Surface Rights

by Melissa Hardy

  “Ten minutes,” replied Verna morosely. “If that.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything?” Romy sat opposite Verna, vibrating. She reminded Verna of a hovercraft. “No car or truck or anything? No engine noise?”

  “Nope.”

  Paisley, who was sautéing peppers and zucchini in olive oil, shook her head. “That’s so strange.You’d have thought you’d hear something. It’s so quiet here.”

  “Unless Eubanks is lurking around in the bush somewhere nearby,” suggested Romy. “And just popped out to drop off the notice.” She turned to Tai. “I hope you’re not planning to be a surgeon. The way you’re cutting that chicken.”

  “A urologist, actually,” said Tai, “and I hardly think Mr. Eubanks is hiding in the bushes.”

  “Hardly?” Romy asked. “Hardly!”

  “A urologist?” wondered Verna. That could be useful, she thought. In my doubtless rapid decline, which is due to begin any moment now.

  “What about yesterday?” Romy defended her theory. “When I saw him on the far side of the lake? First he was there and then he wasn’t. Isn’t that so, Auntie Verna?”

  “Yep,” said Verna glumly. She wished Romy would stop vibrating; she was all blurred. “What’s that you’re doing anyway? That bouncing thing?”

  “I’m micro-exercising. You can burn calories even while sitting.”

  “Well, stop it,” Verna told her. “It’s making me … I don’t know. Carsick.”

  “And that’s the other thing,” said Romy. “No car. We didn’t hear one. No engine noise whatsoever. Just now you see him, now you don’t.”

  Verna sighed. Clearly Romy did not intend to stop vibrating. She felt defeated and not a little wobbly. She turned her chair slightly so that she no longer had to look directly at her niece. “Right,” she said. “It’s all very mysterious.” Then, “We’re totally screwed.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Auntie Verna,” Paisley enjoined her. “We’ll think of something. Won’t we, Tai? Hot stuff coming through!” Picking up the pot of boiling pasta, she carried it to the sink and dumped its steaming contents into a colander. She took the colander by its handles and shook it to drain the water. “Fettuccini,” she announced, sliding a heap of pasta onto Verna’s plate. She was about to do the same with her sister’s plate, but Romy snatched it away. “What? It’s pasta, Romy. Vegans eat pasta.”

  “And how do we know that the machine that made this pasta wasn’t used for making egg noodles and not cleaned properly?”

  “Romy!” said Paisley.

  “Don’t be idiotic,” Tai told her.

  “What? There could be traces of egg. You don’t know!”

  “And that would kill you?” Tai asked, spooning bits of chicken and sautéed vegetables onto Verna’s heap of pasta. “Traces of egg? At least have some vegetables.”

  “Vegetables tainted with chicken juice?” Romy was disdainful. “No thanks. I’ll make my own supper later.”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “What?” she asked. “I will! I like to dine fashionably late. Now is too early.” Paisley and Tai had suggested eating by six-thirty so that they could catch the seven-thirty showing of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. That afternoon they had discovered an unlikely thing — a shabby little second-run movie theatre in Beverley open only on Saturday nights. Romy had declined to join them; she had seen the movie on one of the Birches’ entertainment outings. “Because if there’s anything that cheers a depressed anorexic up, it’s Passion of the Christ. Honestly, it’s worse than a slasher flick. And the ending sucks.”

  While Paisley was checking in with Jill on the telephone in the study, Tai joined Verna on the front porch. Romy had shooed them from the kitchen. She was making her dinner. “Cooking is a very private thing for me,” she had explained. “Personal. I don’t like people watching. There are things that must be done in a certain order. Rules — hard and fast ones. Counting is involved. I can’t be distracted or the whole thing goes up in smoke and I have to start all over again. It’s complicated. Don’t ask.”

  “So, Tai, you’re the doctor,” Verna began. She drew her heavy flannel shirt closer around her; it had grown chilly and the clouds that had begun to fill up the sky promised rain. “What was that — that stuff back there with Romy — what was that all about?”

  Tai shook his head. He ran his fingers through his sooty hair, leaving it on end, his expression concentrated and concerned. Verna remembered that he had been a serious boy, one who took things hard. “Elaborate food rituals,” he said. “It’s typical of eating disorders. It’s like she’s dealing with an angry, vengeful, and capricious god — one whom she can only propitiate by performing some complicated ritual that she has dreamed up and perfected over the years. And she is both that god and herself.”

  “So what you’re saying is, she’s crazy.”

  “Basically.”

  “Yeah, well, I sort of knew that.”

  “No, really, she’s not thinking straight,” said Tai. “She’s too depleted. Malnutrition takes its toll on the central nervous system, on the brain. This isn’t Romy. This isn’t my baby sister. This is Romy’s body trying desperately to stay alive.”

  “So, what am I going to do with her?” I with her, Verna thought. What will I do with her? It seemed strange — having to do something with a person whom she had met only two days’ prior. Yet it was absolutely clear to her that something was going to have to be done with Romy and that she was the one who must do it. She was, after all, for better or for worse, the adult. Nieces and nephews did not count as adults, regardless of how old they were. At least not until it came time for them to take away your car keys and put you in a nursing home.

  “She needs to go back to that place — back to the Birches,” Tai said. “And it needs to be soon. I don’t know what she weighs, but I’d be willing to bet she’s less than a hundred pounds. It’s hard to tell with all those clothes.”

  “I’ve seen her naked,” confessed Verna, “and, believe me, next to her, Biafrans look chunky.”

  “If she loses any more weight, I think she’s at real risk.”

  “Real risk of what?”

  “Dying,” said Tai flatly. “A third of anorexics die of the disease.” His face convulsed. “God!” he said, his voice strained. “How could this have happened?”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well, it was somebody’s fault. That it was allowed to get to this point. When I think of her as this little toddler … so happy. So carefree.”

  Verna went dredging around in her memory and came up with a snotty-nosed urchin with dirty feet, plantar warts, squawking because she had just gotten gum stuck in her blond curls. “Yeah, well …”

  “It just breaks my heart,” said Tai. “That’s all.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then, “What about you, Tai?”

  “What about me?”

  “Paisley has issues. Romy has an eating disorder. What about you? How are you?”

  Tai sighed. He rubbed his forehead. “Oh, let’s see. I was taken away from the mother I dearly loved and my two sisters in the middle of the night by a gang of uncles and raised by a woman I continue to hate to this day. A vicious harridan who has always resented me because — needless to say — I am the son of a woman my father never stopped loving. I guess I have a few hang-ups. I don’t sleep well, for starters. I have difficulty with relationships. Mostly I’m just sad. And angry. I feel like there’s something broken inside.”

  “Me, too,” said Verna.

  “Well, there you have it,” said Tai. “We’re broken.”

  Paisley appeared in the door. “Ready?” she asked. “It’s seven o’clock.”

  “Ready,” said Tai. He stood. “Oh, yeah. Before I forget. My stepmother told me to ‘get the tapestry that whore stole. Get the tapestry.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Verna.

  It turned out that not only did Romy dislike people
watching her while she cooked, she also didn’t like them watching her while she ate. “I got enough of that at the Birches,” she told Verna. “Watching, watching. Always watching your every mouthful. Like goddamned border collies.” She was standing in the door when she told Verna this, holding a large mixing bowl heaped with steaming vegetables.

  “What’s in there?” Verna asked. “Besides onions.” She could smell the onions.

  “Celery,” said Romy. “Cucumber. Zucchini. Carrots. Cabbage. Broccoli. Cauliflower. Good stuff.”

  “But what about protein?” Verna objected. “You’ve got to have some protein, Romy. What about starch?”

  “What about protein? What about starch? What about minding your own bee’s wax, Auntie Verna? What I eat is my business. It’s my body, not yours.”

  “Yes, but …”

  Romy huffed off, headed upstairs with her bowl of vegetables and brandishing chop sticks. Where did she get chopsticks? Verna wondered.

  “I bet she travels with them.” A familiar voice to her left. “So she can eat slow, eh?”

  “Hi, Lionel,” said Verna. “Yeah, you’re probably right. She probably does travel with them.” There he was, where he always was, sitting on the porch floor, looking out at the lake.

  “That girl of yours,” Lionel continued, “that Romy there, eh, she’s pretty sick.”

  “She’s not my girl,” retorted Verna. “And what do you expect with Fern for a mother?”

  “No,” Lionel corrected her. “She had a mother and then she didn’t. That’s what happens when you have no mother. You get sick. You don’t know how to live. Mothers teach you how to live.”

  “Hey!” Verna reached for the bottle of Russian Prince and slopped another finger of the vodka into her glass. “I didn’t have a mother and you don’t see me starving myself to death!”

  “No,” said Lionel. “Just drinking yourself to death.”

  Verna flushed. “Not to death,” she protested. “I’m just knocking off a few of those crappy years toward the end when you’d rather be dead, anyway, not dependent on strangers, not all by yourself in some nursing home.”

  “You should put Romy in the lake,” Lionel suggested. “Let the Nebaunaubaequaewuk heal her.”

  Verna laughed. “Look, I’ll make a deal with you. Me feeling better is one thing, but Romy … well, let’s just say that, when the mermaids cure Romy, that’s when I’ll believe in them.”

  Lionel shook his head. “They don’t ask you to believe in them,” he told her. “They’re not like that Jesus guy. They are not like Tinkerbelle.”

  “It’s a moot point in any case,” Verna told him. “She can’t swim. Can you believe that? Nobody taught her how to swim.”

  “Then you teach her.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re a good swimmer,” said Lionel. “You teach her to swim.”

  “No way,” she objected. “That is so not my responsibility.”

  “Then whose responsibility is it?”

  Suddenly there came a loud crash from outside and around back, followed by a piercing scream from upstairs. Verna leapt to her feet at the same time as Jude, who had been sleeping in the hall at the foot of the stairs, arose in a scramble of claws and four splaying feet and galloped upstairs. Barking frantically, he began to hurl himself over and over again at the door to Fern’s bedroom.

  Verna raced upstairs, and, reaching over Jude, pushed the door to Fern’s bedroom open a crack. The Lab immediately wedged himself into the opening, and, together, they half-burst, half-toppled into the room. There was Romy, cowering in Fern’s bed, with the mixing bowl of flaccid vegetables clutched to her sunken chest. Eyes wide with terror, she pointed toward the latched window.

  Verna gulped. Craning her neck, she squinted hard at the window. Through its glass pane she could just make out a man’s haggard face, patchily bearded. The sight jolted her. She gasped and staggered back a step. Jude bounded forward, positioning himself between the window and the women. He growled, hackles up, tail held low and motionless. “Who’s there?” Verna managed. Barely.

  “Jesus H. Christ! Is that dog vicious?” This from the man on the other side of the window.

  Verna heard fear in his voice and fought for breath. “He’ll rip your throat out if I tell him to,” she lied.

  “Well, don’t tell him to. Please,” the man pleaded — a broken tenor, scratchy and nodular. “Don’t mean no harm!”

  “Who are you?” Verna grew braver. “Why are you breaking into my house?”

  “J.R. Eubanks! I’m J.R. Eubanks — the one left the notice. The prospector. Shit, lady. I just come to get my smokes! I saw the others leave and you on the porch and figured I’d just come up the ladder. Not disturb you. Didn’t know there was anybody in Fern’s room. Then,” pointing to Romy, “that one there, she goes off like a goddamned car alarm. Don’t think I haven’t heard that before. Scares the bejesus out of me. Made me knock the ladder over. Now, you going to call your dog off? Cause I don’t like dogs. I never did.”

  “He won’t hurt you if you don’t give him cause,” replied Verna. “Otherwise I can’t answer for what he’ll do. He’s got a real mean streak.” Crossing over to Jude, she bent down and pulled back his flews; his array of teeth was impressive. “Show me some ID. Hold it up to the window so I can see it.”

  There was a pause while the man foraged around in his pockets. He surfaced a moment later with an Ontario driver’s licence, which he held against the window. Verna leaned forward to inspect it. “You don’t have a beard in this photo,” she said suspiciously.

  “Back then I had a razor.”

  “How do I know that this is not some fake ID?”

  “Look, I just come to get my Camels. That’s all. Please. It’s getting cold out here and I’m pretty sick.”

  “Your Camels?” Romy decompressed and entered the fray. “Were those your Camels?”

  Verna turned from the window. “I’m going to call the O.P.P.”

  “Hey, Verna, please!” He sounded panicked, stricken. “Don’t do that. You can’t do that. Please!”

  Verna stopped in her tracks. She turned back to the window. “How did you know my name? Never mind that — how did you know my sister’s name? And how did you know that this was her room?”

  “I knew her, okay? She was …” he hesitated for a moment, then, shyly, proudly, “she was my old lady.”

  “Your ‘old lady’?” Verna repeated, incredulous. “Your ‘old lady’? Good Lord! What were you? A singer in the band? Christ Almighty!” Closing her eyes and hitting herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand, she flopped down on the bed and lay back. “Fern, you slut!”

  “Hey!” Romy objected. “That’s my mother you’re talking about!”

  “Please, Verna, please let me in,” J.R. whined. “These bugs are eating me alive and it’s fixing to rain.”

  Verna sat up. She closed her eyes, sighed, and shook her head. “Yeah, well. What the hell! Join the party!” Rising, she unlatched the window and pushed up the sash.

  J.R. eyed Jude apprehensively. “What about him? He’s not going to bite me, now, is he?”

  “Here, Fang.” Verna took hold of Jude’s collar and yanked him toward her. “Don’t eat the boyfriend. Not unless I tell you to. Good dog.”

  J.R. thrust his head tentatively into the room, blinking at the light with rheumy, red-rimmed eyes the washed-out colour of old denim. His nose was red and bulbous, riven with spider veins, and a scruffy mange of rusty beard obscured the lower part of his leathery, sunken face. What of his sallow face the beard did not hide was dotted with rubbery-looking purple lesions.

  “Ooh!” hissed Romy. “Dude! What’s on your face?”

  He bristled. “Acne,” he said defensively. “Rosacea.”

  “Yeah, well. It looks like bugs.”

  Verna peered hard at the intruder, trying to gauge his age. Judging by appearance alone, she might equally have said forty or sixty or anywhere in between. That’s
how weathered, how eroded and windswept, how distressed he appeared. However, there was about him a certain awkward callowness that made her think he might be younger than he appeared.

  “Didn’t nobody ever tell you it’s rude to make personal remarks?”

  “Didn’t nobody ever tell you it’s against the law to break into other peoples’ houses?”

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell either of you not to use double negatives?” Verna was exasperated. “Are you coming in or not? Because, if you aren’t, I’m closing the goddamned window and you can just hurl yourself off the roof and into the elderberry bushes for all I care!”

  “All right! I’m coming!”

  J.R. clambered in through the window, using one hand to keep a black baseball cap sporting the name and logo of the Toronto Blue Jays affixed to his head, and straightened up, tentatively, one vertebra at a time, as though the process pained him. In the end he fell several inches short of his full height of perhaps six feet, seemingly not having the wherewithal to stand much straighter than a stoop. His breathing was laboured — heavy, deep, and stertorous; his sunken chest rose and fell on its tide. Under filthy clothing well on its way to becoming rags — a tattered red flannel shirt, torn, smoke-stained blue jeans — he appeared to be little more than bone and loose skin.

  “Okay. What’s this about you and my sister?” Verna asked.

  “Fern and me, we was going to get married,” J.R. explained, his voice thick with expectoration. “Before. But she took sick and I … I, well …” He blinked at Verna and Romy. He coughed, trying unsuccessfully to clear a throat clogged with phlegm, then turned to Romy. “You her kid?”

  Romy wrinkled up her nose. “Yeah and P.U.! You stink.” He did stink. Verna tried to identify the various strains of odour and settled on a combination of wood smoke, stale, sour sweat, and something else besides — some sweet sort of rot.

  He swallowed, absorbing this information. Then, “Right,” he said, wobbling. “Anyway, I just come for my smokes.”