The Complex Arms

by Dolly Dennis

  I rallied around to the back, got out of the car, and headed toward Mona’s trailer. The living dead staggered toward me through great clouds of asbestos and insulation, bleeding, moaning, and screaming in agony. Some just sat there in a catatonic state amid the devastation.

  Maybe Mona was there cleaning up the mess like some of the survivors I saw. I reached for anything resembling the life that had been there: a dented saucepan, a blanket, toys, or a teddy bear. Irene had one of those. I dug with my hands alongside the rescuers for signs of life: a family pet, a father, mother, grandparents, and children. Nothing. I skipped over heaps of destroyed mobile homes shredded like matchsticks for kindling, and then I swung in the direction of Mona’s trailer, smashed to smithereens. I began to run like I was approaching the finishing line in a marathon, a last-minute push of energy behind my back, and then I stopped, dropped to my knees, kneeled down amid a pile of ripped insulation. “NO!” I cried so loud, but no one took notice. Everyone who survived was now familiar with the noise of grief and ignored me, busy searching for their own.

  My voice seemed to carry across the rubble of what was once a thriving community for young families and retired seniors. Only one trailer and a wall of mobile homes bordering the park remained upright. Those lucky residents had escaped. I stood up and began a systematic hunt for anything I might recognize. “Irene! Mona!” I kept calling out. I pulled up a blow-dryer, hairbrush, and Irene’s teddy bear blanket from under a pile of siding. In the adjacent yard I came across a ripped chair with stuffing poking out of the faux leather; it was from Mona’s salon. She and Irene had to be nearby.

  The rescuers dragged out the injured from under the rubble of mattresses and broken furniture. None of the mobile homes had basements. The only place with one was the rental office, which was connected to the residence of the park manager and to the community hall. When we boarded with Mona on our arrival to Edmonton, we often took Irene to the hall for various child-centred activities. We would leave her there while Mona and I went shopping, knowing she was safe. She adored Mr. Pumpkinhead, the kids’ nickname for the park manager, and his wife, Mrs. Pumpkinhead, who was the children’s supervisor. Irene was in good hands. A childless couple, the Pumpkinheads had a knack for handling youngsters of all ages and temperaments. I never knew their real names.

  I sprinted toward the community hall, still standing, having survived the effects of the tornado. I tumbled inside and Irene was sitting on a bench, Mr. and Mrs. Pumpkinhead on either side of her like bookends. All the other children had been picked up. My arms reached over with hugs and kisses, but she remained stone-faced with a queer look of puzzlement until I showed her the teddy bear blanket. Her eyes grew wide and brightened as she snatched it from me and smothered it against her face.

  I beamed, tears streaming down my face. That look of recognition returned, her arms aflutter. “EEEeeeeeee. Momma!”

  “Yes, Irene,” I said, “Moma.”

  Did she mean Mona? I asked Mr. Pumpkinhead about Mona. Evergreen, with a population a little over a thousand, was a friendly community where just about everyone knew just about everyone else. However, he didn’t know her whereabouts; only that she was to pick up Irene at the end of the day. “I suspect she went home,” said Mrs. Pumpkinhead. But her home had disappeared off the face of the world as though by magic. They convinced me to leave as there was not much I could do but get in everyone’s way. I left with Irene and hope.

  The emergency crews were still sifting through the ruins for signs of the living as we headed for the car. Irene played with her blanket, distracted from the chaotic mess around her. I had forgotten to eat and felt a sudden light-headedness, so I rested for a minute and talked to a couple of volunteers who were taking a breather. I inquired again about Mona but they suggested that, one way or another, someone would call me if she was found and that I best just go on home and wait for that call. I obeyed.

  With their reassurance, Irene and I traipsed back to the car keeping our heads down. Water surged up to our knees in places; the landscape was overrun with photos, paper money, garbage, sewage, furniture, and torn clothing. I prayed we wouldn’t step on a submerged body. All around me, people, digging, crawling from under flattened roofs or missing siding. A young woman, cuts to her face, was stationed at the park’s back entrance, her long arms stretched around her four babies. She was in shock — I could see that because I asked her if she needed any assistance and she just stared past me like she was in another galaxy. An Edmonton Transit bus pulled up in front of us. They were taking the injured to Alberta Hospital and the driver asked if we needed a lift. I told them we were okay but to take the young woman with her children. Perhaps Mona was at the hospital. Returning from Evergreen, out of habit, I ended up taking the old scenic road, forgetting that most of the low roads were now flooded, and I had to turn around to get back onto the main highway and home.

  As we drove back from that scene of destruction and suffering, I thought back to how it used to be. When Irene and I moved out here, Mona and I would sometimes go sit and picnic at this special place in the ravine near a creek. Being a city girl, I always felt anything with a small amount of water was either a puddle or a spill needing a mopping. Irene tagged along, and we would relax on a log while Irene pulled up dandelions and other prairie weeds and presented a bouquet to me and one for Mona, her “auntie.” Mona, with the patience of a saint, showed her how to make a crown of dandelions. She’d place it on Irene’s head and, well, we’d be entertained by Irene’s usual happy dance, all that clapping and bouncing up and down, pirouetting like a circus dog. Somehow it conveyed a simple contagious joy that was unfortunately lost in a world of too much suffering.

  The Evergreen community was built in 1982; Irene was five then, and Mona was one of their first occupants. Everything was on the verge of polish, a newness you could feel in the shine of new windows and neat rows of planted gardens, shrubs and flowers framing yards and patios. Now, everything gone.

  Three days later, a police officer called to say they unearthed a body with a description “similar to your friend, Mona.”

  “Irene,” I said, “they found Mona. They found Mona.” I had to repeat the news as though saying the words out loud would make her appear right there. Irene just applauded as she always did whenever she heard Mona’s name. “Momma, Momma,” she said.

  “Where is she? Where is she? I’ll come and get her,” I told the guy. And then he soberly gave me the address to the medical examiner’s office and told me to go and identify her. I dropped the receiver, letting the cord dangle like a noose. Wailed like a banshee and Irene still doing her happy dance. Clap clap clap. I wanted to hit her. Told you not to judge me!

  Not a happy moment. Frosty picked up the receiver and said, “Hey, you, who’s this? Who am I talkin’ to?” And when the voice on the other end finished, Frosty hung up and turned to me and just said, “I’m sorry, Adeen.”

  They recovered Mona’s body under the wreckage of her neighbour’s trailer, which landed atop her own damaged home. I couldn’t stop crying. I became a fountain of tears. I wept until there was nothing left inside me, a hollow shell. Life didn’t seem worth living anymore. Oh, you can’t see my tears anymore because they are hidden inside my heart, scar tissue. She was my only family. Always there for me and now I felt so alone. And what’s left is still the anger. I don’t know why. S’cuse me while I get a tissue.

  Anyhow, that’s the story there.

  JULY 2007

  HOME IS LIVING IN A TRAILER PARK

  At a time when most women her age were settled in adult condos somewhere in Canmore with the Three Sisters Mountains as backdrop, Adeen never thought that she would instead be living in a glove compartment, as she called the six-hundred-square-foot mobile home, set in the Arboreau Trailer Park on the outskirts of Hinton. Her life, at fifty, had come full circle. This circumstance brought to mind Mona and the tragedy at the Evergreen Mobile Home Park. She hesitated to live in a flimsy fabricated buildin
g without a basement.

  “It won’t happen again. That was a fluke of nature,” Frosty convinced her. “What are the chances?”

  Frosty and Adeen settled in and continued their emotional roller-coaster ride as one year sprung into the next. “I won’t be around much longer,” he’d say after another explosion of words. Such outbursts were typically followed by days of noncommunication until one or the other eventually decided to break the intolerable chill. Over the last twenty years the relationship had vacillated between volatile words and stony silence. It was not unusual for them to renew the armistice until the next altercation. They became indifferent to lapses in conversation that bordered on rebellious inertia. A couple in a room, yet separate; two strangers passing through.

  The cowboy poet had traded writing poetry for driving a truck, transporting horses, food, furniture, and electronics to various parts of northern Alberta. “It’s a job,” Frosty would say, “so don’t complain.” She didn’t. He was now contributing to the household expenses, and those distant delivery days when he was on the road were a respite for Adeen from their stormy marriage.

  Their mobile home, an older model with a carport, was far removed from prying eyes, sheltered in a woodsy area so Adeen could sporadically neglect its upkeep; however, what little self-pride remained ensured that at least the front yard and deck, with its floral containers and window boxes on view, were kept tidy. Appearances were essential.

  “If you’re going to smoke, you can at least pick up the butts. This isn’t the city dump, you know,” she would scold Frosty.

  He feigned deafness, or a purposeful absent-mindedness that he’d acquired over the years as a coping mechanism for Adeen’s constant nagging.

  The previous summer she counted two hundred cigarette stubs scattered in various planters, window boxes, the in-between spaces of the deck floor, and the front yard. When they first moved into the Arboreau Park, she put down her foot and forbade smoking inside their home, so Frosty spent winters and spring by a portable heater, ensconced in blankets on a patio chair, puffing away, contemplating, his chest a pillow for his chin.

  Adeen had quit smoking after witnessing the devastation at the Evergreen Mobile Home Park. The fetor of decay had saturated her lungs, and nicotine now made her ill. She increased her consumption of beer and hid the tower of empties in a crate behind the compost bin concealed by the dogwood. Petty cash, she called it. Payton would have praised her resourcefulness. She thought of him whenever she piled the empty beer bottles. The isolation of life in a rural community and Frosty’s chilly behaviour reduced her to introversion and self-conversation. All traces of the city girl were erased now except for her name.

  Adeen was free from the usual physical ailments afflicting premenopausal women who’ve spent a lifetime working with their hands in fast food joints, packing boxes in clothing warehouses, watering plants in gardening centres, cleaning other people’s houses or apartments, including the Complex Arms. Her doctor pronounced her a healthy specimen for a woman her age and disposition. No arthritis to speak of, except for a recent tricky injury; a slide down a slippery embankment on wet grass after a rainfall — she tumbled to the bottom and shattered a shinbone, which never healed properly. She now walked with a slight, albeit noticeable, limp, especially when tired. Otherwise, Adeen was still quite fit — a bit more full-bodied, perhaps — but she definitely didn’t have the kind of body to appear on the cover of magazines such as Zoomer, which celebrated “women of a certain age.”

  Over the years, Adeen had gradually become slovenly in her grooming. She now sometimes forgot to shower, or perhaps just didn’t care, forgot to brush her teeth, and wore the same T-shirt and shorts for days at a time until permanent stains marked her meagre wardrobe. It saved on laundry work, she would say, should Frosty comment. Her only exception was when appearing in public.

  Alberta summers with their intense heat and dry patches mirrored each other from one year to the next. She squandered her days napping or chewing miniature ice cubes, an acquired nervous habit, until her teeth cracked from the cold tension.

  Adeen never expected to reach fifty, a milestone in her eyes. Too many of her friends and former tenants had already succumbed to the pale reaper from drugs, heart attacks, suicide, and cancer. She was almost certain Alberta’s ecosystem, with all its airborne fossil fuels, bred cancerous cells in the body and mind.

  For a time, after the tornado, she kept in touch with some of the ones who had vacated the Complex Arms — Zita and Derrick, Rosemary, and Mrs. Lapinberg — and several Evergreen residents who were Mona’s neighbours and clients. Very often it was just a phone call to say hello. But once she herself moved away, they were eliminated from her memory bank. Payton, Wayne and Cody, Shylene — gone. The endurance of continuously living in the face of a magnitude of life’s challenges was too difficult for some of them. For others, like Rosemary and Mrs. Lapinberg, old age dealt the final knockout punch. And always, Mona was on her mind.

  On those sleepless nights, and there were many, she would softly hum John Lennon’s lyrics from “In My Life,” and remember all the places and people who had touched her, both dead and the few still living; how they impacted her, reduced her to what she had become. She would hum until she fell asleep or Frosty, in one of his moods, would yell at her to shut up. He was trying to sleep and just needed quiet.

  Velvet returned to the Soo hoping to hear from her absent boyfriend, only to find her whimsical life had become a futile chase after something that never existed in the first place except in her imagination. Frosty was transparent about their relationship. Or so I thought.

  “Nothin’ happened,” he kept insisting once they set up house at the Arboreau Park. “She had a schoolgirl crush on me is all. Forget it, Adeen. Let’s just move on.”

  And to prove his loyalty, he shared Velvet’s postcards from the Soo, along with the photos, in compromising positions. The girl now made her living pole dancing around the “hot spots” of northern Ontario — Thunder Bay, Sudbury, North Bay, Timmins, Elliot Lake — numbing her life against the fierce light of day with whatever drug was available to get her through the night. Adeen witnessed Frosty tossing everything into the shredder after sharing it and he never mentioned Velvet again. He pitched everything except for one black-and-white photo. This one he held hidden in an envelope taped behind the bottom, rarely-used dresser drawer. There was Velvet, naked as a newborn, on her back, legs splayed, enticing arms reaching out, inviting the onlooker to come and consume her.

  Mrs. Lapinberg’s son, Barney, rescued his mother from the Complex Arms the morning after the tornado had done its damage. He set her up in a plush Jewish seniors residence somewhere in Sherwood Park.

  And Zita, poor Zita, she relocated with her husband, Howard, to Houston, Texas, to follow his engineering career with a large oil company. They lost touch and Adeen wondered if she ever roared against the shackles of a loveless marriage. Zita told her once that she was getting tired of her nomadic existence and longed for a solid, secure commitment. If anyone asked her if she was happy, Zita would lie and say, “Yes, of course.” Derrick cried when he bid Irene a final farewell, and Irene, poised like a statue, fixed her attention somewhere in space, an existential moment watching Zita’s car disappear around the corner from the Complex Arms. Years later Adeen heard from Jack that Zita had borne a daughter.

  As for Jan, in 1988 her husband stood trial for manslaughter in a case of domestic violence. Jan’s best friend, Norma, was a character witness for the defence. Norma’s husband threatened to toss her over the balcony in the same manner if she took sides against his best friend. So Norma lied and painted Jan’s husband as a perfect specimen of manhood who loved his family and would never harm his wife or baby daughter in any way. It was an unfortunate accident, his lawyer pleaded. Because of Norma’s testimony, her lie, the jury declared Jan’s husband innocent and he was set free. Norma fell into a deep depression of guilt that stayed with her until one day she went missing a
nd a motorist discovered her body in a ditch near Beaumont, a community south of Edmonton. The consensus was that she had left home, probably hitchhiking, and had accepted a ride, only to find herself in the clutches of a rapist and killer. The suspect was never apprehended and Norma’s husband remarried after a reasonable period of mourning. People’s lives, Adeen would shake her head in disbelief.

  Jack remained at the Complex Arms.

  “Where would I go?” he said. “This is home.”

  He felt a familiar comfort in his compact one-bedroom apartment, convenient to everything, and continued to depict his world on the blank Masonite boards sprawled around the living room floor. He no longer painted dead flowers. Eventually, he connected with a dealer at the Wild Rose Art House, a cozy gallery off Whyte Avenue, where Jack surprisingly sold all his paintings that captured Black Friday in all its force and fury, as well as the anger he felt living a lie, a woman in a man’s body, and the turbulent lives of the tenants in the Complex Arms. He and Adeen kept in touch by phone for a number of years, Jack supplying the latest gossip about the new building manager and residents of the Complex Arms. She often attended his exhibitions and purchased paintings of Irene and Mona to support his talent. And then she never heard from him again.

  Those days when Frosty brought her down, she would go hiking in the foothills of the Rockies, outside Hinton, and scream at the range of mountains, “He’s destroying me.”

  This persistent pattern eventually rendered Adeen a semirecluse. She hid herself in the vale of trailer parks, surrounded by snow-capped ridges far off in the distance, and trees that camouflaged her misery. She would ask Miss Pauline, her neighbour and Arboreau’s resident manager, to babysit Irene while she drove to Hinton, parked the car, and hiked alone into the nearby woods, toting a couple of beers. She would sit on her familiar boulder in a clearing not far from the road and meditate on the flawless sky, the valley below with its vegetation and streams.