by S. M. Beiko
We stayed there up until last year, when the lawyer’s letter came. I hadn’t seen or heard from my grandmother since we got the statues. After that, she seemed to just melt back into the absence I was accustomed to, travelling all over the world for “work,” the nebulous excuse I was always fed when I asked about her. She was just as compact as my mother, except so unreachable as to exist in some other dimension. She would sometimes send me postcards with pictures of exotic places. She only sent them to me, and that made me feel like I was a part of her strange adventures. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
Then the postcards stopped. And the lawyer’s letter came.
I took my bike around the side of the enormous house and to the backyard, where I locked it to the black wrought-iron fence hemming in the property. On my way to the door, I paused at the stone menagerie. Deidre had it moved here with us. I thought, at first, that it was a gesture to make me feel better, but it was one of the many weird “stipulations” we had to fulfill to stay here.
The stone fox stared at me from between the legs of its companions. An untouched layer of snow frosted each statue except the fox’s, and for a second I swore its eyes flickered at me, almost hot as they met mine. My bad eye tingled harder than it had all day, and my hand shot up to it.
“There you are!”
I whipped around, more than startled. “Gee-zus, Dee, can you quit it with the ninja stealth?” I clutched my heart, trying to laugh off the fact that it was slapping around my rib cage like a trapped bird.
Deidre rolled her eyes under the black fringe of her perfect bob. “Teenagers only get jumpy when they’re up to something.” She held the back door open, smile twitching. The inquisition was coming.
On my way in, I threw one last look behind me at the stone fox. Its stone eyes were settled in its stone head. I was already forgetting what I thought I’d seen.
And Deidre was already on the fuss-track. “I saw you pawing your eye out there, missy.” She poured herself a steaming mug of coffee and, without giving it a second to cool off, she’d downed the contents.
I just wanted to beat a hasty retreat to my room for some peace and quiet. I tried to sidestep her impending investigation. “Uh. Yeah, it’s just a bit itchy, that’s all. The usual. Just going to put my drops in . . .”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to look at it?” Deedee had already ditched her mug and reached for me.
“No, no,” I said, trying to desperately ignore how my eye felt like it was going to burst out of my skull and scuttle across the granite floor. Awkward. “C’mon, Deedee, can’t we talk about you for once? Where’s Arnas?”
Deidre swooped into my path like Bela Lugosi before I could dodge her up the stairs and head to my room. I was losing at exercising tact here, leaving me with the only option of faking a hormonal tantrum just to escape.
But Deedee was suddenly distracted, glancing up the stairs and back at me, instantly forgetting about my eye. “Look, I wanted to talk to you about . . . well, you know. The other resident.”
I peered past the shoulder of Deidre’s grey blazer, eyes searching for the room that hovered above our lives on the third floor. “You mean the host.”
Crash. We both froze, and suddenly Arnas’s head poked into the hall, glomming his wet eyes onto Deidre. “You’d better get up there, that’s about the third time today.”
Deidre was already taking the stairs two at a time. “Thanks for the heads up,” she grumbled, and curious enough to ignore the heartbeat in my eye socket, I followed her.
We flew past the room that Arnas had taken as his study. I caught a glimpse of him in passing; he shrugged uselessly, looked at the carpet, and shut the door — his usual reaction to anything he wanted to avoid (read: reality).
Uncle Arnas . . . not much to say about him. He was a ropey guy, features long and narrow like a scarecrow’s. And he always looked somewhat troubled, guilty. Maybe that’s just the way his face was made, but he’d been more distant lately — if that were possible. He may be my father’s only brother — his fraternal twin, actually — but aside from having shared the same womb, I’d never known two people to be so different. From what fading snippets I remembered of my dad, he was so full of life. Arnas barely spoke but to complain, or to relate a new bit of paranoia, or to cluck about his sciatica. He was a freelance editor, so he retreated into work and left Deidre to handle anything difficult that went on in our house. He was pretty much an extra in the play of his life.
I don’t know how Deidre dealt with him, off in his weird world and totally vacant from this one. And things between them lately had been terribly tense, but no one seemed willing to talk about why. He barely looked at me anymore.
When I got to the hallway on the third floor, Deidre was talking in a low voice to one of the nurses who had been consoling a much younger nurse in tears and holding her hands out, palms up. They were red and blistered, ice packs pressed into them. The source of the crash had been a ceramic basin, now in pieces coming loose of the bedsheet the basin had been wrapped in.
I gave them all a wide berth, but I could hear the cogent nurse telling Deidre what happened: “She just said she was bathing her and the water suddenly got very hot. So hot she burned herself. It’s just that this is the third or fourth incident, you understand. And well, naturally, the lot of us aren’t really sure what’s going on.”
Deidre’s classic forehead knot made a cameo as she tried to push back her disbelief. “I really don’t get it, we had someone come in to service the boiler and check the heating system the last time. He said nothing was wrong, and it’s the middle of winter . . .”
I checked to make sure Deidre was fully engrossed with the nurses. I heard the words strange voices and sorry and this might not work out for us as I slipped inside the master bedroom.
There were wide, beautiful windows overlooking the street and the Assiniboine River on one side of the room, but they were half shuttered to the sunlight as it faded over the west. This room, like so many of the closed-up, unused rooms throughout the house, was filled with beautiful furniture, all mismatched and from varied countries and eras. My grandmother had eclectic taste, and the spoils of her life had accumulated in this massive, lonely house. My hands danced over her vanity, the kind of table and mirror in which a vaudeville starlet would fawn over herself, staring past silver-gilt hair brushes and pearls and a bundle of age-yellowed letters tied with twine.
I wish I’d known more about her. Wish she had taken me with her on her mysterious globe-trekking adventures. All I knew about her was enclosed in a handful of postcards, locked in barely-sentence-long observations about cities I had never heard of and climates filled with spices.
It was even worse, seeing her on the bed in the centre of the room, looking even smaller than she had the last time I’d been in here, like the bed was absorbing her into the sheets.
Cecelia. Her name gave away a kind of glamour — not just the Hollywood type of glamour, but capital-G Morgan le Fay faerie-realm kind. She was at least sixty-five, but her face didn’t really look it, except for the slackened features and pale skin that came with a deep coma. She’d lived a full life and had a few lines to prove it, true. But her flesh cleaved to her bones protectively, and even now, on her literal death-bed, she was beautiful.
And I stared at her now just to hope. Hope that maybe I’d escape my awkward seventeen-year-old phase and grow into such a face as the one on that bed. It also gave me comfort that here lay my last connection to my mother’s family, and that — even though I would be soon — at this moment I wasn’t alone.
There really hadn’t been much warning. I hadn’t heard from her in years. Arnas referenced some vague falling-out that Cecelia had with my parents, that she had her issues and it wasn’t a shock that she’d lost touch. It was a while before Arnas thought to bring that up, though, and that was well after the letter.
C
ecelia had collapsed at the airport in Toronto on a return trip from Greenland, brought down by a sudden seizure that had rendered her a rag doll in less than a second. She hadn’t been alone on the trip, thankfully, and after that she was admitted to hospital. Aneurysm, they said. Her travel companion tapped her lawyer for whatever arrangements Cecelia had made for her personal care. And her wishes would baffle a genie:
Return me to Winnipeg despite whatever state I’m in.
Alert my next of kin that they are to take residence in my home for the duration of my hospice care.
Do not remove my life support until I have expired of my own accord.
This last one had been the most confusing of all. She had been in this coma for the past six months, an unfamiliar wax figure with a thousand secrets behind closed eyes.
So here she was, hooked up to a ventilator, fed all the liquid food groups via tubes, the waste products carried away into sterile little bags by yet more tubes. She had the charitable forethought to be mysteriously wealthy in order to pay for the personal health care staff ad infinitum, but why she had to drag us into it was beyond me. Maybe she just wanted to be surrounded by family at the end?
A nice thought. Except that I was her only relative left, and if she’d had no love for my dad, she’d have even less for Arnas. So while I sometimes came into her room to sit next to her, I never ended up saying much, like they do in the movies, thinking it’ll help. Too many futile questions — questions about my mother, about Cecelia herself, and most of all, why she didn’t feel the need to bring me closer to her when I was young and things were hardest. And now, without a clue as to why, she expected us to drop everything and hang around in her dusty house of rare objects until she croaked?
All of this would clatter around inside me until I would get so mad, knowing she was right there but out of my reach, that I’d have to stay away from her cloying room for a while. She had parts of me locked inside her that I needed but I’d never have access to.
But I stood there this time, at her bedside, chewing my nails and trying not to punch my eye or screw my fist into it. I felt like I needed to be here today when the nurses were burning themselves on possessed basins and hearing voices and complaining about the heat of the room. It felt comfortable to me in here, but who knows. There’d been a pretty quick turnaround on the in-home nursing staff lately. Arnas muttered something about foreigners and their deep-seated cultural paranoias.
“Psst.”
I whipped my head to the doorway, chest pounding. Of course it was Deidre, beckoning me out. I looked back down at the shrinking woman in the grand bed, shook my head, and left.
*
It was late. My eye hadn’t improved, and I was getting worried. Worried to the point that I couldn’t sleep, and I found myself padding down to the kitchen.
I cupped my hands under the cool tap water, bringing my eye down to meet it. It offered only a second’s relief. I’d jokingly asked Deidre for an eyewash station in my room for my seventeenth birthday and, man, now I wish I’d been serious.
I dabbed my eye with a wet paper towel. I tried to ignore the lump, even though it felt bigger than before. The burning was something new, same with the swelling, and it was getting to the point where even sleep wouldn’t make these symptoms, or the headache, go away. I caught my reflection in the kitchen window and scowled at it and the darkness beyond speckled by falling snow. Sticking my head in a snowbank might actually be therapeutic, I thought, before I focused out and saw the stone menagerie beyond the window.
I threw on my jacket and stuffed my thick legs into my boots, careful to unlatch the back door to avoid triggering the motion light. I popped my hood up and trudged into the yard, until I was standing in front of the stone animals, my breath a clouded curtain that dissolved to reveal shattered stone at my feet.
There was nothing much left of the fox. I knelt down and scooped up the remains of its pointed head, brushing the snow off its elegant snout, whiskers, and nose. There were pieces scattered everywhere, and they crumbled in my hand when I tried to pick them up and fit them back together. I don’t know why, but tears sprung to my eyes. The rest of the animals were fine, which was odd, since they all had more vulnerable pieces — unfurled wings, swiping claws, outstretched flippers, delicate antlers. But the fox had been the most grounded, not to mention my favourite. It felt like another member of my family had just been smashed to pieces.
I got up, dejected. But something twinkled in the rubble. I bent down and picked up a glistening green stone I’d never seen before. I turned it over. Geology had never been my strong suit. When I switched hands, it suddenly became molten-hot, and I dropped it.
The motion light came on. I swiped away the tears and dropped my eye patch down, so Deidre or Arnas wouldn’t see. But when I turned to look, there wasn’t anyone there. No — there was something. My throat thickened and I froze. It was a huge, melting shadow, suspended in the air like a black tablecloth until I let out the breath I’d been holding and it took shape.
“What the —” Then something glimmered green in my periphery — the stone — and the shadow snapped around it like a fist, darting across the veranda and around the other side of the house.
Without thinking, I lurched around the old house, legs twisting under me in the knee-high snow dunes until I’d made it to the semiplowed sidewalks of Wellington Crescent. I bounced on the balls of my feet, checking one way then the other, and saw the shadow bounding west towards the bend in the Assiniboine River.
“Hey!” I shouted, my panting trailing fog down the street. My heart set the tempo in my bones, pounding along with my feet. It was an unfamiliar rhythm, since I didn’t usually chase after hoodlums in the wee hours, but this was too severely personal to let go. As I ran under the St. James Bridge I asked myself if this was really happening or if the shadow was just a trick of my horrible eyeball.
I lost steam at a loop in the path, the one that suddenly became bush before ending at the intersection of Wellington and Academy. That part of the path wasn’t lit, and I wasn’t about to let myself get stuck in the snowy dark if my quarry pulled a knife or something worse. Hands on my hips, I bent, trying to catch my breath, swearing and mad and wondering why I’d expected to catch the creep, let alone what I’d do with them if I did.
I turned back towards the knot of trees, and peering out from the corner of the path was a fox.
Now, wild forest animals in this city weren’t at all weird. I mean, as you got closer to Charleswood and the Assiniboine Forest, you’d find deer in almost everyone’s front yards, or even as far out as Tuxedo, they might be devouring the expensive annuals one day and bringing their friends the next. And if you happened to have a cabin out in the Whiteshell, foxes were a given.
But this was the first time I’d seen a fox in the suburbs, and it was staring straight at me, curious and calculating. And looking way too familiar for me not to be weirded out.
“Hi,” I breathed, not sure what else to do. Every time I saw a wild animal, I immediately (somewhat stupidly) wanted to get as close to it as possible. I didn’t care if it could hurt me — in that moment, I wanted to have mystical animal-communicating powers, whatever the cost.
I got down to a crouch and edged closer, each half an inch a boon before the fox would inevitably take off into the trees. But I jumped back up when it actually came towards me in a pounce-stance. I grit my teeth. Did foxes attack people? Did they carry significant diseases? My kingdom for Wikipedia. The fox was suddenly at my feet, staring up at me with golden, clear eyes, and without breaking eye contact, it swept its enormous tail to the side, and sat down.
“Uh. Okay,” I said to it.
The fox cocked its head.
“I don’t have food,” I shrugged, hands open. It blinked.
Someone in the neighbourhood had been feeding it, probably. I took a second to scan the street, the path, and the general
area. I was totally alone, save for a couple of porch lights. I took a chance and offered my nearly numb, open palm. The fox got to its feet, sniffing. It looked up at me again as if to say, Uh, it’s empty, dude.
I cleared my throat, quickly pocketing the hand and wondering how late it really was. My muscles were draining fast.
“Well,” I said, shrugging and wishing I’d brought my camera phone with me, “I better head home, little guy.” I backed away until the fox was a good few feet off, turned, and started jogging back to my grandmother’s house.
I clenched and unclenched my hands, trying to keep the heat in them. All the anger I’d felt from my little brush with backyard vandalism and a totally failed citizen’s arrest fell away into the snow underfoot. The night air had a surreal texture, and I wondered if the fox had really been there at all. People didn’t normally encounter the flesh-and-blood versions of their busted garden statuary. Imagine being jumped by a gnarly gnome after dropping your ceramic one. Too bizarre, even for fanfiction.
I shook my head. What had I been chasing, anyway? I blinked and saw the glinting green in my mind’s eye, the shadow that took it. The hot stone I’d dropped in the snow. Had there been some precious gem inside that statue all along, and the suburban vandal just got lucky?
Ugh. I clenched my teeth. Being out in the cold had distracted me from the pain in my head, but now it was boomeranging back with full force. I just wanted to get back to my warm bed.
