“Yeah, yeah.” Romy dismissed her concern. “And people drink themselves to death, too. As for the Oxys, what do you want to do with them that’s so frigging noble? Drive to Timmins and give it to homeless people with cancer? You’d flush it down the toilet. That’s what you’d do. And then what would happen to all the fish in the Great Lakes? Stoned out of their gourds! And you thought mercury was bad!”
“Hah!” Verna was triumphant. “Gotcha! We’re north of the Arctic Watershed.”
Romy blinked at her. “What?”
“You flush a toilet here, it drains into the Arctic Ocean, not the Great Lakes.”
Romy recalibrated her argument. “Polar bears,” she said. “Polar bears would be stoned out of their gourds. And you thought global warming was bad!” Retrieving the bottle, she shook it. “Oooh,” she exclaimed. “Lots!” Then she peered at the bottle’s label in the fading light. “Eighty milligrams. Wow!”
“What do you mean — ‘wow’?”
“As in ‘wow,’ that’s a lot of milligrams. This is the good stuff.”
“As opposed to …?”
“Forty milligrams, twenty milligrams.” Romy opened the bottle and shook a pill out into the palm of her hand. “You really should reconsider,” she told Verna, popping the pill in her mouth. “It would calm you down. You’re, like, a total stress puppy.”
“I’m not a stress puppy!”
“Yeah, right!”
“I’m not!”
“Think about it. You’re old. You’ve got nobody. And you have no idea what you’re going to do with the rest of your — excuse me for saying so — but your miserable life.”
How do you know that? Verna wanted to ask. She didn’t, however. She took a sip of her V and T instead. “My life’s not so miserable. Well, maybe a little.”
The women sat in a silence for a few moments. Romy butted out her cigarette and lit another. “Did you think when you were a little girl that you were going to grow up to be an alcoholic, Auntie Verna?”
“Did you think that you were going to be an anorexic?” Verna countered.
“It wasn’t an aspiration, if that’s what you mean,” Romy replied. “I mean, in retrospect, it makes sense.”
“It’s strange to be something and know how you got to be something without realizing that you actually are, in fact, something,” Verna mused. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Absolutely.”
“I think I will try one of those pills.” Verna decided. Why not? she thought. What difference does it make? Maybe it will make me not see Lionel. Maybe it will make me less fragile, more resolved.
“Excellent!” Romy produced a second pill from wherever she had stashed the bottle and handed it to her. “You have to chew it,” she told her. “Otherwise it’s time-release.”
“Time-release?” Verna asked. “That’s an interesting Germanic word construction — two nouns sort of mushed together to create an adjective. Really it should be ‘timed release.’”
“Auntie Verna.” Romy sighed. “Nobody cares. Chew.”
Some time later (it had grown quite dark), Verna realized that someone had joined them on the screened-in porch. This realization was gradual. A dawning, really. Well, sort of. Oh! She thought. Then, I wonder! A few moments later, she whispered, “Who’s there?” Whispered, because what need was there to raise her voice? Whoever it was — he or she or possibly even it — was right there beside her.
“Pardon?” This from Romy.
“No. Not you,” Verna told the girl. “Lionel? Lionel, is that you?”
Oh, it was Lionel all right — a little blurred around the edges as befitted something ectoplasmic, but Lionel nevertheless. All she had to do was turn her head ninety degrees to the right to sort of see him sitting cross-legged on the floor beside her. “Indian-style,” was what they used to call it. So politically incorrect, really. When you thought about it. Wasn’t everything these days? Bob had thought that this was a bad thing — people were too bloody sensitive; grin and bear it; suck it up and choke it down; put up or shut up. He might as well have been an American, a Republican American. Donald, on the other hand, had thought political correctness a good thing — according to him, inclusiveness was the watermark of an enlightened society. How could she have married a man so different from her father? Why had she made so many bad choices?
“You don’t have to sit on the floor, you know,” she told Lionel. “You can sit on the settee.”
No reply. Lionel stared out towards the lake. He is implacable, she decided. Implacable? No, that wasn’t right. Inscrutable.
“Be that way,” she told him. “Be inscrutable.” Closing her eyes, she allowed herself just to float. I am a beautiful water lily, she told herself, and my legs are hollow stems anchoring me to my underwater rhizomes, my creeping root stalks …
Despite her whispering it, Romy’s question barged into Verna’s subaqueous reverie like a policeman breaking up a fight: “Are you talking to cremains?”
Verna was startled. “No, actually. Well, sort of. I was talking to Lionel.”
“Lionel?” the girl asked.
“Yes, Lionel,” she replied.
“If you’re going to talk to Lionel, I’m going to talk to Mom!” Romy’s tone was both defensive and defiant
“Sure. Right. Go ahead. I’m cool with that,” Verna told her. Remarkably, she was. Cool with that and so many other things, now that she thought about it. Floating on a sea of tranquility. This Oxy, this hillbilly heroin, she thought, is outstanding.
“There’s so much I want to say to her,” Romy explained.
“I understand,” Verna assured her. “Oh, believe me, I understand! My mother — your grandmother, that is — she died when I and your mom were born. We killed her, Fern and me. Yep. Oh, it was an accident. Of course we didn’t mean to. We were … like … newborns. Happened all the same. So, yes. Once upon a time I, too, had so much to say to my mother, but now … well, whatever it was I had to say, I’ve forgotten.” She paused, and, in that moment, noticed that she was sinking down, down, down into some place she hadn’t been for a very long time. Someplace dark and hollow where unseen fingers played an electric arpeggio down her spine. She shivered and drew the bulky flannel shirt close around her, “So, be my guest. Talk to your mother,” she told Romy. “Just don’t expect me to.”
“Why?” asked Romy. “Why don’t you want to talk to her?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Not wanting to talk to your own sister — that sucks.”
“Yeah,” Verna agreed. “It does suck. I still don’t want to talk to her.”
“What could she have done to you that was so terrible? Did she steal your boyfriend or sleep with Uncle Bob or something?”
Verna must have looked funny, because Romy’s jaw dropped. “Oh! She did! She slept with Uncle Bob, didn’t she? She did!” The girl shook her head. “Wow! That is bad. No wonder you were mad at her.”
“Yeah. Well, I was. Am. Sort of. Not so much now.”
“But you still don’t want to talk to her?”
“No. That would be stressful.”
“Okay. That’s fair, I guess.” Romy hesitated, then said, “I’ve never slept with anyone. I guess that means I’m a virgin.”
“In most universes.”
“I don’t even have a period. That is, I had it, but then I lost it.”
“Hey!” said Verna. “Easy come, easy go.”
“Auntie Verna?”
“What?”
“Do you think it’s … like … whacked to talk to her?”
Verna considered this for a moment, before countering with, “Do you think it’s whacked for me to talk to Lionel?”
“Yes, actually. But, no, it’s okay. If you must.” Reassured, the girl retrieved the carton of Fern’s ashes from the floor by her rocker and set it on her lap.
A long moment ensued. “Well …?” asked Verna.
“I’m collecting my thoughts.”
�
�Be spontaneous,” Verna advised. “Say whatever comes into your head.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Romy. “Mom? Is that you? Are you there? It’s me, your Little Roo.”
“Little Roo?”
“Don’t laugh!” Romy warned her. “That’s what she used to call me. Like Baby Roo in Winnie the Pooh. At least that’s what my Dad told me.” She hesitated, listening for a moment. “Auntie Verna, did you hear that?”
“What? No.”
“She said, ‘Yes.’”
“Sure she did!”
“Actually, she did,” Lionel piped up.
Verna turned to him. “What? So now you talk!”
Lionel shrugged and returned his gaze to the lake.
“What? Did Lionel say something?”
Verna considered her response, then said, “Oh, to hell with it! If you must know, he said that your mother said ‘yes.’ That he heard her.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“And you heard him say that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I didn’t hear him.”
“But I did.”
“And you didn’t hear Mom, but I did.”
Verna’s heart felt like a stone hitting the water’s surface and then skipping. “You heard her? As in actually heard her?”
“Yes.”
“As in ‘with your ears’ heard her?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Her voice?”
“Well, I assume it’s her voice!”
A moment passed, no, floated downstream. In its wake the porch seemed to lose its form, its definition — to melt and slip away. It became a kind of panic room, one with walls not of screen or plaster or stone, but night and distance.
“This is super weird,” Romy managed from her very small place in the chair.
“You’re telling me!”
“It must be the Oxy.”
Verna debated mentioning her earlier, non-drug-induced encounters with Lionel and decided: Best not. “Yeah,” she agreed.
“Maybe we’ve entered another dimension,” Romy speculated.
“Who knows? Anything’s possible. On second thought, is it?”
“I think I’d better go to bed.” Romy decided.
“And leave me here with the dearly departed? Thanks!”
“No, really,” Romy insisted. “I feel … woozy.”
“Are you a fainter?” Verna asked. “Oh, yes. I remember. You said so. Earlier. Which makes sense, because Fern … she was a fainter.”
“Should we leave the cremains out here?” Romy asked.
“I think we’d better,” said Verna.
“They won’t get cold or anything?”
“They’re dead.”
“Yeah, well.” Romy stood, a slow racheting upright. Her ascent more closely resembled that of an arthritic old woman than a girl in her early twenties. “Winonah said that Lionel’s got carsick.”
“Do you get carsick?” Verna asked Lionel.
“No,” replied Lionel. “I used to.”
“Will you be cold?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“He says ‘no,’” Verna told Romy. “They won’t be cold.”
“Well, then.” Romy wobbled toward the front door, negotiating the air between her chair and it was though she were striking out across a marsh through tall grasses. The door opened and into the house she fell.
While this was going on, Verna’s thoughts fell like a gentle rain — pling, pling. It wasn’t until she heard the squeak of her niece’s running shoes on the stairs that she snapped out of whatever idyll she had, for the moment, been, well, idling in. “Romy!” she called after her, “Where are you going to sleep? You can sleep in my old room! There are sheets.” And mouse droppings, she thought. Could be worse. Could be …
“Sleep in a bed-wetter’s bed, steeped in urine? I’ll sleep in my mother’s bed, thank you very much …”
… your mother’s deathbed.
A distant click — Fern’s door being closed. Verna sank back into the rocker and closed her eyes.
After a moment: “Eh, Verna, what you doing?” This from Lionel.
“Contemplating my navel,” Verna said, not opening her eyes. “Metaphorically speaking.”
“You and the big words.”
“Me and the big words,” Verna agreed. A wave of sadness rolled over her, swept her away. Inexplicably she began to cry — little catlike yips.
“What’s up?” Lionel asked.
“What do you mean, what’s up?”
“Why are you crying?’
“Because I’m old,” she blubbered. “And I’ve got nobody. And I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my miserable life, not that there’s much of it left. Oh, Lionel, I’ve ruined everything!”
“Hey! How do you think I feel?” Lionel asked. “I choked to death on marshmallows.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“Well, yeah,” said Lionel.
They lapsed into silence. Verna wept quietly, making snuffling noises like a mole nosing its way underground.
“I know,” said Lionel after a few minutes had elapsed. “You could jump in the lake.”
This startled Verna. “Excuse me?” she asked.
“You could jump in the lake,” Lionel repeated.
“Why?”
“It would make you feel better.”
“How?”
“Refreshed,” replied Lionel.
“Frozen is more like it,” Verna told him. “Do you know how cold that lake is?”
“I didn’t mean now, eh? I meant tomorrow.”
“I’ve been in the lake on May 2-4,” Verna informed him. “It’s frigging freezing.”
But Lionel was undeterred. “The Nebaunaubaequaewuk who live in the lake. They will give you a nice scalp massage. Foot massage. All-over body massage. Like one of those fancy spas.”
“The … what?” Verna asked. “Did you say ‘nematodes’?”
Lionel shook his head. “The Nebaunaubaequaewuk,” he corrected her. “Female manitous that live at the bottom of the lake. Half human, half fish.”
Verna giggled. Extracting a Kleenex from her jeans pocket, she wiped her streaming eyes. “Oh, Lionel, are you actually telling me that there are mermaids in the lake?” She blew her nose loudly.
“Of course there are,” Lionel replied. “There are Nebaunaubaequaewuk in every lake and stream and river. Nebaunaubaewuk, too. Male manitous. But you don’t have to worry about the Nebaunaubaewuk. You are too old and stringy for them.”
She laughed. “Thanks a lot!”
“No, no, you should be glad,” Lionel assured her. “How there get to be Nebaunaubaequaewuk in the first place is the Nebaunaubaewuk see a pretty girl on the shore or playing around in the water and they grab her, drag her down to the bottom of the lake and make her into a nebaunaubaequae. It’s a real concern for parents. But you — you are old enough to be No’okomiss. Nebaunaubaewuk honour No’okomiss. Steal only young girls.”
“Will they steal Romy?”
Lionel appeared to consider this for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “She is also too stringy.”
“Well, that’s certainly a relief,” said Verna. “Knowing that neither Romy nor I will be abducted by lascivious Indian mermen if we should decide to swim in the lake.”
“We prefer the term ‘First Nations,’” Lionel reminded her.
At that moment, Jude lurched to life. First he lifted his head. Then he sniffed the air and cocked his ears. Then he rolled over, stood, and stretched. He shook and loped over to the carton containing Donald’s cremains. As Verna watched, he applied his nose ravenously to the box before yelping — the sound made her jump — and wagging his tail.
“Shit!” she breathed, shaken.
“What?”
“Shit, Lionel, is my father here?”
Lionel shrugged. “Sure. Of course. What do you think? They�
�re all here. Everybody’s here. Everybody who belongs to the lake.”
“And Aunt Margie?”
“And your grandfather.”
All of a sudden Verna remembered Bob — Bob, who, to the best of her knowledge, Resquiat in pace in a Dumpster on the way to Greater Gammage. “But not Bob?” she begged him. “Tell me Bob’s not here.”
“Who’s Bob?” asked Lionel.
Verna let out a sigh of relief and cast her eyes heavenward. “Thank you, Jesus!”
“He’s not here, either,” Lionel told her.
“I’m talking to dead people,” Verna marvelled. “Which leads me to my next question: am I going insane?”
Lionel shook his head. “Nah,” he assured her. “After a certain age, everybody talks to dead people. Just because people are dead doesn’t mean you don’t talk to them.”
“Oh, yes, it does,” Verna countered. “Crazy people talk to dead people. Sane people —”
“— do it when nobody’s listening,” Lionel finished her sentence.
“The difference is: the dead don’t talk back,” said Verna.
“How do you know?” Lionel asked.
Trumped, Verna stood. “I’m going to bed,” she announced. “I’d say good night, only you’re dead, so you can’t hear me.”
“Okay,” said Lionel.
“Fern and Dad aren’t here, either, so I won’t bother saying goodnight to them.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And, while we’re on the subject, how come I can see you, but not the others? It’s not like I knew you or anything. I mean, when you were alive.”
“All I know is I heard somebody say my name and, all of a sudden, here I was,” replied Lionel. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m new at this myself.”
“Okay,” said Verna. “I guess. Well, I’m off. Come on, Jude.” She took hold of his collar; he was reluctant to go. “Come on, boy,” she insisted. “Time for bed! Come on, boy.” Don’t worry, Jude. He’ll be here tomorrow. Right here. I promise. Come on. Time for bed. She dragged him by the collar to the door, opened it, and shoved him inside. As she closed the door behind them and turned the key in the lock, she heard Lionel softly say, “Yes, it is. A beautiful, starry night.”
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