Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  In the parking lot Wendy tells her that she and Karl are going to the square dance in West Mabou. In her car, which means that the rest of them have to go home in Karl’s Subaru. Jenny is the DD but Eric says, ‘It’s a standard, I’ll drive’ because Jenny hates standards. ‘No,’ she says. She looks mad. Maybe because Eric has been drinking and she has to drive. Or maybe because she’s still upset about the baby.

  * * *

  Earlier that month. Santana had come over while Lucy was helping Annabel make chow. Lucy was cutting up green tomatoes at the table and Annabel was across from her, chopping onions. The onions were strong and their eyes were crying. Santana would tell them later that it really threw her to see them both crying. How could they know? she thought. She’d just found out herself when Eric had come home from the hospital.

  Jenny had lost the baby.

  Annabel’s arms dropped to her sides. ‘Oh no …,’ she said, and ‘I’m so sorry to hear that’ and ‘Poor Jenny.’ She didn’t hug Santana – she was old-school like that – but Lucy did and Santana cried and cried. She had gotten used to the idea of a baby; a girl, she was convinced. (But it had been a boy.) Lucy didn’t see Jenny for almost a week after that. She didn’t know what she’d say to her when she did. What were you supposed to say? When she finally did they hugged, and Lucy could feel Jenny’s stomach against her; it was still big but it looked slack, like an empty fleshy bag, and it was distasteful to her, like everything about childbirth.

  It took Santana a long time to get over it. She just wanted to talk about it all the time and Lucy let her, she didn’t mind, but after a while she noticed that Annabel didn’t like it. As if it wasn’t a suitable subject for girls their age. As if they would get ‘ideas’ and want to have babies themselves. She wasn’t sure that’s what Annabel thought but this was the vibe she was getting. Maybe it had something to do with Jackson. They had exchanged letters for a while. He was a poor writer, could not spell at all, but this she found endearing. He was working with his dad, a landscaper, for the summer. They were crazy-busy he said, he had a humongous sunburn. Then one night he called on the phone. She was in her bedroom and Curly called from the bottom of the stairs but she couldn’t hear him because she had her earphones on so he had to come up and knock on her door.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ he said. Should she take the call in the kitchen, where Curly was eating a bowl of cornflakes, or in the parlour, where Annabel was watching a rerun of an Anne Murray special? She opted for the kitchen but it was awkward with Curly there. Jackson’s voice had seemed different, higher than she remembered it, a little whiny. He didn’t have anything to say. And neither did she. The next day she realized she was tired of the mix tape, there were way too many Slayer songs, she had never liked Slayer, and just like that it was over.

  Lucy and Santana squeeze into the bucket seat. Lucy feels Santana’s hipbone against hers as she extends the seatbelt around both their waists.

  ‘Girls in the front and party in the back!’ Eric says, and Lucy notices that she is the only one who laughs. When he says, ‘Pity me, boys, always surrounded by women,’ no one answers. ‘Women, women everywhere,’ he says. And then he is silent.

  The window beside Lucy is down and she can feel the warm wind, hear the gravel spitting under the tires. A dog barking. Then, as Jenny turns onto the highway, the urgent beep of an alarm. ‘Are you all wearing your seatbelts?’ Jenny says. A red warning light flashes on the dashboard. Santana reads the message: the fuel tank is empty.

  ‘Just what we need!’ Jenny says. As if things weren’t bad enough already.

  ‘The garage might be open in Mabou,’ Santana says.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Jenny says. She slows down to conserve what little gasoline there is in the tank. In Mabou the lights are off at the garage and the sign in the window says Closed.

  Lucy’s heart is beating fast. Will the Subaru just stop in the middle of the road? Will Jenny have time to pull over? Will she know what to do, given that she hates standards?

  How will they get home?

  Somehow the car makes it to town. None of the garages are open there but at least they’re close to home now. Lucy could call Curly, he’d come get them. They could even siphon a little gas from Denise’s car, couldn’t they? But no, they’d probably walk home before asking Denise for gas.

  She and the boys live in one of the company duplexes. Her side of the house is forest green with white trim. The other side is a slumping, peeling blue. ‘Thanks,’ Jared says as he opens the car door.

  ‘Say hi to your mom,’ Jenny says.

  ‘Yep,’ Reuel says. ‘Thanks for the ride.’

  Lucy feels sorry for them. Karl taking off with Wendy and then sending them home in a car with no gas. She feels she’s partly to blame for the situation.

  Because Wendy is hers.

  TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONE

  Proudfoot Motors had called that morning to say that the PTO shaft was in. Annabel gave Curly the message when he came in at one-thirty. He hadn’t eaten lunch yet and it was late in the day to drive that far – it was dark by five this time of year – but he said he’d waste the whole day if he went tomorrow, and as he had some other business to take care of in Stellarton he’d kill two birds with one stone. He swallowed a baloney sandwich with half a cup of tea and took off.

  There had been a lot of rain all week and the river was high. Annabel could hear it when she let the cat in after supper. She stepped out, stuck out her hand: a fine drizzle was falling. It was so mild, however – ‘unseasonably warm’ the weatherman had said on Live at Five – that there was no danger of it turning to black ice on the road. One less worry.

  She had worried about Curly all her life, it seemed. Lately, however, her fears were less about his physical safety than about his behaviour. She was hearing things. Not directly, but through Donalda. ‘Just thought you’d want to know,’ she’d say. Curly’s truck was often seen, minus its driver, at the bluff at the end of the beach road. Or parked on the side of the road somewhere. Some people had stopped to see if there was anything wrong. Curly said he was looking at an eagle nest, pointed it out to them. Or he had just seen a moose. Another time he was ‘just sitting there, listening to the radio; I swear I could smell dope.’ Donalda suspected Alzheimer’s.

  ‘His memory’s perfect,’ Annabel said with finality. She felt disloyal talking about her husband like this. It wasn’t right. But after Donalda was gone she thought about it some more. She had noticed changes in her husband. For one thing, Curly didn’t talk about work with her anymore. He had always shared the details of his day: where he had been, how much he had made on a deal, who had done or said what. But on most days now he left the house without saying where he was going and came home with no story to tell. And he often seemed distracted, spent a lot of time just sitting and thinking. He didn’t even pace the floor anymore. It crossed her mind once that maybe it was another woman. But she dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Curly had changed but he was still Curly. The few times she had asked him if anything was bothering him he had looked surprised. But not unpleased. As if he was happy she was keeping tabs on him. But no, he said, he was ‘right as rain.’ Funny he should use that expression, she thought, recalling the rainy night he was struck by lightning. If lightning could make a man’s hair go straight, it could probably do something to his mind. She still blamed herself for not calling an ambulance.

  Annabel took the sewing machine out after supper. She wanted to mend a rip in Curly’s new work pants. No one was harder on his clothes than Curly. After she was done she decided to pull out her bag of used dishcloths. She collected them until she had enough to sew together in pairs. They made great rags then. After that she put away the sewing machine and swept up a little. One thing about sewing it made a lot of dust. Then she boiled water for tea and sat in front of the TV. It was eight o’clock. Curly should be home anytime.

  Nine o’clock w
ent by. Then ten. Annabel never called anyone after nine o’clock. But she knew that Donalda would still be up.

  ‘If it was an accident you would have heard about it,’ Donalda said. ‘No news is good news.’

  ‘Maybe he just ran out of gas.’

  ‘Maybe the truck broke down and the garages are all closed and he had to get a motel room: he doesn’t want to call and wake you up. And you know Curly, he wouldn’t call collect.’ (Nor would he get a motel room, Annabel thought. He’d sleep in the truck.)

  ‘Did you know that ninety percent of the things we worry about never happen? I heard it on Oprah the other day. He’s probably on his way home right now, just wait: he’ll turn into the driveway any minute. Imagine if everybody called the Mounties when their husband was late.’

  LITTLE ROSEWOOD CASKET

  J.C. Giles heard the tune on his way to work. He slowed down a little so he could pay attention to it. Not that he had been driving very fast. He was that kind of guy, slow and steady. He processed employment insurance claims for Human Resources Development Canada. In the summer he took every second Friday off (as vacation or, the odd time, as sick leave) to travel with his band. He was a banjo player and singer in a bluegrass band. It was his passion.

  The tune was good, and popular with audiences, but for some reason the band had stopped playing it. He made a mental note of putting it back on one of the set lists.

  That’s when he saw something red in the ravine.

  It was the tail of a pickup truck. Clambering down the bank he saw that the front end was submerged. And that there was a man inside. He was upside down, his legs sticking up and his head in the foot well on the passenger side. J.C. tried to open the doors but he couldn’t; they were jammed in the earth. He banged on the window – ‘Wake up, buddy! Hey buddy, you all right?’ – until his knuckles were sore. Finally, he sucked his hiking boots out of the muck and, not even waiting to get back to his SUV, he pulled out his phone to call 911.

  The accident was on the radio news for the rest of the day. Each time J.C. hoped to hear something about the man. But the newscast was always the same: foul play was not suspected, an autopsy would be conducted and the victim’s name would not be released until his relatives had been contacted.

  J.C. couldn’t stop thinking about him. He kept see-ing the man’s boots, his legs flopping over the seat, his baseball cap floating in the murky water in the foot well. He felt connected to him somehow: hadn’t he been the one to find him? The first person in the whole world to know that his life had ended? So he was relieved when he finally heard the dead man’s name: John Roderick MacLeod, age seventy-one. Nothing was said about the cause of death, however. Had he fallen asleep or been drunk? Suffered a heart attack or stroke? Lost control of the vehicle somehow? J.C. wanted to know. There was nothing much in the obituary when it came out in next day’s Herald. J.C. read and reread it. Then he cut it out and put it in an envelope in his desk at work.

  After that, whenever the band played ‘Little Rosewood Casket,’ J.C. would tell the audience about the old guy he had found dead one morning while driving to work.

  SGUDAL

  Annabel had long wanted a garbage box at the end of her driveway. Not an old freezer or a cut-open oil tank as some people had, with ‘Garbage’ (or Sgudal) painted on. No, she wanted a proper one, made of wooden boards and with a hinged cover. So that as soon as she had a full bag she could just walk to the road, open the cover, and plop it in. Instead of stowing it in the barn where it smelled and attracted rats, and carting it to the road on garbage day where it had to be covered with a blanket so the crows couldn’t get at it. She brought it up to Curly at least once a year. But he always resisted the idea. One year she even suggested it as a birthday present for herself.

  ‘I’m not getting you a garbage box for your birthday,’ Curly said. ‘I’d never hear the end of that.’

  ‘Well then I’m going to ask Eric to build me one,’ she said. ‘I have my own money now.’ (She meant the old age pension.) But she never did. She wanted Curly to see the necessity. She wanted him to buy it.

  Now that Curly was gone she had to give up on luxuries like wooden garbage boxes. A can would have to do. She remembered the metal can Curly used to keep feed in the barn. What had happened to it, anyway?

  John A was the one who had cleared out the barn after Curly died. He sold the remaining horses (Curly had already sold all the beef cattle), cleaned the stalls and put away the machinery. The loft was full of that summer’s hay and John A said he would sell it but he never did. And instead of taking the feed like she told him to, or giving it to Eric and Jenny, he had scattered it on the field back of the barn. That was John A for you. He had always been wasteful. The crows had soon found the oats.

  So there she was, all alone for the first time in her life, her husband dead, and she’d look outside at November, already the worst month of the year, and all she could see were those crows.

  Opening the barn door on this day it wasn’t crows she was thinking of but rats. Curly had once told her about walking into a barn one night and seeing an entire wall covered with rats, their little eyes blinking with surprise in the sudden light. Her fear of rats had seared the image in her brain and it sometimes came to her when she opened the barn door. She found the can right away. It was surprisingly heavy. Maybe there was still feed inside. She pulled off the lid and saw, in the half-light of a dangling bulb, half a dozen Co-op bags, each closed with a knot. They didn’t smell so it wasn’t garbage. She lifted one. It was heavy and lumpy. She carried it to the school-bus bench Curly had set up against the sunny side of the barn. He used to sit there on nice days when he was fixing something. She undid the knot and looked in. It was full of sea glass. She tumbled them out on the bench and they sparkled in the sun, blue and white and green against the faded brown leatherette. Lucy used to bring them home from the beach by the pocketful. Annabel would find them here and there. On the windowsill in her bedroom. Or under the bed after she went back to her mother, alongside a hair barrette and a dustball. She always threw them out. Was that why Lucy had hidden them?

  ‘I found your glass collection,’ she said the next time Lucy called.

  ‘I didn’t know I had one.’

  ‘Remember that old glass you used to bring home from the beach?’

  ‘You always threw them out.’

  ‘After you were gone. It made me too lonesome to see them.’

  ‘You threw everything out.’

  ‘Not everything.’

  ‘What about the book I wrote in grade six?’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Well, someone did. I put it on the shelf in the closet and when I came back the next summer it was gone. I spent all summer writing that book …’

  Annabel sighed. ‘So what do you want me to do with them?’

  ‘Keep them until I come home.’

  ‘They’re not mine,’ Lucy says. They are in front of the barn, where Annabel has brought out one of the bags.

  ‘Well, I didn’t put them there,’ Annabel says.

  ‘It must be Grampie then.’

  A grown man collecting glass. That’s what she would have said, and he knew it. A grown man walking on the beach. Like Fraser Campbell, who liked to look at little girls in their bathing suits. No. Curly had not been one of those. Of that she was sure.

  It had been one thing after another after the lightning. She watched out for them like some women did for liquor bottles or evidence of womanizing. Like others did for signs of dementia in a parent or spouse. (Donalda’s mother, sitting at the table all morning long, tearing the newspaper into little pieces.) Curly had become another man after the lightning. She had not been able to follow him. Had not wished to. She had married him when he was Curly (yes, yes, it was supposed to be in sickness and in health …). She hadn’t signed up for this go-ahead.

  But t
hese pieces of glass and pottery, this was harmless enough. It made her sad to think he had not been able to tell her about them. She riffled through the pieces. An oval of pale yellow caught her eye. It was translucent except for a darker stain at the centre. Like a heart. She closed her hand over it and pressed it to her bosom.

  THE EYES OF MURDERERS

  ‘How much is he paying you?’ Wendy says, tipping the bottle up to her mouth. A little beer dribbles onto her chin. She wipes it off and sets the bottle beside the three empties on the floor of the verandah. They are at the Pink Villa. Wendy and Andrea have been here for two weeks. Lucy flew in two days ago. It’s March break.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Lucy.’ Her hand still on the bottle. ‘You’re not doing this for nothing, I hope.’

  Lucy looks at the fingernails of her left hand.

  ‘That is really stupid,’ Wendy says.

  She had met him in Montréal. She had a job there for the summer, a student exchange between Ontario and Québec. As it was career-related, and she was studying psychology, her placement was with Les services correctionnels.

  She had imagined weighty prison doors clanging shut behind her, the heart-rending stories of inmates, the eyes of murderers. But she would spend the summer sitting on the floor of a file vault filing a two-year backlog of inmates’ leave slips. Jacques Lamoureux, in for holding up a bank on Sainte Catherine, out for chemotherapy. Mario Tremblay, in for selling coke, out on a day pass for his father’s funeral. Reading the files was the only respite from the tedium.

  She had arrived in Montréal a few days early and stayed at a hostel while she looked around for a sublet. The second day it had begun to rain. The hostel closed its doors between nine and four and she had spent those hours running from museum to library to coffee shop. At three fifty-five she rang the doorbell at the hostel. A slight young man came to the door. Observing her wet hair and face he said, ‘Venez, je vous prépare un café pour vous réchauffer.’ He spoke the standard French she had learned in school, not the street French of Sudbury and Montréal, and she found it comforting, a song she knew by heart.