by Fran Kimmel
She was ready to end it before we even started. She thought she knew me, but she was wrong. I didn’t want other friends. I wanted her. I didn’t care if Carla ever showed up. In fact, I’d rather she didn’t.
“My mom’s nuts. I never want to see her again.”
Rebee turned to me under that big shining sky. “Listen to me. Your mom comes back, you go with her. Eat your Cheerios. Do your math. You watch and listen. Endure. One day, it will be over. You’ll wake up one morning and realize you can walk out that door and take any road you want.” She put her fingers on my shoulder and squeezed. “You don’t have to end like you started, Joey. You know that, right?”
I didn’t know anything. All I wanted was to stay with her on the grass. But she was getting to her feet, stretching her arms slow and strong. She took my arm and pulled me to my feet and towards the hedge that separated our houses. I limped along beside her silently. When we got to the road, she said, “You’ll be okay, Joey.”
“Whatever.”
How could I tell her? I was thirteen. She was more than I knew how to imagine.
She fished her Wintergreens from her jeans pocket and took my hand in hers. She dropped the roll in my palm and closed my fist in her fingers and held them there. Her skin felt warm, hot almost. “In case you need light,” she said, smiling.
I watched until she got halfway to her porch. Then I yelled, “Don’t ignore me, Rebee.”
“I won’t,” she said with a wave of her arm. She might have been lying, telling me what I needed to hear, because even though I chanted in my head, look back, look back, look back, she never did.
* * *
Rebee got it part right.
Carla showed up the next morning to collect me like I was a box waiting for her at the post office. She arrived at ten. By half past eleven we were careening down the highway. I couldn’t stop us. It started lovey-dovey. Joey, baby, look at you. What happened to your forehead? Give your momma a hug. So great of you to watch him for me, Nelda.
Let’s make nice didn’t last. It never does with Carla. She can’t keep her mouth shut. Shouldn’t you get rid of this, Nelda? What are you saving that old thing for? Grandma skulked around in her knitted slippers, slamming cupboards, muttering about how the girl was ungrateful, so high and mighty you’d think she’d just hung the moon. I thought she’d be an ally, but by the time Carla was done, Grandma seemed ready to be rid of us both.
I stayed away from Rebee’s door. I didn’t want goodbyes. Rebee knew a lot of stuff, but she didn’t know everything. She didn’t know, for example, that you can rearrange your existence so as not to forget. Every thought, every movement, every feeling, every molecule. Your survival can depend on it.
Carla said she’d borrowed the car from her new friend. Calvin somebody or other. It smelled like dirty feet. A pair of scuffed handcuffs dangled from the rear-view mirror. She’d brought me a stupid beaded basket, courtesy of her orphan boys. Either my mother had really managed to get herself to Africa, or the basket was a cover from the dollar store. She hadn’t brought up Jesus once. She coulda spent the summer in Vegas for all I knew.
Carla waited until her first pee break before she thought to ask, “Anything go on for you? While I was gone?”
Nothing, Carla. Nothing at all.
There was stomach thunder, the start of the threat. I fingered Rebee’s Life Savers, wedged in my pocket. I concentrated on rearranging my insides. Rebee in the grass. Rebee in me. My guts tried to push her out, but she was too strong, and when the shredded strands shrank back to their cave, I was covered in sweat and feeling like I’d won something.
Carla parked at a rest stop beside an overflowing garbage can. The sign said no camping like somebody might. There was a sagging wooden picnic table with shattered boards along the top. A group of brown cows bunched by a fence behind the outhouses.
“Aren’t you getting out?” She rummaged through her purse, pulled out her lipstick, and smeared red across her mouth.
“Stop sulking, Joey. I came back, didn’t I?” When I didn’t answer, she slammed her door hard.
The cows raised their heads. We stared at each other until one by one they shoved their noses back in the tall grass. I closed my eyes, waiting for Carla to finish her business, and endured.
REBEE
SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DROWNING. I see myself standing on the cliff looking down. Darkness falls, and the water below churns and roars. The Judge’s car starts to rise from the bottom of the troubled lake, and my fear rises with it. I tell myself that nobody knows; there will be no search. I tell myself all kinds of lies to make the trembling stop.
* * *
Sometimes I think about those ice children discovered in the mountains of the ancient Inca Empire.
And the others, too. The ones who haven’t been found, sacrificed to the mountain gods by their mothers. Children buried close to heaven with nothing but bags of nail clippings their mothers saved for them in case their spirits returned.
Nail clippings are necessary in uncivilized times.
When Jake came to my grandfather’s house that day,
I flushed mine down the toilet. I just opened my nail box and sprinkled them into the water. I suppose I decided, without really thinking it, there was nothing left of that world to hang onto.
I don’t need nails to keep me safe anymore. I’ve learned to wear mittens in January. To shield my July eyes from the white hot sun. To sleep without dreaming, to wake without fighting my pillow.
I’ve learned to cook too. Carrots in orange sauce. Asparagus with lemon. Sticky rice. Apple pie. I cook roasts on Sundays in my grandfather’s blue-speckled pot, opening my closets and drawers, letting the dark meaty smell get into my sweaters and shoes. This weekend, I’m going to bake the Chocolate Angel Food Cake, page 292 from County Cooking, with powdered sugar and frosting daisies and twenty-one candles circling the top.
My mother forgot to teach me these things. That’s not true. My mother forgets nothing.
I don’t even know how to find her. Vanishing is what she does best. Over and over and over again. We never left Alberta, ricocheting inside her borders like an angry bullet. Just look at her map, shaped like a holster. If you look closely, you can find the dot named Chesterfield. Inside the dot, look for Blueberry Hill. Step around the towering hedge that no one owns and out onto the oiled road. When you can go no further, you can see the white house with the stippled green roof, the wrap-around veranda and the old wicker chair.
This is the place where my mother lived. She lived with the Judge, the man who lies buried in the sixth row of the Chesterfield cemetery on the far side of the dot. You can search for what she will not forget in this house. Search in the closets, the bed sheets, the desk drawers with the brass handles. You won’t find any evidence. Before I came here, I searched in the silence as we flitted like moths atop the pimply dots of the holster. I searched and searched, trying to sniff out our history in her green-grey eyes, in the smells along the highway, in the night words she whimpered from her mattress on the floor.
Before I even knew of this place, I wanted to know if her leaving it — her running — had something to do with me.
It did, of course. But it doesn’t matter anymore. I can tell you now that I’m all grown up, that I don’t need a mother to keep me safe. That might be a lie. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I stand at her window, and I think I see her haunted eyes staring back at me. And I have to remind myself that it’s not really my fault. That I am me. And I have come home.
* * *
I was sixteen when I found this place. Aunt Vic and Harmony had been summoned to Chesterfield after the Judge’s funeral. I don’t know who whispered what when my grandfather was lowered to the ground. All I know is I wanted to stay. “There’s nothing for you here,” Harmony kept saying. But there was everything I ever wanted here. My mother’s house. My mother’s town. My family’s huge kitchen with rows and rows of cupboards. None of it could fit into the back o
f a van.
What surprised me most was that my mother fought at all. There were no tearful goodbyes before she drove away. We could have been strangers who met at a truck stop as
I walked her to the van. Vic yelled out the window as they backed down the driveway, “I’ll give you three weeks before you beg us to get you outta here.”
But then they were gone, and I was alone and angry and so upside-down homesick I couldn’t breathe. If Harmony had come back for me that first summer — if she’d just barrelled up Blueberry Hill and honked the horn — I would have jumped in the van, lit an incense stick, and let her drive us in circles for another sixteen years. But she didn’t come back. And I knew I needed to stay. My grandfather’s car became such a distraction, the way it whispered in my ear, calling me to the highway, telling me I belonged out there, nowhere. So I waited until Chesterfield was sleeping. I eased the car down Blueberry Hill, terrified to be in the driver’s seat, fingers gripping the steering wheel so tight I thought they might break. I crawled towards the back road that led to the trailhead. Then I followed the narrow twisting trail, up, up, up, the car lurching on the loose gravel. When I reached the cliff — the end of the road — I opened the door and fell onto the cold ground. It took a long time until I could breathe normally. Then I stood up, moved the gearshift to drive, and pushed with all my strength. The Judge’s car, carrying my whole past, inched slowly towards the edge, then hurled down the bank and disappeared into the black water.
* * *
He is better at finding than my mother is hiding. Jake arrived when the leaves were starting to fall from the trees. It was near the end of my first summer, a few weeks after my night on the cliff. I recognized him instantly when he rang my bell. He was wearing blue jeans and a suit jacket over his white shirt and his hair was combed back and curling over his collar. I was flooded by memories, a thousand little details. Washing dishes in the river. Playing cards at the picnic table. Harmony laughing. The sticky feel of pine needles. The smell of clean, white snow.
We stood in front of each other awkwardly. He didn’t take his eyes off me, concentrated, dark with questions.
“Jake. Kit Creek. Remember? You’ve changed. You look more like your mother now.”
“Why are you here?” I leaned around him and looked towards his empty truck.
“I heard about the Judge. I wanted to know you’re okay. Are you? Okay?”
I couldn’t believe he was real.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“Why?” I felt angry for no reason that made sense.
“I’ve driven a long way to get here.”
“She’s gone,” I said.
His voice sounded weary. “I know. I came to see you.”
I stepped back from the door and he followed, this man I barely knew. We went from standing awkwardly at the front door to standing awkwardly in the kitchen. I eventually plunked myself into a chair, and Jake pulled out another and sat down beside me. We stayed like that for a long while, neither of us saying anything.
“After we met at the campground I went to look for my brother.” He leaned towards me, hands on his knees.
He didn’t try to touch me, although he could have, and I wouldn’t have backed away. “His name’s Matt. I went all the way to Mexico.” Jake’s skin was the colour of hayfields in late summer.
“But he didn’t want to be found. So I made a place for him, in case he decided to come home. I built a house on his property, my property now I suppose. Along the way, I did a little search for you and your mom, too. It wasn’t hard. I had your license plate number and a guy named Elroy who knows that kind of stuff.”
I thought maybe we owed him something. Something that would be hard to pay.
But then Jake said, “I found Chesterfield easy enough and then 21 Blueberry Hill. I figured you and your mom would come home one day.”
He had a worried look then, which made me feel glad at first. Then I just felt tired.
“I got to know your grandpa some,” Jake was saying. “I came up here a few times. Before today. Your grandpa, he was — ”
“He’s dead. He killed himself. On my sixteenth birthday.”
Jake sat perfectly still. His eyes had the same gold flecks buried inside grey that peered in the van window on that snowy night. “If I’d of known, I would of done something. Maybe I could have stopped it.”
But he couldn’t have stopped anything. This family’s rage burned like a torch.
Jake stayed all afternoon. He said he had something to give me and went to his truck to fetch it. When he came back, he had a house in his arms. There were glued trees in its front yard. Painted shutters. A tiny basket of flowers beside the front door.
Jake set the house down on the kitchen table, folded his arms, and rocked on his heels. He could hardly look at me. His cheeks were flushed as he stammered through his speech. “I know you’re too old for dolls. But I got this for you. When you were at that campground.”
“I was too old then.” It was an ungrateful thing to say, but I was so caught off guard, and there was such hesitancy in his eyes. He had uncertainty written all over his face, and surprise as well, as though until precisely that moment he had known his way.
“You don’t have to keep it,” he said, unfolding his arms, readying to reach down and take it away.
“No,” I said, touching his sleeve. “I’ll keep it.”
I’ve put the dollhouse in my grandfather’s living room beside the stone fireplace. A house within a house. Sometimes I lie on the floor, leg crossed over a knee, and stare through the little shuttered windows. I pretend there’s a family inside. A father like Jake. A mother who is beautiful like Harmony, only she listens and smiles. There’s a grandpa, too. He comes from my dreams, not my dreams of the dead man in the casket, but of a grandpa who carried me in his arms when I pretended to be sleeping. Only the daughter is a mystery. No matter how many times I try to imagine her as a little girl, she’s too old for her age, not a child at all.
Before he left that day, Jake pulled a purple address book from the inside pocket of his jacket. The book’s cover has two little kittens with bows around their necks. Jake sat across from me, red-cheeked, head bent, pointing to the page with his phone number and a carefully written set of directions to his place.
He said, “Call me, Rebee. As often as you like. I’ll pay your phone bill. Call every day if you want. Will you do that?”
The hope in his voice brought a lump to my throat that tasted like warm honey. I thought about what it would be like. I could stand at my window, the phone to my ear. I could tell him how to read a map upside down. The places a person could get lost in. Ways to be invisible.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Hope has soft edges. Only after does it cut you to shreds. When he found us at the campground, I was so bloated with it I thought I might burst. Mile after mile I thought about him, about the man named Jake, about the man who was my father. I pummelled Harmony with questions like fists, which was not like me at all. I had always kept my mouth shut. But I was obsessed. Jake opened a vein and I couldn’t stop bleeding. Who was my father? Was he disappointed I was a girl? Did he hold me in his arms when I was a baby? Would we ever see Jake again? Couldn’t we go see my father? Couldn’t we even once?
Harmony confessed on a day that started like any other. I was thirteen, hungry, hoping for breakfast, coughing up leftovers from my newly scarred lungs. We were setting up in a new town and waiting for the bank to open, and I was worrying about not finding the school and not having indoor runners without grass stains or scuffs. The bank had glass walls, like smoky mirrors, the kind where you could see your reflection clearly, only shadows of bank people milling inside. Four or five others waited, Harmony first in line. I stood well back from the wall, by myself, under the lamp pole. An older man in a pinstriped suit stepped out of his car, crossed the street slowly, and stood near to me. He held his bankbook in his hand, almost dangled it in front of me, and he wouldn’t sto
p staring me up and down. At first, I thought I’d done something stupid, like I’d chosen a don’t-wait-here zone, or had my shirt inside-out. This was before I knew men had permission to look at girls that way. Certain girls. Girls that tumble out of rundown vans. Girls that stand under lampposts when they should be in school. I tried not to squirm or look at him. I wanted the bank to hurry and open, intent on shrinking to invisible. I focused past his face, far into the distance, traced the D in the Dairy Queen sign, unblinking, eyes watering.
I turned and caught Harmony’s reflection in the mirrored wall. She was seeing the man seeing me, with eyes I didn’t recognize. They held an expression of pain, raw and gaping, a deep, open sore. I would have run to her, but that look in her eyes flickered then died, almost instantly, so fleeting in fact that I’ve wondered since if I imagined it there.
Harmony pushed past the others, strode over to us and stood between me and the man, legs slightly parted, shoulders back. The man backed up a step, looking surprised at first, perhaps a bit sheepish, smaller somehow than when he had me to himself. Harmony stepped toward him, one step, close enough to brush his pinstripes. She didn’t say a word. But he looked afraid then, really afraid, of what he found in her eyes. Nothing else happened with the man. The bank opened in that moment, good morning, good morning, and the people shuffled in. The man crossed the street again, quickly this time, got back in his car and drove away. We drove away, too. When we got to the highway, I asked, so what about the bank, but Harmony didn’t answer. She was driving too fast, and I pressed against the back of my seat and thought about how she might have killed that guy.
She told me, hours later, after we’d turned onto a back road that crumbled to a stop at the mouth of an old barn.
“I’ll say this only once, Rebee. Then we will not discuss it again. His name was William Sacks. He was a circuit judge, like your grandfather.”
“Who?” I asked, clueless.
“We saw each other in secret. I was just a town girl. A stupid girl with stars in her eyes. Then I got pregnant and we ended. He’s dead. I want you to forget about him.”