The Seary Line (46 page)

“These young men,” he said, peeling off his glasses, jamming them into a leather case, “all they're doing is setting out to destroy. Pad their own pockets off the ruination of others.”

Stella nodded again, attempted to portray more sincerity, though she guessed she had missed some crucial aspect of the conversation. “Young men today idn't what they were in my day.”

He stopped, smiled at her. “Oh, Mother,” he said. Then he crossed the room towards her, touched her face. The kind of touch that Stella appreciated. Honest. Loving. “Yes, those were kinder times, Mom. You've had a lucky life.”

She smiled back, looking up at him from her seat. They held each other's gaze longer than usual, and at once, she was girlishly, amusingly aware of her appearance. She
desperately hoped her make-up wasn't overly clownish, as it sometimes looked when she caught her reflection. A little too much blush on her gaunt cheeks, too bright lipstick on her mostly hidden lips. Those compounds crept into the wrinkles on her face, created a map of stained lines. Touching the palm of his hand with her dry fingertips, she suddenly wanted to look pretty. To have her only son remember her as a pretty woman. And have that memory, whenever he paused to reflect on her, make him happy.

He broke away first, after another smile. Pacifying, this time, though she didn't like to admit it.

“Miss Parsons?” he called down the hallway of her apartment. “Can you help mother get ready for her overnight outing?”

“Of course, Mr. Edgecombe.”

Miss Parsons appeared almost instantly. Stella suspected her nurse was hiding around the corner, listening in on that private conversation with her son. After all, the woman did work for Elise, was paid to know what transpired in Stella's life. Stella glared at Miss Parsons, glared at her starched white cap, white button-up dress, white sweater, white hose, white sneakers without a single scuff. Those sneakers annoyed Stella. She found it rude that someone would walk over her soft carpet wearing sneakers. Clean or not, it was irrelevant. But not wanting to seem focused on petty trivialities, she never mentioned her issue with Miss Parsons to another soul.

“She won't be but a moment now, will you, Mrs. Edgecombe?”

Stella had not wanted to return to Bended Knee. She did not want to see the old buildings torn down, the wild grass shorn with electric mowers, dirt roads paved, and teenagers with painted on clothes loitering underneath
electric streetlights. Instead, she preferred the Bended Knee that existed inside her mind. One where Leander still made furniture, where Amos yearned for Nettie, where her father hobbled down the laneway towards a hot Sunday dinner. But her preference was disregarded, and she was packed up like a piece of antique luggage, helped into a van, secured in place with a belt. Flanked by two hot-bodied children, they began to glide down the circular drive in front of Stella's building.

“Stop,” Jane had said. And Robert jammed his foot on the break, everyone lunging forward. “Jason. Andrew. Did you empty your bladders?”

“Yes, Grandmother,” they chimed, eyes rolling.

“And Mother?”

“What do you want?”

“Did you. . .you know?”

“You know?”

“Go to the toilet,” Elise chimed in. “Tea goes right through you. And I seen you on your second cup.”

Stella noticed Robert glancing down at his hands, his fingers curled around the plastic steering wheel. Was it plastic? Or rubber? She had never learned to drive, never gripped a steering wheel, controlled the movement of a car.

“Well, Mother?”

Stella sneezed lightly, a fake sneeze. Something of a habit she had developed when she couldn't say something polite.

“Let's just get going,” Robert said. “Not as though we're going to the moon. We're allowed to stop.”

Thank you, my son
.

After arriving, a cup of tea, two cherry squares later, Elise took Stella by the arm, led her down the long hallway along the back of the house. Elise paused outside the second
dark-wooden door on the right, said, “I wonders if this is the one she said. I don't want to go poking around.”

As Elise darted back to the kitchen to double-check the room, Stella waited in the hallway, hand on the doorframe. At the end of the hall was a long window that looked on a stretch of closely shorn grass, two burgundy coloured picnic tables. Stella could imagine how it once looked, rows of hearty cabbages and potato plants, a man standing along a row, head bent, hoe in hand, summer sun beating down on his neck. She could picture it clearly.

With the toe of her slipper, she adjusted the hooked rug that was bunched on the floor, heard the sigh escape from her lips. She moved her hand, touched the door, paint somehow sticky even though it was dry. In all her years in Bended Knee, she had never been in this house, but now, something about it felt entirely familiar. She smelled the air, detected the faint scent of onions, even though she was fairly certain there were no onions chopped and waiting on the kitchen counter. How peculiar, Stella thought. She knew the hallway would smell of onions even before she walked through the door.

Elise was beside her again, opened the door with some gusto to reveal a bedroom the size of a large closet. A twin bed jammed into a corner, log cabin quilt hung over the footboard. “Well,” Elise said. “A short nap'll do you good, Mother. And you don't need nothing more than you got here.”

Stella sneezed lightly.

“You'll feel better afterwards.”

As she sat on the edge of the creaky mattress, Stella grunted. The older she got, the more difficult she found it to disguise her annoyance for Elise. Or for anyone else for that matter. Stella's words often emerged before her brain had
time to warn her tongue. She couldn't help herself. And she could get away with it too. People attributed her occasional display of crotchetiness to her age.

“Refreshed.”

Stella lay her head down, thought about the stupidity in Elise's statement. Feeling refreshed. How was it possible to feel refreshed when her faulty carcass was degrading much faster than it was being born?

“That don't look much like a lamp,” Elise said, indicating a pale blue contraption on the nightstand. She reached along the cord, snapped a button, and light emerged from the inside of a hard papery cylinder. The cylinder, decorated with a smattering of cutout stars, began to revolve slowly, coating the walls in moving shapes of light.

“Isn't that nice, Mother?” Elise asked.

“Don't need a nightlight now, Elissse.” She hated to whistle her daughter's name. “I idn't a child.”

“Not far off,” she said with a half smile, and shook the quilt in the air, covered Stella up to her neck.

“God, Elise, I got to breathe.”

“I would hope so.”

After Elise had receded down the hallway, the house became quiet, except for the gentle knocking of pipes, floorboards creaking as though ghosts were ambling over them. Stella did not mind these noises. They were sounds of ease, well-deserved after more than a century of standing.

She slid her hands under her cheek, began to think about Leander. She often conjured his image before sleeping, pulled him up from her reserves. And there he was, as though by magic, appearing inside her mind's eye, standing on the cliff near their home. His hair was thick and wind-whipped, a tawny brown. He wore black trousers, a crisp white Sunday shirt, and she could see the outline of his
undershirt beneath it. Harriet was by his side, yipping and jumping up to kiss Leander's outstretched hand, wiggling her backside to gain height. Behind them, man and dog, the black ocean sparkled with a thousand points of light.

Leander turned, began to meander on the path along those cliffs, Harriet following close on his heels. But there was something different. She noticed Leander's gait was even, balanced. Steady and strong. He wasn't limping as he had done in life.

And when she noticed this, a curious feeling spread throughout Stella's frail bones, a tingling of sorts. She was reminded of being a young child in summertime, sitting on a stretch of rounded beach rocks, dirt-stained feet near the very lip of the ocean. The tide would slowly edge over her toes, her ankles, her legs, slipping in ever so gently. Covering her. Then, as gently, drawing her out. Lying there, she had this sense of being solidly still and in a state of motion at the same time. These images of Leander gave her the same feeling. For a reason she could not grasp, she understood that the Leander in her mind was not a memory, and not quite an imagining. Something ever so slightly different.

He stopped just before the path dipped downwards, the place where earth and frigid water met with sky. As she watched, he looked over his shoulder, waved his hand, beckoning her to follow him. Harriet howled, her furry neck stretched upwards, wide jaw snapping at the clouds.

That feeling again, throughout her entire body now. Leander, like the tide, washing over her, pulling her towards him. She had no desire to rise, shake off her dripping frozen limbs, run towards the house. She desired, more deeply than anything she'd ever experienced, to move with that tide.

“Wait,” she managed. “Wait.” And with some urgency, she tried to get up from her bed and go. To flow forward. Before he disappeared down over the cut of the cliff. She
reached outwards, knocked the lamp with her hand, and it fell, striking the wooden floor, covering her in a blanket of soft-edged stars. The light moved over her eyelids, and ever so gradually, under her eyelids. She barely noticed the shift at all, it was so subtle. Nothing more than a single breath in, a single breath out. “Wait,” she said again, as she stood up. “Wait for me, Leander. I'm coming.”

The wind had come up out of nowhere, forcing curled leaves to skitter over the pavement, across the sheet of rock, out over the cliffs. As she watched them, Elise thought these tired leaves looked as though they were being propelled towards certain death. Tumbling into nothingness against their will. There was something romantic about it, as though those leaves were unable to resist the wildness of the wind. She liked this weather, would love it, in fact, if only she could excise the raspy whistle from inside her ears. That sound reminded her of her mother's voice. Chiding her.

She held her coat across her chest, ambled up the laneway, then stood for a moment at a curve in the road, stared up at the old farmhouse. It was bright red now, like a fresh wound, when before, the clapboard had been painted blue, perhaps grey. Maybe it had been no colour at all, that last time she had seen it. Close enough to be touching the boards, fingernails scraping the boards. Maybe the farmhouse had been stripped bare of paint, standing there in the salty storms, naked as the day it was built. No, she couldn't remember the colour. Couldn't remember it at all.

In her mind, she decided to continue her walk around Bended Knee, maybe stroll down to the old schoolhouse, rest on the cement stoop, stare at the field where she
and Robert had eaten ice cream, bowled with the set of homemade pins her father had fashioned so many years ago. But her body had other ideas. Without thought given to the tall grass, the mucky ditch, her feet stepped off the laneway and onto the property of the bed and breakfast. Secured inside new shoes, her feet cut a line straight across the land until they reached the farmhouse. Elise looked around, wondering how she had arrived on that particular spot, and she hunched down, her back firmly pressed against the wood slats.

Stupid. Forcing herself to sit there and think about that night. Her body wanting her to stay, when her mind longed to meander about, dodging this way and that, blissfully ignorant. Very well. Get on with it.
Not as though one particular day in a life makes a whole lot of difference
, she thought.
It's the culmination of years that shape a person, not a few hours with some boy. Some boy who was worth nothing
. “Lewis Hickey.” She whispered his name into the wind, then knotted the tough grass through her fingers, and pulled. Its roots were old, would not let go, and urged her down. No point to focus on that now. Think about something else.

Two empty cola cans, a married pair, rattled down the road side by side, popping over pebbles, rollicking left and right, clanking into each other for a metal kiss. Garbage. Who would throw out garbage like that? Bloody litterbugs. Elise hated trash on the roads, was meticulous about her own garbage. Double-bagged, heavy-duty twist ties. No chance of leakage or emission of foul odours. She took pride in her silver container at the end of her driveway, undented, clean. A much better job than a man would do.

But she hadn't always been like that. One week, she'd missed the truck, and after two weeks of unprecedented
summer heat, the mess had begun to liquefy, leak out of newly created holes, trailing down the incline towards her driveway. But that wasn't the worst of it. On the top of each bag she noticed the contents rippling, the black plastic shifting, a faint crackling sound rising up from within. Before her brain could assess the prospects, her hand reached out, tugged away the bag. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw the maggots. Masses of identical fat beige bodies, writhing over and under each other, bathed in filth.
Surely
, Elise thought,
that is the very image of Hell. Right there before her
.