“Bonavere, did you hear what I said?” the officer asked. He clicked his pen with the ball of his thumb.
“What are you going to do with Candice?” I asked.
The clicking stopped.
“Candice Pyke,” I said. “Where is she going to go?”
The officer’s face remained composed, but strained like stretched cellophane. He leaned back in his chair. “What do you know about Candice Pyke?”
I rubbed my fingers into my eyes. They must have thought that I was crying — Mama’s gentle touch against my wrist — but I was not. Something about the gesture, seen many times on my father, fingertips hard beneath the brow, held all of my thoughts in place. A pin of concentration slid from the base of my skull to the space between my eyes. “Nothing. I know nothing about her. I met her once, when Fritzi and I asked Mr. Fields to help with a search crew for our sister.”
“Who is this?” my mother demanded. “Who is this Candice?”
“Mr. Fields’ niece, ma’am. Turns out he was caring for her.”
“What are you going to do with her?” I asked.
“Do with her? We’re not going to do anything with her. She’s going back to Nevada where she came from, once all of this is figured out. Live with her grandparents.”
“She wasn’t hurt, was she?”
“Jittery as a June bug, maybe, but she’s in one piece.” As the officer shifted his weight, leaning to the side, light cut in from around him and into my eyes. I was suddenly breathless. Somewhere off in the station an object fell with a metallic clang, and I felt it like it had hit me in the back.
“Where’s Fritzi?” I asked. “I want to see my sister.”
In the hot-vinyl sting of the car, our parents exchanging polite parting words with two officers at the station door, Fritzi and I sat in the backseat in silence. Our father had bought her a cup of ice cream while they waited for us to finish, and she was busy stirring it into a Pepto-Bismol slush. I wanted to speak to her, but each word shrank away. The familiar strawberry scent of her ice cream bloomed through my nostrils, oozing through me with sickening nostalgia. Quiet summers, the long shadows of late afternoon. Easy laughter on the sidewalk, the jingle of the ice cream truck dwindling down the street. The world was now the way it had always been, gliding along with a sheen of bright and fast and busy deniability. Everything, just going on.
“She wasn’t there,” Fritzi said, startling me. “After everything, he didn’t have her, did he?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“But he hurt her. He hurt other girls.”
“ Yes.”
Listless stirs of her spoon. “He hurt you,” she said. Her drowsy stare lingered just above the paper ice cream cup, at nothing. “And that girl we found, under the yard — what happens to her?”
“She has grandparents in Nevada,” I said.
“Good.”
There was another lulling quiet as I stared up into the wiry oaks beyond the car window — and then, a light lift of heart. On the street corner, schoolbag over his shoulder, Saul waited with his family for the light to turn green. Mrs. Chiffree had her hand curled around his arm, a gesture I had not seen her use since she had to drag him away from a hornet’s nest. I heard them faintly; Saul had a science test this week, he had not studied enough, he did not think he needed to. When the green light flashed, they headed across the street, ignoring our car parked by the curb. He was too far now, though he could not have been more than thirty feet away. Watching him was voyeuristic, like he was in a movie, reel after reel clicking into place as we carried on invisible to one another from opposite sides of the screen.
Fritzi coughed into her fist with a painful chest-cold sound.
“Your cough sounds a little better,” I said. She had not smoked a cigarette since the fire. Enough smoke for a lifetime swallowed up in the greenhouse.
“He came at me,” she said, with such intensity of focus, as if all of the air in the car had been sucked into that single pinhole of a statement. “I didn’t go in there to hurt him.”
“I know,” I said, though truthfully I had not thought about why she did it. I had not cared.
Outside of the station, our mother and father began to step backward, with obliging nods, while the police officers did the same. I watched as Mama’s hand — staunch at her midriff, where she clutched her red velvet pocketbook with the pearly trim — drifted as she and our father began to walk to the car. It extended, slightly, from her side, and clung to his fingers.
“Let’s get on home, girls.” He opened the car door and let in a warm wind heavy with the scent of road dust.
Our mother stood at the open backdoor, squinting in at us against the sun. Her shoulders were hunched and her arms were crossed, as if against a chill, and her weightless blue eyes scattered the light like the surface of a swimming pool. In the sticky heat, her dark hair frizzed in unkempt and unflattering waves. She touched the back of her hand to my forehead.
Nobody turned on the radio as we pulled onto Royal Street. The lavender brick storefronts and dirty yellow cafés, and the wraparound galleries with green starbursts of potted ferns, all splashed in speedy streaks across our windows. In the silence, Fritzi’s voice clouded my thoughts. He came at me. I didn’t go in there to hurt him. I looked at her, with her leg at an awkward slant, wrapped in gauze up to her knee, and thought of Connie with a revived, nervous pulse. That was what Fritzi and I could not say, after all, the heart of our silence; how the space between us remained empty, forever occupied by a subject who was not there.
I grabbed hold of the handle on the side-door as we swerved onto Toulouse, where our pink-brick house sat wild with wisteria. A crushing vastness was collecting upon me — flake by flake, like ash. We will never see her again. A split through my chest. Will we ever see her again? The vastness of it all blew through me with the grey, wide, empty rush of a wind tunnel. It was where Connie lived now, was it not? This vastness? A timeless and untraceable landscape. A place where the heart swings back and forth, between hope and fear, like a primal pendulum. And in vanishing she swept us off to this place with her, where we would live forever staring out from its deep unknown. Waiting, until the pendulum stilled.
Chapter 36
APRIL SKIES WERE clear, luminous as an aquarium, with an occasional cloud sighing across sugar-sweet blue. The Mississippi was calm as we drove into Jefferson Parish. It shimmered through the windows on our way to the airport.
“How do y’all know one another again?” Theodore asked, gesturing toward Candy.
Fritzi flung her hair out of her eyes and threw him a dull scowl from behind her sunglasses. “I already told you.”
“Shoot me, I forget.”
“She knows Connie,” I said. Fritzi was disagreeable. She had to keep readjusting the bandage on her leg, continually shifting around in discomfort before slumping, flustered, against the backseat next to me.
A month had gone by since we sat in the police station with our mother and father, but still we found ourselves jumping at the rustle of squirrels or springing laughter, a ball rolling by in the breeze. A storm sat with Fritzi; it was nearly identical on the surface to her usual broods, only absent-minded, distant, clumsy. I would come upon her standing still at the sink with a dish and cloth in her hands, heavy-eyed with daydreaming, as if her mind were stumbling into one gaping hole of thought after another.
Most days after class I slept through dinner and into the soft heat of evening. I would go about my chores in the dark, eat my meals in the dark, do my homework with the lights turned low. I read Swift and Brontë and Dickens and Tolkien, well past sunrise, bundled under weak lamplight in the den. Stories of adventurers and brave, grubby heroes.
There was unreality in the dark. In the day the stage lights all flashed on, and I could see it stripped bare, the blooddeep toxin that I now knew existed in Fritzi and me. It had swept over us, propelled us through what we had endured, and what we would be willing to
endure again, for Connie.
Candy was quiet in the passenger seat. She held a giant floral canvas purse on her lap, gripping the bag’s handle, her disparaged disposition unwavering no matter how often Theodore offered her a friendly nudge as he sang off-key with the radio.
“Turn here, please, Theo,” Fritzi said.
Theodore swung the car around a curb and soon the airport arched into view. We parked and gathered Candy’s suitcases out of the trunk, while she watched from underneath her floppy sunhat, dour scarlet hair over her face. She was not taking much to Reno with her, but the bags she did pack were so heavy that we had to lug them with both hands. Fritzi insisted on helping despite needing crutches to walk, so I gave her Candy’s book bag to hoist over her shoulders. I could not help wondering what Candy had decided to take, what she could have even wanted to take from that dolled-up jail cell. I imagined she had filled her bags with marble busts and family jewellery, ceramics and brooches and unopened nineteenth-century wines, all to sell to shoddy little pawn shops, or give to casual friends in passing — dissipating the poison vapour of her family’s history in whatever small way she could.
“Your grandparents will be excited to see you, Candy,” I said.
She smiled, faint flash across her face. “It’s been a long time.”
“Too bad you can’t take your cousin with you, get him out of our hair,” Theodore said, laughing.
We entered the massive polished linoleum of the airport. A flock of stewardesses in matching uniforms streamed past us like fluttery bluebirds.
“Emma Lasalle is taking him for now,” Candy said. “For the company. Mr. Bellrose is off to Morocco with Amy. They’ll be gone for years.”
We stood on the glossy tile and watched Candy join the crowd of travellers. I took in her frail frame, her timid steps and long tawny hair. It could have been Connie standing there, passport in hand, with her head tilted up to see from under some too-big hat she had found at the flea market and loved because it reminded her of a character from a period piece movie, or made her feel like she could disappear beneath the shadow-veil of its wide brim.
Most of the time I missed Connie so much, it was like my skin was turning inside out. Even when I was not thinking of her, I was. She moved through my blood like a bird flying down the river, following my trail, a dark reflection out of reach.
On our way back to the car, Fritzi stopped.
“Could we sit a moment?” she asked. Her hand was flat in a salute against her forehead as she squinted from the bright midday sun.
“Of course,” I said. Theodore hustled ahead to bring the car around. “Does your leg hurt?”
She shrugged.
Nestled on the ground, we looked out over the parking lot gleaming with cars.
“I’ve been writing to her,” Fritzi said. “In her old journal.”
“You mean letters?”
“Thoughts. Books and movies she would like. Stuff about Mama and Daddy and you.”
“Like what?”
“Well, Mama’s wearing makeup again. And Daddy cooked breakfast yesterday, too.”
“He did? I don’t remember him doing that.”
“You were still asleep.”
My breeze-blown hair fell over my face as Fritzi reached over and took my hand. She folded it on her lap. I touched my chest in search of Connie’s necklace, before remembering that it was not there. It was a gesture of habit that I struggled to break, and each time I recalled the stone’s absence I pictured it lying in the burned-down greenhouse, alone and out of place among the charred debris.
That afternoon, when we were home and Fritzi lay on the lawn scribbling into a sketchbook, I stuck my hand under the mattress and dug out Connie’s old journal. I did not read what Fritzi had written. I grabbed a pen from the decorative inkwell on our desk, and sat cross-legged on the floor beside my and Connie’s bunk bed, its linens damply fragrant from disuse, and began to write what would be the first of many letters:
Dear Connie,
I saw a bird you would have liked by the oak tree. Yellow-gold, puffy little chest, all bravado and making lots of noise. He was tinier than his friends and a little funny, poking around on the outskirts. I named him Carnaby and crumbled some bread for him on the windowsill above the nook. I bought seeds, too, so I hope that he comes back. I’ve been checking each morning.
Broken beats knocked from the centre of my heart like a second pulse, a heart within a heart. I carried my sister’s presence, or absence, wherever I went; it was a part of me now. Another person soft around my bones.
My letter went on, unending, day after day, detailing for Connie what Fritzi said that made me laugh, how we were catching up in summer school, how Daddy was staying home more and Mama was going out. At times the letter grew angry, following a night where Dorian trespassed into my dreams and I woke up screaming, Fritzi cradling me to her chest and letting me squeeze up next to her despite the burn of skin-on-skin in the city’s worst heat.
There were sluggish entries. Mornings, many mornings, when I woke up to enormous mountains which had assembled over me while I slept, and that I slowly had to drag myself out from under. But some days the mountains were smaller, and one day I was so sure — for hours and hours — of Connie’s safety, that they fell away from my shoulders and let me walk with ease. That day the sun rested warmly on my face, and I sat on my bedroom’s uneven hardwood floor as dinnerware clattered in the kitchen directly beneath me. My hand was cramping, my penmanship beginning to slant and loosen.
I see you all over the world, wandering under shifting skies. Rumbling grey, and pristine blue, and twilight skies glassy with rain and the static-sparkle of lightning. I see you under a Tennessee sky, where smoky violet clouds rain out faded hurricanes. Or snow-starred New York, with some new name (you’ve always loved Margot), and some new look about you, living some new life. Maybe you’re far off in California (we talked about travelling to Venice Beach). Clear desert plains and a dry sun that bakes your hair citrusy gold, and where there are groomed lagoons and waterfalls by busy beach coves, and we could play make-believe, and be pirates or mermaids or draw pictures in the sand like when we were children. Fritzi said you should move somewhere dark and cold, like Alaska. She said it to be helpful. I can see it, too. No more heat headaches. Night-glitter raining across the sky.
I don’t know if it’s cruel to think like this, Connie. There’s a sagging feeling that comes with it — and a twist of pain, like your hand is tight around my heart. But sometimes I can’t help it. In the back of my mind at night, I hear a voice chugging along — any day, any day we could find her — and I see you staring into the same sky that I’m looking at, too. And you’re smiling up at a flock of birds, their fleeting rush of movement in all of that blue stillness, and you’re happy, and you’re calm, between two rustling fields, on the side of whatever road you’re taking home.
Acknowledgements
MY THANKS AND endless gratitude to Guernica Editions for giving this story a home, and the Toronto Arts Council for giving it the time and space to be written. Thank you, as well, to my strange and resilient family.
About the Author
CAITLIN GALWAY IS an author and freelance editor. Her fiction has been published in Riddle Fence, House of Anansi’s The Broken Social Scene Story Project, Exile Editions and Gloria Vanderbilt’s Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology Series: Volume Six, and by CBC Books. She has won and been shortlisted for numerous contests, and has received multiple literary grants. She studied English Literature at Queen’s University.
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Bonavere Howl Page 22
