Paper Stones

by Laurie Ray Hill

  I remember the door opening. Blue sky.

  We went home for a break. Sally tried to make us eat lunch. Al kept saying, “What in the name of wonder?”

  Two o’clock we’re all back in there. Meredith’s in the stand.

  Frank, he told the judge that his witness was here in two capacities. He would ask her some questions about my psychological history. It had also come to light most unexpectedly, he said, that this witness had personal knowledge of the defendant, which would have a great bearing on this case.

  The judge, he come to life. Tried looking at Meredith both ways, with and without his glasses.

  Meredith has her hair combed, but she’s still the colour of month-old pastry. Eyes and nose red.

  Frank starts in with the psychology.

  I can’t listen to Meredith tell about me. I’m waiting for the other part.

  It’s not always such a bad thing to be able to fake good, eh. She was up there, shoulders back, answering questions like a pro. Held herself together, never turned her face left or right, never looked at the old man or nobody else neither. Give her answers clear and strong.

  When they were through talking about me, Meredith’s own time come. And that’s how she finally took, for herself, that “important early step in healing” that she was always getting other people to take. Up there in the witness box, Meredith was face to face with her own childhood trauma.

  I felt sorry for her, eh. She didn’t have no Marg’s arm around her. No Josie’s hand to squeeze under the table, like what I had when I told.

  Meredith, she took it like a soldier, though. Up there, all alone. Told her story to the top of the dark brown door frame at the back of that court room.

  She quit using big words. Told it simple as a kid would.

  “I had made a little farm in a shoe box,” poor Meredith said. “I had gone to a lot of trouble with it. I made a little red barn out of folded construction paper and stuck cotton batting clouds in the sky behind it. I coloured fields, green and brown and golden-yellow, and I made little toothpick fences. I had some small plastic animals. I had a pig and a goat and a horse. But I didn’t have a cow. Until that day. In my mother’s new box of tea, there was a perfect little china cow, just the right size for my field.

  “It seemed like a wish come true,” she said, in her shaky, new, human voice. “It was just what I was looking for. It seemed magical. As if somebody had known exactly what I needed! A perfect little red-brown cow to look over my fence.”

  The judge give up on his glasses. Plunked them on his desk. Wanted to know if this was relevant.

  Frank shuts him up. “Directly relevant.”

  “I carefully picked my project up off the windowsill of my classroom and I went down the stairs with it, after school, being so very careful not to damage it. I remember very clearly going down those worn, black stairs, carrying my shoe box farm. I was afraid that the glue on the toothpicks might not hold….”

  I got in this soft mood, sitting there listening to Meredith, thinking how you couldn’t begin to make life up one half as weird as what it really is. Meredith and my old man! Not only was she screwed up just like me, the exact same frigging old man had screwed up the both of us. No way! What were the odds? But there it was. Ferry Street Public School. Meredith in knee socks, going down to see the janitor because he promised to show her something. Something to help with her little farm, which got dropped in the boiler room—scattered her little fences, broke her tiny, magical, new, china cow.

  I could just picture Jenny doing a school project like that. She’d spend so much time on it. Glue one toothpick to another for a little fence. Stand the little animals, so careful, on their coloured fields.

  Meredith was right back there in days gone by, talking about the model farm as if it getting damaged was the saddest part of the story. Saying it over again in a mournful voice. Her little cow, that was just the right size to look over her little fence and had came, like magic, in her mother’s new box of tea, that very morning. I could see Meredith was dissociated from her pain now, just like she probably was at the time, concentrating on the toy farm. So she didn’t have to think about what else was getting broke.

  Just imagine what must’ve been going on, in the insides of her, all them times when she was pushing the rest of us to face what she couldn’t face herself! Getting one person after another to come out with what was locked up tight as a drum inside herself! All the years she’d did that! Seeing people face their pain and move on. And herself never moving one bit. No wonder she didn’t really want us to get acrost the river, when she couldn’t! Oh my god. She was jealous of us. That was it.

  I thought of Josie, at home. I bet she could see Meredith standing at the top of them worn, black public-school stairs right now. That’s where Meredith had been standing all her life, eh? Too scared to take the first step back down and face what was at the bottom.

  Just about nothing seems to surprise Josie. I figured the coincidence about my father wouldn’t strike her much. Too weird, for anybody else, is just normal for Josie. That’s the way she seems to think the world is, rolling in the great unknown, bringing us back around and back around. Another morning and another morning, in case we ever decide to face the day.

  Wouldn’t surprise me if Josie’s dog was saying, “Well, finally, there’s where the cow fits in!”

  I think, when nobody’s around, the both of them can talk just fine, Josie and her dog.

  48.

  NOW, DON’T WORRY. I’m almost done talking. Just one more thing I gotta tell yous and it puts the icing on the cake.

  After the trial and all that commotion, things settled down. Old Dad there was locked up. Meredith, she was on her way to dealing with her own shit. In time, she made a real good counsellor. Comes up here now and runs groups.

  The only question left was the big one: Jenny. Same question we started with at the very first. Can we save this kid? Can we fix up her world for her? Will the damages be too much or will she be all right after all?

  Few months after the trial, Marion started to sound cheerful on that. Said Jenny was coming along nice. Me and Dave, we thought so too. Spell was broke and she quit running off. She moped around for a while and then we could see her starting to take an interest in her normal stuff.

  Nothing new blew up. We got some quiet years after that, for her to grow up in. Time slipped along, the way it does. We done our best and hoped our hardest. Jenny grew.

  Any of yous that have raised kids will know that worry is a part of it. You’re going to worry about them kids. Are they doing okay? Are they going to choose okay when they come to an age to make their own decisions? How’s the world going to treat them? Are they ready for to handle it? For a kid like Jenny with all her traumas, you worry a hundred times more.

  I says to Dave sometimes, “Do you think we’ve really did it? Have we saved her? Will she be okay?”

  “So far, so good,” Dave says.

  And that was true. Jenny had a lot working in her favour. All of us there for her. She had her ups and downs. Not so many downs, as time went on. Her mood got more even. You could see her slumpy shame shoulders straightening up and all the sunshine that’s in her starting to beam out more and more, as the years went by.

  She joined the high school band. Trombone. (Dave said Al was lucky to be getting deaf.) She made good friends. Good marks. Loved her art courses. She was talking about being a Psychotherapist in Art Therapy, like Marion and Meghan. She was not just daydreaming neither. (Mind you, I’m the last person to laugh at daydreams.) But Jenny, she already had it researched where she wanted to go through for that kind of work, and what undergraduate study you do first, talked with her guidance counsellor at school, all that. If there ever was a youngster who looked like they had their act together, it was our Jenny.

  But the fear still preyed on me. I done my best not to sh
ow it. But it was right there. I’d get awful flashbacks of what she had went through and I’d wonder if she could ever get healed. I’d think about the avalanche. The weight of all that, the power of it to crush anybody in its path. Rocks the size of destiny hanging over my sweetheart. Me and my little line of paper stones looked like a pitiful defence.

  I used to talk to Josie about it, rocking by the fire in the winter, rocking on the porch in the summer. I would tell her the point of my life was to save that kid from the rockslide and I’d ask my deep-heart question. “Is it really working? Have we did it, Josie?”

  Josie, she told me once, early on, she said, “Wait for a sign.”

  I couldn’t get no more of an answer out of her. So that’s what I done for years. I hung on, waiting for a sign, while we watched our Jenny growing into a fine young woman.

  “What sign, Josie? How will I know if we’ve won or lost?”

  I suppose there was plenty of signs but I’ll tell yous the sign that hit me. It come along quiet and beautiful as the light of morning.

  October. Me and Dave had took the day off for our anniversary. He was still asleep and I was laying there watching the early morning lake light play on our bedroom ceiling. I could hear Jenny moving around in the kitchen, getting ready for school. Then I heard her quick step on the stairs and her light tap on our door. She’s got a pen and paper.

  “Sign this, would you?” she whispers.

  I’m reaching over to the night table, pawing for my glasses. “What am I signing?”

  “Just a course change form. I’m changing out my art class.”

  “What for? Art’s your favourite.”

  “I got Mr. Creepy this year.”

  I sit up like I’m on a spring. I hiss, “What? Why? What’s going on?”

  “You don’t have to overreact. I’ve been going in at lunch to work on the dragon and he’s been hanging around and I just don’t feel comfortable, so I’m changing my course.”

  “Jenny, what did he do creepy? Why did you call him Mr. Creepy? Did he treat you inappropriate?”

  “Relax, Ann Toes, it’s just a feeling. Something about him. I’m out of there. Gotta hurry.” She kissed the top of my head and blew a kiss in Dave’s direction. She says, “Have a fun day off, you lucky ducks.” Her feet skimmed down the stairs, the outside door tapped shut and that is when I got it. I seen what just happened. I seen good hope in it for all the years ahead.

  I lay back, let the joy run over me. She changed her course. That and the course of history, I’m thinking. She felt something wrong, listened to herself, took her own action, all on her own, based on her own hunch. Our young bird, on her healed-up wings, was taking to the air.

  We’d get Mr. Creepy looked into. But it wasn’t him I was thinking of, right in that minute.

  Alls I could feel was wonderful. What would possibly be the word for a feeling like this? What would be the stepping stone? If I could ever make such a thing, it would have to spring like a trampoline. It would have to be made out of sparkling lake light and I would jump high as the sky on it.

  What’s a word for when something is the point of your life and you work and work and work and then it has worked and you’ve did it? Triumph. That could be it. Triumph. Like, in my head, we’re at the Olympics with gold medals on our necks and the music swelling up proud, crowds cheering.

  Dave’s rubbing his eyes, mumbling, “What’s up?”

  I was squeezing the breath out of him and wetting his chest with my tears. I’m telling him, “We’ve did it, Davey!”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I extend grateful acknowledgements to The Arts Group and The Vein of Gold Group. I wish to express particular appreciation for all the insights and specific knowledge offered by those members who are social workers and therapists, as well as for the friendship and encouragement of all who have offered feedback on this book during its development. Special thanks to Edward Hagedorn, MA, Psychotherapist, Art Therapy.

  Huge thanks to my husband, Richard C. Hill, who has devoted countless hours to assisting and supporting me in the completion of this book and who is my lucky ticket.

  Note: The English vernacular spoken by Rose and her friends is common in rural Ontario. It is carefully and faithfully represented in this book.

  Laurie Ray Hill is best known in her area as a playwright. She has had plays produced and has won awards including selection of one play as Finalist in Theatre BC’s Canadian National Playwrighting Competition and another as Eastern Ontario Drama League Best Original Script. She taught creative writing for many years with Loyalist College. Vision Loss Rehabilitation was a beloved career that took Laurie to homes and schools throughout a wide region, working with people who, like her own father, were blind or visually impaired, teaching specialized travel skills like street crossing with white cane or guide dog. All along, she has been secretly writing novels. Recently retired, she lives in Brighton, Ontario.