Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  And he nodded like I had made a point, even though I hadn’t. He ran a tongue over his moustache, which I later came to know as a sign of mounting annoyance. If you got three of these, he would cease speaking altogether.

  “Well, no. It’s the other way around,” he said. “She didn’t have hypothermia because she was naked. She was naked because she had hypothermia. People undress when they’re at the most severe part of freezing to death. Their body sort of tricks them into thinking they’re overheating, but they’re not.”

  He went on to explain, using the hand on the wheel to describe Missy and the other for the elements, that there’s an inherent human instinct everyone exhibits when on the way to freezing to death. It was called terminal burrowing. A person with hypothermia will dig a hole in the ground, or crawl in behind something like a dresser, or get underneath a vehicle. In the last stages before a freezing death, a person becomes an animal, he said. They have no control over it.

  “Sometimes, police will think a crime—a rape—has happened, when they find a person naked and stuffed in someplace strange. But they just up and froze to death. Until they get an expert, you can’t tell.”

  And he had been thinking of her in the woodpile, crammed between stacks of logs, her body pressed into what would seem—at any other time—a miserable place to be. A part of the story that had never made sense to me, that I had doubted, and now which made perfect sense.

  Our honeymoon was the last time I told the story in this way, which was without sympathy for Missy herself. Even before then I had spoken about it to friends and colleagues, in university and at work as a kind of a crazy story, almost like how you’d tell a joke. It came up more than once when I was around people trying to outdo each other with stories of dysfunctional families or complicated origin stories. I had even, while drunk at a backyard party, put on my mother’s thick Maritime accent and vacant stare and told the story using her words.

  “She was as naked as an ape,” I’d say, and then explain how as a girl I’d pictured Missy as an actual chimp-faced girl in a dress, though I have no recollection of ever imagining her that way. It was a lie, an exaggeration I’d made to get laughs, just like all the other lies I was tossing around at that time in my life. I lied that I liked customers, my job, and myself. I was lying to myself when I accepted Lewis’s offer of marriage, lying when I found out I was pregnant and said I wanted children anyway, lying when I told everyone things were going great. A few more lies on top of a far-fetched story for a few laughs wasn’t hurting anyone.

  Then, when my daughter, Janine, was born, absolutely none of it was funny anymore. Though I understood, on some level, that Missy had a mother, it wasn’t anything I had really considered before. But looking at my daughter, even when she was red-faced and wailing, even when I was sore and tired and wished her away, I could see the real horror of Missy’s story. It was something simple and completely heartbreaking, the most basic betrayal a person can suffer:

  Someone had her, and someone had gotten rid of her.

  IV

  I didn’t tell the story to my daughter, but it made it to her anyway, from the few times my mother looked after her. My mother—whom I had given up speaking to several times by then—always had difficulty connecting with my daughter. She was a bright girl but often unhappy, and dissatisfied with my mother’s gifts, with the clothes she gave to her, the food she fed her. My mother must have told her the story on some boring afternoon together, trying to impart the same joy she had brought to me with it.

  I wasn’t aware that Missy—as a concept—had been transferred from my mother to my daughter until she was eleven years old. Her sixth-grade teacher had been alarmed by a picture she’d drawn for a school project and met with me privately after school. I had been teaching for ten years longer than her, in a different era, and she had come up through an age of hypervigilance, where everyone was looking for signs of harm done. She talked about the red flags she saw in my daughter’s homework, which embodied a list of things she had been trained to watch for. Child nudity and adult nudity, Inappropriate contact, Threats of violence or coercion, and Earlier than normal sexual knowledge.

  The picture and a photocopy of the picture was handed to me in an envelope with the date marked on the front by the teacher. It felt like I was handling evidence. When I took it out, it bore no resemblance to the story I had come to know.

  A man with a kerchief over his mouth (and a cowboy hat) pointed a gun at Missy, who wasn’t much more than a lump of peach flesh with fuchsia-coloured nipples and a pink-coloured swatch between her legs. A dog was there, but growling at Missy, seemingly on the bandit’s side of things.

  Miss Ross explained that the project was to draw something from your family history. Everyone else had drawn a scene from WWII or their grandparents getting married or something more benign; only my daughter had produced something truly worrisome.

  “This was supposed to be worked on with the parents,” she said. “Did she not give you the note we sent home?”

  “No,” I said.

  Then I had to explain the story for the first time in years. And it was difficult. I had to find the right words to speak about it responsibly, to justify it as part of our history. In telling it to a virtual stranger, it was sadder and more disturbing than I had ever remembered it being. I found myself getting upset and was struggling to maintain my composure when I concluded that, while the story was inappropriate for the classroom, it wasn’t a sign of molestation or violence or anything. It was just a sad, awful story from our past.

  “I think,” I told her, after swallowing some emotion, “this is—for better or worse—a sign of her independence. She misunderstood, but she came to its importance on her own.”

  The teacher agreed, took the picture back from me, and this time sealed it in the envelope. She looked at me with a familiar condescension, the kind I had given to indifferent, careless, and bad parents for years.

  “I’m keeping the original,” she said, “just in case.” She smiled and put it in her purse. “What you need to do now is to have a conversation about what’s classroom appropriate. I’m sure you can do that.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I was furious.

  I saw what it was right away. She was acting out. She and I had been fighting around that time, about staying over with friends, about what she was and wasn’t allowed to do, about how little I knew her. I wasn’t sure if this was an attempt by her to attack or ensnare me, which seemed far-fetched, but it was in some way about her and I regardless. Whether she knew it or not, it was about what I had and hadn’t deemed necessary to share with her.

  When I got home, I told her to do her project again.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “You know which one.”

  She looked at me, turning red. She immediately went to work on a more palatable piece of history, which confirmed my suspicions. She knew what she was doing. She already knew what was and what wasn’t okay to share at school. This was a big fuck you—to me, to her teachers—and an attempt to show off to her friends. Any other part of the story would have been suitable and even interesting, but she had chosen the most vulgar part, without even understanding why it was so upsetting. I could see her saying something like They said it had to be true and this IS a true story. I imagined her laughing with her friends, shocked that she was going to turn something like this in.

  Her new picture was of Lewis’s great grandfather, who had been an early settler, and who had herds of (smiling) sheep. It looked like the bandit had been recast from a snuff film to a Disney movie.

  When I looked at it, and then to her, I knew I had a choice to finally talk about Missy on my own terms. To clarify what it meant and why it wasn’t a joke. To find out what my mother had told her and try to understand where this mutation in the story had developed. What words and which ideas were wrong. I wasn’t sure if my mother
had shared this gruesomeness with her, or if it was her own addition to the story, and I genuinely wanted to know its origin.

  But the moment came and went.

  I handed it back to her and all I said was, “Don’t do that to me again.”

  She looked at me without shame on her face, and it was over.

  When she was set to graduate high school, when her breasts and hips had come in bigger and wider than mine and she was covered in so much of her father’s dark, curly hair she hardly felt like a part of me anymore, I knew I had made a mistake.

  A girl—one of my daughter’s classmates—had hanged herself with a rope from a batting cage. She was cut down and rescued by a neighbour, but had already suffered enough brain damage that she was lost to everyone. In a letter the girl had left behind when she could still hold a pencil and form thoughts, she implicated my daughter among several girls as the source of her anguish. The parents had taken it to the police, and now the school was looking to do something about it. She was sent home early with a letter from the principal, and a call was made to me personally.

  My daughter was unrepentant.

  She said she had done nothing wrong, and that this girl had been an annoyance for as long as she’d known her, that all of it was bullshit. But I had been teaching for a long time by then, and had seen this kind of thing enough times to know that merely ignoring someone, excluding them, or teasing them wasn’t enough to make this happen. I told her what I thought, which was that someone doesn’t do this sort of thing for no reason. The letter made reference to constant attacks. When I used their words, she exploded. Then I did. It was the worst fight I’d ever had with a person in my entire life.

  After enough screaming, I got her to admit that her behaviour was a problem, but she also shouted that everyone else’s was too, and that’s as far as we got. She wouldn’t let go of the point that her role in it was exaggerated, that the girl was going to do this no matter what. I didn’t have much to say to that, because she was right to a certain degree, and because she was resigned to this narrative. She couldn’t add to it or take away. It was a load-bearing structure in the story of her life.

  I blamed it on a lot of things, later on.

  On my husband, who had gone through some kind of political awakening and found the right jargon to articulate what he had felt his entire life. A special kind of isolationism and indifference that he might have taught her. A proud kind of callousness I’d seen her trying out.

  On myself, for failing to offer her any kind of strong feelings about anything one way or the other.

  That night, after all the arguing and shouting at the kitchen table was done, after the punishments were doled out and I was in bed—where I could imagine without getting embarrassed that there were things like fate and deep meanings—I decided this was all about Missy. About the purpose the story might have had for my daughter. That this piece of history wasn’t a mere curiosity, but a real lesson, an exercise in compassion that could have inspired something approaching kindness from her. Even pity might have been enough, and she might have had it if I had bothered to try and make her feel some for Missy. I decided that I would tell her everything I knew about Missy the next day. But when the sun came up, I just didn’t. It all felt like too much.

  Years later, when she was in her thirties with a career and money and responsibilities, I mentioned the Missy story to her. This was when I was getting back into researching her, and my findings about Missy were all the news I had to share. But she didn’t know who I was talking about.

  She had taken me on vacation with her. We were at one of those corporate getaway destinations in Barbados, sitting side by side in beach chairs. She had a sunhat pulled down over her face when she responded. She asked if Missy was my mother’s cousin, the one who died?

  I said it wasn’t, and tried reminding her about it, but she just said Mmm, and gave no indication either way if she did or didn’t remember.

  Another time, on the same trip, when I mentioned that the girl who had attempted suicide had finally passed away, my daughter rolled her eyes. She said, flatly, What a shame and waved at a waitress to bring us more drinks.

  I had nothing to say to that.

  Even though by then I no longer believed that omitting a single story—even one as important to me as Missy’s—could make a person like this, I still understood that she was missing something, and it was because of me. I had kept it all for myself.

  V

  The mystery has no solution.

  It’s something that I now accept, but only after putting more effort into it than would I admit to most people. When Lewis died—quite suddenly—of heart failure, and my daughter moved away soon after, solving it was the first thing I dreamed of doing with my freedom. I was going to dig deep and find out what really happened. I imagined learning who she really was, and tracking down her family, meeting them, getting to know them. I imagined writing a book. I imagined signing them, and giving lectures. I imagined moving onto the next project and having wide-open days where I would do nothing but find clues in dark libraries and track down leads on country roads.

  But then my mother got sick.

  She had been in decline for some time without my knowledge. A kind of dementia had set in while we weren’t speaking to each other, or maybe earlier, when she started acting so petty and cruel that she drove me away to begin with. She had done small, annoying things like giving away furniture or heirlooms I had been promised, or telling me I was getting fat or ugly in my old age. When I’d call, she’d sometimes hang up mid-conversation, or when I showed up at her house, she wouldn’t open the door for me. I was happy to have a reason to stop talking to her again. I believed, at the time, that it was for good.

  Then I was commanded by my father to go and see her after six months of estrangement. He wasn’t quite friends with her, and certainly didn’t love her anymore—he had remarried long ago—but he still checked in on her from time to time. When I asked why I had to see her, all he said was that she was sick and that she needed my help. He added, quietly, that he was too old to help her.

  I found out later that he’d been summoned by the authorities to deal with her after she’d entered a neighbour’s house and stayed there for days while they were vacationing. They’d come home and found her sleeping in the guest bedroom, wearing their clothes, eating their food. Like Goldilocks, I was told. The Mounties who brought her home took one look at how she had been living and knew she couldn’t stay by herself anymore.

  My father had gone to see things for himself—to spare me to having to see her like that—only to decide it was too much for him. When I got there, it looked like a place invaded. The woman I knew was gone and the creature in her place had defiled what was once her home. A side table and lamp were overturned and blocking the stairwell, and the throws and afghans and quilts from the living room were now strewn about the house, covering windows and stretched over kitchen chairs to create a fort like one fashioned by children. The timeline of her decline was well documented, in the form of letters from the phone and power company, from past due to overdue to final warning to third-party intervention.

  She had been living in the dark, using the main level laundry hamper as a toilet, and sleeping on any surface that would allow it, most often a pile of old coats and dresses on the kitchen floor. She was eating primarily out of cans, which were all but gone. She’d made her way to the neighbours because she was starving.

  The moment I saw her—skinny and frightened, grey-skinned and toothless—I knew every facet of my life was going to need to change in order to accommodate her. I would end up selling her house and mine, and delaying my retirement just so I could barely afford low-level home care for when I was working. And, because I couldn’t bear to sell the house, and because we could live there debt-free, she and I moved back into the old house, in Dale.

  Missy’s house.

  When thing
s settled down, I did what I could. I tried, at first, to do it all on paper. I looked at parish birth records, persons reported missing in the months leading up to her appearance, and read terrible self-published family histories. Family trees, too, of varying quality and size, so many that I ended up reading the same ones multiple times and not knowing it. And when all of that amounted to nothing, I did the same thing with records from the surrounding areas, until I no longer had a sense of what was useful and what wasn’t.

  What I scrutinized most was our own genealogy. My pet theory—that she was one of us to begin with—made the most sense to me, though there was nothing there either, or at least nothing left for me to find. No remaining birth records for anyone in the family up until my grandmother. But then, if she were a secret of some kind, there’s a good chance there wouldn’t have been a record to begin with. Records meant nothing.

  Finally I began talking to people—the thing I had been avoiding all this time—but all I found were more people like me. People in the neighbourhood who’d heard conflicting stories from the old-timers, and from each other. A man who fixed our chimney told me he knew the story, but remembered it as being about a boy who was blind and cared for by the priest. This detail worked its way into other versions, so lots of people had a story in which Missy was blind. Most peculiar were those who had the story right—or at least close to my understanding of it—except for a bit where it had been turned into complete fiction.

  The first time I heard it was from a very old woman who I was recommended to go and talk to because she was old and supposedly knew all the “old stories.” I found her at a flea market, selling quilts and crocheted hats and scarves. Her story was identical to mine, but had something mine didn’t. An ending.

  “She was with a family for a great many years,” the woman told me, raising her eyebrows dramatically, “and then the house caught fire. In the dead of winter, when no one was home. And after it had burned down, and they looked for a body in the ruins, they found nothing, except for footsteps, leading off into the forest. But they never found her.”