by Fran Kimmel
Why was it she wouldn’t answer even one question?
She turned her body, leaning against her door, and stretched her legs so her feet rested on my lap. Her toes were tinged with blue and I covered them with my hand. She was smiling at me, lip slightly curled. I tried to keep my eyes on the road.
“Maybe you just can’t stand the fact that he didn’t say goodbye,” she said.
Maybe. Maybe I was just mad he ended what we had without my say. It was hard to concentrate with this woman laid out before me.
We passed a car in the ditch, angled sideways, back end sticking up, and I slowed down and inched alongside, checking for bodies. Harmony ignored the vehicle, didn’t feign the slightest interest, and when I saw it was empty, we picked up speed again and kept going.
“You live around here, right? Or your brother does. Can I see your place?”
When we drove through the gate she looked from the sludge-filled swamp to the outhouse to the sagging trailer. Since Rita, I hadn’t brought another woman here. The place almost looked decent in its blanket of white. It had nearly stopped snowing, just leftover circles of flakes, the air so clear and new it sparkled. Harmony didn’t say a word. Before I was even out of the cab, she headed to the trailer. By the time I got inside, she was leaning against the sink, looking out the small window.
“Home sweet home,” I said loudly. The power was out again. I lit the candle from the knife drawer and put it on the table. “Just spin around once and you’ll have had the grand tour. Not much, I know. Now you’ve seen it, wanna go?”
“We just got here. I need a drink.” She smiled.
I went and got the bottle from the truck. When I got back, she was sitting at the table, wrapped in her blanket. I rummaged through the cupboard, found two glasses and poured us each a drink.
“Is this Matt?” She reached for the yellowed picture and held it against the flickering candle.
I nodded.
“Who is the woman?”
“Don’t know. Found the picture in his drawer.”
“She’s radiant.”
“Matt liked to pay for his women. Pay ’em and leave ’em.” “Not with this woman. Look at her. Look at your brother with her.”
She handed me the picture and I studied him closely again. This picture looked nothing like Matt, though it reminded me of the man I saw him to be. After my dad left for good, Matt used to come home to visit mother and me.
I can’t remember my mother’s face. White lace-up shoes. A checkered cotton dress. Mostly, it’s her voice I remember, husky sounding, like she always had a sore throat. Matt would show up for breakfast on Saturday mornings, sit at his usual spot in our crowded kitchen, and my mother would bring us each two soft-boiled eggs in tiny yellow cups. “Each day your bones need two,” she’d tell me in her gravelly voice, as though strong bones were what a boy most needed. Then she’d leave our table and disappear. For hours, for days. Matt never said too much during his visits. Didn’t fix stuff or give us money. But he kept coming back, regular as a paycheque, and for that I was grateful. When our mother died, just before Rita showed up, I’d drag my seventeen-year-old weary body to Matt’s trailer on Saturday mornings, and he’d feed me soft-boiled eggs.
“You hold onto this, Jake,” Harmony said, her finger touching mine as she pointed to the picture in my hand. “Don’t let this go.”
We drank Scotch in the semi-dark, Matt and his woman taking up the space between us. When Harmony told me she felt cold, I started to stand, to find her a dry blanket, and she stood too, and we bumped into each other in the cramped little space. She was shivering hard and I wrapped me around her as best I could. I wanted her, badly in fact, but I wanted to get it right more. I felt I could do this, whatever it was. This tenderness or softening or cautious unravelling. She buried her face to my neck, held my ribs in place. She smelled like the river, wet earth. My fingers caught in her hair. We pressed against each other until my knees felt weak.
“I need to go home,” she said finally, untangling from me, looking up with huge eyes.
I thought she was telling me she needed to go home. Home to her people. To doors that opened for friends and neighbours.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. The truck’s all gassed up. We’ll have the road to ourselves. We can drive all night.”
But she shook her head as though I was confused. “Just get me back to Rebee. She’ll be frantic.”
I instantly felt my stomach roll. “Of course we’ll get Rebee. You said she’d be sleeping.”
“She doesn’t sleep for shit, Jake.” Her voice had hardened again, those traces of softness all gone. “Just put me back where you found me, okay?”
We drove slowly back to the campground, plowing through the sludge. Harmony sat on her side of the cab, me on mine.
“Can you find my place again, now that you’ve been there? It’s twenty-seven kilometres from the campground to the trailer.”
She didn’t answer me, so I repeated, “Twenty-seven kilometres due east. You can clock it on your odometer.”
“I’m a good mother,” she whispered.
I pulled her towards me and wrapped one arm around her and she curled into my shoulder. We didn’t speak again. When I slid the truck to a stop, shadows flickered inside the van, Rebee’s candle or lantern, maybe. I wanted to open the door for Harmony, but she got out too fast. We met just as her hand started to turn the rusted handle of the van’s back door. I kissed her on the cheek like we were seventeen and her father was waiting on the other side. But it was Rebee who waited. Her almond eyes locked onto mine from behind the frosty window, then disappeared.
I went to the truck and pulled out the thermos, but when I came back to the van, Harmony was already inside. I knocked on the door, and knocked again. Finally, there was nothing left for me to do but go. Rebee’s rosehips jumped when I slammed the truck door. They still dangled from my mirror, dark and withered now, like a string of tired eyes. They had that trapped-inside-the-nightmare look, like Rebee. Tonight I was the cause of her bad dreams, but I had the feeling it happened a lot for her. My tires hurled dirty chunks of snow muck as they ground out and away. At the halfway point between the girls’ home and mine, I stopped the truck and stepped down, leaving the door open and the engine running. I limped stiffly down the middle of the highway, splashing slop, the hot chocolate thermos pressed to my chest. The pumpjack was out there, anchored to a field, but I couldn’t see that far, just the sheepish remains of a blustering storm, the bearded fence lines and toppling white wheat. I marched on, unscrewing the thermos top and pouring slowly. Brown liquid trickled to the ground and melted into a steaming row of splunks where the highway’s centre line should have been. Then I shook out the last drop and hurled that thermos into the night with everything my good arm would give.
* * *
I woke up already hung over, knotted and fluey. The dream leaked out of me and into the trailer’s stillness. It was the dream where I’m a little kid and my father drives me into the backwoods. He parks the truck at the locked gate and we walk along a thistled fence line to the place where the land drops. He lifts me over the barb wire first and then hurdles himself over effortlessly. I follow him straight into the deafening noise until I let his hand slip from mine, cover my ears and stumble and slip, dropping farther and farther behind. He’s ahead now, standing at the base of the towering pumpjack. The giant black paw screeches and swoops straight towards him. I think it’s going to pluck him from the earth and carry him upwards. Over and over, the angry paw swings. My father waves to come join him but my feet won’t move. The pumpjack screams so loud I can’t hear his words. In the dream, I turn and run along the endless row of thistles until the noise is just a faint rumble, and my father has disappeared. I wake up each time all prickling and breathless, then I lie in bed and go over that day until I can’t stand thinking about it anymore. The way I remember it, I stayed planted near the fence. My father came to me finally and led me by the hand t
o the truck. He wiped the snot from my nose with a hankie from his pocket. Gave me a stick of gum. Strapped on my seatbelt.
He might have been whistling, but his eyes gave him away. They told how he felt about the sissy boy beside him, afraid of a little oil.
In the trailer, the after-the-storm air tasted wet and smelled like Harmony. I lay on the mattress a long time, staring at the grimy ceiling. I stayed there until I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had an appointment with the detective. Farley was in his field, straddling a quad with his stubby legs, surveying the storm’s damage the way good farmers do. He waved at me wildly as I drove by.
Today, Elroy PI wore a bright yellow shirt that billowed over his chest and shoulders like a girl’s nightie. He sat on the other side of his desk, clucking into the phone while I waited, something about it’ll be all right dear and you’re better off now it’s out in the open. I wondered if the client was imaginary, if I was his only one, and he was whispering soothingly to a dial tone to prepare me for the worst.
“My apologies for that, Jake,” he said, slamming the phone down. “Thanks for coming in.”
“Have you found him yet?” Elroy PI had sugar sparkles glittering on his chin. No sign of the doughnut box.
“Unfortunately, no. He hasn’t turned up.”
I waited. Elroy pushed back his chair, stood, and came over to my side of the desk. He hopped up awkwardly and crossed one gangly leg over the other, grabbed onto his bony knee with both hands, leaned back and gave me a sympathetic look. I wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled.
“Don’t be disheartened, Jake. There’s good news in this. Morgues, hospitals, police stations — all clear. License checks — nothing. Airlines — nothing. I’ve been very thorough. Your brother doesn’t appear to be dead or dying.”
“So now what?”
“You mentioned Mexico. Technically speaking, Mexico makes it harder. They just don’t have the connections we can hook into from here.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“Do you want me to keep going?”
Elroy studied me, his eyes on mine unfaltering, rock steady. He looked like he’d toned it down a notch or two, grown up all of a sudden. I admitted there might be more to the man than his bumblebee outfit. Maybe I’d been itching to slap the sugar from his chin with a rolled up newspaper for all the wrong reasons. Maybe I hadn’t been listening. All I know is he was making me decide. Matt was probably not anywhere he didn’t want to be. My decision what I wanted to do with that.
“Could you get to Mexico?” I asked.
“I could and I would. It’s your decision.”
“For $500 a day, of course.”
“If we keep going, it’s the next logical step.”
There was nothing logical here. I handed him another wad of cash. It wasn’t hope I was buying, just time.
* * *
Dollhouses are hard to find. I ended up on the outskirts of High River at a converted country house called Charlie’s Dollhouse Shop. There was a swinging sign above the creaky summer cottage door with a painting of a two-storey home in the palm of a man’s hand. As I entered, an old guy’s voice chirped from the back, “Be with you in a minute.”
It was a small place, crammed from floor to ceiling with bins of miniatures in baggies. Little porcelain toilets and bathtubs, baby cradles, chairs that rock, candlesticks the size of matches, tea sets no bigger than a child’s fingernail. Black Labs with sticks in their mouths, cats curled into circles, mommies, daddies, children of all little sizes. Cows, ducks, pigs. Crabapple trees and evergreens, tiny wicker flower baskets. Charlie had all the fixings.
“And how can I help you today, sir?” He’d come out from behind a set of red curtains. He looked like a dollhouse man, miniature himself, maybe half my height. Stooped shoulders, tiny round wire spectacles, balding head, an old-fashioned red sweater and wool pants with suspenders. I picked up a little porcelain grandpa wrapped in plastic. They could be brothers. “Are you Charlie?” I dropped the man back to his bin and extended my arm to shake hands.
“The one and only. What can I do you for today?”
We shook hands. “Name’s Jake. Looking for a dollhouse.”
“Come to the right place. Got a model in mind?”
I stared at him blankly.
“Haven’t seen you in here before. New to the dollhouse world?”
I started to laugh when he said this, but he was perfectly serious, so I pretended to clear my throat.
“I’m not really taking it up. I just want a dollhouse. One dollhouse. Like that one over there.” I pointed to the table display in front of the cash register.
“Ah, the Hillsdale. She’s a beauty.”
He instructed me with a wave of his arm to follow him until we stood over the Hillsdale like God and his sidekick. The house was about as big as a beer cooler. Two storeys, blue-painted wood with a multi-gabled roof and a wraparound white gazebo porch. A solid country home for a farmer and his family.
“Straight out of the heartland and rich in tradition,” Charlie said.
I put my hands behind my back so as not to topple the whole thing over with my clumsy fingers, then I bent down and stuck my eye against the top-storey window. It was the farmer’s bedroom. Gold-etched pictures on the walls, white doilies on the dressers, a full length mirror in a wooden frame.
“One-inch-scale furniture, moving pieces, durable all wood, pre-cut, and easy assembly,” he said.
“I’ll take it. And everything inside too.”
“This is a display model, son,” he said. “They don’t come pre-assembled. You have to build the Hillsdale yourself.”
“I’ll take this one.”
“Sorry, that’s not how it works,” Charlie shuffled behind the counter. He eyed me up and down, sniffing for danger. I wondered if he had a gun under the shelf. I figured I had to level with him or these negotiations would go sour.
“Charlie, it’s for this kid I know. A friend of mine. She just had her twelfth birthday. Name your price.”
“Name’s Jake, you said?”
I nodded impatiently, wanting to get on with it.
“These houses need to be personally crafted by an adult — sanded, glued, painted. They’re one-of-a-kind collectibles. I can sell you the kit. Got two in the back.”
“I don’t have time to build her this house,” I said, reaching into my jeans pocket for my wallet.
“But that’s the whole point. It takes time to build one of these.”
“She’ll be leaving soon. The girl and her mother. It’ll be too late.” I was embarrassed by the way my words tumbled out.
“These houses are not toys.” Charlie took off his glasses and wiped them on a counter rag, then returned them to his face, hooking one ear at a time. His fingers were age-spotted and jittery, and I wondered how they could put together such delicate, tiny pieces. He studied me closely, cheeks crinkling, his eyes magnified behind his glasses, seeing everything.
Cracked ribs, swollen joints, bruised heart, the works.
“She’s old for her age,” I said, my voice barely more than a whisper.
“A lot of love went into this particular Hillsdale.”
“Like I said, just name your price.”
“You’re sure now.”
“Absolutely,” I replied, though I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
* * *
Last Monday, the physiotherapists told me I was finished. Our eight weeks were done. I called on Elroy PI and told him he was done too. He put his hand on my shoulder and said I was making the right choice.
Dr. Williamson handed me another prescription for Tylenol 3 this morning. I can breathe without wincing, but my left arm still can’t unscrew a jar of pickles.
I must have banged my left side just hard enough for something inside to come unstuck. Somewhere between my falling off a rig and my sitting at this table, I decided. I’m done. I’m done with landscapes not mine, with places where I need a work visa to t
ell me who I am. I’ll get a building permit instead, start with the foundation, and work my way up.
I’ve got the Hillsdale displayed on the trailer’s tabletop. Charlie took his time packaging her up for me. He rummaged behind the curtain for the right-sized box, then he wrapped the furniture and tiny knickknacks in bubbled plastic. He talked the whole time, cautioning me about house moving, location-location-location, the dry Alberta air. As I was leaving, he threw in some landscaping — yellow shrubs and a fuzzy green mat for grass. He asked if I wanted the family to go with it, but I said no. I drove straight from Charlie’s to the campground, the Hillsdale strapped beside me on the front seat.
I knew they were gone before I started down the little hill. I could smell their leaving in the empty air. Tidy packers. No wine corks, no bottle caps, no paper trail. No trace at all, aside from the deep grooves of tires spinning through wet ground. I parked in their empty space and sat at their empty picnic table, chipping paint with my thumbnail. Then I walked along the river. A breeze scattered the leaves in the trees, dropping speckled shadows across my path. When I got to where I first spotted them, I chose the whitest bark from the gnarly old birch tree, and carved “Rebee was here” with my army knife. Harmony was never really here; her life was tangled up elsewhere. I knew how that was.
It’s a fine-looking house. The architect can scale the plan, add a few more rooms, make it fit this land. From my top-storey room, facing west, I might be able to see the pumpjack with a pair of binoculars. If Matt comes home, the main floor bedroom will save him the stairs.
I could see Farley’s truck signalling at my gate. I headed outside to greet him, limping only slightly. I’d offer him a cup of coffee, see what shape his face screwed into over that.
REBEE
WE PULLED IN LAST NIGHT — HARMONY, VIC, AND ME. We slept awful in our stuffy motel room.
Normally, Vic only has to stop fidgeting for a few minutes and she’s asleep — doesn’t matter where she is, sitting on the toilet, leaning against a wall.
We shared a bed and every time she rolled towards me I rolled away. My skin felt shivery and my lungs ached and I wanted to open the window but it was nailed shut. Harmony had the other bed to herself.