The Girls

by Lori Lansens

  A moment passed. And another moment. And another, each moment’s passing a miracle, for Uncle Stash thought he was dead and that moments should be passing no more, but ceasing altogether. The pressure continued to crush Uncle Stash’s chest and make ragged his breath. He opened his eyes. Another moment. And another. There were black spots in his field of vision, which, when he managed to focus, revealed themselves as a massive assemblage of black crows in the maples. The crows, Stash thought through his pain. Old Berb had been staring at the crows.

  One curious crow descended to the ditch, flapping brashly and landing within inches of Uncle Stash’s feet. He tried to kick the bird away but did not have the strength to move his smallest toe. A second crow joined the first, and another and another, no longer silent but calling to their fellows about the man in the ditch with his trousers at his ankles. Uncle Stash was suddenly, horribly aware of his exposure and, afraid he might be found this way, or, worse, that he would not be found at all, attempted to rise. He attempted to pull up his trousers. He attempted to call out. He wished he had his camera and could take a picture. He cursed the crows in Slovak. “Metrovy kokot do tvojeje riti, you little crow shits.” (Loosely translated: “Shove a meter-long stick up your arses, you little crow shits.”)

  As Uncle Stash struggled to stay conscious, several dozen of the black birds swooped down from the branches and joined him in the ditch. One of the crows stood on his chest, strutting like a champion, which seemed to make the others laugh. Another pair of crows tugged at his laces, trying to steal his old shoes. The ones to his left were sizing up his wedding ring, arguing about how to get it off. There were no more black spots in the trees. The crows had him surrounded.

  Of course Uncle Stash knew, even as he was slipping into blackness, that he was hallucinating about the crows. They were there, of course, but not with motive or intent, just there, the way crows are always there when something bad happens in Baldoon County.

  Then it wasn’t the crows anymore causing Uncle Stash to swallow his fear. It was Berb Foyle, who had appeared suddenly over the ridge of the ditch, aiming a rifle at Uncle Stash’s head. The blast from the rifle erupted in Uncle Stash’s ear. He let go of consciousness. He let go of fear.

  Of course Nonna didn’t describe the story exactly that way because she didn’t know then, no one knew then, the events preceding Uncle Stash’s heart attack. But she did say that when Uncle Stash was found, he was in Berb Foyle’s ditch surrounded by crows. The rest I pieced together as the years went by and the secrets of that day were, one by one, unveiled.

  One of the things I learned, a thing that shocked me (because I could picture so easily Berb Foyle, his crazy eye exaggerated by the scope of his rifle, about to shoot Uncle Stash), was that it wasn’t Berb, but Frankie Foyle standing there with the gun. He’d been drawn to the spot by the crows and by a sound he described as “howling.” He’d been aiming his rifle because he thought his wounded dog was in the ditch, and he was gonna do what he had to do as quick as he could do it. His bullet hit a cattail about fourteen inches from Uncle Stash’s head.

  Frankie laughed about the cattail and described the way it had exploded when he told Ruby and me that story a few months later, riding down the snowy Fourth Concession in the rickety yellow school bus. Ruby and I both instinctively acted as if we already knew about Frankie’s involvement, even though we’d never been told and would never have guessed. (I was pleased—more pleased than I should have been under the circumstances—that it was Frankie Foyle who had found, and nearly shot, my Uncle Stash.)

  Back to the night of Uncle Stash’s heart attack. When the telephone rang, Nonna raced from the kitchen to take the call. I watched her in the mirror. With each phrase that Aunt Lovey uttered on the other end of the line, Nonna’s face revised its forecast from bleak to bleaker. There’d been an episode. Uncle Stash had flatlined. The doctors had shocked his heart back to life, but he wasn’t expected to survive the night. I heard all of this, repeated in heavily accented English by Nonna, but, as much as I knew it was all true, I couldn’t believe a word. Most of all, it seemed impossible that Aunt Lovey hadn’t asked to speak to me. I was her second-in-command. I was the strong one.

  Ruby slept that night. But I was too angry to sleep. Or too afraid to dream. When I opened my eyes at dawn, there was a black crow on the windowsill. His feathers were mottled and his beak looked rusty. He regarded my sleeping sister and me with his right eye, then his left, then his right again. He bobbed his head up and down for a time, then cawed and flew away. I felt oddly insulted.

  I was startled when the telephone rang. I lay with my arm around my sister, helpless, and desperate to hear Aunt Lovey’s voice. In a moment, Nonna came into the room wearing the woolly black bathrobe she’d brought from home. She was smiling.

  By the time we got to the hospital, Uncle Stash had opened his eyes, though he wasn’t quite strong enough to sit up and not ready to speak. I couldn’t lean down to kiss him, of course, so I squeezed his fingers as hard as I could. Then I urged Ruby to the window because I didn’t want him to see me cry.

  “Leaford is the crow capital of the world,” Ruby said, though she had not seen the crow on the windowsill that morning and could not know that I had been thinking about the bird at that very moment.

  Heaven’s Door

  Aunt Lovey had so many stories to tell. When we were children, they were made-up stories about Ruby and me, but as we grew older the stories became memories, extrapolated upon and polished, and they began to stretch beyond Ruby and me to Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash, their courtship and their youth, then further back to stories about her mother, and hers. After a while, I sensed that Aunt Lovey was not telling me the stories so much as entrusting them to me.

  It was Aunt Lovey’s belief that all ordinary people led extraordinary lives, but just didn’t notice. She said her favorite books were about average people and their everyday existence, and she didn’t go in much for crime drama or murder mysteries. She’d read a bumper sticker once that said, “God is in the details.” She had nodded solemnly, but couldn’t answer when Ruby asked what it meant. I didn’t write for a full year after Aunt Lovey died. Not even in my journal. Ruby took it worse. Dr. Ruttle considered putting Ruby on antidepressants, but was unsure how they might affect me. (I’ve had some terrible side effects from Ruby’s medication.) Ruby wasn’t eating much and wasn’t sleeping at all. Time would not ease her sorrow. I felt her awake at night, praying that heaven was true and that Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash were there riding clouds in white robes. There were times I felt Ruby imagining she was riding the clouds with them. But I had the strangest sense she was there without me.

  We decided to visit the graves. Ruby’s idea. I was reluctant; my graveside experience with Ruby being what it was, I was terrified she’d make a scene. We took the Leaford bus to the cemetery, where we said good-bye to the driver, Joey, after promising twice that we’d be at the stop when he returned in an hour. (Ruby and I cannot and never will live anonymously. Because of our situation, people treat us like children, or the elderly. Can you imagine a city bus driver extracting a promise of return from any other twenty-two-year-old passengers—as we were at the time?)

  I felt guilty and responsible that the place wasn’t better tended, but I liked the feel of the long soft grass tickling my calves, and the smell of the black earth and the ragged cedar hedges that hid the barren field to the east. It was the middle of the day in the middle of the week, and, to my relief, we were the only two people in the cemetery.

  We had to pass through the old cemetery (some graves dating back to the early 1800s) to get to the new cemetery, and, in the maze of weathered white crosses and headstones inscribed by verse describing deaths from childbirth and influenza and old age, I found myself slowing down. I sensed behind each ordinary grave an extraordinary tale, just as Aunt Lovey had said. I wanted to read all the inscriptions and imagine the stories of these dead people’s lives. Ruby was impatient and unaffected by the
strangers’ graves. “It’s up there past the catalpa tree, Rose.”

  The headstones grew larger as we moved toward the new section, gray and clay and pink and polished, some with hand-painted pictures, some with lavishly landscaped plots, neat beds of annuals, and frothy perennials. A few of the headstones were dwarfed by bushes planted long ago and forgotten. We’d brought two wilting pink peonies from Nonna’s thorny bush out back.

  A sweat bee buzzed around my ear as we searched and found the green double granite Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey had chosen for themselves when they long ago wrote their wills. We set the two fragrant pink peonies, entwined, on top of the double headstone and said a few private words to them both.

  Ruby began to cry. Not to sob but, worse, a tight little whimper that stretched her cheeks, and mine, and was no release at all.

  “Aunt Lovey would call this a waste of time,” I said.

  “I know,” Ruby sniffed.

  “She’d say our time was better spent cleaning out the silverware drawer,” I said.

  “I know,” she sniffed again.

  “They’re not here, Ruby.”

  “I know.”

  “What can I do, Ruby?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Let’s go wait for the bus.”

  “Okay.”

  As I turned to move, Ruby’s hand, the hand that lives on my neck and shoulder and is so much a part of me I imagine its pulse linked to my heart, not hers, suddenly lost its grip and, as had only ever happened when my sister was very sick, my balance shifted and the two of us nearly careened headfirst into the sharp edge of Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash’s stone.

  The deadweight of my fainted sister forced me to my knees. “Ruby. Ruby. Ruby,” I whispered and shook her, but she didn’t wake up.

  “Help,” I whispered in the direction of Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash.

  I felt Ruby’s lids lift. “Did I faint?” she asked.

  I was afraid to rise. I knew our blood pressure was low and that I’d be dizzy. There was an ant, or some other small insect (I couldn’t turn to look), biting the back of my knee. I took some pleasure in the irritation. I think it helped me focus. “What can we do, Ruby? I want to help you.”

  “Is it time for the bus?”

  I made Ruby drink all the water we’d packed in the knapsack, and we each ate a raisin cookie (made from Aunt Lovey’s mother’s recipe, which I thought was nice). After a short time we rose and started for the road. The long grass sliced at my bare legs. The sweat bee that had followed me before returned with some friends. I must have looked strange from a distance, swatting the air near our heads. Just before Ruby and I reached the bus stop, with only ten minutes to spare before Joey’s next run, I realized we’d forgotten the knapsack at the gravestone. We walked back to retrieve the bag from the grass where we’d left it. I used my foot to catch the strap and lift the thing closer to my hand. We turned to go, but Ruby stopped me with a gasp. She squeezed my shoulder and gestured at the top of Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash’s double headstone. The entwined peonies were gone.

  We searched the surrounding area, then checked the nearby gravestones in case there was a vandal or an animal that might have swiped the flowers. The air hardly stirred, so the wind couldn’t have blown them away. And there wasn’t a squirrel in sight. We were stumped. Then Ruby decided, by process of elimination, that if it wasn’t an animal or a vandal or the wind that took the peonies, it must have been a ghost (or ghosts). It was obviously a sign from Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash. They wanted us to know that they were all right. And together.

  That night, Ruby slept for the first time in months. I stayed awake and wrote a short story about a sister’s kind deception, encouraging myself that I’d done the right thing tricking Ruby about the disappearing flowers.

  As Ruby’s sadness lifted, so did mine.

  Mysterious Ways

  Our cinder-block bungalow sits in the middle of Chippewa Drive, a short straight street lined with identical cinder-block bungalows, each with a small window on either side of a solid wood door. The kind of house a child will draw when she’s still in her stick-people phase. The houses are architecturally the same, but their owners have changed them so that, except for being identifiable as bungalows, they are as different as any two people. Back then Mrs. Foyle (Berb’s estranged wife), even though she was just a renter, had painted the little home in forest green, with a lemon-yellow trim. The lawn ornaments—an elf on a toadstool, a frog couple in wedding apparel, a large fairy with pointed ears and butterfly wings—were hers too. Mrs. Foyle caught Ruby and me staring at the ornaments one day and remarked, “Aren’t they a hoot?” On a particular weekend, when Frankie was ripped on lemon gin, he swung a golf club at the frog couple and kicked the shit out of the elf.

  Frankie Foyle was crude. And rude. And dangerous. And a hero of sorts. He had saved Uncle Stash’s life (and nearly shot him in the ditch after his heart attack) and was a current object of obsession for Ruby and me. (“Desire” is too tepid to describe our crushes.) We’d known Frankie since first grade. Then he was a chubby, scowling boy with wiry blond hair who sat with us at the back of the bus and talked nonstop about hockey and basketball and baseball. Now he was tall and broad, with smoldering eyes and pouting lips and locks that shone gold in the sun. He was a natural athlete (much too cool for team sports, but he dazzled with a Frisbee) and had reportedly outrun the Leaford police on three separate occasions. He was popular and infamous, a druggie, and a dog with the girls.

  I argued about sports with Frankie. (We both liked the Tigers and the Pistons, but for some inexplicable reason he liked the Maple Leafs! The Leafs? If you live in Leaford, your team’s gotta be the Red Wings!) Ruby and Frankie commiserated about their grades. They both failed math and went to summer school nearly every year. I got straight As in every subject except math, where I got an A+. Still, I had to go to summer school with Ruby, who could not fathom functions or equations or algebra or geometry. When I groaned about it to Aunt Lovey, she’d said, “Ruby’s going to summer school for the math, but you’ll be learning a valuable lesson too, Rose.”

  I’d have stomped, if I were a stomper. “It’s just not fair,” I whined.

  “Yep.” She’d nodded. “That’s the lesson.”

  Having learned that life wasn’t always fair, and even less so for a girl attached to her sister, I took some comfort in knowing that Frankie Foyle would be at summer school and that Ruby and I could worship him from our pushed-together desks at the back of the room. Ruby insisted Frankie was disgusting, but I knew, the way I knew everything about Ruby, that she was infatuated with him too.

  We were eager to accompany Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey to the house on Chippewa Drive each Sunday afternoon, which is when they did maintenance inside and out. Uncle Stash raked the leaves, shoveled the snow, cut the grass, and watered the flowers while Aunt Lovey sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Foyle, pouring sympathy, drinking tea. Once in a while Frankie was home, dribbling his basketball idly in the driveway or lying facedown on the broken lounge chair in the backyard. (He had angry red pimples all over his back.) We spied on him from behind curtains. When Frankie came inside, we went out. We inhaled when he shifted, gasped when he moved, hoped he’d see us, died when he did.

  Sometimes he wore gym shorts.

  On one particular Saturday, we were to accompany our aunt and uncle to the Chippewa house to see about a leaky pipe that couldn’t wait a day. Aunt Lovey thought it was something Frankie could have looked after. He was seventeen years old, after all. But Uncle Stash wanted to take care of the leak. After his heart attack, he’d taken a leave of absence from Vanderhagen’s. But he hated being idle. He even, disastrously, took up golf. “I am only Slovak on whole golf course,” he told us, winking. “Hovno!”

  They were going to bring separate vehicles. Aunt Lovey would be getting groceries after what needed doing was done. Uncle Stash would drive himself home in the truck. I wanted to go with Uncle Stash. Ruby wanted to go with Aunt Lo
vey. It was always like that, and we laughed.

  When we discovered that Frankie and his mother were not at home, we’d gone over to see Nonna, disappointed to find that she was gone too. (She’d gotten to the train station herself and rushed off to Windsor when her son, Nick, called to say he needed money.) Ruby and I wandered back to the rented house, entering unnoticed through the side door. I saw that the door to the basement, which was usually locked from one side or the other, was open a crack. We had never been down in the basement before. We were not under any circumstances allowed to go down in the basement. Here I saw a unique opportunity.

  Ruby whispered, “No way, Rose,” when I reached for the door but didn’t object further when I pulled it open all the way. Her heart was thudding, and mine was too, because this was not a regular basement—this was where Frankie Foyle slept. And that’s why we weren’t allowed down.

  Ruby and I knew about Frankie’s basement room. Everyone at Leaford Collegiate knew about Frankie’s room. It was a place of fable and legend where Frankie had sex with a married woman from Chatham, and French girls from across the river, and college girls home from Windsor and London for the weekend. It was where the senior boys got stoned and the cool kids pulled all-nighters. Frankie had a full bar with imported beer and liquor, a tray of glow-in-the-dark condoms, and a stereo system worth six thousand dollars.

  Ruby and I didn’t discuss it as we inched down the stairs, but decided that to see this room just once would be worth the consequences if we got caught. The truth is we never expected we’d get caught.

  As I found the first stair with my foot, we were hit by a deadly stench. Ruby buried her nose in my neck. “Gross.”