by Angie Abdou
I read quickly. The caption says most girls like this one couldn’t go off the reserve without a pass from the Indian Agent, but this girl, referred to almost always only by her first name, Mary, had an Italian father and so the Indian Agent treated the girl like a white as long as her father lived. With a funny twisting in my stomach, I run my forefinger in a circle around them, narrowing in toward the girl in the middle. Mary. The feeling in my stomach tightens, but I say nothing.
My breathing comes slow and even, my back rising and falling into Lucy’s chest. I feel her synch her own breath with mine, our bedtime sleeping trick. My finger has stopped to rest on the girl’s chin. I tap my finger there on her face, once, twice, three times. The whistle of the coal-train sounds from the tracks at the bottom of the hill, Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. That’s how Nicholas makes the train noise—the sound of a cash register rolling. Elijah’s shack vibrates in response.
When I finally speak, my voice sounds odd, like it barely fits in my own throat. “Actually, Mary is not her real name,” I say in my low and serious new voice. “She let the men call her that, but it is not her name.”
Mary
“Perhaps you would like to come with me to the community sports day this afternoon, Mary? Once you’re done with the rooms.” Mrs Knowles sat behind the front desk of the hotel and made this suggestion as if going to the sports day were something she and Mary did every afternoon after Mary finished cleaning rooms.
“Yes, Mrs Knowles. I would like that. Thank you.” Mary did not stop her work. She kept climbing the stairs, balancing her bucket to keep the water from sloshing onto the freshly washed floor. She did not rush the cleaning of the rooms either. While Mrs Knowles was often kind and generous, she might change her mind about the community sports day if Mary did a poor job. So Mary did an even more careful than usual job with the rooms upstairs. She used the tip of the rag to dig the dust out of every corner. She made sure not to leave a single streak on the mirrors. She smoothed every wrinkle out of the bedding. Although the family sports day, with its soccer matches and running races, happened in Coalton twice every summer and again in late fall, Mary had not been in a long while. A girl did not attend such events alone. Who else would take her? Mary didn’t go to the school anymore, and she worked long days. Mrs Knowles preferred to see her working than “loitering.” Loiter, that’s what Mrs Knowles had called it, the loose skin at her neck wobbling with the force of the word. After that one time, Mrs Knowles did not allow Mary to have girl friends at the hotel, not inside, not outside. So it had proven impossible for Mary to keep the few school friends she’d made.
Mary had gone to the sports day once with her father, after she was already too big for the children’s games (the silly sack hop or the three-legged race), but too small for the adult games (the men intent to win the four-hundred dollar prize for the first-place soccer team and the women left to watch from the stands in their fine dresses). Her father bought her a frankfurter wrapped in fried bread. Mary dipped it in mustard after each bite. It was the messiest thing she had ever eaten. At night, she and her father sat in the grass and watched the firecrackers. Mary held his hand and watched his face light up with each explosion.
When she and her father first arrived, Mary noticed that there was nobody else her colour at the sports day and asked her father where her mother’s people were. He’d been angry when his wife first left. And then sad. Now he was only quiet. “Shhh, Mary, shhh. You and I are all the family we need now. We can go where we like, when we like. Your mother’s people cannot. Shhh, girl.” He petted Mary’s hair with his warm, strong palm, and Mary focused on that kindness.
After Mary finished the day’s cleaning for Mrs Knowles, she dumped her bucket and wrung out her mop and climbed the stairs to her room in the back of the hotel. She washed quickly with a wet cloth and some soap, and then picked the white cotton dress Mrs Knowles had given her, a hand-me-down from a grown niece. She liked that it let the air touch her skin in a way her old wool ones never did. It fell in folds down over her knees, red and raw from scrubbing floors, and to her ankles. She knew the hug of the material drew attention to her small waist and firm hips. But there would be no older boys at the sports day to impress. Even back when she went to school, she did not like the boys, and now all the single young men had gone to war.
Mary could think of a few men, though, some of the ones who came to the hotel and smiled at her in a way that made her feel taller and warm from the inside out. Sometimes they thanked her for cleaning their rooms by leaving a treat of candy or a shiny hair clip. (She always wondered if they’d taken those clips from their own wives or daughters.)
Mrs Knowles made herself look nice for the event too. Mary had never seen the dress she wore with its delicate pearl buttons, three at each wrist, and a long line of them running up the front. The high lace collar hid the sag of her neck, and she’d done something to her face too. She looked fresher and younger, almost pretty. Like a memory of pretty. Cleaning had taken longer than Mary hoped, but she and Mrs Knowles would make it to the field in time for the impromptu violin circles and then the fun of the firecrackers.
Mr Knowles did not accompany them, and Mary wondered if the invitation had come only so Mrs Knowles would have an excuse to go. She likely couldn’t go by herself any more than Mary could. “Women do not go wandering about whenever they like,” Mary’s father had said when she complained of her mother’s infrequent visits, before her mother stopped coming altogether. “Especially Indian women. Now, don’t look at me like that, Mary. It’s the way it is. The way of the world. She made her choice.” He didn’t stroke her hair with kindness this time. “At least she had the sense to leave you. You should be thankful.” It was the closest he came to saying a kind word about her mother. Mary did not feel thankful.
The noise from the field reached Mrs Knowles and Mary first, before they could even see the crowds. The shots and laughter put Mary right back there in the grass watching firecrackers with her father, lines of golden light streaking his face and mustard staining her dress.
When she and Mrs Knowles found themselves in the crush of people, Mary almost changed her mind and told Mrs Knowles that she needed to go back to her room at the hotel. She did not like the bumping and jostling, the smell of alcohol, the people yelling. In Coalton, Mary was just different enough that people looked at her in a crowd, and it wasn’t the kind of looking she liked. But Mrs Knowles grabbed Mary’s hand and pulled her through the worst of the crowd. Mary stared at the pearled buttons along Mrs Knowles’ wrist to avoid meeting the eyes of strangers.
Mrs Knowles had invited Mary to this event, but she didn’t offer to pay Mary’s way. The girl had saved a little money from cleaning and would allow herself one drink and one treat. She picked brown sugar fudge from the baking table, then pinched off a small piece, placing it under her tongue to let it melt. This way, she would make it last.
When the woman approached, Mary was standing alone with her piece of fudge, waiting for Mrs Knowles who had lined up for a cup of apple cider. The woman did not need to introduce herself. Mary saw her own eyes in this woman’s face, her own high cheekbones, her own long, straight nose. Mary saw even her own eyelashes, heavy on top and thin on the bottom.
You’re not allowed out here, she wanted to say. Not without a pass from the Indian Agent. But the words wouldn’t come. She put the meanness in her eyes instead of her voice.
Even so, the woman put a hand on the crook of Mary’s elbow and said her name. Not “Mary” but her other name. Mary did not pull away. She let the woman hold tight to her elbow. “I haven’t seen you for so long,” the woman said. “You are big now.”
“Hello, mother,” Mary finally said. “How do you do?” Mary instantly hated her awkward, formal phrasing, and felt colour rising to her cheeks. She no longer wanted her sugary treat and had to fight the desire to spit the small piece under her tongue to the ground at this woman’s feet.
“I am well,” the woman a
nswered slowly. She let go of Mary’s elbow. “I just wanted—”
Mary could not listen. She turned her back on the stranger with her face. I don’t care what you want. She dropped her fudge to the grass.
Mary had been only a toddler when her mother left the first time. On the starting day of school, Mary stood up to introduce herself to the class and said, “I came from my mommy’s tummy. When I was a baby, a bee stung my tongue. Turtles have been on the earth longer than dinosaurs.” Her father loved to tell that story and laugh. But Mary remembered the line she said to end her speech, the line her father never repeated: My mother does not live with us anymore. After that day at school, Mary avoided mentioning her mother again.
She would not cry at the sports day for everyone to see. By the time Mrs Knowles returned, Mary had a headache from the effort of stopping the rush of tears. She could taste them at the back of her throat. She wished she could rest her head on Mrs Knowles’ shoulder, imagined the woman stroking her hair as her father had once done, palming the back of her head with a warm, gentle hand. Mrs Knowles could be her mother. She was old enough, at least. Mrs Knowles will never be your mother, silly girl. You mean nothing to her. It came to her in her father’s voice, as he sounded near the end, when he’d become nothing but the drink.
Mary swallowed hard. Mrs Knowles, she knew, would have no patience for crying at community sports day.
“Mary, what has gotten into you? Composure!” She said it the same way she’d said loiter the day Mary invited her friends to visit. If not for the high collar, Mrs Knowles’ neck would wobble. Mrs Knowles searched the crowd as she spoke, her eyes jumping through the crowd. “That woman—the one I saw you talking to—was she bothering you? Did she ask you for money? You mustn’t talk to people like her, Mary, not when you work for me. Not when you live in my quarters. I know her kind. They only bring trouble.” She brought her eyes back to Mary’s face. “What Mr Knowles and I do for you is generous, but our generosity ends the moment you bring trouble.”
“I am sorry. I want to go back,” Mary said, her words no longer sloppy with tears. She would not say home. “I need to go back to the hotel. I am not well,” she thought to add. “I am sorry.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I keep thinking I see Mary at the window, her forehead resting against the glass, her arms limp. It’s like when I squint at the kitchen lights and see rainbows floating through the air, but I open my eyes wide and they’re gone. I squint at the window: Mary there. I open my eyes wide: Mary gone. It’s weird.
“Don’t use the word ‘weird,’” Lucy always says. “Or ‘nice.’ Weak words, both of them. You can do better.”
I disagree. For some things, weird is the only word. For Mary at my window, weird works fine. Mary does not come to my house. She refuses even to cross the property line into the yard. She’s always in Sam’s yard—waiting for me, I know, but never turning in the direction of our home. Today, she hovers in the window, looking for me, demanding me. I don’t like her there.
I want to get Sam—but this Mary feels different than that Mary. This Mary is the one only I know. I feel it in my bones. I see it in the way Lucy’s eyes float across the window without stopping. Lucy does not see her. This Mary ignores the cold, mean wind, the dark clouds swallowing the sky. These clouds hold the rain Nicholas says we need, and they make afternoon look like night. But the clouds don’t break and the rain doesn’t come. Still, when I squint, Mary looks wet, her hair soaked straight through. I look at the dry ground and the rainless skies, as water drips down the glass. It ripples Mary’s face and blurs her edges. Through the blur, Mary’s face frightens me. I feel the fear in the tingle of my skin and the clench of my stomach.
I can’t think of the right thing to do, so I pretend that I don’t see Mary. I pretend I don’t hear rain.
I stick close by Lucy.
Last night, in my dream, I sat on this couch too, in this same house. But the house smelled different in the dream—not mouldy and dank like it did when we moved in, like it still does under Lucy’s soaps and bleaches and incense. In the dream, it smelled new, like paint and glue and woodchips. But just underneath those smells was an unpleasant one. Man sweat. Strong, not like anything I’ve ever sniffed off Nicholas or even Sam. Inside the dream, I wasn’t surprised the smell came from me, but I wonder at it now, in the daytime.
While I slept, the fingers in my hair belonged to Mary—not Lucy. Come around here, Mary, I wanted to say. Come sit in my lap. But my voice wasn’t my own either. Those words, fighting their way out of my throat, the Come here, Mary, belonged to that man smell. And I am only a boy.
Lucy pulls her hands from my hair and goes back to her knitting. She often knits on the dark indoor days. I lay with my head in her warm lap and watch the click of her needles, the loop of her wool. Before we came to Coalton, Lucy’s hands always moved too, but then they moved on her phone, clicking out a text message, poking at a Facebook link, uploading an image to Twitter. She had The Addiction, and I told her so too. Here, she’s put her phone away, but she needs something to take its place. So she knits. Unlike Mary, Lucy is not good at stillness.
I let my eyes slide by the window, as if they’ve gone there accidently on their way from the living room to the kitchen. I don’t let my gaze stop on the possibility of Mary for even a second, but I squint and she’s still there, forehead resting on the glass, arms falling loose, wild wind blowing in her wet hair.
I pretend to smile at Lucy, watching her hands move fast with her needles, and I try not to think about last night, about what I did with Mary’s hand.
What you did in your dream, I remind myself. It was only a dream. Besides, that wasn’t even me. Not me with Mary’s fingers in my hair. Not me pulling Mary into my lap. Not me moving Mary’s hand. It was not me.
A half-finished, turquoise-blue toque hangs from the end of Lucy’s knitting needles. She tells me she might give it to Sam.
“He already has a hat he likes,” I say. “The yellow ball cap. That’s what he wears. Always.” I keep my voice low, almost a whisper, and close my eyes so they don’t stray past the window again. I can’t fool Mary twice. “His cap says Too-Na-Ha. He loves it.” In other words: Stay away. I’ve changed my mind about sharing my friend.
“Well, this hat can be for when it’s cooler out.” There’s a sharp edge of irritability in Lucy’s voice. I fight the urge to squirm out of her lap, away from her. “This toque,” Lucy says with more softness, “will keep Sam’s ears warm. You don’t want your friend getting cold ears, do you?” She pulls the wool across my face, dangling it so it tickles my ears.
I scratch the wool away from my face. “Are you trying to make Sam your friend too?” I can’t help myself, even with my head in Lucy’s warm lap, even with her soft wool tickling my ears, even with Mary staring at me from the howling wind, behind the confusing wet pane of glass.
“Oh, Eli, stop. You’re jealous of every man I speak to. He’s my neighbour. Our neighbour. I’m being neighbourly.” Lucy takes a deep breath. I picture her sitting on the floor cross-legged, doing the loud ocean breath. Some days, dealing with me requires the ocean breath. “He’s my son’s friend. And the uncle of my son’s only good friend.” The only is not nice, the way Lucy says it. “I should be kind to him.”
“You don’t like him then? You don’t wish you were his friend?” I wrap a piece of wool around my finger and stare at it as if it’s far more interesting to me than Lucy’s answer.
“I barely know him,” she says. “Do I like him? Not in the way you’re suggesting.” I like only Nicholas in that way, she used to say when I’d “get like this.” Before Danica.
I flip the TV on to give me something to look at other than the wet window with its Mary, no Mary, Mary, no Mary.
We only get the news channel here. Nicholas likes to brag about how cheap our cable bill is—lower than the cheapest package. This brag he and Lucy do together: “We barely watch any television at all!” Adults love these little
things that make them feel better than their neighbours. Lucy and Nicholas see everything as a competition. Even goodness. Some people want to be the best at being good.
But it’s okay because I like to watch the news for the same reason I like listening to Lucy and Nicholas talk at night when they think I’m asleep. In the news, I can find out the information adults don’t think I need to know. But today my attention drifts. I’m not so much watching TV as I am not-watching Mary. I listen to the click, click, click of Lucy’s needles and look straight ahead.
I’m nearly asleep when the TV voice says, “It’s a popular getaway for city folk, a world-renowned ski destination in the winter, a quaint tourist spot in the summer, but it’s also the backdrop for a century-old mystery, one that might cost property owners in the end.”
I’m so freaked out about by rainbow Mary that I don’t realize right away that the TV Voice is talking about my town. I shouldn’t be able to smell Mary through the glass, but I can. Her outdoors’ scent—sunshine and dust and dandelions blowing in the hot summer breeze—reaches me through the window pane, clings to my skin, to my hair. I hold the crook of my arm across my face and breathe her in, picturing the outdoors’ Mary, the one telling me stories in Sam’s backyard, the girl I like. I’m thinking so hard about Mary that I don’t clue in even as the views I know best flicker across the television screen—the snow-peaked Three Sisters, the steeple of the Catholic church high above the rest of Coalton, the red brick City Hall with mountains jutting up sharp behind it. But as soon as I recognize this “quaint tourist spot” as Coalton, I know. Mary made this happen.
On the screen, a woman I recognize walks through the green fields of the cemetery just across the street. If I let myself look at the window, out past Mary, I would see the very spot. I almost recognize the stoop of this woman’s shoulders, her long stride as she crosses the grass. “This is her refuge,” the announcer says before I recognize the walking woman, “the intoxicating scenery a backdrop to what appears a peaceful journey. The troubling truth is hard to believe. We will take you to the heart of this mystery in this special program ...” The announcer pauses, and silence fills our house, a quiet unbroken even by the click of Lucy’s knitting needles. “Our exposé is called ‘A Grave Mistake.’”