by Angie Abdou
“Anyway, Sam and Lucy are both married. Married people can have friends, you know.” I try to sound very sure of myself, like there’s nobody who knows more about marriage than I do.
“Sam is sort of married,” Mary says. “His wife is not here. I don’t know about Lucy’s marriage. Nicholas doesn’t seem to be here either. That I can see.” Mary has filled her pail. She sits next to me and puts it on the ground between us. “You can have a few,” she says, but takes none herself.
I’d like to tell her I don’t want her stupid berries, but my mouth waters so badly that I can’t resist. I reach for a handful. The warm juice explodes in my mouth, and I reach for more.
“Sam’s wife left, like my mom did.” Mary talks as I stuff my mouth with warm messy bursts of berry. “My mom came here for a man too. She didn’t come from far away, but she left her family for him. She thought she could do that, stay for him, but she missed her people. They got married, but she left him anyway, eventually. She had to go back to her people, across the border. Not a border between countries, but a border the government made. That’s what my father told me, a border between her people and our people.”
This is new. Sam has told me Mary’s mom didn’t leave her; Mary’s mom was taken away. And Sam is Mary’s mom’s brother. Wouldn’t he know? According to Sam, Mary doesn’t have a father. “No father we need to know of,” he’s said. I don’t know whose story Mary thinks she is telling me, but it is not her own. I asked Sam once about his sister who can’t take care of her own daughter anymore, and Sam said, “My sister’s had a rough life, Eli. A lot of my people have. Your people don’t like to hear about that. There’s no way to tell that story nice. No way that your mom and dad would like. If you want to keep coming over to my place, you and I should steer clear of my sister’s story.” But I would like to know more about quiet Mary’s mom. Not my Mary, who can say one thing with her eyes at the same time she says another thing with her mouth. No. Now I’m dizzy again with all the Marys.
I turn to check on Sam and Lucy. Nothing out of the ordinary, I tell myself. She’s only talking to the neighbour, helping him plant his trees.
“You’re cranky today, Elijah. Let’s go on an adventure.”
Mary’s face looks fresh and bright, but I see something behind that, like when an apple looks new and juicy but you bite into it and get a mouth full of rot. I think of Mary in the bathtub covered in blood, Mary in the backyard holding a match, Mary in the ice with her lips turning blue. One is true.
“An adventure where?” I will go. It’s as close as I can offer to an apology, though I don’t know why I’m sorry.
“Come on.” She jumps up, reaching her hand to me. “I’ll show you.”
I’ve never gone into the woods without Nicholas. But he’s off pretending to save a robin, and Lucy doesn’t care about me right now.
I get up and follow Mary.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As Mary and I walk up the mountain and away from Sam’s yard, the woods become like a house. Thick trunks stand tall around us in every direction like walls, and the dense leaves overhead make a roof. I can’t see the sky, but golden streams of sun push past the leaves and create a maze of laser beams. Mary stays well ahead of me, her strong legs mounting the steep slope without effort. She looks so pretty here in the deep-green shade of the woods, striding through the golden beams of light. So much prettier than she did last night in the bathtub.
That wasn’t Mary. Just a dream, I tell myself again. It seems so obvious now, here in the woods with the real Mary. I hear Sam: Only fears. What-might-have-beens.
My skinny legs don’t have the strength for mountain climbing. My thighs burn. I try to ignore the dull ache in my calves. I lean forward and put a hand on my knee with each step to relieve the pressure on my already-tired muscles. I am one step short of crawling up the steep slope, and I pray for the land to level out, but it gets steeper until it feels like we’re climbing a wall. Sweat rolls down my face and neck, soaking my shirt and stinging my eyes. My lungs feel full of something hard and inflexible. I can’t get past that thing to get a full breath. Mary bounds up the mountain ahead of me. Wait up, I want to say, please wait up.
But the rat-a-tat-tat of my heart thumps in my ears, and I have no breath to make words. I’ve never been this far above the house before. Nicholas would be proud of me for doing such a hard climb. That’s my boy, he’d say. Lucy would want only for me to come home. I cannot think of Lucy now.
The farther we get, the quieter the forest grows, but it’s not a restful quiet. Not for me. Why should a living thing be so silent? I know you’re here, I want to say to the forest, to the leaves, to the animals, even to all the little bugs. I know you’re here: Speak up!
I stop long enough to catch my breath, and then I yell up ahead, “Slow down, Mary. Wait for me.” I use my loudest voice. I want my statement to come out as a demand, not a plea. I wish I could be like Sam. I want to control Mary the way Sam controls Lucy, turning her into an eager-to-please puppy dog, someone I no longer recognize as my mother.
“Oh, Elijah. Come on. You can’t keep up anymore?” Mary taunts me, walking backward on the trail a few steps out of my reach. She stretches out her hand as if she’d hold mine if I could only catch her.
“I never could keep up, Mary.”
Sickly boy. Sickly boy. Sickly boy.
Faces run through my mind chanting the words: Mrs Evanhart, Nicholas, the boys who put the sand in my mouth, even the girls at my old school who pretended to like me out of pity. But the way Mary looks at me—I’m neither sick nor a boy. And her look makes it so.
“It’s the miner’s lung that holds you back,” she says. “Or black lung. That’s what you called it.”
“What?”
“You’ve all got it.”
“Got what?” I ask, but my breath is so short, the words die inches from my face.
“Nothing.”
When I think I can go no farther, we break into a clearing in the trees where we can see the sky again. The dark clouds that spent the day clinging to the Lizard Range ridge have come forward. Mountainous black pillows fill the horizon, marching toward us. Stupidly, I have run up the mountain after Mary in nothing but a T-shirt and shorts, and Mary’s wearing just her yellow sundress. We have not dressed for a storm. Nicholas likes to say there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.
If I ask Mary questions, she might slow down. I use that trick when I hike in the woods with Nicholas. He tells me about the cottonwoods being the weed of the forest and shows me how they’ll grow anywhere. But once they make a space hospitable with their shadow, beautiful trees grow up beneath them. He points out the younger spruce or cedars springing up among them. “Cottonwoods might not be beautiful,” he says, “but we need them. Everything has its purpose.” He shows me nurse trees—ones that have died but have living ones growing out of their corpse. And wolf-trees, the name for a lone tree spared by a natural disaster, like a forest fire or an avalanche, now standing way above the new growth. Nicholas and I don’t cover as much ground when he talks, but if I show interest, he never complains about my pace.
“Mary!” I shout, planning to stop her in her tracks with a good question. “Where are we going?”
It’s the only question I can think of. I’ve never been this far. I can’t even hear the highway sounds from below. There’s no chaching cha-ching cha-ching from the train tracks near our house. Only silence. I’ve lost my sense of direction. I can still tell up from down, of course, but otherwise I couldn’t point toward my house. It’s down there, somewhere.
I yell as loud as my voice will carry. “Ay-Oh! Ay-Oh!” The noise does nothing to chase away my fear, but I yell it again. It’s the sound we make when I go walking with Nicholas and Lucy to scare away any bears.
“They don’t want to run into you any more than you want to run into them,” Nicholas always says. “Just let them know you’re coming.” I cup my hands around my mouth and yell it agai
n as loud as I can. “Ayyyyy-Oh! Mary, where are you taking me?”
Mary doesn’t even slow in response. If anything, her strides have gotten longer and her pace faster. She’s forgotten me. Her muscular legs charge on. She wears old sandals on her feet, but that doesn’t hinder her upward progress at all. I think I hear her humming “One little duck went out one day, over the hills and far away.” But when she looks over her shoulder, her warm smile pulls me along. I tell myself I must be imagining the cruel humming.
“Do you want to surprise me, Mary?” Maybe she’s planned a reward for this hike. A waterfall. A swimming hole. I hope there won’t be swimming. I hate to take my shirt off.
The ground levels out a bit, our climb gets less steep, and Mary lets herself fall back into pace with me. “No surprises here, Elijah. You know all about this place. You made it. I’m only reminding you.” The wind blows her hair into her eyes, and she turns to the breeze, taking the full force of it into her face, her hair whipping out behind her. The word reminding—the way Mary says it—makes me feel the cold. Mary stays still long enough for me to catch up to her. I don’t want her to see my T-shirt soaked with sweat and clinging to my back. I feel the red surge of heat in my cheeks despite the new cold crawl of my blood. Maybe she pities me, because when I reach for her hand, she doesn’t pull away.
“Come on, slow poke,” she says into the strong wind. “We’re almost there.” She tugs on my arm, and we push through some dense underbrush. Twigs scratch my arms and neck and face. I know I will be a mess of wounds if I ever get home to Lucy. I’m about to complain—Enough, Mary, I want to go home!—but then we come out on a flat bench of the mountain, a green clearing filled with wild daisies. I recognize this place.
In the centre of that familiar field stands a copse of trees. It looks planted—too precise, too orderly to be natural. The trees make an almost perfect ring. Nature doesn’t do that. In the middle of the circle of trees I see a grand stone. I recognize it right away as a tombstone. A grave comes as no surprise in this neighbourhood. This pretty clearing makes a nice spot to remember a special person. A family has put some thought into this grave, even if it is hard to get to.
Mary watches me, waiting, and I know there’s more for me to discover. I’m cold, and I’ve eaten nothing today except half a bowl of oatmeal and some wild berries. I haven’t seen Mary eat at all. I want to go home where Lucy will warm and feed me, even if she scolds me first. I would take the scolding.
The dark clouds move quickly across the sky now and send shadows scattering across Mary’s face. In this light, I see a new sharpness in her cheekbones and a hollowness under her eyes. Suddenly, she wears the face of a woman, not a child. She looks hungry. The yellow fabric of her dress pulls tightly across her breasts. (Lucy says never to call them boobies—adult names for adult body parts.)
It hurts to look at Mary. I round the stone and read:
MARY
1902–1920
Much Loved
I’m cut loose—falling, falling, falling, and there is no ground. I reach for the tombstone to steady myself against it, but then I don’t want to touch it. I know this stone.
Mary sits down in the long grass and pulls daisies from the ground, tucks one behind each ear. She picks another and leaves the long stem attached. I watch her use it to tie her hair back. I try to steady my vision on her—on my friend Mary—but she blurs and spins. There are two of her and then there are six. I close my eyes tightly. I am Eli Mountain. My mom is Lucy, a medievalist. My dad is Nicholas, an environmental scientist who works at a coal mine. I am Eli Mountain. I am ten years old. One. Zero. A number to hold onto with each hand. I do want to stay.
Mary picks up a small pebble and lobs it at the tombstone. Her throw is not fierce. The pebble bounces off the stone and lands lightly in the grass. “Even on my gravestone, they always called me Mary. Even there, he could not acknowledge that Mary was not my name.” She runs her hands the length of her legs, but not as if she’s cold. “It’s about power,” she says. “They name you, they know you. More than that. They name you, they own you.”
Rain begins to fall. I shiver, but Mary has no goosebumps on her bare arms. “You couldn’t stop either. You always called me ‘Mary.’ Until the very end.” What do you want, I hear her say, though her lips don’t move, the same or different? The clouds passing overhead cast her face into shadow, and the air around her body turns black.
But I am different too, Mary. We both are. Remember?
She lifts two daisies to her face and puts them in the holes where her eyes should be.
And then I run. I am a terrible runner. Mary could catch me if she tried. But she stays in the daisies and sings to my retreating back. The noise she makes sounds like the ay-oh, ay-oh I yell to scare the bears away, but slower and deeper—not like she’s warning the bear or trying to frighten it off, but as if she feels sorry for it, as if she offers her song as a gift to the bear. The song says, We, poor bear, are on the same side.
Eye ya ah nuss hewk zoo kah nee, eye ya ah nuss hewk zoo kah nee.
Slow and mournful, the song seems to come from the trees and the grass, from the mountain itself. I run and run and run, but the song does not fade. No matter how far I get, the breath of Mary’s song stays right there in my ear. I don’t dare look back. I can’t stand to see her face with black holes for eyes. I just go. I don’t know what direction my house is in, so I just run down, down, down. I follow the clearest path, the spaces in the trees, wherever they take me.
A root trips me. I feel the burn on my knee, the trickle of blood. Still, I don’t look back, but bounce up like I’ve never bounced before, and again I run and run. I ignore the rumble in my stomach and try not to think of the table Lucy will have set, of Nicholas at the barbeque, making his Saturday night steaks (rare for him, well-done with extra sauce for me, tofu steak for Lucy). The clouds open, and the rain Nicholas has been waiting for dumps down. The forest grows darker and darker. I run so hard that I’m warm—and then hot—even though I’m wet, even though my body shivers and my lungs feel ready to burst. I will not think of cougars travelling in packs. I’m too winded to yell “ay-oh! ay-oh!” and I don’t know if it even works for cougars.
By now, there must be a large space between me and the tombstone, but still it’s right there in my mind’s eye.
MARY
1902–1920
Much Loved
Nothing I can think of makes it go away. Not Saskatoon berries and cream, not Helena Handbasket, not Creatures of the Shade, not my head in Lucy’s warm lap, her soft wool tickling my face, her needles clicking at my ear. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. I whisper it out loud as I run, but it comes out in gasps. and I barely know my own sound.
***
When the mountain spits me out at the bottom, I’m standing in a yard I don’t recognize. On the back deck, pressed up flat against the house, a small group of adults huddle under an overhang, watching the miracle of rain. I come to a standstill in the middle of their yard, arms wrapped around myself, water dripping down my hair into my face. I look at my wet feet and shiver rather than looking up at the strange adults. I don’t know how to explain myself. They must think me some sort of ghost, a mountain spirit appearing from nowhere in the middle of this rare summer storm. It takes them awhile to respond, but finally one woman, short and big-breasted, wearing a dress covered with giant purple blossoms, runs toward me, kicking off her heels so they don’t catch in the lawn.
“Oh honey! Oh honey!” She wraps me in her arms and pulls me into her chest. I think of warm loaves of bread. Her sharp earring scratches against my cheek. If I didn’t need her heat, I’d pull away, but I ignore the scratch and sink into the warm-bread sensation. I let her carry me into the house, wrap me in fleece blankets, and hand me a cup of hot tea. I don’t raise the steaming liquid to my lips, just press my palms against the warm cup and let it heat me from the outside in.
The woman shoots q
uestions at me. Her friends have gathered around me too, all trying to touch my head and my arms and my back and my hands, but I can’t make sense of their questions. Mary’s song, deep and sad, shuts out their words. Eye ya ah nuss hewk zoo kah nee.
Go away, Mary. I’m sorry. Go away. I rock in time with each wish.
When Patricia, the woman in the dress of giant purple flowers, drives me home, I let her ring the doorbell while I stand behind her wearing her son’s warm, dry clothes, which are too big for me. Nicholas’s work truck is not in the driveway, and I try to decide if Nicholas not being home will make things better or worse.
And then Lucy stands in the doorway, frazzled and talking fast. “Oh, thank god! Oh, Eli! Oh, thank god!” Dirt stains the knees of her yoga pants, and she wears a heavy blue fleece jacket that I don’t recognize. Her hair lays flat on one side and springs out in a wild tangle on the other, like maybe she’s been sleeping. Her eyes look puffy but not wet. I can’t tell if she’s been crying. She won’t like a stranger seeing her this way, but she holds her hand out to Patricia. “I’m Lucy. Lucy Mountain. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Patricia takes her hand but gives off no warmth. “I’m just happy we could help him. Poor little man. Nearly hypothermic.” Patricia puts a hand on my shoulder and holds it tight, like she hasn’t decided if she’ll give me over to Lucy after all.
“I wanted to go look for him,” Lucy smiles, putting her hand on my elbow and pulling me close to her body.
Patricia does not loosen her grip on my shoulder. I imagine myself pulled apart in a tug-of-war between these two women.
“But his dad has our only vehicle. He’s up working at the mine today. I didn’t know if I should leave the house empty, in case Eli came back. I didn’t think he would’ve gone far. He never ventures out on his own like that.” Lucy gives my arm a squeeze that I don’t like. “He’s a very reliable boy. We thought he’d gone out with the mute girl next door. Then, when it started to storm, we found her cuddled up alone in her bedroom, no Eli anywhere. So I called the police. They told me it wasn’t a missing person situation if he’d only been gone a couple of hours, but they’d keep their eyes out. My friend Sam—our friend Sam—the mute girl’s uncle—he went to look in the woods while I waited here, hoping Eli would come back.” Again Lucy gives me a squeeze that is not exactly kind.