Falling

by Anne Simpson

  One who was scared to leave Canada, in the end, and had got off the bus at the last possible place before crossing the border between Ontario and New York State.

  One who found a place to rent after a bad night in the bus terminal, walking from one basement apartment to another before she found Tarah, who saved her life, because she needed someone to share The Dump on Stanley Street.

  One who got a job in the Lundy’s Lane Historical Museum by giving the impression she was bright and perky. Of course, it helped that she was majoring in Canadian history at – at the University of Toronto.

  One who’d been in Niagara Falls, Ontario, for five weeks and two days.

  One who couldn’t draw motorcycles.

  That was what kind of girl she was, if anyone wanted to know, but no one did.

  She switched off the lights and went out the side door into the alley, making sure the door was locked behind her. She glanced down the alley to Clifton Street as she unlocked her bicycle, and it was then that she noticed the man in pyjamas. He was on the other side of the street. He was staring at her. No, he wasn’t staring at her; he was staring into the window of the Ornamental Hand. One side of his face was green because of the light from Alien Terrors. His feet were bare, and this was the strangest part of it, because why would a person go outside without shoes? He was a nutcase, that’s what he was. A car went by, and his pyjama top swelled out as it passed. She had a sudden, eerie thought that he must have been watching her.

  A blond-haired man took his hand and spoke to him; she saw how they turned slowly, like people in hospitals when they’d come to the end of a long hall. It could have been an old-fashioned, complicated dance they were doing, with one leading the other. The blond man was tall and lanky, with a braid down his back, and the other was solidly built, with tufts of hair standing up on his head. The streetlight turned their hair to silver, but neither of them was old. There was something about the way the tall one took his time, as if this was the kind of thing people did all the time, at midnight, on Clifton Hill, in Niagara Falls, Ontario; they could have been moving in a dream.

  Once, on such a night, her father had woken her.

  Wake up, Sandy, he’d said, tapping her on the shoulder.

  She woke, frightened to see him standing over her. She’d been only seven. He whispered to her to come with him and she’d climbed down the ladder from her bunkbed. He got Shirl up too, but it was harder to wake her, because Shirl was sixteen and didn’t see why they had to go outside. It was dumb. But she came anyway. They’d gone to the back door and he’d suggested they put on their rubber boots. Sandra rubbed her eyes, feeling weary, but then he took them outside, into the wide, dark prairie night, and she woke up. The night had been soft as the black velvet collar on her mother’s red dress, the one that hung in the closet upstairs, all zipped up in a plastic case because she didn’t want moths to get into it.

  They’d made a procession: her father, then Queenie, the dog, then Shirl, then Sandra. Shirl’s boots made a shouk, shouk sound as she walked. It had been a wet spring, and moist leaves touched the skin of their arms. The three of them went through the damp grass, between the aspen saplings, down to the creek bed, and over the little bridge – where the thin line of water flowed out of the shadows and back into them – through the sparking of fireflies, and up the slight rise to a windbreak of poplar. When Sandra turned, she could see the comforting light at the back door of the house. It was close, yet she was in an exotic place that smelled of wet earth and wolf willow. Shirl slapped at the bugs, but their father had motioned for them to be quiet.

  There was a plaintive cry of young birds, and it turned out to be owlets calling to the mother owl. She flew over them, large as a giant’s gloved hand, making no noise. It had been strange to sense her flying over them, as if she could fly down and clutch their wrists with her talons. But she didn’t; she flew back to her young.

  Her father was not a man who usually noticed such things, Jasmine thought now. He tried to be practical, yet somehow he managed to let money slip through his fingers like water, as her mother put it. She said he would bring them all to grief one day. But that June night he stood watching for the owl attentively, holding up his face with a look of anticipation. Then Queenie barked, abruptly, and that was the end of the owl watching.

  She held on to this memory of her father when her parents gave up the place outside Lanigan and bought a dry-cleaning business in town. Her mother had gone back into hairstyling; now she couldn’t imagine life before the Hair Lair. But her father seemed to grow smaller. He grew fretful.

  She thought about him as she walked her bicycle behind the odd pair, the tall man and the solid, stocky one, keeping her distance, following them to a parking lot at the back of the casino, where they seemed to vanish into the shadows. Perhaps they’d been carried off into the night sky, she thought. But they hadn’t been carried off into the night sky.

  She caught herself, wondering what she’d been thinking, then got on her bicycle and pedalled up Clifton Hill. She rode to Stanley Street, put her bicycle against the house by the back door, and sat on the picnic table, where the moonlight fell through the old willow, through its tangled branches and many-fingered leaves. It fell on the laundry that had been left on the neighbour’s clothesline, turning each blouse and tea towel and washcloth into spirits of the air.

  Damian wasn’t the slightest bit drowsy. He lay on his bed thinking about the girl in the window of the Ornamental Hand. She’d been drawing. He turned on his left side. He hadn’t drawn anything in a long time. He turned on his right side.

  After a while he got up and unrolled one of the sheets of paper he’d brought with him, paper that his mother had urged him to bring along. Sitting on the bedroom floor, he clipped the paper to his drawing board and sharpened a few pencils with a bone-handled knife. He put the drawing board against his drawn-up knees, shutting his eyes to recall the exact shadows caused by the way the light fell, the bright tulips of the apron, the sarong under it, the shapely brown hands, gleams of hair.

  The last time he’d drawn anything he’d been at Adam’s uncle’s hunting cabin. The day he’d arrived was the third of April, but it had snowed thickly, so the whiteness had clung to every branch of the birches just outside. He’d had a vivid dream that first night, and he’d wrapped himself in a musty-smelling orange-and-brown afghan and wandered into the kitchen. The fire in the woodstove had gone out, and, starting it again, he found himself fully awake. Bits and pieces of his dream came back. Lisa, standing on a stool, dressed in a blue satin gown that made her look years older. His mother pinning up the hem of the dress. A dance. Trevor coming to pick her up. He could see Lisa so clearly it was as if she were standing in front of him.

  He’d found a pencil in a drawer in the kitchen of the cabin. He took one of the newspapers off the stack by the woodstove, opened it, and drew across the photograph of the high-school basketball team. Lisa, in a strapless dress with a small rhinestone brooch at the front. Standing on a stool, yes, that was it. In the dream there hadn’t been enough time to pin the dress and hem it – the lack of time had been the problem, he realized. In the dream, both his mother and sister had been upset because of it. His drawing became more frenzied: he drew Lisa’s arms, her neck, the sparkling brooch, her neat, small ears, her hair twisted up into a knot at the back of her head.

  He wasn’t drawing Lisa now. He had all the paper he could ask for, and good, freshly sharpened drawing pencils. If he half closed his eyes, he could see the girl again. He was motionless for a few moments before he opened his eyes and began drawing swiftly. After that he didn’t stop, and it was a full half-hour before he set down the drawing board against the wall and stepped back. The eyes were too close-set, and the lips – the lips were too full. It wasn’t even a ghost of what he’d seen. He gave a snort of disgust. He’d have to see her again to get it right, he thought, sprawling across his bed. It was almost afternoon when he went downstairs, rubbing sleep from his eyes.r />
  He heard voices outside the kitchen, and then Roger came in, setting a trowel in the bucket by the kitchen door, taking off his gardening gloves and putting them, one at a time, on the edge of the bucket. He stood up, turning more or less in Damian’s direction.

  You slept in, he said.

  How’d you know I was here?

  My extraordinary powers of perception. What happened with Elvis last night? He shuffled to the sink.

  We went out.

  Out?

  Well, he took off and I went after him.

  I wondered if that might happen.

  Damian watched how his uncle fumbled with the cabinet door and ran his hand along the shelf before he found a glass.

  He likes you, Damian. But he’ll do all kinds of things to test you.

  I can see that.

  Roger ran some water into the glass and drank it.

  You have to be careful if you come into his life. Know what I mean?

  I think so.

  The thing is that the two of us – we’re at a turning point. He doesn’t like that. Nobody likes that. A big man stood in the doorway of the Ornamental Hand and took a last, long drag on his rolled cigarette before stepping aside as Damian entered.

  You want a tattoo? asked the man. He had small, beady eyes and a face that unfolded in pockets of skin from the pouches under his eyes to his jowls. Cleanest house in town. No dirty needles around here. Ever had a tattoo?

  No, said Damian. He did, in fact, have a tattoo of two small oak leaves at the back of his neck.

  What you’ve got is a machine working at sixty revolutions per second, injecting ink under the skin. See this – beautiful, huh? Puss ’n Boots. Hey, Tarah, get your ass out here. Tarah does the tattoos.

  A hand parted the beaded curtain neatly, as if it were dividing air. It was such a delicate hand. A hand that could part the waters of the Red Sea. But, no, it was a different hand, belonging to a girl with short hair that was dyed magenta. She had black sleeves laced to her black bodice. She was tiny, and for all her tattoos and triple-pierced lip, she looked like a wren with a broken wing.

  What? she said flatly.

  We got everything under the rainbow, said the man. You ask Tarah.

  D’you want something? she asked Damian.

  Why else would he be here?

  Fuck off, Gordie.

  Bitch. He went outside and rolled himself another cigarette.

  Tarah flicked something off her wrist. Her nails were painted dark blue.

  I came by here last night, said Damian. There was a girl – a woman – working in here.

  Girlwoman, Tarah mimicked. She ran her hand through the ends of her magenta hair and laughed. She softened, her fingers doing a little staccato dance on the glass counter. Are you some kind of asshole?

  No.

  Serial killer?

  No.

  How do I know that? She glanced through the window at Gordie. There’s a real fuck for you, she said. Gordie.

  She turned back to Damian. Her name’s Jasmine – we live in the same house. She’s at the Lundy’s Lane Museum. Ferry Street. That’s where she works, and don’t fucking tell her I said so.

  Thanks. Thanks a lot.

  There was a wreath of hair in an ornately framed shadow box over the desk where Jasmine worked in the Lundy’s Lane Historical Museum.

  VICTORIAN HAIR WREATH

  circa 1860-1865

  Hamilton, Ontario

  Human hair and horsehair, wire, wool, glass,

  steel, and wood beads

  Gift of the MacLeod Family

  Jasmine had never coveted anything the way she coveted that wreath of hair. It reminded her of her grandmother’s hair – long, silky, and white – which she had brushed and brushed as a child. Once, she had fallen asleep in her grandmother’s lap, her fingers still entwined in the white hair, and her grandmother hadn’t woken her.

  The wreath was shaped like a crescent moon, with hair of different shades – blond, honey-brown, dark brown, red, black, grey, and white – which had been stitched into loops that formed flowers, sprigs, and leaves. The wreath was made into a crescent, with its ends pointing up, so it could hold the luck inside. Whoever had made it had done it by gimping, which involved looping the hair over a knitting needle, binding it along a wire rod, and making another loop – a technique that Jasmine was trying to learn from a library book on hair decoration.

  When Tarah had dyed her hair dark blue, she’d let Jasmine cut some of it off. Jasmine had grouped the blue hair together in strands of twenty before making loops, and she was starting to get the hang of it. She hid the hair and knitting needle in a plastic bag in a drawer of the front desk of the museum. Maybe she could ask Tarah’s boyfriend, Matt, for some of his hair, since it was sandy brown, a nice contrast with Tarah’s. If it worked, she was going to give them the wreath, crescent-shaped, and open at the top, so they could hold their luck.

  You can’t keep people’s hair, her mother had told her.

  It was the first day that Sandra-not-yet-Jasmine had been hired to clean up the Hair Lair. She was swishing the soft broom across the floor, catching swirls of red, strawlike heaps of blond, wisps of grey.

  Why not?

  It’s not hygienic, for one thing, said her mother. It’s not right. It’d be like taking people’s toes or fingers.

  Look at it. It’s wonderful. All those colours –

  It’s hair, for heaven’s sake, Sandra. Put it in the garbage out back.

  She put some of it in the garbage and saved the rest of it. She shampooed it, carefully, and dried it on paper towels in her bedroom. By the time she left Saskatchewan, she’d saved fifty-seven different shades of hair, each tied in a loop, and deposited into one of six zippered plastic bags. Black, brown, red, blond, grey, white. She’d carried them on her way Somewhere Else.

  At twenty after four each day, Jasmine began locking up the museum. It took her ten minutes to make sure – even though she was sure – that the windows were locked and the doors bolted, before she put on the alarm system. It was like tucking a child into bed, she thought, as she went down the steps of the museum.

  Tarah arrived home an hour later than Jasmine, slinging a few grocery bags on the kitchen table.

  You did your hair again. Jasmine picked up the change on the table.

  I did it before work today – it’s called Magenta Madness. Tarah turned in a circle, arms out gracefully. What do you think?

  Nice. I like it.

  And Jordan didn’t come in – you know, Mr. Kawasaki. After both of us killed ourselves trying to give him the tattoo of his dreams. Honest to God.

  A jerk. Jasmine started washing the romaine lettuce in the sink.

  Yeah. Tarah took orange and yellow peppers out of a bag and stopped to study her fingernails. I’ll have to change my nail polish. You know, there was this guy today – have you ever come across a tall guy with blond hair? She held the fridge door open with her knee, a jug of milk in one hand and carton of eggs in the other. He was asking about you.

  I don’t know anyone like that. Jasmine patted the romaine leaves with a piece of paper towel.

  He was beautiful. Tarah slammed the fridge door with her foot. That light’s off in the fridge again. I mean on a scale of one to ten –

  Jasmine grinned at her, opening the fridge to check the light. You’re actually rating him? That light – yesterday I sort of wiggled it and it worked as long as I didn’t slam the door. So, okay, this guy, what did you tell him?

  Nothing.

  Nothing?

  Are you kidding? He could have been anyone.

  The Lundy’s Lane Museum was closed by the time Damian got there, so he returned the next day, early, and sat on the steps until it opened. No, he thought. Sitting there he’d look like a fool. He got up and went across the street to Tony’s Watch Repair, where he paced in front of the window. Watches covered with a grainy dust. Fake Rolex and Cartier watches. Girlwoman. There she was. He could see he
r reflection in the glass through the letters of Tony’s Watch Repair as she climbed the steps to the entrance of the museum and opened the red door.

  Jasmine. Her name was Jasmine.

  He crossed the street slowly, went up the steps, and stopped. A bit of time; he had to give it a bit of time. The door opened to a world of dimness inside, and he stepped over the threshold into the dark, waiting for his eyes to adjust. There was a desk in front of him, but no one was there and he flipped through a photocopied guidebook to the museum, a coil-bound brochure with plastic covers. Welcome to Lundy’s Lane Historical Museum. There was a bell on the desk with a silver knob on top that could be pushed down – dinggg! – but he didn’t ring it. He put three dollars in the woven basket with its hand-lettered card: Adults $3.00, Children & Seniors $1.50.

  Taking the photocopied guidebook, he went around the desk into a shadowy corner where a happily grinning mannequin knelt beside a birchbark canoe. The mannequin, identified by a sign hanging from the wall (Mature Ojibwa Male) held a paddle clumsily in his hands, but for some reason he wasn’t in the canoe. He was outside it, kneeling, about to start paddling air. Near his bent knees was an animal skull, where the water might be expected to flow. Wolf Skull, stated the card next to it.

  Hello.

  Damian jumped. I – I didn’t see anyone at the desk, so I just came in here. I put three dollars in the basket.

  I saw that, she said. Enjoy your visit – there’s more upstairs.

  She disappeared.

  Shit, he whispered, looking dutifully at the javelin heads, arrayed on a board, the pieces of pipe, the bone pendant, the beaded Ojibwa fire bag. He studied the costumes of the British soldiers, the gold braid and buttons of the officers. Captain Robert Henry Dee’s Commissariat Uniform, circa 1824. He examined the British boots. There were several pairs, and he looked at each one carefully. Why did the boot holes, the laces, the polished toes, make him feel anxious?