Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  [ NINE ]

  WHEN THE END OF AUGUST CAME, we had to leave the well-equipped house in Dultso Lake, the records and games and the foreign smell of someone else’s life. I wasn’t sad to go, but Jenny grew anxious as the time approached.

  “Where are we going to go?” she asked at least three times a day, sometimes asking me, sometimes Mom.

  “First we’re going to camp,” Mom said. “We haven’t really had a holiday this summer. We’ll find a nice spot and settle in for a couple of weeks.”

  “I don’t want to camp,” Jenny said. “It’ll be too cold. I want to go home.”

  “Well,” Mom said, then smiled tightly. She didn’t say what we all knew—that we had no home anymore. She had given up the house in Duchess Creek because she didn’t want to pay the rent on it for the summer, and we had left our most important possessions in a shed at Rita’s. Anyhow, there was no work for her in Duchess Creek, and she needed work.

  “Will I be able to go back to my old school?” Jenny wanted to know.

  “We’ll see,” Mom said.

  “ ‘We’ll see’ means no,” Jenny muttered.

  In a way I suppose I blamed Jenny for what happened next. All through the bright cooling days of an Indian summer, our gypsy life—sleeping out, fishing for trout in the river, frying them crackling in a cast iron pan over the fire, even learning to shoot with Dad’s 30.30 and, once, helping to bring hay off a field for pay—was soured by Jenny’s constant questions about school. Mom grew tired of trying to reassure her, and the lightness went out of our adventure. We drove the dusty back roads in silence, each of us occupied with our own worries.

  Once September came and school had started, Jenny became sullen and stayed in the station wagon all day with Cinnamon, reading and rereading old Archie comics, chewing her nails to ragged nubs and staring out the window while Mom and I fished or made camp. About the second week in September, Mom drove down the Nakenitses Road to Rita’s, and Rita came out on the porch and hugged each of us tightly and made a fuss over how much Cinnamon had grown.

  There was a school at Nakenitses Lake, but Jenny didn’t want to go to it. “I want to go to my own school,” Jenny demanded. “Why should I start school here and be the stupid new girl if we aren’t even going to stay? Then I’ll just have to do it over again somewhere else.”

  I didn’t want to go to school at all, and at first Mom, distracted and irritable, let it go. She left us with Rita some days and went off in the car, returning late. I watched for the station wagon headlights swinging into the driveway and sweeping across the living-room wall. Rita didn’t like it when Mom was gone, I could tell. She grew testy and tried to play the parent with us, which she hadn’t done before. “Don’t you think you should clean that litter box?” or “You better turn on the lamp or you’ll ruin your eyes.” One evening after Mom had been gone all day, I was doing the dishes and broke a glass trying to get the milk ring out of the bottom. I cut myself, only a little, but blood seeped into the hot water. It looked like a lot and Rita, who was drying, snapped, “Oh for Christ’s sake. Now what?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s just a cut.” I put the two pieces of the glass in the garbage, feeling my face flush with shame. It was all I could do to stand there at the sink.

  “I’ll finish them up,” said Jenny, coming up beside me. I felt tears well up in gratitude. I dried my hands and went to the bathroom to get a strip of toilet paper. I sat on the couch with my hand wrapped and stared out the window, trying not to cry. The dishes clattered in the awkward silence.

  “It’s only a glass, guys,” Rita finally said. “We’ll live, right? Will we all live?” She looked over at me and I nodded, trying to smile.

  —

  That night we were in bed when Mom got back. I don’t know what time it was, but I’d had long enough to imagine the various horrible accidents that could have befallen her. She came into the room and kissed Jenny and me on our foreheads. “Sleep tight, my sweets,” she said, and relief coursed through me.

  I had drifted to sleep when Mom and Rita’s voices woke me.

  “I think you should send them to school,” Rita said. “At least Jennifer. She’s thirteen—she’s at that age when she just wants to belong. You’re a conformist at thirteen.”

  “When I was her age my mother had already died and I was only three years away from being pregnant with her.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Silence.

  “Have you been drinking?” Rita asked.

  “ ‘Have you been drinking?’ What are you, my mother?”

  “Well, it seems like you could use a mother.”

  “Ha. I’ve been managing just fine for many, many years. If anyone is going to remember what it was like to be thirteen, it’s me.”

  “I’m just giving you my opinion as your friend.”

  “Rita, I’m tired.”

  “Here’s an idea—come home earlier. It’s not like I don’t worry.”

  “I appreciate what you do for us, I really do.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t get it, Irene.”

  Jenny and I started school in Nakenitses Lake the next Monday. I was in grade six and in a room together with the grade four and five kids, and Jenny was in grade eight and in with the sevens and nines. Because the fall weather had turned warm, the teacher had us outside collecting leaves for a project. After school I wandered far along a creek and out to the lake, looking for more leaves. At Rita’s, I used the iron to press yellow aspen leaves, red maple, the heart-shaped cottonwood and paper birch between two sheets of wax paper. I labelled them with name and habitat. I got the project back on Friday, A+.

  Mom wasn’t there when I got home. I waited on the porch, the leaf project in my lap, until Rita called me in and wordlessly placed bowls of canned spaghetti on the table. Jenny read at the table as we ate, and Rita didn’t tell her not to.

  I kept the leaf project beside my bed all through the night, woke up to touch it, check the colour of the light coming in the window and listen.

  When Mom drove up on Saturday afternoon, I was sitting on the porch waiting. But when she kissed me lightly, I was too overcome with relief to show her my project.

  “Did you miss me?” she said on her way in, as if being gone all night was nothing.

  Jenny came out a minute later and the two of us sat and listened to the argument going on inside.

  “What am I, your babysitter?” Rita shouted.

  “You’re my friend.” Mom’s voice, calmer, but still insistent.

  “And what does that mean to you?”

  “What does it mean to you?” Now her volume rose, too. “You’ve got some rigid formula of debits and credits and every time you do something for me I feel as if you’re waiting to see if I fill in the matching thing on the ledger. I’m always just a little in the red with you.”

  “A little?”

  “See. This is pointless.” Mom came outside, letting the screen door slam behind her. The three of us sat there gloomily. Through the trees, the afternoon light shadowed the mountains. We had nowhere to go—the porch, the car, that was it, the safe zones. I picked up Cinnamon and went and sat in the car. Its smells and warmth cocooned me in familiarity. I might sleep in it if Mom would let me. That way I wouldn’t have to worry about her slipping out of my sight.

  Sometime in the middle of the night the car door jerked open and a blast of cold air rushed in. Mom began throwing in blankets and pillows. Jenny climbed in on top of them, groggy with sleep, her eyes barely open. The two of us sat in a stupor as Mom made several agitated trips in and out of the house, piling armloads of our possessions into the back of the station wagon. She slammed the hatch and got into the driver’s seat, all without a word to us. Then she started the car, revved the engine for minute, and drove out onto Nakenitses Road, ribboning out in front of us in the moonlight. I don’t know how long it was—maybe twenty minutes, half an hour—before Jenny spoke. “Why was Rita
crying?”

  “Never mind, honey.” Her tone said that was the end of it.

  Rita crying was such a bizarre and improbable thing that I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like. A long time later I asked Jenny about it. She told me Rita had sat in a kitchen chair with her face in her hands and cried like her heart was broken.

  We drove all night. I woke up once when the car stopped and saw Mom outside, leaning against the car smoking a cigarette. The northern lights sent fingers of green light creeping, retreating, shooting up into the night sky. Cinnamon sighed and stretched in the nest of blankets, then settled herself again. Mom climbed back in and put her hands on the wheel. For a moment I felt intensely happy. Everything I had was in this car and safe.

  [ TEN ]

  THE EDWARDS’ PLACE in Williams Lake smelled of old hamburger grease with an undertone of mothballs. This was not the scent of a happy house. I could sniff some tragedy—large or small, I didn’t know—hanging in the close air. I wondered what it was. It may have had to do with the husband, Ted, who sat in the kitchen in his wheelchair, using a bent spoon to dunk his teabag in a stained white mug. He smiled crookedly at us as we came in.

  I disliked Mrs. Edwards instantly, with her straw blonde hair and her runny eye. She was not like my mother or Rita, women who took charge, did what needed to be done, enjoyed their competence. Mrs. Edwards seemed helpless, trapped, a woman who wrung her hands and wept and moaned—I could see that right away. I could tell by the dingy house, lit by fixtures dimmed with drifts of insect bodies inside the glass globes, the TV on in the corner, dusty drapes drawn against the brilliance of a fall morning.

  Our mother’s need to find a viable solution to whatever problem plagued her must have been strong, because she blinded herself to what was obvious even to an eleven year-old: Mrs. Edwards was not a happy woman and she would be no use to two unhappy girls.

  Our mother took us into a bedroom with two twin beds covered in matching blue bedspreads with a synthetic sheen to them. I expected a puff of dust to rise up when I sat on one. Later, when I had had a lot of time to reflect on every object in the house, every plastic, pretend-crocheted doily and scented, fake flower–decorated toilet roll cover, I thought that even the bedspreads spoke of Mrs. Edwards’ unhappiness and helplessness. Only a person who had no idea how to be comfortable and happy in the world would pick such a slippery, staticky, uncomfortable fabric to adorn a guest’s bed.

  “You’re going to billet for a while with the Edwards,” Mom told us, as Jenny and I sat side by side on one of the beds, frightened by the look on her face.

  “What does billet mean?” Jenny asked.

  “You’re going to stay here,” Mom said. “The Edwards are old friends of your dad’s. They’re good people. They’ll take care of you while I go cook in the logging camps.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Jenny said.

  “Neither do I,” I said. “We can come with you. We won’t be any trouble. I know how to take care of myself.”

  “I know you do,” Mom said. “But they don’t allow kids. Those are the rules. We need money.”

  “Why can’t you get a job here in town? Why can’t you be a secretary or something? Why couldn’t we go back to Duchess Creek? Glenna could get you a job in the nurses’ station.”

  “Stop it right now,” Mom said. “This is the best I can do. Let’s just hope it won’t be for long.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Let’s hope not too long.”

  “How long?” Jenny said. Her voice cracked and she started to cry.

  “Stop it,” Mom said sharply. “There’s nothing I can do. The Edwards are good people. You’ll be able to go to school here.”

  Good people. Never trust someone described as a “good” person. I know now that “good” means that they won’t murder you, throw you out into the snow or let you starve. But also that there are obvious shortcomings and you’re going to find out what they are pretty damn quick. Those were the kind of people our mother left us with.

  Jenny pulled her knees up under her chin and cried softly into the circle of her arms. She was like an island on the slippery bedspread. I knew she would be of no more help to me in persuading our mother to collapse with regret, then drive us to the nearest campground where Mom would boil up some coffee, lean back in her lawn chair, gazing up, then Jenny and I would ask her for spoons to dig for Chiwid’s treasure by the river.

  —

  Mom led me outside to the car. I remember the feeling of my small hand in hers. She was still my protector that day. If I held on to her hand, I didn’t think she would let me go. I didn’t think she would be able to. But at the car she shook free of me, and there was nothing I could do.

  “Maggie,” she said. “I know Jenny’s the older one, but I’m going to rely on you. You were right when you said you know how to take care of yourself. I don’t have to worry about you.”

  She must have meant it as a compliment, a way to get me to look at myself as something other than a helpless child. But when she said it, smiling at me softly, her face open like a wish, it felt more like a recognition of a weakness I had, a thing I’d always have to live with, like a harelip.

  “Okay,” I said because I couldn’t say anything else. Mom began to unpack the car. I picked up Cinnamon from the back seat and carried her into the hamburger-smelling house. Mom followed with our pillows and suitcases.

  “What’s that?” Mrs. Edwards said.

  “What?” Mom said.

  “Is that a cat?”

  I slipped quickly into the bedroom and dropped Cinnamon to the floor, as if I could hide her.

  “No, no,” Mrs. Edwards said. “We can’t have cats. I’m very allergic.”

  “Beatrice, please,” Mom said. She pulled the bedroom door closed and I heard their voices going back and forth.

  Jenny raised her head to look at me. Behind her on the wall above the bed hung an embroidered picture of two hands clasped together, praying. I picked up Cinnamon and she curled two soft white paws over my shoulder and clung to me like a baby. I buried my nose in her blanket-scented fur. She began to purr, deep contented trills. Cinnamon could be happy anywhere, as long as she was with me.

  When Mom came into the room, I could tell by the look on her face that she had lost.

  “I’m sorry, Maggie,” she said. “I promise I’ll take good care of her.”

  That was the second time I saw Mom cry. Tears filled her eyes and ran down her cheeks leaving tracks across her brown freckles. Some brief understanding of her situation flickered in my brain, just for a moment, and I wanted to say something to make her feel better, maybe tell her that Cinnamon wasn’t a city cat anyway, but a lump had risen up from my heart and was choking me, and I couldn’t say it.

  Neither Jenny nor I said a word about this being our second thing. To acknowledge it openly would be to acknowledge that the third thing was still to come.

  I had once seen a house demolished, a little shack of a house in Duchess Creek where an old man had lived until he died. The shack was razed to be replaced by a bigger, solid log house, the kind that wants to look rustic even though it’s brand new. Jenny and I had watched from the road as the backhoe bit into the roof and pulled down the walls like they were cardboard. Faded flowered curtains, still on the rod, clung to the tines of the backhoe as it came up for another round, then the curtains and rod were folded into the dust of the ruins and disappeared. With my unpacked suitcase on the bed in front of me, I felt like that house, a tumult of dust and disorder, nothing where it should be, nothing left standing.

  [ ELEVEN ]

  I CAN’T SAY THAT MOM was wrong about my being able to look after myself. I soon recognized Bea Edwards for the ticking time bomb that she was. Only three weeks into our stay, I learned that what could set her off was unpredictable. It was my job to set the table each night. Sometimes Ted didn’t come home until after supper, when one of his drinking buddies dropped him off and pushed him
up the plywood ramp to the door. He could do it himself, unless he’d had a few.

  One night I thought I might save time by finding out if he’d be home. “Should I set a place for Ted?” I asked Bea, as I took down the plates.

  “How should I know?” she snapped.

  But this was nothing. This was just normal Bea impatience. It was later, when we were washing up the supper dishes and I tucked Ted’s clean, unused plate in with our three dirty ones that Bea exploded. Her soapy hands shot up from the hot dishwater and tore the steaming eyeglasses from her face. She hurled the glasses across the kitchen, where they skittered against the refrigerator grill, and she screamed, “Do I have so little to do around here? Do I? Do I?” Her pale eyes popped wetly in the midst of the red blur that was her face. “Now I’m washing clean dishes! I’m washing dishes that haven’t even been used! Is that how you do things at your house? Here!” She began clumsily scooping clean plates and saucers and bowls and cups from the cupboards and piling them haphazardly beside the sink. She didn’t stop until she had cleared every last dish from every shelf.

  I stood back, my hands knotted tightly in front of me. I watched as her face swelled, grew redder and redder, the veins throbbing at her temples. She might literally explode, I thought. But instead she went limp as a wet dishrag and with a choked sob hissed, “Wash them.” She left the kitchen, the door swinging in her wake. And so I did.

  One day not too long after Bea’s explosion, I was wandering around town after school, killing time until Jenny was done volleyball practice. Jenny liked the novelty of living in a town. She’d bought herself a paisley wallet at Stedman’s and tucked the money Mom had given her into it. After school, when she wasn’t playing volleyball, she went to the Tastee-Freez with her friends. She had an easy charm that I didn’t and acted as the buffer between Bea and me. Up ahead, the doors of the Maple Leaf Hotel swung open and Ted rolled out into the sun. Ted had a way of wheeling his chair that I wouldn’t have expected from a man who couldn’t walk. There was a vigour to it, the way his hands gripped the wheels, pushed off strongly. He was not feeble, Ted, and it seemed like he wanted anyone who saw him to know it. He had broad shoulders, a straight back and large, lean hands. He had silver-grey hair, lots of it for a man his age, I thought, although I didn’t really know how old he was. He went to the barber once a week for a trim. Ted wore the same kind of flannel shirts and blue jeans as my dad had worn, so that made me like him a little.