24 Sore

Lucky, think back to the night you were sick with rabbit fever.” I pause my bedtime reading of Dr Seuss’s The Lorax. I’ve been impatient to get Lucky alone, to reach the right moment to ask him about Etta. “You said a lady told you I had something for you?” Lucky nods, squeezes his eyes tighter shut, and pulls the patchwork quilt up to his chin. “What did she sound like?”

Lucky shrugs. “Like a lady.”

“An older lady, like Bobby, or a younger lady, like me?”

Lucky giggles, he cracks open one eye. “I dunno. She talks funny. Like, faraway talk. Like the TV at nighttime. Heeeerree’s Johnny. Da bap da da bah …”

“Can you think of something she said?”

He shakes his head “no.”

“How often does she talk to you?” Lucky can probably hear the urgency in my voice. I take a breath. “Does she speak to you every night? Once a week? Lucky, try to remember when was the last time you heard her. Please—”

“I dunno. She comes when I sick or when I havin’ bad dreams,” he says. “Finish the story, please … I said ‘please.’”

Lucky screws his sleepy eyes up at the orange and pink pages of The Lorax. I read the book cover-to-cover, twice, before kissing his forehead and tiptoeing out for my rounds.

I look for Etta at campsite number nine. Several times I trick myself into thinking I hear the opening hooks of the rhythm and blues ballad that announces her arrival. I flinch and flinch, but the anticipation is my own making. The campsite is empty. I then search all seventy-five other seasonal campsites. Each site is almost identical: a clearing of stamped dirt rimmed by large quarry rocks. More quarry rocks ring the fire pits. Picnic tables usually on the left, tent space on the right. Premium sites with electrical hookups, regular sites without. Trees for privacy. I kick fallen pine cones and branches away out of the sites. It’s too early to do this chore. I’ll have to redo it before the May long weekend. No one likes to set up their tent on scraggy ground.

I hover near Hal and Bobby’s darkened trailer, but hear only Hal’s phlegmy snoring faintly through the door.

In between my rounds I scan short passages from Ricky Esposito’s handyman’s notebook, hoping to find further evidence that he had been contacted by Etta. One page is marked with a strip of Crystal Beach ride tickets. Here, his step-by-step instructions turn from how to sand and finish a live-edge tabletop or braid a rag rug to a catalogue of wild mushrooms and berries. He had identified and illustrated more poisonous kinds than edible. Is that how he killed himself? Is this an unaskable question?

The strip of tickets twitches on the page. It’s her. I knew she wouldn’t leave me alone for the entire night. “Again,” I whisper, and the tickets twitch. “Again.” I wait, willing them to move a third time. A discouraging amount of time passes before I fold the tickets into my jeans pocket and move on.

Before the sun begins to rise, I sit at the east side of the quarry and turn off my flashlight. The water makes paddling sounds that grow louder the longer I sit in the dark. Sheepshead and catfish are nocturnal feeders. Same goes for the whip-poor-will chanting in the distance. This time in May, he’s calling for a mate. Roosting season is coming soon. Behold the natural world I forgot about in Toronto. There were chickadees in the hedgerows outside my old building; their onomatopoeic calls, I thought, sounded more like “cheese-bur-ger” than “chick-a-dee-dee.” But a whip-poor-will is unmistakable. I’m becoming a rural girl again with each whip-poor-will call. I belong to this stamped flat earth, to the stinky lake. I belong to every cricket and bullfrog and coyote and whip-poor-will. And I suspect I’ll belong to Etta. I’ll hand myself over, if she’ll have me.

“I know you can hear me,” I whisper into the pitch. Ghosts always listen, right?

“And you can hear me.” She is beside me. I don’t have to turn to look. The entire left side of my body is numb. “And you can touch me,” she says.

I extend my arm toward her, slowly, as if reaching into a lion’s mouth. Only my middle and pointer finger tap her skin, and my body changes. I salivate, almost spit. The fine muscles of my eyelids spasm.

She says, “no” and skims away. I briefly panic, my outstretched arm left dangling in the night air, as if I can’t remember how to retract it. She says, “Just lay back, darling.” Her voice in my ear pops like a pocket of air, like the air pressure around me is changing.

The sand is covered in cool dew. Her weight is on top of me, but she doesn’t show herself. Again, I try to reach for her, and she warns me. “Tuck your hands behind your back.”

Don’t fight her this time, I tell myself. Give up, I tell myself. My hands burrow in my back pockets. My left hand clutches the strip of ride tickets. “I got good stuff, if you let me. You gonna let me? You gonna be mine?”

She pushes down on me. I can’t see anything. Not her. Not the darkened tree line. Not the moon. The quarry is silent. Birds, mute. I can’t hear if I’m crying or if I’m moaning. I only know that my throat feels hoarse. My chest feels like I’m coughing. She is so heavy. I will be sore in the morning. Is that true? Can she bruise me? I’d like a bruise. Proof. I am sure this is real. Everything from this moment onward is impossible. And real.