When the Saints (11 page)

Part of me was secretly thrilled that I might become a different person for real, not just in my pretend games. Maybe I’d be a girl who wore brand name jeans and had a horse in a barn whose tail I could brush whenever I felt like it. My new friends would have names like Victoria and Cindy and they’d invite me to sleepovers where the worst crime a dare could lead to would be swiping macaroons from the pantry. I’d start over, just like Ma said.

I hadn’t argued with her when she told me I was shipping out. Nobody in our house was eating enough, and wherever I was headed couldn’t be any more miserable. I’d always wondered what it was like to be in a normal family, one that watched movies together and could make it through a whole board game without someone hurling another player into the wall. I’d see kids at school take out Velcro lunch bags with their names on them, talking about how their grandparents brought them to PEI to see Anne of Green Gables’ house. The only place Grandma Jean ever took us was the Legion parking lot. She was watching us for the day and said she was just going to pop in and say hello to Gladys. She came running out three hours later, big braless tits swinging under her light blue World’s Greatest Grandmother
T-shirt, yelling, “SHIT, YOU FELLERS, I FORGOT ALL ABOUT YAS!” By then Bird and Jackie were jumping from roof to roof on parked cars and Poppy had eaten a thyroid pill she dug out from between the seats.

So, I was intrigued. But I hadn’t even met this Barbara woman, and the way Ma was talking, it was as if we were never going to see each other again.

“Your father’s heart is going to break when he finds out you ran away.”

“Ran away?”

I glared at her, slung the backpack over my shoulder and stormed down to the foot of the driveway. I didn’t look back and she didn’t follow, but I could hear her up there sobbing like a professional mourner.

Barbara Best arrived right on time. I jumped into the spotless back seat and told her to drive away fast.

“Shouldn’t I speak with your mother?” she asked.

“She’s too emotional. She said we should just go.”

Barbara Best waved up at Ma. As she started to drive off, I looked back and saw Ma running down the driveway flailing her arms. Barbara was already firing a hundred questions at me and didn’t hear my mother yelling for her to stop. For the next eleven years of my life, I’d wonder if my mother was trying to call the whole thing off.

“So, Tabatha, what do you like to eat?”

I opened my mouth then closed it again. I was about to say anything my mother didn’t kill herself.

“Pizza.”

“Well, I’ve got ham and potatoes ready for the oven back home. Hopefully that’ll do for tonight.”

My stomach growled, and Barbara laughed. “Goodness gracious!”

I realized right then we weren’t going to get along. Goodness gracious? What an asshole. Plus, she had a whole rack of Billy Joel cassettes.

On the way out of town, we got stuck behind the Acadian Lines coach that stopped once a day outside the library. Passengers spilled out of its grey belly and started crossing the road right in front of Barbara’s car, so we just had to sit there and wait. I snuck a few glances at the bus shelter I’d smashed up a few weeks before. They still hadn’t replaced the glass, just duct-taped some cardboard in its place.

“What are your hobbies? Do you enjoy gardening?”

Obviously she’d failed to notice our pop bottle tree.

“Sure.”

Somehow I knew before he stepped off the bus that my father was on board. He was wearing a wrinkled old suit, carrying a garbage bag slung over one shoulder. He had a day-old shiner and his knuckles were bandaged up, which might make another man seem tough but only made him look more pathetic. I suddenly realized that he must cause as much trouble in jail as out of it, that Daddy was Daddy no matter where he went. He just couldn’t shut off the tap.

I watched him bum a smoke off the bus driver and lean against a tree trunk to light it with a pack of soggy matches. Barbara Best followed my gaze and said, “Lock your door, Tabatha. You never
know with these characters.” She tapped her fingers impatiently on the wheel and a half second before her open-toed sandal met the gas pedal, Daddy finally looked over. His face broke into a gap-toothed smile when he saw me. His eyes flicked to Barbara in the driver’s seat and then his mouth hardened. He gave me a questioning look and I gave him the finger.

While Barbara Best rambled about how a seed needs to be nurtured in the right soil, I twisted around and watched through the back window as my father walked out into the road and grew smaller and smaller and smaller.

“W
RONG ROOM
.”

“I’m your daughter—Tabby.”

He turns his head to look, blinks a few times and tries to sit up. “Holy whoredust. Where the fuck did you come from? Am I dead? Where’s your mother at?”

I walk in and stand at the side of his bed, behold the patron Saint of Shitville.

“How are you, Daddy?”

“I thought I was fine, but now I think I’m cracking up.” His voice is ragged from years of smoking outside in a T-shirt. It sounds like sandpaper running over his vocal chords. He closes his eyes and presses his palms against his lids. Then his eyes fly open again and he reaches over and tries to touch my face.

I flinch.

“You look like me, around the eyes. In the jaw, too.” He stares. “Are you really here? I’m dying, you know.”

“I heard.”

“The doctors say there’s nothing they can do. They’re crooks, every one of them.” He struggles again to sit up. “Fucking flapjacks! My girl Tabby is here to visit me. I must be almost dead. Where have you been?”

“A lot of places.”

“Bad places, I bet. Me too, girl. This place is the worst of them. Your mother left me here at the mercy of these goons.”

“I can’t say I blame her, Daddy. You never took care of
her.
You beat her and left her whenever you felt like it.”

“As soon as I got too weak to hold my own dick, she made a break for it. After all them good years.”

“What good years? Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? After you put us all through hell and made us all ashamed to be who we are?”

“Nobody can make you ashamed of who you are except yourself. You’re not too stupid to know that, girl.” He gives up trying to sit up and falls back on the pillow.

“Don’t tell me what I know.”

I grip his bed rail, remembering the time he slammed my face into the sink because I didn’t want to brush my teeth and my front tooth broke in half. I didn’t smile again until I was fifteen years old and some welfare-sponsored dentist came to Raspberry. I’m blinded with rage for a few seconds, and then I can almost see it seeping out of me, black and pooling on
Daddy’s white sheets. I watch my right hand fly out and grab his throat. It pushes down hard on his Adam’s apple and he starts laughing. His face goes from blue to crimson and he’s laughing. He’s not struggling, and I have to ease up or kill him. I release my grip and he coughs and coughs. A nurse sticks her head in, but Daddy waves her off.

“Tabby Cat, listen to me,” he manages. “I’m not right. In my head and my heart, I’ve never been right. My father beat the human out of me. If I knew what sorry was, I’d be sorry for the things I done.” He sighs. “I just fuck and fight and eat. That’s it. I don’t feel nothing. Can’t even fuck anymore. You can kill me right now. I’d rather it was you than Doctor Donkey Dick.”

“I’m not going to kill you, you asshole. I’m going to let you lie there thinking about how you shovelled so much shit on top of us we’ll never climb out from under it.”

“You hate me, do you?” He blinks. “Do you love me a little bit, too?”

Before I open my mouth to answer that, something Ma once told me jumps into my head. She said when Daddy found out she was pregnant with Bird, he wouldn’t leave her side. He sang songs to her belly and built a crib out of an old chicken coop. That’s how Bird got his name.

Daddy’s small eyes case my face, studying his own blue eyes, his own mouth. Then he reaches down and shoves his hand between the mattress and the bed frame. “I got something for your mother. Come help me.”

I push his arm out of the way and slide my hand in until
my fingertips touch something. I nudge it into my grasp, work it forward and pull out a soft wad of bills.

“Stick that in your purse and don’t talk to any of those crooks on the way out.” He pats my hand and closes his lids. “You look just like me. Not like your sister. She looks like a beggar. Nothing worse than one of those.”

When I get to the door, he opens his eyes again. “Hey, girl.”

I pause.

“There’s a lot more where that came from.”

I
GET IN THE TRUCK AND COUNT IT QUICKLY.
T
HERE’S
over two thousand dollars. My hands shake as I roll up the bills and stick them down my boot. I press the gas and peel out of there, speeding toward the highway turnoff. My heart’s pounding in my ears as I try to form a plan. If I drive to Yarmouth, I can catch the ferry to Bar Harbor. I heard it’s easy to find work in the States, and no one will know me.

I’m almost to the end of the ramp when I glimpse Janis’s little purple jacket scrunched up on the passenger-side floor. I hesitate then slam on the brakes. The tires lift up a cloud of dust that slowly settles on the windshield.

I think of a story Daddy once told me about Grandpa Jack. He was walking home from school one day and saw a four-year-old girl crying on her porch. She ran up to him and pleaded for help, said she’d gone out in the yard to feed the chickens and
her grandmother forgot she was outside and locked the door by mistake. She’d yelled through the window, but the old woman couldn’t remember how to undo the latch. Jack went and got a slim jim. He came back and pried the latch, told the little girl to take her granny to lie down in one of the bedrooms while he strolled around the house taking whatever valuables he could find. When the little girl emerged from the room, he told her never to tell anyone he’d been inside their house. “If you even tell a kitty cat that you saw me,” he said, “I’ll come back and kill your granny in the night.”

Grandpa Jack told Daddy it was as if Garnet had taken over his body. Garnet wouldn’t think twice about doing something like that to people so helpless. He’d call it Lady Luck. Daddy told me it was the only time he saw his father regret anything he’d done. But did that story make Daddy pause for thought any time he caught himself pulling a Grandpa Jack? Fuck no. He was probably worse than Jack and Garnet put together. And he didn’t even have the decency to call it opportunity. He’d come home with someone else’s engine in his truck and act like he’d had no choice.

I was about to pull a Daddy, and I hate us both for it. I whip the truck around in a U-turn and head back down the ramp. It’s one-way, but I’m not worried about oncoming cars. Anyone smart enough to leave this town left long ago. I check the rear-view mirror all the way to the trailer, and when I pull in the driveway, I wait a few minutes to be sure no one’s on my tail. It’s so quiet a deer pokes its head out of the trees at the end of the lot.
I open the truck door and it sprints off. I stare at the empty space where it was standing. Then I walk up to the trailer and mount the rickety stairs.

“Which one of you has been praying for a miracle?” I ask, bursting inside.

Swimmer is perched on the sofa, sucking on his fingers. He pops them out of his mouth and raises his pale little hand in the air.

B
EFORE
I
HEAD BACK TO
S
OLACE
R
IVER
, I
DRIVE
P
OPPY
to get a month’s worth of groceries then hand the rest of the cash to Ma.

“That bastard!” She drops to her knees. “He had all that money all this time? What was he going to do with it? And us here with kids nearly starving to death and Bird needing a decent chair.” She slaps the floor a few times with her palm. “Why does he punish me like this? Why? After all the years I lied for him and cooked for him and acted as his goddamned whipping post.”

“Daddy is not right, Ma. He said so himself. He’s like that doll Poppy had that came out of the factory without ears or a nose.”

“I remember that ugly thing,” Poppy says. “What was her name?”

“Bernadette.”

“Bernadette!” she shrieks. She follows me to the bedroom, sits on the bed as I whisk a brush through my wet hair. “You’re going back to that man in those ratty jeans?” She goes to the closet and
rummages around, grabs a dress from the back. It’s cornflower blue with tiny white flowers. “Here. This don’t fit me no more.”

It slides down over my curves like a glove. Poppy catches my eye in the full-length mirror hanging on her closet door and gives me a sad smile. She pulls a blow-dryer out of a drawer and offers to dry my hair, but her hands are shaking so bad she can barely hold on to it. She rips the plug from the wall, swearing under her breath.

“I bet you wish you never came back,” she says. “If I was you, I’d have been gone by now.”

“I’ll be back. Jackie’s going to sleep here every night until I am and Detective Surette has a cruiser driving by every few hours to check on things. I saw one go past this afternoon.”

She sits down again, knees and elbows vibrating slightly out of sync. “I feel like I don’t know a thing about my own sister.”

Sitting this close, I notice grey spots on her front teeth. The whites of her eyes are a dull yellow.

“We’ll have lots of time, you and I. And Jackie. I guess I’ll never know Bird.”

“I can tell you about him.” She perks up. “He loved playing cards like he does now, only nobody could beat him. Sometimes he’d let me win and pretend to be all pissed off, but I knew he lost on purpose. His friends were all half scared of him. He had a temper like Daddy. But I wasn’t scared of him. He was a good brother. Good father, too. At Christmas he would spoil those girls rotten. If one asked for ham and the other wanted turkey, he’d go out and get both.”

My smile sinks as I remember what Christmas was like at
our house. I grab Poppy’s hand, but it’s so slight I’m afraid I’ll break a bone. I let go and it falls back in her lap with a soft thud.