And Then She Fell, page 11
No, I tell myself. No. You can’t let yourself think like this.
As if it’s a choice.
I turn over and pretend I’m asleep.
CHAPTER 9
Who Needs Sleep When You’ve Got an Overactive Imagination?
I don’t know how long I’ve been lying here, still as a stone under Steve’s arm, flung carelessly, possessively across my chest. His snores are quiet but constant, rhythmic, as though they’re on a timer. We left the blinds open, so the yellowing light of the full moon is illuminating parts of the room while other parts stay shadowed. I’ve been staring at our textured ceiling, waiting for images to pop out at me the way I imagine, somewhere, Melita and Tanya are doing with the stars in the night sky. They’d been meeting up with some other women around our age for full-moon ceremonies the past six months. “we all wanna b more n touch w women’s medicine,” Melita told me in a text, “its rly powerful 2 just sit around w other native women n rly listen 2 them. n rly b listened 2 ur self. makes u feel like a real ndn woman or summin lol.”
I’d gone a couple times before Dawn was born, but now that I was a new mom, I guess it didn’t occur to them that I’d still want to come. Even if it did, though, one of them would have had to pick me up, which I knew was a pain in the ass. No one wants to drive into Toronto and back to Six if they can help it. I felt bad even asking Aunt Rachel to do it the other day.
“Am I supposed to feel bad for you now?” a voice rings in the air.
A shiver runs through me. The voice is bitchy and accusatory, soaked in sarcasm. Is there a woman here?
I look at Steve. He hasn’t registered anything, but that man can sleep soundly despite anything. He’d wanted to be the sort of father who gets up with his baby, but he couldn’t change his nature. He sleeps the way I imagine people who’ve always known safety and prosperity do. The type of people who don’t have the possibility of trauma lurking in the back of their minds, always, making them hypervigilant of every creak or shift in the dark. Not like me. I don’t remember the last time I slept through the night. Even before Dawn, I’d be up for hours, watching the horizon darken, then lighten as my brain recycled guilty thoughts and self-criticisms. Motherhood has only amplified my senses.
“Hello?” I whisper, my eyes darting into the recesses of every corner, finding nothing, flitting away. Steve grumbles in his sleep, lifts his arm, and turns away from me. I sit up. Move my feet carefully from the bed to the floor. Everything is still. I must be imagining things.
Then I hear it: laughter—mocking, amused. Sounds like it’s coming from the hall. Who the fuck is it? And how did she get in?
I stand, try to slow my quickening breath. Breathe in. Breathe out. Slowly pad over to the door. Breathe in. Breathe out. Bite my lip, hard. Peek out.
Just in time to watch Dawn’s nursery door click shut.
Someone’s taking her, I think.
Immediately I’m in the hall, the cold brass doorknob in my hand as adrenaline courses through my body. I open the door and look around. There doesn’t seem to be anyone there. Not even the rocking chair is moving. I slip inside the room, check behind that door, then open the closet and move aside the hangers of dresses.
Nothing. I go to Dawn. I can’t quite hear her shallow little breaths, so I gently place my fingers on her tummy. It rises and falls. Thank the Creator.
There’s a slight smell of baby shampoo, but nothing out of the ordinary. I stand there in the silence for I don’t know how long. Time moves differently when you’re exceedingly alert and apprehensive of your surroundings. You don’t have the space to think—every part of you is too intensely focused on what’s in front of you—and yet, in that lack of space, you also lose time.
I stand and watch. My heart thuds and thuds. I can practically hear the blood whooshing through my ears. No one’s here. No one’s taking Dawn. Did I really imagine all of this?
Then the voice comes again, seemingly from right behind me, making my whole body shudder: “We bring our minds together as one and give thanks to Shonkwaia’tison for these stories.”
My father. The voice isn’t his, but the words. The words are entirely his. I haven’t heard them in years. Tears well in my eyes as I snap around. There’s nothing there, but the voice continues.
“All our stories are a gift from Shonkwaia’tison, just like all of creation is his gift to us.”
“Please,” I ask, holding in the sobs. “Please stop.”
“The stories help us as Onkwehón:we to learn about ourselves, the world around us, and our place in the world.”
“How is this happening?” I whisper, rubbing my wet eyes so hard they burn. There’s no one here but Dawn. And even if there was, the only people who know these words are on Six Nations or dead.
“We offer up this tobacco as a prayer, in order to give thanks for these stories.” There is no emotion in the words, but they still feel cruel, relentless.
“What do you want?”
“And now . . .”
“I’ll do anything. Just stop!” my voice gets screechy as I smack my hands over my ears.
“And now . . .”
Suddenly the fear dissipates. I know what the voice wants. It seems so obvious. I feel like a fool for not figuring it out faster.
“And now our minds are one,” I whisper into the dark. There’s no response, but there doesn’t have to be. I know what I’m supposed to do.
I carefully close the door to Dawn’s nursery and walk downstairs to my office. There’s a big mahogany desk in the center of the room, a laptop closed on top, with big, full bookshelves framing everything. It’s the sort of room I imagined established writers occupied while penning their masterpieces. The whole setup seems premature, like I’m cheating or playing pretend. It’s hard to enjoy the space when I haven’t earned any of it. Technically Steve hasn’t earned it, either. Most of his wealth has filtered through his family, washing away discomfort like a never-ending spring. Still, he was born into excess, whereas I was born into lack. He has intergenerational wealth; I have intergenerational trauma. Dawn, the lucky girl, gets to inherit both.
I keep the light off, then open the laptop and wait for it to boot up. I’ve had this big-ass brick of a computer for years now. Stickers from bands I loved in high school are still stuck on the case. It was the first big purchase I’d ever made, a couple years after high school. At that point I’d already been paying for almost half the bills because Ma’s accident made it so she couldn’t work full-time hours anymore.
My eyes dart to the drawer where Ma’s oxies are—
No.
The blue of the laptop screen sign-in page flashes in front of me. As soon as I sign in, a pow-wow drum starts up.
“Fuck!”
I scramble to pause the music. The singers go on, unperturbed by my frantic slamming on the space bar. After about a minute it stops, finally, and I listen intently for any sign Dawn has heard. Silence. Seems like I’ve lucked out for once. Still, what the fuck? I don’t even remember having any YouTube videos up. Steve must have been on my laptop, looking for music he thinks will help him better relate to the others in Mohawk class. It’s weird, though, that he just so happened to have up Ma’s favorite song. One she’d sing to me whenever it came on, immediately turning whatever happened to be nearby into a microphone—a bottle of Coke, a pen, occasionally my foot.
Unless it wasn’t a coincidence. The thought doesn’t feel like mine, but it makes a sort of sense all the same. After all, her pill bottle is here. Maybe that, and my hesitancy to let her go, has kept her here, too. Maybe it wasn’t Steve leaving a song open on my laptop. Maybe it was a sign from her. The thought makes tears well up in my eyes.
“Ma?” I ask, realizing it’s the first time I’ve said the word out loud since her funeral. “Are you here?”
The only sound is the hum of the laptop.
I pull Ma’s pill bottle out from the drawer and turn it in my hand. There’s nothing special about it, apart from it once being hers. I don’t feel any kind of tingling when I hold it, or the sensation of eyes watching me, or anything like what happened upstairs. That was visceral, unexplainable. This is . . . simply a song. I put the bottle back in its hiding place, then open my Word document.
I’d saved the story in a hurry as “Creation.” I need to try to come up with a better title before I even consider letting anyone else read it. Though perhaps, I can’t help but think, Ma is reading it now, as I write. Dad, too. If I’m finally writing what they always knew I could, what they always hoped I would, they could be watching. Right?
I open my Facebook messages to check what Melita said the other names for Sky Woman were. Steve had good instincts there. It wouldn’t make sense to call her Sky Woman when I was starting her story back in Sky World.
I take a deep breath. I stare at the cursor. I wait.
CHAPTER 10
Enter Sky Woman. You Can Call Her Mature Flowers.
So. The Sky World. The place where it all began. How should I properly prepare you for Sky World? I should mention it’s not nice. This is important. Sometimes people get this idea that everything used to be perfect in the past when really everything was in a lot of ways the same. Some people were good; some people were bad. There was never a point where, for example, if Terry down the road told her friends you were a right home-wrecker who stole her precious Shawny away, you would ever be able to get gas in the village without them giving you the stink eye. Even if you were all born three hundred years ago, those same people would probably still be dicks and call you all kinds of foul shit. The only difference is they’d be dicks without modern stuff like SUVs and diabetes and Facebook.
Speaking of rumors, Sky Woman’s actual name was not Sky Woman at all. It was Mature Flowers. It would have been too confusing for her to be named Sky Woman, since technically all women in Sky World were sky women.
Now, I’m not sure what you’ve heard about Mature Flowers, but you should know she had a messed-up life before she landed on that Turtle’s back and jump-started Creation. And not just messed up—sad. Like, really sad. One awful thing after another. The kind of stuff that piles up and makes your heart heavy. I’m warning you now—this isn’t Disney. It doesn’t end with emotionally satisfying heterosexual domestic bliss. Far from it.
But first I should probably tell you about the Great Tree. Set the scene and whatnot. It was smack in the middle of Sky World and pretty much held the whole place together. Plus it fed everyone, so it was kind of a big deal. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it. I guess if trees were old movie monsters, the Great Tree was like Frankenstein’s monster, only more useful. It didn’t have all those annoying existential questions, for one. You’ve heard of grafting? I guess you could call it that. The Great Tree was grafted with every type of fruit you can think of. There were whole branches of cherries, apples, juicy strawberries big as your hand. And even when it had a decomposing body in its canopy, the Great Tree smelled sweet, like a handful of flowers and fresh tobacco.
You’re probably wondering about that dead body, huh? I don’t blame you. Mature Flowers’s dad died before she was born, which meant she was mourning this stranger her entire life. What’s worse, he was the first person in all of Sky World to die, so no one even knew how to comfort her. They put his body in a coffin-type structure and kind of threw it into the branches of the Great Tree. It sounds bad, I know, but what else were they gonna do? It’s not like they’d disposed of a dead body before. There was no Breaking Bad back then to introduce to them the ingenious idea of melting a body down in hydrofluoric acid. Plus the Great Tree was gorgeous, so they could have done much worse.
Anyway, Mature Flowers was always crying because she was the only person she knew without her dad, and since she was also the saddest person she knew, she was convinced those two facts could not be a coincidence. I’m honestly not sure her dad was really that good a guy, but since she never met him, she couldn’t really gauge where he fell on the asshole scale herself. All she had were her stupid childish assumptions to rely on, and you know how that can get. In her head he was the best dad who never was, and now that he was dead, her life would always and forever be shit. The people who threw her dad’s body in the tree had never told her that they’d done so, either, so that little omission made her already bad trust issues worse.
A long time passed and Mature Flowers was still moping around pretty much all the time. No one really knew what to say to her. She became the weird girl everyone whispers about and avoids, which was unfortunate because she was actually really pretty and could have been super popular if she wasn’t so sad.
Mature Flowers’s mother didn’t help matters. This one day she must have saw her lying facedown in the middle of the village or something equally weird and embarrassing, because she finally decided to do something. What, you ask? Tell her where her dad’s body was! I’m not totally sure why. It’s not like that could have made her feel much better. Her dad was most definitely still dead. Like I said, they didn’t really know how to handle the grief thing. They mostly wanted her to get over it already. Pretty much the same as how we treat mourning people today. Oh, your loved one died? Get over it! Your tears ain’t bringing anyone back to life, buttercup. You or Mature Flowers. And anyway, even if they could, we need you to be a “productive” member of society first and foremost, which really means we need you to be a slave to the economy and sell or buy shit immediately. Preferably both. Forever. G’wan den!
CHAPTER 11
The Ghosts of Colonizers Past
Tanya called earlier today. She had loads of good gossip, which I’d normally eat up. This time I couldn’t be bothered.
“You’ll never fucking guess who Dex Johnson cheated on Jamie with. One of them girls who works at Lone Wolf! You know the one who free-pours sugar in the coffee and makes it way too sweet? Her! Jamie caught them doing a stand-up sixty-nine in the bathroom of the Laundromat and dumped liquid Tide all over them. I had no idea Dex even had the upper-body strength to pull off something like that.”
I was quiet, trying to figure out how to bring up the voice I’d heard last night. Anything I considered sounded crazy.
“What’s the matter with you? Come on, it’s funny! I heard they totally looked like Smurfs when they came out.”
“Maybe my sense of humor got flushed out with Dawn’s placenta,” I managed.
“So it’s buried in your ma’s yard? Heck, I’ll get one of my brothers to dig it up right now.”
“That’s not the point, Tanya.”
“What’s the point, then?”
“I feel like shit.”
Tanya laughed. “Of course you feel like shit. You pushed a cranky kid out your snatch, what, a little over a month ago? What’d you expect? Least you didn’t get covered in liquid Tide.”
What did I expect? I expected Dawn to love me, I want to say but know I can’t. She screams in my presence for hours. Sometimes it seems like she barely needs to breathe. But she always stops a little shy of the three-hour mark, as if she’s on a timer, which is weird because, according to the internet, that’s the exact time I’d need to cite for doctors to take her crying seriously.
I’m so far from being a perfect mother it’s starting to scare me. I can’t calm Dawn down the way Steve does, or even the way Dana does. When Dawn screams, I want to scream back. Sometimes, when she won’t stop, when the screams feel like they’re one long continuous blast, images appear in my mind that scare me, like me shaking her violently until she stops. I don’t know where they come from. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t. So why is my brain so ready and willing to create scenarios where I do, where I have?
Motherhood is sacrifice. Not metaphorical sacrifice. Literal sacrifice. Every day I feel like I’m destroying pieces of myself to win the favor of this insatiable demigod who wants and wants and wants. Prayers and candles are never enough. This being wants blood. And the more you give the greater it grows. Ma must have felt it back then—especially after Dad died. Those deep lines between her eyebrows and thick brackets around her lips more offerings to me than markers of time passed and life lived. I wish I could talk to her about it. She was usually pretty honest once she’d had her painkillers. Sometimes too honest, her words like tacks popping any unrealistic ideas or dreams ballooning in my head. But that’s exactly what I need right now.
“Helloooo? You still there, Al?”
“Yeah, sorry. I—” I bit the nail of my thumb, hard, then mumbled, “I’m pretty sure I was hearing things last night.”
“Whoa, really? Like, voices?”
“Yeah. A woman.” I didn’t mention anything about the talking cockroach or the song I thought could be a sign from Ma.
“In your head, or in the room? What’d she say?” I could hear her interest perk immediately. Tanya has always seen herself as a sort of unlicensed private investigator. She spends most of her free time trying to figure out unsolved murders on internet message boards. I should have figured she’d see this as another case to crack. At least she wasn’t making plans to take me to the mental hospital.
“In the room, I think. She was criticizing me to start,” I said, considering whether I should tell her about Dad’s little storytelling Thanksgiving Address. I decided against it. “Then she kind of . . . guilted me?”
“Guilted you over what?”
“My writing,” I said before thinking about it.
