Blasted (22 page)

The way the rage entered me, like possession, how could I talk about that? “It's really good of you to come over.” Did my voice sound the way it should? I searched her face.

“Okay.” She drew smoke into her lungs and stared out the window.

Looking back at me, she made an effort to smile. “Apology accepted,” she said, trying to sound smug.

Relief washed over me. “Bitch,” I said.

“Cow.”

“Slut.”

“Whore.”

“Ouch.”

“At least you're getting some. I haven't gotten laid in… oh, God, I don't want to think about it,” she said.

Eventually five o'clock rolled around and I offered Juanita a beer. Dennis was with his dead-beat dad – “Oh, holy day,” said Juanita, rolling her eyes – so she accepted. She regaled me with an account of Dennis's latest thing, that he'd been adopted. “He's driving me nuts,” she said, “he goes around calling me ‘Mrs. Cooper' all the time. Especially when I try to lay down a rule.”

“I went through a phase like that,” I said. “Just to piss off my mother.”

“Maybe,” she mused, “it's an only-child thing.”

“What?!”

“Well, you and Dennis are both…”

“I know what you're going to say.” I held up my hand. “That all only children need to be the centre of attention all the time, that we are on a constant quest to be special…”

“I wasn't even think…”

“… that we don't know how to acknowledge that there are other people in the universe, we can never get enough love…”

“Ruby, I never said any such thing!”

“No, go on. Say it. I can take it. It's not like I haven't heard it before.

I still
feel
adopted. Every time I come back here, I leave less sure of who I am.”

“Nothing like family to make you feel crazy.”

She spoke quietly, and it struck me how brave she was, so much braver than I. I looked down at the table, shame, at last, sweeping through me.

“Juanita, I'm so sorry.”

She shook her head. “It's okay, Ruby.”

I drained my beer, and silence grew between us until I felt like screaming. I cast around for a change of subject, and found myself saying, “Juanita… The Great-Aunt came over last night, and she alluded to some kind of hereditary illness in the family. Something my dad had. You're a nurse. I know you were only young when he died, but…?”

She thought for a moment, shaking her head. “I don't really remember him well enough to... What are
you
thinking?”

“Well, he never worked in the winter.”

“So?” Seasonal employment wasn't exactly rare in the province.

“And he'd eat,” I remembered. “He'd eat and eat, but only when there wasn't anyone else around. Mom'd bring up these huge trays of food to the bedroom and as soon as you turned around he'd clean the plate in a minute.” I felt cold, cold and nervous. I got another beer.

“Maybe he had S.A.D.,” Juanita said.

“Sad? Of course he was sad. He was fucking gloomy all the time.”

“No, S.A.D. Seasonal affective disorder. Lots of people have it. It can be quite severe.”

“What is it?” My interest piqued.

“Less light in winter – it makes some people depressed.”

“But that doesn't explain it.” All that my father had done, had been, was because there wasn't enough
light
? “It doesn't explain anything!”

“Ruby, I hardly know anyway – I was thirteen too, remember?”

She reached over the table and took my hand. The gesture was unlike the Juanita I remembered, so motherly, so calming. I disengaged my hand and sucked on my beer bottle. “Okay, fine,” I snapped. “Probably you're right. Probably what I want you to say is, ‘Hey, Ruby, your family has a rare congenital form of madness that explains how very fucking special you've always been.'”

“Will you calm down?”

“I mean, having
dead
parents earned me special points for years.”

“Yes. I remember.”

I downed the rest of my beer. “Want another?”

“No thanks, I'm driving.”

“How very responsible of you.”

“Look, girl, don't get into it with me again.” Her voice was firm. I took a breath and forced myself to remember who I was talking to. A girl who'd lost her father, whose mother was mad and had pimped her own daughters.

“Okay. I'm sorry. Again.” My chair scraped floor as I stood, grabbed another beer.

“It's alright, Ruby.”

CHAPTER 15

That night, sitting in bed, I took my plane ticket from the bedside table where I'd thrown it so carelessly on arrival, and checked the dates. Three days. Three days until I went back, leaving my grandfather, leaving this house. Outside, trees creaked and swayed; the lumps up and down my spine throbbed, I couldn't find any way to lie. The wind shrieked and whispered. It was almost human, the wind, its voices, like a woman crying, and underneath that, small whisperings. If I listened hard enough I would be able to understand what they were saying.
Inside, inside, come back.
The voices nearer now, under my bed,
come in.

I came to with a jolt. The bedside lamp was still on, and the plane ticket had fallen to the floor; that's what had awoken me. I began to reach for the ticket, then, absurdly, stopped. What if there was something under the bed? Those eyes I'd seen after the evening out with Juanita – what if something
had
been there? Slowly, heart pounding, I peered over the side of my bed. Nothing. I snatched the ticket from the floor and rolled onto my back. Wonderful, I thought, now I'm losing my mind. Something Aunt Queenie said came to me – clothes inside out? I thrashed around, taking off the T-shirt I wore and turning its ragged seams outward.

Then I tried to relax. I stared at the ceiling. The damp had made patterned patches in the plaster: when younger I'd seen a witch with hair streaming out behind her, and a lamb, and a tree. They just looked like rusty stains now; I'd lost the trick of shifting my eyes to see. I'd identified them that first night long ago when I'd slept here; Gramma had shown them to me. Bowed and shaken with grief at the loss of her son, she'd taken me up to this room, his room. “I'll tuck you in, my girl,” she'd said, her hands gentle, smoothing the sheet over the rough edge of the woolen blanket. She'd shown the shapes to me and said I could keep the light on because, old as I was, I was afraid to sleep in the dark. Too old to sleep with a light on, too old for shapes on the ceiling, too old to be “tucked in,” and needing it all.

So much had gone wrong between us after that. She'd had the kind of temper that roils in a slow, continuous boil. Sure, she never came down on me; Juanita used to say she envied me, for my grandmother would lay down rules and then do little when I broke them (and I always broke them). Every bit of trouble I caused seemed to surprise her not at all. She'd just get more grim. I used to think that if once, just once, she'd be surprised when I screwed up, if only she'd punish me, it wouldn't be so bad. It was like the way she'd take the paint can out after Grandpa kicked the furniture up – only without the love and long certainty they had between them.

She'd cast me adrift.

So many of my feelings had been kept in behind my smart remarks.

Had she known how terrified and desperate I was? Had she maybe even loved me?

Because I had loved her, oh, I had loved her. With all my poor heart.

Tears came, and more tears; I tried to keep quiet so Grandpa wouldn't hear. Every joint ached; my bones felt like they were poking out through my skin. I could feel every hair on my head, on my legs and arms, and they all hurt. At one point I got out of bed and pressed my face to the dark cold of the window-glass. The orange lights from the highway lit the Hill in a lurid glow and power lines criss-crossed the sky, low clouds pale with the light bouncing off them. I crawled back under the covers and pulled them over my head.

I was awakened by a sound from down the hall: Grandpa's footsteps hollow and creaking in his bedroom. The loneliness of that sound almost beyond bearing. My chest and throat ached with crying, and I was hot, so hot; I took my T-shirt off and threw it to the floor. I couldn't bear to leave my grandfather, even if that was what he wanted – couldn't bear to leave him, couldn't bear to go back to the city. Was that about him, about wanting to look after him, or about me?

It seemed seconds later that I found myself sitting bolt upright, shrieking. Obscenities echoed in my head, a man's angry voice. And something else, buzzing and grating in my ears, thousands of little noises, the voices of insects or birds. There had been a great weight on my chest, and I hadn't been able to move – like being buried alive. I took in great lungfuls of air – they'd been drowning me again, rough hands throwing me through the air, and just before I hit the cold, still surface of the water, the dawning sky above me had filled with pigeon wings.

I held my breath and listened – had my cries awakened Grandpa? No sound came from down the hall. No, no one. My heart started to slow. That was the Hag for sure. She'd come sit on your chest in the night, you couldn't move, and if you didn't awaken, you died, she sucked the breath right out of you. My father had known, that time, to come in and look after me. It had been summer, he'd held me in his arms.
He'd never be there for you in winter
: the thought came unbidden, and I pushed it down like vomit.

I hugged my knees to myself. The lamp made the window black, black and scary. I tried to remember what one was supposed to do to stave off nightmares. Wasn't there something about shoes? Turning your shoes around at the foot of your bed? Or wearing your clothes inside out? No, that was Queenie. Taking my courage in hand, I swung my icy feet down onto the floor and found my thrown T-shirt. I made sure it was still inside out and put it on. Then, skin crawling, I found my boots and brought them to the foot of the bed. Were you supposed to put them
on
the bed? That didn't make any sense. So, on the floor, but which way? I put the toes pointing away, considered, then toward. No, that didn't look right either. I kicked viciously at the boots. One shot away into the shadows under the bed.

I woke up late, the bedside lamp pale in the daylight. It was a piss of a day out, and the house felt cold. I stumbled down to the kitchen and put on the kettle. Grandpa wasn't anywhere to be found. I stomped into the living room and turned on the TV, flipping through the dismal channels until the kettle started screaming.

There were two photos on top of the TV, so familiar that I hardly saw them any more: a wedding photo of Gramma and Grandpa, strangely anonymous as most wedding photos are, and a hunting picture of Grandpa with Dad. I noticed that the glass was cracked on the wedding one, like an omen. Putting my tea down, I brought the photos to the couch.

My father, young, and Grandpa with two white dogs and a dead caribou, out on the Barrens. A hunting trip. I remembered Queenie's story and wondered if this was the one when my father was sixteen, the one when he'd gone missing? He looked younger than sixteen here. He knelt at his father's feet, holding up the head of the dead caribou. His dark hair was cut short, sticking up wildly in patches. Typically, he wasn't looking at the camera. He gazed off to the side, an absent quality to him, his strong, young hands gripping the beautiful antlers so that they curved around his head in a pagan halo. The animal was magnificent, a gorgeous rack on him, and with his head raised up he seemed almost alive, looking at the same oblique horizon as my father, smelling the air. Two pale dogs, English Setters by the looks of them, looked small as puppies next to him.

But his body was heavy, twisted, betraying his death. Dad's black sweater was unraveling at the neck, revealing the softness of his throat. Behind the tableau loomed a few of the standing stones, covered in lichens, that the glaciers dumped on the Barrens so long ago.

Dad used to go out on his own after he married Mom. I wouldn't call what he did a hunting trip, although that's what I'd tell my friends when they asked where he was. We never saw him go, he'd just be gone. The pattern was always the same. It would be autumn, late in October, cold wild gale-force winds coming in off the sea, the trees sometimes bent double with the strength of them. Dad would start getting restless, and talk even less than usual. He'd stop sleeping and stop eating, and Mom would carp at him and cook incessantly, huge elaborate meals which none of us ate. I remembered my mother's tight-lipped rage, me creeping around the house the whole time afraid of bringing her anger down on my head. He'd take to standing out in the back yard, just standing there. Dad? I said once, I must've been little for in this memory I barely came up to his waist. He looked unknowingly at me, his eyes flat and dark, strange. I asked him, with relentless child's logic, what he ate up on the Hill, and he turned to me with those eyes and smiled, showing all his teeth. I never asked again.