View From a Kite (26 page)

In the evening she brings me the day's copy of the
Tribune
Valley Star
, a liberal elaboration of local events and political infighting, cheap ads, and upcoming social and cultural events, published five afternoons a week.

She flings it dramatically down in front of me, upsetting the chocolate pudding I am trying to coax my stomach into tolerating.

“Look at this!”

On the front page is a photo of Bing standing by his van. His pants are back on. There is no sign of a screwdriver. The headline reads:
ALIENS ABDUCT LOCAL MAN, VEHICLE.

“Ohmigod,” I say.

“Read it.”

“I'm reading.”

ALIENS ABDUCT LOCAL MAN, VEHICLE

UFO Sightings Disturb Valley Residents

by Derek Latson

Mr. Lyle MacDonald, of West Branch Lower Road East, claims to have been abducted by aliens as he was driving home from a dance at the Reardon Community Hall late last night.

“I was just driving along, minding my own business,” said Mr. MacDonald, who goes by the sobriquet of Bing, “when suddenly I hear this weird humming noise and the van stops dead. Then the hair on my head starts to stand straight up, you know what I mean? Like I'm all electrified. So I get out to see what's wrong and that's when I seen it.”

It, according to Mr. MacDonald, was a UFO.

“She just hung there,” he told this reporter, “like two saucers stuck together with a golf ball glued on top. But big, real big, like about the size of a hockey rink. I tell you I was some scared. It was real bright, sort of a greenish colour, and there was this white light underneath like a searchlight that kept swooping back and forth over the van. You want to believe I ducked every time it come near. And there was a whole string of red lights around the outside of the thing, blinking and winking one after the other. I believe it's some kind of code. Then she come in a little closer and some yellow lights start blinking along with the red ones.”

But that wasn't the most frightening part of Mr. MacDonald's experience. Suddenly… “Bam! I woke up,” says Mr. MacDonald. “She was gone. Not a sign of her. And my van gone with her. And me with my pants down. I do believe they did science experiments on me while I was out cold. They knocked me out with their death ray and then they took chunks out of me. There's round holes on my hands and my knees.”

There are indeed circular abrasions on Mr. MacDonald's knees and hands.

“They burn some bad,” said Mr. MacDonald. “I believe it's the radiation. I don't believe they used any anesthetic on me at all, just knocked me sideways with that death ray. We're just animals to them, like. We're just lab rats to them, that's for sure.”

Mr. MacDonald managed to make his way to the main highway, where he flagged down a police car. It was then that he discovered his van had been located in a ditch on the Old Ferry Road, about seventy miles from where the alleged UFO had allegedly snatched it.

“They just picked her up, examined her, siphoned her gas off and dropped her in a ditch when they was done,” says Mr. MacDonald. “They scratched her up some good, too.”

They also removed eight cans of Moosehead beer and a large, flat-headed screwdriver. It is Mr. MacDonald's theory that the aliens, being unfamiliar with pull tabs, took the screwdriver to open the beer.

Mr. MacDonald doesn't think his insurance company will cover the cost of repairs to his van or the replacement cost of the stolen items. “It's like that Act of God thing,” he explained.

Constables Rich Steeves and Albert Podinsky, who discovered the van and later picked up Mr. MacDonald on the highway, declined to comment other than to say that the investigation of the disappearance of the van is ongoing.

“Denise,” I whisper, “Old Ferry Road is forty miles from where we left the van.”

“With the keys in it,” says Denise. “We left it by the tavern with the keys in it, don't forget.”

“The tavern was closed. There was no one else around.”

“Someone was around. Someone else came along and stole it and ran it out of gas.”

“Do you think they saw us?”

“Naw. They probably found it after we'd left. Even if they did, whoever stole that van is not about to go the police and tell them we took it first and then left it for them to go joyriding in. We're safe.”

“Bingybing is nuts. Why on earth would he make up that story about aliens? It's crazy.”

“Who knows? To get some attention? To get his name in the paper? The man's certifiable in the first place and he was real drunk. Maybe his tiny brain couldn't admit he'd been tricked by a couple of girls.”

“Yes, and maybe he really did see a big white light when you backed over him. Maybe he's having hallucinations because you ran him down with his own damn van!”

“Could be.”

“It must have been a really slow news day,” I say, “for Bing to make the front page.”

“I happened to mention at suppertime that when I was up having a pee last night about two in the morning, a big white light flashed in the bathroom window and when I looked I could see a sort-of saucer-shaped thing heading west of town,” says Denise. “Then Patrick had to tell his UFO story, and then it turned out that everybody who got up to pee in the night saw or felt something creepy. By tomorrow half the town will swear they saw something weird last night, and then other half will stay up for a month hoping to catch their own glimpse of a UFO. Nobody likes to be overlooked, even by aliens.”

“You want to hope aliens are not real. Or if they are they've got a good sense of humour.”

“If they are real they're laughing themselves sick at us.”

“At Bingybing, anyway.”

CHAPTER 54

Denise and Christine and Evvie and I are in the sunroom, playing the mirror game. We each have a hand mirror and the winner is the one who can stare longest into their own eyes. It's creeping everyone else out because they've never tried it before, and staring into your own eyes can be a horribly frightening experience if you do it long enough. I'm winning, of course, because I've been doing this since I was eight. At first it seems okay, but kind of silly, as you stare at your eyeballs and examine the colour of the iris minutely. By now I can draw my eyes and colour them in, the exact shade of medium green, the colour of young kale in Elizabeth's garden in June. I can draw the thin rusty line around the pupil, between the black and the green, and I can dot in each rusty fleck buried in the green with a fine-pointed brush. After a bit you get self-conscious, staring, and the black dot of pupil makes you uneasy. Behind it, deep in your skull, you are looking out at yourself and you are not accustomed to being stared at by yourself. If anyone else stared so long and so hard, you'd think they were rude and want them to stop. But you don't stop, you just keep staring, and then you begin to feel the you staring at you isn't you, but some sort of dybbuk that's inhabited your soul, and you begin to feel frightened. This is where Evvie squeals and slaps her mirror on the table. Who is this you? you think, and then all the scary thoughts you suppress start pushing to get out into the front of your mind, and then you begin to get really frightened because you've been suppressing the fact that you want to break things and blow things up and turn the world inside out. A fierce unholy sort of rage that's full of excitement takes hold of you and you know you can do anything, you know you've got a deep dark power buried in there. Denise drops her mirror, nearly breaking it. You can't quit now, you have to fall farther and farther into your head, beyond the dybbuk in the doorway. Deep, deep inside is the darkest space of all, and it's quiet; you can fall there for a long time. Falling and falling, down the rabbit hole, until you get to the softest dark of all, where you can float forever. Where everything is calm and peaceful and you know that you're all right and everything is all right. Then suddenly you're staring at your irises again and they're just green and rust, and the noises of the world come back, chairs scraping in the sunroom and Christine saying, “That's the stupidest game I ever played,” and Evvie saying, “Gwennie wins. Pay up, everybody,” and I get IOUs for their Jell-O for the next three days.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 55

Evvie's flinging tinsel like a demented three-year-old and Denise is scolding her, telling her she has to hang it strand by strand on the tree. Evvie just laughs at her and keeps flinging. We are decorating the sunroom for the Christmas party this evening. Tomorrow after lunch, those of us who are allowed are going home for Christmas. Evvie weighed in this morning at a hefty one hundred and three-and-a-half pounds and she is as high as a kite with joy. We could have dispensed with the two pounds of weights we sewed into the hem of her bathrobe and the sides of her slippers, but better safe than sorry, we'd thought. Christine is putting mistletoe up everywhere she thinks she might like to stand; I'm holding the stepladder for her so she doesn't fall and break her neck. Denise has unearthed some Christmas tapes and the Lennon Sisters are singing “How'd You Like To Spend Christmas On Christmas Island.” Nice harmony, but got to be the dumbest Christmas song ever. I like the old carols myself, “In The Bleak Midwinter,” with its minor notes and poetic, frigid depiction of winter.
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.
Chilling, what a couple of elegant similes can do.

“Gwen,” says MacConnell, “come with me.”

I immediately panic, thinking they've found my fingerprints on the van. Or Grass has changed her mind and wants to decorate my torso with a million stitches in a fit of holiday excess. I let go of the stepladder, which starts to wobble.

“Hey!” yells Christine, “Help!” and Evvie downs tinsel and leaps to the rescue.

Out in the hall, MacConnell takes my arm and says,

“Your cousins are coming to get you, Gwen. You'd better go and pack, they'll be here in half an hour.”

“They aren't supposed to be here until tomorrow,” I say. “I'll miss the party.”

“Dear, your mother is not doing very well…” and everything else is lost in the black wind that roars down the corridor. MacConnell's mouth is moving so I try to catch her words. There is “pneumonia” and “unresponsive” and “intensive care,” all of which are very bad words and not the sort of thing MacConnell should be saying to me at all. She should know better, she's read the handbook, patients are not to be upset.

Denise and Evvie appear in my room. Evvie has been crying and Denise just looks mad. They help me pack because I can't seem to find any of my things and when I do they don't seem to fit in my suitcase. Denise pounds them flat and stuffs them in and then makes Evvie sit on the case while she closes the latches. They help me get dressed and then we go down to the main entrance. We wait there for a few minutes, until Elizabeth comes in the door, snow on her hat and the shoulders of her coat. Her gloves don't match. One is black and one is gray. So unlike Elizabeth. She likes things to match. Denise and Evvie hug me hard between them and then George puts my case in the trunk and Elizabeth sits in the back seat beside me, holding my hand. We drive through quiet back streets, and all the houses are decorated for Christmas. Strings of coloured lights outline eaves and windows, and Rudolph and eight plastic reindeer pull sleighs across lawns that are beginning, finally, to turn white as wet flakes fill the air and then settle down upon the ground. My mother died on me two years ago and now she is going to do it again.

This room is full of clicks and ticks and whirrs. The white clock on the wall ticks every time the second hand jumps forward. The IV machine ticks off the drops as they fall down the plastic tube and into the needle in my mother's hand. White shoes click in the tiled corridor, heat pipes tick and click as the heat in them adjusts up and down, trying to keep the rooms all the same temperature all the time. There is a soft hissing coming from the oxygen mask on her face. There is a soft snoring from the chair on the other side of the bed, where Elizabeth is slumped, asleep. It is sixteen minutes after seven in the morning. We spent all night in the ICU and then at five o'clock they wheeled her down to this place. It's a quiet room, tucked in a corner just off the nurses' station so they can keep a close eye on her. They put a cot in the corner so that I can lie down if I want to, but I don't want to. I tried to get Elizabeth to use it and she tried to get me to use it and neither of us would. George went out three-quarters of an hour ago to find us something for breakfast. There is a Styrofoam cup half full of room-temperature cocoa he brought me before he left, sitting on the table by her bed. It tastes cool and sweet and flat. There are red and green and blue miniature lights in a string around the window and a small wreath hanging below the peephole on the inside of the door. It is made of pine cones and Canadian holly and dried seaweed and seashells. Someone has spent a lot of time wiring and gluing bits of real materials onto a metal frame. There is no plastic anywhere on it, I checked. Some of the seashells are lightly flecked with gold paint, which makes them look festive but not too tacky.

There is a plastic bag on a stand dripping glucose and antibiotics into her veins, and a tank of oxygen blowing into her lungs through a regulator, plastic tubing, and a mask. The problem, the doctors say, is that she doesn't move enough, so when she got the flu and it turned into pneumonia her lungs filled up and now they can't get them to clear. She doesn't move or cough or sit up or do anything that would help keep her lungs clear and they can't beat on her all day long to clear them for her. The antibiotics can't keep up with the germs, which are having an undisturbed free-for-all, and it's putting a huge strain on her heart. She barely makes a bump in the bed anymore. Her skin is folding around her bones, she has lost fifteen pounds in the last week. Lead weights will not help. Food is beyond her, they're just trying to keep enough liquid running into her so that she doesn't dry up and blow away. They didn't move her down here because she is getting better, they moved her because they can't do anything more for her and a three-car pileup on the 105 has filled all the emergency-room stretchers and the beds in the ICU.