Catch Me When I Fall (14 page)

•  •  •

On a Friday, I packed my bag and drove to Edmonton. Following Mrs. Meijer's directions, I pulled up in front of a small run-down apartment building. The dirt beds that bordered the little pathway to the entrance held patches of gritty snow and the drooping remains of last summer's weeds.

I climbed to the third floor. The stairwell smelled of onions. I knocked loudly on number 304, until a woman from the neighbouring apartment stuck her head out her door. “You looking for Kristy?” she asked. She had grey roots in her crimson hair, and she coughed between words. “She's in Fort McMurray. Went there on Friday. You can probably find her in one of the bars, looking for some work. Weekend work,” she added with a sharp little nod.

This was one of those truths like a bad piece of mail that you shove aside to read later, the message on the answering machine you put off returning. You know what the news is, but you pretend it hasn't yet shattered your ease. I called Lawrence and started the five-hour trip to Fort McMurray. It was mid-April and most of the snow had melted. The road was clear, the traffic sparse. Still, I drove slowly, not wanting to make too much headway in case I decided to turn around.

It was early evening when I arrived. I checked into the Nomad Inn and ordered some chicken soup and a grilled sandwich in the lounge. It was packed, and I seemed to be the only one there alone, so I gulped down the food, paid my bill, and scooted out to my car.

You'd think I might have enjoyed a little time to myself, away from potty training, board books, cutting up grapes, and folding laundry. But as I drove through the city, my imagination played out the scenarios from the kinds of emails my sister-in-law sends me, stories about rapists in the back seat and criminals impersonating police officers. Pickup trucks jammed the roads and the parking lots I passed. Restaurants, a Walmart, and a casino whizzed by. Help Wanted signs hung in every storefront. I saw only one church. Its message board read:
MY LAST NAME IS NOT ‘DAMN.' SIGNED, GOD.

I stopped at a half-dozen restaurants, all of them too fancy to be the likely place I'd find Kristy. I checked inside each, asking to look at a menu. As I held it, I scrutinized the bars and tables. What would she look like? How would she be dressed? I gave up and drove back to the hotel.

After a restless night in my beige room with its beige painting of the Alberta badlands bolted to the wall, I spent a dull, lonely day wandering through a shopping mall and watching
TV
in my hotel room. I dreaded nightfall. What was left to search were the kinds of bars Christian girls didn't enter; at least that's what my mother would say.

Around 8:00, I pulled a loose sweatshirt over my blouse and headed downtown. I wished I had told my prayer circle at church about my mission. I felt like I could use more help.

The fifth bar I visited was The Loose Tire on Franklin Avenue. Loud country music blared from cheap speakers, an old Patsy Cline hit that was a lot older than I was. I wove my way to the bar, past tables of rough-looking men, some ogling me despite my baggy clothes. I've kept a few pounds from my pregnancies, and I'm stocky to begin with, but I got the sense that extra weight wouldn't deter these men.

I saw Kristy before she saw me. She was sitting sideways on the last barstool, leaning forward in quiet conversation with the bartender. She looked great, like a Hollywood celebrity on a photo shoot. Her figure was still willowy and her light brown hair fell in big waves. She turned her head to scan the bar and caught sight of me. The light was dim, but she looked horrified.

I stood beside her. “Hi there!” I sounded like a hospital volunteer.

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. I—met your son a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to see you.” My mouth was dry and my palms were wet. “Kyle. He's beautiful.”

“Can I get you something?” the bartender asked. He looked about fourteen.

“Yes,” I said with relief. “A diet Coke, please.” I looked back at Kristy, who rolled her eyes. “Do you want to sit at a table?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

I paid for my Coke and we moved to a booth in a dim corner. “You don't look like a prostitute.” Stupid, I said to myself. That's a stupid thing to say.

“A Working Girl,” she said. She had a remote look in her grey eyes, and her voice was scornful. “I'd get arrested if I looked obvious.”

I looked down at her black jeans and gauzy turquoise blouse. Not church clothes, but passable. The boots though—black platforms with corset ties. My mother's God kept talking in my head. I tried to shush him and find my Mr. Meijer-God instead. Even he was having trouble with the boots.

“You seem . . . different,” I said.

Her eyes were opaque. Up close, she seemed brittle, as if veneer or varnish were coating her face. “I
am
different,” she said. She lit a cigarette. “What do you want?”

“How could you have changed this much?”

She shook her head. “Forget it,” she said. “You don't know me anymore.” She let out a long breath of smoke and avoided my eyes. I breathed a prayer for patience. It had been a long way to drive for silence.

“What about your son?” I said. “Don't you want to be with him?”

“Here?” She waved her hand toward the smoky tables around us. A loud and distorted version of “Rhinestone Cowboy” crackled through the speakers. Kristy leaned toward me and spoke in a voice harsh and defensive, but without scorn. “Listen, I just need to earn enough so that I have first and last month's rent for a new apartment. And enough money for groceries and daycare for a few weeks. Then I can hunt for a real job.” She leaned back against the torn vinyl bench. “But you wouldn't understand. You've never had to manage on your own.”

•  •  •

As I drove back to my hotel, I thought about her eyes. They reminded me of saints or martyrs; they looked like eyes from those cracked old paintings where the perspective is all wrong. But those eyes had brimmed with private knowledge and sorrow.
If you knew what I knew, you'd understand.

When my cell phone rang a few hours later, I was surprised to hear Kristy's voice. In the bar, when I'd scribbled my number on a napkin, she had blown smoke in its direction and then looked away.

“You really liked my father, didn't you?” she said. The din of the bar and tinny pedal steel whined through the receiver, and her voice was unsteady. Loud.

“He was always really nice to me,” I said.

“Sure. He liked little girls.” She sounded drunk; her words blurred and pitched. “You do know about him, right?”

“I guess I have some idea.” I sat up and turned on the bedside light.

“You have
no
idea.” The words sliced through the roar of the background noise. She made a sharp sound, a bark of laughter or pain. “So I'm going to tell you.” I moved the phone back an inch.

Later, what stayed with me was what she said about the cows. Her humiliation at the cows watching.

•  •  •

I left the hotel at dawn and drove home fast, pulled by a vision of my waiting children. I needed to hug them, to pull their little bodies close to mine, to centre myself in my role as mother. To return to the routines: mealtime, playtime, bathtime, and bedtime.

My mother was reading
The Christian Courier
when I arrived. Lawrence had gone into town, Jonah was at pre-school and Zoe was down for her afternoon nap. I sat down and poured out my story. I told her about having seen Kristy and what I now knew to be true about her dad.

“He's a rat bastard, all right,” my mother said when I'd finished.

“Mom!” I had never heard her use such language. She still rates movies by the number of “swears” in them. I pushed aside the Co-op catalogue on the table and let my head sink onto my folded arms. “Where was God when it was happening?”

Mom said nothing. I looked up. “Do we tell someone?”

“Did Kristy ask you to?”

“No. But how can we keep going to the same church as him, acting like we don't know? I never want to see him again.”

“I don't blame you. Or Kristy.”

That was as unusual as her bad language. When she hears something uncharitable, my mother barks Scripture or doctrine in response. She halts conversations with her pronouncements.

I balanced my chin on my forearm, my head heavy. “Aren't we supposed to love everyone?”

My mother stared at the Delft plates on the wall behind me, her back straight as always. “I've never understood God loving everyone. To me it seems like a failing of his. A lack of discernment.”

She saw my incredulous expression and folded her hands. “I don't really mean that, of course. Who are we to know the mind of God?” She began nodding, and I put my head back down and closed my eyes. “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” she said, “but then we shall see face to face.”

When I tried to pray that night, I found I couldn't. My picture of God had shattered.

•  •  •

I stopped attending church. Mrs. Bouwen brought me a saskatoon berry pie. She patted my cheek. She said, “God will hold tight on to you, Helena, when you can't hold on to God. But that pie is two days old already, so you should eat it soon.” She meandered back to the car where her son was waiting to chauffer her to her weekly visit to her husband's grave. My prayer-circle friends phoned. “We prayed for you last night,” Eliza said. “I hope you feel God's presence.”

“Well, I can't seem to shake him,” I said.

•  •  •

On Saturdays I continued to tend the little flowerbeds in front of the church, a job I've had for years now. One morning in June, a grader and a roller were working in the old gravel parking lot, readying it for paving. After parking as far from the workers as I could, I stepped out of the car. A piercing cry sounded overhead. A killdeer. I recognized it first by the plaintive sound, “kill-deah,” and then, when I spotted it swooping back and forth on the edge of the lot, by the black bands across its chest. I walked nearer. It fluttered to the ground as I approached, nursing a suddenly broken wing. I knew this trick, and I looked around for its nest.

It took me a minute to find it, a mere depression in the gravel. But instead of stone-coloured eggs, the nest held bits of greyish spotty shell and slimy membrane. A worker's shovel or a heavy foot had crushed the eggs long before they were ready to hatch. I backed up several steps, and the bird soared into the air again, crying its piercing lament. It must have had a mate nearby—I was pretty sure that with killdeers, both birds tended the eggs. Was this the male or the female? I couldn't tell.

My ears throbbed from the keening.
Bereft I am bereft.
The bird's cry pulsed with sorrow. “Go!” I said to it. “Do something! Fly at the worker. Beat them with your wings. Peck at their eyes.” The bird swooped again over its piteous nest.

•  •  •

I haven't returned to church. But last night I prayed again. I prayed for Kristy. “Mother-God, shelter her under your broken wing.”

“YOU'RE ASKING ME
to put my father in a home?”

“
We
can't manage him.” Harvey nudged the crib board to the centre of the coffee table. His frown deepened the lines on his face; they looked rigid as tree bark. “We've got enough strain on this family.”

He shuffled the cards, split the deck, shuffled some more. Divided them. I listened to the mantel clock ticking its loud, mechanical
tchot
,
tchot.
Another voice grating in the room. It had been a wedding present—from Dad, brought with him from the Old Country. Winding it seemed an act of loyalty, so I let it clatter the seconds.

Harvey placed the deck on the table and reached over to stroke my cheek, flashing his movie-star smile, dazzling on his craggy face. It usually worked—bent my way of thinking toward his, like a powerful gush of water drawing a smaller stream to join it. “Vicky. Sweetheart. You don't really want him living
here
, do you?”

My spine tightened. “He's
family
.”

Harvey picked up the cards. “Your deal.”

•  •  •

When I was five, Oma told me a story about the war and about my father when he was a boy. January 1945—the tail end of the Nazi occupation and one of the coldest winters in Holland for many years. No electricity. You couldn't find coal; there was no more firewood. My grandmother had already burned a ladder, the extra milking stool, and even—on a terribly cold night—one of the chests of drawers. At dawn, my father, dressed in patched coat and too-short pants, crept outside, snuck past the school where the Nazi soldiers slept, and stole down the road to the village square. There, axe sagging in his thin six-year-old's arms, he chopped down a sapling.