by Kim Aubrey
Each time Laina sets cup and saucer onto the nightstand, the sight of her crinkled forehead stirs Liv’s guilt. A twelve year old shouldn’t have to take care of her mother. Liv tugs at one of the round leather buttons on her wool cardigan, clutches it to her chest, feeling herself slide ever closer to the hard, bare place she senses at the end. Don’t they call it rock bottom? Isn’t she there yet?
Laina hates weekends. She can’t have friends over, and she can’t go anywhere without her siblings. Her life has become a box she moves within. On one side are her brother and sister. On the opposite side lies her mother. The third side is school. And the last side, the one that walls her off most completely from herself, is the need she feels to keep people from knowing, to pretend that everything in their house is normal.
Laina returns the Monopoly game to the closet, notices the vacuum cleaner, and decides the house needs a good cleaning. The vacuum sucks up dried grass and mud tracked in from the garden, Cheerios and corn flakes spilled on the carpet, crinkled curls of paper cast off from the children’s notebooks. Its loud hum drowns out the silence oozing from Luke’s and her mother’s rooms. She imagines Luke behind his closed door, lying flat on his stomach across his bed, face lost in his pillow.
Laina wipes the cedar coffee table with a damp cloth, erasing the sticky fingerprints and smears of chocolate her brother and sister have left there. She thinks of what Aunt Carol said when she was visiting from England a few months ago—that Luke would miss his father most because he’s a boy, and boys should not have to grow up without their fathers. Laina has always loved Aunt Carol, who has a British accent, wears short skirts, and tells stories about her many boyfriends, but when she said that about Luke, Laina felt her stomach twist. She wanted to scream that it wasn’t true. Laina is the one who misses their father most, and hates him most too, because, as everyone always said, she was his favourite, and she will never understand how he could leave her behind.
Liv thinks of the time before the children because those are the years that seem most truly happy. The June day she and Larry first met at a party on the beach, when everyone had returned from their American and Canadian universities. He walked her home, and they kissed on the swing in her parents’ garden until the stars came out. A week or two later, she took him for a boat cruise in the lemony sunlight amongst the islands of Hamilton Harbour, then out to Somerset where they docked at Lantana for lunch under pink umbrellas. Larry drank beer from a chilled mug. Liv sipped Planters’ Punch, the dark rum floating on top, sweet and strong on her tongue, like the sun that was burning her skin, like Larry stroking her body in a private cove, where they crouched half-submersed in the salty water. He scraped his calf on a limestone reef, and she would never forget the sudden bruising pressure of his fingers on her forearm, his yelp of pain, or the tears that bent his lashes.
Luke removes the screen from his window and climbs through, dropping softly to the ground. He doesn’t want Laina to know where he’s going. Luke is a boy full of secrets. His biggest secret is that he doesn’t really miss his father. It’s his mother he misses. She never wanders into his room at night anymore. He used to hear her soft footsteps, feel her hand rest on his forehead, smell her lavender hand lotion as he floated back to sleep. Lately, bereft of her hovering presence, he wakes abruptly from nightmares. Last night he was chasing her wheeled coffin, which rolled ahead of him like an old-fashioned racing car past pink and yellow houses until it was so far ahead that he knew he’d never catch it.
Luke lets himself out the back gate, closes it behind him. Before setting off down the road, he takes a deep breath as if steeling himself for adventure. You can tell that each stride fills him with a sense of freedom and forgetting. The rain has stopped, the clouds are parting, and the asphalt sparkles in the sun. His bare arms feel warm even though it’s only two weeks until Christmas. His grandparents will be coming from the States. Maybe they can get his mother out of bed. Luke climbs onto the limestone wall that skirts the road and walks along the top of it, picking petals off hibiscus, doing battle with long flexible oleander stalks, popping acid-green cherry leaves into his mouth. At the end of the road, he jumps off to cross the busy street before following rough stone steps down to the water. Even though winter is near, it’s a fine Saturday afternoon, and a few people are boating. A warm breeze ripples across the harbour. Luke breathes in the salty air with its tang of sulphur, feeling his body soften.
His father used to take them out in the motorboat. There it sits, glistening on the water. It’s not fair that they don’t use it anymore. All alone out there, the boat will rot or sink. Someone needs to watch it, or put it away for the winter. He climbs into the small rowboat, moored at the dock, grabs the oars and rows out to the motorboat. You can easily read its embarrassing name, “Liv and Larn,” painted on the stern in bold blue script, and understand why Luke wants to take a stone and scratch out the “Larn.” Tying up to the boat’s mooring, he pulls on the rope until he is close enough to jump aboard.
Liv remembers the blue ribbons she won jumping horses when she was young, how her horse, Ringo, had responded to the slightest pressure of her knees as he carried her over white gates and stiff green hedges. Ringo’s love and loyalty had been exclusive and had lasted until his sudden death while Liv was away at university. She can still make herself cry by reading the letter in which her mother described his heart attack, a letter Liv received on a sunny October morning when she was planning to skip classes for a drive in the country with a tall, shy philosophy student she’d been flirting with for weeks. After spending the afternoon weeping on his shoulder, she refused to see him again because she couldn’t look into his dark, attentive eyes without thinking of Ringo.
Luke finds a sponge under a seat. He sops up the rainwater that has collected in the stern, grimacing as he squeezes the sponge dry. He pulls a key from his pocket, another of his secrets. He’d found it in the kitchen drawer reserved for odds and ends, the place his father had always kept it. He tells himself that he only wants to see if the engine is still running, but once he hears its steady growl, he can’t resist taking the boat for a spin. That’s what his father used to say—“Hey, sport, want to go for a spin?”
Luke pulls in the bumpers, releases the boat from its mooring, and starts off with a burst of speed, which lifts the bow so that he can’t see what’s ahead. Slowing it a little to reach a plane, he heads towards the islands where they used to anchor for a swim and a picnic. Luke wishes he had one of his mother’s tuna sandwiches now, along with a thermos of lemonade, but he forgets about food as the cool air rushes at his face, the salt spray splashes his arms, and the sun warms the top of his head. He has driven the boat plenty of times, but always with his parents and sisters along. Now he feels different—older, freer, more excited, and more afraid. The hairs on his arms and legs rise. His scalp tingles.
Liv’s foot twitches as if she would like to kick someone. She’s reliving one of the fights she and Larry had before they were married. They’d been snorkelling amongst the coral reefs. Liv’s head was still full of the brightly coloured fishes she’d seen—red squirrel fish, blue and yellow angelfish, a milky purple man-o-war, the pale green body of a moray eel whose head was hidden inside the reef. Larry was trying to start the engine, which sputtered as it ran out of gas.
“I asked you if the tank was full,” Liv said.
“No, you didn’t,” Larry argued. “I assumed your father had filled it up after the weekend.”
“Why should my father keep the tank full for us?”
“He usually does.”
“Not after the weekend.”
“Are you trying to make me look like a fool? You and your father…”
“What? Do you think we planned this?”
Larry grabbed an oar and started to paddle on one side of the boat. Liv took the other oar, trying to help.
“No! Sit down.”
Liv sat. The a
fternoon sun scorched her skin. Larry had a thing about her father, maybe because he’d grown up without one. She watched him attack the waves with the wooden oar. It would take hours to get anywhere. A cloud crept across the sun, cooling the breeze. Larry looked like a little boy playing ship’s captain, or pirate. She couldn’t decide which. Luckily, another boat came along and lent them a tank of gas. Larry helped Liv out of the boat without looking at her, his lips pressed tight, eyes glistening.
She touched his face. “Marry me,” she said.
A white boat approaches from the west. The driver waves to Luke, who slides down in his seat, slowing the engine. POLICE, the side of the boat reads. Shit and damn, as Lucy would say. He considers racing away. He’d keep going, out of the harbour, past the breakers, out to the open ocean, until he ran out of gas. And then what? He’d be fish food, that’s what. Like his father always said, “Respect the ocean, sport, or you might end up food for the fishes.”
Liv sees the infant arms and legs of her children. Lucy’s are pudgy and pink. She learned to walk early, making a point of running away whenever she could. Liv watched her toddle down the garden path, yellow curls bobbing, hurling herself at the trunk of the white cedar, arms stretched around it, face looking up into its long limbs, where Larry stood balanced on one fat branch, hammering nails into a board. Luke was there too—four years old, playing on the gravel path, sifting pebbles through his fingers. When he saw Liv, he ran to her and grabbed at her cotton skirt, wiping his constantly running nose on the hem. Liv could not lift him because her arms were full of ripe lemons. She called to Laina, jumping rope with a friend, “Bring me a basket for these lemons, sweetie.” Laina dropped the rope and skipped to the house without a word to fetch the basket.
Laina puts away the vacuum cleaner, the dusting rags, the Lemon Pledge, the Windex. The house looks clean and neat. Windows gleam. She has even cleaned the piano keys. In ten days, her grandparents will be here, returned for the holidays from their house in North Carolina, where they’d retired a few years ago, claiming they’d had enough of the island. But Dad had said admiringly, “They made a pretty penny selling that big property of theirs. Now they can buy a nice place Stateside for a third of the price and live on the proceeds. The cost of living is a hell of a lot cheaper over there.” Is that why Dad’s gone Stateside? The cost of living? Laina’s other grandmother had retired to Florida when Laina was a baby, but she’d been American to start with, which made Dad American too, even though he’d been born here. Since he’d never lived in the States, he’d been unable to get U.S. citizenship for his kids. If Laina were American, would he have taken her with him?
She slumps onto the couch, staring at the shiny surface of the coffee table she’s just polished. At first she’d dreaded her grandparents’ impending arrival, what they’d say when they saw her mother, that they’d take them all away to North Carolina, and Laina would lose her friends. But now that everything is too much, she longs for them to take over. She thinks of phoning to ask them to come sooner, but doesn’t know how to say what’s the matter with her mother, doesn’t know the word to use.
If you look closely at Liv, the only movement you’ll notice is her top lip twitching. She’s running through the garden with her sister, Carol. Her father lifts them up, one in each arm, so they can pick oranges from the big tree. Her small palm cups an orange, its bulk dropping instantly into her hand, as if it has been waiting for an excuse to fall, or a safe landing place.
Lucy has eaten two lemons. The tart sweet juice has dried on her fingers, leaving them a little sticky. She’s picked nasturtiums, roses, and oleander to decorate her tree house. Their colours brighten the shade of the white cedar. She’s fetched a blanket, some books, and her stuffed rabbit from the room she shares with Laina. She sits on the blanket, Alice in Wonderland in hand, and reads a few pages, looking ahead for the pictures. The Cheshire cat is her favourite, how he disappears around his smile. She also likes the caterpillar’s raised eyebrows as he asks, “Whoo Are Yoou?” Lucy is perhaps the least affected by her father’s unexplained departure and her mother’s depression. Licking her fingers, she turns the page—all those little oysters following the Walrus and the Carpenter. She doesn’t feel a bit sorry for them—well, maybe just a bit. She drops the book to pick up her stuffed rabbit. Rubbing his fuzzy belly across her face, she lies down on the blanket. The tree is dry after its late morning shower. The sun peeks in through the thick shiny leaves as it begins to sink behind the oleanders.
Liv lies in her playpen. A yellow bear stares at her. Its eyes are blue buttons. She reaches towards it, noticing her own pink fingers, her small starfish hand. She’s caught up in staring at it, until she feels a gnawing, yawning emptiness in her belly, and opens her mouth to cry for food.
Laina, stirring a pot of chicken noodle soup, hears the click of the driveway gate. The spoon falls into the soup. Dad’s home! She bolts out the door and up the path to the driveway, but instead of her dad, she sees her brother with a policeman. Luke waves, giving her a sheepish smile.
“Good afternoon, young lady,” says the policeman. “Are your parents home?”
Laina feels something small and brittle snap under her stocking feet. She cannot answer the policeman, whose warm, bright smile makes her want to cry. She runs back inside to get her mother.
Lucy hears a man’s deep voice in her dreams. “Daddy.” She wakes, and rolls over in bed. But the bed slips and splinters, falling out from under her, as she drops past shadowy leaves like feathers stroking the orange sky, until she meets the rain-softened earth with a thump.
Liv steps outside, blinks into the last rays of sunlight, jumps at the sound of the screen door clicking shut. She and Laina are both in time to see the policeman’s jacket billow behind him as he and Luke run down the path to the lemon grove. A sour lump of fear rises in Liv’s chest. Wrapping her ratty wool cardigan more closely around her, she stumbles after them.
Laina follows her mother. Great warm tears drip down her face as she runs. She feels a rush of emotions that will inundate her dreams for years, but what rises to the top, loosening her arms and legs, is relief.
The policeman reaches Lucy first. Luke crouches beside them, watches him check her pulse with trembling fingers and bend his face close to hers to feel her breath. Luke can hear the rustle of the policeman’s jacket and the sigh he makes as he rests back on his heels.
Liv stands under the white cedar, twisting and tugging at one of the leather buttons on her cardigan. She steps forward as the policeman lifts Lucy from the ground, holding her so that Liv can see her face. A round patch of Lucy’s cheek is bright yellow. At first Liv feels queasy, thinking a yellow hole has opened into her daughter’s face. Then she touches the yellow, discovers she can peel it from Lucy’s warm skin. She stares at it, feels its smooth oily surface, presses it to her nose.
What We Hold in Our Hands
“THE MOON’S HOLDING WATER TONIGHT,” SAID MY GRANDmother, Esty. She was gazing out my mother’s bay window at the half moon, which lay on its side like a white bowl suspended in the dark. Its light softened the yellow lawns of the Boston suburb, and smoothed the dirty traces of snow.
“I’ve never heard that expression before,” I said, thinking it made the moon into a sponge or a woman’s body retaining water.
Esty was starting to be frail. Her shoulders leaned forward to protect a sinking chest. Her pale knuckles trembled as she gripped the arms of her chair, and lowered herself back onto the cushioned seat.
We had just finished eating. My husband Len was in the kitchen helping my mother with the dishes. She always had to wipe away the remains of dinner before we could have dessert. Esty had wanted to dry, but Len had insisted, pressing his palms together in what he thought was a whimsical imitation of prayer, and begging, “Please, Esty. Drying dishes is one of the great pleasures in my life.”
Esty had given a dry laugh like a cough. “Well, I wo
uldn’t want to deprive you.”
Len liked to make Esty and my mother laugh. Lately his antics never earned more than a grudging smile from me. His need for approval was wearing me out, and I didn’t like the way he sought it everywhere, joking with shop clerks and waitresses, wooing his patients into thinking he was wonderful.
“Here’s dessert,” he said, bearing one of Esty’s homemade pumpkin pies into the dining room. My mother followed with teapot and mugs. Len poured the tea while I served the pie.
Looking up from her plate with half a smile, Esty said, “Last night I dreamed I killed a man.”
My mother raised her eyebrows and sent me a side-sweeping, I-told-you-so look. She wanted to convince me that Esty was slipping into senility, but although Esty’s body was weakening, her mind seemed as sharp and tough as ever. I suspected that my mother’s worries were fueled by equal parts dread and desire, like the whiskey and soda she used to pour herself each evening after my father left.
“How did you kill him?” I asked, squeezing lemon into my tea and thinking about the gun Esty kept under her pillow.
“I just beat him with my fists until he fell over dead. He died so easily, he must have been in pretty bad shape.”
At my grandfather Gus’s funeral, Esty had thrown herself onto his body during the viewing, kissing him and crying like a little girl. I’d never seen her show him such affection when he was alive, not so much as a peck or a hug. They were always arguing or teasing each other. Sometimes he’d kiss her cheek, causing her to squirm and hiss an exasperated Oh, Gus!
