What is Going to Happen Next

by Karen Hofmann

  But it was good that he said he didn’t want a birthday party, because they’re all happily planning a party anyway, and he doesn’t have to feel stressed about it. Doesn’t have to worry about what he wants, or about being the centre of attention. The party will happen, and he can move in and out of it as he likes.

  Or not. Here’s a job for you, Cliff, Darrell says. I’m going to need you to get up and clear out those tent caterpillars from those maples there across the yard. They’re just too creepy hanging there now, thinking about that lawn being full of guests eating and such. I’m going to need you to get up there with the twelve-foot ladder and cut them down and burn them up. You know how to do that?

  Yeah, he knows how to do that. He has to do it all the time. Clients that don’t like spraying. It’s his least favourite job, probably. Afterwards, he can’t ever seem to feel clean.

  They all have jobs, already. It seems he has been assigned the most disgusting one.

  Mandalay’s and Ben’s is to drive around and borrow lawn chairs. Mandalay has to do that because she’s the only one who knows the neighbourhood; she lived here for a while, in her teens. (Why hadn’t he been allowed to come back, then, when his mom was better and Darrell was living here? That has never been satisfactorily explained to him.) Ben because he can lift the chairs into the truck. He could do that. But no; he has to do the caterpillars.

  FIRST HE HAS ANOTHER JOB. Crystal wants the rock garden weeded. He’d noticed it, long rock bank holding back the ferns and salal, the dusty miller and creeping phlox choked with dandelions, with plantain, but figured they were letting it go back to bush. Crystal says, I keep meaning to get to it but I just never seem to. He doesn’t mind it, kneeling on the ground, pulling the weeds out by hand with a dibber, with his thumb and forefinger. He’s not on the clock. He can relax into it. Crystal gets them both some sacking to kneel on, and gloves, but he likes to feel around with his bare fingers. He can do a more accurate job that way.

  They go out in the morning, when this side of the yard is still in shade, the sky still sort of iridescent, like a thin Chinese bowl. He can hear birds in the trees, several kinds, but he doesn’t know their names.

  He’d like to know their names.

  I want you to tell me something, Crystal says. I’ve never asked you this and you can tell me to go to hell if you want. But Cliff, at that place you and Cleo lived — I can never pronounce it, started with a G — was there something funny going on there?

  Cliff’s body stiffens, though he has tried to stiffen himself against stiffening.

  What do you mean, funny?

  What everyone means. No. What people used to mean. Not funny ha-ha. Funny peculiar. Stuff with kids.

  Someone has inserted an inflated balloon into his chest, and it is gently but inexorably squeezing out any possible inflation of his lungs. The wall of roaring rears itself beyond his eardrums.

  Molestation, Crystal says.

  He shakes his head. I don’t know. Then: Why would you even ask that?

  I don’t know, she says. You hear so much about it on the news. I just wondered. Did someone hurt you, Cliff?

  He’s paralyzed; he’s hardened into some dense lifeless material.

  Crystal reaches for him then, puts her hands, covered in garden soil, on either side of his head. He so does not want her touch but she has not touched him like this before and he feels he can’t pull away; he has to give her this gesture. But she moves her hands away.

  It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, you know that, she says. It’s not something you did. You know that, Cliffie?

  She’s all wrong, she’s got it all wrong. And he can’t talk about it. He says, I’m fine, Mom. I’m fine.

  You’re the only one who ever calls me Mom, you know that? Crystal says. He glances at her, then. He doesn’t mean to but he looks at her, and sees that tears are spilling down her cheeks, and she has wiped at them with her loamy fingers, and left muddy dabs across her cheeks. Tribal marks, he thinks. Like in shows about the Amazon. How people paint their faces when they are going to be part of some big ceremony. Some ritual of transition.

  He reaches over to her with his own dirty hands, draws more lines of earth across her forehead, down her nose and chin.

  Hey, she says. Hey! Cliff!

  When they stop throwing the garden dirt at each other, they’re covered in it.

  He gets the ladder from the shed. Fourteen-foot aluminum: He won’t be able to get all of the bugs, but he’ll try. Olivia now in the yard, hanging out, watching him set it up. Are you going to kill all of the worms?

  They’re not worms, he says. Caterpillars aren’t worms. They have legs. They’re baby moths.

  Stay back now, he says. Things could fall. You stay on the deck.

  I want to help, she says.

  No you don’t, he says. He gets the pruning loppers. Up the ladder, he’s used to that. He’s not supposed to be climbing yet, technically, but he sees a hard hat in the shed, puts it on. Also goggles.

  I want to do that, Olivia says. Lift me up so I can do it.

  No, he says. And then he has an idea. He climbs down the ladder, carrying the loppers, which are big ones, three-footers, leaving the hard hat on, and swinging a pair of goggles with a nose filtration cone attached from his arms. He goes in through the deck doors, past Ben, who’s on the computer, toward the kitchen, moving slowly, deliberately. Just getting a glass of water, he says to Crystal. Ben looks up.

  Oh, man, he says. Hey, I want to do that. Give me that gear.

  Then a little show of reluctance, so that Ben almost tussles him for the hat, the loppers. Better take the goggles, then, he says. When you dislodge a caterpillar nest, you get a shower of bug shit.

  He doesn’t mind picking up the lopped branches with their pouches of translucent silk, the crawling inside, as much. It’s when they’re above his head, falling around him, that he doesn’t like them.

  He gets the can of lawnmower gas, an old spray bottle. He lays the branches out on the gravel driveway, well away from the shed, and sprays each lightly, as if he’s one of those women standing inside the rounded glass part of The Bay downtown, with their perfume bottles. The caterpillars don’t like the gasoline; they start to move more vigorously, inside their tent. His hair rises. There’s nothing creepier than a mass of something wormy, moving. Moving behind a translucent membrane, especially. It curdles something inside him. What’s that called? Atavistic.

  Ben coming around the house now, the odd caterpillar hanging from him still, brushing at himself spasmodically. Ben has the matches. He tosses the box to Cliff.

  Nah, you do it, Cliff says. You earned it. He feels good.

  He catches Olivia as she brushes by, steps back a few feet, keeps a good grip on her. Ben tosses the match.

  Even from this safe distance they can see the caterpillars writhe and shrivel in the flames. Olivia bounces and laughs.

  Holy shit, Ben says. And then to Olivia: You’re a bloodthirsty devil, aren’t you?

  Thin black smoke from the burning curls upward. Cliff wonders, too late: What eats the tent caterpillars? Something, now, will go hungry.

  THEY’VE PUT THE STEREO OUTSIDE: Ben puts on Darrell’s and Crystal’s LPS and CDS and tapes. Darrell says, Look at this, they sure know how to make things obsolete, don’t they? Ben plays Cream, The Doors, CCR, Led Zeppelin. He puts on Blondie and Pat Benatar and Rush and Journey, 54-40 and April Wine. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ian Tyson. U2 and Green Day and Shania Twain and Jay-Z.

  There are five kinds of salad and a laundry basket full of rolls. There are tubs and tubs of beer on ice, and people bring even more. There are pies: All around Butterfly Lake, fruit and berries have ripened and people have made pies with the glut. There are two huge roasts of pork that have been cooked for twenty-four hours and then pulled apart and doused with barbecue sauce. There are Sockeye salmon, grilled on the brick barbecue, the silvery planks of them bursting out into coral meat.

  Th
ere must be three hundred people, Cliff estimates. He doesn’t think he knows any of them, and then after a while he isn’t sure. People keep coming up to him, saying things like, I was a year ahead of you at school, or, I used to babysit you. Sometimes they look familiar.

  When it gets dark, the strings of white lights that Darrell and Cliff have strung along the edges of the yard are turned on, and people dance. Cliff has not seen people dance on a lawn before. They dance all together, the shaggy oldsters who tell him they were friends of his dadda, the middle-aged people with their weighty bodies, the younger adults who claim to know him, the troop of small children. He sees Ben dancing with Cleo, and then Mandalay, and then Crystal, and he figures he might do that too. He takes off his shoes, because other people are barefoot and it seems disrespectful to wear shoes here.

  He sees some people about his own age dancing together, slowly, in a circle, their arms around each other’s shoulders, and when he tries to move by politely one of them sees him and pulls him into the circle. They’re smoking; they pass the joint to him but he says no, as he always does, even though he feels that this group might be offended by that. One of the guys says, hey, Cliffie, you stay clean, now, and he thinks it is mocking and affectionate, both. They are also all weeping, he sees, or the women are and some of the men. One of them says, then, as if they’ve been interrupted and are just continuing on: Che, it’s Lisa, I’m remembering you and me swimming naked all the time. Hope you’re doing okay, wherever you are. And this is very weird for a moment, until the next person speaks, and says, Che, buddy, I guess you always knew it was me that lifted your Black Sabbath tape, I hope you’ve forgiven me, and Cliff understands that this is a kind of private wake, a remembrance. And when it’s his turn, he says, Che, my brother, I wish you were here, which is true at that moment, anyway.

  After that a girl pulls him over to dance, a girl or woman, he can’t quite tell. She’s wearing her hair loose, down her back, and a white top with tiny straps, and cut-off denim shorts, and she reminds him of someone else, but also doesn’t. He’s nervous, though, when she puts his arms around her waist, and her arms around his neck, and he says, How old are you? And she says, Thanks! and, twenty-five. Which seems okay. She smells like apples, he thinks, or roses, or something, and the grass touches his bare feet in a way that’s on the border between pleasant and tormenting.

  Then he gets bold enough to try to pirouette her, to spin her around by one hand, and she dips her head and her hair falls back and he sees the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder.

  He touches it. I saw one just like this before, he says, on a girl.

  Oh, then it was on a Butterfly Lake girl. We all got them, one year, all of us that were apprehended and came back, that were high school age. The same tattoo, in the same place. And we had it specially designed. Nobody else can have it.

  He thinks of the girl in the apartment building, the one who found Sophie. He is almost sure it is the same tattoo.

  In the morning everyone sleeps in, and when he gets up it’s bright, bright, and he thinks: Drank too much beer.

  The house is quiet, as if everyone has a headache. He finds coffee made in the kitchen, and follows the sound of a voice to the deck, where Cleo is stretched out on a lounge chair, on the phone, Sam beside her playing with some rocks. When she sees him, Cleo beckons him over, says into the phone, just hold it up to her again, and then to Cliff, listen. And he does, he holds the receiver to his ear, and there is Sophie’s purr, loud as a bulldozer, the purr that sounds like it’s going to burst out of her pigeon chest.

  SO NOW EVERYBODY WANTS a piece of him. First Crystal and Darrell, who sit him down with a formal proposal: He can move back and live with them. Pete McCurdy up the road is looking for someone to take over his backhoe and landscaping business. Learn the ropes. Lots of work now, did he see all of the new houses on the way in? He could live with them for a while, see how he likes it.

  He says, But I have a job.

  But this. Get in on the ground floor. Own your own company in a couple of years. Your own house. Whole house here for the price of an apartment in the city. Anyway, talk to Pete.

  He will, he says.

  Then Ben: Let’s stick around another couple of weeks, drive up the coast. Do some hiking and camping.

  My job, he says. And your job.

  I quit already, Ben says. They wouldn’t give me the time off to come up here so I quit. Anyway I have enough for next year. My parents cover my tuition.

  I miss my cat, Cliff says.

  You really need a girlfriend, Ben says.

  No, Cliff says. I think I don’t. He touches his head where the shaved part, the new scar, still surprises his fingertips. But he laughs.

  Think about it, Ben says. You can get some more time off.

  Cleo says: We’re leaving tomorrow. I need to get back for an appointment.

  Maybe I’ll stay a bit longer, he says. Get a ride back with Ben.

  Cleo says, sharply: I was counting on you to take turns driving and help with the kids.

  He doesn’t know what to say. It’s Mandalay who answers: You should have asked him earlier. Did you even ask him? You can’t just spring this on him. It’s not always about you and your kids.

  Then Cleo in tears, and he feels like he ought to go back with her, but suddenly knows that he doesn’t want to leave, not just yet. He hates it when people are pulling him in different directions. He doesn’t want to make Cleo mad at him or to feel that he is letting her down. For so much of his life he has struggled with the things people have wanted of him: wanting to go to play pickup hockey after school but not wanting to displease Mr. Giesbrecht, who always needed him to do farm chores; wanting to tell Ray off but not wanting to lose his job; wanting to ask a girl out but not wanting to risk some sort of trouble.

  Wanting to leave Loretta’s and to stay.

  But now he wants what he wants so strongly that there’s no contest. He wants to stay much more than he wants to please Cleo. For once there’s no contest. It makes everything clean and safe. He says, no, Cleo, I don’t want to go back with you.

  Okay, she says. Then he does feel sorry for a few moments. He knows that he owes Cleo everything, not just for giving him a place to stay and feeding him the last few weeks since his accident, but also because she saved him before. She got the Giesbrechts to take him in and raise him and that was the best thing for him.

  He can remember the time before, the foster home before, as a series of corrections: an obstacle course of a thousand inexplicable rules. Don’t butter the toast that way. Don’t put your shoes there. Don’t teach the little kids to pretend they are puppies. Don’t touch the books. He remembers lots of children, all or some slow, or deaf, or blind. The woman who never quite looked in his face, but made sure everyone was clean and fed and went to school in her little van, walked the gauntlet to the special needs classroom, holding hands, her big huffs of relief when she saw the teacher, Mrs. Barber. Here we are again, she always said, like she was putting down a big load. He made no friends but sat in the corner, tried to do as he was told, to stay out of trouble. On the playground tried to slip away, to join in games with the other kids but Mrs. Barber was vigilant: She kept them all together where she could watch that they didn’t get bullied too much by the normal kids. Sometimes when he tried to join in a game the kids would call out, Mrs. Barber, here’s one of the special kids.

  He was stupid, of course. He was stunned, his mind curling up inside his head like a hibernating animal, that first year. He had forgotten how to talk, to read even the baby books inside Mrs. Barber’s classroom.

  Then Cleo came and visited him and talked the Giesbrechts into asking for him to come and live with them. That he knows from Cleo, rather than remembers. He doesn’t remember leaving, moving: only then being with Cleo at the Giesbrecht’s, on the farm. Always Cleo. He has so many memories of Cleo: how she’d sit with him at the kitchen table, helping him read or do his arithmetic, showing him with raisins: three g
roups of five is fifteen. Her own books, thick and dense, spread out. Cleo making dinner, her job, the big roasts and piles of dumplings, the steaming potatoes. Cleo burning her fingers, her arms, on pots, the oven, the ironing board, swearing if nobody but him was there, running her hands under cold water, showing him: see? The red blistered triangular mark on her wrist.

  How Cleo softened everything, found a way for him to do everything. He had been like a little spring freshet rolling from obstacle to obstacle, and she’d been there guessing at what he had needed, smoothing out his way. Always in that big warm sunny kitchen, with her books, her patience, her attunement to him. Whatever happened at school — and it was hard; he was in a regular classroom, he was often, it seemed, the worst at everything — he could shed it all, shake it off like the farm dogs shaking off the pond — when Cleo was there.

  And at night he slept in her room. He had his own little room but it was next to Cleo’s and at night he would lie awake until he heard her springs move — that meant she had stopped studying and gone to bed — and then he would knock softly as she had asked him to and come in, close the door without a sound, feel his way with his bare feet across her room and into her single bed, and she would put her arm around him, so that he could spoon into her, and he’d fall asleep.

  He was always falling asleep in class, when he was small.

  So he owes Cleo everything but now he also sees that living at the Giesbrechts, growing up there, he had missed out on a lot too. Watching Ben, listening to Mandalay talk, being here in Butterfly Lake, he sees that. Listening to rock music and hanging out with friends, girls especially. Being able to have his hair the way he wanted it and more than those things, the chance to figure things out himself, like what he wanted to do for a career or what he liked to think about some things.

  And it was true that Cleo had taken care of him and been like an extra skin, a shell, for him. And the Giesbrechts had been a family, the older boys that lived there and did the farm work; Mr. and Mrs. Giesbrecht themselves, grey and doughy and happy when they were all around the table, the gravy and the dumplings piled up, or taking up that whole pew at church, himself leaning into Cleo, allowed to colour, the older boys in their white shirts they only wore on Sunday falling asleep in a row, their heads going back, mouths open, or leaning forward, head on hands, as if praying but really asleep.