Playgroung of Lost Toys

by Exile

  As she stirred seven-minute icing on the stove (Cubbie said store icing in a tub was the devil’s work, and if the day came that she couldn’t scratch-build icing for a cake, she might as well be in her grave), Lori said, “You know, Reenie’s old enough now to stay late after school, or come home and let herself in. You don’t have to be bothered with her if you don’t want.”

  Reenie held her breath. But Cubbie said, “Let her come. She’s no trouble. She earns her keep.”

  One day in January, Renée came in all bundled up and unwound the scarf she was wearing. She and Lori had made it themselves, after Cubbie taught them to knit, and Renée’s dad even took a turn. It was made of three balls of wool of three different colours, and was a little wonky here and there, but it wrapped around four times with room to tie, so Reenie liked it.

  Cubbie was working in the kitchen, and Reenie went to help her turn the chocolate chip cookies out onto the cooling rack. She knew how to make them herself now.

  Suddenly Cubbie sat down, hard, on the easy chair she kept in the kitchen, and said, “Renée, please take those cookies out and then turn off the oven.”

  “But there’s more…” Renée looked at the shade of Cubbie’s face, and turned off the oven.

  “You need to get my phone and call 911 for me, honey,” Cubbie said. Renée called, and when the operator told her to, she brought the cordless phone to Cubbie so Cubbie could have a word with the lady at the other end. Before you could say Jack Robinson, Cubbie’s house was cluttered up with paramedics – Pete and Kate, by their name tags – fussing with a stretcher and making the place seem very small. When they helped Cubbie up from the chair, Renée sat down in her warm spot, mostly to stay out of the way, but also because it seemed like the last warm spot in the kitchen.

  Cubbie on the stretcher under a beige blanket made a mound like bread dough until paramedic Pete raised the head end so Reenie could see her face again.

  “Hold on a sec,” Cubbie said as they began to wheel her out. “Kate, dear, you’re tall. Reach up there on top of the fridge and get down that cookie jar? Just put it on the table there.” Paramedic Kate carefully lifted down the cookie jar. It was shaped like a mother cat in a storybook with a hat and a shawl, and matched the salt and pepper set that always sat on Cubbie’s table.

  “Renée, you look in there and find my spare key. You come in and out like usual, and keep my plants watered too, if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay, Cubbie.”

  “Go home now and stay there, tell your folks what happened. She’ll be fine,” Cubbie said to the paramedics. “Go get me my purse, Renée, honey, I’ll need it.”

  Renée ran to Cubbie’s lacy bedroom to get the worn red leather purse, and brought it to the stretcher. Cubbie put her arm around her and kissed her cheek.

  “You did real good,” she said. “Don’t worry, now. I’ll call when I know what’s what.”

  After they left, Renée carefully lifted off the cookie jar lid – it was the whole of the cat’s head, which was a bit uncanny. Inside were a lot of bits of paper – mostly crochet patterns and recipes, plus Cubbie’s pair of embroidery scissors shaped like a crane, and a key ring with two keys hanging from it, labelled FRONT and BACK on bits of white tape. She put it on the table.

  Then she turned the oven back on and used two teaspoons to put out the last batch of cookies onto a baking sheet. While they baked, she licked out and washed up the batter bowl, and while they were on the cookie rack, she washed and put away the cookie sheets. She stacked the cooled cookies, separating the layers with waxed paper, into one of Cubbie’s cookie tins, the one with the peacock on the lid. She washed the cooling rack and put it away. She watered the plants, and looked around the house. Everything was the way it should be.

  She turned out the lights and, taking the cookie tin, her coat and scarf and mitts, and her school backpack, she locked up after herself and went home to wait for Ren and Lori.

  They ate two chocolate chip cookies each while they waited for news. Lori put the rest in the freezer against a special occasion.

  As had happened with Renée’s father years earlier, Cubbie’s stay in hospital seemed to get longer the more optimistically the doctors talked. Lori and Ren and Renée visited her quite a bit. Cubbie seemed to get thinner in the bed, smaller, older, a stranger walking away down a long road: Renée looked around at some of the other old folks on the same ward and realized that this is how it happens.

  It was like looking backwards through binoculars into her parents’ future, and her own. She didn’t like it.

  The day Cubbie had been in hospital exactly three months, when Reenie went over to water Cubbie’s plants she went to the puzzle cupboard. She and Cubbie hadn’t done many puzzles the last little while. The one she wanted wasn’t on the shelves she could reach. She went and got the kitchen stool and climbed up to reach the top shelf. It was right at the back, at the bottom.

  With trepidation, she took down the red dot puzzle. She carefully put all the other boxes back, climbed down, and put the kitchen stool in its place. She went back home and got the chocolate chip cookies out of the freezer. She put two on Cubbie’s Bunnykins plate to defrost. She rolled out the felt cloth onto the bridge table, put the puzzle box in the cloth, and opened the lid.

  This was a puzzle that had to be worked from the outside in. It had 2500 pieces, and every one of them red. In the end, it would be just a big round red dot. Even finding the edges took days, let alone placing them.

  It was the hardest thing. With her dad, it had been putting back something that wanted to get better anyway, just giving a little shove. With the red puzzle, it was just the opposite. She was fighting something back, something immature and growing that just wanted to be alive, to be everywhere, to eat and eat no matter who else went hungry. She had to fight the energy these uncontrolled cells had.

  Renée had to fight herself, too. She had to fight the shame she felt that her younger self had been like that, so hungry in her heart. She had to fight her guilt that she hadn’t noticed Cubbie getting thinner and sicker in time to work on it earlier, when it would have been easier. But she fought. Every day she added more pieces.

  One day, Ren was home early so Renée asked him to help her make a bread pudding for dinner. She was so tired.

  “We can have it for dinner, and take some of the leftovers up to Cubbie,” she said. “She told me she hates that hospital food.”

  “Renée, ma chou, I don’t think she’ll be able to eat any. She’s pretty sick, you know.”

  “Why does she have to be sick, anyway?”

  “It’s entropy. We French have a saying about it, you know. Tout passé, tout lasse, tout casse. It means that—”

  “I know what it means, Papa, I’m in French immersion, OK?”

  “No need to be rude, p’tite.”

  “Je m’excuse, Papa. But let’s just try, OK?”

  So they did try, and ate the pudding for supper with Kraft Dinner. “Comfort food,” said Lori.

  “Cubbie food,” said Reenie.

  The next day at the hospital, Cubbie was sitting up in a chair. She took the lid off the Tupperware, took her Rogers silver-plate spoon that Renée had brought, and ate almost all of the bread pudding. “That was just fine, girl.”

  “Daddy helped me cut the bread,” said Renée. “We buttered it with real butter.”

  “You learned what I taught you pretty good. You know, I’m leaving you my things. You might need them later, when you grow up.”

  “You need them now, Cubbie!” Reenie protested. She was afraid of entropy, but she needed to know. “Cubbie, did we use it all up? You know, on Daddy?”

  Cubbie looked at her sharply. “It don’t work that way, child. It’s like water. It just flows down.”

  “So it’s always there?”

  “If you can get at it, it sure is.”

  Renée went home to her puzzle. Every day that week Cubbie sat up in a chair. Renée began to think that she might be able
to manage. At night she couldn’t sleep, dogged by shadows in her room made by the lights as cars whooshed by on the service road outside. Seemed like there were more cars than Renée had ever noticed, but then again, she usually slept better.

  All week she worked on the spiralling closing eye of the puzzle, until by Friday suppertime she was at the centre.

  The hole for the last piece was heart-shaped: not heart like a greeting card, but shaped like the actual heart in the Heart Association brochure on Cubbie’s TV table. But there were no more pieces on the table. She reached into the box and felt around. The box was empty.

  The heart of the puzzle was missing.

  It wasn’t in the box. It wasn’t on the floor. She looked all through the living room and down beside all the couch cushions. She took every puzzle out of the puzzle cupboard and opened the boxes one at a time, rummaged through the pieces of each one before she put it back. The centre piece wasn’t there either.

  All weekend she searched Cubbie’s house. She went through Cubbie’s bedroom, feeling like a trespasser, but driven to it. She searched the lavender-smelling drawers, even under their shelf-paper lining. She took all the sensible shoes out of the bottom of the closet and searched behind them. She glimpsed red at the back of the closet but it wasn’t the puzzle piece. It was a beautiful pair of red open-toed high-heeled pumps that she couldn’t imagine Cubbie ever wearing. Among the clothes, the swatch of red she saw in a garment bag at the side wasn’t the puzzle piece but a red velvet evening gown with a strapless sweetheart bodice and a full skirt. She had always known there was more to Cubbie than met the eye. Cubbie couldn’t die now, she just couldn’t die. Cubbie was a bundle of life; this was the proof she always had been. How could death come for her so soon? The lady in the next bed at the hospital was ninety-nine, and still telling stories. It wasn’t fair.

  Reenie searched the spare room, the bathroom with its shelf of scented bath oils, the mud room, and the porch. She searched the basement with its toolbox and good wood. Nothing.

  Finally she searched her own room at home, in case somehow she’d tracked the piece back when she came home one time.

  Rien. Nothing.

  By Sunday afternoon when it was time to go over to the hospital Renée was ready to cry at the drop of a hat. At least she didn’t need her winter coat. It was the first nice spring day.

  “Maybe she’s too tired to go,” Lori said to Ren. “She spent all weekend doing housework over there, and she has school tomorrow.”

  “Let her go, cherie,” said Ren. “Her heart fairly beats on our Cubbie.”

  Renée thought about this all the way over on the LRT. Hearts and heartbeats – difficult and complicated and a terrible challenge. When she got to Cubbie’s room Cubbie was back in bed. She had an oxygen tank on one side and a drip-controlling machine on the other, and on its IV stand was clamped a box full of monitors that were hooked up to a plastic pincher on Cubbie’s finger.

  “Hello, my loves.” Cubbie hugged Lori, and Ren awkwardly bent over for his own hug. They talked a few minutes about the kind of things they always did. If it hadn’t been for the beeps and humming of the machines, it would have been calming.

  Then Cubbie beckoned Renée closer. “Come over here so I can hug you! Lori and Ren, why don’t you go get a coffee so I can talk to my girl?”

  Renée wended her way between the equipment and approached the hospital bed with its metal edges. Cubbie took her hand. Her warm comforting grip was the same, even though she looked flat as an empty plastic bag, lying there covered only by a single white sheet. Her crocheted afghan was folded on the chair.

  “Are you cold, Cubbie?” Renée said. “Do you need your afghan?”

  “My lovely Renée,” said Cubbie. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”

  “I’m doing the red puzzle for you,” whispered Renée, finally telling her secret. “I’ve done it all, but one piece is missing.”

  Cubbie winked at her. “That’s why I’ve been feeling so good. Thank you, child.”

  Then she did a strange thing. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue at Renée.

  On her tongue was the last piece from the heart of the puzzle.

  “Oh, give it back,” begged Renée. “Please! It’s the last one…”

  But even as she watched, the red puzzle piece, the triangular three-legged one from the very heart of the round red puzzle, began to dissolve, and lose its edges. It soaked into Cubbie’s tongue until nothing was left but a bright red stain, as if Cubbie had been sucking on those red Valentine cinnamon hearts. Cubbie closed her mouth and swallowed, smiling as if around a sweet taste.

  Reenie began to cry.

  Cubbie squeezed her hand gently. “I’m an old woman,” she said. “A person can’t live forever.”

  “But Papa…he…we…”

  “It wasn’t the right time for him. We just helped the Universe see that. But for me, it’s the right time. It happens to everyone.”

  “I don’t like it!”

  “The Universe never asked us if we do or we don’t. It is what it is.”

  “It is what it is… ?”

  “That’s my girl. Give me a kiss goodbye, now, Reenie. You won’t see me again.”

  It was the first time Cubbie had ever used Renée’s nickname.

  Renée squeezed Cubbie’s hand hard and leaned in to kiss her pale, frail, wrinkled cheek. Cubbie kissed Renée on both cheeks and smiled at her. “Now, my girl. Don’t forget all I taught you.”

  “Oh, Cubbie,” said Renée. She put Cubbie’s hand up to her cheek, where both their hands got wet with Renée’s tears.

  She was just pulling herself back together when Lori and Ren came back from the coffee machine with their covered paper cups. “Come on, Reenie,” said her mom. “Cubbie has to rest now. We can see her again next Saturday.” Lori couldn’t help it. She didn’t know.

  “Bye-bye, dear,” said Cubbie. “You know I love you. Remember.”

  “Goodbye, Cubbie,” said Renée. “I love you too. I won’t forget. I promise.”

  She didn’t cry all the way home, but she felt like it. The only reason that she didn’t was Lori and Ren didn’t know what was going to happen, and Renée didn’t know how to explain it to them.

  They were very practical people. It had been a trial to her and Cubbie sometimes.

  When Renée and her parents got home, Renée went next door. She had to water the plants, she said.

  Through the wall she could hear her parents talking, but not what they were saying. Cubbie always said these places had walls like paper.

  She walked slowly to the table with the red puzzle on it, the proof of her failure to save Cubbie’s life, the puzzle with the heart missing.

  But that’s not what she saw. The puzzle lay there complete, the heart-shaped centre piece in place as if she had never searched all of Cubbie’s row house and theirs too, trying to find it, as if she’d never seen it dissolve on Cubbie’s tongue and be swallowed.

  She walked forward slowly and reached out her hand to touch the piece. It was smoothly fitted in, as if by Cubbie’s gentle, precise hand. It felt warm.

  “Cubbie,” she whispered. “I’ll remember everything. Everything. I promise.”

  Through the wall, she heard the phone ringing, the call from the hospital.

  CHAYA AND LOONY-BOY

  Rati Mehrotra

  One monsoon evening when the clouds hung low over the old city, I was banished by my grandmother to the dark and dusty attic at the top of our tall, crumbling house. It was all Chaya’s fault. She’d broken a glass tray from Mumbai, the one that was reserved for special occasions. As always, the blame had fallen on my ten-year-old shoulders.

  Clutching Chaya in one hand, I trudged up the winding staircase, my grandmother chivvying me from behind. “Hurry up,” she said, poking me with her favourite walnut stick. “The attic ghost must be very hungry. He hasn’t eaten a fat little girl like you for ages. We mustn’t keep him waiting.”

&nbs
p; “What ghost?” I said, stopping just short of the attic door. “The ghost is in the cellar cupboard downstairs, not in the attic.” I knew this because on one memorable occasion I had been locked in the cellar, and heard the ghost rattling the cupboard, moaning to be let out. Chaya and I spent the hour of our punishment hugging each other and promising to be good, if only the ghost would stay inside the cupboard.

  “There are ghosts everywhere,” said my grandmother, pushing me inside the attic. “That is why you must behave nicely, like a well-mannered child, not a glass-breaking hooligan. Then maybe they won’t notice you.” She bolted the door and I was left alone, listening to her footsteps going down the creaky staircase.

  I shook Chaya. “This is all because of you!” I shouted. Some doll she turned out to be. She’d arrived in the mail one morning with a birthday card from my father, who was in the navy. At the time, I’d stroked her silky black hair, marvelled at her smooth brown skin, and fingered the blue dress, prettier than anything I owned. Now her hair was matted and the dress torn – she never let me comb her hair or mend her frock.

  “You’re always getting me into trouble,” I told her. “Act more like a doll sometimes,” knowing even as I said it that it would rile her.

  “I’m not a doll, so why should I act like one?” snapped Chaya, wriggling out of my grasp. “Be quiet or the attic ghost will hear you. Let’s not wake him up.”

  We’d never been up here by ourselves before. I followed Chaya on tiptoe to the lone window. She climbed up to sit on the dusty ledge. A gloomy twilight filtered in through the window’s grimy pane; I was relieved that at least it wasn’t pitch-dark, like the cellar.

  We were in a large room cluttered with the assorted junk of half a century or more. Whenever my grandmother couldn’t make up her mind whether to keep something or throw it out, it usually found its way into the attic – trunks of old clothes, shelves stuffed with tattered books, broken lamps, bundles of old letters, their ink fading into oblivion. And somewhere, of course, the ghost that hid and sighed and waited to make its move.