The Laboratory of Love, page 19
“This way,” she says over her shoulder, walking quickly. Where are we going, Lily? She won’t wait for me, I know. I hurry to follow my sister across the highway and through brush on the mountain’s base. Lily threads her way surely up the lower slope. Her breath puffs signals that vanish before I can read them.
She stops in a narrow gully and bows her head toward the ground.
What is it?
I don’t want to see, don’t want to know.
“Look,” says Lily.
A boy. There’s something wrong with him. He’s wearing only running shoes and socks. The left shoe is torn at the toe; green peeks out. It’s cold, he should be dressed, why didn’t we bring him a shirt and pants? My drawers are filled with clothes that would fit; he’s the same size and shape as me, nine or ten or a stunted twelve.
Something else is wrong. His throat shouldn’t look like that.
A second, messy mouth. Torn lips caked with rust.
“Who is he?” I ask Lily. I don’t recognize him. I haven’t seen him among the boys who yelp like wild dogs across the schoolyard. Maybe he goes to the Catholic school with the Italians, lives up in the Gulch or down in one of the shacks on the river flats.
“His name is Billy,” says my sister, poking his stomach with a stick.
His hands curl around something that isn’t there. His legs twist at odd angles and dirt sticks to his white chest. He stares at Lily as she jabs the stick. He won’t close his eyes, he won’t cry. His lips are blue. He must have been eating berries. That’s not right. Berries don’t grow on the mountain in November, we slather their juice in July.
“He doesn’t feel anything.” Lily drops the stick. She turns, faces me.
“He’s mine,” she says.
I bend over the boy and touch his face. Cold skin tingles my hand.
“It’s going to snow,” Lily says behind me. “It’s going to get dark.”
“Billy,” I breathe. “It’s time to go home.”
After my walk from Aunt Madeleine’s, the house seems very warm. It feels empty, though something cooks in the oven.
A muffled thud sounds from below. Steps ascend the stairs. Lily walks past me to the stove. “Greetings from the aunts,” I say, attempting lightness. Silent, Lily peers into the oven.
Downstairs, I throw my coat onto MJ’s bed, where the contents of my suitcase are strewn. I start to leave the room, turn back. Is something different about the things on the bed? In their appearance? Arrangement? The book I brought for Lily is gone. I search the space carefully, even kneel to look beneath the bed, without success.
“Time to eat,” Lily calls down the stairs.
We have the same supper as the night before. I suggest we take in the movie at the Royal Theatre. “We’ll sit in the front row,” I propose. “It wouldn’t surprise me if John Wayne still exterminates Indians on that screen. My treat.”
Lily declines. “It’s going to snow,” she says. As she clears the kitchen, refusing my help again, I feel I’ve sat in this room every evening of my life and never gone away. There’s been only a single supper, a single evening. Long ago, time stopped, stiffened, froze.
Before Lily can finish at the sink, I move to the living room and turn the radio on. I fiddle with the dial until I find the CBC. Voices cant about Quebec. Perhaps Lily will settle on the opposite couch; even if we don’t talk, that would be something. A start. Water runs in the bathroom down the hall. Lily enters the living room, walks to the radio, turns it off. Before I can speak, she’s gone. Her bedroom door closes.
I can’t remain in this silent house. I slip on my coat and step outside. Cold jabs me wider awake. Lily’s window is dark, the empty street is quiet. I move past curtained squares glowing with yellow light, with television screens leaking cancer. Lily, is it going to snow?
“He’s still there,” says Lily in 1972, parting the curtains and looking into the dark street. Although Brale stores preen with Christmas decorations, the ground remains bare because the snow is late this year.
I haven’t been back to the gully since Lily showed me what it holds. “Stay away,” she’s sidled up to warn me. In the schoolyard, I’ve studied yelping boys and wondered whether one is missing. Maybe Billy was among them; maybe I didn’t notice him before. His parents must know he’s lost. They are looking for him, or they have given up looking. His toys no longer wait for his hands to curl around them. He shivers where he lies. I want to bring him clothes, but I’m afraid. There was something the matter with him, something more than blue berries and a second throat, I can’t remember.
“Don’t tell,” says Lily, dropping the curtain.
When she slips from the house now, I know where she’s going. Perched on a flat rock near Billy, she tells him things she won’t tell me, describes what’s locked in the small white valise at the back of her closet. He will never betray her secrets; my uncle won’t reveal mine.
Down in the furnace room, at the warmest part of the house, I curl in my hiding place. My uncle inhaled too much smoke when he was twelve. The Christmas tree caught fire, something was wrong with the wires of its lights. The boy tried to crawl to the window; the smoke was too thick and he couldn’t get out. Now his can of marbles sighs in the corner; his hockey sticks stir the shadows. My pencil presses against the pad of paper I’ve taken from Mitch’s study. Dear Jesus, I print. Dig deeper, my uncle whispers. There’s something different about his voice. My uncle sounds like Billy now. Dig harder, they plead. I press the pencil until there is only a hole where Jesus was.
I can’t find the gully in the dark. Dear Jesus, it’s cold. Stumbling across loose rock, I wonder if the features of this slope could have changed since my childhood, if a million years of weather since then have done their work. Or has sly memory played another of its tricks? “It was just a game,” Lily told me in January that year. “He was just pretending. Billy lives up on Shaver’s Bench. He goes to the park there all the time. He’s probably on the swings right now. We just wanted to see how your face would look.” His face looked pale and thin; a smudge of dirt clung to his risen ribs. I saw the shoe with the hole in the toe and a clue of green sock so I wouldn’t see something else. As that winter passed, memory of Billy froze into a picture of my uncle in my mind. The same face. Speaking shadows in the furnace room turned muffled, then mute. Only the deep-freeze hummed. He was silenced so he would never tell.
Lily walks quickly toward the mountain as snow finally falls. I believe she doesn’t know I’m behind her, at a quiet distance, until she stops and turns. “Don’t follow,” she calls, standing still, becoming white. Snow will bury Billy until spring. It’s too heavy and too thick; he can’t dig himself out from the hole where Jesus was. I retrace a dozen steps; my trail has already been covered. I stop to look where Lily stood a moment ago. A dark shape moves through falling flakes. The white curtain closes, the white valise snaps shut. Billy’s heart beats against my chest, hammers its cage of bone. Let me in, let me out.
No longer a nimble child, I fall with a grunt. A small, sharp stone presses into my spine. I can feel it, Lily. My hands curl as sky begins to shred white scraps of a letter from Jesus. Something glassy glints toward me; a shape of darkness breathes nearby. I’m trying and failing to close my eyes against the intent face above me. The puffy features. A white blanket covers me with warm weight. I’ll never tell, Lily. These blue lips will never ask why.
Snow won’t stop falling through the past or through the present. It fills the timeless hole as quickly as I dig, forbids me to find the face. I can’t reach Billy. Dig harder, he calls up to me. Dig faster. Dig more.
The house on Aster Drive hovers in darkness amid descending snow, though I left the living room lit. My iced feet feel their way quietly down the hall and stairs. This way, Billy. In the black hole, I fumble for the edge of a bed. Objects fall to the floor as I pull back covers. We’ve climbed into MJ’s abandoned bed by mistake. It feels the same as mine. Billy’s skin feels as cold as mine. Until dawn, we shiver in synchronization. Our teeth chatter in time.
At morning, silver light gleans the kitchen. The snow has stopped. Six white inches conceal the features of the landscape. The blanched bones of the backyard maple rise as foreground to the black-and-white mountain. A cup of cold coffee rests on the table.
“Lily?” I call. My unanswered voice sounds thin and frightened as a child’s.
Let’s go, he says. Hurry, he urges.
My suitcase is packed. Should I leave a note? Dear Jesus ... Fresh footprints lead from the front door, bend in the direction of the mountain. Shivering, I stall. My feet start to follow my sister’s trail, then turn the other way, toward downtown Brale and the bus that will carry me back to the cabin on the lake.
The fire in my stove has gone out and the cabin is cold. Beyond my wall of windows, the small ferry still floats across a black hole yawning between white shores. Still pursues the endless back and forth. On the farther side, lights from scattered cabins peer down into liquid darkness, seek the contents of the depths. Steam rises through falling snow, from the lake, as someone down there sighs.
The receiver in my hand is warm. How many days have passed since my telephone has rung? Since my voice has spoken? My lips kissed? I glance around the cabin. After four months, it still looks unknown. There’s no television or music system. No framed photographs or sleek machines or glossy magazines. Only a few pieces of shabby furniture left behind by previous tenants. I don’t hold a job or own a car. My clothes are washed in the sink, hung to dry on a string above the stove. Taking what I need for warmth, I steal wood from distant neighbours. There’s no money to buy a cord of larch for the stove or curtains for the windows. I am exposed in this cabin hugged from behind by brush and cottonwoods and ponderosa pine but, in front, perched boldly upon the shore. Anyone driving on or off the ferry can see inside. “He’s different,” locals have begun to mutter.
How and why have I ended up in this flimsy structure, this unlikely location? I sense I’m undergoing someone else’s experience. My own existence has ended; this is afterlife, though the empty shell of self still sings. In some indeterminate season, the source of my ghost wanders the clearing above Lovers’ Lane. Hand-in-hand with my uncle, he roams among berries and thistles and weeds, up where the cold wind blows.
I dial Lily’s number. A measured sound fills my ear. He was raped and killed and left on a mountain. Searching the slope for pussy willows the following spring, I once found myself by accident in that narrow gully. Not even a pair of running shoes remained there after the April thaw. “You lied. He doesn’t play on Shaver’s Bench. Where did he go?” I asked Lily, who had turned more silent that season. Inside a locked white valise, she was already storing razor blades and pills with other secret things. My sister didn’t answer me or turn her face toward my question, as if it had failed to reach her.
Is it possible? In a small town, children are apt to hear disturbing news that adults might try to keep secret. The sexual murder of a boy would have filled the Brale Daily Times. The town would have bristled with panic, shuddered from fear. Doors would have been locked at night. The park and other places where children play would have turned deserted after dark. Uniformed men would have combed the mountain and dragged the river until they found a body or gave up looking. They would have gone from house to house with questions. They would have had no reason to look in the closet of a girl on Aster Drive. No cause to notice the white valise at the back, no motive to discover a green sock inside.
A sound like fingernails scrapes the window at the back of the cabin. Or it’s just a branch. I’ve been here too long. It’s time to leave. I can no longer share the cold with you. Donald. Billy. Whatever you call yourself. My shell of self must seek a warmer climate in order to keep singing.
Snow shakes steadily through the dark; the cabin roof groans beneath its weight. A buzzing in my ear swells in volume as it persists. I glance at my watch. Is it too late, Lily? Ringing violates the house on Aster Drive. It won’t stop until I put the receiver to rest or my sister disconnects the cord. I never told, Lily. I never asked who, I never asked why.
Phantasmagoria
They say that you were just a dream, but now the night is over. At chill dawn I waken once more in the cabin on the lake, with pines pressed behind and the meadow farther back. There is the shape of your head indented upon the pillow, the scent of your last cigarette stale in the air. Night turned traitor, inhaled, and held its breath while you stole away, while I slept unaware.
If I believed them, we never scattered yellow leaves on the road to Redfish Creek or rowed the boat to Sunshine Bay to drink wine upon the midnight cliff. I search drawers and corners and beneath the bed for proof of your presence. Where are your shirts that furled within the closet, the razor rusting beside the sink? All evidence has been immaculately removed (by you?), and now with insistent voices empty space demands to be filled. You were here, I know—even as they repeat that imagination plays pranks and desire conjures phantoms that hover like mist above cold water before they fade. I remember that you never said you’d stay.
The long grass stiffens with frost and the kettle steams upon the stove and a boomerang of birds slides above the slate lake. Sometimes the damp morning earth betrays the spoor of prowling through the dark. Claws, hooves, paws.
So at night I turn the pages of my books and hear the ferry cross back and forth nearby, connecting this side to the other. Tomorrow I will see you standing on the farther shore, shrunken by distance into anyone at all, dissolved into blue and green and grey, reflected upon the still water. And I will glimpse you walking through the woods above the old man’s farm. You turn once to glance behind, then continue toward the clearing where we lay in tall weeds through summer afternoons languid with bees. Even now I know the shape and size and texture of the muscles that strode your legs from me. From a distance, well-intentioned neighbours arrive at noon to say that I will soon forget, or will dream a new lover in the night.
Each week darkness arrives earlier, and the snow-line lowers. A descending lake exposes small stones that were concealed by water before. Already it is winter and summer people have retreated into town. Cabins are locked tight; they twitch with ghosts. We listen for the last train to whistle above the water; we split enough wood to warm us from November until March. There is coffee in the morning, a candle for the night. The refrigerator buzzes. Mice rattle between the walls.
Perhaps your voice draws me out this afternoon, and I find myself on the point beyond the wooden bridge. I realize I’ve been here before. I know this landscape that you are coming back to breathe with me. In the meantime, another Kokanee wind sweeps down the valley, and my warm breath puffs above Lovers’ Lane. Bears curl in safe, dark caves, and deer descend the mountains in search of food beneath the snow.
Marie
During the day, he had his buddy, Old Jack D, while Marie got by on the hard food he put down for the cats. He didn’t know if she fell or what. Comes in from the other room, finds her licking the floor on hands and knees. She seemed to like it down there, Marie. At dark, they attempt to chew off foil plates while first frost creeps past the county line. Not many souls out this way: another trailer across the field, smoke in the sky above the stumps. He made her feed herself supper; she could do it if she tried. Her noise starts, her left arm floating stiff in the air. You had to knock it down. The spoon hits the floor, scares the cats out into the cold. They stayed inside, Marie and him. TV voices ricochet between the pasteboard walls, echoes carry him way back. Marie by the grill, behind the smoke; him at the blurred counter. That’s how it began. Ammonia ascending from bent spoons, eggs twitching in café grease. Praise the Lord, and praise the holy hunchback. His heart jumped, she flipped it over, squinted at the edges curling crisp and black. Seeing what was there, if it was any good. You never know what will happen. Just ask Old Jack D; maybe he holds all the answers, deciphers static scratched from radios as years slouch by. Taking the truck to town alone, having to tie her to the trailer door to keep her safe. Having to avert eyes from the rearview mirror. How she looks in clothes she fights him not to change, grey eyes still fierce sometimes. It’s for her own good, sure. A knot left over from fishing trips up in the Suquamish, loons crying to the lake. Once he rattled back to a tilted porch, hollow bottles, no Marie. She’d left him before, when she could. Tried more than once to stay away across the hills. Another awkward woman off-balance awhile in another small town. Now, at the same time, she’s here and she’s gone. Marie, he called. Where are you? The name steamed the air, smoked inside his heart. For forty years he’d liked to call her, even when there was no need. Marie, my own Marie. Something stirs the brush past the next clearing. He sees her barefoot in the stems and weeds, the rope trailing from one wrist. Time to cut her hair, to put plastic on the windows, to find a winter coat for the stoic scarecrow. He could do it if he tried. Marie, he keeps calling while she snaps November twigs brittle as old bones. This time her face would turn and know him. Next time, another time. Some magic time. Come on, Marie. She starts that noise, loons at lakes. The ammonia circle swells. Back home, it’s time Old Jack D grinned him to sleep. Marie curls on the kitchen floor, a purring corner.
