by Kate Sundara
Petals confetti the streets with ironic beauty, like the blossoms weeks before, those cruel illusionists who’d tricked her into believing in their pretty fleeting dream. Mia’s glass heart could shatter and crunch beneath Ruth’s tyres. Only, when it comes to the crunch, there’s nothing left to break.
She turns a corner, pulls over by a garden to steady herself.
How can he still have this effect on me?
‘I tried to help him too,’ says a sweet voice behind her. Mia spins around. Neve. Stood in a cotton dress and a flurry of flower-fall, she appears like a vision. ‘You know who I am? I know who you are,’ she says dreamily. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard all about me, but with him you can never be sure of anything, right? I tried to help him, y’know. It all got too much. I couldn’t be everything to one person. I don’t have infinite emotional resources.’
Mia’s heard the words before. Zak’s words. ‘That’s what he said about you.’
Neve smiles, a smile that says go figure… She holds Mia in her piercing blue eyes, then looks up at the sky and whispers, ‘Down comes the rain.’
With the first droplets on her nose, Mia asks, ‘What’s with the schizo weather in this valley? What’ll be next today, snow?’
Neve turns on her bare feet, gives her a soft sedated smile then, just like that, she’s gone.
Rain hammering upon her, Mia pedals to the Dale house. On her way she wonders what it is that always attracts her there: the happy energy and homely comfort, the kitchen with its syrupy sunlight? The warmth of friends who live there, who bring out her better nature, who make her feel liked and understood? The hoppy-smelling beer mats, parties and good times… It’s all of it.
She leaps off Ruth’s bike, rests it under the corrugated shelter in the yard, the bread in her basket swollen into a soggy inedible sponge. She enters through the unlocked front door and checks in all the rooms. None of the Dale crowd are home. Sunday afternoon: the guys are probably out playing sports. Drying off with a bath-towel, she thinks over her eerie encounter with Neve, not knowing what to make of it, thinking how disconcerting it’d been to hear her reiterating Zak’s very words. Mia replays all the girl said. Maybe Neve isn’t crazy, like Zak had claimed, maybe she’s right. There’s more to all this than meets the eye, thinks Mia. The hunch won’t dissipate until she cracks it.
Deep in auguration, Mia finds herself in Wil’s room where the two of them have had so many of their chats. Now it’s quiet, just the rain against the window, making it even cosier inside. Wil’s is the smallest, most basic bedroom of all, a den. He said he didn’t mind taking that one when nobody else wanted it – typical Wil. It’s tidy and minimalist, reflecting his restraint. Everything in order, no fuss, no mess.
She wanders back into the living room, examines those funny photos, quotes and tally-charts on the pine-panelled walls. A car door slamming and she startles. Realising she’s holding Wil’s sweater under her nose – unthinkingly she’d picked it up off his bed – she flusters, ducking behind the couch. She hears muffled male voices through heavy rain, the creaking door, then everyone rallying into the kitchen, noisily, excitedly, joking and jostling, bursting open snacks and grabbing drinks from the fridge. She stays crouched behind the sofa like a madwoman, asking herself why the heck she’s hiding out with Wil’s sweater. The Dale bunch wouldn’t mind her being here, she’s practically part of the furniture! Only, she feels weird about being here and she’s found herself doing a whole lot of weird stuff around Wil lately, like pretending she hasn’t seen him when he enters a room, and Zak no longer being the first person she looks for in photos.
Crawling out from her hiding-hole she goes and deliberately slams the front door.
‘Hey guys!’ she greets her friends, breezing into the kitchen. ‘Oh, you’ve been out?’ The boys, in high spirits – they must’ve won a game – cheer and squish Mia into a rugby-tackle, making her laugh out loud and do that odd thing of pretending she hasn’t seen Wil again.
‘Hey Mia! I’m here too!’ he says above the racket.
She smiles and tells him hi, but they don’t hug. Mia and Wil never hug. She doesn’t know why.
‘How come you’re not drenched? What, are you waterproof?’ jokes Eric. ‘You little mermaid.’
That jars Mia, being called by her old nickname. I used to call her that.
Wil stands there, smiling, leaning against the kitchen-counter, observing her from his usual distance. Something has shifted between them since the bear attack, she can feel it, something she can’t explain. It’s like he’s keeping an eye on her – all prolonged glances, ambiguous silences, the little wink he gives her every now and then like the two of them are in on some big secret.
…Maybe they are…
They’d shared a terrifying ordeal. Perhaps fear had fused them together. Wil was bound to her body when the bear attacked – the one and only time they’d ever touched.
Standing there, Mia supposes what all this weirdness must be: the powerful new energy encircling them is Wil joining her in the recognition of their own mortality.
I recognise it as something else, and now I’m not the only one watching over her.
* * *
Thunder beings! Rain spirits! The creation of fire! When Rosa speaks of magic and mysticism they’re the times Mia loves the most. Rosa makes up funny voices for the animal characters. Some of the tales are hilarious, others downright dirty. Several story-filled visits to Chokecherry Shack this week have given Mia something light-hearted to think about.
Today they talk about dreams. They’ve talked about many things: vision quests, medicine wheels, sweat cabins, smudging, and those topics Mia has read about in her book. Rosa educates without condescension, advocating the philosophy that life works in circles, signified by the circular tapestries on her walls. She speaks about everything and everyone being part of a greater plan. Mia finds that comforting. She just knows never to bring up the subject of children again…
‘I keep dreaming I’m swimming with mermaids,’ reveals Mia.
‘A recurring dream? What do you think that means?’
Mia suspects the sirens represent the seduction of sex, her longing for intimacy, her repressed sensuality and desire to explore. They embody the idea she could be soothed in the same place she is sore. Mia craves sexual healing, but to her that’s still a shameful thing, a temptation to feel guilty for.
Rosa doesn’t offer her solace on the matter, instead changing tack. ‘Merfolk are the reason we ever reached America.’
‘Really? How?’
‘It’s a story,’ says Rosa.
‘Tell me a story!’
‘Well. Once Upon A Time in a land far away…’ Rosa gives a cheeky grin with half-closed eyes, then palms away her strange-smelling smoke and begins her story afresh. ‘Long ago, the people – the Indians – lived in a vast and barren land. It was so cold that no food could grow. The people were hungry, they didn’t know what to do. Then, one day, an enchanting man arose from the sea. He had a tail like a fish and a long green beard. He sang to the people of a land where there was plenty, a place of luscious pastures and fertile earth. The people were scared, knowing that those who went to sea did not always return. But since they had little choice, they built boats, packed up their families and few possessions and followed the song of the merman. They followed him right across the water to the land that he sung of. And that’s how the Indians came to be in what we now know as America.’ Rosa lets out a long, slow stream of who-knows-what, looks at Mia and pulls a funny face.
Mia doesn’t laugh like she usually might, she looks poignant. ‘I wish there really were such a thing as merfolk. To rescue those from drowning at sea…’
Rosa says she believes in a lot of things. ‘In life, in love. My grandfather taught me to see magic and beauty. Oh, he believed in all the old ways. When he died it’d been raining, so the earth was soft. Near to where he lay I saw footprints of the little people.’
Mia read about the littl
e people in that book Wil gave her.
‘They came to the Shoshones,’ says Rosa. ‘Their footprints appeared after a death. The little people lived around the mountain, close to where the railroad is now.’
‘They’re no longer there?’ asks Mia.
Rosa shrugs. ‘Old Indians say that when someone’s about to die you’ll hear Paohmaa – a water baby – crying, or Owl will come round hooting, or Bull-Frog will croak around the house. Well, I didn’t hear any of those things, but I saw the little footprints after my grandfather’s death. No doubt about it, they were all around our hut.’
‘Are all these stories real to you or do you just think they’re just stories?’ asks Mia.
‘Does it matter? I carry the essence. The trace.’
Mia appreciates the simplicity of Chokecherry Shack, how both Rosa and her abode are full of warmth and character. She’s an inspiration too: loving life despite experiencing its cruelty. Rosa always remains dignified and peaceful. Mia has come to think of her much like a favourite aunt – the way Rosa reproaches her for taking solitary walks around the valley with ‘Coyote still at large.’ Today she even tells Mia off for picking up the little tin of snuff beside Rosa’s rocking-chair. Characteristically interested in new things, Mia tells her she recently chewed tobacco with a man from Alberta who made a living hunting game. Rosa isn’t impressed: ‘Well don’t,’ she chides. ‘That stuff’s cancer in a can. Only to be chewed on very rare occasions. You’re not a smoker, don’t go starting on tobacco now.’ It’s the first and only time Mia has heard her angry, but then her anger turns into a coughing fit.
‘What’s gotten into you, doing that?’ she croaks between splutters, taking herself off to the bathroom. Rosa has too much decorum to expose anyone to what she calls ‘black coughing catarrh.’
‘Coyote?’ suggests Mia.
‘I told you, he can only get inside of men.’
Again, Mia thinks of Zak.
* * *
Mia bundles her coloureds into the washing machine, closes the door and rattles coins into the slot. She goes to join Ruth, sat over by the window with her craft materials filling the Laundromat table, all set to make a birthday card for new guy Corey while they wait for their clothes.
‘I want to write something special,’ says Ruth, taking out a big book of poetry from her bag.
Mia’s looking up at the sky, only half listening.
‘Where’s your mind at?’ Ruth asks her.
‘Zak’s place.’
Ruth frowns.
‘My passport. I stashed it at his place and forgot all about it. I need it back, I’m leaving the country in three weeks.’
‘Where will you go? Back to London?’
Mia exhales stress through clenched jaw, shakes her head then slaps her palms over her face.
‘Want me to come with? To Zak’s, I mean?’
The thought of going back there distresses Mia. She doesn’t want to think about it, to talk about it, any of it. ‘Everything’s such a mess.’ She leans against the windowpane, listening to the water swishing in the machines. Distanced from laundries since her island job, it’s now obvious to Mia why she finds the task therapeutic: creating order out of chaos, all that newly washed linen, fresh, unmarked, spotless sheets. She’d laundered a thousand times last summer and didn’t mind it as far as menial work went.
‘How great it’d be if we could do this with our lives,’ she tells Ruth. ‘To bundle in all our accidents and mistakes and press a button to wash them away and make us perfect white sheets again.’ She briefly ponders absolution and Utopia, where the summer sun itself could blanch away stains.
‘That’s poetic,’ smiles Ruth. ‘Want me to read you a poem?’
‘From the big book of romance? Not really.’
Ruth looks at her enquiringly.
‘Well, they’re just words. They don’t mean anything.’
‘Bite me!’ quips Ruth under her breath.
Mia sniggers slightly.
‘It’s good to see you smile,’ says Ruth. But as soon as it’s there, it’s gone.
‘Words,’ says Mia. ‘A person can say anything. It’s what they do that counts. That’s why ‘love’ is a verb. ‘Tell a man by what he does, not by what he says,’ that’s what my aunt Zia is always telling me. Why did I forget to remember that?’
Ruth leafs through her book. ‘I can’t stand those generic poems you buy in greetings cards,’ she says. ‘I want to write Corey something heartfelt, personal.’
‘But poetry?’ asks Mia. ‘I never had you down as the type.’
‘What, are you kidding? I’ve a whole book of stuff I’ve written, mostly depressing outpourings. No prizes for guessing who that’s about.’
Mia gives her a knowing look, noting how the mere hint of Wil’s name sweetens the air like a songbird. ‘I still haven’t thanked him,’ she tells Ruth. ‘For saving my ass in the forest that day.’
‘So make him a card!’
‘To say what?’
‘Err – Thanks for saving my ass in the forest that day?’
Mia smiles. ‘I don’t know, I’m embarrassed.’
‘Why?’
‘The night before the bear attack I yelled at Wil that I didn’t need him looking out for me. But if he hadn’t shielded me, I might not even be here.’
Ruth grows silent, drops her eyes to her book. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friend.’ She says the line so quietly it’s like she’s speaking to herself. ‘Friend?’ Ruth’s eyes suddenly confront Mia’s. She glares at her wordlessly, as if desperately wanting to say something but containing it. ‘On the road-trip – did anything happen?’ she finally says.
‘Lots happened! Nearly getting killed by a bear for one thing!’
‘Between you and Wil.’
‘No!’
‘Really?’
‘Really… He’s not my type.’
‘The caring, handsome, smart, funny type isn’t your type?’
‘Apparently not,’ replies Mia, only that pings back to her as false, an unexpected reflex that leaves her stupefied, a bizarre memory simultaneously taking her by surprise: Wil rhythmically banging a hole for a tent-peg into fertile earth. She’d stood watching him do it – how focused he was, how it made her feel funny inside – yes, she’s started feeling again. Although she’s felt half dead these past few weeks, being around Wil brings out the half that’s still alive, road-tripping with him her best days in America.
Overcome with imagery of things unfolding: flowers opening, nature blooming and blossoming, Mia begins to blush. I find it endearing. I saw her attraction to Wil a mile off, but its revelation unto herself is genuine. If this is sexual awakening then she’d prefer to let it sleep-in. She doesn’t want to think about nectar and hummingbirds and that day in the tree-house, aged eighteen, when we nearly went there for the first time – what would’ve been the first time for both of us. That day we laughed as the bird sounds we made morphed into a mating-call. She doesn’t want to consider what this could do to her friendship with Ruth. Ruth who’d spent the entirety of her university career holding out for Wil. No, Mia and Wil are just friends – just friends – and the more she tells herself that, the less it feels true.
‘You call him Dutch. Nobody else does. I think he likes it.’
‘I call you Ruthie. You’re Ruth to everyone else.’
Ruth looks down at her pad, clearly unconvinced.
‘Wil’s a great guy,’ says Mia, ‘but it’s companionship, nothing more. Besides, he’s nice to everyone, and it’s not as if you’re not invited on our adventures. It’s your choice not to come.’
An uncomfortable pause. Ruth doodles on her card, cocking her head to one side, poking her tongue out slightly, the way kids do when trying to stay within the lines. It’s not like Ruth to act childishly. ‘He likes you,’ she says after a long while.
‘He thinks I’m crazy.’
‘I think he likes that.’
>
‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘I don’t think so… I saw the two of you at Megan’s barbecue, the way he is around you, how he lights up. You’re pulled to each other like magnets.’ Ruth slams down her pen, demonstrating a baffling array of states – from playfulness, to sullenness, to outright mimicry. Ruth reaches up her arms into an exaggerated stretch, hands behind neck, impersonating Wil. ‘Check out my pecs, Mia, the breadth of my chest, my guns.’
‘What are you doing?’ Mia snickers, jovially bewildered. ‘Wil isn’t like that…’
It’s not like Ruth to be this passive-aggressive either.
‘He not even aware he’s doing it! It’s more than him, it’s instinct.’ Ruth’s totally serious now, Mia disconcerted. ‘I majored in Animal Psychology. I can identify when a male primate’s trying to attract a female. Body-language. Looking down his nose at you, arching his back…’
‘Sounds like he’s trying to keep his distance!’ says Mia.
‘He’s peacocking around you at every opportunity, displaying his tail-feathers.’
Mia bursts out a laugh picturing Wil as a peacock, but Ruth’s not seeing the silly side. ‘Peacocks aren’t primates, Ruthie. It was Megan’s birthday, everyone was in a good mood. You’re mixing your metaphors, your primates with your peacocks, you misread the body-language, that’s all.’
‘I know what I saw…’
Finally one of the washers finishes its cycle. Mia goes to unload the damp contents then gathers up her dirty whites to pile in. Just as she’s walking away, a garment falls from her bundle, Ruth darts to pick it up, hot on Mia’s heels, then, realising what it is, they both just stand there staring down at it.
Colour drains from Ruth’s face like water from the machine. ‘Wow,’ she says gravely.
‘It’s okay. I know it looks bad. Probably looks worse than it is. Probably.’ Mia understands Ruth’s shock: the T-shirt stained with Wil’s dried blood from the bear attack is horrendous, she can’t even recall whose shirt it is or how it ended up in her laundry. It was likely used as a press at some point. That morning in the forest was pandemonium. Seeing the garment now makes Mia queasy. ‘Why don’t I just bin the thing? It’ll never be white again.’