The Shore Girl (21 page)

Grandma found a bottle of children's vitamins in one of her boxes in the living room. She said they would make me right again. I stared at the bottle until the letters turned fuzzy. According to the lid's date, I was twenty-five years too late.

“I'm sorry, Joey.” She cleared her throat as though something stuck in there. One hand covered the other, like she was holding a dying bird. “I'm sorry,” she said again.

I didn't know what she was sorry for. I hadn't told her about Rebee. I hadn't said one word about drowning inside. About feeling how maybe for the first time in my life I'd found something to hang onto, but now I had just a sinking feeling, like I'd let it slip through my fingers.

“It's okay,” I mumbled. I stared at her swollen ankles bulging out of her knitted slippers. I wanted her to leave me alone. She lifted one hand. A stone turtle rested in the other. She petted it.

“I shouldn't have let her go.”

Who? Who was this now? Why couldn't she go work on her cutouts? Why couldn't she throw out all this junk? Why was she petting a fake turtle?

“That day they came and took her back. She was still a little girl. But I couldn't get her to eat. Couldn't get her to sleep. After a while, I couldn't do any of it anymore.”

My mother? Was that who she was talking about? I didn't want to hear it. It wouldn't bring her back.

“Kids do that,” I said bitterly. “They have bad dreams and their stomachs hurt. What did you expect?” I pictured Carla's orphans, sitting in the dirt, gobbling down their lunches, devouring every crumb, not one of them barfing.

“That social services woman says it happens sometimes. Your mother didn't cry when she was led to that woman's car. She didn't even look back. It was my greatest shame.”

“You shouldn't have got her if you didn't plan to keep her.” It's not right. Giving something. Taking it back.

Grandma pulled a Kleenex out of her housecoat pocket and sniffed and squeezed and blew. Her other hand cradled the turtle.

“Why did you?”

“You can't understand, Joey.”

I wanted to slap her puffy cheek. If I couldn't understand, why did she bring it up?

“The Shore girls were everything to me. They were my life. Little Elizabeth. She was so precious. When Albert sent me away, I didn't know what to do. I'd been with those girls every day since — since their mother died. And then Albert barred me from the house. There were children with special needs who needed good homes. I heard about it on a radio program. On the
CBC
. So I phoned the social services.”

Grandma must have thought, why not, trade one little girl for another. But then she got Carla, who was already wrecked, who wanted to sleep in a closet on a pile of shoes and hide bits of food under the rug.

“I wanted to help,” Grandma was saying. “I thought I could provide a good home. I won't turn you away, Joey. You can be cross. I won't turn you away.”

“Whatever.” I moved around her standing there in the junk of the living room and stumbled towards the door. “It doesn't matter. She's gonna come back.” Grandma called my name, but I kicked open the screen and ran.

* * *

At suppertime I pushed peas around my plate with my fork. Grandma was staring at me with her fat face, so I stood up quickly and offered to wash the dishes instead of just drying them.

I was scrubbing the crusties off the frying pan when Melvin Peevley stopped by with the weekly grocery order. He hoisted the paper bags onto the kitchen table and sat down beside Grandma. I stood at the sink with my back to both of them.

“How's the boy making out?” he asked Grandma, as if I wasn't right there.

I stared at their square reflections in the kitchen window. Grandma counted bills from the little purse around her neck and passed them to Melvin. Wisps of her hair stuck up every which way. Melvin's ponytail dangled like a dead rat. He smelled like sausage. They chatted about blueberries and bagging deer and about the coffee house at the LetterDrop, how the whole town takes a whirl at the karaoke mic and then everyone gets carrot cake. Grandma asked about some guy with a fiddle, and Melvin said, he's dead, remember, he'd brought her the program, and then he listed the people who went to the guy's funeral. I held the potato knife and stabbed at my fingertip under the suds. I thought about the similarities between wrists and antlers, about sawing them off, and which would be harder.

But then Melvin was blabbering about how the girl didn't seem to need much. What girl? I whirled around, flinging bubble strings across the counter.

“I said I'd deliver her groceries,” he was telling Grandma. “Told her it would be no extra trouble. But she won't have it. Got a steely look, that girl.”

Grandma had her mouth pursed in a wrinkled frown.

“We were hoping you might know something, Nelda. Like what's going on over there.”

I plunked down in the only chair between them.

Melvin looked at me with concern. “What'd you do to your face, son?”

I blurted, “Did you see her?” A pinprick of watery blood fell on the table. I swiped my wet hands on my jeans, smearing pink.

“Well she's gone, Joey.”

“Rebee. Gone?” I fought the cramps, clamping my jaw shut.

Melvin shook his head like I was an idiot. “Not Rebee. I was just over there. It's her mother who's gone.”

“You talked to her? When?” I wanted to ram him with my fists. Why could he be the one?

“Just a jiffy ago. Before I came here.” Then he laughed, pleased with himself, and winked at Grandma. “Your boy here is a lovesick bull.”

I pushed away from the table and flailed my way to my room. My eyes watered. Baby's tears. I tried to fight them back but they wouldn't stop coming. I could still smell her, still feel her body pressed against my thudding chest. Why wouldn't she talk to me? Why wouldn't she come to her door when it was me standing on the other side? I had been banned like the others. Like the Judge banned the old woman. Like the old woman banned my mother. Like my mother banned me. All that hurt. All that pathetic seeping hurt going round and round.

Melvin eventually said his goodbyes.

Grandma eventually got herself into bed.

I eventually padded down the hallway and knocked on her door. My stomach was eating me from the inside out, hissy and burning.

“Who's that?”

“Me, Grandma.”

“Joey?”

I'd never been in her bedroom. It was surprisingly neat, no junk stacks floor to roof, front to back. Everything was pink. Pink bedspread, pink lampshades, pink doilies, pink poodle dolls. She lay like a giant creampuff in a sea of pink pillows. She squinted as I got closer, the light from the hallway creeping in with me.

“What is it, Joey. Did you have a bad dream?”

“Grandma, I need to ask you something.”

“What, dear?” I sat down beside her on the sagging bed.

“Why did the Judge ban you from his house?”

“Joey.”

“Please.”

She patted her hand along her night side table, stalling. Her glasses were beside her Kleenex box. I reached over and passed them to her and sat on her bed. In the dim light, pink from the pillows splashed colour across her leathery cheeks. I waited. We both just stared at each other.

“I knew too much,” she said finally. “That was all, Joey. That was my crime.”

“Too much about what?”

“About the Judge.”

Maybe that was my crime too. Maybe I knew too much. I knew her smell. I knew the shape of her. I knew that she used to dream about a daddy. That her real daddy was dead. That she waited by the side of the road for her mother to wake up. That she was not unbreakable, even though she looked at you with those fierce warrior eyes.

Grandma said something.

“What?” I leaned in closer.

“Not Albert. The other one.”

The other one? “Two judges?”

“Oh, yes. There were two. William Sacks. A circuit judge as well. Albert's peer, but much younger. I met him, only the once. He was too glib, too handsome, too smartly put together for his own good. He wore that gold watch on a chain in his vest pocket, something an older man would choose. He kept taking that watch out, opening it up, snapping it closed again, as though time flew by for an important man like him. I didn't like the look of him.”

Grandma was trying to sit up, breathing in short little breaths. I propped another pillow behind her back.

“So what about him?”

“It was so long ago, Joey.”

“Please, Grandma. It's important.” I didn't know why, but it was.

She looked haggard, worn out, blinking behind her splotchy glasses into the light of the hallway. “There had been only the one time — just that one time when Albert went to Edmonton for the Damer boy trial. William came to the house. He was fully aware that Albert was gone. Elizabeth put Victoria to bed. She and William drank brandy in front of the fire. She didn't stop him.”

Didn't stop him from what?

Oh. This was awkward.

Grandma eyed me warily, like she wasn't sure she should go on. “Do you know about girls, Joey?”

Jesus. “I know they don't lay eggs, Grandma. So, what happened?”

A long pause. “When she started to show, Elizabeth couldn't bear it. She told Albert everything. I warned her not to, but she wouldn't listen. Such yelling in that house after that.” Grandma pulled a Kleenex out from somewhere beneath the blankets and wiped at her nose. “And then, of course, Elizabeth died. So suddenly. And then nothing could be done to make it right for either one of them. Albert let it eat away at him, until he forgot how much he once loved her.”

What a picnic, growing up in that house. No wonder the Shore sisters weren't that eager to stick around. Maybe that's why the Judge offed himself. A little after the fact, but still. . .

“So what about the other judge?” I asked. Rebee's real grandfather. The man with the pocket watch. “Did he come back? Did he want Harmony?”

“Harmony?”

“The baby. Did he try to get the baby?”

“No. No. Nothing like that. But Albert still had to work with him. Bad business, that was. I don't know why he didn't just give up on judging and take up something else.”

He was still out there somewhere. Rebee's grandpa. William Sacks. Maybe Rebee ran into him at a fruit stand and didn't even know.

Grandma reached towards the nightstand for her half-filled glass and I passed it to her and she sipped on her water. “He's long dead now. Years ago. It was all over the radio. Killed by a runaway car. Late in the night, right in front of his house. He and his apple tree knocked to the ground. He didn't die instantly. He lay on the ground for a long time, and if someone had found him, he might have been saved. It was like that driver was sitting there waiting for him.”

“That's gross,” I said, a pinecone in my belly, its layers scraping my insides. “Who did it?”

“Someone he'd sentenced most likely. That's what the radio said. Judges have many enemies.”

I could hear rumblings from under her pink blankets.

“Oh dear, I have to visit the bathroom.”

I pulled her blanket away from her. A bad egg smell rose up. Grandma slid one massive leg across the sheets and let it fall to the floor. Then the other. I tucked my hands under her jiggling elbow and heaved till she was up and moving.

I held onto her until we got to the hall. Then I watched her feel her way unsteadily past the boxes piled floor to ceiling, past the detergent drums and newspaper stacks. When she got to the bathroom door, she turned back to me and said, “The gossips in this town know nothing, Joey.”

* * *

I dreamed bad dreams. I dreamed we were driving on a highway that dropped into a bottomless hole. The car was greasy with fingerprints. Rebee had no clothes, she was bare everywhere, the kind of fantasy I would gladly work myself into a frenzy over, except her body was blistering and char-broiled and her breasts were black and hanging, nothing like the way she is, and my seatbelt wouldn't pry loose no matter how hard I yanked, and Carla popped up from the backseat and dangled a pocket watch in my face and whispered slobbery in my ear,
What did I tell you, Joey, what did I
tell you
. I stumbled into the bathroom and kneeled in front of the toilet until my knees turned blue.

* * *

Grandma looked off balance when I came into the kitchen the next morning. She'd forgotten to take her curlers out. Her apron hung lopsided around her huge middle.

“Did you sleep well, Joey?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said, lifting muffins from the tin. They dropped to the counter like rocks.

It was possibly the worst night ever, except maybe that time when Carla crawled home with that sicko from the bar, and he sat on the couch and swatted at the
terrible angel
coming out of the
TV
.

“The happy pills must be working,” Grandma was saying.

What was I? Three? “I'm going out to get some fresh air.”

She wrapped my muffins in a paper towel and kissed me on the cheek. “Take these. And don't play near the road.”

I wandered over to the drop-off back of our houses and chucked the muffins one at a time into the forest below. I thought about that mess over at the Shore house, the stuff Rebee inherited. About her grandpa who wasn't. Her missing mom. It wasn't those details that were hard to understand. I had a grandma who wasn't. My mom was missing too.

What I couldn't figure out is why Rebee was avoiding me. I thought about her pressed against me in that car. Everything about it had felt good, even my stomach. Why couldn't we just stay like that?

I spotted her backpack first, then the rest of her. She was zigzagging her way down the steep hill, as sure-footed as a mountain goat.

“Rebee,” I yelled. “Rebee. Wait.” For one happy second I thought everything would be right again.