This, in its original and much shorter incarnation, was originally written for the same Story Club challenge as "Fan Club."
Again, two of the required elements: name a character after a place on Vancouver Island, and in some way include all the song titles (directly or indirectly) from U2's Joshua Tree album.
This effort grew into a longer, fully fleshed out story during a fiction class taken with Myriam Chancy at SFU.
*
It seemed to her that the leaves of the solitary aspen on the hillside were quivering more than usual. The faintest whiff of air would set them off. Tonight’s murmuring winds had sent them into a frenzied dance under the moonlit sky.
It didn’t feel like spring yet, Cedar thought. The air held none of the soft promise of April. The wind carried none of the damp, peaty odour of the reawakening earth as it emerged from its winter slumber.
Besides, it was just too bloody cold.
Cedar felt the chill breeze sting her cheeks and pulled the zipper of her fleece up around her chin as she settled cross-legged on the ground to wait for David. She snuggled her back against the cold stone, seeking respite from the winds in the shelter of its weathered grey solidity.
She loved the cemetery. Had ever since she’d arrived in Red Hill. This overgrown yard, with its haphazard rows of stones and crosses, had fast become her place of peace.
Here, she could immerse herself in a life beyond her own. Here, she could leave behind her cares. The leak in the trailer roof. The judder in the steering of the old VW van. The pile of bills accumulating on the table.
Here she could simply be, in a way she couldn’t with anyone.
Except for David.
He didn’t always come. He wasn’t predictable. But something about the clear sky, with its delicate, gleaming sliver of moon, gave Cedar hope that he’d come tonight.
He always found her here, at the Olsen family plot. He seemed to understand Cedar’s bond with Fanny.
Cedar knew, from the inscription on the grey stone at her back, that Fanny had lived to be eighty-four. But, in Cedar’s thoughts and conversations with the other woman, they were always the same age. Twenty-four. It was the age Fanny had been when little Benjamin was born. The age she had still been, three months later, when he died.
His tiny stone stood beside his mother’s, a tribute to her lasting love.
Beloved son.
Cedar half-turned to read the words she’d seen so often. She traced the letters with her finger, feeling the indentations of the cold stone beneath her skin. She felt her heart tug for the young mother who’d never seen her child walk. Who’d never heard him call her name or run with him on the hillside. Who’d had to grieve for a life unlived.
But at least she’d had those three months.
Cedar pushed the thought away as a barely seen movement made her turn into the night.
“Mama! Mama!”
The tiny voice made Cedar’s heart leap as she reached out to greet David, feeling a pang at the realization that he was fast becoming more boy than toddler.
His legs – were they really so long? – churned as he ran to her and grabbed playfully at her hair. Loosed from its usual braid, it fell in a cascade over her shoulders, the light brown gleaming almost silver in the moonlight.
She felt a catch in her throat at the sight of him. The large dark eyes so like his father’s. The open smile and easy laughter so like Cedar’s own.
Or like she used to be. Laughter didn’t come as easily these days. Except here, when David came.
“Don’t be sad, Mama.”
A worried frown puckered the face that gazed with earnest solemnity into her own. A small hand touched her cheek, and she smiled.
“Never, when you’re here,” she assured him.
His grin returned as quickly as it had vanished.
“Catch me, Mama!”
Cedar found herself wondering if David was coming less often than he used to. If he was a little less happy to see her. A little more eager to leave. But she pushed the thought away and gave chase, darting merrily around the gravestones in a pattern of ever-widening circles, following his clear laughter as he evaded her grasp time and again.
Until she lost sight of him altogether.
Her eyes scanned the graveyard, hoping for a sign that he was out there. Listening. Hiding. Ready to jump out from behind a stone with his silvery laugh, extending his arms for one of his fierce, clinging hugs.
Nothing stirred.
“David! David!”
She heard the fear in her own voice and knew, even as she called, that there would be no answer from the silent night.
Cedar had to will herself not to run into the darkness calling his name.
It wouldn’t bring him back. It never did.
She turned slowly from the stones and walked to the edge of the graveyard, to the hillside of red columbine that had given this once-thriving mining town its name.
It was here she came each night to gather the flowers for Fanny. Somehow, Cedar knew they had been Fanny’s favourite.
Cedar, gathering the columbine, reflected that Gran would never have expected her to end up here. She’d never really believed Cedar would leave – not even on that day when Cedar went home to tell them.
Cedar had made Sam stay behind. Not that he’d fought her all that hard, she reflected, then dismissed the thought as disloyal. It wasn’t Sam’s fault her family was – well, the way it was.
She could still see the look on the old woman’s face when Cedar had broken the news.
She faced Gran across the stiff, formal sitting room, where even the sunshine through the large bay window couldn’t lighten the dark and oppressive atmosphere.
“I suppose you expect me to pay for the wedding?” was all Gran said.
But her lips tightened into a thin line that made her disapproval clear.
Cedar tilted her chin up, the thought of Sam and their child giving her the courage to break what would, for Gran, be the worst of the news.
“There isn’t going to be a wedding.”
Cedar could hear the quiver in her own voice. She had to steel herself not to give in, not to beg for forgiveness.
“We aren’t getting married,” she went on, relieved to hear her voice sounding stronger. It was the right decision. Cedar knew that.
The old woman’s eyebrows lifted a fraction, but otherwise she made no response.
“We’re going to move to Red Hill. Sam’s from there, you know.”
Cedar knew her voice was speeding up, tightening, rising in pitch as it always did when she was forced to face Gran down. But she couldn’t stop herself.
“Sam’s friend runs the pub there. He can get him a job. Bartending, you know. For now. I mean, then …”
Cedar heard her voice trail off into the silence of the two women facing her. She had expected it from Gran. But Mom – why wasn’t Mom speaking?
Cedar clasped her hands together as she turned to face her mother.
The mild brown eyes held an expression Cedar had never seen. Sadness, Cedar thought, combined with something hard. Bitter.
“Don’t do this.”
Her mother’s voice was so nearly inaudible that Cedar had to strain to hear.
“Don’t use him to get back at your family,” the soft voice went on. “Don’t throw your life away for nothing.”
“Nothing?” Cedar, trying for a firm tone, had to settle for strident instead. “It’s not nothing, Mom. It’s a baby. My baby. Mine and Sam’s.”
Her mother’s eyes didn’t change.
“And love, Cedar?” she asked in the same soft tone. “Do you love him?”
Of course I do, Cedar was about to protest hotly. But when she opened her mouth, all that came out was a strangled sound somewhere between a grunt and a gulp.
Stooping to collect some low-lying blossoms, Cedar could still hear the old woman’s tone of disdain when at last she deigned to speak again. Ignoring, as she always did, any conversation contributed by Cedar’s mother.
“Red Hill? Have you forgotten, my dear Rose, that you are a Wakefield?”
Gran always called Cedar by her middle name, refusing to vocalize the name bestowed by Cedar’s mother. Mom hadn’t fought about it. That much Cedar knew, even without Mom telling her. Cedar knew that Mom had just smiled, in her gentle way, and explained that her daughter was not a Catherine. Nor a Victoria. Nor any of the other approved names that had followed the Wakefield women through the generations. She was a Cedar. And that was that.
It had been the shy woman’s one act of rebellion against the mother-in-law who ruled her kingdom with Elizabethan certainty and Victorian imperiousness.
Cedar had loved her mother for that one silly, defiant gesture. As she had loved her for everything. Her mother’s soft smile had always saved Cedar from the worst of Gran’s stings. Gran had never allowed them to forget her magnanimity in taking in the young mother and her newborn child after the child’s father drove off one night to the grocery store and never came back.
Gran never said his name. Neither did Mom.
Even as a child, though, Cedar knew his departure was her fault. At least in the eyes of Gran, who’d never warmed to the young girl who carried the Wakefield name.
So Cedar hadn’t cared a whit when the old tyrant disapproved of Sam.
“But, my dear, he looks like a myrmidon!” Gran had said in her usual scandalized stage whisper, with the clipped elocution and overwrought vocabulary that always made Cedar giggle to herself. One clearly couldn’t be a true Wakefield, she often thought mockingly, unless one spoke as though one had consumed the entire unabridged Oxford English Dictionary for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Cedar had refused to be insulted. Instead she’d just grinned, admitting there was something of the hired ruffian about Sam. Even if Gran had been able to get past Sam’s brown skin, she’d never have accepted the unkempt appearance: the dark stubble that shaded his cheeks; the long black hair left to fall in an uncontrolled tangle.
What irked Gran even more, Cedar knew, was Sam’s refusal to be impressed by the trappings of the Wakefield name: the stately Victorian home in Oak Bay, the gleaming Waterford crystal, the Spode china passed through the generations.
Sam never cared. And he wasn’t afraid to dismiss Gran’s dinners as crap, remarking he’d rather have chicken wings and a beer than paté and champagne.
Even now, in the cold, empty graveyard, Cedar could still laugh at the expression on Gran’s face when Sam dared to question the Wakefield traditions.
But she felt the chill wind bite her cheeks again when she remembered the rest of that conversation with her mother.
Cedar had finally said, feebly, that she did love Sam. She did.
Mom’s eyes hadn’t changed.
She’d warned Cedar that Sam wouldn’t stay. That when it got tough he’d vanish as if he’d never been there at all.
Cedar had said nothing. She had pushed away her hurt and followed Sam to Red Hill, trying to capture some of his enthusiasm about the small town where he’d grown up.
“You’ll love it, Cedar,” he promised with an exuberance Cedar had seldom seen him show. “In the city, no one cares. Out there, they have time for you.”
To her own surprise, Cedar soon found life in Red Hill preferable to the faceless anonymity of the city. Sam often complained of the ceaseless din of the pub, but Cedar came to enjoy it after she took a part-time job clearing tables. She gathered glasses and wiped soft rags across the scratched wood while she listened to snatches of conversation and marvelled at the snippets of lives that would have appalled Gran.
Ed and Harry, in their matching baseball caps, who came in without fail for their lunchtime pints and talked about the women who had left them years ago. Ed was bitter. Harry wasn’t. Some days, he was downright cheerful about it, figuring he’d probably have been fighting with Helen every day anyway so, this way, he could get straight to the drinking and not worry about the nagging afterwards.
Kenna, the waitress with the ever-changing hair colour and a series of two-sizes-too-small T-shirts, with plunging necklines that she claimed doubled her tips. It helped her save for her son’s college fund, she’d confided once, since that bastard of a father of his was nowhere to be found to chip in.
James, the shy teenager who hauled boxes and ran errands. He wanted out of town, Cedar knew. He was going to Victoria to university if he could save enough money. He was sure as heck getting out of Red Hill, anyway. No reason to stay there any longer than he had to. He wanted a life.
Cedar said little. Just watched and listened and came to absorb them all as part of the background tapestry of her life as she tried to make the trailer homey for when the baby arrived.
And she was happy. For awhile. As long as she didn’t think about what it meant those nights Sam came home drunk. Upset. Swearing and vowing to get out of this godforsaken town if it was the last thing he did. She’d tease him, make him smile, dance with him around the tiny living area and show off her newfound cooking skills. She had mastered only spaghetti and hamburger helper, but Sam never complained.
Cedar often told herself that life was good. Mostly.
Even that terrible day when the dragging pain came and the bleeding started, Cedar never let go. Even when the doctors told her what she already knew, that her body had betrayed its promise of new life, she clung to the world she’d created with Sam.
She never told Sam how she felt. How empty her body became that day. How bleak the future seemed without the hope of that new life: the warmth of those tiny, perfect hands she was already holding in her mind, the velvet softness of the infant skin she could already feel in her arms.
He never knew about the guilt. The blame. The endless series of what-ifs that raced without stop through Cedar’s mind even while she wiped tables and cooked suppers.
She couldn’t tell him, fearing that to do so might be to tip him over the edge of the precipice on which he seemed to live.
The drinking grew worse. The swearing more frequent. Even his favourite spaghetti and meatballs wasn’t enough to make him smile anymore. There was never any dancing.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” he’d say nearly every night when he got home from the late shift. “I can’t take it. Why the hell are we staying here? Your family would help if we went back.”
She always tried to calm him. Point out to him that, here, they had a life. Friends. Jobs. Even without the baby, they could make it work.
“We could,” he agreed with her one night in a voice that was dangerously calm. “But what’s the fucking point?”
She never let him see the hurt she felt.
They loved each other. They did. It would get better. It would.
It wasn’t until Sam came home early one night and caught her crying that she changed her mind. It was the night he spoke the unforgivable words – “come on, Cedar, snap out of it, we didn’t want a kid anyway” – that she told him to go.
She stayed.
She knew Sam didn’t understand why. But then he’d never understood any of it.
He’d never understood her insistence on naming their son. He hadn’t stopped her. He hadn’t said a word when Cedar told him she wanted to name their son after her own absent father. He just let her do it and never spoke the name.
Cedar never told him the rest. She knew he wouldn’t have accepted her need to bury the pile of barely formed tissue.
There was no headstone for David. There was no place in the yard for those who had never been born.
But Cedar was undeterred.
At night, she crept out to the hillside of red columbine and made David a home among the blossoms, a pile of reddish stone collected into a small cairn above his resting place. She made sure it was in view of the Olsen family plot, so Fanny could keep watch over both their sons.
While she waited for David each night, she talked to Fanny.
Fanny understood what Cedar had never been able to say to Sam. She felt the grief. The loss. The emptiness of a mother’s arms and the bleak desolation of an unused cradle.
Fanny understood the guilt. The shame. The why-me, why-now, why-this, that kept Cedar up and made her toss restlessly at night.
And Fanny understood the rest, too.
The leap of joy inside when the little feet came running. The tug of her heart when his small arms reached up for a hug. The bubble of warmth that started when she heard his clear silver laughter, a warmth that began deep inside and slowly enveloped her entire body.
Fanny would never tell her it wasn’t real. That it wasn’t happening. That David wasn’t there, couldn’t be there, never had been there.
Fanny knew that wasn’t so.
Because Fanny was a mother, too.
Cedar felt herself shivering, the fleece no longer enough to protect her from the chill, and realized her arms were full of the flowers she’d gathered.
She shook off her memories and paused to cast one long, last look over the graveyard.
The quaking aspen was still in the quiet of the night.
But the hillside of red columbine waved gently as Cedar turned to walk back to the weathered grey marker.
She knelt next to Fanny’s stone, as she always did, and prayed. A wordless prayer for the young mother and her lost son. For their eternal love.
For their salvation.
“Good-night, Fanny,” Cedar said softly.
And she laid the armful of red blossoms gently on the ground next to the cold stone.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Mrs. K
Mrs. K always smelled like lavender.
The memory hits me unexpectedly as I stand out on the sidewalk. The street looks the same as it always did. Still dingy. Still grey. Still rutted and potholed and undisturbed by greenery or any attempts at beautification.
The old building looks the same too. That cheap grey stucco front with the paint peeling from the white window frames. The tilting concrete steps that posed a daily hazard to those customers who weren’t quite steady on their pins. The sign, faded now, that still proclaims in its hopeful but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at elegant italic script, Maria’s Beauty Parlour.
It’s been thirteen years since I stood here. Thirteen years since I bid farewell to the lavender smell and the dry chuckle and the throaty voice with its guttural consonants and half-swallowed vowels. Thirteen years since she said goodbye and told me to never look back.
I never did.
I wouldn’t have dared. I never crossed Mrs. K when she set her mind to something, and she was even more determined to get me out of Chetwynd than I was to leave.
“You’re meant for brighter lights than this, Sarah-Jean,” she’d say. (Other than my mother, she was the only person who called me by my dorky full name. But from Mrs. K I didn’t hate it. Much.) “It’s Toronto you want. Or New York.”
I used to just laugh. Well, not laugh really. Laughing wasn’t part of the Sarah persona. A dark snicker or two perhaps. More often a put-on sneer with curled lip. It worked for James Dean – I saw no reason why the decade shift and gender transformation should stand in the way of another Rebel Without A Cause. Only I had a cause, and the cause was Get Out Of This Hellhole Before It Sucks The Life Out Of Me.
Elegantly put, I know. But that was me.
I am that me again as I head up those decrepit steps and pull open the door, hearing that annoyingly perky jangling bell, the same bell we used to hear every time a biddy walked in to get her weekly blue-rinse and curler set.
In memory, Mrs. K looks up with that smile, the face-achingly broad smile she puts on the minute we unlatch the door and flip the sign to Open and doesn’t take off until the last hair dryer stops running and the last change is in the till.
She asks about my day. Her questions are as predictable as Mrs. McGillivray’s orange dye job and Mrs. Dubchek’s sausage curls. What am I working on, what did the teachers say about my history essay (or science experiment, or math exam), what I do on Friday night. (It was always kind of touching, that belief of hers that somehow Friday night meant anything at all to me, that I did anything other than lock myself in my room with The Doors cranked on the turntable and try not to talk to my parents.)
She smiles and nods and comments seldom. Usually only to remind me when my language becomes inappropriate (frankly, Mr. Zyla was a prick and Mr. Haupt was an asshole, and language wasn’t about to change those facts) or when she believes I am feeling sorry for myself.
That, for Maria Krancevic, was the Deadliest Sin.
Sloth, Gluttony, Lust and their brethren be damned, Self-Pity was the evil that would keep me from achieving my potential, and Mrs. K was not about to stand by and let that happen.
“What can I do for you?”
I’m momentarily taken aback by the fact that the voice that addresses me is youngish, high-pitched, slightly breathy – nothing at all like Mrs. K’s.
And the girl who owns it – woman, I should say, since she must be as old as me – is too well put together to have been caught dead in the Maria’s Beauty Parlour of 1978. She would have been one of those who went to the city (as we used to touchingly refer to Grande Prairie), to the salon with the Italian name, Luigi’s or Lombardo’s or whatever it was called.
She’s assessing me, head tilted slightly, and there’s something vaguely familiar about the expression as she checks out my hair. Something 1978 in me is glad I just got it cut, that it’s freshly washed and shiny and falling in sleek layers around my face. And it’s something 1978 in me that prevents me from explaining who I am and why I’m there. Instead, I do what I always did.
I lie.
“I’m just here for a cut,” I say, wondering why those six simple words come out sounding defensive and belligerent.
The girl – woman – doesn’t seem bothered, though. She just grins. “Well, it looks pretty good to me, but if you really want some off, I guess I can do that for you.”
She leads me to a chair – not the ugly, uncomfortable orange vinyl of Mrs. K’s days but a stylish black leather job that looks like it cost more than the building it’s in.
Something of that thought must reflect on my face, because the girl grins.
“I’m remodelling,” she explains in a perky tone that grates on my nerves for some half-remembered reason. “Wash or just a cut?”
I catch her reflection in the mirror, head cocked expectantly to one side, and it hits me. Chantelle Tremblay. Cheerleader, student council secretary, straight-A student and all-around pain in my sixteen-year-old misfit ass.
I refrain from saying anything other than, “Just a trim, please, I don’t need it washed.”
But as she starts to clip – quite expertly, I have to admit – I can’t help feeling a little gleeful about our apparent reversal of fortune.
Do you know who I am? I want to ask, but I don’t. I wonder if she’s even noticed the resemblance between the halfway presentable person who’s sitting in front of her and the gawky misfit she used to be so friendly to – at least when the teachers were watching.
I wonder if she’s seen my film. I know the thought is unworthy – yes, Mrs. K., it’s Pride and not Self-Pity that’s your protégé’s downfall these days – but I can’t help it.
Then I realize Chantelle is looking at me expectantly, and I think maybe I’ve missed something.
“What?” I’m distressed to hear echoes of misfit Sarah in my ungracious tone.
She just grins again.
“Not to worry. You don’t have to listen to me.” Her chirpiness is irksome, but I’ve gotta admit I can see why people always found her cute. “I was just asking if you’re from around here.”
She doesn’t wait for an answer before she leans in closer, in a confiding, just-us-girls way that grates on my nerves. “I’ve just come back myself. I wasn’t crazy about it, but my husband really wanted to leave the city. So I thought I’d take over this old place and see if I could make a go of it.”
I don’t want to react, but the “this old place” gets under my skin.
“I used to know Mrs. K.”
My abrupt tone seems to startle her a little, and she manages not to be perky for about a second-and-a-half. Then the smile comes back.
“Maria? You knew her? She was nice, wasn’t she?”
It takes a second to hit me: She’s using the past tense. A leaden heaviness settles in my chest, and I struggle to return the smile.
“Yeah, really nice.”
It’s a lame answer, but I don’t have any other words. I’m saved from the need to speak by the jangle of the front bell and the arrival of a guy who’s immediately recognizable.
Jason Prenty. Drama club star, basketball player, second-best student and all-around Good Guy. Is it petty that I notice he’s put on a gut, that his face is paunchy and that there’s more than a little grey at the temples of his thick dark hair?
Now, Sarah-Jean, there’s no need to be uncharitable.
I can hear Mrs. K’s gentle remonstrance as clearly as if she had walked in with him, and I actually feel a little bad. Only a little. Enough to smile half-heartedly as he approaches Chantelle, slings a possessive arm around her shoulders and plants an ostentatious kiss on her lips.
He smiles quickly at me with a glance that seems ready to roam right past me and back to Chantelle. Then something changes and he stares outright.
“No way!”
He’s thirty-one, I know – he was a year ahead of me in school – but he sounds just like the seventeen-year-old I remember.
“Sarah Harper. No way!”
He seems genuinely excited, and I can’t help smiling back.
“Hi, Jason.”
I shift my gaze to Chantelle, who’s suddenly so thrilled she’s practically bouncing. I can nearly see the pompoms as she bubbles over with a torrent of words.
“Sarah! I didn’t recognize you, I’m sorry. I should’ve known you right away, we all saw Dangerous Games, everybody did, they held it over at the Cineplex, we told everybody we knew you in high school, it was so cool, we loved it, you were really cool …”
She looks a little embarrassed as Jason starts to laugh. I don’t want to, but I find myself joining him.
“Yeah, thanks.”
It bugs me that I can’t think of anything else to say – me, who managed to sound so witty for the Maclean’s reporter who interviewed me for the article on ‘Who’s New in Canadian Cinema.’
But Jason and Chantelle don’t seem to notice. They’re both falling over themselves to bring me up to speed on what everyone’s been doing in the last thirteen years and how everyone’s so excited and so pleased for me and how they always knew I’d do well. I hardly have to say a word as Chantelle snips and chats and Jason throws me enough admiring looks to almost make up for the four years of totally ignoring me that constituted our high school relationship.
It’s almost enough to take the heaviness off my chest. Almost.
But Mrs. K. Poor Mrs. K. The reason I came back and I’ll never get a chance to do it. To make amends. To tell her what a jerk I am.
I can feel the stinging in my eyes and tightness in my throat that always signals the onset of embarrassingly girly tears. But I cough them away and wait for a break in the stream of conversation.
“So.” I manage to squeeze the syllable into the pause after an anecdote about Mr. Zyla’s retirement party and another about how Skipper Jackson – Steven now, if you please – has moved to Vancouver and become a lawyer. “So, what happened to Mrs. K? When did she – pass away?”
I hate euphemisms, but I just can’t bring myself to say it.
Chantelle and Jason exchange a glance, and it’s Chantelle who answers.
“Pass away? Did she? I’d heard she was sick but I hadn’t heard – oh, Sarah, I’m sorry.” She stops and puts a hand on my shoulder. “You did a work placement with her, didn’t you? I’m sorry.”
She stops, starts to lift her hand and changes her mind, squeezing my shoulder slightly.
But a small bit of hope has come over me.
“I haven’t heard either.” My voice is less surly now, if not exactly gracious. “I just thought … you said –”
Chantelle looks puzzled, and I shrug, affecting a nonchalance I don’t quite feel.
“Never mind. I thought wrong. I’m sure she’s fine. Do you know where she went?”
“She was in hospital last I heard,” Jason offers.
Chantelle shoots him a look, and her tone is cautious.
“Sarah, she was really sick. That’s partly why she sold this place. I don’t know if – I mean – ”
I shake my head suddenly. What the hell am I doing here, getting a haircut I don’t need, visiting with people who were never my friends, when Mrs. K is in the hospital?
“Thanks for the haircut.” I stand up so abruptly that I’m nearly impaled on Chantelle’s scissors. “I’ve gotta run. How much?”
Chantelle starts to protest that there’s no charge for old friends and that she’s not quite done anyway, so I just chuck three twenties on the counter and flee to my little red Volkswagen, the only bright and gleaming thing on the old grey street.
The hospital hasn’t changed, I soon see, any more than Maria’s Beauty Parlour had. It’s still the Cold War-Eastern bloc-institutional eyesore it always was. But the interior is clean and cheerful as I bang through the front door and demand of a slightly startled admissions clerk where I can find Maria Krancevic’s room.
“She was in 216.” She doesn’t even have to consult the list, and I can tell she knows Mrs. K. “But miss …”
I leave her protesting as I run for the stairs and pound up to 216. Don’t let me be too late. Please don’t let me be too late. The refrain is nearly a prayer, though I haven’t talked to God in years and I’m not entirely certain he’s going to listen. Why should he start now?
I nearly bang into a nurse, who looks affronted and demands to know where I think I’m going.
“216.”
I push by and hear her voice behind me.
“Mrs. Krancevic? But –”
I don’t want to hear it. I won’t hear it. I race to the end of the hallway and fling myself around the corner into the room. I will it to happen. Mrs. K. will be there. She will look up with a gentle smile and a calm request to walk more quietly.
A lady should always be graceful, Sarah-Jean.
The bed is empty. Stripped. With a pile of white sheets in a heap on the floor beside it.
I grab at the wall as my head starts to spin and my knees go oddly weak. The heavy band that’s wrapped around my chest must be squeezing my lungs, because I can’t breathe.
It isn’t fair. Not Mrs. K. Not now. Not before I said goodbye.
“Can I help you?”
The voice is pleasant enough, if slightly suspicious, and I turn to see a white-clad nurse returning to the room. She bustles by me to grab the sheets, close enough to brush my arm, but I can’t tell what she looks like. She seems hazy, and I realize only belatedly that I must have started to cry.
I shake my head. “I was here to see Mrs. K.”
The woman laughs – a response so unexpected that it takes me a second to place the sound.
“Maria? Lord, girl, we couldn’t keep her in here a minute longer if we tried. She was all packed before the doctor even discharged her. But you haven’t missed her by much. She only left five minutes ago.”
“Five minutes?” I hear the foolishness of the echo, but I’m too confused to make any more sense than that.
Now, Sarah-Jean, you know that repeating another’s words is impolite. And it makes you seem unintelligent. We don’t want that, do we?
Mrs. K’s voice is so clear to me that I could swear she’s right behind me.
But it isn’t until the lavender smell hits my nose that I become aware of the blindingly obvious fact that, well, she’s right behind me.
I whirl and capture her in a bone-crushing hug before conscious thought has even returned. “I thought you were dead” is the insightful greeting I manage to come up with after thirteen years, accompanied by tears, snuffles and snorts of the most unladylike kind.
Mrs. K extricates herself from the hug and holds me at arm’s length with a smile.
“I knew you’d grow up to be a lovely woman, Sarah-Jean.”
The band that was squeezing my lungs has loosened and I can breathe again. I find myself doing something that’s part dance, part jumping jack, and I’m starting to giggle in a way that’s completely unlike Sarah-Jean.
“You’re not dead.”
Mrs. K. laughs then, the same dry chuckle I remember from those long-ago Saturdays.
“Certainly not.” She stares at me levelly, and her look becomes stern. “We had some unfinished business to take care of, did we not, Sarah-Jean?”
The sternness makes me quake a little, but the residual silliness from the spontaneous dance has left me braver than Sarah-Jean ever used to be. I yank my wallet out of my jacket pocket and pull out the neat stack of twenties I got at the bank machine on my way into town. I thrust them, firmly if inelegantly, towards Mrs. K.
“Here. It’s yours.”
Her hand closes on the stack and she doesn’t count them, but she frowns a little.
“That’s far too much, Sarah-Jean.”
She attempts to give it back, but my hands are balled into fists in my jacket pockets.
“Interest.” I shrug in my old fashion, and I can feel my lip curling a little. “I always felt bad about it, you know.”
She still looks stern, but something about the firmly set lips suggests she’s trying hard not to smile. “You didn’t have to steal it from the cash register, Sarah-Jean. I’d have given it to you if you’d asked.”
I do feel bad. I do. But I hate feeling sheepish, so I sound more like my sneering seventeen-year-old self than I intend to. “Yeah, well, maybe I didn’t want you to know I needed money. Maybe I was embarrassed. Maybe I was mad my parents wouldn’t even help me out with the bloody bus ticket. Maybe –”
I see her frown, and I take a deep breath.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s the simplest words that are the hardest to say. Those three syllables took me thirteen years. And I haven’t even got to Mom and Dad’s yet.
“I know you are, Sarah-Jean.”
I feel myself enveloped in a lavender-scented hug, then her tone turns brisk and she pushes gently past me into the room.
“Now, where did I leave my gloves?” Even as she speaks, she plucks a pair of black leather gloves from the table next to the bed. “I’m sure you have somewhere else to be, Sarah-Jean.”
I want to protest, to tell her I’ll take her to dinner, but the steely gaze prevents me from objecting. I nod, more meekly than I’d ever admit, and she smiles and pats my hand.
“Now go.”
I obey as readily as if the last thirteen years haven’t happened, not even looking back as I make my way downstairs and out to the parking lot. I’m fumbling for my keys – why can I never remember what pocket I put the damn things in? – and I nearly jump out of my skin when I feel a warm hand on my arm.
I turn to see her smiling face.
“You’ve done us proud, Sarah-Jean.”
I feel the stinging in my eyes and the tightness in my throat again.
“Now say hello to your parents for me.”
I nod, desperately searching for the right thing to say, but can only watch as she turns and walks back across the parking lot.
“Mrs. K!”
She stops and turns halfway towards me.
“I love you, Mrs. K!”
She doesn’t even turn around the rest of the way, just pauses.
“I know you do, Sarah-Jean.”
She doesn’t seem to be yelling, but the familiar voice with its guttural consonants and half-swallowed vowels carries clearly across the parking lot.
“Now go, Sarah-Jean. Your parents are waiting.”
She starts to walk again.
And I do what I’ve always done: I listen to Mrs. K.
I get in my car and go.
The memory hits me unexpectedly as I stand out on the sidewalk. The street looks the same as it always did. Still dingy. Still grey. Still rutted and potholed and undisturbed by greenery or any attempts at beautification.
The old building looks the same too. That cheap grey stucco front with the paint peeling from the white window frames. The tilting concrete steps that posed a daily hazard to those customers who weren’t quite steady on their pins. The sign, faded now, that still proclaims in its hopeful but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at elegant italic script, Maria’s Beauty Parlour.
It’s been thirteen years since I stood here. Thirteen years since I bid farewell to the lavender smell and the dry chuckle and the throaty voice with its guttural consonants and half-swallowed vowels. Thirteen years since she said goodbye and told me to never look back.
I never did.
I wouldn’t have dared. I never crossed Mrs. K when she set her mind to something, and she was even more determined to get me out of Chetwynd than I was to leave.
“You’re meant for brighter lights than this, Sarah-Jean,” she’d say. (Other than my mother, she was the only person who called me by my dorky full name. But from Mrs. K I didn’t hate it. Much.) “It’s Toronto you want. Or New York.”
I used to just laugh. Well, not laugh really. Laughing wasn’t part of the Sarah persona. A dark snicker or two perhaps. More often a put-on sneer with curled lip. It worked for James Dean – I saw no reason why the decade shift and gender transformation should stand in the way of another Rebel Without A Cause. Only I had a cause, and the cause was Get Out Of This Hellhole Before It Sucks The Life Out Of Me.
Elegantly put, I know. But that was me.
I am that me again as I head up those decrepit steps and pull open the door, hearing that annoyingly perky jangling bell, the same bell we used to hear every time a biddy walked in to get her weekly blue-rinse and curler set.
In memory, Mrs. K looks up with that smile, the face-achingly broad smile she puts on the minute we unlatch the door and flip the sign to Open and doesn’t take off until the last hair dryer stops running and the last change is in the till.
She asks about my day. Her questions are as predictable as Mrs. McGillivray’s orange dye job and Mrs. Dubchek’s sausage curls. What am I working on, what did the teachers say about my history essay (or science experiment, or math exam), what I do on Friday night. (It was always kind of touching, that belief of hers that somehow Friday night meant anything at all to me, that I did anything other than lock myself in my room with The Doors cranked on the turntable and try not to talk to my parents.)
She smiles and nods and comments seldom. Usually only to remind me when my language becomes inappropriate (frankly, Mr. Zyla was a prick and Mr. Haupt was an asshole, and language wasn’t about to change those facts) or when she believes I am feeling sorry for myself.
That, for Maria Krancevic, was the Deadliest Sin.
Sloth, Gluttony, Lust and their brethren be damned, Self-Pity was the evil that would keep me from achieving my potential, and Mrs. K was not about to stand by and let that happen.
“What can I do for you?”
I’m momentarily taken aback by the fact that the voice that addresses me is youngish, high-pitched, slightly breathy – nothing at all like Mrs. K’s.
And the girl who owns it – woman, I should say, since she must be as old as me – is too well put together to have been caught dead in the Maria’s Beauty Parlour of 1978. She would have been one of those who went to the city (as we used to touchingly refer to Grande Prairie), to the salon with the Italian name, Luigi’s or Lombardo’s or whatever it was called.
She’s assessing me, head tilted slightly, and there’s something vaguely familiar about the expression as she checks out my hair. Something 1978 in me is glad I just got it cut, that it’s freshly washed and shiny and falling in sleek layers around my face. And it’s something 1978 in me that prevents me from explaining who I am and why I’m there. Instead, I do what I always did.
I lie.
“I’m just here for a cut,” I say, wondering why those six simple words come out sounding defensive and belligerent.
The girl – woman – doesn’t seem bothered, though. She just grins. “Well, it looks pretty good to me, but if you really want some off, I guess I can do that for you.”
She leads me to a chair – not the ugly, uncomfortable orange vinyl of Mrs. K’s days but a stylish black leather job that looks like it cost more than the building it’s in.
Something of that thought must reflect on my face, because the girl grins.
“I’m remodelling,” she explains in a perky tone that grates on my nerves for some half-remembered reason. “Wash or just a cut?”
I catch her reflection in the mirror, head cocked expectantly to one side, and it hits me. Chantelle Tremblay. Cheerleader, student council secretary, straight-A student and all-around pain in my sixteen-year-old misfit ass.
I refrain from saying anything other than, “Just a trim, please, I don’t need it washed.”
But as she starts to clip – quite expertly, I have to admit – I can’t help feeling a little gleeful about our apparent reversal of fortune.
Do you know who I am? I want to ask, but I don’t. I wonder if she’s even noticed the resemblance between the halfway presentable person who’s sitting in front of her and the gawky misfit she used to be so friendly to – at least when the teachers were watching.
I wonder if she’s seen my film. I know the thought is unworthy – yes, Mrs. K., it’s Pride and not Self-Pity that’s your protégé’s downfall these days – but I can’t help it.
Then I realize Chantelle is looking at me expectantly, and I think maybe I’ve missed something.
“What?” I’m distressed to hear echoes of misfit Sarah in my ungracious tone.
She just grins again.
“Not to worry. You don’t have to listen to me.” Her chirpiness is irksome, but I’ve gotta admit I can see why people always found her cute. “I was just asking if you’re from around here.”
She doesn’t wait for an answer before she leans in closer, in a confiding, just-us-girls way that grates on my nerves. “I’ve just come back myself. I wasn’t crazy about it, but my husband really wanted to leave the city. So I thought I’d take over this old place and see if I could make a go of it.”
I don’t want to react, but the “this old place” gets under my skin.
“I used to know Mrs. K.”
My abrupt tone seems to startle her a little, and she manages not to be perky for about a second-and-a-half. Then the smile comes back.
“Maria? You knew her? She was nice, wasn’t she?”
It takes a second to hit me: She’s using the past tense. A leaden heaviness settles in my chest, and I struggle to return the smile.
“Yeah, really nice.”
It’s a lame answer, but I don’t have any other words. I’m saved from the need to speak by the jangle of the front bell and the arrival of a guy who’s immediately recognizable.
Jason Prenty. Drama club star, basketball player, second-best student and all-around Good Guy. Is it petty that I notice he’s put on a gut, that his face is paunchy and that there’s more than a little grey at the temples of his thick dark hair?
Now, Sarah-Jean, there’s no need to be uncharitable.
I can hear Mrs. K’s gentle remonstrance as clearly as if she had walked in with him, and I actually feel a little bad. Only a little. Enough to smile half-heartedly as he approaches Chantelle, slings a possessive arm around her shoulders and plants an ostentatious kiss on her lips.
He smiles quickly at me with a glance that seems ready to roam right past me and back to Chantelle. Then something changes and he stares outright.
“No way!”
He’s thirty-one, I know – he was a year ahead of me in school – but he sounds just like the seventeen-year-old I remember.
“Sarah Harper. No way!”
He seems genuinely excited, and I can’t help smiling back.
“Hi, Jason.”
I shift my gaze to Chantelle, who’s suddenly so thrilled she’s practically bouncing. I can nearly see the pompoms as she bubbles over with a torrent of words.
“Sarah! I didn’t recognize you, I’m sorry. I should’ve known you right away, we all saw Dangerous Games, everybody did, they held it over at the Cineplex, we told everybody we knew you in high school, it was so cool, we loved it, you were really cool …”
She looks a little embarrassed as Jason starts to laugh. I don’t want to, but I find myself joining him.
“Yeah, thanks.”
It bugs me that I can’t think of anything else to say – me, who managed to sound so witty for the Maclean’s reporter who interviewed me for the article on ‘Who’s New in Canadian Cinema.’
But Jason and Chantelle don’t seem to notice. They’re both falling over themselves to bring me up to speed on what everyone’s been doing in the last thirteen years and how everyone’s so excited and so pleased for me and how they always knew I’d do well. I hardly have to say a word as Chantelle snips and chats and Jason throws me enough admiring looks to almost make up for the four years of totally ignoring me that constituted our high school relationship.
It’s almost enough to take the heaviness off my chest. Almost.
But Mrs. K. Poor Mrs. K. The reason I came back and I’ll never get a chance to do it. To make amends. To tell her what a jerk I am.
I can feel the stinging in my eyes and tightness in my throat that always signals the onset of embarrassingly girly tears. But I cough them away and wait for a break in the stream of conversation.
“So.” I manage to squeeze the syllable into the pause after an anecdote about Mr. Zyla’s retirement party and another about how Skipper Jackson – Steven now, if you please – has moved to Vancouver and become a lawyer. “So, what happened to Mrs. K? When did she – pass away?”
I hate euphemisms, but I just can’t bring myself to say it.
Chantelle and Jason exchange a glance, and it’s Chantelle who answers.
“Pass away? Did she? I’d heard she was sick but I hadn’t heard – oh, Sarah, I’m sorry.” She stops and puts a hand on my shoulder. “You did a work placement with her, didn’t you? I’m sorry.”
She stops, starts to lift her hand and changes her mind, squeezing my shoulder slightly.
But a small bit of hope has come over me.
“I haven’t heard either.” My voice is less surly now, if not exactly gracious. “I just thought … you said –”
Chantelle looks puzzled, and I shrug, affecting a nonchalance I don’t quite feel.
“Never mind. I thought wrong. I’m sure she’s fine. Do you know where she went?”
“She was in hospital last I heard,” Jason offers.
Chantelle shoots him a look, and her tone is cautious.
“Sarah, she was really sick. That’s partly why she sold this place. I don’t know if – I mean – ”
I shake my head suddenly. What the hell am I doing here, getting a haircut I don’t need, visiting with people who were never my friends, when Mrs. K is in the hospital?
“Thanks for the haircut.” I stand up so abruptly that I’m nearly impaled on Chantelle’s scissors. “I’ve gotta run. How much?”
Chantelle starts to protest that there’s no charge for old friends and that she’s not quite done anyway, so I just chuck three twenties on the counter and flee to my little red Volkswagen, the only bright and gleaming thing on the old grey street.
The hospital hasn’t changed, I soon see, any more than Maria’s Beauty Parlour had. It’s still the Cold War-Eastern bloc-institutional eyesore it always was. But the interior is clean and cheerful as I bang through the front door and demand of a slightly startled admissions clerk where I can find Maria Krancevic’s room.
“She was in 216.” She doesn’t even have to consult the list, and I can tell she knows Mrs. K. “But miss …”
I leave her protesting as I run for the stairs and pound up to 216. Don’t let me be too late. Please don’t let me be too late. The refrain is nearly a prayer, though I haven’t talked to God in years and I’m not entirely certain he’s going to listen. Why should he start now?
I nearly bang into a nurse, who looks affronted and demands to know where I think I’m going.
“216.”
I push by and hear her voice behind me.
“Mrs. Krancevic? But –”
I don’t want to hear it. I won’t hear it. I race to the end of the hallway and fling myself around the corner into the room. I will it to happen. Mrs. K. will be there. She will look up with a gentle smile and a calm request to walk more quietly.
A lady should always be graceful, Sarah-Jean.
The bed is empty. Stripped. With a pile of white sheets in a heap on the floor beside it.
I grab at the wall as my head starts to spin and my knees go oddly weak. The heavy band that’s wrapped around my chest must be squeezing my lungs, because I can’t breathe.
It isn’t fair. Not Mrs. K. Not now. Not before I said goodbye.
“Can I help you?”
The voice is pleasant enough, if slightly suspicious, and I turn to see a white-clad nurse returning to the room. She bustles by me to grab the sheets, close enough to brush my arm, but I can’t tell what she looks like. She seems hazy, and I realize only belatedly that I must have started to cry.
I shake my head. “I was here to see Mrs. K.”
The woman laughs – a response so unexpected that it takes me a second to place the sound.
“Maria? Lord, girl, we couldn’t keep her in here a minute longer if we tried. She was all packed before the doctor even discharged her. But you haven’t missed her by much. She only left five minutes ago.”
“Five minutes?” I hear the foolishness of the echo, but I’m too confused to make any more sense than that.
Now, Sarah-Jean, you know that repeating another’s words is impolite. And it makes you seem unintelligent. We don’t want that, do we?
Mrs. K’s voice is so clear to me that I could swear she’s right behind me.
But it isn’t until the lavender smell hits my nose that I become aware of the blindingly obvious fact that, well, she’s right behind me.
I whirl and capture her in a bone-crushing hug before conscious thought has even returned. “I thought you were dead” is the insightful greeting I manage to come up with after thirteen years, accompanied by tears, snuffles and snorts of the most unladylike kind.
Mrs. K extricates herself from the hug and holds me at arm’s length with a smile.
“I knew you’d grow up to be a lovely woman, Sarah-Jean.”
The band that was squeezing my lungs has loosened and I can breathe again. I find myself doing something that’s part dance, part jumping jack, and I’m starting to giggle in a way that’s completely unlike Sarah-Jean.
“You’re not dead.”
Mrs. K. laughs then, the same dry chuckle I remember from those long-ago Saturdays.
“Certainly not.” She stares at me levelly, and her look becomes stern. “We had some unfinished business to take care of, did we not, Sarah-Jean?”
The sternness makes me quake a little, but the residual silliness from the spontaneous dance has left me braver than Sarah-Jean ever used to be. I yank my wallet out of my jacket pocket and pull out the neat stack of twenties I got at the bank machine on my way into town. I thrust them, firmly if inelegantly, towards Mrs. K.
“Here. It’s yours.”
Her hand closes on the stack and she doesn’t count them, but she frowns a little.
“That’s far too much, Sarah-Jean.”
She attempts to give it back, but my hands are balled into fists in my jacket pockets.
“Interest.” I shrug in my old fashion, and I can feel my lip curling a little. “I always felt bad about it, you know.”
She still looks stern, but something about the firmly set lips suggests she’s trying hard not to smile. “You didn’t have to steal it from the cash register, Sarah-Jean. I’d have given it to you if you’d asked.”
I do feel bad. I do. But I hate feeling sheepish, so I sound more like my sneering seventeen-year-old self than I intend to. “Yeah, well, maybe I didn’t want you to know I needed money. Maybe I was embarrassed. Maybe I was mad my parents wouldn’t even help me out with the bloody bus ticket. Maybe –”
I see her frown, and I take a deep breath.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s the simplest words that are the hardest to say. Those three syllables took me thirteen years. And I haven’t even got to Mom and Dad’s yet.
“I know you are, Sarah-Jean.”
I feel myself enveloped in a lavender-scented hug, then her tone turns brisk and she pushes gently past me into the room.
“Now, where did I leave my gloves?” Even as she speaks, she plucks a pair of black leather gloves from the table next to the bed. “I’m sure you have somewhere else to be, Sarah-Jean.”
I want to protest, to tell her I’ll take her to dinner, but the steely gaze prevents me from objecting. I nod, more meekly than I’d ever admit, and she smiles and pats my hand.
“Now go.”
I obey as readily as if the last thirteen years haven’t happened, not even looking back as I make my way downstairs and out to the parking lot. I’m fumbling for my keys – why can I never remember what pocket I put the damn things in? – and I nearly jump out of my skin when I feel a warm hand on my arm.
I turn to see her smiling face.
“You’ve done us proud, Sarah-Jean.”
I feel the stinging in my eyes and the tightness in my throat again.
“Now say hello to your parents for me.”
I nod, desperately searching for the right thing to say, but can only watch as she turns and walks back across the parking lot.
“Mrs. K!”
She stops and turns halfway towards me.
“I love you, Mrs. K!”
She doesn’t even turn around the rest of the way, just pauses.
“I know you do, Sarah-Jean.”
She doesn’t seem to be yelling, but the familiar voice with its guttural consonants and half-swallowed vowels carries clearly across the parking lot.
“Now go, Sarah-Jean. Your parents are waiting.”
She starts to walk again.
And I do what I’ve always done: I listen to Mrs. K.
I get in my car and go.
Fan Club
Fan Club
Written for a Story Club challenge.
Of the elements I can remember, one was that we had to name a character after a place on Vancouver Island, and another was that we had to in some way incorporate all the song titles (directly or indirectly) from U2's Joshua Tree album.
This is one of two stories I wrote for that challenge.
*
The six faces smile at Jordan from the poster on his dressing room wall. The eyes – ten blue, two brown; two shaded by dark-framed glasses – watch as he runs a comb through his short blond hair.
Not for him the diamond-in-the-rough image of the others on Teen Beat’s Hot 100 list. Clean-shaven. Clean-cut. Mama’s boy, they call him.
He feels the familiar rush of adrenalin that makes his skin tingle and his body vibrate. In the mirror he is still – almost unnaturally so – but inside he feels the familiar juddering, the electric pulse coursing through his veins.
There’s energy in the air tonight.
Probably because he’s finally left behind those godforsaken mining towns. Sage Hill. Red Hill. Abbott’s Hill.
At least there hasn’t been a fucking Blueberry Hill.
Yet.
They call it God’s country. He calls it unfuckingbelievably boring.
When there are no stoplights – when the streets didn’t even have names, for god’s sake – it just isn’t Jordan River’s kind of place. And the way they yammer on about the open sky makes him long to shoot a bullet into the air and shatter it into infinite pieces of blue.
He’d never have agreed to this godawful tour if that woman hadn’t cried. He could take anything but tears.
She and those five other mothers were raising money for their missing children’s charity. Her daughter is Missy, second from the left in the poster. The brown-haired one with overlarge blue eyes and a saucy smile.
“Missy was … is … such a fan,” she’d said, lower lip trembling. “We’ll do it with or without you. But if you’d perform, we’d raise more money.”
He’d agreed. Naturally. You’d have to be hard-hearted to say no to a crying mother.
And Jordan isn’t hard-hearted.
He isn’t quite the mama’s boy they write about, either.
Jordan still doesn’t get the media’s fascination with his so-called goodness. All because he’d made that crack about the bible when some dork of a reporter asked about his name.
Mind you, the bible-thumper image is more appealing than the truth – that his hippie mother had been too stoned when she named him to make any connection whatsoever between “Jordan” and “River.”
He’d long since dropped her surname. Jordan River Johnson was just too much, but the rest of it works.
Anyway, the bible thing isn’t totally untrue. He does read it. It fascinates him: the strict orderliness of Leviticus, the lyric poetry of the psalms, the inspired hallucinations of Revelations.
It has plenty to teach those who are willing to learn.
“Yo, Jord, five minutes!”
Duncan’s bellow breaks into Jordan’s reverie.
The jackass couldn’t keep the volume down if he tried. But at least he knows when to keep his mouth shut.
Jordan checks his smile in the mirror – nope, no spinach – and grabs his guitar, nearly crashing into Duncan as he swings into the hallway.
“Remember, I’ll point her out and you bring her through the left exit,” he reminds Duncan, who nods impatiently and rolls his eyes in his I’m-such-a-martyr-for-putting-up-with-this-asshole fashion.
“Yeah, Jord, done it a few times before, remember?”
Jordan heads towards the stage, remembering those other times. Before this bloody backwoods tour.
He’s never sure when it’s going to happen.
Always in the big cities – small-town skanks aren’t worth the fuss – and only when one catches his eye. The one in front, with shining eyes and an air of nervous anticipation. She’s always alone – he doesn’t do friends – and always a little classier than the others.
No wanna-be hookers with their tits in his face, thanks.
But her mouth always gives her away: breathlessly parted lips; a pink tongue tracing delicate circles.
Missy was one of the lip-lickers. Melanie too – third from the right – and Sarah, the one in glasses.
Kaitlin wasn’t a licker, but her pouty lips spoke volumes. Just like Vanessa, the prettiest by far, whose photo graced the top left corner of the poster.
Joanne didn’t have her looks. But she had one of those mouths that promised plenty.
She’d been a disappointment.
He shoulda known brown eyes wouldn’t work.
Not that any of them had.
They’d turned out to be as silly and stupid as all teenage girls.
They never appreciated the class he offered: the delicacies and champagne, the erudite conversation, the philosophy and poetry of the bible.
They couldn’t have cared less. They just giggled and simpered and hiccuped sometimes when the champagne bubbles kicked in.
They weren’t even fucking smart enough to be scared when he moved in close and put one arm around their necks.
They never even screamed.
They were about as stupid as Duncan, who never questioned why the black equipment bag sometimes looked lumpier and weighed a hundred extra pounds.
“Careful, Jord, don’t trip on the wires.”
Jordan acknowledges the sound guy – Steve? who cares, really – with a nod and carefully steps over the cords into the light.
Up front, Heather Carson is nearly jumping with anticipation.
This is so worth the lie – Kathy never minds covering for her, anyway – and the hitch to town.
She’s practically close enough to touch Jordan.
Mind you, it’s awfully hot. She probably should’ve worn the V-neck tank top and not this long-sleeved Gap shirt. But she didn’t want Mom to get suspicious.
And she should’ve grabbed some water. It’s dry in here and her lips are getting chapped.
The air is electric.
Jordan barely hears the piercing screams and girlish giggles. He knows something special is about to happen. He can feel it in his bones. In his veins. In his blood.
He settles onto his stool and looks out into the crowd, meeting the gaze of a bright-eyed girl in a button-down shirt. She flushes at the unexpected eye contact and slowly licks her lips.
Jordan pulls the microphone down to his face and opens his mouth to sing.
Written for a Story Club challenge.
Of the elements I can remember, one was that we had to name a character after a place on Vancouver Island, and another was that we had to in some way incorporate all the song titles (directly or indirectly) from U2's Joshua Tree album.
This is one of two stories I wrote for that challenge.
*
The six faces smile at Jordan from the poster on his dressing room wall. The eyes – ten blue, two brown; two shaded by dark-framed glasses – watch as he runs a comb through his short blond hair.
Not for him the diamond-in-the-rough image of the others on Teen Beat’s Hot 100 list. Clean-shaven. Clean-cut. Mama’s boy, they call him.
He feels the familiar rush of adrenalin that makes his skin tingle and his body vibrate. In the mirror he is still – almost unnaturally so – but inside he feels the familiar juddering, the electric pulse coursing through his veins.
There’s energy in the air tonight.
Probably because he’s finally left behind those godforsaken mining towns. Sage Hill. Red Hill. Abbott’s Hill.
At least there hasn’t been a fucking Blueberry Hill.
Yet.
They call it God’s country. He calls it unfuckingbelievably boring.
When there are no stoplights – when the streets didn’t even have names, for god’s sake – it just isn’t Jordan River’s kind of place. And the way they yammer on about the open sky makes him long to shoot a bullet into the air and shatter it into infinite pieces of blue.
He’d never have agreed to this godawful tour if that woman hadn’t cried. He could take anything but tears.
She and those five other mothers were raising money for their missing children’s charity. Her daughter is Missy, second from the left in the poster. The brown-haired one with overlarge blue eyes and a saucy smile.
“Missy was … is … such a fan,” she’d said, lower lip trembling. “We’ll do it with or without you. But if you’d perform, we’d raise more money.”
He’d agreed. Naturally. You’d have to be hard-hearted to say no to a crying mother.
And Jordan isn’t hard-hearted.
He isn’t quite the mama’s boy they write about, either.
Jordan still doesn’t get the media’s fascination with his so-called goodness. All because he’d made that crack about the bible when some dork of a reporter asked about his name.
Mind you, the bible-thumper image is more appealing than the truth – that his hippie mother had been too stoned when she named him to make any connection whatsoever between “Jordan” and “River.”
He’d long since dropped her surname. Jordan River Johnson was just too much, but the rest of it works.
Anyway, the bible thing isn’t totally untrue. He does read it. It fascinates him: the strict orderliness of Leviticus, the lyric poetry of the psalms, the inspired hallucinations of Revelations.
It has plenty to teach those who are willing to learn.
“Yo, Jord, five minutes!”
Duncan’s bellow breaks into Jordan’s reverie.
The jackass couldn’t keep the volume down if he tried. But at least he knows when to keep his mouth shut.
Jordan checks his smile in the mirror – nope, no spinach – and grabs his guitar, nearly crashing into Duncan as he swings into the hallway.
“Remember, I’ll point her out and you bring her through the left exit,” he reminds Duncan, who nods impatiently and rolls his eyes in his I’m-such-a-martyr-for-putting-up-with-this-asshole fashion.
“Yeah, Jord, done it a few times before, remember?”
Jordan heads towards the stage, remembering those other times. Before this bloody backwoods tour.
He’s never sure when it’s going to happen.
Always in the big cities – small-town skanks aren’t worth the fuss – and only when one catches his eye. The one in front, with shining eyes and an air of nervous anticipation. She’s always alone – he doesn’t do friends – and always a little classier than the others.
No wanna-be hookers with their tits in his face, thanks.
But her mouth always gives her away: breathlessly parted lips; a pink tongue tracing delicate circles.
Missy was one of the lip-lickers. Melanie too – third from the right – and Sarah, the one in glasses.
Kaitlin wasn’t a licker, but her pouty lips spoke volumes. Just like Vanessa, the prettiest by far, whose photo graced the top left corner of the poster.
Joanne didn’t have her looks. But she had one of those mouths that promised plenty.
She’d been a disappointment.
He shoulda known brown eyes wouldn’t work.
Not that any of them had.
They’d turned out to be as silly and stupid as all teenage girls.
They never appreciated the class he offered: the delicacies and champagne, the erudite conversation, the philosophy and poetry of the bible.
They couldn’t have cared less. They just giggled and simpered and hiccuped sometimes when the champagne bubbles kicked in.
They weren’t even fucking smart enough to be scared when he moved in close and put one arm around their necks.
They never even screamed.
They were about as stupid as Duncan, who never questioned why the black equipment bag sometimes looked lumpier and weighed a hundred extra pounds.
“Careful, Jord, don’t trip on the wires.”
Jordan acknowledges the sound guy – Steve? who cares, really – with a nod and carefully steps over the cords into the light.
Up front, Heather Carson is nearly jumping with anticipation.
This is so worth the lie – Kathy never minds covering for her, anyway – and the hitch to town.
She’s practically close enough to touch Jordan.
Mind you, it’s awfully hot. She probably should’ve worn the V-neck tank top and not this long-sleeved Gap shirt. But she didn’t want Mom to get suspicious.
And she should’ve grabbed some water. It’s dry in here and her lips are getting chapped.
The air is electric.
Jordan barely hears the piercing screams and girlish giggles. He knows something special is about to happen. He can feel it in his bones. In his veins. In his blood.
He settles onto his stool and looks out into the crowd, meeting the gaze of a bright-eyed girl in a button-down shirt. She flushes at the unexpected eye contact and slowly licks her lips.
Jordan pulls the microphone down to his face and opens his mouth to sing.
On the Precipice
She should probably feel cold, Margaret thinks.
The biting wind has whipped her hair into a riotous tangle of dark curls and stirred the firth into a frenzy below.
Spring, it seems, is a relative term in Scotland. Not so much the presence of warmth and sunshine as the absence of the chill, impenetrable wall of darkness that envelops Edinburgh for six months of the year.
But the unforgiving assault of air at least numbs pain.
Margaret feels oddly exhilarated by the salt tang of the air. She takes it into her lungs in huge gulps as she tries to slow her heart, still racing from the climb up Arthur’s Seat.
Standing on the edge of the precipice, looking over the city, she has the giddy, dizzying feeling of childhood rides on the ferris wheel. But there are no safety bars here. And no strong hands to catch her if she starts to slip.
One step, thinks Margaret, and she’ll be tomorrow’s headlines.
Canadian backpacker falls to death.
One step to instant fame.
And nothingness.
*
Maggie was seven when it started.
Her obsession with Scotland began on her First Communion day. She was walking with her classmates across the church lawn, eyes cast primly down at folded hands as she pretended not to notice the satisfying swish of white satin against her tights and the slight prickling of the flowers in her hair. God might not like it if she was vain. Especially today.
Today Maggie could even ignore Stuart, who taunted everyone but seemed to have a special chapter in his book of insults for Maggie MacKenzie.
“Stuart Ian Fraser, walk nicely and keep your hands folded like a good lad.”
It was a woman’s voice – Stuart’s mom, Maggie guessed – and Maggie liked it. The lady didn’t sound like other old people. She sounded fun, with a song in her voice, and Maggie wondered why other grownups didn’t sound like that.
Mass was interminable for Maggie, who hated sitting still at the best of times. Even the curious cardboard taste of the host dissolving on her tongue didn’t hold her attention for long.
She was too eager to ask her father about Stuart’s mom. Dad knew everything, and Maggie was sure he’d know why she sounded so pretty.
He laughed, as he always did when Maggie came with one of her questions. Usually Maggie didn’t like being laughged at. but from Dad is was okay. She knew he meant it nicely. And he never told her stop asking questions, like Sister Mary did all the time at school.
“Why does she sound like that? Because she’s from Scotland, Sprout, and that’s how they talk in Scotland.”
Maggie made up her mind then and there that, when she was big, she’d go to Scotland. Imagine someplace where everyone had such pretty voices. As if they really wanted to sing but sometimes had to just talk instead.
Even when Stuart tugged the flowers from her hair and ran away with them, Maggie held onto her hopes for Scotland. Probably there were no awful people like Stuart there. Probably they made those people move to Canada.
But she was mad about the flowers. They looked so pretty against her curls, and she wanted them for the class picture.
Should she chase Stuart to get them back?
*
Maggie looked over and saw her parents talking to Pauline’s boring father.
They wouldn’t see her anyway. So she ran after Stuart, growing angry as the taller, faster boy managed to keep them just out of her reach. Then, to her horror, Maggie tripped, falling on her hands and knees onto the church lawn.
Winded and embarrassed, Maggie knew she was going to cry. Now she’d messed up her clothes and wouldn’t look pretty in the picture.
Then, surprisingly, Maggie felt a hand helping her up.
It was Stuart, holding out her flowers.
“I’msorryMaggieIdidn’tmeanit,” he said in a rush, helping her brush off her tights.
Then he ran off.
But not before he smiled at her.
And she smiled back.
*
Maggie looked over and saw her parents talking to Pauline’s boring father.
No, Mom wouldn’t want her to run. Not in her white tights and new, slightly pinchy shoes. (Maggie never mentioned that they were pinchy. If she had, Mom might not have bought them. And Maggie loved the look of them, with their white strap and shiny buckle.)
So Maggie made do without the flowers.
But she felt a pang for years when she looked at the picture.
*
They were fast friends after that. No one knew how it happened, but suddenly there they were. Maggie-and-Stuart. Stuart-and-Maggie. Their names were rarely said separately.
Their parents watched with pleased smiles as the two ran and biked and dared each other to climb higher and higher in the maple tree in Maggie’s front yard.
Maggie had girlfriends, too: Pauline and Tammy. But they were kind of silly. They weren’t friends like Stuart.
*
Maggie couldn’t forgive Stuart for the flowers. Even though she knew it was a sin not to forgive.
Even when they showed up in her desk on Monday with a SweetTart candy that said “Be mine,” Maggie turned away.
Stuart Fraser was a bad boy. Besides, everyone knew boys were stupid. She and Pauline and Tammy said it all the time.
*
Maggie never knew when it changed. When the innocent intimacy of childhood just vanished.
But one day, not long after they’d all moved on to the big high school, she saw Stuart in the hallway and smiled at him. He pretended he hadn’t seen her.
Maggie went home and cried.
Not that she told him that. She went back to school and giggled louder than everybody as she and Pauline and Tammy strutted the halls with the careless confidence of fourteen-year-olds just beginning to realize that the boys were watching.
Stuart watched for a long time.
Maggie knew that. She watched him, too, but she never told anybody.
Then, at one school dance in Grade 10, he asked her – with a great show of indifference – to dance.
Maggie, equally and just as carefully indifferent, agreed.
Then they were Maggie-and-Stuart, Stuart-and-Maggie again. The same. Only different.
*
Stuart went to the big high school, too. Maggie saw him sometimes in the hallway. Sometimes she even smiled at him – seven years was a long time to hold a grudge about some silly flowers.
Sometimes he smiled back.
Once, when Maggie was waiting for Pauline outside the science lab, he left his friends and headed her way.
Then Pauline came out and grabbed her arm with a giggle. “I think Stuart likes you,” she whispered as the two flounced off.
Stuart never tried to talk to Maggie after that.
*
No one was surprised when Maggie and Stuart went off to university together. Not together, precisely – Maggie was studying engineering, Stuart was in arts – but their rooms were in the same dorm, on neighbouring floors.
Maggie never felt the need to tell her parents that she spent most nights in Stuart’s room. And she never told anybody, not even Pauline, how she felt when she watched him lying there wearing nothing but a rumpled sheet. Or about the funny, delightful mornings when he’d smuggle food – muffins or bananas or, on one messy but memorable occasion, chocolate pudding – out of the cafeteria and feed it to her in bed.
And lie there, naked, quoting poetry at her. Usually Robbie Burns, with an exaggerated Scottish accent and an impish grin.
“As fair art thou, my bonnie lass.
So deep in love am I.
And I will love thee still, my dear
Till a’the seas gang dry.”
“It was written for you, Margaret Dhu,” he’d say in that velvety voice that often made her miss her eight-thirty math lecture.
Maggie knew ‘dhu’ only meant dark. But when the word rolled off his tongue like a caress, it meant everything she couldn’t bring herself to say.
Love. Forever.
And she hugged to herself the knowledge that she had found what so many girls wanted.
The perfect man.
*
Maggie figured she’d never see Stuart at university. But, as it turned out, she met him around campus sometimes. He even lived in the same dorm, a floor above her.
Sometimes he’d be with a girl – usually a pretty, laughing blonde. Those times, he’d always say hi to Maggie. With a see-what-you-missed air that got under her skin.
Like she’d missed anything at all.
*
Maggie didn’t know when the shadow fell. When she first saw the darkness in her laughing poet.
It was the little things at first.
The questions. Where were you, Mag. Who was that on the phone. Why weren’t you in last night.
The eyes. The hurt when she made plans with the girls. The dark anger when she stayed out late drinking with Mark and Damian after a gruelling exam.
The voice. The caressing, velvety tones that often turned cold. Condescending. Are you really wearing that. Do you really want to order that steak well-done. Do you really like that kind of wine.
When she got upset, he did too.
“I’m so sorry, Margaret Dhu,” he’d say earnestly.
Looking into his hazel eyes, she’d melt. He didn’t mean to be a jerk. It was just stress, that’s all.
There would always be an act of atonement. Flowers in her room. A teddy bear on her pillow. A KitKat in her bag.
She’d smile then and return to his room. To his bed.
And watch him sleeping in a tangle of sheets and know it would somehow be all right.
Because he loved her.
*
Maggie saw Stuart more and more. Not planned encounters, just around – in the cafeteria, in the stairwell, at the odd keg party.
She could never quite figure him out. He often looked over like he was going to speak.
He never did.
And the parade of laughing blondes seemed to take up more and more of his time.
So why did he keep watching her?
Weird.
Maggie shrugged it off. Stuart Fraser was no concern of hers.
*
It was the night of the engineering grad party at Damian’s – a typically loud, hot, crazy Damian kind of party.
Stuart begged off with a philosophy assignment – defining solipsism, he explained with a rueful shake of his head. Maggie teased him that it was solipsism of the worst sort to think that his philosophy assignment was more important than her grad party.
And they parted, laughing.
It was late – early morning, really – by the time Maggie got back. And she was far from sober when she let herself into Stuart’s room, planning to crawl into bed and tease him awake.
She wasn’t expecting him to be up pacing the floor.
She wasn’t expecting the anger. The ice-cold, quiet rage that was so much worse than noise and fury.
She wasn’t expecting him to grab her roughly.
“You little slut.”
Maggie never knew a voice so soft could sound so vicious.
He grabbed at the black bra strap peeking out from underneath her tank top.
“Does Damian like this one particularly?”
The sneer in his voice hit Maggie like a slap in the face.
“Stu, don’t be silly.”
She shook off his hands and backed towards the door, wanting to put distance between herself and the stranger who wasn’t Stuart.
“Shtu, don’t be shilly,” he mocked her. “Drunk, too, like a slut would be.”
Maggie’s head reeled. This wasn’t Stu, her Stu. He didn’t mean it. It was a bad day, that’s all. Maybe his assignment wasn’t going well.
She reached out a tentative hand towards him.
“Stu –”
She heard the blow before she felt it.
She wondered. If the strange, crunching, cracking sound was connected to the darkness that seemed to be closing in around her. If the searing pain that followed was in her nose or her eye.
And if the hard, agonizing knot in her chest was what a heart felt like when it began to break.
*
Maggie, stumbling home drunk from the grad party at Damian’s, couldn’t believe she’d finished university and somehow failed to find a man after four bloody years.
Oh, there’d been a few. Greg. Todd. Jamie. Sean. And that one awkward, drunken night with Damian. But no sign of Mr. Right.
Aw, screw it. Who needed men, anyway?
Maggie was giddy enough to beam happily at Stuart Fraser when she passed him in the stairwell.
He didn’t look happy, she thought. In fact, he looked miserable.
But what did it matter?
Stuart Fraser was nothing to her.
*
She knew they didn’t believe her.
Not the nice nurses or the silent, bearded doctor. Not Pauline or Tammy. And not her parents, who worried when she arrived home announcing she was heading to Scotland. As soon as possible.
She could see from their faces that no one bought the eye story. But they accepted it when she explained, lightly but firmly, that the engineering grad party had gotten out of hand and she’d ended up in the middle of a fight.
No one asked about Stuart. Why he hadn’t been around. Why he wasn’t going on this long-spoken-of journey to Scotland. Why she never returned his tearful calls.
But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
She just packed her backpack and caught a plane.
*
Maggie studied the clothes on her bed with dismay, wondering how so much wardrobe was meant to fit in so little backpack and whether that small bottle of cover-up would be enough to take the worst edges off the shiner she’d earned at the engineers’ softball tournament.
What would Scottish men think of a Canadian girl with a black eye?
Then Maggie grinned. Heck, it was Scotland. She’d just tell them the other guy looked worse. Probably they’d laugh and buy her a pint.
Anyway, this time tomorrow she’d be in Edinburgh.
The phone rang but Maggie ignored it. The machine could get it.
“Maggie, it’s Stuart Fraser.”
She glanced at the machine in surprise.
“I heard you were off to Scotland soon and wondered if you wanted some tips or anything. Anyway, I’m at 592-1756 if you want to gimme a shout.”
Maggie sat on the bed, shaking her head.
Weird. Maybe Pauline hadn’t been wrong years ago when she said Stuart Fraser had a thing for Maggie.
Maggie giggled and returned to packing.
She wouldn’t call him back, of course. Not tonight. Or ever.
But it was nice to think he’d noticed her once.
*
Maggie feels the wind whip against her face, the cold lulling her still-sore eye into numbness. She peers over the edge of the cliff and contemplates what it’s like to be twenty-three years old. In a strange country. And absolutely alone.
She raises her arms as if to control the rush of wind or fly away on its fearsome power.
And she feels a grin spread across her aching face as she turns and walks away from the precipice.
Margaret Anne MacKenzie is finally in Scotland.
The biting wind has whipped her hair into a riotous tangle of dark curls and stirred the firth into a frenzy below.
Spring, it seems, is a relative term in Scotland. Not so much the presence of warmth and sunshine as the absence of the chill, impenetrable wall of darkness that envelops Edinburgh for six months of the year.
But the unforgiving assault of air at least numbs pain.
Margaret feels oddly exhilarated by the salt tang of the air. She takes it into her lungs in huge gulps as she tries to slow her heart, still racing from the climb up Arthur’s Seat.
Standing on the edge of the precipice, looking over the city, she has the giddy, dizzying feeling of childhood rides on the ferris wheel. But there are no safety bars here. And no strong hands to catch her if she starts to slip.
One step, thinks Margaret, and she’ll be tomorrow’s headlines.
Canadian backpacker falls to death.
One step to instant fame.
And nothingness.
*
Maggie was seven when it started.
Her obsession with Scotland began on her First Communion day. She was walking with her classmates across the church lawn, eyes cast primly down at folded hands as she pretended not to notice the satisfying swish of white satin against her tights and the slight prickling of the flowers in her hair. God might not like it if she was vain. Especially today.
Today Maggie could even ignore Stuart, who taunted everyone but seemed to have a special chapter in his book of insults for Maggie MacKenzie.
“Stuart Ian Fraser, walk nicely and keep your hands folded like a good lad.”
It was a woman’s voice – Stuart’s mom, Maggie guessed – and Maggie liked it. The lady didn’t sound like other old people. She sounded fun, with a song in her voice, and Maggie wondered why other grownups didn’t sound like that.
Mass was interminable for Maggie, who hated sitting still at the best of times. Even the curious cardboard taste of the host dissolving on her tongue didn’t hold her attention for long.
She was too eager to ask her father about Stuart’s mom. Dad knew everything, and Maggie was sure he’d know why she sounded so pretty.
He laughed, as he always did when Maggie came with one of her questions. Usually Maggie didn’t like being laughged at. but from Dad is was okay. She knew he meant it nicely. And he never told her stop asking questions, like Sister Mary did all the time at school.
“Why does she sound like that? Because she’s from Scotland, Sprout, and that’s how they talk in Scotland.”
Maggie made up her mind then and there that, when she was big, she’d go to Scotland. Imagine someplace where everyone had such pretty voices. As if they really wanted to sing but sometimes had to just talk instead.
Even when Stuart tugged the flowers from her hair and ran away with them, Maggie held onto her hopes for Scotland. Probably there were no awful people like Stuart there. Probably they made those people move to Canada.
But she was mad about the flowers. They looked so pretty against her curls, and she wanted them for the class picture.
Should she chase Stuart to get them back?
*
Maggie looked over and saw her parents talking to Pauline’s boring father.
They wouldn’t see her anyway. So she ran after Stuart, growing angry as the taller, faster boy managed to keep them just out of her reach. Then, to her horror, Maggie tripped, falling on her hands and knees onto the church lawn.
Winded and embarrassed, Maggie knew she was going to cry. Now she’d messed up her clothes and wouldn’t look pretty in the picture.
Then, surprisingly, Maggie felt a hand helping her up.
It was Stuart, holding out her flowers.
“I’msorryMaggieIdidn’tmeanit,” he said in a rush, helping her brush off her tights.
Then he ran off.
But not before he smiled at her.
And she smiled back.
*
Maggie looked over and saw her parents talking to Pauline’s boring father.
No, Mom wouldn’t want her to run. Not in her white tights and new, slightly pinchy shoes. (Maggie never mentioned that they were pinchy. If she had, Mom might not have bought them. And Maggie loved the look of them, with their white strap and shiny buckle.)
So Maggie made do without the flowers.
But she felt a pang for years when she looked at the picture.
*
They were fast friends after that. No one knew how it happened, but suddenly there they were. Maggie-and-Stuart. Stuart-and-Maggie. Their names were rarely said separately.
Their parents watched with pleased smiles as the two ran and biked and dared each other to climb higher and higher in the maple tree in Maggie’s front yard.
Maggie had girlfriends, too: Pauline and Tammy. But they were kind of silly. They weren’t friends like Stuart.
*
Maggie couldn’t forgive Stuart for the flowers. Even though she knew it was a sin not to forgive.
Even when they showed up in her desk on Monday with a SweetTart candy that said “Be mine,” Maggie turned away.
Stuart Fraser was a bad boy. Besides, everyone knew boys were stupid. She and Pauline and Tammy said it all the time.
*
Maggie never knew when it changed. When the innocent intimacy of childhood just vanished.
But one day, not long after they’d all moved on to the big high school, she saw Stuart in the hallway and smiled at him. He pretended he hadn’t seen her.
Maggie went home and cried.
Not that she told him that. She went back to school and giggled louder than everybody as she and Pauline and Tammy strutted the halls with the careless confidence of fourteen-year-olds just beginning to realize that the boys were watching.
Stuart watched for a long time.
Maggie knew that. She watched him, too, but she never told anybody.
Then, at one school dance in Grade 10, he asked her – with a great show of indifference – to dance.
Maggie, equally and just as carefully indifferent, agreed.
Then they were Maggie-and-Stuart, Stuart-and-Maggie again. The same. Only different.
*
Stuart went to the big high school, too. Maggie saw him sometimes in the hallway. Sometimes she even smiled at him – seven years was a long time to hold a grudge about some silly flowers.
Sometimes he smiled back.
Once, when Maggie was waiting for Pauline outside the science lab, he left his friends and headed her way.
Then Pauline came out and grabbed her arm with a giggle. “I think Stuart likes you,” she whispered as the two flounced off.
Stuart never tried to talk to Maggie after that.
*
No one was surprised when Maggie and Stuart went off to university together. Not together, precisely – Maggie was studying engineering, Stuart was in arts – but their rooms were in the same dorm, on neighbouring floors.
Maggie never felt the need to tell her parents that she spent most nights in Stuart’s room. And she never told anybody, not even Pauline, how she felt when she watched him lying there wearing nothing but a rumpled sheet. Or about the funny, delightful mornings when he’d smuggle food – muffins or bananas or, on one messy but memorable occasion, chocolate pudding – out of the cafeteria and feed it to her in bed.
And lie there, naked, quoting poetry at her. Usually Robbie Burns, with an exaggerated Scottish accent and an impish grin.
“As fair art thou, my bonnie lass.
So deep in love am I.
And I will love thee still, my dear
Till a’the seas gang dry.”
“It was written for you, Margaret Dhu,” he’d say in that velvety voice that often made her miss her eight-thirty math lecture.
Maggie knew ‘dhu’ only meant dark. But when the word rolled off his tongue like a caress, it meant everything she couldn’t bring herself to say.
Love. Forever.
And she hugged to herself the knowledge that she had found what so many girls wanted.
The perfect man.
*
Maggie figured she’d never see Stuart at university. But, as it turned out, she met him around campus sometimes. He even lived in the same dorm, a floor above her.
Sometimes he’d be with a girl – usually a pretty, laughing blonde. Those times, he’d always say hi to Maggie. With a see-what-you-missed air that got under her skin.
Like she’d missed anything at all.
*
Maggie didn’t know when the shadow fell. When she first saw the darkness in her laughing poet.
It was the little things at first.
The questions. Where were you, Mag. Who was that on the phone. Why weren’t you in last night.
The eyes. The hurt when she made plans with the girls. The dark anger when she stayed out late drinking with Mark and Damian after a gruelling exam.
The voice. The caressing, velvety tones that often turned cold. Condescending. Are you really wearing that. Do you really want to order that steak well-done. Do you really like that kind of wine.
When she got upset, he did too.
“I’m so sorry, Margaret Dhu,” he’d say earnestly.
Looking into his hazel eyes, she’d melt. He didn’t mean to be a jerk. It was just stress, that’s all.
There would always be an act of atonement. Flowers in her room. A teddy bear on her pillow. A KitKat in her bag.
She’d smile then and return to his room. To his bed.
And watch him sleeping in a tangle of sheets and know it would somehow be all right.
Because he loved her.
*
Maggie saw Stuart more and more. Not planned encounters, just around – in the cafeteria, in the stairwell, at the odd keg party.
She could never quite figure him out. He often looked over like he was going to speak.
He never did.
And the parade of laughing blondes seemed to take up more and more of his time.
So why did he keep watching her?
Weird.
Maggie shrugged it off. Stuart Fraser was no concern of hers.
*
It was the night of the engineering grad party at Damian’s – a typically loud, hot, crazy Damian kind of party.
Stuart begged off with a philosophy assignment – defining solipsism, he explained with a rueful shake of his head. Maggie teased him that it was solipsism of the worst sort to think that his philosophy assignment was more important than her grad party.
And they parted, laughing.
It was late – early morning, really – by the time Maggie got back. And she was far from sober when she let herself into Stuart’s room, planning to crawl into bed and tease him awake.
She wasn’t expecting him to be up pacing the floor.
She wasn’t expecting the anger. The ice-cold, quiet rage that was so much worse than noise and fury.
She wasn’t expecting him to grab her roughly.
“You little slut.”
Maggie never knew a voice so soft could sound so vicious.
He grabbed at the black bra strap peeking out from underneath her tank top.
“Does Damian like this one particularly?”
The sneer in his voice hit Maggie like a slap in the face.
“Stu, don’t be silly.”
She shook off his hands and backed towards the door, wanting to put distance between herself and the stranger who wasn’t Stuart.
“Shtu, don’t be shilly,” he mocked her. “Drunk, too, like a slut would be.”
Maggie’s head reeled. This wasn’t Stu, her Stu. He didn’t mean it. It was a bad day, that’s all. Maybe his assignment wasn’t going well.
She reached out a tentative hand towards him.
“Stu –”
She heard the blow before she felt it.
She wondered. If the strange, crunching, cracking sound was connected to the darkness that seemed to be closing in around her. If the searing pain that followed was in her nose or her eye.
And if the hard, agonizing knot in her chest was what a heart felt like when it began to break.
*
Maggie, stumbling home drunk from the grad party at Damian’s, couldn’t believe she’d finished university and somehow failed to find a man after four bloody years.
Oh, there’d been a few. Greg. Todd. Jamie. Sean. And that one awkward, drunken night with Damian. But no sign of Mr. Right.
Aw, screw it. Who needed men, anyway?
Maggie was giddy enough to beam happily at Stuart Fraser when she passed him in the stairwell.
He didn’t look happy, she thought. In fact, he looked miserable.
But what did it matter?
Stuart Fraser was nothing to her.
*
She knew they didn’t believe her.
Not the nice nurses or the silent, bearded doctor. Not Pauline or Tammy. And not her parents, who worried when she arrived home announcing she was heading to Scotland. As soon as possible.
She could see from their faces that no one bought the eye story. But they accepted it when she explained, lightly but firmly, that the engineering grad party had gotten out of hand and she’d ended up in the middle of a fight.
No one asked about Stuart. Why he hadn’t been around. Why he wasn’t going on this long-spoken-of journey to Scotland. Why she never returned his tearful calls.
But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
She just packed her backpack and caught a plane.
*
Maggie studied the clothes on her bed with dismay, wondering how so much wardrobe was meant to fit in so little backpack and whether that small bottle of cover-up would be enough to take the worst edges off the shiner she’d earned at the engineers’ softball tournament.
What would Scottish men think of a Canadian girl with a black eye?
Then Maggie grinned. Heck, it was Scotland. She’d just tell them the other guy looked worse. Probably they’d laugh and buy her a pint.
Anyway, this time tomorrow she’d be in Edinburgh.
The phone rang but Maggie ignored it. The machine could get it.
“Maggie, it’s Stuart Fraser.”
She glanced at the machine in surprise.
“I heard you were off to Scotland soon and wondered if you wanted some tips or anything. Anyway, I’m at 592-1756 if you want to gimme a shout.”
Maggie sat on the bed, shaking her head.
Weird. Maybe Pauline hadn’t been wrong years ago when she said Stuart Fraser had a thing for Maggie.
Maggie giggled and returned to packing.
She wouldn’t call him back, of course. Not tonight. Or ever.
But it was nice to think he’d noticed her once.
*
Maggie feels the wind whip against her face, the cold lulling her still-sore eye into numbness. She peers over the edge of the cliff and contemplates what it’s like to be twenty-three years old. In a strange country. And absolutely alone.
She raises her arms as if to control the rush of wind or fly away on its fearsome power.
And she feels a grin spread across her aching face as she turns and walks away from the precipice.
Margaret Anne MacKenzie is finally in Scotland.
Unpretty Girl
Also stemming from a Story Club Challenge … I know that "magic pencils" were one of the elements, but I've long since forgotten the others!
*
You’d want me to make you pretty.
You’d ask for different hair – bouncing red waves or blonde ringlets or a dark silken waterfall over your shoulders. You’d want a different face, too – one of cherub-like sweetness with sparkling blue eyes or something darkly exotic with full curling lashes.
But I can’t change you.
Try as I might, I can’t see you any way but how you were, all bones and angles with mousy boy-cut hair, a hesitant gap-toothed grin, awkward posture and hand-me-down clothes from your cousins that never quite fit.
I see more than that, though. I see the quick light of intelligence in those grey-green eyes, hidden behind too-large plastic-framed glasses. The gentleness of those small hands as they stroked Toby’s ragged coat. The promise of future grace, an awakening lithe slenderness in those pointed elbows and twig-thin legs.
You’d never believe me. You couldn’t see those things. You just saw the unpretty twelve-year-old.
She’s the heroine of my story.
“But that’s not right,” you’d say. “You can’t have a story without a pretty heroine.”
That’s where you’re wrong.
Because I can’t change you. I won’t. But I’ll tell a story anyway.
“What do you want in your story?” I’d ask you.
I know what you’d say.
*
Magic.
When you were little, you’d watch me write – always by hand, in a blue-covered school notebook. I didn’t like the electric Olivetti much, though your dad was so proud of it when he got it for me that Christmas.
You asked me once if I wrote with a magic pencil to make my stories turn out right.
“Yes, “ I told you. “I do.”
You believed in magic pencils for a long time.
When you started to draw – when you discovered that light and shade and perspective were to you what plot and character and theme were to me – you’d ask every Christmas for magic pencils to make your drawings turn out right.
I didn’t believe in magic pencils, exactly, but there was something uncanny about what happened when you sat down with your sketchpad and pencil, absently giving the graphite an occasional lick as you pondered the page in front of you.
You laughed at me that day when I curled up cross-legged with you in the living room with my own paper, your pack of Laurentian pencil crayons between us.
While you sketched with swift, sure strokes, I drew slowly, painstakingly, taking refuge in the bland safety of landscape.
You peeked over at my page, giggled and tossed a new pencil at me.
“Grass isn’t chartreuse, Mom! Try forest green.”
I tossed it back.
“I want chartreuse. And my sky will be periwinkle. So there.”
I bent over my paper with my best imitation of your sulky pout.
You ignored me, but I could see your lips twitching.
I added cerise birds to my periwinkle sky and drew in scarlet flowers and a lemon sun for good measure.
Then you shoved your sketchpad in front of me. There we were. You, me and him. You were in the centre, in a posture that suggested you’d been drawing. I was sitting beside you. He was in the doorway, looking on as though he’d just walked in.
Maybe it was intentional on your part. Maybe it was a quirk of line. An accident of angle.
He was staring at you, smiling in that way of his – the delighted enthusiasm that could sweep the world into the warmth of its beam.
He didn’t seem to see me at all.
*
Love.
With a wrinkle of your pointed little nose, you’d concede the need for some of that in a proper story.
There was so much of it, from that very first moment.
I noticed him first, but I never admitted it. I always let him tell it his way.
“I saw you on the park bench,” he’d say, smile lighting his blue eyes. “Your head was bent over your notebook, and the sunshine caught your hair and turned it to gold. Then you looked up at the sun and smiled, and I knew I had to say hello.”
I never told him I’d already seen him. That I wasn’t startled when he tapped me on the shoulder. That I’d felt my stomach flip a little when I saw him walking towards me with that confident stride, that windblown hair, that all-encompassing smile.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said hi.
And that was that.
It all seemed inevitable after that. As though the moments from park bench to church aisle were part of a story that had already been written and I just had to keep turning the pages to get to the end.
You always liked looking at my wedding photos. Not so much at my long white dress – “ it’s just a wedding dress,” you’d say with a shrug – but at your aunts’ strange fashions.
Connie and Rose got lots of looks that day, with their short skirts and beehive hairdos. More looks than me, I joked.
But not from him.
He didn’t take his eyes off me the whole day.
Connie, for one, found that hilarious.
“Enjoy it while you can,” she warned darkly. “The honeymoon will be over soon enough.”
Connie had to admit she was wrong when you were on the way.
He’d gaze at me, wonderingly, as if I were Mona Lisa in his living room. He’d reach out and caress me with hands so gentle I could almost believe I had imagined his touch. Then he’d place both his hands on my stomach and lean in close to sing to you.
He couldn’t carry a tune. But that never mattered.
You seemed to like his voice. Later, when your crying would wake us up, he’d cradle you against his chest and croon tuneless versions of Shilo and Sweet Caroline.
You’d snuggle against him and sleep.
Then he’d look at me with an expression that said, How did I get so lucky.
When did that end, I wonder.
*
Conflict.
A good story needs some of that, too.
Ten minutes is all you need. Ten minutes to shift the direction of your story forever.
As soon as I arrived, I could sense that something was out of place.
That’s how I would begin this in a story, though in truth that’s not how it happened.
I don’t think I registered anything, other than slight surprise that his gleaming red Volvo was in the driveway. I hadn’t expected him home yet. I knew you were going to Annie’s to work on your science fair project, and I was looking forward to having the house to myself.
Still, I smiled a little at the thought of surprising him. I let myself in quietly, intending to sneak up behind him in his usual spot – the recliner in front of the TV – and put my hands over his eyes, playing our silly game of Guess Who.
He wasn’t in the recliner. He was on the phone. A snippet of conversation caught my ears as I walked quietly across the hall.
“Oh, really? Now that sounds tempting.”
It wasn’t the words that made me pause so much as the tone. The teasing lilt and throaty chuckle he never used with anyone but me. It was the chuckle, I think, that made me freeze in the living room, poised outside the kitchen door, listening to the rest of the conversation with a growing sense of inevitability.
I’d known, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I felt it in the tiredness he’d claim as he’d roll onto his side and turn out the light with a token kiss. The too-frequent showers after late nights at the office. The faint, unfamiliar floral scent that clung to his dress shirts.
I saw the cliché. I just hadn’t admitted to myself that I was living it.
“Listen, Tess, I’ve gotta run. You know how it is. But we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
The kitchen door must have pushed itself open, because I don’t remember doing it.
I just remember standing there, staring, seeing the look on his face. Dread mixed with relief, as if he too sensed the inevitability of the moment.
He opened his mouth, looked ready to speak.
“Spare us both,” I said.
I turned around, feeling tears welling up, unwilling to let him see me cry.
“ I want you gone when I get back.”
That was all I said before I fled, grazing the doorframe and bumping the recliner on my way to the door, blinded by the tears that were already flowing down my cheeks.
I thought you were at Annie’s.
You were supposed to be at Annie’s.
*
Endings.
You always said they were the most important part of the story. And they had to be sad, because happily ever after was for kids and hopelessly old-fashioned mothers.
This is the part where you’d want me to make you prettier.
“It’s always sadder when the heroine is pretty,” you’d say.
Maybe you were right.
Maybe that’s why I won’t make you pretty.
I won’t let this be sad.
I’ll change the ending.
It’ll go something like this:
The driver looked away for just a second and then looked back. She swore. Slammed on the brakes in time to see you scurry, white-faced, back to the lawn, Toby in your arms.
The driver didn’t feel the sickening moment of impact. Did not hear the dull thud, the crunch that sent her heart leaping into her throat. Did not get out of the car screaming your name.
She did not see you lying there, white and still, legs splayed, neck bent awkwardly. Did not see Toby nuzzling your hand with a plaintive mewling that was nothing like his usual imperious yowl.
That did not happen.
Neither did the rest.
I need your magic pencil now. I’ll flip it over and use the pink rubber to make it all disappear.
Erase the frantic phone call. The sirens. The lights. The white-coated ambulance attendants who seemed to move in slow motion as they took you away.
Edit out the journey we took to the hospital, he and I, trapped in a silence we couldn’t break, a chasm too deep and wide to cross.
Remove the moment the doctor came into the room, face grave, eyes gentle.
Delete the words: Skull fracture. Cerebral edema.
None of it was real.
Nor was that day, with its parade of faces, its endless series of hugs and meaningless murmurs of consolation. As if there was any to be had.
“Be strong,” his dad said. “For Carrie.”
“Don’t cry,” my mother said. “God’s taken her home.”
Strike my response.
“Home? Her home was with me.”
Lose the bitter tone that echoed in the muffled silence of the church.
Most of all make me not have said those final words that lashed out at him with lethal venom.
“This was your fault. I left because of you.”
Make him not have replied. Not have spoken in a tone so quiet I could barely hear the words, so icy cold I felt its sting like a physical blow.
“You were driving. Not me.”
Rub out those words, every one of them, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. Remove them from the page and they will not have been said.
Write it my way.
*
You watch me as I bring the car to a halt and leap out. I race to you and capture you in my arms, feeling the unrelenting stiffness of your small body.
“Don’t frighten me like that again,” I say, hugging you so tightly you start to squirm.
“’Kay, whatever,” you mutter. “I was just getting Toby.”
I release you and run a hand through your hair.
“It’s all right,” I say softly. “I was just scared, that’s all.”
There.
It isn’t sad anymore. It will be real, if I will it to be.
The heroine will come in at any moment with her thin awkward body, her short mousy hair, her gap-toothed grin. Her glasses will be slightly askew as she runs to me, eyes alight behind the thick lenses.
She’ll fling her arms around me in an impulsive childish moment of love.
“Hi Mom,” she’ll say. “I missed you today.”
Then she’ll race upstairs to get a book.
You won’t like my ending much.
It’s not sad enough. And the heroine isn’t pretty.
But I’m not changing that part. Not even for you.
I like it better my way.
*
You’d want me to make you pretty.
You’d ask for different hair – bouncing red waves or blonde ringlets or a dark silken waterfall over your shoulders. You’d want a different face, too – one of cherub-like sweetness with sparkling blue eyes or something darkly exotic with full curling lashes.
But I can’t change you.
Try as I might, I can’t see you any way but how you were, all bones and angles with mousy boy-cut hair, a hesitant gap-toothed grin, awkward posture and hand-me-down clothes from your cousins that never quite fit.
I see more than that, though. I see the quick light of intelligence in those grey-green eyes, hidden behind too-large plastic-framed glasses. The gentleness of those small hands as they stroked Toby’s ragged coat. The promise of future grace, an awakening lithe slenderness in those pointed elbows and twig-thin legs.
You’d never believe me. You couldn’t see those things. You just saw the unpretty twelve-year-old.
She’s the heroine of my story.
“But that’s not right,” you’d say. “You can’t have a story without a pretty heroine.”
That’s where you’re wrong.
Because I can’t change you. I won’t. But I’ll tell a story anyway.
“What do you want in your story?” I’d ask you.
I know what you’d say.
*
Magic.
When you were little, you’d watch me write – always by hand, in a blue-covered school notebook. I didn’t like the electric Olivetti much, though your dad was so proud of it when he got it for me that Christmas.
You asked me once if I wrote with a magic pencil to make my stories turn out right.
“Yes, “ I told you. “I do.”
You believed in magic pencils for a long time.
When you started to draw – when you discovered that light and shade and perspective were to you what plot and character and theme were to me – you’d ask every Christmas for magic pencils to make your drawings turn out right.
I didn’t believe in magic pencils, exactly, but there was something uncanny about what happened when you sat down with your sketchpad and pencil, absently giving the graphite an occasional lick as you pondered the page in front of you.
You laughed at me that day when I curled up cross-legged with you in the living room with my own paper, your pack of Laurentian pencil crayons between us.
While you sketched with swift, sure strokes, I drew slowly, painstakingly, taking refuge in the bland safety of landscape.
You peeked over at my page, giggled and tossed a new pencil at me.
“Grass isn’t chartreuse, Mom! Try forest green.”
I tossed it back.
“I want chartreuse. And my sky will be periwinkle. So there.”
I bent over my paper with my best imitation of your sulky pout.
You ignored me, but I could see your lips twitching.
I added cerise birds to my periwinkle sky and drew in scarlet flowers and a lemon sun for good measure.
Then you shoved your sketchpad in front of me. There we were. You, me and him. You were in the centre, in a posture that suggested you’d been drawing. I was sitting beside you. He was in the doorway, looking on as though he’d just walked in.
Maybe it was intentional on your part. Maybe it was a quirk of line. An accident of angle.
He was staring at you, smiling in that way of his – the delighted enthusiasm that could sweep the world into the warmth of its beam.
He didn’t seem to see me at all.
*
Love.
With a wrinkle of your pointed little nose, you’d concede the need for some of that in a proper story.
There was so much of it, from that very first moment.
I noticed him first, but I never admitted it. I always let him tell it his way.
“I saw you on the park bench,” he’d say, smile lighting his blue eyes. “Your head was bent over your notebook, and the sunshine caught your hair and turned it to gold. Then you looked up at the sun and smiled, and I knew I had to say hello.”
I never told him I’d already seen him. That I wasn’t startled when he tapped me on the shoulder. That I’d felt my stomach flip a little when I saw him walking towards me with that confident stride, that windblown hair, that all-encompassing smile.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he said hi.
And that was that.
It all seemed inevitable after that. As though the moments from park bench to church aisle were part of a story that had already been written and I just had to keep turning the pages to get to the end.
You always liked looking at my wedding photos. Not so much at my long white dress – “ it’s just a wedding dress,” you’d say with a shrug – but at your aunts’ strange fashions.
Connie and Rose got lots of looks that day, with their short skirts and beehive hairdos. More looks than me, I joked.
But not from him.
He didn’t take his eyes off me the whole day.
Connie, for one, found that hilarious.
“Enjoy it while you can,” she warned darkly. “The honeymoon will be over soon enough.”
Connie had to admit she was wrong when you were on the way.
He’d gaze at me, wonderingly, as if I were Mona Lisa in his living room. He’d reach out and caress me with hands so gentle I could almost believe I had imagined his touch. Then he’d place both his hands on my stomach and lean in close to sing to you.
He couldn’t carry a tune. But that never mattered.
You seemed to like his voice. Later, when your crying would wake us up, he’d cradle you against his chest and croon tuneless versions of Shilo and Sweet Caroline.
You’d snuggle against him and sleep.
Then he’d look at me with an expression that said, How did I get so lucky.
When did that end, I wonder.
*
Conflict.
A good story needs some of that, too.
Ten minutes is all you need. Ten minutes to shift the direction of your story forever.
As soon as I arrived, I could sense that something was out of place.
That’s how I would begin this in a story, though in truth that’s not how it happened.
I don’t think I registered anything, other than slight surprise that his gleaming red Volvo was in the driveway. I hadn’t expected him home yet. I knew you were going to Annie’s to work on your science fair project, and I was looking forward to having the house to myself.
Still, I smiled a little at the thought of surprising him. I let myself in quietly, intending to sneak up behind him in his usual spot – the recliner in front of the TV – and put my hands over his eyes, playing our silly game of Guess Who.
He wasn’t in the recliner. He was on the phone. A snippet of conversation caught my ears as I walked quietly across the hall.
“Oh, really? Now that sounds tempting.”
It wasn’t the words that made me pause so much as the tone. The teasing lilt and throaty chuckle he never used with anyone but me. It was the chuckle, I think, that made me freeze in the living room, poised outside the kitchen door, listening to the rest of the conversation with a growing sense of inevitability.
I’d known, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I felt it in the tiredness he’d claim as he’d roll onto his side and turn out the light with a token kiss. The too-frequent showers after late nights at the office. The faint, unfamiliar floral scent that clung to his dress shirts.
I saw the cliché. I just hadn’t admitted to myself that I was living it.
“Listen, Tess, I’ve gotta run. You know how it is. But we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
The kitchen door must have pushed itself open, because I don’t remember doing it.
I just remember standing there, staring, seeing the look on his face. Dread mixed with relief, as if he too sensed the inevitability of the moment.
He opened his mouth, looked ready to speak.
“Spare us both,” I said.
I turned around, feeling tears welling up, unwilling to let him see me cry.
“ I want you gone when I get back.”
That was all I said before I fled, grazing the doorframe and bumping the recliner on my way to the door, blinded by the tears that were already flowing down my cheeks.
I thought you were at Annie’s.
You were supposed to be at Annie’s.
*
Endings.
You always said they were the most important part of the story. And they had to be sad, because happily ever after was for kids and hopelessly old-fashioned mothers.
This is the part where you’d want me to make you prettier.
“It’s always sadder when the heroine is pretty,” you’d say.
Maybe you were right.
Maybe that’s why I won’t make you pretty.
I won’t let this be sad.
I’ll change the ending.
It’ll go something like this:
The driver looked away for just a second and then looked back. She swore. Slammed on the brakes in time to see you scurry, white-faced, back to the lawn, Toby in your arms.
The driver didn’t feel the sickening moment of impact. Did not hear the dull thud, the crunch that sent her heart leaping into her throat. Did not get out of the car screaming your name.
She did not see you lying there, white and still, legs splayed, neck bent awkwardly. Did not see Toby nuzzling your hand with a plaintive mewling that was nothing like his usual imperious yowl.
That did not happen.
Neither did the rest.
I need your magic pencil now. I’ll flip it over and use the pink rubber to make it all disappear.
Erase the frantic phone call. The sirens. The lights. The white-coated ambulance attendants who seemed to move in slow motion as they took you away.
Edit out the journey we took to the hospital, he and I, trapped in a silence we couldn’t break, a chasm too deep and wide to cross.
Remove the moment the doctor came into the room, face grave, eyes gentle.
Delete the words: Skull fracture. Cerebral edema.
None of it was real.
Nor was that day, with its parade of faces, its endless series of hugs and meaningless murmurs of consolation. As if there was any to be had.
“Be strong,” his dad said. “For Carrie.”
“Don’t cry,” my mother said. “God’s taken her home.”
Strike my response.
“Home? Her home was with me.”
Lose the bitter tone that echoed in the muffled silence of the church.
Most of all make me not have said those final words that lashed out at him with lethal venom.
“This was your fault. I left because of you.”
Make him not have replied. Not have spoken in a tone so quiet I could barely hear the words, so icy cold I felt its sting like a physical blow.
“You were driving. Not me.”
Rub out those words, every one of them, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. Remove them from the page and they will not have been said.
Write it my way.
*
You watch me as I bring the car to a halt and leap out. I race to you and capture you in my arms, feeling the unrelenting stiffness of your small body.
“Don’t frighten me like that again,” I say, hugging you so tightly you start to squirm.
“’Kay, whatever,” you mutter. “I was just getting Toby.”
I release you and run a hand through your hair.
“It’s all right,” I say softly. “I was just scared, that’s all.”
There.
It isn’t sad anymore. It will be real, if I will it to be.
The heroine will come in at any moment with her thin awkward body, her short mousy hair, her gap-toothed grin. Her glasses will be slightly askew as she runs to me, eyes alight behind the thick lenses.
She’ll fling her arms around me in an impulsive childish moment of love.
“Hi Mom,” she’ll say. “I missed you today.”
Then she’ll race upstairs to get a book.
You won’t like my ending much.
It’s not sad enough. And the heroine isn’t pretty.
But I’m not changing that part. Not even for you.
I like it better my way.
Panther Eyes
A short write – stemming from a writer's forum in which you're given a trigger sentence or idea and then have half an hour to write a piece of fiction coming from it.
The trigger sentence for this one was something like: "Some fathers have wildcat eyes."
**
She’ll know him, she thinks, because he must have them too.
She fiddles with her compact and flips it open, peering in the mirror as if to remind herself of what she’s looking for.
These eyes came from him, she knows. They aren’t her mother’s deep pools of chocolate laughter.
No, these odd, slightly slanting green eyes with the tiny triangles of yellow dotting the pupils are something else altogether. Wildcat’s eyes, Mom used to call them. Panther eyes.
The rest could be Mom’s, she thinks – the too-curvy body, the long curly dark hair with a tendency to frizz in wet weather, the almost-tall-enough-to-be-average height.
She’s her mother, everyone says.
Since she can remember, she’s always been Little Louise to her family.
– I’m not Louise, I’m Emily, she used to correct them, gently, patiently, when her aunts and uncles and Granny would say that to her six-year-old self.
As she got older, she learned to just roll her eyes.
Just like Mom would when they told her she was being such an Emily.
They were peas in a pod, everyone always said.
It’s only the eyes that ever made Emily different.
Secretly, she kind of liked her own eyes better. But she was always a little sorry that they were her best feature, when they were the only thing she had inherited from That Bastard Who Left.
Not, of course, that Mom ever said “bastard.” She wouldn’t. Emily heard that word in a conversation Mom had with Auntie May when she was five, and she never forgot it.
Ever since, he’s always been, in her mind, That Bastard Who Left. Complete with capitals, since Emily likes to capitalize Words That Are Important.
That Bastard Who Left was surprised to hear from her.
This much Emily could deduce, despite the surprisingly pleasant e-mail she’d received back.
“I always hoped Louise would help you get in touch with me some day,” he’d written. “I’ve drawn a picture of you in my mind, and I’m sure you’re more beautiful even than that.”
She wanted to laugh. And cry.
But she didn’t do either. She just e-mailed him and set up this meeting in a short, to-the-point message.
– Wait in the lobby, he’d written back. I’ll be off at five and I’ll see you when I come off the elevator.
It’s early. Naturally.
She’s always early (another Little Louise trait). She’s skipped basketball practice – Jen and Nori told her she was crazy, that Coach would put her on the bench, but she didn’t really care.
This is something she had to do.
She’s been here an hour watching them come and go, all these important-looking people with suits and scowls and briefcases, thinking to herself that if this was what being a lawyer looks like, perhaps she needs to rethink her future plans.
She knows she’ll know him right away.
But she watches them all anyway, not even caring that she’s staring in a way Mom would have told her was rude.
What about him, in the black suit? Too young, probably, and too handsome. Besides, his teeth are too white and his tie is boring.
The one with the umbrella? Closer, she thinks, but still not right. Too soft-looking somehow. A little too fat.
The curly-haired guy? Almost possible, she thinks, but probably too jolly. Too bad, too, because she sort of likes the look of his face. There’s something in it that suggests he’d never tell you off for missing curfew, although he might be strict about homework.
Emily hasn’t decided what she’ll say. She has so much to tell him.
He doesn’t know anything.
That Mom doesn’t know she set up this meeting. That she’d just looked up the address in Mom’s book and gone ahead and got in touch. That she’ll never tell Mom because it would hurt her to think she somehow wasn’t enough for Emily. That Mom would always wonder why, after all this time, Emily needed to meet That Bastard Who Left.
Emily doesn’t know that, either. Except that something about turning sixteen made her realize that she wasn’t a child. And that she shouldn’t be saved like a child from whatever the truth was about That Bastard Who Left.
Then.
The elevator doors open and an anxious-looking man steps off, peering over at the row of seats and scanning them as if dozens of people are waiting there and not just one teenage girl.
He looks quite nice, Emily sees. Not too tall but not too short, with a nice solid pair of shoulders and only a little grey in his brown hair.
And though he wears wire-rimmed glasses that obscure them slightly, Emily can tell as he draws closer that he has green eyes with little yellow triangles in them – yellow triangles that are lighting up and nearly dancing at the sight of her.
“Emily,” he says
It isn’t a question, but Emily pauses.
Looks up at him, at the dancing triangles and the grey hair and the almost childishly eager smile.
And smiles pleasantly back in a distant sort of way, shaking her head.
“Sorry, no,” she hears herself say. “My name’s Nori.”
The smile fades and she sees the doubt come into his eyes.
– But … he starts. And stops.
– I thought…
– But you look like …
Emily continues to smile at him pleasantly, keeping one eye on the elevator door and glancing down at her watch to indicate that she is, in fact, still waiting for someone.
She shrugs slightly, left shoulder a little higher than the right.
His green panther’s eyes meet hers, and an expression she can’t quite name flits across his face. Then she sees him straighten his shoulders.
– So sorry about that, he says. I was waiting for a girl named Emily whom I’ve wanted to see for a very long time.
– Maybe she’s just running late, Emily suggests.
He assesses her with those wildcat eyes and nods.
– Probably, he agrees.
He glances at his watch and shrugs slightly in reply, left shoulder a little higher than the right.
– Well, guess I should get going, he says. Nice to almost meet you. Nori.
He extends his hand and Emily takes it, shaking it slowly with an answering smile.
– Nice to almost meet you too.
He walks away, and Emily knows he can’t hear her finish the sentence in her head.
– Dad.
The trigger sentence for this one was something like: "Some fathers have wildcat eyes."
**
She’ll know him, she thinks, because he must have them too.
She fiddles with her compact and flips it open, peering in the mirror as if to remind herself of what she’s looking for.
These eyes came from him, she knows. They aren’t her mother’s deep pools of chocolate laughter.
No, these odd, slightly slanting green eyes with the tiny triangles of yellow dotting the pupils are something else altogether. Wildcat’s eyes, Mom used to call them. Panther eyes.
The rest could be Mom’s, she thinks – the too-curvy body, the long curly dark hair with a tendency to frizz in wet weather, the almost-tall-enough-to-be-average height.
She’s her mother, everyone says.
Since she can remember, she’s always been Little Louise to her family.
– I’m not Louise, I’m Emily, she used to correct them, gently, patiently, when her aunts and uncles and Granny would say that to her six-year-old self.
As she got older, she learned to just roll her eyes.
Just like Mom would when they told her she was being such an Emily.
They were peas in a pod, everyone always said.
It’s only the eyes that ever made Emily different.
Secretly, she kind of liked her own eyes better. But she was always a little sorry that they were her best feature, when they were the only thing she had inherited from That Bastard Who Left.
Not, of course, that Mom ever said “bastard.” She wouldn’t. Emily heard that word in a conversation Mom had with Auntie May when she was five, and she never forgot it.
Ever since, he’s always been, in her mind, That Bastard Who Left. Complete with capitals, since Emily likes to capitalize Words That Are Important.
That Bastard Who Left was surprised to hear from her.
This much Emily could deduce, despite the surprisingly pleasant e-mail she’d received back.
“I always hoped Louise would help you get in touch with me some day,” he’d written. “I’ve drawn a picture of you in my mind, and I’m sure you’re more beautiful even than that.”
She wanted to laugh. And cry.
But she didn’t do either. She just e-mailed him and set up this meeting in a short, to-the-point message.
– Wait in the lobby, he’d written back. I’ll be off at five and I’ll see you when I come off the elevator.
It’s early. Naturally.
She’s always early (another Little Louise trait). She’s skipped basketball practice – Jen and Nori told her she was crazy, that Coach would put her on the bench, but she didn’t really care.
This is something she had to do.
She’s been here an hour watching them come and go, all these important-looking people with suits and scowls and briefcases, thinking to herself that if this was what being a lawyer looks like, perhaps she needs to rethink her future plans.
She knows she’ll know him right away.
But she watches them all anyway, not even caring that she’s staring in a way Mom would have told her was rude.
What about him, in the black suit? Too young, probably, and too handsome. Besides, his teeth are too white and his tie is boring.
The one with the umbrella? Closer, she thinks, but still not right. Too soft-looking somehow. A little too fat.
The curly-haired guy? Almost possible, she thinks, but probably too jolly. Too bad, too, because she sort of likes the look of his face. There’s something in it that suggests he’d never tell you off for missing curfew, although he might be strict about homework.
Emily hasn’t decided what she’ll say. She has so much to tell him.
He doesn’t know anything.
That Mom doesn’t know she set up this meeting. That she’d just looked up the address in Mom’s book and gone ahead and got in touch. That she’ll never tell Mom because it would hurt her to think she somehow wasn’t enough for Emily. That Mom would always wonder why, after all this time, Emily needed to meet That Bastard Who Left.
Emily doesn’t know that, either. Except that something about turning sixteen made her realize that she wasn’t a child. And that she shouldn’t be saved like a child from whatever the truth was about That Bastard Who Left.
Then.
The elevator doors open and an anxious-looking man steps off, peering over at the row of seats and scanning them as if dozens of people are waiting there and not just one teenage girl.
He looks quite nice, Emily sees. Not too tall but not too short, with a nice solid pair of shoulders and only a little grey in his brown hair.
And though he wears wire-rimmed glasses that obscure them slightly, Emily can tell as he draws closer that he has green eyes with little yellow triangles in them – yellow triangles that are lighting up and nearly dancing at the sight of her.
“Emily,” he says
It isn’t a question, but Emily pauses.
Looks up at him, at the dancing triangles and the grey hair and the almost childishly eager smile.
And smiles pleasantly back in a distant sort of way, shaking her head.
“Sorry, no,” she hears herself say. “My name’s Nori.”
The smile fades and she sees the doubt come into his eyes.
– But … he starts. And stops.
– I thought…
– But you look like …
Emily continues to smile at him pleasantly, keeping one eye on the elevator door and glancing down at her watch to indicate that she is, in fact, still waiting for someone.
She shrugs slightly, left shoulder a little higher than the right.
His green panther’s eyes meet hers, and an expression she can’t quite name flits across his face. Then she sees him straighten his shoulders.
– So sorry about that, he says. I was waiting for a girl named Emily whom I’ve wanted to see for a very long time.
– Maybe she’s just running late, Emily suggests.
He assesses her with those wildcat eyes and nods.
– Probably, he agrees.
He glances at his watch and shrugs slightly in reply, left shoulder a little higher than the right.
– Well, guess I should get going, he says. Nice to almost meet you. Nori.
He extends his hand and Emily takes it, shaking it slowly with an answering smile.
– Nice to almost meet you too.
He walks away, and Emily knows he can’t hear her finish the sentence in her head.
– Dad.
Bangkok Night
Originally written for a Story Club challenge, in which my colleagues and I set ourselves the task of trying to write like one another. This was written in the persona of our enigmatic and marvellous sports editor - a poor imitation, but a fun attempt. This is a version I later revised to enter in a flash fiction contest.
*
One night and the world’s your oyster.
That’s what the guys used to say about this city, on those nights of beer-soaked camaraderie that seem so long ago.
They always said they’d come here one day.
Bangkok.
The name spoke of tantalizing mysteries – exotic women clad in silk, offering forbidden fruits to those who dared to reach for them.
He knows better now.
An oyster? Perhaps. Crushed by a heavy-footed traveller, shell shattered like jagged shards of glass.
There is no pearl here.
Only laughter in the darkness.
And rain.
*
Rain.
He feels it run down his face.
Its warm fingers caress his head and embrace the wiry bristles that are beginning to emerge from the once-smooth skull. Its silver touch slides down his unwashed neck, clings to the faded denim jacket, lends a new lustre to the scuffed shoes.
The shoes.
Florsheims. He bought them to celebrate his first paycheque. He loved to look down and see their dark solidity as he strode down Bay Street to the firm.
He was someone then.
He knew his mind. He owned his heart.
And then she came.
Silver laughter and a teasing smile. A body of curves and sensuous wonder. Hair of molten copper and skin of silk and flame.
She reached out for his heart.
And delicately pried it from his chest with slim fingers extended in a caress.
Even as the thought comes, he wants to laugh. To stave off the inevitable melodramatic metaphor. But the image comes in spite of him.
Her fingers became serpents, sharp fangs digging deep under his skin, pouring their lethal venom into his veins. Intoxicating, poisoning, lulling into the sleep of the damned.
All he knew was her.
And her laughter.
*
Laughter.
The silver sound that carried the poison to his heart.
Love?
He says the word and she repeats it, her light tone airy with disbelief.
Lust maybe, that light voice scoffs, but never love.
Her laughter ripples over him.
And he runs.
*
Runs.
He knows he acts deliberately. Calmly. Secures a leave of absence. Buys a ticket. Catches a flight.
But in his soul, he runs. Stumbling blindly in the night. Fleeing unseen pursuers, heedless of direction or course or destination.
He falls. Gets up. And runs again.
Solace. He yearns for it. Seeks it half a world away, in the oppressive jungle heat that smothers all thought, deadens all emotion.
In the wat where soothing voices chant the refrain of the seeker in pursuit of noble truths, where saffron-coloured robes hide scars from the world’s sight.
They reach for him and he reaches back, a drowning man clinging desperately to a piece of flotsam.
Their shelter is inviting. A fortress against cruelty. A blanket against the cold of night. A rock gently placed to balance a world tilting off-kilter.
But it finds him there.
The laughter. The gilded gates can’t keep it out. The saffron robes are no armour against it.
He leaves their shelter.
He hears their pleas but cannot remain. The fortress is impenetrable no longer, more prison than shelter now.
The gates close behind him, their clang scarcely audible to the world outside.
He is gone. Running.
He is seeking his oyster; a pearl diver in denim jacket and scuffed shoes.
He hears the city’s alluring call.
The promise of Patpong. Of pleasure. Of passion. Of release from pain.
*
Pain.
He feels little of it now. Is it numbness or healing, he wonders as he sits on the curb.
He watches the flickering neon signs made hazy by the rain. The shadowed shapes on the street. The jet-black cascades of hair, the slim hips swaying as, one by one, sellers and buyers seal their bargains and make their way into the night.
The night beckons, its arms reaching out to envelop him in a lover’s embrace, the dark a seductress whispering his name.
But, like a woman, it is all tempting surface and empty soul. Like a woman, Patpong makes promises it cannot keep.
It offers no comfort. No respite. No hope.
Only an interlude of forgetfulness, a blurring of memory, an anesthetic to dull the pain.
So he sits.
He watches the flickering lights.
He feels the rain as it journeys into the very marrow of his bones, into the arteries that travel to his heart.
The night calls to him.
But he will not answer her siren song.
And he will not run.
Not tonight.
He sits.
*
One night and the world’s your oyster.
That’s what the guys used to say about this city, on those nights of beer-soaked camaraderie that seem so long ago.
They always said they’d come here one day.
Bangkok.
The name spoke of tantalizing mysteries – exotic women clad in silk, offering forbidden fruits to those who dared to reach for them.
He knows better now.
An oyster? Perhaps. Crushed by a heavy-footed traveller, shell shattered like jagged shards of glass.
There is no pearl here.
Only laughter in the darkness.
And rain.
*
Rain.
He feels it run down his face.
Its warm fingers caress his head and embrace the wiry bristles that are beginning to emerge from the once-smooth skull. Its silver touch slides down his unwashed neck, clings to the faded denim jacket, lends a new lustre to the scuffed shoes.
The shoes.
Florsheims. He bought them to celebrate his first paycheque. He loved to look down and see their dark solidity as he strode down Bay Street to the firm.
He was someone then.
He knew his mind. He owned his heart.
And then she came.
Silver laughter and a teasing smile. A body of curves and sensuous wonder. Hair of molten copper and skin of silk and flame.
She reached out for his heart.
And delicately pried it from his chest with slim fingers extended in a caress.
Even as the thought comes, he wants to laugh. To stave off the inevitable melodramatic metaphor. But the image comes in spite of him.
Her fingers became serpents, sharp fangs digging deep under his skin, pouring their lethal venom into his veins. Intoxicating, poisoning, lulling into the sleep of the damned.
All he knew was her.
And her laughter.
*
Laughter.
The silver sound that carried the poison to his heart.
Love?
He says the word and she repeats it, her light tone airy with disbelief.
Lust maybe, that light voice scoffs, but never love.
Her laughter ripples over him.
And he runs.
*
Runs.
He knows he acts deliberately. Calmly. Secures a leave of absence. Buys a ticket. Catches a flight.
But in his soul, he runs. Stumbling blindly in the night. Fleeing unseen pursuers, heedless of direction or course or destination.
He falls. Gets up. And runs again.
Solace. He yearns for it. Seeks it half a world away, in the oppressive jungle heat that smothers all thought, deadens all emotion.
In the wat where soothing voices chant the refrain of the seeker in pursuit of noble truths, where saffron-coloured robes hide scars from the world’s sight.
They reach for him and he reaches back, a drowning man clinging desperately to a piece of flotsam.
Their shelter is inviting. A fortress against cruelty. A blanket against the cold of night. A rock gently placed to balance a world tilting off-kilter.
But it finds him there.
The laughter. The gilded gates can’t keep it out. The saffron robes are no armour against it.
He leaves their shelter.
He hears their pleas but cannot remain. The fortress is impenetrable no longer, more prison than shelter now.
The gates close behind him, their clang scarcely audible to the world outside.
He is gone. Running.
He is seeking his oyster; a pearl diver in denim jacket and scuffed shoes.
He hears the city’s alluring call.
The promise of Patpong. Of pleasure. Of passion. Of release from pain.
*
Pain.
He feels little of it now. Is it numbness or healing, he wonders as he sits on the curb.
He watches the flickering neon signs made hazy by the rain. The shadowed shapes on the street. The jet-black cascades of hair, the slim hips swaying as, one by one, sellers and buyers seal their bargains and make their way into the night.
The night beckons, its arms reaching out to envelop him in a lover’s embrace, the dark a seductress whispering his name.
But, like a woman, it is all tempting surface and empty soul. Like a woman, Patpong makes promises it cannot keep.
It offers no comfort. No respite. No hope.
Only an interlude of forgetfulness, a blurring of memory, an anesthetic to dull the pain.
So he sits.
He watches the flickering lights.
He feels the rain as it journeys into the very marrow of his bones, into the arteries that travel to his heart.
The night calls to him.
But he will not answer her siren song.
And he will not run.
Not tonight.
He sits.
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