And Then She Fell, page 7
I want to jump up, to run, but again I can’t move. I want to scream, but I can’t breathe. My entire body feels like it’s made up of cockroaches, all crawling in different directions under my skin. I watch helplessly as it emerges from the sink, scurries up the sides, mounts the lip of the sink, and stares at me. Like it’s daring me to do something. Like it knows I can’t move. It’s inches from my face, its antennae speeding up, its black eyes like pits as they stare into me.
A flurry of knocks at the door.
“Babe? I don’t mean to rush you,” Steve says. “It’s been twenty minutes and Dawn’s getting a bit antsy.” Dawn makes gulping little half cries, as if Steve needs her confirmation.
I look at the door, then back at the sink. The cockroach is gone.
Warm blood rushes back into my body. I jump up, accidentally splashing some medicine on my pants. Eyes darting around the room for any sign of the roach. Nothing but white linoleum and tile. The scent of fake lemons from cleaning products.
I grab a towel and start to dry off.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry! I lost track of time,” I manage, slowly summoning up myself again.
I don’t know why I’m freaking out. It was just a roach. There are probably millions of them in Toronto. Billions, even. No need to mention anything to Steve, or anyone. Like Meghan’s DVDs and the burned dinner, it can be my little secret. I open the door only once I’m sure I look perfect.
“Where’s Mama’s little girl?” I ask, holding out my arms for Dawn. Her eyes lock on to mine and, for that split second Steve is passing her to me, her face looks exactly like Ma’s from my nightmares—skin melting, lips stuck in a sadistic smile. The words from last week whisper in my ear once more: It’s all burning.
I pull Dawn tight against my chest so I can’t see her face, then brush past Steve.
“Well?” he asks, loyally following behind like a golden retriever. “Did the tea work? Do you feel better?”
“Totally,” I say, my hand cupping Dawn’s soft neck as I focus on her smell—baby shampoo, not burning flesh. She’s fine. I’m fine. We’re fine. I’ll make sure we are.
CHAPTER 5
Aunty Bling Can’t Solve Everything
Turn,” Aunt Rachel commands, her cell phone sideways in her heavily ringed hands.
“Which way?” I ask, staring straight ahead.
“It’s the same earring on both sides, Alice. Pick one.”
I turn to the left and wait as she rearranges my hair behind that ear. The earrings are heavy: one large golden jingle dress cone at the top, with long strands of black seed beads coming out of the opening, slowly turning to gold beads at the ends, where tiny little matching gold jingle dress cones hang. Dana, wearing black skinny jeans, black platform shoes with tons of silver buckles that seem mostly for show, and a black It sweater even though it’s hot, looks up with an amused, black-lipped smile. She holds Dawn in one arm and her cell phone in the other, a bottle of pre-pumped breast milk balanced against her chin as her fingers constantly slide across, then tap on the screen.
We’re on the patio behind my house because, according to Aunt Rachel, natural light is always better in pictures than artificial. I’d asked Aunt Rachel if the two of them could come visit this morning. I’d been missing them desperately in the last month, and clearly it was taking a toll on me. It’s all burning was starting to feel like a warning, a prophecy. I hoped the presence of Aunt Rachel and Dana would bring the warmth and comfort it always had when I was a kid. A reminder that I belonged somewhere.
“Your mom always so sweet these days?” I ask Dana as Aunt Rachel steps back, steadies her phone, then pushes a button that makes a bright white light flash in my right eye.
“Shit. I forgot to turn off the flash. Don’t you dare move,” Aunt Rachel says as she focuses on her phone.
“What do you think?” Dana replies dryly. She puts down her own phone and switches the way she’s holding Dawn, cuddling her in tight as she pats her softly on her back to burp her. It’s amazing how good Dana is with her. I remember when I held Dana for the first time. I was seven, and even though Aunt Rachel had coached me on exactly what to do, where to place my hands and how to hold my arms, I still almost dropped her. The fact that Aunt Rachel let me babysit Dana after that continues to boggle my mind. It’s strange to see the young woman I’ll probably always think of as my little baby cousin holding my baby now—a sort of full-circle moment I’d never really anticipated. I drink in the sight, watching them together. My little baby in a short-sleeved onesie, her back not much bigger than Dana’s hand, her chubby bare legs and arms creasing in the cutest way.
Then Dawn lets out a burp followed by a trickle of thick white spit-up.
“Uh, Alice?” Dana looks to me, helpless, but I don’t want to take the baby. I need this break. “Ewww,” she whines as if in response, staring at the curdled white gunk on her sweater.
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Aunt Rachel immediately grabs a receiving blanket from the table and tosses it at Dana’s face. “Who’s the baby now?” she asks.
“Whatever, it’s gross,” Dana mumbles.
Aunt Rachel ignores her and turns back to me, taking more photos. “Dana’s the one who got me on Instagram. Did you know there are girls on there who sell out their entire stock within minutes of posting? I’d never have to go on the pow-wow trail again.”
“I thought you liked visiting all the different rezes.”
“Sure I do. But I’ve never sold my entire stock at a single pow-wow. Far from it.” Aunt Rachel chuckles before pausing to swipe through her pictures. “Okay, I think we got it. You can take them off now.”
I pull the earrings out of my earlobes, then carefully place them down on the glass table. There are at least twenty more pairs—each a different combination of colored seed beads and jingle bell cones.
“Are you selling all of these?”
“Heck no! Not all at once, anyway. I’m only probably putting up ten or so for now. You remember that movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory?”
“That Tim Burton movie where Johnny Depp acts right creepy?” Dana asks.
“Excuse me. Gene Wilder is the only Willy Wonka we acknowledge in this family. He never lied about being an Indian so he could wear a goddamn dead crow on his head for a movie. And a shit movie at that. Tonto, my ass.”
“Who’s Gene Wilder?” Dana asks. I laugh out loud.
“Have I never showed you his Willy Wonka?” Aunt Rachel asks. “What about The Producers? Did I show you that?”
“No . . .”
“Young Frankenstein?”
“Never heard of that in my life.”
“That’s it. We’re watching a Gene Wilder marathon as soon as we get home.”
Dana rolls her eyes with panache. “Whatever.”
“That’s the most excited I’ve seen her in weeks.” Aunt Rachel smiles as she throws herself down in the chair across from me. Dana makes a face.
“I used to think my life was like the scene with Veruca Salt and the golden goose. Like, if I made a decision, I’d have to step on a scale, and either it’d be good and I could step off and be safe, or it’d be bad and the ground would fall out from under me. I’d slide away into the dark,” I say too quickly and without thinking. When I look up, Aunt Rachel and Dana are sharing a look that immediately makes me ashamed. Why did I say that? Why did I even remember? I laugh, try to play it off.
“Wow, I haven’t thought about that in so long. It’s weird, huh? The way movies stick with you.”
“They’re supposed to stick with you. The good ones, anyway. Heck, I’ll always remember the song that spoiled girl sings in that scene. ‘I want the whole world.’ Who doesn’t, innit?” Aunt Rachel laughs, generous as always. I’ve never really thought about it before, but there are parallels between that movie and my life. My golden ticket was marrying Steve. The thing is, in the movie, the golden tickets weren’t all that good in the end. They led everyone who got them to traps specifically designed for them. If Steve’s my golden ticket, does that mean he’s leading me into a trap? Is that why he didn’t want me to have my cousins over anymore? Where is he anyway? He should have been home by now.
“Anyway, my point is, I wanna make buying these earrings feel like finding a golden ticket,” Aunt Rachel proclaims, tapping insistently on the glass table with her finger and interrupting my train of thought. “To do that, I have to release only enough to guarantee I sell out. You know what they say: limit supply, make demand go sky-high.”
“Who says that?” I ask, thankful for the distraction. I’m being weird and paranoid.
“Successful entrepreneurs,” Aunt Rachel replies, a little defensively.
“Mom’s been taking marketing classes online,” Dana explains without looking up from her phone. “She has to steal Wi-Fi from the McDonald’s over in Caledonia cuz the rez internet sucks so bad.”
“I’m sure McDonald’s doesn’t mind. I’ve seen dudes watch hard-core porn in there before,” I say.
“Alice!” Aunt Rachel exclaims, leaning over to smack my arm. “Don’t be so nasty!”
Dana and I exchange a look, then laugh. There’s something forever funny about a scandalized aunty.
“So when did you start those classes anyway?”
Aunt Rachel and Dana lock eyes for a second, their faces suddenly grave, as if they’re telepathically discussing what the answer should be. This can mean only one thing. I hold my breath and wait to see whether they address it outright or not.
“Oh, about three months ago,” Aunt Rachel says, verifying what I’d already assumed. She started them after Ma died. Dana seems satisfied with this answer and goes back to looking at her phone. “Took one on photography, too. Learning’s been a useful distraction.”
I look out across the backyard. It isn’t big—no one has big backyards in this part of Toronto—but it has a few trees and it’s big enough to imagine Ma turning it into some sort of garden oasis. I can picture the giant white pots she’d set up along the edges of the patio, the medicines she’d plant, labeling each one with some cute little sign she’d buy from the dollar store. Here, now, with me, the space is wasted. It didn’t have to be. Steve had asked if I wanted him to arrange a garden like Ma might have made. Said he’d even be sure there was a patch of milkweed to attract monarch butterflies, her favorite. I told him it was too soon.
“Speaking of distractions . . .” Aunt Rachel points with her lips over to the inside of the sliding glass doors, where Steve is pulling off a light blue button-up shirt to reveal a white tank top, his muscled arms and shoulders looking appealing as ever. She wiggles her eyebrows at me.
I look past her at Steve again. He hasn’t turned to look at us yet. I have no idea how he’ll react. “I know we said we were gonna try to do all the parenting on our own so we could strengthen our family bond,” I’d texted him, “but Aunt Rachel and Dana are in town and want to pop over and see Dawn.” He didn’t respond all day, which makes me nervous. I’ve never seen him really angry before. I’ve never given him reason to be.
“And you said I was being nasty,” I say, hoping I look nonchalant as I take a sip of lemonade.
“You were!”
“You’re both nasty,” Dana says as she stands, her hand cradling Dawn’s neck perfectly as she holds her. “And so’s this little girl’s diaper.” She starts to walk toward me.
“You got two hands. Why don’t you do something about it?” Aunt Rachel asks.
For a second Dana stands there, mouth open, and I’m thinking she’s going to refuse, but sure enough, she pulls Dawn back to her and says, “Fine. ’Scuse us.”
We watch as she strides easily across the patio, pulls the door open, then steps inside. She stops to talk to Steve, who doesn’t seem angry at all—at least when he’s interacting with her. He points her in the direction of Dawn’s bedroom, then she and Dawn disappear. I’m amazed at Dana’s independence, the way she takes responsibility for whatever it is she needs to do and just does it. I hope Dawn’s like that when she’s her age—not cripplingly indecisive, like me. When I look back at Aunt Rachel, her eyes are narrowed.
“You and him okay, my love?” she asks quietly, as if she’s been reading my mind.
I shrug. “We’re fine. Managing.”
“Mhmm,” she replies. Her voice is skeptical, but she doesn’t press. “And you? Everything okay with you? You’ve had to shoulder a lot lately.” She looks like she wants to say more, but she stops herself instead and watches me. I know her eyes are cataloging each muscle twitch and blink I make, so I keep my face neutral.
“I guess. I mean, I didn’t know it was possible to be this tired and still not be able to sleep.” I look down at the glass table.
“I sure don’t miss that part. It’s hard being a new mom. In ways it isn’t necessarily hard to be a new dad,” Aunt Rachel says. Before I can ask her what she means by that, she leans forward, takes my hands in hers, and looks me right in my eyes. “But that’s not exactly what I meant. Have you given any thought to her one-year feast?”
I stiffen. “That’s still months away.”
“It’s gonna come up quicker than you’d think. If you want, I can ask a chief from one of the other clans to come. So he can do a full, proper condolence ceremony for you . . . and all of us.”
I don’t want to think about Ma’s one-year feast. I’m still trying to forget that disastrous first attempt at a condolence at her funeral, where I fucked it all up. I don’t know why I was so blindsided. I should have known that it was coming. It was the same at nearly all the funerals on Six Nations: a clear-minded person from outside the immediate family would say informal words of condolence to the immediate, grieving family, which they would accept. But when Melita’s stepdad, Uncle Billy, started talking about how we were suffering a great loss, and telling us to remember Ma and all she’d given us, I didn’t realize what was happening. Not until he mentioned Ma’s spirit would only linger for ten days after she died. After that, he said, it was our responsibility to her spirit to let her go so she could rejoin the ancestors waiting for her.
“NO!” I wailed before he could continue. Sobs like screams poured from me. I refused to let Ma go, swore at Uncle Billy for expecting me to, practically spat venom at my aunties for springing this on me. I was a woman possessed. Everyone stopped, unsure what to do. They didn’t know that the circumstances around Ma’s death were not exactly what they’d thought. That I was not only devastated but also harboring a suffocating guilt, which I would not allow to be cleared away by Uncle Billy’s words, or anything else. Then I felt Melita’s hand on my arm, leading me out of the room, and I heard Aunt Rachel’s voice come forth to accept the condolence. “I acknowledge what has been said, and I accept these words. Even though our sadness is a heavy burden, after ten days we will place that burden down so we can carry on with our duties to life . . .”
I was so angry and ashamed that I skipped Ma’s ten-day feast, telling my family I had a doctor’s appointment I couldn’t reschedule. I could hear the disappointment, the concern, in their voices, but they didn’t say anything outright. Instead, they made Ma’s favorite foods, served a plate for her spirit, and went ahead with the feast like they were supposed to. And, since I didn’t come back in the days following, they took all her possessions I’d started gathering out of her trailer and gave them away, like they were supposed to. We weren’t to hold on to anything that might remind us too much of her and feed our grief, because we had to focus on our own responsibilities to those still living. By the time I finally showed up, there was almost nothing left to save.
I realize Aunt Rachel is offering me a do-over right now. A more structured, formal condolence ceremony—and led by a chief. He’d probably tell the story of its creation as he did it: how Hiawatha came up with the first condolence ceremony while grieving the deaths of his entire family, hoping the words would raise other mourning, nearly mad minds back to reason. It was a story Dad had told many times. The offer’s so generous. I don’t deserve it.
I begin to shake my head when Aunt Rachel interrupts.
“You know they’re still with you, right? Both of them? And they’re so proud of you. But you have to let them go and come back here.” She shakes my hand between hers, desperate.
I look into her eyes—the deep brown on the outside melting into amber in the center—and I see Ma. Their eyes were always so similar. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. The one-year feast is supposed to be when Ma’s spirit comes back one last time, and after that her life cycle is finally complete. But what if I don’t want to let her go? What if I can’t?
“I-I . . . ,” I stutter. “She . . . I . . .” I stop trying. I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to lie to my aunt, but I also can’t bear to tell her the truth. Of course I’m still stuck on Ma and what happened to her. Of course it’s impacting how I mother Dawn. I’m sure Aunt Rachel and Dawn know that, despite my facade. But to admit it out loud would be to admit that I fail at everything, even grieving.
The patio door opens again, and I use the opportunity to pull away. Steve comes out in his tank top and dress pants. He’s carrying a plastic bag, which he places on the table.
“Aunty Rachel,” he says warmly as he leans in to give her a hug. If he is annoyed, he’s hiding it well. “How’re things?”
“Oh, fine. You know how it is down the bush. Same shit, different day,” she says with a grunt of a laugh. “I was just asking Alice how things are going since Baby came. You two doing okay?”
