What is Going to Happen Next

by Karen Hofmann

  But Cleo has been transformed, has transformed herself: She is not just herself but also warrior, defender, and in this role she is consumed by her care for her children, for Cliff: She both wills it and has no say in it. She has taken it on and been taken over by it, both. If there is a Cleo who is all self somewhere in there still, she does not know where it is.

  Is it being a parent that has done this, or has Cleo always been like this?

  She wants to stalk away from all of them, as she used to, but they have all elected to tag along to the store, again as they used to. She has an entourage, but it’s Cleo’s entourage. They are walking along the highway, with its narrow verge of vetches and daisies and seedling conifers, to Butterfly Lake’s one grocery store.

  There are so many more amenities in Butterfly Lake than there had been when she was young. Mandalay can remember the community of Butterfly Lake as it was in the seventies. Then, there was only the gas station with its attached garage, the small mom and pop grocery store, the café, which served Chinese food and perogies and dry ribs and potato salad, the bar, the RCMP detachment, the Roman Catholic church, the elementary school, the community hall where the bookmobile held court on Saturday mornings, all strung out along the highway. Now there’s a bigger grocery store, part of a chain, a Tim Horton’s, an A&W. (No Starbucks, though, Trent had complained.) And Darrell says they’re getting a Canadian Tire soon. Maybe Walmart, in the town, he had said, enthusiastically.

  We used to collect bottles from here, Cliff says, suddenly.

  That explains something, Ben says.

  He would bring pop or beer cans to his parents or nanny. They thought he must have learned to do that before.

  He flushes then, telling this, Mandalay notices. He had not thought out completely the implications of what he was going to say. He flushes and the blond down along his jawbones is white against the reddened skin. He is ashamed. No: He thinks that they will be shamed, embarrassed, and that he will look crass for embarrassing them.

  We used to make you hunt for cans, Cliff says. Soon as you could walk, we sent you out scrounging. No milk for you till you fill that bag with cans, kid.

  A shocked silence, then laughing. They had all collected cans: They could exchange them at the store in Butterfly Lake for penny candy. They all had a sweet tooth, all craved and schemed for and stole sugar, all of the time.

  The shop where they had traded pop and beer bottles for penny candy is now about four times as big, not including its adjunct post office and liquor store. It’s not very interesting, as a grocery store: the usual mainstream brands. Some sad-looking baked goods — muffins, scones, a limp croissant — strangled in cling wrap. They’ll be unbelievably stale. They’re brought in from Powell River, the cashier says. Mandalay thinks: Surely Butterfly Lake is big enough to support a bakery.

  Immediately she imagines herself rolling out and folding, her fingers with their muscle-memory shaping the perfect rows of chilled pastries, the croissants and butterhorns and sausage rolls. Breads, too. Lots of seed and flax breads, some Danish rye. Here? she thinks, then. Could she live and work here? She has not considered it, before. Has never considered leaving the city. But has it turned an inhospitable face to her, begun to wall her out?

  What are you going to do? Cleo asks, as if on the same wavelength, and she says: Look for another job in a bakery or café, I guess.

  If you don’t mind my saying this, Cleo says, I think you should go back to university and finish your degree.

  She does mind, she thinks. She is in no mood to be patronized by Cleo. In what? she asks.

  I always thought you should do visual arts, Cleo says. They are at the dairy cooler. Cleo grabs a four-litre jug of milk, and Mandalay scans for the brand of yogurt she likes, which is not carried here.

  Yeah, that would be practical, she says, letting the sarcasm curl out, snail’s cold path of slime. But it’s not as discouraging a suggestion as others she’s had: that she should go to cooking school, or take business courses.

  And then do what? I’ve just spent two years selling paintings at the café. You can’t make a living. You have to have wealthy parents and connections.

  Anyway, she says, I wouldn’t want to compete with Crystal.

  They drift apart then, and when they rejoin, they both see at the same time that Ben has given Olivia a paper bag and a loonie for penny candy — it’s a nickel apiece, now — and she is almost swooning with excitement and indecision.

  What about your boyfriend, Cleo says. Would he help out? Didn’t your ex — what was his name? Horst? Didn’t he pay some of your tuition?

  Mandalay feels as if she’s been hit with a blunt object.

  Cleo is staring at her, now, wide-eyed. Oh, shit, she says. Boundaries. I’m sorry.

  Under the hard light of the fluorescent fixtures she feels herself penned in, pinned. A snarl curls her upper lip. She opens her mouth, but then Ben is there, draping an arm around her shoulders, a six-pack dangling from each hand.

  Can I have these? he asks, making his eyes cat-slant, smiling beguilingly, and Cleo says, Ben! You’re not supposed to take alcohol out of the liquor store area, and they all turn to look at the cashier in her brown uniform behind the half-barrier, and freeze. Cleo, Cliff, and she herself, she notices, are all rigid, in flight mode. They are all afraid of people in uniforms.

  But the cashier is smiling at Ben. It’s okay, she says. We’ll let you get away with it this time.

  MANDALAY AND BODHI — Ben — have stayed on the deck, in the two lounge chairs that don’t face the sun, Cleo sees. She wants now to talk to Mandalay, to hear about Ben meeting Crystal, to ask her about Crystal bringing up their childhood. That hasn’t happened before; it’s as if there’s been a tacit agreement not to talk about it at the base of their relationship. She thinks: I only have this relationship, tenuous as it is, with Crystal because we have this understanding. I won’t bring up what a terrible time we had and that makes it possible for us to spend time together, for my kids to know her, sort of, as a grandmother.

  But if Crystal is going to bring it up herself? If she’s going to introduce some cute, downmarket women’s magazine version?

  She really needs to talk to Mandalay. But when she opens the new French doors to the deck, she smells, right away, that Mandalay and Bodhi/Ben, are smoking pot.

  Oh, for crying out loud, she says.

  Mandalay giggles. Did you really say that?

  Cleo steps out, shuts the door quickly, so Olivia can’t follow.

  You look so stressed, Mandalay says. Just breathe.

  She breathes. She sinks into a chair and manages to wriggle it around until the sun is not directly in her eyes.

  Pretty bizarre, hey? Mandalay asks.

  Cleo is not sure how much they are going to say about Crystal in front of Ben.

  Ben’s kind of overwhelmed by it, Mandalay says.

  No, I’m not, Ben says. He still doesn’t really look at Cleo. She feels again the cold trickle of loss.

  Mandalay holds the joint out toward her, but she shakes her head. She can feel Olivia’s eyes drilling into them through the glass panes of the doors. And she supposes that’s another nail in the coffin, as far as Ben’s impression of her is going. Prudish, as well as everything else. Well, she’s too tired to bother trying to correct the impression.

  IT WAS BLOWN OUT of proportion by the media, Cleo says. The four of them now, sitting around the brazier on the deck, smoking and drinking beer: Darrell and Crystal have gone to bed, and Trent has taken the children back to the motel in Guisachan Falls.

  I’m guessing, but eleven kids? In five years? Ben asks.

  Cleo says, you have to understand what was happening then. In the late seventies and early eighties, logging had picked up in the areas around Butterfly Lake, and a mine had been opened to the south, and the boom time had swelled the nearest town — Guisachan Falls — creating an acute housing shortage. The town filled up with people with good paycheques, and renters on th
e lower end of the economic scale in Guisachan Falls had spilled over into the village of Butterfly Lake, fifteen kilometres up the road.

  A lot of them ended up living in cabins, shacks, really, or old trailers, that weren’t meant for four seasons — they were summer places. And they weren’t people who had grown up in the country — they didn’t know how to take care of stoves, or what was dangerous for their kids, like the lakeshore, or the old quarry — things like that. There wasn’t a doctor in town, even. And there was some alcoholism, some neglect that was harder to see because people lived further apart. So it was a combination of things that led to that calamity, but it wasn’t Butterfly Lake itself. If you look at the time before the mine opened, there were no problems at all.

  How does Cleo know all of that? Crystal is likely to just say things like: Butterfly Lake was fine until the poor people came there from the town. And Darrell might say worse: might say, It was those welfare cases, the Natives and so on. According to Darrell, the area was doing well, until wiped out by the NDP government’s higher corporate taxes and restrictions on logging. And then a flood of non-desirables — Natives and welfare bums and immigrants — even Vietnamese boat people — had poured in, and turned the place into a dump. Drinking, fighting, neglecting their kids, Darrell says. All they were good for. According to Darrell, the new mine and the proposed pipeline are saving Butterfly Lake — turning it back into the thriving resource-based town it should be.

  So how was our family part of that? Ben asks. You said our dad had lived there since the sixties.

  Mandalay says: It was kind of a hippie place — people did a little fishing, a little farming, a little selective logging. There was a small sawmill. Dad worked there. But after the uproar about the children, the social workers and the police were kind of over-vigilant. They moved in on people much too quickly. They didn’t bother to find out if people were making it or not. Really, we were managing fine. It was just a temporary crisis. When Dad died Crystal happened to be in the hospital. But there was a tight community, Dad had tons of friends. You should have been at his funeral. Well, you were sort of. People would have stepped in. The Mounties and the social worker just overreacted.

  She has imagined telling Bodhi, or Ben, this story, so many times. She has told it to many people.

  My mom says you and Cleo tried to abduct me. That you stole a car and took me away from my foster care into the mountains.

  That is not quite true, Cleo says.

  I wondered, Ben says. Because you must have been, like, twelve and thirteen? That’s badass.

  Mandalay notices that Cleo almost smiles, then.

  IN THE MOTEL Cleo dreams that Crystal has gone for a long walk in the bush — she’s been gone hours or maybe days — and she, Cleo has to give Bodhi a bottle. She is little herself, in the dream; she has to drag a chair to the stove to reach the knobs, and of course because it’s a dream there are no numbers, just squiggles, when she goes to turn the element on. At the same time, she’s also her present age and size; she carries Bodhi easily on her hip, as if he were Olivia or Sam, and feeds him his bottle while folding laundry in her own grown-up laundry room. Then, in her dream, she finds Bodhi playing on the back deck in a bucket of chicken guts, and his hands and face are smeared with chicken blood and grease, and he has feathers clinging all over him. It’s very distressing, that he has got into the bucket, that she has left the bucket there, that she hasn’t been watching him (though she feels that she was just holding him, it’s very confusing). But when she lifts him up, he has wings. The chicken feathers have somehow become white wings, soft and downy underneath, smooth and strong above. When she lifts him, she can feel the stretched tendon of the joint, can feel the warmth and moisture and downiness of the hollow, the wing-pit, against her arm. He has wings: That realization is both joyous and worrisome. She feels how marvellous it is that he will be able to fly. It’s the manifestation of his specialness, his wonderfulness as a baby. It’s proof. On the other hand, now she’ll have to be constantly watching that he doesn’t fly away.

  She wakes first into another dream, in which she realizes quite lucidly that Bodhi hadn’t been born yet when she was that small, when she couldn’t reach the stove dials. It must have been Cliff. She must have dreamed of Cliff. She feels resigned, but also grounded. It was Cliff, of course. Then she really wakes, and isn’t sure.

  Caught

  OH, NO, CRYSTAL SAYS. They are in the kitchen: Crystal has been playing Go Fish with Olivia, and Sam is banging pans on the floor, and Mandalay and Cleo are sitting side by side at the table with Crystal’s photo albums. Oh, it was the fifties. Your dad moved here in the fifties, after the war. Lots of young men immigrated, after the war.

  What war? Mandalay thinks, and Cleo asks.

  The Second World War. He was sent to work on a farm in Manitoba but he didn’t like it. He came here as a logger in the early fifties.

  I thought he was from Indiana, Cleo says.

  No, Crystal says. He was Swedish. Don’t you remember? He had an accent.

  Mandalay does not remember that.

  Likely you’re thinking of Keith Pollard, Darrell says. He was one of those draft dodgers from the States who came up in the sixties. Could have been from Indiana.

  Swedish, Crystal says. He swept me off my feet. (Mandalay cringes at the cliché.)

  Here was this sophisticated, older bachelor. Everyone said he had lots of money. I was hitchhiking through with some friends, looking for work, seeing the world. Powell River. It was the end of the beating path. (She says that, Cleo notes: beating path.) We went to a big Canada Day celebration. I was seventeen. I had hitchhiked from Calgary.

  We went with some relatives of one of the guys I was travelling with. It was them who pointed your Dadda out, said he was a rich bachelor. He wasn’t. They thought he must be because he had lived there so long, and had worked as a logger and on the dam. They thought he must have saved up a lot.

  What about Cliff’s name? Cleo asks. Wasn’t he named after Daddy’s father, back in Indiana?

  Nope, Crystal says. My father. Who had just died when Cliffie was born.

  But Daddy named the boys and you named the girls, right?

  Ha, Crystal says. Your dadda named you all. Even Cliff. I didn’t want to name my kid after him; he was an asshole. Your dadda named you all. That’s why you all have such goddamn weird names.

  The earlier, black and white photos have held up better than the later ones from the seventies, which have bled out their colour, lost their reds and blues. Here are their parents, at what Mandalay realizes must be their wedding day. She’s seen this photograph, or a copy of it, before, but now looks at it as an adult. Her father is wearing a little smile and a suit: His hair is receding and he’s very much taller than Crystal, who stands next to him with her arm tucked into his. Crystal has on a pale shift dress that stops an inch above her knee, and a sort of beehive hairdo, topped with a little round hat and a big bow. She’s very thin, in the photo, her face small under the upswept hair, her eyes huge and her chin pointed.

  She looks like a child. She is a child: She’s eighteen. Mandalay has seen this photo before but had never seen this aspect: that Crystal is so young.

  She says: Don’t you have family? Where was your family?

  Crystal looks at the photo for a few moments as if she hasn’t seen it before. My mom ran off when I was little, she says. I don’t know what happened to my brothers. I didn’t speak to my dad after I took off, when I was seventeen.

  Had Mandalay known that? She can’t remember now. She doesn’t remember, either, any question of their being taken in by relatives, when her father had died.

  Another photo with both of her parents in it: this one, she thinks, taken in the mid-seventies — a group of people, an informal shot. There are a lot of beards, long hair, fringed vests, maxi skirts. She can see herself, a small child wearing only shorts, one of the only figures looking at the camera. Now her father is bearded, heavier, dressed in a
loose shirt: He looks the way she remembers him. Crystal, in a different part of the photograph, her hair long, now, rippling down her back, wearing a mini-dress, carrying a toddler — that would be Cliff, she guesses — on her hip. Crystal is half turned from the camera, smiling at someone off to the side, someone who doesn’t appear in the photo. One of her siblings? There’s a younger child in the background, who might or might not be Cleo.

  Who were you looking at? Mandalay asks.

  I don’t remember, Crystal says, staring at the photo.

  What was going on, in this photograph?

  Some kind of picnic, I think, Crystal says. She’s smiling now, though.

  SHE AND TRENT will leave in the morning, Cleo says.

  Oh, come on, Mandalay says. It’s a long weekend. You don’t have to leave.

  We do. It takes us all day to drive back, with the ferries and so on.

  No, it doesn’t.

  Well, Trent needs to do some work.

  So why didn’t he bring it with him?

  Cleo doesn’t want to leave, suddenly. Ben and Mandalay are going to be here a few more days. Cliff wants to stay: He will stay longer, he says. And then Crystal is asking again, and Olivia begging. Everyone will be gone, back home. It’s August. Trent will be working. What will she and the children do? There’s not even a waterpark near her neighbourhood.

  It’s difficult, here, for Trent to be amused for more than a couple of days. But he can go on home without Cleo, can’t he?

  It would be good to stay, to not always be second-guessing herself, the way she does when Trent’s there.

  Trent is annoyed: She can see that. But then, suddenly, he’s not. He’ll fly back, he says. He’s still contriving to sound annoyed, to sound like it’s a big imposition, but she can see that at some level he has realized some benefit to himself in going back alone.