What are you wearing? What, you want to catch a cold?”
I should have gone home to change before coming to work. Rose wraps me in a terrible argyle cardigan. Not even a knit, but a sweatshirt with an argyle print. She buttons it up past my ridiculous red lace bra. At least it’s not another polyester housecoat. “It still gets cold at night,” she tells me, and, “Please, for the love of Christmas, don’t dress like that tomorrow. The boys will be wild enough.”
According to Rose, tomorrow will mark The Point’s all-time-low opening weekend. When the park was in operation, she saw 100-percent occupancy. Twenty-nine out of fifty seasonal campsites reserved seems busy enough for me, considering most of the campers will be teenagers. Sixteen is the legal age to reserve a campsite in Ontario, a bylaw that clashes with the drinking age. I’m prepared for a shit show.
I visit each campsite, inspecting the handiwork of Rose’s nephew, Vincent, who sands down old picnic tables, who trims tree branches. Vincent, whom I’ve never met, only heard Rose glow about, who shows up at The Point in the daytime. Vincent, who probably takes his shirt off in the midday sun to mow the lawn. While Ricky was hunched over his desk plotting his death into the wee hours of the morning. While I invite the dead to lie in bed with me. Lucky Vincent. Or not. Perspective. Who knows?
For now, Etta is absent. I circle campsite number nine again and again. Nothing but a couple of log benches and a tidy fire pit.
I haul my one part bleach, one part water, one part vodka all-purpose cleaner into the men’s washroom. For some reason, I still haven’t dumped the booze. Too wasteful. Thrift is in my bones. The fluorescent light closest to the door doesn’t flicker on with the rest. Changing the fluorescent bulbs is supposed to be Vincent’s job. “Shit,” I grumble.
“You shit.”
I laugh, almost reply, “No, you shit.” But Bobby isn’t joking. She’s slumped between two urinals on the floor. I drop the mop bucket; cleaning solution splashes my feet. “What happened? Are you all right?” My question is answered as soon as I reach her side. Beer breath—on Bobby? I squat down beside her. No, not her breath. Her hair and clothes too, as if she soaked in Budweiser.
“Lucky’s asleep. And Hal is drinking again. Mister Servant of God. Hal’s drinking. If he wakes Lucky up, I swear …” She dry gags as she speaks. Without thinking, I hug her into me. Her arms are incredibly strong as she pushes me away. I fall back onto my butt. I should have known better—Bobby’s not a hugger.
“How drunk? Should we go in and check on him?” I ask.
She grabs my arm. Her fingertips are freezing. I slip off Rose’s argyle cardigan and wrap it around her. “Bobby, we have to do something. We can’t just sit here crying.”
“Who’s crying? Are you? What do you have to cry about? Hospital took my baby—cry about that, why don’t you?” She pushes me away again.
“They took Lucky? You said he was sleeping.”
“My first baby. A baby girl. Social worker from CFS came and took her. Nurses calling me a negligent mother. Poking at me with needles. Say I need a drug test. I was clean when I was pregnant. I was clean. They never listened to me. Grabbed my baby right out of my arms. You wouldn’t understand. No one knows how much that hurts.”
Her fists pound the tiled floor. I want to comfort her without touching her in any way she doesn’t like. I pat her back tentatively. I think about reading Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism in an Intro to Aboriginal Studies class. In her book, Maracle said Native women were an afterthought in the feminist movement.
“Stole my baby, same as how they stole me. CFS fuckers. What right do they got?”
Native kids and white trash—we could be allies. That’s what growing up in Crystal Beach taught me. We did the same shit. Or did we? Roamed the golf course at night collecting golf balls to return to the caddy shack for five cents a ball. Or snagged empties from neighbours porches to cash in at the Beer Store. I remember the many times the Hill twins and I would push open the doors to Golden Nugget Bingo Hall to yell “Bingo” then run, laughing through the parking lot.
Then I went to university. I took out a student loan to enroll in an Aboriginal Studies class that I was told was groundbreaking. Has the world always been this fucked?
Okay, fucking focus, I scold myself. My white guilt wake-up isn’t doing sweet fuck-all for Bobby.
“Were you drinking back then? Did they take your baby because you were Native?” Fuck my stupid mouth. Why ask one condescending question when you can ask two in a row? Why does she stink like beer, though? Did Hal dump it on her?
“If I lose Lucky, I have nobody. Nobody in the whole wide world. That Dolores told Hal he’d better start going to meetings. If that don’t help, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m so tired. I’m so tired I just want to give up. If it weren’t for my boy …”
“You’re a good mother, Bobby,” I say. “Seriously, you’re, like, a thousand times better than my ma.”
“Don’t talk ill ’bout your mother, girl.”
I want to bump heads with that advice. Why should she stick up for Barbara—she doesn’t even know her. “My ma had dozens and dozens of men in and out of the house when I was I kid,” I spit out. I can’t help myself. “Some of those guys make Hal seem like a real gentleman. She didn’t even protect me from being molested. I used to think it was just normal to feel sore down there. That’s just what it meant to be a little girl.” What am I doing? Trying to be the most hurt woman? Bobby doesn’t need to hear this. Shut up. Shut up.
“Hmm, you’re angry,” says Bobby. “Hal’s angry too. I used to be angry too. Still am sometimes. But now, I’m mostly tired.” She pats my leg. “I ’spose we still need to have that tea. Get to know each other, especially if you’re going to keep looking after Lucky”
“Or I could make you tea? I bake too, a little. Whatever help I can give you, it’s yours,” I say, too eager. I offer to help her again as we stand in the doorway of her trailer, listening to Hal vomit. And again as we fill Lucky’s plastic Snoopy cup with lemon-flavoured electrolytes, delicately place the cup in Hal’s hands, and slip back out of the trailer.
“He looks like a baby when he gets drunk sometimes,” says Bobby. “I have two babies. He wasn’t always like this, eh. There was a time when we were quite the match.”
The blushing morning sun presses through the trees, and we pull lawn chairs into the grass to watch the sky change. “I never knew my father either. Only my mom.”
She looks away from me, then a second later she reaches over and pinches my arm. “Your dad must have been the skinny one. The one who gave you that bony butt.” She tickles and pinches me some more, and I wriggle in my lawn chair. My giggles come out in relieved bursts. “It’s been a long time since I seen the sunrise. I sure did go on fussing and complaining all night, eh?”
“You weren’t fussing, Bobby!” I want to put my arm around her. Laughter and physical affection seem to be the only cards I have. My words don’t say enough, but I try. “People care about you. Dolores and Rose. I even met one of your friends the other day, the bus driver, eh? We’re going to stick by you, whether Hal quits drinking or not.”
Bobby nods, slightly. She stares into the distance, her eyes tracking something. She’s watching a set of high-beam headlights cut toward us. A red Ford Ranger bumps up the driveway. Bobby and I squint, waving at the driver to cut his light bar.
“Where do you want me to unload?” the driver asks, leaning out his window with a smoke hanging from the corner of his mouth. His flatbed is piled with salvaged wood; beams and doors and moldings almost glow in the early light. What Bobby and I marvel at, though, is the perfect shell of the SS Canadiana strapped down with bungee cords. The glass from its round windows is missing, and the weathered white paint is peeling off in large strips, but it’s perfect otherwise.
“I never expected Rose’s money to buy us all this.”
“I should wake up Hal,” says Bobby.
“I should get Rose,” I say. Bobby and I make eye contact and wordlessly we agree that this moment is for us alone.
“Let me check that everything’s accounted for before you unload,” I tell the driver. “You got the inventory sheet handy?”
The driver snorts at me as he hands over a dog-eared, hand-written itemized list. He wanders toward the quarry, cigarette smoke trailing behind him. I notice Rose’s bedroom light switch on. We don’t have much time before she joins us in her slippers and robe. I boost Bobby onto the flatbed and scramble up behind her. “Smell it?” says Bobby. “It smells like the lake.” We squat down, pressing our noses to the salvaged wood. Turpentine. Smoke. Mildew. Algae. Lake Erie, all right. Bobby rests her ear down, as if she might hear the water the boat once travelled. She smiles. “A little sanding. A stiff-bristle brush scrub and washing powder. It’ll be as good as new. Hal better roll up his sleeves.”
Etta! Come to welcome SS Canadiana, have you? I see her hazily standing in the wheelhouse. I think Bobby sees her too by the way she jolts backwards.
Wouldn’t miss if for the world, Dollface.
“I see her,” Bobby whispers to me. “There! There! There! Look at her!” She crawls on her hands and knees into the wheelhouse. The wood is rough with a few exposed rusted nails or screws. Bobby’s kneecaps scrape up so quickly that faint dabs of her blood trail along the wood behind her. When I reach for her, she screams. She’s in a trance that I don’t dare shake her out of. Several times, she starts to speak, but the words gag in her throat. She looks so angry. Angrier than the night I found her bashing Hal over the head with a plastic vodka bottle. She reaches a trembling arm forward.
Don’t mess with her, Etta, I warn. She’s been through enough tonight.
“What kind of spirit are you?” Bobby spits out. She slaps an outstretched hand down on the wood. The entire truck vibrates. “What have you got to teach me? Show me! I ain’t afraid.”
The wheelhouse fills with an impossible light—brighter than the high beams of a thousand flatbed trucks. Instinctively, I cover my eyes, then cautiously lower my hand. Etta’s light is not sharp or blinding. Etta’s light has no temperature. It has a weight, though, or an anti-weight. It’s buoyant. If I jumped, I would float up into the light. Bobby has risen to her feet again, her tiptoes. She looks like a high-contrast illustration on a white sheet of paper. Her laughing is mistimed with the movement of her mouth. A split second later she is shouting words I can’t understand. I too feel swift rotations of happy delirium and terror. My own hand in front of my face is a faded photograph. A ghost image. Fingertips vanishing. Like Etta. We’re disappearing.
Stop it.
Stop now.
The bright light swiftly cuts out.
The pale blue of morning is a farce. To my surprise, Bobby and I clutch onto one another. I can feel her heart pounding against my own chest. A layer of sweat is sandwiched between us, as if we’ve been standing skin to skin for a long while. Outside the missing wheelhouse windows Hal, Rose, Lucky, Dolores, and the driver all gawk at us.
“You saw the Angel, didn’t you? What message did she bring this time?” shouts Hal.
Bobby doesn’t let go of me. She hugs me closer. I smell beer in her hair. The stink of mildewed wood around us.
“She says …” I take a deep breath. Etta did say something, but what was it? Some kind of premonition, a warning. “She says that tough times are coming, and we need to stick together.”