by Fran Kimmel
But last night was bad. At 3:20, I yanked on my sweatpants and hoody and boots, inserted fresh batteries into the rump of my flashlight, and snuck up the stairs, past Buttercup’s door and into the night.
Winter Lake houses shrivel against the night sky like cartoon silhouettes. It’s like they lose all personality after being put to bed. Except for Harmony’s room, whose rock window was lit, the only one, suspended like a star. I crouched in the snow pile on the other side of the street, flashlight off, crinking my neck up, making a wish she would come to the window and give me a sign. I imagined tiptoeing up her stairs, using a key around my neck to let myself in, lying beside her, matching my breathing to hers. My feet started tingling, then numbed solid. I got so cold it felt like wolves were nipping at my wrists and at the dip in my neck. I limped back to Delta’s like a cripple.
Rebee came to school this morning. She showed up twenty minutes after the bell and wouldn’t look at me or the other children as she found her desk, sat, opened her practice scribbler, and picked up her pencil with her left hand. She’d kept her head down since, her cheeks the colour of cold ash.
It’s quiet time. I’ve got the children working on Find the Letters worksheets from the Grade Two Teachers’ Kit. Except for Peter, who thinks we should be well into phonics by now. Peter knows only how to think inside his box, to follow a set of rules he doesn’t understand. He’s like a woodpecker that kid, tuttuttuttuttut. He makes me think of my mother. I’ve stuck him at the back, given him the clean the paintbrush job.
“I want you to come into the hallway with me.”
Rebee jumped. She hadn’t noticed me standing beside her. The hallway was empty. I led her to the water fountain, bent down, and let the water wash the grit off my tongue. Rebee slumped beside me, shuffling from one foot to the other. “Take a drink. It helps. But don’t touch the spout. It’s got germs.”
Rebee stuck her tongue out, shooting water everywhere. “Am I in trouble?” she asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
I leaned against the wall.
“Are you mad ’cause I missed the bell?” Rebee leaned into the wall too, the water fountain between us.
“No. I don’t care about that.” I wanted to give her a warm bath. I wanted to hold her head in my hand as she floated in pink bubbles. “Who’s Victoria?”
“What?” Rebee scrunched her eyebrows and wrinkled her lips.
“Vic then.”
“Auntie Vic.”
“What’s your mom’s real name? Harmony. That’s not it, is it?”
Rebee stayed quiet for a minute, so I gave her shoulder a squeeze.
“She used to be Elizabeth,” she piped up, focusing on her scruffy runners. “But you aren’t supposed to call her that. She doesn’t like it.”
“And where do you come from, Rebee Shore?”
She shrugged like she didn’t know and then bent to yank up her sock.
“Come on, Rebee. Where? Tell me.”
“I don’t know the names. One time Jimmy’s grandpa put Ralph on the table and cut his nails with a squeezer, and Ralph didn’t like it and wouldn’t wag his tail.”
She picked at her sweater like it was covered with dryer lint.
“Who’s Jimmy?”
She wouldn’t look at me, but she kept talking at least. “He lived in the big house and we lived in the cabin. Jimmy had a monkey his grandma made with a sock his grandpa didn’t wear anymore. It had button eyes but it didn’t have a mouth. Then we went away so I don’t know if he’s got it anymore.”
It surprised me to think she once had a friend. She reminded me so much of me when I was a little girl, when there were no friends for miles, no friends at all. “And where was this? Where were you living?”
Rebee shrugged again. “There’s too many. Someplace.”
I thought about this girl and her mother, drifting from town to town like gypsies. Who were they running from? I was about to ask, when Rebee blurted, “You’re not allowed to come to my house anymore.”
“Why not?”
“She said.”
“Did she give a reason?”
Rebee shrugged and turned into the fountain and played with the tap. Water burped in the white bowl.
“What did she say?” I pushed off the wall, lifting her hand from the tap, and waited.
“She says you’re trouble.” Rebee didn’t want to say this. I could tell by her whisper, by how she addressed the water fountain. She didn’t try to pull back her hand as she stared at my fingers over hers.
“What else?”
She rubbed the end of her finger against my jagged nail. I could feel it break free.
“What else?”
She wouldn’t stop staring at our fingers, so I kneeled down in front of her. “What else, Rebee?”
“That if you don’t stay away, we’re outta here.”
I took both her hands in mine and pressed them close to her chest, which gave her no place to look but my face.
“What about you?” She had eyes like her mother’s, like almonds, only wider, more fearful. “Do you want me to stay away?”
I could feel her hammering heart, blood pounding through veins too small for this. Betray the mother. Betray the teacher. I wanted to protect her but didn’t let myself think about what I was protecting her from. So when she shook her head no, I let go of her fists, and she fell backwards. I uncurled slowly, eclipsing her, then bowed my head and whispered in her ear. “You should listen to your mother, Rebee. Go back to your desk. And wash your hands.”
She ran from me as though she’d been burned. I waited a long time before returning to the classroom. I made Peter do Sunburst, which I knew he hated. He stood on the chair, fists curled in angry balls.
I left Rebee alone until the final bell, when she could plunge into the cold and away from here.
* * *
I called in sick today. Terrible cramps, Mrs. Bagot. The worst case of the trots. I had to call my mother in the middle of the night. Yes. Yes. Perhaps something I ate. I’ll try my best. You are very kind. Ohhhhh. I must go. Thank you.
After the morning school bell rang, I walked through back allies to the other side of town where the Safeway was. I bought a French loaf, green olives, sharp cheddar, cherry tomatoes, and slices of pink salmon — now stuffed in my backpack inside plastic bags. Then I stopped at the liquor store and bought expensive French wine from the pimply-faced boy. He talked sincerely about bouquet and body and long finishes, as though he’d travelled to France and stomped the grapes himself.
It was a cold, crisp day, no wind, a little past noon. I didn’t even bother to zipper my jacket. I took off my boots in front of her door and wrapped my knuckles against wood, over and over, until she appeared.
“Hello, Elizabeth.”
It frightened her that I knew her name. I could see it in her face, in the way her cheekbones shifted and her eyes narrowed, although she tried to hide it by blocking the doorway. She kept her shoulders pulled back.
“Miss Bel. No school today?”
“Thought I’d play hooky, come visit instead.” She blended with her surroundings, just as I remembered. She was wearing an oversized sweatshirt, sea blue, and leggings, feet bare, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Glasses, too, with thick black frames, a book tucked close to her chest. I had become vaguely possessive. You should always pull your hair back, I thought. Always wear blue.
“I’m not looking for company.”
“But here I am. Just like that.”
I pushed past her into the beautifully bare room and heard the door bang shut behind me, feeling her cold stare on the back of my neck. I walked over to the window where she must have been reading, wrestled with the straps of my heavy backpack, and slid it to the floor at my feet. I knew she couldn’t see me, so I wrapped my fist over a rock from her shelf, bent down and slipped it into my pack.
“It’s a beautiful day. Even for Winter Lake.”
There was a striped wool blanket crumple
d beside the pillow. I picked it up to feel her leftover warmth and the smell of her skin. I took the blanket in both fists, gave it a good shake, and let it billow to the floor in the centre of the room like a tablecloth.
“Tada.” I spread the wine and the food on the blanket, careful not to turn around and look into her eyes.
“I want you to go,” she told my back.
“You’re only saying that because you feel you must. Because you always do. Where’s your corkscrew?”
I headed to the kitchen without waiting for an answer, opened both drawers, and pulled out an old corkscrew, badly rusted, attached to a coil of stained rawhide. My mother would have found the dish soap, muttered and clucked. I reached for the paring knife and two plastic cups and plates from the cupboard above and carried it all to the blanket. I busied myself by fluffing up the pillows, dragging them to the blanket, opening the wine, and pouring us each a cupful.
Elizabeth still stood at the door. She had taken off her glasses and was chewing on the tip of one of its arms. I felt almost frightened by her shape in the doorway. But it was more of an aching. She could force me to leave in that moment and then it would be over.
I raised my hand, an unconditional gesture, willing some power over her.
She stood there, unmoving, while I held my breath. But then she came, sat on her pillow in cross-legged defeat, and took the cup from my outstretched hand.
“I should have brought flowers.”
“Are we dating, Miss Bel?” She did not try to hide the contempt in her voice.
But I thought about it anyway, about having Elizabeth. Rebee would be with us. We’d walk together on a winter morning, sharing mittens, my hands in theirs. I was filled with a tenderness I could not explain.
“I had to sneak across town to get this stuff. Didn’t want to start a Winter Lake riot for playing hooky from school. My artfulness deserves a toast. Let’s drink to imports most recent, to innocence and impunity.”
I touched the side of her cup with mine. We brought our cups to our lips. I could taste the freshly sawn oak and hint of vanilla, just like the boy said.
“So we’re having your picnic. Are you satisfied, Miss Bel?”
“Yes, yes I am, Miss Elizabeth. Satisfied to my core.”
“My name is Harmony.”
“All right. I’ll go with that. You call me Bel. I’ll call you Harmony.”
The French loaf tore under the dull knife, bread crumbs scattering over the blanket and floorboards. I wanted to borrow Delta’s old Hoover, plug the cord from the lime green canister into the socket by the fireplace, and run its rumpled hose up and down along the pine planks. Elizabeth didn’t notice the mess we were making. She took the bread I offered, and covered it with a slice of salmon. Then she reached for olives and tomatoes until her plate was filled.
We ate what was before us, best friends, sharing a meal. I felt pleased with my choices, colours colliding inside our cheeks.
“You don’t seem the teacher type,” she said at last.
“Thank God for that.” My mother was a teacher. Self-appointed. We sat across from each other at the kitchen table. I perched on the Sears catalogue for the first few years, tied to the chair with a worn nylon stocking wrapped around my stomach. My mother never meant to be cruel, but she lacked imagination. The school was too far, and she knew no other way to keep a young child still. The home schooling lessons arrived in the mail like a prison sentence. Again, Belinda. Do it again. By Grade Five the lessons got too difficult for her. She stumbled over the reading passages and couldn’t understand what the assignments were asking. I got to climb the stairs after breakfast and play school in my bedroom, tracing patterns along the window ledge in the mountains of grey dust that formed through the night. My mother never understood this principle either. She could scrub herself raw, but we lived in a dustbowl. We could never stay clean.
A crumble fell to Elizabeth’s sleeve. I leaned towards her, pinched it with my fingers, and placed it on my tongue. Elizabeth failed to acknowledge my gesture. But she didn’t pull away either.
“Teachers are glorified lab attendants,” I continued. “The bureaucrats have clumped the kiddies together, stuck them in a Petri dish. It’s the teacher type’s job to stir up the mix, watch what festers. An unhygienic process, don’t you think? Bad for the immune system.”
She leaned back on her elbows, legs bent at the knees, her head tilted back. I imagined her at age sixty, sitting that way. She would be limber, sturdy, her beautiful neck stretched back, greying hair flowing past her shoulders.
“Then why do it? Why teach?” she stared up at the speckled ceiling like it was an open sky, where clouds in imaginative shapes wing by.
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t really. “You get up in the morning, hard-wired to squeeze the toothpaste with the same pressure you used yesterday. Step out to wander through a day like any other.”
She was still focused on the ceiling, but I could tell she was listening. “But then you press up against something that defies explanation. A man you don’t recognize but already know. A woman who’s drowning, so she learns to stop breathing. There is something inexplicable in the discovery. Not the discovery itself, but your connection to it. Your neural circuitry shorts out. You cross over recklessly, and in an instant, re-author yourself, start a new path. It can’t be reversed.”
Elizabeth laughed. I felt buoyed by the sound, its weightlessness, as though she had risen from the murky depths and floated to the surface with me. She poured herself more wine.
“It’s a bullshit explanation,” she said.
Her choice of words discouraged me, but I forged ahead anyway. “Can you do any better?”
“You don’t like typing. You want summers off. Maybe you like kids.”
“I meant you. Can you do any better? Explain how you got here? Why you’re sitting on this floor, in this town, with this teacher?”
“I’m sitting with the teacher because she barged through my doorway. She assumes the word ‘no’ doesn’t apply to her.” She was not stingy with her affection. It was merely inaccessible, like a box of chocolates on a shelf too high.
“But you opened the door. And it doesn’t explain the rest. How you and Rebee got to this place. The moments that led you to here. You can trace them back, you know. Try it.” She crossed her legs again, straightening her spine.
“Your one particular moment of discovery,” I added. “That one connection greater than the rest.”
Drops of red spread over her cheeks like food colour in water. She took another drink.
“Aren’t you even going to try?”
“How I got here? The Number 2 highway, then the 55, I think. No great connections. No big moment of truth. I got tired of driving.”
“So you stop when you’re tired? Pick up again when you get your juice back?”
“That’s about it.”
“Bullshit. I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t really care.” She smiled when she said this. She looked right at me.
We sat in the fog, cross-legged, and had the rest of our picnic in silence. I emptied the last of the wine into our cups. Dregs clotted in the bottle, something the boy didn’t mention. Elizabeth’s eyes were shiny. She stared at the blanket.
“I’m going to live in Tuktoyaktuk,” I said, trying to sound bright. We had finished our plates and I busied myself by clearing up the debris. I folded the rest of the salmon back to its bag, covered the French loaf with its plastic wrapping, carried the leftovers to the kitchen and placed them on the top shelf of the near empty fridge. We’d eaten all the olives. I threw the empty bags in the garbage and crammed them on top of the withered spinach and rotting paper. “There’s enough for a snack later,” I called back to her. “It’s all in the fridge.”
Elizabeth stood, cup in hand, and walked over to the window. “No one chooses Tuktoyaktuk.” She stared at the ordinary sky covering the empty street.
“When I was a little kid my mo
ther kept threatening to ship me there to live with the Eskimos.” I dropped to my knees in front of the blanket, sweeping crumbs into my palm. “She sounded like a machine gun — tuktuktuktuk. I thought it was somewhere you went to be shot. Some imaginary bad place. But it’s real enough. You can find it on the map.”
“I suppose that explains it,” Elizabeth turned to face me again. “Your lineup of moments.”
Uncle Walter lived in Tuktoyaktuk. He might live there still. I wanted to tell Elizabeth his stories, stories I’ve told no one. About how we made magic that summer, my uncle and me.
“It’s all about your mother.”
“No, it’s more about my uncle. My Uncle Walter.”
But she’d stopped listening. “Mommy threatens. She’s gonna ship you off. To Tuktoyaktuk,” slurred slightly, not getting the word right. “Mommy says it over and over. Of course you’re mad at Mommy. Off you go. Some kind of mad justice blowing you north.”
I turned away, getting up off my knees, and headed back to the kitchen with my palm full of breadcrumbs. “Perhaps not quite that simple,” I answered, my back to her.
“Aah, but it was just a moment ago.” She spoke lightly now. When I faced her, I saw she was smiling. She had her arms crossed, still holding her cup. We stood across the room from each other, she against the light of the window, me lost in the shadows. “What was it the teacher said? ‘Think about the moments that led you to here. Trace them all the way back.’ There we go then. You’re all figured out. Let’s toast the discovery. To the teacher’s life. Mystery solved.”
She brought her cup to her mouth, eyes glinting at me, and poured the rest of those clotted noble grapes down her throat.
I marched forward, ready to slap her cold cheek. A sting for a sting. But by the time I got to her window my fire was gone. “Life is not petty,” I said. “Not yours and not mine either.”
“Tuktuktuktuk.”
“I thought you could use a friend.”
