Mud Girl (11 page)

Abi becomes aware that she is clutching the book in her
hands so tightly that her fingers feel strained. She opens it to the letter G.

Gilgai: a hollow where rainwater collects.
Hmm. Here's one:
geodesic. The shortest possible line between two points on a sphere.

Like mapping out the flight of a plane when you're traveling the earth, Abi thinks. She looks closely at the book, and then across the water again.
The shortest line…between herself and that thick carpet between her toes.
Well, that would be directly across the water. But that's not possible. That is the nature of water: you have to go around.

“Here you are!” It's Jude, and he's not happy. His voice is angry when he crouches beside her. “I feel like an idiot, marching around the beach yelling out ‘Abi!' Why didn't you come when I called?”

“I didn't hear you.” She closes the dictionary. She's not going anywhere today.

Blinking in the Light

I
t's not as if they had much to say on the way to the downtown beach, but on the way home the silence is different. Jude pulls the steering wheel tightly and brakes too quickly. With each of those fierce tugs, Abi feels something in her tighten, and tighten again.

She has to break the silence. “That girl I borrowed the dictionary from…” Jude hadn't been too happy when Abi had to find Amanda to return it before they could go.

“Amanda,” he says, his voice similar to Amanda's when she'd said “Jude.”

“She doesn't seem really part of your group.”

“She's not really part of any group. She just plunks herself down. Some of the guys call her ‘hen.'” He laughs. “She's definitely not a chick!”

He looks sideways at Abi. “You know what I mean? She is. She's a hen. Looks out for everybody. Won't let anybody dui – drive under the influence. Not even just a couple of beers! She'll take your keys away from you, wrestle you to the ground if necessary, with those big arms of hers! Makes sure you don't swear too much when little kids are around. Offers you books to read. The dictionary!” He laughs again.
This time at me
, Abi thinks. But it's better than the scowls and silence.

“Does she have a boyfriend?” Abi doesn't know why she asks this; maybe because of Amanda's vehemence over pregnancy.

“Who? Amanda?” His tone is enough. “Right,”

Abi says, and looks out the window. “She's not a chick.”

Who's a chick? Am I a chick? Is it something I want to be?
Something tells Abi that Amanda just might strike a blow to anyone calling her that to her face. But “hen” wouldn't sit so well with her either.

It's talk-talk after that, chip-chipping away at the ice between them until it feels as if it should be gone. “Where's this?” she asks, as he pulls up in front of a house, an orange house with a yellow door and window frames the same. Jude looks at her blankly.

“My house,” he says. He gives himself a gentle swat on the side of the head. “I'm supposed to be taking you home!” He shifts back into reverse.

Abi sees a blur of face at the wide front window, a pale smudge against the dark draperies, and then it's gone, and that bright door bursts open.

“It's Dyl!” she calls out, and Jude brakes sharply.

“Don't go!” Those little arms hammer at the door. “Don't go!”

Jude leans out the window. “Buddy,” he says, “I have to.”

The boy bursts into tears, and as Jude turns the engine off a woman comes to the door. “Oh, you're home,” she says, relieved. She puts an arm up to the door jamb and she leans her head into her elbow: a sort of vertical hammock. She'd be pretty if she wasn't so tired looking. She begins to cough, and the coughing makes her eyes water and she swipes at them with a Kleenex. Jude puts his head farther out the window and tries to speak, but she waves her hand at him as if to say “Don't bother me – wait.”

Abi pulls at the truck door handle. “I'll walk to the bus stop,” she tells Jude.

His shoulders slump and he pulls the keys from the ignition. “Okay.” He warns Dyl out of the way and swings open the door. “Dyl and I'll walk you.”

Abi looks back at the woman in the doorway, the woman Jude has not introduced her to. The woman lifts her hand in a tired wave, and shakes her head slightly before turning away.

Something tugs at Abi. It's stupid, she knows, but she wants to do as Dyl does, and shout “Don't go!”

But Dyl starts after the woman. That is, he makes a few quick steps in her direction, then back to Jude, back to her, back and back again. It would be comical except for the look of distress on his face.

Finally he dashes to the woman, grabs her limp hand. “Danma. Boat lady.”

She turns and looks at Abi. “Is that you?” she says. “Are you the girl on the river?”

Mud girl. Back again.
Abi nods.

“Come,” says the woman. “Please. I need you to show me how to fold a paper boat.”

I need
, she says.

Behind Abi now, Jude mutters, “There's always something,” and he follows her into the house.

The inside is much like the outside. Bright, full of colour, crayon box colours. Forest green and orange afghans. A mash of daisies in a jug on the painted table is the only white in the room, and all that colour makes the white almost seem like a real colour. Abi always used to throw the white crayon away. All it ever did was pick up chips of real colour from the others, and if she did use it, what would appear on the paper was streaky something-or-other, but never white. Here the daisies glow with petals white-white, centres yellow-yellow,
and stems green-green. She can't stop herself; she touches the petals.

Jude's mother smiles at Abi and she has the most beautiful smile. Slow and spreading. “I'm Lily Arden,” she says, and puts out her hand, and even though her hand is cool and fragile, there's still a strength to it. Maybe it's just in the extra moment she holds on.

She has a collection of paper that looks like the sort flowers are wrapped in at the grocery store. “I always buy myself flowers and I always save it,” she says. The paper is thick, greeny-blue, with a slick surface.

Abi begins to fold. There is no time to lose; that's the sense Lily gives. Beside Abi, she begins with a second piece of paper. Dyl stands across the table from them, and Jude waits by the door, arms crossed over his chest. Abi can feel him watching, and her hands begin to shake.

Lily pauses, and Abi knows that she has noticed her hands. Makes her shake more. Then Lily looks up at Jude, and it's hard to know what she's thinking. It's not good for a mother to look at a son like that, though, with one brow lifted and her eyes cold.

“Boats!” Dyl reminds them.

They keep on, fold for fold. There's an odd quality to Lily's motions and her silence: an urgency, and at the same time, a holding back…no, a conserving of energy. Something
about her scares Abi. She follows Abi's motions and there's no need, at the end, to check if she got it.

“I need to lie down now,” she says, and leaves the room. Just like that.

Dyl watches after her. “Danma sick,” he says. He picks up both of the paper boats and settles himself into a wide upholstered chair as if he is going to wait for his grandmother while she sleeps.

Some part of Abi wants to sit and wait with him. Instead she says, “I'll take the bus home now.” When Jude looks as if he might protest, she says: “It's not far.”

“Okay.” Jude follows her to the door, and pulls it closed behind him. Outside, he kisses her, a quick hard kiss, something that leaves her feeling as if she's never going to have what she wants.

Sundress

T
he sun is going down. Makes Abi think of being caught in the flush of a tipped-over glass of apple juice, all warm-coloured and yellow. But before the bus comes, the colour is gone and she begins to feel a little creepy out by the roadside in the murk of late summer evening.

The swing of the bus door sounds almost familiar, though she knows that can't be: one bus must be the same as the next…but yes, there's Horace.

“Abi, my girl!” He motions to the seat up front and across from him, where he can turn and talk with her when he has the chance.

“I met your friend Mary,” he says.

Takes her a moment to remember who Mary is.

“I like her,” he says.

Abi decides she likes that about him, that he can say it like that, straight out as a little boy would, Dyl even, and it's not until then that she realizes she thinks of Ernestine as not really having any friends, a sort of island, all on her own.

He's looking at Abi as if for a reply of some sort, but then the road calls for his attention. At the next light, he turns back to her. “You've had a bit of sun, Mary told me. Are you all right now?”

She nods.

“Though you're looking a bit red today.”

She glances down at her shoulder and sure enough; she pokes at it and the spot stays white for too long.

“You've been having a busy summer,” he says. “Too busy to make it to an old man's train set. I told Mary to bring you along. She said she'd see how it goes and all.” The wistfulness of his tone catches her.

How it goes and all.
What was it she said to Ernestine about Horace? Nothing, really. She'd turned her back on the whole subject. Abi never thought she'd be blocking the path of true love.

Horace stops the bus at the stop that is almost directly in front of her house. He says nothing about it, though; just his usual cheery wave. “Bye now, Abi!”

She should have known this about Horace – she should have known he wouldn't care where she lives. Just the same, as she steps down onto the step that causes the bus door to open, Horace peers out his window towards her house front. It's dark.

“Anybody home?” he asks, and Abi ignores the concern in his voice.

“I'll be fine,” she says.

Dad hasn't turned on a light yet, and again the television is off. The silence is sweet and waiting for someone to say something.

“Dad?” begins Abi.

Has he been there all afternoon? With that coffee mug in hand?

When she turns on the overhead light, she notices a second mug, and then the cookie crumbs that dot the gold-flecked Arborite tabletop. Dad blinks in the light.

“Did you have a visitor?”

Dad looks up at her, and his eyes seem blank. It's as if, inside his head, someone's packing boxes and is moving out, taking him away bit by bit.

“Dad?” Abi asks.
Just leave one piece, just one.

But his look is still blank, even with a vague nod, and she backs away into her room and closes the door, doesn't even bother to turn her own light on. She takes off her skirt, slips her
bra off from under the
T
-shirt, and climbs in between the sheets.

When she closes her eyes, she tries hard not to see that man at the kitchen table. Instead she tries to wrap her mind around the moment that Jude kissed her…or the moment he said he wanted his friends to meet her…but the memory won't stay still. Strangely, all she does see is Dyl settling into that chair, waiting for his grandmother.

At last she hears Dad get up from the table and plod to his room. She hears the creak of his old metal-frame bed, then all is still. It's very dark outside the window, with that alive stillness of summer night, the gurgle of the river water.

T
he sun wakes her again. Again, she sees the red of the scarf on the over-turned box beside the bed. She pulls her pillow up behind her, and sits and knits. It takes a couple of rows to feel comfortable, to find a rhythm. She likes how her breathing and thoughts follow the pace. From the living room, she hears the morning strains of “O Canada.” From under the house, she hears the river.

Why did my mother leave?

She puts the knitting down and pulls on shorts, leaves on the
T
-shirt she wore to bed.