“Yeah, but what’re you doing with them, Jayne?” I said.
She stopped spinning and held it out in front of me like it was a treasure she found. I think I let out an “oooh” and an “ahhh” to make her happy.
“Ooooh … she’s doing something real smart with them, I can tell you that much,” Kathy said in a real snotty tone.
“Shut up, Kathy, you don’ even know,” Jayne said.
“Sure I do. You’re writing little notes down on them and chucking them away,” Kathy said, all matter-of-fact.
“Well, yeah, but that’s not what I’m doing with ‘em!”
“What in the heck else could you be doing then? Littering, that’s all!” Kathy said.
“I’m not littering!” Jayne shouted, and she started to cry real hard, and the airplane dropped to the ground like a leaf falling in autumn, rocking back and forth like Alice’s tire swing out back. Jayne dropped to her knees and buried her head deep into her lap, and her body started to sob in time with her crying. That just about broke my heart. Truth was, I’d never seen her cry yet, not since Grace died. I think it took Kathy by surprise too, because just as soon as she was tellin’ Jayne off, she was over beside her little sister, her arms wrapped all the way around her. I went over to Jayne too, me, and I took them both into my arms. We ended up like one of them Russian nesting dolls, and just like we were connected, after Kathy started to cry, I found there were a few tears running down my cheek, too. And just like Jayne, well, I’d never cried yet neither. We stayed like that for a few minutes until arm by arm we let go of each other. We ended up sitting cross-legged in front of each other in a crude little circle, and the airplane Jayne made was in the middle.
“I’m not littering,” Jayne said again, this time with a bit of a quivering lip.
“Okay, Jayne,” Kathy said.
“What’re you doing with them, honey?” I said.
She picked up the paper airplane again and moved it around in the air without getting up, in slow motion. She didn’t use sound effects either. I guess she was thinking about why she was making them in the first place. Sometimes kids did things without thinking about it much. Like, on impulse. You know: something seems like a good idea, and that’s that.
“I jus’ wanted ta do something nice, I guess,” she eventually said, without taking her eyes off the airplane.
Well, I wasn’t sure what she meant by that neither, because, according to Kathy, all she was doing was chucking them out the window after she played with them. I was careful not to challenge her, of course, because Kathy had pretty much traumatized her a few moments earlier. So I said, real careful, “What do you mean by doin’ something nice?”
“My mommy use-ta tell me this story about a sad princess that lived on a cloud, all alone and away from the world, an’ one day there was a prince who was real lonely too. He knew about the princess, cuz everybody knows about princesses in clouds, you know that?”
“Everybody knows that,” I said.
“So, ummm, he went an’ wroted notes to her. An’ because he couldn’t fly, he tied the notes to a bird’s leg, an’ got the bird to fly them to her.”
“What kinds of things did he write about, now?”
“Just nice stuff,” she said, “like what I’m writin’.”
I asked her, after that, what kind of stuff she was writing, but Jayne, she wasn’t havin’ none of that. She said telling me about what she wrote in those paper airplanes would’ve been just like telling somebody about a wish you made, and if you did that, well, your wish wasn’t ever going to come true. She couldn’t stand thinking about somebody not getting what they needed from those notes of hers, so she told us it was a secret she wasn’t ever going to spill. “And then I go like this,” she said, and she ran over to the window and threw it as hard as she could out into the air.
“Where do the notes go?” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, and walked back over to her paper and crayons, spread another piece out onto the floor, and began scribbling some more words down in red crayon. “They jus’ go up and up and fly to whoever needs ‘em.”
“That’s real nice, Jayne,” I said, and I looked down at her with the same kind of wonder she looked at her airplane with. She was a real treasure, that one.
“You can make one,” she said without looking up at me, too intent on writing her words, and I was sure not to peek at what she was writing, too, because I didn’t want to spoil none of the magic she thought she was making.
“Okay,” I said.
I took one of the pieces of paper, picked up a crayon, a “royal blue” one, and began to write down my own words, ones that would make the saddest princess I could think of not so sad anymore. When I was done, I folded it up into the nicest paper airplane I was able to make. I looked up to wait and see when Jayne was finished hers, and that’s when I saw Kathy was making an airplane too. It didn’t take them long to get them ready. When they were, we all walked over to the window. I lifted up the curtain and we all counted to three together. On “three,” Kathy and Jayne let theirs fly. Kathy’s almost flew all the way to the other end of the driveway. Jayne’s, well, it went where I figured it’d go. Jayne noticed I didn’t throw mine, and she got real annoyed at me.
“Hey! What’re you doin’ Uncle Gideon? You didn’t throw your aira-plane!”
I knelt down beside her and looked her right in the eyes.
“Jayne, I’m going to take this airplane to the highest place I can find, and throw it way up in the air so it gets to the very saddest princess. Okay?”
She thought about this for a long time. Finally, she nodded all sweet to me, fell back down on her knees, and started to make another plane. Me, I had other plans, so I began to walk out of the room. Before I left, Kathy ran up to me and gave me a big squeeze around the waist. That felt real good, and I turned around and squeezed her right back. I squeezed her so hard she let out a big ooomph. When I let her go, she walked back over to the bookshelf, sat on the floor, and tucked her legs into her chest. She picked her book up and started to read it again.
“Bye, Uncle Gideon,” both those girls said without looking up or waving.
“See ya, girls,” I said, and left them to their things, their books and airplanes.
I walked back out into the living room and saw Alice still sitting there. She was sucking back one of her menthol cigarettes, watching another talk show. I wished something for her, but I ain’t going to tell you what I wished. If I did, you know, it wouldn’t ever come true.
“I’ll see ya tomorrow, Al,” I said, and she gave me a nod.
I stepped outside and ran my hand along the trailer as I walked back up the driveway. Stopped at the girls’ bedroom window. I bent over, picked up all the paper airplanes, and stuffed them down my shirt so they wouldn’t fall out or blow away. Before leaving, I held out the airplane I made. I pinched the bottom of it between my thumb and pointer finger, cocked it back real far, and tossed it through the window, into the girls’ bedroom. Then I kept on walking. I navigated around Alice’s barricade, got into my car, and started driving down the highway. I ended up driving all the way around the rez that day, and without any real destination. As I drove, every once in a while I threw a paper airplane out the window. It didn’t matter where they landed, neither. They just went up and up and flew to whoever needed them.
FIVE
Terrence didn’t have a cause to be at the cemetery, didn’t have any close relatives or friends buried there. They would’ve all been buried at his own rez, which was a couple of hours west. But he went to the cemetery from time to time because he thought people didn’t visit the dead often enough. So, every once in a while he found somebody to visit.
The first time he visited Grace, it was before winter, but the weather had already begun to turn. As he walked through the cemetery, he listened to the sounds hiding within the silence, how blades of grass beneath his feet crunched like gravel, how leaves that hadn’t fallen yet gently ra
ttled in the breeze. He walked past headstone after headstone, all unique, just like faces in a crowd, all imperfect, cracked, and weathered. He thought about the headstones, how people spoke to them through tears and rested flowers upon their crests like crowns. He thought that cemeteries were like stone beauty pageants.
He was compelled to stop at Grace’s burial site at first because he loved the headstone; it was shaped like an opened book, and he hadn’t seen one like that before. He was used to crosses or cherubs or upright ones that were square or oval shaped. Then he looked closer. On one side of the book, the moon’s soft white light rested upon Grace’s neatly etched name, and the years she’d been alive: 2011-2014. So young when she died—hardly enough time to know the world and what it held for her, or for the world to know her. He hated seeing children’s graves. What had she been like? He always had the same question for the dead. He made up stories for them.
Grace, she was a cute one, with thin black hair and a button nose, and, at three, a handful. But chasing her around was a joy. She got so wound up that she needed to have a story read to her before bedtime or else she couldn’t sleep. Love You Forever. Terrence had been read that story as a child. It was a good one for Grace. On the other side of the headstone he read the name Alice. There was no date of death. Her mother. Alice, she missed her baby. She read stories to an empty bed because she missed her so much.
Terrence wiped a tear from his cheek. He would come visit Grace again. He’d bring a book and read to her.
STARFISH
“HEY.”
Alice couldn’t believe her ears. It was Ryan.
She sat speechless for a long time, long enough that she thought—perhaps hoped—he would hang up. Why now? Why hadn’t he called after Grace’s death? She had a sense of what the answers might be from hearing Ryan’s fractured and weak voice. The tone was out of character for him. It had always been either loud and aggressive, or minutes (sometimes hours) later, it was honeyed and apologetic. Manipulative might be the best word. He would call her a slut or a bitch, depending on what he was mad at, hit her a few times, or more, go for a walk, then come back and talk sweet to her, tell her how much he loved her, tell her that he’d never do it again. Then, the next day, or the next week, he’d lay hands on her again, scream at her, then cool off and be in love with her. One day, on one of the longer walks he took, she remembered going to the bathroom door and telling the girls it was safe to come out. When the door opened, she saw how their bodies were trembling, how pale they looked, and their eyes were wide and wet with tears. That’s when she’d called the RCMP.
It was for them, not for her.
And still she had no words for him as she sat on the couch with the phone to her ear, listening to him breathe. He’d been locked up for over a year now, and during that time he’d called her twice, both times before Grace had been killed, and both times she’d hung up on him before he could finish saying hello. Yet now, though she hoped he would hang up on her, she couldn’t hang up on him. Not this time. His voice stopped her. She worried, despite herself, that it would break him more if she dismissed him again. She hated that she felt that way. She greeted him back, then, with words as hollow as she could muster, words with no intonation, and so without emotion. He didn’t deserve emotion from her.
“Hello, Ryan.”
“How’re you holding up, Alice?” he said.
“I’m doing how I’m doing,” she said.
“I, uh, I loved Grace. I hope you know that. I’m dying over here,” he said.
“Well you would’ve been here if you hadn’t done what you did. It’s nobody’s fault but yours.”
“I know,” he said.
“Grace,” she said before stopping to hold back tears, then continued, saying, “she could’ve used a father. To protect her, you know. She isn’t ever going to know who you are.” Another pause, then, “Or what you did to me, to the girls.”
“I didn’t do nothing to those girls and you know it. I love them.”
“I know you love them, but don’t think for one second that you didn’t do anything to them. And you should’ve been here for her, for all of them.”
He didn’t say anything. She could hear him breathing, hear men in the background shouting at him to get off the phone. She wanted to hang up then, even took the receiver away from her ear and let her thumb hang over the end button, but then replaced the phone to her ear and took a calming breath. There were things she needed to know, now that he was on the phone with her.
“You know every time you beat on me, those girls were locked up in the bathroom after you left. I found them there each time.”
“I know. You told me they were in there.”
“But do you know who put them in there? Did you ever see anything?”
“Anything like what? I thought they’d just gone in there on their own.”
Her heart sank, although there was no reason why he would’ve seen anything. He was too busy concentrating on her to notice anything else. That’s what she’d been trying to do lately, though—trying any way she could think of to confirm that the girls had really seen angel. She would stand in the bathroom for hours on end waiting for the angel to come; pace up and down the hallway, looking over her shoulder to see if it was behind her; lie down on the spot where Grace’s body was found and look up at the stars and wait to see something, anything; and she even found herself praying about it. She’d lie in Grace’s bed, cuddle up to one of her stuffed dolls, and talk to God, ask why, ask Him to show her a sign so she would know Grace was okay. God never said anything back to her, not a whisper, not a gust of wind through the window to move the curtain just so. In the end, Alice knew kids found ways to cope with bad things and there probably never was an angel. If there was, why hadn’t it saved Grace? But she wanted there to be an angel. If there was an angel then there was heaven, and if there was heaven then surely Grace was there.
She heard more shouting in the background, louder shouting. It reminded her of him, the tone she was familiar with.
“Look, I gotta go,” he said. Then he paused and added, “I’m sorry Alice. I really am. For Grace. For everything, you know.”
And there was that sweet voice again, the tone she knew all too well, the tone that had tricked her time and time again.
“Don’t call here again,” she said.
She hung up the phone, then calmly walked outside into the cold.
There was Alice, on her tire swing at the back of her house, staring out across the untouched field of snow, which looked—with its subtle drifts and undulations—like an ocean frozen in time. As late as it was, she could see just fine. The winter sky was a soft orange, and it painted the barren scenery in front of her as an overhead streetlight would in the city. But she saw nothing she wanted to. She had no jacket, but it wasn’t because the cold didn’t bother her—her body was shivering more and more with each passing moment, her skin cool and hard. It was because she didn’t care. Perhaps she cared too much about other things. She was crying, and those tears had formed into tiny patches of ice across her cheeks. Every time she blinked, her eyelids would try to freeze shut, and she would struggle to open them again.
Eventually she heard the sound of crunching but gave no notice. The sound drew closer and closer until it was right beside her, then it stopped altogether. She felt a light touch on her shoulder—against her deadened skin it felt like getting touched on an area frozen by local anaesthetic—but she didn’t turn around. She knew it was Gideon; he was the only person who came and stood beside her as she sat on the tire swing. They were beyond the need for greetings. They remained in silence for a long while, until she could hear the swishing sound of glove against jacket as he tried to warm himself, and his teeth chattering uncontrollably like a set of wind-up dentures. Despite this, he didn’t leave, and she didn’t acknowledge him. It became something of a battle of wills. Alice tried to endure his presence long enough that he would give up and she could be alone and stare out across t
he snow in peace.
“What’re you lookin’ at, Al?” he finally said.
She knew he didn’t expect to hear anything back from her. She’d been this way lately every time he came by. He’d been persistent at first, made every attempt to try to talk with her, keep her company. Eventually, though, he’d stopped trying. This had relieved her, because, as much as it hurt her to hurt him, she didn’t want to talk to anybody about anything. She just wanted to be sad and angry. So, he’d begun just saying hi and then heading over to the girls’ bedroom, where he played games with them, or read stories, or did pretty much whatever it was they were doing at the time. She knew he was doing that. She heard him and the girls laughing and having fun and appreciated it, although she never told him that. She knew somebody had to spend time with Kathy and Jayne. She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“There’s nothing out there, y’know,” he said.
He breathed out, his breath rose up then dissipated. Alice responded, saying blankly, “I know, I just wish there was.”
“What do you wish was there?”
This was met with no response.
“It’s getting real cold, Al. We should get inside.”
Alice knew she wasn’t going to have a choice in the matter. Gideon was never going to let her stay out there in the cold. He’d given up on talking to her when coming over to visit, sure, but this was different. He looked about ready to pick her up and carry her inside, and she knew he would’ve, too. She took one last look out across the great white nothingness and reluctantly, slowly, got up from the tire swing, causing the rubber tire to push away and rock back and forth, the first time it had moved at all. She turned away from the field and made her way to the trailer with Gideon following close behind.
Once inside, Alice walked directly over to the couch and sat down, replacing stares into the snowy field with stares into a blank television screen. She was shivering, and her skin was pale. Gideon went to fetch a comforter and placed it snug around her body. He sat down beside her and gingerly put an arm around her, trying to give her some of his warmth. Alice didn’t move through all of this, just kept staring at the television screen. Perhaps to make things less weird, Gideon eventually reached over and turned the television on. Of course, she didn’t watch the television, didn’t even notice what channel it was on (it was, not surprisingly, on a children’s station). Instead, as she stared at nothing, he stared at her, perhaps wondering what was going through her mind. Eventually, some time in the night, after Alice had fallen asleep slumped over with her head resting on the side of the couch, he left her side.
The Evolution of Alice Page 7
