by Joan Boswell
The weeks tumbled by and before I knew it, summer was over and the trees were wearing their autumn colours. I awoke to frost on the ground that gave way to brilliant afternoons and shorter evenings. It was a week before Thanksgiving that Caroline finally called.
“I need to see you, Lucy,” she said. “I know I’ve been out of touch, but we need to talk.”
“I can’t think what we have to say to each other.” I closed my eyes and tried not to picture her with Rick. I willed myself to feel nothing.
“I’m in trouble, Luce. You have to meet me. I’m being...that is, I can’t talk over the phone. Remember where we used to walk when we lived on Clayton?”
“Yes.” I pictured the trail up to Gussy”s Peak. We’d found the path quite by accident, snaking into the woods behind the Starlight Theatre.
“Meet me there at noon tomorrow. I’ll explain everything. Please, Luce.”
Maybe seeing her would put to rest the hatred that had been building in my heart. I’d tell her how angry and hurt she’d made me, and that would be a catharsis. I’d be able to sleep through the night.
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
The next day was one of the last jewels of autumn before the trees lose their leaves and their branches rest black and spindly against the sky. I wore a white fleece and blue jogging pants, grabbing a pair of gloves as I left the house. I arrived at our appointed meeting place first, parking behind the theatre near the garbage bins. Caroline’s green Volvo arrived a few minutes later. She stepped out of the car, wearing red runners and a grey track suit. Somehow, she made the outfit look sexy—her hair pulled back in a braid and dark sunglasses hiding her eyes from mine. We nodded hello before searching for the entrance to the path, which had become grown over by bushes since our last visit. The path was still there, but we had to trample the grass and push past branches the first while. The soil higher up didn’t support the same vegetation, and soon it was easier going. As if by mutual agreement, we hardly spoke until we broke into a clearing near the top of the hill. We were both breathing heavily when we finally stopped. The view spread out before us, evergreen trees clinging to the side of the cliff and lower down a canopy of reds and yellows. Caroline stepped off the path and moved closer to the edge. I knew the ledge dropped off suddenly to a forty-foot drop and called to her to be careful.
“I could just end it here and now,” I remember her saying. “It would be so easy.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” I snapped. “Why did you bring me up here, Caroline?”
She spoke with her back to me. “I wanted to talk to you in a place where we couldn’t be overheard. Someone is still following me...do you remember when I told you in the coffee shop?” She continued as if I had responded. “It’s worse now. I think sometimes that I’m going crazy.” She raised her arms to the sky and turned her face toward the sun.
Anger wormed up from my stomach. She was on display even here, even with just me for an audience. I realized I’d always been her audience. “I’m sure Rick has been a help, getting you through this tough time.” I couldn’t hide my bitterness.
“Sweet Rick,” she said. “We have talked, yes. I think you were a fool to let him go, by the way.”
“Me a fool?” My voice rose to a shriek, “I had no choice, unlike you.”
Caroline seemed in some sort of reverie. She stepped sideways along the edge until she was a few feet from me. She turned and looked at me, my reflection distorted in her sunglasses.
“You always have a choice with men,” she said. “They do all their thinking with what’s between their legs.” She laughed at their weakness and at my inadequacy.
My vision clouded over in a film of red. Rick, the man I loved with my whole heart, the man she’d stolen from me, was nothing more than a sex object to her. She’d destroyed my life without batting one selfish eyelash, and for what? To mock me? To feed her inflated ego? I felt the heat rise up my back and radiate across the nape of my neck. I stood outside my body and watched a woman in a white fleece and blue track pants barrel at Caroline and shove her over the side of the cliff with the force of a woman scorned. Above the woman’s frenzied panting, I listened to the cracks and thuds as Caroline’s body loosened rocks and tumbled hard down the precipice. Someone, who wasn’t me, who couldn’t be me, put gloved hands over her ears and crouched into a ball waiting for the end of her sister’s long scream and the crash and thump of her body striking the rock cut with the scramble of rocks following in her wake. Only then, did the woman raise her head and look over the side to see her sister twisted and unmoving far below, her head angled on a jagged rock, dark blood already seeping from her head and pooling in the crevices. That was when I let out a scream, twisted by agony and hatred, before I ran back down the path as if pursued by a host of demons.
I feigned surprise when they recovered my sister’s broken body on the rock crevice partway down Gussy’s Peak. I didn’t have to pretend my grief. All that kept me going was my self-righteous anger at Caroline and my unspoken hope that Rick would come home to me. The police had questions, but in the end, they ruled her death a suicide. Gerry told them that Caroline had talked about killing herself, and I repeated her words about ending it all. Of course, I didn’t put myself anywhere near Gussy’s Peak.
A week after the funeral, I heard a knock at my front door. My heart quickened. If I knew Rick, he couldn’t ignore my pain forever, but my hope plummeted cruelly when instead of Rick, I found Gerry standing on the other side of the door, a bottle of single malt Scotch in his hand. His eyes glowed strangely, and I wondered at what I saw in his face.
“We’ll be needing a drink,” he said, stepping inside and closing the door.
“A drink. Yes, I could do with a drink.”
We settled at the kitchen table, and I poured thirsty tumblers of Scotch neat.
“Cheers, love,” he smiled and we clinked glasses.
I studied him over the rim of my glass. “You look like you’re recovering nicely.”
“And I have you to thank,” he said. “Killing your sister saved me untold trouble.”
My thoughts stumbled over each other. “How did you know...?”
“That you killed Caroline? Who do you think was tapping the phone line and following her? The tooth fairy?”
“But you let Caroline go with Rick.” My head felt stuffed with wool. I tried to keep Gerry in focus.
“There never was a Caroline and Rick,” he said, laughing. “She met him a few times to try to convince him to go back with you. Those pictures you got in the mail were innocent enough. You just saw what you wanted to see.”
“You mean, I saw what you knew I’d see.” Black dots began swimming in my line of vision. “My God...why?”
Gerry shrugged. “I get to keep all the money, and you can’t say a word. Nobody even knew she was leaving me, except you and the bloody lawyer. Caroline had her faults, but she tried to look out for you in her way.” He chuckled. “You should have seen your face when you screeched out of that parking lot.”
It was then that I felt the red heat rising along my spine and up the back of my neck. Caroline’s face flashed before me, and I cried out.
Gerry pushed himself out of the chair, still laughing as he said, “You always lorded it over Caroline. Telling you this is my parting gift from your sister.”
He was turning for the door when I watched, as if in slow motion, a woman pick up the Scotch bottle by the neck and raise it over her head. From a distance, I saw the woman lunge forward and heard Gerry grunt heavily as his body crashed to the floor in a shower of glass and liquid amber. The woman dropped into a fetal crouch and rocked herself like a wounded child, a soft moan humming in her throat. The woman, who wasn’t me, who couldn’t be me, covered her eyes with both hands to hide what she’d done.
This time, I did not scream.
Brenda Chapman grew up in Terrace Bay, Ontario. She graduated from Lakehead University with an English degree and Queen’s University with a B
achelor of Education degree. She taught special education for many years before working for the federal government. Brenda has had several magazine articles published, including in Canadian Living. In 2004, Napoleon Publishing published her first young adult novel, Running Scared. Brenda lives in Ottawa with her husband and two daughters.
Booming
In the U.K. the boomers are known as the bulge
And hopefully not ’cause they like to indulge
And I’m told that in these parts we’re known as boomies
So I’m guessing that’s meant to rhyme with loonies.
But in my house I’m neither bulging nor loonie
Though I’m caught in that spread twixt forty and sixty.
So I’m telling you sister, Yes, you Generation X,
Lay your hands off my mister or you won’t like what’s next.
Sure, he’s middle-aged crazy with you whispering in his ear,
While I’m waiting at our table gripping my beer.
You may think that I’m standing three steps from my tomb
But this boomer is itching to lower the boom.
Joy Hewitt Mann
Slow Burning Fire
Bev Panasky
I can’t believe it.” I flipped through the papers again. “The will leaves it all—the house, the business, everything—to the both of us.”
Eddie Henrickson’s broad shoulders filled the doorway to the shop’s back office, his brow furrowed. “But Cheryl, I thought your dad disowned your brother years ago.”
Armstrong’s Nursery, the business my father had spent his whole life building, was quiet, as though mourning him. Only the fitful clanking of the air conditioner and the soft, steady tick of the wall clock dared to break the silence. Until two weeks earlier, when he’d fallen and fractured his hip, my father had been a fixture in the store. On good days, he was happy to stock the seed racks and chat with old friends; on bad days, when Alzheimer’s took him to a far-off place, I stayed behind the cash and kept him in sight. On those days, Eddie did the watering, helped customers and loaded vehicles. Even so, I never had the heart to hire someone and leave Dad at home. Then, in the hospital, his hip filled with infection, and without warning he was gone.
I slumped into my chair. Scorching late July pressed against the window glass, competing with the air-conditioning. The heat threatened to win the battle. I pushed aside a stack of seed catalogues and a sickly geranium, resting my elbows on the desk, my aching head cradled in my hands. “He talked about changing the will so often over the years, I thought he had.” I sighed. “But, you know what a softy he was.” Tears welled up in my eyes. “He probably just couldn’t do it.”
Eddie’s ruddy face shone behind a light layer of sweat. “He always scared me, your brother.”
Vincent scared me too.
Vincent was two years younger than me and had used that position to his advantage every chance he got. More than once, I’d been set up to take the fall for some petty offense he’d committed. Broken vases were always traced back to me, and it wasn’t unusual for a small, precious item of mine to be found at the scene of his crimes. My parents followed the adage “boys will be boys but girls will be perfect” and were blind to his actions, at least until the night of my twelfth birthday.
The party had been a great success, netting me some funky jewellery, a Neil Sedaka album, a new Monopoly board, the book To Kill a Mockingbird and from my grandparents, who still seemed to think I was seven, the newest Barbie—dressed all in red. I would have loved to look that good, though in truth, my not-quite-teen body wasn’t up to Barbie’s standards.
So there we were, six girls on a sugar rush swaying around the living room to my favourite song, “Johnny Angel”, when the night was shattered by the wail of the fire siren.
My dad, a volunteer firefighter, banged through the door and sprinted towards the fire station two blocks away. We rushed to the window. The night was lit by a bright orange glow reaching into the sky from the middle of town.
We piled out onto the street in a flurry of arms slipping into coat-sleeves and feet into runners. My mother warned us to stay well back and out of the way.
The night crackled with the sharp smell of smoke as we thundered up Main Street, past the shops with their black and orange Halloween decorations. Huddling with our schoolmates, we watched with a mixture of fear and excitement as the Calvary Baptist Church burned. In the end, the fire didn’t actually amount to much—some damage to the back rooms, no one hurt. What it did result in was a police car showing up at our door with my sooty, glazed-eyed brother in the back seat.
That had been the start. Things had just got worse from there.
“Have you made all the arrangements?” Eddie’s voice brought me back to the present.
“Arrangements?”
“For your dad. You know, the funeral.”
My dad had made his arrangements years ago, right after my mother’s death. After the fire, he and my mom had felt compelled to join the Baptist Church—an ongoing penance perhaps—and assuming there wasn’t a sudden rash of deaths in our little town, he’d likely be one of the last people sent off from the church’s original site. It had taken thirty-five years, but the church’s Building Committee had finally put together enough money to construct a new church about six miles out of town. Surrounded by trees, it offered a tranquil setting and room to grow. At the time, I’d thought it was a bit morbid for my dad to set up his own affairs, but I was grateful now. “Yes, everything’s arranged.”
Eddie turned to leave, then paused in the doorway. He looked at me, his gaze soft and concerned. Not the kind of look you’d expect from an ex-construction foreman. “You know, I can take care of stuff here if you want to go home.”
I nodded, blinking back tears. “What am I going to do at home?”
It had been a long day. More people stopped by the shop to pay their respects than to buy gardening supplies, and by the time I put out the CLOSED sign, I was ready to crawl into my bed and sleep for a week. No such luck.
I made the familiar trek up the Main Street hill and turned onto Anson Street. My family home, at the far end of the block, was part of a collection of deep-set older houses with wide lots and mature trees. My stomach dropped, and my mouth went dry at the sight of a battered tan Buick dripping oil onto the pavement and obliterating the usual calming view of lavender and black-Eyed Susans bordering my driveway. A tall, sandy-haired man sat on the front step. I knew who he was, even though I hadn’t seen him in a decade or more. Like a moth drawn to a flame, the gleam of money had landed Vince on my doorstep.
“Hey, Sis.” He was thin and pale, as though he hadn’t seen the sun in a few months. Throwing a cigarette butt into the flowerbed, he leaned in to kiss me, but I twisted away.
“Hey,” I said.
“So.” He gave me an open-handed shrug. “The old man’s gone, huh?”
I ignored him and pushed past, fumbling with the door lock.
Inside the cool, dark house, the only sound was the grandfather clock marking time. Kicking off my shoes, I padded down the hall into the kitchen and pulled a carton of orange juice out of the fridge. I finished my second glass just as Vince entered the kitchen.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said. He looked around, pausing to run his hand over the old scarred table. “Lots of antiques in here.”
“Yeah, Vince, I’m sure the house is pretty much as you remember it.” Catching a glimpse of myself in the kitchen window, however, revealed that some things had changed. Grey streaks shot through my dark hair, and lines fanned out from the corners of my mouth and eyes. I tore my gaze away from the reflection. “With Dad’s mind so stuck in the past these last few years, it didn’t seem fair to make any big changes.” I thought of my dad, happily settling into his recliner to watch Judge Judy as I got supper ready. Tears burned in my eyes. “When he couldn’t remember where he was, or who I was any more, sometimes one of his trinkets would bring a flood of memories and stories.”
Vince didn’t say anything.
“But I don’t suppose you want to hear about that. Seeing as you couldn’t find time in your busy schedule to come and visit him. How long has it been, Vince? Ten years?”
He shrugged.
The small hairs on the back of my neck stood up. His silence was ominous. It brought back bad memories. By the time I was seventeen, Vince had been three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than me. One day, when I’d refused to lend him any more money, since he had a habit of not paying me back, he grabbed me from behind and pushed me to the floor. Smiling and silent, he’d sat on my chest while pinning my arms down with his knees. He held up a book of matches and proceeded to light them one by one. Each match burned down almost to his fingers before he flicked it at me. I blew frantically at the falling matches, trying to extinguish them before they landed on my face. All the while, he silently smiled at me. I was left with a small teardrop-shaped burn scar on my throat to remind me of that day. When he’d run out of matches and let me up, he’d told me if I ever squealed, he’d sneak into my room one night and set my bed on fire. I lent him the money, and I never told.
“I’ve got plans for this place now, though,” I babbled. I ran my fingers over the faded yellow and blue flowered wallpaper of the kitchen. “New paint, updated furniture.” I needed a balance between making it my own place and still retaining some memories. I didn’t want to constantly turn the corner or come down the stairs, expecting to see one of my parents.
“We’re not keeping it,” Vince said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” he gestured to the room, “the house, the nursery and all the contents are half mine. I say we sell it all and split the dough.”