“Bush turkey,” said Patrick, and covered it up with a cough into his hand.
“What did you say?” said Kylie.
“Gobble-gobble-gobble,” said Jonathan, hardly moving his lips, like a ventriloquist.
“What did he say?” Kylie asked Danielle.
“Leave her alone,” said Samantha.
“Why?” said her sister, genuinely surprised.
“Because,” Samantha whispered, “she's slow.”
Our mother said we should never call Kylie slow. I wished if I put my hands over my face everything would disappear: all the cousins, all the rustling sweet-smelling aunts, and Nanna banging her head with the Bible. The whole town too, all the pink and green and lemon-colored houses, the red hills that crouched around them, the whole bright blue day.
Afterward Dad peeled Kylie off Patrick. She was still kicking her legs and spraying saliva. The damage was assessed. Patrick's powder-blue suit pocket had been torn clear off and lay on our dead lawn. Aunty Margaret held a Kleenex to his nose and tilted his head back. She screamed at the Brisbane cousins to find ice. It made them cry because they were not used to being screamed at. Especially not in a strange town called Memorial. In the middle of nowhere. On a high summer's day that burned their faces and hurt their lungs. After the funeral of a cousin they did not know.
Nanna waited until all the visitors had gone and the cousins were reassembled along the floor before she
let the cat out of the bag. She was back in the recliner. She put her cup of tea down on the occasional table and folded her hands in her lap. Dad raised his eyes. He'd been begrudgingly given a seat beside Mum on the sofa. He held one of her limp hands in his.
“You must all listen to me,” Nanna said.
“Don't start, Anna,” said Dad.
It was strange to hear her real name like that. It sounded like he was talking to a little girl.
“Don't say don't start to me,” said Nanna.
“Be quiet,” said Mum.
Aunty Margaret, Aunty Louise, and Aunty Cheryl gathered around Mum murmuring as they squeezed Dad off the sofa. There was something in the air.
“Beth spoke with angels,” said Nanna, and everyone shut up.
She looked around the room daring anyone to disagree.
“Holy shit,” whispered Patrick, who was dabbing at his nose with a tissue and examining the blood.
I'd been placed as a buffer between the away cousins and Kylie. Patrick's powder-blue suit scratched against my arm. His Peter Stuyvesant packet poked into my thigh.
Nanna put her hands across her heart. She looked straight at me. I felt a hot flush on my cheeks. I looked at the shag rug. I pulled at some strands. I
imagined what it would be like to be so small that I could get lost in the jungle of white and brown loops.
The away cousins didn't know Nanna like I did.
“Beth told me,” said Nanna.
Her straight gray hair hung in two curtains to her jaw. She stared at me. I refused to meet her eyes.
“When did she tell you?” shouted Mum.
Mum rose up from the sofa like a vampire from a coffin. She was wringing her hands.
“After it happened,” said Nanna, “in the beginning, after the lake.”
“I don't believe you,” shouted Mum. “You witch.”
The clutch of aunts moved closer. They stroked her hair and her shoulders and tried to lay her back down. They stared down Nanna from across the room. They tried to look angry but a ripple passed over them. They shivered. They exchanged glances beneath their hair-sprayed bangs. Hands went up to pale pearl-ringed throats.
“Stop it,” hissed Aunty Margaret.
She was the eldest daughter. Her voice quivered with excitement.
“You don't tell me to stop it,” said Nanna.
“Right,” said Dad, “that's it.”
I thought he was going to make her leave the room but he didn't. He walked toward her but then veered off at the last minute and staggered down the
hallway. He slammed the door to our bedroom. The living room was silent. The door slam toppled the host of fairy cakes from each other's shoulders. Kylie reached out for one but Aunty Cheryl slapped her hand away.
After Nanna's words people wilted where they sat. They closed their eyes. They held their heads in their hands. The Brisbane cousins bit their bottom lips and exchanged hidden glances with the Townsville twins. Kylie scratched at a scab on her leg. Uncle Paavo removed the hankie from his pocket and blew his nose. He coughed and then sobbed.
Our water was poisoned. Our air was poisoned.
“Get out,” shouted Mum, “get out, get out. Don't ever come back.”
Nanna wouldn't go at first. My cheeks burned to look at her.
“You've really done your dash this time,” said Aunty Margaret through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
The cousins stood up and moved slowly from the room. Nanna picked up her teacup and tried to have a drink. Her hand shook. She picked up her glasses case and fumbled with her glasses until they were on her nose. She opened her Bible. Her dentures clicked inside her mouth as she tried to swallow. She closed her Bible. She stood up.
She left a Nanna-shaped bottom imprint on Dad's recliner.
It slowly vanished.
The bottom imprint reminded me of plaster of Paris. It reminded me of Mrs. Bridges-Lamb, my grade 5 teacher, who let us make casts of our own footprints. She said now our ten-year-old footprints were immortalized. Nanna took her Bible and a plate of biscuits and let the screen door bang behind her.
She would not come back to our house for a very long time.
She started her Sunny with too much pedal and squealed her tires. On the mattress between our beds Dad's closed eyes flickered at the sound of her leaving. He lay on his side with his flip-flops still on. Danielle lay behind him on her bed. They grieved in formation, breathing softly.
After the words the aunts removed our mother to her bedroom. They unzipped her from her dress. It whispered a sigh as it fell to the floor. Aunty Margaret directed her to lift her feet over the puddle of material. Mum stood in her petticoat facing the wall. They turned her toward the bed.
After she was laid down the aunties removed their own dresses and placed them on coat hangers in front of Dad's side of the cupboard. The black dresses moved in the breeze from the air conditioner. The aunties unzipped suitcases and found suitable after-funeral wear. Aunty Margaret examined herself side-on in the scallop-edged duchess mirror. The glass
was distorted in the middle and I could see she didn't like it. She frowned and pulled her belly in. When she saw me at the door she laughed, a little nervous laugh, and it was a very strange sound among all of the misery. Aunty Louise put her finger to her lips.
After the words Aunty Cheryl turned her teaspoon slowly in her teacup at the dining room table. The sun hammered at the closed curtains. There was a whole cloudless bright day outside. Kylie sat near her nursing her punching hand.
The house filled up slowly with the sound of nothing. The stillness dripped in, second by second, minute by minute, measured by the Bessemer clock on the kitchen wall. No one spoke. The aunties’ hands murmured between teacups and pot and bowl. Sugar rained into tea. Napkins were unfolded and folded again. Crumbs drifted slowly from chins.
Nanna believed in miracles. The day of the funeral they were burning very brightly inside her mind. After she left our house she was driving fast and crying hard. She didn't see the cousins moving slowly through the heat. She didn't recognize them, her own flesh and blood. They went up through the long grass of the park.
The
Merit Students Encyclopedia
says a miracle is an event that cannot be explained scientifically and is probably caused by a supernatural power. Miracles are things like the sea parting and walking on water
and statues crying blood or milk and the appearances of people like Mary surrounded by heavenly light in unexpected places on ordinary days.
It was Nanna who started everything.
The “miracle” entry is in volume 12. Our mother bought the set from a one-armed salesman. We couldn't afford an Australian set even though the salesman said it would be much better for us in the long term.
Volume 12 also contained the map of the moon. “Maria” is the plural of “mare,” which is what the moon's dark seas are called. And once Beth and I divided up the whole moon between ourselves. I was ruler of the Sea of Rains, where there is a Bay of Rainbows, and also I was queen of the Sea of Storms. Beth owned the Sea of Serenity and the Sea of Tranquillity and the Sea of Clouds. Then Danielle came late to the game and wanted her own territory and we gave her a small section, which was the Sea of Moisture, and she complained. She told Mum and we had to give her more and it ruined everything.
Volume 12 contained everything you could ever want to know about Minnesota, Mississippi, and Missouri but nothing at all about Memorial.
When Jamie and Samantha came back from their walk they were pale-faced and exhausted by the sun. They'd been to the park; it was written all over their faces. They were folded up into the arms of their
mother, Aunty Louise. Patrick and Jonathan looked at the floor.
“It's too terrible, I know,” whispered Aunty Louise into Jamie's and Samantha's ears. “Try not to think about it.”
It would have been easy for them because there was so much they didn't know. For instance they didn't know that:
The wilder Beth grew, the bluer her eyes became, and the bluer her eyes became, the wilder she grew.
She chewed her nails. She chewed them down to the skin until they bled.
When she laughed she closed her eyes and tilted her head backward. She put one arm across her stomach.
She could melt Nanna's stony heart with one smile. After her heart was melted Nanna always said, “What on earth will we do with you?”
She ran away often and when she returned we all tried to act as though she had never gone.
She felt keenly the pain of insects and then the pain of people.
She gave up dancing at thirteen.
Parts of her kept disappearing. Small pieces that she gave away.
Sometimes she drank methylated spirits with her wine, just a dash.
She wanted to save everything but couldn't even save herself.
We put the box away before Danielle woke up. Angela stayed sitting on my bed memorizing the contents while I went through the bottom of the cupboard looking for a blue-lined exercise book. I found an old grade 5 book that was only partly used. It contained mostly information about Greek and Roman history, which was Mrs. Bridges-Lamb's favorite topic, especially the Spartans, who made her glasses fog up. Mostly the pages were filled with towering roman numerals. Angela ripped them out to make a clue book into how I lost my voice.
The ripping woke Danielle and she scowled at us when she opened her eyes. Mum said Danielle was an expert at scowling and she could win a medal for it. I held my breath. Angela held the exercise book in her hand. Danielle sat up ramrod straight in her Milwaukee back brace. I thought she knew about the box from the way she looked at us. She scowled more and looked suspicious. But then she took the sketchbook from the desk so she could draw a picture of
the end of the world and went away. Her Milwaukee back brace clunked as she left the room. The quietness in the house settled again like dust, it rained from the roof onto our faces, it clung to our eyelashes.
Angela took the exercise book and a pencil. I took the cricket bat and tennis ball from under my bed. We went out through the still house. The washing was piled up in the laundry. Ashtrays had filled and overflowed. All the roses and lilies had thrown back their heads over the edges of vases and died. They had cast their petals on the floor. The living room smelled of dead water-logged greenery. Even though Christmas had been and gone the calendar stayed on November 1982.
We passed my mother sleeping on the sofa. We moved quietly so she wouldn't wake. When she was awake she moved from room to room like she was lost. She opened doors and peered inside with one eye. She wept suddenly and wildly when we least expected it. At night great storms of tears came and went and woke me from my sleep and made me rise up in bed.
“Lie back down, chickadee,” Dad said each time.
And he got up slowly from the mattress between our beds to go to her.
But none of this was visible from the outside. From the road I was surprised to find our house
looked no different from the others in Dardanelles Court. It stood brave-faced. It stared with its front sliding glass windows straight ahead. It kept its screen door mouth shut tight. Its little porch chin upright. I looked at our house from the footpath and Angela, chewing on the end of one of her golden braids, waited for me.
The five houses in Dardanelles Court faced each other across the cul-de-sac, which is French for dead end. They were all identical: rectangular, metal-clad, and mint green. They were exactly the same as every other company house in Memorial South. The poinciana trees reached out to each other across the pavement and dropped their red flowers. It was very quiet except for the droning of the outdoor air-conditioner units.
There was no Mr. O'Malley singing about the sea. No Mrs. O'Malley nodding from her patio to me. No Miss Schmidt peeping through her venetian blinds. No Irwin girls sitting on their front steps dreaming of escape. There was no Marshall Murray standing beneath the fountain of his yellow cassia tree. The five houses faced each other as though nothing remarkable had ever happened.
We walked out of Dardanelles Court onto Memorial Drive. We passed the entrances to all the other courts, which had the same houses huddled in circles. We didn't talk.
In Memorial Park I had to squint my eyes after spending weeks in the weeping house. I was unsteady on my feet. The park tilted toward the sky. The calf-high yellow grass shone. The sunlight rested its hands on my shoulders and burned a crown on my head. Angela bowled to me and I cracked the tennis ball into the sky. It was only when we had exhausted ourselves that we lay down in the grass and Angela opened up the book.