by Mary Swan
Mrs. P. had other stories that were more interesting, about spirits and hauntings, about curses that followed families for generations. She told Alan about the ghost train, of course, and about people who made nooses or blew their heads off. The ones who jumped from boats, or walked away into the snowy bush, and were later heard scratching at windows in the winter dark. The whole town full of suicides, it seemed, who had changed their minds and wanted to come back. “You’ll give the boy nightmares,” Aunt Edie said in a sharpish tone, if she overheard that kind of talk, or the old stories about the brollachan and the doonies, the sluagh. It was true that he thought about them, if he woke in the night. The shape-shifters and the unforgiven dead, always looking for a living body to slither into, and the stories about the changeling babies left by the fairies, who never belonged, never thrived. Mrs. P. said she didn’t believe it herself but some of the old people thought blind Pammy was one; how else to explain it, how different she looked, how she was.
Mostly, though, he didn’t wake in the night, and the dreams he used to have had gone quiet, along with the rage that left him limp in its wake, with an image of his father’s white fist as it pounded a thick puzzle piece that would never fit. He was still changing, he knew that, but it seemed to be in a good way. After the first sunburns, which Aunt Edie soothed with a cool spread of Noxzema, his skin had turned brown and the soles of his bare feet had hardened; even his eyes looked different in his tanned face, when he stared into the mirror. Every night now, before he got into bed, he lifted the dumbbells he’d brought down from the attic and did push-ups on the floor Mrs. P. kept gleaming, and every other day he measured his biceps with the cloth tape he snuck from the sewing basket; a quarter of an inch already, he was sure. He thought of those pasty boys in the schoolyard back home, how they’d not dare mess with him now, and if they did he could knock them over with one hand tied behind his back. Uncle Robbie said that about things, though at first Alan didn’t know it was a joke.
Even without the measuring tape he would have known that he was stronger, no burning in his legs when he climbed the secret steps near the place where he’d made his beach shelter. Climbed in a half crouch, a grenade in his hand, waiting for the right moment to pull the pin with his teeth and lob it into the machine gun nest at the top of the bluff. Once, in the dusk, he surprised a couple in the bushes up there; the man yelled and tried to chase him, tripped up by his trousers sagging around his knees, and as Alan slowed to a walk at the edge of the little park he thought how much funnier it would be if there was someone he could tell. I am the Whistler and I know the secrets, hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows; he said it out loud, but quietly, and whistled the tune all the way home.
It wasn’t that he liked it, exactly, but he’d got used to it. The town and the shops and the lake, the house that was always clean but cluttered in a way his mother would never have stood for. He was used to Aunt Edie and Uncle Robbie and the way they were together, the shorthand talk and the jokes between them, that had at first seemed designed to keep him out. Once he climbed on a tall stool to reach the big glass jug for lemonade; when Aunt Edie said, “Be careful,” he twisted his mouth and said, in a hard-boiled voice, “I deal in danger,” and they all laughed as if it was even funnier than it actually was.
When he finished painting the back porch they ate supper out there to christen it, and sat until the bats began to swoop, listening to the music from the band people danced to on the deck of a boat far out on the lake. “Remember those dances?” Aunt Edie said, and Robbie tapped his pipe on the sole of his shoe, and said, “Of course I do.” Alan could picture them, young and dressed up in fine clothes, spinning and dipping beneath the strings of coloured lights, so far from land. Before he fell asleep that night he wondered what it would be like, if he could travel through time and become a boy who closed his eyes in this room every night of his life. If he’d been a fourth boy hammering that catapult together, whooping at the splat on the pavement. He wondered how different it would be, if all the people he knew hadn’t already had things happen to them, how much he would matter.
It had been very still that night and by the next day a dome of stifling heat had settled on the town, not a whisper of a breeze. With the windows closed the house stayed cool at first, but as the days passed there was a point where that tipped, and Alan helped drag the mattresses down so they could sleep in the living room, where it was a little better at night. Aunt Edie said they were like the pioneers, all living and sleeping in one room, and in the dark Uncle Robbie talked about the ship he was on in the war, the first war, and how it was even hotter than this, down in the heart of it. Everything soaked with the sweat that ran, stinging, into their eyes. Other than that time he rarely mentioned the war he’d been in, said nothing at all about what happened when his arm was ripped off; a shell, Alan supposed, or some kind of explosion. Though Uncle Robbie did say once that the worst thing he’d ever seen was a man on fire in a burning sea.
Those stifling nights they talked, before they finally fell asleep, about things that needed doing the next day, or the latest report from Mrs. P. About the way everyone lied to Nick Carter, Master Detective, but he figured it out, and when he explained things to Patsy Bowen, his Girl Friday, it was as if he’d known all along. Aunt Edie thought that Patsy only pretended to be surprised, that she was as smart as Nick Carter any day, and hadn’t she provided the final clue that led to the unmasking of the imposter who was after the inheritance? “How did it go again?” she asked, and Uncle Robbie explained, and Alan was still thinking about it as he drifted into sleep. How did you rumble me? the imposter had said, and then he said that in a strange way he was relieved. That it was hard to fit into a life that wasn’t your own, to remember what to say and not say, how to be.
Alan’s mother was always saying that he told time by his stomach, but he knew even she would be amazed at how much he ate now. The extra servings of potatoes and thick-sliced bread, the cakes and pies Edie made from recipes on splattered cards, some of them written out, she said, by women who were long dead. Most days she did her baking in the morning, when it was cooler, made a list and shopped for their supper. He sometimes went with her if she had a lot to carry, and stared at Patch Coulter, the butcher; he couldn’t get over the way she chatted as if he was just anyone, instead of a man who was filling up the space that should have belonged to her grinning boy.
Mostly she was fine, but then there were times when it was like she’d been caught in the undertow they’d warned him about, like something was pulling her down and away. It showed in her eyes and he hated that look, like his mother’s when she took off her glasses, and he knew that he was nothing but a blurred shape. Edie and Robbie called it sleepwalking, those times she put her purse in the refrigerator instead of the pound of butter, or wandered off with her trowel in the heat of the day.
Often a neighbour walked her home then, talking about this and that as if they’d just happened to meet each other, as if there weren’t knee-shaped dirt marks near the hem of her dress. Sometimes she seemed to remember that she’d been kneeling in the middle of someone’s garden. She made it a joke while she held her hands under the tap at home, said, “Thank goodness I didn’t go after the begonias!” She told Alan that her mother used to sleepwalk, really sleepwalk; from what she had told Edie it was lucky she was never eaten by a bear. Leaving the cabin where she grew up and wandering through the forest in the middle of the night. “What a silly I am,” Aunt Edie said. “I almost asked you if she was back yet.”
The heat broke with rain that lasted more days and he stayed in with Edie, playing cards. She taught him some tricks and a few sneaky deals; usually she made fudge so they could play for pieces, and he couldn’t get enough of that sweetness. In the evenings, while they waited for their programmes, Uncle Robbie gave Alan the funny page while he looked through the rest of the newspaper, reading out bits he thought were interesting. If there was still time he opened the thi
ck book he was reading, the one with the title that made them laugh. It was called A Short History of Greece, and Uncle Robbie said, “Can you imagine the size of the Long one?”
Aunt Edie didn’t like to read much anymore, but she often opened the photograph albums that were still piled from when she’d first brought them out, weeks before. Alan liked to look at the one they called The Book of Faces, pictures taken by Robbie’s mother that they had found in a box, after she was gone. Aunt Edie told him that she’d always had a great admiration for Robbie’s mother, who had never had an easy life but didn’t let it drag her down. She was smiling when they found her dead, or that’s what it looked like, a thing that made it a little easier to bear.
Like the picture of dead Stevie on the mantel, the ones in the face book made Alan feel they were of people he’d seen somewhere, or people he knew something about. Three old men sitting, with bench slats behind, and a very fat woman shouting. A skinny man with maybe flour on his nose, and a girl with a welt on her cheek, who looked terribly sad. Aunt Edie found them all sad, and she preferred to look at the album she’d first shown Alan, the women in their long dresses and the bearded men. One was her parents on their wedding day. “Isn’t my father handsome,” she said. “Don’t they look fine?” Then she turned the page and sighed, said, “They’re all gone now. Everyone’s gone now, aren’t they Robbie.”
“Not everyone,” Uncle Robbie said. “Young Rob’s not gone, and we’re going to see him, remember? And we’re still here, and this fine boy.”
“Yes, this boy,” Aunt Edie said, and it was clear that at that moment she had no idea who he might be.
One Tuesday Alan’s mother didn’t call but the next night she did, and talked to Uncle Robbie so long that the phone was warm when he passed it over. She told Alan that there’d been some trouble, that it wasn’t his father’s fault but he’d hurt someone in the hospital, and been moved to another place, another city. Good, Alan thought, no more drives, no more visits, and he was only half listening, with one eye on the clock. Almost time for The Whistler, and his ice cream was melting in the bowl. “Do you understand?” his mother said, and she told him again, told him they’d be moving too, that it had been quite a scramble but she’d found an apartment in the new city, and a job for herself. She said she needed him home right away; Robbie would buy him a ticket and she’d meet the train. There was so much to do and it would be good, wouldn’t it, to have a few weeks to settle in before school started. She went on about painting his room any colour he liked and the big tree outside his new window, the public pool at the end of the block, but he could hardly hear her for the rushing in his head.
At some point he hung up the phone, and maybe she was still talking or maybe she said, “We miss you,” as she always did. He walked down the hallway and out through the kitchen and the screen door bounced behind him, but once he was outside he didn’t have a clue what came next so he walked around and around the house, thinking of all the things he wouldn’t have a chance to do. Thinking he’d be gone when Bet and the others came back and they’d never see how he’d changed, never follow him through the dark night and wait for the ghost train, never know he was someone they’d miss. And he wouldn’t be here for the fair, to see if Edie’s pie won the prize. Wouldn’t help Robbie fix up the old shed, wouldn’t stand inside it with him while he smoked his pipe, listening to the rain drumming on the tin roof. Through the open window he heard the first notes of The Whistler, saw Robbie and Edie who were saying something to each other, and there was no sign that there’d ever been anyone else there. “It’s not all about you,” his mother had said on the phone, and he’d thought, Why not? Why not.
Alan’s mother made a fuss about how much he’d grown, said she was glad of his strong arms when it came to carrying boxes and shifting heavy furniture. Aunt Edie sent a postcard from their trip west, a picture of mountains and the ocean, and later letters came too. Her pie got a blue ribbon and young Bet had been asking about him, Mrs. P. fell down some stairs and had to have her jaw wired, and couldn’t he just imagine the torment. For Christmas they sent him a pocket knife with his initials etched on it and he sat on his bed while snow fell through the bare branches outside his window, opening and closing the sharp blades. He told his mother that of course he’d written to thank them, but he never did. His father was behind a locked door now, that opened onto another dull corridor; he still didn’t say much but the place was filled with shouting and banging, and people with cloth mittens tied onto their hands so they wouldn’t claw their own faces.
He did well enough at school and went away to the optometry college; he was too busy and it was too far for him to go home very often. He had friends there, he supposed, and they said the right things after the fire in the hospital that killed his father, the scandal and the settlement. They all went out together after their final exams but he left before things got rowdy, a little tipsy, perhaps, when he stepped into the beam of the headlights that were rushing toward him. He’d always heard that your life flashed before your eyes, like one of those movies where everything makes sense just before the screen goes black, but it wasn’t like that; he woke with a sense of a slow unspooling that had gone on as long as that far-off summer itself, though he was told he’d been unconscious less than a day. The nurse told him that, right after she told him her name. “Jane. Plain Jane,” she said, with a little laugh that sounded like part of the sentence. When he said something about the drinks in the bar she whispered, “Least said soonest mended,” and bent down to arrange the pillows beneath his bandaged head.
His leg was badly broken, heavy in plaster and strung up with weights and pulleys, and it should have been humiliating, the way the nurses had to do every intimate thing, but they were so matter-of-fact that he soon got used to it. They talked about practicalities and the future, the way he’d progress to crutches and then a cane, the way he probably wouldn’t even have a limp in six months’ time. “It will be fine,” they said, “and you have your whole life ahead of you,” something he’d been told before, that he knew was supposed to be a good thing.
He got used to Jane too, and looked forward to when she was on nights, with time to sit and talk for a while. Both of them keeping to a whisper so as not to disturb the rest of the ward, and that made everything they said seem like secrets they were sharing. She had a fierce need for order, that he would learn carried on outside the hospital doors, but for now he noticed it in the way she kept the sheets smooth and straight, adjusted the vase of yellow flowers that sat on the bedside table and angled the little white card that just said, Get well. He knew she had bought them herself, and had them delivered with the daily cart; he’d told them not to call his mother and there was no one else who would send him flowers. When Jane denied it he said, “Well, I guess it’s another case for Nick Carter,” and then had to explain, because she told him she’d never heard a radio until she was in the nurses’ residence. He asked if she’d grown up with some strict religion but she said, “Not exactly.”
Jane had days off, of course, that she seemed to spend cleaning her room, ironing her uniforms and sewing on loose buttons. “A stitch in time,” she said, and she said that was the only thing her mother taught her that was of any use. He wondered what she’d looked like as a girl, and she told him she was a scrawny little thing, wearing her sisters’ made-over dresses to school and one year, to her great mortification, her brother’s shoes. She said with the chance to get away she’d never looked back, why would she?
Another time they had a meal together, his cane hooked over the back of the booth, and he misheard something she said, told her he used to believe he was a changeling too; she gave him a look and said, “Changing, I said changing my curtains, I’ll never have to, they’ll go with anything.” Then she said, “You’re a strange one,” and when he said, “Maybe I could say the same,” it felt like a handshake. When they married, months later, he looked down at her flushed cheeks and felt dizzy with hope, and when his daughter
wrapped her baby hand around his finger, her grip so strong for such a tiny thing, he thought that with two of them now on the lifeline, there was no chance he’d ever drift away. He opened his own office and got used to wearing the frames with the plain glass lenses that had been Jane’s idea. “Of course you don’t need them,” she said. “But even if they don’t know why, people will trust you more.”
It was all right for a time, in the apartment and later the small house. Little Clare learned to walk, ride a bike; she went to school, and they did the things families did, had picnics and went every year to the circus, stuck their heads through cut-out holes above cartoon bodies. Once they rented a tiny cottage near Inverhaven, but didn’t go into the town. He thought the next year he would but they didn’t go back; Jane said it was fine, but she couldn’t bear all that tracked-in sand. Years went by and he mowed the lawn and scraped and painted the trim, took storm windows off and put them on again. Jane kept the inside tidy, everything in its place and the weekly menu stuck to the side of the fridge. His name was stencilled boldly on the opaque glass door of his office and he was content there, with the soothing click of changing lenses in the dark. He still marvelled at the view he had, deep behind people’s eyes, and the magical way that angles and numbers turned into clear vision.