by Dolly Dennis
“Pretty thing you got there,” he said pointing at Irene. “Can she talk or does she just make noise?”
Irene’s smile shifted into a frown as though she understood what the old guy was saying. I guess it was his voice that annoyed her.
“How much to take her off your hands?” he said. “I’m a widower and could use some help, take care of me, clean house.”
“S’cuse me,” I said. “You an idiot or something? Get out of here.” And I came at him, reached down for some gravel, and threw a handful into his ugly face. You should have seen him skedaddle down the road and Irene doing her happy dance. Miss Pauline had just come to sit on her deck to see what the fuss was.
“What’s old Braggs up to?”
“He’s a lecherous old man,” I said. “He wanted to buy Irene. What’s the matter with people! This is the twenty-first century last time I looked.”
“Oh, don’t mind him,” Miss Pauline said. “Harmless codger. Dumber than a doorknob. I think you scared him, though.” She laughed.
When Irene showed her dark side, I would shove her medication down her throat as usual and she would gag, try to spit out the pills — they were big, almost like they were meant for thoroughbreds. The struggle would continue until I threw her into the closet screaming, whimpering, and Frosty would stand there and I would shout, “Do something, Frosty. Help me!” Frosty would make some effort but then always gave up, huffed out of there to the pub, his answer to everything. Then after a spell, I would feel remorse, open the closet door, hug my daughter, and sing “Goodnight, Irene,” and Irene would just grin back at me with puzzled eyes like she didn’t remember who I was. Nothing had changed. Told you not to judge me. I’m not a monster.
That’s how it was the last twenty years after the tornado hit, after the loss of so many of my friends. And now another commemoration at the end of the month will open up all those scars, release the pain again. I’ve tried to move on, but they, the people in my head, won’t let me.
And there are the butterflies.
Mona always had a fondness for butterflies and moths and wouldn’t kill an ant or fly even if you paid her a million dollars, so every butterfly that landed in my flowers I thought it was Mona reincarnate. That must be why Irene liked to chase them. Bet she knew it was Mona flitting around like that.
We had formed a pact as children that whoever died first would have to send down a sign from above to verify that heaven existed. I know you won’t believe this, but it rained the day of the memorial service for Mona. As I was leaving the church, for a brief moment, the sun showed itself. I closed my eyes for a second, felt the radiant warmth on my face, and when I opened my eyes, it was raining again. Just like that. So sudden. I took it as a sign from Mona that there indeed was a heaven so I best behave. A monarch butterfly had attached itself to the screen of the low-lying basement window. I walked toward it, extended my arm, and the butterfly perched on my index finger as though it were the most natural thing to do. It sat there for a bit before fluttering away. The odd thing is that it stopped raining, just like that, and the sun beamed down on us all day. Mona.
“That’s crazy,” Frosty said when I told him about the miracle. He didn’t believe me and suggested I see a therapist.
I still couldn’t delete Mona’s name from my old-fashioned address book, and while everyone was embracing new things called the internet and BlackBerry, I remained fossilized in the world of July 1987. Mona. Lying on a slab of marble in the morgue. I could barely identify the remains; wasn’t sure if it was even her. Every bone shattered beyond recognition, but she wore this distinguishing mark around her ankle — a lovely tattoo of a monarch butterfly. Still intact. She was a great fan of the monarch, with its two pairs of brilliant orange-red wings, black veins, and white spots along the edges. Unique, just like her. I later found out the adult butterfly lives for a maximum of four or six weeks. Why do beautiful things have a short life span?
Anyhow, I told her she was nuts to go put needles into her skin, but she thought the tattoo was an art form, the skin its canvas, a thing of beauty. At that time, not too many women were into decorating their bodies with symbols unless they were in motorcycle gangs, and now it’s the hot trend. I persisted in blaming myself. If I had not left Irene with her; if they had been with me at the Complex Arms for the barbecue … If. If. If.
Mona, bless her, left me a small inheritance, enough for a down payment on a house with the stipulation it be in my name. We couldn’t afford a mortgage, but there was enough to purchase a mobile home and live rent-free until death do us part. The trailer fit into Frosty’s lafstyle, as he kept reminding me again and again. But it still wasn’t mine. He was ecstatic and I just went along because what choice did I have? We had to live somewhere.
It was my money, and I understood now why his grandmother listed me in her will instead of Frosty. She knew he would fritter away our lives with his gambling addiction. He would go into our joint account and make small withdrawals until, over the years, it was all gone. Whatever Shylene had left us, gone, lost at the casinos, trips to Vegas, Northlands Raceway, lotto tickets, smokes, weed, alcohol, and whatever schemes his friend Burp had up his sleeve playing the stock market. Frosty was such a sucker for any get-rich scheme, and I was the Bank of Adeen. Should have seen that when I first met him at the food court and he said he had forgotten his wallet. Never paid me back and all was forgotten when we married. To keep the peace, I always stayed quiet, said nothing. I was too tired to fight except when it came to the women, and oh yeah, the final blow when he took Mrs. Lapinberg’s heirloom plate to buy the home lottery tickets. As I reached my midlife crisis, I ignored even his flirtations. Take him, I wanted to tell those oversexed broads. Plus the bills were getting paid, not knowing he was borrowing money to cover our monthly bills from the Bank of Burp. The wife is always the last to know, so they say. I wondered if he ever took the time from writing his pathetic poems to calculate the money we could have saved. We would be millionaires by now. This time would be different. I couldn’t let Mona down. She brought me here for a better life, a house as we had planned, and here she was giving me the chance to make things right.
“You’re my wife,” Frosty said. “What’s yours is mine.”
I didn’t like his raising his voice at me; it always put me in mind of my mother and her confrontational nature. This time I opened my mouth. “Heck with you,” I said.
His calloused hand grazed my cheek in a slap. Irene was watching and began to lash out at her own face.
“Now see what you’ve done.”
I attacked Frosty with my arms, scratching his face, and rushed over to Irene to stop the self-slapping. Frosty in his usual petulant, pathetic manner sulked out of the apartment only to return with an apology. Same routine. Some things just never change. I was done.
The next day when I received the inheritance cheque, we drove by the dream house around the corner from the Complex Arms. It was still standing there, waiting for me. We investigated its merits, the financing, but we didn’t qualify for a mortgage.
Both Frosty and the bank convinced me we couldn’t financially afford a house, but a mobile home was within our reach and could be purchased outright with Mona’s inheritance, and we would at least have a roof over our heads. It would be a means to leave the Complex Arms and all the complications that new incoming tenants were going to bring. A move would also allow us to be closer to nature, which I knew would make Irene happy. Frosty said he would find a job, and with his sworn promise I gave in to his lafstyle once again on the condition that he build a root cellar with an ironclad lid that would accommodate the three of us should a tornado strike again. Maybe I would grow to love mice and wolves. At least wolves take care of their elderly.
One Sunday we drove into the country and came across the Arboreau Trailer Park not far from Jasper. The mountains always choked me — a claustrophobic malaise would set in if I got too close to them — but they were far enough into the horizon from the t
railer park that I could manage. I would have preferred to be near water, move to English Bay in Vancouver, but who could afford a million-dollar outhouse by the ocean?
“Think about it, Adeen. We can get a dog for Irene. She’ll have fun playing with the other kids. Just like at Evergreen,” Frosty tried to convince me.
I didn’t want anything like Evergreen. Irene, if she were like normal kids her age, would have been dating by then. She no longer played with anything, including pets, but instead spent days sleeping under the influence of her medications, sometimes reclining on a wooden park bench that we rescued from the garbage dump, restored, painted fire engine red, and set in back; other times, she would doze off in front of the TV, even on the hottest summer day when it was much more pleasant to be outside.
The Arboreau Trailer Park wasn’t so bad once I became accustomed to that way of living. Miss Pauline, my neighbour, became a good friend. Other residents of the park seemed fine; although, there was the occasional drunken party or fireworks thrown in on a hot Saturday night. I had a lovely deck with annuals cascading from planters and window boxes, tomatoes growing in jumbo containers. Best of all, the community was enclosed by forest and a density of foliage that hid the outside world. I liked the privacy. I had come to terms with Mother Nature and she had come to terms with me, leading my broken spirit to an oasis of tranquility in my hikes around Hinton. I had to look on the bright side.
This one day, on a walk along the Athabasca River Front Park near Hinton, I was asleep in a puddle of sunlight when something annoying twittered around my face. I suspected a fly or mosquito and swatted air several times, but it was still there. I remember rolling over to my right side, curled up like a fiddlehead, then stretching out on my back. I squinted through the angle of slender tall greenery, my hands a visor against the sun’s reflection. I saw it: a monarch butterfly flickering in and out of the ornamental grasses. I lay still and followed its course until it hovered over me, landing on my stomach, and there it sat for a second. “Mona,” I whispered, “Mona.” Then the monarch flew away as though it had just wanted to drop by to ease my grief, to assure me that everything would be okay. Won’t tell Frosty this time because, once again, he’ll spoil everything, saying I dreamed it. I didn’t. My hike was over.
I drove back to the rhythm of Carrie Underwood singing “Before He Cheats.” I used to hate western music and now I listened only to the country station; all that heartbreak and divorce and cheating hearts and cowboys who subjugate their mates. I was an Albertan by osmosis now without realizing it. I no longer felt like the girl who left Montreal. I no longer slipped my hard-earned cash into expensive Gucci shoes when I was flush with money; instead, I wore comfortable, practical cowboy boots and faded baby blue jeans torn at the knees that said, “This girl has character.”
That evening after Frosty and Irene settled down in front of the TV, I sat on the red bench and revisited my day. Miss Pauline was already out there contemplating the flat, leaden sky, awaiting night, which at this time of year was always late on arrival.
“We come full circle eventually,” I told Miss Pauline, not looking at her. “Here I am living in a trailer park again.”
“There are worse things, sweetie,” she said.
Anyhow, that’s the story there.
PRESCRIPTION: BURNS
With the defiance of a dying old man, Frosty spits the half-smoked cigarette in an arc onto the nearby grave of wilting petunias in the front yard. Bull’s eye! Adeen lumbers to retrieve the stub, hobbling like a three-legged dog fetching a stick.
“You’re going to start a fire. And then where will we be? Answer me that. Where will we be, huh, Frosty? Where will we be? You only think of yourself all the time.”
He guns a lighter to another cigarette, relaxes his head back against the patio chair, and launches a line of fumes toward the unblemished blue sky. Frosty follows the smoke with his eyes as it diffuses into the heat of the day, inhales another drag of tobacco, then convulses into a fit of coughing, gasping for air. He reaches for a Kleenex in the pocket of his baggy shorts and wipes the spittle from his chin.
“I’m not the maid here, you know,” Adeen bellows and slams the collection of butts into the compost bin behind their mobile home.
Frosty’s hands dangle over the deck rail until his limp wrists go numb and the burning cigarette drops from his fingers onto the parched lawn below. He jerks his head, vaults from his thoughts, and hurries inside, the screen door halting for a split second before springing shut.
It is another weekend of silence, another weekend when words fail between them. Once again his increasing moodiness puts a damper on their relationship. There was a time, earlier in their twenty-five-year marriage, when his poetic disposition and attentiveness were endearing; after all, her chattiness and outgoing personality offset his more introverted nature. Later, she would find herself in survival mode, dissociating herself from his occasional emotional attacks, which increasingly decimated her self-esteem. Now, she falls into her own pattern of melancholy and out-silences him. Two can play the same game. When Frosty requests a truce, usually after the third day, he’ll say, “Do you want me to leave?”
She always shakes her head and feels her eyes well up. He has gouged her spirit over time until now she feels nothing. She blames her escalating melancholy on the tornado and Mona’s death.
Adeen now looks to the skies to reassure a safe day and busies herself killing dandelion weeds with a steak knife. She wipes the drip of perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand, picks her nose in the absent-minded way children do when distracted, and slides her hand down the side of her shorts to wipe away the offending mucus.
“I should have left him a long time ago. A long time ago. Yessiree, a long time ago.”
Over the years, it grew into another mantra. If Adeen said it often enough, she could be convinced that the best solution for everyone was for her to leave Frosty and Irene; revise her life on some tropical island where no one knew her name. The thought seriously crossed her mind when she received Mona’s inheritance cheque. But she was a chicken shit, just as Mona rightfully nicknamed her as a kid. Chicken shit Adeen. Dare you to steal that lipstick. Take a risk sometimes. No skin off my back. Go ahead.
Adeen sniffs the air and searches the skies again. She follows the acidic odour to the patch of dry grass smouldering where Frosty discarded his cigarette.
“Damnit! That man is going to kill us all with his carelessness. I swear.” She pulverizes the stub with the heel of her sandal, burying it into the cracked soil.
“EEEE-eeeeeeeee.”
Adeen ignores the familiar cry. The screen door screeches open.
“It’s the kid. She needs diaper changin’,” Frosty says, his hand signalling the interior. A familiar complaint.
“I’ll be there. Can’t you see I’m busy here? You almost started a fire.”
“Don’t think she can make it. Stinks.”
The screen door sways back and forth, back and forth, before finally stopping shut. He brushes by her in a rush of rebellion and is already on the gravel road, striking the fragments of stone with his boot, racking up a dust storm with each kick.
“Where you going?”
“Gettin’ smokes.”
The weekend silence broken.
“You promised to quit after the last pack. You promised. You have cancer, remember! Cancer,” she repeats. “Cancer,” she repeats and repeats like an echo.
But he delivers a backhanded wave as if to say “drop dead” and continues on his merry mission until he disappears around the corner. His treatments have ended, and now there is just the wait. He is dying, no doubt. How many months, days, minutes remain? Lung cancer shows no tender mercies. Adeen thrusts the knife into the ground and attends to an adult daughter who still wears diapers.
Red-faced and sweating from the flaming sun, breathless from the repetitive motion of pulling weeds, Adeen relaxes in a patio chair, scrapes dry elbows on the tabl
e. She juts out her neck and stretches it, as though she is in the midst of chin exercises. She shuts her eyes against the unforgiving heat and quiet of the afternoon; not even a birdsong, only the faint annoyance of flies buzzing around the compost and garbage in back. Summer days in Alberta, before branches of dogwood leaves turn amber and the first frost creeps across the land.
Miss Pauline now on her patio lobs a Popsicle over the fence.
“Got the internet going. Wanna come see?”
Adeen opens her eyes, feels the cold compress of the Popsicle on her lap.
“Miss Pauline. Hey, okay. I’ll just make sure Irene is okay and I’ll be right over.”
Irene is asleep, snoring away. Adeen locks the doorknob and deadbolt so Irene will remain indoors until she or Frosty returns. It is the only way she can ensure her daughter’s safety. An adult playpen.
Miss Pauline was one of the first in the trailer park to purchase a computer and just subscribed to Telus for internet service.
“Come here. Have a look-see. You won’t believe this.” Miss Pauline shows her over to the corner desk in the dining room area. She clicks away at various icons and googles a dating service.
“Now, when Frosty goes, you come here and we’ll find you a man of wealth to take care of you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Or look, we can pretend we are widowed and we can chat on the web with a handsome engineer from Arizona.”
“Oh, give me a break, Miss Pauline. Shut that thing down and let’s play Scrabble.”
“Or, lookie here.” And on screen, Adeen views a couple, completely naked, having sex. She can’t take her eyes of the erotic image.
“Rosemary would have loved this.”
“Rosemary?”
“One of my tenants from the Complex Arms. I used to babysit her dying husband when she went out for errands or appointments. One day I happened to look inside a drawer of her nightstand and I found these sex tapes. Slipped one in, and that” — she points to the screen — “is what I saw. I never would have thought Rosemary was into pornography.”