It was the middle of October 1981, and seventeen-year-old Rainey was beginning Grade 12 at a new school. Through what turned out to be some sidewalk arrangement between her mother and one of their new neighbours, it was agreed that the neighbour’s daughter, June, would show up every morning to walk Rainey to school. Rainey hadn’t been informed of this plan, so she thought it was a little weird when a thirteen-year-old Chinese girl appeared at her door at 8:45 a.m. to accompany her that first morning. Fortunately, Rainey was not fazed by much, and June turned out to be all right. She came on time and didn’t mind that they walked in silence.
This new school was more or less like the last one. The kids had different faces, but they were the same jocks, cheerleaders, losers and stoners that existed at the other school. Rainey was still a loner, something she couldn’t change even if she wanted to. Arriving at school over a month after the fall term had started meant everybody was already settled in their social stations and lunchroom positions. She could tell they were curious about her—the fact that she sported a crewcut certainly set her apart. She also never smiled, didn’t like to look anybody in the eye. Walking through the unfamiliar halls, Rainey didn’t feel either comfortable or uncomfortable. She was used to the sensation of numbness and didn’t even mind it when the kids stared at her.
After a week or so, when Rainey finally asked why she always came knocking, June shrugged and said her parents made her. They wanted Rainey to feel welcome. Rainey wondered if they’d considered that not only was she more than three years older than June, and that they didn’t even go to the same school, June’s middle school being all the way across the field from her high school. Still, every morning, her giant canvas knapsack strapped across her chest, June dutifully trekked the five doors down, rang the doorbell and mumbled, “Hi, Lorraine. You ready?”
Rainey had a fleeting thought that maybe her mother paid June to come every morning to make sure she went to school. Maybe June was in fact a thirty-year-old private detective or a really short security escort. Rainey knew that with Chinese people, you could never tell how old they were. Sometimes June’s best friend, Josie, came with her to Rainey’s door. The two of them were like the twins from The Shining. They looked identical and sounded identical. Their private conversations sounded like a foreign language, with made-up words, inside jokes and knowing looks passed between them. Rainey was less than impressed on the days she had two private detective escorts to school. Other times, when Josie was off doing one of her many jobs, it was just Rainey and June.
On one of those fall mornings almost chilly enough to wear a ski jacket, as she and June passed the desolate house on Winifred Street, Rainey finally decided to ask June about it. The house wasn’t exceptional, the same as most of the houses on the street, but it had no blinds, a shingle was waving in the autumn wind like a loose tooth, and the grass in front was overgrown. It was the only house to stand empty and neglected in a neighbourhood where people had so much pride of ownership, snipping and raking their front lawns within an inch of their lives.
June looked surprised at the question. Rainey rarely said more than a word or two. “It’s one of the parent suicide houses, and it’s haunted—who’d ever want to live in it? Duh!” Then in an instant, June’s face turned red. “Um, what I mean is . . . um . . .” She squinted as she glanced sideways at Rainey. Rainey didn’t know June at all, but she suspected that June had been told to treat her especially delicately. She kept her face placid, and they walked the rest of the way to school in silence. Parent suicides? She didn’t know what June was talking about, but she was intrigued.
At the new school, Rainey didn’t talk to anyone, so her second conversation of the day, like a bookend, would come in the evening while her mom hurried around the kitchen, putting together dinner. Between the chopping and stirring, doing her best to be engaged and make eye contact, her mom would ask her questions. There wasn’t ever much to tell. Rainey fed her one-word answers to questions about her classes that would at least prove she’d been going.
Her mom filled the gaps with chatter about her new job at the law office, where she was a secretary. She had been a legal secretary up north too. Her mom warbled on like a budgie with exaggerated enthusiasm. “Everybody at work is so nice. We all eat lunch together. There’s a lunchroom! They even have one of those new microwave ovens, which means I can make hot food! And the way the office is decorated is so nice. Burgundy vinyl couches in the reception. Can you imagine? Proper seating like it’s a living room! And you know the best part? There is an intercom system, which means I don’t have to walk back and forth passing calls and messages. I can stay at my desk and tell them over the phone! Can you believe that? I get so much more work done that way.”
Her mom talked and talked as if she didn’t know what would happen if she stopped. She knew her mom was trying and, entirely for her sake, Rainey let her continue in her nervous energy. It had been her mom’s idea to move. A fresh start, she had said, would be good for them.
Rainey didn’t care. There were more people here than in the last place they lived, which was heavy on cows and less so on teenagers. It didn’t matter where they were. The blankness inside her had followed her, and she figured it always would no matter where they ended up. Her mother didn’t understand it as blankness. She assumed, like the doctor, that it was simply sadness—if sadness could be simple, like a heavy veil that comes on and nudges you into a pit, but eventually, it lifts and you find a way to climb out and get back to normal. A difficult state but a temporary one. She knew her mom was always looking for signs that Rainey had fallen. At the end of every dinner, her mom asked her, as if the whole ritual of chirp-dinner-chirp was merely a preamble for this one moment, “Rainey, have you taken your medication today?”
If Rainey had been someone who had things to rebel against, who needed to test her boundaries to assert her independence and take a stance in the world, she could have gotten away with anything. But she wasn’t like that. When Rainey shaved off all her hair, her mother didn’t even flinch; she told her it looked darling and followed by cutting her own. She didn’t shave it to the scalp like Rainey had, but she did cut her butt-length hair to above her shoulders. Her mother claimed it made her look like Helen Reddy and broke out into the chorus of “I Am Woman.”
It wasn’t like she was trying to get attention or call for help. Rainey didn’t even know why she’d shaved her head. After her father died, she had spotted his old razor in the medicine cabinet one day and thought doing something rash would make her feel something. Most everything of her dad’s had been cleared out of the house. The clothes had all gone to charity. Gone were his books, his smell. The razor had somehow escaped her mother’s purge.
She was doing it—first cutting the long strands that were not quite to her bum like her mother’s but most of the way down her back. Then she rubbed baby oil onto her head and pulled the razor across her scalp. She had felt wonderful. Her heart was beating sure and strong, and she sweated with the effort of the task. It was the most excited she had felt in a long time. But afterward, when her head was clean of hair, and her sweatshirt bore a tangled mess of it, the emptiness returned. She looked in the mirror, her eyes appearing huge in what now seemed like a tiny head. Shadows hung underneath her eyes, the colour of spilled ink on paper. Devoid of hair, she could see the shape of her skull. Rainey was surprised to see how thin she had gotten, the sharp angles of her cheekbones and jaw. Her skin was ghostly pale, and when her eyes trailed down from her face to her neck to her arms, she paused there, noting that her arms were so white, they seemed alien, as if absent of blood, of life. That was when she brought the razor to her wrist. At the time, she’d admired the hue of deep scarlet blood that rose against her too pale skin. It was so beautiful. She admired it and let the red spread on her canvas of white. For a moment, she felt something like inspiration, like a deep swallow of water after being parched and not even realizing the thirst after bearing it for so long.
The do
ctor at the hospital kept asking her why—something murky and dark and deep must have happened. She couldn’t explain how it felt when she had made the cuts. It wasn’t death that she was choosing. Quite the contrary, it had made her feel alive.
The doctor persisted, inquiring about her father’s death. It was a place to start, but Rainey was vacant of emotion, like a hotel filled with empty rooms. The doctor asked her about life before her father died, and she thought about how she sounded typical when you looked at the facts. She had been on the verge of starting junior high; she’d gotten her period for the first time; she had friends. And right up to his heart attack, her father had loved her, and she remembered that love, how tangible it had felt, like a morsel of the best cake, the sweetness meeting all the right taste buds in her mouth, lingering long after.
Five years after her father’s death, Rainey still felt outside of things, like she was separated from everybody by a pane of glass. Maybe she had felt this way even before her father died, and maybe the feeling just thickened after. She couldn’t remember. When she tried to recall the past, it ran like a slow-motion film reel, skipping in places and full of holes. The only time she almost cracked was when her mother had broken down and cried—something Rainey had never seen her do even when her father died of a heart attack—as Rainey lay on the white sheets of her hospital bed, her wrists tightly bandaged. Everything was so bright and blinding, reminding her of her arms, and she struggled to make her eyes stay open. Her mom’s sobs filled the brightness, sharpening its intensity. She made a feeble attempt to tell her mother that she didn’t want to die, but the words were stuck because she didn’t know.
Now her days revolved around a new school, her mother’s forced cheer and medication that she never took. She flushed it down the toilet every morning. The pills made it hard to walk, talk, think, as if she were even more dead inside than she already felt. She didn’t tell her mother this because she didn’t want to break her mother’s heart again. If she could go through the motions of living, she hoped it would be enough. Some days, it was. Some days, she wished the glass walls around her would smash into pieces, and she could step away from the splinters and feel whole again. It had been so long since she had felt anything that the years prior felt like someone else’s memories.
The day after their discussion about the house, when June came to pick her up, Rainey was ready with her questions. June tilted her head in suspicion at Rainey’s sudden need to talk.
“You said something about parent suicides yesterday. Like, plural. When we bought our house, it was a quick sale, so we got to move in after two weeks instead of two months, which the real estate agent said was unusual. Did someone kill himself in there too?”
June nodded quickly, looking as if she was relieved that she could finally tell the truth. “Uh-huh, my softball coach blew his brains out in the basement. Some people say pieces of his brain are still stuck to the walls. Is it true?” June’s eyes bugged out wide.
“Oh . . . So that’s what’s on the walls . . . Hmm. Maybe I’ll show you sometime, June.”
They’d arrived at the point in the field between their two schools where they always parted. Rainey started to turn away. June put her arm out. “That’s not all. There were more—parents who killed themselves in our neighbourhood, I mean. At almost the same time! The houses took some time to sell. Like yours. And that other empty one, the Bevises’.”
Rainey turned back to June and considered the kid’s face. Could this be true? Rainey’s heart thumped, she realized, with excitement.
“I don’t know what happened. I still think about it even though no one wants to talk about it anymore.” June’s voice dropped to a whisper, and Rainey recognized the fear behind June’s eyes. She had seen it before. People had been afraid to talk to her after the razor incident. They didn’t understand why anyone would choose to die. Because of this fear, Rainey had never tried to explain to anyone the vividness of being close to death, how life paled in comparison.
“Tell me about the other ones.”
No longer interested in making the bell, June turned them around and took Rainey back into their neighbourhood on a tour up and down the streets and filled her in on their gruesome history.
“That house, the one I told you was haunted? That was Mrs. Bevis. Hung herself in the bathroom, I heard. No one will buy it because any time someone comes to look at it, the ghost of Mrs. Bevis slams doors and screams. It’s true. I heard it from my friend whose dad is a real estate agent. All the agents have given up trying to sell it. It freaks them out to have to go show that place. Mom said maybe her husband cheated on her? Mom said that because once Mrs. Bevis’s husband gave her the snake eyes. You know? The snake eyes? Yeah, I don’t either. It might be one of Mom’s Chinese things . . .”
They walked past a duplex with the garage door open. A teenager about Rainey’s age was sitting in the garage on a lawn chair, facing the street. He wasn’t doing anything but sitting, smoking, his eyes on them. A radio sat on the ground beside him, tinny sounds of AC/DC coming out. He only had on a lumber jacket even though the sky was white-grey with unshed snow. He had dark hair, wavy more than curly, which hung around his shoulders. It didn’t seem like he was interested in making the bell either.
June quickened her steps to get past the house, and gave a quick wave to the guy as they passed, and he nodded slowly back. After they had walked a few paces away, June whispered, “That was the second suicide. His mother drank bleach. Foamed from the mouth.” June twirled her finger beside her forehead and let her tongue loll out. She pointed out a house with closed curtains as the neighbourhood thief’s place. “Watch out for that Mrs. Johnson. She doesn’t come out much anymore, but tell your mom to keep her doors locked when you’re not home.” Rainey realized that her hunch was right, that June had a lot of information under her hat.
The minute school ended that day, Rainey ran home, threw down her bag and went down to the basement. It was colder down there than the rest of the house. She inspected the walls by running her hands across their smooth surfaces. No signs of brain. She sat cross-legged on the carpet in the middle of the room. The carpet was plush and still smelled new. She remembered the real estate agent had made a big deal about the wall-to-wall rug in the hard sell he gave Rainey’s mom. Now, knowing there’d been a brain explosion, it made sense. She stared up at holes left by nails and wondered what used to hang there, wishing the walls could talk.
It was macabre, Rainey knew, trying to connect with a space that had been home to a suicide, but she had been curious about death, had felt a kinship with it in a way others didn’t. Maybe it began even before her father’s death. When she was four and her cat got run over, she didn’t feel sadness as much as a feeling of completion, as though life had in some small way come full circle.
When she was seven and her granddad passed, Rainey let herself wonder what death felt like, even desiring to feel it for herself. She had taken her dad’s shovel and tried to dig a hole in their backyard vegetable garden, so she could lie in it like her granddad in his coffin. Her mother had found her asleep in a pit, curled in the fetal position among the tomatoes, dirt-smeared and weak from the sun. She did it again, even attempting to bury herself by pulling the soil over her body. She wanted to be enshrouded in complete darkness, until she couldn’t see or breathe or feel. Her parents finally got rid of the garden plot and covered it with stone tiles, calling it the new patio.
As she grew older, her thoughts often lingered on thoughts of death. When her father died, she tried to strangle herself with a belt, holding her breath with the hope that she would pass out. Maybe she would be able to see her dad and granddad. To her disappointment, she was never able to hold tight to the belt in the last moments. She hid the red welts on her neck with makeup and scarves.
At night, her dreams took her into other regions, layers of sheer veils lifting to reveal alternate worlds where she believed death resided. In these dreams, she grew weightless until she was ai
rborne, and she glided through magical starlit landscapes. The air in her dreams was always humid and warm. Shadows danced around her as if welcoming her to their realm. She would wake up with a start, believing that she’d been pulled back from death. Each time, she would be left with a lingering memory of the place: the ghostly silver light, the tinkling silence like music, and an ache to stay. Instead of emptiness, Rainey was convinced that death was full: a state of grace. The thought that her granddad and dad felt this comforted her.
She lay on the basement carpet and immediately felt warmth radiating from a place on the carpet to her left. She shuffled over to the spot and was instantly flooded with a feeling of relief. The baseball coach must have been standing right there when he ended it all. She felt a cascade of calm flow over her. Her blood coursed through her body; her skin flushed. It only lasted a few seconds, but she felt more alive than she’d felt in a long time, even more so than when she cut her arms. Alive to Rainey was a kind of humming in her body, a reminder that she was flesh and blood. She had expected to experience death as a black emptiness, but now she realized that the closer she got, the more alive she felt. She found this strange and wondered if this was the irony of death or its black humour. She sat up and wondered if she would feel this same way in the spots where others had ended their lives.
One afternoon some weeks later, right after the first snowfall, she was turning the corner in the north corridor at school and smacked into Mr. Lumberjack, the guy with the dead mother. She fell right on her ass from the force of the impact. He picked her up as if she were as light as a bird.
“Hey, be careful,” he said to her, still holding on to her arm.
She snatched herself out of his hand. “You be careful,” she retorted. She felt a rare flash of anger, like a small red spark hopping off her chest. She did not like being embarrassed and rarely felt it.
“You okay?” he asked.
That Time I Loved You Page 13