by Angie Abdou
I miss you, Nicholas. I miss us.
Love,
Looooos-eeeee!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mary sits primly on her bench, knees tightly together, back straight. She holds her palms under the back of her thighs, pulling her dress around her smooth brown legs. The dress is too tight at her breast, but I no longer believe that I am the one to tell her so. I am not Mary’s father.
I walk toward her with my bag of sugar cookies in one hand and sweet peas from Ursula’s garden in the other. Dust rises with every step. I keep walking. Dust keeps rising. But I do not get any closer to Mary. She looks my way. I wait for a light of recognition to flit across her features. It does not come.
It’s not that Mary doesn’t know me. It’s not like that first time when her gaze moved across my face and dismissed me, as if she’d been waiting for someone else. This time Mary’s eyes stay flat and say nothing at all. They focus through my chest onto the Company Store behind me.
No matter how many dusty steps I take, I cannot get close to her. Another man, one in uniform, comes between us, moving freely. I look to see what might have brought him back to Coalton: a clumsy limp, a missing eye, a severed limb. But whatever ailment has sent him home does not show.
He stands so close to Mary his leg almost presses into her knee. She looks to his hand instead of his face, but she does not dismiss him. She holds out her own hand, flat against her thigh, and he slides something into it. I do not see what she takes from him. She rises and smooths her dress over her hips. I want my hands to be her hands. I want to be the one smoothing that dress, touching those narrow hips.
She and the man do not talk, but he follows her around the back of the hotel and up the stairs. Now I wish I could stay rooted in my never-ending dusty walk toward Mary’s bench, but I follow. I float behind them as they round the corner, then duck my head to follow as they ascend the dark, narrow staircase up to her room.
There she remains speechless. She’s not the Mary I know. I want her to say something sharp and mean to this man. I want her to make him leave. Instead, she sets what he gave her on the wooden chair. The coins echo as they land in the too quiet space. Mary casts her gaze downwards. It’s a submissive angle that turns her into someone else. She leans away from the man, not enough he would notice, but I know the difference. Mary always leaned toward me.
This man does not need encouragement. He goes to her and pulls the dress over her head. Each rib forms a neat line across her torso. I remember tracing those fine ribs with fingers and then with mouth. Her sharp hips jut out above the line of her underwear, and my tongue remembers those bones too.
Ursula would point to these bones and complain of Mary’s thinness. She would send more sugar cookies. But I see the muscles in Mary’s legs, the bulge in her thigh narrowing toward her kneecap, the deep lines of definition running down her calves. The man does not stop to look. He yanks off her underclothes quickly, his movements not violent but without attention or care. He does not step back to admire Mary, as I would do. He does not pull her into his arms to warm her exposed skin, as I would do. He yanks down his own pants. His belt hits the floor with a loud clang. He shakes one leg out of his pants and then the other and closes the space that separates him and Mary. I want to push myself between them, to shove my hand into his chest, but I am rooted to the spot.
The man does not remove his shirt. “Bend over,” he says, his voice deep and gruff like he’s ordering a dog. Heel. Stay. Fetch. Bend.
When Mary doesn’t move at once, he grabs her under her arm and pushes until she’s turned to face the wall. He forces a hand onto her back so she has no choice except to surrender to the force and kneel on the mattress. Hips higher. Here. I know his voice. Like that. Yes. Just like that.
I do not want to see this man’s face, but the room turns and turns, and I cannot look away. He has her now, his fingers digging into her hips, harder with every thrust. I am forced to watch. The man wears Nicholas’s face and Lucy’s face and Mrs Knowles’ face. And then the man is me, Elijah, and I am the man, and I am behind Mary, my fingers digging into her hips, my pelvis driving into her.
Mary stays still and cold beneath me. My thrusting means nothing to her. The real Mary has gone somewhere else. Ursula’s sugar cookies and sweet peas have spilled across the mattress. I try to turn Mary toward me, to bring life into her body, to warm her skin. I try to bring my mouth to her mouth. I cannot. She yanks her head away with surprising strength and scrambles on all fours like a scared cat, her wiry muscles flexing as she moves, pulling her body from mine, forcing me to look at her.
She is not the Mary I know. Her face is grey and her hair dull. She hunches before me, her body turning in on itself like a bloated worm. The skin sags at her knee caps. Her feet look painful, gnarled and calloused. I see streaks of grey in Mary’s long hair, deep lines at the corners of her eyes, angry wrinkles circling her mouth. I do not want to see her clawed hands, marred with age spots. Even in a dream, this Mary makes no sense. She is a Mary who never was.
A Mary who never was because of me. Me and my false promises.
***
I remember going to young, strong Mary and telling her, “We can’t do this anymore—really, this time—Ursula knows.” Mary looked at me and bit her lips to stop herself from laughing. She didn’t believe me. She thought I would come back to her again, like every other time I’d said “No more.” Of course, I worried that she’d cause a scene and try to ruin me. I imagined her coming to my home, ready to burn everything I’d worked for to the ground and harm herself too, in some dramatic fashion.
But after that last “no more,” she disappeared. I waited in fear, but she never came to my home. What Mary did, she did quietly. She didn’t cause a scene. She let me forget that I was to blame.
In mid-winter, Mrs Knowles summoned me. Mary had been missing from the hotel for a week. Mrs Knowles and I set out together to find her. I knew where she would be, but I didn’t let myself think about how I knew. Mary had gone—despite the snow—to our meeting place in the mountains. She’d lain down on the cold ground, wearing her yellow dress and a threadbare winter cloak. When Mrs Knowles and I found her, she looked peaceful there, snow crystals in her hair, the brown skin of her face against the blanket of white. The perfect snow angel.
I try not to think about why she went there, why she might have had reason to believe I would come to her there. She put too much weight in little signs, that girl, and allowed herself to believe in the watery promises of heated moments.
“Let’s leave her here for now,” Mrs Knowles said. “I know who to talk to. We can make sure this doesn’t create a fuss.”
If not for Ursula and Isaac and James, if not for my family, I would have lain down there in the snow with Mary. I would have stayed. It’s what I deserved. I rested my heavy wool coat over her thin one, knowing her body was already frozen, and I followed Mrs Knowles down the mountain.
“Go.” The old Mary of my vision cruelly spits the word from her wrinkled mouth. She takes the coins from the chair and holds them tightly in her palm. Her knuckles bulge with the effort. “Just go.” In my dreams, I see her over and over again. “Just go.”
I wake in Sahitya’s trailer, grateful for Lucy snoring lightly next to me. I pull her arm over me and squeeze as close to her as I can without waking her. I do not try to go back to sleep.
***
Lucy couldn’t see the image in Sahitya’s fire photo and made light of what she imagined to be Sahitya’s trickery or make-believe. To Lucy, the iPhone photos were a scam, whether deliberate manipulation on Sahitya’s part or not. But I saw the woman there, staring out of the fire. She was not the woman I imagined I’d see.
I expected to see Mary. But it was Ursula, my wife. The hate in her eyes came as a blow. I rarely think of Ursula.
Her stern image in the fire reminded me of what I’d done to that woman, to my wife. She knows.
That’s the phrase that came to me back then, but th
e two words meant so much more than Ursula being aware of what Mary and I had shared behind her back. Yes, I felt the weight of that betrayal, the weight of shame, but also the crushing knowledge that Mary and I did not exist as some world apart that would never seep into this world, the world of family and work and church and propriety, the world of societal standards and judgement. I felt the shame of what I’d done as a hollowness in my bones, a weakness in my very bowels. Everything Mary and I had done, we had done in this world. I would answer for it all here, to Ursula, maybe to the whole community. This realization should not have come as the surprise it did.
When those words—she knows—first drifted to the surface of my mind, Ursula had her back to me. She stood over the stove, stirring soup. I sat in my favourite kitchen chair watching her. I thought of her frying potatoes the morning before she sent me to Mary with that first gift of food.
Ursula and I had changed since then. Ursula’s shoulders now hunched over her work. Her hips didn’t have the same swing. She showed no joy at being watched. She wore her dress long and loose to the floor, no corset to encourage my imagination to wrap itself around her hips or snake its way beneath the hem of her dress.
“I’ve got some food for the girl at the hotel,” Ursula said without turning to me. “But I will take it to her today.”
I wanted to put my hands around her and somehow undo the steely tone that had crept into her voice. I’d never heard her sound so unhappy. But before I could rise from my chair, she turned. What I saw in her face stopped me.
She called our boys in for lunch before I could think of anything to say. Into the silence, where I should have put an explanation or an apology, Ursula said simply, “I think it’s best if I always take the food to the girl. From now on.”
That look on Ursula’s face—the one that held me captive in the kitchen chair on that morning so long ago—that’s the face that I see in Sahitya’s fire photo.
MARY
Even in snowshoes, Mary struggled with the climb, sliding two steps back for every three steps up. The snowshoes had been a gift from Elijah. He kept two sets stashed in the woods at the base of the trail to their spot. His were still there when Mary arrived, which meant he had not yet broken trail, but she could surprise him with her strength and independence. She set out alone.
She started by cutting a gradual switchback through the snow like her father had taught her, but with all that back-and-forthing, it would take her all day to reach the meeting place. The morning had been perfect and blue when she set out, and even now, in the afternoon, when she broke free of the forest’s shade, the sun felt almost warm on her face, its rays glistening off the hoarfrost layer at her feet, so the light came at her from every direction. She closed her eyes at the radiant burn and counted her steps up the mountain to take her mind off the effort.
Although it was still winter, she’d worn her yellow dress over long-johns and under her only winter cloak, a well-worn hand-me-down from Mrs Knowles. Elijah liked the yellow dress best. Mary had almost started to believe his “last-time” talk, enough that she put special effort into each of their visits. If this were to be the last time, she’d make it one to remember.
Even under-dressed, she broke into a sweat at the uphill effort. Few people would attempt this steep climb in Coalton’s deep snow. But she’d seen Elijah downtown that morning. He caught her eye for less than a second. In that second, though, he’d made their sign. She saw it clearly: he held his forefinger to his cheek and made two quick scratches. That was their way of promising, “I’ll meet you at the daisy field—late afternoon, before dinner.” That’s what that promise meant.
Near the top, the way grew so steep Mary had to put her hands to the ground and pull herself along in a scramble. Snow fell into the cuff of her gloves, and her wrists turned red at its touch, but the pain in the muscles of her legs overrode the sharp icy burn. She tried, as her father had taught her, to focus her attention outward at the beauty rather than inward at her own pain. Hurting is only a feeling, he said, like any other feeling. The wind blew fluffs of snow off the high pines, filling the air with a swirling white that contradicted the clear sky.
In the wintry mountains, the sun set early. By the time Mary pushed up into the clearing, sweat tickling the hairline along the base of her neck and her dress sticking to her back, an almost purple cast had already fallen up on the field.
No Elijah.
Not yet.
Even though she knew from his snowshoes at the bottom that she had set out before him, she felt a thudding disappointment at his absence. To endure her climb, she’d imagined arriving to his warm smile, his warm arms, his warm chest, his warm mouth. Even Elijah’s eyes warmed her. But, she told herself, he will be here soon. He’d met her eyes. He’d made their sign. He would come. He promised. We shouldn’t be doing this, he would say with his guilty face. But he would come.
Oh Elijah, there’s nobody here but the crows and the squirrels, and they don’t care. Or if they do, they think this is exactly what we should be doing. If he took too long deciding, Mary would take his hands and put them on her hips for him.
The climb had made her tired, so she moved into the thick pines to shelter herself from the wind and dug a little hole in the snow in which to sit and rest. She’d brought a blanket, which she spread over the little hollow, and tucked herself down, watching the pink alpenglow rise off the rocky ridge in the distance. Warm Elijah would be here soon. She pictured him again, his finger on his cheek. Scratch, scratch. The promise. She knew he would come. She said it to herself over and over to try to feel that knowing, but it slid away from her. Elijah did not always feel real to her—only when he was with her, his arms around her body, his mouth on hers. In those moments, he was everything, but as soon as he left, he became something she’d only ever imagined. She supposed that’s how she avoided feeling guilty about Isaac and James and Ursula. They belonged to that other world, the one Elijah disappeared into when he left her. Mary’s time with Elijah touched none of that: not the world of the hotel, not the world of the Mountain family.
But soon she and Elijah would have their time. He would be here and he would be real and he would be warm. She knew he would come. He promised. She leaned back into her blanket on the snow and closed her eyes against the beauty of the pink sky. She would just rest here for a little while, waiting for Elijah.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I expected lit candles and incense. I expected Sahitya’s weird music—the kind that makes Lucy grind her teeth. I thought maybe we’d wait for a full moon. For sure, I knew when it finally happened, it would be at night. Even without knowing what “it” might be, I expected dark and shadows and a scary walk back to our smelly trailer—that’s what I expected.
Instead, we’re eating breakfast in the dome home when Sahitya looks into me in a way that feels inappropriate. We’re all sitting on cushy chairs or cross-legged on beanbags on the floor. There’s no dining room table—the Universe must not have got around to providing that yet, Lucy says—so we eat with bowls of oatmeal and berries in our laps. Sahitya looks deep inside me and says, as casually as if she’s asking me to pass the sugar (if we were allowed sugar!), “The dead want to take us over, but by recognizing their demands we can be free.”
I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I do understand the words—I have a strong vocabulary, actually—but I don’t know how I’m meant to respond. When Sahitya speaks, even when I do understand her, I almost never know what she wants from me in return. It bugs me, but not as much as it bugs Lucy. Tamara, though, seems intrigued. She pulled me aside before breakfast and said, “We see because we believe, Eli. Let’s believe in Sahitya. For a little while. Who knows what we’ll see then?”
Sahitya puts her bowl of oatmeal on the floor and pulls a chair very close to mine before she speaks again, right into my ear. “We can’t live our lives until we find answers to the unanswered questions of the dead.”
Tamara catches my eye and shru
gs lightly (as if to say, Fair enough, I guess), but a cold has settled over the room, and I see a faint orange light around Sahitya, as if she’s standing underneath Halloween decorations. Her words pull at me even if I don’t understand them. I lean into the warmth coming off her skin. “So,” she sighs. I feel her breath on the top of my head when she speaks, but she doesn’t seem to be talking to me. “How to open the mouths of the dead? That’s my question.”
My body loosens in relief when, a few moments later, Sahitya walks away from me. She goes back to her puffy old purple beanbag chair that matches her headscarf, sits cross-legged in its folds, and lifts her bowl of oatmeal back into her lap. “These ghosts, Eli, they’re not separate from real life.” Sahitya talks when she eats, and my stomach turns a little at the sight of her chewed oatmeal, but I still cannot pull myself away from her words. “The realm of the dead is not separate from real life.” She puts her bowl down on the floor next to her chair again and comes even closer to me, scooting me over and perching so we’re sitting on the same chair. “That’s what we have to see, Eli. The world of the dead is real life. We already live in that realm. We don’t need to call them to us; we need to change our limited way of thinking to see they’re already here.” Sahitya smiles her all-the-world smile, the one she used at the havan. “And then, once we can see them ... we just ... ask them what they want!”
Ask them what they want? Lucy rubs her hands against her bare arms. I’m not the only one who feels the new chill. She sets her half-eaten bowl of oatmeal on the floor and moves to the chair closest to me.
Sahitya places two fingers on each of my eyelids and closes them gently, her fingertips toasty warm against my cool skin. I see orbs of orange where each finger has touched. A hand tugs at my elbow. I recognize the pressure of Lucy’s pull on me. I know her hand. But already these two women have begun to fade.