Blasted (52 page)

I was trying to put Tina to bed. “Come on, I'll read you a story.”

“I hate stories.”

“Well, what would you like to do?”

She wrapped her thin arms around her ribs where she sat on the bed, and rocked herself. “My mother sings to me.”

“Well, you don't want me to sing, I'll tell you that much.”

“Why not?”

“Sounds like I'm killing a cat.” I remembered Queenie's story about my father and shuddered, but Tina didn't notice.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Twenty-five.”

She stared at me. “You don't act like a grown-up.” Her rocking became agitated.

I squinted at her. How could a child look so utterly vulnerable and so utterly full of cosmopolitan disdain at the same time? “You must miss your mom.”

She stilled, looked away from me. “Yeah.”

I rooted through the pile of kids' books on the bedside table, pulling out each only to have it rejected in turn. In desperation I opened the drawer and rummaged around in it.

“There aren't any books in there,” she said.

“What
is
in here? Let's see… three plastic necklaces… no, four… and what are these?”

“Rubber bracelets.”

“Pretty. How many of these?” I put them out on the bed to count, and she arranged them by colour.

“Black means you do it. Blue means you'll…” she hesitated, “give, um, head. Pink means…”

“
What
?”

“Well, that's what the…”

“Tina, do you even know what that
means
?” She blushed and looked vague. “Okay, we're putting these bracelets away. Jeez.”

“That's what the Grade Eights say.”

“Did your school on the mainland have junior high and elementary in the same school?”

She nodded.

“I never thought I'd say this, but I disapprove.”

She shrugged. “It's not really true, anyway, that stuff about what the bracelets mean. People don't get it. I like colours. When you first came here you were all grey, but now you're different ones.”

I stared at her. My left eye throbbed. “I was all grey?”

“Yes. People have different colours,” she said with an air of royal condescension. “But not everyone can see it.
I
can.”

“You can?”

“Grandma says I have the sight.”

“She does?” My mind reeled.

“She says it runs in our family. Can
you
see them?” She looked up at me expectantly, her pale blue eyes boring into mine.

“You know what? Sometimes I can,” I said. “Not all the time, but since… Anyway.”

She smiled. “I
knew
it.”

I cleared my throat. “Okay, what else is in the drawer. Oh look, crayons.” She laid them out in a row like a wax rainbow. “And…”

And the pictures I had stolen. My baby father, sitting bolt upright, his eyes full of old caves and viciousness and the fear of running water. Carefully I pulled the pictures out from under the other debris. “And pictures,” Tina finished for me.

“Yes. Have you looked at these?”

“Yeah.”

She took them from me and rifled through them, brow furrowed, her face alternately softening and hardening like clouds scudding over a landscape. And then she stopped, handing me one of them. “I fixed this one.” It was the picture of my father as an infant that had frightened me so much. Sitting up in his crib, blurry, that terrifying, blank, vicious expression on his face. But now the baby was surrounded by a halo of rainbow colours, red and yellow and blue and green scratched waxily onto the slick black-and-white surface: crazy, joyful lines. She had taken her crayons to it. And the baby's face, that possessed a strangeness old as hills, now looked mischievous – sharing in a joke only he and I knew. I started to laugh.

“He needed some rainbow,” she said.

“I think he looks happier,” I agreed.

She let me read a story to her, and fell asleep part way through it. I turned out the light and began to tiptoe out of the room, but at the threshold I turned. She slept, her body tiny in my old bed, fair hair tangled across the pillow, fist clutching a corner of sheet. The lights from the Arterial shone in orange bars across the bed. As I watched she kicked with her legs and the blankets slid off onto the floor, and she whimpered in her sleep, curled up in her nightie like a little pale shrimp. Softly, I came forward and gathered the covers and spread them on top of her again, smoothing the top of the sheet over the roughness of wool blanket where it met her throat. Her face, screwed into a ferocious scowl, relaxed, and she rolled over onto her back. Her breath came soft and regular again. Sweet dreams little one, I said silently, and crept out as I had come.

I remembered the way she'd held herself, arms wrapped around her bony little ribs, rocking gently. I had done that as a child, as a teenager too. The need for it would steal over me when I lay thinking of nothing of consequence, when no grief shook my frame, when my mind was numb with nothings. I had once thought that this rocking, the ability to bring the tenderness that I longed for to myself, was my dead father or mother watching over me, but it had come to me before they had died. I had thought it was Shanawdithit, but I'd let her go now. No. This softening, like spring, somehow I had always been able to touch it. Something larger than I was came from within me, so full, so rich and simple; it outstripped my small red heart. An intimation of beauty or compassion: I would wrap my arms around my ribs and hold myself. There, there, I would say to myself. That word, repeated – meaningless, really – conveys such healing power.

CHAPTER 39

“But
I
want to put the angel on the tree-
eeee
!”

“It's always been Grandpa's job,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

“But I want to – ”

“– put the angel on the tree, yes, I got that the first three times you said it.”

Tina spun away, pouting. “Uncle John…”

“Oh, let her do it,” Grandpa said, looking indulgent. He picked her up around her waist so she could reach the top of the scrubby ten-dollar spruce we'd picked up at a gas station in the Goulds. There were bare spots as big as Tina's whole body and a thirty-degree crook where someone had sawed off a fork in the upper trunk. We had left the buying of the tree until the last possible minute, driving into the lot at top speed in Aunt Queenie's red car and picking the tree nearest to where we had happened to screech to a halt, tying it to the roof, and screeching off again, swearing and yelling at each other. We'd had to saw three feet off the bottom so it would fit into the living room, and it was already shedding needles like hard green rain.

“You never let
me
put the goddamned angel on the goddamned tree.”

Grandpa turned to me, Tina's legs trailing through the air as he moved. “Language.”

“Well, dear,” Doreen stepped in, throwing me a long-suffering glance, “if Ruby feels so strongly about it, let Uncle John put up the angel.”

“But I
want to put the ANGEL ON THE TREE-EEEEE!!!!!
”

“Fine! Put the angel on the tree! Jeez.” I sat on the couch and Grandpa lifted the girl as high as he could, while Queenie took picture after picture of Tina reaching, reaching with our battered angel clutched in her small grubby hand. Grandpa almost fell into the tree. Lily started barking. Tina, her small teeth bared in a grimace of concentration, stretched her arm even further. And suddenly, like magic, the angel sat perched on the tip of the tree – at a somewhat drunken angle, to be sure, but as the tree itself was so crooked one could hardly tell. She smiled down benevolently at us all.

“Well!” We looked at the tree. “Well!” Queenie repeated, and wiped tears from her bright little eyes. “I call that a Christmas tree!” It was covered with a motley selection of decorations, including some hideous filthy creations that I had made as a child, accompanied by several new ones – much better than mine – crafted by Tina in the last week.

“What a lucky girl you are,” Doreen said, enfolding her daughter in her arms. “Not too many people get
three
trees.”

“The one at our house, the one at Grandma's house, and this one!” she counted off on her fingers. Doreen had moved back home and bought a house near her mother in Mount Pearl with some of the money she got off her husband in the divorce settlement. “I'll say one thing for him,” she said to me one night when I visited her and Queenie, them polishing off a bottle of scotch, “he makes a lot of fuckin' money.” And we'd had a toast to his fuckin' money. It was the only time I ever heard her swear.

Tina ran over to me and climbed up onto the couch, bouncing. I put my arm around her, the tiff over the angel forgotten.

“So when's this mysterious performance you two have cooked up?”

Doreen asked.

“Uh, later?” I suddenly felt nervous.

“I brought Tina's dress in the car,” Queenie giggled from her chair.

“Now, now,
now
!” Tina's bouncing increased until she bounced herself right off the couch. “Come on, Ruby!”

The house had gotten much quieter since Tina had moved into Doreen's new house. I'd relocated to my old room, considered looking for work as a server, then in a fit of forward-thinking (okay, after my interview with her, a woman at the unemployment office had practically coerced me into it) signed up for a course in arts accounting. I was, I'd announced to Blue, going to become an Accountant to the Stars. He hadn't laughed, which made me nervous. He'd been thoughtfully silent and then, tinny on the phone, I heard him clapping his hands.

Tina and Doreen still visited, and often Tina and I would have sleep-overs. She'd entered a new phase in her feminine development, one that inspired her to cut the hair on all her Barbies, refuse to wear dresses, and wear miniature combat boots. The other day she had been visiting Grandpa and me, and had found Gramma's wedding dress in the closet, still wrapped in drycleaning film. She'd made me put it on and I'd flapped my arms and run about the bedroom. Her face had gotten fierce and thoughtful. “I like that,” she said with deep seriousness. “It's funny.” She'd asked Aunt Queenie and her mother if they still had their wedding dresses; Doreen did not, but Queenie had her mother's, which she herself had worn. It was this, my great-grandmother's dress, that Queenie had brought in her car, and Tina and I went up to the bedroom, giggling, to change. At least, she was giggling; I was biting my nails. “What're we doing again?”

“Grandma's going to put on the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies and we're going to dance. Button me up.”

“In these dresses.”

“In these dresses. Like
birds
, come on, Ruby.” Great-Grandma's dress was, of course, too big for Tina; it was covered with lace, and did up the back with about five hundred tiny buttons covered with satin the colour of heavy cream, browned a little with age. White and ivory billowed about our heads, our arms, all lace and satin. We wrapped a belt around Tina's non-existent waist and bloused the dress up over it so she wouldn't trip, Gramma's veil floated over my head, and then Tina yelled, “
Now
, Grandma!”

A pause, then the Dance of the friggin Sugarplum Fairies wafted up. Tina screamed and sailed out of the room. I heard her hopping down the stairs, cawing crow-like; I gazed at myself lonely in the mirror, all in white. Here goes, Gramma, and screeching like a gull, I sailed down over the steps behind Tina, flapping my arms.

“Ruby said I get to open one present. Do I get to open one present?”

Flopped on the floor recovering my breath, I looked at Doreen apologetically through the veil. “I was always allowed to do that on Christmas Eve night – is that okay?”

“Well… most of her presents are under the tree at home.”

“There's the stuff from Ruby and Uncle John!” Tina pleaded.

“Okay. Sure.”

Tina gripped my hand. “I'm going to open the present from Ruby!”

I felt touched. “Aw.”

Tina gave me an ecstatic hug and ran out of the room, going for the plastic bags full of presents already set by the door for when she and her mother left tonight. She came back in carrying my incredibly badly wrapped gift; I had outdone myself, having covered the crumpled, re-used Christmas paper with layers of clear packing tape.

I got off the floor and flopped on the couch. “That was quite a performance,” Doreen said dryly. “They should book you two at the Hall.”

“How'd you like my solo?”

“Piercing.” I'd run around the room screeching until Queenie was crying from laughing, and Doreen had covered her ears.

“Tina's was good, though,” I said.

“Really first-rate,” she agreed in her best radio-announcer voice. “And then the ending where you had a point-counterpoint thing going, a sort of fugue on the twinned themes of weddings and birds, exploring the possibilities of flight within the confines of commitment…”