Girl Runner Read online

  2

  Sisters and Brothers

  WE’RE ON THE MOVE, from stuffy room to antiseptic hall.

  A confiding tone from the nurse: “Do you know, you’re the first visitors she’s had since I started working here. It’s nice of you to come!” I register this tone often, spoken over my head. She pulled the bowl of soup down on her lap. She soiled the sheets. We found her wandering the hall, she could have fallen and broken something. Who knew she could still walk!

  Keep on talking. Just so long as I’m going somewhere, squeaking on rubber wheels away from the nagging television, the muffled room, the whistles and cackles, belches and groans. For a moment the chair is caught on the lip of the threshold, but a professional shove with the wrists has us over and out.

  I hear from my throat a chortle of excitement that comes out quite strangled. Quiet, old woman, I think. They’ve forgotten you’re here.

  We stall in the hall, lit by fluorescent tubes and smelling of disinfectant. The nurse won’t let me go just yet. She’s worried about that chortle.

  She’s saying, “If you sign your name here, and today’s date, and the time.”

  I could do with that information. What if I’ve had a birthday and I’m already 105? What if it’s past breakfast and no one’s spooned me my tea? What is the girl’s name? That might come in handy. I might be able to use that.

  “‘Kaley,’” says the nurse, reading it off the page. “That’s an unusual name.”

  “Not really,” the girl says.

  “I guess nothing’s unusual these days, ha-ha!” The nurse wants a person to like her, which, I could tell her, generally guarantees a person won’t.

  “Kaley,” says the girl. “It’s Celtic,” and we’re back to the name.

  Kaley. I hum the word inside my head. Kaley, like the leafy vegetable, bitter until the first frost and then virtually indestructible. Kaley, and the other one—there’s a second visitor, a boy—says he’s called Max. It’s the first he’s opened his mouth. The nurse doesn’t ask Max to sign the form. She doesn’t ask me either.

  We begin an elaborate exit ritual, not of my choosing. The tucking of the flannel blanket. The fixing of the belt around my midsection to prevent me from slipping out of the wheeled chair. More patting, more fixing, more fussing, more lifting and shifting of the sweater and of my hands. The nurse pulls a woollen hat down over my ears, bound to be unflattering. It already itches.

  The girl says, “Are we ready?”

  She adjusts the woollen hat, an unnecessary action that is nevertheless reassuring. Excellent. I feel the nurse relaxing. The woman will let us go, soon. She will let us go, together.

  As the girl leans into my line of sight, her face sharpens suddenly from dull blur to distinct blur. I would guess her hair to be coloured and not a natural shade of red. No one in my family had red hair, although Edith married a boy with red hair. Carson, that was his name. But their son came out dark, like most of us—all but me. Their daughter was fair, as I suspect this girl is, but I am getting confused. She’s too young to be Edith’s, much too young, if I am as old as I think I am.

  “When should we expect Mrs. Smart back?” the nurse asks.

  The girl looks to the quiet one, the one called Max, as if asking a question, and she says, “I don’t know. An hour, maybe two?”

  “Perfect! A little stroll, a little sunshine, a cup of tea, maybe? She loves her cups of tea, don’t you, Mrs. Smart?” She is very gullible, this one, busy with her bossing, her certainty about a person’s likes and dislikes.

  But I’ve heard it in the girl’s voice: the catch, the sweet spot in which to hide the lie. I hardly dare believe it. They’ve no intention of bringing me back.

  LIES. LET ME COUNT the ways.

  There is the lie of omission, the lie of avoidance, the lie outright, the boast, the tiny indulgence or fudging, the sly miscalculation, the rounding up or down, there is flattery, and the little white lie, and there is the bold sweep, the lie of epic proportions with a million smaller lies to underpin it, there are the muddling lies that confuse or confound, the lie of distraction, the lie that knows it will be caught out, the cold-blooded lie and the quick-witted lie and the lie made in terror and haste, the lie that must lie and lie again to cover its tracks, and, of course, there is the lie that fools even the liar, who knows not what he or she propagates.

  That last one is the most dangerous of all, for it can trick almost everyone. It can come to look like the truth.

  And so I think of another lie. The lie of my own choosing, that lives with me yet, and without me. The lie that protects. That shelters. That builds its fragile hiding place of love.

  FANNIE IS SHOOING me away.

  “But where are you going?” I say. “Can’t I come too? Why not?”

  She walks down the lane in no kind of hurry even as she brushes me away. Calm.

  “Is it Robbie? Are you sad? Are you mad?” I pursue her through the raspberry canes. This summer our front field is planted with wheat, and it waves and bends, thick and green.

  Fannie doesn’t stop at the graveyard. She goes on by. Edith’s husband, Carson, has planted their field in corn, again, and that is where Fannie seems headed.

  “Why won’t you say anything? Why can’t I come?”

  She is well beyond the split rail fence when she turns: “Aggie, I’m going on now. You must not follow me.”

  “But why?” My face crumples. I blink wildly against tears. Fannie is the only person in the whole world who never refuses me, never pushes me away, never fails to enjoy the whirl I cannot help but make.

  She calls me to her, and I run, thinking she has changed her mind. She hugs me warmly against her soft front. I am gaining on her in height, the top of my head past her chin. I am eight years old and growing, and she is twenty-one, long since done. She holds me at arm’s length and gazes into my eyes, and I see, as if through a window freshly cleaned with vinegar and brown paper, that she is hiding something.

  Fannie is hiding something—Fannie, who shares with me everything she knows, clear as glass. She has not changed her mind.

  I feel something turn in me, tighten, all in one sharp click. The chatter of bugs in the grasses rises and falls around us. Fannie smoothes my flyaway hair under her hands. I like her face so much.

  She says, “Do not follow me.”

  She waits for me to leave her. I walk to the graveyard and enter at the gate, stand with arms pinned at my sides, mute, betrayed. Does she see? Doesn’t she?

  There is a new stone this summer, marking another Smart son gone. The grass over his grave isn’t new, as it hasn’t been dug up, there being no remains to bury. The stone is flat, like the others, carved with his initials and the years of his birth and his death: R.S. 1893–1916. I look at his initials and I think: Robbie Smart. I will never know whether his toes turned black or fell off.

  I gather a handful of crab apples and throw them rapid-fire at a bird hiding in the branches of one of the trees. When I check, Fannie is gone.

  She is out of sight, but I can see clearly the path beaten down by her steps, the weeds parting to show where she’s passed, and so I do as she has asked me not to, and I follow. I crouch low, pretending to be a soldier in battle, a spy. Behind the lines. Or in no-man’s-land, where Robbie was marooned when he got shot. The telegram said little of interest. It didn’t say, for instance, where on Robbie’s body the fatal shot caught him.

  I think it must have been his head or his heart. I think it must have looked like a hole blown clean, like a pipe through which daylight could shine, one end to the other, and there he was fallen to the ground, one drop of blood sliding down his forehead, his eyes staring at the sky.

  I’ve caught up.

  I see Fannie, not so very far from me, and she is not alone. She’s almost as tall as the corn in the field next door, and the man is taller.

  I freeze like a rabbit hiding in the open.

  He isn’t one of the young men spit out of the war, m
issing a leg or an eye or wheezy from the gas. But he’s not so old either. He’s dressed like the farmer he is—and I know him, very well. I see he’s got Fannie’s hand in his. Her face is inclined, hidden from me, her bunched hair brushes his shoulder, and they walk together into the corn. They’re gone, like that, the tall stalks shifting, the tassels of brown gold thread drooping, heads hung low.

  I rise like I’m going to follow. But I know that the field of corn is enchanted, its secrets held in tidy rows, and I do not follow.

  I think that Fannie was right, after all: she is going on ahead without me, and I should have let her go. I shouldn’t have seen her walk into the corn with a man who is family, our brother by law, if not by blood.

  I can’t name him, even inside my head.

  All I can think to do is to run—away.

  I AM RUNNING over the crushed weeds.

  I am running past the graves.

  Tangling and scratching through the berry bushes. Choking in the dust raised on the lane. Our big black dog circling me in the barnyard, barking, confused. My breath comes harsh, my heart bangs, hair whips my face. But my feet scarcely graze the ground.

  I had not known that I could run so fast—I can fly, that’s how fast. Now I know. I know that shock can spin itself into something near exhilaration, by mere application of speed.

  The brain is a primitive instrument. It plays its oldest, wildest songs best.

  I fly into the barn—sweet with manure—and dart up the stable’s ladder to the great wide mow.

  Breathe. Climb. Breathe. Sneeze, sneeze.

  I scramble through loosely packed straw, piled like a mountainside nearly to the eaves, where I know there is a fresh nest of kittens. Sharp straw, not soft, cutting fine red lines across exposed skin. My nose streams, and my eyes, and I’m almost blind with sneezing, but I stagger to the nest, rubbing my wet face hard with my wrists. The kittens are not even a week old, eyes like slits, little ears flat to their heads, a tumble of searching hungry fur. Without apology to the mother cat, I crouch and pull from the mass an orange striped creature, and I press its living body under my chin. It is mewling and blind, and I nuzzle its dusty fur until my heart quiets. Its ribs under my fingers feel like the bones of a tiny vessel, fragile as a boat made of sticks. Its darting heart. Its piercing cry and open mouth stills me, and I am myself again.

  I press the kitten’s soft skull into the soft spot under my chin. I coo to it. But I can’t sit still for long. My legs are restless, always, my muscles twitch, my feet kick of their own accord. I’ve been known to kick my sister Cora under the table, not because I’m angry at her, simply because my foot leaps out and does it, can’t be stopped.

  “Ow! Aggie kicked me!”

  “Not on purpose!”

  “Off you go, Aggie. We’ll have none of that.” It’s Mother who puts me to rights; Father is slow to punishment, slow to tune in to the turnings around him. With Robbie dead, Father moves even more like a man living inside a dream. Only one subject captures his interest: a machine of his own invention, powered by a windmill, that he is building in the barn, even now.

  “Off you go, and muck the chicken pen as you were meant to do this afternoon.”

  “But—!”

  “Not a word. Go.”

  But Mother’s punishment is gentle: she sets aside a plate of food for me. She won’t let any of us go without a meal. She went hungry as a child, she has told us, and we are never to know that particular pain.

  Mother is not one for stories, and does not tell more, even if I’d like to know, even if I ask: how hungry, and why, and when, and what did it feel like? She speaks rarely of her family, though her father and brothers are alive, and their homestead lies in the county west of ours. They might as well live in another country for all we see of them.

  The kitten purrs against my neck.

  Father is working nearby, somewhere overhead. I can hear him. It’s likely that he’s heard me too, clambering into the mow all in a scramble. He won’t think anything of it. It is a broiling hot July afternoon, and Father should be busy with the haying, but he’s hired men for the summer work now that Robbie is gone. Last summer and the summer before it seemed like Robbie would come home, eventually, if not quite soon. Edith’s husband, Carson, helped, and Fannie too, and Mother, and even George was called on to drive the team of horses, while Olive and Cora and I made sandwiches and iced tea and carried them out to the field, three little girls in dusty dresses, our hair pulled off our faces under bonnets.

  We managed without Robbie.

  But not this summer.

  Last summer and the summer before, we knew Robbie would be back soon enough. And now we know he won’t be. There is absence, and there is vanishing, and these are not the same thing at all.

  The kitten pricks my thumb with one sharp claw, like a pin piercing the skin. “Ow!” It’s small as pain goes, but I return the kitten to its mother, and stick my thumb into my mouth. I feel oddly recovered, and stride with wide leaps down to the swept barn floor.

  “Hallo!” I call up to my father.

  Father nods his head in acknowledgement. He is erecting a staircase that circles to the top of the barn. When he has built the stairs, he will cut a hole in the roof and make a small house above, like a steeple, to shelter the windmill’s gears. The stairs will climb right inside the little house, so he can mind the mechanics within.

  Outside, on top, the blades of the mill will turn, powering Father’s machine.

  At mealtimes, Father drifts away from the ends of sentences. He goes on ahead in his thoughts and leaves us behind. But here in the barn, his purpose is visible. I am comforted by it, even though his plan lies in pieces—stacks of board—around which I carefully step.

  “Can I help?” I call up.

  “Don’t try the steps,” he warns, even as he climbs down them to the skeletal platform standing twelve feet above me. This is where his invention will rest: a machine powered by the wind that can be used as a lathe, or a spinning saw, or a grain grinder. The platform will double as a ceiling for a grain storage bin. I am quite sure that my father has thought of everything.

  I’ve examined his plans, sketched in pencil onto the backs of flyers that come advertising cures for bloat or canker or colic. His measurements are mysterious and meticulous. I am sure of my father.

  I watch him step silently up the circular staircase carrying an armload of roughly cut boards.

  I love the smell of cut wood. I’ve forgotten about Fannie, here, amidst the ragged ends and sawdust and debris. I don’t think of her at all. Working atop a table made out of two sawhorses and an old door, I hammer bent nails straight, the one job Father lets me do without question.

  I ignore Cora, who has climbed up from the stable below to stand at my elbow, her breathing laborious.

  “What are you doing?” she says.

  “What does it look like?”

  “You’re not getting them straight.” She examines the nail I’ve just finished.

  “Am too.” I snatch the nail out of her hand. The metal is still hot to the touch. I hammer it some more. Cora crosses her arms and observes. I can feel her judgement and the hammer lands wrong, bounces up.

  “Stop watching me.”

  “You’ve had your chance, now it’s my turn. It’s only fair.”

  “Find something else to do.”

  “I won’t.”

  Now that the hammer is silent, we can hear Mother calling our names. Father hears too.

  “Go on,” he says, just that, no more. We must obey.

  I RUN TO THE LADDER ahead of Cora. She makes no appearance of trying to beat me, but steps on my fingers coming down. I’ve underestimated her.

  We burst out of the stable door at the same moment, Cora calling sweetly, “Here we are, Mother. We were helping Father.”

  “Does he want help?” Mother frowns. “You’re meant to be working in the garden, Aggie. And Cora, there’s laundry to pull off the line and ironing.”
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  “I finished in the garden,” I say, knowing that it is quite impossible ever to be finished in the garden.

  “Olive’s doing the ironing,” says Cora. We’re the same height, though I’m younger by two years. I can see eye to eye with her. We’ve been told that we look the same, like twins, which neither of us takes as a compliment.

  “I’m looking for Fannie,” says Mother, “have you seen her?”

  “No,” I say quickly.

  “I saw her going down the lane with you.” Cora stares at me hard, and I say, “That was ages ago,” and Cora says, “Well that’s the last I seen her,” and Mother says, “Saw her, Cora, saw her. That’s the last you saw her.”

  “Yes,” says Cora. “That’s the last I saw her.”

  Mother waits. “Well?” she asks me, and I shake my head to erase trouble from my face, a trick accomplished more easily than expected.

  “You two can run an errand for me, in Fannie’s stead. Take this on over to Edith’s. Tell her: two teaspoons in a glass of water three times a day, starting now.” Mother hands Cora a small jar made of brown glass and stopped with a cork. Cora agitates the liquid like Mother’s just done. “Can you remember that?”

  “Two teaspoons in a glass of water three times a day,” Cora says as I chime in a fraction too late on every word. I know Cora would like to kick me.

  “If Edith looks poorly you must tell me,” says Mother. “And stay and do her washing up.”

  “She said to run,” I tell Cora as soon as we’re out of Mother’s sight, and I take off flying down the lane. I run past the graveyard, and past the place where Fannie walked into the corn, and I make myself not look at it. I make myself keep running.

  Cora doesn’t even try to keep up. It isn’t much fun to best her when she isn’t even trying. Maybe that’s what makes me do it. Maybe. I don’t know what makes me, but as I get farther and farther on, with Cora lagging behind, not even trying, I decide to hide in the corn by the side of the road. I’ll surprise Cora. In a flash, I’m standing in the corn, listening to my own ragged breath and thumping heart and the whoosh of stalks swaying.