Roost

by Ali Bryan

  “So if Grandma had died on a submarine, does that mean she would have been halfway to hell?”

  “No, Wes. Shhh …” I look at Glen for some assistance, but he is fully engaged in my brother’s speech. “Glen,” I whisper. But he responds with an outburst of laughter. A joke I have missed.

  “Glen!” I say again.

  “Can I play on your phone?”

  “No, Wes, you cannot play on my phone. We are at Grandma’s funeral. Glen!”

  He leans in towards me.

  “Do something with Wes.”

  “Come here, bud,” he says, pulling him close. “Do you want to play on my phone?”

  “I just told him he couldn’t play on my phone!”

  Joan slithers off the pew. I tell her to get up but she is trying to locate a Smartie that has dropped from her box. Dan looks down from the altar, distracted. We make brief eye contact. His look is one of disappointment. Wes tugs on my arm.

  “Give me your phone!”

  I shake him off while Glen frantically fumbles for his phone in his pocket, and once located immediately hands it to Wes.

  “My mother,” Dan begins, “was not an extravagant woman. She took pleasure in the simple things in life: a reliable recipe or the discovery of an interesting shell or a perfectly smooth piece of beach glass. The hundreds of pictures Claudia and I made for her and later those made by her grandchildren.” He holds up one of Hannah’s horses and presents it slowly from one side of the church to the other. I stare at Hannah’s painting. The horse’s mane is gnarled and sea-salt-tangled like a runway model’s hairdo. The horse is chestnut-coloured. Is this a Sable Island pony? What next Dan? A plane?

  Joan retrieves her Smartie and promptly smacks her head on the pew. The loud thud resounds through the church, followed by her high-pitched scream. I scoop her up and press her face into my chest to muffle the noise but it’s futile. People look at me sympathetically, except for Dan. I stand to take her out of the church, but Cathy meets me at the end of the pew.

  “I’ll take her,” she says, extending her long arms.

  I hand Joan over. She’s still crying.

  “Can I come too?” Wes asks.

  “Go,” I reply.

  Cathy reaches for Wes’s hand. I mouth “thanks” as she ushers my kids down the aisle. Her full-length black skirt swishes behind her.

  I hear Wes say, “Yes, I got a new level!” before the door opens and closes.

  I slide my sunglasses over my face and cry. Glen offers his hand for comfort. I reach across the space vacated by our kids, and accept it. Dan finishes his eulogy and the minister invites a group of women and a man, who looks like Rex Murphy, to the front of the church. They start singing “Under the Boardwalk.” I don’t remember this being a part of the service. One of the women is loud and off-key. I look over at my father in the pew across the aisle. The performance causes him to hang his head and cry. He is also loud and competes with the singers. Dan puts an arm around him, gives him a squeeze. His kids sit quietly between him and Allison-Jean like a pair of cardboard cutouts.

  I look back up at the group of singers. They sway and the man snaps his fingers. I am irritated that I don’t know the significance of the song. After the performance my dad says a few closing words of thanks and the service comes to an end. People begin to file out and “Margo’s Cargo” spills into the church from the altar speakers.

  Those who share my mother’s affinity with Stompin’ Tom clap along. Their eyes brighten, their skirts even bounce a little, and they sing. They leave their pews, clad in their brown pantyhose and fall sweaters, and stroll down the aisle. Together they chime in “and Reggie’s got the rig!” Margo got the cargo, Reggie the rig, and Janice the coffin. I make sure I don’t leave my program behind. Wes, I see, has left a sneaker, jammed in the slot beside the hymnbook. With dirty shoe and program in hand, I’m anxious to escape.

  Dan and Dad are already in the aisle. When they pass me, Dan blocks my exit from the pew, pausing to smooth down Dad’s lapel. As though he still has an audience. “Go on, now.” He says, guiding my father towards the door like he’s Rainman.

  “I think he knows where the exit is.”

  “He’s exhausted,” Dan says.

  “Well, we wouldn’t even be here if they’d gone to Paris,” I say.

  17

  Glen and I take the kids trick-or-treating together. It is the first time Joan’s really enthusiastic about Halloween and thanks to Allison-Jean’s sewing skills, patience, and ability to understand a two-year-old, people get that she is a cat squirrel. House after house she digs around in each shallow aluminum bowl of chocolate bars and fishes out as many as she pleases. The dieters encourage her to take more. They don’t want any left behind. They’ve been snacking all week. Feasting on Kit Kats and Snickers bars during Coronation Street. Wesley examines everything that goes into his bag and asks for replacements when he disapproves.

  It is under a tree inhabited by a dozen or so plastic ghosts that I realize Glen and I are holding hands. I can feel the scar on his knuckle. Raised and round. A souvenir from a cave tour we took in Bermuda. I don’t know how long we’ve been holding hands or who initiated it and whether I should let go. He doesn’t look at me. He keeps his gaze on the house, on our kids begging for chips. I look at him and I don’t care that he has back fat or a nose that Joan was unfortunate to inherit. There is something about being held. Even though my hand is the only beneficiary, I feel safe. A chick in an egg. A teapot in bubble wrap.

  “I got spicy chips!” Wes calls out to us, jumping down the steps of a house.

  “Nice,” Glen responds. “Those are my favourite.”

  Wes drops the Doritos in his pillowcase and cuts across to the next house. “Not on the grass,” I yell, waiting for Joan.

  A pair of teenagers in Scream masks rush past our cat squirrel. Glen moves in and picks her up.

  “Grandma,” she points to the pair.

  “Grandma?” I ask.

  “Grandma’s a ghost.”

  “Grandma is not a ghost, Joan.”

  “Hurry up!” Wes shouts from the end of the next driveway.

  The teenagers, who’ve already been up to the front door and back, pass by us. “Hi, Grandma,” Joan says to them.

  “No, Joan. Grandma is not a ghost.”

  “But she in heaven.”

  “Yes, but she’s not there as a serial killer. Frig.” I look to Glen for support.

  He puts her down at the end of the driveway and straightens her tail. “Grandma’s more a spirit. Like a fairy,” he explains as an obese Tinkerbell passes by.

  “A fairy?” I say, staring at Glen.

  “It’s better than a ghost,” he argues.

  “Grandma’s a fairy?” Wes asks.

  “No!” I interrupt. “She’s an angel.”

  “Is that her over there?” Wes points.

  “No. She’s not trick-or-treating, okay? She’s not here. Grandma’s in heaven. Go knock on that door.” I point to a house with a trail of pumpkins flanking the front walk.

  “Fuck,” I say, when they are out of earshot. I root through Joan’s bag and jam a mini Oh Henry in my mouth. Glen reaches for my hand. It is more hand pulling than handholding. More “let’s go” than “let’s be.” We follow the kids to the next house. Joan meows, Wes jumps. Still we hold hands until the boys in the Scream masks approach and I can’t help but think my mother is underneath one. That’s when we let go and go back to being two. The boys pass between us, their black cloaks dragging behind them.

  18

  Weeks pass.

  Dan and I don’t talk.

  Things with Glen return to the way they were before my mother died: defunct. Our relationship not unlike a human body, a relatively healthy one that climaxed, that created. But inside it always had a flaw you couldn’t see but we both knew was there. A heart condition. It slowed us down, tripped us up. When Wes was a baby. When I found out I was pregnant with Joan. We seemed to have it
under control; we danced and made things from scratch and for an entire month we had sex and did sixty-nine like we were sixteen. But when Joan began to crawl, so did we, and when she took her first steps, we went into cardiac arrest.

  Dad joins a curling club and buys a fancy brush and shoes and tries to set me up with curlers. Some are in their fifties with bodies that look like they’ve been constructed from Play-Doh. He hangs around the club doing odd jobs other people will have to correct, and he searches for a team in need of a new member. He turns down my Sunday dinner invitations to work charity bonspiels or to watch curling on CBC. Promises of boiled parsnips and mashed turnip don’t sway him.

  It is not until a Sunday afternoon a week shy of Christmas that he shows up on my doorstep. Wes is playing with a kid down the street when he arrives. They are likely eating snow or playing in the semi-frozen bird bath. Joan is watching a Little People DVD we borrowed from Allison-Jean. It features legless clay people with large shoes and chimp-length arms. An Aaron Neville sound-a-like sings the theme song and the characters glide along clay landscapes and help each other.

  Dad stands in the entryway holding his curling broom.

  “What’s for supper?” he asks.

  I point to a pineapple on the counter.

  “What happened to that turkey dinner you were talking about?”

  “That was two weeks ago,” I tell him.

  He makes a puzzled look as though an acting teacher has instructed him to make a puzzled look. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He shrugs and hangs his coat in the closet and says, “Where’s my Joanie?” in a bear-like voice. She giggles and Aaron Neville introduces the next character in need of encouragement and I wonder if the show’s writers ever wish they had more creative freedom. That they could substitute themes of friendship and self-esteem with secret clay people fight clubs and playground poker.

  I rummage through the cupboards and find a taco kit. It will have to work. I can hear my cellphone ringing in the bedroom but I ignore it and put a package of ground beef in the microwave to defrost. Wes comes through the door breathing heavily and yells, “Grandpa!”

  “Take your boots off first,” I say, as Wes tramps down the hall towards the living room. Each boot comes off with a thump before he leaps onto the couch. Dad groans under his weight and Joan proceeds to kick.

  “Joan, stop kicking,” I yell, as I cut an inch of mould off the cheese and hide it under a layer of onion skin in the garbage. I will grate the cheese into a bowl and serve it to my family, though I myself will not be putting cheese on my taco.

  Wesley takes a second to watch Little People, then he announces that the show sucks, turns off the DVD player, and changes the channel, so Joan pulls the remote from him and hits him with it. He cries and she starts to cry and Dad quickly gets up from the couch to observe and I realize that the writers of the Little People are probably parents and that they write about harmonious idyllic things because in reality fight clubs exist in their living rooms too.

  “Timeout! Both of you.”

  Joan seems okay with this and sits on the rubber mat. Wesley is less receptive and spends several seconds howling into a pillow. I grab his arm, which is skinny and cool from the outdoors, and pull him up from the couch. He refuses to place his feet on the ground and I nearly drop him. A piece of shredded cheese falls from my shirt onto his forehead, which he accuses me of throwing at him. I glance at Joan who is bent over, biting her big toenail.

  “Stop that! That’s disgusting.”

  Wesley breaks free and jumps onto the couch.

  I hear the front door open, and go to check who else has arrived. Like Thing 1 and Thing 2, Dan’s kids are at the door standing at attention beside their ride-on Trunki suitcases.

  “Hi,” I greet them. Dan is behind them on the step.

  “Hi Auntie Claudia,” Hannah says.

  “Allison’s in labour,” Dan says, out of breath. “Contractions are really close. I tried to call.” It is the first time I have seen him since the funeral. He looks fatter. We avoid eye contact.

  “Good luck,” I say.

  He nods and gives quick hugs to his kids before rushing back to the car where Allison-Jean is shifting up and down in her seat like a kettlebell is about to swing out of her crotch.

  Dad rushes up behind me. “Good luck, Danny! Hurry hard!”

  We both wave, and I return to the kitchen.

  “Would anyone like a drink?” I ask, trying to remember the feeling when the kettlebell finally comes out and you see it for the first time. Wes asks for pop, Joan picks her nose and eats it.

  “I will have a glass of milk,” Hannah says politely.

  “Me too,” Liam says, raising his hand.

  “Looks like you’ve got your hands full,” Dad chuckles, filling a glass with tap water.

  I flash him a dirty look, remove the now partially cooked ground beef from the microwave, drop it into a pan, and start frying it.

  “We don’t have any pop, Wesley.”

  “Then give me orange juice.”

  “Is that how you ask?”

  He says, “Please,” while making a ridiculous face that doesn’t amuse me.

  “Do you mind getting them drinks?” I ask my father.

  He says, “Of course not.”

  A minute later Wesley says, “This is yucky,” and spits his juice on the coffee table.

  His cousins enjoy this type of behaviour because it is foreign to them. Particularly Hannah who is six going on twelve.

  I tell him to clean it up. Argue that there is nothing wrong with the juice, though upon closer observation notice it’s cloudy. I take it to the kitchen.

  “Did you notice anything funny about the juice?” I say to my father, holding the cup up to the light.

  “I just mixed in a little apple juice,” he explains, putting a handful of cheese in his mouth. “There was only a bit left.”

  “But we don’t mix juice.”

  “I just didn’t want to see it go to waste.”

  I say nothing but try to determine why he assumed the apple juice would go to waste. Does he mix the juice at Dan’s house? Is their juice also at risk of going to waste? Are all juices at risk of going to waste? I chop a tomato, count to ten the way my mother would, and stir the meat.

  “We don’t mix juice,” I say again.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “You don’t have to apologize.”

  I count to ten, in Mandarin this time, and I think of Alphonse Jr. and how peaceful he looked dead.

  “Say, what did you do with the roosters?” he asks, pointing at the border. “Your mother loved those darn things. Especially those ones.” He gestures to one of the remaining mug shot roosters. “Did you know that’s the reason she put the border up in the living room?”

  “No, Dad. I did not know that.” I set the table, and then I slip out the back door for fresh air.

  Later that night, Allison-Jean pushes out a girl in sixteen minutes.

  19

  I take the next day off work. Dad comes back to babysit all the kids when I go to the hospital. After arriving and realizing I’m empty-handed, I duck into the gift shop. The selection is limited to overpriced stuffed animals, Willow Tree statues, and Glosette raisins.

  The man behind the cash says, “Can I help you?” He wears a name tag and a blue pin with volunteer typed in bold letters.

  “Just looking for a gift,” I reply, stopping at a rack of bibs that say Spit Happens.

  “Boy or a girl?”

  “Girl.”

  The bibs don’t amuse me. They amuse middle-aged women with tight perms and turtlenecks.

  “How about music?”

  He points to a collection of CDs by a Pepsi machine.

  I glance over the display and pick one featuring Celtic lullabies, then go back and choose a Spit Happens bib because it will likely also appeal to piano teachers like Allison-Jean.

  “Will that be everything?” the volu
nteer asks.

  “That’s it.”

  He rings the stuff in and jams the items into a tiny bag. I stop and pick up a coffee at a Tim Horton’s kiosk before heading up to the fifth floor. The elevator is crowded and smells like fish. People around me sniff. Then the elevator dings and opens a few feet below the fifth floor.

  “Well that doesn’t happen every day!” says a man wearing a Proud Grandpa T-shirt.

  A doctor opens the compartment containing the emergency phone and everyone glances in, expecting to see an octopus or something, but there is nothing in there, except the phone, which is covered in tape and not working. He sighs and presses the emergency button eleven times. I know it’s eleven because I count and it makes me wonder if he has inside information that indicates the button has to be pressed specifically eleven times so that we all warp to level six and start clubbing turtles.

  The elevator shakes a bit and seems to lose power.

  “We’re going to have to climb out,” a nurse says. She finishes eating a tea biscuit then moves to the front of the pack.

  “Some help?” she requests.

  The proud grandpa hikes up his pants and goes down on one knee. The nurse promptly steps on and it and hoists herself up. Then she says, “Next,” and a woman takes off her drippy snow boots and, also with the help of the grandpa’s knee, and the nurse’s extended hand, frees herself up to the fifth floor. The doctor politely declines the grandpa’s knee or anyone’s help, and he awkwardly clambers up and out on his own. One by one the elevator empties of its passengers. The grandpa grunts under the weight of a hefty woman in a lab coat. She looks embarrassed as she rolls onto the fifth floor.

  It’s my turn at last, and just in time because it feels like the area is getting smaller and I might do something rash to distract myself like nibble the carpet or hang upside down from the safety bars lining the elevator’s perimeter. The grandpa tells me to “hop on.”

  When I hurl myself onto the fifth floor, I land at my brother’s feet. He looks down at me and the puddle of drool that shot out of my mouth on impact, pauses as though thinking of something to say, then turns and goes down the hall.