—
“Hey, Lu.”
In the rear-view Rachel can see that Luca hasn’t taken her eyes off the window. A man walking three miniature pinschers passes by and Luca actually swivels in her seat, straining her cheek against the glass to watch the stumps of their little docked tails jutting straight up toward the overcast sky.
“Lu? Hello? Mom to Lu. Are you there?”
Luca waits until the dogs have rounded a corner before slowly turning her head. “Um-hmm?” she hums, looking Rachel straight in the eyes through the mirror.
In that look Rachel sees a glimpse of the teenage self Luca will become—it is both amusing and terrifying.
“How about we swing by the park again after dinner?”
Luca turns back toward the window, shrugging her shoulders.
—
To enter their apartment, Rachel must drive down the laneway between their house and the neighbour’s. The boxy little sedan nearly skims the brick on either side as she manoeuvres around two sets of trash bins. Clear of the laneway, she makes a tight left onto the wavy patch of gravel that serves as a parking spot. The yard of the house is enclosed in chain-link on three sides, the open side running directly parallel to the length of the car.
Rachel throws the car into park, grabs her purse from the floor of the back seat, and unbuckles Luca’s seat belt with one deep lean between the front seats. Luca is dexterous enough to scramble out and pop open the door once the criss-cross of buckles has been unlocked. Betsy leaps out after her, clearing the booster seat completely and landing on the gravel. They skip around to the back of the car. In the rear-view Rachel can see the fuzzy purple spray of Luca’s scrunchy over the lip of the trunk. She stays in the driver’s seat for a moment, listening to the intermittent pings of the cooling engine. The dash clock reads seven thirty-two. Sixty-two hours before she’ll walk Luca back into morning snack time at the community centre. She hears Luca in the tiny, almost-fenced yard running up and down the wooden steps of the apartment door.
“Up, up, up, and I’m a king in the castle. Down, down, down, and I’m drowning in the moat.”
Through the loose faux leather of her purse, Rachel feels her phone vibrate. Not long enough to be a call, so she knows it cannot be Travis. A spam text, reading, “IMPORTANT MESSAGE: your mobile number has been identified as part of a massive online banking breach. To confirm your account is secure, call this number back immediately.” The number is international, at least fourteen digits long. The whole thing doesn’t fit in the little box at the top of the message. Rachel texts back as she gets out of the car, “Should I jus send u my visa number and bank account login now to save myself the long distance? Asshole.”
“Lu, let’s go,” she calls to Luca, who is bent next to the fence, her face inches above some grass Betsy is chewing. She turns her head toward Rachel without righting her body.
“Now, guys, come on.”
Luca skates across the grass, not lifting her pink boots from the ground, and lets her arms swing stiffly at her sides.
“Speed skater,” Luca says in a mockingly deep man’s voice.
Betsy takes another pull from the crabgrass and jumps up onto the mouldy decking without using the stairs, careful to avoid landing on the one rotting, grey board.
Inside the kitchen the steel of the door is cool against Rachel’s forehead. She leans against it as she toes her shoes and kicks them onto the heap next to the door. She pivots on her forehead to face the kitchen. Dishes piled high and dried just enough to make scrubbing futile. And beyond, in the dining room, Luca’s scrambled mess of crayons and construction paper. She can’t see Luca, but she can hear her in her bedroom, the springs of her mattress straining under what may well be her last round of jumping. Betsy has her front paws up on the edge of the Formica dining table, her head tilted to the side, straining to grab a red crayon in her jaws. Rachel doesn’t stop her. She won’t relish dabbing up the inevitable bloody-looking vomit hours from now, but she’s not in the mood to raise her voice to the level it would take to stop her. Her purse buzzes again.
“You’re kidding me,” she says as she taps open a text from the same long-distance number.
“Yes ok. texting details is fine. We will make sure your account is secure.”
Betsy’s nails make one final, digging pull to lunge her lips toward her prize. As soon as she has it she scrambles into Luca’s room, the metallic crunching of the mattress getting louder, and more frayed with each leap. Then silence. And a barely audible “Oops.”
—
They finish up a late meal of Kraft Dinner and hot dogs, and Rachel shuffles Luca from the table into her pyjamas, with some cajoling, and finally onto her now broken bed with one duct-taped spring.
“I wanna play space when Daddy gets home.”
Luca says this not with excitement or glee, but with the stern look of someone making their final offer after a terse negotiation. She will tolerate nothing less than playing “space,” which means sitting on the steps of the porch and leaning back so that the roofs of the four houses that surround their little scrap of backyard form a perfect frame through which to travel to the stars. Forget that most of the “stars” are actually overnight flights or the odd satellite. This is one of many games that only Travis is permitted to play with Luca. Early in the summer, when the long days meant no lights could be seen in the sky before 10 p.m. Rachel had tried to soothe Luca to sleep by suggesting they play space. Luca’s bedroom was sweltering, nearly forty degrees, Rachel figured, when she opened the door to find her lying starfished on top of her duvet, her sweaty head flopped sideways toward the door.
“I need some water, Ma. I’m dying in here,” Luca had said before flinging both legs up into the air and back down onto the mattress with a loud huff. Rachel gave her a drink that was 60 per cent ice and carried her out onto the porch to cool off. The only fan in the house rattled from the kitchen ceiling, so she left the back door open with the fan whirring at top speed. It was enough to move the air a little bit on the porch, on an otherwise completely breezeless night, Rachel put Luca on the step and leaned her elbows back against the prickly wood.
“Are we ready for liftoff, captain?” Rachel whispered, mimicking the lines she had heard Travis use. Luca didn’t respond. She craned her face up toward the sky.
“We’re headed to Orion’s Belt this mission, right, captain?”
Still no response. She looked down and took a sip of water.
“Captain, I need the okay to start the engines.”
Luca looked up at Rachel, hair matted across her forehead in wet, sweeping strings. Luca pushed it aside, giving her head the distinct look of a middle-aged comb-over.
“We can’t play space, Ma. You don’t sound like a spaceman.”
“Well, you don’t sound like a spaceman either. Just use your imagination.”
“No. You gotta have one real spaceman at least. That’s the rule.”
Luca took another sip from her cup, then stood. She leaned in and hugged the top of Rachel’s head, then shimmied off into the house to fall asleep on the cool bathroom floor.
Telling Luca that there was no chance she would be playing space this weekend might permanently derail the evening—send Luca into a tight-lipped rage. Rachel looks at her daughter, who is propped with her hands outstretched behind her, her brow scrunched into an impossibly deep furrow.
“Maybe another time,” Rachel says, leaving the news that Travis won’t be coming home unbroken for the time being. She’ll tell her tomorrow. Or not at all. She doesn’t want to see Luca’s disappointment. She’s tired of seeing it. And the fact that she’s tired of it makes her feel even worse.
Rachel leaves Luca on the bed, sitting bolt upright, singing a song to Betsy as she holds the ends of Betsy’s soft limp ears between her fingers and makes them dance.
—
Outside, the night is breezy but still warm. Rachel drops herself onto the top step of the porch and digs her elbows into
her knees. A bat darts between the big maple that stands just beyond the rusted-out Honda and an evergreen in the neighbour’s yard. She wonders what else lives in that tree. Whether it is full of its own dramatic life of feuds and turf wars and angling for leaf and trunk space. She doesn’t marvel at the thought. It feels futile. Kind of sad. A song begins to drift through the upstairs neighbour’s window. The first three words are curses before a deep bass and drum line take over.
Another bat shoots out from the canopy of the maple, this one followed by a small bird that twists around it, pecking and flapping madly. The fight continues into the neighbouring evergreen and out again into the darkness until Rachel can no longer see them.
The summer Rachel nailed up those seven-inch lengths of board on the bare and knobby pine in her parents’ backyard, she’d used some thin little one-inch screws and a rubber hammer she’d found on her father’s tool bench. Rachel knew that screws were not meant to be hammered, but she thought if she hit hard enough and for long enough they’d go in. And they did. A bit. But she didn’t have the strength to hammer them deep enough into the dense wood of the tree to support her weight. When she tried the climb anyway, she made it to the third board before a screw popped and the spinning piece of wood sent her ass to grass.
She remembers sitting there, post-fall, looking up at the gnarled bark, the untouched boards looking firm and sturdy yet completely useless.
I’ll have to teach myself how to use a drill, she thought.
MARIA REVA
SUBJECT WINIFRED
I
KEY COMPONENTS OF REPORT
1. DIONAEA MUSCIPULA
I’m disappointed to learn carnivorous plants haven’t been observed to digest anything bigger than a monkey. My idea for a science-fair exhibit isn’t as exciting anymore, though I don’t know where I would’ve found the monkey or anything bigger anyway. Lisa Ferrell picked the same exhibit topic as me so I need to beat her out. It’ll be an uphill battle, Lisa Ferrell’s mom works in faraway places like the Amazon and that’s how she gets her steady supply of seedlings. I have to settle for the ones Klaus gives me. Cradled in moist tissue paper, the seedlings are pale, wrinkly, and, as I can already see, unfit to survive.
2. GOD
Usually my mother, Winnie, sits on the front porch, smoking her Marlboros and mumbling about the president or prices or the old holly tree that keeps dropping needle leaves on the yellow lawn, but this evening she’s not home so I know something is up.
I’m planting the seedlings in yogurt containers when Winnie bursts into the house. She stands at the doorway, kicks off her shoes. Sweaty and flushed, she tells me she went to the library to look for night classes and, instead, found God.
I ask, Did someone sell Him to you out of a van?
Last time she came home kicking her shoes off so energetically was when she bought a cheap Walkman from a guy in a Salvation Army parking lot. He promised it would change her life. The Walkman played half of our Toys in the Attic tape and ate the rest.
Don’t be silly, says Winnie, this is completely different. God isn’t one of those things people can sell you. There was an informational stand and she was the one who came to them.
PLACES
1. CLOSET DOOR
In my room there is a closet with a door and the inside of the door is covered in tallies and numbers. I read them every night. I have woken up 4745 times since birth, my nails grow at a rate of 1 millimetre per week (rate increasing), the moon is in Day 2 of its cycle, I have an average of 180 wake-ups until my first cycle, my exhibit will grow mouths in 5 to 7 days, Winnie is 39, Winnie has discovered herself 4 times through anonymous groups, walk-in clinics, men and women whose voices boom over crowds in need of saving. I slide a piece of chalk out of a sock, find a space between the tallies, and write: Winnie’s relationship with God, number of days: 1.
2. EDISON MIDDLE SCHOOL
White wooden fencing keeps the children in. Lisa Ferrell stands in the middle of the schoolyard: sunny orange curls, alive, visible, a pretty girl with mean eyes and an upper lip too short to cover her front teeth. Between her palms, Lisa Ferrell holds a secret. She says she’s not supposed to show anyone, this thing in her hands is illegal in forty-five states and can wipe out a population. Everyone stands back a little. I inch closer through the crowd. Lisa Ferrell spreads her fingers to reveal a clump of dirt wrapped in tinfoil. Tiny purple leaves stick out with hairy mouths shaped like half moons—one of her famous Venus flytraps, Dionaea muscipula. Lisa Ferrell’s best friend unzips her Ziploc bag and tears a piece of luncheon meat off her sandwich. When Lisa Ferrell gives the nod, the best friend brushes the meat across one of the plant’s open mouths. Slowly the jaws move, the teeth clench. An eighth grader claps, a kid I’ve never seen before claps (new?), the whole schoolyard claps as my stomach boils into my throat. I can’t help thinking about my yogurt containers. My plants are showing some promising buds but still look as threatening as grass.
I imagine Lisa Ferrell in an orange uniform, which makes me feel better. That’s what the girls at Nifty Finds Hardware Store have to wear forever and ever, after they fail their science-fair exhibits. She’d have to tie her hair up too, so those sunny curls don’t get caught in the machinery.
3. NIFTY FINDS
Winnie used to work at Nifty Finds. She told me the uniforms used to be swamp green and made the Nifty Finds girls look jaundiced under the lamp displays until someone high up in management opted for the cheery, uppity orange. The store used to be called Thrifty Finds before the T burned out, followed by the H and R. The ifty seemed foreboding and, after all, the people in charge wanted to attract a sophisticated crowd into Edison, the Mr. Smiths and Thompsons and Browns, so they took a loopy leftover N out of storage and secured it in front. Winnie says that even though the place sucked her soul and hooked her on nicotine (the girls got away with extra breaks if they smoked), there were good moments. Good people too. I think that’s how she met her Mr. Brown (Secret Number 2, see below), and I think that’s how I was born. Stories come in pieces with Winnie, and I never get a full one. But I hear her whisper his name sometimes, chant it, when she sits on the front porch with her Marlboros.
4. HOUSE ON KIDD ROAD
Chicken wire keeps the dogs out. Cracks in the stucco walls: the stucco shimmers but so do the cracks because there are ants in them. And there are people in the rooms. Many, many people, now. Winnie floats around her new friends, neck and wrists wrapped in beads, shooting me looks whenever I do something sacrilegious like set up fly traps or use the microwave to cook an egg.
Today they gather around the kitchen table. They share meditation and fasting stories. They shift reality with positive thoughts. Some of them look at me or maybe something behind me or just in my general direction. They have this way of looking at you and not looking at you at the same time.
I hoist myself up onto a counter and sit with my legs hanging down, resisting the urge to swing them back and forth. With my faded khaki jacket, I blend in with the cupboards.
Among the people sitting below is a man with bright white teeth and a cleft chin. He says he used to be a high-school teacher, a real good one, until he got laid off and told he wasn’t really laid off but given an opportunity to grow. He must’ve taken the advice to heart because all he’s talking about is growing and growing. He takes a shapeless Plasticine thing out of his pocket and the others lean in a little. It’s my chewing device, he says, a real lifesaver, because after all those raw food smoothies my jaw muscles started getting weak.
Awful when that happens, says a woman beside him.
Everyone nods in a moment of silence. Near silence. Their seashell necklaces shake and jingle as they nod.
When I slide off the counter, my foot gets caught in a purse strap. A woman turns to me and asks, What’s your name, treasure? She offers me a bracelet made of wolf fangs and I say, Thanks but I’m really more of a cat person, which she considers with a grave face before turning back to the others.
SECRETS
1. THE HAND
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning there’s a warm, unmoving hand on me. The hand is mine, but in those first precious seconds, two or three at the most, the hand feels like someone else’s. I lift the sleeping arm, heavy, solid, and let the fingers slide across my cheeks, eyelids, the downy lobes of my ears, rounding my shoulders into the caress. It’s all I can do before the game is up, the pain and prickling take over, and the fusion begins, as it always does.
2. MR. BROWN, P.O. BOX 450, MIAMI, FL
Once a month Mr. Brown, P.O. Box 450, Miami, FL, makes his way to Ms. Winifred Haze, 15 Kidd Road, Edison, WA, in the form of a cheque: To cover essential amenities. Nothing is said about Mr. Brown, at least nothing beyond those whispers, escaping her mouth like smoke.
II
METHODS & OBSERVATIONS
Wake-ups since birth: 4755. Science-fair exhibit: T-29 days. Winnie’s relationship with God, number of days: 10. Winnie’s new social life, number of friends: 6. Mrs. Thompson’s nervous tic during Social Studies, total number of elbow twitches: approaching infinity.
Winnie is on her determined way to self-improvement and now smokes Marlboro Lights instead of Regulars. I sit beside her on the front porch, catching flies between my palms and stuffing them into killing jars. Winnie closes her eyes and breathes out a long cloud of smoke, looks at me and my flies (number of flies: 6), and decides it’s a good moment to talk some more about God.
God is Energy, she says in a slow, hushed way, as if every word is heavy and final and deserves a capital, like the name of a town or continent. Imagine Feeding on His Energy, she continues. Soon I Will Feed on His Energy and Cleanse. Isn’t that Nice?
I keep my face straight, mimic her voice. You Are Nuts.
Winnie rolls her eyes and I break into a giggle. She lights another Marlboro Light and tells me her entire system is poisoned, can’t I see that, Poisoned, and she will start her twenty-one-day water fast soon and they say it does Wonders and she’s finally getting all her thoughts in order, so how about we let go of our judgment?
The Journey Prize Stories 29 Page 13
