by Angie Abdou
Eli, stop. Please, please stop.
But I can’t stop. The noise keeps coming. Covering my ears doesn’t help. I pound my hands into the side of my head—Stop! Stop! Stop!—and I pull myself away from Lucy’s grasp.
“It’s one robin, Eli. It’s not the end of the world.” Nicholas’s face looks more tired than angry.
Isn’t it? I don’t even have to ask. I put the question in my eyes and wait for his flinch. It’s not the end of his world, that’s what Nicholas means.
I run for my bed and slam the door. In the dark—rocking on my mattress—I can make the noise slow down and gradually quiet, until it is only a low hum in the bottom of my throat.
Count, the adults say.
Be a big boy, they say.
We must learn to control our emotions, they say.
I curl into a ball and count the ways I hate them. They don’t understand me. They don’t know me. No one does.
***
When Nicholas leaves for the mine, Lucy stands in the doorway and sings “Don’t forget your cat-a-pult” at his back. They leave me alone to feel sorry for myself, all that afternoon and through the evening. Hunger almost pulls me out when I smell Lucy cooking bacon, but I don’t want her to see my puffy swollen eyes. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. Even her. Sometimes especially her.
Only late the next morning, long after Nicholas has left for work, does Lucy finally call me. “Eli?” She sings my name. “I’m going to Sam’s for a bit. You can come, if you want.” She doesn’t know I’ve already been to Sam’s this morning, while she still slept.
I soften to Lucy, the way she says my name, I can never help it, but I’m not ready to look at her. I’ll wait for her to go, and then I will follow at a distance. I will not stay in Elijah’s house alone, without her, not anymore.
I sit close to Sam’s back porch on a bench next to the planted trees between our yard and his. I won’t go in the back near the forest, where Mary and I normally play, though I can’t help looking there, waiting for her to appear. I want the Mary who warms my belly. You have to take the bad with the good, Lucy tells me, people are complicated. But I want only the good Mary to come.
Sam seems happy with Lucy’s toque. He makes a big show of taking off his yellow Ktunaxa cap and replacing it with the wool one. Sam doesn’t need a toque in this weather. It looks silly, the turquoise blue more suited to a new baby than to his old face. His hair, normally tucked up into his cap, falls to his shoulders. The toque isn’t quite big enough either and sits like a beanie too high on his head. But he and Lucy both pretend not to notice.
Sam doesn’t offer Lucy a coffee today. After he’s done fussing about his new toque, he gets back to work. Four spindly trees wait for him in black plastic buckets. Flags mark the spots where he plans to plant them.
“If you’re not busy, you can help,” he says to Lucy. “Quicker we get these into the ground where they belong, the better.”
Lucy looks unsure if Sam is joking, but she takes the shovel he hands her and strikes soil. I guess she must be pretty desperate for friends.
“How deep?” she asks, dumping a second shovelful of dirt into a pile without looking his way. She pulls her hoodie off over her head and throws it on his back step. Underneath, she wears a sleeveless shirt, the one she wore to yoga class before we moved to Coalton.
“Just keep digging,” Sam says. “I’ll tell you when.”
Mary sits near the woods almost invisible, like she always seems when others come around. She’s pulled her body into the shadow of the trees and huddles beneath a blanket around her shoulders. She keeps her eyes on her own toes. Lucy and Sam don’t try to include her in their conversation, obviously, I guess. They ignore us both. I see Lucy’s muscles work against the hard ground as she digs.
“Eli and I saw you on the news, talking about the graves,” she says. “You’re an archaeologist ... or?” Her words come out in breathless spurts. The work has made Lucy brave. It’s the most personal question she has asked Sam. He’s not the type who makes himself easy to ask.
“This is my work, actually. Trees.” Sam winks at me on the “actually.” He knows it’s my word. “The graves are more of a hobby.”
“Trees are your work?”
“I’m a scientist. I study old-growth cottonwoods. The biggest old-growth black cottonwood trees in the world sit just over that ridge.” He points with his elbow so he doesn’t have to let go of the shovel. “Most of the year, I live in Lethbridge and work at the university. In the spring and summer, I can come home here and be closer to my trees.”
“But Eli and I saw you on TV. You work for the Ktunaxa too?”
“Ktunaxa by birth.” He says the word Ktunaxa differently than Lucy, differently than the TV Voice. With Sam, I hear the click of the “k.” “Trees by choice. One of the grave sites was—is—Aboriginal. At one time, Coalton had three graveyards. Catholic,” he points across the street, where rows of stones gleam in the sun. “Non-Catholic,” he points down to the corner at the end of our neighbourhood. “Indian,” he nods his head to the forest behind our houses. “Now there’s only one. Fire, flood, poor administration. We have not taken good care of our dead.”
I know I can’t just sit and stare at Lucy and Sam, doing nothing else—Nicholas would be annoyed: Quit staring into space, Eli! Do something!—so I pick a big stick from the ground and pull the twigs off until it’s smooth, and then maybe I’ll borrow Sam’s pocket knife to sharpen the tip. I can keep it by my bed, though it’ll do no good against what scares me there.
Working on the stick keeps me from looking at Sam and Lucy. I don’t believe Lucy—what she said about the kind of friends they are, the kind of friends they will stay. But I cannot stop believing in Lucy. Without her, I will float off into another world. One little duck floated off one day ...
While Sam and Lucy talk about trees and graves, Mary’s song comes, pulling my attention.
Eye ya ah nuss hewk zoo kah nee.
The vowels stretch out like a baby’s cry. And suddenly Mary, no longer quiet in the shadows studying her own toes, is there in the sun, almost as if she is the sun, a yellow glow all around her, the heat of it stretching even to me from where she leans against the tombstones, smiling my way. I’m tempted to go over and sit beside her in the dirt. I could forget all about Sam and Lucy’s mute Mary or Mary standing in the windowed darkness of yesterday afternoon. I could even forget nightmare Mary in the bathroom and the forest last night. It’s easy to imagine those Marys have nothing to do with this one. Daytime Mary. Sunshine Mary. Mary who wears a yellow dress. Its fabric pulls tightly against her chest and cinches around her waist and then falls loosely to the ground. I remember this dress. She’s worn it before.
“Want to see me twirl, Elijah?” She spins around and around, the dress waving in ripples, her hair fanning out from her face. The bright yellow shines against her dark brown skin. I remember her in a field of daisies, far from this house, yellow skirt spinning. I wave at her and want to blow her a kiss to signal I love you, like Lucy and I sometimes do.
Something Sam says draws my attention. “Sure, there’s bones in this place. Bones are all over the place around here. When I built the garage and driveway, we found an arm and two legs. The guy who rented me the excavator said to just put them right back in and cover them up or my driveway would be shut down for months, maybe a year. So I did what they said. Didn’t bother me as much as it should have, I suppose.”
Lucy stops digging to listen to Sam. She leans on her shovel, her face white as popcorn. Her mouth opens as if she has words to let out, but nothing comes. She closes it without making a sound. “You believe in spirits?” Lucy finally says.
“Of course I believe in spirts. Doesn’t everyone?” Sam sounds almost impatient with her. They dig holes for the trees in silence.
“This will seem crazy ...” Lucy starts to say.
“I doubt it,” Sam prompts when she doesn’t continue. “Try me.”
&nbs
p; “Well, you know that your niece Mary and Eli are friends?”
“Yes?”
“And, I mean, your niece doesn’t ... well, talk ...”
“Yes?”
“But Eli thinks she talks. And I sometimes see him talking to her when she’s not there, when he’s in our house by himself. It’s like he has an imaginary Mary, an imaginary friend, I guess, based on your real Mary.”
I can’t listen. All I can do is stare at Mary in her yellow dress. I sit dumbly and watch as Mary twirls and twirls, her skirt flying, her smile inviting. Come play, Elijah, come play!
When Lucy finishes telling Sam about the museum article in The Coalton Free Press, he says nothing for a while. He takes time with his words. When they finally come, I feel Lucy’s disappointment. She wants more.
“I know it’s hard for academics to understand, but some things ...” He takes off the toque, shoves it in his back pocket, and scratches his head. He stands with his hands on his hips for a few seconds, and then pulls the toque out of his pocket, and puts it back on his head. I wonder if he will ever finish his sentence. “For some things, it’s better not to talk about them. Not too much.”
That’s one of the reasons I like Sam. He knows it’s better not to talk about that other Mary, not too much, maybe not at all. But he listened early this morning when I told him about my dreams—the blood, the fire, the ice.
“Some of this dream could be images of what you fear,” he said. “Wayward imaginings or what-could-have-beens. Some could be true. Likely you’ll know which is which, in your gut. If you listen.”
Neither Lucy nor Sam says more about spirits until all of the holes are dug.
“There are things around here that worry me more than unhappy ghosts.” Sam picks up their conversation as if it’s only been a moment since he last spoke. “Like the cougar spotted in broad daylight walking in Rotary Park last week. That worries me worse.”
“Nicholas says the same thing.” I’m happy to hear Lucy mention Nicholas. Usually she doesn’t say his name when we’re with Sam. “About the cougars’ behaviour. They’ve been travelling in packs at the mine site. Everybody knows cougars are solitary animals. The enviro people didn’t know what to make of these groups up at the mine. Some Elders came on a tour, and Nicholas told them that the cats have been slinking around in packs. You know how the Elder responded? ‘They’re just having a meeting, those cats. You’ve had your meetings about them. Now they’re having their meetings about you.’”
This conversation pulls Lucy back out of herself. They talk of coughing sheep and disruptive robins and plotting cougars. She relaxes into their words.
“I guess it’s true, what people have been predicating for so long,” Lucy says. “The planet is going to hell in a handbasket.” I picture my Helena Handbasket, vengeance etched in the dark shadows on her face. A clear thought bubble, as big as the clouds, waits for me to fill in the blank. “Are you ... relieved you never had kids?” Lucy must remember Mary because she blushes. “Kids of your own, I meant.”
Sam shrugs. “Any more kids in your plans?”
I think this is Sam’s way of saying none of your business, but Lucy doesn’t seem to notice. She answers, “No. I got lucky, we got lucky, to have one. We waited too long and then ran into complications. We hadn’t anticipated those. Hadn’t scheduled them in.”
The wind picks up and the air smells of smoke again. A haze hangs over the mountains. I squint to see Mary on the far side of the yard, like I’m looking through a screen. She smiles and waves. Come on, she seems to say, come play! The smoke makes me think again of the Mary in my dream, the hate in her eyes and the lit match between her fingers. But that Mary has less substance now. Mary in her yellow dress with a pail full of berries—she’s the solid one. Mary waiting for me to come sit with her, crisscross-apple-sauce in the dirt—that Mary feels real.
Sam doesn’t interrupt Lucy’s story about me, but I know about his wife Tamara. “We never wanted kids, never really tried, until it was too late,” he’s told me. I know his story is not that different than the one Lucy tells. The same minus me. Minus a wife now too.
I expect Sam to be bored with Lucy’s talk about old eggs and a sick baby, but he stares at Lucy. I try to see what he sees, to imagine Lucy as someone other than my mom. They balance a spindly tree between them, hoist it out of its pail. Once they centre it in the fresh hole Lucy has dug, they hold it steady while using their feet to scrape the dirt back in around the tree’s base. Next, they both kneel, using their bare hands to pat the dirt in tightly around the newly transplanted canyon maple. Their heads are close, and their hands touch as they move them quickly around the young tree trunk. Again, I feel a heat rise in me. I don’t quite recognize this kind of warming—it’s like anger, but not quite. Almost shame.
“God, we wanted kids,” Lucy says. “And then, when he finally came, he came early. Too early.”
I can tell this story from memory too.
“We couldn’t believe how young the doctor seemed,” Lucy says as she holds a finger to her lower eyelid as if to stop something from rolling out. I hope she’s not going to get messy. “‘Dr Dude,’ my husband called him. This guy’s hair hung to his shoulders even during his rounds, kind of dreads, I think that’s what you’d call them. Big wormy dreadlocks. He had a slow, Californian way of speaking. He looked like he’d be more comfortable carrying a surfboard than a stethoscope. I spent a lot of time alone there at the hospital. My husband ... well, maybe he’s like your graves, better not to talk about too much.”
Sam and Lucy make matching smiles like Nicholas and Lucy do when they tell an in-joke I don’t get. I do not like the way this friendship is going, not at all.
I know all of Lucy’s stories by heart. After I was born, Lucy spent a lot of her time at the hospital talking to Dr Dude. “Our little Eli is going to come out of this a-okay,” he always said. “You trust me. He’s gonna have gifts, this little guy. Baby Elijah. Mad gifts. This dude’s gotta foot in both worlds. He’s gonna know things you and me don’t. He’s our indigo kid, aren’t you, Eli buddy? Our indigo kid.”
Lucy says Dr Dude told her I’d have supernatural abilities: “He’ll have so much empathy, it’s more like telepathy.” I worry all this indigo kid talk is getting too close to the conversation Lucy and Sam had about bones and ghosts. That didn’t go so well. I want to tell them they should go back to talking about cougars travelling in packs or sheep coughing. Selenium and fish maybe. Something every-day and easy.
But Lucy’s hot lava of words won’t stop erupting. She acts like if she could tell this story of Eli the freaky Indigo Kid enough times, she could change the ending. I could turn into a normal boy who likes swimming lessons and downhill skiing and backpacking, a boy who’s not “different” in all the ways she says she appreciates, a boy who has nothing to do with Dr Dude’s prophecy about a weirdo with a foot in other worlds.
***
I drop my stick and turn away from Lucy and Sam, wiping my hands together hard to brush off the bark. The dirt sticks, so I rub my palms on my shorts as I walk toward Mary. I hate dirty hands. I think of all the things that could be in that dirt: poo, urine, germs, creepy-crawlies of all sorts. I imagine them making a home in my skin, and I have to shake my hands hard to get rid of the squirm.
Already, I know going to Mary is the right thing to do. I’m sorry it took me so long. She meets my eyes and smiles like she used to do, so long ago, when I went to her room in the back of the hotel. Laughing, she twirls once for me, so fast her yellow skirt swings out around her ankles, the way she loved to do in our daisy field. She knew I would come. That’s what her smile says.
“You can call me Mary,” she tells me. Same as always. We have our in-jokes too. I don’t need Sam, and I don’t need Lucy. I have Mary.
“Come pick berries with me, Elijah. You can have them with cream for dessert.” She holds the pail to show me it’s already half full. She looks six years old, and I wonder again how old Mary
is, actually.
We pick early-season berries side by side, taking turns dropping a handful into the pail. I like the plunking sound they make when they fall. I have to fight the urge to stuff fistfuls of the ripe berries into my mouth now. They taste even better if you wait. That’s what Lucy tells me when we pick together.
The sun shines hard onto my back making the T-shirt stick to the skin along my ribcage and neck. I pull it away from my body, fan it, trying to get a breeze against my chest, under my arms. “You don’t even look warm, Mary. Aren’t you dying in this heat?” As soon as the sentence is out of my mouth, I regret my wording.
She slides her eyes my way for a moment, but keeps right on picking. “Your Lucy seems to be getting along well with my Sam,” she says instead of responding.
“They’re neighbours,” I answer. “Lucy’s helping him plant his trees. Nicholas will be home from work soon. She’ll be there to meet him. Soon.”
“Hmmm.” Mary stretches her arm far into the branches, reaching for some berries hidden deep in the centre of the bush. “Your Lucy loves being around Sam.” Mary pronounces “loves” so it has two syllables—luh-uhvs. “Being around Sam makes her happy. He gives her new energy. She shines in a way she didn’t when she watched you from the window.”
Shut up, Mary. That’s what I want to say. I won’t turn around to watch Sam and Lucy balancing a new tree into the ground. I don’t want to see Lucy shining. I know the other signs too. Lucy will be watching Sam closely, talking too much and too fast. If Sam gives her the slightest reason, she will brighten with laughter. Even in a cold room, her cheeks would be pink. Sam makes her skin warm.
“That’s just how Lucy is. She’s friendly. It has nothing to do with Sam.” I plop down on the ground and watch Mary stand on her toes to reach for the plump, beautiful berries above her head. She’s hitched her skirt up, and her calves look strong. “Lucy gets excited about things,” I say. “Lots of things.”
That part is true. Lucy goes up, Lucy goes down. Lucy does not do the middle very well.