20

Four months earlier: June

Eleanor agreed to call the young woman named MacKenzie. She did not agree reluctantly. She did not need persuading or convincing. Her daughter Patricia, whom Eleanor herself had named Patricia and who had loved her when she gave her that name and had used that name lovingly the girl’s entire life, had decided to reject the name, to eliminate it, to cross it out like a mistaken answer on a test. And she’d given herself (alarmingly she said it was her dead friend Becky who’d given it to her) the name Sam.

And Eleanor saw Sam’s response when she caught sight of that little tattoo at the funeral. The strange little butterfly on the wrist of Morganne’s cousin from the Running Brook reserve. The girl who’d seemed barely alive a minute before had surged suddenly to life at the sight of that tattoo. In a white and grey haze of smudge smoke, her face became reanimated. Her wide eyes looked from the butterfly to the face of the young woman whose arm it was on.

As she dialled the number, Eleanor looked around her at the kitchen of the mini home she’d been so pleased with just a few years earlier when she’d moved into it with her kids. It had been so new and well looked after compared to the apartments and shitty rental houses she’d been able to afford up until then. But now, after all that had happened, after what happened to Sam, the place just seemed shabby and inadequate, like everything else in their lives.

Eleanor had agreed to call MacKenzie, but because she did not fully understand what Sam wanted, she’d made a fool of herself on the phone. The kind of tattoo Sam wanted was called a stick-and-poke, but she called it a poke and stick. And MacKenzie was confused at first. Had no idea what Eleanor was talking about. And then when it dawned on her what this strange woman was saying to her on the phone, she’d laughed. Not a big, disrespectful laugh. Just a little snicker.

And she’d made a different kind of fool of herself when she asked about the price.

“The price of what?” MacKenzie said. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t want to seem rude. But I’m. I’m sort of disoriented by your call. I’m not a hundred percent certain who you are or even why you’re calling me.”

“I’m Patricia’s mother.”

“My name is Sam!” Sam yelled from her bedroom. Eleanor heard her loud and clear, but she was not certain whether MacKenzie had heard or not.

There was a long moment of quiet on the other end of the line. “I’m not sure I know a…”

“She was one of the… She’s a friend of your cousin Morganne.”

“Oh my god! Trisha! Oh my god! I’m sorry, ma’am. I feel so stupid right now.”

“She’s calling herself Sam now, my daughter.”

“I’m not calling myself anything! That’s my name!” Sam’s voice came again.

“My daughter saw your tattoo the other day. At the. At the funeral.”

“Oh my god! I saw her. I totally saw her looking at my tattoo. Oh, ma’am. Don’t take this the wrong way. But…your daughter looked so…bad when I saw her. She just looked so…bad. I said to my mother when we got home, I said it hurt me to look at that girl. I felt like, when I was looking at her, I was feeling all the pain she was feeling. But bless her heart. She came for a smudge, didn’t she? That’s when I saw her eyes lock in on that stick-and-poke I put on my own wrist.”

“I don’t know much about this,” Eleanor said. “I think she liked that tattoo because. I’m not sure. She felt some connection with it.”

“That’s an Alan Syliboy butterfly,” MacKenzie said. “My own shaky version of it, really. Your daughter would know that from my cousin Morganne’s bedroom. Morganne’s got a print of that. The M’ikmaq Butterfly. Right over her bed. Her grandmother gave her that one year at Christmas. That’d be my grandmother, too.” And MacKenzie said something that Eleanor did not understand, but she assumed it was the M’ikmaw word for grandmother.

“If she wants me to do a stick-and-poke, I can do one for her,” MacKenzie said. “If I was a real tattoo artist, I’d need Alan Syliboy’s permission to do a tattoo of his artwork. But I just do wobbly little doodles. I have time tomorrow afternoon. We can do it right here in my mom’s kitchen. My mom won’t mind.”

Eleanor felt a big exhale of relief come out of her own lungs.

“Thank you so much,” Eleanor said. “Thank you so much. Can you give me an idea of the cost?”

“The cost?”

“I don’t care how much it is. I just want to make sure I come there with the right amount.”

MacKenzie laughed. “Ma’am. I do not do this for money. Honest to God. I like that painting. I saw it first on Morganne’s wall. That’s where I got the idea. But I mostly gave myself that tattoo because I was bored.”

“Look. I don’t mind paying.”

“No. You look, ma’am. Not trying to be rude here. But I must insist. Morganne is my cousin and your girl is her friend.”

So the next afternoon, Eleanor and Sam drove out to the Running Brook reserve.

Since being released from hospital, this was Sam’s second time leaving the house. The first time was Becky’s funeral. Now this. She was so frail and thin, so bruised and injured, Eleanor felt she might tip over sideways in the passenger seat and be unable to get up. She was wearing the baggiest clothes she could find, as tighter fitting items worked painfully against her wounds. Simon’s old plaid work shirt, men’s medium, draped over her shoulders like a smock on some painter from a hundred years ago.

MacKenzie lived on a little cul-de-sac of five or six identical bungalows. Each had a short, paved driveway and a little roofed carport that stuck out the side of the house. A round-faced lady with short, home-permed curls met them at the door. She introduced herself as MacKenzie’s mother, Elizabeth. It took a moment, but Eleanor recognized her as the woman who had done the smudge at the Community Room after the funeral. Elizabeth asked them to wait in the kitchen while she went to get MacKenzie.

There was a TV on in the next room. Eleanor had not had her own TV on since Corporal Vernon had come to the house to give her the terrible news. The sound of a newscaster’s voice on CBC Newsworld was a good reminder to her: there was a world outside her tight little circle of personal and family misery.

Eleanor and Sam sat at the kitchen table. The dining set had a honey-oak tinge to it. It looked brand new. Eleanor was almost certain she recognized the exact set from a flyer from The Brick. It had been on sale for a great price and it had taken her a long time to come to terms with the fact that, great price or no, she still could not afford it.

Sam had a little green writing pad with her. When she no longer felt like talking, she’d write a word or two in the pad. She put the pad on the table along with the thin-stemmed blue pen she sometimes used to write in it. Beside the pad, she placed a black, hardcovered book with a pebbly cover.

When MacKenzie came into the kitchen, she sat down at the table with Sam. Eleanor looked at the young woman’s hands. They were empty. She’d expected to see tattooing supplies.

“I’m Eleanor,” Eleanor said.

MacKenzie nodded at her. “Nice to meet you,” she said. Her voice was hushed. Her manner was slow and subdued. She approached Sam as though Sam were a timid animal she were trying not to frighten away.

“Hi, Trisha,” MacKenzie said.

“I’m Sam, now,” Sam said.

MacKenzie looked at Eleanor and frowned at herself for her mistake. Eleanor shrugged.

“Sorry,” MacKenzie said. “Your mom told me your new name. I should have remembered.”

“That’s okay,” said Sam.

MacKenzie put a forearm on the table in front of Sam. She put the back of her hand on the tabletop so the inner part of her wrist showed. There was the jaggedy asymmetrical outline of an abstract butterfly. A couple of back-to-back crescents, bowing away from each other.

“I saw you looking at this before,” MacKenzie said.

Sam’s neck was bent. Her gaze down in her lap. She looked up, regarded MacKenzie’s tattoo. “I recognized it from Morganne’s room,” Sam said.

“That’s where I saw it first, too.”

Sam nudged the black book in MacKenzie’s direction. She used her left hand for the job, and for the first time, Eleanor noticed that Sam had her right hand down out of sight.

“What’s this?” MacKenzie said.

“Open it,” said Sam.

“Oh my,” MacKenzie said when she opened the book. “Oh, my. These are just the sweetest things.”

Eleanor stood up and took a half step in MacKenzie’s direction, where she could see what MacKenzie was looking at. And MacKenzie was right. They were the sweetest things. Page after page of doodles. Swirly-eyed girls in dresses. Done in black pen.

“Morganne did these, didn’t she?” said MacKenzie. “These are so Morganne.”

Sam nodded. “Morganne calls these the Girly Girls. But…I always called them the Beckys.”

MacKenzie brought her hands up to her face and began to cry in big loud sobs. Her mother came to the door between the kitchen and the living room, stood for a moment where she could see her daughter was overcome with emotion, but otherwise was all right. Then she backed away slowly into the living room again.

“Sorry,” MacKenzie said. She waved her hands at the sides of her face as though she were too warm. She looked up at the ceiling and made a futile attempt to blink back the tears that were rolling down her face in big drops.

“Ma!” MacKenzie called through the door to the living room.

“Yes?” her mother called back.

“Some emotional in here!”

“You okay?”

“I’m good.”

MacKenzie began to laugh. “I find it helps if I just tell my mother.” She laughed a bit louder, but the laughter only made her cry more.

Eleanor noticed a Kleenex box on top of the fridge. She took the liberty of plucking it from its place and setting it on the table in front of MacKenzie.

“I thought you wanted this,” MacKenzie said as she wiped her face with a tissue. She put out her wrist to indicate the butterfly.

Sam shook her head. She tapped Morganne’s sketchbook with the tip of an index finger. “Can you find one of these that would be a good stick-and-poke?”

MacKenzie balled up the wad of Kleenex she’d soiled, walked to the sink and dumped it into a little compost container there. She took a squirt of dish soap and washed her hands, dried them on a little hand towel that hung by a string from the fridge handle. She sat down again and paged through the stiff white pages of the sketch book.

“Ha ha!” MacKenzie said. She turned the book around so Sam and Eleanor could see. The girl in the image had her hands on her hips and was looking directly at the viewer. A voice bubble over her head said: Fuck around.

In spite of her determination to be supportive of her daughter, Eleanor had a moment of fear at the sight of the crude phrase.

“I know you don’t want that one on your arm,” MacKenzie said. “But still. Funny.”

When MacKenzie returned to flipping through the book, Eleanor was sure her relieved exhale was audible in the room.

“How about this?” MacKenzie said after another minute. She spun the book round so it was right side up for Sam. Eleanor, who had backed away from the table, took a step closer in so she could see, too.

“Perfect,” Sam said. The illustration MacKenzie chose was a cute little image of the swirly girl and a flower, half as big as the girl. The girl was leaning down to get a smell.

“It’s got a bit of movement in it,” MacKenzie said. She got up from the table and opened a cupboard. She took down a rectangular cookie tin. Eleanor heard what sounded like more than one hard-edged object, obviously not cookies, slide across the bottom of the tin. When MacKenzie opened the tin, the only thing that stood out was a straight steel needle, about the length of a finger. Eleanor flinched at the sight of it and experienced a moment of mildly rising panic that she breathed deeply through her nose to prevent from escalating. She had to look away from the tin. She stared dumbly at the white door of the fridge.

“Now. Where do you want this,” MacKenzie said.

From the corner of her eye, Eleanor saw Sam take her right hand out from under the table. It was black and red and purple and swollen out of shape. Eleanor could not imagine anyone would mistake the markings on it for anything but a self-inflicted bite mark. The black dents that made a U at the base of the thumb were clearly nothing else but teeth marks.

“You can’t be serious,” MacKenzie said. A look of fear came over her. She looked at Sam, then quickly up to Eleanor.

“I’m serious,” Sam said. She pointed at the skin at the centre of the horseshoe of teeth marks.

MacKenzie said: “Honey, I can’t give you a tattoo in the middle of a wound like that.” She looked again at Eleanor, who was slowly backing toward the doorway to the outside. She’d stay in the room with Sam as long as she could. But she felt close to fainting. Or throwing up.

“Please,” Sam said. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Wait until that heals,” MacKenzie said.

Sam squeezed her eyes shut. Hard. “I can’t wait I can’t wait I can’t wait,” she said. She was clearly on the verge of something.

The expression on MacKenzie’s face turned desperate. Sam’s eyes were still shut tight. MacKenzie turned to Eleanor. Help me, her expression said. Eleanor shook her head. Shrugged.

MacKenzie said, “Oh, girl. This is going to hurt so bad.”

Sam opened her eyes and shook her head no.

“Oh yes it will,” said MacKenzie.

Sam turned her head sideways and exhaled hard. She lowered her head until it rested briefly on the table top, left cheek against the woodgrain. Then she slowly sat back up straight.

“Nothing is going to hurt any more than I already do,” Sam said.

“Ma!” MacKenzie called out.

“You good?” came the mother’s voice.

MacKenzie put both hands on her stick-and-poke tin. She centred the box on the edge of the tabletop in front of her. Her expression turned solemn.

“I’m good!” she called though the door.