The Smell of Other People's Houses

by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

  “Shall I carry the tray in?” I ask, wiping the smile right off her face.

  “Oh no, dear. I can do it,” she says.

  “I need you to go hang these towels on the line anyway,” says Sister Agnes.

  “But yesterday you said we were going to start hanging things inside, in the drying room.”

  “Well, that was yesterday,” she snaps. I look out at the threatening clouds and decide to keep my mouth shut. She piles the hand towels in a basket and Sister Bernadette heads down the hall leading to Mother Superior’s study.

  I’ve only been in there once—the day I arrived. The room is very dark and smells like leather and wood oil and old books. The abbess is very old, too, but also very kind; her round face is papery and her skin is practically translucent, as if she’s never seen the sun. She wears a heavy cross around her neck, which must be the reason she’s slightly hunched over. I think she’s been wearing it for almost a hundred years. She welcomed me and said she hoped I would be happy here, and that was the last time we spoke.

  “Get a move on,” Sister Agnes says, nudging me out the door.

  Sure enough, a light downpour turns torrential as I hang up the last towel, and I put the basket over my head and waddle over to stand under the eaves on the side of the abbey. I lean against the wall to wait for a lull, happy to take a bit more time away from Sister Agnes.

  I sit on the dry ground next to the abbey wall. To my left is a row of windows. I hear voices and realize that these windows are right off the abbess’s study. There’s a soft, distant sound of spoons clinking against teacups. I imagine the abbess putting in her standard three cubes of sugar, the way Sister Bernadette told me she does.

  “So, it seems that all your paperwork is in order,” she says. “The final step is to tell us a little more about yourselves so we can be sure you’re the right fit.”

  Someone sets a cup down heavily, then murmurs an apology—a man’s deep voice. I am trying to remember his face, but all I see is that plaid shirt and possibly a beard. I wish I’d paid better attention.

  “I work at the mill in town,” he says. “It’s good, steady pay and I’ll probably get moved to foreman within a couple years.”

  He has a simple way of talking, but you can hear the kindness in his voice. He seems reluctant, or maybe unpracticed, talking about himself.

  His wife jumps in to finish his sentences. “He got employee of the year last year; he’s a good worker, super dependable. He’s going to go far.”

  The abbess can tell they’re nervous, and she doesn’t seem to be the kind of person to make others suffer. “I hope I’m not putting you on the spot,” she says. “It’s just important to us that this baby have a good home. The mother is not some stranger, she’s a member of our own family.”

  It’s the last part of this sentence that hits me. She’s a member of our own family?

  “The doctors have said we can never have kids,” the woman says. “We just want a family. We would do everything possible to make sure the baby had a good life.”

  “If it’s a boy I can teach him to hunt—” the man begins, but his wife cuts him off. “We’d love it if it’s a girl, as well. Of course, if she wanted to hunt, too…” She trails off, and I imagine them looking at each other wondering if hunting was the wrong topic. I doubt the abbess knows what to think, but it makes me smile.

  “We just really want a family,” the woman says again, a bit defeated, like she’s throwing out one last plea into the wind, hoping Mother Superior will catch it.

  “Well, there’s still a few months before the birth, so we’ll get back to you and let you know about your application. I’m sure the Lord knows what’s best for everyone,” says the abbess.

  They shake hands and I hear the abbess say a prayer, asking for God’s will and for them to trust in him, and then they leave her office. I stare out at the towels and the rain, wondering if I should go finish up before anyone sees me, but it doesn’t seem as important anymore.

  I forget sometimes that this pregnancy won’t last forever. It will be strange not to feel the baby moving, kicking, swimming around inside me—as much as I didn’t want it, it’s hard to remember what I was like before. When it’s over, I’ll have to get used to not knowing anything about my baby.

  It’s obvious now why all these couples keep visiting, but why can’t they just tell me? It feels exactly like Gran ignoring me for months and then one day putting me on a bus.

  Sister Josephine has entered the study. She and the abbess are talking so quietly, I have to lean closer to the window to hear.

  “I don’t know, they seem a bit young,” Mother Superior says.

  “Well, they are married, and certainly older than Ruth,” says Sister Josephine.

  “I just wonder…he did seem keen on hunting. What if it is a girl?”

  “I’m not sure that’s grounds for being a bad parent,” says Sister Josephine. “Things are changing, Mother; I think girls can hunt. No disrespect, but you’re from a few generations back.”

  The abbess laughs quietly. “You know, Sister Josephine, maybe I’m not the one who should be making this decision. What experience do I have besides Marguerite, and now Ruth? She wanted me to give Ruth those flowers, but did you notice she had them in a whiskey bottle? Heavens, if that’s something this generation thinks is appropriate, then I am truly outdated.”

  At these words I jump to my feet, or try to. I struggle and pull myself up along the wall. Then, as fast as my body will let me move, I run out to the parking area, just in time to see the lime-green car backing out.

  “Stop!”

  The man slams on the brakes, looking in his rearview mirror at me standing right behind his car. I am soaking wet, my dress clinging to my round belly, my hair sopping. I must look terrifying.

  But the man opens the door and walks around the car. “Are you all right?” he asks me in the kindest voice ever. It reminds me of George back in the Salvation Army, except that this man has steel-blue eyes and a ginger beard. The woman is out of the car now, too, still holding the glass bottle full of bluebells. I stare at the whiskey bottle and feel like I am five years old again; the smell of my parents’ house wraps around me as if someone has put a blanket over my wet, wet shoulders. Her hair looks so much like my mother’s, after my father twirled his bloody fingers in it and they danced in the kitchen.

  “What’s your favorite kind of venison?” I hear myself say to the man, who is looking at me the way I’m sure he looks at a deer in the forest. Hesitantly, no sudden movements, so it doesn’t bolt and run away. If he thinks the question is odd, he doesn’t show it.

  “I like the shoulder cut,” he says. “But it has to cook all day or it’s too tough.”

  I must look disappointed, because the woman touches his arm lightly and says, “I like backstrap. Everyone knows backstrap is the best cut.”

  She smiles—a genuine smile.

  “Are those flowers really for me?” I ask her.

  “They are,” she says. Her eyes take in my round stomach, bobbing like a buoy under my wet dress.

  She hands me the bottle and it feels heavier than it looks, as if it holds every wildflower bouquet I have missed since my mother left.

  I remember Dumpling’s voice saying, “Sometimes you just have to hold on to whatever you can,” and me saying to Hank, “You mean, like something to look forward to?”

  “Would you really love my baby?” I ask her.

  “With all my heart,” she says. “And you, for trusting me.”

  I stare at the wildflowers spilling out of the whiskey bottle vase, and I know that these are the people that should raise my baby.

  I reach inside my pocket for the other half of the red ribbon. I’ve cut it just like Dumpling told me to.

  “Will you give this to my baby?” I hold it out to the woman, who takes it gingerly, like it’s the most fragile, beautiful thing she’s ever held.

  I don’t know how long the nuns have been standi
ng outside watching us, their habits getting drenched in the rain. The abbess comes over then and really does place a blanket over my shoulders.

  “You don’t have to make any decisions,” she tells me.

  “No,” I say, “I do. It’s my life. It’s my baby. And I want to know that both of us have something good to look forward to.”

  Right then Sister Agnes surprises us by bursting into tears and fleeing back into the kitchen. Sister Josephine and Sister Bernadette look at me and shake their heads, but they, too, wipe their eyes with the corner of their wet habits. I stare at these women, who used to scare me in their long black robes, flitting around the abbey like bats.

  There’s Sister Bernadette, who smells of pistachios and always leaves a cup of tea by my bed; Sister Josephine, with her lead foot and the way she’s helped me understand Gran; even Sister Agnes, off in the kitchen now, because she has to be gruff or she wouldn’t know what to do with herself. I remember the abbess saying “She’s a member of our own family,” and I remember Selma’s letter—how I rolled my eyes at her words even as she knew I would. But once again, Selma was right. We don’t have to be blood to be family.

  Dumpling has been in a coma for weeks now, but she also has a punctured lung and a broken clavicle. Her father might have gotten to her sooner if I hadn’t said she was right behind us, but everyone tells me it’s not my fault. No, I think, it’s all Ruth’s fault. Ruth and her stupid blue note.

  I thought it while I watched them load Dumpling into the plane to be medevaced to Fairbanks; I thought it as we packed up fish camp to return home early; and I’m thinking it now as I bake a blueberry pie because Dumpling’s mother asked me to, before she left to go sit beside Dumpling’s hospital bed again. She wants me to take it over to the Lawrences’, and I wonder if she knows I would rather throw it in their gran’s face than give her a pie while my best friend lies silent in a coma. “Damn you straight to hell, Ruth Lawrence,” I whisper as I roll out the crust.

  It has ruined the smell of blueberries for me, probably forever. Because isn’t that how forever happens—instantly? One minute your best friend is right there, and then suddenly she’s not. I used to love the smell of sweet, hot blueberries signaling the end of summer. Just the right amount of Crisco flaking the crust, the bubbly berries seeping out onto the oven floor and smoking up the whole house. These berries are from last year’s haul on the top of Shotgun Ridge, from a sunny day after Dumpling and Bunny had come home from fish camp and we hiked up to the secret berry spot, up past the tree line where you could see to the end of everywhere. We were all sweating and covered in DEET, but it didn’t make any difference to the mosquitoes. We picked until our fingers were solid purple, and Bunny’s teeth and lips, too, because she always ate more than she put aside.

  It was a bumper crop and a perfect fall day, when everything smells ripe, like it’s just about to turn and it’s rushing to do so before winter. It’s the cry of fall: Hurry up and fill the buckets; hurry up, the fireweed is about to top off. Once it does, the snow is right around the corner and that’s it for another year. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  If the seasons bleed into each other like a watercolor painting, it means not enough fish and berries to last the winter, not enough wood chopped for the stove, not enough meat in the freezer. One year winter came so fast and so hard, the leaves on the birch trees didn’t even have time to turn yellow and fall off; they froze solid green on the branches. They clung there for months on skinny skeleton arms, the color so blindingly wrong it was creepy. Every year it’s a race between the seasons, and that year fall lost.

  And then it hits me—Dumpling lying in her hospital bed is just like fall. Wake up, Dumpling, wake up, wake up, it’s almost winter, hurry, hurry, hurry, I whisper to her in my head, praying that somehow she can hear me.

  Dumpling’s father comes in looking even older than he did when he left this morning to go sit by Dumpling’s bed with her mother. I know her condition is still the same or he wouldn’t look like he does. I pour him a cup of the brothers and he smiles at me, as if it takes all his strength.

  “Pie smells good,” he says. “Is that for Lily’s gran?”

  “Why do I have to take a pie to their gran?” I try not to sound angry. He smiles again, as if my question doesn’t surprise him in the least.

  “She’s an elder,” he says simply.

  “Yeah, but…” Dumpling’s dad does not have to yell or throw things the way my dad does to let me know when I’ve gone too far. The way he looks at me makes me want to crawl under the table.

  “There were a bunch of us who worked really hard to defend the rights of all Alaskans,” he tells me, and I’m not sure what that has to do with pie.

  “We didn’t want to become a state; we wanted to continue to have certain freedoms we’d always had. The right to fish and hunt on our own land; to protect our culture. You know, simple human rights, and it wasn’t just native—a lot of nonnative Alaskans stood right alongside us—all worried about what statehood would mean.”

  I squirm, thinking about my dad drinking at the bar and letting everyone else do all the heavy lifting.

  “I was supposed to be on that plane,” Dumpling’s dad is saying. “The one that went down in Canada and killed five of my good friends, including Ruth and Lily’s dad.”

  I look down at my purple fingers, stained with berry juice.

  “Their mother will never be okay again after losing him, and her gran is trying to raise them all on her own. Is a pie asking too much, Dora?”

  “Did you know about the note?” I ask him, trying to keep my voice as steady as possible, trying not to be a disappointment.

  “I’m the one who told Dumpling where Ruth’s mother is. I visit her from time to time—they hoped seeing a familiar face would jog a part of her memory.”

  He looks defeated.

  “It’s my fault, Dora. I shouldn’t have let any of you girls go there. Dumpling’s accident is all my fault.”

  He slumps in his seat. Adults never talk to us kids like this and I’m not sure how to respond, but I don’t believe it was his fault. Luckily the oven timer dings, and I can busy myself getting the pie out of the oven.

  —

  I knock on the Lawrences’ door, balancing the sticky, hot pie on an oven mitt. I hope desperately that Lily will answer, but that would make me a lucky person and that’s not how I would describe myself.

  I’ve never been up close to their gran before, and when the door opens I brace myself, expecting to see eyes sunk deep in their sockets and perhaps fangs instead of teeth, so I am surprised when she is nothing but an old woman in a faded flowered housecoat. Her wispy gray hair looks like a dust bunny stuck on her head. I could never throw a pie at someone who looks like she does.

  “Hello, Dora,” she says. “Won’t you come in?”

  The kitchen is totally bare, smelling of floor wax and Comet and not a hint of anyone my age or younger possibly living here. I’ve become so accustomed to Dumpling’s house, which is a bustle of activity, with piles of tanned animal skins everywhere waiting to be sewn into hats and mittens, and muddy footprints because who has time to take off their shoes when you just need to grab that book you forgot or one more stick of venison jerky on your way out the door? It smells like a place where people like each other, and the Lawrence house smells like it’s judging you the minute you walk inside. I make sure to slide out of my shoes before I step onto the worn, but still shiny, linoleum.

  Gran—I don’t know what else to call her—motions for me to place the pie on the counter. “That smells wonderful,” she says as she opens the refrigerator, pulling out a brown Tupperware pitcher. I am annoyed at the way she seemed to expect the pie.

  “Would you like some Tang?”

  But she is already pouring me a glass, even though I haven’t said anything.

  “Here; sit, sit,” she says, setting the glass down on the table, which is also polished to a shine and smells of Lemon Pledge. There are no st
acks of magazines, or unopened bills, or plates of half-eaten food. There’s not even one crumb. It’s unlike any table I’ve ever seen, and I am careful not to spill a drop of orange Tang on it.

  She pours herself some coffee and sits across from me.

  I take a gulp of what is normally a sickly sweet drink, but this just tastes like orange-flavored water. Either Gran is skimpy with the powder or Bunny is generous when she makes ours.

  “Did you know that Dumpling’s father was a very close friend of Ruth and Lily’s father?” she asks.

  I keep my eyes down. Why does everyone keep saying that? Who cares if their father worked for native rights and died in a plane crash? Lots of people die in plane crashes every single day around here.

  I do not need to sit here and listen to an old woman who smells like cleaning products talk about dead people. I need to go visit my friend Dumpling and rattle her bones until she wakes up. I push my chair back so hard, it makes a loud screeching sound on her perfect floor and I hope I’ve marked it up.

  Gran looks at me. “You seem angry, Dora.”

  “I seem angry?” I yell at her, before I can stop myself. “Do you know what Dumpling was doing in that village? Do you know why she was there? It’s all Ruth’s fault! Dumpling was trying to give Ruth’s mother this note.”

  I slam the blue note down on the table, making her coffee slosh over the rim of her cup. She doesn’t even seem to notice as she picks up the blue paper and reads the words that have played in a loop in my brain ever since the day Dumpling thrust the note into my hand. All it says is “I forgive you.”

  “And that stupid woman didn’t even know who Ruth was, so it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference anyway. Dumpling is in a coma for nothing!” I am out of breath, still shaking.

  “Sit down, Dora,” she says.

  But I don’t. I stay standing with my hands clenched. She cannot tell me what to do.

  “Okay,” she says, “but you should hear me out. If you want to blame someone, and apparently you do, you should blame me—and don’t worry, nobody will be risking their life to get a note like this to me, not anytime soon, anyway.”