by Méira Cook
“Any news?” she now asked Rose, who shrugged.
No news is good news, Rose was rather too fond of saying, by which she meant the opposite of what everyone else meant. No news is good news, Rose would say, emphasizing the “no” in the news rather than any good that might come of it, however postponed.
“There’s never any good news,” she answered her sister with her habitual, one-shouldered shrug.
The downstairs door shuddered in its frame and Aunt June imagined one of the kids, Elvira or her brother, Jaycee, slamming against it. The cold weather made the wooden door contract and the house shift on its restless, river-fidgety foundations. The first sign of fall was the key sticking in its lock, a ritual throat clearing for the long winter months to come. By December it was impossible to enter the house without jiggling the key in its lock, just so, until something caught, then hurling yourself repeatedly against the door until the frame yielded. Once the family had been in the habit of leaving the door unlocked but nowadays —.
The red cross in the top left quadrant of the window wavered for a moment, then held steady, as Aunt June fell into a dream of nowadays. Obeying a call from downstairs, “Mom, what’s for —” Rose heaved herself from her chair.
“Coming down later?” she asked June. She meant for dinner but Aunt June hardly ever took dinner with the family and didn’t think she would tonight.
For years, dinner had been a grab-bag affair, mostly consumed on various stacking trays in front of the television, but lately it had returned to a more formal dining ambience with every night a family-style stew or casserole, and paper napkins at each place instead of the roll of kitchen paper that had once been passed around. The two-litre bottles of off-brand pop that had once dominated the table like lurid centrepieces were gone. Instead, there was water in the water glasses, only tap water to be sure, but Rose took care to pour her glasses when she set her table so that by dinnertime the sediment had settled and the water was clear again.
All this was because of Macilroy, the boarder, whose rent included one meal a day and access to the washing machine in the basement.
When Rose left, Aunt June reached for her half-finished tea so that she could dip her ginger nut biscuit. Her tooth had been giving her trouble again; she couldn’t bear to press down on it. The tea was cold but wet, at least, and it did the trick vis-à-vis the ginger nut which had turned so soggy that Aunt June had to scoop it into her mouth with a teaspoon. But even the trickle of tea and mush twitched some tripwire of pain in her jaw, and the tooth began to throb again. As always, when pain and its accompanying panic rang through her, Aunt June twisted in her chair so that she could focus on the crucifix beyond her window. She wasn’t, strictly, a believer but the red glow steadied her, allowed her to focus her poor dispersed self.
She stared out at the red cross, stared so long and so hard that it seemed to mutate into two red crosses, the second a faint visual time delay of the first. The jazzy notes of her toothache picked out a delinquent tune in her skull. On and on it played, stranding her in her bright pain.
Later, the downstairs phone rang and Aunt June could hear her sister banging pots in the kitchen. It was Tuesday night, so tuna casserole probably. Rose, as she often remarked of herself, was not one to answer a ringing phone simply because it was expected of her or because its aggravating jangle shattered the peace of the evening and tunnelled directly to the root of her sister’s tooth.
“If they want me they’ll find me,” Rose would say although she did not say how, precisely, anyone would find her since her tolerance for installing a phone line did not stretch to the matter of maintaining an answering machine.
“Mom,” Elvira yelled from her room. “For God’s sake, could you —”
But still the phone rang and rang. Afterward, Aunt June wondered if she had intuited bad news merely from the sound of the phone. She thought she had. She possessed some sort of gift for pale magic, it was generally agreed in the family, and could even perform minor acts of telepathic cajolery. She’d think of someone far away, and within the day they’d phone or write. Or she’d answer the doorbell before it rang, or absently murmur bless you, before a nose had even begun to itch. Her talent for growing tricky perennials was legendary in the neighbourhood.
Yes, she thought she’d felt the earth-shift of calamity before the phone call, and all through the clamour that followed, but Aunt June was distracted by her tooth and could not be sure. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore — the phone, the outraged yells from Elvira’s room, Rose’s stubborn endurance, her tooth that seemed to be delicately wired to the upper registers of the telephone’s choral range — and heaved herself to her feet. The phone had stopped by then but when Aunt June got to the second-floor landing the ringing began again and, one hand pressed to her cheek, she was able to grab the receiver with the other.
“Who was that?” Rose asked when Aunt June finally appeared in the kitchen. It had taken her days to descend the stairs.
Aunt June clutched at her heart. “It was —”
“Some damn solicitor,” Rose said grimly. “You shouldn’t answer the phone on a solicitor. Answering the phone just encourages them.”
“No, Rose. It wasn’t a solicitor.” Aunt June’s heart was banging in her chest and her tooth was throbbing at its root and the two sensations — the banging and the throbbing — were curiously out of sync so that Aunt June experienced the moment as tachycardic and violent.
“Doesn’t pay to answer the phone on those solicitors,” repeated Rose. She had a paring knife in her hand and was turning a potato expertly, around and around, until the peel came away in a thick brown spiral. “Answer the phone on them and they never go away.”
“No but Rose, Rose listen —”
Rose finally turned to face her sister, her hand full of the skinned, naked-looking potato with its topknot of brown spiral boinging this way and that.
With some difficulty, Rose had gotten Aunt June settled on the chesterfield, the crocheted blanket that was the oldest thing the family owned, a legitimate heirloom, tucked around her legs. Rose sat beside her sister, a glass of sugar water at the ready. Their mother had been a great believer in the medicinal properties of sugar water.
“But what about the children?” she asked Aunt June who had been trying for a while to tell her about some children. Children who were lost, it sounded like, or had they been found? Her sister was in such distress that she could barely understand her. She handed the glass of sugar water to Aunt June and made her take a sip.
Aunt June sipped and tried to calm herself. As so often happened these days, she felt adrift and circumstantial. Suddenly she put her hands over her face and rocked in anguish.
When she’d first heard Annunciata’s voice on the phone, she thought the girl was calling to thank her for the costume jewelry she’d pressed into her hand.
“You’re very welcome, my dear,” she’d said.
But no, Annunciata had forgotten all about the bracelet and the brooch. Instead she was phoning to tell her that two bodies had been found near the railway tracks. Children’s bodies was the rumour. The police weren’t making any statements yet, but she didn’t want Aunt June to see the story on the evening news. People had already begun laying their offerings of cellophane wrapped flowers and stuffed animals around the children’s still-visible pavement chalk drawing. It had become a shrine.
Unexpectedly, Annunciata began to weep and Aunt June started to say, “There, there, my child. There, there, there.” But Annunciata said she had to go; they were expecting a call. The birthday phone call hadn’t come yet and her mother was beside herself.
“It’s those children,” Elvira cried, her voice high and excited at the thought of disaster, the swift blood-flex of catastrophe. She had finally emerged from her room to take charge. Her newly painted nails were wet and she waved them through the air then blew on them absently bef
ore exclaiming: “It’s those two kids who went missing.” No one answered and, in frustration, Elvira applied to the boarder. “Don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s those kids?”
“Might be,” he replied, startled. “Might and might not be.”
The boarder had been living with the family for the past three months while his wife lay dying in the nearby hospital. They had come up from the country in early fall, she to die and he to wait, with grace, upon her dying. Meanwhile they occupied their separate, rented rooms: hers in the Sisters of Mercy Palliative Care Unit, his at the back of the house on Furbelow Road. He was an angular yet not discomforting presence, but he seldom provided commentary on his life or theirs.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Elvira keened. “Oh what should we do?”
“We could wash our hands for dinner,” said Rose. But the mother’s tartness could not stiffen the daughter’s resolve.
“But, but don’t you care about them? Two little kids lying dead in the cold?”
“And only eleven shopping days to Christmas,” her brother taunted. Jaycee was crouched low in a chair, his thumbs roving over his phone as he spoke.
“We could wash our hands and we could shut our faces,” his mother snapped. She was sensitive about Christmas. A brisk little ecumenical tree stood in the corner, its plastic branches held out stiffly as if awaiting benediction from some benign agnostic source. Now she turned to her sister in despair: “Oh June, what did you think happened to those kids?”
“Maybe she thought they’d eloped,” Jaycee said. “Went off to Vegas to tie the knot.” He was enjoying himself. He looked up from his phone for the first time since Aunt June had come downstairs and it seemed to her that his glance was derisive. She suddenly saw herself through her nephew’s eyes — a bundle of nerves and sinew, an old sick thing, a Guy Fawkes on a stick.
“Boy’s right,” said Macilroy unexpectedly. “There was no hope right from the beginning.”
“Surely there’s always hope, Mr. Macilroy?” Rose asked, heartened by this evidence of his attention. It was good to have a man about the place, her mother had always maintained. Perhaps Macilroy would turn out to be the man it was good to have around.
But no, Macilroy was having none of it. “Got to go, ladies,” he said. “Doc said to come around again after supper.” He stirred himself, pulling on his coat and boots at the door. Then he turned to them and his voice was, once more, the hesitant mumble they were used to. “Goodnight ladies and, um, gentleman.”
“You haven’t had your supper yet,” Rose called out as the door shut. “He hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast,” she exhorted the family. But the kids were giggling together, united for once in ridicule, and June was still huddled on the chesterfield, one hand picking at the crocheted blanket and the other pressed to her cheek.
“Oh, hush now,” Rose said. “That poor man’s wife is at death’s door. Literally at death’s door,” she repeated, impressed by the alliterative decisiveness of the phrase. Its power to clang shut against mortality.
The boy, whose name was Aaron DeVaughan — “DeVaughan,” Rose would later tell June. “Not Dearborn!” — was nowhere in evidence when Rose hurried home through the park the next evening. He hadn’t been there that morning either, the huddle of teenagers who were doing God knows what barely glanced up as she passed. Rose heard the wind tugging at the kids’ swing, the metal links ringing a single cracked chord upon the cold air.
It had been a dull, leaden day — the identities of the children now confirmed, the falling air pressure a clamp around the skull. Outside 631 Balfour, browning flowers in wind-rattling cellophane massed around the small circle of pavement where the children’s chalk drawing had long been obliterated. There were cards too now, spiked onto the chicken wire fence where a couple of incongruous Mylar balloons had also been fastened.
The girl, Annunciata, had phoned early in the morning to tell Aunt June the terrible news; she’d heard her sister whispering on the phone. Conferring, comforting.
“And the other phone call?” she heard Aunt June ask. “The one —”
Really, there were too many phone calls these days, as far as Rose was concerned. All day she had to answer the phone at work, and then when she came home, more calls. Rose was not fond of the telephone, or of any news that had, so far, proceeded from it.
No need to hustle, Mr. Thiessen had said when Rose told him that her sister would have the November books settled by the end of the week.
“Oh?” she’d replied, a little pert because he’d never asked about the books before. And really, there had been no call to inquire about them. June was never late.
“Oh?” she repeated. “But with Christmas on the way —”
“Christmas comes every year around this time,” her boss said. “Nothing we can do about it.” He’d only dropped in to check on an estimate that some fool apprentice had messed up, and didn’t even remove his jacket but sat on his desk, his legs swinging as he added columns of figures in his head and scribbled corrections in the margins.
“You’re a human computer, Mr. Thiessen,” Rose said when he handed her the estimate for retyping.
The wind had picked up in the late afternoon. It tossed leaves and cigarette butts across her path, exhaled into plastic bags, flipped through the pages of stray flyers as if searching for bargains. In the park, the wind played its single broken chord on the metal links of the swing set. Over and over again. It was dark already, and in the windows of nearby houses, Rose could see Christmas lights flickering rhythmically, a semaphore of effortful merrymaking. Except for one crackling streetlight the park was dark entirely, but the lone streetlight seemed to roar with a terrible orange voltage.
All day, Rose had been trying to recall the song her mother had loved and now, when she was no longer picking at it, a phrase popped into her head, summoned perhaps by the wind’s oddly tuned chord and her own inattention. Walk me back home, my sweetheart…No, not sweetheart — darling. The words pierced her. She was nobody’s darling, never had been.
Without warning the boy stepped across her path, his hood pulled low. Dearborn, her sister had called him. At first Rose thought he was only a figment of her preoccupation but no, he was real.
“Oh, you,” she said.
Startled, he looked up then ducked his head. “Do you have a smoke, lady?”
“Lady, is it?”
“Cigarette,” he explained as if she was a moron, even going so far as to tap his fingertips against his mouth in an explanatory gesture.
“So what am I, then?” Rose was enraged. “What, eh? One day a, a bitch, the next day a lady?”
The boy stood still for a moment and the orange crackle of the streetlight roared between them. Then he lowered his head and stepped into the shadows again. From outside the circle of light and noise, Rose heard the word that he called her. It was neither bitch nor lady.
Dinner was a desultory affair. Macilroy’s wife had died in the night. Her death, so long anticipated, was swift when it came. Macilroy had spent the day at the hospital and later, the funeral home. Making arrangements, he told them. He would be moving out at the end of the week.
“But what about Christmas?” Rose said, immediately regretting her lapse. “We’re, we’re so sorry for your loss,” she amended, but her children looked ironic and she felt ashamed.
Macilroy, however, took her question seriously. He would be spending Christmas with his daughter, he explained. His daughter had a couple of kids of her own — “Whippersnappers,” he called them — so that was Christmas taken care of. The family, to whom the daughter and the whippersnappers were something of a surprise, could not refrain from self-expression. Elvira, especially.
“A daughter?” she asked, skeptically.
“Nope, two,” Macilroy replied. One lived in Elk River, Minnesota, the other on Vancouver Island. One had kids, the other no interest in
them. One was tall and rangy —he pointed at himself — the other took after his late wife in looks and temperament.
“She’s only been dead a day and already she’s late,” Rose would exclaim to her sister.
“That’s what late means, dear,” Aunt June would comfort, although, in truth, she had only a vague notion as to why comfort was required.
But Macilroy, previously a man of few words and those terse, had turned loquacious. Something, perhaps death, had tugged open the catch of whatever was rusted shut in him. Fact is, he told them, both of his girls had been standing by. All that fall. Standing by and holding hard and weighing their options. But one had a young family and the other had a new job and, in the end, neither could see their way to gallivanting across the country at the drop of a hat. Here he caught Rose’s outraged expression and hastily assured them that the Elk River daughter had made him swear, swear on their mother’s life, that the minute things took a turn for the worse he would send for them. It was unfortunate that the end had come too swiftly for his daughters to say their goodbyes, but that was life, eh?
“More like death,” Elvira whispered to her brother, and the two commenced giggling, united as they always were by malevolence.
As he talked, Macilroy cut at his flank steak, shovelling loaded forkfuls of meat and mash and corn niblets into his mouth, and talking through the resulting spin cycle of half-chewed food. For months he’d picked at his dinner, surviving on Timbits and cans of Mountain Dew. Rose knew all about it — she was the one who cleaned his room, disposing of the empty donut boxes with their crumbs and transparent grease spots, the pop can that he balanced on the dresser and used as an ashtray, although smoking was forbidden and he wasn’t fooling anyone but Christ on a crutch, Rose had thought, cut the man a break. His wife was dying, and if that didn’t give a man a hankering for what he’d once told her it had been the greatest challenge of his life to quit, well then, she didn’t know what to say.