The sky looks heavy again like more rain is coming. Marla needs the power of these storms to wash away the dust and make the trees grow, to give and renew because she feels so empty. The worst part is the way Dani’s going to smile and brush this off like it’s nothing at all, and then lie because that is something Dani can do like no one else. Lie for Marla, because she would always choose Marla over herself.
Marla smokes the cigarette with shallow puffs just in case that’s better for her baby. She read somewhere that light cigarettes are just as bad so she bought regular. As soon as Dani comes, she’s going to put it out. But Dani doesn’t come. She holds the cigarette until the filter is burning, then stubs it out and hides the butt under the steps. She tiptoes inside past Zigzag sleeping on the couch, then down the stairs, not sure what she’s afraid of, only that the silence is overwhelming. “Dani?” Her voice sounds an echo, and she wishes someone else were here. Anyone else.
When Marla rounds the corner, she can see the TV on mute. There’s a bowl of fluorescent cheese puffs spilled on the table, and Dani’s pop mug beside it. Fast food garbage is heaped beside the chair where Dani sits with her head back and her mouth open. Sprawling and grinning. “Marla, you’re here already!” she slurs. She shakes her head hard, waking her eyes up.
Marla feels responsible. This is exactly how it wasn’t supposed to be. “I’m sorry, Dani, about Gavin. He told me what happened.” She leans close to put her arm on Dani’s shoulder, like patting her would help.
“That was nothing. You think I’m put out by a little fucking?” She rocks back dangerously in her chair.
Marla struggles to find something to say, something that will mean anything. “It’s shitty of him. I hate him.”
Dani laughs, a sputtering sound. “I already forgot him.” Dani pulls a baggie of meth from under the cushion. Marla thought she gave that up years ago for Kamon.
“Where’s the pills we just got?”
Dani shrugs, waving her lighter around.
Marla backs up, tripping on a cardboard burger box. “Gavin won’t bother you anymore.”
Dani lights the bowl and inhales deeply. “Nothing bothers me anymore.” She laughs so hard she starts coughing. “Fuck.”
Marla wants another cigarette and hates herself for it. She should go.
“Just you and me, babe.” Dani starts singing some old song in a perfect falsetto. It’s silly at first, but Dani can’t help getting serious. She’s breathing with her diaphragm, signalling the beat with the fingers of her left hand. It sounds so beautiful that Marla starts crying. “Don’t stop, Dani,” Marla whispers.
Dani leaps from the chair and uses her dirty old spoon as a microphone. She wails it out, not even singing words, just scatting around the basement in her housecoat. Her breasts bounce and her hair flaps against her head as her moves get very disco. She John Travoltas it, puts in a spin, then moonwalks, her feet smooth and solid. Her sound is bright and sharp, and for a moment Marla forgets.
Dani gives one last vibrating yowl with her face pointed at the ceiling and ends with her fist in the air. “Boo ya, Marla. I haven’t done that shit in so long.”
She flops back into her chair, panting, but it’s Marla’s chest that heaves, like she’s the one who’s been dancing at a club with lots of noise in the near dark with too many people beside her. Marla’s breathing too fast.
Dani takes an empty fast food bag from the floor and holds it over Marla’s mouth. “Breathe in. You’re gonna live.” She strokes Marla’s hair with her other hand. “Look how many people care about you.” The bag fills and deflates.
That’s what Gavin said: no one worries about her and she’ll be fine. Marla smashes the full bag with a satisfying pop. “I’m sad, okay? I’m allowed to be sad.”
“Sure. Be sad. I’m sad all the fucking time.”
Marla holds the broken bag in her hand. “Shouldn’t you do something about it? Shouldn’t I?”
Dani takes a huge hit then offers the pipe to Marla. “Stop dwelling, girlfriend.”
Marla takes the pipe and the fluorescent lights buzz. The pipe looks pretty in her hand with the designs in the blown glass, and nothing would be easier than to let Dani show her a new trick, but there is something about how the light is glinting off it. It takes Marla a moment to remember who else was mesmerized by holding Dani’s pipe: Kamon. Marla dumps the bowl out on the floor and then throws the pipe at Dani. “I’m having a baby, dumbass.”
Dani jumps out of her chair, suddenly much larger than before. “Do not do that, Marla. Now I gotta pick this shit out of the carpet.”
Marla doesn’t bend down to help. Crystal meth. Fuck. “Seriously.”
“You’re shitting me, right? Did I not just make everything all better?” Dani talks in a baby voice that Marla can’t stand.
“No, you didn’t. You mess everything up and then wait for the worst to happen.” In Dani’s dark basement with its fast food smell, Marla says the first thing that comes to mind. “I think you asked for it.”
Bad move. Dani cups Marla’s face in her hands so Marla can’t back away. “Learn with me a minute, Marla.”
Marla is sure Dani can hear her heart thumping. “What if I don’t want to?”
“You do, or you wouldn’t be here mouthing off like a little punkass. I know he’s your brother. I respect that. But you owe me some dignity. I just—” She lets her hand fall from Marla’s face and closes her eyes.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar. Talk to me.”
Dani pulls her in close, crying. “It’s never been like this.”
Marla holds Dani, stroking her hair, getting it, finally. “You loved him.”
“That shitty fucker. Yeah. I did.” Dani wipes her eyes with her forearm and sinks into her chair. “Serves me right.”
“Don’t say that. No one deserves that.”
“You’re damn right.”
Marla lights a cigarette and holds it, lets it grow a long leg of ash while she watches the news with no sound, trying to think. A red ribbon’s been running along the bottom of the screen. “It says there’s a flood warning.”
“We’ll be fine. It didn’t happen last time.”
Marla flips to CBC. “They’re evacuating people to rescue centres.”
“Whatever.”
Her phone rings. Liam. “Hello?”
“Did you hear?”
Marla doesn’t recognize the river she sees on TV. The water is just a foot and a half below the lower deck of the Centre Street bridge. It’s coming hard, brown and angry, full of trees and debris. The path alongside the river has been washed out in places. People are hanging over the edge of the upper deck, watching water run. “I’m just seeing it.”
“I’m coming to pick you and Dani up. Is she there?”
Marla looks at Dani with her housecoat spilling open. “Yeah. I don’t know if she’ll come.”
Dani raises her eyebrows. “Is that your boyfriend?”
“No,” Marla says, softly. “It’s Liam.”
16. PUMPKIN
GAVIN DOES TRICEPS DIPS in the spare room at Liam’s house. He is shirtless, sweating. When he’s done one hundred he can check them off his list.
He stands up, and Dani is right in front of him. “Sorry,” he says, startled.
Dani spreads out in the doorway, blocking it. She slurps from a pop can. “This would have been a better week to jump.” Marla and Liam peer from the hall, looking unsure whether to intervene.
Gavin grabs his shirt. “I’m leaving. I won’t bother you.”
“Where are you …?” Marla asks.
“To a hotel.” Gavin glances at Liam. “I should have left already.”
Dani snorts, and Gavin jumps. “Don’t bother. You clearly can’t be alone. I’m going to bed.” She trails down the hall to th
e couch and crumples onto it.
She’s here, and this is it. Gavin knows it. There’s no time to be afraid. He kneels by her head to whisper even though he knows Marla and Liam can probably hear from the kitchen because he whispers like a deaf person. “I hate myself for what I did to you.”
Dani nods, deadpan. “I hate you too.”
She’s trying to make light of it, make it easier for everyone. Gavin looks at the makeup line under her jaw where she hasn’t blended it in, her red eyes. “Don’t be funny now. Please.”
“I’m not. Look, you’re this sensitive, journaling fucking kid. You’re not even old enough to know what you’re doing.”
“Not true.” Gavin can’t say it, how he wanted to punish her for never hiding anything. “I’m going to turn myself in.”
“No one’s going to put you in jail over me. You have major anger issues, but you don’t need to quit.” She pulls her pipe out and lights it. “Keep trying.”
“Like this?” She allows him to take the pipe from her, and the lighter, her fingers against his. He puts the pipe in his mouth and flicks the lighter.
“No, you dipshit.” She yanks the pipe away, then sits up abruptly and empties her pockets onto the table. Pills and rolling papers, a spoon. Needles. “This is what it looks like, how I keep myself from getting sick, okay? I can’t even get high anymore.” She kicks at the table, but carefully, so nothing falls off.
“I know.”
Dani fits it all back into her pockets. “Doesn’t matter. To you and everyone else I’m just a burnt-out hooker.” She jiggles her breasts.
He shakes his head, and tears spill down his cheeks. “No. You’re my friend. My best friend.” Gavin reaches for her hands, tentative, because he sees a tremble in her lip that means something.
She slaps his hands away. “You can’t touch me anymore, Gavin. You don’t know what friendship is.”
“You’re right.” She looks away like she’s tired of talking to him, but he has to say it. “Before this, you helped me, you listened to me, and I am so grateful for that.”
Dani leans in close, her nostrils flared. “You think it’s your deafness that sets you apart, but it’s not. It’s the way you punch things up when you freak out. It’s fucked up.” She stares him down, and he turns away.
In the kitchen, Marla slams things around, not putting them away, just picking them up and banging them into new places. Liam takes the teapot out of her hands, so she picks up the toaster instead. “You love her.” She drops the toaster on the table in front of Gavin like a challenge.
He whispers, worried they’ll wake Dani. “I’m sorry, Marla.”
Marla’s talking like she hasn’t heard him. “How … rape …” Gavin sucks in a terrible little breath at that word.
Liam reaches for Marla, folding his arms around her middle until she leans into him. “Be angry, if you have too.” He signals Gavin to get his bag.
She shakes her head, disentangles herself from Liam. “… not good enough … me.”
It’s hard to look at her. “I’m going to make it up to you, to everyone. I’ve got this list and a counsellor—” Gavin’s voice shakes, wobbling between his useless ears.
“You’ll have to,” she says. Marla stands in the doorway watching him sob, and Gavin thinks about how much she looks like their mother. “Look, I can’t be around you right now.”
Liam says something to Marla that Gavin can’t catch, and she turns to him. “Sounds really bad,” she says.
“I don’t know,” Liam says. “Last time it was really just High River.”
It’s only seconds before Dani is in the doorway. “Kamon,” she says. “I need to go there right now.”
Marla stays home to sleep, so Gavin goes with Liam and Dani to the rec centre in High River. Inside, a smattering of moms and elderly people supervise kids running between cots. Near the main entrance is a kitchen, where sandal-footed women and teens make sandwiches. A senior with a clipboard sits at a table. She squints at them and says something Gavin can’t understand. No one translates.
“No,” Dani says, and then a small person breaks out of the game of tag and wraps himself around Dani’s legs. He is towheaded and freckled and so obviously Dani’s son that Gavin’s heart breaks.
“Mommy Mommy Mommy!” the boy squeals. She squeezes him, kissing him until he starts arching his back. “I can’t fucking breathe!”
Dani sets him down. “Kamon, don’t talk that way. Wave to my friend, Liam. This is Gavin.” She catches Liam staring at her. “What? He has a problem with profanity.”
Liam grins so hard all his teeth are showing. “Interesting.”
“Hi … Gavin,” Kamon says, his body wagging with his wave. “Holy shit … the water … pick one toy…” Kamon speaks in a hurry with his head wiggling all about and his eyebrows raised as if every phrase is a question. He looks right at Gavin. “Are you … boyfriend?”
Gavin feels the sick stab of shame. He shakes his head.
“You know … Mommy gets all better … with her instead … bring your pillow, Mommy?”
“No, baby. Where’s Nanny?” She takes a stick of gum from her pocket and unwraps it. Kamon grabs it.
He points to the kitchen. Another little boy runs up to him, and Kamon talks with his hands in his excitement. “My mommy’s here, sucker!” He jumps on two feet all the way to the kitchen, leaving the other boy behind. Dani watches him go.
She throws the gum wrapper in the garbage can, pausing there, then suddenly shakes out her coat pockets as if they were full of sand. Pants pockets too. She dumps her pills, keeping her eyes on Gavin. He swallows a lump in his throat, and this time it feels good.
The kitchen smells like ham. A short woman with thighs that touch and a rolled-up long-sleeved shirt leaves the bread she was buttering. Dani’s mom, Sandra. She’s angry. “… tried to call … Danielle.”
Liam takes the slices she’s buttered and lays meat on them, arranging it just so. Gavin starts washing lettuce. It puddles in the sink. He doesn’t see a salad spinner, so he dries it with paper towel, which makes little white pieces of paper stick all over it.
“Sorry, Mom, I forgot my phone. We got evacuated too.”
“… that business … before.”
Kamon leans in closer. “Nanny said … welfare … useless. You’re not … Mommy?”
Dani glances at Gavin, and he suddenly feels her fear. All the women in the kitchen are staring at her and pretending not to. Dani gets down on her knees and puts her hands on Kamon’s shoulders. “Me? Useless? Never. But I did have some hard days. ’Member when we talked about hard days?”
“… lots right?”
“Yep. All hard days for a while. But not anymore.” She nods to herself.
Sandra snorts. “… clean this time? … long?”
“For good. Look, you’re busy here. I’ll take Kamon for a sleepover.”
“Yes yes yes yes motherfuckers!” Kamon pounds his fist into the air, then whirls around the room with his lips pursed, blowing air. He bumps into a woman carrying two loaves of bread and bashes one of them to the floor by accident, where he steps on it.
Sandra narrows her eyes at him. “Get out of here, Kamon!” He rushes out, and Sandra shakes her head, arguing. Dani’s mom looks old, deep crow’s feet around her eyes, thin hair.
Dani takes Sandra’s arm. “Listen, I’m staying at Marla’s boyfriend’s house.” She nods at Liam. “Nothing will happen.”
Sandra shakes her head like only she could have so much suffering. “… basement already flooded, you know … really bad.”
Gavin thinks of his list at home—sit ups and weight lifting and not making a baby present for his nephew because he broke it. “I could help.” He signs “I” and “help”, then lets his hands fall to his sides when everyone stares. This is exactly the kind of place he can’t ma
ke it work.
Sandra is momentarily startled by the sound of his voice. “… earth can he do?”
Dani catches the look on Gavin’s face. “Maybe he could fill sandbags.” She stage winks at him. “By the river.”
Gavin cannot believe she just made a suicide joke, but he laughs, and it feels less hollow than he thought it would. This is what real people do, he thinks. They go out and make sandwiches and sandbags instead of sitting around feeling shitty.
“We have a plan,” Dani says, already taking giant strides out to the open hall. She cups a hand to her mouth to call her son, but her lips don’t look like English words. Gavin thinks she must be yodelling.
Whatever she said has the whole hall of kids running to her. Kamon shrieks something that looks like, “Ariba! Ariba!”
“Get your toy, little guy.”
Kamon nods and pulls it out of his pocket. A green turtle. “… got it, Mommy … I keep … right here.” He has a smile on his face that burns a hole in Gavin’s heart.
At the riverbank, Gavin works through the night, his arms strong and his mind perfectly empty, his crutches abandoned in the back of someone’s pickup. There is an irresistible togetherness about these people, these foothills people who Gavin had thought were too proud, too self-involved. They work together with such energy, without the grimness Gavin finds in himself. They smile at him and help him, and Gavin feels welcome.
When people leave, others come. Guys aim their headlights at the berm they’re building, then work in a dirty, wet line. Everyone is ready for the roast beef buns with potato salad that older women bring at eleven o’clock. Gavin fills sandbags, passes them person to person. Some people are in knee-deep water.
The way the river moves is so convincing, like it should be washing over the road and filling up the town. He understands the water sliding under cars and around their wheels, going everywhere it can. It’s how Gavin feels most of the time, if he thinks about it, worried that everything will spill over and be uncontained. Overwhelmed. But this is easy—with enough sandbags and people it might be possible to coax a broken river to be tame and quiet. Whether it works doesn’t matter to Gavin. It matters that these people know exactly what to do.
A Handbook for Beautiful People Page 23