“Muse,” said Jude. “You were my muse.”
“I’m not angry. I make similar notes about people myself. It just unsettled me. It’s strange to see yourself through another’s eyes.” I put the sketchbook back in the box and pushed the box toward him. “In any case, this is yours.”
He picked up one of the cards he had given me and read what he had written: “There were a couple of hot air balloons hovering just above the highway as I got close to Kamloops this afternoon. They looked so peaceful, just hanging there, weightless, at the mercy of the winds, or their lack, able to rise or fall, but nothing more. This is how I am, weightless in your love, and at your mercy.… God, did I really write this drivel?”
I laughed. “I liked it at the time.”
“I don’t understand how all these cards I gave you got in here.”
“I had stored that stuff at Mom’s. The day after my wedding I left an envelope full of the things you had given me on your doorstep.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. After I saw you at my wedding, I guess I just wanted to say—”
“That you still thought of me too.”
I smoothed a hand over the wedding invitation in the scrapbook. “Why did you come to my wedding?”
“It was a community event; the whole valley was there. Lillian would have wondered why I refused to go. Obviously she had her suspicions.”
“I half hoped Lillian would find that envelope of your cards first.”
“I imagine she did, and stuck them in this box. I never heard anything about it. But then she wouldn’t have said anything. She would have hoped that I would stumble across it myself. Jesus, that woman, she would never just come out and talk to me. It was all cat and mouse.” He waved the card. “But you weren’t much better, leaving those cards on the doorstep for Lillian. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
I grinned. “I guess I did at one time.”
“That explains why you never came over to visit Lillian and me in all those years.”
“Well, how could I?” I said. “After everything we’d been through? I never understood how you got away with coming over to see me when I was back home. How you found the nerve.”
“Ezra was always there, and your parents. We were chaperoned.” He shrugged. “I had to see you.”
I stared up at the fire glowing on the mountainside, not sure how to respond. After a time he ran a hand down my spine to the small of my back. “Mosquito,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows to him but he didn’t remove his hand. Instead he doodled on my back with his finger, as the girl sitting behind me had in elementary school, as I had doodled on the back of the girl seated ahead of me, to tickle and shudder the senses: Criss-cross, apple sauce, spiders crawling up your back. Spiders here, spiders there, spiders crawling in your hair. Jude’s was the same seductive, agonizing tickle. I wanted him to stop. I wanted him to go on.
“Guess what I’m writing,” he said. A game we used to play during those afternoons we spent in bed in my apartment.
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
I shook my head and drew away. “I’ve got to go.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I shouldn’t have come over. I don’t know what I was thinking. What if Jeremy wakes and I’m not there?”
“Won’t Ezra get up with him? Or your mother?”
“Mom’s not up to taking care of Jeremy anymore. And what if Ezra did wake? How would I explain coming over here? I shouldn’t be here.”
He took my hand. “Please stay a few more minutes, Katrine.”
“I’ve got to go.”
I WALKED THROUGH THE DRY GRASS back home, carrying the pan of fudge and the manila envelope, breathing smoke. Someone in the valley was playing the old tune “If You Were the Only Girl in the World” on a piano. Was it Mom? It sounded as if it was coming from the farm. The tune was something she often played, a quaint choice at odds with the war that raged in the hills above us. But there were no lights on at the house. Perhaps, then, the sound originated elsewhere, at a neighbour’s, and was bouncing off the steep valley walls. When I was a child Mom warned me not to talk about the neighbours outdoors, in case our gossip drifted over the hayfield to their ears.
A figure emerged from the dark, standing by the bush surrounding the old well.
“Hello?” I said. The man stood completely still and said nothing. I saw no face, no hands, only his outline as a shadow in the black, a glint of light reflecting off his glasses. “Can I help you?” I said. He stepped back against the bush so I couldn’t see where he was anymore. I stood a moment, my heart beating against my throat. Then I ran, and once I passed the well, I heard footsteps running after me. I dropped the pan of fudge and fled toward the house, my ears filled with the sound of my own breath and the thump of blood. The heavy footsteps gaining on me. The jingle of keys in a pocket.
The piano was clearly coming from my parents’ house. I reached the porch out of breath and coughing, the footsteps behind me crunching gravel. As I slammed the kitchen door shut behind me, and locked it, the music stopped abruptly.
“Mommy!” said Jeremy. “Look! Look!” I turned to find Jeremy standing in the dark of the kitchen, his face lit up in the red glow from the stove. All the burners were on again.
12.
MOM OPENED AND CLOSED her hand as she read what she had written, then shook the hand to loosen the accumulated ache of decades of writing. I knew this ache, the electric jolts to my fingers, the fright of waking in the night to find my hand dead, then tingling as I shook the feeling back into it. In bed each night I wore what Ezra, searching for the right word, once called my “evening gloves,” my night splints. As a small joke between us, I now called them my “industrial-strength evening gloves,” clumsy plastic things that discouraged touch between Ezra and me in the precious morning hour before Jeremy woke. I suffered from the ubiquitous carpal tunnel syndrome, a symptom of the writing life. That’s not how my mother saw her condition, though; she blamed that lightning strike for the shocks that buzzed up her arm and made her fingers tingle or go numb.
“You want anything, Mom?” I asked her. “It’s coffee time.”
“Just a cup of tea.”
I plugged in the new kettle that sat next to my mother’s. I had bought this one for her but, though she left it sitting on the kitchen counter, she never used it, preferring the old one that had witnessed countless conversations, arguments, and celebrations. My mother made cup after cup of tea throughout the day, and served it, without fail, at the kitchen table with the beautiful Noritake creamer and sugar bowl that had belonged to my grandmother, the set Maud had used when she entertained Valentine. Both the creamer and the sugar bowl were hand-painted with the stylized eyes of peacock feathers, and stared up at us as we drank our tea, just as they would have stared up at Maud and Valentine. My mother was married to these familiar objects of her past as much as to her habits.
“I want cinnamon toast please!” said Jeremy.
“We don’t have any brown sugar,” I told him.
“I’ve got a bag in the cupboard,” Mom said. “Don’t I?”
“I used it up making a batch of Grandma’s penuche last night.” And I hadn’t had a piece of it. When I had gone outside to retrieve the pan earlier that morning, my fudge had been a lump on the ground licked and eaten by Mom’s cats.
“If you wanted sweets, I have a box of chocolates on the fridge,” she said.
“Chocolate!” said Jeremy. “Can I have a chocolate?”
“No, but you can have apple and peanut butter,” I said, and I started cutting an apple for him. “I had a craving for fudge,” I said to Mom.
“Something your body needs, I imagine.” When I raised an eyebrow she said, “This past spring I had a craving for uncooked macaroni. I ate handfuls of the stuff. Couldn’t get enough. I suppose Val told you.”
I glanced at the parlour, where Val was stacking boxes, trying to make room for Mom’s bed. �
��She mentioned something about it.”
“I thought I was loony too. I’d buy a month’s supply at a time and hide it all over the place. I ate it in bed, and while I sat watching television with your father, I’d hide handfuls of macaroni in my lap under the crochet blanket I was making for Jeremy. Your dad asked me, ‘Where does all this damn macaroni come from?’ I told him a box had broke open, that I must have missed some when I swept it up. I thought I was losing my mind, so I told my doctor. She had me tested for anemia.”
“Anemia?”
“Most pastas are fortified with iron. I didn’t know that. Did you know that?”
I shook my head. “Why didn’t you tell Val?”
“She’s convinced her old mother has lost it. She thinks I go around leaving all the burners on and flinging hot irons into the laundry. If she wants to believe that, she can go right ahead.”
As I handed Jeremy his plate, I looked over at the parlour to catch Val’s eye, but she hadn’t heard. “All the burners were on again last night,” I said. “Although I did wonder if we’d had an intruder in the house. I saw somebody out by the well. Then I heard footsteps, and keys jingling in the man’s pocket.”
“That was one of my father’s habits,” Mom said. “He’d come up behind me, jingle, jingle. I hated that sound.”
I poured water from the kettle into the teapot. “And I heard the piano being played,” I said, and I hummed “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.”
My mother picked up the tune and sang it, though her elderly voice was a wisp that I strained to hear. “My mother loved that old song.”
Val came out dusting off her jeans. “Okay, so I’ve made some room. Now we can move that single bed out of my old room and into the parlour for you, Mom. Kat, can you give me a hand?”
My mother started up from her rocker. “Can’t you do it later?”
“I’m just about to pick up Dad,” said Val. “In fact I’m late. I said I’d be there by ten.”
“Then just leave the bed in there. Jeremy doesn’t bother me.”
I glanced at Val. “It’ll only take a few minutes to get things organized,” I said, and I followed my sister into the room, where we immediately spotted what Mom didn’t want us to see—the kitten among the bedclothes, a tiny tabby, too young, surely, to be taken from its mother. She must have intended to feed it milk by dropper, as she once fed the wild hares I found in a burrow and brought home, hares that died after two weeks of exhausting care. She would have known the kitten was too young, of course—she knew about the needs of young things—but had forced her mother urge on this kitten, to ensure its affections.
“Oh, Mom,” I said.
She picked up the kitten. “I was going to take it out to the barn before Jeremy’s nap. I know you don’t like cats.”
“I like cats,” I said. “I have three at home.” But our cats were barn cats, working cats, and earned their salary of dry cat food and the occasional scratch behind the ear by keeping the rodent population down. I had inherited this attitude toward cats from my eminently practical father, who had neutered the toms himself: he placed them head first in a gumboot, cut them open with a jackknife, and sterilized the wound with Dettol. Once he had quickly accomplished this task, he immediately released the cats and they staggered off from their ordeal, shaking one hind leg and then the other, to lick their humiliation beneath the potting shed.
“It’s just—the last thing you need is another cat,” I said.
She cuddled the kitten to her cheek. “What’s going to happen to her if I don’t take her?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She headed back to her rocker in the kitchen, talking to the kitten as she went.
From the kitchen Jeremy called out, “Kitty!”
“Ruth Samuels was just leaving when I got up,” I said to Val. “She must have brought it over.”
Val began stripping the mattress of its bedclothes. “Don’t make a fuss over it, Kat. It doesn’t matter.”
“But you keep on finding these cats homes for her,” I said, “and she just keeps on taking in more strays. She must spend nearly three hundred bucks a month in cat food alone, and then there are all those ‘treats’ she buys them.”
“She’s been doing it for years,” said Val, “decades. You saw those photo albums we dug out of her room. She’s got more pictures of her cats than of us. Giving her hell isn’t going to change anything.” She tossed the sheets to the floor. “In any case, why does it bother you? I’m the one who has to deal with them.”
“I don’t know.” The screen door in the kitchen opened and a chair scraped on the floor as Ezra, presumably, came in for coffee. I picked up one sheet and then the other, to fold them, as Val folded the blankets. “When I was a kid I’d come home from school and find Mom sitting in that rocker, writing, lost in it,” I said. “You know how she gets. No Hello, how was your day? It was like I wasn’t there, like she didn’t give a shit about me or anything else. But then one of her cats would come yowling around her legs and she’d pick it up and coo at it like it was a baby.”
“You can’t tell me you’re jealous of the cats.”
“It wasn’t the cats,” I said. “It was that she wasn’t here. I remember wandering around the house when I was, I don’t know, three? Screaming, thinking that I was in the house alone. I was terrified. Then I found Mom curled up in bed, a cat at her feet, writing away like she hadn’t heard me crying. I pulled at her pen and said, Mommy, stop! But she wouldn’t.”
“Or couldn’t.”
“Other times she really did leave me alone in the house, or in public places. I had a tantrum on the grocery floor once, and she just left. I wandered around crying until I found her looking out the front window of the store. Another time at that same grocery she left me sitting, crying, in the shopping cart and walked off. God knows what would have happened if I had decided to climb out. Eventually another shopper took me to the checkout counter. The clerk and I found Mom sitting on the bench outside, crying.”
Val sat on the mattress. “I didn’t know she’d done that.”
I tossed the folded sheets on the second bed and sat beside her. “Every single time she left, I thought it was for good. Then there was this day when I was maybe six or seven. I’d taken one of Grandma’s vases outside to collect lilacs as a gift for Mom—it was that lovely blue and white vase—and I tripped and dropped it and chipped the rim. When Mom saw what I’d done she burst into tears. I guess the vase had been a favourite of Grandma’s. She stood there for a minute just shaking, clenching her fists, and then she walked off down the driveway, heading for Blood Road, like she had a hundred other times when I’d done something wrong. I started to follow, crying, thinking she was leaving and never coming back. Then as she was walking away, she stepped on a twig, and it was like something inside me snapped as well. I turned back and headed for the barn where Dad was working. I just unplugged myself from her.”
Val rubbed her face and then turned to me. “I want to tell you something that might help explain Mom, something that happened to me. You were asking about Grandpa. After he disappeared I was so afraid that he hadn’t actually died on that mountain, that he’d just turn up in the night. I slept with the light on, so he couldn’t surprise me.”
“Why would he surprise you?” Then I understood. “Oh, Val!”
“Most of the time he caught me out in the barn, or in the field, or in the bush when I was bringing in the cows. I’d hear his keys as he approached, you know, jingling in his pocket, and I’d hide, but he’d always find me.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “His hands were so huge, the size of dinner plates. Now they teach kids to say no, to tell. But how could I say no to a man with hands that big?”
She looked up at me, but in that moment I didn’t know how to respond, what to say.
“One day Mom and Grandma were in Kamloops shopping, and I was feeding the calves over at Grandma’s, and he caught me in the barn and pushed me down into the hay. I don’t know what got int
o me, but this time I kicked him hard in the shin. I said, ‘I’m going to tell Dad.’ But he dragged me by the arm out to the yard and then into the greenhouse where one of the barn cats had just given birth to a litter. He held one of the kittens over a bucket of water and threatened to drown the whole batch if I didn’t keep quiet. I struggled to get away, but he made me watch as he drowned that kitten. It squirmed in his hand, trying to get breath. Then he picked up another kitten and was about to drown that one too when Uncle Valentine came running across the field and into the greenhouse; Valentine held a rake like it was a gun and told him, ‘Put the cat down, John, and let the girl go, or I’ll tell Maud all about this.’ Like he knew, you know, like he knew everything. The next morning I found all those kittens in that bucket, dead.”
“Jesus, Val.”
“Given how much energy Mom puts into her cats, I imagine he must have done exactly the same kind of thing to her. You understand now, don’t you? Why I don’t make a fuss about her cats, why I try to find them homes, why I don’t want you to make an issue of them?”
I nodded.
She patted my thigh. “Speaking of which—can you and Ezra get those barn cats rounded up into cages this afternoon? Then maybe Ezra can drive them to the SPCA shelter at the fairgrounds. I’ll need to stay here with Dad.”
“I’ll have to do it myself. Ezra won’t be able to drive for some time.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I doubt I could keep him focused on the job long enough to help me in any case. He still hasn’t gotten around to butchering that calf.”
A chair scraped against the floor in the kitchen and then Ezra was at the doorway. “Your mother heard every saying,” he said. “She heard every goddamned word.” He turned on his heel and left the house; I heard the screen door slap shut.
I rubbed my face. “Shit.”
“You should talk to Mom,” Val said. “About what you told me.” When I looked up at her, she said, “Nothing I said was new to her.” She glanced at her watch. “I told the nursing staff at the hospital I’d be picking up Dad about now, so I’d better run. Maybe you can get Ezra to help you move Mom’s bed?” I followed her into the kitchen and she started for the door before turning back. “Mom, you want anything?”
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