The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (62 page)

Crocus and bird.

Bones and snow.

No one goes out there now. No call to. Except kids, sometimes, looking for trouble.

Anyone ever see anything?

Oh, sure. You hear things from time to time.

What about the Ghost Woman?

They say she’s looking for her little girl who drowned in the slough. Say you can still see her nights, walking the fields, calling to her.

Some folks don’t like the prairie. They don’t like the sky pressing down on them. In summer, wind combs the fields like a hand passing through hair. In winter, snowdrifts layer down the highway and the wind sounds like someone’s quiet weeping a long way away.

Jodi understands why people might feel anxious out here. Why they might jump at any sound. Or get the feeling something’s hidden in the grass, attending their every movement. But sometimes . . . it’s not what you hear, or
think
you hear, that unsettles you.

It’s what you don’t.

And sometimes there’s nothing more lonesome than an empty field under an empty sky, when the only sound is your own breathing and your own boots punching through a blanket of spring snow. Because that’s when you know that not only are you alone . . . you always have been.

The Ghost Woman’s husband is gone.

Looking for work

looking for

looking . . .

The little girl watches him leave early one morning while her mother sleeps. She stands at the window, her breath frosting the glass. Her father sets out across the field in the golden haze as if something draws him onward. And the girl remembers, long afterwards, that he’d glowed in that sunlight . . . glittering in the distance like a lost coin.

There, then gone.

After the crystalline brightness outside it takes a minute for Jodi’s eyes to adjust to the dim trailer. The carpet remnants covering parts of the flooring are islands in a swamp of buckled plywood. An armchair swollen as a mushroom seats a radio with a broken dial. An ancient space heater shelters a family of mice. Next to the heater sits a cardboard box of musty clothes and a child’s pair of gumboots crusted with mud.

Jodi moves through shadows.

It’s best not to think too much about who lived here. Who left here.

Who died here.

So she closes her mind to the past.

Next to the kitchen sink, a bowl lies tipped on its side. Petrified cornflakes stick to the rim. Wedged inside a half-open drawer is a shoebox crammed with yellowed receipts and government checks. Through a smudge in the window, Jodi sees the smooth stretch of sky and field. Telephone poles disappearing down the highway. Shimmer of ice. The slough doesn’t look far, though it must have seemed the end of the world to an eight-year-old girl who’d lived every one of her years in a trailer parked in the middle of nowhere.

What’s on the other side of the fence, Mama?

Fields and more fields. Same as this side.

The girl runs through the field with empty jars in each hand, trying to catch the wind. If she captures enough, its invisible power will buoy her above the earth where, looking down, she will see—

What?

Everything.

Field, fence . . . her father’s footprints in the snow. What God sees when he looks down from heaven.

Everything.

An old
Farmer’s Almanac
calendar hangs on a nail beside the kitchen window. Jodi pages through phases of the moon. Sees that favorable dates for picking Saskatoon berries, putting in preserves, cutting hair, have been marked in faded pencil.
When the breastbone of a fresh-cooked turkey is dark purple it will be a cold winter.
The perception of bones foretells the future . . . knowledge deepens the marrow.

Jodi wonders what color the turkey’s breastbone had been forty years ago. She wonders if it would have made a difference, whether the little girl might have lived had that breastbone been dark as a ripe plum.

She turns over February’s frozen lake, sees March’s field of crocuses.

When the crocus opens, warm weather is in store.

Except for the January cold snap it hasn’t been a bitter winter, not for a prairie province west of the Canadian Shield and east of the Rocky Mountains. And yet, when Jodi steps out of the trailer into the mild afternoon her hands are chilled to the bone, her skin tough as the meat of a fresh-cooked turkey too long in the freezer.

Using even pressure as you walk across the icy slough, you can test the physical properties of frozen hydrogen and oxygen: the universal law of cause and effect. With experience you will soon determine, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, whether or not the ice possesses sufficient density to sustain your weight.

The moment that air pocket jumps like a bubble in a spirit level or the last breath of air you’ll ever take, you are faced with a decision: that is, whether or not you should place the balance of your life and faith in Mother Nature’s hands, in the same way you know to bake bread on the seventeenth and twenty-fourth of this month, or to can fruit from the third to the fifth.

Jodi considers whether the ability to walk on water would have made a difference. Eyes closed, she raises one foot several inches above the frozen slough. Her boot hovers over the ice.

If you look down, you’ll see there’s nothing there.

The secret, then, is not to look down. Then you can walk forever.

But when Jodi opens her eyes, she sees that she has not walked on water. That she has not, in point of fact, gone anywhere at all.

Skates, the little girl knows, are remarkable things. Sparkling blades and shining leather as white and unobtainable as a cottontail rabbit. So she sits on the edge of the slough and pulls on the next best thing: gumboots dug out of the Sally Ann with worn soles ideal for sliding. Her mother wears a beaver coat that might have belonged to a movie star but has seen more glamorous days, and a pair of Daddy’s tightly laced work boots.

Mother and daughter hold hands and wobble onto the ice like a couple of ducks. Before long they’re practicing figure eights on the slick surface. It seems too soon when a warm wind gusts out of nowhere and Mama looks up at the changing sky.

Time to be getting home,
she says.

The girl reaches round to brush a circle of snow from her coat. Her Christmas coat, red as cranberries.

Just a few more minutes!

We can’t, the ice is thawing. We’ve already been out too long.

But the girl is eyeing the barbed-wire fence that runs through the center of the slough . . . white-stubbled fields, telephone poles on the horizon, voices whispering in the sky.

What’s on the other side of the fence, Mama?

Fields and more fields. Let’s go home and we’ll make molasses cookies.

The girl clasps her mittened hand in her mother’s bare red one. Then they glide across layers of water gleaming on the ice. The girl slides backwards, staring at the mysterious expanse of fence and sky that makes up their backyard. Mama nudges her homeward like a wayward calf at sunset.

It’s the same as this side, honey.

Fields and more fields,
the girl whispers.

So quiet not even the birds hear.

The dead child gazes up at Jodi from beneath the ice. Her face is pale as the last afternoon of sunlight. Snails leave glistening trails across her ribs. Smooth round stones weight the pockets of her coat. Grains of sand settle beneath her fingernails, sedimentary layers recording the passage of time, seasonal variations.

Nothing ever happens here, nothing ever changes but the wind.

Sunlight breaks through the bank of clouds. Suddenly the sky seems too exposed.

Jodi thinks about the little girl setting out across the field. She sees her glance anxiously at the trailer, hoping her mother won’t notice how far she’s come. But she needs to see what lies beyond that fence. Needs to see why her father left them for a chimera of field, the lure of an empty sky.

The wirecutters in the girl’s pocket are heavy, and she doesn’t know how to use them. But she’ll find a way. Red mittens dangle on strings through the sleeves of her coat; it’s warm enough and she doesn’t need them. The Chinook is blowing today and everything is clean and white, the melting snowdrifts so wet they’re translucent.

Translucent,
Jodi tells the girl.
That’s what your dreams are. I see through them like I see through air.
For a moment she expects a small hand to break through the ice.

But no. Nothing lives in this slough but hibernating frogs, sleeping tadpoles. Fear, thick as mud. Heavy and still as water trapped beneath ice.

It’s
time
that changes everything, Jodi realizes. The passage of time—a drop of water, a grain of sand. Memories sifting to the bottom like silt.

And here I am, looking down.

The girl’s world had ended here. Her last moments of awareness preserved like a bird beneath the snow. But Jodi can’t let herself think about those last seconds of life, the last spirit bubble of breath the girl took before water closed over her.

So she examines the barbed-wire fence.

The posts have rotted, the wire rusted to the Indian-red of a grain elevator. It’s so predictable, this cycle of sun and rain, thaw and freeze, she could mark it in on the almanac. But predictability isn’t something that little girl had understood.

Jodi applies her boot heel to the slough, as much slush and snow as it is ice. Soon it begins to give. A few more kicks and she’s broken through. She heaves a slab of ice loose and water sloshes through the opening she’s made.

All it takes, Jodi knows, is a moment of inattention. Of childish defiance. The stubborn refusal to listen to that still small voice inside yourself that will tell you what to do if only you’d let it, will show you how to keep yourself from harm’s way.
But can we ever really keep ourselves from harm’s way?

The sun is setting, the deepening sky soon to be drowned in a river of night. Jodi lies flat on the ice and plunges her arm deep as she can into the frigid water.

The little girl’s gumboots slip out from under her and she cracks through the ice too fast to let out much more than a startled hiccup. The wirecutters anchor her straight down to the bottom. Barbed wire jabs to the bone, snags the soft skin of her wrists. She wriggles like a minnow on a pin. Her hair tangles in the reeds. Blood ribbons from her punctured wrists like mitten-strings. She kicks the submerged fencepost, catches her sodden coat on the wire, struggles for that air bubble inches above her mouth—

Jodi rolls onto her back, breathing hard, and holds her half-frozen arm to her chest. Water pools beside her on the ice. She pictures a turkey’s breastbone, arterial purple in the cold.

It would be so easy to stay here. To never leave.

She blinks hard.

Once, twice.

Then she repositions herself beside the ice-hole and thrusts her arm back into the water. This time she doesn’t stop until her hand grazes the sludgy bottom. Leaves stick to her arm like leeches. Something solid—dead fish, maybe. Bird with a broken wing, lying in a footprint filled with snowmelt. Jodi’s hand closes around something cold and metal. She pulls the wire cutters free of the water and they thud beside her on the ice. She drags herself to her knees. Standing now, her hands numb, she pries open the wirecutters and positions them on the barbed wire that runs between the fenceposts.

When she cuts through the steel line it recoils like a springing deer.

She cuts the next wire, and the next, until nothing separates her from the other side. It takes all her strength to do the job. She knows now that the little girl never stood a chance, that she never could have cut her way through this wire, no matter how desperately she’d wanted to follow her father into the sunlit morning.

On the other side of the open fence she sees an old woman in the field. Her head is bowed before a stone that might be a shadow. Something inside Jodi breaks, splinters like ice, slivers her heart like falling glass.
How old you’ve become,
she thinks. And:
Has it been so long?

She steps into the indigo twilight.

II.

It’s colder now that the sun’s gone down.

The Ghost Woman glances at the plum-colored sky, cracks her arthritic knuckles. Crocus-purple veins twist across the backs of them, road maps to places she’s never been. These can’t be the hands she remembers from her youth. Someone else must have buried her little girl. Someone else must have broken the shovel blade on that hard ground because she couldn’t have done it with these ruined claws.

It was on an afternoon in March, just like today.

The sun reflecting on the slough. The shadow of a bird on the snow.

A sudden departure, from this world to the next . . .

The Ghost Woman turns over her hands in the fading light.
Seems I can see right through them,
she thinks. But that’s what comes from being alone. No one sees you, eventually you stop seeing yourself.

She must have passed on.
That’s what they say.

Passed on, eh? When was that?

Oh, must be years now. Least, I haven’t heard anything.

They never sold that property, did they?

Couldn’t say.

Sometimes people see the Ghost Woman’s flashlight dancing in the night sky. Will-o’-the-wisp of the prairies. But no one comes near. Not in daylight, not at night. Because it’s only fields and fence, and frozen water. Someone else’s sorrows.

The Ghost Woman collects checks the government still sends once a month to the rail route box. Sometimes she walks five miles into town to cash them when she remembers, like an afterthought, that she needs bread or cornflakes or milk. No one pays her any mind as she shuffles down the highway in a beaver coat that smells of decaying birds. She still wears the workboots her husband left on the doorstep. Shoelaces trail behind like earthworms curled on the sidewalk after a rain. In springtime, grass sprouts from soles that never seem to dry out and still hold forty summers of mud from the field.