Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  What’s the matter with her? I peek in the box.

  There it is at the top of four thousand sheets of paper: Zhou Tao, R.R. #1, Strone, Sales Representative… and in big letters, his brand new, made it up himself, company name: HARD WEAR.

  They were all clambering to know what it was. Dave, he looked in the box and read it out loud.

  Charlie says, “I would’ve thought you might get some confusion with a name like that.”

  But Sally, she’s pretty near cutting off Tao’s air, crying, thanking her heavenly Father. And I’m laughing, trying to hug the both of them at the same time.

  Elmer says, “Women seems to like it.”

  “That’s what you’re after, selling clothes.”

  “Ellen always bought my overalls.”

  Dave and Al, they’re sitting there, the way they’re getting used to by now, waiting to find out what in the world just happened.

  Tao, he’s one of the family now. Because that’s the same thing he’s doing too. His eyes are round, for him, and he’s looking from one to another, blinking out through me and Sally’s hugs and kisses, wondering what in the world.

  I don’t know why he never run it past some of us that talks good English before he went and got all them sheets printed off. But, then again, if he had’ve, Sally maybe would have never braided the pink satin ribbon into her long blonde hair. And we wouldn’t have had their wedding reception for the first event at our brand new hotel.

  It wasn’t open yet. We weren’t done drywalling. But we planned on filling up the gaps with flowers.

  “We won’t need to buy them,” Sally told me, waving her hand around Al’s.

  She had plants growing in buckets and barrels all over the place on Al’s porch and windowsills, all up his driveway. She had flowers growing out of his old tin bath tub. (She makes him sit in a real bath once a week now.) She had gardens full of flowers. She had flowering vines all over his rusty harrows and ploughs in the yard.

  “All from the seeds I planted,” she tells me, with a shining face.

  I remember so clear the day she moved up here, the first out of all of us. Her and her baby plants that were going to grow up to be flowers on the porch of our hotel, dumb as that sure seemed at the time.

  When we’re sweating, unloading the second trailer load of buckets full of blooming plants out on to the hotel porch and it was a solid wall of pink flowers from end to end, and you couldn’t turn around for pink geraniums in the washrooms or see anybody behind the reception desk for more pink flowers, Dave wondered whether we maybe had pretty near enough flowers.

  I told him what we were looking at was not just flowers. “What we’re looking at is Sally’s hope.”

  41.

  THE YEAR AFTER Sally and Tao got married was another big year for the bunch of us. According to Sal, God moves in mysterious ways. Tao, he says that the way down is the way up.

  Whatever. Alls I know is the world is weird, the way things work out sometimes.

  That first summer at the lodge, it was a lot like the way we’d had it pictured. But different, of course, because real life is full of stuff that you don’t exactly picture beforehand. Little wee details like the green pens we got and the type of phones, the smell of new wood. It was all actual stuff.

  I set up my new desk at an angle so I could look out to my right and see a strip of the sparkling lake and also keep an eye, over the other way, on the front desk.

  Sally, she was getting set up to run the dining room. We had her in charge of the decorating in there. She was having a fight with the design fellow over the colour. Him threatening to jump off a bridge if she went and painted the walls of this wood, stone, and glass dining room the colour she wanted, which she said was like the inside of a shell and he said was like bubble gum. What they come down to ended up looking good to me. It was a subtle clay tone, according to the designer guy, that picked up a shade in the stone.

  Dave comes in the office and he says, “You sure that ain’t pink?”

  I got my bifocals that year, so I could read him the paint chip. “Says here it’s Pre-dawn.”

  Anyhow, with the view out them windows—the lake on three sides, blue at breakfast, green mirror for trees at lunch, silver with the moon at dinner—that couldn’t help being one gorgeous place to sit and eat. We built the star-gazing patio, put a see-through roof on her, like we always said. We got the deck chairs and the red lights. We done her all.

  There was the hotel, standing on solid rock in the real world, not nobody’s fantasy. Stone on stone.

  John, the furniture guy, he made us handsome log furniture for the lobby. We set it up in front of the big fieldstone fireplace.

  I put my hand on the smooth wood. Run my fingers over the cool, rough stones.

  Sally seen me. She says, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” I’m a Doubting Thomas, she says.

  Her Tao says all that we have ever seen in the mind, exists in some dimension.

  Anyways, I seen the lodge standing there in broad daylight with the Canada maple leaf flapping from the flagpole in the morning sun. I could hear it snapping in the wind and the gear jingling against the pole. I sat in the chairs. I seen the new landscaping with cedar chips. I walked on the flagstone path up to the door. I smelled the paint and the new wood. Helped to clean the windows.

  I guess I didn’t quite believe it was ours, though, till they hoisted the banner of Princess Jenny. Dave got Sally to sew that for her. A yellow flag with a big J. Rigged that up and flew it right under the maple leaf. When I seen that waving in the breeze off the lake, I went and turned in my notice at the plumbing place.

  Me and Marg went to work, full steam ahead, me in the hotel office and her on the desk.

  Tammy, she was there all the time too, once we got going, helping with the housekeeping. It done all our hearts good to see the changes in Tammy. If she could take her time, she could think things through good enough. Made her so proud.

  “Remember how she used to diddle over every little thing?” Marg says. “Couldn’t never make up her mind or get going on nothing?”

  We figure it was being so upset and nervous all the time, used to make her seem stupider than what she is.

  Marg done great on the desk, right from day one. The general public, it can’t come up with nothing more outrageous, ruder, more of a disaster or nothing, than what a sex abuse survivor has been used to. Marg, she can hold steady through anything. I can hear her out there.

  To one person, she’s saying, “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, thank you very much,” she’s saying to the next one.

  And to somebody else, all in the same steady Marg tone of voice, “We’ll get your father an ambulance.”

  Business was on the slow side. I was sick worrying that we’d made a big mistake. Put Al’s money into a dumb idea. Who was ever going to find out about a place way up here? We done some advertising. It cost a lot. Didn’t seem to do much.

  Dave’s dad, he started renting out boats and doing sightseeing trips. Dave tried to convince him he didn’t have to do nothing. But Al said he was weak in the knees from how much money he’d laid out lately and he’d be happier bringing some in again. Anyways, if he sat idle, he said, he’d get old.

  Young Matthew started helping him.

  And that’ll be the making of Matthew. Tagging after Al, learning all about boats, motors, repairs, ropes, fishing, birds, weather, and how to live. You could pretty near stand and watch that kid grow that summer, grow and heal and straighten up.

  Jenny, she was having a grand old time too, tagging after Dave, swimming or boat-riding with Al, helping Meghan around the hotel, playing with the cousins over at Jan’s. She had a lot of freedom. I was always nervous, but I tried not to let that cramp her style too much.

  Josie, she’d sit on the veranda. Je
nny’d go sit beside her. That’s what she usually done in her sad times now.

  I could get a glimpse out my office window, Jenny staring or hugging her rabbit and Josie watching her, nodding.

  I’d have rather saw Jenny swinging on the tires all the time, jumping into the lake, laughing with the kids, or running around after Al or Dave, like she didn’t have a care. She did them things. But then she’d be sitting in the shadow of the wall with Josie, gazing, serious, out at the sparkle and shine of Lost Gold Lake.

  That was Jenny’s nature. You could see it more and more. A thoughtful, deep little soul, with lots of happy times and also a wide streak of sadness.

  Town of Strone got an almighty kick out of having its very own millionaire. Local paper run a story, pretty near every week for a while there, on Al winning the lottery. What Al was thinking of doing with his money. Tom’s construction firm using a new type of beams. Al witching for the well. New resort lodge coming along on schedule. New resort lodge being named The Sunny Shore. We was always news.

  Of course, relatives Al never even heard of started getting in touch.

  “They get a warm family feeling for me,” he said. “Comes over them sudden when they read about the money.”

  We never did find out who told the newspaper about Group.

  Alls I know is I was sitting by the woodstove at home, one Wednesday night, with my feet up, for once, reading the paper. And I read that millionaire Al Smith’s daughter-in-law, Rose (née Underhill), who many of us know from Dodd’s Plumbing and Heating, was a survivor of childhood physical and sexual abuse.

  I hopped out of my chair like it had bust into flames, called Tammy and screamed at her. But she swore it wasn’t her. Said she never told nobody nothing.

  I was ready to sue that damn paper.

  Two days later, Marg steams in waving another newspaper clipping. Her aunt in Toronto sent it to her. And, holy shit, if we aren’t wrote up in there too!

  The human interest story that I’m telling yous here, the drift of it anyways, is right there in the paper! This group of low socio-economic sex abuse victims without a thin dime is now sitting pretty, aided by a backwoods millionaire lottery winner. Real-life Cinderella story, it says.

  We were mad as wet hens. Blamed it on Darlene. I bet it was her. Talked and fumed about getting a lawyer.

  But we never got around to that. Because, man, was that Toronto article good for business! The phone just started and it never quit. Online bookings filling in. Hotel caught on.

  And more than that, too. The day come when Marg called me out to the desk and introduced me to a guest.

  “This is Natasha,” Marg says. “She’s one of us.”

  So that’s how that all got started. Without us doing nothing to reach out to them, people, as Meredith would say, “from backgrounds like ours” just started showing up and talking to us.

  You’d see Sally sit down at a corner table with a guest. Or you’d see Marg walk around the desk and shake hands with somebody, looking her or him in the eye a certain way. I’d bring a person into my office, open up the bottom drawer of my filebox, and get out one or another of my stepping stones. The first one, usually: that old, red I can stand pain stepping stone. That first step. My red piece of paper was getting pretty tattered by then, but you could still make out the block letters I’d printed on it in black crayon: I CAN STAND PAIN.

  Tammy, she’d be out on the veranda, making this slicing down gesture, the right hand coming down on the left, in no uncertain terms. And we knew she was telling somebody to make the break, cut the asshole clean out of their life and don’t take them back for nothing, no matter what.

  It wasn’t just women, neither. We sure found that out. Lots of little boys have came in for the same shit. Mixes them up something awful because they’ve got the gay question to think about on top of everything else.

  We heard every kind of a story there is. Heard them over and over. It was quickly getting past what we could handle. I went and talked to Jenny’s shrink, Marion. Got her in on it. She started setting up retreats and weekends at the hotel.

  One day a telemarketer called. I got a soft spot for them people, eh. I know what the frig it’s like doing that job. I got talking to her. Wound up telling her to get to a shelter.

  Held the line while she looked up the number for it. Made her promise to go there straight from work.

  “And you don’t have to work where you’re working,” I says. I told her to look at the job listings. And, when she called for a new job, to tell the people what her strengths are.

  She didn’t know she had any.

  I says, “Sure you do.” I told her the strengths she must have had to survive this far and be working at all.

  Marg heard me preaching there. She had to laugh. She says, “You’re worse than what Sally is,” she says. “You’re like born again.”

  I says, “What?” I says, “Am I supposed to leave somebody sitting there with her background taking shit and say nothing? She’s a bright one. She’s only got to take that first step. and she’ll be on her way.”

  Marg smiles, pats my shoulder. She says, “Go, girl!”

  As Al said, the road was rising up to meet us and the wind was at our back.

  42.

  WE HAD A WHOLE YEAR like that. And it wasn’t until the summer when Jenny was eight that she come running in one day when I was opening the mail. “Guess what I saw! A cave!”

  I set a handful of letters down.

  “It’s big and special,” she says, “and full of pictures!”

  “Did Josie say something to you about a cave?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  Jenny nods.

  I says, “Are you fooling me? Is it a pretend cave?”

  Jenny said, “No. It’s real.”

  I says, “Take me to it.”

  But she wouldn’t agree to that. It was a secret. It was magic. Nobody could find it. I questioned her on that until I got to be pretty sure that the cave wasn’t a real cave. Seemed like it was some fantasy play place of her own. I asked her again if Josie had put it into her head.

  No.

  But where else would she have got an idea about a cave around here?

  When she’d been going on about it for a day or two, I went and talked to Josie. “I guess you and Jenny been talking about the old caves idea, eh?”

  Josie looked at me blank.

  “Did you say something to her about that? You must have. She keeps telling me about a cave.”

  I have hardly ever saw Josie looking like she didn’t know what I was talking about. But that’s the look on her now. She frowned and shook her head.

  I asked the rest of them. Everybody claimed they hadn’t said nothing to Jenny about a cave.

  It got so Jenny would tell me every night, when I was tucking her in, about what she seen that day in the cave. I’d sit on the edge of her little bed there and look out at the apple tree in the last light of them summer days. Little green apples forming. Robins flown.

  She told me there was a man in the cave. Then one night she whispered to me the man was like Ian. It give me the creeps.

  “A man?” I says. “You’re pretending, right honey? The cave is make-believe? And the caveman?”

  Jenny said no. She said it was real.

  “Are you talking to some stranger out there?”

  No. Not a stranger. She said she knew the man in the cave from long ago, when she was little. He was at mommy’s house.

  I said, “You are going to have to show me and Dave this cave tomorrow.”

  Morning come. Jenny said she couldn’t show us.

  I says, “Why not?”

  She didn’t say nothing. So I said, “The cave’s pretend, really. Ain’t it, Jenny?”

  She didn’t say nothing.

&n
bsp; “Jenny? Is this all fantasy?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well then, I want to know where this cave is and who this man is!”

  I couldn’t get her to agree on showing me the place. I told her she was not to go there by herself. She was not to talk to no man out there in the bush.

  I called the shrink.

  She said Jenny was finding a way to talk about what had happened to her. That was why Jenny was telling us that the man was no stranger. She was revisiting her past. It was positive, she said. To Jenny, it was not pretend because it was about something very real in her own mind. I should let her keep taking her little walks and communing with nature. I should just listen to her stories of what she was finding.

  I says, “But there’s no real cave, right? There’s not some man out in the bush?”

  Marion said some more shrink stuff that meant no, it was pretend.

  I listened, night after night, sitting there in the summer dusk, getting the chills. Jenny, she’d curl her little body tight up against me and squeeze on my hand and tell me what the man in the cave showed her today.

  I was stalling on telling Dave. Knew it would drive him nuts.

  When I finally told him, it did. “Fuckhead Ian must’ve got out of jail! He’s hiding out back somewheres.” Dave’s heading for his gun locker.

  I says, “Hold on. I bet we can check if Ian’s still in jail.”

  We checked. He was.

  Dave says, “I shouldn’t have read her all them adventure stories.”

  “For crying out loud, it’s not your fault!” I says.

  “I’m going out there and find this cave.”

  “There is no cave.”

  “I’m looking anyhow.”

  He might just as well go and look for a cave. Give him something to feel like he was doing about it.

  The shrink said to listen. But it was no piece of cake, listening to this stuff, I’ll tell you. Jenny, she whispered to me every night about the cave man. The cave man showed her the hidden entrance. The cave man showed her the rabbit man. The rabbit man told her how the world began. The cave man was old.