SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DROWNING. I see myself standing on the cliff looking down. Darkness falls, and the water below churns and roars. The Judge’s car starts to rise from the bottom of the troubled lake, and my fear rises with it. I tell myself that nobody knows; there will be no search. I tell myself all kinds of lies to make the trembling stop.
* * *
Sometimes I think about those ice children discovered in the mountains of the ancient Inca Empire.
And the others, too. The ones who haven’t been found, sacrificed to the mountain gods by their mothers. Children buried close to heaven with nothing but bags of nail clippings their mothers saved for them in case their spirits returned.
Nail clippings are necessary in uncivilized times.
When Jake came to my grandfather’s house that day,
I flushed mine down the toilet. I just opened my nail box and sprinkled them into the water. I suppose I decided, without really thinking it, there was nothing left of that world to hang onto.
I don’t need nails to keep me safe anymore. I’ve learned to wear mittens in January. To shield my July eyes from the white hot sun. To sleep without dreaming, to wake without fighting my pillow.
I’ve learned to cook too. Carrots in orange sauce. Asparagus with lemon. Sticky rice. Apple pie. I cook roasts on Sundays in my grandfather’s blue-speckled pot, opening my closets and drawers, letting the dark meaty smell get into my sweaters and shoes. This weekend, I’m going to bake the Chocolate Angel Food Cake, page 292 from County Cooking, with powdered sugar and frosting daisies and twenty-one candles circling the top.
My mother forgot to teach me these things. That’s not true. My mother forgets nothing.
I don’t even know how to find her. Vanishing is what she does best. Over and over and over again. We never left Alberta, ricocheting inside her borders like an angry bullet. Just look at her map, shaped like a holster. If you look closely, you can find the dot named Chesterfield. Inside the dot, look for Blueberry Hill. Step around the towering hedge that no one owns and out onto the oiled road. When you can go no further, you can see the white house with the stippled green roof, the wrap-around veranda and the old wicker chair.
This is the place where my mother lived. She lived with the Judge, the man who lies buried in the sixth row of the Chesterfield cemetery on the far side of the dot. You can search for what she will not forget in this house. Search in the closets, the bed sheets, the desk drawers with the brass handles. You won’t find any evidence. Before I came here, I searched in the silence as we flitted like moths atop the pimply dots of the holster. I searched and searched, trying to sniff out our history in her green-grey eyes, in the smells along the highway, in the night words she whimpered from her mattress on the floor.
Before I even knew of this place, I wanted to know if her leaving it — her running — had something to do with me.
It did, of course. But it doesn’t matter anymore. I can tell you now that I’m all grown up, that I don’t need a mother to keep me safe. That might be a lie. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I stand at her window, and I think I see her haunted eyes staring back at me. And I have to remind myself that it’s not really my fault. That I am me. And I have come home.
* * *
I was sixteen when I found this place. Aunt Vic and Harmony had been summoned to Chesterfield after the Judge’s funeral. I don’t know who whispered what when my grandfather was lowered to the ground. All I know is I wanted to stay. “There’s nothing for you here,” Harmony kept saying. But there was everything I ever wanted here. My mother’s house. My mother’s town. My family’s huge kitchen with rows and rows of cupboards. None of it could fit into the back of a van.
What surprised me most was that my mother fought at all. There were no tearful goodbyes before she drove away. We could have been strangers who met at a truck stop as
I walked her to the van. Vic yelled out the window as they backed down the driveway, “I’ll give you three weeks before you beg us to get you outta here.”
But then they were gone, and I was alone and angry and so upside-down homesick I couldn’t breathe. If Harmony had come back for me that first summer — if she’d just barrelled up Blueberry Hill and honked the horn — I would have jumped in the van, lit an incense stick, and let her drive us in circles for another sixteen years. But she didn’t come back. And I knew I needed to stay. My grandfather’s car became such a distraction, the way it whispered in my ear, calling me to the highway, telling me I belonged out there, nowhere. So I waited until Chesterfield was sleeping. I eased the car down Blueberry Hill, terrified to be in the driver’s seat, fingers gripping the steering wheel so tight I thought they might break. I crawled towards the back road that led to the trailhead. Then I followed the narrow twisting trail, up, up, up, the car lurching on the loose gravel. When I reached the cliff — the end of the road — I opened the door and fell onto the cold ground. It took a long time until I could breathe normally. Then I stood up, moved the gearshift to drive, and pushed with all my strength. The Judge’s car, carrying my whole past, inched slowly towards the edge, then hurled down the bank and disappeared into the black water.
* * *
He is better at finding than my mother is hiding. Jake arrived when the leaves were starting to fall from the trees. It was near the end of my first summer, a few weeks after my night on the cliff. I recognized him instantly when he rang my bell. He was wearing blue jeans and a suit jacket over his white shirt and his hair was combed back and curling over his collar. I was flooded by memories, a thousand little details. Washing dishes in the river. Playing cards at the picnic table. Harmony laughing. The sticky feel of pine needles. The smell of clean, white snow.
We stood in front of each other awkwardly. He didn’t take his eyes off me, concentrated, dark with questions.
“Jake. Kit Creek. Remember? You’ve changed. You look more like your mother now.”
“Why are you here?” I leaned around him and looked towards his empty truck.
“I heard about the Judge. I wanted to know you’re okay. Are you? Okay?”
I couldn’t believe he was real.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“Why?” I felt angry for no reason that made sense.
“I’ve driven a long way to get here.”
“She’s gone,” I said.
His voice sounded weary. “I know. I came to see you.”
I stepped back from the door and he followed, this man I barely knew. We went from standing awkwardly at the front door to standing awkwardly in the kitchen. I eventually plunked myself into a chair, and Jake pulled out another and sat down beside me. We stayed like that for a long while, neither of us saying anything.
“After we met at the campground I went to look for my brother.” He leaned towards me, hands on his knees.
He didn’t try to touch me, although he could have, and I wouldn’t have backed away. “His name’s Matt. I went all the way to Mexico.” Jake’s skin was the colour of hayfields in late summer.
“But he didn’t want to be found. So I made a place for him, in case he decided to come home. I built a house on his property, my property now I suppose. Along the way, I did a little search for you and your mom, too. It wasn’t hard. I had your license plate number and a guy named Elroy who knows that kind of stuff.”
I thought maybe we owed him something. Something that would be hard to pay.
But then Jake said, “I found Chesterfield easy enough and then 21 Blueberry Hill. I figured you and your mom would come home one day.”
He had a worried look then, which made me feel glad at first. Then I just felt tired.
“I got to know your grandpa some,” Jake was saying. “I came up here a few times. Before today. Your grandpa, he was — ”
“He’s dead. He killed himself. On my sixteenth birthday.”
Jake sat perfectly still. His eyes had the same gold flecks buried inside grey that peered in the van window on that snowy night. “If I’d of known, I would of done something. Maybe I could have stopped it.”
But he couldn’t have stopped anything. This family’s rage burned like a torch.
Jake stayed all afternoon. He said he had something to give me and went to his truck to fetch it. When he came back, he had a house in his arms. There were glued trees in its front yard. Painted shutters. A tiny basket of flowers beside the front door.
Jake set the house down on the kitchen table, folded his arms, and rocked on his heels. He could hardly look at me. His cheeks were flushed as he stammered through his speech. “I know you’re too old for dolls. But I got this for you. When you were at that campground.”
“I was too old then.” It was an ungrateful thing to say, but I was so caught off guard, and there was such hesitancy in his eyes. He had uncertainty written all over his face, and surprise as well, as though until precisely that moment he had known his way.
“You don’t have to keep it,” he said, unfolding his arms, readying to reach down and take it away.
“No,” I said, touching his sleeve. “I’ll keep it.”
I’ve put the dollhouse in my grandfather’s living room beside the stone fireplace. A house within a house. Sometimes I lie on the floor, leg crossed over a knee, and stare through the little shuttered windows. I pretend there’s a family inside. A father like Jake. A mother who is beautiful like Harmony, only she listens and smiles. There’s a grandpa, too. He comes from my dreams, not my dreams of the dead man in the casket, but of a grandpa who carried me in his arms when I pretended to be sleeping. Only the daughter is a mystery. No matter how many times I try to imagine her as a little girl, she’s too old for her age, not a child at all.
Before he left that day, Jake pulled a purple address book from the inside pocket of his jacket. The book’s cover has two little kittens with bows around their necks. Jake sat across from me, red-cheeked, head bent, pointing to the page with his phone number and a carefully written set of directions to his place.
He said, “Call me, Rebee. As often as you like. I’ll pay your phone bill. Call every day if you want. Will you do that?”
The hope in his voice brought a lump to my throat that tasted like warm honey. I thought about what it would be like. I could stand at my window, the phone to my ear. I could tell him how to read a map upside down. The places a person could get lost in. Ways to be invisible.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Hope has soft edges. Only after does it cut you to shreds. When he found us at the campground, I was so bloated with it I thought I might burst. Mile after mile I thought about him, about the man named Jake, about the man who was my father. I pummelled Harmony with questions like fists, which was not like me at all. I had always kept my mouth shut. But I was obsessed. Jake opened a vein and I couldn’t stop bleeding. Who was my father? Was he disappointed I was a girl? Did he hold me in his arms when I was a baby? Would we ever see Jake again? Couldn’t we go see my father? Couldn’t we even once?
Harmony confessed on a day that started like any other. I was thirteen, hungry, hoping for breakfast, coughing up leftovers from my newly scarred lungs. We were setting up in a new town and waiting for the bank to open, and I was worrying about not finding the school and not having indoor runners without grass stains or scuffs. The bank had glass walls, like smoky mirrors, the kind where you could see your reflection clearly, only shadows of bank people milling inside. Four or five others waited, Harmony first in line. I stood well back from the wall, by myself, under the lamp pole. An older man in a pinstriped suit stepped out of his car, crossed the street slowly, and stood near to me. He held his bankbook in his hand, almost dangled it in front of me, and he wouldn’t stop staring me up and down. At first, I thought I’d done something stupid, like I’d chosen a don’t-wait-here zone, or had my shirt inside-out. This was before I knew men had permission to look at girls that way. Certain girls. Girls that tumble out of rundown vans. Girls that stand under lampposts when they should be in school. I tried not to squirm or look at him. I wanted the bank to hurry and open, intent on shrinking to invisible. I focused past his face, far into the distance, traced the D in the Dairy Queen sign, unblinking, eyes watering.
I turned and caught Harmony’s reflection in the mirrored wall. She was seeing the man seeing me, with eyes I didn’t recognize. They held an expression of pain, raw and gaping, a deep, open sore. I would have run to her, but that look in her eyes flickered then died, almost instantly, so fleeting in fact that I’ve wondered since if I imagined it there.
Harmony pushed past the others, strode over to us and stood between me and the man, legs slightly parted, shoulders back. The man backed up a step, looking surprised at first, perhaps a bit sheepish, smaller somehow than when he had me to himself. Harmony stepped toward him, one step, close enough to brush his pinstripes. She didn’t say a word. But he looked afraid then, really afraid, of what he found in her eyes. Nothing else happened with the man. The bank opened in that moment, good morning, good morning, and the people shuffled in. The man crossed the street again, quickly this time, got back in his car and drove away. We drove away, too. When we got to the highway, I asked, so what about the bank, but Harmony didn’t answer. She was driving too fast, and I pressed against the back of my seat and thought about how she might have killed that guy.
She told me, hours later, after we’d turned onto a back road that crumbled to a stop at the mouth of an old barn.
“I’ll say this only once, Rebee. Then we will not discuss it again. His name was William Sacks. He was a circuit judge, like your grandfather.”
“Who?” I asked, clueless.
“We saw each other in secret. I was just a town girl. A stupid girl with stars in her eyes. Then I got pregnant and we ended. He’s dead. I want you to forget about him.”
I couldn’t breathe, my past pushing me under like a wave. “Did he meet me? Even once?”
“He didn’t meet you. He didn’t want you, Rebee.”
“Did he even know I existed?”
She ignored me, cranking the steering wheel, spewing gravel as she turned us around.
“What about my grandfather? Why can’t we go see him? Maybe he’d like to meet me.”
“He didn’t want you either.”
“He could change his mind. If he meets me, I mean.”
“Drop it, Rebee. I gave you what you asked for. William Sacks. Sperm. That’s all he was to you.”
But I couldn’t drop it. He sat like a heavy lump at the back of my throat.
Having Jake in my kitchen brought back that choking feeling. He stared at me like I was fragile, like I was precious to him. I could not afford hope, sitting at my table, inviting me to share my life. I lied to him that day. I said sure, of course I would phone him sometimes, though I knew that I wouldn’t. How could it work? He would hear my voice and think of her. And I would hear his voice and think of her.
I’ve not seen him again. He calls on my birthday, and at Christmas, and many times for no reason. In those first clunky conversations, the way he said my name made me think I wasn’t real to him; that I was just an idea tangled up in his hopefulness. He would ask if I needed money, or if the shingles or porch railings or plumbing needed fixing, and should he come to Chesterfield to check things out. But it’s different now. We can talk for a long time and it doesn’t hurt at all. He never asks about Harmony. I can only hear his longing for her, too, in the empty seconds before we say our goodbyes.
* * *
Six newspaper articles and three letters to the editor tell the story. My father was struck on June 27 in front of his house in Edmonton. It was in the dead of night — a single moment is all it would take — somewhere between the hours of eleven and two. The police called it suspicious; one went so far as to give it a title. Deliberate homicide, vehicular manslaughter. A lawyer wrote about how more needed to be done to ensure safety for circuit judges, those pillars of the community who made such a lasting contribution to justice in this land. The driver’s vehicle jumped the curb and struck the victim with tremendous force. “Unprecedented” force, even for a hit and run, one report said. His body was found at 5:27 AM by a neighbour heading out for a morning run. He had remained pinned through the night between the twisted branches of the large uprooted tree in his front yard. Collapsed lungs and internal bleeding stopped his heart. It took several hours. He was sixty-one years old. Glass shards were scattered about the lawn and street. Police expected considerable damage to the suspect’s vehicle, including broken headlights and a dented front end. The police appealed to the public for help in finding the driver or the vehicle. There were several tips, but both seemed to have vanished.
Of course clippings in newspapers and law journals are just scattered bits. They don’t really tell the story. There’s no mention, for example, of a little girl alone on a motel bed, or of the mother who left her there.
Harmony doesn’t know what I know. How could she? I was so small. I had no business remembering the smell in that sad room or that too-big bed or that flashing neon sign or that blood on her face. I was two years old and locked in that room. When she came back for me, we drove through the black night, the van’s front end screeching and shaking.
William Sacks, the circuit judge, cut through this family like a knife.
We got a different van somewhere. My grandfather was a regular provider. Sometimes I’ll lie on the Judge’s bed and close my eyes and try to picture the man my grandfather might have been. How could he love his little daughter when she was not his own? He was a man too wounded to heal himself.
I imagine my mother, trying to please a father who can’t bear to look at her, and pleasing a father who does. And I imagine a mother named Harmony who kept me before she finally left me to grow on my own; and a grandfather who gave me a home to grow in.
* * *
Joey will be here by Saturday. He’ll barge through the door, halting before we collide, and we’ll study each other, shyly at first, taking in the changes, his new height and filled-out shoulders, his fading scar on the clear, smooth skin of his forehead. And he’ll lift me high and twirl me around, to prove to me how strong he’s become, and when he puts me back down I will feel dizzy with the extraordinariness of it. We’ll walk down into the woods out back and sit on a moss-covered log, and Joey will take a flat piece of green grass between his thumbs and blow it like a foghorn. Something to the side will catch his eye, and it will be Harmony’s Tree, charred and black, but we won’t speak of it. We’ll pluck Indian paintbrushes out of the rock and wrap them together with wild twine. In the afternoon, we’ll drive to the cemetery in Joey’s rickety car and place the flowers on their graves, the Judge and Mrs. Nielsen’s.
When it’s evening, after I’ve blown out my candles, Joey will prowl around the kitchen and get in the way and eat another piece of cake. Aunt Vic will call, to wish me a happy birthday, and she’ll say her feet are killing her and her wait-ressing days are over. She’ll tell me her psychic said she should get herself a bloodstone and a piece of hematite to ward against harm.
And Jake will call, too, because it’s my birthday, and I will see his face soften when he thinks of her. And when he says goodbye, he says love you, and I say it back, and it’s true. When it’s dark, after Joey and I have put away the dishes, we’ll sit side by side on the porch and breathe in the smells of summer all around. Joey will pull out his Wintergreens from somewhere deep in the pocket of his baggy jeans. He will carefully unfold the crinkled wrapping and pass one to me before popping another between his lips.
We’ll look up at the stars, and I’ll see them as beacons lighting her dark road.