In Case I Go

by Angie Abdou

  “That’s okay, son. It’s a bumpy road.”

  Nicholas never calls me “son,” but I couldn’t thank him, my mouth full of thick spit.

  “We’ll get you out of here, son.” Nicholas kept saying that, the whole winding way down to the highway, as the sour smell of my vomit filled the cab of his new truck. “We’ll get you out of here, son.”

  ***

  The official story is we came to Coalton for my asthma, but I’ve learned a lot about official stories versus real truths since we moved. One official story is Danica was Nicholas’s intern, a girl he sometimes played racquetball with. I wonder about a different story to do with the way Lucy never says Danica’s name. Instead, it’s always her and she or, worse yet, that woman. Danica won’t be visiting our new home. For one, we don’t even have a guestroom, actually. There’s only a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom. (The smallest bathroom Lucy has ever seen. She says it’s a good thing she’s only four-eleven or she wouldn’t even be able to stand in the shower.) We squished my bed into the tiny alcove off the kitchen.

  Another official story is that this move was Nicholas’s idea: he wanted to retire from the rat race, get back to his family’s small-town roots, and “spend more time with his son.” But I heard Lucy late at night, saying, “Either way, Elijah and I are leaving.” Lucy spoke with that strangled sound she gets when she’s trying not to scream or cry, like she’s wearing a too-tight turtleneck. “You make your decision, Nicholas—come or stay. But if you come, things will be different.”

  He came. Things are different.

  When we left our big-city house, I cried a little bit. Not the noisy kind of crying, just the kind that makes my cheeks wet. I kept so quiet Lucy didn’t even hand me a Kleenex. I don’t know why I cried. The kids weren’t nice to me there. There was nobody I’d miss. Still, I’d never lived anywhere else. I guess that’s what people mean by home: a place that’s hard to leave even if it’s just as crappy as everywhere else.

  That last time, in front of our old house, Nicholas put his hand on my shoulder while I cried. We didn’t look at each other, just leaned against the warm car (sheets and pillows and stacks of dishes piled high against the windows) and stared at that big house, an exact copy of each of its neighbours. “This new life will be better, Eli. You’ll see.”

  Parents do that, pretend they’re doing something because of the kids, when actually they have their own grown-up reasons. I don’t think Lucy and Nicholas are lying, exactly. I think they actually believe the strange stories they tell. That’s different than lying, right?

  Mary gives me a funny look when I tell her this theory. “I guess you’re right,” I admit. “Lying is lying. No matter what tricks people play on their minds.”

  “You’ve come a long way for a little white boy from the city,” Mary says. I get that warm-honey feeling. If she keeps looking at me with those kind of eyes, little bumps poke up on my arms, and the back of my neck breaks into a cool sweat, and that’s when I know I can never tell Nicholas and Lucy a single thing about this Mary who talks, a Mary who’s different than the one they all see. Different in a way that feels a little bit dangerous. The shivery feeling Mary gives me all over my back, the heat growing up my neck and face, make me glad we never got rid of this mountain shack.

  Nicholas planned to keep the house just as a ski retreat after Grandpa died, but that was before I came into the picture. If we stay, Lucy and Nicholas will hire someone to tear down our house and build one like we had in the city. Then Sam’s will be the only miner’s shack left—the only house that still remembers the olden times. I wonder if houses get lonely. Imagining his little house surrounded by nothing but big ones makes me sad. It’s not fun, being small and different.

  Sam can almost make me see the beauty of Coalton. “I wish I knew my people’s word for that kind of beauty,” he says. “The Creator told us, ‘You need to know your language. You need to speak your language. When I shake the earth, you will need it to survive.’ But not many people know my language. Less than seventy in the whole world. And even then, not all the words. So you and I, Eli, we’ll have to take in this beauty with no words.”

  Without Sam, the mountains on every side feel like a cage. When the clouds settle down below the mountains’ peaks, it’s as if God has closed the lid on our town. I hear myself breathing in short, quick gasps like I’m afraid whoever closed the lid might have forgotten to cut air holes. On those days, the sun sleeps, and the valley stays dark enough to match Lucy’s mood.

  In Coalton, even the land feels angry. The sharp rock faces, the towering pines. I miss our old home where we had wide-open skies full of sun, and the mountains were only a pretty ornament in the background, the place where the sky kissed the land. I liked the mountains as somewhere we might go for a holiday but never stay long enough to feel the weight of them. I hope I can learn to love them like Sam does.

  I wonder how my great-great-grandfather Elijah felt about these mountains. Since we moved here to Coalton, I remember a lot more about him: the dark coal underneath his fingernails; the way he bathed from a bowl on the kitchen table, wiping the back of his neck and his underarms with a sponge he kept beneath the kitchen sink. I remember the way his heavy hands smelled of whiskey and tobacco. If I close my eyes and think back, I can hear that deep, rolling laugh that made it nearly impossible for anyone to hold a grudge against him. Even if times were hard, and Elijah gave people plenty of reason to grudge.

  “How can you remember him?” Lucy puts her hands on my arms, on that bony part between my shoulder and my elbow. She’s strong for someone so tiny. She pushes down hard, as if she is the only thing holding me to this earth. “You do not remember him, Eli. You didn’t know him. He died before you were born. Before I was born.”

  I like that about Mary. How can you remember him? Mary never asks such silly questions. She doesn’t need to. She’s like me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mary joins me under the trees in Sam’s backyard, where I sit with my back pressed into the rough bark. I can see through Sam’s yard into the Coalton cemetery.

  “We live right next to the dead centre of town,” Nicholas likes to say.

  But in Coalton, not all the graves are inside the cemetery fence. Two lean into each other right here on the back edge of Sam’s property. Down the street, on the corner near the mailboxes, the city fenced off a clump of three gravestones, but mostly broken-up tombstones sit on that line between yard and forest, as if that’s exactly where they belong. Nobody pays them any attention.

  “That’s not your business,” Lucy and Nicholas both say about the graves, as if they’ve rehearsed the line together in their mirror. “Not your worry.”

  But Sam tells me. The fenced gravestones on the corner used to be part of Crow Cemetery, built for the non-Catholics. The graves behind our house were part of an Aboriginal graveyard.

  I ask Sam where the rest of those graves went and why there’s no fence. He puffs out his cheeks and blows a burst of air like I’ve never seen an adult do before. He looks like a kid blowing the fluff off a dandelion. “Fire. Flood. Poor records. The burial sites weren’t well cared for. We need a body count and a proper cemetery, not a weed patch. The city needs to do something.”

  I look over at Mary.

  “You can go up the mountain a ways with Mary,” says Sam. “She likes to sit there in the back by the forest or walk up in the woods. That’s all fine, but don’t let her wander too far. She can’t talk, but she understands you. Say what you need. Nothing wrong with her mind.” His eyes land kindly on Mary’s face, but she doesn’t look at him. Her looking is all on me, her eyes shining like we both know a joke on Sam, even if we’ll never say. “She’s had a tough go. Back when I was kid, a girl like her would’ve ended up in a foster home. But now we try to keep it in the family. So she got stuck with Uncle Samuel, even if I never claimed to be fit to be anybody’s dad. We do our best, don’t we, Mary?” Sam makes a signal at her like he’s waving goodbye b
ut with the two middle fingers pointed down at the heel of his hand. She forgets me then, her hand making the same sign, me all on the outside of their new way of bodytalking.

  When Sam goes, Mary relaxes, leaning against the tombstone in his yard. It’s early March, but there’s no trace of winter. Mary folds one tanned leg over the other and spreads a big leaf on her hand, squishing thimbleberries onto it until she has a puddle of red goo. I don’t ask where she got the berries—or the tan—in March. I just watch as Mary rubs the red into her lips.

  I guess she uses the berries to look prettier. She looks pretty either way, but I won’t tell her that. Not yet. I pick the tiny coal-black rocks out of the ground around the base of the pine tree, keeping only the ones that leave black marks when I rub them against my skin. I write E-L-I in big square letters on the inside of my arm. Mary takes the stones from me and rubs one under and over her eyes, tracing the lower lids and smudging the upper ones. I tell her the black eyes make her look like a corpse, but Mary only laughs, her teeth red with berries.

  “You can call me Mary.” She says this every time we meet, even though it’s the only thing I ever call her. “That’s what they called me.”

  “What who called you?” I push my asthma inhaler deep into the pocket of my shorts. Lucy doesn’t let me leave the house without it, but I don’t like Mary to see it. I won’t puff it in front of her.

  “The men,” Mary answers. “They always called me that. It made them feel better.” She dips one finger in the red goo and licks it without looking at me. “It’s a familiar name, Mary is. Isn’t that funny?” I see no hint of a laugh in her blackened eyes. “They liked me because I was different but then gave me a name that pretended I was the same. Which do men want, Elijah, different or familiar?” She rubs the red finger along her upper lip and then her lower. When she’s done, she stares into my eyes like she’s looking for her own reflection. I don’t like her looking inside of me this way. A tight pain grabs hold of my chest and squeezes until I can’t get a full breath. I fight the urge to grab my inhaler. All shall be well. All shall be well. All shall be well.

  Julian of Norwich is Lucy’s favourite medieval mystic. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. That’s what Julian liked to say. “And if Julian could have an all-shall-be-well attitude in her dark anchorage with no food and no bath and no company,” says Lucy, “then so too can we!”

  I squirm against Mary’s staring and repeat these words, keep them slow and even like Lucy taught me.

  Finally, Mary smiles, satisfied, as if a glimpse of my fear is all she needs for now.

  ***

  Lucy has decided to take me to school. “Just to see,” she says. I don’t want to go. Mary warned me she won’t come anywhere near the school. “That place gives me the willies,” she says. “White people and white people’s rules: two things I have no use for. Except for you, Elijah.” She looks older when she says it, her eyes sad. “You’re okay.”

  The way she says it makes me feel older too. For her, I want to be better than okay.

  I know exactly what Mary means by the “willies” when I meet my new school principal, Mrs Evanhart. She’s taller than Nicholas. I figure she must be wearing high heels the way she stretches to the sky and almost totters at the effort of keeping that long body upright. But when I look down, I see flip-flops on dirty feet. From top to bottom, she’s a jumble of mismatched: hair so yellow it should be on TV; a fancy suit like the tellers wear at the bank; and then garden feet on the bottom. I can’t imagine Lucy wearing those shoes (or those feet!) back when she used to teach.

  “So good to have you back in Coalton!” Mrs Evanhart bends over to steer me into the office with a hand on each of my hips, but she speaks so loudly she must have forgotten how near her mouth is to my ear.

  “Yes,” says Lucy, quietly. “Yes, we’re back.”

  People talk like that here, as if our family has been gone for three weeks instead of two generations. We’ve gotten used to it, until even Lucy has given up correcting them.

  “We knew Coalton would get you back, eventually,” says Mrs Evanhart. “With a name like Mountain, how could you live anywhere else?”

  I watch for Lucy’s flinch, and there it is. How could someone so little feel at home in a name so big?

  Nicholas Mountain

  Lucy Mountain

  Eli Mountain

  The Mountains

  It’s a name that grabs nobody’s attention in the city, but never escapes comment here. The funny thing is that Elijah Mountain wasn’t even my great-great-grandfather’s name when he first came here, actually.

  “It was a hard time, Eli, during the First World War,” Nicholas explained. “You wanted to blend in back then. Being different could be a death sentence. Coalton was a true Wild West. The mining company took a house right out of a box and built it just for Elijah. In return, he had to give what he had—his time, his labour, his life. He had enough trouble without a name that drew attention to the ways he didn’t fit in. So he became Elijah Mountain.”

  “What’s his real name, then?” I’d asked.

  “Oh, I could never say it properly and forgot it. Mountain suits the family better.”

  “We’ve all been keeping an eye on that little house of Elijah’s, waiting for the return of the Mountains,” Mrs Evanhart says, her words rolling along as she places forms before Lucy and a pen in her hand. “It needs some lovin’ for sure. But don’t you go turning it into one of those big-city monstrosities, a house as big as a hotel. Coalton doesn’t need any more of those.”

  Mrs Evanhart’s thinking is old-time Coalton: forget about the giant houses with their walls of windows. “Enjoy the view when you’re in it,” that’s what Sam says. “Locals respect scale—mountains big, houses small.”

  “Sure, fix the house up a little,” Mrs Evanhart continues, tapping the form to remind Lucy to keep her pen moving. I imagine she has stalled out at the ATHLETIC ACHIEVEMENTS category. “Make the house your own. But keep the character, the Coalton character. You are locals, after all.”

  Lucy pretends a smile at this compliment, but her smile looks nothing like it used to. Before Danica. Before Coalton.

  “Oh, I don’t think we’ll change the house much,” Lucy says, loud enough for me to hear across the room where I’ve slid up against a wall, my eyes on my knees. Mary taught me this: stay still and flat and you can be invisible. It’s amazing what you’ll see. It works with adults as well as animals. Three deep wrinkles appear across Lucy’s forehead when she finds me in my dark corner. I see myself through her, my chest hollow, my shoulders hunched, dark smudges under my eyes. She’s worried about me. She sees part scared ten-year-old boy, part worn-out old man. Only Sam and Mary see how strong I am.

  “We want Eli to feel good about this move,” Lucy says more quietly to Mrs Evanhart. She’s forgotten me again, the real Eli disappearing behind the “Eli” on her form. “We need him to have faith in this move.”

  “So, Eli, ready to start school then, are we?” I can tell that Mrs Evanhart does not mean it as a question (if she did, I could tell her, No, actually, I’m not). She extends a big hand, and I pull my shoulders up around my ears. Mrs Evanhart scares me, but I have to put my hand in hers and let her lead me down the hall. She’s strong like Sam. But when Sam touches me I see orange, and I turn warm from the inside out. With her, I see brown and feel nothing.

  I pull the collar of my shirt toward my lips. I want to feel it on my tongue, between my teeth. Lucy hates my shirt-chewing habit even more than my hand flinging. I let it go. The quick taste of freshly laundered cotton is almost enough. I trace the frayed edges of the collar where I’ve already chewed the material loose, and then I let that go too.

  ***

  “Why don’t you make friends with some kids in the neighbourhood, Eli?”

  I kneel on the floor in the front hallway tying my shoes. Lucy stands before a pile of clean laundry on the kitchen table. She has a b
asket for folded laundry on the chair but the unfolded pile doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller. She picks up one of my T-shirts and looks at it like she can’t image what it’s for, folds in one sleeve, and then crumples the whole thing in a ball and drops it back on the table with the rest.

  “Mary’s my friend.” Mary is not the kind of kid Lucy has in mind. I know that.

  “You spend too much time at Sam’s,” she says as if I haven’t even mentioned Mary. “He’s practically my age.” She gives one of Nicholas’s dress shirts a hard shake and then drops it in the basket.

  “Yes, I spend time at Sam’s house because his niece Mary is my friend.”

  Lucy has a way of sighing that hurts me right in the heart. She does it twice before answering. “Mary is a bit too old for you too.”

  I want to say, You mean a bit too brown for me. But I wouldn’t dare. My skin prickles, and the hair on my arms bristles just imagining saying such a thing aloud.

  “She’s also not well. Mary can’t even speak, Eli. I can’t imagine what you two do all day.”

  I want to tell her that just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not true. It’s like Sam says about the squirrels. Lucy doesn’t see Mary speak, doesn’t hear her.

  “Mary and I talk our own way,” I say.

  “Fine, Eli.” Lucy swipes the whole big pile of unfolded laundry into the folded basked and moves toward the bedroom. “Fine,” she says again over her shoulder.

  She’s forgiven me by the afternoon, and after lunch we sit on the front step enjoying the sun on our bare legs. I hold my hands out, and Lucy wraps her wool around and around and around, making a tidy ball of each colour.

  “It doesn’t make me a bad person.” Lucy says each word soft, almost as if she’s talking to herself. “The way I feel about you and Mary. Their people have had hard lives. I—Nicholas and I—we don’t want that ... to touch you. We’re your parents. We want to protect you. That’s natural.”