In Case I Go

by Angie Abdou

  We leave the potatoes to cool by the stove and the bowl of eggs uncooked on the counter.

  ***

  After I make a “spectacle” of myself, showing up in the middle of Patricia’s state-of-the-art kitchen with my face a dirty, snotty, bleeding mess, Lucy keeps me indoors. I’m happy I don’t have to play with children anymore, but the house feels lonely and quiet. Lucy and Nicholas leave my door nearly closed and talk quietly between themselves in the other room. They’ve drawn closer together in response to the challenge of me. This new, shared fear pulls them into a team.

  Lucy comes to me with a wet cold cloth, though I don’t have a fever. She needs to do something, and I guess a cool cloth and a glass of orange juice—these are the only offerings that come to her mind.

  “There you go, my Elly Belly.” Lucy rests the cloth against my forehead and sets the juice on my nightstand. “You’ll be all better soon.”

  Better from what? She doesn’t know.

  When she leaves, Nicholas comes in and changes the packing in my nose. “You’re not a real Mountain until you’ve broken your nose at least once,” he says. “Welcome to the club, buddy.” He holds up a mirror so I can see the bruising under my eyes.

  I tell him, “You should see the other guy,” and wink. We both know this game well and fall easily into our roles.

  But then Nicholas too leaves me alone. I don’t mind the quiet. By myself in the dim room, I don’t have to perform for anyone. I don’t have to pretend I’ll be all right or that I even know what all right might mean for me. I sit quietly with my head against the pillow and eyes closed. Mostly, I try not to think. I repeat All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of thing shall be well using Julian’s words to push out others. That’s me being afraid; I know it. I should face the fear, like Sam said, but I’m not ready.

  Above all else, I want Mary. I want I want I want. I’m like a baby robin, its beak open to the sky, hungry and begging for worms. My yearning, raw and intense, pulls at me. I want I want I want.

  And, finally, Mary does come to me. She sits on the edge of my bed in her yellow dress. Lucy and Nicholas keep my room cool, so they can cocoon me in big duvets despite the summer heat, but Mary wears no sweater. I am not afraid of Mary anymore, none of the versions of her. She slowly becomes less afraid of my house too. We make progress, though I’m unsure what we’re working toward. I wonder if Mary knows. I cannot bring myself to ask her. Not yet.

  Today, Mary and I sit quietly, our fingers intertwined, and let the noise happen in the other room. The music, the laughter, the dinging of plates. It’s almost like she’s Sam’s mute niece, his traumatized niece, the one done in by history, the Mary everyone else knows.

  Nicholas and Lucy do not invite me to the table, even now when they have guests. Maybe they’re worried I’ll scare the visitors. I worry I scare Nicholas and Lucy.

  They throw this small party to welcome Sam’s wife Tamara back to the neighbourhood. Nicholas has decided to show interest in the neighbours. That seems a bad idea to me. But, even when my parents do visit my bedside, I don’t care enough to offer my opinion. Now that I am more able than ever to understand the adult world, I find I don’t care very much, not about the world of Nicholas and Lucy, anyway.

  “Mary, tell me about Elijah.” I say the words carefully, fill each with gentleness. I am nervous to break our comfortable silence. “Tell me about him and ... what he was to you.”

  “No.” Mary lets go of my hand and wraps her arms tightly around her own torso.

  “No?” I stroke her fingers lightly, try again to intertwine my fingers with hers, but she resists.

  “Why is Elijah always the focus?” There’s no pout in her words. They come out strong and firm. “I want to tell you my story. Why don’t you ask about me?” It’s not only the bossy voice that makes her different than the Mary next door. She looks older too. She’s no child. Imagining all these Marys at once—different and yet the same, splitting apart and doubling but changing too, like pictures in a kaleidoscope—makes me dizzy again.

  I do ask her, though—What happened to you?—and she tells me her story. I’ve heard some of it before, at the museum. Some of it is new, but the voice she uses is different than the one that came through the old-fashioned phone receiver. This time Mary’s voice does not hint at laughter. I never feel an oncoming punchline. She fills her story with sadness but also strength. She tells me her father wanted her mother to pretend away her past, but she wouldn’t.

  “‘Stubborn,’ my father said. ‘Ungrateful.’ I wanted to tell him he asked too much. She couldn’t be something other than what she was. Not everyone can do that, Elijah. Pretend.” She smiles to soften the accusation, but I feel its sickening impact anyway. “I hated her for leaving me,” she continues. “Then I hated my father for her leaving me. Neither of them were to blame, Elijah, though hatred and blame were not inappropriate responses.” For a second I see the hatred in her eyes, and it seems to land on me. “I suspect ... my mother died. Many died. The government saw to that. And there are many kinds of death, not all of the body.”

  Gradually, as Mary talks, she lets me hold her hand again. The noise from the kitchen party fades away, and Mary’s voice alone fills my ears and thoughts. But when she says her mother went back to her people, I interrupt her.

  “What does that mean? Went back to her people? This was her place. Her people were from here.”

  “Not anymore they weren’t. Coal mining pushed them out. Coalton pushed them out. Or pushed them onto reserves. And what kind of life was that? And then the government pushed their children into schools. The one thing my father saved me from.”

  “Where did your mother go?”

  “To the reserve, at first. And then, away from me. That’s all I know.”

  Mary drops her gaze to our hands resting together on my bed. She looks so beautiful like this, so peaceful. I want to raise my fingers to her face, trace her sharp cheekbones, run the tips of my fingers across her deep eyelids. But I’m afraid to startle her. I worry she’ll pull away. It takes so little. I almost wish for her to cry so I would have an excuse to gather her into my arms and comfort her, to breathe in her skin, her hair.

  But Mary does not cry. She barely moves. So I can only sit and wait. When she speaks again, she is fully composed.

  “I don’t look eighteen, do I, Elijah?”

  I study her face, her smooth skin, the dark hollows around her eyes. I don’t know. What does eighteen look like, Mary? I feel like I’ve only ever looked at her face. She looks like Mary. I say nothing.

  “You promised to marry me when I turned nineteen.” I like the way her eyes touch me when she says this. “But you always contradicted yourself. ‘Go. Stay. It’s over. I will marry you.’ The promise, do you remember it?”

  I nod. I feel the weight of the promise: “When you’re an adult, I will marry you.”

  “Oh, and what is an adult, wise Elijah?”

  “Nineteen, Mary. When you turn nineteen, we will call you an adult. We will marry.”

  I was drunk on her body when I said it. I promised to find a way where there was no way. I can’t let my mind rest on the enormity of my failure. I won’t think of the dream with the blood and the fire and the ice. I won’t think of the reality of where I found her.

  I focus instead on her lips, her long neck, her soft shoulders. I remind myself of times before the burden of my broken promises—on the mattress in her little room above the hotel, in the daisy field up the mountain behind my house, on the bank of the river under the moon.

  Mary turns away from me and reaches up to my window. She pulls up the corner of the blind, and the sunlight hurts my eyes. I realize Lucy has left me in darkness, though it must still be early evening. Mary squints into the light.

  “I never did turn nineteen, did I, Elijah?” She looks so serious.

  “No, Mary.” I put my hand on her chin and pull her back to face me. “You never did.”

  Of course, e
veryone in Coalton knows that. You only have to go to the local museum to know that. You can pick up an old-fashioned phone receiver and hold it to your ear to hear Mary Gagliano tell you this herself. She died when she was eighteen. But the museum display said influenza caused her death. On that phone, Mary told me she couldn’t fight off the illness because of a weak constitution brought on by malnourishment. Nobody who ever laid eyes on Mary would believe that. She may have been slender, but nobody would have called her weak. Coalton history has lied about both of us.

  “And what would you have done if I did turn nineteen?” Mary keeps her gaze out the window, focused on something I can’t see. “It looked to me like you had other plans. A man can only have one wife.”

  “But I loved two, Mary,” I hear myself say. “I loved two.”

  “That sounds so much like ‘I love you.’ I’ve heard you say that before too, Elijah. Words that meant nothing.”

  I want to answer, to explain.

  But laughter rings loudly from the dinner table in the next room, and I am alone.

  Dear Elly Belly,

  Where have you gone? You look so fragile lying all day in your dark room, mumbling to yourself in that sombre, adult voice. I hoped, after we settled in Coalton, your new interest in the outdoors would cure you, but that hope has vanished. Even so, your fragility is not what bothers me most. We’ve always known weakness in your body. What scares me more is the strength in your eyes, a new kind of strength. I see something in your gaze so fundamentally not-Eli that I can hardly bear to look.

  Nicholas does not contradict me when I say so. He makes none of his dismissive jokes about my overactive imagination or my medievalist’s disposition that leaves me susceptible to what he dismisses as “wacky ideas.” He doesn’t call me moody or too sensitive or crazy. I know he sees it too, this new thing in your eyes. You scare Nicholas as much as you scare me.

  We put in our required time at your bedside, but no more than that. Please come back, Elly Belly, and then we will come back too, I promise. And you know how much a promise means to me. I am no wœrlogan.

  In the meantime, Nicholas and I try to fill the house with life and go on as normal. Even though I can’t say the word “normal” without an ugly laugh.

  Last night, we threw a party. We left your door closed and told everyone you’ve been sleepy lately, that you wanted some time alone. They pretended to believe us. Steven and Patricia left their kids at home. I think even Gracie and Quinn are scared of you now, though Patricia would never say so. They all steered a wide berth around your room and didn’t ask detailed questions about you. Sam and Tamara didn’t bring Mary, either. “She’s spending some time with Lillian, her mother,” Sam said. Tamara threw her eyes to the ceiling. “Lil’s my sister,” Sam said to her. “Be nice, Tamara.” He turned away from Tamara to me, his voice kind. “I have a good feeling this time. It’s important for Mary and Lillian to spend time together.”

  I thought Sam, at the very least, would ask to see you. He did not, though he and I were leaving an equally wide berth around each other, he especially attentive to Tamara, I unusually doting on Nicholas. Sam’s eyes met mine only once again after his kind words about Mary and Lillian. He nodded gravely at me and said, “He will be okay. He just needs time.”

  I embarrassed myself by being extra attentive to Tamara, like I had something to make up for. I’m pretty sure that she sensed my attempt to compensate. There was something knowing about her smile. She’s beautiful, Tamara. A Mohawk giantess, she dresses in man’s clothes—jean overalls, ugly work boots—but nobody would mistake her for a man. Not with those cheekbones and those eyelashes. She keeps her hair short too, like she knows she doesn’t have to try.

  You will like her, Elly Belly. She tells funny stories about her work and makes herself the butt of every joke. She always laughs first, a sound so full and rich, I can’t help joining in. She has crude expressions. “Bite my ass” seems to be her favourite. She makes Nicholas blush.

  Only Tamara paid your room any attention. “Okay,” she said to me while Patricia’s husband was telling a rather tedious story about his most recent triathlon, “let’s see this Eli who has captured my Sam’s attention.” I joined her at your door while she peeked through the crack. I wasn’t going to let a stranger just wander into your room.

  “He’s tired,” I said, pulling the door closed. “Not well enough for visitors tonight.”

  When Tamara faced me, she wore the already familiar smirk. What she said next made me shudder. “Who’s Eli’s friend? She looks like Mary ... but older and not—” She lowered her voice and leaned toward me. “Not off in the head.”

  You were alone. I looked where Tamara looked and there was nobody there. Nobody.

  The party ended soon, and I didn’t repeat her question to Nicholas. He knows—despite your one-way conversations, despite your agitation at some imagined presence—he knows you’ve only ever been alone in your room. We will be having no more parties, not until things are truly back to normal.

  Soon, okay? Please.

  Love,

  Mama

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I find the girl exactly where Ursula said I would. She sits alone on the bench outside the hotel, her back straight and her bare knees squeezed together. Her skirt is too tight for a girl her age, the neckline too low. If I were her father, I would tell her so. I would make her go back inside and change. But she’s not interested in me or my advice. Her eyes pass over my face as if she’s waiting for someone else.

  I stand in front of her bench, feeling self-conscious with my basket of biscuits and apples. Ursula baked the biscuits this morning after we finished our “nap” and had breakfast with our boys (how I love Saturdays). The piece of red cloth that covers the fresh baking still feels warm. I toy with it, rubbing its corner between my fingers and thumb while I wait for the girl to look my way. The smell of biscuits rises and makes my mouth water.

  I would like to sit down with this girl on her bench. We could each eat a biscuit. I would like to learn why this stranger inspires Ursula’s generosity. Ursula has packed a small container of butter. We could spread it easily, now. Soon the biscuits will cool.

  But I will not sit until I am invited to sit.

  “Yes?” The girl finally raises her face to meet mine, tucking her long dark hair behind her ears.

  Her yes means What do you want?

  “My name is Elijah,” I say. I’m not used to introducing myself in Coalton. I am the mine foreman. I sing in the choir at the Catholic Church. I rescued my men from explosions, one of which left me with a limp but saved me from a war that has taken so many. People here know me and my limp and my status, if not my whole story. “My wife has sent biscuits. Freshly baked this morning. And apples. As a gift.” I feel ridiculous standing there with the basket, waiting for the approval of this skinny girl in her too-tight skirt.

  She does not smile. She does not acknowledge my introduction or my offering. Her face stays still. It’s a look I might interpret as contempt, but I decide not to. I must deal with many difficult people in my work. I can certainly deal with her, a mere girl. I hold my basket and wait.

  Even if she does refuse to smile, I like something about her face. Her dark skin reminds me of home. I wonder if she, like me, has to pretend to belong.

  Finally, the girl pushes over and pats the bench next to her, inviting me to sit. “You can call me Mary,” she says, looking down her legs. Her feet are bare beneath the hem of her work smock, and she flexes her ankles, stretching her dirty toes wide apart. “That’s what all the men call me. Mary.”

  I lower myself onto the bench with the basket of food in my lap, and I am inside her scent of wild grass and daisies. She turns toward me, tucking her hair behind her ears again. She leans forward to take a biscuit from my lap, and the dark hair falls back into her eyes. I want to run my fingers through that hair, to hold it back for her while she enjoys her warm biscuit, butter melting on her tongue.

&nb
sp; I wonder how old she is, exactly, but I cannot ask. Her age is not my business.

  ***

  When I come out of Elijah’s world, I remember the events not like a dream but like a trip. But where are the other people in the town, in Coalton of long ago? Why is nobody in the streets? No women walking. No men on horses. No children playing kick the can. People besides Mary do hover in the corners or in the narrow spaces between buildings, but they stay away from me. They are not my people. I believe if I blew hard in their direction, they would disappear.

  Only Mary and I seem solid, made of real human flesh that weighs upon the earth. Mary and I and Ursula. Your life must continue his story. I play Sam’s sentence over and over in my mind, but it remains an unanswered riddle.

  ***

  “Don’t you get bored.” Mary says this like it’s a statement, not a question. She keeps her gaze fixed on my window instead of looking to my face for an answer. “Staying in your bed all of the time—doesn’t it feel like we’ve been doing this for an awfully long time, sitting on a mattress, holding hands, waiting.”

  I don’t hear a question so I don’t answer, but I hold Mary’s hand tighter. This new life would be even harder if Mary left me. I don’t mind the waiting as much as Mary does. I guess I’m more afraid than she is of what comes next. The waiting I understand; I’ve gotten used to it. Also, I get visitors. Mary has only me, and I am not enough for anyone.

  Sam comes back. He does not apologize for taking so long. He sits and nods at me as if we were washing potatoes together in his yard just yesterday.

  “Tamara has returned,” I say. It’s his biggest news since I last saw him, and I don’t want to talk about my news.

  He nods. “And Mary has left. She’s going to try living with her mom again. Lillian is doing better. Tamara says she understands that Mary is my niece and I have to try to help, but she also says the house is too small for two women needing my attention. So, yes, Mary has gone, and Tamara has returned.”