It got so she started searching about before laying down a laundry basket or picking up the hoe, as though she felt unsafe till my whereabouts were established.
“Like the ghost,” she complained to Gran in the garden once, “appears out of nowhere,” and she pursed her lips irritably as I stared up into her face with a shrill set of giggles.
I never meant to spy on my mother, or startle her. I simply wanted to be near her, to watch her, examine her, yet safely at a distance, as though it were some wild creature I scouted, whose mannerisms I was intrigued by and uncertain of. Like her sudden cries of fright or fun over some small thing with the boys, her spurts of laughter or anger at Father, her manner of sinking to her knees near a drill of cabbage and holding handfuls of dirt before her as though sifting through it for something lost, those hours of quiet she spent sitting on a white-speckled rock by the brook, watching the water flowing past. “Shh, quiet, now, Sylvie,” Gran whispered those times we spied her kneeling by the graves of her three little dears sleeping in the graveyard, “same as sitting in church when you’re sitting in prayer.”
Once, while Gran was puttering at the bin and I was polishing windows, I spotted Mom kneeling besides the graves. “Are the three little dears ghosts?” I asked, for I knew about ghosts, heard them all the time in the boarded-up houses. Plus I’d woken up several times from a deep, deep sleep and heard the rocker creaking in the kitchen, knowing it was Grandfather Now’s ghost coming to keep watch through the window.
“No, Dolly, they’re not ghosts,” Gran had replied, “little angels is what they are.”
“So why’re they buried?”
“They’re not in the ground, Dolly. Graves are marking places, is all, marking where they last slept.”
I’d been struck by that. “They slept? They were real like me?”
“Goodness mercy, yes, they were as real as you, and now they’re pretty angels. Take down them curtains, we’ll wash them too.”
“Are ghosts angels?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But will they be sometime?”
“I suppose so.”
“When?”
“When they finds their way home.”
“Where’s their home?”
“Goodness mercy, Sylvie, bide your tongue and bring me the curtains—mind now you don’t trip over them.”
“Their home’s in heaven, right,” I said, “where all the animals go, and where they plays with children and don’t bite them?”This last was spoken with conviction, for ever since I’d found the ribcage of our old cat, Boots, who never came home one day, and I sat crying over his bones, Gran had explained to me about how all animals went to heaven, moose and bears too, and played with the children on huge fields of flowers.
I dropped the curtains, clasping my hands tight to my heart. “Oh, Gran, I can’t wait to die,” I busted out with an excitement akin to the time Father took me to my first show at the theatre in Ragged Rock.
With a gasp of fright Gran stepped over her curtains and sat me on a chair, telling me another side of the story of death, about how it’s only God who chooses when one goes to heaven, and how, if somebody does something silly, like walk out in the water over their head or roll off a cliff so’s to die, God met them at the Heavenly Gates and sent them back to their mothers and grandmothers in shame, for thinking they could take on the role of God, and the rest of their lives would be spent washing dishes and ironing clothes for punishment.
I took particular care skirting the water’s edge the following days, and stayed away from all cliff tops. Yet each time I snuck inside one of the abandoned houses, hearing ghosts creaking the walls, a huge curiosity grew within me. I carried on plaguing Gran with questions about ghosts and how come they got lost, and do they never find their way home, and where’s home anyway, and can they see us, and how long are you in the ground before you becomes an angel, or before you becomes a ghost, or do ghosts become angels?
When my questions outgrew Gran’s patience and started causing her worry, I made up my own answers and told them to Chris. “Close your eyes now,” I’d say, laying him out on an old weed-choked grave in the graveyard where the three little dears slept, “it’s how we become angels—we die first, get laid out in a grave, and then comes up through the dirt like a ghost, only with wings, and flies to heaven. And if you don’t keep your eyes closed, you don’t grow wings, you don’t go to heaven, just rots in the ground or drifts around the shore in wet clothes like poor Grandfather Now, or gets trapped in the walls of old, boarded-up houses, waiting to find your way home.”
It was the one game Chris liked. Spread out on the grave, covered in leaves and grass, and sometimes with a white crocheted cloth over his face that I snuck from Gran’s drawer, he would lie still forever—long as he could see through that bit of cloth. One day I covered his face with a scrap of flannel, and after a couple of minutes he flung it aside and started to bawl because it was too dark. I calmed him, then raced back inside the house, found the crocheted one from the drawer, and raced back out, starting the game again. It was a sunny autumn day, with a full wind and lots of leaves gusting about. Laying Chris back down on the grave, I covered his face with the crocheted cloth and buried his body in withered leaves.
Then, kneeling beside him, I stuck my finger into my eyes to make real tears and started moaning and swaying as my mother’s sisters and brothers had done over fat Nanny Ralph’s burying in Ragged Rock. When Chris was deathly still I laid myself out on the grave nearest him, still moaning, and covered myself with handfuls of leaves and grass, then covered my face with the scrap of flannel and shut my eyes against the diffused blue of the sky coming through. For the next while we both lay there, perfectly still.
With the sea smashing upon the rocks and the wind rustling the trees and swishing through the tall timothy grass overgrowing the graveyard, neither of us saw or heard Mother coming through the gate and making her way to kneel beside her three little dears. Nor had she seen us. When I, hearing a sound, popped up from my grave, and Chris sat up from his, the cloth falling from our faces, dead leaves falling from our heads and shoulders, Mother’s eyes constricted in fright. Her face went pale, paler than the dead grandmother’s. She clenched her fists before her face and let out a ragged scream, shaking so hard it appeared she was falling over.
Frightened of a wrongdoing, I clambered to my feet, yelling at Chris to come, and flew out of the cemetery. Chris made to follow but Mother called after him in a sharp, tinny voice. She called after us both, but I kept running, past Gran’s and down amongst the abandoned houses. I pushed open the door to one of them, Uncle Jake’s, where Father sometimes stored his nets, and crept over to a partially boarded-up window, looking back towards the graveyard. Mother was still sitting there, holding Chris in her arms and kissing the top of his head and rocking him like a baby. She looked up once and, afraid of being seen, I crept away, hiding inside an emptied, darkish closet near the porch.
I’d often hidden there with Chris, hoping to see or hear one of the ghosts in the walls. Sometimes I came without Chris, crouching in the dusky light, pretending to be one of the ghosts. Once, I became so intently fixed on the silence singing through the house that I felt myself becoming lightheaded, and it started to feel like I was fading, drifting, fusing into the singing somehow, and a quiver of pure joyousness shot through me. So strong was that feeling, so strong the sense of losing myself, that I was immediately gripped by a shiver of fright and snapped open my eyes, grasping hold of the walls. Scrabbling out of the closet, I raced off to Gran’s with a terrified heart and a need to be seen.
It was the fear of a youngster having done wrong that I was feeling on this day, crouching in the closet, hiding from Mother. A prickling went down my back and I felt my heartbeat quicken. It started beating faster in that cramped corner, and suddenly I could hear it—thump thump thump. My stomach was cramping with fear and I thought to flee. But then something creaked somewhere, and I froze. The wa
lls started up with their singing. My breathing grew raspy and I wanted to scream. Another creak sounded, and blood sluiced like cold brook water through my veins. Then the sound of Mother’s voice uttering a curse as her foot must’ve gone through a rotted step.
“Sylvie, Sylvie, where you hiding—Sylvie.”
I pressed both hands to my mouth. The door pushed open, letting in a stream of silver light across the greyish room.
“Sylvie!”
My name echoed through the emptied house. Through a partial opening in the closet doorway I watched Mother stepping inside. I watched her treading cautiously past the closet into the dimly lit room. I watched her standing still for a moment, then moving her hand to her heart as though she, too, heard the singing. Quietly, she moved towards the window, her hands clutched before her as if frightened of touching the walls. It was my moment. She’d left the door open and it stood just a few steps away. Sucking in a good breath, I took a stealthy step outside the closet, cringing from the rustling of my clothes. I hesitated, then lifted my foot for another step. Mother was peering out through the window. Bursting to breathe, I crept forward another step. The floor creaked and then my lungs caved, making a dreadful hissing sound. Mother spun about, her hand flying to her heart as I, red-faced and with bulging eyes, stood in the silver stream of light, breathing raggedly.
“Sweet jeezes!” groaned Mother, and staggered back against the windowsill. Tearing out the door, I never looked back.
Nothing was ever said about it. Not by Gran, Dad, or Mom. But Mother didn’t come the next day to sip tea or hot toddies with Gran. And when she did come, that wariness was foremost in her eyes when she looked at me, and her lips barely touched my cheek after she listened to my prayers that evening and kissed me good night.
“I’m going to be a traveller,” I kept offering from my pillow by way of atonement. Getting nothing of the usual smiles of encouragement, I strained to touch her hand, wanting to avow my innocence, that I hadn’t been trying to spook her in the graveyard; had simply been playing dead, was all, and likewise, hadn’t meant to frighten her in the abandoned house. But Mother’s ghastly reaction when Chris and I rose from the grave like that, and then her staggering with fright at the sight of me inside the haunted house, and then never yelling at me for what I’d done or speaking a word of it to Gran or Dad, and her staying away from Gran’s like that—she’d never stayed away from Gran’s before, not even when Chris was sick or the baby was sick did she stay away from Gran’s—well, all these things measured so big somehow that my voice felt like a whisper in a windstorm, my innocence a matter of no consequence next to Mother’s fright.
Now, seating myself on the edge of the hospital sofa, I touched my mother’s slender white hand resting on her lap, wondering how much I had contributed to its pallor. For it hadn’t been an easy fit, the coming together of me and Gran in Mother’s house. Wonderful, Father promised that last day in Cooney Arm as I reluctantly packed my bag, it would be wonderful—all of us eating and sleeping beneath the one roof finally, being a real family. And there would be a real school with real friends other than my brothers, and everything would be nice, he promised, smoothing my hair and kissing my face. But I felt his weightiness in the manner in which he held me so tight, as though I were a pillow for his own fears. And so’s not to burden him more I let him believe that I believed him, and started packing my room.
Despite my wretchedness over leaving Gran’s house, it did feel like a real family that first day, pushing off from the shores of Cooney Arm, huddling towards each other, watching the beach, the meadow, falling away from us. And it was a moment that gave a good start to our all living together, for we’d been kind to each other those first few weeks, everyone helping the other unpack, and touching and speaking to each other gently as though we’d each been bruised by the one falling rock. And it suited me fine in the days to come that Mother was always hovering over Chris, fixing his hair, fixing his collar—mostly for the love of touching him, I always felt—for it was Father I coveted. Many times in Cooney Arm I pretended that Father belonged to me and Mother belonged to Chris, and that we all watched over Gran and Kyle, making for the perfect halves of the one family.
Perhaps—as when Dad had halved his house in order to launch it from Cooney Arm—if the house had remained divided, allowing for each unit of this perfect family to remain on its own shelving, it might not have fallen in on itself—at least where me and Mother were concerned. But the house was already formed when I entered it, with Mother its crossbar, and Dad and the boys—and now me and Gran, too— forming her framework. In Gran’s house it was me who’d been foremost and centre, polishing its floors and windows since I’d been big enough to drag around a broom. And from the time I could swing an axe I was chopping kindling, lugging wood, and stogging that old stove so full that it singed the air with heat whenever Gran needed to bake bread, make soup, or chase off them cold winter days when her old bones creaked more than the rafters in a squally wind.
Yet in Mother’s house I was shooed to the sidelines with the boys, watching as she swept, mopped, and dusted right down to the farthest corner in every room, including the one I shared with Gran. I’d stand resentfully beside my bed, protesting as she polished my bureau or decorated it with doilies and dried flowers, tucking my things—rocks, a bird’s nest, Boots’s tiny, polished skull—into drawers, or worse, into boxes and suitcases that she’d push under the beds or into the closets along with the other things from my old room in Cooney Arm.
“Take it out when you needs it,” she’d respond to my yelps of protest, and carry right on with her cleaning and tidying. Except those times when she strolled determinedly towards me with a ribbon or clips or some article of clothing. She didn’t shoo me away on those days, but would stand arguing till the sun went down over my refusal to have my hair combed and fixed. During those times, I actually ran outdoors, or to my room, barring myself inside for fear of becoming no more than a thing myself, all prettily polished and tidied and tucked inside a fold of Mother’s house.
I got no sympathy from Gran. Back in Cooney Arm, Gran had always lauded my swiftness with a dishcloth or a scrubbing rag. Now she sided with Mother and was forever directing my attention—as Mother did—towards homework, or out to the wharf, watching that the boys didn’t fall overboard. Neither was Father much of a consolation. A brooding figure he’d been, those first years in Hampden, hunched over the wharf and looking back towards Cooney Arm, gutted by the loss of the fish, his stage. And instead of lazing back on the sofa when evening came, snoring out the strains of the day with me on his chest, he was now going off to bed, into that room he shared with my mother, whose door was always closed, emitting tiny gasps of cool air whenever it opened as I walked by. When he did settle on the sofa, throwing his feet upon the humpty, it was always Kyle clambering over him, and sometimes Chris. Never me, for under Mother’s critical eye I suddenly felt too big for anything I used to do, all my cozy comforts replaced by big-girl dresses, big-girl ponytails, big-girl ways of sitting in a chair with my knees beneath the table and not comfortably tucked beneath my chin.
Tricked. I felt like I’d been tricked out of my nice, warm home with Gran and staged in Mother’s, which held nothing of its comforts. All the things I’d brought from my life in Cooney Arm, tucked now into boxes beneath the bed, felt no more than souvenirs of a home that once was. And worse, every time I crept around the house—hoping to escape attention, homework, the boys—and accidentally scared Mother by appearing silently in a doorway, she’d accuse me of sneaking about.
“Just like when you were small, always spying,” she cried out once.
“I’m not spying,” I protested.
“Yes, you are, nobody walks that quietly without they’re up to something.”
“Perhaps I’d like to be alone for once,” I shouted, and seeing the disbelieving look on Mother’s face, flounced to my room in a fit of frustration. In an effort to prove my innocence, I started walking mo
re quietly at all times, keeping a preoccupied look on my face and pretending I was looking for something, should Mother look up from her cooking or cleaning or reading with a start. Times I feigned a start myself upon a sudden gasp from her. Mostly it was during those quietest of moments—when the boys and Father were outside somewhere, and Gran dozing in her rocker, and the house humming along with Mother as she tidied her kitchen or living room—that I tended to appear. Always, during this silly, repeated exercise, I wore a preoccupied look, then bafflement each time Mother jumped or shrieked in fright. Once, she was so startled she dropped and shattered her prized candy dish she’d been about to wash.
“Nobody walks that quietly, Sylvie, without they’re trying to,” she cried, looking piteously at the glass scattered around her feet.
“Gawd, you always says that.”
“Then why you doing it—always trying to frighten me?”
“I don’t. I’m not—lord, everybody else always hears me.”
“Everybody else—you only does it around me, whatever kind of game you’re playing.”
“Well, you knows I’m in the house,” I kept going as Mother fell to her knees, picking up bits of glass, “what’s so strange about me walking down the hall—you rather I stayed in my room all day?” Getting nothing more than a painful yelp from Mother as she pricked a finger with a sliver of glass, I gave a righteous huff and went outside, muttering loudly about the unfairness of her accusations when I was simply walking down the hallway, was all, simply minding my own business like the day in the graveyard, like the abandoned house thing—just minding my own business when suddenly, poof—there’s Mother, all in a jitters and frightening her own self with her own jittery nerves.
What They Wanted Page 6