Blasted (15 page)

“Photos?!” Grandpa and Gramma were perhaps unique in the grandparental tribe in that they had no photograph albums, no rosters of slides with which to torture their descendants. My parents had produced the odd baby picture of me, but even these had petered out by the time I was ten or eleven.
We are not a sentimental family
, the adults used to tell me. Try pathologically disinterested. I sat next to my grandfather on the floor. “Okay, Grandpa. Spill.”

Grandpa started looking through the photos in his hands; when I realized he was selecting which ones he'd deign to show me, I squawked and tried to grab them. He held them out of my reach. “Do you want to look at these or not, Miss Grabby?” I subsided, while he shuffled the photos from hand to hand like Tarot cards, put some back in the old shoebox behind him, and spread those remaining across the rug with a smooth, conjuror's motion. I leaned over them, my hair dropping in a tangled curtain between us, and my heart beat a little faster: faded Polaroid colours, little windows on my past. They were wedding pictures: a groom in black, a bride in white. My parents. I shoved my hair behind my ear to look at Grandpa. “I've never seen these before! I thought there weren't any.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don't know. Mom, I guess.” My mother's family, the Blanchards, had been furious when she'd run off with Dad. They'd eloped, so I'd understood, because the Blanchards considered the Joneses beneath them; the lack of photos had made sense. “Who took these?”

“I did,” Grandpa admitted.

“Why didn't I –”

“Stop yelling.”

I bent over the pictures again. Mom and Dad were eighteen and twenty: younger than I was now. Strange to see these people, my parents, so young looking, so vulnerable. Painful. It made me feel, not for the first time, preternaturally old, as if I were their parent. With my finger I traced my father's face. In his suit, his hand resting on my mother's white arm, he looked unhappy, as if he'd wandered into the wedding by mistake. He listed slightly to one side to rest his right leg, the lame one. Only the wedding ring marked him as the groom. The gold band burned whitely against his strong, brown fingers.

My mother glowed, a nimbus of light around her hair, flirting outrageously with the camera – with her new father-in-law. White suited Mom; she'd worn it almost all the time. As a child I'd thought it was because her maiden name was Blanchard. Perhaps so; but you can be damn sure she wouldn't have if it hadn't suited her so perfectly. Her eyes were clear, pale, startlingly blue; her skin perfect porcelain; her hair light honey brown. She'd grown up in a big white house on an emerald hill, old St. John's money, and her family sported a fleet of white cars, a pack of white dogs, and apparently my grandmother invariably wore, fall into spring, a gorgeous blue-white fox fur coat. The whole family displayed the studied, flamboyant eccentricity in which old St. John's reveled.

Good thing the Blanchard grandparents died before I was born. They'd have hated me.

But Mom did sacrifice when she married Dad. It must have been love: marrying him, she'd had to relinquish any hope of a white fox fur forever.

I sifted through the photos. Besides the posed wedding party, there were the usual cake-cutting pictures and such. Most were of my mother. In a few Dad actually had his hand blocking the lens. I'll bet Grandpa was driving him crazy with that Polaroid camera; he'd hated having his picture taken. And this was hardly a real wedding, just Dad and Mom, Grandpa and Gramma, a few young friends.

It was odd seeing Gramma – and Grandpa too, in the few pictures where someone had wrested control of the camera from him for a moment – just in their fifties at this point. Grandpa's hair was almost as black as his son's, and Gramma's still mousy brown. A real Jack Spratt couple – he, tall and thin; she, short and plump.

“Didn't Dad take off during the wedding or something?” I asked, remembering. “Mom used to tease him about that. He fled the scene and you had to go find him?” Grandpa coughed and didn't answer, but all thoughts of my father the reluctant bridegroom were driven from my head by an old black-and-white photo, mixed in with the Polaroids: a woman.

“Grandpa,” I faltered, “Grandpa, who's that?”

“My mother,” he grated, then coughed again.

She was alone in the picture, my great-grandmother. She stood to one side, thin and pale and dressed in black, staring vaguely past the camera, and if her hair hadn't been grey… “Queenie is right! God, she looks like me. Or me in forty years, if I live so long.”

Grandpa stared at me, and then looked away, almost trembling. He began to gather up the photos.

“Grandpa, I wanted to look at those…”

He cut me off as if he hadn't heard. “People said our family was touched. Touched.” His voice was harsh. He snatched the picture of his mother from me and struggled to his feet, his face a mask of rage. I reached a hand out to him. Suddenly the phone rang. And rang again.

Grandpa turned to the wall and aimed a kick at the old wooden baseboard by the bed. The phone rang again. I scurried out the bedroom door and downstairs to answer it.

It was Juanita. She wondered if I wanted to go out with her tomorrow night. I twined my fingers in my hair, wincing at the banging noises Grandpa was making in his rage upstairs.

“I… look, I'd love to see you, but I… things are weird around here just now and…”

“You can't go out for one evening?” she asked.

“It's not that.” It sounded like Grandpa was demolishing his room with a wrecking ball. “Look, can I call you back?”

Juanita's voice was cold. “I need a little notice, remember, to find a babysitter. And I'm three days on, three off, at work…” “I'm sorry…” Grandpa came down the stairs, his face set and white. “Hold on.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Grandpa?”

He looked right through me. “Bad, bad blood,” he said. He disappeared into the kitchen, going straight out the back door. I went cold, the phone still pressed to my face.

“Ruby?” Juanita's voice was sharp in my ear. “You okay?”

I started. “Me? Yeah, you know me, I'm fine.”

“Depends on your definition of
fine
.”

I laughed. It came out sounding like a death rattle. “Oh, just grand.”

I promised to call soon, and said goodbye, Grandpa's words skipping over and over in my head.
Bad blood, bad blood
.

People do say the strangest things after a death. I remembered something Gramma said just after my parents died. They had been coming home from a Hallowe'en party out in the Goulds; Dad was driving. They were on the Arterial, almost above the house, when he veered out of control. I moved next door, into this house with my grandparents; nothing would please me, nothing they did was right. Thirteen, hating myself so much I could taste it. I was shrieking like a banshee over one thing or another, when Gramma said something about Mom never raising me right.

“Don't you say anything about her!” I raged.

Then Gramma said, “If your mother had fed your father properly, he never would've had that car accident.”

The first thing I did after hanging up on Juanita was go back upstairs for those photos.

They were nowhere to be seen. I got down on my hands and knees, grubbing around under my grandfather's bed. I found two faded Danielle Steeles on Gramma's side, six bobby pins, an old rag rug, and three big garment bags. I opened one – it was Gramma's summer wardrobe. Cotton skirts and blouses, pastel dresses and the inevitable cardigans, she'd packed them carefully away for spring. For her to wear. I hastily slipped the bag closed, tears scalding my eyes.

I checked the closet, Grandpa's chest of drawers, then went to the window and peered out to see if he'd just lobbed the photos outside, like white leaves on the gravel. He hadn't. But for the imprint of heavy, punishing emotion lingering in the halls of the house, the photos might never have existed.

I made my way down over the stairs into the darkening kitchen, with its slammed doors, its scarred linoleum. The silence of the place stole over me, deadening like wool. Like velvet.

Grandpa finally came back. We ate, we drank. We watched TV. We went to bed.

CHAPTER 10

The next morning was clear and hot. Like any true Newfoundlander I immediately leapt into outdoor action. Good weather inspires joy and suspicion; a rare treasure, it's fairy-tale gold that turns to wind and dry leaves in an instant. I tied back my hair and stepped out to the garden.

Traffic whizzed across the overpass, wheels grating and buzzing. Once this garden had been so peaceful. Grandpa had carved it out of the hillside, a series of terraces sloping behind the house. He had shifted dozens of flat stones into dry-stone walls. Dragged wheelbarrow-loads of fertilizer, bone meal, fish guts – anything to make that poor, opinionated, cranky dirt bear. I remembered telling him about gardens I saw after moving to Ontario. “Sure, it's no challenge to grow anything in that place,” he'd said sourly. “No challenge at all.” He'd laid out everything in straight lines. I remembered Gramma once confiding, “I wish he'd thought to build in a few curves; but then, what is one to expect?” Her version of
Men are from Mars.

Privately I'd suspected her of a certain jealousy of my mother's garden. Mom hadn't had to contend with bedrock, the slope softening just there, and the overpass didn't shadow things on the east side of the two joined houses. It was a pretty little place, but had stood vacant ever since my parents' deaths.

You couldn't see it from here – the linny, and a jutting stone buttress from the Hill, got in the way – but all I'd have to do, I knew, was scramble up the steep little rise and there I'd be, in the backyard of the house in which I'd spent the first years of my life. The windows were all boarded up – who had decided to do that? I wondered now. My grandparents? But I'd known how to get in. The boards had been loose on one back window: I could pry them apart, plywood splintering in fingers, glass broken in the frame, forcing an opening exactly right for a skinny thirteen-year-old body. The furniture was gone, dust coated every surface, the water and electricity had been disconnected. In the bathroom, the old claw-footed tub that I used to imagine scuttling across the ocean floor stood lonely, broken off from its pipes. Mold grew on the windowsills; it stank.

Juanita was the only person I shared that house with. We'd broken in countless times, huddling in the dry old bathtub together, drinking or getting stoned – shivering until we didn't feel cold any more, talking late into spring and summer nights – until things changed again.

Spring had been cold and wet, but Grandpa's garden was fairly bursting to grow. Dandelions had made great inroads, and chickweed lurked damp and green at the roots. But Gramma's lupins were in fine form, the bleeding heart was getting bigger, and the solomon's seal doing well. The greenish pods of wild poppies swelled like silver-furred balloons, waving heavy above serrated leaves. One or two had begun to split, a sensuous, vivid lipstick crack.

I picked one and peeled it, the flower wrinkled and tender as a butterfly from its chrysalis. Red: a gift, these flowers, from my childhood, from an abandoned garden near my elementary school. The remains of the foundations of an old house were there, and all around it poppies (and roses and black currant bushes and even a few tulips) warred with the weeds that had long since moved in for the slow kill. I had discovered the secret garden, and for weeks told no one about it. It was my special place that spring, to go and daydream during dinner break, or to play with the snails that lived there by the thousands – gorgeous in their delicate yellows and pinks, oranges and pearl, chocolate brown, caramel, their white and black spirals drawn precisely around and around.

Eventually I brought other kids into the garden, friends, a select few.

We staged competitive snail races, named all the plant species with wild inaccuracy, and had tea parties in what we decided had been the living room of the ruined house. Then we uncovered an old well and Juanita fell into it and broke her leg; there was a dramatic rescue wherein I raced back to the school and fetched Mr. Moore, our crushable grade six teacher, who carried Juanita out in his arms and into an ambulance. After that the principal pronounced it off limits, and so of course every kid in the school tramped over at every opportunity. By mid-June the garden was trampled flat, snails oozed dying within crushed shells, and all that remained of the poppies was scraps of red scattered over the foundation stones.

I moped around the house for days, until my mother finally snapped and asked me what in God's name was the matter. I blurted out my tale of woe. Mom looked thoughtful.

“Let's go over there in the car,” she said. “I'll bring a trowel.”

“That won't do any good,” I wailed. “It's
ruined
!”