Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  “Goodbye, Bernadette,” her father said, adding as he always did: “Get thee to your nunnery, kiddo.”

  She got into her car and drove down the street and through the Heights and onto the highway. Three quarters of an hour into the future and twenty years out of the past, the kilometres clicking by, adding up incrementally on the dashboard display while the windshield wipers chased a small patch of the unblurred world backward and forward across the glass.

  First Snow

  Twelve

  Sisters of Mercy

  One good thing was that it was an unusually mild December. Naturally, everyone had turned on their furnaces by mid-November, but the river was still medium-to-swift-flowing, and in some places only slightly narrower than it had been at the fullness of its summer girth.

  “Hardly chunky at all,” June pointed out to her sister. She meant with ice.

  The March sisters had been named for summer — doubly named, for they were christened May and June, although June was the older by fifteen years — and both had been born in the fall. May and June March! Imagine!

  But if they had been named for summer, they were nicknamed for blight. When they were children their father, whether impelled by a sense of playfulness or cruelty, had referred to them as Mayfly and Junebug, the emphasis entirely his. One sister was a middle-aged woman now and the other was — “Oh, older than that, surely?” June had no desire to live to be 140 years old and was too honest to pretend nostalgia for her despondent youth. But while June had long ago resolved to make a good thing of their father’s ill-natured jocularity, her sister had changed not only the joke of her detested double-month name, but her genus as well. She was Rose now, by any other name.

  The reason it was a good thing that December was unusually mild was tacked onto a very bad thing, in this case the two kids who’d gone missing outside a house on the six hundred block of Lord Balfour Street. Their names were Brittany Thomas and Billy Sinclair and they’d last been seen three days ago, making chalk drawings on the sidewalk outside number 631. The mail carrier had come by at nine-ish and said, “No school today?” But they hadn’t been seen since.

  The street in which the sisters lived, Rose with her kids in the main part of the house, June in the attic, was a rundown, piecemeal, catch-as-catch sort of place, in a neighbourhood that matched the street in all essentials. We’re just across the tracks from the river, Rose would always say, but in truth everything in the city was across from the river or the railway tracks. The sisters had inherited the house from their parents, but it was hard making ends meet, and they’d lately taken on a boarder, a quiet man called Macilroy. The house itself was an undistinguished double storey on a street of houses distinguished mainly by an air of desultory neglect. Every couple of years there were rumours of gentrification but these, it was generally agreed, had been planted by wily realtors with an eye to the main chance.

  “But at least you have a madwoman in the attic,” Aunt June would tell the youngsters. However, Jane Eyre had not yet been parodied on The Simpsons, where her niece and nephew acquired their cultural references. Always slightly elderly in her inclinations, Aunt June had aged disproportionately since her stroke. She’d grown so frail and thin that her niece and nephew often stared at her, at their peculiar relation whom they had once called Auntie Junebug.

  In those days they’d thrown their small compact bodies into her arms like missiles — ah, but she’d welcomed those ground attacks of love — demanding all kinds of comforts: a kiss for a grazed knee, candy smuggled into a sticky hand. When their truant father came home on a bender they’d smuggle themselves up to Auntie Junebug’s attic room, climbing the wooden stairs with wide eyes set in pinched and anxious little faces. In time, she would grow out of the diminutive, jokey nickname, yet she would always be Aunt June to Rose’s kids and, as if in thrall to her childless, ageless self, she remained Aunt June to the world although she was unrelated to anyone in it but these closest three.

  “A bender!” exclaimed Rose. “Where do you get your crazy notions, Bug?” When agitated, Rose tended to scold, which was not the worst of her transgressions, that being reserved for what she had just called her older sister. Bug.

  Bug. It was undignified, it was inaccurate, it provoked Aunt June to say, “What do you call it when a man comes home drunk every week? I heard him yelling at you, Rose, I heard him.”

  But she did not say, “We all heard him.” She did not say the children heard him or the neighbours or perhaps — in a merciful world — even God. In any case her sister would only have said, “He wasn’t yelling, Junie,” which was not true — he had been yelling and banging on walls and throwing what sounded like a hatful of ball bearings down the stairs — but the way her sister would have said it, wearily and with her hand picking at the fragile broken necklace of her collarbones, gave Aunt June pause. Rose was difficult to contradict. Perhaps it hadn’t been yelling but something else, Aunt June thought with a shiver. Her sister had so many different names for love.

  With the years, Rose had thickened and grown plump. Her name suited her in that she resembled a blowsy, somewhat dishevelled tea rose, a hybrid. She was divorced now and Aunt June was a spinster, an old maid.

  The sisters lived on Furbelow Road, in a labyrinth of side streets leading off the grimmest of the city’s training hospitals. Sisters of Mercy occupied almost a city block of squared-off buildings and clamp-jawed parking garages connected by breezeways and wind tunnels and a fluorescent-bright skywalk that hung suspended in the air on dark nights like an empty thought bubble in a comic book. Above the Emergency entrance a red neon cross blazed into the sky. The crucifix was a remnant from the time when the four nuns of the Sisters of Mercy Order ran their Home for Abandoned Mothers on the site. The home had become a maternity hospital, and later a general hospital and health sciences centre. All the while the red cross flickered on, although by now it had become a secular landmark. Most people took it for granted, an indication that patients had come to the right place and might exit their vehicles, although parking outside Emergency was strictly prohibited.

  But at night when the winds blew the clouds across the sky, shapes changed and re-formed, the neon cross becoming fanciful, a shape shifter. Aunt June, leaning her chin in her palm and her elbow on the windowsill, could almost imagine that the cross had slipped sideways in the sky, become an X marking the spot on a treasure map, or a cursor clicking on points of interest in the night sky. Ladies and gentlemen — the Milky Way! It’s only a landmark, Aunt June would remind herself at these times, it’s only the Sisters of Mercy crucifix. But no, Aunt June was unconvincing, even to herself. On windy nights the crucifix was this, it was that. It was:

  “The hand of God,” said Rose’s daughter, who had a dramatic temperament.

  “It’s just a crucifix, dear,” said Aunt June who did not.

  “The hand of God holding a crucifix,” her niece insisted.

  Aunt June sighed. Her niece was a fanciful creature, currently pouting and primping her way through an aesthetician’s course at the local community college. Her name was Elvira, neither flower nor bug.

  From her high window in the attic of the house on Furbelow Road, Aunt June could see the red cross and even imagine that she could hear its neon hum. The nights were so cold they cracked. You could hear a train whistle from far away, miles and miles away, as if the train was coming toward them out of the future.

  The cross hung in the top left quadrant of her attic window, always in the same place, for it was not a moon that moved across the steep acreages of the sky. Nights it hung there, red and insomniac, but by day it was only a sketchy outline of faith against the blowing snow or guttering clouds, the leaves that massed in the summer and fell in the fall. You are here, it seemed to whisper to Aunt June. Here in your room, here in the city, here in the breathing, broken world.

  But the cross wasn’t the only thing Aunt June could gl
impse from her window. Looking down, she could take in almost the entire neighbourhood: the cross-hatching of streets near the hospital, the steeple of All Saints Catholic in the distance, and in the foreground the little Filipino church with its timely announcements (“He is Born!”). There was the new refugee counselling centre in the basement of the United Church and Ken’s Kum & Go, the oddly named convenience store across the way, and the usual collection of pawn shops and charity stores and hotel off-license drinking establishments. The auto body place had been there forever but the hair salon on the corner that specialized in weaves was new. In winter when the trees were bare, she could even peer into the refuse-strewn park where the older kids hung out on the swings in the dusk. To smoke and canoodle.

  “If canoodling means trash talking and dope smoking, then I guess that’s what they’re doing,” Rose sighed.

  “Perhaps they’re just courting, Rosie,” Aunt June said gently. “Don’t you remember —”

  But what she remembered, or thought she did, had nothing to do with Rose, who had been called the B-word by one of the young ruffians that very morning as she was crossing the park to her bus stop. All day she’d sat in her office at the new industrial park and stewed — stewed in her own juices, as her mother would have said, encouraging Rose to imagine those juices, syrupy and cloying, and she the fat pink peach at their centre.

  Sticks and stones, she told herself. Rubber and glue. I know I am but what are you?

  But still, it hurt her, that B-word. For why should she be taunted with a word too awful to pronounce in polite society, a word permissible only by the coy erasure of its subsequent letters? And what had she done? she asked herself, as she sat at her desk in the front office of Thiessen’s Tiling and Flooring. She had only walked through the park, more briskly than usual (she was late), pulling out her pocketbook so as to have her bus pass handy. She hadn’t seen the kids or she never would have reached into her purse in the first place, no fool she.

  In the afternoon, Mr. Thiessen came in to sign for a delivery of laminates but he didn’t josh her, didn’t call her Ring-a-Rosie in his ham-fisted but courtly fashion. Instead, he’d asked if by any chance June March had completed the books for the previous month. He never failed to call her sister by her full name — June March — it was his little joke. But June, who was never late with the books, wasn’t late this month either.

  “It’s only the twelfth, Mr. Thiessen,” Rose started to reply but her boss was already out the door, goodbye and good luck, and she was not A Rose Is A Rose, not A Rose By Any Other Name.

  Oh what was the matter, what had she done? She slumped in her vinyl office chair, the afternoon’s sour trough of boredom and longing washing over her. Bitch, she whispered, trying out the word. Bitch bitch bitch.

  “The B-word?” wondered Annunciata when Aunt June told her what Rosie had been called. As if to say: And what word is that?

  What she actually said was: “Brittany and Billy? Isn’t that odd?”

  She meant the missing kids, of course. Brittany Thomas and Billy Sinclair: both B-words, but not in the least odd to Aunt June’s mind.

  Annunciata had come to Aunt June by way of a friend of Rose’s, someone Aunt June had never met. The friend had asked the young girl to look in on Aunt June, who’d grown so frail that winter that Rose was always worried she’d fall and break into pieces.

  Aunt June was feeling pretty bad again. The unsettled weather had settled in her bones, she joked. Mostly, though, those poor children played on her fancy. Earlier, Annunciata had climbed the attic stairs to her room, carrying a mug of tea and a packet of ginger biscuits, both of which she set down on the stacking table, sheepish because she knew that Aunt June yearned for a tray with a steeping teapot and a teacup in its saucer and the ginger nuts fanned out in a little plate beside it. Aunt June had once told Annunciata how her dear mother used to interleave a paper lace doily between the biscuits and the plate on which they were served, although now she could hardly credit such fastidiousness. Who could? A doily!

  Annunciata was too shy to root through the cupboards in search of a teapot let alone those blessed doilies, Aunt June knew. But the young girl did her best, letting the teabag draw then squeezing it against the side of the mug to extract all of its strength. Adding milk at the end, and then only a drop. Aunt June could certainly taste the effort she’d put into that mug of tea. She always told her to make herself a cup of tea too, but sometimes Annunciata forgot to make the tea and sometimes she merely forgot to bring it up. The poor girl was so tired today that she looked transparent, Aunt June couldn’t help exclaiming.

  “Oh my dear!” she said, as Annunciata seated herself beside her. “Oh my dear, I know.”

  The girl looked startled, as if she was wondering what, what did Aunt June know. Did she have a vision of Annunciata’s forgotten mug of tea steaming on the kitchen counter, or of Annunciata’s mother who was refusing to leave the house until the birthday phone call came? She had not yet grown accustomed to Aunt June’s odd intuitions.

  It was strange, Aunt June considered, that the Bautista family always referred to it as Maria’s birthday phone call when the phone call was anything but celebratory. Annunciata had told Aunt June all about the calls that came on her dead sister’s birthday. It was always a man. He was phoning to wish Maria a happy birthday, he said. Sometimes he was amiable and would pretend to be surprised that she was out — Again! Do you know when she’ll be back? — but more often he was cruel. He would say terrible things to Maria’s mother — Do you want to know how she died? Do you want to know if she cried? — and Imee would listen until he finished then collapse and take ill for weeks. But when Aunt June asked Annunciata why, why in heaven did her poor mama answer the phone, the girl shrugged.

  The man had probably killed Maria, Aunt June reckoned. He was Imee’s last link to her daughter and she couldn’t give him up.

  Annunciata began to talk about the two missing children. Last summer she’d bought a paper cup of lemonade from the little girl. At least she thought it was her. Brittany.

  “Her mother must be —” Aunt June caught herself in time, blushed furiously, and fumbled at her collar. “My dear,” she began again.

  Aunt June’s eyes were marmoset in her pale face; the scrawnier she became the bigger her eyes appeared to be. She’d begun to look positively nocturnal, huddled in her layers of cardigan and shawl in the room beneath the eaves.

  Poor girl, Rose couldn’t help thinking. But Aunt June wasn’t a girl, hadn’t been one for fifty-some years, she reminded herself. It was just that for a brief time they’d been girls together and she, Rose, still felt like a girl, no matter what she looked like (she knew what she looked like). It was just that Aunt June had a talent for sympathy, her breastbone vibrating like a tuning fork to what others were feeling. It was just the iron lung of the sky breathing for the city, and the office workers and retail clerks and nurses coming off their shifts who resembled sleepwalkers stumbling home through the raw weather, their nostrils and eyes reddening. It was just that the first snow hadn’t yet fallen and the whole city was poised for that irretrievable leap into winter.

  It was the four o’clock darkness and the streetlights coming on along Furbelow Road. At moments like this, the winter darkness descending, the streetlights flickering bravely, she remembered a song her mother used to sing, although she could recall neither the melody nor most of the words. Something about a child walking home in the dark, whistling. Rose often thought that this was the worst time of year, the days before the snow fell when it was conceivable — just — for the foolishly optimistic to think, “Well, maybe not?” and “Perhaps this year?” But of course, like everyone else, she longed for the first snowfall, the city’s momentary release into silence and snow light.

  Rose had fallen into a reverie by this time, forcing her sister to repeat herself.

  “Was it the tall boy, Rosie? The one w
ho —”

  “How should I know, do you think I stopped to chat?” Rose snapped. “Which tall boy?”

  “He wears a baseball cap under his hoodie. He’s —” Aunt June was about to say the one without gloves. A baseball cap and a hoodie but no winter gloves. Imagine! But she didn’t want to sound overfond.

  “Do you stand all day and watch those hoodlums?” Rose was shocked but not surprised.

  Aunt June, who did, in fact, spend a fair amount of her time gazing down at the street, at the little refugee children walking to school in their unfamiliar coats and boots, and at the young people who congregated on the sidewalk outside Ken’s Kum & Go convenience store said, “No, no, hardly ever. I think he’s called Dearborn.”

  “Can’t be,” Rose said. “No such name.”

  “Maybe not,” conceded Aunt June. “Only I thought I heard one of his friends call him that. Dearborn, Rosie.”

  “His name is Aaron, June.” Rose wanted to put an end to the matter of the little thug’s name.

  “Ah, then, Aaron Dearborn, Rosie. Do you see?”

  But Aunt June took a conciliatory tone because she could see that her sister was shaken, had shaken all day at the humiliation of what that Dearborn boy had called her.

  Poor Rosie, Aunt June thought. She was worn out, she had no resilience. And then there was the worry about the missing children, one of whom, the girl, lived down the street at number 631 and the other, the little boy, lived in the nearby government housing complex. The older boy, Dearborn, lived there too.

  Aunt June had a dim feeling that they were related — the two boys — the missing child and the teenager who had so unsettled Rose. She had the impression of a many-branching tree of relationships unfolding. It was the same feeling she had when she climbed the stairs and paused on the second-floor landing, watching the dark-cornered rooms scuttle off into the shadows.