Meteorites

by Julie Paul

  Julianna had her eyes open, but it seemed as if she couldn’t see Jen, right across from her. Her face was pale, her brows pulled in, her hands, shaking.

  Oh, God, it was bad, Jen thought. Either her angels were ganging up on her, or Julianna had suddenly gotten the flu and was going to vomit all over the desk.

  When Julianna spoke it was in a quieter, higher voice.

  “You should probably go,” she said. “You need to call home as soon as you can.”

  “What’s wrong?” Jen said. “Julianna, what’s going on?”

  Julianna closed her eyes, then shuddered a little, after which her eyes popped open again. This time, she saw Jen.

  “I’m sorry. That’s all they want to tell me. You can use the phone in the hall, if you want.”

  She sat back and straightened her legs out to one side, cracked her ankles by rotating them, then stood up and offered Jen her hand.

  Jen took Julianna’s cool fingers and let herself be pulled out of the pillow prison.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Julianna said, smiling thinly. “Sometimes the angels can overreact.”

  Just then, Jen’s cellphone vibrated against her hip bone and she jumped as if she’d been lashed. It was Ben’s name on the screen.

  “What is it?” Jen cried into the phone. “Are you all right?”

  No answer came.

  “Ben! Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “Cody and I are here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s . . . it’s Carolina,” he said.

  Carolina? Not Cody. Relief surged through Jen like embarrassment. It was all she could do not to cry out with the release. “What about Carolina?”

  Ben sounded like he was crying. “She’s gone.”

  “Back home? To Regina?”

  “No. Just gone. Run away, or I don’t know.” He was crying.

  “That’s awful,” Jen said. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  She joined Julianna and Adrienne on the porch. “I’ve got to go home,” she said.

  “Is everything okay?” Adrienne asked.

  It was all Jen could do not to say yes.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  Jen settled into her seat on the ferry. She had an hour and a half sailing time to get herself together. All that raced through her head was the proverb from some culture or another wiser than the one they were in: Be careful what you wish for.

  Jen had not been careful. She’d spent way too many hours imagining a specific teenaged girl, vanishing. But it had been only fantasy, therapy—not sorcery.

  Carolina, it seemed, had vanished. Nothing was missing, according to Ben, except her jacket and rubber boots—sensible—and her backpack. No doubt the mountain of wool remained, as did the ragged mess of belongings she’d brought when she moved in.

  Ben was beside himself. What if she’s been abducted, or worse? he’d said on the phone.

  Jen didn’t think so. Likely she’d just run away. But she told him to call the police anyway.

  After a snack and a walk on the outside deck for air, which nicely infused her hair with salt, she had half an hour more to practice her look of devastation.

  Another pat phrase came into Jen’s head: I have a vision problem: I don’t see that happening. It was something her older brother used to say when she asked him for a ride, and it always infuriated her.

  She did have a vision problem, though. No way could she picture Carolina as part of the family. It was completely unfair to Ben, this obstinacy on her part, and yet, she had no idea about how to bridge the gap.

  Ben’s nutmeg-haired head was among the first row of greeters at the ferry terminal. He looked ruined. Before she could ask, he said, “Cody’s at our place with Mom,” then squeezed her so hard she coughed. “I’m so scared,” he said.

  Jen squeezed back before extracting herself from his grasp and heading out to the parking lot, murmuring things to him that would calm him down. She was no monster. She could support her husband in his time of need.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  Cody appeared unscathed when Jen arrived home—no mention of the missing Carolina—and wanted to show her his drawings and his new Mad Libs, courtesy of Grandma Kathy. Other than all the names being Biblical and the adjectives words like holy and glorious, they were still pretty funny. Dogs are glorious animals, and every Moses or Mary should have a blessed pet like God.

  “No calls, then?” Ben asked, when he came in from parking the car.

  “No calls, son,” Kathy told him. “Would you both like to pray with Cody and me?”

  Jen had never seen Ben’s face look like that—as if someone had let all the air out of him. It was like the time she tried to pump up her bike tire but ended up allowing all its air out of the valve instead. Prayers from Kathy were meant to make him feel better, weren’t they? Instead the idea of them hollowed her poor man right out. Nothing left to do but pray? She knew that meant worst-case scenario to him.

  Ben nodded his deflated head. “After I lay down with an ice pack,” he said. “I’ve got a huge headache.”

  “Of course, honey,” Kathy said. “We’ll get dinner going.”

  Cody hadn’t eaten yet? Jen swallowed her surprise and watched him choose pancakes from the marginal choices left in the cupboards; clearly Ben had not done the shopping. He dragged a chair up to the counter so he could man the whisk.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  After dinner they all sat in the living room in a small circle as Kathy led a prayer to St. Christopher. It was the first time Jen had sat on her own couch in months.

  Here was the problem: Jen’s prayers had already been answered. How could she sit there, gut bursting with Aunt Jemima, and pretend to want Carolina back?

  Because: deflated husband. He was nearly flat, a 2-D image of himself.

  Because she was not a barbarian.

  Because she was secretly afraid that she had manifested this disappearance.

  Because she could not get out of the group prayer.

  Because maybe manifesting was the same thing as prayer, and despite her denial, she’d been good at it most of her life. Example: she’d been lonely, after dear old Dan knocked her up and skipped town, and although it was the stuff of fantasies, she’d made a list of what she wanted in a lover.

  Nowhere on the list had there been a girl named Carolina, but she’d gotten nearly everything else. It was amazing, in fact, when she thought about it, all these years later. She was basically a master manifester. Cody, the wonder kid, had been conceived on her last day of bleeding, when her thoughts had literally just begun to turn toward procreation the week before. And Ben, this empty balloon of a man that she loved sitting beside her, holding his mother’s thin hands, bowing his head and mumbling all he could remember of the prayers, mostly a lot of amens, had been the real, live answer to her desires.

  She’d made stuff happen! Gratitude swelled within her. But wasn’t it better if Jen rested in her secret, sudden awareness? It would have been better for the Jen of six weeks ago, the pre-Carolinian woman who awakened every morning with peace and gratitude percolating through her system, the Jen who’d find a groggy, powdery, fruity-scented Cody in her bed once Ben had left for work.

  But that Jen was no more. The current Jen sat between her sad, distressed husband and her suddenly sour-smelling boy—another change since Carolina had arrived, as if having a teen in the house had chemically altered her son, pulled him into early, early onset puberty—and manifested/prayed.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  Two hours of intermittent prayer and silence later, just after the clock chimed ten PM, with Cody was fast asleep against Jen’s thighs, the buzzer rang, twice.

  Saint Kathy called out mercy from where sh
e sat at the kitchen table reading Chatelaine. Cody moaned and snuggled in further. Jen got a wave of chills. And Ben leaped up and answered the intercom phone to find Carolina’s voice on the other end, saying, Daddy? He bolted out the door to greet her in the lobby.

  Even Jen hugged the bedraggled girl when she and Ben came in the door. She’d expected to smell booze, smoke, semen, filth, but all she could detect was the scent of night air and a faint trace of spearmint gum.

  “I told myself I had to do something big,” Carolina said, after she’d been squeezed and offered tea and toast, once a bath had been started. “I wanted to see if I could do it.”

  “And?” Jen said, feeling a pinch of pride toward the girl, underlined with a slight worry she had overheard her conversations in which she’d said that Carolina was a useless lump.

  “It was okay, until it got dark out.”

  Ben saw the little-girl pout on his daughter’s face and responded with another squeeze around her shoulders.

  “The Lord was still with you,” Kathy said. “You never need to fear.”

  “Did something happen?” Jen asked. “Are you hurt?”

  Her mind leapt to the microbial level, to the under-a-special-light evidence, to delicate, unmentionable tissues, to the possibility that the thundering bathtub would erase both too much and not enough.

  “A creepy guy followed me,” the girl said. “Down near Granville Island.”

  “You were all the way down there?” Ben was pale, still shaking.

  “I ran to Chapters,” she said. “I spent the rest of the night in there until they closed, down in the kids section.”

  Then, with Julianna-like ability, Jen pictured the water spilling over the tub just seconds before they saw it flowing out from under the bathroom door.

  “Oh, shit!” Kathy yelled, and ran toward the bathroom. “I mean, shoot! Benny, get some towels!”

  Cody half-woke up and began to whimper, until Jen stroked his head and pulled a blanket over him.

  “Jen,” Carolina said, sitting down in the chair next to her. “You’re a good mom.”

  And Jen, reflexively, said, “Thank you,” before she was able to make her brain and her mouth unite and respond differently. And what should she have said? I’m not your mom, or, Yeah, it’s true, I’m kicking ass at it, or, It’s about time somebody noticed, or, No shit, Sherlock?

  Because wasn’t this, after all was said and done, what Jen had been trying to achieve—just a little recognition, just a little moment of being seen?

  “It’s just too bad that Cody is such a little shit,” Carolina continued. “It must be because of his bio dad, right? I mean, it can’t be my dad’s fault.”

  Jen had been good for so long that it was, like her thank you, ninety-nine percent of the time reflexive. Call and response, do-si-do, wasn’t it all a big ol’ square dance, and wasn’t she a decent, law-abiding, moral-high-grounded woman, even if she didn’t call it religion? That left one percent.

  The first slap managed to make contact with Carolina’s nose, alone, but that didn’t matter. Jen’s other hand was backup, at the ready, the old one-two, and it hit Carolina’s cold, bright face with perfect aim.

  The girl yelped like a dog with a caught tail, but Jen had made her own sound—the grunt of a tennis player, serving, the ball in the racquet’s sweet spot, bound to be an ace.

  What brought Ben and Kathy running, Jen couldn’t say for sure, but the satisfaction of both her stinging palm and Carolina’s cry of You bitch! just as Ben appeared, forced a kind of smirk onto Jen’s face—the way a bowl of stones and water in mid-winter forces blooms from bulbs—that she had no chance of disguising from anyone in the room. Julianna had told her to come home, and now she knew why. Jen had powers, just like her. She could make things happen with only her mind.

  In fact, right then, Jen had a vision of her perfect blue bowl filled with narcissus bulbs, wrapping their slender roots around ocean-smooth stones so their stems could emerge, then rise to wave their white heads around like peace flags. Just one more thing she would manifest, when the time was right.

  Cody started to cry then; two kids crying. And even though Jen was right there, Cody still on her lap, when Ben reached for the boy he raised his arms to be picked up. He burrowed his head into Ben’s shoulder, like it was the only safe place for miles.

  //// Millie’s Calling

  Mildred MacDonald’s right arm was removed on a Saturday, just after lunch. Lunch, in this case, was simply the time of day, given that Millie had eaten nothing since Friday’s breakfast of cottage cheese and a hot cross bun. And it was nearly Saturday at dinner before anything else crossed her lips, except for a simple prayer, coming the other way. Thank the Lord, she prayed. I’ve made it out alive.

  Against everyone’s wishes, including the surgeon and her open-minded doctor, she was home from the hospital by the following Friday. On Saturday morning, she felt well enough to make applesauce muffins, and despite the occasional eggshell, she believed they were some of her best. In the afternoon, her daughter-in-law came by to wash, comb, and set her hair, and that night, she worked doggedly on three of the newspaper crosswords she’d missed while she was in Room 233. By Sunday morning, she was tired. A day of rest. But she carried on with her ordinary routine for the Sabbath, which included playing the organ during the eleven o’clock service at the First United Church.

  She arrived at ten thirty, as was her custom, to adjust her seat cushions and arrange her arrangements, and she was gladder than ever for the quiet time. Alone in the church, she sat on her bench and inhaled the church’s silence and the scent of lemon wood polish. When Millie closed her eyes, she felt a surge of fatigue wash over her, but she ignored it and focused instead on the presence of the Holy Spirit: it was easier to feel its power before the congregation arrived. Sometimes, the pilgrims of the Lord, in all their earthly glory, were easier to appreciate in the abstract.

  She began to touch the keys lightly with her one remaining hand. She plucked out the melody to “A Closer Walk with Thee,” using her feet to pedal the bass notes in. Then she started in on “Amazing Grace.” She gave herself an imaginary pat on the back, which needed no bodily arms at all. It could be done, His will. She could continue as the organist, and no one would be the wiser.

  There were only the hundred and ten regular churchgoers to slip it past. Only the eight hundred villagers to hypnotize into forgetting about the accident, most of whom seemed to have heard about it mere moments after the manure spreader caught her shirt and pulled her in. Only the empty sleeve to hide, tucked modestly into her skirt’s waistband. And only Jessie Thompson to convince, who at this very moment was barrelling down the aisle in her turquoise jumpsuit, hollering at Millie to get herself home before she fainted on the altar.

  Millie smiled, and started to play “How Great Thou Art” as Jessie neared the organ.

  “Well, now I’ve seen everything,” Jessie said, standing there, peach nails on hips.

  Millie kept playing.

  “What in God’s name are you thinking, Millie?”

  She wasn’t thinking, she was praising: Then sings my soul, my saviour God to Thee, how great Thou art, how great Thou art . . .

  “Reverend Short called me up as soon as he heard,” Jessie said. “He asked me if I’d mind taking up the organ for service.” She was tugging at her brassiere through the polyester of her one-piece suit, likely to help the buttons stay fastened. “‘Mind!’ I said. ‘It would be an honour.’ And I played just fine last week, too, and I was all ready to do the same today. But now, you’re here, when you should still be in the hospital, playing like . . . well, playing with only one arm!”

  Millie finished the chorus, with feeling, and then came to a slow halt. She laughed, then said, “Not bad for only five fingers, eh?”

  “Millie! It’s—” Jessie’s face
couldn’t find an expression. “You shouldn’t be taxing yourself like this.”

  “It’s better than sitting at home, moping about bad luck.” Then Millie remembered Gord. “No offence, Jessie.”

  Jessie’s husband was recovering from a fall off a roof he’d been working on and hadn’t seen much improvement. Some said it was drink that caused the fall; others said it was drink that kept him at home these six months later. Millie didn’t pry.

  Jessie acted as if Millie had said nothing. “Did your doctor okay this?”

  Oh, but wasn’t the Almighty Doctor another Lord in the minds of some people? An Old Testament God, handing out sentences and commandments along with the drugs. Millie worshipped only one God, and she had a female doctor who didn’t interfere with her decisions to take herbal remedies and see the chiropractor when her neck was out.

  “No,” Millie said. “But I think she’d be fine with it. She tickles the ivories herself.”

  Millie didn’t mention that she was supposed to be on bed rest for at least another week, to speed up healing at the amputation site. She didn’t mention the throbbing that had started in her shoulder just a few minutes before Jessie arrived. In all of Millie’s sixty-one years, she had never been one to just sit around and complain.

  “Well,” said Jessie. “If you’re gonna play, then what am I supposed to do? I’m twenty minutes early.”

  “Why don’t you bring out the choir stands?” Millie suggested, tipping her head toward her missing arm. “That’s going to be a bit of a challenge for me now.”

  Jess stormed off the altar and into the back vestibule, and Millie heard the clatter of metal on metal. The dammit that followed was surely meant for more than the music stands. Millie laughed quietly and picked up “Amazing Grace” where she left off. She wasn’t going to give up her place on the bench for a minor thing like a missing limb.

  It wasn’t pretty, the way a Coors Light T-shirt had saved her life. Her Teddy was a good boy, even if he himself was prone to the drink on weekends. But Millie wouldn’t complain about this, or anything Teddy might do, ever again, now that he and one of his beer-box T-shirts had come to her rescue. He’d torn that shirt into strips and wrapped her crushed right arm—a stand-in for the skin and muscles that had come away from the bone—and made a tourniquet for the unrelenting blood. Then he’d carried Millie to the truck and drove the ten kilometres into town, since the county ambulance his wife wanted to call was stationed a fifteen-minute ride from their farm: not even an option. Teddy steered around the potholes as best as he could and got her to the hospital in just over ten minutes.