Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  Frank is a big slow man with surprisingly dainty ways. He brings his own helpers, his sons and nephews and their friends.

  ‘What’s this?’ Ryan says, pointing to the desert rose on the windowsill. He is Frank’s eldest, home from university. As she explains he riffles through the sea glass in the butter box. While Lucy serves vegetable soup and grilled cheese sandwiches (no homemade white pudding and pickled beets and biscuits and a raspberry pie for the haymakers, like Annabel), she sees him measuring her against the stories he has heard. A woman from here, and not. A woman without a man.

  Frank likes to talk about the twins.

  ‘Argued every single minute of their lives. If John A said white, Alec said black. And if you saw them the next day it was the exact opposite.’

  Lucy puts cookies on the table, on the pink and white plate that Annabel used to bring out when the priest visited.

  ‘Good,’ Frank says with his mouth full.

  ‘It’s Annabel’s recipe,’ she says. From the worn Red Roses recipe book, the pages splattered with stains and faded scribbles. Use sour cream. Better with coconut. On the wall next to the table is a black and white photograph that Lucy has had framed. It’s of a young Annabel striking a pose on the front veranda of this house. Looking happy.

  ‘My father used to take Annabel to the dances in Brook Village,’ Frank says. The last time Lucy saw Hoppy he was all stooped up. It was hard to imagine him going to a dance. But Annabel she had seen step-dancing many times.

  ‘Oh, was he in love with her?’

  Ryan looks up. He has his mother’s arresting blue eyes. But Frank looks at his plate. ‘Don’t know about that,’ he says.

  Love not a word to be used in casual conversation.

  While she is away, the old house sulks. The smell when she first opens the door. Of solitude and despair, an ancient smell that predates Alec and John A, that feeds on winter, absence and neglect. Everything still, silent, frozen. The water turned off. She hopes that none of the pipes have frozen. Tomorrow she’ll call Dan Joseph to come prime the pump. Quickly, she pulls on the drafts of the Pioneer Maid, lifts the heavy lid, and burns a twist of newspaper to pre-warm the chimney. Just inside the door is the fish crate of dry kindling and newspaper, enough wood for three days. She learned this the hard way. Dragging herself from the woodshed that time. After three days she had to call Katie; she was too weak to drive herself to the hospital. Santana was angry: ‘Do I have to check on you like some old lady?’ And Lucy feels the guilt again, in the pit of her stomach. Santana would not have failed Annabel. She would have been all over it. Would have insisted on yearly checkups. Pencilled in the appointment on her calendar. Called her in the morning to remind her.

  ‘I didn’t know I had malaria. I thought it was the flu.’

  ‘Call me if you have the flu.’

  ‘You have enough on your plate, Santana. And it was a good lesson. I’ll always have wood inside the house now.’

  ‘I would have loved to come. You know that.’

  Your friend always, Santana signs every birthday and Christmas card. And Lucy knows she means it.

  During one of Lucy’s absences – it was the middle of summer and the grass in the yard so high her house looked abandoned (‘Still, that’s no excuse,’ Santana said) – someone had broken in, taken the carpet Mohammed had given her and a lamp that had been in Annabel’s grandmother’s house on Mount Young. They had even ripped out the kitchen cabinets, custom-built by Liam and Eric. Santana was outraged. At the thieves. At the Mounties, who were ‘next to useless.’ At what the world was coming to. She inspected the tire tracks in the driveway (it was a pickup, definitely a pickup) and nosed around until she found the bag of garbage that the thieves (‘the alleged thieves,’ Lucy said) had jettisoned to make room for the loot. In it were two envelopes with a man’s name and address on it.

  ‘Morons,’ Santana said. But it had not made Lucy feel better to know their identity, even if she got Annabel’s lamp back.

  In the warm season, the smells of the empty house are even more intense. The feint whiff of tomcat on the armchair in the living room, the tropical smell of the wooden shutters, the mould seeping in from the cellar. A mixture of mildew and mouse shit and creosote. Even in the summer, the interior remains cool.

  Returning from Pakistan one year. The first thing she sees upon opening the door is a candlestick on the floor: a djinn has skipped through her house, knocked down lamps and wine glasses, unravelled a roll of toilet paper in the upstairs hallway, pissed in the fruit bowl. The next day she wakes to sunny chirps in her bedroom. She spends the day looking for her, tears down a nest in her closet, finds others. But not the squirrel: she’s moved out.

  The itching began a few days later. Then the red bumps appeared on her legs and belly: the squirrels had infested the house with fleas.

  ‘Try diatomaceous earth,’ Liam says. ‘You can get it at the garden centre. You just sprinkle it on the floor, leave it there overnight, and then vacuum it up.’

  Liam and Santana have been together since high school. He had taken over his father’s lobster license (reluctantly; he had hoped to have a career in biology) just before he died of cancer.

  ‘But wear a mask when you use it,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to get it in your lungs. It has really sharp edges.’

  Lucy buys a bag of it at the Co-op. Wraps a scarf over her mouth while she sprinkles the white powder on all her floors. Goes camping in Meat Cove for the weekend.

  There’s always something going on with the house. The chimney leaks, the rain and snow feed lumpy growths along the upstairs ceiling and wall. They crack and bubble and ooze. It has to be replaced, Liam says, the walls torn, the bricks re-mortared. He shakes his head. ‘Expensive. But if you don’t do it, the whole place will rot.’ He touches the puffs and blisters of paint, the crack oozing pus: ‘It already is.’

  The earth swallowing up her home, wanting to grow trees again.

  A spring day, with the juicy new grass getting longer by the hour. Lucy keeps a token lawn around the house, mows a path to the old milk house, which she uses as a shed. The whine of the door as it opens. Dust and dried grass pirouetting in the shaft of sunlight. She imagines mice stopping in their tracks, squinting in the sudden brightness. She pulls out the lawnmower. A cardboard box falls from a stack behind it, breaks open. The belongings she has never unpacked. An hour later the box’s contents, and that of two more, make up three piles on the unmowed grass outside the door: Keep / Give away / Throw out. Instead of facilitating the task, the categories have made it more onerous, each object needing to be handled, evaluated, assessed. The memories coloured in. This red vase she had forgotten until she peeled away the crumpled pages of the Sudbury Star. Should she keep it? Yes: it was a gift from her mother. No: Wendy had probably bought it hungover from a night of partying on her last day in Puerto Vallarta. (Why else would she have thought it a suitable gift for an eleven-year-old girl?) Yes: the vase is pretty. Better than the jam jars she uses now for her bouquets of wildflowers.

  After a while she stands, stretches her arms over her head. Sighs. A lumpy garbage bag calls out to her. She lifts it. Too light for clothing or bedding. And then she remembers. Coco. Monkey-Bear. Slippy.

  She plucks at the tight knot closing the bag until she sees white fluff pouring out of the hole in the back. She stretches the opening. Blue’s deflated belly. The spill of his white entrails. When she lifts him out she recoils: a snake has left its skin inside Blue’s empty hindquarters.

  The apartment on Calvin? On Lynch?

  Lucy S. MacLeod, 223 Lynch Street, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, North America, The World.

  She is sitting on the hallway floor when Brenda walks in, without knocking on the door. Just like her uncle Dave, earlier. (Maybe you’re not supposed to knock on moving day.) Brenda’s gruff smoker’s voice. (All Wendy’s friends are smokers.)

>   ‘Hi Lucy! What’cha doin’?’

  Lucy shrugs. She is putting Blue in a garbage bag with the rest of her teddies, has just finished kissing him, whispering that he will get a special treat when they get to the new place.

  ‘Where’s your mom?’

  ‘She’s gone to get boxes,’ her uncle Dave answers from the doorway to the living room. He is holding a Tim Hortons cup. Behind him, the sound of the toilet flushing.

  ‘Did she run out of boxes already?’

  ‘Are you kidding? She hasn’t even started packing.’ He opens the cupboard door behind him to demonstrate. An empty plastic container falls from one of the crammed shelves.

  ‘I thought we were helping her move, not pack. Did she get a truck?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Fuck off. Well. I’m only staying ’til noon.’

  ‘And it’s the last time I’m helping her move.’

  But they were both wrong. As soon as Wendy walked in the door she cranked up the stereo (for the annoying neighbours, always complaining about the noise). When Cat People came on she joined in, at the top of her lungs. Dave played ‘Jet Airliner’ twice in a row and everyone started dancing when ‘Billie Jean’ came on. That night Wendy ordered pizzas and pulled out the wine (red for Dave, white for Brenda, the corkscrew was in her purse) and when Dave went to the corner store for cigarettes he brought back a root beer for Lucy. They sat on the floor in the living room among the boxes and it was a party. Lucy had to go to sleep with her clothes on because Wendy didn’t know where the pyjamas were. But the teddies were all there. Dave and Wendy and Brenda, making a game of it, had pulled them out of the garbage bags and set them up in a circle on the floor around her mattress.

  Lucy tumbles all the stuffed animals on the grass. Tufts of white stuffing float up. Monkey-Bear, she notes with surprise, is neither monkey nor bear. His beige fur smells of urine. She opens a box: a jar of sand from the beach at Tea Hill. The Barbie she had stolen at a sleepover. Her lunchbox from kindergarten, in which she had kept Annabel’s letters.

  When are you coming? Your grandfather’s lonesome. We had the elections.

  There was an awful wind last week and one of the big poplars fell right beside the house.

  Donalda won three hundred dollars at Bingo.

  You should see what happened to Pepper last Saturday. I called him in before I went to bed but he never came in. The next morning he wasn’t at the door. I went outside to call him but no Pepper. It’s only when we got in the truck to go to church that we found him. He had spent the whole night in the truck, poor Pepper.

  Eric put in three new windows downstairs. One in the kitchen one in the pantry and one in the parlour. Wait till you see them.

  We had a silver thaw last night. Joey Mailbox died. He was only 73.

  The power was out when we got up this morning. They said it would be back by noon but it’s three o’clock and it’s still out. So I made Boston Brown Bread on the stove like my mother used to make.

  Malcolm MacPhee’s barn burned down. He lost all his hay and his two tractors. They had a variety concert for him and Santana played the piano. She’s after getting good.

  Alec fell on the ice and broke his arm. Your grandfather misses you.

  She remembers the comfort of reading them as a child. Each letter would take her directly to the big shiny kitchen in the white farmhouse. The smell of wood smoke and baking and boiled potatoes and boiled tea; of hot soapy dishwater and Mister Clean and fabric steaming on the ironing board. The faint underlay of mothballs. And barn. Of lunch at noon and supper at five o’clock sharp. Of clean, line-dried sheets on her bed every Monday night. Of everything in its place, including Annabel. Because no matter how long Lucy is gone, Annabel is always there when she returns. Ironing tea towels. Wiping down the counter. Rolling pie dough. Or just sitting in her rocking chair, listening to The Ceilidh.

  That’s how Ryan finds Lucy that day, driving into the yard on a pretend errand: sitting cross-legged in the long green grass among the cocoa, pink, and yellow stuffed animals, a letter in her hand.

  The skin on Ryan’s shoulders is the colour of milk. On his arms, last summer’s tan has mellowed to honey.

  ‘I found some of my old journals, too,’ Lucy says. I think I’ll put them in the stove the next time I start a fire.’

  ‘That sounds dramatic,’ he says.

  ‘Did you ever keep a journal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about poetry? Did you ever write poetry?’

  ‘Yes, I confess.’ The son of the prosaic Katie and Frank.

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘I started in grade eight. I loved English, believe it or not.’

  ‘Why is that hard to believe?’

  ‘None of my friends did.’

  ‘Did you ever show them to anyone? The poems?’

  ‘To my teachers. And to my girlfriend in grade twelve. I gave her a poem I wrote about her. Bad move. She showed it to all her friends.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Sarah Campbell. MacIsaac now.’

  ‘Sarah at the funeral home?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

  ‘I met her when Annabel died.’

  ‘—’

  ‘I’d like to read one of your poems.’

  ‘You’re out of luck. I threw them all away. I wasn’t interested in them so I didn’t think anyone else would be.’

  ‘That’s how I feel about my journals.’

  * * *

  Ryan is paying off his student loan by working at Fort McMurray. Something environmental he says. But later he admits that it’s just the job title. It has nothing to do with helping the environment.

  ‘You studied economics, right?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Philosophy and economics.’

  ‘Philosophy, wow.’

  ‘What did you study?’ Ryan said.

  ‘Psychology.’

  ‘So here we are, with our fancy-shmancy liberal arts degrees.’

  ‘Yes. Here we are.’

  FOUR THIEVES’ OIL

  Lucy is flying over a burned land. Beige and brown and ochre, spattered with the dried-blood of boulders, the stark black of their precise shadows, the rust of gorse on parched hillsides. The cruel bones of thorn trees.

  She knows that when she steps off the plane the air will be dry as a rock, the sky white and hot. That up close the scorched ground will be littered with ashy nuggets of mud. And also, that a UN worker will meet her. Someone who knows not to ask questions. But not anyone in the unit. Few of them know apart from Mohammed.

  On the books she’s a contract worker, a drought specialist. A purveyor of hope, Mohammed says. Most ex-pats are inquisitive. One reason to avoid the big hotels, the poolside bars full of drunk journalists and other sketchy characters. If she’s evasive they think she’s with Big Water or the IMF. The best way to blow them off is to say that she’s working on a book. Few people want to know what she’s writing. But if pressed, she says, ‘Textbooks. Very boring.’ And she hopes that they don’t Google her. (Although Mohammed says a techie has taken care of that.) Her aim is to be as bland and unexciting as the landscape. As it first appears, that is. Later its beauty will break her heart.

  Upon her arrival the airports always appear dingy and old, unsophisticated beside the wide concourses she last traversed, with their floor to ceiling windows, their polished granite and steel. But when the time comes to leave again – after weeks of seeing only rusty corrugated metal roofs, baked mud walls, dust and destitution and sometimes trash, she will marvel at how big and clean and bright the airport now appears, how different from her first impression.

  Serge Duchesne is the man who meets her today. He has spiky grey hair, speaks French with an accent she can’t identify. Belgian?

  He sits in the front beside
the driver.

  ‘Pas trop fatiguée?’ he says.

  ‘Oui. Très fatiguée.’ She’s been up for twenty-four hours – all she wants to do is sleep. But it’s only midday here so she’ll try to hold off until nightfall. She’s found it helps with jetlag. Outside the taxi it’s brown and dusty and the people are grey. It’s Ramadan, and today most of them have been fasting since a precise moment before dawn, when a white thread can be distinguished from a black one out of doors. She sees the many stalls of Ramadan sweet sellers, a café with the windows covered in brown paper. Where one can cheat unseen. The car stops in front of a small one-storey house embedded in the thick walls of the old quarter.

  She has a rider in her contcract. Just like lady Gaga when she’s on tour, Egedeo teases. He is Mohammed’s assistant. Her rider specifies an apartment or a small house, never a hotel. A fan is okay but not air-conditioning. She learned that the hard way in Burkina Faso.

  A woman unlocks the ancient wooden door of the house. The first thing Lucy sees is a case of bottled water on the kitchen counter. Kind of them, she thinks, but she always takes a UV sterilizer with her so that she can drink public water. In the bedroom she opens and closes the wooden shutters at the window. Notes that there is no mosquito net over the bed. Not necessary, the woman tells her, showing her the screens in the windows. But later Lucy will find the remains of a mosquito coil, and a bottle of louse killer on a shelf.

  ‘Is there a hamam nearby?’ she asks. The woman tells her it’s two streets away, near the entrance to the souk, and that it is exclusively for women.