TWO WHITE QUEENS AND THE ONE-EYED JACK
TWO WHITE QUEENS AND THE ONE-EYED JACK
HEIDI VON PALLESKE
Copyright © Heidi von Palleske, 2021
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All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Rachel Spence | Editor: Shannon Whibbs
Cover designer: Laura Boyle
Cover image: istockphoto.com/sbayram
Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Two white queens and the one-eyed jack / Heidi von Palleske.
Names: Palleske, Heidi von, 1960- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200165518 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200165526 | ISBN 9781459746787 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459746794 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459746800 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8631.A444 T86 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
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To the first twins in my life, mother Doreen and aunt Colleen, born of rape and full of rage and life; and to their mother, my grandmother, Vera, who was a warrior woman all the days of her life even though her youth was stolen at sixteen years old; and to my daughter, Cavanagh, who is brave enough to speak out and claim her voice. To all the daughters of rape. The cycle ends here.
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
— Robertson Davies
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
HE WAS THERE WHEN JOHNNY fell from the tree. The crack of the branch, that double sound, a cra-crack warning before the final, disappointing snap. Then the slow-motion tumble through the air as the wood gave way. It was impossible to get to him. A slow-motion pantomime where the force of a turbo engine wouldn’t be quick enough. He twisted and spiralled, taking leaves and twigs along with him. Those were the only sounds: the snaps, the cracks, and the rustles. Then, finally, the thud of his body touching down.
Hadn’t they been warned about climbing? That smothering, mothering voice, “Well, don’t come crying to me if you break your necks!” But that hadn’t discouraged them. After Gareth emerged the climbing victor, up to the tippy-top and down again, it was Johnny’s turn.
“Higher! Higher!” Gareth called out.
Johnny, being light and adept, was only too happy to comply. Until the top branches could not bear his weight. Surely it was not high enough to break his neck. It was only a few feet over their heads. An oversized bush, really. A hawthorn, Gareth thought, but perhaps that’s just because of the word thorn following “haw, haw, haw.” But no one was laughing. No one ever laughed. And no one ever mentioned how Gareth had called Johnny a “scaredy-cat” that hot afternoon.
The scream sent Gareth running. After an initial pause of frozen realization, his legs moved on their own until he was nothing but pounding heart and pounding feet, faster and faster across the field, over the fence, past the barn to the driveway and up the newly painted steps.
“Gareth, I told you! I just painted those!” Johnny’s mother, Hilda, shrieked, but one look at Gareth’s face and she began running in the direction from which he had just come. Finally, Gareth just stood there, catching his breath, squeezing his eyes, willing it all to go away.
He didn’t go back to the tree that day. Didn’t want to see the blood or his screaming friend clutching his eye. He turned his face toward home. To the understanding embrace of his mother.
“Good thing it was his bad eye,” his older brother, Tristan, declared when Gareth delivered the awful news.
“What do you mean, Trist?” their mother asked.
Tristan regarded his mother with the weak disdain that only first-borns possess. He tossed back his mass of blond curls and planted his feet squarely, hands on his hips. His knowing look to his younger brother, then his inhalation followed by a slow exhaled sigh, all pointed to the fact that he had been alive an entire year and a half longer than Gareth. He knew things. He knew all sorts of things.
“Well, if he can still see then he only hurt the lazy eye. It’s not the eye that does all the work.” Then Tristan took his hand and covered one eye and then the other to make his point. “You know. Try it! See … can’t see … see … can’t see.”
And so on one hot day at the start of June, Gareth’s best friend lost his eye to a thorn bush and it was discovered that Gareth’s older brother was blind in one of his.
It was far easier dealing with his brother’s blind eye than his friend’s. Nothing had really changed for Gareth’s brother, after all. Tristan didn’t think twice about it. He was used to being monocular, having had single-eye vision since birth. Sure, their parents fretted over it, but deep down Gareth knew that nothing had changed for Tristan that day. He was blind in his left eye when he woke up and still blind in his left eye when he went to bed. Besides, the dud eye functioned as though it were a seeing eye. It moved as the good eye moved, following the stronger twin. Never letting on that it was in any way less.
But Johnny was another story. His new eye was, for the most part, unmoving. It was freaky how it sometimes stayed, staring blindly ahead, while the other did as it pleased with no regard for the replacement eye. Gareth assumed that his friend’s old eye hated the new one. It must have missed its matching eye and begrudged the new eye’s placement in his friend’s head.
Johnny underwent surgeries and procedures throughout that entire summer. An enucleation to remove the eye happened just days after the accident, and Johnny was required to wear a patch to cover where the eye had been. Gareth didn’t understand why the eye had to come out, why they didn’t just let it get better. His eye always got better when he accidentally poked it! Sure, this was worse, but why not give it a chance?
“Well, Gareth, his eye had too much damage. They had to take the eye out because if they didn’t then he could go blind in the other eye,” Johnny’s mom explained to him carefully with her deep, strange voice.
“Why? He didn’t hurt the other eye.”
“It’s a strange thing that happens. When one eye goes blind, sometimes the brain gets all mixed up and then the other eye goes blind, too. Especially with kids,” Hild
a explained, although she, too, didn’t quite believe it. She had wanted to wait and see. Perhaps his eye would be fine. But the surgeon had been insistent. So she sat outside the surgery door. She waited. Even when her husband suggested they go have a coffee, that they should take a break, Hilda stayed behind, feeling those first pains of separation. How could she leave her son to those consoling strangers with their sharp scalpels?
“But my brother is blind in one eye and the other one didn’t go blind.”
“That is because he didn’t suffer a trauma. It’s different.” She wanted to let it drop, not wanting Gareth to feel responsible for the accident. Not wanting to remember.
Eventually, the patch came off and Johnny was allowed out to play. He had a pair of glasses on, for protection. Gareth stared at his friend in shock. It wasn’t the strangeness of sudden glasses that bothered him; it was that the bad eye had been replaced with something that seemed to have a drawing of an eye on it. Unmoving. Hard. And just a little bit creepy.
“Not catch, Gareth. What if that baseball hits Johnny in the eye? But you can look at comic books together. I got the new Spider-Man one for the both of you.”
Gareth didn’t know if Johnny’s mom was more worried about the fake eye or the seeing eye. If the ball hit the seeing eye, and Johnny got a shiner, then he wouldn’t be able to see at all, not till the swelling went down. But what if it hit the fake eye? Gareth imagined shards shooting out of his friend’s eye socket. Like the crystal vase that had slid from his hands when he was helping with the washing-up. Hundreds of sharp little splinters that cut into his hurrying fingers as he tried to pick it all up before anyone noticed.
“We want his eye to get better, don’t we Gareth?” Johnny’s mother asked, her w’s sounding more like v’s than the way other mothers said words starting with the letter w.
Gareth nodded. Of course, he wanted the eye to get better, but he knew deep in his belly that the eye wouldn’t get better. It would never see again. Gareth wondered why Johnny’s mother didn’t know that, as well.
* * *
Gareth’s feet didn’t quite touch the ground. They dangled somewhere between the seat and the floor. He swung them back and forth, counting how many times each foot passed the other. Why did he have to go to the eye doctor with his brother again? Boring, boring, boring.
“You could colour. There are colouring books and crayons over there,” his father, Mark, suggested, hoping Gareth would settle down.
Gareth scowled, his full bottom lip in a petulant pout. How many times did he have to explain to his dad that he only colours the things that he draws himself? Whoever drew those many pictures in the fat paper book should colour his own stuff!
“I’m not colouring someone else’s stupid pictures!” Gareth’s young sense of justice was slighted at the suggestion he should do someone else’s work.
“Higher, higher!” He suddenly remembered his words and his stomach clenched, reliving his friend’s fall from the tree. He knew it was all his fault, and yet he still resented all the attention Johnny was getting. At least his brother’s eye problems weren’t his fault. “Go on, you’re almost there, don’t be a scaredy-cat!”
Gareth put his hands over his ears but it didn’t quiet the voice in his head. And so his leg-swinging took on more vigour until every exchange was punctuated by the whish, whish, whish sound of corduroy ribs rubbing violently against each other.
It was only when the two matching girls walked in that Gareth stopped counting the swings of his legs. His hands dropped from his ears and he could not help but ask out loud, “What are they?” His father swatted him on the thigh to make him hush.
“Tristan?” The woman in the white pants, the white coat, and the white shoes spoke his brother’s name, as she opened the door separating those waiting from whatever strange happenings might be occurring inside, beyond the barrier. On each previous appointment Gareth was invited in to join them but he always shook his head no. He had glimpsed the large machines and could only imagine the torture his brother had to face. It was bad enough that he would have to see his brother’s dilated pupils.
Tristan and their father went through the magical doors, leaving Gareth in the presence of the two white girls. He waved awkwardly at them. His hand doing that childlike side-to-side gesture that is always accompanied by a courageous, unnatural smile. A smile of hope. A smile that says, I made the first move, do not humiliate me by not mimicking it back. But the girls took no notice of him; they just talked to each other in whispers. He couldn’t quite make out the words, but what snippets he did hear were gibberish to him. A foreign language from some faraway place.
“Den snippet up zen blondish boy?”
“Yes, him den snippet gooden still.”
They seemed the colour of snow, with straight hair that blended in with their skin so that you couldn’t tell where their foreheads ended and the soft, downy strands of their hair began. And downy they were, with hair more like goslings’ feathers than actual hair, pulling off their faces and into tight, long, white braids, each secured with a blue bauble-band popping out violently from a sea of white. Behind their thick glasses, Gareth could just catch a glimpse of pink eyes, circled by thick, snowy lashes. The pink ovals darted side to side quickly. He looked from one twin to the other and, yes, both girls had pink eyes, with dark reddish-black pupils, moving back and forth, back and forth, rapidly, in small, slightly jittery movements. Bunny eyes, he thought. Scared bunnies. Like the ones Johnny’s mother had in hutches. Pets until they vanished, only to show up skinned and headless in the freezer.
Gareth glanced at the colouring books. They were so close to the pale creatures. If he could only pretend to want one, he could creep closer, get a better look. Figure out who and what they really were.
“Don’t stare!” an old man bellowed in his direction. “Not po-lite to stare!”
The old man turned his attention to the girls. Swatted them both on their backs and ordered that they sit up straight. The girls improved their posture, straightened their backs, and tried to focus their vibrating pink eyes in front of themselves.
“I … I … just wanted a colouring book,” Gareth stammered.
“Oh, for Chrissakes, they don’t bite. Get off your heinie and get one, then! Clara, hand this idiot a colouring book.”
One of the matching creatures reached over and picked up a book. She brought it close to her face, to her vibrating pink eyes, and examined it. Then she discarded it. She picked up another and repeated the process. Each time she seemed to smile a bit more, enjoying the power she was building as she reached, lifted, examined, and discarded. Finally, she settled on the fourth book and, smiling broadly, held it to her chest as she crossed the waiting-room floor before offering it to Gareth.
It was only when he looked at the book with its missing cover that he understood her hidden message. There, flying amongst the flowers, was a pair of winged fairies. Outlines, no more, with uncoloured insides as white as the girls looking over at him.
Changelings. Switched at birth and expelled from the fairy world. Forced to live with the evil, fat, old ogre. Gareth quickly glanced at the old man sitting there. White ribbed socks, patent leather shoes in black and white, Bermuda shorts, and a stained, improperly buttoned polyester shirt.
“Ya need some crayons with that, don’cha?”
Gareth shook his head. The uncoloured fairies were perfect just the way they were.
* * *
The albino twins were ready and waiting. Their hair was combed and braided perfectly. Their clothes, matching, were their best dresses. They had put on fresh white knee socks. Even their shoes, Mary Janes, were polished and shiny! After all, their mother was coming home for a visit, so everything had to be perfect. They saw her only intermittently, weekends mostly, when she was well enough to see them. On those days they would ride in their uncle’s second-hand station wagon with its fake wood sides and backward-facing seats. They always took those seats, looking at what had alre
ady been, what they were leaving behind. They would hold hands as they watched the scenery fall away from them, as they sped toward the little yellow cottages on the shores of Lake Ontario, past Lynde Creek where the swans and geese nested, beyond the Girl Guide camp where city Guides and Brownies could experience the joys of nature away from their concrete lives, and then along a gravel road that wound past a small hospital and weaved, benignly, to the little yellow cottages. They thought it unfair that their mom got to stay there on her own, staring out at the water, while they were shuttled between disgruntled relatives. And worse, they had to go to school to learn things, like how to lie low, how to seem invisible, and how to be deaf to the jokes made about them.
What did she do there all day, their mother? Probably not much since she said and did so little at home. Just stared ahead, counting the minutes. The only difference was that when she was home the girls had to “put a special effort” into behaving. No fights, no bickering, and not too much noise. Then, only then, at the end of the day, she would come and kiss their foreheads. Tuck them into bed. Snug as a bug in a rug.
Clara and Blanca thought of what it would be like if their mother never came home again. If she just decided to stay, forever, in her yellow cottage. Then they could be adopted by someone else, escape their reality and move far away from their grandfather with his ashtray of smokes, his greasy fry-ups, and his stinking farts. They could find new parents. A mother and a father who would be there every night when they got home from school, ready to help them with their studies while they sipped hot cocoa or tea. Maybe they could even be home-schooled, away from bullying nicknames, in the safe embrace of these new parents. The father would smoke a pipe and puff, puff, puff while he threw out words of wisdom or turned on his hi-fi to play something from his collection of records. And there would be a mother who baked cakes and pies. A mother who could sing like the dark-eyed woman who lived in the main floor apartment, two floors below them. Yes, they would be the perfect parents, the couple downstairs. Esther and David with their music and art! Imagine being tucked away in that mysterious lower apartment that smelled of wood polish, baking, and lavender.
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