Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  Radio was blasting and I was trying to think. It’s pitiful how mixed up I was. I remember thinking that Ken didn’t give me that weird ache in my chest like Dave done. (No clue, eh, what that weird feeling is. Duh.)

  I’m thinking, maybe I should move in with Ken. He knows me. He knows what I’ll do to keep a job. I’m not no fake or wannabe with him. I’m just my fair-and-square shit self. Dave thinks I’m something special. Dave must be crazy. I remember striking on that idea and thinking, Dave’s nuts. Yeah, that explains it! That’s why he’s treating me so good. He thinks I’m somebody else who’s worth caring about.

  Just past the hospital, Ken turns up a side street. Stops the car. “Did you ever live in a detached house?”

  We’re in front of a white bungalow on a decent enough street. Shrubs in front, covered in snow. Green front door. Wreath on it.

  I’m all mixed up. Trying to figure out if it would be better to go live with Ken. I tell him I want to see inside.

  He says, “Whoa, baby! All right!”

  He unlocks the car doors, heaves his heavy-set ass out. I follow him a few steps up his driveway. He’s got his back turned. He’s picking out his house key.

  My head clears.

  I take off. Run across the road. Right through the people’s yard. Bust through their back hedge. Snow down my neck. Rip my pantyhose. Don’t quit running till I’m in the hospital emergency waiting room. Lock myself in the can, lean on the sink and catch my breath.

  I look at the puffing person in the mirror and pant out, “Dave’s way better than Ken.”

  The mirror woman looks me in the eye like, well, shit, genius, no kidding!

  Then I go see Josie. She’s sitting up in bed looking better. Shines them eyes of hers on me. I let out a long breath as I sit down.

  Josie, she waits a while, looking at me. Then she says, “I seen something.”

  I’m thinking, not now, for pity’s sakes.

  But she starts in, telling me this daydream she had. She seen me holding a candle. And a man come to my door with a winning lottery ticket. Snow falling on his ball cap.

  “I wouldn’t laugh, Rose,” she says. “Once in a while, somebody wins. Why couldn’t it be you?”

  “I don’t buy them tickets. They’re nothing but a tax on stupidness.”

  But Josie, she put her head to one side and sat there, looking at me, smiling, like, in her mind, I’ve already had some lucky ticket handed to me.

  “Oh, and…” she says and stops. She rummages around in her bedside table drawer there, and hasn’t she still got that magazine picture! She gets me to look careful at the space between two houses. I look through her magnifying glass. There’s her finger, big, pointing. Fingernail looks like a new moon.

  In front of that moon, you can just see somebody. I never noticed no one before. But there’s a person in the picture alright, a man in a plaid shirt. It gives me a jolt because, jeeze, under the magnifying glass, he looks a lot like Dave.

  I toss the picture like it’s caught fire. “You’re scary!”

  She says, “Maybe that guy’s your winning ticket.”

  I says, “Who was running after me in their cast a few weeks ago, telling me Dave was no good, telling me to kick him out?”

  “I told you it was just what I heard,” she says. “That’s what Marg and them were saying. I told you I never seen nothing, then. It’s just since I been laying here I seen him as a handyman. Then I seen the man at the door with a lucky ticket. Then I seen him in the town. Those are omens.”

  I says, “You’re cracked. You’re right nuts.”

  She says, “The more you look, the more you see, right?”

  I let out a big sigh and slumped down. Ken would be steaming pissed now. He might fire me. Or he might be hanging around wanting to beat me up. I didn’t know if he seen where I went.

  I wanted to tell Josie. I just wanted so bad to spit it all out to her about Ken. But she’d think I was a disgusting bitch. After what she just said about Dave, too, I figured I’d better keep quiet.

  “Seen Darlene yesterday. Didn’t have nothing in the place, not a kibble left to feed her cat. Peeking out of her blinds there, like there’s a war in the street.”

  And I told how Sally was backsliding without her. “Never gets out of bed but to shit, pee, or open another can of lima beans.”

  Josie says, “There’s just the one person in Group whose story I ain’t heard lately.”

  But I just couldn’t tell her my story. What if Josie lost all respect for me? Stopped giving me them icy little fingers of hope on the back of my neck? Stopped making me smile and wonder?

  Ken wasn’t anywheres that I could see out the window.

  I went out a back door of the hospital, slipped along the back way, and got home.

  When Dave come in, I was sitting at the kitchen table staring at my sheet of homework for tomorrow. It’s a blank sheet that just says at the top, Today, it’s not my fault when….

  9.

  JOSIE’S DOG WAS STILL AT OUR PLACE and taking up a lot of the floor. When Dave went to go around it, he caught his leg on the edge of my TV stand. I says, “Oh! Sorry! That thing’s sticking out.”

  He says, “I walk into the furniture and you apologize.” He says, “I ought to go where I’m looking.”

  “Well,” I says, “I could put some tape or something over that corner so nobody dings themself.”

  “If I go in the kitchen and sit on a knife, what are you going to do? Run and tape up all the knives? Apologize to my butt?”

  He sees my paper there that I’m trying to work on. Asks if it’s okay if he looks at it. (He asks me!)

  I says, “Sure.” Slide it over to him.

  “Today, it’s not my fault when…. Boy, they got your number! Put down, It’s not my fault when Dave Smith walks into the furniture!”

  I laugh, eh, but he’s serious. Thinks it’s a good example.

  I says, “I’d feel foolish writing that.”

  He hangs around and bugs me. “What are they after, then?”

  I don’t know. More important stuff.

  Dave won’t quit. It’s the tip of the iceberg, according to him. He says I apologize for breathing. “Write that, about the TV stand, and see what the shrink says. I bet she’s going to say you’re right on to something.”

  I sat there trying to think of some more important kind of thing that isn’t my fault. “Rose, do you need help to get started?” That’s Meredith’s voice in my head.

  Okay. Sorry. I’m starting. I’m trying to think. This is just the same as what I didn’t know last week. What, in my life, is not my fault? Ken?

  No. I do something to make men hit on me. I must. It’s not like I was good-looking. Ken must be my fault. Besides, I run away when I was fifteen. If I hadn’t did that, maybe I would have finished school and gotten a decent job. So I’m poor and hate my job and have to put up with shit at work, but that’s all my fault because I quit school and run off.

  I sit there, chewing the pencil, thinking, the whole mess of my life is my own fault.

  Half hour later, Dave wants to know if I’ve put down about the TV stand. To shut him up, and because I can’t think of nothing else to put, I write that down.

  “See there,” he says, “now you’re started. Put down about the dirty glass at The Pig. Remember when you got the dirty glass and you were saying, ‘Sorry to mention it. Sorry to bug you!’ Sorry, sorry, like as if it’s your fault they didn’t wash it right.”

  I wrote on my homework, “It’s not my fault if they don’t wash a glass correct at The Pig & Whistle Pub.”

  “Don’t that feel good?” Dave says. “What about the sidewalk? You should hear yourself. You say to every person that walks into this place, you say, ‘Watch out for the bump there. It’s heaved up. Sorry.’”

  “Do I
?”

  “Every time. ‘Sorry,’ you say, like it’s your fault. Like you’re in the public works crew and it’s your job to patch the sidewalk.”

  So I wrote that down. “It’s not my fault the sidewalk outside of here is heaved up.”

  I said I could put down stuff out of the news. Blood, fires, crazy religions, floods, which was, none of it, my fault. Dave didn’t think I should run off at the mouth with all of that.

  He says, “You never apologize for none of that anyways.”

  “What else do I apologize for?”

  Dave says, “You know, Toes, the first time I pulled up your sweater and seen your little body there, you know what you said?”

  According to Dave, what I did then was I apologized for the size of my boobs. (I never got an A in school, eh. Only in underwear.)

  “You want me to write, It’s not my fault I’m flat?’”

  He says, “You’re the shape the good Lord made you and it’s cute. I don’t know how you’re going to say that on the sheet. But that’s the whole thing, right there. There’s nothing wrong with you, Rosie. You’re good the way you are. Your body’s nice and you’re nice. You’re fun. You’re straightforward. You’re quick to catch on. You got a heart of gold. You look fine. You don’t have to be sorry for nothing about the way you are.”

  I says, “You are a lucky ticket!”

  Then of course I had to explain to him about Josie’s dream of me and some lucky ticket. And I told him he’s in her picture, there, kind of shadowy, coming out from between two houses.

  He laughed. He says, “That girl has fell on her head once or twice too often.”

  Josie’s dog opens its eyes, lifts its nose off the floor and gives him this look, as if to say, watch what you say about Josie.

  “Even her dog’s spooky,” he says. “Ain’t you?” he says, running his sock foot, gentle, over the dog.

  Then he went and monkeyed with my old dollhouse. He’s repairing it for Jenny. Landlord lets him use the garage to do his sawing in.

  I wrote down everything else I could think of that I’m always apologizing for.

  “At least you done your homework,” Dave says, when we’re getting into bed. “Have you heard the one about the student who says to his teacher, he says, ‘Would you punish me for something I didn’t do?’ Teacher says, ‘Of course not.’ Kid says, ‘Good. Because I didn’t do my homework.’”

  Dave never went too far in school. His dad wanted him to go to work in his uncle’s garage but he never did.

  “That work don’t suit me,” he says. “I like to take and build things. I’d like to build a house again some day soon. That’s what I like doing. My cousin Tom’s doing real good, contracting back north. They put up the big summer homes for rich people, eh. Or, you know what I’ve been dreaming of this fall?” he says when we’re cuddled down. “I could get into a bigger challenge. Someday I want to build something bigger than a house.”

  I opened my eyes wide and looked at the dark. Couldn’t even croak out, what, for instance, did you have in mind to build, that’s bigger than a house?

  Dave was asleep, that night, long time before I was. I looked into the dark and seen Josie’s drawing like it was shining on the wall from a projector. Stone and wood and glass. Standing out on a fine, waterfront lot. I could smell the fresh water and feel the breeze off it. Dave in a hard hat and tool belt.

  Yellow flag snapping. It’s got a J on it. Not a printed J. Handwriting J. It was Josie who drew that, wasn’t it? But didn’t Jenny say it? My mind snagged on that question a second before it let go and washed along the river to sleep.

  Ken never did nothing to me at work on Tuesday. Didn’t say nothing about yesterday.

  When I got to Group, Marg and Sally were sitting in the waiting room with Tammy, talking about what’s the best colour to paint hotel bedrooms. Marg, she likes a butter yellow. Perks her right up, she says. Of course Sally is pushing for pink. Tammy wasn’t saying much.

  We didn’t expect to hear no clunking cast on the stairs this week, but there it was.

  We all stampeded to see Josie and help her out. She comes limping up the stairs with her overnight bag, wearing reindeer antlers. Says they’re not reindeer. They’re elk antlers.

  She was so light and weak. Just got out of hospital. Took a cab straight to here.

  Tammy grabbed Josie’s little case. Sally had to know if Josie was warm enough or too warm or if she wanted a drink of water. She was propping Josie’s bad leg up and asking if she’d had any supper.

  “Ladies!” Josie says, when she’s all set up there like the queen. “We got no further problems!”

  Marg, she busts out with her funny laugh. Like a three-litre jug getting shook.

  We are like your one-stop shopping for any problem you might care to name. But Josie’s Josie. She’ll tell you the sky is purple polka dots. We got no further problems, she says.

  Josie’s been laying in the hospital just doing her best work, there, with the daydreams. The hotel is going to have these canvas deck chair items like they have on an ocean liner, eh, and you can open them out flat for to look at the sky. Our screen porch is going to have a clear ceiling, so you can lay on your deck chair and take in the stars and the northern lights. There’s going to be maps of all the stars, with low red lights to see by, because Josie heard somewheres that red light don’t wreck your night vision. And there’s going to be experts come to see the caves.

  “What caves?” I says.

  Josie gives me a glance and she says that, on the far side of the point, there’s secret caves. She seen them, she says.

  “What point?”

  Hotel’s going to be on a point of land sticking out into the lake. So you can see the water on three sides.

  And there’s a man coming out of the cave, holding a rabbit by the ears. Josie seen him up against a clear blue sky. A crow flew past his head. Nobody knows about these caves except they’re in old legends that the Native people tells.

  My niece Jenny’s going to find them. The man in the cave will show her. He’s not good news, the cave man. But he’s going to be the last of the bad news. She seen him up against the sky, holding a rabbit by the ears.

  Everybody’s dazed, listening.

  I figure it’s whatever they got her on for pain, except I wouldn’t put it past her to know that I have been thinking about that brain-injured caveman father. (Humans, eh? Far as I know, nothing else is twisted like us. The father robin, out in the trees, he don’t try to mate with his little birds, does he? A rock must have never fell on no cave bird.)

  That’s what Josie’s doing making up these caves, I bet. This here man with a rabbit, he’s going to turn out to be a dream of our first bad ancestor.

  The rabbit put me in mind of my sister Sandra’s stuffed rabbit that she had when she was a little girl. She held it in her hand when Dad held her down in the boiler room at school.

  Tammy says, “Will we take red lights into the caves to look at the pictures by?”

  Sally says that they’ve got a good deal on flashlights now, over at the Canadian Tire. We could put red plastic over them.

  “No, we’ll need real burning torches,” Josie says. “The firelight is going to flicker and it’ll make the old pictures come to life. Them old stories will be like alive on the walls. They’ll tell us the secrets that are under the world.”

  Meredith heard that. She stopped in the doorway. Frances bumped into her. Like two out of the three stooges.

  We’re the toys in the toyshop, and they just caught us, off the shelf, alive, playing.

  Meredith never said nothing. Squashed her lips together and walked on into the meeting room. We filed in behind her. The weirdness, it followed us.

  There was a new pot of red geraniums sitting on the windowsill. Were them flowers ever bright red!

  We al
l kept on looking at Josie. Heads full of secret caves and firelight. Icy fun tickling up and down our spines.

  We went around and heard everybody’s week. Sally’d slept every day. Meredith tried to get her to talk about what it was that she was avoiding by going to sleep. Rest of us weren’t worried. Sally’d be okay now that Josie was back.

  But Sally answered the question. She’s got all these thoughts that goes through her all day like hot needles. “If I’m awake, I remember things.”

  Meredith was on that like a tiger. “What things do you remember?”

  “Bad things. A radio.”

  “Is a radio bad?”

  “That’s where I went.”

  “When did you go into the radio?”

  “When bad things were happening.”

  “You’re safe here, Sally. Do you want to tell us what bad things happened, that made you dissociate yourself from your body and pretend to be one of the people in the radio? Is that what you did?”

  Sally looks around at us. Big blue eyes wild. Like she’s getting ready to jump off a bridge.

  “What was happening when you needed to go into the radio, Sally?”

  Sally’s breathing quick. God, I can feel it right with her. She wants to take the jump and tell. But she’s scared what we’ll think of her.

  Now, Marg moved. Just shifted her weight, so that Sally glanced over at her. Sally looked at Marg for about a week. Breathing scared. Everybody was froze, waiting. Marg looked back at her steady, like, okay Sally, we’re here for you.

  Sally busted out with it. “When I was a little kid, Mr. Mullen used to do it to me in the back room of his auto shop!”

  When she said it, the world did not end.“He seemed like he liked me. I used to go over there. He was the only person who seemed like he liked me.”

  Meredith said, “So Mr. Mullen abused you, but yet he provided your only source of affection?”