by Fran Kimmel
“This is your room and you don’t have to share it,” Sammy repeated.
“That’s right.”
He thought for a minute before repeating for good measure, “You don’t have to share it.” Then he added, “I will say go away. I will tell Hannah to go away.”
By the time Eric looked in on them, they were sitting side by side on the floor, crumpled Christmas wrapping and torn package pieces scattered around them. Eric stared at the balsa wood flyer they’d built. It was an early Christmas present—he could deduce that much. Ellie had given up on a tree dressed with tinsel. She just wanted these next few days to be done with, to go back to the way things were. Her flaws to sort through, her family to stand beside and hold on to for dear life. But Eric, standing in the doorway, was insisting on taking her boys into the frozen forest.
To the surprise of both his parents, Sammy did not put up a fight. He jumped up, as if this were his idea, and squeezed past his father before Ellie could stop him.
—
On his way to Hodgins’s place, Eric had planned to talk to Daniel, to analyze what damage he had caused from the night before. To tell him he was sorry. To tell him how proud he felt.
He had planned to talk to Sammy too about the girl in the kitchen. Sammy was stubbornly protective of his space, and Hannah was not part of it. The mean boys at school had given him more reasons to be afraid. Eric wished he could trade places with his son, but all he could do was meet his son halfway—help Sammy translate the world into a language he could understand.
But trapped in the van with his strapped-in boys, the heat blaring, he realized he would not get to the points on his list. Shyness overcame him. Sammy fidgeted in the back, tracing his finger in circles along the window. Daniel sat beside him in the passenger seat, uncharacteristically quiet, cell phone out of sight, and every time Eric looked over, Daniel looked away, seemingly shy himself.
Eric parked on the machinery road at the backside of Hodgins’s section. The clump of trees stood less than twenty feet beyond. Eric hauled Walter’s chopping axe from the back of the van. Daniel got the tarp and let Sammy out of the back seat, who sprang like a cat, landing on all fours in the deep snow. He was clutching the car brush and wouldn’t let it go. The three traipsed toward the trees, Eric and Daniel sinking to their knees, Sammy, lighter, leaving child-sized indents where his boots landed.
They let Sammy choose. A black spruce in a forest of firs—an outsider, off by itself, spindlier than its neighbours. Daniel wanted to swing the axe. Eric showed him how to wedge out pieces from the side they wanted it to fall and then stepped out of the way. His eyes darted from one son to the next: Sammy out of reach, sweeping snow from tree branches; Daniel taking steady, man-sized swings, feeling the weight with his back foot, hurling forward like a pitcher. He swung the axe effortlessly, his cheeks blotched and shiny red. Only yesterday, he was a weightless gangling heap of legs and arms as Eric carried him to his bed.
It took nearly ten minutes before the tree started to groan and crack and lean. Eric told them to stand back while Daniel slapped his knee and yelled, “Here she comes, Sammy!”
“Here she comes, Sammy!” Sammy yelled back.
Christmas came crashing down with a screech that echoed through the forest, then left a quiet so deep, they could hear nothing but the sound of their white breath.
Sammy’s teeth chattered where he leaned on his brush. He’d lost one mitten; his fingers were brittle and raw red. Eric found the mitten in the snow and carried Sammy awkwardly to the car, which Sammy didn’t like, his small body stiff as a cardboard box. After cranking the heat to high, he put Sammy on lookout, the most important job, and left him there, peering out from behind the icy glass.
When he got back, Daniel had already hauled the felled tree to the edge of the clearing.
“Your first tree. And you had to work for it.”
Daniel smiled, rubbing his forehead with his bulky glove. “It wasn’t that hard. I could have done a bigger one.”
Eric laughed. “But then we couldn’t get it in the house.”
They dragged the spruce through the deep snow and brought it to the side of the road. Daniel made faces at Sammy through the window, while Eric walked around the van, and the two spread the blue tarp lengthwise along the roof like a picnic tablecloth.
“Do you think she’ll like it?” Daniel yelled from his side.
The two of them heaved the tree up top, trunk forward, scattering snow and causing the van to rock back and forth, so that Sammy squealed. Would Ellie like it? It had been a small thing to ask, getting her the tree, and yet he’d managed to find a string of excuses as long as his arm. Why did he do that? Why did he wait until the small requests became impossibly large?
“So, you think?”
“Think what, Dan?”
He was thinking about their kiss that morning, his reaching for her like that before he could talk himself out of it.
Daniel exaggerated every syllable. “Do you think she’ll like the tree?”
“I’m sure she’ll like it. It’s a beaut.”
“Do you think she’s ever had a Christmas tree? Or Christmas?”
What was Daniel talking about? Eric had missed too many Christmases, dropping Ellie and the boys at the bus station before he sped to the detachment, but there had always been a tree. Cotton-ball Santa heads and papier-mâché bells and cut-out snowflakes. He knew that much. But then it got through to him. Daniel was not talking about his mother. It was Hannah he wanted to get a read on.
Eric gave one final tug on the rope, which didn’t budge. “I don’t know. We’d better get back and find out.”
“What’s going to happen to her? Where will she go?”
“To a good home,” he said. “A home with good people.”
But he wasn’t sure. Betty had called while he was making the pancakes, asking if they were all still in one piece, if there had been tears, or worse. She had a place lined up for Boxing Day; she’d pick Hannah up before noon. The Baxter family was out to the west, in Clearwater County. They had a hobby farm, llamas and ostriches, and four foster kids at the moment. The whole lot of them were in the mountains until December 26, visiting a great aunt or second cousin. Betty had been cautious as she described the Baxters, not her typical silver-lining endorsement. But the list had dwindled and she could only do so much.
“We can keep her safe over Christmas,” he told Daniel. He could only do so much too.
—
Ellie sat on the floor in Sammy’s room, working back through the bleak months since she’d brought them all here. It was a brutal day last January, so ridiculously cold that when they stepped inside, exhausted yet hopeful—Walter, we made it, we’re here!—their breath rose up like smoke rings. Eric carried the large Rubbermaid container of bedding, the one he had clamped to the top of the van, but the brittle cold had proved too much for it, and its plastic lid snapped right in two, clean sheets and pillow cases tumbling onto the floor. She had looked down at the pile, laughing at first, but then winter stains bled over the sheets, the dog hairs and gravelly wet clumps made by their boots, and a sudden and horrible thought pressed in on her: this move would fix nothing.
The others didn’t figure this out until later. Except for Walter, who planted himself at the lip of the hallway, not out of the way, but unable and unwilling to stop the procession of boxes and dark rubber boots trudging past like an army of ants. Every so often, he’d raise his cane and bring it down with a wallop, rattling the china.
That first day, Danny moseyed from room to room, touching this and that. Moments from his childhood: the Coca-Cola wall phone with the light-up rotary dial pad; the cat in the gunny sack, its striped tail sticking out, screeching and shaking when he pressed the button. But by evening, he too was sullen. There were only twelve TV stations and no internet.
Sammy kept out of the way of W
alter’s cane, sitting off to the side on his spot on the carpet as they ate the deviled-egg sandwiches and celery sticks, picnic style, that Ellie had brought in the cooler. Before she and Eric even opened a closet door, they ripped open the boxes labelled Sammy in thick black marker to replicate his old room. They made his bed, then lined his racing cars on the dresser in precisely the right order, plugged in his table lamp shaped like a truck, hung his star chart. “My room,” he said and then wouldn’t come out.
That was nearly a year ago now. A year of changes to the colours and textures of the fields beyond these windows, yet nothing inside her had changed, no matter how often she tapped SOS signals on her forehead. In all that time, she’d not let one visitor through the door.
Several tried, at least at first. Friends of Eric’s stopped by with a case of beer or bottle of wine. Friends of Myrtle’s, old women with large purses and Kleenexes up their sleeves, showed up with cakes and casseroles. And younger women appeared too, including a pair of welcome-wagon recruits delivering heartiest greetings and free coffee-and-a-muffin coupons. There was even a Daughters of the Empire trio, breathless in their explanation of how Ellie could help make a better country.
She’d never been one to take in stray dogs or birds with broken wings or to suffer prying neighbours, especially since Sammy. She’d given a litany of reasons for why they couldn’t pass her doorstep. Her son had a winter cold, a flu bug, spring allergies. They had appointments to keep. She came up with one lame excuse after another—she pictured them swirling about town like snowflakes—until eventually people stopped ringing her bell.
Well, she couldn’t stay in Sammy’s room all day. She headed back to the kitchen. The girl sat alone at the table with the litter of the pancakes experiment. Walter had fallen asleep in front of his puzzle, shoulders curled forward, head bobbing like a blue jay at the feeder.
She ignored the girl and instead washed away the silty sludge on her tongue with a swig of lukewarm coffee. She went to start the cleanup, but Thorn had begun circling the floor.
“Hold on, Thorn,” she yelled on her way to her coat and boots. He was too old for this weather. She didn’t need him breaking a hip on the wooden stairs, getting stuck in a mound of frozen snow, haunches spread wide.
“Are you leaving too?” Hannah said.
Ellie turned to the girl. A thread of red, fear perhaps, passed over her cheeks.
“I’m only taking out the dog. And you don’t have to stay at the table, Hannah. You can go wherever you want in the house. Would you like to turn on the TV, see if you can find a show?”
“No, that’s okay.”
Ellie held back Thorn, who was panting through his nose. “Or maybe you’d like to go back to your room and rest for a bit?”
“Can I just sit here for another minute?”
“Do what you like,” Ellie said. She zipped her coat in a violent pull and reached back down to grab Thorn’s collar. He looked up, shame-faced. A single brown turd had dropped out of his backside onto the hardwood floor.
A stain of disgrace washed over her too then, for what she seemed unable to hold back herself. “It’s all right now, old boy.” She scratched beneath his grey, whiskered chin, pulled a baggie from her coat pocket, and scooped up the polished stool with a practised efficiency. “Let’s go finish what we started.”
—
When they got back inside, Ellie stomped the snow from her boots and wiped Thorn’s paws one at a time, extra gently, with the old towel they kept by the door. She looked toward the table and saw that Hannah had disappeared. Her relief gave way to an odd sense of déjà vu, as if she had stood on this threshold before, on this very same square of warped wood, looking into an empty room for a girl who was not there.
Ellie threw down her soggy mittens. She could not stand days of this. She needed to pull up her socks, turn it around. That’s what she’d do. She’d march down the hall, use her best voice, and come up with something decent. She could tell stories about life on the farm or life before the farm. How she’d plowed through Mitch’s fence that time—how embarrassed she’d been, there was no explanation, the steering worked fine. Or about how they got trapped in that godawful corn maze, Sammy wailing in the stroller, the pair of them choking on corn dust in the stifling heat, going round and round until the owner rescued them on his tractor. Or she could tell stories about Thorn chasing the plastic bag in the wind, hooting like a crazed owl. Hannah seemed to like the dog, who stuck to her like a piece of old gum.
And Hannah could tell her things too. She could talk about how cold it was in that awful cellar and how deranged the man was who put her there. Hannah could tell her any number of despicable details and Ellie would listen and nod and squeeze the girl’s shoulder, and while she wouldn’t say it out loud, she’d think that when you get to a certain age, you’ll realize that unfairness is the substance of life, always; that it’s only a matter of degree.
Ellie rounded the hallway corner to find Thorn stretched out in front of the closed bathroom door.
She could make up stories if she had to, like she did with Danny when he had chicken pox and needed the distraction, his chest covered in itchy, red bumps.
She slipped into Myrtle’s craft room and sat on the lumpy bed and waited for Hannah to come out of the bathroom. She practised the way she might nod and smile and say all the right things, but the longer she studied it, the harder it became. What could the girl be doing in there? She was taking forever.
It crept up on her in notches, tiny tremors at first, then a full-on slap to the face. No. She couldn’t do this. She was so poorly equipped for this task that it would be like asking Myrtle to burn the potatoes.
She looked toward the door, hoping Hannah wouldn’t come out of the bathroom right then and catch her before she could compose herself. Her eye latched onto the pathetic pile of the girl’s things, threadbare and faded, folded neatly into piles on the floor.
She could deal with the pile, if not the girl. Yes, that’s what she could do. She would launder her clothes. She would do it right now. It would be a kind gesture, to have everything put in drawers. She’d use extra softener so they’d smell fresh, better than new, like they advertised on TV. You don’t just wear clothes; you live life in them.
She scooped up the pile and carried the works to the basement. She sorted darks from lights, taking note of missing buttons and torn hems, making plans to mend them with supplies from Myrtle’s room.
Ellie sat on the stool beside the washing machine, thumbing mindlessly through the Maytag manual as the first load cycled through. Then she pulled out Hannah’s darks, one at a time, each flat as crinkled paper, and placed them in a stacked heap in the dryer. She threw in two bounce sheets, slammed the dryer door, and turned the water back on for the whites. But she couldn’t stay down here through this cycle too, her cold toes turning a bluish grey from standing on the cold concrete. It was rude to leave the girl so long, and the disaster in the kitchen waited. She strained to hear the van’s tires crunching over the driveway, the boys stomping feet as they piled into the house. But Eric was taking his sweet time. All she heard was the swishing of the murky water and the thumping round and round.
Ellie dragged herself upstairs to find Hannah at the kitchen sink, skinny arm banging up and down. Remarkably, the table had been cleared of dishes and crumbs, maple syrup blobs wiped up, juice jug and butter dish put away, chairs pushed into place, and china dishes stacked on a rack beside the sink. The counter gleamed: no lingering trace of Eric’s big palms in the pancake dust, no dribbles of bacon grease on the stove.
Hannah turned to find Ellie beside her. A little oh sound escaped her lips as her arm splashed down into the sudsy sink, soap bubbles flying.
Ellie shouldn’t have snuck up on her like that. “What are you doing?” she asked, though it was obvious: Hannah was scrubbing a pot.
“I’m cleaning the bacon pan,” s
he said, leaning closer into the sink and looking over to Walter’s bobbing head in his corner, as if she could rely on him to corroborate the facts.
“I can see that.” The girl looked so uncomfortable that Ellie unfolded her arms and placed them at her side.
“I didn’t know where to put the grease, so I poured it in here.” She pointed to the yogourt container, half-filled with brown, sooty bacon drippings. “It hasn’t gone hard yet. I can put it in something else if it’s wrong.”
Danny would have poured it down the sink if left to his own ideas.
“No, the yogourt container is good.” Ellie should say something kind, but nothing came to her.
“I found the cutlery drawer. I like how it’s divided with the stick-up wood so you know where the forks and knives and spoons should go.” Hannah rubbed her forearm across her forehead like a char woman. “I didn’t find the cupboard for the plates. I mean, I found the cupboard, but these plates have roses on them, and the ones in the cupboard are just blue. That’s why they’re on the rack and not put away.”
If Myrtle were here, she’d banish them both from her kitchen with a wave of her hand.
“You’re a guest in our house, Hannah. Not Cinderella. You don’t have to clean up our mess.”
“I like cleaning,” Hannah said, squinting down at her sudsy fingers.
Ellie found no trace of sarcasm in her. “I haven’t met many girls who like cleaning.” But she didn’t know any girls well enough to know what they liked.
“Mrs. Ellderslie let me be the cleanup monitor for art class for all of grade three. We were supposed to take turns—it went by the alphabet—but after my name came up, I got to stay on. Mrs. Ellderslie said I was the best with the brushes.”
“Well, you’ve done a lovely job with the bacon pan too.”
Hannah had laid the heavy fry pan upside down on the spread-out tea towel, which was wet enough to be wrung out. She popped out the sink stopper and wiped her hands on her jeans as the water drained. “I think I’m finished.”
