Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  I never seen myself buying a house before.

  “If you rent, you’re just throwing her down the drain,” Dave says. “We’re better off to buy.”

  All this was brand new to me. Just the thoughts of having my own house!

  I went to see Josie the next week, finally. I hadn’t saw her the whole time Jenny was sick.

  “Josie?” I says. I was feeling a bit cautious, not wanting to say she was a fortune teller, which pisses her off. But I had to ask her. “Is the hotel and everything … is it really going to come true?”

  Josie, she raised her chin like a wild horse, like as if she could smell our luck starting to change. Didn’t look pissed off.

  “It is, isn’t it? It’s going to come true!”

  Josie nodded, but she looked sad.

  But that was so great! Why would she be sad?

  “Do you think we’re leaving you? Of course, we wouldn’t leave you here, Josie! We’ll take you along with us. I’m planning to look for someplace up there for you.”

  That might be the only time I ever seen Josie surprised. Them eyes widened up.

  “Some fortune teller you are!” I says. “You don’t know shit about the future if you think we’re ever going to leave you behind!”

  She reached out her arms and we hugged, her sitting forward in the wheelchair. The bones of her spine sticking out.

  I told her I’d look into chronic care homes where they could look after her, near to me and Dave. I told her we were looking for a house to buy.

  “In a valley,” was alls she said.

  Dave got cranky, traipsing all over, turning down perfectly all right houses because they weren’t in valleys. I knew enough by now, though, to wait.

  “All things come to them who waits,” according to Sally. We have to wait for God to answer our prayers. (Mind you, she don’t give Him no peace until He does.) Josie, I don’t know whether she prays, or what you’d call it, but she’s sure got some type of a hotline to Whatever. She never gives up neither. Both of them two girls are full, to the hairline, with hope. Josie gazing at her pictures till she can see the times to come. Sally sewing, planting, collecting stuff, starting a hotel bank account, saying her prayers.

  Sally don’t just wait and pray. She hops into action. She “puts her hand to the plough,” as she says.

  I hadn’t said nothing yet to Marg or the others.

  Tammy was in a panic the next week, over the vice principal wanting to talk to her. Asshole was out of jail by this point, and Tammy, she figured she’d better call him up and get him to talk to the vice principal. Marg’s over there holding Tammy’s hand while Tammy phones the school. They say the vice principal is in a meeting, ask can he call her back. So Marg spends the whole day walking up and down in Tammy’s apartment, waiting for the phone to ring, convincing her, forty times, not to call Asshole in on it.

  “Turns out Matthew shoved some other kid in the schoolyard,” Marg told me. “Nobody even got hurt. They give him a detention, and that was alls there was to it.”

  Me and Marg were sitting at the Times Square Restaurant. I invited her there. To tell her about us moving. Was not looking forwards to it.

  Marg, she was busy catching me up on our friends, and I sat and listened, wondering what I was going to do without her.

  “Darlene’s met some prize over the internet again. This one’s trying to get her to fly to Cancun.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Good thing she can’t afford to.”

  “Yeah. Hey did you hear she won the fridge?”

  “She did? Still got the fridge draw at the Pig, do they?”

  How was I going to lead up to telling Marg? Finally just bust out with it. Said we were moving.

  Marg looked at the cream mixing into her coffee. “Wish I was going too,” she says.

  I grabbed her hand. I says, “Why not? That would be so great! This will make it perfect!”

  Marg looks into her mug. The cream in the coffee looked like them pictures you see of outer space, swirls of worlds. Marg said Tammy and Darlene would fall apart the minute she turned her back on them.

  Marg got a deluxe sundae with peanuts and caramel sauce.

  She smiled at me over the top of Mount Whipped Cream there. “Tammy’d kill me if she seen this.”

  “Tammy still the calorie police?”

  “Can’t you tell? I’m fading to a shadow.” Marg give her belly a pat. She’s still a big fat woman. But definitely not so much as before. Marg gobbled down a few big mouthfuls. “I know this ain’t doing me no good,” she says. She looks at the sundae, sad. “I know it’s a bad Coping Mechanism. It’s what I done for comfort when I was an abused kid. I know it’ll only make me ashamed of myself later. I know and yet I’m eating it.”

  Marg said she had to find some healthy Coping Mechanisms.

  We were learning that in Group. Meredith said you got to find some good way to get comfort. It ain’t rocket science. But, frig, it was news to us at that time. “Healthy Coping,” Meredith calls it. We were to take notice of anything we liked to do that was not damaging and could give us a feeling of comfort. It was crucial to our ongoing mental health, Meredith said, that we find healthy sources of comfort to replace our old, damaging coping mechanisms. I made a Healthy Coping stepping stone that night.

  I made it a turquoise colour because a comfort I’d took notice of was walking beside water. I noticed that lakes and streams, the colours and the motion of them, could comfort me any time.

  I notice that I get comfort, now, out of working on writing this, too. I like trying to write stuff down. Time goes by, eh, and I’m sitting here, lost in space, trying to get yous to see what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye. All them pictures, so bright and so dark. And the voices too, loud and soft, out of the past. Telling yous about the Times Square Restaurant there, I could smell the grilled cheese. Kind of fun. Maybe I’ll even write about something else after I’m done telling this.

  Whatever works for yous, eh. Long as it don’t hurt nobody else, leave yous worse off after you’ve did it, jam your arteries, poison your liver, kill off your brain cells, blow up your love life, get yous arrested or beat to pulp, or make fat pigs out of yous.

  Some people, it’s model trains. Make theirself a little wee world they can handle. Some people, it’s scrapbooks. Fight off death, so it don’t wipe out all memory of theirself. Whatever gives yous a bit of comfort. Make sure yous find something like that.

  32.

  THE FOSTER HOME was in deep shit for losing track of Jenny that day. Not that they meant to. Sandra must have peered in the window and beckoned Jenny out or something like that, but it looked like the people might not get to be foster caregivers no more.

  Jenny was at this other place now, for the time being, while me and Dave were scrambling to put together a real home for her. She hated the second foster home.

  We had forms to fill in about how we were planning to provide for her, where she would be living, who was going to look after her while I was working and all that.

  Too bad the good Lord don’t make people fill in this type of information before He hands out the kids in the first place.

  The Children’s Aid had a lot of questions about Dave. I could see why. They got to watch they don’t send Jenny into another abuse situation.

  “They want a police check on you,” I says to him one night on the phone.

  There was this long silence. Finally he says, “There’s nothing on paper.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, there’s cops around that town that pretty well knew, eh, what I was into, before. They took me in a few times. But they never pinned nothing on me.”

  I started breathing again. “That’ll be okay then, likely.”

  “Think so? They won’t ask around?”

  “I imagine they’d have to st
ick with what they’ve got in their computer or whatever.” I hoped to God I was right.

  Alls Dave can think of is we got to get Jenny out of here, get her where she’s safe, before something else happens. He don’t trust foster people to look after her. And why should he?

  He keeps saying, “We got to get her out! We got to get her out!”

  The foster home, they’re not bad people. But there’s always things that go through your mind, eh. You think, what if the foster woman turns her back and Ian jumps out and grabs Jenny? You remind yourself: Ian’s in jail. Well, but what if some other jerk grabs her?

  What if it’s sort of true what Sandra said about Jenny looking for it? We learned in Group that kids do get conditioned to sex.

  (I remember we all had that Question to Think About one night: how did your abuser condition you to accept sex? We were joking about it on the stairs, Josie calling out, “Don’t forget to think about what kind of conditioner you use.”)

  I kept phoning the foster woman to ask her if she was being careful at the store, careful with any uncles that come to visit, careful, careful of our sunshine.

  I went over there as much as I could. Jenny was miserable, missing the first foster people, not sure of nothing. Her mother wasn’t coming to see her no more.

  I told Meredith in Group once about the way Jenny first showed me a picture of what Ian was doing. Jenny couldn’t say it. She didn’t even know a word for it. But she could draw me a picture. Meredith told me about this whole line of shrink work that’s about getting people to draw pictures. Not just kids, neither. Art Therapy, they call that.

  The adoption people were talking about lining up a shrink to work with Jenny in our new place. Jenny really likes doing art. I suggested how about an art therapist.

  It’s funny, eh, the way they stare at a person like me if I come out with anything like that. Like the way they’d stare at Josie’s dog if he lifted his nose off the floor and said to get Jenny an art therapist.

  Well, they did get her an art therapist. And maybe I got a couple of brownie points for thinking of it.

  Anyways they told me everything for the adoption was coming along. I’d did good on the assessment.

  Sandra signed her release papers. She was waiting for Ian to get out of jail, she said. She still wanted to marry him.

  Dave did good on his assessment.

  I went back north the next weekend to house hunt and talk to the people at the plumbing place. They wanted me to start in about a month’s time. Dave, he’d been working on the baby-sitting angle. Lined up his cousin Jan, if that was okay with me. I was real happy with that but surprised. I wouldn’t have thought to ask Jan. Why would she have to babysit, with Tom doing so good?

  She don’t have to, Dave tells me. She’d like to. She thinks it would be nice to have Jenny around, and little Alexander would like Jenny to play with.

  The way these people think, eh. It blows me away. People that would take on an extra kid when they didn’t have to! Jan would like to have Jenny!

  Kids was a pain in the ass. That was the idea you grew up with in our family.

  We had to write on the form where Jenny would be living. We needed a place quick. The “house in a valley” thing was getting past a joke.

  Dave was in a mood after I turned up my nose at the fourth house that was good except that it was built on rising ground.

  We went into the Chinese place for lunch.

  Sally’s waiting tables. There’s old Elmer that’s always sitting in the corner. He yells out, “David! You look so miserable anybody’d take you for a married man!”

  Dave, he managed a smile. He was still pissed off, though.

  Uncle Elmer there, he won’t quit. He moves over to our table. “What’s eating you, son?” he says.

  Dave says, “House huntin’.”

  I was looking at the vinegar bottle, thinking back on the first time I ever come here, how John who makes the furniture had took hold of the vinegar and used it to stand for the church. And I was in a dream land, finding Josie’s town.

  And now here we were, coming here for real.

  Real was different than dream. But I wasn’t ready to throw dreams away. Dreaming’s what’s got us this far. We’d be fools to let go of it now.

  “She’s got this notion.” Dave lets out a sigh. “She wants a house in a valley.”

  Elmer, he looks at me. They’ve wondered about me, right from the start, eh, because I knew what kind of pies there was here that day, and a couple of other things. Them stories ain’t lost nothing, I’ll bet, in a year’s worth of telling.

  “In a valley!” Elmer says, looking at me strange. “Got the second sight, have you?”

  “Me, no,” I says. “But we got this friend, she does. I never knew her wrong yet. She says pick a house in a valley.”

  “Well then,” Elmer says, “I take that for a sign! You’re meant to buy my place!” He gives us a big yellow, teeth-missing grin.

  After lunch, we’re bumping along a gravel road with Elmer, going to look at his place. Elmer’s getting up in years. He’s been thinking it’s about time to sell. Says he can’t find a woman who wants to move in with him and chop the wood for his stove. At least he won’t have to move far, he tells us. There’s a nice place right across the road.

  The goosebumps come over me like I’d ran through a sprinkler. Josie! That’s what you’re up to!

  “What kind of a nice place is right across the road?” I said that but I was pretty sure I knew.

  I could see Dave’s jaw relax. He was guessing too.

  “Oh,” Elmer says, “like a nursing home. You can have your own apartment in the one end of it. Or if you need more doctoring, you can move into a room on the other side. County runs it.”

  We come over a hill and there they are below us, down in the valley, a little house looking cosy under the trees at the end of a long lane. And, right across the road from that, a nursing home.

  The house was what the real estate people like to call “a handyman special.” Elmer, he hadn’t took a hammer and nail or a paint brush to her since his shoulder give out.

  “Well, it’s in a valley,” Dave whispers to me, as if that was all you could say for it.

  “How long you been having the shoulder trouble?” Dave says, standing in the hallway, wiggling the stair rail.

  Uncle Elmer says, “I was shovelling out around the hen house door and something give, right in there.” Elmer puts his left hand on his right shoulder joint. “Which year was that we had the big snow in April?”

  We walk through to the kitchen.

  “A while back, I guess, eh?” Dave says, looking around.

  There was a tin pie pan on the floor in one corner Elmer had been using to spit in. Didn’t always hit.

  “If I’d knew you was coming,” Elmer says, “I’d have did the dishes.”

  “Generally just do them up Saturday night while the water’s hot?” Dave asks him.

  Elmer give a nod.

  “I see the hydro goes by here,” Dave says. “You never got her hooked up, though?”

  Uncle Elmer said, long as there was a sun in the sky, he wasn’t going to pay nobody for light. And he had two good oil lamps, upstairs and down, for when the sun was down.

  The best thing about Elmer’s place was it was right on the lake.

  There was an old screen door with a spring. Water pump by the porch. Upstairs had two rooms. I was standing in one looking out at the apple tree just outside the window, thinking that Jenny would like to wake up and see that. It was all out in blossom, white and pink. The buds is dark pink on the outside. They open up pure white. Made me think of hope and Sally.

  A robin flew up with a dew worm, folded, tidy, in its beak. That’s how they’ll carry a worm to their babies. That parent bird flew up to a branch four feet in front of my
face. They’ve got a little bright spark of a black eye, eh, and I’m telling you, it looked at me special.

  You get a little nuts once you’re started with this “seeing signs” business. Oh well. Don’t cut off any type of seeing that you can do, I’d say. See alls you can. See signs and wonders. Look at a pink bud and see hope. Why not? Listen to the birds in the trees if they’re telling you something.

  Dave, he was in the other bedroom, shaking his head at the condition of the floor boards. Elmer had took and sawed a square right through them for the stove pipe.

  “I suppose you like this dump?” Dave whispers.

  I was lit up like one of Elmer’s oil lamps.

  Dave put his arm around me. “He better not want much for it.” But I could see he liked it too. Against his own better judgement. He liked it.

  We went away to think about it. Come back a second time. Took Jenny with us. First thing she done was she stood there inside the front door with her eyes shut, smile on her, right about from one pigtail to the other. She took a great big breath.

  She says, “It smells like Grandpa Al’s house!”

  That hunt camp damp, the water nearby, mouse, wood going soft, ferns by the door.

  I says, “We’ll get her cleaned up and aired out. That’s what we’ll do this summer, eh, honey? You can help me and Dave.”

  “We have to be careful not to destroy the good smells,” she says. “Can we please paint it all shades of yellow?”

  “If we buy it, you can pick whatever colour you want for your room.”

  “How about this room here, Jenny wren?” Dave’s looking around the front hall, which is no colour exactly and stained with wood smoke.

  I can see we’re likely going to buy this piece of crap, and I’m all bubbling happy.

  I asked Elmer if I could take Jenny upstairs and show her around. She scampered up like a chipmunk. By the time I got there she’d already found the robins’ nest.

  “They’re sleeping!”

  Being little, she could see right in under there where the nest was tucked. I squatted down with her and we looked at the two fat babies, resting their beaks—big red-edged wedges like two pieces of cherry pie—on the side of the nest. We could see the little birds breathing.