Then my mum said, I’m sorry, Danny. I’m so sorry I don’t do a better job of cooking for you kids. I guess, when I have the strength, I want to cook something fun.
Danny made a snorting sound at that, as though the word fun couldn’t possibly apply to anything that happens in our house.
And then Mum said something like, And as for the problem with Cookie, I’m sure she’ll outgrow it. I don’t think what I choose to bake has much to do with it. It’s normal to have dessert.
Then Danny said, But Cookie isn’t normal. What she’s doing to herself isn’t normal.
And Mum: Teenagers often go through unusual phases. As I say, I think she’ll grow out of it.
She started blabbing about when she was young, and I stopped listening. Then I heard the snap of a tea towel, and Danny was through the kitchen door in an instant.
I didn’t move fast enough, and he saw me.
He came towards me and said my name but I put up my hands against him coming any closer, and he stopped.
I grabbed onto the banister and ran upstairs. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would be part of the question. It was supposed to be about our mum’s cooking, not about me. We were supposed to be in it together. I closed my bedroom door behind me.
He didn’t follow me at first. He would know there was nothing he could say to make it better. I missed him as I wondered if he would try. I wanted to talk to him about what had just happened, but I wanted it to be someone else that I would be talking about. Not him.
When the floorboards creaked I knew it was Danny outside my room.
He said my name a couple of times, but I covered my ears with my hands; I didn’t want to hear any more words. My stomach felt empty and my mouth felt dry. I shivered under my quilt and couldn’t remember the last time I was warm.
A little while later I took off my clothes and retrieved my knife from under the mattress. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I hate my mirror. When I look at my bare self all I see is fat, even though people tell me I’ve gotten too thin. If I’m so thin, what is this blubber that I can grab a hold of at my waist? I want to cut it off.
My hand was a little shaky so I cut deeper this time. I felt like I went inside the pain — right inside it; it held me close like it loved me — and this time I watched the blood run. I didn’t stanch it, but pressed around the cut. I bled on my sheets, but I don’t care. It was the best part of my day.
At midnight I got out of bed and started downstairs. I had been lying awake thinking about the cake. It will be a glaring omission tomorrow if I eat it; Danny and Mum will want some, but neither of them will be surprised if it’s gone. There has been so much gone food.
I was on the top landing when I remembered what Danny had said earlier. I sat down where I stood. His words came back: …our problem with her; …Cookie isn’t normal.
Once I walked into a conversation between my mum and Aunt Dot, and Mum said, You don’t know what it’s like for me. She stopped talking when she saw me. I thought then that she was talking about her disease. Now on the stairs I realized that she might have been talking about me.
It’s possible that Danny would say something like that to Paul when they’re out seeking adventure. You don’t know what it’s like for me. Like Mum said to Dot.
It was hard to digest this new realization. I truly hadn’t known that it was like anything for anyone else; I just thought it was like something for me. It makes me feel sick to think that anything about me is like something for anyone else.
My thoughts returned to the cake. If I eat it, there will be silence tomorrow. Not at first. At first Mum will say something like, I was looking forward to a piece of that cake for my lunch today. My throat has been feeling so good lately. You’ve gone and eaten the whole thing.
Sorry, Mum. I’ll make another one.
Never mind.
She’ll look at me with distaste, the way Miss Hartley does, the way I do myself when I look in a mirror.
And then there will be silence.
I thought about coming back to my room and using my knife again to help me stay away from the fridge. I could cut my nipples. That might hurt enough.
Instead I went to the cellar and chose two cans of pork and beans and two cans of Klik from the pantry and put them in the deep pockets of my housecoat. I’m back in my room now and I’m struggling. The cake. I’ll go now to the river.
And that was all.
It was his fault. He had sent her over the edge. Never mind Miss Hartley and her vicious cruelty, never mind his mum and her criticisms of Cookie. He was worse than both of them because he was supposed to be her ally and he had torn that bond apart with his words. She had loved him more than anyone, and in return he had hurt her more than she could bear.
Danny returned the scribbler to where he had found it. He was sure he would never want to read it again. But he would wait till he was thinking clearly before deciding what to do with it, what Cookie would want him to do with it. Destroy it, in all likelihood, but he would wait till he knew for sure. It was the least he could do for her.
Back in his own room he closed the door behind him. A moment later Russell scratched at the door, and Danny got up to let him in. Then he lay down on his bed and wept.
42
When Danny woke up in the morning he was still in his clothes. He changed quietly and went downstairs. His mum’s bedroom door was closed. He looked in the living room and saw that the bedding was gone from the couch. Quickly, he brushed his teeth, splashed water on his face, and slipped out the back door.
It had become more important than ever to find out what had happened to Miss Hartley. He didn’t know who to ask. Surely if she was dead, the school would be buzzing with the news. At lunchtime he stood inside the cloud of smoke outside the teachers’ lounge and tried to hear what they were talking about. The words melded into one another and formed a limp murmur with no edges or personality. His ears weren’t equipped for the job.
By the end of the day he had picked someone to ask. Morven Rankin was unpopular, more so even than he had become, but it didn’t seem to have any effect on her; she didn’t seem to care. One of the reasons she was unpopular was that she stared at people way too long. Her brother George tried to train her to do otherwise — Danny had heard him — but she didn’t pay any attention to him, or if she did, she chose not to do as he said.
It probably hadn’t even occurred to Morven to hate him or snub him. She didn’t follow the rule of Paul as so many did. Plus, Danny didn’t make fun of her. He didn’t chant nasty rhymes at her or pass around her cooties, as he had seen the horrible girls doing back at Nordale, as they had done with Janine. Morven was all right, as Janine had said. And she had something in common with Cookie: Miss Hartley had humiliated her in front of the class, with the blood-between-her-legs incident.
The worst that could happen was that she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. There had been talk forever that she was a couple of bricks short of a load, as Uncle Edwin would say.
A moment presented itself after classes ended for the day. He caught her alone just outside the school doors. She was facing away.
“Morven,” Danny said.
She was slow to turn around. “Yes.”
“I was wonderin’…do you know how long Miss Hartley is gonna be away?”
“Why?” said Morven.
He hadn’t counted on that.
“Just curious,” he said and stared at her, in the way he had learned to do. Maybe it would make her think they had something in common, since staring was what she was famous for.
“I don’t know,” said Morven. “Somebody said that the substitute said she’s bereaved.”
Bereaved. He had heard the word a lot at the time of Cookie’s death. He and his mum had apparently been bereaved. So, if what Morven said was true, Miss Hartley’s absence had no
thing to do with her being dead. You had to be alive to be bereaved. He was dizzy with relief.
Russell ran across the school grounds to meet Danny, who introduced her to Morven. She held out her hand, and Russell licked it thoroughly on both sides and between the fingers.
“Thanks,” said Morven.
Danny walked over to Janine’s house with Russell stepping smartly at his side. He knocked on the screen door and Janine let them both in. She was making macaroni and cheese. Danny sat down — Russell alert beside his chair.
A cigarette burned in an ashtray on the kitchen table.
“Is your dad home?” Danny said.
“No.”
“Is he on a bender?”
“No.”
“Are you smokin’?”
“Yes.”
She grated cheese on top of the macaroni, way more than anyone in his house had ever grated at one time. More than Cookie had, on the last macaroni she had ever made.
He wanted to tell Janine about Cookie’s diary. But he was afraid to. What if she thought it was funny that Cookie broke into people’s houses? What if she laughed? And he couldn’t tell her that it was all his fault that Cookie died. He could barely tell that to himself.
“Would you like to hear the latest development,” he said instead, “or have you totally lost interest?”
He took a drag on the cigarette and blew out the smoke without inhaling.
Janine slid the casserole dish in the oven and sat down across from him.
“Of course I want to hear, Danny. Crisse, I just wanted to finish what I was doing.”
He told her what Morven had said. “I wonder who died,” he added.
“Who cares?”
“Me.”
“Why?”
“What if it was the divorcée Flood?”
“That’d be great,” said Janine.
“What Morven said doesn’t explain what happened on Tuesday when Miss Hardass collapsed beside her car.”
“Maybe she collapsed from grief.” Janine stood up and ran hot water over the cheese grater. “Maybe she got a phone call at the school just before she left, and that was the beginning of her bereavement.”
Danny took another drag. “But there was an ambulance, a close-by ambulance. It must have been for her. You don’t get ambulanced anywhere for bereavement.”
“We don’t know that it was for her,” said Janine. “Plus, maybe if it was for her it was because whoever found her didn’t know that her collapse was because of bereavement, and they called just to be on the safe side.”
“Could be,” said Danny.
“Guess what?” said Janine.
“What?”
“I was talking to my dad about slingshots and stuff. Don’t worry,” she said, responding to the look on Danny’s face. “Not in connection to what we did or anything. I didn’t tell him anything about that. Honest.”
She let that sink in.
“Anyway, he told me that it would be nigh unto impossible to kill someone with a slingshot and a stone.”
“What?”
“Nigh unto impossible. That’s what he said.”
Danny felt as though his whole self had been transferred out of his body to a mysterious destination. And what replaced it was nothing. He watched a girl clean up a kitchen counter. He felt a dog’s head beneath one of his hands. A colourful cat sat in a doorway. A clock struck six in another room.
“That clock’s way off.” The girl rinsed a rag and sat down. “It’s been off ever since I’ve known it.”
“Can I have a whole cigarette?” The empty boy spoke.
“Sure, help yourself.” She pushed an open pack of filterless Exports towards him.
Danny came back to himself as he lit up his smoke.
“You’re going to have to inhale if you don’t want to look like a simp,” Janine said.
“We spent a lot of time workin’ up to an impossible feat,” he said.
“Yup.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
He stared at Russell next to his chair and then at Pearl, who had stationed herself in the hall. “Little do Pearl and Russell know. They probably think all our thoughts and actions these past weeks have been about planning their next meals or whether or not we’re gonna throw sticks for them.”
“Or balls of yarn in Pearl’s case,” said Janine. “Do you want to stay for macaroni?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
Danny and Russell got up and walked out the back door. He dropped his cigarette into the damp grass.
On quivery legs at first, he began the walk down the lane. He felt like a gopher poking its head out from the earth after a prairie winter, adjusting its eyes to the light, taking a slow look around at the world it left a couple of seasons ago. It felt as if he had lived a whole life in the past few months, separate from his usual one. He could disconnect from it now, and set it aside, as his own being had done to itself just a few minutes ago. He wouldn’t throw it away; it was too important to discard, but he could put it on a shelf, maybe in the shed along with his stones, and let it sit. Later, he could revisit it. Or not.
He could concentrate on Cookie herself now, not on what he was going to do about her. There was nothing to do but miss her and apologize to her, forever.
43
The next day Morven walked over to Danny in the schoolyard before the bell rang.
“Miss Hartley’s sister died,” she said.
“What?”
“Miss Hartley’s sister died.”
For a second Danny believed in another sister — one that wasn’t a twin — who was much older than Miss Hartley and Mrs. Flood.
“Her twin,” said Morven.
She started to walk away when Danny was unable to summon up any words. His head was very crowded.
“Wait. Morven.” He ran to catch up. “Do you know what she died from?”
“A heart attack.”
“Whoa.” He touched the sleeve of her jacket when she started walking again, and she pulled it away.
“Sorry,” said Danny. “Wasn’t she too young to die from a heart attack?”
“Oh,” said Morven. “I don’t know about that part.”
“Where did she die?”
“In the St. Boniface Hospital. That’s what they say.”
Thoughts shifted inside Danny’s head, searching for a sequence that made sense.
“She had episodes forever,” said Morven, back into it.
“Episodes?”
“Yeah, episodes to do with her heart. They say serious episodes.”
Morven’s answers were slow coming, but Danny didn’t want them to come any faster.
“Thanks, Morven,” he said.
“Welcome.”
They both began to walk towards the school.
“Mr. Potter found her,” she said.
He stopped, so she did too. The bell rang, and they both ignored it.
“Mr. Potter found her?”
“Yes. He found her on the ground in the parking lot and called for an ambulance. Birchdale Betty helped. He went inside her house to use her phone. It was closer than walking all the way to the other end of the school to where the office is. Plus, she offered. She was out there. Mr. Potter has been inside Birchdale Betty’s house.”
She seemed amazed by this last piece of information, and rightly so. No one, to anyone’s knowledge, had ever been inside Birchdale Betty’s house, and it was a matter of speculation by everyone in the neighbourhood, adults and kids alike. Was it insanely decorated, like her yard? Did she have old ladies tied up in the cellar? Did she keep her husband on a leash? Were there pickled toes in her pantry?
“You’d better get goin’, Morven,” said Danny. “You don’t wanna be late on my account.”
&
nbsp; She headed towards the school, and Danny went home for his bike. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t care if he ever made it back to school.
Cars honked as he rode through traffic on his way over to rue Valade. He parked his bike by the spruce tree.
What he saw didn’t come as a surprise; he had developed a theory on the ride over. Side by side, in the small parking area behind the house, were two Volkswagen Beetles: one blue, one green. Mrs. Flood had bought herself a car. It was the high-heeled twin sister who had crumpled to the ground in the parking lot. The deepening dusk had darkened the colour of her hair. Where had Miss Hartley been? It didn’t matter.
Danny pedalled back to the school and knocked on the door of room 11-26. A familiar girl answered his knock. He had expected a stranger, someone from the other side of St. Mary’s Road, one of the girls that should befriend Janine despite her poorness and self-cut hair. Before he said a word this girl turned to the class and said, “Janine. Your little boyfriend’s here.”
Amid tittering, Janine made her way to the door. She slammed it shut behind her.
“Calice, Danny, what are you doing? Trying to ruin my life?”
He told her what Morven had said, and what he had seen. As he told it, he noticed that she was wearing pale pink lipstick, almost white, and she had made an effort to curl her hair. He had never seen either of those things before. Also, there was something about her eyebrows. They were lesser somehow.
She was quiet as he spoke, and his words slowed as he took in her new look. He didn’t like it. It went a ways towards taking her away from him.
The teacher opened the door. It was a man teacher.
Another thing Danny hadn’t expected.
“Is this important?” he said, speaking to Janine.
“Yes.”
She said it at the same time as Danny did, but for a different reason, he knew. She wanted everyone to think something serious, perhaps family related, had happened, and that was the reason a kid had come to call.
Blue Vengeance Page 22