Glory

by Gillian Wigmore

  “You want anything?” she said to me, her eyes gobbling up the gossip of us. “Another, Hardy?”

  Hardy took one look at her and she scooted off.

  Hardy looked at me sideways. Straightened his back. Pushed his ball cap back on his head.

  “You seen Glory tonight, Hardy?”

  Hardy narrowed his eyes. “What’s it to you?” He turned his body away from me. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Just looking for her on behalf of her dad.” That was strange enough for me to say that he turned back. Everyone knew Mac Stuart had nothing to say to his daughter. “I have to tell her something and I don’t know where she is.”

  He made me wait a long beat. “Why should I tell you where she is?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that. I knew why anyone else should tell me where she was: they’d care that I was freaking out. Hardy didn’t care. He went back to his beer.

  “Her brothers are on the lake. They didn’t come in from fishing.”

  He took a sip of beer. The conversation was over, as far as he was concerned. But I wasn’t done. Around us the talk and the laughter swirled, but eyes were on us, I could feel them.

  “Fuck you, Hardy.”

  A chill went through me. Sound slipped away as I watched him for some reaction, some snake strike, venom and muscle, but he only paused before he sipped again.

  I turned to go, then I heard him say, soft, “I haven’t seen her tonight.”

  I looked back, and in the mirror behind the bar I could see his eyes on me. They were still and mean and they said: fuck you.

  It was a dark ride out to Southside. The wind threw branches across the road and trees leaned drunkenly over the pavement. I parked in the driveway and walked down the root-lumpy path through the cottonwoods toward the light I could see through the trees. Then I noticed the music. I stopped for a second. Pink Floyd. That didn’t sound like Glory.

  “As if you never party here,” I said, as if she could hear me.

  A bottle smashed and laughter rose over the music. I started running.

  From the outside, with the lights on, it looked like a carousel. People moved behind the blurry window screens, flickered, their shadows falling on the ground outside in dizzying patterns. I heard another laugh, then saw a hand press onto the window, palm out, perfect and dainty. Glory’s, I was sure. I lunged for the door.

  It was Renee Chance, with her back to me, dancing with her arms out. I was confused—it had looked like the shack was full of people, but it was empty except for Renee and the music blasting out of the ripped speaker. I pulled the cord from the wall and my ears popped in the sudden silence. Renee whipped around. She brought her arms down as if she was nude, trying to cover her body. Then she put one hand on her hip and ran the other through her hair.

  “Where’s Glory?” I walked further into the shack, pushing empty bottles off the table in a show of ownership.

  “She’s gone. Her boyfriend came this afternoon and they left. I think they drove into town.” She sat on a bench with her bony fingers in her lap. She had bags under her eyes. She sat, hunched, and chewed a cuticle.

  “Her boyfriend?” I dropped onto the bench nearest me.

  “Some guy with floppy hair. He had nice teeth.”

  Oh, fuck. “Todd.”

  “That’s it. She said she wanted to go somewhere new and he said he wanted to go somewhere old and so they left.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “I didn’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Well, you’re coming with me. We’ve gotta find them. Glory’s brothers are out on the lake and she’s gonna freak out when she hears about it. Best she hears it from me.” I stood up, but Renee didn’t move. “Well?”

  She didn’t so much lie down on the bench as fold into herself. It was pitiful. Tears and snot leaked out of her face.

  I grabbed her by the arm. “Oh, for fucksake. Get up! This isn’t about you. People are in danger and we’ve got to help.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You can quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

  She must have been scared of me because she got up. She put on the sweater of Glory’s I threw at her and slid her feet into her shoes. I grabbed a sweater myself and a box of granola bars. I was shaky with hunger. “Get going.” I marched her out the door. “The truck’s just up here.”

  Bud’s truck started up fine. Renee got in and slammed the door, and I jammed my foot onto the clutch, put it in reverse, and backed it up onto the road and started toward town. I didn’t know how to work the stereo or the heater. Our breath steamed up the windows and I had to crack mine so it didn’t fog up so much I couldn’t see. Outside, Fort St. James rolled past, quiet and deceiving, all its wounds bound up from sight but flowing deadly and silent from unseen sores. Over the bridge, past the public works yard, past the slough and creek, past the boarded-up gas station. A dog trundled out in front of me just a few houses into the reserve, and I stood on the brakes. It didn’t even look our way, but its buddy did, teeth in a grin that glinted in the headlights.

  Glory would have laughed at me. She always told me to wait for the second dog.

  Renee was crying softly in the front seat. “Where are we going, anyway? Are we going to the police station?”

  “No. We have to find her ourselves.” I glanced at her and felt some pity starting up. “I could take you home.”

  She panicked. “No! You can’t. I mean, don’t. I mean, I can’t.” Then she gave up and just kept crying.

  I remembered Renee had a kid. “Where’s your baby?”

  She sniffled. “With his dad.”

  “Are you still with him?”

  She didn’t answer. She wiped her eyes with the arm of the sweater.

  I couldn’t help, so I didn’t say anything. I peered through the dark at the empty streets and quiet houses and the lake churning beyond them.

  “I can’t imagine being out in that,” she said eventually.

  “Try not to,” I said. “Most of us spend our living days trying not to imagine what it’d be like to drown in there.”

  “That’s pretty morbid.”

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t you have happy memories of the lake?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I did. Me and Glory all sticky with Popsicles, walking up and down Cottonwood Beach in our bikinis when the summers were so long they had no end; me and Glory driving with all the windows open when the northern lights were glowing green-tiger stripes right down to the ground; swimming out at Southside when her mom and my mom were only sisters and neither one was dead. “Yeah, I’ve got memories.”

  “You should try and dwell on those.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do. You have no idea.” I breathed in deep. I let the anger go out with my breath, away with the wind. I heard her snuffle. I turned to look at her in the patchy light and she seemed so small and shabby. God. “I’m sorry. I just get mad.”

  “Screw you.”

  “What?” That surprised me.

  “Don’t apologize because you pity me. I don’t need your pity.”

  “Jesus. Fine.” I looked away from her. “Look, I don’t know your story and you don’t know mine. Neither of us knows what in fuck we’re doing here, but it looks like we’re stuck together until we find Glory. They’re not going to find those boys tonight. The best thing we can do is just find her and keep her safe.” However safe she could be with Todd, I thought. “Help me figure out where to go. She wanted to go somewhere new and what did he want? To go somewhere old? We’ll try the fort. That’s the oldest place in town.”

  I took a left after the fry shack at the edge of the reserve. We pulled into the service lot at the fort. A lawn tractor was parked in the grass by the fence. Beyond the fence, the silver wood of the buildings shone in the street lights, the rest of the compound in darkness. I parked the truck and we sat there for a moment. I heard the truck tick and ping.

  “Where are we?” Renee asked, staring ou
t the windshield.

  “Historic fort,” I said. Anyone from here wouldn’t need more of an explanation, but she looked confused. “It’s the Hudson’s Bay Fort. Kind of a museum.” I thought of Bud reading in the archives, wherever those were. It made me smile to think of him hunkered over old books. “They redid it in the seventies. Brought the old broken-down buildings up to1880s standards and rebuilt other buildings from pictures. It’s a national park now.”

  We got out of the truck and walked up to the tall fence. I slipped a rope latch over the top of a fence post and opened a gate.

  “Shouldn’t it be harder to get into if it’s a national park?” Renee asked.

  “It usually is. In the daytime. This is the service entrance. Maybe there’s no night watchman? Besides, who’d want to come out in this to check the grounds?” I pushed through the gate, walked through a dark garden, and out another gate onto the grounds, Renee right on my heels. The wind smashed into us as soon as we left the last gate. Boardwalks crossed the grass ahead and seemed to break off suddenly when the street lights ran out.

  Where was Glory? I didn’t know my way around the fort. I hadn’t been there since grade school, but it wasn’t big—the entire thing seemed to be laid out in a square in front of us: four buildings connected by the boardwalk, the wild lake out front, a flagpole, and many, many flat brown shapes on the lawns.

  “What are those?” Renee asked, leaning over.

  “Cow shit, I think.” I looked around for the culprit prowling around in the night, but saw nothing. Then I heard Glory laugh. “Over here!” I grabbed Renee’s hand and pulled. We ran down the boardwalk toward the biggest building.

  Renee put her hand on the wooden wall while I peered into the dark beyond it. “I didn’t know this place was here. I bet it’s amazing in the light.”

  I glanced around at the shadowy fences and the blocky buildings and remembered how silvery they were in daytime. “Yeah, it is, kind of.”

  “What was this building, do you think?”

  “The fur warehouse. Maybe. I think Grade 4 was the last time I was here. They stored the furs here before they shipped them out. That’s about all I know of Canadian history. I know it was a party place before Parks Canada took it over. My dad told me stories about riding bikes off the pier.”

  There was constant movement all around us: the long grasses from last summer rustled in the wind; the building creaked and settled; the trees around the fort rattled and banged, their branches whipping back and forth.

  “I wonder if Danny knows about this place.”

  “Your husband? He would. I heard he’s a Chance.”

  “Jesus, this is a small town.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. This is a tourist place. He probably visited when he was a kid.”

  Renee looked around, maybe trying to see the place differently from Danny’s having been there when he was small, but how could she? It was dark. There was just the wind and the water eating away the shore. We walked to the front of the building and I tried the door. It didn’t budge. I rattled the huge metal handle.

  “Hey, Crystal, do you know what happened with Danny’s granddad? I know there’s something.”

  That made me pause. I asked her, “You don’t know?” There were probably reasons I shouldn’t tell her, but I didn’t care. Maybe she was entitled to know. “They say he killed his wife.” I glanced at her and saw the whites of her eyes. “He may have. He may have killed his wife, that’s what they say. I know he lived on that point where you live and he and his neighbour Swannell worked up here in the bush for years. Forty years, maybe more? My uncle Mac said they cleared this whole area. They were partners.”

  “But what about his wife?”

  “I think Chance had it harder than Swannell. Swannell was younger. He and his wife worked their piece of land together. But Chance’s wife was sick. And his boys were wild. Mean. You still hear stories about them. Mrs. Chance had cerebral palsy or something. Chance couldn’t look after her like she needed. I don’t know why she wasn’t in the hospital.” I led Renee around the lake side of the building and the wind took our breath. We ducked back to the building’s front and crowded into the doorway.

  “Mrs. Chance got really sick and then no one saw her again. We heard she died, but there was something about the way she died wasn’t right. They said that Chance did it. No one blamed him totally—she was sick and suffering—but he was never part of the town again after that. He cut himself off. Even from Swannell.

  “Their sons left, then one of them came back with the little boys—Danny and his brother—once or twice, but then never again. Danny’s moving back surprised everyone.”

  “But what happened to his granddad?”

  I watched her for a second. “He killed himself.”

  “How?”

  “The lake.”

  She held herself tightly, arms wrapped around her elbows. “And how did he kill his wife?”

  “They say the bathtub, but I don’t believe it. He probably smothered her.”

  “Why didn’t he go to jail?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he should have. But maybe he did her a favour.”

  She was quiet. I thought about her bathtub. The bed, the walls, everything about that cabin had probably changed because of what I told her. “I’m sorry. Did I wreck it for you?”

  “What?” She seemed dazed.

  “Your place.”

  “No,” she said, and let out her breath. “I feel like you… fixed it for me.”

  My turn: “What?”

  “Maybe that’s all it is—maybe it’s the place that feels helpless and sad. I felt so trapped all winter. It was dark so early and it was always cold in there, even when I had the fire blazing I felt cold. Now, I’m thinking about the bedroom. Maybe it wasn’t really awful to be in bed with Danny. Maybe it’s something the house projected. Is that ridiculous?”

  It was, but I didn’t say so. I sort of half nodded. It was probably pretty creepy to live there.

  “I remember this night last winter, when Thomas wouldn’t sleep. He cried every time I tried to lay him down. At one point, all three of us were in one chair, rocking, all of us staring out at the water, all exhausted, like we’d washed up from a shipwreck on an island while everyone in the world was asleep. It was amazing. It was the only time I ever felt like that—a little family, alone against the world. The rest of the time it’s been awful.” She paused. “What do people say about the cabin?” she asked.

  I told her: that it’s haunted. That Chance was unlucky. That the bay is unlucky because of him. “But it wasn’t just Chance who was unlucky. Swannell and his wife couldn’t have any kids. And she taught kindergarten. She loved kids. Glory and I were in her class and she always let us sit together. And it’s a beautiful bay. They get the best sunsets in the world over there. They say the fishing’s good, too. There’s no curse. I think people curse themselves repeating that stuff. They just want to feel better off than someone else. Chance couldn’t help the hand he was dealt. None of us can.”

  We leaned against the door and let the wind blow away everything I said. I heard the waves crashing and Renee snuffling again.

  “You okay?”

  “Danny said I can’t come back.”

  “Did he mean it?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “That why you went to Glory?”

  “I had nowhere else to go. She’s the only friend I have in town.”

  That made me pause—it was true for both of us. What in hell did that mean?

  “Maybe Danny’s not so mad.”

  “He kicked me out. I’d say he’s pretty mad.”

  We stood there in the dark together and I realized neither one of us had a real anchor. We’d both clung to Glory, but she was hardly solid. And now we didn’t even know where she was. I felt sick and lost, and if I felt sick and lost, Renee probably felt worse—she’d lost her family. I shifted closer so our hips touched and we shared that small w
armth in the night.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked her eventually.

  “Go back to when Danny loved me and I loved him. Figure out how to be a mom, how to be okay.” She hauled in a deep breath and let it out.

  “I want to go back to when things were simple, when it was just me and Glory singing,” I said.

  “Don’t you have anyone else? A boyfriend?”

  “I do now, I guess.”

  “If you went back in time you’d lose him.”

  “That might happen, anyway.”

  “Pretty fatalistic way of thinking about things.”

  I shrugged. “Shit happens. That’s a guarantee.”

  “But if shit happens, then love happens. Even if you lose it, you’ll get it again.”

  “I like your logic.” I smiled at her even if she couldn’t see me. Maybe she wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. “I guess that’s true for you, too, isn’t it?”

  I could hear her smile back. “I hope so.”

  A smashed can landed at my feet and made me jump. Glory landed there right after. She was zipping up her fly.

  “Hey! It’s Crystal! Where have you been?” She stood up and brushed off her butt. She walked over with her arms out to hug me, I thought, but then she swung her fist at me.

  I grabbed her. “You’re drunk.”

  “So what? That’s for this morning. You were drunk when you left. Aren’t you drunk anymore? Is that what’s wrong? You want a drink?”

  “Shut up, Glory.”

  “I got drinks if that’s what you want. We’re having a party!”

  Todd moseyed out of the dark, doing up the buttons on his coat, all handsome and smarmy.

  “You can have a drink if you want one. We got beer.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her, but it wouldn’t come. Tears came instead.

  “What, for fucksake?” She pushed me away.

  “Glory,” I managed, but it came out funny. “Anton and Tiny are out on the lake.”

  “What are they doing on the lake? It’s night.”

  “They’re lost or they ran out of gas or something. They went out today and they’re still out there.”

  “No. Anton wouldn’t stay out after dark. No. They’re not on the lake. They’re probably at the pub.”