Pluto's Ghost

by Sheree Fitch

  The sirens were deafening and the headlights flashed at me like the eyes of some psychotic monster closing in. My speedometer cranked up twenty clicks plus past the limit as he got closer. Images of roadblocks ahead and me in a ditch, dead, curled my toes. I had a hunch car chases were more fun in the movies than in real life. I’m not a complete lunatic, so I slowed down, eased onto the shoulder, put the car in park and began rehearsing what I’d say, just in case it wasn’t Skye’s father.

  “Evening, officer. I’m pretty sure I was going the speed limit, wasn’t I? My driver’s licence? Well now, that would be a bit of a problem. See, I don’t have one yet on account of this little incident with my dad’s car when I was fourteen, sir. My name? Jake. Jake Upshore. This car? It’s borrowed, not stolen. I can explain. Honest.”

  Sure, if I had all night.

  Miraculously, the cruiser sped on past me. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I bellowed. No Derucci! In fact, it was a female officer behind the wheel. “You go, girl,” I shouted. “Put the pedal to the metal! Yeehaw!”

  I was jittery as hell, though. Wired. Think of a coke-snorting tap dancer after twenty cups of coffee. Not that I’ve ever tap danced. My stomach churned. I got out of the car and spelled my name in the snow. Relief. Something like battery acid bubbled in my gut, and I crawled back into the car and decided to wait until my stomach settled and my legs stopped their shaking. I grabbed the red binder, warthog stickers and all, and turned on the dash light. The first thing I saw was a collage of Skye’s school photos on the inside cover. Her face beamed up at me and made me feel better until the lima bean shape of a developing fetus from my biology books filled my brain pan.

  When did a baby’s heart begin to beat? I wondered. I couldn’t remember. I closed my eyes and reached in the binder.

  My mother’s on board now. It was so hard to talk about. But we did. She’s sad and she’s scared but she’s committed. She’s been crying so much you could wring her out like a wet dishcloth. She says her heart is broken open. I think, when she said this, she meant just broken. She had a broken heart. But, no, broken open. So I pictured an egg. The way an egg cracks and the chicks come out. It made me feel better, to think that life could come out of this whole mess somehow. After all. Maybe. It surprised me how quickly she agreed. Then again, I was pretty firm. It’s not negotiable, I told her. And I said there were times of no going backwards. Times when waiting would do more harm than good. That a woman had to take charge of her own life, claim her own body. She nodded as I said all this, stroking my forehead. “But it’s not all rational,” she protested. If choices were only logical, they’d be so easy. I know she’s right. That everything is complex and emotions coming into it could make us hesitate. But we have to act soon.

  e

  I drained the last bit of coffee from my Thermos and checked my cellphone.

  Where u got to bro?

  Teddy.

  I’m on my way found wheels.

  Then, because I was worried that soon there’d be no signal, I harassed Skye. I left voicemail messages.

  “callm­elove­youlo­veyou callm­elove­youlo­veyou callme lovey­oulov­eyou callm­elove­youlo­veyou callm­elove­youlo­veyou callm­elove­youlo­veyou”

  Finally, I started the engine up again. The car whistled, a wind-tunnel sound, like when you blow into an empty beer bottle.

  You know how sometimes you ask yourself what if you’d done so and so or such and such instead of this and this and then would that and that have ever happened? And so forth. Drive yourself crazy doing that. Well, that’s what I was doing, thinking I should go back while I still could. I was mad at Skye. No thought of me. Whatsoever. As I drove on, I had lots of what-ifs like little hamsters spinning wheels inside my head and gnawing at my brain.

  I figure it was about an hour later when the storm started blowing in. Flakes swirled against the windshield like little moth-winged alien creatures you’d see in science fiction movies. Creepy. No cars around. The stretch of road I was on was a back road of a back road back of beyond, which is why I’d chosen it to begin with, but as minutes ticked on I was getting a little worried. The gas gauge was about one-quarter full. I realized, in more ways than one, I was totally, completely lost.

  f

  There’s a difference between learning and remembering. I should know. I usually can’t remember what I’m supposed to and I keep things stored in file folders in my head in no kind of order, weird factoids that don’t really do me much good when it comes right down to it. Like did you know that it takes one hundred and twenty years of drops to make one cubic centimetre of a stalagmite? Or I ask non-answerable questions, like why are there short and long vowel sounds and hard sounds and soft sounds for certain consonants? Take for example the letter g. Like, did you know if you add d to anger you get danger? So why don’t they rhyme? So why doesn’t anger rhyme with danger? Hard and soft gs, that’s why. Who made that rule up, eh? See when you’ve got the reading wonkiness I have, well, no one can have the same wonkiness, but for me it’s an up and down kind of thing. Some reads are better than others. Some days reading is easier than other days. Like yeah, sometimes I get my p’s and q’s mixed up. Or b’s and d’s. Things you might expect. But it’s complicated. Things change. Sometimes a b is a b. And d is a musical note. Sometimes a V is an L. Grammar can change to gramma or gummy with a blink of my eye. Sometimes I hearleath instead of leaf, and milk and cream is mocha cream, big success is basic sex, lettuce is let us and I might hear bells when I read the word rings. Five is the way five appears on a set of dice to me, so I see polka dots before my eyes, I do, and I’m sure if you’d taken a CAT scan of my brain even before I messed with it, it would have looked like a few wires were fried or were frayed at the edges. “This is his brain before drugs. This is his brain after drugs. No dif.” I managed to get as far as I did in school because I memorize a lot and it helps me if I read out loud, but you can’t really do that in front of people in an exam, right? Exam, eczema. Same thing. See, scrambled brain. Ever since spell-check, I’ve been much better. I’m sure they got a person with dyslexia to program the computer to come up with alternate spelling suggestions. And I’ve had some good teachers over the years, but some still think if you’re mouthy like I am and colourful and can talk up a storm you can read. Wrong. It ain’t so. My father’s been good helping and that’s not easy because of my frustration. What helps is if I use a little cardboard with a hole cut out of it and slide it along a sentence word by word. But reading’s not necessarily understanding, either, and besides, you feel a little stupid with that ruler thing in school, and I go ballistic when I think I look stupid, so no, I don’t often do the slide thing. I use my thumb, as I’ve admitted, if no one’s looking. All I know is if you went to China, you’d need a translator to read the signs so you’d know where you were, where you were going. When you read like me you are your own translator. Every day. Every goddam day I open a book, I kind of don’t know where I am going. And don’t even get me started about writing and how long it takes me for one paragraph. So yeah. That’s how it is.

  So realizing I was lost, knowing how to use a compass might have come in handy right about then. Reading a map might have given me a few clues. Helped me get my bearings. Instead, I just kept driving on, thinking all over the place. I was playing a new movie reel of my life with Skye. Like how once, when I rounded the corner at school and Skye was there and we saw no one was around, how we grabbed each other and hid in the janitor’s closet and made out and no one saw us. Her mouth all over me. Mine all over her. Smelled like cleaning guck when we got out of there. The smell of Lysol always brought a great big grin to my face. Now I grinned remembering, even though I didn’t know where the hell I was. “But I can find out where I am. No problemo,” I said out loud.

  Who was I kidding? Truth was, at that moment, I felt three years old and like the little engine that puffed out, “I think I can I think I can.” And I heard my mother’s voice. Reading to me.

>   g

  “Don’t you remember anything about her?” Skye tried from time to time to get me to open up about my mother.

  I said no, until one night, right after she’d rolled over after being on top of me and I was feeling a little like a flock of small butterflies had just brushed their wings all over my body, I finally gave in.

  “Well, okay, yeah. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a dream or a memory. I can’t see her, exactly, but there’s all these smells. There’s music. She’s making a puppet from an old dishrag, it’s hopping, hopping all over the table. I’m laughing, she tickles, the music—it’s some kind of folk song. I don’t remember how it goes. So there’s a smell like bacon. Some sort of cooking spice. Maybe cinnamon. I’m sitting in her lap I think and she’s singing. Yep, her arms are around me. Her breath’s fresh as rain. That’s it. That’s all. I found a bottle of her perfume my dad had saved years after she died. He’d pushed it far back in the linen closet in this old suitcase. I opened up the thing. I was maybe ten by then and the smell of her perfume hit me in waves and that smell made that memory come back, the song she was humming. The bottle said ‘Rose Geranium.’ Yeah. Her…hug.”

  When I finished, the silence between Skye and me was endless. Then she reached over and kissed my cheek, and even though I’d tried hard as I could to somehow suck my tears somewhere back into my eye sockets and brain cavity, one teardrop dripped out, escaped, slid down my cheek, and for some strange reason I said, “Do you know it takes a hundred and twenty years of dripping to make one frickin’ cubic centimetre of stalagmite?” Then I swallowed air and forced a burp. I felt much better.

  “Jake. That is dis-gust-ing.” Skye slapped at my arm. “Excuse me,” I said. “It’s a nervous habit I have.” “Well, save your burps for Teddy would you please?”

  “And my father, he’s the burp champion,” I added with pride. “Way too much info,” Skye replied. “Keep it in your own kitchen.”

  h

  My father, the burping champion dad, my father, my kind old Golden Lab of a father. Jigsaw puzzle maniac. Single parent. The old jockstrap. Lonely widower. Brewery worker. Union organizer. Man of peace. Leaf listener. As I rounded a bend in the road, I tried to see him as Timothy Upshore, not my dad. Tim Upshore, getting home, standing in the kitchen, reading the note I’d left him. There he was, rubbing his scalp, pacing the floor. Worried. He so didn’t deserve me.

  “Turn around! Cool your hot wort, Jake.” His voice, buried deep in my belly, called out to me as I barrelled along the highway. I looked in the rear-view mirror, and I swear I saw him, as real as if he were sitting in the back seat.

  “Dad, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. You taught me that, understand, right? Right?” He shook his head sadly, looked away from my gaze, then whoosh—he disappeared. I was alone in the car again.

  I’d seen that look on my father’s face before. For the longest time after my mother died, he’d come home after work, pick up her picture, kiss his finger and touch her face and then kiss the top of my head. Then he’d start supper. Anyhow, that was so long ago, and I know I mentioned that was the same year I met Skye, in that kindergarten class.

  I shook myself awake and realized the storm was getting nasty. The windshield wipers were acting up. Rounding the next bend, I spotted someone hunched against the wind. As I got closer I could tell it was a woman bundled up in parka and scarf. She was doing little jumping jacks, waving at me to stop. When I pulled up beside her she stuck her thumb out. I stopped completely, and she opened the passenger door.

  “So how in the name of God did you end up on this lonely road?” she said, pulling back her hood and getting in. She shook her hair out and smiled. You could have shoved an arrow through my heart. The dashboard lights cast dancing shadows on the woman’s face and for just a second, I swear, I really do, the woman could have been my mother’s sister.

  i

  “My name’s Rita,” she said. She was older than I thought at first. “Hey,” I said. “Thanks for stopping,” she said. I’m not going far but in this godforsaken weather I figure if you hadn’t shown up, I’d have turned into a human icicle and never gotten there. Wicked out there, eh?” She unzipped her coat at the neck, unravelled her scarf, and then blew in her hands.

  I nodded and kept my eyes on the road.

  “So anyway, you just go on down the road a ways—maybe five minutes and hang a left and drive another ten and I’m where I need to be going. That’d be great, then. Brrr!” She rubbed her hands together and blew into them again. “Got some more heat in this old jalopy?” She blew her nose the way old people do. With a lot of gusto. Gross. I cranked up the heat and looked at the time. This was going to cost me time I couldn’t afford. But I was pretty much stuck with her. Rita.

  “You got a name?” she asked. “Mind if I smoke?” She had a pipe in her hand.

  “Jake,” I said. “No,” I said, but I did mind.

  “Nice to meet you, Jake.” She lit her pipe and looked satisfied when she inhaled her first puff. “Here, turn here!”

  Maybe I grunted something back. I wasn’t going to pretend I was thrilled about the detour I was making. Who did she think she was, giving me directions?

  She leaned forward and began fiddling with the radio. “Heard any reports of how much snow they’re expecting?”

  “I didn’t see any houses back there,” I said, suspicious-like. It was true, I’d rounded that corner and it seemed she’d popped out of nowhere.

  “I live in the woods. Can’t see my place from the road.”

  “Why would you go out anywhere on a night like this?” I snapped. I wasn’t any kind of good Samaritan. Up close, she wasn’t reminding me of my mother one bit. She was more like a prune-faced shrivelled-up old apple woman.

  “I could ask you the same question,” she chuckled. I was glad it was dark and I had the road to concentrate on. I wanted to dump her in the nearest snowbank.

  “But I won’t,” she said after a bit. Her voice reminded me of flannel then. She adjusted the bundle in her lap. It was a large basket covered with a red-checked dish towel. The smell of fresh-baked bread made my mouth water.

  “For your information,” she said suddenly, “I’m on my way to help a child who’s sick. Dying. I’m a shaman.” That’s what she said. But not what I heard.

  “Say what?” I said, feeling bad, hoisting myself up straighter in my seat. “Ashamed of what? That’s nothing to be ashamed of. You a nurse?” My mother had been a nurse.

  “They call me the Grim Rita,” she said. “Get it? A little joke. Instead of Grim Reaper.”

  “Not so funny. I don’t get it,” I said.

  “I help them pass over. I’m usually called by the family when they think the time’s coming. I got the call today. I’ve got a feeling tonight’s Caleb’s last. He’s a brave one. So young, too!”

  “Oh, okay, you’re kind of like a medicine woman?”

  She nodded and continued on in a dreamy voice. Her words reminded me of soap bubbles for some reason.

  “Sometimes I hear the knocks. You know. The death knocks. Heard three ones today, clear as this.” She rapped her knuckles on the dashboard. “Sometimes I can smell when death’s near.” She was almost boasting. Knocking again, she turned to me. “You know what I mean?” The way she threw back her head and laughed bugged the hell out of me. I wondered if she’d escaped from some loony bin. To make matters worse, she started up singing. A tune like a dirge. New word: Dirge. Translate: Song played at funerals.

  “Left here.” She pointed ahead. I turned down a narrow snow-drifted road. It was darker deeper in the woods.

  “Whoah,” I said. “And could you stop with the song?” She knocked three times on my dashboard again. Knock it off is what I almost said, picturing me knocking her out the door into that snowbank.

  “Yep, yep. Death knocks. Loud as that. Yep. I’ve got gifts is all. I just help people when it’s time to pass over. Road’s bad, eh? The entrance into the village is alway
s hard to find, even in good weather. You’re on Mi’kmaq land, by the way.”

  “I just figured that out. Isn’t all of it Mi’kmaq land? I mean, you know—what with you being here first and all that? Look, I’m in a hurry, so if—”

  She looked at me hard. “The land belongs to no one. We belong to the land. Not far now.”

  “So like what do you do—talk to the folks? Give them medicine? Like what?” I wanted to know for real because I remembered sitting by my mother’s bedside so long ago, watching my father give her water.

  “Oh, no need to talk with ones close to transition. You can of course, but no need. At this point you can read their thoughts.”

  “Did you just say read thoughts?” The car swerved. She grabbed my arm, gave a nervous little laugh.

  “Absolutely. Send them, too. That’s one of my gifts. Without them saying anything, I can hear them. What they need. Glass of water. Toes uncovered. Story. Privacy. So I sit there and I listen. I breathe with them, every breath until they breathe in or out that one last time.” She sighed deeply when she said this as if it were her last breath.

  “What’s your gift, Jake?” she asked suddenly.

  “I sure as hell don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t have a knack at much, not really good at anything.”

  “That’s not what I asked. A gift is not what you’re good at, it’s something you’ve been blessed with. An ability uniquely yours. It’s one you have to nurture, of course. And share.”

  “Well, you’re wrong about that,” I said. “Some of us have diddly-squat in terms of special gifts. And some things you should keep for yourself.”

  “Wrong? Did you just say I was wrong? HA! Good for you. No one ever says I’m wrong. Okay, maybe you don’t like the word ‘gifts.’ What’s your passion, then?”