Stolen Life (39 page)

A warm evening, 12 September. Dwa sat in his white shorts in the living-room sofa chair with a beer. Chantal’s visit to the doctor had been okay, and all the kids were bathed and asleep on their mattresses in their room off the living room. Shirley Anne sat beside Ernie on the couch, talking, but now talking only to Dwa.

She had often seen him playing dolls with the little girls, sitting on the floor—no Native man they knew would do that—and so Shirley Anne tried to play small with the children too and hug them when he was around as if she truly loved them, to impress him with her tender motherliness. But all she managed was to scare them and annoy him. When he saw her there when he returned from Edmonton, he’d asked Yvonne in an undertone: “Why do you even open the door?”

He wouldn’t, of course, say anything to Shirley Anne himself; he had no confrontational bone in his body, but this late in the evening he could avoid her clumsy, drunken attempts at sexy play now that the children were asleep.

“I’m bushed, I’m hitting the sack.”

And Yvonne, exhausted and wiped on beer, followed his cue fast, her mind strung out by too much Shirley Anne drone all day. She said they could both stay for the night, she had lots of sheets, she’d just make a bed for Shirley Anne on the couch and one for Ernie on a foamy on the floor, no problem at all.

No sooner were she and Dwa in bed in their room beside the bathroom in the short hall off the kitchen than they heard whispering from the living room. They nudged each other, listened; soon the noises, the sliding sheets, the mutterings were obvious enough. Yvonne and Dwa laughed a little together and Dwa said, “Hey, maybe Ernie’s getting some tonight,” and Yvonne turned to him and he put his heavy arm around her and fell asleep. He always smelled the same: paint, beer, an irrefutable base of rye whisky; a bottle of Southern Comfort to
sip steadily, just a bit, but steadily, keeping the world nicely balanced, mostly level. His wide body, muscles thick as trees.

Yvonne slept.

Wednesday, 13 September 1989. Yvonne lay in bed, listening. Dwa was out so late most evenings that morning had become his time with the children: Chantal getting ready for school, and then James too, were playing their game of finding animal shapes in the pancake batter Dwa ladled into the pan. But someone else was in the kitchen too, bustling around—Shirley Anne. Up early to impress Dwa. Or maybe she’d fallen asleep with Ernie on the floor and didn’t want Dwa to find her. Who cared?

Shirley Anne was cleaning, which was the Native way of saying thank you for hospitality, though she’d never done it before. This was for Dwa’s benefit, of course. And she was talking.

“Does Vonnie always just lie in bed and make you make the kids’ breakfast?”

But Dwa said nothing. He could block anyone with silence; especially Shirley Anne. Dwa came into the bedroom, kissed Yvonne, and left. Then she got up.

In the kitchen she thanked Shirley Anne for cleaning. Dwa came back in, asked Yvonne to pick up a cheque owed him for painting, and then deliberately peered into the living room; past him Yvonne could see the burn suit Ernie wore lying crumpled on the floor. Ernie himself wasn’t on the foamy, he was asleep on the couch.

Dwa grinned, going out again. “I wonder who wiped out Ernie.”

Shirley Anne stood there, nonplussed, going red. She was stuttering something about Ernie being so drunk he must have taken his clothes off, but Dwa was gone and quickly Yvonne asked her, since she hadn’t used the twenty dollars yesterday, maybe she wanted to catch the noon bus to Edmonton today. And in a minute Shirley Anne was gone.

James and Suzie trundled out into the yard to play, but before Yvonne could eat breakfast Ernie appeared, heading for the bathroom. He came out and found a beer in the fridge.

“So,” Yvonne said, deadpan, “you got some last night, huh?”

Ernie’s smile was relieved, and big, “If you’re anything like your cousin, whoa!” And he elaborated in detail how she’d pulled him up for a second time. Yvonne was astonished at his frankness, and then realized it was pride: maybe he was no handsome man, but he’d had his fun.

He turned back into the living room—maybe get a bit more sleep—and amazingly, Yvonne found she actually had the house to herself. Five minutes to savour that, then Shirley Anne was at the door again, opening it. She carried her purse and two gallon jugs of Royal White Wine—the wino’s special—and no bus ticket to anywhere.

The two small children were digging in the garden, grubbing out vegetables; when Chantal came home after school she would help them do the job properly. Shirley Anne sat drinking wine, denying she had slept with Ernie—no, she was a married woman, she’d never do that—and at the same time saying that all night she had dreamed Yvonne’s beautiful house was a Taj Mahal and Ernie a sheik—she’s got her “knights in shining armour” mixed up, Yvonne thought, but it’s her game, let her run it—and then elaborating again on how she had not, she had never, ever, even tried to sleep with Dwa. Yvonne knew Shirley Anne would have been happier if she had accused her of sleeping with Dwa than Yvonne knowing, as she did, that he had turned her down.

Minute by inevitable minute, 13 September moved on.

Thursday, 14 September 1989. The last day Yvonne Johnson would be free of the iron of criminal law. For literally years, as she wrote to me, “I only ran it over in the silence of my mind.”

By the time she dared to speak her memories of that day, could try to order the facts of action and thought and impression and image into words, the weight of it filled notebooks, tapes, videos, pages upon pages of comments on the trial and appeal records.

I have studied them, at length, and researched more—including, of course, the trial records—and to create a reasonable account of this day I can only draw out the absolutely necessary strands of details, sketch what seem to be the most crucial and inevitable scenes. What is
clear to us both is that, until the very last minutes before midnight, nothing criminal at all need ever have happened.

The first and most fundamental of the inevitabilities of that day was Shirley Anne in Yvonne’s house. Drinking, talking. She had claimed to have a computer course to register for in Edmonton, but she stayed, immovable.

The second inevitability was Chuck Skwarok. He arrived at Yvonne’s house at two o’clock in his Hornet hatchback, alone. He said Erna had signed herself into the hospital; she had almost died from a grand-mal seizure while drinking.

Yvonne was deeply disturbed. What had happened? Why? But Chuck explained nothing, just “She’s not doing too good,” and stood there as if expecting her to do something. The kids were hauling vegetables into the house, running water over them in the sink, and Yvonne had to supervise things. So Shirley Anne hauled Chuck into the living room with a beer.

Outside, the gentleness of a September day, trees gold and shedding. Yvonne could see children jumping in the leaves in the park across the street; her littlest ones were there and her heart gave a jolt, and suddenly she ran, she had to for ever be on watch for them every minute, every second, like a deer or caribou mother. The television news had been full of warnings about a man hanging around schools, of children disappearing for a few hours and then showing up again in the same place, and some talked about a man who had picked them up, fondled them while he played with himself, though apparently not more than that yet—she ran, perhaps someone was behind the school bushes watching John, or her blonde Baby jump and land in the leaves, her chubby legs waving out of her training panties and the frill of the embroidered dress she wanted to wear today—no, no man seemed to be watching: five children playing under the spruce and poplars, their small bodies unmolested.

James was throwing leaves.… Baby was not there.

If only a stare would stay frozen in the air.

Baby! Ernie was in the garage, helping Yvonne out again, this time with the freezer, wiring laid bare, but it would soon—no, he hadn’t seen Suzie. Yvonne was tearing through the garden, into the house, every wild glance, nothing! But there was her baby. Safe in the living room, with Shirley Anne. And Chuck.

The little girl stood rigid with her arms stiff, pushing herself away from Shirley Anne’s attempts to pull her close—but her pretty dress was bunched up, her panties down around her ankles. Shirley Anne and Chuck were looking at her.

“Baby!” Yvonne said sharply. “Baby, what is it?”

Shirley Anne, startled, snatched the panties up over Baby’s bottom. Yvonne could not even look at the adults; she just led the little girl into the kitchen. “What is it?” Trying to control her voice.

And to her astonishment, Baby pulled down her panties again and pointed to the raspberry birthmark high on her leg. Yvonne turned back into the living room.

“What’s going on?” she demanded.

Shirley Anne said, “Nothing. I was just showing Chuck her birthmark.”

Chuck shrugged; perhaps he was mildly embarrassed, but Yvonne couldn’t really look at him. “Don’t you ever do that again,” she said to her cousin and turned quickly back to the kitchen and settled her child’s clothes properly on her little body.

“No, no,” she spoke carefully, trying to sound ordinary, “remember what we talked about: the only time you pull them down is to go pee-pee, only when you’re with me, or alone. Never with other people—not even James—remember? If you want to show your birthmark”—she pushed one side of the panties up a bit higher—“see, then they can see, okay?”