by Fran Kimmel
“I see you’ve given Hannah a lift. Getting into a stranger’s car. Not the best decision, Hannah.”
Hannah was hunched over, off to the side of the floor mat, busying herself with her runners, one of which was missing its shoelace. Wilson still hadn’t looked at the girl.
“I’m not a stranger,” Eric said, feeling the heat rise up through his throat. “I live right across the road.” Why wasn’t he concerned about what she was doing out there in the first place?
“Who’d have thought we would both end up back here,” Wilson said.
Eric glanced over at Hannah, who wasn’t making a sound. “Hannah’s had a time of it. She’ll need to crawl under the covers.”
“Yes, well, of course.”
“And Child and Family Services will be stopping by.”
“Oh?” Wilson raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms again. “For taking a walk? Overkill, don’t you think?”
“It’s what we do,” Eric lied.
“We? What’s this to do with you, exactly?”
Wilson was right. Eric had no business poking his nose in police business. But he wanted his friend Betty Holt to meet this girl, to sit near her, maybe up in Hannah’s room, maybe beside her on the bed.
“Where’s Mandy?” Eric said. “I’d like to meet her.”
Hannah looked up and their eyes locked and she almost smiled. Then she stood, slow-motion slow, more an unfolding, crimson blotches spreading over her cheeks and neck. She looked even scrawnier now that she’d taken off her coat.
“Ah,” Wilson said. “The cat.”
Wilson turned to Hannah then, mouth smiling, eyes cold and hard. She stared back, matching steel with steel. Good for you, Eric thought.
“Probably under the bed,” Wilson said. “Or in the closet. Right, Hannah? I doubt she’ll show herself.”
“Maybe next time then,” Eric said.
Wilson’s eyes flickered. If he understood Eric’s warning, he didn’t flinch.
—
After Sergeant Nyland left her with him, Nigel stood in the living room and glared at her.
“Where did you think you could go?” he asked. When she didn’t answer, he snorted. “Perhaps you could try harder next time.”
He turned for the kitchen, leaving her shivering in the hallway. She’d brought the frozen world into the house with her, the cold a burning sensation, flames licking her fingers and toes. She jumped when she heard Nigel slam the cupboard door and again when his bottle clanged on the table.
Hannah ran up to her room. Mandy was in her usual hiding spot, a mound of long black fur wedged behind the empty boxes in Hannah’s bedroom closet. Besides the boxes and a few empty hangers strung on a rusty pole, her closet was bare. She hadn’t been allowed to bring much of her stuff when Nigel moved her down from Bear Creek.
She stripped out of her frozen jeans and sweater and folded them neatly on the chair beside her bed. Then she put on her thin pajamas and wrapped herself in a blanket and lay down on the floor in front of the closet. She whispered Mandy’s name and made her favourite bird sounds—twee twee twee—but Mandy wouldn’t budge. It was as if she knew that Hannah had planned to never come back.
It would have been easy to pull the boxes aside and unhide her cat. An empty box weighs less than snow. But Hannah wanted Mandy to come to her. So she lay on crossed arms until they were blotchy blue against the frigid floor and told her cat everything that had happened. Hannah talked haltingly at first, scarcely above a whisper. Soon the words tumbled out, one on top of the other, until she could hardly catch a breath between. She’d never been that close to the sergeant before. That’s what Nigel called him, “the sergeant.” Nigel had told her he’d been booted off the police force and had crawled back to his mommy’s house with his tail between his legs. He’d told her the sergeant was a sick, twisted bastard who thought he was God. But Hannah didn’t believe him; Nigel lied all the time. When she got in her neighbour’s car, the sergeant was kind and didn’t press her with questions or call her stupid for walking down the road in a storm or for puking in the snow. She wanted to tell him that bad things were happening in this house, but Nigel’s words came bubbling up from her stomach. They’d drag her off to a foster home full of brats or a school for troubled girls that had locked doors and bars on the windows. She didn’t tell Mandy about her other attempts to get away, because she didn’t want to think about them.
She told Mandy the things she knew about Nigel. About him standing in the backyard looking up at the darkening sky, clouds sewn like flowers on an apron. This was at their first house, the three of them starting out together, and she hadn’t yet learned that she didn’t belong. Nigel stepped onto the back porch and Hannah turned to him and announced, “Rain’s heading our way,” mimicking what she’d heard the adults around her say. A look of disdain passed across his face, a fast-moving storm, barely discernible before he buried it behind a smile and told her she’d better come inside.
She told Mandy how much space that look on his face came to take up in her head. Her throat was a dry creek bed, words rasping in the still air. She wanted to tell Mandy how sorry she was too, but sorries meant nothing to a cat.
When Mandy rolled over and scratched her paws along the width of the box, Hannah raised herself to her knees and then stood on legs achy from her long walk. She tiptoed on bare feet to her dresser and pulled her spelling bee medal, with its red ribbon, from her drawer. Then she came back to the closet and dangled the medal, pulling the ribbon so it bobbed up and down. Mandy poked her head from around the box, and as Hannah backed up, she followed. After they played with the medal, Hannah sat on her bed, cross-legged, and Mandy hopped up and kneaded a spot on the blanket, cocooned between her legs.
She focused on a spot on the wall and waited until her eyes saw somewhere else. She’d done this trick a lot lately. Now she was at the lake. Seven years old. She was on that beach with her mother, just the two of them, the waves so loud they had to shout to be heard. The trip was her reward for getting her latest swimming badge. It was a hot, windy day and their wide-brimmed sunhats kept lifting off their foreheads and they kept clamping them down again with sandy palms. They dug deep with their plastic shovels, filling their pails with wet, heavy sand, flipping them over for castle walls. They built moats and tunnels and bridges with seaweed-wrapped sticks covered with lady bugs. They found white feather flags with tips sharp as thistles.
But it was the whale that was the real prize. A gift her mother had to save for weeks for. After they finished their cheese and cucumber sandwiches, her mother told Hannah to reach down into her huge woven bag. When she pulled out the plastic package with the picture of a girl on a black-and-white whale, Hannah jumped up and down and ran in circles around the castle. She could be a whale rider, just like Pai in the movie. She could climb onto the whale’s back and coax it back to the sea and ride faster than all whale riders before her.
It took a long time for her mother to get enough air inside the whale to make its fins stand straight. When it was finally full grown, Hannah pulled her whale by its tail through the foaming suds at the shoreline and into the shallow, choppy water and swung her leg over its wide back. She fit snugly, her arms easily reaching the small handles above each fin. She stayed close to shore, as she’d been told, while her mother stood on the beach and clapped and cheered like the people in Pai’s village. Her mother was afraid to go into the water herself. Hannah loved her for this. For bringing her to the edge of the place she feared most.
Hannah leaned forward, hugging her whale to keep from tipping in the waves. It was as if she had been born in the water, as if she and her whale could skim across the surface of the whole beautiful world.
A ferocious gust whipped Hannah’s sun hat up into the air and carried it like a leaf across the water. Hannah didn’t know how to maneuver her whale toward her hat, so she hopped off its back and pushed
through the knee-deep waves in order to fetch it. Her hat had been carried along the shore a great distance by the wind, and when she finally got to it, she scooped it up and rung it out, then waved to her mother. But it was the whale her mother was looking at. Hannah’s precious whale, riding the waves without her, swimming farther and farther away.
Hannah cried out, ready to chase after it, but it was her mother who crashed through the waves, running through shallow water at first, then getting farther from the shoreline, sinking deeper, until she was thrashing arms, a bobbing doll’s head, little more than a speck. The whale, a much better swimmer, was too far away to catch.
Come back, come back, Hannah yelled into the wind. Why had she been so stupid? She’d abandoned her whale for a silly hat that meant nothing to her. Now she just wanted her mother.
It took a long, long time, but she eventually staggered out of the water and fell onto the sand. Hannah wrapped her arms around her marble-cold skin and said I’m sorry, I’m sorry, over and over, while her mother lay there gasping. Finally she stood, wobbly at first, and dusted the sand from her suit. She bent down and kissed Hannah’s forehead, whispering in Hannah’s ear, “I should have known better. Today was too windy for hats.” Then she stretched tall, raised her arms, and started laughing. Hannah would forever remember her like that, her beautiful mother, laughing to the sky.
—
Eric drove too fast in his hurry to get away. When he neared the place where Hannah’s vomit sullied the bank, he pressed hard on the gas, fishtailing in the wet snow. By the time he pulled onto the main road, the plow had been by on the other side, while his lane was still pocked with ruts of ice and drifting snow. Ellie would be white-knuckled if she were out in this. She mapped her route in advance, chose the quietest roads, avoided left turns, and braced herself to make a mistake. He tried to encourage his wife, tell her she was a good driver, but he didn’t really believe it. He’d pulled her out of so many snow banks over the years he thought she must aim for them on purpose.
Before his detour back to Wilson’s, Eric had been on his way to Gerry’s place to get Ellie her spruce tree, something he promised he’d take care of. Ellie was disappointed when he hadn’t got over to Gerry’s last Saturday as planned, even more so when Sunday came and went and they were treeless still. He’d woken up that morning with one purpose only and that was to get this done for her today. He’d work his last half shift before Christmas, get Ellie the tree, make things right between them. But the morning turned sour before he even got out of the house. And then he couldn’t find his keys again, prolonging the unpleasantness. He and Ellie hunted through the usual spots—top of the dresser, beside the phone, coat pockets. She found them in the front closet, inside Walter’s boot. “You’re such a child, Eric,” she’d said, hurling the key ring across the room, hitting him in the chest.
He imagined Ellie back at home. She’d be standing at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes or pulling the skin off chicken breasts, and she would turn her head and before she could think to change her expression, he’d see the deadness in her eyes. He couldn’t remember when she’d started going blank like that. After Sammy stopped letting them hug him? After Daniel started slamming doors over every little thing? After his father quit aiming at the toilet bowl? Ellie was a mess of trying too hard, and Christmas only made it worse.
He parked on the road as he neared Gerry’s turnoff. He started to dial Betty’s number, planning to fill her in on what he’d seen. He’d tell her he was aware that the timing was terrible, Friday and all, Christmas coming, but this Hannah Finch walking along the road, a wind chill of minus twenty-six for God sakes, dead mother, alone with Nigel Wilson. Could Betty get out there and talk with this kid?
But as he rehearsed the words, his pitch seemed laced with bad history and unsettled grudges. He wedged the phone back into his pocket. He’d drive to Child and Family Services in Neesley and sit across from her instead.
Two
After Eric left the house that morning, Ellie stood beside the laundry heap in her cotton nightgown. She’d forgotten slippers, and her bare toes curled on the cold concrete floor. The old washer and dryer leaned against the far wall in the bowels of the dingy basement, freezer on one side, furnace on the other. She’d needed two laundry baskets, thirty-one steps per trip, to haul down Sammy’s toothpaste-splattered towels, Walter’s soiled sheets, Eric’s work shirts, her panties and bras, shapeless and faded. Danny’s jeans and t-shirts were off to the side, where he’d chucked them over the course of the week, stray socks unable to catch the pile.
There was a time when she’d dreamed of a main-floor washer and dryer, maybe tucked into a hallway behind white-painted louvered doors or set off to the side in a room of their own. A window with yellow curtains, a chrome light fixture instead of a bulb and ratty string, built-in shelves, a shiny enamel sink with a sprayer faucet.
Now, she just tried to get through each day without doing something foolish, without falling down the stairs and shattering.
Ellie filled the plastic cup with detergent, dumped it into the washer, and stabbed the button for the heavy cycle. She could feel the steely gaze of Eric’s dead mother over her shoulder. This had been Myrtle’s domain, her plot of land for eternity. Myrtle had stood on this very spot in her solid shoes, scrubbing clean the countless spills and stains that were her family.
Walter’s sheets reeked of urine and the old-man smell he left in the bathroom. Ellie stared at the brown stains, as big as hens’ eggs. She should scrub away the worst of it, but her fingers reached to her temples instead. The pamphlet had said to use the same firmness as one might drum fingers on a desk, middle three fingers of both hands. Tap tap tap tap tap tap. Not too hard—it shouldn’t hurt. She wasn’t to worry about hitting the acupuncture points, just draw her mind to her problem using a manageable statement. The statement needed to be specific and focused, according to paragraph three. Not one of those murky thoughts that swim to the surface unnoticed. I’ve entered a black lagoon of despair wouldn’t work. The declaration had to be snappier, more immediate. Something like, Even though Walter loses control of his bowels, I love and approve of myself. Ellie had tried countless beginnings—Even though Sammy won’t use his words, even though Danny nearly killed himself in his grandfather’s truck, even though Eric has been checked out for months—always finishing with words like I accept myself anyway, because the pamphlet said so, not because she did.
She couldn’t concentrate enough to come up with anything peppy, especially with the thought of Myrtle, standing right beside her, larger than life—Pull up your socks, girl, it’s Christmas. Oh, for God sakes, put on some socks.
Ellie knew all about her mother-in-law’s idea of Christmas. Before her family moved here last winter, Ellie had escaped to this place for the holidays each year, though in hindsight she wished she hadn’t. Eric worked Christmases—every damn one, it seemed—so Ellie searched for bus routes to Neesley from wherever they were stationed. She packed up the boys, mounds of diapers and baby wipes, then Tonka trucks and big boy pants, stuffing everything she could think of into mismatched suitcases. She endured Sammy’s tears and strangers’ stares at his outbursts, ratty bus seats, and startling snowstorms—whatever it took to get to Myrtle’s doorstep.
Myrtle always met them in front of the Esso coffee bar on Main that served as the bus station. She squeezed them into the front seat of the big truck and drove the terrible winter roads home, making no fuss whatsoever over the black ice. Then once inside the front landing, dazed and bedraggled, Ellie breathed deeply while Myrtle scooped up the boys with her strong farmer’s arms and stripped snowsuits and mittens, carried suitcases to bedrooms.
Ellie had liked the way Myrtle arranged the garland over the mantel and scattered the tiny toy soldiers and crocheted snowflakes about the tree’s branches. The way Myrtle took over the kitchen, robust and rosy cheeked, mashing potatoes in the old copper pot, stirring vats of perfe
ct, lump-free gravy, checking the doneness of carrots and Brussels sprouts, the brownness of pie crusts. She could as easily pull gizzards from the turkey cavity as fold napkins into dainty flowers. It was incredible to watch.
Every year, Ellie repeatedly offered help. Her mother-in-law repeatedly refused it. She said things like, “You need rest, dear” or “Why don’t you go have a lie down,” so Ellie backed away, tamping down feelings of unworthiness and choosing to be grateful for the woman’s generosity instead.
Those Christmases might have saved her or they might have been her ruin—she was not sure which. All she knew was that she craved getting to this place, earlier and earlier each year, like it was a drug and she an addict. Certainly now, she could see hairline cracks in her fairy tale. At the time, she barely noticed Walter’s sullenness as he sat in his chair, or Myrtle’s sideways glances of pity, her tsk-tsking about Sammy’s growing number of compulsions—and Eric nowhere to be found.
After Myrtle died in this house, Walter lived alone for a few months, homecare workers coming in and out, failing to keep him satisfied. It had been her idea, not Eric’s, to move back to the home he was raised in. The RCMP had had him too long already, stolen too many Christmases, too many weekends and nights away from his family. He could quit the force, get a less formidable job, and start over. They could all start over. Neesley, with all of its fond memories, was the right place to be. And here they’d be able to look after Walter. Wasn’t that what families were supposed to do?
She regretted it now, of course. Myrtle seemed less tolerant after her death. Ellie could feel her hot breath on her neck. You should be dressed. The beds made, porridge bubbling on the stove for the boys. What have you been doing with your days? Where was the Christmas pudding? Why were there no boughs on the mantel, no paper snowflakes in the windows?
