Over Our Heads

by Andrea Thompson

  She wanted to go outside for a smoke right after the service was over, but Mrs. Dalloway pulled Wanda the other way. She had made her put on the necklace and the tie and the medal. She had her around the neck.

  Wanda walked over to them. They were standing together, all three. It was time.

  She couldn’t say anything. She just stood there. Mrs. Dalloway tried to pull the words out of her. Any words. But she couldn’t make Wanda speak. It was okay, though. They knew who she was. Even the nervous one, who looked so surprised to see her, knew who she was now.

  They looked at the things dangling from around Wanda’s neck. The nervous girl, who looked sad and stern with all her hair pulled back, asked Wanda if she could give her the tie back now. Wanda said, “Yes.” She gave back the tie and the other things as well. They must have been heavier than she realized, because without them Wanda felt like she was floating. She felt light and soft and warm, and now she was going back home.

  Mrs. Dalloway smiled and said, “An offering for the sake of offering.”

  Wanda looked at the children again. “Sorry,” she said, then walked away.

  34.

  THE MORNING OF THE GARAGE SALE, Emma woke up in her old bed at number 66, with Lester snoring in her ear. He had been drunk the night before. They all had. After the service, everyone had gone back to the house for drinks and sandwiches. Rachel had stocked up, so the booze flowed until the birds started chirping.

  Emma was in her underwear and bra, the old turtle pendant around her neck. She touched it, and thought for a moment about Wanda. She hadn’t been surprised that her mother wasn’t well – the yelling lady on the streetcar had prepared Emma for that. What had come as a shock was how old, tired, and bewildered Wanda had seemed. It was as if they, her own children, had become strangers to her now. What had it taken out of her to make the trip back to Toronto? And why had she come? Had it been a sense of duty, or had she needed to say goodbye? Emma had waited after the service for Wanda to join them at the house, but when Nina arrived, she said she had dropped their mother off at a hotel. Nina would go by in the morning to get the paperwork finalized, and then drive Wanda to the airport.

  Emma knew that was it. They would never see their mother again.

  She sat up, and wiggled herself out from under the covers. She was pinned between the wall and Lester, who was still fully clothed. Emma looked down; her own clothes were in a ball on the floor at the bottom of the bed. She bent over to look at them, and found they were covered in dirt. She tried to remember what had happened. She had danced on the coffee table to Harry Belafonte at some point, she knew that much. She laughed to herself as she remembered that she had also taken the old astrology book out of her room, and had started telling people about how to cast a birth chart. She remembered Rachel playing hostess, and getting mad at Emma for smoking a joint with Billy. Billy the Kid, Emma thought, chuckled to herself for a moment, and then stopped. It was a clue, some piece to the puzzle of what happened the night before. Something about her and Billy being outlaws – not like Bonnie and Clyde, more like Robin Hood. Yes, she had a whiff of it now – Robin Hood and his merry band of Bison. Bison? Emma reached into her memory for more, but her mind just laughed, and sloshed around in the puddle of a hangover that promised to be a tsunami by noon. Harry Belafonte, Billy the Kid, dancing on the coffee table, dirty clothes left in a mound on the floor. Turtle pendant – that was it, the trail went cold.

  Emma had seen Billy at the funeral, and wondered who he was – this big, bald, rough-looking guy who had showed-up on a Harley Davidson. When he came to the house and introduced himself after the service, he told Emma that he met Grandma on a plane to Florida once, a long time ago. He had said she had given him some advice on how to get back together with a girlfriend he had cheated on. “I’ll never forget,” Emma remembered him saying, “I was pounding back double JD’s, and she made it so simple,” he’d said. “She said, if you love her, you have to beg her forgiveness and hope that she gives it to you.” Billy had laughed. “I kept coming up with excuses, trying to weasel out of it, and she kept saying, ‘you’ve got to own up to your mistakes, William, and that’s that’.” Billy had only seen their grandmother once after that, when she had asked him to come scare Sam straight when he was getting in trouble as a teenager.

  Rachel had been angry about the pot. She’d said that at least they could have gone outside instead of in the garage, stinking up the whole house. She had even accused Billy of being a criminal. She hadn’t minded him so much later, though, when Lester and Sam got into it, and Billy had stepped in and told them both to knock it off.

  Emma got out of bed, and stood up. Lester was still asleep. She looked down at him, and remembered how he had flirted with Nina Buziak the night before. Nina had dropped Wanda off at the airport, and then gone back to the house. Lester was standing with Emma at first, saying, “She looks good, eh? Who would have thought she’d turn out to be such a knockout. I wonder if she’d let me take her picture sometime.”

  “Why don’t you go ask her?” Emma remembered saying.

  Lester had looked at her, a little suspicious, then he had shrugged his shoulders and off he went. Emma had stood there like an idiot, feeling jealous and abandoned as she watched him flirt with Nina, at her grandmother’s wake, no less. So much for the gallant knight, so much for Mr. Save-the-Day.

  Emma picked her dirty clothes off the floor and placed them gently over Lester’s head, rubbing them together a bit before letting them drop, so some of the dirt fell into his hair. He, oblivious, slept on. Nina Buziak, of all people. At least she’d had the decency to look uncomfortable, and to leave the house shortly after. Emma vaguely remembered crying. She looked in the mirror. Her eyes were small, the skin around them puffy and tight. Yes, she must have cried. She remembered Sam had gone over to Lester, yelling and calling him a slimy little shit. Then, the pushing had started between Sam and Lester until Billy stepped in. After that? Emma couldn’t remember. The rest of the evening sank like a stone below consciousness.

  Emma looked around the room for her purse, then gave up, and sat on the floor with her back to the bed, rummaging around in her duffle bag for her indigo cotton dress. Already, it was too hot, and she’d be spending the day outside with Rachel, selling all their memories off to the highest bidder.

  Lester began snoring loudly. He had tossed off Emma’s dirty clothes and flipped onto his back. Lester. He had to be the centre of attention, always had to be the meat of the sandwich. Emma looked at him again, and had the urge to pull out the corners of the sheet underneath him. Then what would she do? Roll him out of bed, and dump him into a heap onto the floor? Or wrap him up as if she was swaddling him? She wanted to do both.

  Outside, the woodpecker egged her on. Emma put her housecoat on and left the room.

  35.

  RACHEL HADN’T SLEPT at all the night after her grandmother’s funeral service. First, there had been the guests to attend to at the reception at the house. The caterers had arrived on schedule with the sandwiches, but there had been two platters of egg salad, only one of roast beef, and they had forgotten the tuna altogether. Then there was Emma, smoking drugs in the house with some Hell’s Angel funeral-crasher that she had the nerve to tell Rachel was a friend of their grandmother’s.

  Whoever he was, like most of the guests, he left just after midnight. Rachel had heard his motorcycle start up as she was taking the empty bottles out to the trash. Emma and Sam were nowhere to be found, so it had been left to Rachel to sort out the guests who remained. There were no takers on her offer to sleepover, so most had been ushered into a series of taxis that came and left in succession until the street grew quiet. The few who had remained lived within walking distance. Rachel had put on a pot of coffee for these local stragglers, and then did one final inspection of the house, collecting anything that had been left out of the inventory of items to be sold.

  She had open
ed the door to the basement, flicked the light switch three times, and then had gone down to check that everything had been properly labelled for the garage sale, working quietly as drunken footsteps above her stumbled toward bed, or out the door. Eventually, the house grew quiet, and Rachel had climbed up the stairs and gone into her old room, taking off her clothes and leaving them in a pile on the floor. Not folding them was a proclamation: mourning clothes – I will never wear you again. She had flicked the switch to her bedroom light three times, and then lay in the dark, eyes open, as glow-in-the-dark planets stuck onto her ceiling shone with silly, brilliant innocence.

  It was likely the slam of the screen door that woke Rachel up, that and the sound Emma’s singing, loud, slurring and off-key:

  Emancipate yourself from mental slavery

  None but ourselves can free our kind!

  The sound of the kitchen tap being turned on, of the fridge door opening, the cutlery drawer, the tap being turned off, then silence.

  She’s left the fucking fridge open, Rachel thought, sitting up and reaching in the darkness for her robe. Then the fridge door closed, and Emma thumped up the stairs and slammed the door to her bedroom shut.

  Rachel reached for her phone to check the time. It was four a.m. for chrissake. She lay back down, eyes open. She knew she wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep. A familiar flush of annoyance throbbed between her temples as Emma’s singing echoed in her ears. When her alarm went off at six am, Rachel was relieved, tired but relieved. At least she hadn’t slept in. Before her feet hit the floor, she shot a text off to Nina. She wanted to ensure the papers had been signed before Wanda got on the plane. Next, was the garage sale. She could do a lot of the preparation on her own. First, she would drive around the neighborhood putting up signs, then she’d pull the card tables out of the garage and set them up on the lawn. After that, she’d put coffee on for everyone, and paste a smile on her face. Just one more day, and it would all be over.

  By noon, many of the big-ticket items were gone. The kitchen table and chairs went for much less than Rachel expected, but they got what they asked for with the couch and bookshelves. It was a good thing she’d managed to get Sam and Lester up early to move the big pieces out of the house, even if they did both go back to bed immediately afterward. There were at least a dozen people milling around by the time everything was ready to go. Emma, surprisingly, was up early, though for the most part she stayed on the front lawn, mooning around, looking longingly at the sale items with a coffee cup in hand. Rachel felt annoyed at the sight of her, and gave her a wide berth. The sun was high and hot, and that, plus the lack of sleep, left Rachel feeling dizzy and worn.

  Emma went into the house, and came out later with sandwiches and lemonade on a tray. Rachel looked at the frosted glass as Emma handed it to her. She wasn’t falling for the bait. She’d take the lemonade, but an apology for being woken from a dead sleep was what Rachel was holding out for. I can wait all day, she thought at first, but when she saw the sandwiches, she caved. Tuna fish. A coincidence of course, but it softened the gesture. She looked up at Emma, who avoided Rachel’s gaze by looking out at the scene on the lawn.

  “I found a can of tuna in the back of the pantry,” Emma muttered. “I know you wanted one of these yesterday. Better late than never,” Emma let her sandwich sit, and went back to wandering around the yard, as if she were looking for something. Rachel watched her, thinking about Emma’s tuna, sitting out in the sun. Emma turned, looking back at her sandwich, as if she had heard.

  “I’ll eat mine in a sec,” Emma yelled in Rachel’s direction. “I just want to … I’m just…” Emma stopped speaking, reached across the fold-out table in front of her, and picked up a book. She then turned, and marched over to Rachel as if entering combat.

  “What the hell is this?” Emma slammed an astrology book down on the table.

  “It’s an old book,” Rachel said, frowning. It was too hot for this sort of nonsense. A fly began to buzz over Emma’s sandwich.

  “What the hell, Rachel, I put that aside to keep!” Emma was shouting. People were turning to watch the scene.

  “Fine, if you want it, you can have it, I don’t really care. It was sitting there on the kitchen counter, so I put it out. You don’t have to get so dramatic about it.”

  “Oh, I can have it? I have your permission, do I? Thanks so much, Ms. Queen of the Universe.” Emma stormed up the steps of the old porch, and into the house, the screen door slamming behind her.

  Rachel finished off her sandwich, watching as the fly and his new friend strolled leisurely across Emma’s. The sun was directly overhead. A news van rolled down the street. A couple of people came up to the table to pay for things. One particularly senile old man told her that he needed new lawn furniture because a herd of buffalo had strolled through his backyard earlier that morning. Rachel looked away, embarrassed. She made the sale and didn’t haggle, instead taking five dollars off the ticket price and throwing the garden hose in for free. Grandma would have been appalled.

  A few moments later, the screen door swung open and Emma barrelled out, dragging a long box beside her. She dropped it on the porch, and bounded down the steps.

  “Here!” Emma pulled a book out from under her arm, and slammed it down on the table, next to the astrology book. It was The Secret Garden, the book Grandma had given Rachel just after her father died. Rachel looked up at Emma, then over at the box. “It’s your father’s telescope. I found it in the attic. I put both of these things aside because I knew that they meant something to you.” Emma was crying. It was emotional blackmail, irrational and inappropriate. The events of the day before were clearly too much for her. She hadn’t even mentioned Wanda.

  “Just settle down Emma,” Rachel sighed, thinking that they both really needed to get out of the sun.

  “Don’t tell me to settle down. In fact, don’t tell me what to do at all anymore. That’s over now. No more lists, no more directions, no more judgment, no more condescension, no more of your holier-than-thou superiority. I’ve had it with all that shit.” Emma was shaking in a way that conjured an image of Wanda in Rachel’s mind.

  Perhaps it was a simple matter of not enough sleep and too much time in the sun, or maybe it was something less probable, like a small tear in space-time, or the brief manifestation of a subatomic worm-hole, but for a moment, Rachel was transported back to the gas-station chapel after the service – staring into her mother’s eyes as she returned the tie. Wanda’s face had looked tired and expressionless, not like she was performing an act of contrition, but like she was doing it because someone told her to. There was a distance, a lack of recognition. Her hair was grey and matted, and the smell in the air around her was rancid, like sour milk.

  “Enough!” Rachel suddenly stood up. Everyone was staring now, so what the hell, but standing so fast made her dizzy. She could have sworn she saw a peacock out of the corner of her eye, strolling down Garden Avenue.

  Rachel was about to let loose, to give Emma just enough of a blast that she backed off, when Sam, in track pants and his old Rolling Stones t-shirt, suddenly swung open the screen door.

  “Nina’s coming over soon. She wants to talk to you both.” He rubbed his eyes, patted his hair down and attempted to look stern. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said, and went back in the house.

  Rachel was relieved. Nina was on the way – the wheels were in motion. The papers were signed, and soon Robertson would put the final seal on the will. Soon this would all be over.

  Emma got up and took their lunch plates in without a word. The screen door banged shut behind her. Rachel took a sip of lemonade, then she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Was that a sheep bleating?

  The screen door banged open again.

  36.

  “LISTEN, RACHEL, I know you mean well, but you act like you know what’s best for everyone, when sometimes you don’t even kno
w what’s best for yourself.” Emma stood in front of the card table, her voice calm and even. She was going to try a different approach. “You think you’re objective – you think that the way you see things is the way they are, just because your worldview is reflected back to you in all of its hollow, materialistic glory every time you turn on the TV or open up a magazine. But that doesn’t make it the truth.”

  Emma felt much better now. Her emotions had gotten the better of her earlier. Too much alcohol the night before, too little sleep, and too much sun. Plus, there had been another sound, a buzz of energetic interference that had hung in the air all day like a thundercloud. It reminded Emma of that night in the park, and she wondered, for a moment, if it was the Howards again: John and Jemima, offering their sage advice. Emma tried to tune in the static, but her booze-addled brain rebelled. So, she decided to take a quick moment in the kitchen, to ground herself, and call on the Grandmothers – not for protection, but for guidance.

  She had gone back outside afterward, to confront Rachel, again. Rachel was leaning forward, peering out onto the lawn. For a moment, it looked as if she was going to ignore Emma all together. Then she leaned back, and replied with a sigh, “Some of us look at the world objectively, Emma, we weigh the facts and then come to a rational decision.” Rachel continued looking out at the scene before her. “And some of us see everything through our emotions.”

  Okay, touché. Emma could let that one go. She knew she had been a tad dramatic. She felt the weight of the pendant around her neck, and took a slow deep breath.

  “Yes, and some of us see everything through our prejudices.” Rachel looked up suddenly; seeming surprised that Emma had a response. Emma thought to herself, the possum has arisen.