by Angie Abdou
“Well. I’m glad we could help him,” Patricia says again, making no move to return to her car.
“God, yes. Thank you. I don’t know how to thank you.” Lucy swings the door open revealing the living room, its cramped space full of wicker baskets overflowing with yarn and stacks of books on every surface. “Please come in. We could have some tea. Dinner. Join us. Please. I don’t know how to thank you.” Tears come to Lucy’s eyes again.
Patricia doesn’t want to join us for dinner, but something about the living room lets her leave me. Maybe, like Lucy, she’s the kind of person who trusts book-owners. She will go. She turns for her car, Lucy throwing thanks at her all the way down the walk.
Lucy has put on her best manners at the front door, but I’m not fooled. I’m ready for her worst. When Patricia finally drives away, Lucy screams. I’ve never seen her this mad, worse than the time those boys put dirt in my mouth.
“Think, Eli! Think! You do not go off alone in the woods. Even a healthy boy your age should not do such a thing. You are not a healthy boy. Think what could have happened.” Her last words come out as a fierce whisper.
“But I wasn’t alone,” I whimper, wanting to offer Lucy something, some explanation, some solace. “Mary knows the woods,” I finally say. “Talking Mary was with me ...”
Right away I know I’ve said the wrong thing. Lucy’s anger erupts. This time her body does not shake from the effort of what she holds back. This time she lets it all out. “Mary was in her room. Alone at Sam’s house. There is no talking Mary!”
Lucy truly does not believe in Mary, the Mary I know. What Lucy needs to know is her belief makes no difference. Not to my Mary.
MARY
Sometimes he took Mary to a little lake west of town. They could walk around the entire thing in less than an hour. Elijah walked slowly because of his limp, but Mary knew the limp kept him with her and far away from the war. She could thank his limp—and his wife—for saving him from that. And now that the war meant more need for steel but fewer men to mine the coal to make the steel, Elijah had plenty of work in Coalton. But when the mine closed on Sundays, and after he attended church with his family, his time belonged to Mary.
Elijah said he liked to be with Mary in the quiet wilderness. Maybe he did like that, but she knew they went there mainly so nobody would see them together. He and Mary had three places they went together, all of them quiet and wild. In the spring, they counted the painted turtles, the palm-sized green ovals cuddled together on the sunny logs or in shallow warm pools. The highest count in a single afternoon came to ninety-six.
“You only find these in the west,” Elijah told Mary. “The western part of North America, I mean.”
“I didn’t know you were a turtle expert,” Mary said. “I thought you were a coal miner.” She liked to tease him. He seemed to like it too.
“Maybe I’m an expert in a lot of things.” He held out a hand to help her cross some slippery rocks, his grip firm and steadying. “Depending on what you ask.”
“My mother loved wild creatures. Her people sang to the wolf, to its strength.” Mary could hear a challenge in her own words, one even she didn’t understand. She wanted to tell him more about her mother, about the things she learned from her in the short visits she made, and how even those stopped before Mary turned twelve. “Listen,” her mother would say with an urgency that ensured Mary focused and remembered every word. “These teachings should come once you’re a teen. I’m sharing them with you early. In case I go. Listen.”
In the warmer months, Elijah brought food. He and Mary ate on the side of the lake farthest from the trailhead, sitting on a blanket up in the woods where nobody would accidentally stumble upon them. As they ate, she liked to tell him about how different animals killed their human prey. “If you get between a moose and her cubs, she will stomp you to death. If you see a cougar, it’s too late. The animal will tear out your larynx with its teeth before you have time to scream. If you get attacked by a grizzly, play dead. It will store you as food, waiting for a little rot to improve your flavour; once the grizzly goes, you can sneak away. If you see a black bear, hold your hands out in a weak gesture of defeat and back slowly away. Don’t run. But if it gets you, do not play dead. Fight.” She wanted him to know that he was not the only expert on these woods.
Elijah sometimes brought strange foods—minced meat seasoned with cinnamon and rolled into little balls they ate raw, a long line of vegetables jabbed onto a stick, pieces of fried flat bread mixed into a salad. He brought only enough for one, each dish wrapped with care and set inside a paper bag with one fork and one knife wrapped inside a cloth napkin. But he shared with Mary anyway.
“This food reminds me of home,” he said once.
“I thought Coalton was your home.”
“It is now.” He smiled as if he really wanted Mary to believe him, as if Mary’s believing him mattered. She could see from his dark skin he was different from most of the other men in Coalton, a stranger to these mountains, and maybe even a little lonely like her, but he pretended to be the same as the others here, pretended to be strong. He pretended harder than Mary ever did.
Mary always ate plenty and claimed to like his odd food. “It’s delicious,” she’d say, scooping the cinnamon-flavoured raw meat into her mouth, putting happiness on her face even when the wormy texture made her gag.
“You,” he said, “are delicious.” He broke off a piece of green grass and tied it snugly to her ring finger and then leaned forward to kiss it.
“You don’t feel like a real person to me,” Elijah told her later. “I feel ... like I imagined you.” He traced a finger from her eye down her cheek and then to her chin, following the path a tear would take.
“I am,” she said, bringing his finger to her mouth, “very, very real.”
“Are you sure?”
But he brought his mouth to hers before she had time to answer.
Mary and Elijah never talked about the woman who packed his perfect picnics and whether she knew that he shared them.
CHAPTER NINE
I’m changing. I feel it. Lucy sees it too. She tries to keep hold of me by talking to me like I’m the same boy. She still believes if she wants something bad enough, she can make it true with her words. “You’re just a little under the weather,” she says. “You’ll be good as gold tomorrow, Elly Belly.”
She doesn’t know about the new ache in my lungs, which feel like they’re filled with burning rocks, or the way I’m being pulled away from myself, or the way she feels less real to me every day. I don’t get that dizzy feeling with Mary anymore, the present-past-present whiplash of lives buzzing by in the wrong direction. Now there is only one Mary. My Mary.
Today Lucy has planned a trip to the new museum with Sam and me to see the coal-mining exhibit. “Think of the possibilities for theories. You might come up with a new comic book idea.”
I put my arm around her lower back and lean my head into her body. “Maybe, Mama. I might like that.” I do wish she could still be my mama. I don’t mind pretending. For both of us.
At the museum, the man behind the front desk asks us to sign the registry. I write Elijah Mountain in a cursive scrawl that makes Lucy look twice. But before she can say anything, the man guides me, Lucy, and Sam into the main exhibit. Sam sticks around us a lot now. He’s Lucy’s “friend.” Like Danica was Nicholas’s “friend.” Like Mary was my “friend.” We’ve been through this friend scenario so many times in our family. It repeats like a skip in a record: Just a friend, just a friend, just a friend. Maybe we need a new word for these kinds of friends.
“I think you three will enjoy the main-floor exhibit best,” the museum man tells us, pointing the way. “Explosions! Fires! Coal-trains! That’s where the boy stuff is.” He winks at me. The poster on the front door advertises an upstairs exhibit on the World War II Japanese internment camps, the ones just down the road in Morrisey. Not boy stuff. He’s right about that.
Lucy r
ambles, the way she always does when she meets someone new. Sam smiles silently behind her, her incessant talking another of their new in-jokes.
“Well, Eli is not your typical boy,” Lucy says, a hand scooped possessively around the back of my neck. “He does like stories of Coalton’s early coal-mining days, but not the choo-choo stuff. Eli takes an interest because of his great-great-grandfather.”
Lucy doesn’t say the name Elijah Mountain. I know she’s torn. She likes the second-hand respect that comes along with the name—Elijah Mountain!—but mentioning him will derail her own story, take attention off of me, young Eli. Anyway, the museum man will see who we are when he reads the guest book. I’m surprised he doesn’t recognize us. He must be new in Coalton. I look more closely, and it’s true: His white shirt is too white, too pressed, too buttoned. His slacks—well, slacks. Instead of running shoes or hiking boots, he’s wearing leather loafers, like the ones Nicholas wore to Grandpa’s funeral. The man’s head bobs in response to Lucy’s words while he uses his pinky finger to scratch at a small, dried cold sore on his bottom lip. He looks at his watch, except that he’s not wearing one. He pats the bare spot on his wrist and opens his mouth to tell Lucy he’s got to go. But she won’t stop talking long enough for him to release a single word, not even bye. Sam’s head hovers over Lucy’s shoulder, a possessive smile playing at the corner of his lips.
“We homeschool Eli, sort of. A blend. Hybrid-Ed. Eli likes to learn about history and then fill in the gaps with his own theories. He’s very imaginative and interactive, aren’t you, Eli? Sometimes he turns his stories into comic books.”
The museum man has steered us into a small room with black-and-white photos of old Coalton filling the walls. At each photo you can pick up a telephone receiver, and a voice from the past will tell you the story behind the image. A miniature train track fills the centre of the room, Thomas the Tank and all his friends ready to go round and round at any child’s wish. I wonder if the museum manager stole it from his own son’s room. It feels out of place, here in the past.
“Of course, Eli is getting so big. I suppose his comic books too might be a thing of the past pretty soon,” she says, half to Sam but still keeping her eyes on this new man. “I miss the little-kid mistakes he used to make when he told his stories. One time at the library, he put down his science book and told me with great seriousness: ‘Nobody knows how the dinosaurs died. Some people think a Frost Giant killed them.’” She laughs as freely as she did in my dream about the trip west. Like she used to sometimes before Danica. Before Coalton. “Giant frost, of course. But ‘Frost Giant’ makes a better story. Eli always goes for the better story.”
Sam finally rescues the museum man from Lucy. “Well, let’s check it out,” he says, pulling Lucy’s arm until she steps up to an old-fashioned telephone that hangs next to a framed image of a tired-looking, wild-haired woman beside a large horse. The woman holds a rough rope slung around the horse’s neck. Sam waves at the museum man who takes the chance to hurry away, his shoulders hunched and hands pushed deep into his pockets.
“Another time Eli asked me what ‘foreign’ meant,” Lucy continues. “I told him if you’re not from a country—if you don’t know its language and its customs and its food—then it’s foreign to you. Foreign means different, I told him. Then Eli said, ‘When I was born, everywhere was foreign to me. All the countries.’ He couldn’t have been more than four years old.”
I’ve slid out from under Lucy’s hand, but she keeps her eyes on me and puts force in each word, like if she could speak hard enough, her words might summon clever little Eli. Words can do things. Lucy wants to believe that. She’s not doing so well, anyone can see that.
Black-and-white photos crowd the walls. Trains. Dirty men smoking. Underground figures with lights shining from their foreheads. Women climbing mountains in tight dresses that go from under their chins right to their feet. I’ve seen most of these pictures, or ones like them, before.
I go straight to the photograph from The Coalton Free Press, the one with Mary on a bench between two older women. I hesitate. I want to reach out and touch the glass, looping my finger around and around until it narrows on Mary. I know I need to pick up the phone. I have to hear about this girl. When I hold the receiver to my ear, I’m barely surprised to hear Mary’s own voice telling me the story of this photograph.
“Mary was born of a Ktunaxa mother, known as Catharine, and a white father, Joseph Gagliano. Her father immigrated from Italy to this area to work as a manager at the local mine. Though their mixed-race relationship was controversial, Gagliano stood by Mary’s mother and intended to make the marriage work.” Mary tells her story calmly and formally, but I can hear a laugh hiding just beneath the surface—a hint of hilarity that whispers Hello, Elijah behind every sentence of her official speech. She talks about herself in the third person. “Records indicate that their daughter pictured here went by Mary Gagliano.” The name doesn’t sound right. “Gagliano was her Italian father’s last name, though locals associated Mary more with her mother’s culture. Catharine tried to adapt to the white community in Coalton, and although the government allowed her temporary exemption, enabling her to go off the reserve without a pass, she never truly felt at home in Coalton proper. She didn’t think she had been genuinely accepted by her neighbours or by her husband’s community, and she missed her family. Eventually, she returned to her people, leaving her daughter in Coalton. Joseph Gagliano, unable to raise Mary on his own, struggled to do his duty and to maintain respect in the community. Sadly, however, he succumbed to the temptation of the bottle. After his death, Mary simply belonged to the town. She lived in a staff room at the local hotel, did what work came available, and relied on the goodwill of the townspeople to survive.”
Goodwill? Anger tightens my jaw. Who has written this history? Not Mary.
“Local historians posit that Mary’s hotel duties extended beyond housekeeping. There were few single women in the region. Men worked hard. They sometimes sought a certain kind of company. On payday, especially, Coalton took a turn to the wild, many of the single men spending their entire paycheques in a single evening. In response to excessive drinking and brawling, the mines focussed their recruiting efforts on married men, believing they would be more reliable and hard-working, and hoping that Coalton’s night life would become more subdued. According to police records, the increase in married men with families did not alter payday behaviour significantly.”
As I listen, I avoid looking at the photograph of Mary. Instead, I watch Sam and Lucy moving slowly past each of the Coalton images, Sam’s hand too familiar with Lucy’s elbow, too comfortable on her lower back. They stop in front of a picture of Elijah, and Lucy hesitates as if she might pick up the phone, but then moves on with Sam. They don’t try to hurry me, but they give each photo no more than a passing glance.
“Mary was eighteen when she died.” My ear feels hot against the receiver, the skin of my cheek sticky when I try to pull away from the telephone. Her voice betrays no sadness at this announcement. “Malnourishment, however, made her appear much younger. In several of the photographs, she looks no more than a child. She did not have the physical stamina and good health to withstand the bad bout of influenza that tore through Coalton in 1920. Mary could not be buried in the Coalton Cemetery. During those days, foreigners and non-Christians and other undesirables tended to be buried rather haphazardly outside the cemetery’s bounds in alternate graveyards that did not survive the fires and floods. Historical records suggest that Mary’s chosen occupation, prostitution—” Chosen? I want to bang the receiver against the wall, but it stays stuck fast to my ear “prohibited her from earning a resting spot in sanctified ground. However, while living at the hotel, Mary appears to have become close to several of the town’s most distinguished men. Legend has it that these men prepared an elaborate burial site for her, hidden in the woods on a mountain bench where Mary enjoyed picking daisies and singing the traditional Ktunaxa balla
ds she had learned from her mother Catharine.”
Several men? I put the receiver down hard then. The slam startles Lucy and Sam. Only when Lucy steps toward me do I realize I have asked the question aloud. Too loud. Of course I knew what Mary was. What she had to be. History left her no choice. Coalton was a small town. Everyone knew. But what she and I had was different, outside of that other thing that I try not to think about. What she had with those men was nothing like what we had. One man honoured her with an elaborate burial site. One.
“I want to go,” I say more quietly. “Right now.”
Patricia comes back. She stands at the front door dangling a bottle of red wine by its neck. “I want to apologize,” she says, making deliberate, effortful eye contact with Lucy. “For Saturday. Poor Eli—soaking wet and lost—he startled me, appearing like that in the middle of my dinner party. I knew how easily it could’ve been one of my own. Hypothermic and scared.”
Lucy does not step back to welcome Patricia inside. Instead, she stands on the threshold, head peeking out through the barely open door. I half expect her to close the door firmly in Patricia’s face, but Lucy stays frozen.
“I knew things with Eli could have gone more badly than they did,” Patricia continues. “It’s terrifying how easy it is for us to screw up.” Though the small crack of door, I see Patricia’s hand come up to stop Lucy’s interruption. “I’m embarrassed of the way I acted when I came over here with your son. I judged. But I’m also a mother: I know how it goes. God, do I know. A few hours ago, I looked at my Quinn and Gracie sitting in front of the television, one o’clock in the afternoon, still in their pyjamas, teeth unbrushed, eating Fruit Loops from the box, and I wondered, Who do I think I am? I slipped on Saturday. It’s so easy to do. I’m sorry.” Patricia pushes the wine into Lucy’s hands, and finally Lucy steps back to let the door swing open, though she still hasn’t said a thing. Patricia keeps talking. “As my husband and I like to say, we were perfect parents until we had kids. Parenting looks so easy—people without kids don’t know. But I should know.”