Читать книгу Love Object - Sally Cooper - Страница 9

After Sam shut the bedroom door on Sylvia, I retreated upstairs where I pulled on an old pair of terry-cloth sleepers and lay on my bed peering through my afghan’s loops at the maple’s shadow limbs crawling and heaving across the stippled ceiling. Downstairs, doors opened and closed and a car left the driveway then soon after another one arrived, but I didn’t get up to see which. Ten minutes later Grandma Vi called up to tell me to pack some T-shirts, I was coming to sleep over. I put my running shoes over the sleeper feet and went out to her car. Nicky came too but Sam picked him up in the middle of the night so when I woke up in Vi’s spare bed, Nicky was gone.

Vi’s house was on the highway, not far away at all, though we hadn’t seen her much in recent months. After a couple of days I could separate the smells: budgie shavings, urine, cigarette smoke, burnt meat and lavender perfume. Some mornings a sweet vermouth scent from the living room where Vi had left the bottle open the night before.

The one-storey house was dark with the damp feeling of a basement. The lamps were stout, able to spare only weak circles that were difficult to read by. Each room except the kitchen had one whole mirrored wall. In the living room, an autumn forest scene that covered a second wall embarrassed me because it was obvious that such a forest would fool no one.

I slept in the spare room at the back of the house, where the buzz and rumble of Vi’s snores and the early morning truck traffic woke me before dawn. A set of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books lined the shelf of the double bed. I pulled them down one by one and read abbreviated versions of books like Valley of the Dolls and Up the Down Staircase, a flashlight held under my chin. Vi had other books too, paperbacks with glossy black covers and raised red lettering and titles like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and Heiter Skelter that I read when Vi wasn’t around.

The back yard was short, wide and treeless. A waist-high chain-link fence separated it from acres of flat field whose openness induced a dizziness in me that the rolling hills near our house had not prepared me for. A sliding door led from the living room to a patio made of concrete squares etched between with dandelion leaves. The grass looked bitten and brown. While Vi slept in the mornings I lounged under a canvas umbrella, my bum on one nylon-weave lawn chair, my feet on the other, my skin slathered in baby oil and Alice in Wonderland on my lap. Vi’s pinched back yard looked unlikely to offer up a rabbit hole for me to fall into. Groundhog maybe.

Grandma Vi was the only person I knew who wore wigs, alternating between a frosty blond shag and a curly chestnut. She shuffled around her house in cracked gold lamé mules and pantsuits in her favourite colours: turquoise, purple and orange. Each afternoon she spent a good forty-five minutes building up her face, starting with a solid layer of Caramel Creme foundation. A pair of black horn-rims with a rhinestone insert on each tip gave her the look of a great horned owl on the attack. She talked from the minute she got up — about her operations, how her husband Earl had run around and how her sons never visited her when she was in the hospital. How Sylvia was in the hospital now and it was a good thing Sam went. At least he said he did. I didn’t know the word uterus until I moved into Vi’s. Now I was hearing on a daily basis about Vi’s hysterectomy, when they removed her source of life. Vi never forgot to emphasize how if it weren’t for her uterus, I wouldn’t be here.

The first night with Nicky sleeping on the couch, I lay awake beneath the curved vinyl spines of the Condensed Books and took account of all I’d done to cause my mother to go crazy. I’d broken the rules of love and imagined my mother was a witch. I was cruel to Nicky. I’d yelled at my mother, sworn at her, called her names. My mother had howled like a beast and struck herself with utensils because I was too much to handle.

That night I refused to go to sleep. If craziness was catching, I wanted to be aware the minute it happened so I could stop it. Maybe that was my mother’s flaw: she hadn’t paid attention and the craziness had taken her over. I resolved from then on to pay attention.

I was no stranger to staying up nights with my thoughts. Some nights I cried for hours with the fierce love I felt for the baby Jesus and the grown-up Jesus.

God was a different matter.

In the waiting room at the doctor’s office there was a large book with a picture of the grown-up Jesus surrounded by children on its blue cover. The same book was in the dentist’s office and the skin doctor’s office where I’d gone once a week over the winter to have my plantar’s wart scraped. The stories of impossibly good children who became terminally ill then died and went to Heaven both fascinated and horrified me. One particular story drew me and I savoured every word. Whenever I visited a doctor, I went straight for the blue book and flipped through the pages with it on my lap, my cheeks hot as I searched for the story of The Boy with the Arm.

The Boy with the Arm was a good gentle boy with a biblical name like Davey or Johnny. Everyone liked him. He had thick, straight blond hair and wire-framed glasses. When he found out he was sick and had to stay in bed because he probably wouldn’t live, his only worry was whether God would be able to find the soul of a boy so small and take him to Heaven. This troubled The Boy so much that it was all he talked about, and his sweet-hearted mother too became fretful. Finally, when he was close to dying and unable to breathe well or speak loudly, he came upon a solution: if he raised his arm every night before he went to sleep, God would be able to see him and know that this little boy’s soul needed to be taken to Heaven. With the help of his mother, he propped up his arm and fell asleep with a smile on his face. That night, The Boy with the Arm died and went peacefully to Heaven. Beside the story was a picture of The Boy sleeping with his arm bolstered by striped pillows while his soul floated toward the ceiling.

I was hooked. In the waiting room, I devoured the story, anxious to feel the thrill of The Boy with the Arm’s death before the nurse called my name.

Each night after a doctor’s appointment and the inevitable encounter with the story of The Boy with the Arm, I lay in bed debating whether the story was true. Did God know the little boy was dead and that his soul was ready for Heaven, or was it the arm in the air that signalled Him? If it was the arm, what would have happened if the little boy hadn’t propped up his? Would the Devil take him? I didn’t think so.

My concept of the Devil was more vague than my concepts of Jesus and God. The Sunday school taught by Lucy Stevens in the United Church basement never mentioned the Devil, and it didn’t provide me with stories like The Boy with the Arm. The bad characters in Sunday school were people: evil kings and disciples like Judas-Who-Betrayed-Jesus. The closest I’d come to the Devil was the red costume with tail, horns and pitchfork Duncan Matheson had worn last Hallowe’en over his mother’s protests. If The Boy hadn’t signalled with his arm, maybe he would have ended up in space, his body stretching then breaking apart as he got sucked into a black hole, his chance at Heaven missed.

Part of me believed it was impossible for God not to know the boy was dead — after all, He’d created everything. Surely He was aware of each person who died and needed to come to Heaven. On the other hand, what if like Santa Claus, He was fallible, sometimes so busy He needed human help to do His job?

There was one way to test God: go to sleep with my arm raised. If God did know everything, as Lucy Stevens said and I preferred to believe, He’d realize I was just a little kid with a plantar’s wart who wasn’t dying or ready to go to Heaven. Yet, there was the thrilling possibility that maybe God did respond to signals from down below, that there was a code between God and good children wherein they helped Him with the little tasks He might not notice in his grandness. But I’d found the story of The Boy with the Arm by accident. If such a code did exist, no one had told me. The thought of God using children as helpers firmed my belief that I was not a good child which led to the third and perhaps most exciting prospect: if I slept with my arm raised and I wasn’t a good enough child to go to Heaven, the Devil in his red suit might come and take my soul; in fact, God might even be the one to point me out.

Most nights when I tried this experiment, I raised and lowered my arm several times before I gave in and hid it under the sheets, fearful of success. Only then was I able to fall asleep.

Thus it was that God had the same status that Santa Claus used to have in my mind: an energy beyond my understanding, bigger than I was and potentially out of control.

I needed a way to signal this God-energy; to let God know I wasn’t crazy, no matter what He might think about my mother; to tell God to leave me alone. I lay in the centre of the double bed in Vi’s spare bedroom and spread my body so my fingers touched the edge. With my eyes closed, I tried to sink into the mattress. In this position, I thought long and hard about normal and crazy. If I concentrated on what I was not, maybe God would get the message, a prayer that told Him what I did not want to be. One thing was sure. Crazy was not what I wanted to be.

In the evenings, I sat at Vi’s counter at Effie’s Diner, two houses down at the BP station. I filled in crossword puzzles and read Alice and ate grilled cheese with salted fries and ketchup while Vi talked about her varicose veins and flirted with the men who’d stopped by for a burger before going home to their wives. People said hi to me and I smiled with the corners of my mouth but mostly I kept my head down and my eyes on the page.

Some nights Sam dropped in on his way home from work and handed me a pocket notebook or a rubber oval change purse or a black comb in a sleeve that he’d purchased out front where people paid for gas. He stayed long enough for a coffee and to tell Vi and me about his day. Nicky, he said, was helping on a farm. Farm work was good for a boy.

When Vi was out of earshot, I asked why I couldn’t help on the farm, too. Wasn’t farm work good for a girl?

Sam explained that Nicky was going to the Sousas’ and Jack and Betty had two daughters and didn’t need another girl.

“Your grandma likes having you around too. You’re good for her,” he said, pecking me on the temple and standing to go.

Though I kept my head down, I could tell through my bangs that Vi had her eye on me. Every twenty minutes or so, she made a point of lifting my plate, bleach-soaked J-Cloth in hand, and swiping the counter beneath it. I’d twirl on my stool, knees together and up, folded crossword book in hand, my pencil steadily filling in words while she swooped past. Her jokes, definitions, soap opera gossip and stories about her sons were part of the restaurant din.

Then she told the story of how Sylvia had come to Apple Ford.

“It was in the middle of an electrical storm, the rain lunging down so sudden men were wringing out their pant legs afterward. For five minutes, the clouds spat crystal green hailstones. Then they were gone. Nothing was damaged. Later they found out Apple Ford was the only town hit.”

For the first time in the weeks since I’d come to Vi’s, I looked up. Her eyes, already magnified by the horn-rims, widened.

“The storm left only one memento: Sylvia.

“No one ever found out where she came from, and it was your daddy she decided to marry.”

I sat unblinking.

“Sylvia chose Sam,” Vi said, squeezing the J-Cloth in her fist, then shaking it out over the floor. “Not the other way around. He couldn’t have said no if he’d tried.”

The Sam in Vi’s stories was always helpless. He was her oldest by five years and hadn’t done a thing right since those nights at the logging camp when Earl stayed out. Those nights, Vi would hold Sam tight between her legs in the dark, her Oxford dictionary open on his lap. He’d fix his sharp blue eyes on the door and listen for bears while she fingered the tissuelike pages. Her shoulders shook, but even at six years his were rigid as a man’s, the hard blades jutting into her breasts.

After the story, Vi stuck a lit menthol into her sideways grin and tossed the J-Cloth into the sink.

When she went into the back to get a fresh canister of butterscotch ice cream, I left my crossword puzzle book and Alice in Wonderland on the counter and went outside. From the corner of Number 8 highway, I walked along the sideroad on the dirt shoulders of the irregularly-edged asphalt. There were some houses, high up on hills, and a stretch of pine and marsh. I turned north onto County Line 3 and walked another stretch by the river cottages where Sylvia took pottery, then across the bridge and past the park and the Stevens’, willing myself not to glance toward the graveyard I’d dreamed. Uphill into town I remembered Front Street from when I’d started school when there were no sidewalks, only dirt paths worn into the lilac bushes that separated lawns from road. Front Street had more stores then: pool hall, hardware, shoe and watch repair, tack shop. We had a general store still but most of the others were empty storefronts that I peered into, imagining what a person could sell there.

The air was warm and I felt no chill in my jeans and Drag County Fall Fair T shirt. At my house I wedged behind the tangled peonies, tiger lilies and bleeding hearts in Sylvia’s flower garden and looked in at the violet shadows Sam and Nicky made on the living room wall as they watched TV Nicky got to come home in the evenings. Vi and Sam both said it was at my grandmother’s insistence, not my father’s, but I wondered if I had been sent to live with Vi because Sam was a man and fathers weren’t supposed to raise girls.

Already I had forgotten my mother’s face. I relied on the Sylvia of Vi’s story, dark-eyed and -haired, rising up in the midst of the elements, commanding them to retreat once they’d served her purpose and calling them back when she was ready to leave.

This I remembered: each day the week before my mother went away there’d been a thunderstorm. The same weather that had delivered my mother had taken her away.

I continued north in the opposite direction from Vi’s. I needed to walk, was all. To walk and think about how I was connected to Sylvia’s craziness. Was I crazy too? Maybe I was too young to be sent to the crazy ward of the hospital so Vi was looking after me instead. Maybe they thought I would catch what Sylvia had because I was a girl.

Beyond our place, the houses were farther apart and the driveways longer. The road was lined with maples and beyond them stretched apple orchards and fields of corn, clover, sod and potatoes. I liked the sod best: acres and acres of shiny green lawn that made me want to run off the road, lie down and roll the entire length of it, folding the sod around me like a thick green blanket. The corn was good too; it reached past my waist. Endless inviting rows of stalk after stalk, a place I could wander into and walk and walk and never leave. I sniffed in deep, letting the corn smell fill my nostrils. Everything was growing; nothing had been cut down.

Two or three cars slowed down, then passed. I was almost at the next sideroad when a truck stopped, pulling onto the soft shoulder. A man leaned out, removed his cap and said, “You must be Sam Brewer’s kid.” He pushed his hand through hair greased back like Fonzie’s. His skin was the hard red of some coats.

I said, “Yes,” my voice clear.

The man was quiet then, scratching his head. He was familiar. I had seen him somewhere, with Sam, but I couldn’t remember where.

“C’mon, then,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride as far as my place.”

His offer confused me. It assumed my journey had a destination. If he drove me to his farm, I would have a longer distance to walk back. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t go back. Vi’s house smelled like the budgies that sat three to a cage and screamed in her kitchen.

I nodded and walked around the front of the truck, one arm outstretched to protect myself in case the vehicle rolled forward. The door was open, and on the third try, I lifted myself onto Jack Sousa’s oily front seat.

I’d been in trucks like this before. It was the truck of a farmer, the floor cluttered with stained work gloves and bits of hay clumped with manure. The truck was old and had a comforting outdoor smell, like Sam’s suede jacket when he came home from hunting.

Mr. Sousa didn’t talk for a while. His farm was a couple of lines over. In the summers he had a honey stand painted with a big cartoon bee by the side of the road. I had been there once with Sam. Mr. Sousa had joked about his daughters being out at confirmation class. He seemed to think I’d be bored without other girls to talk to. It turned out I was, but I didn’t want him to know, so I spent the time petting a bony, bowlegged rust hound that had teats as long as my fingers. The dog’s ears were silky. I explored further and found bites which I rubbed with my finger pads. When I’d asked if I could let the hound off her chain, both men had laughed and Sam told me to get away from the dog and find something else to do, his voice suddenly harsh like Jack Sousa’s. Sam believed dogs were for hunting or farms and wouldn’t let us keep one as a pet.

“You’re the one with the crazy mother, aren’t you?”

I stiffened, my eyes on the passing headlights.

“That is correct.”

“What’s your name again? Mary? Martyr? I remember something odd and churchy about it. Nobody said anything to Sylvia at the time — she wouldn’t stand for it — but I know it was a doozy.”

“Mercy. My name is Mercy.”

Mr. Sousa picked his hat up from the seat and put it back on.

“Sorry if I offended you. I’ve known Sylvia a long time. You know how gossip travels. Don’t think anyone was surprised. You?”

I opened the window. I turned my face toward the fresh air, letting the watery corn smell wash over me.

“I keep forgetting she’s your mama. I tend to let my tongue run away with itself. You’ll have to forgive me. My wife says I’m a worse gossip than the church ladies. I ‘spect you see her all the time.”

Mr. Sousa looked over at me and grinned.

“Who?” I hadn’t seen my mother for weeks, since she went away. I edged closer to the door.

“My wife. Mrs. Sousa. She comes practically every day now to your place to do what all needs doing. Your brother’s at our place every day. Your father says he’s a bit girly, that one, but I’m putting him to work. Seems alright to me. Who’s taking care of you? Not Vi, is it?” He looked at me again, his smile forgotten.

I folded my fingers around the door handle. What if I opened it, hurled myself onto the road and rolled into the ditch? If I curled into a ball, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. As long as it didn’t kill me.

Mr. Sousa glanced at the road, then back at me.

“Seems like you take after Sam. Sensible and practical. He always was that. He and me went to school together after Vi and her husband split and she moved down here. I was pretty good-looking in them days, believe it or not, an old farmer like me.”

He laughed, filling the cab with a wet tobacco smell similar to the stink of feet.

“I swear, I don’t know what we thought when Sam announced he was marrying her. ‘Course, we were all pretty taken by her when she came to town like that. Good thing Sam’s brothers was too young, or there might have been some competition. But Larry was thirteen, not yet in high school and Reese younger’n that. Besides, them two went back up to live with Earl after that one year. Least I’m pretty sure that’s where they went because it wasn’t Vi what raised them. Probably what killed Earl in the end, those two boys. Sam was the best of them and he stayed though not with Vi. He and Sylvia were hitched by then. Anyways, Sylvia was too unpredictable. Sam should of stuck with what he knew.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. I straightened and stared right at Mr. Sousa. Maybe if I was nice to him, he would take me back to his farm and I could see Nicky tomorrow. Mr. Sousa’s two daughters, Tory and Elizabeth, were a year apart like Nicky and I, but older. Like Lucy Stevens. Elizabeth taught Sunday school. Though it seemed as if Nicky was happier without me. Maybe he thought the Sousas were his new family.

“I don’t think you know my mother very well.”

Mr. Sousa snorted.

“Perhaps you misunderstood me there. I’m talking about events that happened a long time ago. Before your time.”

I shifted so my hip was pressed against the armrest on the door. I put both hands on the handle.

“I would like you to let me out now, please,” I said, my eyes on the dirt shoulder.

“That wouldn’t be very neighbourly. We’re almost at the farm. You can get out there and call your father to come and get you.”

I pictured Nicky playing with the Sousas’ hound.

“I’ll jump,” I said, my voice level. I was almost as surprised as he by the threat.

Jack Sousa glanced at me a couple of times then sighed.

“It wouldn’t be right if I just let you off. Tell you what. I’ll turn right here and take you up to the pancake place on the highway. I’ll give you some coffee money. You can use the phone there and call your dad.”

I nodded. I kept my hand on the door. Coffee money. I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee. Not even at Vi’s.

At Wheel of Pancakes, Jack Sousa smiled as I fumbled with the door handle, my shoulders tight. I hoped he wouldn’t decide to reach over and open the door for me. That’s what Sam would do. I might bite him if he did. He didn’t.

I jumped down and held the door open. I had no money at all and I wanted him to make good on his offer. We stared at each other for a long time, he with his grin, me working up the courage to ask for the money. Then he laughed his moist tobacco laugh and reached into his back pocket. I remembered the thick square bulge with the oily outline his wallet made when I’d visited his farm. Sam had said, “You wouldn’t think it, but there’s a rich man.” If I asked for more money, if I told Jack Sousa I was running away from home — or didn’t tell him anything, just that I needed it — he would give it to me. I saw myself reaching over to the open wallet, plucking out a handful of bills and dancing off into the bushes with a quick wave. Mr. Sousa wouldn’t follow, wouldn’t even say anything to Sam. But who knew what he might say to others? I had to resist the urge to put my hand out as I did with my father on allowance day.

Mr. Sousa leaned across the seat and pressed two one-dollar bills into my palm. One bill was crisp, new, unfolded. The other was dirty, tattered, with a corner missing and numbers written on it in blue pen. I mumbled “thank you” and was glad to leave. I didn’t want to spend a minute longer with Jack Sousa. The bills made him suspect.

I had been walking up the highway for almost half an hour when Vi pulled up in her black Duster and ordered me into the car. By that time, my calves hurt and my arms were chilly so I obliged.

I slunk down. Vi faced straight ahead, holding her back away from the seat, occasionally adjusting her horn-rims or poking a finger under her wig. Vi wasn’t fussy about wearing seatbelts so I pulled both my feet up on the seat and leaned my head against the door. I listened to the wheels on the road and tried to let the sounds of the car carry me to sleep.

Vi pushed the lighter in.

“I want you to get me my cigarettes, up there on the visor.” Vi held her shoulders as if they were resting on a shelf.

I struggled up and removed a cigarette as the lighter popped.

“Light it for me, please.”

I yanked the lighter out, mesmerized by the glowing red circle of its tip. Vi clamped the cigarette in the side of her lips and leaned over, both hands still on the wheel, left eye on the road. The cigarette tip flared orange and she pulled away, twin smoke streams flowing from her nostrils.

“I don’t think much of people who run away from their problems,” she said.

It took me a moment. At first I thought Vi was referring to Sylvia. Then I realized she was talking about me. But I wasn’t running away, only walking to sort out my thoughts. There was a difference. I turned to the window and pretended I had a chainsaw or a medieval hatchet that sliced through each pole as it raced past.

Vi loosened the grip of her fingers on the steering wheel, allowing one hand to drop down and hang from the bottom.

“Before I give you back to your father, I’m going to tell you about the first time Sam met Sylvia.”

I didn’t blink. Vi must have thought that if I knew more about Sylvia before she was married, I might not be bothered so much by her craziness. The opposite was true. I turned to face her, my body still. The more I knew, the more the craziness obsessed me and the more I saw myself as crazy. Crazy was the easiest thing to believe in. To believe in it, I needed to know the truth.

“It starts with Sam. He was always good in school and he was the top athlete. It was the same back in Drag. We moved down before his senior year and he picked right up where he left off. He was very popular, though to look at him now, you might not think so. He always had a girl. One after the other. I couldn’t keep them straight. That was nothing compared to his brothers. Or so I hear. I suppose that was to be expected if teenage boys don’t have their mother around. After Earl left, that’s when I moved down here. Larry and Reese went back north to Earl so he raised them through high school. I always said that’s what killed him, not the heart attack. Served him right, wild as those boys were. Sam was the best of them. It’s no wonder they ended up after the women the way they were at that age, their father’s nature being what it was. But Sam was no slouch, let me tell you.”

Vi took a long pull on her cigarette, letting the smoke filter out the corner of her mouth.

I had a hard time picturing Sam as popular. My father had a wide easy smile, but he hid his face behind glasses bigger and blacker than Vi’s own, and the front and top of his head were almost bare.

“On the day Sylvia came to town,” Vi continued, “things changed. She was dark-haired and dark-skinned with those sloe-eyes that the boys liked so much.”

“She had slow eyes?” My mother’s eyes weren’t slow. If anything they were quick as whips, able to spot the slightest imperfection and bring it to the attention of her sharp tongue.

“Sloe eyes? Well they certainly aren’t like yours. Do you know what a sloe is?”

“Isn’t it a kind of animal that hangs from a tree? The lazy one?”

I didn’t like to admit I didn’t know. Being wrong was better than not knowing.

“That’s a sloth. A sloe is a plum, a dark velvety plum. Your mother’s eyes have that same quality. Men love it. Your eyes are blue like Sam’s.”

There was nothing Vi relished more than handing out definitions.

“Anything else?”

“No.”

My grandmother talked about men a lot. Maybe she would fall in love and find a new husband.

“Alright, then. No one knew exactly where this new girl lived or even how old she was. She showed up at the high school and the kids could talk of nothing else, boys or girls. The girls all wanted to be her friend and when they couldn’t get close to her, they turned on her. The boys — well that was another story.

“It wasn’t that she was beautiful, exactly, because she wasn’t. Not if you ask me. Sure, her hair was dark and shiny and her eyes big with long lashes. But her face was pointy and she had a crooked nose. Besides, she was so tall and skinny. No curves on her. She wore her hair short, in a ducktail and the girls said she would stride into the washroom at school, take a handful of grease from a tin in her purse and slick it through her hair. No one knew whose class she was in, or if she was even in the school, but she was always there. And it didn’t take long for her to find Sam.”

Vi stopped to finish off her cigarette. She pushed in the lighter for the next one. Vi had never told me stories before. I didn’t know where she got them. Perhaps they’d always been out there, hovering, waiting for Vi to pull them in.

“I was running a laundry and a dry clean then. I had Sam in there most evenings after his track and field practice helping me load up the machines, then sorting and folding the sheets and shirts and whatnot. It was so hot we both wore elastics around our heads to hold our glasses in place.

“One day, Sam was out front, loading up the dryers while I was operating the steam press in the back. I could do that job with my eyes closed. Almost did — had to do it mostly by hand, like a blind person, because the room was so humid my glasses had a steam on them almost an inch thick.

“When that girl walked in, the air changed. All the moisture in the building seemed to be sucked upward and out the ceiling. Maybe she gathered it all into herself, but I know it was in one instant that my glasses cleared and the clouds of vapour pouring out of the sides of the steam press evaporated. Poof!”

I forgot about chopping the poles and focused on the glowing heater of Vi’s cigarette.

“When I went out front to see what was happening, there they were, like any two teenagers, talking about school and athletics and going to the movies. But Sam had changed. He was under a spell from the moment he set eyes on her.

“She turned and flashed me a look so cold and dead that I stepped back. Then she smiled and came forward and said, ‘Nice to meet you.’ When she shook my hand, her palm was wet, maybe from all the moisture she’d extracted from the air. I felt like my hand could almost go through hers, it was so transparent, ethereal — did you know that word is derived from ether?”

I hugged my knees to my chest.

“Like in science? The one that disappears?”

“It means lighter than air, something supernatural, not from our earth. Maybe she wasn’t even there. What do you think of that?”

In the dark, Vi was grinning. Her false teeth gave off a solid white glow.

Maybe my mother was a ghost. Maybe Sylvia had transformed herself and she wasn’t really in the crazy hospital where she was supposed to be. This thought tormented me. If she wasn’t in the hospital, where was she? I had difficulty getting back into the story, but I forced myself. That’s where the clues were.

Vi proceeded, barely pausing to draw on her cigarette.

“She asked me if I would excuse Sam so she could take him to the movies, something unheard of at that time. Back then, in our part of the world, girls never asked boys out. But I said yes, feeling how lucky Sam was that she chose him. Sam felt it too. I was under a spell. After she left and the vapours descended, resting on my skin and in every nook and cranny of my body, I stood, my hands pulling the laundry out of the press and hanging it by rote, my eyes safe behind two misty lenses, and the lucky feeling left me. It left me abruptly, and I was filled with a tiredness and a sadness so profound, I had to leave that place, lock up for the night and go out to the hotel. From that moment on, Sam and Sylvia have been together.”

Vi made the turn into Apple Ford.

“Until now, that is.”

I pressed my back against the seat. That outpouring of words had sharpened my senses. I could hear the crickets, the tires rolling on the asphalt, a ticking in the engine. I could smell the roses in their gardens and someone’s fresh-cut lawn. I could even tell who’d had barbecue for dinner.

Vi stared at me, one eye on the road. I looked out the window. Could Vi feel the change in the air as we pulled closer to my house?

Seeing the house made my stomach churn. If Sylvia was a ghost, maybe she was still at home, watching unseen, hanging around in the ceiling corners waiting for signs that her children didn’t love her enough, the perfect way to get under their skin.

“Two more things,” Vi said. “Sylvia is someone you can’t understand, can’t ever hope to know. But I do think it’s important that you see for yourself and I’ll tell that to your father.”

She cut the engine and listened to the car’s shakes and shudders. She reached across the seat and patted me on the knee.

“Well, Mercy. It’s time to meet your maker.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“Oh, that. It’s supposed to be a surprise, but you’re better off being prepared. Your father is sending you to camp.”

“Camp? What about Nicky?” I held my breath.

“Never mind that. You’ll have to get your stuff out of the trunk. My veins are throbbing enough as it is.”

I scrambled after her, home again.