What They Wanted

by Donna Morrissey

  “Jumpin’s, why’s everybody so rabbity,” I complained a few days after the broken dish, when I appeared out of the hallway, startling Gran this time.

  “You’ll give us all heart attacks,” warned Gran as I glided to the sofa, picking up the catalogue I’d been flipping through earlier. I sat with my back to them both, hearing Gran tsk. A sideways glance at Mother showed her pursed mouth as she kept silent, stirring the meat and onions she was frying up on the stove. Gran, letting out a small groan over the ache in her legs from the foggy, drizzly day outside, shuffled to where I was sitting and poked at my back with a gnarled finger.

  “I tell you, you’re making your mother sick,” she said irritably.

  “Jumpin’s, I didn’t do nothing.”

  “You’re making your mother sick, I tell you.”

  “How’s I making her sick—I don’t do nothing to make her sick.”

  “You just frightened Gran,” said Mother firmly. “So I’m not imagining things when you frightened Gran as well. It’s how you’ve always been, sneaking about.”

  I jumped to my feet, swinging around to face her. “I don’t! I don’t sneak about, you always says that, and I don’t. Well, I don’t,” I yelled as Mother went, tight-lipped, back to her stirring.

  I threw the catalogue on the sofa. “You always believes her,” I charged Gran. “Ever since we moved in here you always believes her.”

  Gran tsked again, sitting back down in her rocker.

  “Well, it’s true!” I yelled. Hurt by Gran’s not listening, and with a surge of brazenness, I looked to Mother, saying in a loud, prim voice, “Not my fault you’re always thinking I’m a ghost. Well, that’s what you thinks, isn’t it, that I’m a ghost? You always looks afraid of me, like I was walking around dead or something. I believe you wishes I was dead, anyway.”

  I fell silent for a moment, Mother’s face going all white again. “And perhaps I wishes I was dead,” I yelled, my voice turning into a whine. “I wouldn’t have to live here then, she only likes Chris anyway,” and felt the cut of my words in Mother’s flinch. “Leaving here anyway,” I shouted, half bawling now, and fled down the hall, “soon’s I finishes school, I’m leaving, I won’t be living around here.”

  I slammed the door of my room and fell across the bed, heart pounding, ears ringing, no different from that moment when I’d sat hidden in the closet of the boarded-up house. Only this time I wasn’t holding my breath. I’d just blown it out like a tempest, releasing a tension in my chest that I hadn’t realized was there till now, with the sudden release of its being gone.

  But, like any rutted container in a storm, it remained empty only for as long as it takes the elements to fill it again, and instantly my chest tightened with another thought: that my carelessly flung words had hurt Mother, a hurt I couldn’t fathom, given how foolish and of little meaning I felt the words to be. For sure I had yelled worse than those before, cussed even, and gotten scarcely a backhanded glance.

  I pulled the blankets over me, but then hearing Gran’s voice rising in the kitchen, I snuck off the bed and eased open the door, listening.

  “Start ignoring her, maid,” Gran was saying, “long as you keeps it in your head, she’ll keep doing it, she’ll keep carrying it out.”

  “Carrying it out—carrying what out?” asked Mother, but then kept on talking, scarcely able to keep her voice down as she rattled on about the ridiculousness of my words, the silly things I was getting on with, my foolishness. “For goodness sakes, you seen her, Gran, how you suppose to ignore someone traipsing like a ghost through the house?”

  Gran’s voice fell, and straining to hear, I leaned harder against the door, creaking it. Both voices stopped for a second, and then carried on in normal tones about Father working too hard in the woods. I threw myself back across the bed, balling up the pillow and winging it at the wall. Even Gran was blaming me for Mother’s bad nerves. To show them I didn’t care, I bounced off the bed, opened the door with a quick soundless movement, and glided down the hallway more quietly than a swan crossing a summer’s pond. Snatching up the catalogue that I’d thrown on the sofa and looking to neither of them, I glided back to my room, closing the door in the same quick, soundless motion.

  For the rest of that week and the following I glided through the house. I glided about the wharf, too, as silent in my rubber boots as I was in stocking feet, taking no apparent notice of anyone, most especially Mother and Gran. Neither did they seem to notice me, except in the usual way of a parent—how’s school, got your homework done, are you hungry. Always I shook or nodded my head, as silent with words as I was with my footstep, spending most of the days in my room, needing nothing from nobody. I did notice, however, that Mother was no longer gasping out loud those times I appeared unexpectedly before her. Not that she wasn’t startled, for I saw in the way she pursed her mouth or whipped her hand to her heart that she was. But nothing was ever said, and after a short while it all faded into nothing, Mother’s frights, my emanations. The rowing might’ve stopped too, if not for a comment I overheard Mother making to Gran a few months later, on Christmas morning.

  I had ripped the wrapping paper off a pair of shiny black shoes that had rhinestones across the toes and soles that clicked loudly against the vinyl floors as I excitedly pulled them on and tap-danced down the hall.

  “Could’ve saved myself a few grey hairs,” Mother said to Gran, and vexed by the quiet laugh they shared, I threw Mother a dark look and tapped extra loud coming back up the hall.

  Another series of rows started, this time over my noisy step. But now Mother kept a smile on her face and paid me no more attention than she did Chris and Kyle roughhousing about the sofa. Within a short time I gave up—or forgot—my tap-dancing routine, and found other things to bicker over with Mother.

  That was one thing that never changed, me and Mother bickering—much to the anguish of everyone else, most especially Father. Times when I’d fling out through the door and hunch beside him on the wharf, taking up his sullen stare out the bay, and he’d ply me with soft talk, trying to get at the reason for my apparent anger with Mother. But I could never say, for I never knew, beyond the trivialities of the moment. Going beyond that took me back into the graveyard, the house of haunts, or some look in Mother’s eye—conscious moments that capped some deeper thing I was never able to properly see or give expression to. Yet, for all its elusiveness, it bubbled along just below the surface in my relationship with Mother, obscured in its brackish waters but requiring only the slightest slackening of the tides for that black edge of a dorsal fin to jut between us.

  “Going to university anyway,” I’d say loudly to Father whenever Mother was lurking within earshot. “And after that I’m moving to Rome.”

  “Learn to navigate Hampden first,” said Mother, patting my head in passing, “or are we just a stepping stone now? Stop pouting, get your boots on, you’re late for school.”

  I sniffed hard at that one and dragged my heels out the door, miffed that my travel aspirations, having once garnered such looks of delight from Mother, had somehow become the family joke.

  Worse, I hated the overstuffed school in Hampden. They made fun of the way I talked. Plus, coming from the quiet of Cooney Arm with simply Chris and Kyle for company, the number of kids I met that first day in a real school felt like a mob, stoning me with words. I got used to it quickly enough, though. The kids even started being friendly, inviting me to birthday parties, bonfires, soccer games in the field behind the school. Sometimes I went, but it was never fun. I simply wasn’t the type to make close friends. And there were always so many of them, and so highly charged and caught up in each other’s lives that they felt like one large family. As with Mother’s house, they were fully formed before I arrived; I never felt a comfortable fit. Besides, I’d already made up my mind sitting at Mother’s table in Cooney Arm that I’d be travelling far and wide the minute I finished school. So why bother planting feet on a stepping stone, I kept asking myself, c
asting surly looks at Mother.

  ONE WEEK IN EARLY JUNE, about five years after we left Cooney Arm, I got so homesick for the life I’d once had in my own little house with Gran that Father took me for a walk up the road to where the river emptied into the sea. It had been so long since we’d been alone that I almost felt shy walking beside him. The tide was out, the sandbar shimmering wet beneath the sun and spreading about a quarter mile out, almost flush with our house on the wharf. Hundreds of gulls cried and strutted about, their feathers white against the browns of the sandbar as they snatched hold of clams with their beaks and took flight, dropping and cracking the hard shells on the rocks below.

  “Nice way of making supper, hey,” said Father, skirting one of the smashed clams as a burly gull swooped down, suckling the wet, slimy muscle out of the broken bits of shell.

  “Yuh,” I said, and noted his hand swinging by his side as he walked. Somewhere in the past few years I’d grown too big to naturally grasp hold of his hand. I trailed behind as he followed the river deeper into the estuary through little crooked paths amongst the immense alder bed, bringing us to a meadow not too unlike the one in Cooney Arm.

  “Pretty, hey?” Father said, gazing upon the hills to the far side of the river. They rose tall, steep, forming a wall of patch-worked greens. Growing tired, he sat on a rock near where a strong current gutted itself over the rocks, drowning out most other sounds but its own gurgling. I sat beside him, watching as he listened quietly to the song of the river. His thick, dark hair was longish, past his usual cutting point, and there was an ease about him that I hadn’t felt since before the fish went, before the hated move from Cooney Arm.

  “Thought I might build agin, here—near the river—your mother’s getting crippled up, arthritis,” he said to my surprised look. “Needs to get away from the water. Think this might be a nice place?”

  “Is she going to be crippled?”

  “Noo, just aches and pains is all. She’d like it here, away from the wind, have a garden.”

  My twinge of alarm faded, and I looked about disinterestedly. “What about you, you like living near the water.”

  He gave an offhand shrug. A brown-feathered sparrow with a grey crown flitted onto a shrub nearby, letting out a series of short, incessant chirps to which Father quickly responded with a low, trilling whistle. I noted again how he wasn’t looking as glum as he used to. “Long as the family’s all right I can live anywhere,” he said and leaned back on his hands, watching as the sparrow took flight, flittering into the thicket.

  “But you hates it here.”

  “Gets silly after a while, don’t it, hating something because you’re mad at something else, you think? Time we had a bigger house—you needs your own room.”

  I scoffed. “I don’t need my own room, I’d rather sleep with Gran, and I wouldn’t like living here in the woods, too many flies. Besides, there’s no road, how’re we going to get places?” I got up, bored with sitting and scratching flies off my neck. “Can we go back now? I don’t like it here.”

  He kept gazing into the thicket where the little bird had flown, then slowly got up, brushing off the seat of his pants. “Tomorrow,” he said, starting back along the river, “we’ll go to Cooney Arm, camp over for the night, you want that?”

  I eagerly agreed, and the following morning glided through the house in ghost slippers again so’s not to wake the boys, not wanting them along on this coveted trip with Father to the place of my heart. Gran had given up her garden, and it had been a few years now since I’d been back.

  The one-hour boat trip took forever, and then finally we were motoring through the rock-choked channel of the neck.

  Father shut off the motor, letting in the roar of Bear Falls as it foamed an angry white whilst crashing down the centre of the tree-draped hills. The few abandoned houses on the flat, grassy land beneath looked small and weathered, sagging heavily inwards. I turned to Gran’s house, its yellow paint all blistery and cracked, the weathering beneath encroaching like a grey fungus over whatever yellow was left. And the gouged-out earth where Father’s house had been was grassed over now; with its thick spattering of dandelions it looked little more than a sunken grave marking where the house had once stood.

  I shivered. The sky was cloudy and a brisk wind chopped the water, cooling the air. Father lifted me out of the boat and I stood for a moment, looking about. It felt eerily quiet in a sudden lull of the wind. Everything looked so small.

  “It’s because you’ve grown,” said Father.

  I wandered over to his old stage, its floorboards no longer trustworthy to stand upon, then trailed along the beach, stepping over anchors left behind by the uncles and now bleeding red onto the rocks. Farther up on the bank were bundles of netting that looked like clumps of rotting seaweed. The ribbed skeleton of a boat, tossed inland by the sea, lay beside the abandoned house where I’d crouched with the spirits.

  I walked slowly through Gran’s broken-down gate and untied her front door. I nudged it open, the hinges squeaky and stiff, and made to push my way inside but suddenly pulled back, unable to stand the smell of mould, of decay. Rot. The whole place—Gran’s house, everything—felt like death.

  Father was in the graveyard, ripping handfuls of last year’s dead grass off the three graves and clearing away space around the crosses. He’d brought a bucket of white paint. I retreated to the falls, grateful for the bounteous rush of air from the cascading water. Something caught my eye near the back step in Gran’s backyard. My breath caught in my throat and then slowly released itself. On a nail beside Gran’s back door was one of her aprons, the kind that looped around her neck and tied around her waist, hanging past her knees. It used to be blue and was nearly white now from the sun and snow, and hung in tatters. For a second I thought it was Gran, stooped, as she always was, over a bucket of scrubbing water or a dustpan or some such thing.

  I huddled on Mother’s white-speckled rock near the brook, hugging my knees, the vapour from the falls settling like a wintry mist on my face. After Father had painted the three crosses and tidied up the graves, he came and stood beside me, watching the gulls squawking and swooping over mussel shells they’d dropped and shattered on the rocks.

  His dark eyes beneath their brush of brows looked sadly at the decaying wooden structures and then back to the gulls again, the water lopping against the shore, the sun just breaking through the cloud, perking open the dandelions that had claimed the spot where his house had stood.

  “Wanna go?” he asked.

  “Thought we were spending the night.”

  “If you want to.”

  I shook my head.

  “Let’s go then.”

  For the first time in the years since we’d left Cooney Arm, I relished hopping into the boat. And for the first time ever I didn’t look back as we motored through the neck.

  THREE

  ISAT FORWARD on the springy sofa in the hospital waiting room, watching while Mother stirred, as intrigued as I’d been as a child by those thickly fringed eyes fluttering alive.

  “What’s wrong, my, what’s wrong?” she cried upon seeing me sitting so close and looking so pensive. “

  Nothing. Nothing,” I said. “I—everything’s fine. I just saw Dad;he’s looking better. Sit back,” I coaxed as she made to rise, “sit back, it’s early.”

  She shook her head. “Lord, if I lives through this.” “

  You will. And he’s doing great.” I watched as she rubbed her temples, rubbed her eyes, noting the tired lines on her face. “Gran’s worried about you.” “

  She shouldn’t worry, then. Enough on her mind.” Mother broke into a yawn. “My!” she exclaimed, shaking it off. “Feels like I haven’t slept in days.” “

  Why don’t you go home for a day? I’ll stay with Dad. Why not, you should, you should go home.” “

  No. No, I’ll not leave him. I’m fine—you’ve been in? You’ve seen him?” “

  Yes. Yes, I told you. They’re bathing hi
m.” “

  I told them I’d bathe him.” “

  They’re doing other stuff too. Oh, just sit back, Mom.”

  She sat back, unable to stop yawning. “My,” she said again, and rubbed some more at her eyes. “Chris!” she exclaimed, glancing about the room, “Where’s Chris—and Kyle?”

  “Doing stuff around the house.”

  “Stuff—what stuff?”

  “Cleaving wood. Are you eating?”

  “Cleaving wood?”She eyed me suspiciously. “They got lots of time for cleaving wood. How come they’re not here?”

  “Tomorrow. They’re coming tomorrow. You need some breakfast—seriously, why don’t you go home for the day, let Gran feed you. I can sit with Dad—will you take a day?” I pleaded as she rose with a brisk shake of her head.

  “I’ll not leave, Sylvie, don’t start with that again. The boys should be here, too—where’s my purse, lord, search by the sofa—he’ll not like it the boys aren’t here, does him good to see the boys.”

  “I told them to stay with Gran. I’m leaving in a couple of days, I want to spend some time with him.”

  “He likes seeing everybody here, your father does. First time he’s ever been sick.”

  “He’ll be fine with me. Gawd, Mom, there,” I said, exasperated by her inattentive searching for her purse. “I told you, I want to sit by him all day. Besides, the boys are looking after Gran, she’s tired.”

  “Where, Sylvie, I can’t see no purse.”

  “By the chair leg—there.” I darted forward, rescuing the purse from behind the chair. She took it gratefully and sat back, pulling out a compact. “Quite the fright, I know,” she said, eyeing herself in the dusty little mirror.

  “You look like a girl,” I said.