Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  She is described as fair-haired with blue eyes and a ruddy complexion, of short and stocky build, with a childlike demeanour (though not a child). The girl also has a malformity of the right leg and numerous scars across her body. Authorities believe she may be known in Annapolis County or nearby parishes. It would be prudent for those who recall a person such as this to come forth and provide her name, so that she might find her rightful home and so that her generous keepers may be relieved of the burden of so mysterious a guest.

  Reading it filled me up with questions. Chief among them was the same one the article posed: who was she? There was no conclusion, nothing more to be found in the archives, no follow-up story. All I had was what my mother had told me, which was that the girl was cared for for the rest of her life. Once I found the article, this piece of history came alive inside of me and suddenly mattered. I realized what I had taken forward with me was not just a story, but a riddle. Soon I found myself doing what I had done with it as a child, interrogating my mother.

  It was through this act that I had first populated Missy’s story with details. The difference now was the nature of the questions, and of course, my relationship with my mother. Back then, maybe five or six years old, I’d lie on her, my head on her shoulder or across her lap, combing her hair with my hand and caressing her face, asking things like:

  Was Missy pretty?

  No. But she was very nice and all the children played with her.

  What kind of clothes did she wear?

  Well, whatever they had given the other children, I suppose.

  Did she go to school?

  No, because she couldn’t talk or walk and would throw fits if you tried to make her leave the house.

  Why would she do that?

  Because she wanted to stay with our family.

  At the time, I was obsessed with all the particulars of the story instead of the story itself. I was enchanted with the idea of being given a new name, or else having not been given one to begin with. I loved the strange details of the story, like how she couldn’t read or write but could draw crude little images on paper or on the flat side of split firewood. That she slept on the floor, despite having been given one of the children’s beds, and would have to be moved back to the bed every morning. That the dog slept with, and was inseparable from her.

  My very favourite part of the story was how, every Christmas, the neighbours would get together and bring her gifts, and that Missy herself would be brought out, in a chair and blanket, to receive them. Here, I remember being unreasonable, trying to get more out of my mother than she even knew:

  Did they give her a doll?

  I don’t know. Probably.

  Did they give her an animal?

  I don’t know, Shannon.

  Was there carolling?

  I think so.

  What other toys did they give her?

  Shannon, it was a million years ago, I don’t know every goddamn thing they gave her.

  This was, I now know, during a period of unrest for her and my father, when she was often up all night on a static-filled line to Germany or Egypt or Cyprus, drunk and arguing with him. I would have been up at sunrise and bothering her during the beginnings of a hangover on what might have been three hours of sleep for her. This didn’t explain all the other times, of course. All the times she went silent in the buildup to a meltdown, when she would grab my arm and scream into my face until I cried, leave me with bruises and, worse, a panic that would take hold of my windpipe and clamp it shut whenever I thought I saw her changing into the person she was when she was angry. But I’ve always been happy to give her an excuse when one is available, so I gave her one here.

  I asked my new questions about Missy when I was a little older, but still young—maybe as young as twenty-one, which would’ve made her fifty on the nose—the two of us sitting in my apartment in Toronto, as far away from Dale, Nova Scotia, as she or I had ever been. My mother had taken a train all the way there, a journey that I thought could be good for her, as it had followed her divorce from my father. I questioned her after she had rested for the night and was sitting at my kitchen table, looking dissatisfied with its size. I remember feeling that she looked older and smaller than I remembered, and out of place in an apartment as bare as mine. She lived in a world of carpet and quilt, a fuzzy nest of soft things. Stuffed animals and slippers and blankets. Outside it, she seemed irritated, a crab pulled from its shell and left naked in the sand.

  When I asked about Missy, her eyes sort of glazed over, like she had begun to dream right there in my kitchen. She looked like she was returning to some familiar, comfortable place in her mind.

  “Did anyone ever have a guess about where she came from?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, after a moment. “No one ever found that out.”

  Right away I pressed her:

  “I don’t understand that part. When we lived in Dale, we knew everybody. And with Missy it was what—ninety people living there? All going to the same church, all working in the same logging camp. How is it possible that nobody knew this girl?”

  My mother tilted her head and I could see that this thought had never occurred to her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Somebody had to know who she was.”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated, even quieter this time. She was getting embarrassed, I could see, but by what I didn’t know. Maybe at never having had this thought, or just at not having any kind of answers for me. But then I saw her face change and she doubled back from where she was into stone certainty. She said:

  “No one ever knew where she came from.”

  These were critical words from the story itself, flat and sturdy like a stone beaten into a road. When she said them, even a part of myself felt that she was right, that this was true. I imagined that maybe Missy wasn’t anybody. A feral child, born of a feral mother, a sharp-toothed animal in the shape of a woman. Maybe it really was true that nobody knew who she was—maybe it was impossible to know it. Maybe she floated down and into our family like a lost balloon from over the treetops.

  The children found her, and at first they thought she was a ghost, slow-moving and white-bodied.

  There were three children in the family, two girls and a boy, and my mother always pointed out that the oldest—the girl who would be my great grandmother—was the only one who thought Missy might be a girl in distress.

  My mother put herself into this girl, probably because she was the eldest herself, and liked to believe she was capable of something heroic and kind. The valiant older sister is the one who covered up the girl and took her inside. Their mother, who was cooking dinner at the time, was so shocked to see this girl that she screamed, or fainted. It wasn’t clear which was right. I had heard each from my mother multiple times, but I didn’t know if either was true or just the result of years of her watching television and movies and seeing this same act repeated in tacky comedies.

  In truth, all of it—except for the details in the paper—seemed to ring false to me. It sounded like a story—not like something that had really happened, but like something that had been constructed. Something we’d heard many times. It was the same as when my mother postulated that Missy might have been royalty, some princess or heiress who had fallen off a merchant vessel or been kept prisoner in some shack in the colonies. A romantic notion that she was happy to consider because she’d heard it so many times. Missy as Moses, or the Man in the Iron Mask. Missy as Oedipus complete with club foot. But I was arrogant, and drunk on skeptical thoughts like this, believing I was sophisticated for having them. This made it easy to allow those more obvious falsehoods to discredit the rest of the story, especially the mother’s fainting spell.

  I remember pressing her about it.

  “Did the mother really faint?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  �
�But sometimes you said she only screamed. Other times you said she fainted.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yeah. It’s just a kind of Hollywood trope. You see it in movies all the time.”

  “Well, she definitely fainted, because after that they had to keep her in the bedroom for a day and a night, and then they kept Missy hidden from her too, and made like it never happened.”

  “You never told me that before,” I said.

  “I haven’t?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said, puckering her mouth. “Now I have.”

  She told me the children were worried that the sight of Missy might send their mother for a loop again.

  That was when things shifted on me, and I saw my mother in the story. Red-faced, screaming and manic, having a fit, spitting cruelties, and shaking with rage. I bought it completely. It was what she had done for years with my father when he said something she didn’t like or want to hear, even though to me it never sounded like he’d ever said anything particularly upsetting to begin with. I had imagined that, when faced with this kind of confusing behaviour, there were a secret set of meanings hidden inside regular phrases, like a code, that my mother and father could use against each other. That something like are you all right was actually a terrible, veiled insult, something vile enough to make her smash plates and roar so loud the neighbours could hear, stick her long fingernails into the wallpaper and drag down until either her nail broke or the pattern ripped open.

  I diagnosed her with what was then called “manic-depression” when I was thirteen and thought I had some scientific idea of things that no on else in my family possessed. I imagined something similar in the Missy story. Something about heredity and social stressors, words I had learned in college. And most of all, abuse, which I understood—vaguely—that my mother had endured at the hands of her own parents, and which might represent a cycle we were stuck in.

  During the Toronto visit, I also learned that the kids found Missy three weeks before she was discovered by the adults. My mother threw this fact at me like an insult, or a betrayal, like it was something she’d kept from me. For this reason, I didn’t believe her.

  “But you said the mother already saw her, and lost it at the sight of her.”

  “So?”

  She was frowning at this point, the lines around her mouth pushing the bottom of her cheeks down, turning them into jowls. I hadn’t seen this transformation in years, and even though I felt the familiar breathless sensation I always felt, there was something else, too. An anger of my own.

  “So—did she just forget that it happened? How does that work, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know everything she did. I don’t have an explanation.”

  Then I replied quickly, and without thinking:

  “What else is fucking new?”

  And then, because it was suddenly about her and me, we dropped the issue of Missy all at once. This unpleasantness was left inside of Missy’s story, which we ceased to mention altogether. My boyfriend, Clark—a quiet, sensitive man who went on to become a librarian—took immediate notice of the strain between us when he came home. From the time he had left for work and come back, he could see that something had changed, and because he was scared to be involved—or else probably just scared of me—he said nothing too, and joined us, in a room far too small for it, in a tense, uncomfortable chat about nothing.

  We went to bed with the same breathless silence that only occurred after the worst fights, only this time he and I had disagreed about absolutely nothing. In bed he asked, after he finished his nightly reading, if I had found out more about that mystery woman, and I said that I knew nothing about her whatsoever.

  II

  My great grandmother was the little girl in the story, the one who put clothes on Missy, who fed her and hid her.

  I met her once. My mother and father thought it was important that I meet her when I was four and she was dying. All I remember now is looking at her skin, which was nearly transparent and lined with dark green veins. I thought that some poison had taken root in her, and didn’t know that the IV drip in her arm was providing her with anything but thought it was instead taking something away.

  If I had been older, I would have been able to get more out of her about Missy than I’d ever gotten from any living person, but I’d missed out by a decade or so. She would have had Missy in her memories. The ordinary, day-to-day memories we all had. She could have talked about the experience with clarity. She would have access to unknowable details that have been washed away from us, like what she smelled like, what expressions showed up on her face, what her routine consisted of, what exactly she had managed to scratch out with lumps of coal clutched between her fingers.

  My grandmother, however, did have something to offer. Besides having been alive for the last few years of Missy’s life, she had a factual and straightforward understanding of the story that my mother did not. The simple matter of her proximity in time to the events, and to people who were around for it, was invaluable, but—to be blunt—the real truth was that she was smarter than my mother. I had heard her version less than my mother’s but even in memory, hers felt more substantial. More complete. Her story had fewer boundaries, like I could push past the walls of her story and still end up somewhere.

  The main contradiction between her story and my mother’s came right at the start. In my grandmother’s version, Missy was found in the woodshed connected to the house, hiding out for what might have been days. After discovering Missy, my grandmother said, the children kept her a secret for fear of punishment. Tending to firewood was their job so the shed was more or less their domain, which let them keep it from their parents for a long time.

  “They were right to fear them,” my grandmother said.

  I didn’t know if this meant that the family had been particularly cruel at the time, or if my grandmother believed hiding a young woman in the house was grounds for a beating. The stories I’d heard from my father about my mother’s upbringing—about belts and rods and axe handles, and being made to stand for hours only to receive vicious beatings over what seemed like not very much—kept me from asking. Whatever my mother had suffered at this woman’s hands was something I couldn’t engage with. It was something I knew about but couldn’t acknowledge without compromising my relationship with either one of them. It felt like speaking of the matter would somehow make me complicit in the act, somehow put me on the scene of some unspeakable crime between the two of them.

  I remember phoning my grandmother after my mother’s visit and trying to get her to talk about Missy, but instead getting inundated by questions about grad school and what Toronto was like in those days, about Clark and our plans for the future, for marriage and children. None of the things I wanted to talk about. I left the conversation altogether within the first ten minutes and pretended to have forgotten some appointment.

  Later, I spoke to her in person, and by then I was single, had dropped out of school, and had nothing else going on that seemed the least bit pleasant to her. I was unemployed, hungover, and had adopted a safety-pin and self-cut-hairdo punk rock aesthetic that she couldn’t bear to look at. This made our passage into her memories easier, and after only a few prods she began to speak at length about Missy. It helped, too, that we were in the very same spot where Missy had once lived, if not in the same exact house—it had changed drastically several times by that point—then at least on the same plot of land where she had been discovered.

  My grandmother was very old by then, eighty-five or maybe even older, but it seemed like everything in her skull was perfectly intact. She spoke with the kind of emphasis a person has when they’re trying to clarify a misunderstanding. Every word was carefully chosen, and spoke not just of the person or the story, but of the era. She began, after looking away from me, by explaining that Missy wasn’t even the strangest
thing that was supposed to have happened at that time. People were hearing all kinds of baffling sounds, she said. A kind of “popping” sound echoing all over the forest. She then attempted to unfurl one of her weak hands and slap her cheek with her mouth open to illustrate. It didn’t sound like much.

  “Like that, you know. I can’t do it. But at our house they were hearing it in the cupboards and from the peak of the house, where the awning ended. Some thought it was coming from the house itself.

  “There was also the case of the peeper,” she said. “Weeks before, a man had begun to appear in windows, looking in on different houses at night. He would stare, and freeze whomever laid eyes upon him. Or else, that’s what they say.”

  This part I suddenly remembered. He was another part of the story that wasn’t in my mother’s version. When I’d heard about him as a girl, I’d been afraid. I didn’t understand it, but also had no questions about it. Monsters had merited no explanation back then, which is probably why I forgot about him. The strange sounds, on the other hand, were completely new to me. But both of these ideas lacked the realness of Missy herself, and had no connection to the immutable little article I’d found, which I had come to use as a kind of Rosetta Stone. A compass with which to navigate the story. When I asked her who she thought the man might have been, she surprised me with such a level of regard and consideration for the otherwise silly notion that I immediately reversed my feelings on the matter. She was like me, I realized. Had been doing the same things I had with the story for the last few years all her life:

  “I’ve thought about it many times,” she said. “He might have been a logger. A drunk. People moved through that patch of forest all the time, and a lot of them were drunk. There was a tavern on the other side of the river, near the logging camp, and lots of wives came by the house on the way to finding their husbands, and sometimes had to stay with us, especially during very rough weather.”