Doc let out a single, snotty note of laughter. He looked at his hands, rubbed them together. The two of them sat in silence together.
Finally, he spoke again. “I really want to thank you, Bex.”
“Bex,” she said. “You haven’t called me that in years.”
“Appreciate you for taking some of this Mary stuff off my hands, Rebekah.”
“Rebekah!” she said with a laugh. “Now you really haven’t called me that in a hundred years!”
This immediately broke his worn, weary look. He smiled. He was his old self for a flash. “How long we known each other, Bex?”
“Oh, well, it’s far too late at night to start counting all those years up. Don’t you think?”
“Serious, woman. Be serious. How many?”
She looked off at nothing—nothing except maybe the hidden memories somewhere inside that only she kept. “Oh,” she said. “At least fifty. At least.”
“Right-o,” he said, again rubbing his hands and looking at her in a strange way. “School together. And everything after. And in all that time...What I mean is. Sometimes I wonder what’d bin like if, say, you didn’t go with Oren and I didn’t go with Aggie. Maybe we’d a—”
Bexy cut him off. “Now, Doc, you old so-and-so, I mean it. It’s the late hour and the drink in you, for certain. But we are simply not going to go down that rose garden path—”
“Can I stay?”
“What—?”
“Bexy. I’m asking. Can I stay the night? Here? With you?”
“You most certainly may not.” This came out in a huffy snap. Her complexion matched his and she hadn’t had a drop of the drink. Not in years, she’d wager.
“Now you listen, y'old coot. We’ve got ourselves enough eyes on us since old Troyer and old Frye lectured us with their twenty tongues and their acid eyes yesterday morning at the activity hall of St. Dom’s. You and I both know the whole town—a certain subset of it anyways—already thinks you and I have had some improper dealings. For shame, Father said. He said it like he knew. Now whether he does or he doesn’t is simply not for me to speculate. But while you’re married and while I’m helping you with the Smithson girl, we will not have you slipping in here like we’re some horny college co-eds on spring break. What you and I have done or not done is not this town’s business. But I will not have my name sullied more than it already has been. Not while we’re being looked at under a microscope.”
She took a breath and let it out. “Is that kosher with you?”
He threw his head back and he laughed. It was a big, loud roar of laughter. And the kind she had known from the big man her whole life. She couldn’t help but smile at it, at him. “Oh, it’s kosher with me, my lady. It is nothing but a big, sweet, kosher meal for two.” He was crying again, but it was tears of laughter.
She put her hand on his lap and his laughter eased. It was a good feeling, she could tell.
“For shame!” he said in a mock of the Father’s tongue-lashing from this morning.
“For shame!” she echoed, throwing her chin into her chest and finding the deepest baritone she could muster.
They laughed a little more. Bexy wiped her tears. Maude was funny. So were Sonny and Cher. But together, she and the doc were hilarious.
“Okay,” Doc said, getting up from the sagging pullout bed. “I’ll skedaddle. I know you too well. You’re just itching to make sure m’old Plymouth drives away before any of the neighbours see it and starting making calls on the party line.” She gave him a playful smack on the knee.
“It’s late,” she said. “You’ve had a few and you weren’t thinking clearly. It happens.”
“It happens,” he agreed. “You should know, though,” he said, as he turned and opened the door to go back out into the blustery cold.
“What now?” she said, a little exasperation colouring her tone.
“I called in that favour. The...specialist? From the mainland? He’ll be here by tomorrow night. Coming in on the late ferry.”
She was speechless. And, after her rejection of him, soft though it may have been, he had been made speechless too. He treaded out into fresh snow and headed for his car at the street. No return look, no drink-induced stagger off the front walk. He’d been sobered by his visit.
And so had she.
6.
Bexy hadn’t even gotten herself heaved back into her cold pullout bed when she heard Mary stir in the other room. It was a muffled cry, one that could easily be the loud rambling of a troubled dream. She had wondered how much of today’s exchanges between the various ‘adults’ in her life had been internalized by Mary. How much had the girl truly understood?
Bexy, now regretting her decision to stay up for Sonny and Cher—even though Doc’s tap-tap-tapping upon her chamber door would have still woken her—wheeled herself around the back of the sofa and off to Mary’s door. She reached out and pushed it open, hoping to go in and maybe pull covers up to the girl’s chin. It was chilly in here and the propane furnace hadn’t kicked in for a while.
In the room, just past the arc of the door, Mary stood fully nude, her heavy, round, pregnancy breasts bobbing as she stood on her tiptoes. It was as if she had been hanged by a noose and dangled low enough that her first two toes on each foot kissed the floor. There was no noose. It was a trick of light and posture. Her sudden appearance jolted Bexy nearly out of her chair. The girl stood at full height on her tip-toes but hunched at her shoulders, her head hung. Her messy black hair spilled down over her face in a scraggly set of lines. The hair split enough for Bexy to see the heavy whites of the girl’s eyes. Her head tilted and she reached out one hand to Bexy. The woman’s heart went thud in her chest.
“Toofairy,” Mary said in a deep, throaty voice. She took a step. Bexy flinched back.
“Tooooofaaaairy,” she said again, in a long, drawn gag.
But the girl turned. Bexy watched Mary head back for bed. Beyond her, on the white sheets of the bed in the girl’s room, something dark moved.
There was a black cat there.
The sudden sight of that locked Bexy into a breathless stare of disbelief. The cat was making an awful noise, as though it was sick or dying. It was gagging, as if battling the mother of all hair balls.
The cat choked and sputtered. And when it let go of what was in its throat, Bexy discovered a small, flat round stone smeared with phlegm and spots of blood. The cat licked the stone and then moved away. The feline wretched again in a second or two. This time, a fuzzy, wet gob of Kleenex came up. More dots of blood hit the pale sheets.
Then, more of that sickly, screeching gag noise.
And a second stone came from the mouth of the cat. It licked and swallowed and tried to recover. Then, as if woken from a dream, the cat spotted Bexy at the doorway. Mary sat down on the bed, in her dream state, eyes open and staring blindly. She reached out and picked up the two stones.
At Bexy in the doorway, the cat gave a screaming hiss, wide with fangs and big round, shimmering eyes. It threw out a set of claws as if it was batting back a predator. Then it jumped from the bed up onto the dresser then through a patch of window screen that had been clawed to shreds. It fled like water pouring out of the room and disappeared into the bleak night, only making branches on an outside tree bob.
Breathing shallowly, Bexy sat immobilized and watched Mary’s nude form climb gingerly into the bed, then curl up in a fetal ball on the cat’s leavings of mucous and blood. The girl squeezed the stones tightly in her hand and closed her eyes. In a moment, her breathing was so heavy and steady, a stranger would mistake it for that of a deep sleep.
Bexy inched her chair all the way through the door. She drove up to the bed and looked down at the girl, balled up and nude. She reached out and touched the girl’s hip, as if to confirm she was real. Mary’s skin was cold to the touch, but she didn’t startle at Bexy’s contact. Bexy strained to gather up some of the disheveled blankets. She poured them over the girl, covering her naked form. Behind her
, cold air blew on her back and her neck from the partially-open window.
She turned, still stunned, and half-expecting nightmare kitty to be there, throwing a swoop with her claws. But there was nothing at the window, just a gentle howl moving through the tree branches and the window screen which held a scraggly hole about the size of two fists together.
Bexy eased forward, reached as far as she could and finally found purchase for her fingertips on the open window. She slammed it shut, but then realized she wouldn’t be able to reach the latch to fasten it. She had to fasten it. No way was she going to find sleep thinking that demonic cat could push its way in again.
She realized that if she swung around and backed up beside the dresser, she’d probably have enough reach. She did that, and as she was reaching up and straining to get the latch, a noise startled her. Beneath her, something reached out and touched the bottom of her chair. In a split flash, she had a vision of the cat’s tail. Or maybe it wasn’t the cat’s tail stroking the bottom of the chair. Maybe it was its paw, ready to claw at her.
She gasped at the noise and the flurry of movement beneath her. She froze. And then the drapes around her fluttered. Their fabric bristled at her.
It wasn’t the cat making it happen. She looked down and saw a hint of the floor register. She was parked almost directly over it. Oh God, that was all. The propane furnace in the basement had switched on. Somewhere, a thermostat had cooled off. Not surprising—with Doc’s visit and now the lunatic cat ripping its way in.
She got her fingers on the window latch and dragged it into place. It was a firm click, sealing the room off from the night once more. She drove forward, turned a bit and then pulled the floor-length curtains shut as well as she could. They kept out the night, but more importantly, they shut away the outside world of that cat. This simple gesture of see-no-evil did much to alleviate the mental picture of it screaming at her. But not entirely. She took a chill and shivered.
She drove to the door and looked back as she crossed the threshold. Mary slept soundly, still curled in the same fetal way she was after claiming the two stones.
Mary eased the door shut. She had no clue how she’d sleep now.
Not after seeing a stray vomit out two coloured stones that looked exactly like Mary’s coveted set of four.
Tomorrow night’s visitor couldn’t arrive fast enough, as far as Bexy was concerned.
But no more visitors, tonight, she thought. Please. No more. Tonight had already seen too many. She shuddered with the cold and from the memory of that gagging, hissing cat. She wouldn’t be able to sleep now, not after that.
Morning would never come.
Part III
Full of Grace
O MY GOD and MY ALL,
In Thy goodness and mercy,
Grant that before I die I may regain
All the graces which I have lost
through my carelessness and folly.
This I humbly beg through the merits
Of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
And Immaculate Virgin Mary. Amen.
—Common Prayer for Grace
Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
—Hail Mary
1.
Morning came. Wrapped in a bed sheet, Mary stood over Bexy who was squished between two cushions at the back of the pullout couch. She had been upright, propped between them, watching the doorway and listening to every tick and ping of the house and the furnace for what seemed like two hours. She must have succumbed to sleep and fallen partially over in the night. Her last thought was an imagination of what that cat had done with Mary’s grey tooth in the Kleenex bundle. She thought she could hear the kitty crunching down on it as if it was a bit of glass. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
And then what? Did the kitty’s super-powered intestines spin the tooth around like a rock tumbler? Did the magical belly of that cat flatten it, expand it, make it into a disc and then polish it into the quartz-like mass before ejecting it out into the waiting hands of happy-as-a-lamb Mary Smithson?
Morning light streamed in through the sheer curtains of the family room and from the kitchen behind her. The opposing light criss-crossed, making a blinding array where Mary stood in a bowled-over knot and whispered, “Missa Cloud?” She touched the older woman’s shoulder and stirred her. Bexy woke with a start, that image of the tooth in a Kleenex and the sound of it in the cat’s mouth dribbling away from mind like snow drifting in a mound at the front door.
“What time is it?” Bexy asked when she settled on where she was and who was standing over her.
Mary giggled. “Missa Cloud, you know I can’t tell time!” The volume right next to Mary’s face was excruciating. She felt hungover. But it was Doc who’d imbibed. Not Bexy. Bexy hadn’t ingested more than her communion wine on Sunday in at least a decade. And she was sure that was simple grape juice nowadays.
Bexy rubbed her face and yawned. She picked at the sleep in the corners of her eyes with a shaky pinky and said, “Honey, help me get in my chair, okay?”
Mary reached out and, together, they awkwardly coaxed Bexy off the edge of the mattress and into her wheelchair. She was stiff and sore and her neck crackled with pain. It was like she’d pinched a nerve in there and the electric current of that traveled down into her lower back. Mary lost her bed sheet in the process but picked it up and re-wrapped herself. “Are you cold, hon?” Bexy asked.
“A little,” Mary confided sheepishly.
“How ‘bout you go and start a hot bath for yourself. Pour in some bubbles. I saw some Avon stuff. I’ll be there in a minute. After, we can make pancakes.”
“Yay! Pancakes! Okay!” Mary said, her exuberance returning. As the girl got up and headed off, her sheet fell open at the middle again. Bexy couldn’t help but notice: in this clean morning light, the young woman really did have a glow. It was a mother-to-be radiance, the kind she wondered if she possessed all those years ago before each of her little ones. With her mouth closed and her crooked, missing teeth hidden, Mary could almost pass for a magazine cover girl. But not in a men’s edition; one sold to women, that was certain.
Mary moved off to the bathroom and Bexy slowly got herself mobile, fighting the stiffness in her neck and arms. She headed to the kitchen where her watch waited by the dishes in a drying rack beside the sink. She’d taken it off and left it there late yesterday.
Quarter past eight. She put coffee grounds in the perk and got it plugged in. She heard the faucet start to run in the bathroom. The plumbing was connected out here, and there was the sound of it way down in the sink.
It occurred to her that last night’s run-in might have only been a tired dream. Mary remembered the stones the girl had clutched in the half-light thrown from the wrecked window. It seemed like maybe it wasn’t real. Like it was a bit of TV she fell into after Sonny and Cher had ended. Maybe none of that business even really happened, a choking cat and the smooth stones turned out onto a spotted bed sheet. After all, Mary hadn’t said a word about getting a new set of stones from her magical tooth fairy.
While the coffee perk burbled away, and the kitchen filled with the aroma of strong Folgers, Mary heard the sound of the bathroom faucet end, way down inside the kitchen drain. She wheeled around and headed out of the kitchen, destined for the bathroom.
She pushed the door open, half-expecting a naked Mary to be standing on her tip toes with her hair pulled over her face, throatily repeating, “Toofairy-toofairy.” But she wasn’t. She was just climbing in, her legs coming up to slip over the edge, her white, smooth back rounded as she held the edges of the clawfoot tub. She settled down into the generous mountain of suds, looked over at Bexy, and smiled. The water looked good and steamy. And the girl looked
nothing like she had last night after dark when she stood on tip-toes in a delirious, half-dream of awake and sleep blended together.
Bexy saw the ever-so-slight roundness of the girl’s paunch and a tiny, distant pang of postpartum longing hit Bexy right in her own belly. Never again would Bexy have a fresh baby to carry around, to dress and to love and to teach. And that feeling of having one moving inside her, it was gone forever. Hell, she might never see any of her three grown children again.
“I made lotsa bubbles!” Mary said, grinning up at Bexy. And she did, mounds of them. Enough to make Bexy wonder how much Avon bubble bath the girl had poured in before filling the tub.
“You sure did!” Bexy said, reaching down into the hot water with one hand. She caught herself again talking to Mary as if the girl was only a toddler, or, at most, a six year old she was looking after while her parents were out of town for the weekend.
Her chest felt a strange, heaving weight. She returned Mary’s smile, but it was a melancholy one. She realized that weight was in her throat now, and she might just break down in wracking sobs at the thought of everything she had lost. Her husband, her children. And now, maybe even the friendship of the one man in this town who didn’t look at her like she carried the plague.
But she couldn’t. She’d hold it together until Mary was through the next part of this ordeal of hers. Despite the heaving soft spot for how it felt to carry a child, Bexy knew what was coming would be the best for everyone. Mostly for Mary.
Bexy watched her new favourite person in the world play with the giant mounds of suds. She lay back in the steaming water and poured them like white slush down on her breasts. The young woman was unabashed. Like a child, she knew no shame of her body. How could anyone do this to her? How could a man take that and make it dirty?
She thought briefly that it would be a good thing for Mary to keep the baby. That she could live with Mary and the baby. Bex could be a kind of surrogate grandmother. They could fit the Banatyne mansion with wheelchair ramps and a lift so Bexy could finally go upstairs. They could sleep in real bedrooms and live their lives. Bexy would never need to avoid glances at the stairs in her own house, and the awful, violent reminders that went with those broken glances.
Unwed (Dovetail Cove, 1976) (Dovetail Cove Series) Page 6
