Stunt (7 page)

I have been abandoned.
Please be kind.

And then I toss them. Straight-legging their way through the air, onto the sidewalk in front of our house, they land in unison, bored cheerleaders. They look back at me with vague accusation, and then they walk away, a funeral procession up to King Street. I watch them shrink with the horizon. Another unrecorded moment of loss in the world. Another notch in the invisible gloom. The strays made strays again.

You told me that to hunt something, you have to become the thing you are hunting. I cut my hair in the style of yours, a slice across the front and a slice across the back. I bury it, making my bare hands black. The twins watch me. They are in their nightgowns, freshly bathed, their hair combed down flat against their foreheads. They glisten, open wounds. Their teeth: kindling. I let them watch me, knowing that I possess a higher magic, the hard worm of my grief. I am the widow. I am full of spells and incantations, languages they never knew existed. I have snuck up on them and won the race. Their sombre faces strain
through the chain-link fence, legs overbandaged from their earlier collisions.

I walk toward them. The one with the gash across her cheek moves away. I hold up my hand, white-flagging. ‘Sorry,' I whisper, my voice hoarse, a scrape to the air. I take in their faces: fruit growing hollow. The other one wants to touch me as though she paid admission. I won't let her. She pulls her hand back through the fence and says, caterpillar lips, ‘It's okay.'

‘Yeah. It's okay.'

‘We know what a difficult time this must be.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Yeah.'

‘We know suffering.'

‘Yeah.'

‘We are baking some stuff for you right now.'

‘Cookies and casseroles.'

‘Our personal favourites.'

‘From a Betty Crocker cookbook for kids.'

‘It's excellent.'

They hop.

‘When we're ten, we can make pastry.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Pastry is tricky.'

‘We'll bring the baked goods by.'

‘Tomorrow.'

‘If that's okay.'

‘Yeah. If that's okay.'

‘You could sell them if you're not hungry.'

‘No. You couldn't.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Eugenia?'

‘Yeah, Eugenia?'

‘We want to make a pyramid.'

‘We want to make a pyramid, Eugenia.'

‘And a pyramid takes three.'

‘Eugenia.'

‘We want you to play with us.'

‘You.'

‘Play with us tomorrow.'

‘Wanna?'

I can smell their breath. Toothpaste and vanilla. Premature death. Mrs. Next Door sees them and calls out, ‘Bedtime. Now.' I watch them vanish past her. She forms the curtain to their world.

The lights of the twins' house are turned off so quickly. For them, the sky is choked with bombers.

Where is my sign? My bundle of clues? An arrow. A homing pigeon. ‘It is I, Eugenia, your daughter beloved.' I mouth this up to the apple tree. Its licked branches against the night sky, the strokes of the first alphabet. I wave two hands in the air,
help,
but the world is unmoved. A mute witness.

The twins' house is a black eye now as they are pressed between their sheets and worried into sleep. Mr. Next Door comes out onto the back porch and lights a cigarette. He does not even pace while moths throw themselves at the porch light, suicides fast as fetal heartbeats. I listen to his inhalations and exhalations. They are the breath of a sleeping beast. I crouch to the ground.

Children lose their minds the way that adults do. Same as adults, we have various strategies to win our minds back. Immaculata told me about a girl who did equations in her head to fall asleep at night. The equations were very sophisticated. The numbers made her less distraught. And they kept the witches away. If you have a million birds flying in your head, it makes a difference if you can name them. All of that skittering. Name the birds. Only then can their calls be separated. Only then can their beaks be blunted.

You ride the shoulder of the highway, wheels spitting up gravel. A grimace on your face. Beard: hoarfrost. Cheeks more sunken, more hungry than usual, you're thin as a line drawing. You think to yourself,
I was supposed to be hero to something but I have forgotten what that was.
Me. You were supposed to be hero to me.

You did not write
eugenia
on the note because you could not. I would have tripped you up. I was your last bit of health. I would
have kept you here. When you ride, you hear a sound in the brush travelling, running alongside you. Sometimes you stop to see if it is animal and sometimes you stop to see if it is human.

Tonight you build a fire in a farmer's field, and you burn, like diseased livestock, my photograph and my baby hair, and you fall asleep to the smell of me being licked away until I am black curls and ash. But you make the mistake of speaking to me when you are tired, a child who is lost on his way home, all of his landmarks inexplicably gone. You are not able to erase me from your mind. No matter how much your fists bleed from being scraped against rock, I am a noise there. A rattle. With the totems gone, the photograph, the hair, the thing you once wanted to remember and now try to forget is no longer fastened. It is freed and so it takes on a life of its own. I am freed. Framed by empty night, I take on a life of my own. The end of you. The beginning of me.

Marta stands in our yard in her black pantsuit with its cinched waist, her swollen face too rouged. I gasp when I see her. She came home from your funeral and, with an oven mitt on, loosened all the light bulbs in her apartment. It seemed to be the only thing she could do. She put on blush before leaving again. She wished to be civilized. She put it on in the dark.

Oven mitt still on, she hands me a rope, coiled into a perfect O, and says with the offering, guttural, ‘A gift. Purely symbolic. Otherwise useless.' From the story. From the story about the girl who stood above the flood. I loop the rope around my shoulder. It sits heavy as if a ship hangs from its end.

‘Thank you.' I look up at Marta, her desperate weariness. She has just been pulled to shore. So close to perishing, she cannot
afford to be giving anything away. Too much has gone missing already. Habit, she touches her throat. Her locket is not there. She lets her hands fall. Arms still too tired to pat my head. ‘You're welcome,' Marta says, walking away, a straight black seam completing the night.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

e,

there are astronauts lost in space. bolts,
gloves and tanks too. they float toward fires.
for days, for decades. sometimes, centuries.
just waiting to catch. everything, all of us just parts,
waiting to fall to the ground.

bring tobacco.
bring apples.
bring you.

sssss.

If Marta's rope were laid flat on the ground, and there were no apartment towers or highways to negotiate, it could, from our backyard, reach the lake. It is as long as Finbar's walk across the Niagara Gorge. As long as Finbar's walk between the skyscrapers in New York City. And as long as Finbar's last walk on that fateful morning in Florence when the world shook itself free of the thing he loved the most, and he retired into oblivion to feast on his own heart, among other things.

I sling it round my shoulder and I climb the south side of our house to the roof, where I will tie the rope from our chimney to the twins' chimney. There, I will take my first walk, a humble length, but in the doing I will be feathered like Finbar, with the world below me, an open mouth, surrounded by water it cannot yet see. And you will clap so loud, a
racket,
that it will be, amidst streetcars, slurs, barrel fires, bottles smashed, sirens, the only sound that will reach me thirty feet above the ground. No matter how far you have gotten, even if you are clinking bronze mugs with Finbar, both of you in your overcoats despite the air outside being, you both agree,
sultry,
I will hear you. Your two half-ruined hands coming together as cymbals.

Our last night together, before we fished in the sideways rain, I did a handstand on a crane, hundreds of feet above a construction site on Lake Shore, just east of Bathurst, and below, you marched the mud, you snorted and paced, a penned-in rodeo bull, eyes on me, a speck, a balancing speck, and suddenly you hollered, ‘A daredevil, an aerialist, a miracle!' like a great audience was gathering and they were hungry.
Pow pow.
You startled me with your
cry, I tipped, a silver needle, speedometer, but I steadied myself, my white nightgown another skin, folded loose and sodden against me. My palms firm, they pressed down against the wet metal, making my stamp, my future.

But for a moment I imagined myself, barrelling toward the ground like the woman in the photograph did, barrelling so fast that even if you did want to catch me, you couldn't.

Partway to the roof, I crouch in front of Immaculata's bedroom window. Between her thumb and forefinger, she holds a mouse by the tail. The mouse is as big as her tongue and brownish. If the mouse were a girl, she would be called plain. Immaculata pets her and places her on her stained handkerchief. Another common lump gone. Immaculata does not feel sorrow. She feels only curiosity, clean curiosity.

She fills a glass jar with rubbing alcohol. I watch her breathe in the smell of it, a pure antiseptic, unabashed. She is grateful for the authority of a solvent. She holds the mouse up by her tail and drops her into the clear liquid. A small splash. She puts the lid on the jar. There is no sorrow around death for Immaculata. It is only the place where she has the most questions. She lowers her body to the floor and stares, in line with the jar, as if wishing the mouse's dull brown eyes for her own. The mouse spins weightless.

I pull myself onto Mink's windowsill. She stands erect in her nighttime robe rubbing cold cream into her face, which is now a white mask. And then she does two things I have never seen her do before: she pulls out her teeth and she lifts a wig off her
head. Underneath, she has a few strands of long grey hair. Without teeth, her face sinks inward. Without hair, her scalp is a shine, the last strands, crooked and desperate. Cracks on a shell. She could burst apart.

My rope falls to the ground. And I fall, fast after it.

My breath in pinpoints. Eventually it matches Immaculata's, calm as a tidal pool.

We sit at the edge of my bed, the rope still around my neck. A collar, brittle and sure, its bite rises red on my skin. ‘Don't you dare.' She smells like antiseptic. When she bolted into my bedroom, I was hanging from the rafter, my body kicking, a kipper on the end of a line. I will have a bruise on my stomach from where she charged me.

Immaculata's braids came undone in the struggle. Looking at her now, the colour of wax, I see that she has grown her hair to cover her face. Not because it is ugly, no, but because it has that quality of belonging to another world and she is tired of uninvited eyes. Her beauty has pried her open long enough. Her cheeks are Paleolithic slabs, her hair red as warning, her eyes: ink wells. She is betrayed by their depths, and tries to coat them, blinking back indifference. ‘Don't you dare, Euge.' She says it again, hard. With a period at the end of the sentence. Suddenly full of punctuation.
Death for life. A clean trade.

You taught me how to tie a noose, and after you did, you said to me, ‘Unlearn that, unlearn that right now, Eugenia!' But I never forget anything.

Mink appears in the doorway, her arms up against its sides, the threshold of a saloon. She is naked and sweating. Her breasts hang shallow. Her belly is round and small like the tip of a helmet. She gives the impression that she has been running for years, reached her destination and forgotten what it is that she wanted. She looks at us as though she has never seen us before. She does not come toward us in measured steps. She does not
chide us. She does not hold our faces to hers and make promises about the future. She does not make us hot drinks. She does not cry. She barely interrupts this moment that is a lifespan in itself. Instead, bald and toothless, her face buried under a thick coat of white cold cream, she says, ‘How do you even know he was your father?' and then, for one last time, she rises up onto the tips of her toes, those sharpened points, turns, opens the winter closet, pulls out a brown fur coat and a pink toque and makes her naked way down the hall and down the stairs. Too late, Immaculata says, ‘Where are you going?' And then, never forgetting her manners, ‘Good night.'

We listen to Mink's footsteps fade. The retreat of an intruder. A perfect stranger. The click of the front door. The whine of the engine. We look out the window. The car pulls away. The sign still there:
with my daughter.
Mink is gone. We are safe. For now. We laugh. We laugh in shudders and balls, heaps and chokes, spores caught on the wind.

Mink leaves her hairbrush behind.

As though performing for my stare, Immaculata's body begins to exaggerate itself, a swan attacking. In a shock, her red hair turns milk-white and her bones sling through her, multiplying themselves, an eerie mathematics. Immaculata does not groan or cry but watches intently, the spectator to a race, as she embodies her final transfiguration. She is a giantess with the appearance of a child bride. Her white dress is now shockingly short, pulled tight against her, a bandage. I realize it was this that stopped people in the street. They could sense that her form could shift. They would not so much watch Immaculata as they would be watchful in her presence, unsure of what they might witness; she could have a fit and lash out or bite her tongue or fly. Whereas, if she could, she would drop herself into a jar filled with clear liquid and spin weightless for the white noise of eternity, under a box spring, in a house soon to be entirely abandoned, a world abandoned of eyes.

And then it is my turn. I grow. It is the sound of a heavy gate being opened, hands crowded against it, pushing. Then there is a loud crack – lightning cleaving a tree, and briefly the smell of burning. Immaculata is transfixed, her mouth a loose zero. She directs me to my door frame, presses my ruler against the top of my head, lilts, ‘Don't move,' measures and makes a mark. Three inches. She adds an exclamation point and dates it: June
9, 1981.
‘Whoa.' She fumbles the ruler; it hits the hardwood floor and with everything around it – clay pipe stems, snow globes, my neat piles of feathers and shells, my owl lamp, my black corduroy dress – it is instantly a remnant of a previous life. My room smells like storage unit. I do too.