is true.

  Or, I should say, it’s as true as a story can be when so much time has elapsed since the original events, and after having been in the custody of so many. It is based on something that really, actually happened to the people in my family.

  I’ve heard multiple versions of the story—and even grew up hearing two conflicting ones simultaneously—but all versions open the same way, so I feel confident about its beginning. Past this early point, things are difficult, but there are a few elements I am certain of. A few anchors:

  She couldn’t speak.

  They called her Missy because they didn’t know her real name.

  She slept most days next to the family dog.

  She was taken, at least one time, into town, and put on display as a spectacle.

  She died young.

  That’s about all I know, but I also know that when you tell the story, you begin it like this, with the most tantalizing and shocking bit, which is as true as all the others:

  A naked woman stumbled onto my family’s property in the middle of a snowstorm.

  My mother’s version, which had been passed down to her from her mother and six aunts, was the first one I heard. Hers was the purest. A girl was found, unclothed, stumbling through the brush near our house— the same one I’ve since inherited—and our family took her in, nursed her back to health, and she became part of the family.

  Because I was so young when I first heard it, I absorbed the story, and took it for granted that these sort of things jus
t happened. She presented it alongside other family history, like the story of where she bought a piece of furniture, or how she and my father met. I didn’t have any sense that the story was very bizarre, nor that it didn’t make a lot of sense. I didn’t have a sense, at that age, of how much it meant to her.

  Later, as an adult, when I was finally able to look back on my childhood as something separate from myself—something I had shed—only then could I really see it. This glaring error, a corrupted piece of information that I had just been accepting as real for all these years. Of course it can’t be real, I thought. It’s some kind of folk tale or maybe a story that’s been embellished and unintentionally taken on as family history. Maybe it happened to someone else, someone nearby, and we had attributed it to ourselves.

  But in the provincial archives, I found the evidence in a hard little square of text, spotted with age and marked with all the right names and dates. A version so much more concrete than my mother’s:

  DALE, NS--

  Wednesday, November 12, 1890

  An unknown woman has been found on the outskirts of the small logging community of Dale, Nova Scotia, confused and undressed, walking barefoot in the snow.

  When a family from the nearest camp came upon this pitiful creature, they found her to be frostbitten and in a state of shock, wholly unable to communicate, except for guttural sounds and vague gestures.

  As a good Christian family, the Daigles took pains to see that the young soul who was dying of famine and exposure was cared for and brought back to full health. The Daigles are seeking to ascertain her true identity with the help of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who have launched an inquisition to discover where she came from. Being that the girl is unable to make herself understood, Const. Andrew Sullivan is pleading with the public to see that this sick and feeble girl is returned to her proper home.