Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  “Yes, Romy,” the girl said. “Your niece Romy.”

  Verna stared at her. “My what?” she asked.

  “Your niece,” Winonah informed her. “The youngest one. Fern’s baby. I picked her up outside Beverley. She was hitchhiking.”

  “The bus goes to Beverley,” explained Romy. “It doesn’t go here. I would have called, but I didn’t know the number.”

  “She knows,” Winonah said. “About Fern.”

  “Oh!”

  “About her being dead and all. Some neighbour told her.”

  Mrs. Rothman. Verna grimaced. “Ah!”

  Winonah squatted down to collect the scattered contents of the toolbox. She looked up at Verna. “Are you going to stand there gawping or are you going to help me?”

  “Gawping,” Verna repeated carefully. In the sudden maelstrom that the word “niece” had unleashed in her, Verna clung for dear life to “gawping.” Interesting, she thought as she skimmed the fragile skin that had immediately formed over her inner turmoil. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the word “gawping” used in a sentence. Then the skin broke and down she toppled into the swirl of turbulence. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she murmured and went to sit down in a chair, only, of course, there wasn’t one, which meant that her descent was a controlled one for about a foot and a plummet for the remaining twenty or so inches. “Oof!” she exclaimed as her coccyx hit the ground with a smack. “Ouch!”

  “Are you okay?” asked the girl, all elbows and knees and bony wrists. She bent down, palms on thighs. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “I’m fine.” Verna waved vaguely.

  The girl gave her a look — she didn’t believe her. “If you say so.” Hunkering down, she helped Winonah with the tools as Verna surreptitiously scrutinized her, searching for traces of Fern. The eyes, maybe. The bump of nose.… She was wearing a heap of clothing, one layer on top of another, the palest shades of blue and white and gym-suit gray. What the younger women at the Bureau would describe as a layered look, only taken to some absurd extreme. Maybe she didn’t have a suitcase. Maybe she carried her wardrobe on her back like a homeless person. Was she a homeless person? No. She looked too clean to be a homeless person. Spotless, actually. Well, that’s a relief, thought Verna. My niece is not a homeless person. Whatever the case, the super abundance of clothing failed to disguise the central fact that the girl was thin, bone-thin. It looked as though her cheeks had been hollowed out with a trowel and her eye sockets with a melon baller. God knows how old she would be, Fern’s last baby. Twenty? Twenty-four? Trying to figure it out made Verna’s head ache. From a distance the girl looked like a teenage waif; up close she looked like a little old man.

  A moment later the handywoman was snapping the toolbox shut and Romy, Romy, her niece, was standing. “Need a hand?” she asked, extending one to Verna.

  Verna eyed it with trepidation. She had seen more meat on a soup bone. Shaking her head, she struggled to her feet on her own, joints protesting.

  Winonah looked at Romy, who looked downcast, then at Verna, who looked stunned. “Well, this is a heartwarming family reunion,” she observed. “I’m going to make coffee.” She picked up the toolbox and went into the house. “Where’s Jude?” they could hear her shouting up the stairs. “Yoo-hoo! Where’s The Dog?”

  Verna peered furtively at Romy. “I’m sorry if I don’t sound … It’s just that …”

  “You’re freaked out.” Romy sounded aggrieved herself — brittle, her voice strained, eked out. Red-rimmed eyes, the scleras faintly pink. She’d been crying. “How do you think I feel? Some stranger tells me my mother is dead.”

  Verna considered this; as she did, remorse waylaid her, bowled her over. “I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” she said feebly. “It’s just that you and the others … Your fathers took you away. One by one. You were there and then you were gone. Vanished. Years and years passed. We never heard from you.” If she sounded this lame to herself, what must she sound to Romy?

  “Did you ever consider 411?” Romy asked. “We’re in Canada, for God’s sake. How hard is it to find anybody in Canada? How clueless are you? You could have hired a detective.”

  “We didn’t think of that,” Verna admitted, wondering why that hadn’t occurred to them. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to find Fern’s children. Okay, she thought, I can see how that might happen, but what about Dad? Surely he would have wanted to know where his grandchildren were. “We did think about Googling you,” she remembered. “Or I did, at any rate.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Romy. “You have to have done something to be on the Internet. I haven’t done anything.”

  “But your father.… Didn’t he do something? Wasn’t he an artist of some kind?”

  “An escape artist,” Romy replied.

  “At any rate, I couldn’t remember his name. His last name. In fact, now that I think about it, I can’t remember his first name.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Romy, looking stricken. “It’s Paul. Paul Doucette.”

  Desperate, Verna took her by her stick arm. “Let’s get some coffee,” she suggested.

  Romy and Verna sat on the screened-in porch, holding mugs of coffee and watching Jude paddle around in the lake. The box containing Fern’s cremains sat in Romy’s lap. As for Winonah, she was up on the roof, making thumping noises.

  “What’s she doing again?” Romy asked.

  “Checking the chimney for birds’ nests,” Verna replied.

  “Oh,” said Romy. She paused. “Did Mom look like you? I mean, you were twins, weren’t you?”

  Verna winced. She closed her eyes. “We were, but no, we didn’t actually look alike. We were fraternal twins. Well, actually, sororal.”

  “Which means …?”

  “Not identical,” replied Verna grimly.

  “Good,” said Romy. She sounded relieved.

  Verna bristled. “Thanks a lot!”

  “Nothing personal.”

  Don’t be cranky, Verna admonished herself. After all, you’re long past your “best-before” date. The best you can hope for now is “presentable.” She glanced down at herself — the same shirt and jeans, and, more to the point, the same underwear she had arrived in two days earlier. Had she washed her face even once since then? Had she combed her hair? She had to admit that, at the moment, she fell fairly far short of even the presentable mark. What is up with me? Am I coming undone? I wonder if I smell. She rallied herself. Clearly Romy wanted to learn more about the mother she had never known. You’d think someone who had lost her own mother at — what was it, two hours old? — could spare a little compassion for someone in similar straits. And hadn’t the poor girl just learned of her mother’s death? What a shock that must have been! If Romy had been anything like Verna, she had built Fern up in her mind to be some sort of saint and/or goddess. Verna winced, remembering how she had put Joan Macoun on a pedestal, then used her as a stick with which to beat poor, mild, stricken Donald. For a while, at least. During her terrible teenage years. Then not so much. In the end she had let it go, the way she had let everything go — Fern, Bob, herself. Zen-like, really. So, belly up to the bar. Tell her about Fern. And be nice.

  “If there was ‘the pretty twin,’ then Fern was it. In case you’re wondering,” she said, remembering the way boys had sprung up like mushrooms after a rain the moment the Macoun family’s white Mercury Comet made its annual appearance at the intersection that was Greater Gammage. And, pretend though Donald valiantly might that they came for both Verna and Fern, everyone understood that they came for Fern alone. Just thinking about it triggered a hot flash in Verna; she was consumed by sudden heat. Now, Verna, she reasoned with herself, if living equates to winning — and surely, in the greater scheme of things, it must — then it’s you who have won, not Fern. You.

  “Really?” Romy pounced. “Pretty? How? Describe her to me!”

  “She had these big, big eyes and this, like, I guess you could call it, nimbus of strawberry-blond hair
… dyed, of course …” She couldn’t resist that. “And then there was her complexion. My father insisted on describing it as peaches and cream, although really, between you and me, it was more splotchy than peaches and cream.”

  “Was she thin? I imagine her as wispy. Was she wispy?”

  Verna considered this. “No, not thin,” she remembered. “More … blowsy. But she did manage to retain some semblance of a figure into middle age, despite having borne all you kids. Which is to say,” she clarified, “she had a waist.” Fern’s figure was a sore point with Verna, whose body, meagre to begin with, had gone all stringy with age. (Well, what about Fern wasn’t a sore point?) “You look like a boiling chicken,” Bob had once observed. Unkind, but that was the way he was and, besides, it was true. “Do you remember her at all?” Verna asked. “How old were you, anyway, when your father came for you?”

  Romy shrugged. “Maybe three? I don’t know. Four? I can remember her singing us to sleep. As for how she looked, I have an image in my mind of her, but I don’t know if it’s an actual memory or a photo I saw. There were some. Not many, but some. I found them when I was a kid, tucked away in his drawer. Dad’s drawer. They were kind of fuzzy. She looked fuzzy.”

  “She was fuzzy,” Verna replied. “Not in a bad way. At least, that’s the way I remember her. She was in a sort of soft focus most of the time. I don’t know how she managed it. Like one of those Impressionist paintings. Maybe it was her hair. Does that make any sense?”

  “I guess,” said Romy. “So, how did she die?”

  Verna paused, wondering, but really for just a moment, whether she should tell Romy the whole truth — what she had to date not told another living soul, that Fern’s cancer had most likely been precipitated by the all-out attack upon her immune system by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus — or the authorized, pasteurized version. But, no, she told herself. You asked the doctor to keep Fern’s HIV status confidential for a reason. To spare Donald the embarrassment and the shame. To spare yourself. What possible good would it do Romy to know such an unsettling thing about her mother? Cui bono? So, in the end, “cancer,” was all she said. “Cervical cancer,” adding, “although the immediate cause of death was sepsis. Sepsis caused by the cancer.”

  “What’s ‘sepsis’?” Romy asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Try me.”

  “Oh, no. Trust me.”

  “No, I mean it. Go ahead. Try me.”

  “Putrefaction,” replied Verna. “It means putrefaction. Sepsis. It’s from the Greek.”

  Romy shuddered. “Okay, you’re right. I don’t want to know.”

  “I didn’t think so,” said Verna with grim satisfaction. Then, a moment later, “It didn’t have to be that way, you know. Fern was such a goddamned hippie. She believed in magnetic bracelets. In crystals. She didn’t believe in doctors. As a result the cancer went undetected until very late, too late.” Culminating in a death, Verna thought, that was both messy and spectacular. Like her life.

  Romy shook her head and sighed. “What a tragedy!”

  Verna scowled. She hated it when people described Fern’s death as a tragedy. It wasn’t a tragedy. Not in her books. In her books it was equal parts carelessness, stupidity, and stubbornness.

  “So where did she die?” Romy asked. “In Toronto?”

  “Here, actually,” Verna replied. “In her bedroom. Upstairs. She lived here, you know? The last few years of her life, at least. From ninety-eight until she died.” And, with those words, a can of worms exploded open.

  “Here? Really?” Romy looked around. “How come?”

  Verna panicked. She did not want to go down this road. Prevaricate, she told thought. “Oh, well, she liked it here, I suppose,” she waffled. “Nature. And so forth. And the rents in Toronto — through the roof.”

  The truth was that Fern lived in the cottage because her impromptu sexual trysts with randomly encountered males made their aging father too anxious to put her up at the house on Indian Crescent for more than a couple of weeks at a time. He was never sure of what he would walk in on. As for why she couldn’t live with Verna and her husband, well …

  “Who was with her when she died?’ Romy asked. “Were you with her?”

  Verna paused. She hated being asked this. It was the worst question and everybody asked it. She swallowed, then told the truth. “She died alone.”

  “Alone? That’s terrible,” exclaimed Romy.

  “Yes, well … we’d had a falling out, she and I. We weren’t talking. And she didn’t let on how sick she was. Made light of it. If we had known, if we had had even an inkling, we would have come collect her, or Dad would have, at any rate, but, you see, we didn’t. Know, that is.”

  “Was it over a man?” Romy asked.

  “What?” Verna felt herself flushing.

  “Your falling out. Because my Dad said she was a tramp.”

  “Well, your Dad’s a dick,” retorted Verna. Settle down, she advised herself. Remember that we’re talking a long time ago. A long, long time.

  “I know that,” replied Romy. “But still. Was it over a man?”

  1988. Seventeen years ago. Fern had just left one of her several husbands and was “getting herself back on her feet!” Again. A self-styled artist, Fern threw pots and knotted macramé hangings and tie-dyed T-shirts — all badly. Her pots were misshapen, her hangings lumpy, and her T-shirts bled like scalp wounds. She nevertheless remained maddeningly, inexplicably optimistic that she would be able to sell her artistic spew on consignment. This, of course, never happened, and, during those brief interludes between men, the chances that she would turn up at either her father’s or her sister’s door were very good. So Verna had agreed to let her live with them until such time as this theoretical getting-back-on-her-feet had transpired. Her sister had not been with them two weeks before Verna walked in on her and Bob in an untidy heap on the guest room bed, limbs tangled, clothes everywhere.

  Verna had comported herself with a chilly dignity that surprised even her. The truth was that she was probably just a little drunk. Just enough to take the edge off, and, who knows? Perhaps she had known this would happen all along. Perhaps there had been signals between the two of them that she had read and recognized, but had somehow failed to compute. Then again she knew her sister and she knew her husband. They had propensities, the two of them. Perhaps it was just an accident waiting to happen … one that the clock had run down on.

  “Everybody out of the pool!” That’s what she had said — what lifeguards at public pools say at the sound of distant thunder.

  “I can explain everything,” Bob had said.

  But Verna had shaken her head. “Uh-uh. Nope. Not interested.”

  “I was upset …” Fern had insisted. “And Bob, he …”

  “Oh, Fern!” Verna had scoffed. “Do I look like I just fell off the turnip wagon?”

  “It will never happen again,” Bob swore.

  Where had she heard that before? Oh, yes. Only semi-annually for the past number of years — for Bob had hardly bothered to hide the string of affairs that had begun shortly after their eighth wedding anniversary and that were to continue for the years that remained to him. Only when he decided to ditch the current girlfriend and move on would he confess to Verna and pledge life-long fidelity. This had happened not once too often, but five times too often. The charade sickened her. Girls from the office, seeking advancement. Surely they could not have found Bob appealing, with his thick, Coke-bottle glasses in Elvis Costello frames and that really big ass — like there had been a landslide in his pants. But that Bob had proven successful in his career was both maddening and indisputable. Verna had only ever made it to manager, a hike in status that had brought with it a modest salary increase and a cubicle overlooking Bay Street, as opposed to one without windows. Bob, however, had risen quickly through the bureaucratic ranks until, at the time of his death, he was serving as senior policy advisor to the minister. This was thanks in lar
ge part to his lubricity, to the fact that he could slide into any social situation, and, like a slug exuding slime, ooze enough sloppy bonhomie to grease the wheels of any project or program of measure that was his to secure or undermine or promote. After all, the ministry was nothing if not an Old Boys’ Club and Bob had been nothing if not an Old Boy. And Old Boys played around. All right. Okay. That she got. But not with their wives’ twin sisters.

  “Pack your things, Fern,” she had told her. “You’re going to Daddy’s. I’m calling him now. Bob, you’re driving. Put some clothes on.” A dazzling display of sangfroid. Where had all that stiff upper lip come from? More to the point, where had it gone?

  So Fern moved in with their father on Indian Crescent Road, then left with her next inamorato, then moved in again, and so on.

  “You shouldn’t be too hard on her,” Donald told Verna. “She feels just terrible.”

  “I bet she does,” Verna had replied.

  “She didn’t mean any harm by it. She hasn’t a malicious bone in her body. You know how she is — emotional, impulsive. She doesn’t think.”

  “‘Feckless’ is the word.”

  “Yes,” her father agreed. “That’s what she is. Feckless.”

  Thinking back on the affair now, Verna wondered why hadn’t it mattered really? Or did it? Fern had been her sister. At some point she must have loved her. She was sure of it. And then things changed. Not overnight, but gradually.

  “She just … she had this way about her,” she struggled to explain to Romy. How had Carmen put it? That’s right. “She exuded pheromones. I don’t think she could help it. She didn’t mean to steal men. It just … happened. Really, I shouldn’t have been so angry with her. In retrospect, I mean.”

  “You shouldn’t have been so angry about what?” Romy wanted to know.

  “Shit!” A cry from the roof. Cedar shakes rained down onto the lawn.

  “Are you all right?” Verna called up.

  “You’re going to need some new shingles!” cried Winonah.