Authors: Sarah Mian
“Sentimental value,” I say, handing it over.
“Jesus Christ,” West says. “That’s not going to cut it.”
“Why not?”
He turns it over a few times. “This means that much to you?”
“Did you know that Macho Man’s real name is Randy Mario Poffo?”
“No.”
“Do you know who Leaping Lanny Poffo is?”
“Ain’t he the WWF wrestler who used to write poems on Frisbees and chuck them out to the crowd?”
“Did you know that the Poffo brothers got their start right here in Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling?”
West massages his eyebrows. “No.”
“Before WWF, they fought each other in an International Title Match in Truro, and guess who got to see it? It was the only time my family ever left Solace River. I was only six years old, but I still remember every move. You know what a moonsault is?”
“No.”
I stand up on the bed. “Want me to show you?”
T
HE BRIDGE HAS A NEW SIGN ON IT:
E
RNIE
E
LLS
B
RIDGE.
I guess that means Ernie’s cashed in his chips. He didn’t live too far from our house. He used to ride his Supercycle down here every morning and wave at the cars that crossed the river. It was part of his routine. From nine in the morning till noon, he stood on the bridge waving at cars. Then he’d go home and let all his cats run around the yard while he counted them, 1-2-3-4-5-6, over and over again. After that he’d hide and wait for Mrs. Glen on her afternoon walk. He’d get behind a bush or a tree, jump out at her and yell, “I get a kick out of you!” She hated it, but there was only one road. Ernie wasn’t that great a hider anyway.
Mrs. Glen was always talking to whoever would listen about how her husband died in a factory accident. She must have told Ernie the date of their wedding anniversary because he boasted to everyone in town that he had a surprise planned. He put on a ski mask and a pair of yellow dish gloves, climbed the tree at the edge of his property and waited over an hour.
When Mrs. Glen was right underneath him, he jumped down, hollering, “I get a kick out of yoooooooooooou!” He almost kicked her in the head. She had an anxiety attack and Ernie wasn’t sure what to do, so he came up and banged on our door. Ma went down and helped Mrs. Glen up to the house. I was in the kitchen when they came in. I watched Mrs. Glen’s heavy makeup lift off her skin in beads of sweat until it hovered over her face like a mask. She wouldn’t sit on our chair until I laid her sweater on it, and she didn’t trust our water, so Ma had to boil it for her. At one point she turned to me and said, “Which one are you?” I told her I was Tabby, and right in front of Ma she asked me, “Do all your brothers and sisters have the same father?” As she was leaving, Jackie loudly asked Ma why she didn’t tell the bitch to go fuck herself. Ma waited till the door was closed after Mrs. Glen before she turned to him and hissed, “Because it’s her anniversary with her dead husband.”
I guess they named the bridge after Ernie simply because he liked to stand on it and wave at cars. If Mrs. Glen’s still around, I wonder what she thinks of that. Her poor husband got pressed into paper by two forklifts, and Ernie gets all the glory. That alone might have killed her.
Just off the exit ramp, I see a giant square rock on the side of the highway that some bored hick painted to look like a Rubik’s cube. Most of the squares are almost faded off, but I can still make out the colours. Two sides of the cube are partially solved, which, if you’ve ever tried to crack one of those bastards, doesn’t mean shit. Even if you get five sides lined up, you end up having
to break them up again to line up the sixth. The only way to solve it is to peel off the stickers and re-stick them when no one’s looking.
Three oncoming cars in a row flick their lights to tip me off there’s a cop hiding around the bend. West’s headlight knob is jerry-rigged with a wine cork and I don’t want to mess with it too much, so after I pass the cop car I pass on the warning by pointing my index finger in the air and rotating it like a siren.
This has to be the most unscenic stretch of highway. The only thing distinguishing one long run of trees from another is the occasional Christmas tree farm, and the only difference between those trees and the rest of the forest is signs that say CHRISTMAS TREES. Around the halfway point, my stomach starts to growl and I turn off the highway looking for a nice place to park while I eat my lunch. I pass an old Mi’kmaq burial ground, a one-truck volunteer fire station, a sign telling me to Choose Life. There’s grass growing up through the pavement in some spots. Finally, I spy a small farm. I pull over and walk up to the fence, hold out my apple and wait for one of the ponies to trot over. I’m stroking her nose with those big horsey eyelashes brushing my fingers and the rain holding off and West’s big truck parked behind me, and I realize part of me is waiting for the farmer to come out here and yell for me to get the hell off his property. I have to remind myself I’m not fourteen anymore and nobody way out here’s going to know I’m a Saint unless I tell them myself.
I get back in the truck and eat the bologna sandwiches while I listen to the country stillness. I keep trying to remember the tune
of this old church hymn Ma used to hum low and quiet at the foot of our beds. She didn’t think she had a voice for singing, so she’d speak the lyrics. It was maybe what church was like if your mother delivered the sermon in her nightgown and all you could see was the tip of her Export “A” glowing in the dark. Even when the verses were punctuated by Jackie’s farts, she would just keep droning on in that creepy voice. Ma was never one for brightening the mood. If you skinned your knee, she’d say, “Course you did.” If you asked if it might rain, she’d say, “Only if you don’t want it to.”
I wonder if there really is such a thing as blood ties. Even though I always thought of my family as just a pack of wolves forced to live together in that big drafty shack, I do feel something pull on me every now and then. I imagine there’s a long string holding us together, stretching and fraying as the years drag on. Maybe that’s why I’m driving through the armpit of nowhere trying to find a sister I haven’t seen since she was ten years old and who may well spread her legs for a living. I guess I’m afraid the string’s about to finally snap.
D
OWNTOWN
J
UBILANT MAKES
S
OLACE
R
IVER LOOK LIKE
Shangri-La. Some of the shops even have bars on their windows. West says stories of trouble in Jubilant have swamped the news ever since the lobster population started to dwindle. A few weeks ago, some fishermen surrounded a truck delivering cheap US lobsters to the processing plant and busted a few of the driver’s ribs, and last summer there was a murder over trapping turf.
West said the dead guy’s boat washed up so full of gunshot holes it looked like a hunk of Swiss cheese.
It’s early afternoon when I pull into town, but dusk is settling in by the time I find out where Poppy lives. The owners of the feed store give me directions. I walked in as they were closing and the old man said he never heard of Poppy Saint. “She’s leggy,” I said. “Probably swears a lot, doesn’t dress for the weather.” His wife came out, wiped off her hands and drew me a map on a piece of cardboard.
I crawl along in the truck with the windows rolled down so I can see the numbers on the houses. There are homemade protest signs in people’s windows with slogans like FEELING THE PINCH? or TRY ON OUR RUBBER BOOTS FOR A DAY AND SEA HOW IT FEELS. Some homes have dulse laid out to dry on the rooftops and fishing buoys piled on the lawns. I’m hoping one of these hard-working places is Poppy’s, but of course she’s in the rusty trailer up at the edge of the woods.
I park at the end of the long driveway and take my time getting out, hoping she’ll see me before I have to walk up and knock on the door. The air is much cooler and damper here. I can’t see the ocean, but I can smell it.
There’s a swing set on Poppy’s lawn made from the back seat of a car and a broken plastic swan planter full of Popsicle wrappers and beer caps. The wrought iron steps aren’t attached to the trailer, just propped up against it. The paint is chipped on the mailbox nailed to the exterior wall, and the name says
Saint.
It feels like a punch to look at it, that ugly peeling name.
After a long minute, a woman comes to the door. She looks
like an ashtray that’s been left out in the rain. Her eyeglasses are hanging around her neck on one of those granny strings. She puts them on roughly and stares at me from behind the screen, takes a drag of her smoke.
“Poppy?” I say stupidly.
“She ain’t here.”
“I’m Poppy’s sister.”
“She don’t got no sister.”
“She used to.”
The woman retreats inside and stubs out her cigarette. Then she comes back and looks at me again, moves her tongue around in her mouth as if to make sure her teeth are in there.
“Tabby?”
“Hi, Ma.”
I stand there with the fog falling between us like a curtain until she finally opens the door. The interior light floods the steps, and I follow her inside. There’s a permeating smell of microwave cooking mixing with the general bouquet of cigarette smoke. The chesterfield looks like a werewolf got hold of it, stuffing coming out at all the seams.
“What a dump.”
“Nice of you to say.” Ma lights a fresh cigarette from her blouse pocket and lowers herself into a faded armchair. I remembered her being so pretty, but now she’s all slumped and puffy-faced. Her hair looks like she cut it with a pocket knife.
“Sorry.”
She avoids my eyes. “My God, Tabby. Where have you been all these years?”
She puts down the cigarette. “Come here. Let me hold you.” Neither of us makes a move and finally she picks her smoke back up. “Poppy disappeared. Went to work one night five weeks ago and never came back.”
I ask Ma what line of work Poppy’s in, but she won’t answer. So I ask if she gets paid by the hour and Ma picks up a cloth and starts wiping the table as if somebody just spilled something. Not that there’s anything to spill. She didn’t offer me coffee.
Poppy takes off like this every once in a while, Ma says, but never for more than a week because of her kids. Janis and Swimmer. Janis is five and wears sunglasses in the house. Swimmer is three. He’s got a big round head and eyes so huge they remind me of peanut butter cups. They pretend to be shy at first, peeking around the corner, but then they march in and curl up on either side of me like little bookends.
“So, where’ve you been living?” Ma asks.
“All over New Brunswick, but I came back and met a guy in Solace River.”
“Solace River?” Ma freezes. “Why the hell would you go back there?”
“I was looking for you.”
She picks up the cloth again. “This man of yours. He got a job?”
“Of course,” I say, like I’m so used to having a man, let alone one with a job. “He runs his own business.”
“Good.” She nods. “Good for you.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s in hospital waiting to die.” She wrings the cloth in her hands. “They say he’s got colon cancer. He might be dead already for all I know.”
“How can you not know?”
“We cut ties a long time ago.”
“Oh.” I can’t seem to find an emotion. “What about Bird and Jackie?”
Janis tugs on my arm. “I got a picture of you.”
“Of me? I haven’t even got one of those.”
She pulls on my arm. “Come on. I’ll show it to you.”
I follow her down the short hallway into a tiny bedroom crammed with toys. The purple walls are covered in personalized stamps, gold stars with her name inside them. I can tell she tried to stamp up the whole room with JANIS! but the ink faded and wore out. There are a few stray stars on the dresser and ceiling like the faded embers of a dream.
She hauls out a pink plastic cash register from under the bunk bed, removes some old, sticky photographs from the drawer and slaps them into my palm.
The photo on top is one of all of us in front of our house: Daddy, Ma, Bird, Jackie, Poppy and me. We look like we’re in a police lineup. I wonder who took the picture, and why on that particular day. I flip through the stack and find the one of just me. I’m wearing a dress with a hole in it and my hair is so blond it’s almost invisible.
“I hated those shoes,” I say.
There’s a used Q-tip stuck to the photograph and when I pull it off, a piece of my little leg comes with it.
“Gross.” Janis screws up her face. “You can keep that one.”
“Thanks,” I say, tucking it into my purse.
I walk out of the room when Ma comes in to get the kids ready for bed, and Janis yells after me, “Will you still be here when it’s morning? If you are, I can learn you how to do two somersaults in a row.”
“You can do two somersaults in a row?”
“Probably four.”
“Then how come you’re only going to show me how to do two?”
She doesn’t get back to me on that, so I head for the living room. Ten minutes later, Ma comes with an armful of wool blankets and some flannel sheets. “You can have the bedroom,” she says.
“I’m not going to take your bed.”
“It ain’t mine. It’s Poppy’s.”
“I’ll be fine on the sofa.”
She watches me make it up before shuffling off. I can’t sleep, and I can tell she can’t either. She coughs constantly and the bedsprings squeak every time she rolls over. When I glance at the clock, it’s barely nine. When we were kids, Ma never went to bed before 2 a.m. She’d sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee, doing word search puzzles and thinking up worst-case scenarios. I trudged past her once on the way to the bathroom and she reminded me I couldn’t flush the toilet because the well was almost dry. Then she said, “Tabby, if the house catches fire and none of you can get out, give the kids all the pink pills in my bottom drawer.” I nodded, squinting against the kitchen light, and by the time I realized I’d just agreed to poison Poppy
and Jackie to death, she’d licked her finger and flipped to the next puzzle.
There are so many things I want to ask her now. I consider knocking on her door, but every time I sit up, I chicken out and lie back down.