“I WONDER IF I COULD live like Chiwid does.”
Vern didn’t say anything.
“You know Chiwid, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, I do.” I could tell he was thinking. “You couldn’t do it,” he said. “I just mean, I couldn’t do it either. People say she’s left her body. She’s a spirit now. What happened to her, it was too much. She survived but she’s free of her body. Do you get it?”
“I think so.”
“She’s a spirit walking around in a human body. But she doesn’t really need the body. That’s how she survives. Out in the winter, twenty below, and no fire. Some people say she’s an animal spirit. My aunty heard this screaming one night. They were camped near Eagle Lake and they heard this crazy howling in the hills above camp, kind of like a cougar, but scarier. They all got their guns ready. Aunty said the next day they went up there and they found Chiwid and her little camp. Chiwid was smiling. She’s always like that.”
We stretched out on the sun-warm boards. Aspen leaves like plump green hearts shivered in the summer breeze. I closed my eyes and could still see the dappled pattern of sun and leaf and blood against my eyelids. Beside me, Vern’s skin had a familiar, clean smell—soap and sun. I breathed it in. I opened my eyes. He’d crossed his warm brown arms over his white T-shirt. A small indentation at the top of his ribs dipped and rose with his breathing.
“So you’re going to leave,” he said.
“That’s the plan.”
He took my hand and held it to his chest and his heart padded against my palm as if I could catch his heartbeat.
“Mom was good at finding lost things,” I said. “Funny, eh? Jenny lost her Barbie doll once when we were out camping. She was only wearing her bathing suit.”
“Jenny?”
“No, Barbie.”
“So she was worried she might catch her death?”
“She really was. She was just young. I don’t remember how old, maybe eight or nine. Mom said, ‘Start at the beginning. Retrace your steps. Tell me everything you did with her.’ And while Mom closed her eyes and listened, Jenny went through it step by step. ‘I got her out of the tent after breakfast. She climbed a mountain and rescued Stick Man, who broke his leg because his horse got spooked by a bear and bucked him off. Then we had lunch. Then she married Stick Man. She went swimming in the creek, then she was sunbathing.’ ”
“Barbie?” Vern said.
“Yeah. And Mom said, ‘That’s where you’ll find her’ and sure enough, there she was, sunbathing in the mud by the creek. Under the stars.”
“So you’re going to retrace your steps,” said Vern.
“That’s the plan.”
It didn’t take long for Jenny to meet another boy. His name was John. This one was different from the others. I liked him, and that made me nervous. He played three instruments, drums, piano and saxophone, not only in the school band, but also in the country and cover bands that played at weddings and community dances. Jenny said he stayed up all night composing his own songs. He had unsettling blue eyes and a gaze like an X-ray. When he looked at me, I squirmed.
Also, Jenny had started to worry about what would happen to Bea without us. I sensed my plan unravelling. As she was getting ready to go out with John one evening, Jenny said, “You should get out yourself more, Bea. Why don’t you ever go to the Elks Hall?” She blew delicately on her freshly painted nails.
“What would I go to the Elks Hall for?” Bea said.
“I don’t know. Dancing? Maybe for fun? Do you even know that word, Bea? Fun is not washing dishes, not doing laundry, not even watching TV—well, except for Get Smart.”
Bea laughed and waved Jenny away with one hand and wiped her weepy eye with the other. “I don’t like drinking and those smoky places bother my eyes. And dancing with some smelly drunk is not fun to me.”
Jenny smiled, her nail polish wand poised for the second coat. “Okay. I can see that. But what is fun to you? You’re not so old. You’ve still got lots of time. Who wants to waste away in this little house in Nowheres-ville, B.C.?”
“Shh, Jenny!” Bea said, as if her boring life was a well-kept secret and someone listening might be offended.
“So what is your idea of fun?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“See, it’s been so long since you’ve had any, you forget what it is.”
“Well,” she said hesitantly, “I do like to bowl.”
Jenny threw her hands up dramatically. “You like to bowl? You like to bowl?” Jenny looked at me, where I sat silently, impatiently, leafing through a National Geographic. “Bea likes to bowl. For heaven’s sakes, Bea—that’s so simple. You can bowl right here in Williams Lake. I thought you were going to say you liked going to art galleries or something and we’d have to ship you off to Paris or New York.”
Bea took off her glasses and rubbed her eye harder, laughing.
“What else is fun to you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought once I’d like to go on a cruise.”
“That can be done,” Jenny said. “Do you have any money?”
“That’s not a polite question. But since you ask, I have enough to get by. But who would I go with?”
“You don’t need to go with anybody. That’s why you go on a cruise—to meet eligible men.”
“It’s no fun going alone,” Bea said.
“You live alone. I’d say going on a cruise alone is a heck of a lot more fun than being here alone.”
“I don’t live alone.” Bea looked at Jenny strangely.
I shot Jenny a murderous stare, silently pleading, shut-up, shut-up, shut-up.
Jenny looked at me with stupid alarmed bird eyes, her mouth clamped shut. “I meant, you’re alone, like not with a husband or anything.”
Bea nodded at that and it was okay again. “I would like to swim in the Caribbean Sea. I’ve seen photographs of that white sand and turquoise water. They say it’s like bath water. I read about that in the National Geographic. Have you seen that, Margaret?”
I looked up, startled, because she never included me in their conversations.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“That would be something. You can put on those scuba diving outfits and get right down under the water.”
It was more enthusiasm than she’d shown for anything, ever, around us.
“They’ve got fish, all kinds of colours, really different from what’s around here.” Bea waved her arm in the general direction of the kitchen.
Through the heat of August, Jenny and John went for long walks down to Scout Island and around the lake. He wore no shirt. His jeans hung loosely around his hip bones and his chest was lean and tanned. When it cooled off in the evening, he put on his flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the buttons undone. I suppose I had a crush on him. One night he sat on the front step with me while Jenny was inside getting dressed.
“Hear those crickets?” he asked. “When I’m old, I’ll dream about that sound every winter. I’ll want just one more summer, so I can hear them again. Winter makes you old. I want to live in a place where I can walk around all year with no shirt on, feeling the wind on my skin.”
Talk of wind on his skin made me shiver. He was sitting so close, I could feel the heat from his body.
“Would you like that?”
“Pardon?”
“Where would you live where you could be what you really are?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, there must be a place where Maggie Dillon would be so comfortable in her skin she wouldn’t care what anybody else said or what clothes she wore.”
“There would be crickets,” I blurted.
He laughed. “I like that. I want crickets, too. I wonder if there are crickets in Mexico.”
Jenny came out. When she looked at John her face softened. He smiled. There was something between them that made me jealous. It made me think that as long as John was in Williams Lake, I would not get Jenny to leave.