by Mere Joyce
Simon’s room is ordinary. The teal paint is old, and there are a few spots where dirt has left a permanent smudge on the white plastic light switch and the frame surrounding the door. But the bed is made, the brown satin comforter rustling beneath my weight as I settle into a cross-legged position at its foot. Inside, it’s easy to spot the scratch on the dresser and the streaks on the mirror above it. An empty nail sticks out of the wall where a picture used to hang, and the brown curtains framing the dark window are frayed.
The room is simple, the decor cheap and boring. But it doesn’t feel like the room of a dead man.
I’m curious to know if Forrester had a creeping chill when he tidied in here earlier. The air is warm and fresh now, and I’m not uneasy sitting on my late uncle’s bed. I’m not even sad. Either there’s something wrong with me or cheesy movies overplay the emotions of estranged relatives.
I’m annoyed our family stopped talking. I want to know who the hell Julie is and why Simon’s stored her old clothes in the attic. And I’m bothered by the idea of my uncle being dead. But the sadness doesn’t make my bones ache. The squeeze on my lungs only comes when I think about Forrester, when I picture my cousin dealing with all of this shit on his own. My uncle’s newly acquired non-existence doesn’t rattle my nerves. His death is only an unpleasant and unhappy fact of life.
“Hey.” I swivel my head around to see Allison leaning against the doorframe, her hands tucked into the pockets of her pants. “Kitchen’s clean. We’re going to head down to the basement now.”
I nod, but I don’t move from the bed — and she stays still in the doorway.
“I only have one memory of Uncle Simon,” I say after a moment. I’m not sure why I’ve been struck with the sudden need to start rambling about the past. Maybe it’s a continuation of the talk Allison and I had when we cleaned the guest room this morning. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been rambling about the past in some form or another all day. “I think that’s kind of pathetic. I mean, I remember him being around. I have family memories with him included, but only one that’s just about him.”
“That’s more than I have,” Allison admits, and I nod again as if that’s the kind of response I was expecting. “Is it a good one?”
“I’m not sure.” I shrug. “It was my eighth birthday. He bought me a present. A pair of earrings. They were beaded, and I think they might have been triangles or … I don’t know, tents or something. I didn’t get a great look because my mother got pissed and snatched them away so quick you would’ve thought he’d bought me porn. So, I guess it wasn’t that great. I remember my mother saying ‘How dare you’ and Aunt Shirley muttering ‘I told you’ under her breath. But I also remember Uncle Simon looking at me when they both started bitching. He was sorry. Genuinely sorry I didn’t get to keep the gift he bought me. I thought that part was nice.”
“Not tents,” Allison says, her voice cutting through the image of my uncle’s face drawn in a silent apology.
“What?”
“The earrings,” Allison clarifies. “They weren’t tents. They were teepees.”
“How do you …” I stop asking how she knows what those earrings looked like when I remember she was there, sitting on one side of me while Kayla sat on the other, like it always was when we were kids and we were a family. The how of her knowledge isn’t important, anyway. Not as important as the what. “Teepees?” I mutter, thinking back to the vague memory and trying in vain to picture the dangling beads.
“Yeah,” Allison says. “Orange and brown and white teepees. They were cute. I thought it was so weird when your mom took them away.”
“Fucking hell,” I breathe, the words a sigh I’ve uttered a thousand times before. “No shit my mother flipped.”
“She’s really against all that Native stuff, isn’t she?” Allison asks.
I finger the feather around my neck, ignoring Allison’s choice of word as I work to keep old anger at bay.
“Unbelievably so,” I say, pushing down the rage and the tingling remnants of confusion I can’t quash even after all these years.
“But why?” Allison asks.
I wish the answer was as simple as the question.
“She has her reasons,” I say, “but I don’t know what they are. I speculate, and I’m sure some of my guesses are true. But I don’t know a damned thing for certain.” I look up at my cousin and fail to smile. “Worst part is, I think I might be too chickenshit to find out.”
“What do you mean?”
She steps into the room and takes up a new post leaning against the wall beside the door. She looks so much like her brother. If she chopped off her hair, it’d be impossible to tell them apart.
“I’ve kept in touch with the leaders from the camp I attended over the summer. One of them is a part-time professor at Trent University, and she has a connection with a reservation up north,” I tell her. “There’s an open invitation for me to spend time up there. A few days, a few weeks … however long I want. I can immerse myself in the culture, see what living there is like. When she offered the opportunity, I thought it was my chance to piece together the story of my mother’s life. But every time I go to email her about setting something up for next summer, I’m too fucking terrified to go through with it.”
Allison smirks. The expression’s unexpected, but I’m dazzled by its ease.
“I never took you for the kind of girl who let fear change her plans,” she says. She scratches at a pimple on her neck, the motion automatic. “I don’t know you well anymore. But the Hailey I used to know … she would have jumped at the chance to get her answers.”
“You think?” I say, flipping one pigtail over my shoulder and loving the way the dark strands I once despised now glisten in the artificial glow of the bedroom light. “I never cared about knowing all the answers. I never wanted to be the kind of girl who changed the world.”
“Really?” Allison laughs in surprise. “That’s all I’ve ever dreamt about. If not changing it, at least leaving my mark.”
“You’d go to the reservation in an instant, wouldn’t you?” I ask.
Allison smiles, her eyes bright in a way I haven’t seen all weekend.
“Damn straight I would,” she says. “Especially if there was something to discover.”
“Even if the discovery might be horrendous?”
Allison falters for half a second, her lips dropping to a gentler curve. “Answers are answers. Sometimes they’re not what we want to hear, but knowing is better.”
“I’m not so sure,” I mumble, looking down at my necklace as I stroke the feather. “I always liked the idea of living an ordinary life. I thought I’d grow up, get a job, work the week and play the weekend away. Ordinary — and nice.”
“So, what changed?”
I look back at Allison and lick my lips.
“I realized why my mother didn’t talk about her old life,” I say. “Bad things must have happened, and because of that she refuses to share any of her upbringing. The bad or the good. Because I can’t believe there was no good. Not when we both search for Mahkan Atchakos and she tells me stories about the origins of dogs and wolves.”
Allison doesn’t interrupt to ask for clarification, and I don’t bother to translate the name my mother doesn’t use, the one I only learned a month ago. The terminology is not of significance right now. The hard truth of what I’m admitting is.
“The more she refused to talk, the angrier I got, until the anger turned to desperation,” I explain. “I figured if things were that bad, something needed to be done about it. So, I started a mental crusade. I mapped out my life, decided I would earn my degree and go up north to fix the problems she faced. But the more I researched, the more unsettling the facts became. Imagining the truth and knowing it aren’t the same. Turns out, I’m not sure I’m ready to delve into my mother’s life. Not when she’s worked so da
mned hard to keep me away from it. I’m not sure I’m capable of making a difference to a problem so huge.”
“You can try,” Allison says, pushing off from the wall. “And that’s a hell of a lot more than our parents ever did. It’s more than Eli does now. It’s more than Nathan does, too.”
Now it’s my turn to smirk. “Is that why you don’t want him around? He doesn’t try hard enough for your satisfaction?”
Allison rolls her eyes. “Nathan doesn’t try hard enough for anyone’s satisfaction. It’s like he lacks the ability. He has no dreams, no plans, no goals. He stays attached to my hip because it’s easier for him to hang around than try someone new.”
“Why don’t you cut him off? Eli seems to think you’re keeping him enticed.”
I’ve had my share of clingy boyfriends in the past, and in my younger days I played the clingy role myself at least once. Navigating that sort of shipwreck is not easy if you’re determined to make it away free. But it’s usually for the best, and I can’t believe a girl as unsentimental as Allison wouldn’t agree.
My cousin’s smirk has returned.
“If he wants to break from me, all he has to do is try,” she says, her voice smoky and low.
I laugh as I get off the bed, my chuckle girlish next to Allison’s sexy purr. I smooth the comforter and follow her out to the hallway. After I switch off the lights, I survey the darkness, remembering the earrings my uncle bought me a long time ago.
“Simon tried,” I say with a sharp twitch of what might be actual grief. “He tried to connect me to my heritage, in whatever small way he could. That was great of him.” I look at Allison and put an arm around her waist as we head back downstairs. “That was really fucking great.”
Kayla
I HATE THE BASEMENT at my house. Always have. When I was a child, it was a dungeon of perpetual darkness, the place where bogeymen and ghouls resided. My brother liked to tell me stories of the countless scores of people he swore had been hacked at, burned alive, and otherwise murdered in our home. I believed all his gruesome tales, and to think of them now, it’s amazing I was ever bothered by Forrester’s lie about the shed outside. Night dwellers, even vampires, are far less frightening than the blood-soaked corpses I used to be certain were stacked in my basement.
But the cottage’s lowest level has forever been a safe haven. As kids, we gathered here to play board games, watch movies, and fall asleep in comfort and company. Now, each creaking step down overwhelms me with small details I never used to notice, like the unexplained splotch of baby blue paint on the otherwise brown-beige wall, or the illogical way I get warmer as I move deeper beneath the earth.
“Nothing here has changed, has it?” Eli remarks as we reach the bottom of the stairs. His gaze is full of the distaste he’s worn all day, but his tone reveals a note of tenderness I don’t believe he’d ever stoop to fake. First the abandoned fort in the shed, and now this? I think even Eli’s succumbing to the charm of this place. And why shouldn’t he? We had a lot of good times in this brown-shaded and musty-scented room.
I wonder if it holds any of the same magic for Forrester. He’s had a full decade to create a set of memories the rest of us never had the chance to build. Do his feet still tingle when he squishes his toes into the too old but still soft flooring? Or is this just another room, another place he has to give away because his dad has died?
“Dad never bothered with upgrading to a DVD player,” Forrester says, dragging a large cardboard box from the closet on the far side of the room. “And there’s no network connection, so we can’t stream anything. We’ve got a VCR, though. Thing’s ancient, but amazingly, it still works.”
I step off the stairs, my eyes traveling to the nearby fireplace and the space over the mantel above it. A painting is hung there, one I’m sure has been around for years, but one I’ve never bothered to look at before. Yellow, orange, and muted green foliage surrounds a white-barked tree shedding its few remaining leaves. This painting is not the same as the one we have at home. Different style, different hand. But although I’m not familiar with the painting itself, I’m sure the work is from another Group of Seven artist.
The painting hangs crooked on the wall, and I wrap my arms around myself as I flop onto the old sofa, the warmth of the picture and its off-kilter resting place making me shiver.
“What do we want to watch?” Forrester asks.
Hailey grins, dropping to her knees beside the box and rummaging through it. I see the worn covers of dozens of VHS tapes, big and bulky compared to the slim cases of the few Blu-rays we still have at home. For a few seconds, the movies seem fake, their thick shapes less like films than like a weird collection of dusty old books. But then I remember the way we used to hunt through similar boxes when we were kids, how seemingly prehistoric the movies were even then.
“That greatly depends on what’s inside.” She smiles.
“There’s nothing new,” Forrester warns, sitting back and surveying her.
Forrester was quieter at dinner than he’s been all day. While we shoved food in our mouths and prattled non-stop until the feast was complete and the dishes were washed, he remained silent and still, observing us all but not partaking in our easy conversation. I think he wanted to talk more about the sweater we found in the attic. But I’m glad he’s content to have a break now. Today’s been stressful in many more ways than one. We all need to surrender ourselves to the pure joy of hunting through old movie tapes to try and find the most entertaining thing to watch.
Nolan frowns when Hailey pulls out a movie without any cover at all. The plastic label on its front is so faded it’s impossible to tell what the title is.
“If I know one thing about VHS, it’s that we’re going to be really annoyed when we have to rewind whatever we choose to play, right?” he asks.
“That’s part of the magic,” I say in a dreamy voice, at once saddened and amused by the fact Nolan doesn’t remember watching any of these tapes with us.
He lets out a soft breath of laughter.
“This stuff is great!” Hailey exclaims from overtop of the box.
She grabs a few movies and places them on the ground, tossing others back in while she sifts through the mound of choices.
I perk up when I see a cover I recognize. “Oh! We could watch The Notebook!”
“No,” Hailey says, giving me a thumbs-down.
I appeal to my other cousins, but it’s a useless endeavor. All five of them take Hailey’s side, leaving me to mope on the couch with glowering eyes.
Watching a romance would be weird here, anyway. The last time I saw The Notebook was with Hudson. He says he doesn’t mind sitting through it because it puts me in a mood. I smile at the thought. Then my stomach tightens, and I remember this is the night we could have been in a mood together, the only night for who knows how many more weeks. We haven’t talked much since Tuesday, since I told him of the change in our plans. We’ve sacrificed more than a couple of days already, and I’m scared this is how it starts — how relationships begin to end.
“Find anything good to watch?” Allison asks, pulling me back to the cottage and the family I chose to be with tonight.
Hailey nods without looking up.
“Tons,” she sighs. “It’s a matter of deciding which one to experience again.”
“Hailey, you’re pathetic,” Thomas scolds, sitting down beside her. “These movies are awful!”
He holds up some cheap cartoon we probably watched as kids. I don’t remember it in the slightest.
“There is gold here, Thomas,” Hailey replies as she lifts another tape, the title covered by her fingers. “But you have to be willing to see it.”
“This is going to lead to the worst movie-watching experience of my life,” Eli moans.
Allison hits him with one of the sofa’s raggedy red throw pillows.
The Notebook w
ould have been nice, but I don’t care what we watch. I don’t even care if we watch anything at all. As Hailey and Thomas fight over what movie to put on, I go back to studying the basement’s beige walls and brown carpet, the seeming unattractiveness of the room somehow making it more brilliant than any stylish decorations could. When my gaze again lands on the painting over the fireplace, it lingers until the others make their decision.
“Okay, I think we’ll watch this,” Hailey says at last.
I tear my eyes away from the picture to see her holding up a VHS of an old movie called The Peanut Butter Solution.
I smile, the bizarre movie about a kid who loses his hair and uses a concoction with peanut butter to grow it back an old favorite. I used to think this was the weirdest movie ever made, and I don’t even know how a copy ended up in the cottage basement. Forrester’s parents must have bought it at a garage sale or something, part of a collection of unwanted movies given a new home in this beautiful place.
Forrester gets a small fire going, and Thomas turns off the lights as Hailey pushes the tape into the VCR. She curses when she realizes she does, in fact, have to rewind it.
“Useless technology,” Eli says with a shake of his head. “No wonder it’s extinct.”
Allison rolls her eyes, and I tuck my knees under me, my muscles tight with anticipation.
Maybe it’s sad, us being stuck in a childlike state of companion-ship. But perhaps this is the way we break through the tangled years of distance and grab hold of one another again.
And maybe I’m reading too much into all of this. Maybe we’re just watching a movie, and I’m the only one whose heart pounds as if all these tiny moments will amount to something bigger.
