by Fran Kimmel
“I’d say you are too.” Ellie looked about the tidied room, unsure what was expected of her after this gift she’d been given.
—
In the early afternoon, the first snow of the day fell. Harsh wind picked up the fat flakes and swirled them about in all directions, so it was hard to tell if they were falling or rising. Eric watched the wind peak and roar, lift the bird feeder dangling on the dead branch beyond the window, spin it around like a carousel.
The tree now leaned against the wall in the corner of the living room, its grey scaled trunk in a bucket of warm water. Eric and Dan had had to haul it in through the patio door off the dining room. It was a good-sized spruce, over eight feet tall, its needles soft and waxy, silvery green, and if its branches looked flattened a bit on one side, that part could go against the wall.
Ellie had praised the boys affectionately—Sammy for his choice, Danny for his chopping—and if she didn’t look Eric in the eye when they marched through the patio door, flinging snow everywhere, she didn’t turn away either.
Eric stood at the window and stared at the distant horizon. There was a bleakness to the fields, one dip or swell indistinguishable from the next. He rubbed at the ache beneath his collarbone. Don’t just stand there, his mother used to say when he was small and at a loss for what to do next. Plenty of time to do nothing when you’re dead. Myrtle saw inactivity as a sign of weakness, a holy path to hell and a sin more egregious than stealing, which in her mind took gumption, at least in the planning of a good heist. Myrtle lived by her principles. And died by them. Her heart gave out when she was down on her knees in the bowels of the basement, fiddling with the furnace filter on a day as cold as this.
He knew Ellie craved that kind of conviction. That’s what brought them back here, her warped belief in the healing powers of Myrtle’s busyness. She wanted to be under the protection of Myrtle’s roof—not simply a holiday guest arriving sticky and exhausted—but a mother who cared for her family as Myrtle had done before her. It was what they needed, she argued. Fresh air, the country garden. The simplicity of Neesley. They could watch over Walter, keep him clean and fed. It was a good place for the boys, with its wide open spaces, clean dirt, and lack of unsavouriness. The boys have such fond memories of Neesley, Eric; they deserve this chance.
Eric had his own memories, which he was not inclined to speak of over the years. By the time Ellie showed up, Walter had ended his drinking days, and though he was never agreeable, she held a romanticized view of the man he had been, if only because Myrtle had chosen him.
He looked across the room to Walter now, slumped harmlessly in his chair, a dried-out fig. Years before, he had watched and waited for his father’s body to go slack like that: jaw open, glasses askew, large fists smaller as they dangled at the ends of limp arms. Myrtle had ignored Walter for the most part—his slurred soliloquys and raging torrents. She’d protected Eric from the worst, but Eric resented that she’d never once openly contemplated leaving the man, with her son in tow. When Walter passed out, she hummed while she worked, dusting him with her rag like he was a piece of furniture. For his part, Eric watched and waited for the bottle to empty. Only then could he crawl from his trench, like a soldier at the front.
Since they’d moved back, he felt as if he was living in a museum of who his parents were, with a ghost of a father and a mother who was gone. He had never admitted to Ellie that he hated the man and this house. He didn’t argue with her when she came up with the idea. Her enthusiasm gave him hope, and God knows he needed some. He’d discovered the book under their bed at Smoky River, searching for one of Sammy’s toys. Should You Leave? was the title. Whole paragraphs underlined, passages starred, page corners turned down. He never mentioned it, and neither did she. All he knew was that they needed to start over and this was where she wanted to be. And if the move hadn’t yet brought back their earlier happiness, at least they were still under the same roof.
Hannah came and stood beside Eric at the window. She looked pale and tired, her lips as colourless as water.
“I want to bury Mandy,” she said.
“Oh.” Eric stared down at the top of her head. While he knew she would not just forget that she had a cat—or what that bastard had done to it—he’d hoped she might not dwell on particulars. The winter ground was granite-hard. “The ground is too frozen, Hannah. It has been for weeks. If we tried to dig a space for her, the shovel would break.”
“Is she still in your car?” she asked.
Would she want it in the car? “She’s in the barn. Near the house.”
“It’s so cold out there.”
“It’s not a good idea to bring her inside.”
“I know that. You can’t keep dead things in a house.”
“We could take her into Neesley. Jane’s a good vet.”
“Mandy’s dead already. A veterinarian can’t help her.”
“But we could get Mandy cremated. That’s one of the things that they do at the vet office.”
Hannah looked up. “They put the bodies into an oven and burn them up.”
How matter-of-fact she was, as though she passed by a crematorium on her way to dance class every day.
“Yes,” he said. “And if you ask, you can have the ashes too.” For a few dollars more, Barb Delancy, the town’s tireless entreprenuer, would fire up her kiln to make a paw-print impression, hand-painted and stuck inside a not-quite-rectangular shadow box. Her husband, no carpenter, made twelve at a time. They were hung crookedly on living room walls all over Neesley.
“They do that when people die too,” Hannah said. “They burn up the bodies and give you the ashes in a big vase and you can put them on your dresser if you want.”
Maybe that’s what they’d done with her mother. Eric recalled her bedroom, the items he’d seen on her rickety wooden dresser. There’d been a jewellery box on top of a faded doily and a hairbrush with a blue handle. No urn.
“I don’t want to do that to Mandy,” she said. “I don’t want her body burnt up. I want her to get buried.”
Eric had carved a small wooden box for Lily. He’d stabbed into the wood, then the earth. None of it helped.
Hannah rocked back and forth on her heels, hands clasped behind her back. “I want to say goodbye. I didn’t have time. It happened too fast.”
He wasn’t sure what to say, but then a picture came into his head as if he’d been handed a photograph of his younger self, before Ellie, before Lily, back when he was still a constable stationed up north, green as grass and eager to please, standing on frozen earth beside those not willing to wait to bury their dead. They were suicides most often, or might as well have been—freezing to death after a binge, trying to stagger home.
Silent relatives, old men mostly, cleared snow from the site first, then lit a fire and waited. As the ground became soft enough to dig, the fire was moved aside and the grave chipped away with shovels and pick axes. When the diggers, Eric among them, again hit frozen earth, the fire was moved back into the hole until all that was left was the sound of the earth on the casket, ka-thud, ka-thud, and the wailing of the women, breaking like ice.
“We can build a fire,” Eric said. A cat didn’t need much depth.
Hannah touched his sleeve with the ends of her fingers. “Don’t burn her.”
He was making this worse. “A fire to soften the earth. That’s all I meant.” He’d find a box to put her cat in. He would dig over by the apple tree, downwind, away from the swing set he’d assembled for Sammy last summer, pile bags of charcoal on the ground, set them alight, and cover them with Walter’s old water drum—he’d have to cut that in half first with the bow saw. “It’ll take some time to thaw the ground. But we can bury her then.”
“How much time,” Hannah wanted to know.
“A day. Maybe two. We can keep the fire going through the night.”
“Not today?” S
he looked deflated, all the oomph gone out of her as she stared out at nothing.
“Not today.”
What if I’m already gone? That’s what she wanted to know. But she asked instead, “Can I go to my room now?”
Eric nodded, although he didn’t want to let her go just then.
“I promise,” he added as she walked away. “We’ll bury your cat. We’ll do it together.” But she just kept going as if she didn’t hear.
—
Sammy lay on the floor in front of his closed bedroom door. He remembered what his mom said. This is your room and you don’t have to share it. Words stuck in his brains. He didn’t like words. He liked numbers the most. His look-out tower got to two hundred and seventy-nine. He needed it built higher to stop the troopers waiting under the couch. Three hundred and seventy-four doubles; ninety-five more. But he couldn’t get to the Lego box unless he opened the door.
He lined up his cars, biggest to smallest, blocking the space between the carpet and the door bottom. Black is one. Purple. Blue. Green. Other green. Yellow. Orange. White is eight.
Except his cars were supposed to go on his dresser, not the floor, so he carried them back, biggest to smallest. He didn’t want to open his door. In the kitchen, the chairs were wrong. Now there were six and there were supposed to be five. And there were two salts on the table, not one, and it was supposed to be beside the juice jug, not beside the spot for his dad’s green cup. It made his stomach hurt.
His mom said that girl would go away. Good.
—
Back in her room, Hannah lay under a heap of blankets, tiny buds in her ears attached by wires, Thorn on the bed at her feet. She kept a tight grip on Daniel’s iPad. He’d been excited to hand it over. “This is cool, you gotta see this—and now go here, and if you push your finger up and down, that’s right, this does that.”
He’d shown her how to blow stuff up and choose the best bombs, but then the phone in his pocket vibrated, and he took one look and stormed away. She stopped the explosions and went to the songs in the store instead, tapping buttons, and letting the sounds fill her ears. She’d forgotten how music made her feel, that fragile buzzing sensation inside her chest, a joy in her throat as thick as a chocolate shake. Each clip lasted just a few seconds, but it was enough to make her forget where she was and why.
Her mother sang songs about love and the moon and yellow sunlight on her face. She kept CDs everywhere—at the bottom of her bag, in messy piles on top of the coffee table and her dresser. She would dance around their tiny kitchen in the trailer park, pulling Hannah along with her, the pair of them belting out tunes, rattling the pots drawer and the nosy neighbours down the row, Mandy perched on top of the fridge, staring down like they were crazy.
After school each day, Hannah used to skip past the playground, past Drucker Pharmacy, past the concrete bench that said Enjoy Your Day, past rows of trees spilling pinecones. She looked both ways before she marched through the crosswalk, her arm pointing out like a rifle. Then up the saggy hill, through the parking lot, under the canopy with the Sunnybrook sign. She pressed the button to open the wide door, waved at the old people shuffling behind their walkers, and said hello to the striped fish zig-zagging across their tank. She stood on tiptoes to hang her coat on the peg in the staff room. She sat in the flowery chair by the paper towel rack, ate the cookie set for her on a paper plate, drank the juice in the plastic cup, practised her letters and numbers worksheets, and waited for her mother’s laugh to burst through.
That’s where Nigel Wilson found them, at the Sunnybrook place. He had an old uncle there—Mr. Lambert, a favourite of her mother’s—and he had driven up to see him. Mr. Lambert was one hundred and one years old and had butterflies with black and yellow wings mounted on red-headed pins all over his wall. Hannah was not allowed to go past the staff room (Their rooms are their homes, Hannah, you would not just walk off the street into someone’s home!), but her mother showed her the photo on the bulletin board: Mr. Lambert, not smiling, standing in front of his beige wall in pants too short, butterflies as big as hummingbirds all around, perched on his head and the tips of his shoulders.
Nigel Wilson had come to get his uncle’s affairs in order. He was obsessed with order, an uncomfortable and dirty word, Hannah had since found out. He’d just stepped into his uncle’s room and was leaning down to take off his wet boots when her mother pushed her cleaning cart through the door, knocking him off balance into the puddle he’d made on the floor. His glasses flew off, skittering all the way into the bathroom.
You’ve bowled me over, he said, once he’d picked himself up, got his glasses back on, and took a long look at her. That’s how it started.
Hannah poked hard on the buttons of Daniel’s iPad, trying to find melodies that would bring her mother near. But it was turning against her now, making her think of him instead, the two of them such a tangled mess inside her that she couldn’t have one without the other.
He’s gone, he’s not here, he’s not coming. But it was no good, she couldn’t get rid of Nigel’s face, not even when she squeezed her eyes shut and pulled the blanket over her head. She ripped the buds from her ears.
No man had ever come to their trailer before. He was so quiet at first, hair slicked back, shiny shoes. He’d knock on their door, a tap-tap-tap so timid they had to cock their heads and hold their breath to hear it. Her mother would open the screen and press her hands to her chest. Then she’d take the bouquet he held in front of him—look, Hannah, aren’t these lovely. First carnations, then tulips, then roses, until their trailer became a garden, flowers in every jar that could hold water. If Hannah had known flowers would make her mother so happy, she would have picked every one she could find, filling jars with them herself.
She’d never had to share her mother before. When Nigel showed up at their trailer night after night, Hannah insisted they put on shows for him, the coffee table and the big trunk pushed aside to give them room. She and her mother would wrap themselves in bed sheets for evening gowns, stick flowers in their hair with bobby pins, and clutch wooden spoons for microphones. They would sing just for him, bodies swaying, voices blending together, and he would jump to his feet and clap and whistle. Bravo, bravo. Encore. Encore. Sometimes he would take them for a drive to the river to skip flat stones in the green-blue water. He’d escort them to his car, open both their doors, and wait for the metal snap of their seat belt buckles before starting the engine. Hannah sat in the back, her mother’s hair in waves in front of her, Palmolive shampoo mixed in with the apple-shaped air freshener dangling from the mirror, her fingers wrapped around the radio dial. When she found a good song, she’d glance back at Hannah, and the two of them would join in the chorus, making up words as they went. They’d bounce along the gravel, a mile-long dust cloud trailing behind them, bugs flying at the windshield. Nigel kept his lips pressed tight, eyes on the road, but every so often his finger tapped out the drumbeat on the steering wheel, her mother exploding in a fit of giggles.
He stayed on for his uncle’s funeral service. Hannah begged to keep poor old Mr. Lambert’s butterflies, but she was too late; Nigel had already told the night staff to throw them in the trash. She cried like a baby at the thought of their beautiful broken wings, mashed in with dirty Kleenexes and food scraps.
He stayed through the Sunnybrook spring tea and the Jiggy in June school concert. He stayed through the big rainstorm that left frothy waves in the gutters and turned the park down the street into a lake.
But he couldn’t stay forever. He said he had a business to run.
Her mother didn’t want to leave. She loved the old people and they loved her. In the end, Hannah was the one who clinched the deal. She thought if they moved, her mother wouldn’t have to work so much and she wouldn’t be so tired. They could spend more time together.
So they went, the whole of their lives squashed into Nigel’s car. They didn’t need a U
-Haul, he told them, because his house was already complete—nice furniture, soft pillows and blankets, pots and pans, everything they’d need to start over—so they took their clothes and Mandy and nothing else. Hannah didn’t care. They were headed to his acreage near a town called Bear Creek. She buzzed with excitement along the miles and miles of flat roads, picturing her first real house, a bedroom she could dance in, fields covered in butterflies.
It wasn’t the dream she imagined—not one butterfly that whole, long summer. It was lonelier than she thought it would be in a big house, with so many doors she could be closed out of. Every room was bare and tidy, without so much as a drinking glass or a pair of shoes out of place. There were no more shows for Nigel in the evenings; they were now the guests in his world. Those first weeks were filled with tears. Hannah could not find where she belonged and neither could Mandy, who refused to come out of hiding, not even when Hannah shook the treats bag. But her mother seemed so happy that she didn’t want to ruin things. Her eyes shone as she held hands with Nigel on the porch step or squeezed beside him on the living room couch. She would tilt her head back and laugh at something Nigel said—the way she used to do with her—and Hannah would go up to her room, close her door, and fling herself on her bed. Her mother found her like that, head buried under the pillow. She held her close and said, Oh, Hannah, there’s plenty of love to go around, you’ll see.
Her mother started taking her on drives in the country every morning, just the two of them side by side in the front seat of Nigel’s car. They passed magic forests and unicorns, found clouds shaped like hearts. Hannah treasured those times, her mother beside her, listening so closely to every word Hannah said. Nigel grumbled about their road trips without him—What is it you two are up to? You have nowhere to go!—but her mother insisted, and every time she wrapped her arms around him, he handed over the keys.