The Shore Girl (2 page)

A baby feather is on the green blanket. I put it in my hand. I want to tell Mommy, but she bends down and picks up the bags and a red drop from her face falls on the pink rug and she looks at that drop and a sound comes out of her mouth. She yanks on my hand too hard and I fall off the bed. I want to cry but I'm a big girl. Mommy lifts me up and we go outside under the blinky light. She throws the red key and it hits the
TV
and bounces on the pink rug and the door closes all by itself.

The van's got a big bash. It's all crumpled at the front like a Kleenex box when you kick it. My car seat smells like apple juice. I want a drink. I want a drink but I don't tell.
Big girls can wait.

How did the van get broke? Mommy won't talk. Mommy is quiet. We go bump, bump, bump. There are bad noises under the van. Shaking my car seat. The trees whoosh. Then the trees go away. Fences. A big barn, maybe for chickens. Mommy's teeth chatter. Mommy's cold. I give Mommy my yellow blanket but she says no.

Turn on the lights. I can't see the cows. Mommy, turn on the lights.

The headlights are broken, Rebee. We're invisible. Lay back
and close your eyes.

Mommy is sad. Are you sad, Mommy? How did the headlights get broke? How did your face get blood on it?

Go to sleep now, Rebee. Be a big girl. Close your eyes and dream
about cows.

I have a feather in my hand. It's soft like bunny's ear. Bunny. Where's bunny?

Shit, shit, shit.

Can I have bunny please?

Sorry, baby, bunny's gone. We left him at the motel.

Go back. Go back. I want BUNNY!

We can't go back, Rebee. We can't ever go back.

And I cry and cry and cry.

AUNT
VIC
     

REBEE HATES WATER
. Lakes, bathtubs, alley puddles. They all scare the crap out of her. If she blames me, her dear old auntie, she's never said a word. She was only four years old and God knows what she remembers. It was supposed to be a nice surprise for the missing mommy. Look at the big girl who could float in the water. Look at the auntie who let them all drown.

Funny, the details that stick. I remember having blood in my shoe. Eddy whistling through his nose in my bed. Rebee slept on the couch in her panties and undershirt, curled into the letter C, hands over her knees. Her tiny mouth opened and closed like a little fish, like she was fighting for air in a dirty bowl.

It had been slow as a wet week at the Lucky Dollar, mostly just regulars, but the end of my left foot looked like it'd been worked over by a man with a bat. I kept telling my boss the patrons prefer a quick drink over a hobbling waitress in five-inch heels, but Dennis, he says I couldn't go changing the uniform. I could have written the book about what Georges want, what brings a good tip, how to smell a stiff, but Dennis liked to keep his girls down, keep morale about as high as the belly of a snake.

The apartment felt sticky hot when I got home from the night shift, but I covered Rebee anyway with the old yellowed sheet she'd kicked into the couch fold. The place was a war zone. Pizza crusts and cardboard boxes, dirty napkin piles, overflowing ashtrays, a scuzzy green cup with crusties up the sides. She must have got wired pretty good. Coke float most likely, one of Eddy's two specialties, the other being pancakes with whipped topping from a can. But he'd found the book from the closet I bought for her last time. It was on the glass coffee table beside Eddy's crumpled “Skydivers, Good to the Last Drop”
T
-shirt, opened to Rebee's favourite, the page where Willie loses his mittens and his mother has to come rescue him. Eddy could surprise me with the things he did.

I slumped down in the chair beside Rebee's damp mop, threw my legs on the coffee table, lit a cigarette, and waited for her to wake up. Eddy was an early riser most days, too. Get him liquored up, he could miss a whole day, sleep right through and then couldn't figure out why the bank was closed, why there was no baseball from four to six like the
TV
Guide
said. But there were no empties scattered about. And Eddy promised.

Eddy thought I looked like Cher and kept asking me to sing “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves.” I should have crawled into bed with him but I was too damn tired. I just sat with my feet on the pizza box and watched the blood drain from my swollen toes.

“Just a few days,” Elizabeth whispered when she handed Rebee to Eddy in the middle of the night. This was a few nights before. I was doing last call at the Lucky Dollar so I missed the drop-off. But what Elizabeth said meant nothing anyway. The time before, a few days stretched to three weeks, then to three months, and when she came at last and took Rebee back, I felt a slash through my centre so deep the doctors woulda shook their heads and covered me with a plastic sheet.

Rebee whimpered. Strange little mewing sounds, like a newborn kitten crying for her mother's tit. I thought, whimper all you want, Rebee, she's not here, and even if she was, she's all dried up.

* * *

“So, how 'bout it?” Eddy asked again, pouring the bacon grease from the frying pan into his empty coffee cup.

“I can't just take off. I'll get canned.”

“Not if you get a doctor's note. You get a doctor's note, they can't touch you.”

“And who's going to give me a doctor's note?”

“A Doc Tor.”

“For what? They give notes these days to ladies with cracked sisters who show up in the middle of the night? Leave their babies on your doorstep?”

“For your feet, that's what. You limping around like you do, they'll give you a note. Short-term disability. You and Rebee can come with me to the cabin. You can recover. Have some fun, relax.”

“You live in a dump, Eddy. What are we supposed to do while you're at work?” I'd been to Eddy's. Only once. He lived on a mountain in a shack about as big as a prison cell.

“You'll be sleeping, that's what. I'll be home for breakfast and we'll have pancakes. I'll lay down a couple hours, then we've got the whole day. We can explore the woods, do a bit a climbing.”

“Well, that oughta cure my feet.”

“Or whatever. I only got three more shifts anyway. Then I can pull for some time off. We can go anywhere we want, have ourselves a holiday.”

“You a family man all of a sudden?”

Eddy looked wounded, but he was right. I needed some kind of plan for the kid. I couldn't just leave her alone after Eddy headed out.

So I got myself a doctor's note and fought with Dennis for a few weeks off. When I got back to the truck, Rebee was asleep, doubled over at the waist. I sidled in beside her, closed the door quietly and told Eddy it was done. I should have told him I was grateful, too, but I couldn't stand confessing to a man. So I asked him instead why I should pack up for Exshaw when my problem was fixed, for two weeks at least, and when Rebee and I could just hang out in the apartment and wait for Elizabeth to show.

Eddy didn't answer for the longest while, blowing smoke rings out his window. Rebee started to snore.

“I suppose I can't come up with a reason to suit you. 'Cause I want you to is not enough?”

“That's it? That's your big reason?”

“Whatever, Vic.”

* * *

It was a dump all right. Just like I remembered.

Rebee rode up with Eddy while I followed behind in my car. No way I wanted to be stuck in Exshaw without an escape vehicle. Eddy loved listening to the big ten-fours and roger-dodgers. Rebee probably stared at the box the whole way, waiting for the voices, hugging her knees, and sucking on her finger.

The drive took forever. Eddy wouldn't give it more gas when going up a hill, and Exshaw sat on top of a mountain, the last stop. I wanted to ram into the back of him to move us along. How could she just dump her kid off with Eddy like that, a stranger to her, a guy who could be worse than the last one for all she knew?

“This is where we sleep and this is where we eat and that's where the bathroom is in case you have to go.” You'd think we were in a palace or something, the way he carried on.

Rebee twirled around. “Do you got a bathtub?”

“Of course.”

Eddy's place was like one of those holiday cottages that starts with a promise of good times ahead, a getaway place from the rest of your life. Only then you can't find the oomph to fix the place up, and you're left with a dump. Sure you got a mountain out your back door. But it's still a dump.

“Will you help me with the tree?” I asked him, wanting to be outside more than in.

“Don't figure we have to rush it, do you?”

“I want to get it done.”

So we traipsed back out, Rebee on our heels, and headed to the truck. The mosquitoes were so thick I couldn't slap them off fast enough. Blood smears and bug guts coated my arms and legs. Eddy hopped in the back of the truck and started digging through the box. He hauled the tattered hockey flag from the bag and passed it down to me, then rooted around some more for the bungee cords and jumped back over the side.

We shuffled through the gravel, single file, to the turnoff from the highway that marked the end of Eddy's property. The highway dead-ended just up ahead. If you needed to get away from this shit piece of land, apparently you had to back out the way you came in.

“How about this one?” Eddy pointed to the tree closest to the turnoff, the tallest, its leaves choking on silver layers of filth. The cement plant chimney loomed in the distance, spewing great clouds of the stuff day and night over everything in sight.

“What you doing with the blanket?” Rebee squatted in the gravelly dip between the highway and the tree line, burying her fingers in grimy stones.

“It's not a blanket, it's a flag,” I told her.

Eddy strung the bungee through the hole in the flag corner, looping it through the tree branch and pulling it tight so the flag shot up and over our heads.

Rebee watched him closely, squinting into the sun. “How come you're putting it on that tree?”

“So your mom will know where to find us,” Eddy said, grunting as he hooked the bungee ends together. Then he stepped back and stood beside me, and we both looked up at the drab tattered flag, dangling lifelessly, like there was a dead body hidden beneath it.

“Mommy's coming? This morning?” Rebee sprung up out of the dirt, a load of pebbles falling from her fingers. Mosquitoes swarmed around her, chomping on her soft, pink skin.

“It's not morning, Rebee,” I told her. “It's almost suppertime. Eddy's going to work pretty soon.”

“Then will she come?”

“Maybe,” Eddy said. I threw him a warning look but he couldn't help himself, he had this obligation to answer each of her questions. “We left her that note. On Auntie Vic's apartment door. Remember? The note tells her to look for the flag.”

She looked around wildly for Elizabeth to pop out of nowhere and land in that tree. A
Slow Down, Children Playing
sign was getting ready to drop off its post. What children? And what business did they have playing on the road anyway? You'd never guess that shacks were hidden in the tangle of bushes beyond with people in them, children no less. Unless we were the only ones left.

“What if the note falls off?”

“We taped it on good. It'll stick.”

Rebee held her breath, crossing her arms over her middle and squeezing. “What if a wind blows it away?”

Eddy scooped her up and pressed his fingers over hers and yanked on the bottom of the flag. “See? It's not going anywhere.”

I could have killed my sister just then. “Enough already. Let's go back.”

Eddy hoisted Rebee onto his shoulders and I weaved along behind them into the cabin, swatting and slapping. We fixed ourselves cheese and pickle sandwiches, and Eddy packed extra to take with him to the plant. Then we made a bed on the floor for Rebee with the blankets I brought up in the car. It wasn't fancy, but she was used to less and never seemed to notice where she got put.

“So, you gonna be all right?” Eddy asked on the way out.

It was weird, me seeing him off to work like that, Rebee underfoot, like we were an ordinary family saying ordinary goodbyes. “Sure, yah. Don't work too hard.”

“Never do.”

“Are you coming back?” Rebee looked at Eddy, pitifully earnest. That kid had so much coming and going in her life she couldn't trust the difference. There was nothing ordinary here.

“'Course I'm coming back,” Eddy assured her. “You'll still be sleeping on that nice bed there. Then I'll make you some pancakes.”

Rebee watched him go like she almost believed him.

* * *

Eddy did three nights at the plant — six to six — then he pulled some time off for what he called our “summer vacation.” Some vacation. Me hobbling about, Elizabeth milling around in the back of our thoughts. Rebee kept insisting we walk down to the tree to check on the flag. She wanted to make that trip a hundred times a day. Either that, or park her butt in the dirt by the side of the road to wait.

Eddy rigged up a “build your own forest” game with an apple crate box lined with wax paper. He and Rebee kept going into the trees and coming back to the shack with as much as they could carry. Chunks of moss and rocks and twigs. Dead leaves and pinecones and other forest stuff. They arranged it all in the bottom of the crate. He got her to pretend they were angels looking down from heaven and the apple crate was their special kingdom. Only angels could see the tiny people running through the forest and swimming in the rusty old jar lid filled with water, which Eddy insisted was a lake so deep no one would ever find the bottom. Rebee kept bending over the crate, her bum in the air, and yelling, “There's one. He's a boy.” Eddy told her his name was Sam. I couldn't find Sam myself, only bugs crawling and slithering and buzzing about on top of the moss.