Crow

by Amy Spurway

  “Resting? No,” I say, flatly at first, before I force myself to perk up and put Becky in her place. A hand flutters up to smooth my hair. Arms fold across my chest as I remember that I don’t have a bra on. “Emailing Toronto . . . developing a framework . . . new marketing campaign. For my company. In Toronto. Having some trouble filling my shoes. No rest for the wicked awesome.” I flash the biggest, fakest smile. Until I feel the crack of crusted sleep drool that gathered in the corner of my mouth during my mid-morning nap.

  “How can I help you?” I say, my back teeth gritting with insincerity because frankly I’m more likely to bite her stupid blinky head off than I am to actually help her. Her chin sinks low to her chest, her gloved fingers clasp and wring in an anxious prayer.

  “First, my condolences on the loss of your mother. She was a great woman. Secondly, I hope I’m not overstepping any boundaries here. But I heard you can see things.”

  “Yeah,” I grunt. “Not blind. Yet.”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come.” Her eyes begin to well with wetness beneath her glasses. She turns to leave, with a none too subtle sniff and a whimper. I watch as a jagged mass of forest green shards sputter out from a damn near blinding lemon-coloured gush of aura crap. I know that what I’m about to do will give the whole goddamn Island an open invitation to knock on my door and ask me to fix their lives with my psychic powers, and I know that means the risk of becoming a spent, sore, posthumous community saint, just like my mother. I know that I hardly believe all this is anything more than a figment of my own chaotic brain chemistry with a touch of ancestral insanity anyway. And I know that I really can’t stand Becky Chickenshit, no matter how puppy-dog pathetic she gets.

  Despite all of that, I take heed when I hear my mother’s voice whisper, Don’t you ever turn your back on a person in need. Look at her. She’s a mess. And you can help. Be somebody else’s light when you get the chance, lest you find yourself alone. In the dark.

  Yes, Mama.

  “Becky. Wait.” I step aside, making space for her and her sobbing mess of colourful thoughts. “Come in. I just put the tea on.”

  Her bawling slows to weeping and then subsides to a sniffle as I place a pot of tea and a box of tissues on the table. She takes one from the box, making a meticulously folded square with which to dab the corners of her eyes, and clears her throat with a silent sip of tea.

  “Congratulations, by the way,” I say. “How far along are you?”

  She nearly chokes on her tea, her eyes wide with surprise.

  “Only six weeks. How did you know?”

  I tilt my head and smile enigmatically. “I just do.” Because Peggy Fortune is the Gossip Queen.

  The sniffling starts again. “I just need some advice. You may have heard through the grapevine that Duke and I are having difficulties.”

  The sniffling morphs into streaming tears, and the green shards in her aura crash and compact. Becky chases the tears with a precisely angled tissue corner, as they sneak past the thick rims of her glasses and onto her cheeks.

  “Yeah well, he’s a —” I stop short. Because she already looks damaged enough. “So where’d you hear that I can see things?” I ask.

  “The Fortunes have . . . ways,” she murmurs. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Well, it was news to me. Seriously. Who told you?”

  “Char told William, and William told me.”

  “Gimp?”

  “I don’t call him that, it’s insulting.” She stiffens and shifts. “Look, I know you and Duke have some history. And I know I don’t really deserve your help after what I did.” Becky’s voice drops to a whisper, as she rolls the tip of her Kleenex between her trembling, fidgeting fingers.

  It is hard to be gleeful when you can see another person’s pain so vividly. Even if that person is Becky Chickenshit.

  “That crap in high school with the picture in the slideshow?” I say, as if I haven’t held the sting of the whole thing in my heart and mind for twenty years. “Duke used you to get at me. It wasn’t your fault, he was popular and you were . . . you. We’re adults now. Water under the bridge, Becky.”

  I reach out to touch her hand, expecting to see a whole new spectrum of gratitude and relief blooming above her head at being forgiven. Instead, I get an eyeful of dirty brown guilt, accented with bottomless puddles of a deep, dark blue. But then I see something that makes me panic a little. A misshapen blackened red hole, like a burning garbage bag, creeps into Becky’s colours. There’s a greasy, sick sort of deterioration happening on the edge of her emotional orbit that I can only perceive in the peripheral vision of my left eye. I try to blink it away. And fail. My stomach churns.

  “You don’t know what actually happened, do you?” her words jolt me out of my uneasy fixation.

  All through high school, Becky Chickenshit and Willy Gimp were close friends. All through high school, Becky wished that she and Willy could be more than friends. And all through high school, Willy confided in Becky about his feelings for me. So every time I’d be out chasing the arse off Weasel Tobin, then sneaking back to Willy Gimp when I got hurt, Becky Chickenshit knew. Every time I acted like he was invisible at school, only to go looking for him when I needed a shoulder to cry on, Becky knew. And every time I crowed indiscreetly about my nameless “friend with benefits,” Becky knew.

  “He loved you,” she says flatly. “And you used him. You thought you were so cool, and he wasn’t good enough to be anything other than a secret. Don’t think that didn’t hurt him. So, on graduation night? That was me. All on my own.”

  One day during the last week of school, Becky just happened to be on the other side of a bathroom stall door, when she overheard me telling Allie that I had chlamydia. While waiting for Dr. Gill to give her a check-up she didn’t need, Becky found my file and snapped a picture of my lab report. She — a vigilante nerd mastermind who loved the guy I’d selfishly screwed over for too many years — put that picture in the slideshow.

  With this confession, her colours clear and brighten. But the rosy sheen that envelops her freshly cleared conscience is no match for the eerie bruised shadow blob that still lurks around the edge of my awareness. It grows, smearing itself across her cheeks, her neck, her pregnant belly.

  “Crow, are you okay? You are very pale. Was it something I said?”

  “Yeah. No. Just tired.”

  Becky suddenly looks frightened. As though she can sense the unsettling creep of the invading darkness, too. “I should go.” She gathers her coat tight around her neck, bracing for the chill outside. “Duke will be home at five, and he —”

  And right there, I can see the blackened heart of Becky Chickenshit’s rose-tinted life. Why she came here. What she wanted me to see this whole time.

  “Becky, he hits you, doesn’t he?”

  “I’m not much of a cook, but I’m trying to —”

  “Becky, don’t go back there. Not tonight. Please. Here.” I dart over to the cupboard and grab the cash-stuffed ladies’ auxiliary envelope that would have bought my escape to Toronto. I press it into her hands. “Take this. Go stay at a hotel. In Town, Town. You can’t go back there. He’ll hurt you. The baby. Let me take care of Duke. You take care of you, okay?”

  She takes the envelope, fingers trembling. Her eyes, her aura, fight to stay steady and sure.

  “I knew you’d see it, Crow,” she gasps. “Other people, they didn’t believe me because he’s so charming. He’s always sorry after.”

  “Sorry is as sorry does, as my mother would say.” And the next thing I know, I’m hugging Becky Chickenshit and imagining that my own aura is reaching into hers and filling it up with the guts and self-righteousness and curse words she’s gonna need to get through the days and weeks and months to come. “And Duke? He’ll be sorry, all right.”

  As soon as she’s gone, I call Willy. To apologize for every moment spent not loving him the way he deserved to be loved. To tell him I want to spend the rest of my days making up fo
r it. Or at least trying to. Right before I hang up, I blurt “Hey, did it ever bother you, being called Gimp?”

  “I don’t know,” he chuckles. “Nobody ever asked me that before. Worked pretty good for me in the clink. Could have been called worse.”

  “Yeah, but if you had the choice?”

  He is quiet, thoughtful for a moment. I stop myself from filling the silence with smartassery, even though a dozen flippant phrases teeter on the tip of my guilt-tinged tongue.

  “They’d call me Mr. Crow Fortune. That’d make me some proud.”

  “G’wan ya fool. Come over here and say that to my face, why don’t you. Also, I’m naming our baby Cletus the Fetus unless you can come up with something better.” I hang up before he can say anything else. Because that’s about all the lovey-dovey talk I can handle. Besides, I’ve got other fish to fry.

  I call Peggy. I need her and Char to do me a favour.

  […]

  Peggy’s house is warmer and brighter than I remember, even in the scowling darkness of winter’s last hurrah. Willy came with me to watch Daktari while Peggy and Char set out on a fact-finding mission, to get a sense of just how deep Duke’s rotten streak runs. With Becky not home and no hot dinner ready at five o’clock, Duke decided to go on a bit of a rip. Duke got really drunk and went to a high school hockey game to jeer at the other team and leer at girls half his age. Duke staggered out back behind the rink after the game, looking for trouble. And he found it.

  “Stargazer lilies,” Peggy says matter-of-factly as she sits down at the table to pry her boots off her feet. “That was the hum off Skroink. Crow would have been about twelve at the time. I’d catch him eyeing her up and down like an old pervert, and bam! A wall of stench. Stargazer lilies. No one believed me except Effie, and everyone said I was the bitch for divorcing such a fine fella. But I could smell it. Couldn’t even sit in the same room as him after a while. And see Mr. Duke, eh? You were right, Crow. He smelled like rotten meat and puke. Smells like sorry now, though, don’t he Charlotte?”

  “Dukie boy didn’t know what hit him! And every single tree behind the rink was cheering you on, Big Mama.” Char twirls and glides across the kitchen, sleeping babe in arms, and stands next to Peggy.

  “Jesus, you two, you weren’t supposed to beat him up.”

  Peggy laughs. “No? What were we supposed to do? Ask him to pretty please stop smacking his wife and chasing young girls? Cross our fingers and hope he doesn’t do something worse? Or tell his cop buddies what he done and wait for the wheels of justice to start turning in the right direction? I think not. When the world is this goddamn cracked and broken, people like us have no choice. We take matters into our own hands. Speaking of hands, Charlotte, grab me an ice pack from the freezer would ya, dear? Best thing Effie ever taught me was how to throw a proper punch.”

  Char gently wraps the ice pack around Peggy’s puffy pink knuckles, and kisses her on the cheek.

  “Proud of you, Big Mama.”

  “Big Mama?” I smirk.

  “Crow, you suck at this psychic thing.” Char nudges Peggy’s frame with her swaying hip. “C’mon, just tell her already.”

  My eyes flicker in and out of focus for a second, and nobody needs to tell me anything. The truth is written all over the air in the room, in sweeping strokes of deep, pure purple and ribbons of milky white that flow effortlessly between Char and Peggy, and wrap lovingly around Daktari’s body as he nuzzles into his mother’s chest.

  “Holy shit, Peggy. Char is yours.”

  8 DOWN AROUND THE ROOTS

  It’s late, but Peggy puts the kettle on, and adds another tea bag to the remnants of the day’s brew before she settles at the table to tell us the story. Six months after my mother nearly hemorrhaged to death in a hospital giving birth to me, Peggy gave quiet, uneventful birth to a baby girl, on a cot in a sparse room at the Home of the Guardian Angel on the Mainland. Four months later, when the baby weight was gone, and she’d stayed to see a few fellow unwed teenage trollops through their own entrance to and exit from motherhood, Peggy returned to Cape Breton, a heavy burden lifted from her belly, her conscience, and her family. Instead, she carried the weight of a slew of fictions about having “gone to an Aunt’s.”

  Four years after Peggy’s child was born, Freddy and Dar MacIsaac adopted a little spitfire of a girl from the Mainland. The kid with the wild red hair, snaggled teeth, and blazing eyes had already exhausted a few foster homes. She’d super glued fifteen caterpillars to a cat, and then the cat to a tricycle. Ended up with a forked tongue after sticking it in an electrical outlet. Smashed one car into the side of a house and another into the woods. The child was a well-documented, rip-roaring terror. But from the moment Peggy saw her friend Dar’s new daughter, she could smell it. The smell of blood. Which smells like pine sap, according to Peg. So Charlotte MacIsaac is a bona fide cursed Fortune lunatic criminal, too.

  Her eyes are wide and her smile is wild as Peggy tells the story. “Makes sense now, don’t it? Cuss-int!” she croons, snake dancing around the room, sleeping baby in her arms.

  “Yous are some messed,” Willy says. “And God, I loves yas all for it.”

  “Shut up.” I pinch his leg with my toes under the table. “You only love me for my money.”

  That was the other shocker of the day. While Peg and Char were out pucking the piss out of drunk Duke the Puke behind the rink, and Willy and I were playing happy family pretendsies with baby Daktari, Jacinta the lawyer from down the road called me, looking to deliver a copy of Mama’s will. Mama had a life insurance policy. Mama died in an accident. Mama’s will says I’m getting the fifty thousand dollars from her accidental death benefit. I didn’t need to think too hard about my first order of business.

  “Jacinta, how about you give your real estate agent friend a call, and make Sarah Spenser get her goddamn For Sale sign off my land.”

  It took a couple of weeks of haggling with Saint Sarah, and more than once I had to remind Char and Peggy that they were not to go trying to speed the process along. But now, the sign is gone.

  This land is mine.

  […]

  I probably should be inside hauling Willy out of bed, or Javexing the bejesus out of something in preparation for company coming. Instead, I’m parked on a stump seat near the firepit, staring at the little pokes of green dotting the yard. The mystery bulbs I found under the hoarded piles of newspaper have begun peeking out of the earth. The ones I planted all over the yard in an act of guerilla garden apology for burning Mama’s proudest memories. The ones I assumed Mama would be here to see, even if I wasn’t. Maybe they’ll be blooming in time for the proper celebration of Mama’s life, which Wendy and Allie are on their way over to help me plan. When they arrive, I tell them to ignore the mess and the rumble of Willy’s snoring that’s bound to be the backdrop of our conversation. But I did put the tea on at the crack of dawn, so it is good and strong.

  “Death isn’t the opposite of life.” Wendy swirls her pointer finger around the edge of her nearly empty cup, as she gazes out the kitchen window at the just-starting-to-awaken rambling rose. “Death is the opposite of birth. They’re like bookends. In between is the story we call life. My vision is that we relate to death in much the same way as we relate to birth. That we see it as a transition. A painful, yet normal and natural part of the human condition.”

  I glance over at Allie, expecting to see the roll and flutter of her lash-laden eyes, her head cocked in a sardonic tilt, traces of a barely swallowed smirk. Instead, I see strands of deep ruby and shimmery rose weaving their way through her wobbly blue halo, making it stronger. Brighter. Less wobbly. More beautiful. And when I finally pry my eyes away from Allie’s colours, I see her looking at Wendy in a way I’ve never seen her look at anything that wasn’t wine, chocolate, or super deluxe, high-tech medical equipment before. A look of profound gratitude. Of reverence. Of love. Holy Shit. Allie Walker is in love. With The Wendigo. And as Wendy drones on about celebrations of life an
d planning for death, I just sit there grinning like a fool. Allie will have someone to love her and take care of her and help her make sense of herself when I’m gone.

  But the lovey-dovey shades of Allie Walker evaporate when Char comes crashing through the door and into my kitchen. Sweating, panting. Like she’s run all the way here from Peggy’s. Which she has. With her baby secured to her back with an elaborate scarf contraption.

  “Crow, you ain’t gonna believe what Bruce the Spruce said!”

  That would be the tree in Peggy’s yard. Char’s new arboreal advisor. And no, I’m probably not going to believe it. Unless it suits me.

  “Oops! Didn’t know you had company.” The words spill fast and furious in spite of her breathlessness. “Allie . . . Wendigo! Witches, right? Starting a coven? You need a fourth corner? I’m cool with the lezzie stuff, but no cousin lovin’.” Char winks and elbows me, then plunks Daktari on the floor. Before he can fuss, there’s a bippy in his mouth and a book about trees in his hand, and I can’t even figure out where those things came from because all Char is wearing is a python print tube dress and Peggy’s old sneakers. The mess of green and violet fanning out around her head is inversely proportionate to the size of her dress. Meanwhile, Allie’s colours have gone all broody blue and bruised, and if there was ever such a thing as an amused shade of what-the-fuck-orange, well, it’s wafting from Wendy like weed clouds from Willy’s truck.

  Allie’s aura is headed for the door a few solid seconds before her physical body begins to move, but it snaps right back to the table when I say, “Stay put there, missy.” I put another bag and another splash of water in the teapot. Because nobody’s going anywhere.

  “Look, I’ll not go to my grave with the two of you carrying on a decades’ old feud over who said what, and what screwed who. This foolishness is ending. Today.”

  “Jesus, Crow, you sound like your mother,” Allie murmurs.

  “Well, somebody’s got to.”

  But unlike Mama, I order them both out to Willy’s truck to smoke a gigantic joint, and to not come back until they’ve both laughed, cried, and begun building a bridge to get over all that has come between them.