When the Saints (20 page)

I start gathering up Janis’s stuff.

“Tabby, give me twenty bucks for smokes.”

“Let’s go, Janis.”

Poppy tries to grab hold of my jacket as I usher Janis off the bed and out of the room. Janis ignores Poppy’s yelling, asks me if she can have some chocolate milk from the cafeteria. I buy her some breakfast and take her to the playground in back of the hospital. She doesn’t play, though, just sits on the little wooden bridge in her sunglasses with her arms dangling over the ropes. I notice she’s got two different sneakers on and it makes me feel like shit.

“So, guess what?” I say. “You’re going to live in a brand new house with a big bedroom.”

She perks up, but then her shoulders droop again, as if she’s heard this one before. “I don’t want to go live in a new house if my mother gets to live there too.”

“Your mother doesn’t want to do drugs, you know.”

“Then why does she?”

“They change her body so that she feels sick if she doesn’t take them.”

Janis swings one leg. “One time I had a wedding to my big teddy bear, Lippy, that I won at the fair from bonking a frog on the head. Swimmer was the ring boy and Mama was the judge, and then we had a party after with Cheezies and danced. But that was before, when she was nice.”

I see my face reflected in her sunglasses as I ask, “Did she ever hurt you?”

“Nope.” Janis rests her chin on the rope. “But she set the oven on fire and I had to call the fire truck because she forgot how to use the phone.”

Two little girls in matching purple cowboy boots race each other to the slides. I watch Janis eyeball the boots.

“Want to go over there and play with those kids?”

She picks at the hole in the knee of her jeans and doesn’t answer.

“Come on.” I grab her feet and slide her underneath the rope, set her down on the ground. “Let’s go look at the Sears catalogue and see what kind of furniture they have for your new bedroom. I bet you want one of those beds shaped like a race car.”

“Do they have any shaped like a pineapple?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you going to live at our new house? You can sleep in my new bedroom with me and Swimmer if you want.”

“Maybe I’ll live at West’s house with him,” I say, feeling myself blush. “It’s not far from your new house.”

“Are you going to have a wedding to West? I will, if you don’t want to.”

“Hands off, you already got a husband.”

“Lippy the bear? Not no more. I broke it off when he cheated around.”

“Who’d he cheat with?”

“Swimmer’s baby girl doll, Wendy. I poked a fork through her forehead.”

“You’d marry West, huh?” I bend down to zip her coat, but she pushes my hand away.

“Grandma thinks he got a nice rear end on him, but I like his truck.”

When we get back to the trailer, I tuck her in for a nap and recline on Swimmer’s empty bottom bunk. I stare up at the sagging bump in the mattress where her body lies, too tired to fall asleep myself. One of the photographs she showed me the first night I stayed here is lying on the floor. I reach down and pick it up.

Daddy was right: I do look like him, eyeing the camera like I want to punch it, sunken cheeks even at that age. That was probably the summer Bird and Jackie started stringing up cats to use for target practice. The same summer Terry Profit slid his wet tongue around in my ear.

I toss the photo back onto the floor and stare at the rectangle of grey sky framed in the small window. There are dark forces attracted to us Saints like the tide to the moon. Even when I was far away pretending to be somebody else, everything I tried to grab hold of wound up getting me in trouble. I’m sure if I’d tried to dodge this whole snakepit by turning on my boot heels and leaving Solace River the same day I arrived, the darkness would have just followed me wherever I went next. I can almost feel it shape-shifting around me sometimes. If it ever finds a way in, I’ll
wind up just like Daddy and Poppy, with eyes like two dead fish and carnage strewn for miles.

Swimmer’s pillow smells sour. There’s something lumpy stuffed beneath his covers. I reach down and pull out a woman’s tank top and blouse. He must have been cuddling with Poppy’s clothes like a security blanket. I stuff them back where they were, feeling oddly sheepish for invading a three-year-old’s privacy.

On the low dresser there’s a plaster imprint of his hands like little monkey paws, and beside it a photograph of him and his sister standing in one of those cheap wading pools. Janis is flexing her bicep while Swimmer grins up at her. “He can’t even swim,” Janis tells everyone. Poppy told me she named him Swimmer because he was conceived through a condom. If his father doesn’t know he exists, maybe he should. Janis told me Swimmer’s father is named John. Probably more of Poppy’s sick sense of humour.

Nobody’s trying to find Swimmer except for us. That’s the sad truth. It’s why I want out of here and why I can’t leave.

I close my eyes and try to sleep, but thoughts keep banging around my head like boots in a clothes dryer. We have to drive the darkness out, and it’s not something a priest or shaman can do for us. If we’re ever going to stop biting our tails, we have to outrun Daddy’s ghost back to Solace River, slide into that dried-up husk of a life and start all over. It’s the only way to trick the devil: hide in the one place he’d never look.

W
EST ISN’T PICKING UP AT THE TAVERN OR AT HOME
either. I’ve been calling for two days straight. When the phone finally rings, I rip the receiver from the cradle.

“I was starting to think you were dead in a ditch.”

“If I am, the afterlife is as shitty as the real one.”

It’s Detective Surette.

“Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“I’m sorry I’m not someone else too. It would solve a lot of my problems.” Surette coughs. “Enough of my sparkling wit. I’m just calling to let you know that your father’s house fell off the town grid.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that seeing as how it’s on a dirt road with its own well water and no power hooked up since the family left, best I can tell, you’re clear on taxes. I hear it’s in pretty rough shape, though.”

“That’s why I asked for bulldozers.”

“I’m working on it. You’ll have to go legit if you rebuild. This is a one-time loophole.”

“Fine. What’s the update on Swimmer?”

“Detective McNeil’s been getting a lot of false leads. I think certain people are wasting his time on purpose.”

“We all know who did it.”

“Nobody knows anything for sure. Not even you.”

I slam down the receiver and go back to driving myself bonkers over West. I’m worried Troy found out he gave us an alibi and sent someone after him. By the time the phone rings again the next afternoon, I’m half hysterical.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Abriel showed up here,” West says.

“What?” My chest pinches. “At the tavern?”

“At the house.”

“At
your
house?”

“Well, it’s not all mine. Not yet.”

I wish phones had TV screens so you could see the expression on the other person’s face.

“What did she want?”

“She wants to get back together. I told her I’m done with her, but she won’t listen. She keeps talking to me like I’ve got amnesia, saying everything was my fault and she’s been trying to come back all this time.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

He hesitates a half second too long.

“She’s making it real hard to say no, I suppose.” I wind the phone cord around my finger so tight, the skin turns blue.

“Tabby, I didn’t see this coming. I need to sort a few things out.”

“What things?”

“I got some questions for her.”

I hang up on him even harder than I did on Surette. All I can see in my head is that auburn hair splayed out on my pillow. I bet she took one look around and decided the place wasn’t so bad after all with the plants and the new curtains. She probably put my apron on and started frying up eggs. Even if she’s gone again, she’ll always be back.

I grab my purse, bang out the door and start running down the road. I veer up the driveway of the blue house and barge in the door, shove Bird’s yellowed feet into his ugly Velcro sneakers, stick his arms through his denim jacket. I wheel him down the uneven ramp to the bottom of the driveway and start along the dirt road as fast as I can go. He bumps up and down, trucker hat veering to one side of his head. When his protest noises get louder, I stop to light a cigarette. My hands shake as I push his wheelchair down the ditch into the woods. About twenty feet into the trees, I can’t manoeuvre his chair any farther. I park him next to a log and sit on it.

“He said if she came back, he’d tell her to go to hell,” I say. “He said he doesn’t have feelings for her, that it was over as soon as she walked out the door.”

Bird tries to reach for my cigarette. I hold it up to his lips for a drag and he snatches it from me. I watch him perch it daintily between his fingertips and puff on it like a little old lady. I wonder how it is he can hold a cigarette but not a spoon, and why he can rip the shit out of the wallpaper but can’t put on his own pants.
I bet Ma treats him like a baby just so she can take care of him, the same way she comes in and hands me a towel the minute she hears me turn on the tap. She can’t protect us from getting our brains kicked in or being raped by some motel slumlord, but she shows up with hot soup and clean towels.

I tap another smoke out of my pack and stick it in my teeth. “What the hell did I come back here for? Daddy got what he deserved. Poppy’s a mess. Janis and Swimmer will be the ones on drugs soon enough. Jackie’s going to wind up in jail. And Ma, well, Ma’s never going to be happy, is she? And here I am a grown woman with no house, no job, no car, no husband. You want to know why it took me so long to come find everybody? I wanted to have something to show for all these years. Joke’s on me.” I kick my purse. “I don’t even have a social insurance number, which means I don’t exist, just like the house we grew up in.”

My lighter’s dead. I flick it ten times then whip it at a tree.

“I don’t even know West’s real fucking name.”

The fog sinks lower into the tree branches, mingling with Bird’s cigarette smoke. We sit there so long my mind wanders all sorts of strange places. I start to imagine that Swimmer’s been in these woods all along, eating fiddleheads and berries and babbling with the birds. I can almost see him toddling out of the mist with pine cones in his hair.

After a while it starts getting cold, so I button up Bird’s coat and wheel him back up the road.

J
ANIS WANTS TO COME WITH ME TO
S
OLACE
R
IVER.
S
HE’S
never been. I don’t know if she’s ever been anywhere. I feel uneasy leaving Ma alone, but I need to sort out where we’re going to live.

“I picture it’s cloudy and the water’s all black and everybody looks like this.” Janis twists her face into a snarl. She clambers into the front seat of Ma’s car, starts rolling the windows up and down and looking under the floor mats for dimes. “Are we going to visit West at his house?”

I pretend not to hear and distract her by telling her to pick a good song on the radio. She scans through every channel twice and finally settles on Dutch Mason, sits back nodding her head like an old bluesman.

“Janis, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I’m genuinely curious.

She bolts upright. “A bagpipe blower.”

“Why?”

I get the feeling she’s been dying for someone to ask her this question.

“Because. You walk at parades and you have hangy things on your socks, and a purse that goes in the front, and you don’t got to put on no underpants. Everybody goes ‘ooh aah’ and takes pictures of you. They can hear you coming for a long time, and there’s a person at the back who bangs on a drum this big.” She flings her arms wide. “And old men watch and cry because they wish they got to play the bagpipes and now they’re too old.”

“What goes in those bagpipers’ purses?”

“Tissues and gum.”

I point to her sequined purse in her lap. “Is that what’s in yours?”

“In here?” She unzips it and shows me a one-dollar bill, a ceramic rabbit figurine and some lip gloss called Ghostberry.

“Where did you get a one-dollar bill? They don’t even make those anymore. It might be worth something someday.”

She unrolls it. “How much?”

“Maybe a hundred dollars if you wait a long time.”

Ma’s car leaks oil, so we have to stop at four different gas stations along the way. One of them has a convenience store attached and Janis unclips her belt, says she’ll be right back. I stare at the door until she re-emerges with a root beer slushie, a box of Cracker Jack and some licorice twists. She’s clutching a five-dollar bill and a bunch of change in one fist.

“I thought you only had a buck?”

“I did, but I told the teenager in there that a one-dollar bill will be worth a hundred dollars someday and he bought it off me for ten bucks.”

I lean over and sip her slushie. “You’re just like your aunt Tabby, you know that?”

“Yup.” Janis nods, adjusting her sunglasses.

It must be lunch break when we arrive at the house. The bulldozers are parked willy-nilly and there’s no one around. They’ve already torn down the garage and the sheds and have started to pull the house apart from the back.

I paint Janis a picture. “You can have a swing set there, and a tree house back there. I bet Uncle Jackie will build you one if you ask him nicely.”

“Like this?” She cups both her hands under her chin and
flutters her eyelashes. “That’s what I do at church group so Mr. Northwood will let me pound the nails into Jesus.”

When we get back in the car and drive into town, I realize the real estate office is only a few buildings down from the Four Horses. I spy West’s truck in the parking lot and hurry Janis across the street.

We walk into the tiny beige office and she starts pawing the house models, poking her candy-coated fingers in the windows of a mock-up of a prefab called the Buckingham.

“I was thinking something more like this.” I redirect her to the Brunswick. “It’s got enough space, and we won’t piss off the Queen.”