by Jan Redford
I pulled Sam out with me and propped him on my hip. “Kim said to just tie him up if they weren’t home.”
Grant grabbed the red Hudson’s Bay blanket from the back seat. He spread it out in the doghouse, smoothed it, tucked in the ends so they wouldn’t get wet when it rained. My throat throbbed and squeezed shut as I watched him set up Chaba’s new home.
I dropped the tailgate. “Come on, Chaba!” He looked at me but didn’t move from his spot in the corner of the box. Jenna peered through the rear window, her fingers crammed in her mouth, her special blanket balled up in her fist.
“Come on, Chaba.” I patted the tailgate. My voice quavered, came out in almost a whisper. Chaba didn’t move. I tried again, but he only looked at me and whined.
“Chaba, come!” I started at Grant’s booming voice beside me.
Chaba stood slowly and paused.
“Come on, baby,” I said softly. I was crying now. I couldn’t help it. With my twenty-month-old pressed against me, and my five-year-old glaring from the truck.
Chaba lumbered toward me, licked the hand I extended to him. For three years we’d been in the bush together, tromping up and down logging blocks. I’d screamed at him when he’d chased after a fawn, held him while the neighbours pulled porcupine quills from his muzzle with pliers. Guilt needled into my gut like bark beetles and I buried my face in his fur, sobbing. Sam stopped squirming. His hand crept into my hair and he stroked my head.
Grant’s hand was on my shoulder for a moment, brief enough that it could have been my imagination, or an accident, then he was lifting Sam out of my arms. I pulled my face out of Chaba’s fur and my eyes locked with Jenna’s. Her mouth was open, her fingers forgotten, the blanket dropped out of sight. Shock had replaced her anger, and I saw what she saw reflected in the glass. Wild, dark hair sticking out in all directions, my face shining wet in the sun.
I stepped back, my reflection disappearing from the glass, pulled Chaba’s collar till he was on the ground beside me. I walked him over to his doghouse, knelt down, clipped the carabiner to his collar, put my arms around him.
“Come on, Jan. You’re just torturing yourself. We’ve got to get driving.” Grant’s voice had lost its edge. He sounded defeated. He’d told me I was ruining everything we’d built together. Our home. Our family. That we had a good life. I stumbled to the truck and crawled in beside my silent children. Chaba yipped and whined.
As we started down the driveway, I twisted around in the seat, peered through the back window. Chaba charged after the truck but got jerked back when he reached the end of the rope. I put my face in my hands and choked out big, heaving sobs.
34
ONLY FOUR YEARS
“Please, Jan, just leave. Sam will be fine. Really.”
Tina, the daycare worker, tried to peel my son from my hip but he seized my shirt and wouldn’t let go. I watched her hands pry one tiny finger open at a time.
“Come on, Sam. Let’s go to the window and wave bye-bye to Mommy!” Tina finally got the last of Sam’s fingers unfastened, took his bottle from me. “Then we’ll have story time! You love story time, don’t you, Sam!” Her voice dripped with enthusiasm, exclamation after exclamation.
She pulled him from my hip, then turned and walked toward the front room with Sam howling and twisting in her arms, reaching for me. His blond hair stood straight up, his face seeped snot and tears and saliva.
“Thanks, Tina,” I called after her. My voice broke. What was I thanking her for? Ripping my child from my arms? I took a deep breath. I could not afford to cry now. I had to get to school.
In approximately two hours, after my first class, I would run straight to the pay phone in the Education building, phone the daycare, and they’d tell me he was just fine, playing happily with the other kids. Settled down as soon as I’d left. I’d been phoning them after class for two weeks, and I’d probably phone every day for the next four years. I wanted to set up a video camera in each corner to see if they were telling the truth.
The screams followed me out the door. I looked back to see his face glued to the window. I forced a smile, curled my fingers in another wave. There should have been a course at the university called Mother Guilt 101.
I looked at my watch. Shit! Late again. Wiping my face on my sleeve, I hurried to the car. Jenna was in her booster seat in the back, clutching her blanket and sucking her fingers. She looked at me through droopy eyelids with her best pissed-off look. At least she suffered quietly.
“I’m going to be late for kindergarten,” she slurred through her spit. She was all dolled up in her pink princess dress and multi-coloured knee socks from her auntie. I wasn’t sure how she’d turned out like this—I lived in fleece sweaters, jeans and hiking shoes—but I’d given up worrying what her kindergarten teacher thought of me. I was picking my battles.
We headed west, toward the red-brick school a few blocks away. In a couple of hours one of the daycare workers would pick up a half dozen morning kindergarten kids, including Jenna, and lead them all in a row holding on to a rope back to the daycare, like little ducklings behind a mother duck, or the Pied Piper.
At the door to her classroom, Jenna handed me her blanket. Her class was seated in the story corner at the back of the room. There were so many of them, a wriggling sea of four- and five-year-olds. The teacher counted, un, deux, trois, quatre, and tapped her wooden pointer on the calendar, then reached out to gently pull one little boy, who seemed to have no idea of personal space, off the legs of another. She looked up, smiled and greeted Jenna. This would be me in four years. A teacher. I’d have to keep a stash of Valium in my desk.
Jenna’s little friend, Breanne, one ponytail planted on the top of her head like a water fountain, wiggled her fingers at us. In the first week of school, this harmless-looking child had told Jenna she was going to chop off her head if she didn’t play with her.
“Breanne wouldn’t chop off your head,” I’d told her, trying to picture a five-year-old with a machete sticking out of her pink Pocahontas backpack. “She’s your friend.”
“She said she’d get her big sister to do it,” Jenna had wailed. I didn’t know how much was true and how much was a stall tactic, but it had led to our first meeting with the teacher—in week one of her first year of school.
As Jenna walked away from me, her face deadpan, I said, “I love you, sweetie,” quietly, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed. She sat down next to Breanne, turned back and saw me lingering in the doorway. She raised her hand in a little wave.
* * *
—
My attempt to sneak into the classroom, quiet like a bunny, failed. The heavy door slammed shut behind me like it was loaded on lead springs, and about thirty heads turned to watch me take my seat. The silver-haired professor paused and looked up over his glasses from his papers, smiled briefly. My face felt hot but everyone’s attention was already on the front of the room.
“Could you please pass your essays to the front?”
I took the stack of papers from the guy behind me. They were all typed up on computers. I looked down at my own white-out-blotched handwriting on lined paper. I hadn’t been able to get to the computer lab at the library to type it. When I passed the pile to the girl in front of me, I noticed she had written hers out too.
“Thank God I’m not the only one with a handwritten paper,” I whispered to her. She looked at me like I was a bug, or worse, a thirty-two-year-old mother in a first-year education class. She could easily have been in grade ten.
“How long did you spend on it?” I continued, wondering what I’d do if she completely ignored me.
“On what?” Her voice exuded boredom.
“On your paper.”
“I wrote it on the bus on the way here. It’s only worth one percent. I wasn’t even going to write it.”
I stared at her. I’d spent hours on it: a conservative guess would have been about eight. It was a critical review of a chapter on “school culture” and I could barely
understand what the author was going on about, let alone critique it. It made me think I should study factual content like geography so I wouldn’t spread my stupidity around for the whole world to see.
“What kind of moron assigns eight one-percent papers?” She didn’t bother to whisper.
I forced a smile and slouched back in my seat but I wanted to shake the little sloth and scream, Do you realize how lucky you are to be here? She was probably living at home with parents who paid her tuition, bought and cooked her food, and did her laundry.
“…oral presentations will start next Monday….” The prof described another assignment.
Hummingbird-sized butterflies slammed into the walls of my stomach. An oral presentation? In front of all these people? I got a flash of eight-year-old me in Whitehorse, up in front of a huge audience to sing my first and only solo. The piano music started, I opened my mouth, and froze. In spite of hours of practice, I couldn’t remember one word to “Under the Lollipop Tree.” I’d run from the room crying.
I stared at my three-ringed notebook. What had possessed me to go into education when I had a phobia about public speaking?
* * *
—
“Do you see the symbolism here?”
Grant thumped his big hand on my wooden desk, the one I’d bought for my first attempt at university, after Dan died.
“What are you talking about?” I was hunched over my French essay.
“Well, think about it. Look at your desk. Look at our bed.”
I looked around the room. Everything seemed in order. A little cluttered, not much space to move around between the bed, the desk and the dresser, but nothing out of the ordinary.
“Don’t you see it?”
I put my highlighter down and sighed. All I wanted was for him to go downstairs and not bug me for the next little while. I had four mid-term exams in the next two weeks and a French essay due in two days.
“The desk is symbolically cutting me off from the bed!” he said, as though he’d just pulled a rabbit out of his hat.
The desk was wedged up against the bed, the first thing you bumped into as you walked into the bedroom. I’d moved it there so I could manoeuvre around the bed and look out the window.
“That’s stupid. I just moved stuff where it fits.”
Muffled voices rose and fell in the other unit through the wall, followed by thumps up the stairs, like someone dragging a body.
“How do you live like this? Stuck to other people. No windows. Crap everywhere.”
“I have a window.” I pointed to the window that looked out on the grassy communal area and the sandbox Sam had mistaken for a urinal at first. The view didn’t compare to the view of the mountains in the Blaeberry, but it was my view and my window and my house. I could drink water right out of the tap, no more hauling it from town; I could shower for ten minutes and the well would never run dry; I could turn the heat up on a thermostat with one finger instead of dragging the kids out into the snow to chop and haul wood.
That morning, Grant had asked Jenna what she thought of her new house and she’d said, “I love it!” Grant had just grunted.
Jenna already had a perfect pair of friends, seven-year-old identical twins called Amanda and Cassandra. If one couldn’t come over, the other could, and since neither of us could tell them apart, it was like having a best friend who was always at her disposal. A few months earlier their mother, Karen, who was already becoming a good friend, had packed up the twins and their nine-year-old brother in the middle of the night and left in a taxi. When she realized they’d all starve on child support from a guy who filled vending machines for a living, she’d applied to nursing school. We’d be neighbours for the next four years. I was hoping if she could do it with three kids, I could do it with two.
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t live like this.” He circled around me and went out the door. I shook my head and stared out the window, then shouted at his retreating back, “What the hell is your problem?”
I hunched back over my desk, wrote a couple of sentences, looked a word up in my French-English dictionary, then kept writing, but Grant had messed up my concentration. And now he was banging pots as he rummaged around in the kitchen. I was so primed for his anger I could almost feel it radiate up through the floor like heat from our wood stove.
I reread my paragraph, crumpled the paper and threw it across the room where it landed noiselessly beside a scattering of other balled-up pieces. I needed a computer. I’d calculated that I could buy a second-hand one after Christmas with the hundred dollars a month Mom was giving me out of her old age pension.
Grant started up the vacuum. A few moments later Sam was tugging on my shirt with an empty bottle in his mouth and his arms out. “Up, Mommy.” This was the fourth time Jenna or Sam had interrupted me. Grant had even vacuumed under my feet earlier on. With Sam on my hip, I pounded down the stairs, yanked the plug of the vacuum out of the wall. Jenna looked up from her video.
“You’re supposed to watch the kids. I can’t get this essay done if you keep letting them come upstairs.”
“This place is a pigsty. My feet stick to the floor.”
A shiny film covered the linoleum of my tiny kitchen. Sam had chucked his sippy cup of apple juice at the cupboard the other day and I’d wiped it up with a cloth, but our shoes still peeled off the floor like Velcro.
“Can’t you take them out to the playground? This paper’s due Monday and I still have to get to the library to type it.” Actually, I still had to write it.
Grant let the vacuum hose crash to the floor. “Come on, you guys. Let’s go outside. Mommy’s got more important things to do than look after her kids.”
I flinched. “Just give me an hour. And you have to stay with them. You can’t just…”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to look after my kids.” He grabbed Sam from my arms. Sam started to cry and reach for me. “See? He needs his mother.”
Jenna hopped off the couch and turned up the volume on the TV. The orchestra music swelled, filling the room, as the prince twirled Sleeping Beauty around and around.
“Jenna, turn that down!” Grant roared. He turned back to me. “She shouldn’t be watching so much TV.”
“She wouldn’t be if you’d take them out to play.”
“Jenna!” He was losing control, I could hear it in his voice, but Jenna kept her back to her father. He took three giant steps to the TV with Sam under his arm and slammed the power button. The room went quiet except for Sam’s crying. Grant put him on the couch with Jenna.
“This is bullshit. How long are you planning to keep this up for?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at you guys. Sam’s always sick from that goddamned daycare. Jenna’s stuck to her blanket. You’ve lost so much weight your clothes are hanging off you.”
I looked down at my jeans, pulled them up. I couldn’t seem to relax enough to eat. I was always running: from daycare to school to university to home, my metabolism zipping along at a million miles an hour. My face was hollowed out, just like it had been after Dan died.
Sam looked back and forth between me and his father, snot and tears running down his face. Jenna stared at the blank TV, dry-eyed.
It was a struggle to maintain eye contact with Grant, to not cringe and look away. “If you’d just help me,” I whispered.
“Help you? All I do is help you. I drive here and clean for two days then drive back to the bush to make more money for you to go to school.”
“I need help with the kids, not the house.”
“You need to be looking after them yourself.”
Sam was howling now. He crawled off the couch and stumbled toward me.
“I am looking after them!” I couldn’t get any air into my lungs.
Sam wrapped himself around my leg while Grant stepped into the kitchen, picked up a pot with hardened noodles stuck to it. Jenna, Sam and I jumped as he threw it into the steel sink with a crash.
&n
bsp; “Look at this fucking place! Every time I come here it looks the same!”
“I don’t have time! I don’t have time to breathe!” My veins thudded in my ears, in time with my heart.
“Then come home and look after your goddamned family!”
I couldn’t believe I’d felt homesick twenty-four hours ago, waiting for him to arrive.
“It’s all about you, isn’t it? What about us?” His words pummelled me. I fought the urge to duck.
Jenna stood up on the couch, clapped her hands over her ears, squeezed her eyes shut and screamed, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She kept screaming. Sam clamped harder around my leg, choking on big shuddering sobs.
“What do you mean ‘what about us’? I’m here. I’m still their mother. I pick them up every day at five. I’m with them all weekend, all night, all morning. I’m not the only mother that has a fucking life, you know.”
“What kind of mother lets strangers raise her kids, for chrissake?” His voice was quiet, controlled. It sounded like a touché, like he knew the whole community of loggers and back-to-the-land friends in Golden were rallying behind those words. Several couples had voiced their disapproval.
Something let loose inside me. It was too much. Leaving my home. Leaving the mountains. Giving up Gus and Chaba. Being on my own with the kids. Here I was living my dream, but it was more like an LSD-induced psychosis. As though some big hand had just plucked us all up in mid-fight from a living room with a mountain view and plunked us—still squabbling and screaming—into another living room three hours away, one with a red-brick-wall view. Going to school was supposed to transform me, but nothing had changed. And Grant was going to keep putting up roadblock after roadblock until I gave in and came home.
“I hate you!” The words of a trapped teenager burst out of my mouth. I was transported back to Munster, like I’d never left.
I had to get away from this man, but I couldn’t move. Sam was clinging to me, sobbing. I shook my leg, like I was shaking off a Jack Russell terrier. I shook until Sam loosened his grip and sat heavily on the floor on his diaper, then I turned and ran up the stairs, away from my family.