No Good Asking

by Fran Kimmel

  “We didn’t get the tree,” Danny piped up. He marched past Ellie, grabbed hold of the fridge door, and yanked it hard. Her son looked wired, like he was ready to run a lap around the furniture. Her husband pushed and pulled, kicking boots out of the way. “Eric, just leave the closet door. Please.”

  The girl crouched to undo her one lace, while Thorn stretched his giant paws over her runners in case she tried to escape. Eric stood beside her, as if his socks were glued to the spot on the floor.

  “Do we have any Orange Crush?” Danny called out from behind the fridge door.

  Eric looked at Ellie, confused. Their boy had never asked for Orange Crush in his life.

  “There’s chocolate milk. And chicken,” Ellie said, but Danny had already found it. He brought the milk carton and a stack of Tupperware over to the counter, slamming doors and drawers as he got out a plate and fork.

  “Want a snack?” he yelled to Hannah.

  “Danny, please,” Ellie said. “You’ll wake Sammy.”

  What would this do to Sammy? This girl in the house, swaying slightly, runners sitting side by side on the worn hardwood beside her, blanket folded in her arms. Ellie examined her from top to bottom. She might be called pretty, even though she lacked the usual markers. Her long hair was a snarled mess. She looked unkempt and underfed and disconcertingly pale and shadowed. Yet there was a brightness too in that unwavering gaze. She seemed out of sync: too travelled for her small body, too composed given what she’d been through.

  Ellie said, “Are you hungry, Hannah? We can make you a sandwich.”

  The girl shook her head and, as if forcing out the words, said, “No, thank you, Mrs. Nyland.”

  “You can call me Ellie. Ellie would be fine.”

  Hannah winced a little, shifting the weight of the quilt from one arm to the other. Ellie still clutched the side of the sink. Bad things had happened to this girl; she was obviously hurt and hurting. Ellie pushed herself forward until she stood in front of her, looking down on glassy eyes, inhaling her dusty drawer smell and a faint trace of urine. One cheek was raised, slightly purple under the hallway light.

  “Let me take this.” Ellie reached for the quilt, which was surprisingly heavy. The girl’s arms dropped to her sides like stones. “Would you like to see your room?”

  Hannah looked up. “I have a room?”

  Ellie tried to sound light. “Well, of course. Did you think we’d put you in the barn?” She refused to look over to her husband, regretting her words instantly. What else might this girl think? She’d already been put in a cellar.

  “What room?” Danny wanted to know. Ellie glanced back at her son. He was ripping into a drumstick without a care in the world. Of course, it would only occur to him now to ask where she would sleep. It likely hadn’t occurred to Eric at all. Beds magically made themselves and tables expanded on their own.

  “Where’s she gonna sleep, Mom?” Danny asked again, his mouth crammed with chicken.

  “In the craft room,” Ellie said.

  “But you said—”

  “I’ve made up the bed,” Ellie cut in. Yes, she’d told her children they weren’t to go in that room down the hallway, but the ban was meant to be temporary. She had plans. She’d make the room her own, every bit as special as Myrtle’s had once been: a hive of activity; a source of pretty projects for home and hearth; a testament to the magnanimousness of motherhood. She only needed to fix herself first.

  “That’s cool,” Danny said between great gulps of chocolate milk, to no one in particular. “Wicked room. Grandma and me used to dress Heidi like a soldier. We made a sword with a yardstick, whittled it pointy and painted it silver.”

  The girl looked at her boy. Ellie turned to see her son’s cheeks crispy red, his body stiff. Heidi was the secret name he and Myrtle had invented for the damn dress form. The pair had secrets galore in that room. He’d embarrassed himself, Ellie knew instantly, by outing his enthusiasm for pretend swords.

  “Let’s go get you settled,” Ellie said, more to rescue her son than the girl. “And you too, Danny. It’s been a long night.”

  Danny pushed his brown-filmed glass down the counter toward the sink but not in it, she noted, although she’d repeatedly asked him to. He rubbed the chicken grease from his fingers on the sides of his jeans.

  “Goodbye, Daniel.” The girl sounded panicked.

  He looked at Hannah, softly, Ellie thought, which shocked her. Not because he’d regained his composure, but because he had the wherewithal to be soft at this moment.

  “I’m just going downstairs,” he said. “That’s where my bedroom is. Yours is up here.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “See you in the morning.”

  “Okay,” she said again, sounding even less sure.

  Ellie reached down and grabbed the garbage bag—her things, she assumed—and then led the girl away from Eric, who hadn’t said a word this whole time, just stood there at attention, like he was overseeing a disciplinary hearing. He couldn’t even manage to grab hold of the dog, who had taken it upon himself to follow, his nose attached to the back of Hannah’s knees.

  At the end of the hallway, Ellie pushed hard at the dog’s chest and whispered, “Go back, Thorn. Go lie down now.” He teetered with a harrumph and fell right there at the entrance, farting as he sunk to the floor before stretching full out.

  As they stepped into the room, Ellie followed Hannah’s gaze as she looked first at the turned-down bed, then at the old-fashioned daisy wallpaper, then the broken pull chain of the ancient lamp, then here and there at the scramble of colours and bits of nonsense poking out in every direction. Ellie wished she could have opened the window a crack, if only for a minute, to let in a blast of new air. But it had been frozen shut since November, like every other damn window in the house.

  Ellie hadn’t a clue what Hannah felt about this unbearable room, this unbearable situation. But then how could Ellie expect to, she of all people, when time after time she had been judged unfit to bring a girl into her world. She dropped the bag to the floor, cleared her throat, and said matter-of-factly, “So this is your room. For tonight. Or a few nights maybe.”

  Hannah looked up and nodded.

  “These are your things? In the bag?”

  “I think so.”

  Eric must have stuffed the bag for her. “I’ll let you sort through your things then.” Ellie stepped over to Myrtle’s wooden dresser and yanked on the ivory knob with a flourish. The drawer moaned in complaint, dresser legs shaking on upholstered coasters. “I’ve emptied a drawer for you. You can put your things in here.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Nyland.”

  “Ellie. Just call me that.”

  She felt an overwhelming urge to tap her forehead. She buried her hand deep into her housecoat pocket and squeezed her fingers as hard as she could. “The bathroom’s just down the hall. There’s a towel and washcloth on your pillow.”

  “Thank you, Mrs.—Ellie.”

  “And we’ll keep your door closed so that Thorn won’t bother you. He sheds like a bear. You’re not allergic, are you?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never had a dog. He’s very nice.” Ellie couldn’t stand another second in that too-close room. Hannah hadn’t moved an inch since she entered, as if by standing still she’d take up the least space possible. There was much more Ellie should have said, but she felt so dried up her skin was starting to crack. She could feel it tear along the edge of her hairline, down the centre of her spine.

  “Well, good night then, Hannah.” She ran her tongue over her top lip, making it easier to smile. “I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

  She might just as well shake the girl’s hand for all the good she’d done, or could do, like a politician sniffing at a doorstep on the night before an election. Ellie turned and left the room, stepping over Thorn, snoring at his
guard post.

  But Hannah called her name, “Mrs.—Ellie,” so she had to look back. Please, God, don’t let her need something more.

  “What is it, Hannah?”

  The girl shifted from one socked foot to the other before blurting, “Can you thank the sergeant for me?”

  The sergeant? “Yes, of course.”

  “I forgot to tell him thank you for coming back to get me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I wanted him to come back.” The girl said this weakly, like she was ready to cry. “And then he was there.”

  I wanted him to come back too, Ellie thought, and then he was here, except he wasn’t really. Here. It was no good asking why he’d gone into that house without telling her first. No good asking how he could stand right beside her and be so far away.

  “You don’t need to thank him, Hannah. Neighbours should help each other. Good night now. Get some sleep.”

  The girl stood in a daze like a rabbit about to be shot. Ellie closed the door. Ellie too felt in a daze as she went down the hallway to turn out the bright yellow lights. Around the corner, she found Eric in Walter’s chair, the ratty straight back with the sagging upholstered seat, card table in front of him, fingers moving puzzle pieces. The box showed a picture of a grain elevator beside a train track and a mauve sky with galloping white horses in a distant yellow field. It was Walter’s favourite, the only puzzle he could get right. Walter fitted the pieces together each afternoon. Eric undid all but the border each night. It was a building up and tearing down as predictable, and as necessary, as the tides.

  Ellie looked at her husband, undetected, for more than a minute. “The sergeant,” the girl had whispered, with reverence. Ellie thought she noticed Eric’s eye twitch, though she was too far away to be sure. She might have heard humming too. Eric often hummed when he felt troubled, a tuneless concoction of white noise to drown out all else. He did this, for example, after he forgot to turn off the tap at the utility sink and flooded the basement, or after his father messed his pants, or after Thorn’s back leg gave out on the stairs, or after they fought over Sammy or Walter or Daniel or over no one at all. Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, up and down he see-saw sang as he padded between rooms. She held her breath and listened more closely until she could make out the faint sounds. Yes, he was doing it now.

  —

  Hannah couldn’t remember how many times she had stood at her bedroom window and looked across the road and imagined herself running over to their house and banging on their door. But she’d never created a picture of what she might find inside. In her head, she saw the sergeant and Daniel and herself out of the cold—but not in any place specifically, nowhere that could be described. She’d asked to come here—she’d insisted to that woman in the hospital. The sergeant seemed nice, but hadn’t Nigel seemed nice too in the beginning? What if the sergeant was a sick, twisted bastard like Nigel said? What if he regretted bringing her here and locked her in his basement and nobody ever came?

  Hannah usually felt a burning desire to know what came next, but tonight she was a ghost of herself, too dazed to be curious. She couldn’t think straight. By the time they’d pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the car, she was focused on putting one foot in front of the other and that was all.

  With a rush of warm air, she was inside instead of out, and the big black dog came right up and said hello with his nose. She looked at the woman in the kitchen and everything changed. It took only a split second, a snap of a finger. There was her mother. She was at the sink, long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, bangs falling low on her forehead. She had the same beautiful face, same milky white neck rising up from the folds of her much-loved housecoat. Same long fingers. Why wasn’t she smiling?

  It cracked the wind from Hannah. Shouldn’t you be in bed by now, darling? You’ve had a bad dream. That’s all it was. A bad dream. Here you are, come, get warm in the kitchen.

  Where were her fuzzy blue slippers? Keep your feet warm, Hannah—cold feet can ruin your day. But then she remembered Mandy cold in her arms, and her mother stepped out of view, and other pictures flashed by, unasked for, becoming uglier and uglier.

  If she could have made her legs work, she would have run and run and run. She heard the banging of her heart, impossibly loud, and tried to hang on. The dog licked her fingers. Yes. Please. Eat me. Swallow me whole.

  She was supposed to call her Ellie. How could she? But she nodded anyway—she was not a puddle on the floor. They were taking off their outdoor shoes. She bent and fumbled with her runners. She closed her eyes and held up the mothers’ pictures in her head, side by side. Now she could spot the differences, like on the back page of the Saturday paper—a missing belt buckle, an extra polka dot. Mrs. Nyland had a mole above her top lip and a spattering of freckles across her pale cheeks. Her mother’s face was a flutter of emotions; Mrs. Nyland’s was not. She was taller too, and her housecoat was the wrong colour.

  It was just a cruel trick of the light. By the time Hannah had lined up her runners beside her feet and folded the blanket in her arms, she was standing in front of someone else’s mother in some other family’s house.

  —

  Eric looked up, startled to see his wife leaning against the wall, staring at him. He stood, knocking the puzzle box lid onto the floor.

  “Ellie?” he said. How long had she been standing there? Now acutely aware of his wife watching, he stooped to retrieve the box lid and stood it upright on the table so the quaint prairie scene faced Walter’s chair.

  He turned. “Will she be all right?” he asked, crossing the room to her. She pressed tight against the wall, arms crossed, fingers digging into the folds of her housecoat.

  “Do you think she’ll be all right?” he said again. “Has she settled in?”

  “It’s a horrible room.”

  “But she’s all tucked in?”

  She ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s drier than any desert in there. We should get her a humidifier.”

  “She’s safe at least.” Going back to that house was the first bit of use he’d been to anyone since they’d moved back to Neesley. “I didn’t plan for this to happen.”

  “I know, Eric.”

  He leaned down close to her ear, one hand on the wall above her head. “Bringing her here was the last resort. Betty and I couldn’t think of what else to do.”

  Ellie flushed. “So glad you and Betty worked it out.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “You make it sound like the girl is moving in.”

  “No. Just a few days. Just until Christmas is over and we can get her into a foster home.”

  “You and Betty?”

  “I’m sorry, El.”

  But it was no good. He didn’t have the right words. It was Christmas, and Christmas was the deepest of blue in this house and in all their houses before this. Even if he could erase the last twelve hours, even if he’d brought in the perfect tree instead of Hannah, or the whole damn forest, or the baby Jesus himself, it wouldn’t turn Christmas a different colour. When Ellie got like this, whatever this was called, he had no way to make it better.

  “And Danny?” she said now. “Will he be all right?”

  Eric was quite sure he would be, especially after watching him dig into the leftovers. “I was proud of him tonight. He seemed so . . . grown up.”

  Ellie pushed him away with the palms of her hand. “But he’s not grown up, is he? He’s fourteen years old. And you drag him into this.”

  “I know,” Eric said, helpless.

  Ellie slid along the wall away from him. “Get Thorn out so he doesn’t do his business in the hallway. And turn out the lights when you’re done. I’m going to bed.”

  Then she rounded the corner and was gone.

  —

  Hannah stayed right where Ellie had left her. It wasn’t exactl
y fear that kept her frozen like a Popsicle—she just didn’t know what she should do next.

  Ellie had dropped the green garbage bag right here, right beside her left foot. She could nudge it with her toe, but the plastic was gathered into a tight knot at the top. She didn’t want to open it anyway. The bag was stuffed with reminders of Nigel’s house.

  She thought about Sammy. They’d all talked about him in whispers at the hospital. She was supposed to be answering the constable’s questions, but when he turned away to answer the phone, she climbed out of her hospital bed and stood hidden by the curtain and tried to catch what the sergeant and Daniel and that lady in the waiting room were saying. Sammy would explode when he saw her. She wasn’t supposed to hear that, but Daniel had practically yelled, clear as day. She didn’t know who or what Sammy was, only that she had to be careful. She was cold enough to shiver-dance, to clack her teeth and stomp her feet, but then the whole family would sit up straight in their beds and shout out, What was that?!

  Mostly she wanted to cry. But that would be worse still, because sounds of misery travel far in a house, and there was Sammy to think about. If she started, she might never stop. She was a bad crier too. She was noisy and out of control, with a high-pitched wail that swelled in volume until her ears hurt. Then came hiccups. Then her nose ran like a river and made her collar wet and she swallowed the dripping snot when she gasped for air, and sometimes she choked. Once, she threw up all over her jewellery box.

  So, she didn’t dare cry, even though she had held Mandy in her arms, impossibly stiff and cold. It was the hardest thing in the world to hold a dead friend, and it was her fault and it had happened so fast she couldn’t even say goodbye.

  She pressed her fingers along her shirt, feeling each one of her not-broken ribs. She hurt all over: back, front, legs, arms. She tried to ignore the achy parts. She studied the room, turning her body in a perfect slow circle. She’d been in a room like this once before, except it had no bed. It was a store in the city. She’d ducked in to get out of the wind while she waited for Nigel to come out of the pub. The store’s bell tinkled when she pushed open the door; a woman with a silver-haired bun on top of her head stood behind the cash register. “Can I help you?” the woman said, not in a mean voice. Yes, yes, I need help, Hannah wanted to scream. But she stayed quiet and pretended to eye the displays instead, flexing red, raw fingers that stung as they thawed out. She got so caught up in what she saw, she forgot to pretend. It was a small space, with barely enough room to squeeze between aisles, and very warm. Moist, happy air rose from fancy grates on the floor. She saw rolls of material in giant bins, colourful and shiny, waving like flags; a great long table with scissors as big as hedge trimmers; rows and rows of beautiful buttons; and, sitting high on shelves, felt hats shaped like little canoes, decorated with feathers tucked into ribbons. The woman snuck up from behind and asked again, “Can I help you?” She was less friendly now and much older than she had seemed behind the cash register. Her body tilted forward from the waist up, a hump at the back of her dress. “You know this is a sewing store,” she said. Hannah wanted to stay there, but her mother hadn’t taught her about sewing. She couldn’t think of words beyond buttons and thread, so she stepped back into the wind.