The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  But what had occurred to her, during those sleepless nights, was what she’d be giving up in order to dally in city life. Where would she find another McKinnon Hill? Where would she walk in summer fields of sweet clover and cow vetch and forests of thickly sprouted pines if she ended up on the third floor of some apartment building in Portland? Amy Joy wondered if there were any woods left in Maine where it might be safe to walk. The whole state was abuzz with what had happened to Karen Wood, who had had the misfortune to walk one hundred and eighty-nine innocent feet from her own back door. Some hunter had focused on her white gloves in his scope and had put a bullet in her chest. Amy Joy used to think that things like that might happen if you trespassed on someone else’s land. But nowadays there were so many trigger-happy hunters crawling through the woods of Maine that no one was safe any longer on their own land. But there were issues closer to home that Amy Joy had to contend with first. Sicily.

  Just when Amy Joy had decided to let the move to Pine Valley rest—and assumed that Sicily had come to the same conclusion—she returned from a windblown outing on her snowshoes to find her mother all packed up. Two small suitcases and a cardboard box were waiting by the kitchen door. Sicily was sitting on the edge of the living room sofa, wearing her coat and scarf and gloves. During the past few days, she had spoken only brief replies to Amy Joy’s questions. And she’d spent even more time on the phone to her pal Winnie, talking in soft whispers, quickly hanging up whenever Amy Joy entered the room. Now here she was, ready to go.

  “What’s this all about?” Amy Joy asked. She pulled off her snowy boots and left them by the door.

  “No need to take your boots off,” Sicily said. “I need a ride.”

  “Where, might I ask?” said Amy Joy.

  “Yesterday I called that Grandmaison woman,” Sicily said. “They’re expecting me.”

  “You what?” Amy Joy was appalled. This didn’t appear to be one of Sicily’s schemes, not if she had enlisted Patrice Grandmaison into the drama. Not if she’d packed up all her precious belongings. She loathed for her things to be trifled with. Yet in Sicily’s bedroom, Amy Joy saw the aftermath of some serious packing. Bright squares adorned the walls where pictures had hung. Drawers were empty. In the closet was a huge box labeled Junk. On the dresser sat the last picture of Ed Lawler, in his gray principal’s suit.

  Amy Joy remembered it, recalled the day, her eighth-grade graduation. She had a photo of Ed somewhere in her scrapbook, taken on that same day, in the same gray suit, with the same squinty eyes, with the entire twelve-member class, his arm around Amy Joy in a congratulatory grasp. Reginald Monihan, one of the faces in that same graduating class, had had a sweet crush on her back then. He had carried his crush all through high school, had most likely lugged it across the ocean to Vietnam. Amy Joy still had, in her big lifetime scrapbook, a lacy valentine Reginald had given her, with Love Always, Reggie scrawled across the bottom. And she kept his high school class picture on a shelf in her bedroom, with other important faces from her life. Sometimes at night, waking from another nightmare of babies—babies needing her to change them, to feed them, to diaper them, desperate babies she couldn’t seem to reach with her dream arms that were grown much too short—Amy Joy took down the picture of Reginald Monihan and wondered about the crooked twist of fate, crooked as the Mattagash River. See You Later, Alligator was the inscription. Then he’d gone off to the army, and Amy Joy never did see him later. But he had died a hero. Ed had committed suicide. Yet there was something to be said about both deaths. Most folks simply die.

  “Why aren’t you taking this picture of Daddy?” Amy Joy shouted out to Sicily, but received no answer. Sicily had decided earlier not to answer her when asked. How could she explain to Amy Joy that Ed Lawler, who was forty-eight years old in the picture, forty-eight years old when he died, was far too young to be dragged off to an old folks’ home. Sicily said nothing.

  “What’s this all about?” Amy Joy asked again, going back into the living room. “You don’t need to do this, you know. I was wrong to even suggest it.” She noticed suddenly that the lines around Sicily’s mouth were more numerous, the gray in her hair more desperate, her eyes sprouting more yellow.

  “She’s grown older just this past year,” Amy Joy thought, and was horrified to realize it.

  “My mind’s made up,” Sicily said. She took her gloves off and then, rather than have them idle in her hands, put them back on again. Amy Joy bit the inside of her cheek.

  “At least wait until Thanksgiving is over,” she suggested gently. “That’ll give you more time to get used to it.”

  “No,” said Sicily, “that’ll give you more time to get used to it. I don’t want to spend Thanksgiving here,” she added and reached out to the geranium on the end table. She snapped a brown leaf off its stalk. Things were dying everywhere, it seemed.

  “Wait till after Thanksgiving,” Amy Joy said again, her heart beginning to drum a bit. What had she done? What would life be like, after all these years, without her mother? This was a serious Sicily before her. Amy Joy knew her games well enough, surely, to recognize that this was not one of them.

  “I got nothing to be thankful for,” said Sicily. She placed the dead leaf on the soil of the pot, left it there to become fertilizer, just as she was on her way to becoming fertilizer.

  “We’ll bring Winnie for Thanksgiving dinner,” Amy Joy offered.

  “Winnie’s got the flu,” said Sicily, and she pushed herself up out of the cushiony chair, adjusted her legs beneath her, made sure they still worked. She clutched her purse under her arm.

  “You’ll have to lug that stuff out for me,” she said matter-of-factly, pointing to the suitcases and the box sitting in the hallway. “You can keep my furniture.” Amy Joy looked at her mother’s belongings. Two suitcases and a cardboard box, all plenty big enough to hold the remnants of a life, not to mention the box full of Junk. Tears shot quickly to her eyes.

  “Mama, please,” she said. She looked at Sicily, her closest relative. “I never wanted it to be like this.”

  “There ain’t no other way to do it,” Sicily said, and suddenly she seemed so much more grown than Amy Joy had ever imagined. She seemed like the mother again, and Amy Joy the sniveling child.

  “There ain’t no easy way,” said Sicily. “You should’ve thought of that. Now you put up with it.”

  ***

  At Pine Valley, Sicily was given a room just across the hall from Winnie’s. It was a room without a view, but in her secret transactions with Patrice Grandmaison, Sicily had mentioned that she wanted to be as close to Winnie Craft as possible. A Mrs. Gauvin from St. Leonard was only too happy to switch her dingy, viewless room for the sunny one Sicily had offered to trade.

  Sicily sat on the bed while Amy Joy unpacked and arranged her things. The conversation between mother and daughter was civil, constrained, the talk that washes between acquaintances.

  “You stop that,” Sicily had said to Amy Joy in the car as they made the torturous drive to Pine Valley, past the rickety ruins of Albert Pinkham’s old motel. “I don’t want to hear it. That’s not part of the bargain. If you got tears, you save them for private.” So Amy Joy had reduced her crying to the occasional sniffle.

  “This is the hardest part,” Patrice Grandmaison had whispered to Amy Joy when she saw her blotched, unhappy face. “But each day it gets easier. Pretty soon it’ll seem as though it was always this way.”

  Amy Joy wondered about this as she arranged pictures on the Pine Valley bookshelf in Sicily’s room, folded items into the drawers of a Pine Valley dresser, hung coats and dresses in a Pine Valley closet. Sicily sat on her Pine Valley bed and stared at the wall.

  “You can come home whenever you want to,” Amy Joy was saying. “You just call and I’ll come get you. You got your own phone here, remember.”

  Old faces peered in the door at the new arrival, the new k
id on the block. Faces from other generations, those ghostly residents at Pine Valley, paraded slowly up and down the shiny tiled hallway, up and down, up and down, a mindless treading, their footfalls so cobwebby, the shells of their bodies so light as to leave no sound at all.

  Patrice Grandmaison appeared in the doorway with a small “Welcome to Pine Valley” basket of fruit.

  “In the winter our residents do their walking in the hallway,” she explained. “Too much snow and cold outside. And too much slippery ice.” Amy Joy watched as the skeletons of old lumberjacks, men who could turn logs beneath their feet like the best of acrobats, filed past the doorway. She watched the passing outlines of aging women, women who had helped to birth small towns, who had baked a million loaves of bread, had knitted up miles of yarn. Like years, they ambled past. Sicily ignored them. She was now one of their numbers.

  “Mrs. Craft just woke up,” Patrice said. “I didn’t tell her you’re here. I thought since you girls are such good friends, you’d want to rush right in there and surprise her yourself.”

  “Damn,” Amy Joy thought. “She’s making it sound like a pajama party.” She peeked at Sicily. Surely her mother would respond to that. We ain’t girls, Amy Joy could hear her mother inform Ms. Grandmaison sharply. I’ll thank you to remember that.

  “How’s her cold?” Sicily asked vaguely, her head rising like a turtle’s up out of its slump to look at Patrice. Amy Joy wished she’d look at her just once, but Sicily had been avoiding her daughter’s eyes.

  “Much better,” said Patrice. “Dr. Brassard takes very good care of folks here. He makes his rounds of Pine Valley every single weekday.”

  “I’ll try not to get sick on the weekend,” Sicily said flatly, and Amy Joy smiled. That was a little of the old McKinnon punch she was used to in her mother. Patrice Grandmaison smiled too.

  “Dr. Brassard, or one of the doctors from Watertown, is on call at all times,” she said. “And guess what? You’re just in time for your first supper at Pine Valley. We’re having a nice chicken stew with doughboys.” First supper. Sicily finally looked at Amy Joy. One of you has betrayed me.

  “Ooh, does that sound good,” Amy Joy said, and was suddenly embarrassed at her own attempt to pick up Patrice Grandmaison’s pretenses. Her mother knew her much too well to be fooled by an airy voice. Did Patrice ever manage to convince new Pine Valley residents that their arrival there was a marvelous bit of luck?

  “I wanna see Winnie,” Sicily said, and eased herself slowly off the bed.

  “Well, Sicily McKinnon!” a wavering voice said from the doorway. It was Betty Henderson, who had operated Betty’s Grocery in Mattagash for thirty years, until a fire in 1975 had eaten the old building up in a swift fury. Now Betty teetered at the door, surrounded by the silvery aluminum legs of her walker. After a little chat, she inched her way on down the hall, a huge metallic spider.

  “I’ll see you at supper,” she called back.

  “We were in the same class, Betty and I were,” Sicily told Patrice. See you later, alligator.

  “There now,” Patrice patronized further. “See? You’re going to have all kinds of company here.”

  ***

  They ate in Winnie’s room, on that first evening, with Winnie in bed still, although her bout with the flu was nearly over. Amy Joy and Sicily sat in front of table trays at her bedside. Amy Joy was surprised at how tasty the stew was, as well as the nice little salad and the spectacular slab of chocolate cake. But Sicily never touched the food.

  “You get used to it,” Winnie said to Sicily, who simply shrugged.

  “They still gonna give your mother a plaque at the Thanksgiving Day Co-op Dinner?” Sicily asked.

  “I suppose so,” said Winnie. “That peaked-faced girl of Rose’s come back again and told me the Women’s Auxiliary’s gotta give a plaque to someone every year. They already give one to Walter Fennelson, Larry Fennelson, and Reginald Monihan for dying in wars, and now they’re desperate. They can’t find anyone else important.”

  “How’s Albert Pinkham doing?” Amy Joy asked. She imagined that one year Simon Cross might be given a plaque for having read and delivered the mail for over thirty years. Someone important.

  “Alive, I guess,” Winnie said. “The ambulance come this afternoon. I was afraid it might be for Mama, but it wasn’t. Some woman from St. Leonard took ill. I never knew her. She didn’t say much.”

  “She okay?” Sicily asked, and Winnie shrugged her shoulders, as if to ask, What is okay? That you get to come back to Pine Valley and try for another month? A year?

  “Patrice tells me they play a lot of Charlemagne here,” Amy Joy said. “Didn’t you two used to be partners in Charlemagne tournaments?”

  “Most of the people who play here speak French,” said Winnie. “They bid in French and they joke in French. I think they even breathe in French.”

  “You could get Betty,” said Amy Joy. “And then you’ll only need one more. Surely there’s another English-speaking person here who likes to play Charlemagne.”

  “I’m going to my room,” Sicily said. Unlike Winnie, she had yet to grow accustomed to the cheery voice of the family member, a soft drone of guilt wafting in between the invisible bars at Pine Valley. “I’ll come tell you good night, though,” she said to Winnie, “before I fall asleep.”

  Amy Joy said good night to Winnie, who merely nodded. In Sicily’s room, she sat on the Pine Valley chair and waited while Sicily used her own little bathroom. She was cleaning food particles out of her dentures, Amy Joy supposed, as she listened to water running in the bathroom sink. The room looked very much like a motel room, a space reserved for someone passing through. Would it ever grow to be lived in, comfy, homey? Would newspapers and clothes and knickknacks and dust balls pile up high, as they did in Sicily’s old room back at the McKinnon homestead? Amy Joy imagined not. Except for the occasional drawings from grandchildren taped to Winnie’s wall, her room looked exactly like Sicily’s, and Winnie had been at Pine Valley for more than a year.

  “I’m going to call you the minute I get home,” Amy Joy offered. “To say good night.” But Sicily unfolded her spare blanket, spread it out on her bed, and said nothing.

  “Why are you acting like this?” Amy Joy finally asked, exasperation raising its familiar head. “I told you to forget I ever said the words ‘Pine Valley’ to you. You can come home with me right now if you want to.” Sicily still said nothing. Down the hall, at the front desk, a phone rang loudly several times before someone answered it. Employees came and went in the hallway, their voices flippant, free, rising above the circumstances at Pine Valley. Through the walls of the next room came the wavering voice of an old man as he murmured his rosary in French. Je vous salué, Marie. Pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec vous.

  “Come on,” Amy Joy said softly. “Come on home with me. I’ll come back for your stuff tomorrow.” Sicily shook her head. She went to her dresser and found her nightdress in the top drawer where Amy Joy had placed it.

  “I’m staying here,” Sicily said. She found her slippers where Amy Joy had left them at the end of the bed. “Now I need to wash up before bed, so you go on home,” she said, and flicked the tip of her fingers at Amy Joy, as if to make her disappear. “That Grandmaison woman is right. Pretty soon it’ll seem like I always been here.”

  “Mama,” Amy Joy pleaded, “I was wrong. This was a mistake. I can see that now.”

  “Listen,” Sicily said sharply. “Even when you was little, you spoke your mind. Like your father spoke his. That’s where you got that habit, and it ain’t your fault. And you’re a lot like your aunt Pearl, too, I’ll admit that. She couldn’t hold her tongue either, but sometimes, when you let a tongue go, it says some things that need to be said. The whole country does this nowadays. It ain’t just you. So stick by your guns the way Pearl would’ve. I lived my life. It’s time you lived yours.”
/>   “I’ll call you,” Amy Joy said. “To say good night.”

  “You already said it,” Sicily noted. “So go on home.”

  ***

  Back in Winnie Craft’s room, Sicily was tucking her old friend into bed.

  “Just you wait,” Sicily was saying. “It’s only a matter of days until she’s down here begging me to come back home.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Winnie said. “If you ain’t, that means you’re already home.”

  “I know Amy Joy Lawler a whole lot better than she knows herself,” said Sicily. She was brushing Winnie’s long gray hair, finally freed from its daytime bun. “Travel, my foot. She ain’t even been out of the state of Maine. Where’s she gonna travel to?”

  “She mighta heard you on the phone,” Winnie reminded her. “Talking to me.”

  “No, she didn’t,” said Sicily. “All she hears anymore is bird calls. All she sees is them flowers and leaves she pastes into books. This’ll just remind her of a few things.”

  “Well,” Winnie said, remembering her dreadful experience with her own daughter Lola. “I hope it don’t backfire.”

  “It won’t backfire,” said Sicily. “She’ll be on her knees in no time. And like I been telling you on the phone, I ain’t leaving here without you.”

  “Do you think she’ll take us to the co-op dinner?” asked Winnie, always one to go for the proverbial yard once the foot appeared certain.

  ***

  And Amy Joy did call, several times, beginning at nine o’clock, Sicily’s traditional bedtime while she was still lodging at the old homestead. But the phone rang and rang without an answer. Amy Joy imagined the rings bouncing off the lime-green walls, pinging off all the silver walkers, ricocheting off the dentures soaking in all those glasses. At nine thirty she gave up, supposing that she would keep the whole institution awake if she persisted. In all her years of knowing Sicily, there had never been such a coup as this, although Sicily had pulled some whoppers. But something genuine was going on inside of her mother, Amy Joy felt certain, something the daughter had unknowingly set in motion. Surely by morning Sicily would be her old self, would be on the phone before the first cold rays of sun cut across the frozen river to light up the trees in the yard at Pine Valley.