The Gravesavers (22 page)

Our fun came to an end when Davey Stevenson came back from Florida with his sunburned face orange as a pumpkin. His sled was black plastic with silver chrome. He hogged the whole hill, taking more turns than anybody, pushing some of the smaller kids out of the way, washing some of the girls’ faces with snow.

“I’ll bet my sled goes faster than that old-fashioned wooden piece of junk,” he said to me.

“Bet it doesn’t,” I snapped back.

“Bet you’re too chicken too race.”

“Bet I’m not!”

The Robichaud twins, Rita and Renette, said on yer mark get set go! and we flew down the hill. I won!

I should have let it go at that—I see this now, of course. At the time, though, Davey was bugging me too much. Besides, we had a long history, years of getting underneath each other’s skin.

“Girls are better than boys!” I shouted out in a singsongy voice, rubbing it in.

Everyone laughed. His sunburn reddened. Sunburn Blush! I’d have to tell my mother about this one for sure.

“Cinnamon Hog-kiss!” said Davey and snorted like a pig. He kissed the air with loud smacking noises.

He yanked the toboggan rope out of my mittened hands and ran up to the top of the hill. I tried to follow. You’re not likely to break any records for speed when you try running uphill weighted down by all your winter gear. I couldn’t catch up in time, I knew this. My mind worked fast enough, though, and I saw a way to stop him.

Everyone said what happened next was like watching a movie in slow motion.

Davey took a running start and hit the toboggan with his stomach and blasted off. He careened down the hill. When he got to the middle and the little jump that made you really fly into the air, I jumped on. I started thwacking him on the back.

Instead of veering to the left to go down by the side of our house and out onto the sidewalk, the toboggan boomeranged to the right. I rolled off. Davey kept on going. And smashed right through our basement window. And landed in the furnace. Well, almost. When we reached him, there was glass everywhere and red pinpricks on the snow that led to a big splotch of blood. I remember thinking that blood on snow was the reddest red I had ever seen. Blood on Snow. My mother would never use that! Before I knew it, my mother was there, shoving her way through the circle of kids.

“Rita, Renette!” she screamed. “Get your mother to call the ambulance!”

We all watched as my mother grunted and groaned and pulled off the whole window frame. Then, with all her might, she pulled Davey, toboggan and all, back through the opening. His skull must be cracked this time for sure, I thought. There was blood coming from his nose, too.

Davey was howling, and my mother sat right down in the snow, cradling his head in her lap. She only had on a pair of sweats and a skimpy sweater that didn’t stretch all the way over her belly. On her feet were the fluffy pink bunny slippers I’d given her for Christmas. Her ankles had to be freezing, I was thinking. And what about the baby inside
her? Could the baby feel the cold too?

But my mother didn’t seem to notice. She just kept rocking Davey as if he was a baby, back and forth, until the ambulance arrived.

At supper, we found out that Davey had a concussion all right, and “a broken nose to boot,” said Corporal Ray. “He’s going to be fine, just fine.” He even tried to make a joke about it.

If you take Cinnamon’s flying toboggan

You’ll break your nose and crack your noggin.

“Ray, it’s no laughing matter,” said my mother. She was lying on the couch with her feet up on a cushion. “There will be no more tobogganing out back. We know now it’s just too dangerous.”

So that would have been enough bad news for the week and I felt guilty as anything over what happened to Davey’s head. But then …

“Yes?” said Miss Rayborn. “What else?”

“I can’t.”

“You must continue.”

“It’s too horrible.”

“Whisper softer if you have to.”

So I did. I understood then why she called herself the Woman of Whispers. See, the worst things we have done in our lives, the worst thoughts, can’t really come out in a normal voice. Stubby was right. Instead, it’s more like breathing the thoughts out,
like small gusts of wind, a poisonous breeze. So I whispered even softer.

In the middle of the night, the same night as Davey’s accident, I woke up to hear my mother crying out. The sound! It was a cross between the whimpering of a dog and the piercing cry of a bird.

My father rushed into my bedroom. “Wake up!” he shouted. “Hurry up, Minn!” He was almost shaking me. “I have to take your mother to the hospital—now! Get your coat.”

He dialled Mrs. Robichaud as I ran for my coat. It was like a dream and I kept thinking I would wake up. I peeked in the bedroom on my way downstairs. I saw blood—a splash of pink on their white sheets.

When Mrs. Robichaud took me to her house, she sat me down in her kitchen and made me cinnamon toast.

“Not to worree it will be all right, everyting will be okay.” She was fingering the beads of her rosary as she told me this.

Later, she tucked me into bed with the twins. Even in their sleep, they were identical, breathing in time with each other. I tried to match my breathing to theirs and pretended I was a triplet.

The next day my father told me that the baby—my sister—was dead.

The Woman of Whispers was hugging herself, her arms folded tight across her chest.

“I killed my sister,” I whispered. “I’m the reason she died. It was me who took Davey up on his bet. It was me who made him so mad he took my toboggan. It was me who jumped on the toboggan and made him crash through the window. If I had just shut up. If it wasn’t for me, my mother would never have lifted off that window frame and lugged him like that. I killed Pippa and my mother will never be the same again. Ever.”

All those tears I couldn’t let out that night with Harv came gushing out then. My sad throat feeling flooded my whole body, my chest, my belly, behind my eyes.

Miss Rayborn said nothing. When my loud messy blubbering slowed down to little hiccupy sobs, she stood up.

She waved her arms in a circle and the cabin door blew open with a bang. It was a lot like Stubby told me. A cloud drifted in through the door. The Woman of Whispers circled my head with her arms and whispered into the cloud. Then she blew softly, as if fanning a fire. The cloud changed colour, from layers of wispy white fog into a cloud of soot. A rain cloud. It drifted out and the door slammed shut.

I can’t say I felt any better.

“Next time it rains, you will,” she said. I guess she could read thoughts, too.

“Minn,” she continued in a whisper, “you must tell your mother.”

“Never!”

“Trust me.”

Before I could argue, there were heavy, thudding footsteps on the porch. I froze.

“There you are!” That voice!

I screamed and turned to Miss Rayborn.

She was gone.

He wobbled in the door, holding an axe. “Minn,” he said.

“Please, I have my whole life ahead of me!”

“My name’s John Hindley,” he said.

“So you said.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said and shook my hand. His touch was like a feather tickle. His eyes were the eyes I had in my photo. Only older and glazed.

I looked at the axe.

“It’s just for the woodpile, miss.” He leaned it against the wall.

And then? John Hindley talked. And talked. He told me his story.

When he was through I didn’t know what to say. His story was more tragic than the few dry lines in
the newspaper accounts. He wouldn’t tell me much at all about his new life after he left for New York.

“Maybe some other time. You’ve heard enough for one night. But I must tell you this, Miss Minn. You have given me such a gift in saving the grave.”

“But I haven’t done it yet!”

“You have. But more than that, thanks to you, my brother and I have found our way back to each other. It takes the living to reunite the dead sometimes.” He pointed towards the door.

Standing in the door frame was a shadow. I peered into the darkness. The shadow floated closer.

“Cucurbita MAXima! Where have you been?” I shouted. “And … And …”

I looked back at John. “What did you say?”

“Minn.” Max stepped towards me. He held me close. He sighed. “My name isn’t Max. It’s Thomas. Thomas Hindley.”

I stuttered and blubbered. I looked back and forth between the two. I tried to swallow. The resemblance between them was unmistakable. Striking! Those eyes.

I pounded Max’s chest. “Stop this now! It’s not a joke any more! You can’t be. You’re real. See?” I hit him again. He winced.

“I’m real to you,” he said. “And that’s what counts.” I kicked him again—in the shin—and ran for the door.

The floor crumbled beneath my feet. All I remember was a sinking feeling, a horrible weightlessness as I fell through space. Down. Deep down. The smell of wet earth. Rotting seaweed. Sinking, falling, flying, dying? Mum, Dad, Nana, Harv, Carolina, Davey, Coach Rigby, John Hindley. Jumping down from the mizzen rigging into the frigid waves. Max. Thomas? Then no thoughts. No pictures. Black nothingness. Nightmare Black.

Blue. Baby blue. Periwinkle blue. The blankets covering me and the walls around me were that kind of blue. At the foot of my bed was a semicircle of dark blue shapes that wobbled. Mum, Dad, Nana, Harv—I recognized them, but it was like I was looking through the windshield of a car going through a car wash, the glass dripping with water thick as petroleum jelly.

“Mum?” Pushing the word out took effort, as if it was sticking to my parched lips.

“My baby, my baby.” She was by my side, smelling like lavender soap, kissing my cheeks, her cheek like velvet against mine.

Nana grabbed one hand and Harv stood beside her. Corporal Ray came to the other side of the bed and ran his fingers over my eyelids.

“Oh, Minn,” my mother said.

That’s the only memory I have until a nurse woke me up saying, “Drink this.”

She put a glass to my lips. I sipped through a bendy straw. It hurt to swallow. I couldn’t move one arm. My head felt like hundreds of fairies with spurs on their heels danced on the top of my skull.

“Your parents are out in the hall. Want me to send them in?”

“Just my mother.”

If I was about to die, I needed to tell her.

“How’s your arm?” she asked first thing.

“Plaster White,” I whispered.

“Goofball,” she said.

“What happened, Mum? How did I get here?”

“Harv and another man—a camper out on Elbow Island—rescued you. You’ve been unconscious for a bit.”

“Am I going to die?”

“Not unless your grandmother kills you.”

“Am I ever going to run again?”

“Cut the melodrama, Minn. There’s not a thing wrong with your legs. Thank God, it’s just your arm and a concussion.”

That shushy word.

So I wasn’t going to die. Maybe I didn’t have to tell her anything.

“I’m really not going to die?”

“Not a chance. But oh, the risk you took!”

“Guess you’re pretty mad, hey?”

“Molten Lava Red Mad. Also relieved, exasperated, guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“We never should have sent you away for the summer.”

“It wasn’t so bad, leastways now that it’s almost over.” I winced as I tried to laugh. “Mum, I have … I have to tell you something.”

“I’m listening,” she said.

It hit me. She
was.
Listening like she used to. Her eyes looking into mine. So I began.

It took a long time, because the words were still sticking to the roof of my mouth. I thought of Stubby searching for words. I felt a bit like that.

“So. Now you know. I’m sorry. The baby.” For a while the only sound was my own breathing.

Then she grabbed my good hand and squeezed so tight I figured I’d need another cast when she was through.

“Oh, Minn. All this time that’s what you’ve thought? Look—we didn’t tell you what really happened because … well, I guess we wanted to protect you. We thought it was too terrible to tell you. So we said it was just a miscarriage … which in a way it was.”

“What are you saying?”

“Minn, the baby had already died, at least ten days before then. It wasn’t because of Davey’s accident.
If anything, it might have gone on longer and I could have been in real danger.”

“You mean …” I shuddered. “The baby was dead, inside you?”

“Yes. And … I think I knew, too. I felt something was wrong. She’d stopped kicking.”

No wonder she had been lost for so long in that silence.

“Where is she, Mum. The baby? What do you do with a baby that died just before it was born? You never told me that either!” I was fuming.

“We had her cremated. She’s, um … in a vase in the china cabinet.” I suddenly understood the dusting obsession she had. Why she was so fanatical about that old china cabinet. It was the only thing she did all winter.

“You should have told me the whole truth, nothing but the truth cross my h-heart, h-hope to d-die sstick a needle—I
was
old enough!” I screamed.

The nurse rushed in. She rubbed my forehead until I fell asleep again. “Shh, honey, calm down” was the last thing I heard my mother say.

I had a new Pippa dream. This time, I was flying through the night sky on my toboggan. My sister angel was very alive and beside me.

“Smile!”

“Could you repeat that again, looking into this camera?”

The media had descended upon Boulder Basin. They came right into my room to snap photos of me with my cast and turban of bandages. I did an interview for TV for
Live at Five
and the CBC. Imagine, me on CBC radio! The woman who interviewed me had wild red hair. First she scolded me for doing what I did and putting my life at risk. “I’m a mother and you’d be grounded for life if you were mine,” she said, but with a huge grin.

All the media attention made me think of how John Hindley must have felt in New York City. I’d read in my research that the New York media called him Miracle Boy and hounded him. Thoughts of that night and what he’d told me kept drifting in and out of my dreams.