Corridor Nine

by Sophie Stocking

  Lola looks at Eben. “I’ll go check’” she says and walks down the hall. She stands for a minute looking at the crack of light under her mother’s bedroom door, and then goes back to the kitchen.

  “They’re talking, and I think she’s crying again. I’ll tuck you in and give you a back rub okay?”

  “I want Momma.” Louis scratches at the tops of his hands, his neck. “I feel all itchy.”

  “He’s getting that rash, Eben.”

  “Come on Lou, the calamine’s in your room.” Eben steers his little brother by the top of the head out of the kitchen with the girls following. In the bottom bunk he pulls off Louis’ shirt and examines his back and chest.

  “Well it’s still just his hands and his neck. Do you think it will affect his breathing?” he asks Lola.

  “I don’t know.”

  He squirts the pink calamine lotion into his palm, rubs his hands together and then applies it to his squirming little brother.

  “That tickles, it’s cold!”

  “Shut up, do you want to itch or not?” He turns to Lola. “I’ve got to study for my science test, I’ll come check on his breathing before I go to sleep.” “Okay,” says Lola. “I’ll give them a back rub.”

  “But I want stories!” Moira insists from the top bunk.

  “No time, I have to clean Cynthia’s cage. Did you guys brush your teeth? Go brush your teeth and I’ll give you a quick back rub, hurry up.”

  An hour later Bernie splashes cold water on her face and wonders why crying makes her feel so exhausted, blown out from the inside. Her eyes ache. Behind her, Peter soaps his hair in the shower. She looks at her watch. It says ten fifteen.

  “Oh my God, the kids!” Quickly she dries her face and opens the bedroom door. Dark and quiet fill the house. Angus sits at the back door. He paws it mechanically like he’s been doing every thirty seconds for the last half hour. She lets him out for the final pee of the night.

  By the glow of the night light she sees Louis’ freckled face lying sideways on his pillow, his eyelids twitch and a rivulet of expression flickers over his face so fast she can’t catch the story line. He ends with a watery grin and nuzzles his cheek deeper into the pillow. Bernie climbs the ladder to check on Moira who lies curled in fetal position. She can’t see her face, but she touches the gold fuzz of her hair for a moment and climbs back down.

  No light shines under Lola’s door further down the hall, and Bernie doesn’t want to risk its grating against the floor when it opens. Something must be wrong with the hinges, maybe the screws have worn their way out of the wood with kids swinging on it. She needs to buy longer thicker screws at Totem, but she keeps forgetting. Looking up, yellow light spills onto the landing from Eben’s room. Slowly she climbs the stairs. He sits hunched over his desk, textbooks spread around him, his earbuds in and the lines running to the pocket of his hoodie. She watches for a moment, how the raw bones in his face have lengthened. The acne on his cheekbones looks painful and inflamed. Sensing something, he turns to her and jumps.

  “Sorry. I surprised you. Did you put everyone to bed? Thank you, you shouldn’t have to. Things will be better soon; I’m almost on top of . . . ” She stops, remembering how many times she’s said this. Eben thinks of Louis’ rash while he takes in his mother’s puffy features and swollen red eyes, how her shoulders cave forward.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “They listened pretty well. I don’t mind.”

  “Why are you still working?”

  “I have a science test tomorrow.”

  “Are you almost done? Don’t stay up too much longer, okay? Better to sleep. If you’re too tired you can’t remember anything anyhow.”

  “I won’t be long.”

  “And Eben,”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks buddy.” She turns, and he listens to her go back down the stairs. He reaches into his pocket and takes out his phone. He sets his alarm for one o’clock to check on Louis again, then for six forty-five so he’ll be up early enough to catch the school bus. The bus. He should talk to Madison. He can’t avoid this forever, but he really doesn’t know what to tell her.

  “How much further?”

  “One third to go. Do you want to rest or eat something?”

  “No, let’s just get there. How many more songs is ‘one third to go’?”

  “If they are Bob Dylan songs, I imagine only three or four, but please, didn’t you sing anything else?”

  “But he wrote so many and I can remember the lyrics perfectly here. This is a great one; actually you have a choice. Do you want ‘It’s All Right Ma I’m Only Bleeding’ or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’?”

  “Oh God help me, sounds like more of the same. ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, I guess, but then, please can we move onto a different artist, a different genre perhaps?”

  “Well Margaret and I used to sing folk songs with the kids, though they lack the penetrating vision of Bob Dylan. Oh! I know! Leadbelly, I’d love to sing like Leadbelly, but first ‘Tangled Up in Blue’,” and he launches in with gusto.

  “You sing too, come on.” Bune sighs and his baritone rumbles in to join Fabian.

  Bernie pulls into her driveway after dropping the kids off for school. Angus sits sentinel in the passenger seat. The blue storage bins wait in the back of the van. She decides to take them to her studio and look at the photos there. First, she puts the dog in the house, and then she carries each bin to the swing gate. She sets the numbers on the combination lock and unlatches it, pushes the gate open and drags the boxes into the backyard.

  The wind gusts and dislodges the last red leaves from the crabapple tree. They flare against the grey sky before circling down to the lawn. Across the yard the studio hunkers in the naked grove of aspen, its windows dark. The weather vane on the roof rotates with a squawk. Bernie looks up at it as she puts the box down. Why does she keep it? She should just get a ladder and take it down. The sun and moon cut from a sheet of tin while little Bernie sits cross-legged on her dad’s worktable to watch. She twists the door handle and pushes it open, bends over and drags in the first box.

  Her studio is so jam-packed with old bikes, garden tools, and camping gear that there is nowhere to put the box down. Today she will make room and clear this junk out. Leaving the box on a pile of winter tires, Bernie picks up two rolls of garden hose and slings them over a shoulder, grabs a rake, two trowels, some loppers, and clamps a folded green tarp under her arm. They can all go in the garden shed. She sees the twins’ bikes from two years ago. Those she can donate, and the four other bikes can be stored in the garage.

  Two hours later, after a trip to Cycle Rama and dumping boxes of kitchenware and old skates at the Women in Need, Bernie stares at the little room, light filtering through the dirty window, empty except for the camping gear piled neatly against one wall. She walks to the kitchen to get a broom and fills a bucket with soapy water. Soon the red-painted plywood floor, the counter, and sink are clean. She scours the big multipaned window with vinegar water and a microfiber cloth, then drags her easel back into place and sets it up. One of the two aluminum-shaded spotlights still have a functional bulb, but she switches it off, preferring the end of September light now flooding the clean window. The Franklin stove squats in the middle of the room, empty and cold. Bernie carries in kindling and some split birch from the stack against the garage and builds a teepee of fire inside its mouth. The chimney still draws. No hornet’s nest in the stove pipe at least. Taking a break, she goes to the kitchen to make a sandwich and fills a go-cup with coffee, then carries them back to her studio. Sitting cross-legged on the floor Bernadette opens the first box of old sepia photos and begins to sort.

  “Let’s have another train song then, they’re good for walking. I like Leadbelly.”

  “Well you can’t do better than ‘Rock Island Line’, that’s for sure. Let me think, okay, ‘The Midnight Special’. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, you start.” This time Fabian’s voice booms out scratchy and dee
p.

  Bune joins in and Fabian abandons the Leadbelly growl to play with a contralto counterpoint, weaving in and out of the angel’s rock-steady backup. They’re about to launch into the rollicking chorus when whack! Fabian hits something so impenetrable he almost knocks himself out. He rebounds, falling on his back into the turf. It sucks away his impact and forms itself around him, all gentle extrusion. To the left Bune stumbles and regains his feet.

  “Oh! We made it, we’re here!”

  “But how do you know we’re at the doorway?” asks Fabian, still supine and too simultaneously comfortable and dizzy to get up. “The doorway skips all over the place. Do you have some special demon capacity to locate it? How do you time your entry if the door is always moving?”

  “You just need to stay with me. Where are you? Stand up and hold my hand again. You have to be touching me or you’ll get left behind.” In the dark Fabian rolls to his knees and crawls forward, wanting to feel the wall. For a moment he registers a rough surface, but then his hand flies back, slapped violently out of the way.

  “Best not to meddle, it can be a little sensitive and irritable. Stand up now. Where’s your hand?” Fabian slips his little hand into Bune’s grip.

  “Rotate, so we’re facing the way we came. Good.” Fabian hears the wings open and remembers their catching like a parachute on entry into his old home.

  “Are we going to fall again?” he asks, his stomach clenching.

  “No. Just back up slowly and don’t let go of my hand, otherwise I’ll have to come back for you. “They start to shuffle the few metres distance. “My wings just need to . . . Ahh! You first.”

  Fabian experiences an overwhelming suction and feels himself extruding backwards, leading with his tailbone. That end of him stretches as if he were taffy pulled into a long tear drop, while every part of him on the other side of the barrier snaps into a ball and seems about to implode with the pressure. With a sudden squelch he fires through and lands amoeba-like and jellified. He lies still for a long time until he feels solid enough to open his eyes. Bune leans over him, his beetle brows raised. He smiles encouragement.

  “There you go. Back in shape. Entry is intense but thankfully quick. Welcome to the Gateway! The Sponsor Ring!”

  Fabian squints and tries to find the ceiling but can’t locate it. In the dim red light there seems no end to the space stretching above him. The floor does not cup him like the obsequious memory-foam turf. This feels resistant yet oddly rubbery. It vibrates with some distant pulse and the humid air throbs in synchrony. He rolls to his hands and knees on the uncooperative ground and smells the sulfurous stink of a hot springs. Standing, he sways like a sailor on a ship.

  “It’s not so supportive.”

  “Yes, strange after the turf isn’t it?”

  Fabian straightens all the way. The pulse, and then he realizes many pulses, beat and murmur around him, coming in and out of his awareness with every shift in position. A hallway stretches endlessly ahead in the red gloom. He remembers looking across the flat prairie and seeing the arch of the earth along the horizon, but this time, vertically, he can see in the distance how the corridor eventually curves out of sight. Where Corridor Nine’s grey ceiling had nailed him down, here the ceiling stretches infinitely. Where Corridor Nine extended laterally into the dark, the two walls pinch him in their claustrophobic grip. Fabian guesses three Bunes could lay head to foot from wall to wall. Three demon widths.

  “I don’t like this place. Where can you go? At least on Corridor Nine I ran out into the dark if I wanted to, here the only escape would be up the walls, or down that hall like a hamster on a wheel.”

  “I like to compare the Sponsor Ring to a desert island,” says Bune. “If you’re afraid of the ocean, a desert island becomes a prison. If you like to swim however, it’s a diving platform.”

  “I don’t see any water.”

  Bune takes Fabian by the shoulders and steers him until his back touches the barrier they just fired through. Fabian flinches.

  “Won’t it slap me?”

  “Not once you’ve gained entry. Now look up, look at the outside wall as far as you can see.”

  Fabian looks up and up.

  Bernie lays out the piles of sorted photos. She wonders who held the camera for the pictures of little Fabian, her Grandmother Evelyn, “Grammy”, or Grandad Herbert. Most of the snapshots are three by five inches with a white border but one large picture jumps out, an eight-by-eleven-inch print on heavier sepia paper than the others.

  She picks up the image of a young woman standing in a forest of hollyhocks taller than her. The vertical sun casts everything in shadow except for the straw cloche, her shoulders, the very tip of her nose, and the t-strap shoes. Bernie thinks she can detect the sheen of a silk stocking below the longer than knee-length skirt. It looks like a loose linen jacket, neatly fitted at the shoulders, but a rose bush obscures the details. Her grandmother as a young woman. The face in shadow renders her mysterious, even foreboding, pulling back instead of stepping forward and tipping her face to the sun. Bernie turns the print over and reads her grandmother’s writing in faded pencil. ‘Evelyn Mary on July 5, 1925 — only a few hours before my terrible accident’. Bernie looks at the image for a long time, then stands up and props it on her easel.

  Sitting back down she organizes the pictures chronologically. The very youngest she can find reads, “Evelyn Mary on her way to school,” in different writing this time, probably Evelyn’s mother Bernadette’s. The little girl poses in a chunky, cabled cardigan over her schoolgirl skirt, heavy tights bunching around her knees. She must be six or seven. A giant bow protrudes on either side of her neck, and she holds two books in the crook of her arm with her kid-gloved hand. The little girl looks about to leap with excitement, her cheeks creased by the eager confidence of her smile. Grammy on her first day of school.

  Now here stands Evelyn M. under a tree, grinning with her ukulele, maybe ten years old. Evelyn on a porch swing reading a book. Holding up a heavy bicycle and smiling again under a broad-brimmed hat. How old? Maybe twelve. A serious photo of the high school graduate wearing a gown and mortarboard. The note on the back reads, “Graduated Honours, Calgary Central High.” The number of photos explodes around her grandmother’s late teens and her university days.

  “These are amazing,” mutters Bernie. She digs her phone out of her pocket and takes close-up pictures of the old photos, then attaches them to texts and sends them to David. How could these be Grammy? Often, she wears a man’s tie at the neck of a white-collared blouse, her signature perhaps. Laughing on a blanket at a picnic in the woods. Here she reclines on a deck chair beside another young woman, both of them stylish and excited in fur-collared coats, hairpin curls glossy on cheekbones. ‘Victoria, March 1931’, a girl’s get-a-way. Another graduation photo, “1933, University of Alberta, BA English, Honours”. Honours again, Grammy must have been pretty bright. Bernie snaps each one.

  “Oh, wow.” ‘Dean Kimmel and Evelyn M., 1951’. It looks like a still from The Great Gatsby. Evelyn wears a knit swimming dress, cut high on her thighs; v-necked and sleeveless, a bathing cap covers her hair. The Errol Flynn look-alike wraps his arm around her waist and with his other hand holds the fingers of the lithesome arm she drapes over his shoulder. Her hip curves into his side, confident and supple.

  Ka sha, Bernie snaps a photo and sends it to Peter. “Who knew Grammy was sexy once? And so happy? This man is not Grandad!”

  “Kind of like an endless card catalogue,” says Fabian, looking up at the outside wall of the hallway. Row upon row of perforations, black holes into which he can fit his fist. Beside each one he can make out the imprint of a hand. From these openings come the overlapping unsynchronized beat that pulses around him. Fabian’s nose wrinkles and he pulls away.

  “No, come. See the writing if you look very closely? “Bune puts his hand on the boy’s back and urges him forward until Fabian’s face is only a foot away from the throbbing wall of holes.
/>   “What writing?”

  “Don’t you see? It hovers in the miasma of each gateway,” and now Fabian can make out the script, handwriting like thread that lies in the faint oil-slick opalescence floating in each opening. He reaches up to his forehead for a moment and then laughs. He says to Bune, “Glasses, I forgot. No longer required. What do they all say? So many. Where would you start?”

  “They tell each sponsor’s story, at least the most pertinent conditions for, how shall I say, a prospective applicant. Look here, I brought us into the section of your kin, there are many who will be familiar to you. For example, your grandmother Bernadette.”

  “Oh!” Eagerly Fabian steps over towards Bune but is perplexed to see just one diagonal line of writing across the aperture. He reads, grins at Fabian, “I recognize her writing!” Temporary leave of absence. Possible future sponsorships accepted. Please check back and best wishes on your next assignment. “Oh, that’s too bad. You mean possibly she could have been my new mother?”

  “Yes. If you put your hand in the palm print, you can remember her a moment.” Fabian fits his small hand into the indent. His lids quiver shut and a beatific smile creeps over his face.

  “Those apples off the tree behind the kitchen, creamed salmon on toast. She always smelled like toast. Amazing! I can feel her; loyal, reliable, no matter if you made a mistake. Oh, her laugh. My Gran always had my back. I trusted her.” He takes his hand down and steps back, his small body slumps. “Now please, now could I have my tears back?”

  “Look here though, try this one. So many options.” Bune steers him gently back to the wall. “I know you wouldn’t want to attempt this one again so soon, Evelyn Mary Eddy, but just out of curiosity. Anyhow, it reads: ‘Extended leave of absence.’”

  Fabian shudders, raises his hand slowly to the imprint. As soon as his hand is in place, he starts wincing like a lab rat undergoing electric shock stimuli.