What is Going to Happen Next

by Karen Hofmann

  Turn, she says, turn, and Trent swings the wheel and the vehicle lurches down the unpaved driveway. Yard — a small clearing, in an impenetrable stand of cedar and fir, fronted by maple, filled with cars. Two large dogs, a volley of barking.

  This is it? Trent asks. She doesn’t answer, at first. She can hear Cliff breathe out slowly through his nose.

  The two dogs — one black and white, the other yellow leap at the car windows, barking. Olivia shrieks, laughs. Mom! The dogs are slobbering on the windows!

  This is it, Cleo says, but she doesn’t move.

  The front door of the A-frame opens and Mandalay stands in the doorway. She’s wearing a little smocked top, flared jeans, has her hair in a loose ponytail, rather than in her usual elaborate updo. Her arms are crossed; she’s smiling the smile that says to Cleo, I am here first. She looks like she might have done twenty years earlier.

  It’s Mandalay, Cleo says, unnecessarily.

  Then Crystal bursts out from behind Mandalay, totters toward them across the lawn, the heels of her boots sinking into the spongy turf. Above the boots Crystal’s legs are encased in bright-blue tights. Then there’s a flowered dirndl skirt, black with large flowers, a yellow sweat shirt, a flowered headband. Crystal’s long hair flying out behind her, witchily.

  Cleo registers the open arms, begins, belatedly, to move, but she can’t get the door open: The child safety locks are on. It’s Trent who emerges from the car first and is seized and embraced, emerging to stand stiffly, hands in pockets, looking around him, hunched like a heron in a sudden rain. He’s forgotten that Cleo can’t get out of the back seat on her own.

  Crystal turns to their car, then, and opens the back doors. Hello, hello, who’s this very big person! she says, and unbuckles Sam, scooping him out of the car seat. Sam, like his father, stiffens, arches back from Crystal’s kiss, looks appalled. No, he says.

  In the other seat, Olivia bounces, then undoes her own harness. Grandma! Grandma! I’m here! Cleo is amazed: She has not taught Olivia to call Crystal Grandma, and Olivia has seen Crystal maybe three times in her life.

  So you are, darling! Crystal says, passing Sam suddenly to Trent, taking pirouetting steps around to the other side of the vehicle to capture Olivia.

  As she clambers out herself, she sees the house door open again, and Bodhi — or Ben (She must remember to call him Ben) — emerges, wearing a large hat, followed quickly by Darrell, Crystal’s husband.

  I don’t recognize any of this, Cliff, still in the passenger seat, says querulously, not moving to undo his seat belt.

  And so they are reunited.

  COME ON! Trent says. Knucklehead Mountain! You’re making that up! Tell him, Mandalay instructs. She’s laughing, in top form. Tell him. We can show him on the map.

  It’s true, Cleo says. It really is called Knucklehead. The Knuckleheads, actually.

  Cleo’s mouth is pursed up, her voice prim. Mandalay knows that Cleo doesn’t like the way she and Trent interact, but it’s just a game. It’s their ritual. They have a relationship of jokes, of teasing. They each have their role to play. An anthropologist would call it a joking relationship. Trent becomes heavier, stiffer, avuncular, even, though he’s the same age as Mandalay. He treats her with a kind of assumed tolerance, incredulousness: What will this outrageous woman come out with next? And Mandalay lets go a little, lets herself get a little loud, a little unbuttoned. Cleo complains that they always go too far. She doesn’t like them swearing in front of the children. She doesn’t like the repartee between Mandalay and Trent, takes it too seriously. Maybe Trent complains, after, to Cleo. (Mandalay herself complains, sometimes, about Trent, to Cleo.) But it’s their ritual. It’s a performance. Maybe a performance for Cleo, for Cliff, for Ben.

  Mandalay knows she is entertaining. She’s got a gift for telling stories. She’s funny; she knows how to put a story together effectively, so much so that people always accuse her of making it up.

  And all of Mandalay’s stories are true, yes. But they are, nevertheless, shaped in some specific ways. Their childhood, their lives, are all apparently a big soft medium that Mandalay can shape as she will.

  She is telling them, now, about hiking up Knucklehead. The time Crystal, their mother, took them up Knucklehead and they were caught in the snowstorm. She’s told it before, but not to Ben. There’s no harm in it. It’s true that the story isn’t very flattering to Crystal, but sometimes their mother, Crystal joins in the stories, though Crystal says she doesn’t remember much of those years anymore. Mandalay thinks, What electroshock therapy hasn’t erased of Crystal’s memory, pot has.

  It was April, she says. Ma decided to take us all out of school to go hiking on Knucklehead, to see the spring flowers. It was too early, of course. Ma forgot it wouldn’t be spring yet up the mountain, didn’t you, Ma?

  They all glance at Crystal, involuntarily, Mandalay thinks. Crystal is smiling, looking down at her plate; when they look at her, she looks up and says, brightly, Can I get anyone anything? More water? Coffee? But they all shake their heads, they all let Mandalay go on.

  Ma drove us up the mountain, it’s a provincial park, in the old station wagon. Remember that car? What happened to it? You could see the rust holes in the floor. You could see the road going by underneath! It’s a wonder we weren’t all asphyxiated by the exhaust. And no seatbelts! The boys rode in the hatch like groceries. Remember that, Cliff?

  Cliff doesn’t look up, barely shakes his head. Cleo doesn’t look at Crystal or at Mandalay. Ben doesn’t look at her, either. What is he thinking, what is this like for him? But she can’t imagine: Her mind throws up a wall.

  Ma drove to the park gate, then we went up a trail. We’re totally unprepared for the bush, let alone that time of year. We’re all in canvas runners and shorts. I think we had along a plastic bag with some trail mix and some apples in it. And maybe an extra diaper. We hiked about an hour, and then the sun went behind a cloud and it got cold. And then it started to snow.

  Crystal says, then: Oh, wow — I can’t remember. . . .

  It’s Darrell who interrupts, surprising them. He’s a big, silent man whom most of them ignore, or maybe not exactly ignore, but don’t remember to interact with. Now he says, through his beard, Well, I don’t know as we need to rehash all of those old stories now, do we?

  Mandalay feels herself flush. Crystal’s smile has gone stiff. Nobody is looking at Mandalay: She can feel the energy of their emotion, all turned against her, all in support of Crystal. Cliff, beside her, makes some sort of grunt, or mutters in agreement with Darrell.

  Fuck them all. Especially Darrell.

  She has known him all her life. Darrell was ten years older than her, had grown up in Butterfly Lake, had been a teenager when she was kid, a young adult when she was a teen, had worked for her dad, sometimes, or hung around asking for help with fixing his car. When she’d emancipated herself from her foster home and moved back to Butterfly Lake, when she was sixteen, she’d thought for about five minutes that he was coming around the house to see her. But it had been Crystal, a few years older than him, that Darrell, now in his mid-twenties, was after. She hadn’t seen how that was possible. But of course Crystal would have been thirty-four, then — the age Mandalay is now.

  She remembers herself taunting him: What’s with the moustache? Perv-stache. Looks like two Little Brown Bats copulating on your face. Darrell once pinning her, hands on her shoulders, against the wall, his face darkened, then releasing her, crashing bear-like out of the house.

  She’d been a brat, then, and Darrell had taken Crystal’s side, had told her off a couple of times. Deservedly, she thinks now. She’d been jealous. She hadn’t really been interested in him; already at sixteen she felt herself more sophisticated than Darrell was ever going to be. But he had been good-looking, and had taken Crystal’s side.

  THEY ARE HAVING A TOUR of the house. Cleo had tried to time their arrival so that it would be, say, an hour to dinner, and she would be able to help finish
the preparations, and then they could all sit down and eat, and it would be a way to have something to do, to avoid the awkwardness of a roomful of people both too closely and too distantly connected. But it doesn’t seem that any dinner preparations have begun, at all, so once Crystal and Darrell have exclaimed over the size of the children (itself a silent reproach, an occasion for awkwardness, the unspoken thought that she does not visit, that she does not invite Crystal to visit her very often), once they have had a conversation about the trip up (which takes all day, and involves two ferries), there is not much more that can be said, with all of them there. They sit on the deck, from which there is a view of the mountains that wouldn’t have been there when Cleo was a child. Trees have been removed. The sun is starting to move toward the horizon, and slants toward the deck in a spotlight glare, too bright for the eyes. Crystal and then Darrell fiddle with an umbrella, but it’s no use: Anyone facing west right now is blinded.

  So: a tour.

  Mandalay and Ben have already been shown around, so the tour is for Cleo and Olivia and Cliff, Cliff who has never been back at all. Trent stays with Darrell, who says he wants to ask him some questions about his new computer, and Sam. Cleo is glad to have a few minutes apart from Trent, who is going to scold her pretty soon about there not being dinner on the horizon. He’d wanted to stop in the town for burgers, when they got off the ferry, and she had said, don’t spoil your appetite.

  I don’t remember any of this, Cliff says again, as they look around the house, and now Cleo wants to snap at him that he must, that he was nearly seven when they left, he must remember something. In any case, she is tired of him repeating the phrase. What does he mean by it?

  It has all been redone, anyway. Darrell has put a lot of work into it, the last ten or so years. The A-frame still has its loft, its cathedral ceiling, but the log walls have been drywalled over and painted — hard clear shades of blue, yellow, pink — and an addition with more bedrooms and a bathroom added onto the house. The kitchen has new fixtures and cabinets — the kind you can buy from Home Depot, Cleo thinks — and the old chipped terra-cotta tile and shag carpeting have been replaced throughout with inexpensive laminate and vinyl.

  Darrell and I couldn’t make up our minds about the laminate, Crystal says, so we got a different kind for each room! Isn’t that fun? Doesn’t it look nice?

  Yes, it does, Grandma, Olivia says.

  Cleo imagines how Trent will smirk, how impossible the floor is, the look of the house with all the different floorings, the amateur finishing. Crystal says, the living room is Denver Pine and the master bedroom is Old Virginia Beech and Darrell’s study is Holland Cherry. Olivia dashes from room to room, demanding the names of the flooring styles, repeating them. She’ll remember them all, too. At four, she’s soaking up language at the rate of a dictionary a day, as Trent says.

  In some of the rooms, Crystal has painted, freehand, on the walls: curlicues and flowering vines and birds. The paintings are decidedly amateur, and Cleo wonders what Darrell thinks of them. Olivia, of course, is entranced. Grandma! You are an artist!

  Crystal gives Cleo a wink, a knowing smile that throws her for a second. Cliff studies the paintings closely, seriously. What will you do when you have to paint over? he asks. You won’t want to lose these!

  Oh, well, Crystal says. They’re not that good.

  All this work, Cliff says. Maybe you can get Darrell to cut out pieces from the drywall, get them framed.

  Cleo is glad that Trent is not with them. She says, The pictures are so detailed. And the colours are so pretty.

  Crystal says, Oh, I should take classes and learn how to do it properly, I know. Mandalay is always saying that. But I get all seized up, you know, if someone is watching me and telling me what not to do.

  Olivia takes Crystal’s hand. Me too, Grandma, she says.

  Crystal looks mischievous then. Why don’t you ask your mom which room was hers?

  Is she kidding? But Cleo says: The loft, all of us kids slept in the loft.

  Yes, Crystal says. Isn’t that funny? Your mom’s daddy wouldn’t make any more rooms. All of those children were up there, in two sets of bunk beds and a wee little crib, packed in like baby bunnies. I used to tuck them in at night and think, all of my baby bunnies are now tucked in and safe.

  Inside Cleo the ground shifts unsettlingly. What is Crystal thinking, bringing this stuff up?

  Cliff asks, How old were we then, I mean when we were all living here?

  And now Crystal looks doubtful, confused. Hmmm, she says. That’s hard to say.

  I’m thinking, Cliff says, that it might have been kind of chaotic. Yes, Crystal says. It was crazy! You can’t imagine! But we all had a lot of fun, didn’t we?

  She seems to be asking Cleo. She never uses my name, Cleo realizes.

  You were six when we left, Cleo says to Cliff. I was twelve.

  The loft is now Darrell’s study. Trent and Darrell and Ben are up there now, looking at Darrell’s computer, Darrell asking, What is this Windows 98, Trent explaining about operating systems, Ben contributing computer jargon that is making Darrell more confused.

  Crystal points to the pullout couch upholstered in deep sea blue. See, there’s lots of room, Crystal says. You could stay here. I could fix an air mattress on the floor for Olivia.

  It’s okay, Cleo says. Trent’s back bothers him. He can’t sleep on a pullout.

  Oh, well, Crystal says. You could have mine and Darrell’s bed, we’d sleep up here.

  We’re better off in the motel, Cleo says. She can’t imagine, even with the extra rooms, how they’d all fit — Mandalay and Cliff, she and Trent and their kids, Ben.

  Are you sure? Crystal says. I hate to think you come to visit after all these years and have to stay in a motel.

  It’s fine. We’re fine.

  Maybe you and hubby would like to have the motel to yourself? You could leave the little ones here.

  Olivia pipes up then: I want to stay at Grandma’s!

  No, she says. The kids won’t actually sleep away from us. I don’t think it would work.

  Whatever you want, hon, Crystal says, brightly.

  Trent has put Sam down, and suddenly he’s pushing a chair over to the railing of the loft, obviously intending to climb up and look over, as Olivia is doing now. Cleo catches him, pushes the chair back, says, Trent! a little sharply. Does she have to do it all? Nobody else has noticed Sam climbing toward a fatal fall.

  I thought you had him, Trent says, and Crystal says, My aren’t you quick! But it’s not clear if she’s addressing Cleo or Sam.

  Darrell says, Now, what can you tell me about this Y2K bug? Folks said I shouldn’t buy a computer with that coming up but the fellow at the store said there would be a plug to fix it.

  Oh, let’s go downstairs, Crystal says, picking Sam up. Let’s leave them to it.

  Cleo has to agree with that. But she wants to linger — she can see Cliff does too — and try, in this room where she spent a good deal of her first decade, to see what remains. What remains of her.

  So I slept here, Cliff says.

  Do you recognize anything now?

  I’m afraid to go near the railing, Cliff says. I have a deep fear of that railing.

  THEY’RE WALKING to the store, the four siblings and Olivia. First the path through the trees, which Mandalay remembers as being much longer, and then along the highway, where there’s luckily not much traffic on a Sunday afternoon, just the odd pickup truck.

  What do people do here? Ben asks, and Mandalay says: binge drinking, firearms accidents, incest. Ben laughs, but Cleo and Cliff do not.

  I mean for work, Ben says. Why is the town here?

  Nobody says anything for a few moments. Then Cleo says: Do you remember, Che almost burned the garage down.

  There’s a new one, now.

  Mandalay feels cold: The sun has already set behind the high walls of spruce that guard the valley.

  The mill and the dam, Cliff answers, unex
pectedly.

  Ben asks, and our dad worked at the mill?

  Mandalay says: And was pretty self-sufficient. He could make or fix anything. He made that house, and he made furniture for people, and bartered for food.

  And self-educated, Cleo says. He read a lot. He told us stories, things he’d read. He knew a lot about history and geography and politics.

  He was a draft dodger, Mandalay says. Do you know what that is, Cliff? She sees, suddenly, that she and Cleo can give the boys a real gift: a sense of who their father was. A good role model. There aren’t very many men like him around anymore.

  Cleo says: I don’t think that can be true, do you, Mandalay? Think about the dates. Dad was fifty-four when he died. That means he was born in nineteen twenty-five. He’d have been too old, he’d have been already in his forties, during the Vietnam War.

  Can that be true? But she’s always known that about Dadda. Draft dodger. Hippie.

  She’s disoriented.

  I think there was a bit of farming here in the sixties and seventies, Cleo says. Sunflowers and — pumpkins, maybe?

  None of them really know. It’s strange.

  And where does the highway go?

  To the mine, Cliff says. There’s a new road in now, though, from Guisachan Falls.

  That’s a Native word, right? Ben says. What does it mean?

  You’d think so, but you’d be wrong, Cliff says. It’s from some Scottish title that David Thompson had.

  We’ve been watching a lot of Knowledge Network, Cleo says.

  Cleo has appropriated Cliff again, Mandalay thinks. Cliff obviously thinks the sun shines out of Cleo’s backside. And Ben has become obsessed with Cleo’s kids, carrying Sam around, playing endless inane games with Olivia, so that he too has become a satellite of Cleo.

  How annoying Cleo is, with her round, bland face, her smooth prim hair. Not soft, but implacable, somehow inhuman, disturbing. Termite-queen. She is so analytical; she has to know everything, take care of everyone’s needs before they’re even aware of them.