Mud Girl (2 page)

Nobody rings the bell for her usual stop, not even Abi. But Horace brakes anyway, waits for her to climb off. “Bye, Abi!” he calls out. “Come visit over the summer!”

She's glad for the people between them, standing and chatting. She tells herself that Horace can't possibly hear, even if she did say something. She climbs down from the bottom step and stands, as always, until the bus is out of sight, and the
diesel smell is replaced by the cedar of the mill.

She walks along the gravel edge. Cars pass, and long dragging trucks. Their tires growl and the air tries to pull her into the rubber molars. She holds her arms across her chest, head down, almost to the next bus stop. From there, Abi's house is across the street and four metres from the roadway. The front of the house sits on the bank of the river, and the bank is steep, so there is a narrow wooden bridge that reaches to the front porch for when it's muddy. Out back, the house rests on pilings, heavy and stained and standing in river mud when the tide's down, and in swirling water when it's up.

She crosses the bridge and the door slams shut behind her; that same pull of air from yet another truck. Her father, in his chair in the middle of the room, doesn't seem to hear or to feel the sway of the floor.

Bairn

O
nce Abi found a pamphlet – can't remember where exactly –
Expanding Your Vocabulary.
The pamphlet promised that if you expanded your vocabulary, you could go anywhere you wanted. Of course, she knows that's not true. When you're a teenager, in high school, you can't go anywhere. But still. Now and then she looks up words because she likes the thought. Usually she carries the falling-apart paperback dictionary on the twenty-minute morning bus trip – so different from Horace's afternoon bus – full of morning silence and perfume strong enough to last until five o'clock. Makes her wish there was a school bus on this road, instead of just the regular bus. Makes her wonder about the adult thing. Makes her think about being sixteen – and how
close it is to being one of these soldiers in overcoats, armed with briefcase and cell phone. Lipstick smacked on. But with a school bus it would be a matter of time, a short time, before someone would say something, and they'd come poking around and take her away to some place. A foster home. Someplace where no one really cares about you, or worse, someone might hurt you. A place chosen for you by people who don't know you. A place that might be in the newspaper someday, with a big ugly headline over it. Or maybe it wouldn't be in the papers; maybe it would be a place where secrets happen.

Sometimes, Abi is convinced, the only reason she looks up new words is to distract her from the old.

Here's one, in the dictionary.
Bairn. A child
. Funny how when she thinks of it she can only hear the word
wee
in front of it. Wee bairn. The dictionary says the word is related to the verb
bear
, but all she can think of is the noun, and an angry she-bear protecting her…wee bairn. Abi likes that mental picture of a fighting mother-bear. She wishes it had more in common with the picture of her own mother, which is not bear-like at all.

Somebody gave Mum a New Age baby name book when she was pregnant. The first name in the girl section was Aba, which means born on Thursday. Abi was actually born at one in the morning on Friday, but by then her mother had spent
twenty-four hours thinking she'd be born on Thursday for sure, and she said “close enough.” Zytka was the last name in the girl section, so that's her second name. Abi suspects her mother never looked at the rest of the book.

Of course, she'd never asked her. She'd never thought of that until it was too late. There were many questions Abi hadn't asked. Some she'd thought of before, and some have popped into her mind over this past year. The biggest is: Why?

Why did you leave, Mum?

Abi tries to come up with the answer. “Because I had to.” Could be like one of those games you play with a little kid.
Why did you have to…
It could go on forever. Abi suspects that her mother could even tell her why and Abi still wouldn't know the real answer. Not an answer that satisfies. But maybe she has pieces of answers – enough pieces to put together even. She knows a few things.

Just in Case

A
bi knows that when Mum said
blue
she meant the pale blue of the early morning sky, or perhaps the blue of china plates people might hang on walls. Abi wondered – after Dad painted the back of the house – how it was that he didn't know that. How could he bring home that blinding colour? What had he called it – a mistint?

“That's someone else's colour gone bad,” Mum had said, in that frighteningly calm voice she had sometimes.

Dad hadn't seemed to notice the voice.

“It's the luck of the thing,” he said. “I walk in, I say I'm looking for the most beautiful blue for the most beautiful woman on the earth, and they show me this, and it's the only blue they have. I figure it's destiny.”

“Not everything that falls across your path is destiny,” Mum said. “Sometimes what falls across your path is just there to trip you.”

Abi can remember what Dad's face looked like then. It was as if Mum had walked over and shaken him.

But all she shook was her head, looking sorrowfully at him, then at the back of the house. Abi can still remember her like that: clinging to the railing on the dock as it moved in the river, head shaking over the blue. “Next time you choose paint chips,” she said, “you bring them home, we discuss together, we choose together, then back to the paint store where they make up the colour. If a mistake happens someone else can buy it. It can be
their
mistint.”

Dad hadn't gone to the paint store, hadn't chosen paint chips. The front and the sides of the house remained white and the back blazed blue and that's how it was.

“Mary,” he'd say on occasion, “where's your sense of adventure?”

“Brought me as far across the Atlantic as this side of Canada, then left me for someone else,” would be her answer.

But Abi, listening, wasn't at all convinced that her mother had ever had a sense of adventure. A sense of something, yes, but it wasn't adventure. What had brought her to Canada from Britain? What had caused her to stay in Canada? Abi knew the answer to the second question: Dad.

Abi would hear these exchanges between them and feel dread. What bothered her most was that she couldn't take sides.

Now
she could take a side; that was one of her first thoughts when they discovered Mum had left. But she couldn't. She didn't want a side; she wanted an answer.

Here is another piece about her mother: she loved this place, this narrow greenhouse, with its one bench, and three shelves, and glass. Most of the glass is broken. She even loved it like that, though she cried when the first piece broke, one of two times Abi ever saw her cry.

The greenhouse sits on one of two connected small docks that float at the end of the wharf. The wharf starts as a wooden walkway by the front door, goes down the side of the house, and runs all the way into the river water at the back of the house. The first dock is connected with enormous hinges, so that it can move with the tide, and the greenhouse dock is attached to that. Her mother asked her dad to attach extra chains to hold the greenhouse in place – “just in case,” she said. She said that often. She grew those spindly tomato plants and fried up their green fruit in the fall. Abi doesn't remember any red ones ever. So many little seed containers, the size of a thumb. Her mother always planted too many seeds, and they'd come up all white stems, looking like grubs, until they collapsed in despair. Maybe if Mum had realized
she loved this place and she could just sit here with her coffee – she didn't have to try to grow all those stupid things – maybe things would have been different. Sometimes Abi comes here and thinks about that: just why did her mother grow all those sad, stupid plants. Other times she sits here, pries pieces of broken glass from the window frames, drops them through the floorboards into the river, and makes a wish. The glass sinks; it's not like her dad's bottles, plastic and floating. The bottles with their messages in them are wishes themselves. No, Abi uses her mother's glass, and makes a wish. She always wishes the same thing, even when she tries to think of something new.

I wish…

“Knock, knock!”

Abi jumps at the spoken words. Wishes don't come true. And even if they did, it would never be this quick.

“Knock!” The voice is chirpy, bird-like. Abi stares out at the river for one more moment, and puts together a mental picture of this person: a woman; skinny (chicken legs, definitely); hair like feathers and close to her scalp; a sharp nose; eyes like burnt raisins in gingerbread.

“Knock, knock!” This time someone actually taps on the wooden door frame. You could think that's brave or you could think that's stupid. Of course a piece of glass falls and smashes on the slats of the floor.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

Abi turns around, but can see only the top of the person's head. She's bent over trying to pick up the glass. Such a useless thing to do. Makes Abi feel sorry for her. But the thin hair on the top of her head makes Abi feel even more. Something very sorry about a balding woman. Then the woman looks up and Abi can see that she was so wrong about the eyes.

A word comes to Abi's mind, as her own eyes connect with this woman's:
steadfast
. Such an odd old word, and perfect for these eyes that are clear and do hold Abi fast. They're a bit unnerving, really. Abi feels grateful that the rest of this woman is soft and round. Otherwise those eyes would be too much.

The glass falls between the boards and spins to the water below.

“No one answered the door,” says the woman. “So I thought I'd come around to the back.”

She was going to say “yard,” wasn't she?

“You knocked on the front door?” How brave after all.

She looks embarrassed. “I tried the window, too. A bit.”

She means she had to pound. Heck, if she broke it, he'd never notice.

“The television was on,” she says.

“Full blast.”

“The traffic
is
very loud.” So she did see him, there in his chair. Those eyes wouldn't miss a thing. She doesn't have to
defend him, though, does she? With her face all twisted, as if she has to feel badly for him?

But the traffic is loud, so loud that sometimes late at night, if a high-speed car comes chasing around the curve, Abi braces herself: this is it, this time it will come through the front wall.

The woman says nothing about Dad in his chair. Instead, she looks around. “Could be nice if it was fixed up a bit, no?”

Did she notice the decrepit car bench seat on the small front porch? The peeling paint on the windowsills? “I think it's beyond that.” Uh-oh. The eyes are suddenly even more clear as she looks at Abi, and Abi has the feeling the woman doesn't like her Fix-It-Up ability to be challenged.

“I'm your big sister,” she says then, and Abi almost falls between the floorboards. Her parents have given her enough surprises. It can't be. Her rational mind takes over: this woman is as old as her mother, maybe even a little older.

She liked that, Abi can see. She's had those words playing over in her mind. There's some little humour in her that wouldn't mind being let out now and then.

“Big sister.” Abi laughs, awkward herself, but with something stirring in her mind. The school counsellor sent home some pamphlets. One from the Big Sister organization. She left them on the table for a week before throwing them out. Abi didn't think her father had even touched them.

“You were registered quite a while ago now. I'm sorry it took so long. It can take a long time to find a match.” She doesn't say what takes long: the Big Sister part, or the little sister.