Blasted (48 page)

Voices, urgent voices, coming from a long way off. I turned this way and that, trying to find the direction. I rubbed at my eyes. The left one, swollen, hurt like bejesus, the right was caked with mud. Voices, a man and a woman. I managed to open my right eye. Blinking, sand in it, tearing, but I could see the world blurry and grey-bright. I could make out structures, I was lying on the edge of a wide bowl of broken gravel. Behind me, the dark, familiar mass of the Hill, outlines blurred by rain. I was sitting crumpled where the Shanawdithit monument used to be, beneath the Southside Hill, across the road from the synchrolift, just down from my grandfather's house. It was dawn. And through the wet, coming toward me on the road, my tall, thin grandfather and my Great-Aunt Queenie.

I raised my dirty little hand and waved hello.

Hands hot as fire on my skin. Grandpa's voice – What happened to you, what did this, bastards, I'll kill them. How could you do this? Are you alright? Why did you do this, I'll kill you, what happened? – Shaking me.

Aunt Queenie, firm, a little angry. – For heaven's sake, John, calm down, you'll kill her will you? – The shaking stopped. Queenie's face before me, she was careless of old knees and nylons on wet stone, her face trembling, even now smelling chemically of lily of the valley, even now wearing red lipstick. Thin hands smoothed my hair, ran lightly over my swollen eye. Look, she's dry, dry. Let's get you home, Ruby.

I couldn't smile or speak. Grandpa's hand on top of my head, patting my head over and over again. His voice not his, a deep, broken, husky sound, as if it hadn't been used in a long time. O, Ruby. O, girl. O, my love.

They got me back to the house somehow; I could hardly walk. Later it occurred to me to be grateful that it had been so very early in the morning; no one else along the road was up to see me half-dressed, covered in blood and dirt, propped between the incongruous figures of Aunt Queenie in a frilly dress, and Grandpa, tall, weeping, dressed in grey. They got me to the house and upstairs to the bathroom. Queenie was running a warm bath.

“Goddamn little bastards.”

“John!” Queenie stripped my clothing from me, and Grandpa turned away and put his face to the shut door, big hands hanging. I could see the veins, blue snakes under thin skin. “We need to think about Ruby now, you old fool. There, there, down you go.” She somehow maneuvered me into the tub. Warmth flooded like life back into my limbs, painfully, and I flailed, sounds deep in my throat; my skin stung. She flicked a washcloth over my skin. “There, there, sweet. I'm going to have a look at that eye now.” Warm wet cloth folded over the painful swollen blind thing. “She was dry in that rain when we found her. Did you see that, John?”

I was so thirsty. I scooped at the surface of the water with stinging palms, splashing, filling my mouth with hot water.

“It's Neil all over again, it's just like what happened to Neil…”

“Keep your voice down, you'll wake Tina…”

“They took him and they've taken her!” His voice rose.

“Hush!”

She got me out of the bath, wrapped in a towel, and we hobbled down the hall to Grandpa's room. We sat still at last. Queenie took the cloth off my eye, and, turning her head sideways like a bird, peered at it. “Hold, now, love, this may hurt a little…” Gentle cool fingers at the edges of the wound. Sudden pressure, painful. Queenie and I gasped simultaneously.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” my grandfather said. “You've been blasted.”

Grandpa watched her work on my wound, his lips stretched away from his teeth in a grimace. She pulled things out, impossible things: pine needles and ribbons of grass and spruce twigs. Iridescent feathers. Like my father that night. I remembered.

“Do you think we should get a doctor?”

“What in God's name would a doctor be able to do?”

“Well I'm not going for a priest, we're Protestant.” Then Queenie was struck by a thought. “What about her friend? That nurse?”

“Juanita.”

Grandpa found the phone number in the book, his fingers trembling over the thin pages. Queenie phoned.

“Hello, is this Juanita?
Yes
, girl, I know what time it is. I'm Ruby's Aunt Queenie. Yes. She's back. Yes. Well, there's something… she's been attacked, but it's rather strange. Yes. Well, we were wondering – Oh, would you, dear? Oh, thank you. Yes. Thank you.”

She hung up the phone. “She's on her way.”

Juanita's hands had always been restless, ever since I could remember. Smoking cigarettes, picking and prying, jabbing at my latest zit, peeling back little strips of skin from around her nails making her fingers bleed, until there were times when we were younger that my nervous temper prompted me to shout, Enough!

Those hands that now cradled her son's head when he hurt himself. That administered needles with nurse's efficiency. That held a man's hand while he died alone in hospital.

Her hands hadn't changed. Mine were already ageing, knuckles thrusting up against roughened skin, veins emerging blue. Her hands were as smooth as when we were fifteen. They felt good on my body, palpating the bruises, feeling deftly along my limbs. She made me follow a little light with my eyes, asked me questions, which I answered with nods and shakes, not trusting my voice. She didn't mutilate her own fingers any more, I noticed. Gently she probed the wound around my left eye. I couldn't open it, but the area was strangely numb. She wiped away spruce needles oozing from the slash, and shook her head.

“I've never seen anything like this,” she said. “The detritus inside… I just don't know.”

Queenie cleared her throat. “Maybe we should call her Toronto friends, see if she was on the flight we thought she was.”

Juanita looked up. “What makes you think she wasn't?”

It lay in the air, what they thought or knew, unspeakable.

“We went to the airport to meet her…”

“Late,” Grandpa interrupted.

“We arrived just as the passengers were getting off the plane, John,” Queenie said severely. “I don't call that late.”

“You wouldn't.”

“I had to get gas.”

“And you couldn't have done that before?”

“Well, if you'd deign to own a
car
…”

“Waste of money.”

“You're so cheap, diamonds would turn to coal in your arse.” Queenie glared at her brother.

“Like that red gas-eater you own…”

“
Anyway
, she wasn't there.”

“If we'd gotten there when
I
wanted to…”

“Oh, for heaven's sake. So we checked with the airline, and they said she had been on the flight. We figured she had headed for home on her own, and so came here ourselves. And waited.”

“All night.”

“All night. And she never came.”

“No, she never did.”

“And about dawn, John said she was at the church, you know, the one that used to be there, just down the road. And we went there, and there she was, in the construction site.”

“How did you know?” Juanita wondered.

Grandpa cleared his throat and looked miserable. “I knew,” he said.

They fell silent. I stirred, opened my mouth, tried to speak. “Walk…
girl
…” It was a horrible noise, and hurt my throat.

“You walked from the airport?”

I nodded.

“We should take her to the hospital,” Juanita said.

“We're keeping her at home,” Grandpa cut in.

Juanita looked at him, then at Queenie, long and hard. She cleared her throat, lowered her head, and probed at my motorcycle shoulder. “Some of these contusions are older.”

“Let's keep her at home.” Queenie spoke to my grandfather as if Juanita hadn't said anything at all. Her voice sounded choked, and she took my hand as if afraid someone was going to snatch me away.

Juanita blew air through her nose. “Well. At least let's find out if some of those injuries occurred in the city, before she arrived here.”

“That's a good idea, dear,” said Queenie. “Do you have the phone number for that nice young man she was staying with, John?”

They went downstairs to phone Blue. I could hear their voices, first Queenie, then Juanita, with Grandpa shouting questions in the background until Queenie told him to quiet down.

A low sound from the door made me lift my head. A pale, fur-covered creature stood there. A white dog, back stiff, neck raised, was staring fixedly at me. Oh, great – now my grandfather's dog was going to rip my throat out. I lay very still. She was much, much bigger than the day I'd met her and she'd tried to piss on me. What was it about dogs? Look into their eyes? Or don't at all costs look into their eyes? The growling got louder, and she was taking slow, stiff steps toward the bed, teeth bared. The voices downstairs went on. Would they never come back?

Suddenly, next to the dog, stood a little figure all in white. Hair so colourless it looked silver, translucent skin; I could see the delicate tracery of veins mapped subcutaneously on her face. A long white gown, a pale face with pale eyes, eyes like the bright lining of a black mussel shell. “Who,” she demanded, “are
you
?”

It was the child. I cleared my throat. “Ruby.”

She shied back, her brow wrinkling in an expression strangely adult. “Why're you all cut up?”

I gestured, then touched my throat. “Hurts… talk.”

“Oh.” The child's hand twined in the setter's wavy fur. Lily yawned. Tina's frown deepened into something like scorn. And then her face opened, cleared. “Do you have strep throat? I had strep throat once. Mumma said people can die of strep throat. But I didn't, I made a speedy recovery.” She came forward and climbed onto the bed, settling her small bum comfortably by my side. She rubbed her toes. “My feet are always cold in this house. Mumma says when we live together again we'll stay here in Newfoundland and we'll have a house like Grandma's, with central heating and a central vac and white carpets everywhere, and I'll have all my toys again in the basement that will be my whole room like cousin Ian's in Toronto, and Daddy won't come to visit not hardly ever.” She turned her strange, light eyes upon me. “I
hate
him,” she said.

Juanita came into the room. “So you finally smashed up that motorcycle of yours? Oh, hi, you must be Tina. My name's Juanita. Listen, Tina, Ruby's sick; you're not tiring her out, are you? Downstairs with you, ask your grandmother for something to eat. Off you go.” The child scrambled off the bed and pattered down the stairs, Lily following her with nails clack-clacking on the floor. Juanita sat on the edge of the bed, smoothed my hair back from my face. “Oh, Ruby. Sounds like you're having a time, girl.”

There was some controversy over where to put me. Tina was asked to vacate her room for me. I was sinking away, but I saw her face closed and frowning like a little thundercloud, and I thought of lying in that room overlooking the Hill, alone through the day. That room where I had awakened months ago, scratched and dirty from a night-run They'd taken me on, all unwilling. I shook my head. “Should we just keep her here, then?”

Queenie looked around the room of my grandfather. Grandpa said he'd sleep on the downstairs couch, which was really a loveseat and wouldn't fit him. “No…” I said, words surfacing. “Cot in the cellar.”

“You want to sleep in the
cellar
?” Queenie squawked.

I shook my head. “Kitchen.”

They looked at each other. “I know the cot she means, it's one of those folding kinds. Used to sleep on it myself when Maddie snored,”

Grandpa said.

“Well, I suppose there's room for it in the kitchen,” Queenie said.

“Why would anybody want to sleep in a
kitchen
?” Tina asked, and Lily growled assent.

“Lonely,” I forced out.

I was installed at the heart of the house. Days passed. Their voices, Queenie and Juanita's and Grandpa's, came to me from a distance, and I remembered that time had been when I would have made sense of them, when what they were saying would have struck off answering sparks from me. But the shape of my thoughts was fixed; sleeping or waking I crouched naked and filthy in a dark corner of my own mind. My body lay on the cot and mended itself; blood cells ran to the hurt places and carried infection away, wounds slowly began to close over, skin repaired itself. My throat felt less raw, but I had nothing to say. I moved alone along the shadow paths.

My left eye wouldn't heal, oozing impossible traces of forest and feather. Queenie wiped them away, singing to herself under her breath and rocking. Juanita visited and changed the dressing, asking no questions. Grandpa produced a little leather bag on a string and dropped it on my cot, growling that I should wear it around my neck. It contained a coin and a bit of lavender; he made an identical one for Tina and made her wear it. She was not allowed out of the house alone. Whispers went through me like gnawing on tin foil. “We should take her to a doctor…” “They can't help, sure, girl…” “…another day, and then…”

Nights were worst. Then the house grew thin, and I was most alone. The old window panes, pouring so slowly from their frames, rattled as if boney fingers tapped upon them. The spruce trees hissed and spoke. Grass heaved up and settled again, the very stones creaked. I thought I could hear the swish of the tides as they rushed up the river, or were sucked back down it by the vast, yearning need of the ocean. I lay on my back, one hand clutching the little bag so tightly that the hard round edges of the pitiful human talisman inside it pressed into my palm. Crushed lavender mingled with my sweat. I dared not sleep. I hardly knew if I were awake.

One night I came to myself with a sudden consciousness of some other presence in the room with me. My one eye flew open, the ceiling was there, my hand cramped around the talisman. But had I heard, or imagined – ? I tried to hold my breath. That old night-terror, old as humankind, afraid to look, afraid not to. I slowly turned my head. Nothing. I listened, sure of my sense that I was not alone – nothing. Muscles gripping, I lifted my head from the pillow to look down the hall of the house. Nothing – no, O God, a small glimmering figure. Lights dancing in front of my eyes coalesced into something solid out of the darkness, in the doorway of the kitchen. I whimpered aloud.