Blasted (23 page)

Once he'd gotten lost down in the coal cellar; I heard him blundering around. I went to find him. “I can't seem to find the stairs,” he said to me.

He was vague, sweet. “I've been down here for the longest time.” As we came up into the light he looked at me, bemused. “You've grown, girl. Where'd we get this young woman, Brenda? Brenda?” And he limped off in search of my mother. It was spring, that time. I remembered the new leaves on the birch trees outside the kitchen window.

As I got older I learned to look at his left hand. If he wore the wedding ring, everything was okay.

I sat on the couch until Grandpa came home.

“I'm leaving in a couple of days,” I heard myself say.

Grandpa froze for an instant. “I see,” he said, not looking at me, and disappeared down the hall.

CHAPTER 16

My mother and my grandmother used to cure styes by touching their gold wedding bands to the tips of their tongues, then tracing three crosses over the offended eye. It always worked, always. As I readied myself for bed I wondered if they could have cured my infestation of cystic zits. My left thumb probed the smooth nakedness of my own ring finger, plucking at the slight webbing in the skin there. How would it feel to have something around it? I remembered my cousin Doreen's wedding, my last visit home; remembered watching the ring go on her finger during the ceremony, how she fiddled and worried and twisted that thing unconsciously for the rest of the show.
Metal can bind them
, Queenie had said. And how my parents marrying
brought the other one back.
What had she meant? I rubbed and rubbed at the base of that finger of mine. Just the thought of a ring there made me feel sick. Well, I thought, it's not like marriage is imminent. It's not like suitors are banging the door down, an army of them pressing through the hallway, smiling and proffering rings.

I started to put on the inside-out T-shirt from the night before, but it smelled so sour I threw it across the room. And then I couldn't sleep. Did Grandpa want me here or not? What if I'd misinterpreted him and he wanted me to stay, needed me? My plane would crash and the grief would kill him. I couldn't go back to oh-so-fashionable Toronto, not with my skin like this; they wouldn't let me off the plane. I'd never find a job. Grandpa would have a stroke. I thought of Blue and Brendan, Izzie and Earl, Steve, and Judith and Tad about to get hitched. Thought about them asking me how I was and what had happened in New-
found
-lind. I was unutterably weary of it all. Under the exhaustion an acrid taste of metal coiled in my mouth, I wanted to run, to run away from them, from here.

This had been my father's room. Gramma had put him to bed here every night, when he was a child. The witch and the lamb and the tree were his. Had he sat here, just as I sat now, feeling these things? Was this what was in him as he fled from us, limping over the Hill? I remembered his body in the coffin, how his twisted leg was straight. At the time I'd thought it was some kind of undertaking magic, to be able to render my father's pigeon-toed leg normal.

The wonder, I thought, was that he ever came back from his treks at all.

Why had he come back? Because he loved us? A man like my father – did his wedding ring bind him to his family, the way Queenie said metal binds those others? I could see his ring more clearly than if I held it in my hand, lying on the dressing table, its single, perfect circle like a shout. “With this ring I thee wed… until death do us part.”

I am wandering the Hill. I find a cave in the ground. There are caves up here: Duck Pond Cave, Dead Soldier's Cave. But this isn't one I know. I climb through its lichen-encrusted mouth, damp air surging around me in waves, like breath. Inside, the air is hazy pink. I crawl forward. The pink darkens to blood, shot through with dazzling flashes of gold. The rock wall is ribbed as if I am inside some ancient, heavy, century-slumbering animal. A treasure cave, it's a treasure cave; if I keep going, somewhere below me I'll find treasure. But the ground falls away and I plunge down, down, deep down in the cold. I try to cry out, but my mouth and nose are full of earth. My fingers and hair turn to sticks and leaves. I am drowning in earth. Drowning. My limbs begin to snake out white roots, like a tree. Around me, murmuring, babbling voices, and the dry snap of birds' wings. A figure sits in the corner draped in a cloak of iridescent feathers, holding a bundle, a baby; dark hair falls over its face but its eyes are gleaming round. “Shanawdithit?” I say, but it disappears, and then I see Grandpa's face. He looks sad. “They've been wanting you back,”
he says. “Your whole life, they've been wanting you back.” The voices get louder, they fill my head with buzzing, yammering, until there is nothing else.

Grey daylight. I was lying spread out like a starfish, as if I'd been wishing for
her
. I pushed at the blankets with my hands and feet until my naked body lay open to the chill air, then eased my legs over the edge of the bed and sat there, swaying a little, eyes closed. My ears still sounded with the last echoes of incessant buzzing, the yammering of thousands of voiced insects. Maybe a shower would bring me back. Half-way down the hall I realized I'd forgotten to pull on my dressing gown, and lurched into a half-hearted sprint to gain the bathroom undetected.

I fumbled with the taps, fingers slipping, the skin on my back stinging. As usual it took a million years for the water to get hot, old pipes grinding and shuddering. When at last it warmed up, and I was about to step into the shower, I noticed my feet.

They were covered in mud, and streaks of blood where they had been scratched and torn as if by thorns. My legs too, and my hands and arms. Dirt and half-dried blood covered my torso. My hair felt tight and heavy on my head – I touched it and my fingers found rough braids, stiff with mud, tangled with leaves and grass and twigs. I looked in the mirror. A wild woman looked back at me, a green girl crowned with dirt.

I must have been sleepwalking in the night. That's it, that's all. Gone out stark naked on the Hill and gotten covered in mud. Not that I'd ever in my life gone sleepwalking, but there's a first time for everything, isn't there? The bathroom was filling with steam, and the shower drummed insistently behind me. I got in and started scrubbing. The water sluiced over my skin in hot gushes, the mud and dried blood went spiraling down the drain. I emerged pale and clean, the shallow scratches and acne tracing over my flesh, connect-the-dots pattern in red. I unplucked the braids and attacked my hair with a fistful of shampoo, working twigs and grass from the strands. The tangles reminded me of when I was little, how my mother took to my hair with a brush every morning.
I wish you'd let me braid your hair for you. You make such a tangle of it
, she'd say, as if the braids were a personal affront to her. I'd tried to tell her that I wasn't braiding my hair at all, that I woke up that way, but she'd given me a smack for “romancing.” I dug a bit of mud out of one ear with my finger, found myself humming; I felt better than I had in weeks, months. Energy flowed through me like wine.

I sprinted to my room to dress. The sheets were marked with mud; I hauled them off the bed, throwing them into the hamper.

When I entered the kitchen Grandpa was sitting over his morning tea and newspaper. “Up at this hour? What, is the Queen coming to visit?”

“Good morning!” I chirped. I took a mug down and helped myself to tea from the pot, smiling at him. Grandpa stared.

“What happened to
you
?”

“Nothing, why do you ask?” A giggle flew out of me. “I'm in a good mood, okay?” I flopped down in a chair opposite him. Grandpa glared at me from over his paper, then went back to reading. The silence between us grew until I could almost hear it, a buzzing, rustling whisper.
You're coming, we will have you back.
I took a breath, and felt air fall cold within me like a draft through an old cave. I forced myself to speak. “It's not because I'm going back to Toronto, if that's what you're thinking,” I said to the wall of newsprint.

Grandpa flipped down the paper. “What?”

“I said, I'm
not
cheerful because I'm
leaving
.”

Grandpa locked his eyes with mine until I shifted my gaze. Then he resumed reading. I finished my tea in silence. The damp of the house seeped into me. The day was cloudy, dismal, the Hill cut off what little light attempted to enter the kitchen. The empty chair where Gramma used to sit was like a palm open on a lap, a tired person, the end of a long day. Traffic whined incessantly across the overpass, grating and moaning, grating and moaning, and the cake of hard-tack on the windowsill shuddered slightly with every vibration. I cleared my throat.

“Look,” I said, “it's my last day here. Why don't we go out and do something together? A movie or something?”

“You want to see a movie.”

“A matinee, maybe. We could take a bus to the mall.”

We looked over the pitiful movie listings in the paper and found a lowkey sort of thriller that appealed to Grandpa, then headed over to Water Street to catch the bus.

There was something comforting about being in a hideous hub of commerce. Mothers, kids, teenagers pipping off school, women in stretch pants with bad hair. I felt a change in myself, as if the echoes of last night were dying away. The kids were a lot better-dressed than my friends and I had been. There was even a Gap in the mall, just like Toronto. When Juanita had gotten back from that visit to Toronto she'd said, her eyes round, “Everyone dresses up. All of the time. Even the mothers. And
everyone
has a swimming pool.” She told me about eight-lane highways, and four-leaf clovers, and seven floors of Eaton's Centre – “with a
glass elevator
!” – homeless bums and “black people everywhere and women all wrapped up in cloth. And everyone eats in restaurants.
All the time
.”

Grandpa looked so old. I wanted to take his arm. Then his face warmed with his abrupt smile, he took
my
arm, and so we walked together.

He insisted on paying for the movie tickets. We went into one of the cinemas and argued over how close to get to the screen – I wanted the front row so the images and sound would engulf me – Grandpa said he'd get a crick in his neck and took a seat at the very back. I fell asleep during the movie, and woke to closing credits and Grandpa's elbow in my ribs. “That was what you call non-stop action,” he said, a bit dazed. I thought he was being sarcastic, but he was sincere. It made me remember how old he was.

“You used to take Gramma to movies all the time,” I said.

“That was a long time ago. And they used to make them slower,” he replied.

We emerged into already-failing light. “It's not even five o'clock yet!” I said, dismayed.

“Dark day,” Grandpa grunted.

Fog settled over the parking lot and seeped into my bones. Once free of the noise and bustle of the mall, the nagging insistence of last night returned, whispering in my head. We approached the bus stop, and I saw the round headlights looming as the bus roared through the fog. The whispering grew; my breath stuck in my throat. Grandpa walked ahead of me. “Wait… wait for me.”

“What is it now?” He turned back to me. The bus stopped and people pushed off it, jostling past us. Roaring grew in my ears. A person banged a shoulder into me and I almost fell.

“I can't – get on – the bus.”

“What do you mean, you can't get on the bus? Of course you can get on the bus!” I was aware of Grandpa's tall figure beside me, like a standing stone in the river of people and fog. The bus shuddered and growled, exhaling hot air and stinking exhaust. I covered my face. Grandpa's hands were at my elbows, guiding me. “Sit down, sit down here,” he was saying from a distance. He placed me on a chill concrete bench.

“We'll miss the bus!” I panicked, trying to rise. Small figures swam before my vision like black spots, gabbling at each other, tangling in my hair. I tried to pluck them out, beat at my head with my hands until I fell back onto the bench.

“Don't worry about the bus. Stay down.” Grandpa's voice came from far away. It occurred to me that I might be fainting, and I put my head between my knees. I was vaguely aware of the bus doors hissing shut. Soon Grandpa and I were alone again. His feet stood firm on the sidewalk, and his hand rested on my shoulder. Calm emanated from his touch, and the air smelled sweet again. I sat up, shaking my hair back.

“You alright?”

“I think so. I felt faint, is all,” I replied, trying to laugh. You couldn't see further than twenty paces in any direction now. Car headlights arced across the soupy mist. “The fog… I'm not used to it.” It had wound its way around my heart.

“No one ever fainted from too much fog,” said Grandpa. Tears began to seep out of my eyes. “
Now
what?” he snapped.