She didn’t want to cry on his doorstep, so she ran up the hill and past the houses. Mary would know what to do, but she didn’t know where Mary lived. She didn’t have the courage to return to the cemetery and face the ghost alone.
Her name echoed from the bottom of the hill; Rob yelling, his voice scraping. He’d seen her. She couldn’t go back, not until she’d figured out a solution. Mamma and Rob wouldn’t understand about the curse. She caught her leggings on barbed wire as she disappeared into the long grass.
Clouds hid the moon and there were no lights in the fields. Darkness was descending quickly. The ground was uneven and it forced her to move slowly. She stepped in something soft; fresh cow dung, she guessed. Cows grazed up here sometimes but there was no sign of them now. Maybe they had somewhere else to go at night. She was supposed to be at home. Facing Mamma’s anger was better than being alone out here. The stillness was starting to frighten her. She looked around and could no longer see the lights of her community. Behind her had to be the way back; that was the way she had come.
After a few minutes, she reached an old barn where a barn should not have been. There were no structures of any kind when she walked into the fields. The walls of the barn were made of wooden boards that supported a v-shaped, thin metal roof. Elena had played at the top of Logan’s hill before but she’d never come this far. She doubled back, certain this time that home had to be behind her.
She took small steps to make sure she was travelling in a straight line. The grass was longer in some areas, short in others; shaved thin by animals. It smelled like manure. The lights on Douglas Street did not emerge from the darkness.
Stars appeared and disappeared as the clouds shifted. The night got cooler. She zipped her jacket up to her chin. Her legs grew tired, her eyelids heavy. It felt as though hours had slipped away as she stumbled onwards through the cold air.
In the distance was a barn. The same barn.
There had to be a way back; why couldn’t she find it? In the blackness that surrounded her she imagined the white eyes she’d seen at the cemetery. She was in the semi-wild now; the space between the community and the wilderness, and she didn’t know this place. The night was hiding her home, and it could have been hiding other things, cursed things.
The wind picked up and howled through the eaves of the barn as soon as she shut the door behind her. Hay was packed up at the back but she couldn’t curl up on it for fear of discovering a rats’ nest. Dad had told her once that vermin liked to make their homes in hay. He should have come home with Brandon.
Had Dad heard the bang? Had the flames licked at his arms and peeled away the skin? She found a corner near the door and tried not to think too much. She brought her knees up to her chest and rested her head against the wooden wall, eyes half open until they had to close.
It was a long night. Her neck ached and it gripped her shoulders like long fingers digging under her skin. Every time she drifted off, the wind broke through the quiet and startled her awake. Distant noises drew closer. Ferocious creatures disturbed her erratic dreams. Bears, cougars, hungry ghosts. She worried her breathing was too loud. She tried to breathe more softly. If she moved an inch she’d give herself away; her presence would be revealed to whatever might be lying in wait outside.
Scraps of dreams and the sounds of the night were hard to separate. Elena thought she’d heard voices too, and vehicle engines, planes, tires rolling over dirt, but she couldn’t be sure. Dad said ranchers were hard-working but he never said they were kind. They had guns; she knew that. Dad had told her stories about hunters shooting other people by accident. They could mistake her for an animal in the darkness. She was too afraid to do anything but wait for morning to come.
The hanging tree had a distinctive twist. There was a knot in one of the upper limbs where the dying left their sins in an attempt to get closer to heaven. That’s what people used to think, according to the little plaque positioned in front of it for the tourists that never came. The tree was down by the river, near the new cemetery, but at that moment it was also outside the barn door. She could hear the knotted limb creaking in the wind. If it broke, all the rottenness that was inside it would fall down on her and the curse would never be lifted.
Her neck was in the noose and many people came to judge. The people of this town. They all knew what she had done. She had released the curse. She had ruined everything. The rope tightened and the tree creaked and her little legs kicked around in the weightless air and nobody came to rescue her.
Daylight broke through the barn door. Elena woke with her head resting on the floor where the rats could crawl over her and chew her long hair. She sprang up and brushed her hands against her head, swatting away imagined vermin.
Fog spooled across the fields like lost clouds. She pulled her cold hands up inside her jacket sleeves and moved quickly through the dew.
There was a small log house nearby with a green roof. She hadn’t spotted it was when she stumbled into the barn the night before. The front door was open a crack and it was dark inside. She didn’t know whom she might find, out here in the semi-wild. She sprinted to the nearest fence and spun around to make sure she wasn’t being watched.
With the sunlight to guide her, it didn’t take long to reach the top of Logan’s street. She was so relieved to see it that she propelled herself out of the wildness and onto the top of the road in one quick burst. She half-walked, half-skipped down the asphalt, but there was a strange kind of quiet around her; the kind of stillness she sometimes sensed when she’d fallen behind on hikes in the forest. It was exactly how she felt when she was completely alone.
By the time she laid eyes on their little house, it hardly mattered that Mamma would be furious. Elena opened the front door and tiptoed inside, readying herself for Mamma’s tirade and the joy of seeing them all again. Dad would be home, too. They would’ve found him by now.
“Mamma?” she called out. “Rob? Dad?”
The house was quiet. No one was in the living room or the kitchen. The bathroom door was open and the light was off. She peeked into her parents’ bedroom. Empty. Rob was not at his desk armed with his game controller. The emptiness rattled her but she knew they were out looking for her, worried sick.
Her stomach was so empty it hurt. Two strawberry yoghurts and a leftover slice of Hawaiian pizza helped. She splashed water on her face, changed her clothes, brushed her teeth and hair so at least she would look presentable when Mamma saw her. She intended to go straight to Ken’s café because he would know where they were, but she sat down on the sofa for a second, curled up and fell asleep.
When she woke she checked the clock on the mantelpiece—11 am. Everyone would be awake now, and the café would be open. Ken was probably worried, too, but he would be kind. Maybe he’d help her explain things, make Mamma understand that she ran away because she was scared.
Elena pulled her bicycle out of the shed and sped to Main Street. The wind had picked up again and it pummelled her so badly that it felt like she was merely steadying herself against it instead of moving forward. Not a single car drove past her. No one strolled by and said, “Mornin’,” the way people in Stapleton always did.
She tried the handle on Ken’s café door three times, but it wouldn’t budge. Through the window the interior was dark, the tables empty. She hammered on the glass, but there was no answer. The wind barrelled down the street and it carried a smell that made Elena shudder. Smoke.
Fear of the curse filtered back into her mind and the more she tried to ignore it the bigger it got. The supermarket was closed. So was the pharmacy and the restaurant. The lights were off in the salon and the doors were locked. Sunlight touched the curved metal of the machines behind the large windows, but nobody occupied the chairs beneath them. Elena looked closer and caught what might have been a shadow pass by a doorway in the back. She struck her knuckles against the glass, but no one was there.
She began knocking on doors: politely at first, and only houses
of school friends or family acquaintances. Then, more frantically at the homes of strangers. THUMP. A fat tabby descended from a fence and crept across someone’s yard.
“Hello!” she shouted down a deserted street. “Hello! Is anyone there?”
A historic house stood on the corner with beautiful hanging baskets on the veranda, and beside it was a row of newer homes with tan sidings and cedar hedges. Every window and door was closed. Her calls echoed down the lanes that shot off Main Street in neat rows.
She circled back and rolled her bike down the middle of Main Street, waiting for a car to honk. Then, because it was better than crying, she sat on the white dotted line, stretched out her legs and pushed her feet into a large pothole. If anyone saw her sitting in the middle of the road, even a Stapleton road, they’d come and yell at her.
It was the worst kind of nightmare because there was no one to go to for help. They were all gone. She wiped her arm against her eyes. The hungry ghost was supposed to take her, but instead it took everyone else.
“Grow up, Elena,” Rob would tell her. “Stop crying.”
She stood up and threw her bike against the tarmac just to hear it clatter against the quiet. She wanted the ground to rumble, faintly at first and then louder. The rumble would bulge into the squeals and hisses of the freight trains that crawled past Stapleton at regular intervals, day and night. She hadn’t heard them all morning.
The low rumble of a vehicle approaching should have been a happy sound. A relief. But who would travel through a cursed town?
Elena slipped behind the church fence and sent up a quick prayer. “Dear God. I’m sorry. Amen.” He already knew the rest. Rob and Dad didn’t think prayers worked but Mamma did. She hoped Mamma was right.
Through the cracks in the fence she could see a truck approaching, not the kind of truck that usually rolled through Stapleton. It was muddy green and rugged. She expected it to rumble past her down the street but it stopped right there in front of the church. She slipped along the fence and into the bushes beside the church.
Doors opened. Boots hit the ground. Footsteps coming closer. A clatter; the spinning of her bike tire. That’s why they stopped. They had seen her bike from the road. Movement by the fence. The church gate opened with a rusty squeak.
“Elena?”
They knew her name.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re not in any trouble. We just want to get you back to your mom. She’s very worried.”
She could’ve seen his face if she’d dared to look. A snap of a twig and they would hear her. Footsteps entered the neighbour’s yard. “Elena,” another voice called out. She was surrounded. Two more men lingered on the sidewalk while the others moved around the grounds. One went inside the church and repeated her name as he scoured the space between the pews.
The men on the sidewalk were close enough that she could have reached out and touched their heavy boots.
“Do you think he took her?” one asked in a hushed voice.
“Guys on the run don’t take their kids with them. She’s just scared. She’ll show up.”
She fought the urge to abandon her hiding spot and demand to know what they were talking about. They wouldn’t tell her anything. Adults never did. They must have been referring to Dad, which meant he was hiding from them, too. She wished there was a way she could reach him.
The soldier in the church came back out again and stretched her name out in a long, low call from the front steps. “Eleeeeeenaaaaaa.” She wanted to tell him to stop using it. He didn’t know her. Another soldier picked up her bike and threw it in their big truck. Then they all left, as suddenly as they came.
Elena stayed in the hedge for a while, scrunched up with her legs cramped. When it hurt too much to remain there any longer, she crawled out cautiously. She hadn’t counted them. One could easily have stayed behind, lying in wait like a hunter tracking a deer through the forest. She stood up to full height. No one charged at her. No trucks flew down the street towards her. She didn’t trust those men, but they knew where Mamma was. She had no choice. She had to go where they had gone.
CHAPTER 4
2 0 1 8
STAPLETON USED TO be a much more vibrant place. Sometimes Vivian forgets just how much they have lost, and she chalks it up to old age when she asks Todd if he’d like to go for dinner at the restaurant or to a show at the tiny theatre that hasn’t been lit up since she was a girl.
On days when everything appears clear, she knows just as well as everybody else that daily social interactions can now only be found at the post office, the gas station and the Inn. Vivian hasn’t stepped inside the Inn for 25 years (for reasons she keeps to herself) but she still makes frequent stops at the gas station.
The coffee is brown water with a mild chemical bite to it and the aisles are stacked full of shiny, colourful junk. Bread that lasts forever and cans of chunky soup, instant oatmeal and piles of chips and candy. She knows a few old bachelors who do all their shopping at the gas station. She’s quite sure none of them use their ovens, except perhaps to store their tax returns.
Rhonda is at her post behind the counter in her usual attire: old jeans and a sweatshirt swathed in dog fur. She has the voice of a chain smoker and the grace of a long-distance trucker but Vivian likes her. Rhonda doesn’t pretend to be anyone else. She just is. That makes her an easy sort of person to understand.
Vivian picks up a packet of individually foil-wrapped chocolates and two scratch cards and places them on the counter. “How are you today, Rhonda?”
“Oh, you know ...” Rhonda grumbles about her lazy husband who spends hours at the Inn drinking away his newly-acquired pension. Up until a couple of months ago, Rhonda’s husband was one of the few people still employed in Stapleton. He was the village’s maintenance manager, and they had struggled to find someone to replace him. No one is looking for work in Stapleton these days. Those people left long ago.
Vivian pushes a scratch card in Rhonda’s direction. “If you win, don’t give him a cent.” Rhonda takes a good look at the gold-lettered promise. JACKPOT. Relationships with people who see things are invaluable in a small town.
Their exchange is interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up out front. Not an unusual sound at a gas station, but they both instinctively do the Stapleton turn-and-stare. Vivian hmms in surprise. It’s a new car. An Audi? She can’t quite see the logo and she doesn’t want to gawk like some country bumpkin. The vehicle is sleek and black and businesslike. Or at least it would be, if it hadn’t just been driven through the dust of the semi-desert.
A young man gets out. Well, he’s probably in his forties, but that’s a good couple of generations younger than most in this town. Black shirt, sleeves rolled up for fashion not work, and tight beige pants. He must be lost. Probably took a wrong turn on the highway while he was tapping away on his phone.
Vivian pulls her shoulders back and straightens the amber beads resting on her olive silk blouse. She steps away from the counter as if to leave, though that’s the last thing on her mind. He pulls the door marked PUSH. She forgives him. He’s probably tired after all that driving. Black hair left long enough on the top to be tousled. Sharp green eyes, clean shaven at his slender jaw. Average height; defined upper body muscles suggest he works out but he remains on the slim side. Leather shoes. Italian perhaps? Custom-made certainly. Details that would be lost on Rhonda.
“Long drive?” Vivian asks casually.
“Not too far.”
There’s a warm resonance to his voice, friendly and self-assured, and a familiarity in his expression.
“Are you visiting or just passing through?”
“I’m visiting.”
“Welcome to our community.”
“Thank you.” He smiles politely as he makes his way over to the counter.
Vivian takes another step towards the door, but she picks up a local paper and examines the front cover. GEARING UP FOR A GIANT FALL FAIR. “Giant,” as everyone knows,
refers to the anticipated size of the locally grown vegetable entries.
“This is the most expensive gas I’ve seen outside Vancouver,” she hears him remark. Vivian can’t help shooting a glance in his direction.
“It’s 50 kilometres till the next pump.” Rhonda replies flatly, and Vivian is grateful that she didn’t add, as she has before: “Go ahead. See how far you get.” Rhonda could never comprehend the potential value of this presumably wealthy stranger who appears to be in some way connected to their one-foot-in-the-grave town.
The young man asks about coffee, and Rhonda directs him to the corner of the store, where there are a couple of little tables, a coffee machine and a basket of plastic-wrapped muffins. A wall-mounted lottery screen flashes life-changing numbers.
“Did you win?” Vivian hears him ask somebody. She lowers her paper and peeks between the metal racks. Pam, Frank’s sister, heaves herself out of a chair, and the stranger’s jaw drops.
“Pam?”
He knows Pam, of all people! He didn’t recognize her at first. She has changed.
As a young woman, Pam was one of those adrenaline junkies. All the women who lived in Stapleton in the ’80s and early ’90s attended at least one of her Jazzercise or aerobics classes at some point. Then came the incident at the mill and like the town, Pam hit a slump. But as the town contracted, she expanded. Vivian has absolutely no sympathy for such acts of self-neglect, and as a rule avoids Pam. But now, she moves closer.
Vivian looks on with fascination as Pam gives the young man a damning stare. “That property’s been in my family for generations. You better look after it.”
The man with the flashy car has no words for Pam. She throws down her useless lottery slip and reaches for her purse.
Vivian adopts a passive expression and slips out before anyone mistakes her for a common snoop. It’s time she got home to feed her French bulldog, Cherie, because Todd never cooks Cherie’s meals properly, and there are some things that man just can’t seem to learn no matter how many times he is corrected.
Unravelling Page 4
