he walked for almost four weeks. The balmy weather held for her, high skies during the day, and warm enveloping nights, which carried the essence and softness of the night she swam in the gravel pits, the night she had recognized as being one of the few when she did not yearn to be moving towards another place. Her predilection for the melancholy is evident in how often she recalls the external landscape. A romantic Amy, remembering with her body and not her mind.
She walked well into each night, frightened, imagining what demons look like. Grinning tiny imps with monkey tails, or bloated gargoyles with steaming, fetid breath? She would startle at every small sound by the way, and look with yearning at lights in windows of distant farmhouses. Then, as those dots of lights winked out one by one and only yard lights remained lit and churning with a frenzy of moths, this was where you could find her. In the darkness. Not during the day, but at night, when there was no one but herself.
Even though she would like you to think so, there is nothing at all romantic about being alone on the road in the dead of night. It wasn’t so much the absence of people but the presence of absence; not a single loving person at her centre. And, frankly, who, if they dared to approach, would find much that was lovable there – a heart as flat and as polished as her white face.
That first night I walked until past three in the morning, and then trampled down some grain, making a nest for myself in a field, and spread my jacket as a pillow and slept. In the morning I awoke feeling damp and stiff but strangely exhilarated as I stretched and listened to a dog barking in the far distance and heard, too, the whistling, cawing, the hiss and croak of the landscape, and thought: I did it. Then the barking was drowned out by the sound of a machine’s engine sputtering to life and I knew it was time to move on.
During the days I ignored the curious appraisals of the truckers, farmers, and waitresses I encountered in roadside gas stations, and I didn’t speak more than was necessary to order what I wanted to eat and to ask directions to the washroom. After the first day, when I saw myself in one of those washroom mirrors, I noticed that the skin beneath my eyes looked bruised from smudged mascara and so I dampened a paper towel and wiped my face clean of cosmetics. By the end of the first week my skin took on a rosy glow from the sun and my arms became deeply tanned. As I travelled I tried not to think of distances, set no goals, just walked, cutting away from the main highway after the first day to travel along secondary roads and then roads that were not really roads but rutted paths crossing open fields, until I saw on the horizon the crawl of headlights or rows of telephone poles, meaning that I had come back to the main highway. I would follow it again, perplexed sometimes to find myself passing by a hamlet or town I had come across several days earlier.
My feet seemed to move independently of my will, so that even though the rest of my body ached with tiredness, my brain screamed for sleep, still I could walk.
In the days and nights that followed I did not think about Shirley’s crushed chest or ruptured heart; but I suppose now that Cam and Gord did. They were among the pall-bearers at Shirley’s funeral and they must have thought about her broken body as they filed past the open casket and saw her too-high, pointy, and obviously fake breasts thrusting out against the dress her mother delivered to the undertaker, one of her own, probably, because Shirley didn’t own a dress.
I did not imagine myself as Amy the squirrel, or standing on a book and floating towards a harbour, heading towards Truth and Knowledge. I thought instead about Margaret. If there was one thing I could have changed, I wouldn’t have struck her. I reasoned that my mother had told me I was possessed by a demon for revenge. I began to dread the silent telephone calls in my own future.
But gradually thoughts of Margaret vanished in the open air, and during the days I walked I became aware of how large everything was, how tall and wide the sky, how broad the plains of the Midwest, which seemed to breathe and become twitchy with nervous energy during the night. At night I heard the earth’s nervousness in the ground as I lay on it, how it quivered with sound.
Once, I squatted beside a water-filled ditch, dropped pebbles into its scummy surface, one by one, and watched the ripples circle outwards, a water insect riding the ridge of energy I had set in motion to the outer limits of its cosmos. In the days as I continued to walk, I believed that the air rippled with sound waves which circled outwards and upwards, and that my breath pushed the noise of the chirping and sawing insects out further and up through the stratosphere and beyond the stars to the place where angels and God abide.
I began to duck out of sight into deep grass beside the road at the sound of an approaching vehicle, desiring to be alone, unseen, and becoming stealthy. I had no one. You would think that I would have felt sad about that, a bereft child, cut off and cut loose. But as I bent over the squashed remains of a gopher lying to the side of the road and studied its insides which heaved with rice-shaped plump maggots, I believed instead that I had been freed.
I felt myself begin to blend in with the landscape, become as much a part of it as the insects, the frogs gliding through still ponds, the Franklin’s gulls hovering over freshly tilled fields, the whippoorwills calling out their own names at nightfall, and the need and desire to see Timothy ebbed. I wanted to spend the rest of the summer outdoors but, towards the end of July, when I squatted in a field to empty my bladder, I realized by the spatters of blood on the ground that my body had played its trick and I would need to go into a town.
Spectrail, the town Amy enters the following morning, appears to be similar to the others she has passed, in that the highway skirts around it, and to enter it she must take the service road which passes through the inevitable ugly clutch of buildings on the town’s perimeter, corrugated steel sheds, gas stations, farm-implement lots, and car dealers. She worries that she won’t find the main street and the hotel or cafe washroom before she leaks through her jeans. Then she sees a half-moon-shaped building which has a sign above the door. COMMUNITY CENTRE, she reads, which probably means a bingo hall and curling rink and likely not open yet. But just as she thinks this the door does open and a young woman wearing a peach-coloured halter top and white shorts steps outside. As the door swings closed behind her, Amy smells the aroma of food cooking and her stomach turns with hunger. The young woman walks over to a bicycle rack where several bikes are parked. She sees Amy and shields her eyes against the sun and stares. This is Marlene. When Amy thinks about Marlene years later, she sees the heavy sausage-shaped ringlets hanging across her forehead, a clear-eyed person with a broad smile revealing almost perfectly shaped teeth, and a friendly, even disposition. She will also remember Marlene referring to her elderly father as “the old bugger.”
She asks the girl if there’s a washroom inside the building and is startled by the sound of her own voice, at how thin and strained it has become.
“Yes.” The girl’s long curly dark hair sweeps across her shoulders as she pulls her bike free. She walks it over to the door as though she’s waiting for Amy. She isn’t wearing shoes and her painted toenails shine as though still wet. “The washrooms are just inside the door. Men’s to the left.” She takes a white cap from the wicker basket on the handlebars and jams it onto the back of her head. She glances up as Amy passes by and her eyes go wide with surprise. “Oh sorry! I thought you were a boy.” Snorts of laughter shoot from her nostrils. “Great hair, I really like it,” she says.
Yeah, sure, Amy thinks, believing the tone of voice is derision. She steps inside the dim interior to the sound of voices and the smell of perspiration mixed with cooking odours. She hears the snap of a ping-pong ball meeting a paddle and strange shuffling and grunting sounds coming from another room. The washrooms are just inside the doorway and beyond them are the raw plywood walls of a hallway and doors which open up on either side of it. She enters the washroom and is relieved to discover that she’s alone. The muscles in her abdomen have become rigid and ache with cramps. She sees in her mind the girl outside, the perky white tilt of her sailor’s cap, the painted toenails, and she feels dirty. Her jeans are dirt-encrusted and grass-stained, the white socks now grey. She pulls her shoes off and removes her socks, turns them inside out, and puts them back on. Then she winds toilet paper into several pads and stuffs them into her pockets.
She studies her reflection in the mirror above the sink as she washes her hands and sees how tightly the skin stretches across her cheekbones, making her eyes look hollow. The door opens behind her and two small girls enter and stop dead to stare at her. They sidle around her and then dash into the cubicle and she hears them whispering and stifling giggles. Well, to hell with this tight-ass town, Amy thinks, and her throat constricts without warning. She hears Shirley’s words in her own mouth and for one terrible moment she has to grab hold of the sink to keep from pitching forward. She sees her face twist to one side, her mouth crinkling. A stranger looks out from behind her eyes, admonishing her. She instructs herself not to think about Shirley but to think instead about the maggots in the gopher and not to give in to self-pity. The toilet flushes. She sees the little girls’ shoes, a pair of red and a pair of navy sneakers, their mosquito-bitten, stem-like ankles, and how their feet seem to waltz as they tug their clothing back into place. She takes several deep breaths. No one must see anything unusual in her face. She checks her reflection in the mirror and, although her eyes are still suspect, the rest of her face has settled back into place. Now she will walk into the town and buy what she needs and move on.
As she enters the hallway, the smell of food once again pulls at her empty stomach. She hesitates, but then is drawn by it down the hall, past a door and a room where several children play ping-pong. They’re engrossed and don’t look up as she goes by, following her nose to the end of the hallway and the other door.
When Amy walks into the room, she sees a tall man wearing a Stetson standing in the centre of a raised platform: a boxing ring. The two young men standing on either side of him wear leather helmets and boxing gloves. “Okay, you guys, now remember what I said. You fight fair now.” Amy recognizes the voice, the slow, thick tongue, and the frizzy hair above his ears. It’s the man called Hank, she realizes, the bass guitar player she met in the park years ago with the country and western performer Stu Farmer Junior.
Just then a bell clangs and Hank steps back and the boys begin to weave and bob. Hank looks up and sees her, stares for a second, and then several young boys who have been shouting encouragement to the boxers turn and stare at her as well. As she walks towards the concession stand at the end of the room she feels their eyes on her. A woman works behind the counter at a stove. This is Elaine, Marlene’s mother. Amy is aware of the woman’s backward glance in her direction, a question forming in her face, but she ignores it as she reads the menu written on a blackboard and thinks about Stu Farmer Junior. She remembers him sitting on a picnic bench in the city, hugging his acoustic guitar, the day Mel almost fell into the river, and it feels like it happened in another world and to another person. She remembers his music and then Hank approaching as she lay stretched out on the grass about to take off and fly. “So who’s the dopey kid?” Hank had asked.
She senses that Hank is still looking at her, that he leans against the ropes and peers out over the heads of the dancing boxers, checking her out. She calculates what she can afford to eat and for the first time it occurs to her that she might have to stop moving and get a job. The band of muscles in her abdomen tightens sharply. What if I get sick? I don’t get sick, she tells herself. She realizes that the strange shuffling sound she’d heard when she first came in had been the sound of the boxers’ feet, the grunting their breathing, and although she has studied flies feeding on blood on a car seat, she has no desire to turn and watch fists pounding bodies. Another clang of the bell ends the round. She hears Hank talking to the boys, his diction slow, a slight lisp, and then Marlene is at her side. Wet teeth, Amy thinks as the girl smiles at her, she should really swallow her spit. Her eyes shine with friendliness. Vacuous.
Elaine comes over to the counter and leans into it. A red bandanna holds her hair off her forehead. She swipes at perspiration on her face with a corner of her apron. Hot flashes, the change, Elaine explains several days later to Amy as they sit out on the back step peeling potatoes for a batch of french fries. She’d made a fake stab at Amy with the potato peeler. “I can’t be held responsible for my actions,” she said. “I’m in the change and women have been known to go batty.” She reminds Amy of Bunny North, Margaret’s friend.
“I thought you were on your way home,” Elaine says to Marlene.
“I was, but I came back.”
“He’ll be cooked by now.”
Marlene points to Amy’s head. “I want my hair like that.”
Elaine wipes a spot of grease from the counter. “Sure you do. Now get out of my sight.”
“I’m serious, Mom, I want that hair.”
The woman sighs dramatically and rolls her eyes. “What you really want is the back of my hand,” she says with mock sternness. “Kissy, kissy,” she says, and makes kissing sounds with her red mouth. “I happen to think you’re beautiful just the way you are.”
Corny, Amy thinks, and wonders if this is a show staged for her benefit. Elaine leans across the counter and winks at Amy. “She takes after me.” Despite herself Amy wants to laugh. They couldn’t be more opposite, she thinks. Elaine has a meat-and-potatoes face, ordinary, with large pores and a doughy little nose, while Marlene’s sharp and clearly defined features are doll-like, perfect, and dance with a certain mischievousness. Several young boys rush past Amy and straddle the stools at the counter. Elaine sends them off to wash their hands.
“You finished?” Marlene says to someone who has just stepped up behind Amy. Amy can smell him. It’s the smell of Hank. It’s the smell of Lifebuoy soap.
“Yah,” Hank says, “that’s it till after lunch anyways.” He saunters past Amy over to the stools, appearing disinterested in her, but she senses that he’s sprung tightly inside, as tight as his bristly curls, and is acutely aware of her. As the woman sets a cup of coffee down in front of him, Amy turns away, reading the blackboard menu once again.
“Well, if you’re finished,” Marlene says to Hank, “then maybe you’d like to go down to the house and move the old bugger into the shade.” Her voice is high and child-like.
“From where?”
“Outside. In the garden. Since nine,” Elaine says. “If you don’t mind, Hank, he’s had enough of the sun. He’ll be cooked by now. Just wheel him into the shade of the tree.”
“Will do,” Hank says.
Steam billows up around Elaine’s face as she lifts the lid of a pot on the stove and Amy smells vegetable soup. Yes, she thinks, something hot, but she can’t find it on the menu. A hand taps her on the shoulder.
“Where you from?” Marlene asks. Amy turns, about to reply that it’s none of their business and walk away, when Marlene disarms her with formal introductions. “Sorry,” she says, “here we are talking all around you. I’m Marlene, that’s my mom, Elaine, and the funny-looking person over there is Hank, Spectrail’s celebrity and most eligible bachelor. Huh, huh, huh.” Her breasts jiggle behind the peach halter top as she laughs.
“You can be replaced,” Hank says.
They all wait for Amy to tell them who she is.
“You want to order something to eat, dear?” Elaine says quickly, filling the gap.
“No.”
“Fine!” Elaine smacks the soup ladle against the counter. “Don’t eat then. But skinny is not beautiful, honey, not in my books.” She pats her ample thigh. “Check this out. This is beautiful.” She smiles at them, pleased with herself. “Now sit!” she commands, and goes over to the stove and ladles soup into a large bowl.
As Amy sits at the counter eating the soup, which is thick with barley and vegetables, Hank’s sleepy eyes tell her that he thinks it is she who is beautiful, right now, skinny and all. Amy feels that he’s stealing parts of her face with his eyes. She vows not to tell him that she’s the dopey kid he met in the park that day. She doesn’t want them to have any history at all.
Spectrail is an odd name for a town, Amy thinks. Main Street isn’t where she expected it to be, isn’t broad, either, or strung with those prerequisite coloured lights, which in winter are depressing in their feeble attempt at gaiety and which stay up all year round. The town itself isn’t where Amy thought it would be, but hidden behind a screen of trees, she discovers, as she hangs onto the seat of Marlene’s bicycle and not Marlene’s waist as she had instructed her to do. Marlene rides standing up and her bare shoulders dip from side to side as she pedals. The string ties of her halter top shift against her back. Marlene smells like green apples, Amy thinks, like summer.
The bicycle’s wheels jar against the wooden planks of a bridge and Amy sucks in her breath, feeling the jiggling motion in her abdomen and the sudden sharp rise of a cramp. Below the bridge she sees an almost dry creek bed, a trickle of water washing bright the smooth river stones. As they cross the bridge and pass through an arch of trees Amy sees Main Street, how it opens up the town, a strip of shiny black asphalt about four blocks long. It ends in a U-turn just as abruptly as it began and Marlene makes that U-turn at the war memorial which has a colourful spattering of flowers planted around the base of it. The town is clean, the stores and houses neat and bright as though freshly painted. It owes its name to the word “spectacular,” Elaine explains later, and Amy doesn’t question this, given the view, which stretches beyond the end of Main Street where the landscape drops away to miles and miles of tilled soil and fields of flax and sunflowers.
Spectral. Amy changes the name of the town when she later tries to write about it because of the way it appeared so suddenly behind the trees, because the substance of the events in her life while she lived there will remain foggy, illusive, and come to mind when she least expects it.
Marlene is quick to understand Amy’s problem and goes with her to the store, then waits outside the washroom at the playground in the town’s centre while inside Amy hunches over, gasping through the pain of what have become strong, intermittent contractions. When one subsides she’s left shaking and bathed in a cold sweat. Amy grits her teeth as another contraction begins to crawl through her muscles. She can no longer, hold back. “Oooooohhhh,” she hears herself moan. The door opens and then Marlene hovers over her, wide-eyed with worry. “Gee. I’ve got some Midol at home if you want.”
When Amy opens her eyes she realizes that she’s slept for a long time. The light has changed and the air in the room has become suffocatingly heavy with heat. An attic room. She vaguely remembers entering Marlene and Elaine’s yard and seeing a patch of red poppies, petals flipping in the air, a tree, and, in the shadow of its branches, the slight figure of a man slouched in a wheelchair. She remembers Marlene calling, “Have you had enough of being outside, you old bugger?” and cheerfully hopping through the swaying poppies towards him, and that the thin elderly man’s head wobbled as she moved his wheelchair along the uneven garden path to where Amy sat on the back step, shivering and holding back nausea. “I’ll just take the old bugger inside and I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
“Why do you call him that?” she’d asked.
“Because he is.” Marlene laughed. She leaned towards his ear and yelled, “You can’t hear a darn thing, can you, you old bugger? Stone deaf.” The old man didn’t flinch or his bright eyes flicker with any indication that he’d heard.
The room she’s in is large and contains the bed she lies in, a washstand, what looks like a kitchen chair in one corner, and a low chest beneath a small window. The walls are unfinished, rough unpainted boards, and hung randomly at waist level are glossy magazine photographs of movie stars. Marlene’s room, she supposes. Strange, Amy thinks, that the pictures aren’t hung at eye level. The room is surprisingly bare given the colourful and well-kept appearance of Marlene and her mother. She hears whispering behind the door. Marlene’s and Elaine’s voices. Amy braces herself, believing that she’ll be asked to leave. The door opens and Elaine steps inside. Time to get up, Amy thinks.
“Good grief, it’s hot in here.” The floor creaks as Elaine strides over to the window and pries it open. Then she stands at the foot of the bed, crosses her arms against her chest, and looks down at Amy. “Well. So what is it? Have you run away from home?”
“No.” The sanitary napkins between her legs feel sodden and spongy.
“Kicked out, then?”
“No. I left.”
“Left where? From where? You do have a name, don’t you?”
Because she’s lying in Marlene’s bed in this woman’s house, she thinks it’s only fair. She tells Elaine her name; the place: Carona.
The bed dips as Elaine sits down. Amy notices her ears, large, like bread and butter plates lying flat against the sides of her head, and wonders if they are receivers for the news of the world; whether Elaine might be the town snoop and blabbermouth.
“And you do have parents?”
“Come on! Left in a basket then, on a doorstep?” She slouches, her work-rough hands resting against her thighs. Amy notices that the lines beside her mouth and eyes curve up naturally. Perhaps Elaine is asking questions, Amy thinks, because she is interested and not gathering information to be used later as ammunition. “I have a mother,” Amy says. “Kind of.”
“Kind of? Well, did your ‘kind of’ mother know that you were pregnant?”
Amy’s heart kicks and she feels the push of anger in her throat. “I am not.” Pregnant. She sits up and swings her legs over the bed. She will get the hell out of this place and gain herself back. But when she stands up the room sways and she must grab the bedpost to keep from falling.
Elaine pats the bed. “Come on. Don’t be a silly ass. You can’t go anywhere today.”
Amy feels the room move inside her head. She sits down. She sees her tiny pointy feet and the dirt encrusted in the cracks between her toes.
“You know, of course, what has to happen between a man and a woman for the woman to become pregnant,” Elaine speaks quietly.
“Of course.” And I’m not pregnant, she thinks. This is a heavy period, that’s all.
Elaine’s hand slides across the blanket and Amy feels its warm pat against her leg. “You’re right. You’re not pregnant. Not any more. It’s in the toilet downstairs.” She sighs as she gets up off the bed. “So it’s all over now and you don’t have anything to worry about.” She stops at the door, pulls the red bandanna free from her hair. “You’re welcome to stay with us until you feel better, but I’ll have to call your mother and let her know where you are.”
“No.”
“Listen. I have a daughter and so I know how your mother must be frantic.”
“I’m leaving here anyway.”
“It’s okay,” Elaine says and smiles as she opens the door. “I’m not going to tell your mother about this. What’s the point?”
The door closes behind her. There’s nothing to tell, Amy thinks.
She falls asleep almost instantly, sleeping through the grainy darkness of nightfall, through the smell of their supper cooking. On she sleeps into the night, no groaning anxious mother-earth sounds to disturb her, no worry in her ear. She doesn’t hear when Marlene enters the room and undresses in the light of a flashlight set down on the chair in the corner. “Here we are,” Marlene says as she slides in under the sheets. “We’re a couple of honeymooners.” Amy doesn’t hear the bump of feet on the stairs and Hank’s voice as he half carries, half drags the invalid man up to his room next door to theirs and separated only by the thin board wall. Hank does it for Elaine; he comes as often as he can.
Amy sleeps through the rasp of a saw-whet owl perched on a telephone pole at the end of the street and through the sound of Hank’s feet against the road as he heads home to the room behind the Craft Collective where he lives alone and has since the age of fourteen when his mother died of breast cancer. Hank whistles as he walks, and thinks of the casket-shaped jewel box under his bed which holds his mother’s black Alaskan diamond ring, strings of beads, pins and earrings. He whistles the Hank Snow song about being left behind with a brand on his heart and at the same time thinks of his mother’s jewellery and imagines that some day he’ll give it to the girl he just met at the Community Centre.
Amy dreams of standing beside the war memorial at the end of Main Street, reading the names of the war dead etched into its surface. Private Howard P. Scott, Lieutenant B. Randolph, Timothy Barber, she reads. Then she is standing in a cobblestone street and the damp air smells of fish. She looks up at a tall narrow house where, behind a diamond-shaped leaded-glass window on the top floor, she sees Timothy sitting at a desk. When he swivels in his chair and looks down at her, Amy sees terrible grief in his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me you were dead?” Her voice echoes in the empty street. “Why didn’t you tell me that’s why you never came to see me?” Timothy walks over to the window and places his palms against it. He’s crying. “I’m coming up there.” She begins yanking at the wrought-iron gate in front of the door. In the distance a bell rings, its sound echoing through the thick fog. “No. You can’t,” Timothy says. “Go away.” Amy heats footsteps, high-heel shoes clicking against stone. She turns and sees Margaret step through a swirl of fog. She’s dressed smartly in a tailored emerald-green suit and a hat whose veil covers her eyes. She gestures frantically and her bright red mouth turns down at the corners with worry. “Hurry,” she pleads, “we’ll miss the ship.” The bell clangs and a ship’s whistle blats, the noise of it vibrating harshly. The sounds envelop Amy like the fog, drift inside her ears. “Go away. Go away,” Timothy says. He presses his mouth against the glass and it looks like a fish mouth gaping open, sucking for air. “Hurry, hurry. The Lord is going to leave without us,” Margaret pleads. Their voices become a hollow-sounding echo inside Amy’s head. “He doesn’t want me to come and live with him because he’s dead,” she hears herself say. Then Amy is standing beside the war memorial again and before her is the spectacular view, the fields which spread for miles, curving over the side of the earth at the horizon.
When Amy awakens the following morning Marlene is already gone. She hears paper rustling and then the soft sound of rubber tires gliding across the floor in the room on the other side of the wall. Resting on the foot of the bed is a mound of clothing and a note. She finds it difficult to read Marlene’s back-slanted loopy script. She has gone to the Community Centre with Elaine. Amy can wear whatever she wants. Amy can have a bath, too, and when she comes down to the Centre Elaine will make her something to eat, she reads.
Amy carries the clothing downstairs to the bathroom and runs water into the tub. A bottle of bubble bath rests on the side of it and beneath it is another note in the same strange scrawl. “Be my guest.” Amy picks up the bottle. Now they will both smell like green apples, she thinks, as she watches the lime-coloured foam bubble up beneath the rushing water. She sinks down into it, up to her neck, and then slides beneath the surface, entirely submerged, and holds her breath for several seconds. She feels the grit of the road lift and float to the surface and lets her limbs float and her body roll to one side. She’s relieved that the bleeding diminished during the night and that the cramps are gone and she can now get back on the road again.
Later, when she looks at herself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, she likes what she sees. She likes the way Marlene’s tan cotton twill pants fit her, baggy, concealing the fact that she has almost no shape at all. She rolls up the legs and then tucks the shirt down into place. Yes, okay, she thinks and begins to make a list of what she might go looking for. Food in the refrigerator. A heavier jacket for cooler nights ahead. She sees a brush resting on the toilet tank. Yes, a hairbrush too. Her hair is going to grow in eventually. She wonders what colour it will turn out to be. Then she sees the bottle of cherry-red nail polish beside the brush and so she sits down on the toilet seat and paints her toenails, carefully fanning them to make them dry quickly while she listens to the sound of the wheelchair overhead as it rolls across the room, pivots, and rolls back again. When she goes into the kitchen in search of food and a closet where she might find a warmer jacket, she hears a steady dripping sound and then sees her jeans, the black denim jacket, her tee shirt, washed and draped across the backs of chairs, puddles forming on the floor. She realizes she’ll have to stay in Spectrail a bit longer. Long enough for her clothes to dry.
Instead of going straight to the Community Centre, she decides to see what the rest of Spectrail has to offer. The houses are more like cottages that have had rooms added to the backs or sides of them. No sign of a new bungalow or split level as there is in Carona. The residential streets are short, sometimes with only three or four houses on either side of them, houses with bright floral plastic curtains in the windows, and some with lawn ornaments, others with plastic roses stuck in the flower-beds. The Craft Collective is something different too. She reads the announcements taped to its windows. It appears that people meet in the building several times a week and make things. There are announcements of play rehearsals coming up and Glee Club practice, which Amy reasons must be music given the treble clef and notes drawn on the poster. The presence of the Community Centre with its summer program of activities for the town’s children, the bowling alley she had seen on Main Street when she’d ridden on Marlene’s bicycle, are different too. And there is no hotel, Marlene had explained yesterday, which means there isn’t a parlour or a lounge so those who want to wet their whistles must drive to another town to do it. The oddest thing of all, though, is the absence of churches. There isn’t a single building with a cross or a spire. Amy notes that the streets are as empty as a Sunday afternoon in Carona. Marlene will explain later that this is because most of the people work in other towns.
Amy passes by the playground and sees a woman standing watch over a child riding a swing. As she turns a corner to head back towards Main Street she sees a two-storey house. LIBRARY, she reads on the sign beside the front door. She inches up the walk in order to read the smaller letters beneath. Enter Quietly. Why not? she thinks, and mounts the stairs.
The library is no more than the front hallway of the large house. But she has never been inside one before and it feels strange to be surrounded by books on all sides. She turns, scanning the shelves. She feels as though she’s entered a church by mistake. Several rows of books near the top appear to be bound in leather. Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote. She reads the names of Dickens, whom she read at school and liked, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, of course. Then she becomes aware of the smell of pipe smoke and hears footsteps. The door at the end of the hall opens a crack and she sees a long thin nose and a white bushy eyebrow.
“If you see something you’d like to read, just put your name and the title of the book in the ledger.” The long nose disappears and the door closes.
“Thanks,” Amy says to the closed door. Then she sees the ledger lying open on top of an old school desk. There are only a few names written on the open page and it seems that the last person to borrow a book did so several years ago. She slides a volume from the shelf and blows dust from its cover. The White Company, a book Mel read in his final year of high school. No thanks, she thinks, as she puts the book back on the shelf and walks out the door. Books are too heavy to carry.
She hears voices as she enters the Community Centre. “Hello, Amy,” Hank calls as she passes by the ping-pong room. She’s startled by the shape her name takes in his mouth. It’s as though she’s hearing it for the first time. It doesn’t sound like Shorty, or Short Stuff, she thinks. It’s a softer rounder sound. Amy doesn’t know that he’s practised saying it. That when he got home last night he’d stood in front of the mirror and put his mouth around her name. Amy. He’d said it over and over, in the same way he was teaching himself to play his latest favourite, the Hank Snow song, “I’m Movin’ On.”
The ping-pong table is covered with newspaper and sitting around it with him are several children. “I told Marlene I’d keep my eyes open for you. They’re out back,” he says and Amy sees colour rise in his neck.
“Look.” A little girl sitting beside Hank demands Amy’s attention. She holds up a white object for Amy to see. Her sun-browned fingers are tinged with white dust. “I’m making a turtle.”
“And I’m making a gopher,” the girl across the table from her says loudly. They’re the same two girls she’d seen in the washroom the day before. They look up at her and their eyes are inquisitive, their faces shine with intelligence.
“Not bad,” Amy says against her will.
“Soap carving. We went out first to scout an animal we might carve,” Hank explains.
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” the girl interrupts Hank. “I didn’t actually see a turtle. It was a rock that looked like a turtle.”
Cute, Amy thinks.
“Mostly we’re making a mess. I’m no good at this.” Hank laughs, a nervous little cough.
She’s surprised to discover that there’s a large vegetable garden behind the Community Centre building. Elaine sits on the back steps with a bucket of peeled potatoes at her side and a basket of unpeeled ones between her legs. Beyond, Marlene stands among the vegetables, hoeing. “Howdy,” she calls when she sees Amy. “Man, oh man, were you ever sawing logs when I got up this morning.”
“You have two gardens?” Amy asks.
“No,” Elaine says. “This is the community garden. We take turns looking after it. Some of the old folks don’t have it in them any more.” She squints up at Amy, searching her face. “How you feeling? Better, I’ll bet.”
Elaine moves over on the step, indicating that Amy should sit down. She hands her a peeler and a potato. “We’ve got fries on the menu every single day.” Her voice drops. “Your mother says hello. Talked to her this morning.” Amy’s hand stiffens around the potato and her stomach tightens.
“And?”
“And that’s about it. Here.” She takes the peeler from Amy and demonstrates how to use it. “She said, ‘Please say hello and tell her’ “ – Elaine coughs and clears her throat – “ ‘tell her that I’m praying for her.’ Is your mother religious?”
Amy watches the wrinkled skin give way to white flesh as she scrapes at the potato. Marlene drops the hoe and walks through the garden towards them.
“You could stay with us,” Elaine says quickly. “We’d find something for you to do.” Her voice becomes businesslike. “Marlene’s always harped about not having a sister. You’d be good for her.”
Yeah, sure, fine, Amy thinks. I am a stray dog to be fed, fattened, my coat brushed until it shines, and in return, of course, I will wag my tail and look up adoringly at every pat, and all for the sake of your darling daughter. What if it isn’t good for me, eh? And anyway, this is probably a pretty dull and boring place. She sees Marlene’s feet stop in front of her own. “I think Hank’s got a crush on you,” Marlene says. Amy doesn’t notice Elaine’s sharp sideways glance, or how her hands have stopped moving for a moment.
Twit, Amy thinks. “How come there aren’t any churches in Spectrail?” A diversionary question.
“We’ve got enough trouble without asking for more,” Elaine replies curtly. “There’s a Denver sandwich in the oven. You’re probably starving.”
She is starving. She feels weak with hunger, and her legs are rubbery as she climbs the stairs and goes back inside. She hears the children’s low chattering in the ping-pong room as she stands behind the counter, hands trembling as she devours the sandwich, and then sucks bits of egg and butter from her fingers. She senses that she’s being watched and turns and sees a girl sitting on a stool. She sees only her head, dark braids trailing down either side of it, brown eyes fixed steadily on Amy’s face. Jill, Amy thinks, and wonders what she would look like now. If she had not died, would I be here in this place or still back in Carona?
“What’s you name?” the girl lisps.
Amy wants to turn away from that steady gaze and ignore the question. It seems that each time she tells someone her name, a piece of her is given away.
“What’s you name?” the child insists.
“Alice,” Hank says from the doorway, “come on now. You’re not finished yet.” Alice slides from the stool and walks over to him. “Her won’t tell me her name,” she complains. Hank laughs. “Amy. Her’s Amy,” he whispers loudly, taking the child by the hand as they leave the room. Amy hears him whistling a tune between his teeth. And her’s getting out of this creepy place, Amy thinks.
Hank was still whistling when he worked at the ping-pong table with the children for the rest of that morning. But even if Amy had been listening, she wouldn’t have recognized the song.
It was a song he’d absentmindedly sing while driving down the road on a Saturday night on his way to play with a pick-up band at an anniversary or wedding social, or when Jerry called and he’d take the bus into the city, or, years later, in bed, Hank would whistle between his teeth, or sing softly under his breath “The Girl That I Marry” – the song a brand or a legacy from his mother.