The Chocolate Bar

A Novella

By Carolyn Mamchur

Chapter One: Pajama Party

“You shouldn’t be looking at that girl with binoculars all the time.”

‘I’m not, I’m waiting to see if a taxi is coming. I like to count how many taxis come and go.”

I was lying of course, and Mom knew it, but she let me have the lie. Mom never embarrassed me with the truth when the truth didn’t really matter. She was just a bit worried about my fascination with Margaret.

Mom worried a lot about me that year. I was a bit of a mess. It was hard to really describe what was wrong. I was overly imaginative. That’s how teachers described it. But Mom and I knew it was more than that. There was an edge of worry and desperation to me that didn’t feel right.

When I was older, I figured out that my imagination was not quite what you might call normal. I could imagine something so hard that it would happen. But I’ve told you about that. Now I want to tell you what it was like before that time.

You might think that having an imagination that make things happen would be a nifty thing. But it really has its dark side. And before I had figured it out, it was spooky. My brain would just go to thinking about something without my wanting it to. And too often, I couldn’t stop. It didn’t always think of good things. Sometimes it was hard to tell real things from imagined things. Now, just try to live with that! Especially when you’re seven years old.

I figured that Margaret was a bit older than me, but not too old. Maybe ten. She dressed kind of old. I imagined that she had sisters and that she borrowed their clothes. Sometimes she wore eye shadow. I’d heard a story about her. That she’d worn nail polish to school and Mother Superior, who ruled all the Catholic Schools in Prince Albert, had made her take it off.

Margaret had scraped at the nails so hard she’d made them bleed. Right in front of the nun she scratched and scraped ‘till there was no polish left. But the next day, there it was again, bright red, painted on each finger nail.

I looked at her hands with the binoculars. There was evidence of nail polish. Red and chipped. No blood.

Margaret came each day to help her mother who was a dispatcher for Prince Albert Taxi Cabs. It was a fleet of six cars which served the city and went even as far north as Lac La Ronge. Mostly, natives and guys from the government took those taxis.

I had noticed Margaret right away, as soon as we moved into the ‘L’. The ‘L’ was what people called our house because it was shaped just like an ‘L’. I liked that about it. Imagine living in a long skinny house that if you were a crow and looked down on it, you would see a big ‘L’.

And inside the ‘L’ lived three people, my mom, my grandfather and me, Marie Kat.

Our ‘L’ was squished in between two rows of poplar trees that shone white in the moonlight. To the right of the poplars was a taxi stand and to the left was a boarding house that Grandfather said was a whorehouse and we should call it a whorehouse, as I’d have to know about such things sooner or later.

“Good God!” mother had said. But she hadn’t corrected him. And from that time on we called it the whorehouse. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew somehow it was forbidden so I said it as often as I could. But not so often that Mom would get mad, just often enough to get a charge out of it.

I went back to watching Margaret.

She had just come into the taxi stand. She did what she always did. She fetched a little chair without a back – not a stool, but a chair that had no back, and pushed it right next to the wheel chair her mother occupied.

They would sit there waiting. I would wait too. Wait for the phone to ring. It only had to ring once.

Mrs. Simpson would pick up the phone and she would hold it so that both she and Margaret could hear. Then Margaret would write the words down on a paper and Mrs. Simpson would pin the paper on a board right next to her wheelchair. The taxi drivers would come in and grab one of the notes off the board and rush to their cabs to collect the people who needed a ride to places all over the city, even places like Lac La Ronge.

I couldn’t imagine why Margaret and her mother listened to the phone together. I had my theories. Perhaps Mrs. Simpson’s hand was paralyzed and she couldn’t write down the addresses. Maybe Margaret’s Mom was blind and she couldn’t see the paper or write down the words. Her eyes were open. I could tell that. But sometimes, blind people have open eyes.

The thought of it spooked me so much I quit thinking about it. I tried to think of new theories. To make myself feel brave, I started to say my theories out loud.

I was actually glad that there was such mystery around the duties that Margaret performed for her Mom. It gave me a real excuse to watch her. Just so long as I didn’t think about blind eyes staring at me.

“What’s she doing now?” Mom wanted to know.

“Nothing. Just sitting there.”

“Why not go over and introduce yourself?”

“Oh, my God!” How I wanted to, but how, how could I?

“She will when she’s ready.” Grandfather had faith that someday I’d be ready. We’d been living in this house for a month already and I wasn’t anywhere near ready.

I was seven years old and would be going to a new school in the fall and I didn’t know one person in this part of town. Not one. Well, not one that wasn’t a mom or a grandpa or relative or grown up. I didn’t even know many of those. Somehow, I blamed my mom. Somehow I felt all decisions came from her.

“We’ll have to move when Dad comes,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

I was always thinking about when Dad would come home from the war. He had gone to war to fight the bad Germans. We were related to good Germans. But Dad went to kill the bad ones. I wondered how he would know which were good and which were bad.

“Uniforms,” Grandfather had explained. “They wear different uniforms.”

I wasn’t convinced.

‘We’ll have to move,” I repeated.

“We’ll see,” Mom said.

I had been watching Margaret for so long that my eyes were getting sore from trying to focus into my grandfather’s big heavy binoculars. I imagined my dad having binoculars like that to check out the bad Germans.

Then I had an idea. “ I think I’m ready,” I said and put the binoculars into their case. I headed for the taxi stand. I walked right in and made my announcement. “I need a taxi,” I said to Mrs. Simpson. I didn’t look at her eyes.

“You’re the weird kid who watches everything with those binoculars, aren’t you?”

Margaret looked at the floor when her mother said that to me. I looked at the floor, too. Well, she sure wasn’t blind. I hadn’t thought of anyone watching me. The thought of it scared me. I felt like getting mad. But that seemed ridiculous. I mean, she was watching me watching her. I guess she had a right.

“I like taxis,” I said as if that explained everything.

“So you want me to put you on the board?” Mrs. Simpson asked. I felt trapped. I walked over to the board and began to examine it carefully.

“Where you want to go?” Margaret’s mom asked me. She stared right at me as she spoke. She stared right at my face. I stopped looking at the board and stared back. I felt glued to her. Then I noticed her lips were thin and pale. She had a shadow of a moustache.

That shadow of a moustache made me think about her legs, that she shaved her legs. My mom who had perfect almost hairless legs and full red lips told me that shaving your legs was a big mistake. Once you shaved them, the hair grew thicker and was awful. It made rough whiskers that were not pleasant to the touch.

I actually didn’t think it much of a problem. I mean, how often does someone touch your legs? Yet, when I looked at Mrs. Simpson’s moustache and thought of her legs, I had to agree with my mom. It felt like a mistake.

I almost said it out loud, it’s being a mistake. I almost warned Mrs. Simpson not to shave her legs. I couldn’t believe I was there asking for a stupid taxi and thinking about Mrs. Simpson’s whiskery legs. What was the matter with me?

Mrs. Simpson repeated her question. Her voice sounded like cinnamon, hot red cinnamon candies that burned your tongue. Margaret glared at her mother. Her mother smiled. Her smile didn’t look like a smile. It looked like a growl might sound. Her lip curled a bit and made her face look mean.

And suddenly I was glad Mrs. Simpson didn’t own a cat. For some strange reason I knew that if she owned a cat, she would hurt it. I don’t know how I knew she didn’t own a cat, but I was sure of it. And I was relieved.

It felt weird sometimes, how thoughts just popped into my mind out of nowhere. “You’re not quite connected,” my Aunt Beryle would often say. Aunt Beryle was my godmother. If something happened to my mom, she was supposed to take care of me, especially my spiritual well being. I didn’t like that fact. My mother’s youngest sister, Beryle, was not my favorite aunt.

“Connected to what?” I’d wanted to know.

“Life,” she’d answered and that made no sense at all. It made no sense at all. How could you not be connected to life? Was I a ghost? The thought appealed to me.

“Want to go for a coke?”

I didn’t quite understand the words as Margaret said them. Was she asking me to go with her to get a coke? I was lost for a moment in that ghost world I seemed to be connected to.

“What?”

“Let’s go.” And we were off. Away from the board, away from Mrs. Simpson, away from the embarrassing questions about the taxi I had asked for.

“What if I get a call?” Mrs. Simpson said, her voice not nearly so full of spice now.

“Answer it,” Margaret said without even looking at her mother. I stood stock-still. I knew that Margaret was punishing her mother. I had never punished my mother for anything. I wouldn’t dream of it. Part of me wanted to tell Margaret it was ok, I had to go home.

But, going for a coke with Margaret!

We sat at the back of Mr. McConnell’s store on red stools that swirled. Margaret swirled and swirled as she drank her coke. She made a game of it – swirling and sipping her coke through the straw, swirl, dip, sip, swirl. I really wanted to try that swirl dip sip trick, but I knew I would knock the straw out of the bottle and splash the counter and maybe even fall off the stool. I could see the whole thing happening, so I just stayed in one spot, my lips almost glued to the straw as I sipped. I watched her out of the corner of my eye.

We never spoke. I wanted to say something. I had imagined all the things we would talk about, but I just couldn’t make myself say anything.

When we were done, I paid for the cokes. Both of them. I usually had a bit of money on me. Mom called it mad money. “Never leave the house without mad money,” she often cautioned. Mad money was the money you needed if you got in trouble. Mad money could save you.

Twice after that, I casually wandered over towards the taxi stand and when she saw me, Margaret would get off her little stool and join me. We’d walk over to McConnell’s and I’d buy us a coke.

On the third outing, I tried Margaret’s trick. I swirled around and dipped my head towards the straw and took a sip. I’d been practicing in my head before I went to bed. I knew I’d be able to do it. And I did it.

Margaret laughed when I did it. She patted me on the back and laughed. I was in.

“Can I see the ‘L’?” she asked.

We walked through the tall thin poplars that lined our house on both sides. We entered through the only real door in the house. That was one of the strangest things about the ‘L’ – it had only one door. “Damn fire trap,” Grandfather often reminded everyone.

“Oh God,” Mom would reply, meaning as if we didn’t have enough to worry about without thinking about fires. Mom didn’t like to be reminded of bad things. When Mom was young she had had a lot of fun, dancing and figure skating. She had gorgeous legs. And gorgeous eyes. And red full lips that reminded me of Maureen O’Hara.

But now she didn’t get to dance much, and not to figure skate at all. She had been looking after people lately. She had been looking after her mom and my grandfather and, I guess, me.

The ‘L’ had originally had one long corridor with a door at each end. The leg part was attached later and when that had been done, the door disappeared. The leg of the ‘L’ was where Grandfather slept in a hospital bed Mom had rented from the Holy Family Hospital where she worked as a special duty nurse on week-ends.

She slept in that room most of the time too, near Grandfather, where she could keep an eye on him, where she could change his dressings, empty the smelly bag attached by a tube to his dying bowel, where she could comfort him as he wept into the night. And where she could nurse him.

Mom had trained as a nurse in Humbolt, Saskatchewan. But she’d stopped nursing strangers when her own mother took sick. Now it seemed she was limiting her nursing mostly to loved ones. It was a good, and a very sad thing to do.

My grandfather was dying and we all knew it. But no one would say it, never, never would we say it. Grandfather didn’t want to die. He wasn’t ready to die. He wasn’t ready to say good-bye to all the things about being alive that he loved so much.

I was one of those things. So was my mom. That’s why we were spending as much time with Grandfather as we could. That was why we had moved here to be with him and live in the ‘L’. Grandfather was my Dad’s dad. But Mom loved him as if he were her own father. More, perhaps. Afterall, her own father had left them all to go to make his fortune in Brazil. That had broken my grandmother’s heart.

My mom and dad had grown up together in the little town of Cudworth, Saskatchewan. They were almost like brothers and sisters. Then, Mom came home from Humbolt broken hearted and bang, she and my dad fell in love. But now he was gone and my mom was looking after his dad. We were still a family. “And a damn good one,” Grandfather would say.

I showed Margaret the porch with its little couch and small dresser. It was the space which served as both the front entrance to the house and as my bedroom.

Margaret plunked down on my couch bed and swung her feet back and forth. I just loved the way Margaret took charge of everything. I looked at her face carefully. I was concluding that she must have been at least two years older than I was. I was sure she was wearing eyeliner.

Would I be like that in two years? Would I be able to walk into someone’s bedroom, a bedroom I had never been in before and plunk right down on the person’s bed and swing my legs back and forth as if I had sat on that bed a million times?

“You have this bed all to yourself?” Margaret wanted to know.

I did. It wasn’t very big. It was only wide enough for one person and maybe a dog. If you had one. I wanted one, but we didn’t have one. I thought about having a dog a lot.

“Mom mostly sleeps in Grandfather’s room, to look after him.”

“Yeah, I heard he was dying.”

I looked anxiously towards the kitchen. Was Grandfather up? Might he have heard? We never said that out loud. It was the unspoken truth we all lived with, but would never say. Some lies were ok to say out loud, but not ones that counted. But truths, at least some truths, had to be kept secret. That was a sacred rule.

“He’s got cancer,” I whispered.

Margaret raised her eyes, nodded her head in understanding. “My mom’s deaf,” she said. “We never say so. She’d be fired. But she’s deaf as a post.”

Margaret was a surprising person. She understood things. She was really smart. You didn’t have to say much to her. She just understood. She didn’t discuss things, didn’t ask a lot of questions. She listened, and she got it. Margaret felt like quite an old person in a young person’s body. Sometimes I felt like that. Sometimes I felt like an old person. But I never wore eyeliner.

There was another big difference between Margaret and me. Her old person was smarter and tougher than I was. Her old person didn’t seem to be worried or scared. It just seemed to take things as they were. I wondered if Margaret could teach me how to do that.

My mom was like Margaret in that she acted as if she didn’t have a care in the world. But if you looked into her eyes when she didn’t know you were looking at her, you could see that she worried about everything. You could tell when her hand shook a little when she was thinking hard and smoking. She smoked a lot. But not in front of Grandfather. Grandfather had to give up cigars. He loved them so much, he still snuck a few. But Mom didn’t want to tempt him. So, she mostly smoked outside. And she never smoked cigars, though she loved them.

I was a bit like my Mom. Oh, not that I smoked cigars. Not that. I was like my mom in that I worried about everything, too.

“You’re too young to worry,” Mom would say. “What have you got to worry about?” That was a dumb thing to say. I had so much to worry about. I had everything to worry about. Just like she did. And even worse, I didn’t have control over anything in my life. I was at the mercy of the world.

Margaret wanted to see the kitchen. We walked through the living room, the dining room, to the kitchen. There weren’t any rooms really. It was all one long room with different furniture that indicated what the room was used for. There was a couch and big chair and a record player in the living room, and lots of pictures on the wall. There was a picture of me and my dad. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt and seemed to be seven feet tall.

“Whose that?” Margaret wanted to know. It was the picture of me and my dad. “My dad!” I said. “That’s my dad.”

“He’s cute.”

I’d never thought of my dad as cute before. It felt like a strange thing to say. For a moment I was a bit afraid of Margaret. For a moment I didn’t want her in our house looking at my dad and saying he was cute.

“He’s at war,” I told her.

“The war’s over.”

I stared at Margaret. Was it true? Could the war be over?

Margaret stayed for about an hour. We listened to three records. I

wanted Margaret to go home. I had to talk to my mom.

“I got to go now,” Margaret said, right in the middle of Home on the Range by Gene Autrey. Normally that was one of my favorite songs. Right now, I could hardly hear the words of the song. “The war is over,” were the words I was thinking about.

“Mom’ll be getting a lot of calls. She’ll be going nuts.” Margaret laughed when she said that.

I walked Margaret to the door. She shook my hand when she left. No kid had ever shaken my hand before. “Don’t worry about your dad,” she said. “Having a dad in the house isn’t always the best thing in the world.” And with that, she left.

I marched up to my grandfather’s room. It was the only room in the house with a door on it. I knocked, softly, in case he were sleeping. I wanted to walk right in, but I didn’t want to disturb him either. It was my mom I wanted to disturb.

Mom was lying on the cot next to grandfather’s hospital bed. She was reading one of the magazines she bought from Mr. McConnell’s store, the same store where Margaret and I drank cokes and swirled on the red chrome stools. It was the only general store in town.

I always got the magazines when she was done. She liked to be the first to open the magazine and read the new never read before pages. It bothered her if someone else looked at the magazine before she did. It wasn’t that they tore out a page or did a puzzle or anything. She just wanted to be first. My aunt had visited once from Nipawin and had read one of Mom’s magazines before Mom had.

What’s the big deal? Aunt Beryle wanted to know, hurt that Mom had glared at her over a stupid thing like a damn magazine.

“For Gods’ sake give Rose something,” Grandfather told my aunt. That explained it all. Mom didn’t have a lot. JustBeryle me and Grandfather, I guess.

She didn’t have a full time job and she for sure didn’t have a husband. He was “at war”. A war that I had just been told was over.

“I have to talk to you,” I announced.

“I’m reading.”

“It’s important.”

“Marie, I’m reading.”

“Rose, I need to talk.” I never called her Rose. I scared myself.

I think I scared her, too.

Maybe she knew what I was going to ask her. Maybe she had heard Margaret tell me the war was over. Maybe she was trying to avoid this conversation.

She wasn’t busy at all. Reading a magazine with pictures of women in pretty clothes, reading a magazine with advertisements for perfume and lipstick and jewelry you couldn’t afford, was not busy.

She was lying back against the pillows, her one arm holding the magazine, the other arm resting on the quilt. She looked as if she might be ready for a nap. Often she stayed up all night with Grandfather if he needed her to. She would do anything for him. If she could have taken away his cancer and given it to herself she would have. You could tell. That was my mom. When she liked someone, she really liked him.

I climbed onto the bed beside her and reached over and put my arms on both sides of her shoulders. The magazine dropped. Her eyes flashed anger for a moment.

I didn’t flinch. I had something I needed to do.

“Is the war over?” I looked into her eyes when I asked the question. Mom had a theory that if you told an outright lie your eyes would turn red. She always knew when I was lying, and that was how she knew. My eyes turned red.

She didn’t answer me. She sat up. That made me sit up, too.

“He’s not coming back,” she said. “He’s gone.’

“You said he was in the war,” I insisted.

“He was. But now he isn’t.”

“Uncle Joe is still in the war.”

Uncle Joe was my mom’s favorite brother. He spoke perfect German. I guess he must have looked like a bad German because he was a spy. He’d spied against the Nazis and he’d disappeared. No one knew where he was. My grandmother died thinking he had been captured and tortured and killed. But no one knew for sure.

I had a feeling he was alive, but not well. I had a feeling he was in some kind of a hospital. I had a feeling he was afraid. But I couldn’t have told you why. I hadn’t told anyone. Everyone had her own theory about my Uncle Joe, the brave spy.

My mom thought my uncle was coming back. So, why not my dad, too? Maybe they were together. Maybe they had been captured by the bad Germans, but had escaped and were hiding out. Maybe they didn’t know the war was over. Maybe there were hiding in a barn where a beautiful young woman brought them home-made bread and fresh milk every day. Maybe my uncle had fallen in love with her. I was making this up. I didn’t believe a word of it.

“The war’s over,” Grandfather said. His voice was heavy with medicine. It slurred.

“You lied,” I couldn’t believe my mother had let me believe that the war was still on and that was why my dad was away.

”Not telling is not lying.”

What could I say? It was a rule we all lived by. And her eyes were not red.

I just sat there trying to make sense of it all, trying to understand what it meant. Was my dad coming back or not? When would he be coming? Who knew? Did my mother know something else she wasn’t telling me?

“When Dad comes home we’ll have to move,” I said, ready to cry.

“You’re right,” she said.

I had nothing more to say. She picked up her magazine. She had read about half the articles, looked at about half the pictures. She handed the magazine to me. “What to read it?”

It was her way of saying sorry, so how could I say no. I took the magazine and lay down beside her. I wanted to read it with her, to be with her the way Margaret was with her Mom. I wished for a moment, just a tiny moment that my Mom might go blind and I could read the magazine for her. But that was an awful thought and I almost threw up thinking it.

Sometimes my own thoughts scared me to death.

I busied myself with the page advertising purses and shoes. The purses and shoes were positioned around three alligators. The purses and shoes were made of alligator skins. That upset me so much I dropped the magazine. It landed on the floor and that’s when I saw it.

The magazine opened to a picture of a group of girls in pretty nylon pjs. Pink, blue, pale cream. They had their hair in braids and curlers. They were drinking mugs of hot chocolate. Some girls were on the floor; some were on the bed. They were talking and laughing. They were telling secrets. They were all best friends.

My breath went away and my voice went squeaky and high the way it does when I get excited. I jumped off the bed, out of the bedroom, through the bathroom, kitchen, dining room, living, porch and out to the path I’d made between the poplars. I ran straight to the taxi stand and made the announcement.

“We’re having a pajama party!

Margaret laughed. She laughed at almost everything I said. “You want to sleep over at my house?”

I nodded.

“Ok, on Friday?”

Friday. In three days. Would three days be enough time to get ready? I thought I’d better say yes to Friday just in case she changed her mind.

I nodded again. I was about to leave when she stopped me.

“Don’t you want to know where I live?”

Margaret wrote her address down on a piece of paper. “Come right after supper. Don’t come too late,” she warned.

I nodded again. My throat was too dry to let words come out. My tongue felt like something big and strange that didn’t belong in my mouth.

That night, I made a mental list of all the things I had to do. PJs were first on the list. Pink nylon PJs. And snacks. Snacks that traveled well. Maybe some magazines, and records. The girls in the pictures were listening to records. I had looked at the pictures and the article so often I had it memorized.

I showed it to Mom and she agreed to get me the pink nylon PJs. She was excited for me. Margaret was my first real girl friend and this was my first pajama party.

Finally. Friday. Suppertime. I wolfed down my food. Mom was going to drive me. She seemed to be eating unusually slowly, chewing her food so thoroughly. I couldn’t stand it.

“I can walk.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She was still eating. I picked up my plate and licked it. I put it down with a bit of a bang. She shook her head a little and smiled. She knew I was excited.

“Let’s go, let’s go.” My black plastic suitcase was waiting by the door, the only door in the house, the door leading from my porch/ bedroom.

“I’ll just check on your grandfather.” Three hours later, I stood knocking at Margaret’s door.

“I thought you weren’t coming.” Margaret was standing in her underwear and an old T-shirt. That old T-shirt was nothing like the pink nylon PJs I had imagined. It was nothing like the ones I had carefully packed in my black plastic overnight bag. It was certainly nothing like the ones I had seen in my mother’s magazine.

The T-shirt was too big for her. It had a small tear under the arm. She didn’t say anything else. We just stood there for a minute and then we went in.

I had to get undressed in the dark. I opened my little black suitcase and pulled out the nylon pjs. I didn’t feel like putting them on. They looked ridiculous. I stuffed them back in the suitcase. I could barely see what I was doing. I closed the lid and caught a piece of pink frill. I could see it sticking out. I was afraid to open it, but I was afraid I’d tear the PJs too. I just stared at the suitcase with its little piece of nylon sticking out.

It wasn’t exactly pitch dark because there were white plastic curtains over the windows and the light from the street lamp in front of the house shone through the pale thinness of those curtains.

“I brought some records,” I started to tell Margaret. I’d spent hours picking them out. All the favorites that Mom and I liked to listen to. Big band stuff, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. Mom said it was silly, that kids didn’t listen to that.

“I’m a kid,” I’d said. Mom had only laughed. A lot of people laughed at things I said. That was strange. I never felt funny. I can’t remember, once in all the time we lived in the ‘L’ or anytime in my childhood, can I remember thinking that I was funny. A comedian, I was not.

I had selected six records. I had the records carefully packed with the night snacks and the pink nylon PJs.

“Ssh,” Margaret whispered, “You’ll wake my sisters. We’re sleeping with them.”

I looked at the bed. Two young women in dirty slips lay on the bed. I’d known she’d had sisters.

“Where?”

“Ssh,” Margaret warned again. “I usually sleep in the middle. You get the outside.”

Margaret crawled over one sleeping sister. She crawled in upside down, putting her head next to the sister’s feet.

“More room,” she said and turned her back to me. My stomach felt funny.

I shivered. I was still wearing my underwear. I felt too naked to be lying next to a stranger. I tried to squeeze myself up tight, making myself as small as possible, so as not to disturb Margaret’s sisters, so as not to touch them or have them touch me.

I could tell they were awake, just not saying anything. One of the sisters shifted and her bare legs rubbed against my arm. She must have shaved her legs because they felt like wire brushes.

I remembered Mrs. Simpson’s moustache. I remembered thinking of the possibility of her having bristly whiskery legs. I looked around for any signs of a cat. There were none.

The sister’s leg whiskers scratched me every time the sister stirred. I would have moved closer to the edge but I was already as close as I could get. My arms and legs were half on and half off. The only thing that kept me from falling off was a dresser pushed up against the bed. My face was touching the cold wood. There was an order coming off the wood. A sour, almost rancid smell of oil and bubble gum. I saw some old wads of gum pushed into the side of the dresser, just a bit below where it met the bed, just about, but not quite out of sight.

At that moment, I knew I was going to be sick to my stomach. I had already felt a bit queasy, lying there in the dark, not saying anything, getting touched by that cold wood, those rough legs. The gum put me right over the edge.

I tried to whisper to Margaret but a pair of feet separated us. The toe nails on those so close to my face feet were long and not very clean. They had been polished red, months ago. Somehow those feet seemed to stop my voice from reaching Margaret who lay with her back to me. Margaret’s other sister’s face must have been almost touching the wall. I sure didn’t want that sister to hear me.

“Margaret,” I choked. No answer.

“Marg, Margaret.” Somehow my voice gained a little control, then almost burst out of its strangle hold.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I sort of yelped.

“Oh shit!” The sister whose face was almost touching the wall sat up in bed and reached for the metal chain attached to a bare light bulb dangling over the bed. The light glared right into our faces. It was like a war movie. It scared me worse than the old gum made me feel sick.

“No, it’s okay. I’m alright.”

The chain was pulled again, the light vanished, and then, without warning, the bed became a jangle of arms and legs and curses as I rushed for the toilet. The pajama party was over.

Chapter Two: Invited

Neither Margaret nor I ever mentioned that pajama party again. I knew there would be no more invitations to sleep over at her house.

I was too shy to go over to the taxi stand after that. I had to contend myself with scanning the place with my binoculars, looking for Margaret. I was busy scanning but saw no sign of her. So I focused on Mrs. Simpson. I had to adjust the lens to see her face clearly. She was looking right at me. I almost dropped the binoculars.

The way she looked at me, just staring, with a smirk on her face, I knew the sisters are told her everything. I decided not to watch the taxi stand anymore. I put the binoculars in a drawer.

I couldn’t risk another one of those looks from Margaret’s mother. I couldn’t stand that she knew I was watching. I couldn’t stand that she knew I had thrown up, that I had brought those stupid pink pajamas.

I felt rotten. I was mad at my mom. I hated the smell of grandfather. I wanted a dog. I wanted the summer to be over. I wanted to move back to the farm where my grandmother and all her animals lived. I wanted my dad to come home. I spent two week moping, wanting to go over to see Margaret, but afraid to.

I felt so lonesome one Friday night I poked my way down towards the taxi stand hoping Margaret might be hanging around. I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t want to go too close. I didn’t want Mrs. Simpson to catch me. I imagined her wheeling out of that little box of a room with her wheel chair. I imagined her chasing me down the street laughing at me.

I was ready to head back to the ‘L’ when Margaret and her dad pulled up to the taxi cab station in an old brown Chevy pick-up. I felt so jealous when I saw them drive over I started to cry.

I continued to walk away, pretending not to care that she was all alone with her dad. I tried to stop the tears. I had my head down. That was stupid. Since I cry easily Mom had taught me a trick. If you feel like crying, look up. The brain thinks it’s sad when you look down and it thinks you’re happy when you look up. It really works. But it would be stupid to be walking looking up when you are pretending not to see someone. What could I look at?

Maybe if a crow flew by. I liked crows. My grandmother had a pet crow. But there were no crows in sight, even though the poplars would have been a good place for them to make a nest.

“Hi,” Margaret yelled from the truck. “Hey, it’s me.” She said it in such a welcoming way, I turned around, and then I spoke, unable to stop myself.

“Where you going?” I blurted, imagining all sorts of wonderful places, like going out for shoe-strings at Woo Ling’s, or to the movies at the Orpheum theatre behind the hotel.

“The drive-in.”

The drive-in, that was the best yet. The drive-in was across the river, out in the pines. The drive-in was popcorn and hot dogs and real greasy chips from the concession stand. The drive-in was the tall swings and the twister slide just as it was getting dark, just as the fire-flies were coming out and music played on the speakers. The drive-in was pure heaven.

Mr. Simpson leaned over Margaret and pushed open the door. “Wanna come, Marie?”

I was surprised he knew my name, he’d hardly ever really seen me. Not up close any way. He didn’t always live with Margaret and her mom and the sisters. I figured he traveled a lot. Grandfather had heard he was a Watkins salesman. I could imagine him selling spices. I thought spices would be a nice thing to sell. Things to make food smell nice, taste good. It would be great to have a dad who sold spices.

“Wanna?” he asked again. I couldn’t believe it.

“I… I’ll ask my mom.” For sure I wanted to go. Was he kidding?

“Macey’ll call her and let her know.” Macey was Margaret’s mother. I looked her way, she nodded that she would and sort of motioned us away with her hand.

“I’d better check…”

“Hurry up, we’ll be late…never mind.” Mr. Simpson sounded impatient. He wanted to get going to that drive-in.

“Be sure to call my mom,” I yelled as I hopped in. Somehow leaving like that without telling Mom, or without bringing a sweater made it even more exciting. I knew Mom’d be mad. But Mrs. Simpson was going to tell her. And I had never been at the drive-in with anyone but Mom before. It was the most grown-up thing I had ever done. And maybe the most wicked.

“Isn’t this exciting?” Mr. Simpson asked. I didn’t know what to say. How could he know what I was thinking? I looked at Margaret. She looked away, out the window, not at her dad, not at me. And suddenly I wished I had asked my mom. I couldn’t explain why.

“It’s your night girls, your night on the town,” he said again.

“Could we play on the swings?” I said when we got there.

Playing on the swings was the best part. There was a big clock that was on the screen. It told you the time. Fifteen minutes. Fourteen minutes. Thirteen minutes. I loved that clock. I loved the race to the concession stand just before the clock said ten minutes to show-time. In between the big hands telling you what time it was, pictures of food would appear on the screen. Pictures of hot dogs, of popcorn, of potato chips.

“Swings are for kids,” Margaret said. She still wasn’t looking at me. I almost felt the way I did the day I had gone to her house for the pajama party. The idea in my head of a drive in and what was happening weren’t the same. I didn’t know what to do.

“Go ahead,” Margaret’s dad said. And we jumped out of the truck. I landed with a thud. The truck was a lot higher than a car. I wasn’t used to getting in and out of it. It made me feel small and graceless.

I glanced at the truck as we raced towards the big screen and the swings. I had a hard time finding our car sometimes, had a hard time remembering where it was parked.

That’s why Mom always parked near the concession stand. But Margaret’s dad had parked way over in the back, almost under the pines.

I forgot about the truck. I forgot about everything when I got under that big clock ticking away the minutes, making every minute precious, exciting, as if we were racing against time. I felt like counting the times the swing went in and out, in and out in a minute. I felt that life was being governed by that big clock.

Five minutes to go. I looked at Margaret. She was twirling round and round, twisting the rope then letting herself go in crazy out of control circles. I wanted to try, but just watching her made me dizzy.

When she stopped, I was standing close to her. She jumped when she saw me.

I felt stupid. I was wanting to ask her if we shouldn’t hurry and go to the concession stand. But I didn’t have any money. How could I say it was time to buy stuff? If I had asked Mom, she would have given me money. Mad money. Money to get home with. But I hadn’t asked. I had just gone without asking. And now it was three minutes to show time and we had no stuff to eat.

“Let’s go back.” Margaret didn’t mention the concession stand. We looked towards the spot where the truck was parked. It looked far away, almost by itself, without many cars parked around it, and no other trucks.

Margaret’s dad leaned out of the truck’s window and waved. “You guys want some popcorn?”

“Sure,” Margaret answered for us. She didn’t say anything about hot dogs or French fries so neither did I. He went for the popcorn without us. We scrambled back into the truck. Margaret had to help me get in. I haven’t got the strongest arms. And I’m as graceful as a camel.

I don’t know why I said that. I mean, I’ve never seen a camel. They may be like horses. But you can’t imagine them being very graceful with those big humps, and those big lips. They just don’t look graceful. But I may be misjudging them.

Mr. Simpson came back with a big cone of popcorn. Butter had dribbled down the side. “Here, you sit in the middle and hold the popcorn, Marie,” Margaret’s dad said, “that way Margaret and I won’t get it all.” Margaret gave her dad a real scowl. He just smiled and she crawled over me, giving me a bit of a poke as she did. Her dad handed me the cone. I felt funny in the middle. I could tell Margaret wanted to sit next to her dad, she didn’t get to see him all that often. But I was glad to be away from the speaker. I didn’t like it so close to my ears. Mom always put it in the back when we went to the drive-in, which wasn’t really that often.

The cone was awful slippery from the butter, and it was a bit wobbly because the paper wasn’t really thick enough. I needed two hands to hold it.

“Here, stick it between your knees,” Mr. Simpson said. “Isn’t that better?”

It was. Well, I could hold it and still get some. The cone felt warm and a bit wet and I worried I’d get butter on my skirt. I tried to hold my legs really still and not squeeze the paper cone too hard. It didn’t feel natural. Mom always bought me my own popcorn.

We all sat there eating popcorn and watching the movie. Margaret’s hand would reach over and fill itself up with white buttery popcorn. Her dad’s would come slowly back and forth from the popcorn to his mouth, hand to mouth, one kernel at a time. I became terribly aware of each of his movements. They seemed so careful, so planned. Margaret didn’t seem to notice. She munched away like a little maniac, her eyes glued to the big screen.

I hardly took any. I was afraid my hand would bump into his as he moved slowly back and forth. I sat very still.

“You girls like it here?” her dad said out of the blue.

We nodded that we did. I stuffed some popcorn in my mouth so I couldn’t say anything. I wasn’t liking it but I had no idea why.

“Look at those two.” He leaned over me and pointed to the car next to us. Their car windows were all steamy. We could see inside because we were so high. We could see that the girl’s blouse was unbuttoned. I stared at the blouse. Her boyfriend’s hand was exploring her brassiere, the top of her exposed breast.

I wished the girl would sit up. I felt embarrassed for her. I looked away.

“He sure is having fun,” Mr. Simpson insisted. “Lucky guy.”

“Dad.” Margaret said it in such a way that it made me think she had heard this before and didn’t want him to get started on something, this kind of talk, or something. I was pretty sure dads didn’t usually talk about this. I know my mom would have said something like, “God, why don’t they just stay home,” or “Kathleen Marie don’t you stare. They’re being silly.” Instead, Margaret’s dad said something that made me go purple.

“You’d ever had anyone touch you there?”

I knew he was asking me. I just stared at the screen the way Margaret was and pretended not to hear. I felt Mr. Simpson’s hand move towards the popcorn. Some fell onto my lap. His hand searched, found, lifted the kernels to his mouth. I felt the car fill up with something hard to describe, a heavy silence. People breathing. Not us.

“I remember the first time I touched a woman.” Margaret and I strained to watch the movie. “This stuff embarrass you guys?” he laughed. I heard myself laugh, too. I hated that strangled silence. So I laughed again. He continued, “It is pretty scary, but it’s exciting, too.” He reached over and touched Margaret’s shoulder. “Hey Margie, your old dad embarrassing you?”

“Naw,” Margaret shrugged his arm off.

“Want hot dogs?” The father opened the door to the truck. If I’d been with Mom, I would have yelled “and French fries” after him, but I didn’t. I didn’t say a word. Neither did Margaret.

We didn’t talk when he was gone. We pretended to watch the movie.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. I crawled out of the truck on Mr. Simpson’s side. As I crawled over where he had sat I felt frightened and I said the stupidest thing.

“Do you think your mom called my mom? Do you think she knows I’m here. Maybe I should go home. Maybe she doesn’t know where I am.”

“Shut up!” Margaret said.

“I could call a taxi,” I told her.

“You’re nuts.”

I didn’t feel nuts. I felt as if I were in another person’s body. I wasn’t sure what to do. I crawled out of the truck and once again fell to the ground with a thud.

“Jesus!” Margaret said.

“I’m all right,” I promised, gathering myself up and scurrying off to the bathroom. But when I got there I couldn’t pee. I just didn’t have to any more. I felt badly about coming to the drive-in. I felt so bad about not telling my mom. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be in my own bed.

Mr. Simpson was waiting with hot dogs when I got back. He jumped out and lifted me up and in. I tried to get in without his touching me but it was impossible.

When I got in, Margaret crawled over me. Her dad didn’t say anything. I leaned against the door. My heart was racing. I felt cold. I didn’t eat the hot dog. It smelled awful. Sweet and rich. It smelled like the Burns meat packing plant smelled.

That plant was situated right next door to the hotel where we’d lived. I’d smelled that smell before. I’d heard the pigs squealing when they knew they were going to die.

I squeezed the hotdog tight into a ball and shoved it in my pocket. We sat there watching the movie, Margaret and her dad eating and me trying not to smell the hot dog or think of the squealing pigs when suddenly I felt as if I might pee in my pants. What if I peed in my pants and it got the seat wet? Sometimes I wet the bed. What if I peed in Mr. Simpson’s truck?

That was nuts. I wouldn’t pee in the truck if I were awake. I never really peed my pants when I was awake and there was no way I was going to fall asleep in Mr. Simpson’s truck.

But I did. I did fall asleep. I don’t know how it happened. But it did.

I must have rested my head against the door. And I guess I did fall asleep. I can’t quite believe I did, the way I was feeling and all, but Margaret’s dad was carrying me into the porch of the ‘L’ and Mom was thanking him for being so kind when I woke up.

I went frantic to get away from him and almost knocked him on his kiester in my struggles. “It’s okay baby, you’re home.” I think my mom thought I didn’t know where I was. Sometimes when I would wake up at night that would happen to me, especially after a bad dream.

I stomped into our house confused, embarrassed, frightened for having fallen so deeply asleep. I could hear my mother’s stupid voice laughingly explain away my outburst in terms of my being “so self conscious about those long gangly legs”.

Margaret said something, but I don’t remember what. She was standing beside her dad when he was carrying me. That made his carrying me even worse. She wasn’t sleeping. She didn’t fall asleep in the stupid movie.

“See you again sometime,” I heard Mr. Simpson call out. I didn’t answer. I knew I wouldn’t. I never wanted to see him again.

I had a hard time falling asleep. I kept remembering the feeling in the truck, the heavy silence. I had never really been around a dad. It wasn’t the way I thought it would be.

I had always imagined being with a dad would make you feel safe. It would make you feel proud and safe. I couldn’t say for sure how Margaret felt. But proud and safe weren’t the words that seemed to fit. The trouble was, no words seemed to fit.

I liked words. I liked imagining them, playing with them in my mind. I even liked making up words. But for the life of me, I could not think of a word that described what it was like to be with Margaret and her dad.

Finally one came to me. Hollow. It felt hollow.

That surprised me. Hollow was a word that I thought you would feel when you were alone. Or when you were feeling badly because you didn’t have a dad. But hollow was the word for being with Margaret’s dad.

A great big awful hollow. If I could have given the word a color, it

would have been gray.

That night, I woke up dreaming that I was in a big bath-tub filled with bubbles that smelled like apricots and almonds. And my bed was wet. My pajamas were wet.

And more than anything in the world I wanted my dad. I wanted my dad to be living in our house. I wanted him to be home from the war, strong and smart and home every night.

I knew if my dad were here I would never wet the bed again. I was sure of it.

In the morning Mom sat on the edge of my bed. I was so uncomfortable. The sheet and mattress under me were damp and cold. My pajamas were damp and cold. I could smell myself. I didn’t want Mom to know.

She didn’t seem to notice. She told me that she was surprised when Mrs. Simpson phoned her. It wasn’t like me to go off without asking permission. She didn’t want me to do it again.

I nodded, promising I wouldn’t.

I told her I was sorry.

“Did you have a good time?” she asked indicating all was forgiven.

“It was great. Mr. Simpson bought us popcorn and hot dogs. We went on the swings. We had a great time. Margaret’s dad is so much fun.”

“Are you okay?”

“Jim Dandy!”

“Did you pee the bed?”

“No. No.”

Mom looked sad when I said that. I was sure she could smell the pee even though I kept the covers pulled tight. My fingers hurt I was clutching the blanket so tightly, crushing the blanket against my chest.

And then I had the strangest feeling. I can’t explain it. But I wished my mom would call me a liar. I wished she would slap me and call me a liar.

My mom never slapped me. Never spanked me. Not once in my life. But that day, I wished she would. That day I wished I could get the worst spanking of my life.

Chapter Three: The Forsay Gang

“Who are you watching now?”

I’d turned my attention from one side of the ‘L’ to the other. I had given up watching Margaret. Every time I looked in the direction of the taxi stand that old hollow gray feeling would come back.

“She’s watching the whorehouse,” Grandfather said.

“Katherine Marie!”

“Oh for God’s sake Rose, there are a bunch of kids living over there.”

Grandfather, as usual, was right. There were a bunch of kids over there, twelve of them to be exact.

“What happened to Margaret?” Mom had hoped that friendship would pan out for me.

“She’s too old,” I mumbled not wanting to go into detail.

“I didn’t think anyone was too old or too young for you,” Mom said, unwilling to be shut out of my mind. “I never thought that would be an issue.” She just loved getting inside my head.

“I want some kid friends,” I told her. “Something normal.”

“Good luck,” she said and laughed. I wanted to punch her in the nose.

“I’m going to find some.” My voice faltered a bit and I could tell Mom was sorry she had said the “Good Luck” the way she had. I knew she meant there was nothing normal about us. And I suppose she was right. But I just didn’t want to start a new school without knowing even one person, normal or not.

I was determined. It was time I took things into my own hands. It was time I made things turn out the way I wanted them to. I knew the path to my success lay across the poplars. I knew it lay in the blonde girl they called Annie and her eleven brothers. I knew my success depended upon my becoming a member of the Forsay gang.

That gang stood out like a sore thumb. Not that a sore thumb really sticks out. You just feel it a lot, are aware of it. Maybe that’s why folks say “sticks out”. That gang stuck out all right. They were hard to miss. Two set of twins were part of the whole gang of boys all with pale faces, thin blonde hair and one girl so frail-looking you worried about her the minute you saw her.

At least, I did. But I should have, I mean, she had lots of back up. Lots. Twelve back ups.

Every day I scanned the street for signs of them. I watched them come and go, always the twelve of them, always one in a wagon pulled by a beautiful golden retriever.

They had everything, a big family, a dog, a dad. Everything I wanted.

“Go outside,

Kitten,” Mom said. “It’s so darn hot in here.” She was right. It was only 8 am and it was already that kind of day on the prairies that makes you long for ice cubes and fans and loose clothes and cold water from almost anywhere. The day was going to be hot. Hot, hot, hot. “A scorcher,” Grandfather said.

I watched those kids doing what every kid wants to do on a hot day. They were getting cool under the garden hose. At least, Annie was getting cool. She was wearing a skimpy little bathing suit a pale yellow color. She wore her shoes and socks. The shoes squished with water when she ran.

The boys were laughing, horsing around, taking turns spraying her. As I watched, I had a wonderful urge to join in, to let the cool water spray me, take away the heat, let me be part of the fun. I tried to imagine the cool water spraying my legs, my arms. I tried to hear my own laughter. I wanted to be there with them.

But how could I? Who had invited me? They were a gang, a gang of brothers with one blonde sister.

I put down the binoculars and opened the door to the ‘L’. I leaned against the door and watched and listened. I was partly hidden by the row of Poplars that separated the ‘L’ from their huge house with more rooms than you could imagine.

Annie was laughing wild screams of excitement. I thought she was having the time of her life. The time I could never have, without brothers and at least one sister.

There was something in Annie’s laughter that made me look closer, listen harder. The laughter was too shrill, too insistent of fun. I went back in and looked with the binoculars again.

And then I saw that her thin body was becoming covered with huge red blotches where the water stung. Her eyes were wide with fear.

The brothers weren’t spraying Annie the way Mom had sometimes sprayed me, on the farm, when I was just a kid. Not the soft, filmy spray you can dance to.

These brothers were spraying hard. The hose was rigid with water, screaming with the hard riveting pulse of the water hammering onto Annie. A fireman’s hose of water. And for one second I thought of my Uncle Joe, the one tortured by the bad Germans. Did they spray him with water, throw him helpless into a corner? Had he’d been brave, not told the secrets they wanted?

Only one brother did not spray. One brother sat in a wagon while the others sprayed. A golden retriever attached to the wagon by a harness sat and watched. The boy in the wagon wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on. He was concentrating on a piece of wood that he was carving into perfect replica of his own dog.

I learned later that he was a genius at carving. He had a house full of carvings made out of anything he could get his hands on. He had turned the whorehouse into an art gallery. I don’t think anyone ever went there to see the art, but they could have.

I walked out of the house and through the Poplars towards them. I had on all my clothes. “Spray me,” I said. I wasn’t sure where the words came from. “Spray me,” I repeated. “Looks like fun.”

The Forsay brother holding the hose glanced at his brother who seemed to be tied inside that wagon. I wasn’t sure why. The boy in the wagon stopped carving. He glanced up. He didn’t smile. His dog stood silent beside him.

The water hit hard. It would have knocked me down if I hadn’t braced myself. It pounded like a sharp, small fist.

Annie and I endured the torture, laughing, running, screaming under the merciless pressure of the hose until the brothers tired of the game. I couldn’t imagine why Annie was letting the water hurt her. But I knew why I was. I knew it was a way in. I knew it was part of the rites of passage.

I knew about rites of passage. Grandfather had taught me about them. “ Everyone has them,” he’d told me. In gangs in LA, the rites of passage were brutal. Sometimes you had to kill someone.

In Africa, you had to have your face scarred in beautiful but painful patterns. We’d seen pictures of the scarring in National Geographic.

I was so fascinated by the pictures. I could feel the knife cut the flesh. I could feel my own hot blood come to the surface. I could feel the Chief wipe it away, again, again, until it stopped and the colored ash could be put in my wounds. The ash would burn. And it would heal and I would be apart of my tribe. I could be identified. I would wear my scars proudly.

Getting hit with the water was part of my rite of passage. I prayed I wouldn’t be expected to kill anyone. I hoped I wouldn’t be asked to run a knife across my face. None of the Forsays had scars and they certainly didn’t look like Africans.

In fact, they were as un-African as you can get. Tall, pale, with lips so fine they would have disappeared in their faces except that they were dark pink. And they were perfectly shaped, as if those lips had been stenciled on each of the Forsays and painted in with a fine pink brush. The lips were beautiful, perfect in the thin faces. Only their ears were big. All of them had big ears. But I would never have said so, even under torture.

When the water stopped, Annie and I stood, steaming in the hot sun, our bodies burning with our wounds. We walked away, away from the brothers, away from the hose, lying as if dead where the brother had dropped it.

Like two old soldiers, we walked towards main street and away from the battlefield. My clothes were already beginning to dry.

“My name’s Kathleen Marie,” I told her. “But my friends call me Maria.” It was a lie. No one had ever called me Maria. But somehow, this ritual, this possible entrance into the gang called for a new name. So I gave myself one. I was sure it would bring good luck. I was sure it would make me belong.

“Annie,” she said. She stuck out her hand. I shook it. It was surprisingly strong. Not weak and limp like the way she looked. It was more like the handshake that belonged to a man. A small thin man.

She was the second young person who had shaken my hand. I couldn’t believe it. Is that what kids did? Shake hands? I realized I had no idea. I had no idea what kids did. I was an only child raised on a farm with no kids. I hadn’t had a lot of kid experience.

We walked in silence for a moment. “Want a shake?” she said. I looked confused. I had no money on me, not even any mad money. Besides, she wasn’t even dressed, just the skimpy yellow bathing suit. It had a tear in the back, maybe where the water had caught and pushed. I would notice, as we got to know one another. that a lot of her clothes had tears in them.

Annie reached down into her sock. She pulled out a quarter. “Let’s go,” she screamed, full of wild and forbidden pleasure. I raced after her.

We sat on the very stools where Margaret and I had sat and shared cokes before the pajama party, before the drive-in. I tried not to think of Margaret.

We ordered one huge strawberry malt with two straws. I was careful not to suck too fast, not to get more than my share. I was so excited sitting on the booth, next to this girl, my new friend, sharing a strawberry shake. The cool rich creamy fluid slid slowly to our stomachs, soothing, making us well and whole and strong again. I could imagine the liquid healing the places on my arms, my legs, my back where the water had hit.

“Ain’t this good?” she said. Her lips smiled. They were perfect. They were even pinker from the strawberry stain. They didn’t look real. You could imagine her taking off those lips as one would take off ear-rings at the end of a party.

I nodded.

“We should tell a secret,” she suggested.

“A secret?” I loved the idea. The idea made me think that Annie really wanted to be my friend. Maybe she was as desperate for friends as I was. Maybe brothers didn’t count as much as I thought. I was sure telling secrets sealed a friendship.

“You first.” I wasn’t sure what level of secret Annie was thinking about. There were secrets and then there were secrets.

“My oldest brother has red hair,” she said, “he dyes it to be like us.”

Now that was a secret. I wondered how to match it.

“But if you let on you know, or if you tell anyone, he’ll kill you.”

“I won’t tell.” And I wouldn’t. I was wishing Annie had not told me such a big secret.

“I crave chocolate,” I said.

“That’s not a secret.” She looked disgusted.

“I mean I want chocolate all the time. I even pray for chocolate and my Aunt Beryle says that we can’t pray for such things. But I do. I may be praying my way to hell but I can’t seem to help myself. I pray for it every day.”

Annie looked at me hard, to see if I were telling the truth. She decided I was.

“Chocolate? Why chocolate?”

I didn’t know why. I wasn’t even sure when it started. There’d been a lot of chocolate before the war, then it had just sort of disappeared. It was as if the war had eaten up all the chocolate. It was as is people had almost forgotten all about it.

But I hadn’t. I thought about it all the time. I ended my prayers with it each night. “And God, please, please, get me some chocolate.”

“I’ll bet we could find some,” Annie said. She jumped off the bench. She looked determined. I liked her. I liked her a lot. My hopes soared.

“Maybe your brothers could help.” I figured thirteen people looking for chocolate would be a lot better than two, even if one of them was strapped in a wagon.

“Naw, they only do what they want. They wouldn’t help us.”

“Maybe if we found enough for them, too.”

“Naw, we’re girls. They have a boys’ gang. No girls allowed.”

“They let you in.” I’d watched them with the binoculars and I’d seen Annie and her brothers roam around the neighborhood. All of them together. The Forsay gang. Why was she lying?

They let me follow them, sometimes,” Annie said. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m really in.”

I realized that getting hit by a stream of water was no right of passage. I started worrying about what it would take to get those boys to let us in the gang.

We had reached the ‘L’ when Annie looked at me as if she had the most important thing in the world to say. She looked at me with squinty eyes. It made her look a bit like a mouse or a gerbil.

“I got something to ask you,” she said. “Do you like to swim?”

“I love it,” I lied. Actually I had never been swimming. Well, unless dog paddling in a paddling pool counts. But I could imagine loving it. I had seen pictures of Ester Williams swimming. I had seen clips in the movies of famous swimmers making flowers out of their legs and arms. I imagined it would be wonderful to be a fish flower.

“Let’s go.” She paused. “Let’s go to the river.” It was like casually saying let’s climb Mount Everest. The river ran through our town. It froze in the winter and you could ice fish on it. Someone had once caught a 100 pound Sturgeon in that river. Sturgeon are so old you have to skin them like a snake. The man and the fish had been in the newspaper. I was sure other big fish with skins like snakes lived in that water.

“Just us?”

“Who else?”

“Us is great. Us is fine.”

“I’m not always with my brothers she said, almost in defiance. Almost with anger. I hadn’t ever seen her without them. But then, I didn’t really know everything they did. I hardly knew anything about them, except that I wanted to be with them.

I grabbed my bathing suit and yelled out to my Mom, “We’re going to play in the water,” I sort of lied. I knew Mom would think we were going to jump in the sprinklers. I knew she’d never let me go swimming in a river. Not in the mighty Saskatchewan River!

We stood on the bank. There was no beach. I had often imagined swimming in a lake. I had seen pictures of lakes, blue as my mother’s eyes. I had seen the beaches, white with warm sand.

But this river wasn’t anything like that. This river was even better than that. This river flowed fast, making a beautiful sound like music. Tall grasses and cat-tails edged the river. I knew they were called cat-tails because Mom decorated the house with them for Thanksgiving. I had no idea why they called them cat-tails. They didn’t look anything like cat-tails.

The long brown oval tail part looked like a velvet pop-sickle. I imagined it to feel like a deer’s nose might feel, though I had never really felt either.

I could have sat all day just watching the grass move in a slight breeze. I could have stolen up to the cat-tails and stroked the velvet noses.

Annie told me to get into the water. She was watching me. She was saying it in a way that made me feel afraid. I looked around for her brothers. Was this a trick? Was it a new rite of passage?

I stuck my toe in the cold dark water.

“I can’t swim,” I confessed.

“Then why’d you come swimming? That’s stupid.”

She grabbed hold of her nose and jumped in. She disappeared for a moment, then came up. She waved. She spit water in my direction.

I watched her swim for what seemed like hours. I loved sitting there watching her move about in the water. She was like a blonde mermaid. She was such a good swimmer, she moved with such grace and ease, twisting, turning.

Annie got out. Her lips were blue with cold. Even in the heat of summer that river was ice cold. It never warmed up. It moved too fast for that. It didn’t even thaw until May.

We hadn’t brought towels. We hadn’t thought of towels. I unbuttoned my blouse and handed it to her. She dried herself off. She gave it back to me. “Thanks, Maria,” she said.

It startled me. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone call me Maria. I had almost forgotten I had made up a new name.

“I won’t tell my brothers that you didn’t go in.”

“They knew we were going swimming?”

“They were hoping you’d get a blood sucker. They love to burn them off.”

A blood sucker! There are blood suckers in the river? I got so scared I started to burp.

“Guess they’ll have to come up with something else.”

What did that mean? Were they still considering letting me into the gang?

I burped again. I often burp when I get nervous. Annie stopped walking ahead of me.

“I think it’s time for another secret,” she said. She was one who liked secrets. “You first.”

I knew I was in for it. I had to tell a big secret this time. I had two secrets. One about my dad. One about my grandfather. Neither secret did I want to say out loud. Saying something out loud made it happen. That’s what my grandmother used to say. “Be careful what you say out loud.”

If I told her my dad was not really at war, it would be true. If I told her my grandfather was dying, he might die. I burped again.

“I pee the bed,” I blurted. I didn’t even know where that secret came from. It seemed to satisfy her.

“I have a baby brother,” she told me. “You burp like him.”

That didn’t seem like a very big secret. We moved on, her ahead of me, then she added the really secret part.

“He’s in a hospital,” she said. “He has water on the brain. It gives him a big head.”

I had never heard of such a thing. I couldn’t even imagine it. I had a morbid urge to go and see the baby with the water on his brain.

“Do you visit him?” I asked.

“Naw, why would I?” she wanted to know. She looked at me as if I were really stupid. “He don’t even know you’re there.”

We walked the rest of the way in silence. Then, without even looking at me, she said, “Maybe if we steal them some money.”

What she said confused me. We could see the baby if we stole money? For whom? The nurses? My mother was a nurse. I couldn’t imagine her letting you in to see your brother only if you gave her money. Now it was my turn to look at Annie as if she were stupid.

Then she explained. She and her brothers stole money from the guests who came to their boarding house for the day, or for a few hours even. I was going to ask her if the boarding house was really a whore house, but I wasn’t that dumb. Even though I didn’t exactly know what a whore house was, I knew Annie wouldn’t want me calling it that. It would cook my goose for sure.

Annie went on explaining while I tried to pick up clues to see if I could figure out what a whore house was. All I knew is that there were guests and they didn’t stay too long. The guests would hang their coats in a room and the brothers and Annie would sneak into that room and search their pockets for change.

So this was going to be my rite of passage. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as bad as murder or scarring.

The brothers made Annie and me go in alone. We moved our fingers through the pockets.

Someone banged a door down the hall. I jumped and when I did I peed my pants just a little. Not enough for anyone to notice. But me, of course. I noticed.

We got three quarters and a dime. Was it enough? Was it enough to get us to be part of the gang.

It wasn’t. The brothers just took the money and told us to get lost. Marcel, the one who was always pulled in the wagon by his dog, whose name was Mufflow, looked as if he were willing to let us in. But Frank, the oldest, the leader, said “Nope.” And that was that.

“Told you,” said Annie.

I waved good-bye. I began to make my way through the poplars. It had been a lousy day. I’d been too afraid to swim and I’d stolen money from strangers and I still wasn’t in the gang.

I felt Annie touch me before I heard her say, “I know where there might be chocolate. Mrs. Lily’s garbage.”

Annie was right behind me. She had followed me. All right!

Mrs. Lily was the prettiest widow in town, and the richest. Annie told me that she and her brother’s had found good things in her garbage. A necklace of green beads, a silk blouse, even a silver jug. So why not chocolate?

But you had to be very careful. Mrs. Lily was known to be a really nervous Nellie and if she thought you were up to no good, she might shoot you. She called the police all the time. She always thought folks were trying to break in, to steal her precious things. She was afraid of more than robbers. She was afraid of germs, too. She even worried about floods. Now, there are not a lot of floods on the prairies, I can tell you that.

We found her garbage cans easy enough. We were careful not to make any noise. The garbage didn’t look good. It had cigarette butts and slimy lettuce in it. There were empty wine bottles and several boxes of Quaker oatmeal.

“Could be she makes oatmeal cookies, oatmeal and chocolate,” I said, rummaging through a particularly dirty can. Mrs. Lily had cooked a chicken, but she hadn’t eaten much. The chicken was sitting, half rotten, on its uneaten breast. Only the drumsticks were gone. I guessed Mrs. Lily only liked drumsticks.

I couldn’t pick up the stinking chicken. I couldn’t search any more. My hands felt dirty from the lettuce and cigarette butts. And the chicken I hadn’t even touched. The thought of that chicken was enough to get to me. It’s weird, but thinking upsets me as much as actually doing a thing. I wish it didn’t, but it does.

“I think she bathes in it,” I said, feeling the need to be clean. “I think she fills her bathtub with warm water and oatmeal and she soaks her whole body in it.”

“That’s why she’s so beautiful.” Annie seemed to be agreeing with me. We were both ready to give up. We were both ready to call it a day.

I had saved Annie by joining in the hosing. I had taken some of the brunt of the water jets. She had searched in garbage for chocolate. We were even. And neither of us were in the gang.

That night, I asked Mom if I could put some oatmeal in the bathwater. She wanted to know if I had a rash. I told her no, I just wanted to soak and get real clean.

She sat on the toilet and talked to me while I soaked. Mom was good at knowing when I had something to tell her. Often I told her things while I soaked. I was born in March and Mom said that was why I like water so much. She’s right. I do like it, in a bathtub that is.

I told her about the brothers and the water and the garbage. I told her about wanting to join the gang.

“Is that all?” she wanted to know. “Is that all you wanted to tell me?”

“I stole a quarter.”

“And?”

And then I told her the worst part. You might think the worst part is that we went to the river. But that wasn’t the worst part. Anyway, I didn’t go in, so I didn’t have to confess. Those were her rules, after all. Well, sort of.

No, it wasn’t that. I told her about Annie’s baby brother who had water on the brain. I told her how I wanted to see him. I was curious and I wanted to see him. I felt bad because of the awful sense of curiosity I had experienced. I should have felt sorry for him. But I wanted to see him, like you want to see a circus freak.

Mom listened as I talked. She didn’t get mad. She bathed my back with a sponge. It felt so good. I didn’t want her to ever stop. I closed my eyes as she dipped the sponge in the hot water, squeezed it on my back, moved the warm sponge softly down my back, dipped into the hot water, squeezed, rubbed.

As she bathed me, she talked in her lovely soothing voice. It was deep, and even. It rarely went shrill or loud. It was a strong voice, a voice that you could imagine singing. But actually my mother was not a good singer. When she sang, her voice wavered and went off key. But I loved it. I loved it even more than I would had it been perfect. It made her vulnerable and even more beautiful than she already was.

“I know him,” Mom told me. She wasn’t mad. She didn’t tell me I was awful to want to see him. She talked in her almost dreamy story telling voice. Mom could have been an actress. She had an actress’s voice and body.

“He’s on the ward where I do special duty at the hospital. I sing to him.” That was strange, her singing to him. I felt a twinge of jealousy. Did he love her singing the way I did?

“He doesn’t know if anyone is there.” The jealousy showed a little in my voice. My mom didn’t pay any attention to it.

“He knows,” Mom said. “He knows.”

Mom helped me dry off. She came to my room. She sat on my bed. “Tomorrow, we’ll go and see him. I know the Head Nurse, she’ll let us. She’s a prince.”

Together we walked over to the hospital. Mom brought me to the room where the baby with the big head lay sleeping.

His head was suspended with special bands of gauzy cotton. Mom told me it was so that he wouldn’t hurt himself. His head was so heavy he could actually break his own neck.

“Where’s the water?” I had imagined the brain would be exposed and somehow water would be sitting in some kind of pool or running like a little river.

“Inside his head,” Mom said. “It makes his head swell up with fluid.”

The head was big and doughy. I could imagine my hands in the dough head. The thought frightened me. I wanted to leave.

Mom pulled up a chair for each of us. We sat next to the baby’s crib. She reached over and took his hand. She began to sing a song I knew so well. “Hush little baby don’t you cry, Mamma’s going to sing you a lullaby”. When she sang the baby opened his eyes. He looked at my Mom while she sang. He had to pull at the bands that held his head. He turned as much as the bands allowed and listened and looked right at her. His eyes were big and blue.

That night I dreamed that he was my brother. That I was part of the Forsay gang and that we would pull the baby in the wagon. I dreamed about feeding him chocolate which he would lick from my finger. I imagined him laughing and feeling good. I dreamed that his head was shrinking.

And I was sure that if I ever did become part of the gang, I could talk them into taking the baby out of the hospital. I was sure the baby was too lonely in that hospital. I knew that baby needed to be part of the family.

The next day I told Annie that Mathew liked my mother. That my mother sang to him.

“Who’s Mathew?” she wanted to know.

“He’s your brother.”

“I don’t have a brother named Mathew.

“In the hospital. Your brother who’s in the hospital.”

“He doesn’t have a name.”

“I saw it. I saw it on his chart. His name is Mathew.”

“You never seen that baby. Boy you make stuff up. If you don’t shut up, I’ll tell my brothers. They’d beat you up for that. They could beat you up easy.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You’d better be.”

With that Annie left me. She left me standing in the middle of the street. I was afraid it was the end of things. That baby and I would never be part of the gang. Never!

Chapter Four: Worms

Two weeks later, Annie and her brothers marched past my house. Annie saw me at my usual perch watching, hopeful face pressed against the window. She waved for me to come out and join them.

“Annie!” I said to Mom as way of explanation as I rushed to catch up.

“Don’t be late,” Mom called, giving me permission to go. She knew how I felt about the Forsays. It was actually already late in the afternoon. By her standards it was too late. But Mom believed rules were meant to be broken for a good cause. Me finding a friend was a good cause in her books.

We headed for the downtown area. We passed a store where my dad used to go to buy tools. The store was being turned into a warehouse. Somehow that made me mad. When my dad came home, he’d need that store.

I counted on my dad coming back from the war or where ever he was – in the arms of some person who was nursing him back to health and sanity. He would hate to leave her, but he would, once his memory returned, once he knew who he was and remembered all he had left behind.

I had heard Grandfather say to Mom once, “You’re too much for him, Rose. He was never enough for you. You married on the rebound.” What a thing to say. I wasn’t totally sure what it meant- rebound- but I didn’t think it was a compliment to my dad. If my grandfather had to take sides, it was pretty clear whose side he’d be on.

The Forsays and I marched right past the hotel. I didn’t tell them about my having lived there. I’m not big on giving information unless you have to. Mom says I get that from my dad. I wouldn’t know.

“Destination – Burns Meat Packing Plant!” Frank said, pointing to the big brick structure as he spoke. It usually sounded like an order when he spoke.

I hated the place. Of course I’d seen in often, it being located adjacent to the shop where Dad worked when I was a little kid. Adjacent. I loved that word even though it meant my dad had been working next to the place where they killed pigs and cows and chickens. It was where they made bologna and wieners and hams. As a child I had heard the animals protest as they were led to slaughter. The sound still haunted my dreams.

And now I was heading right for it as if it were the best place in all the world.

Annie and the brothers insisted it was their favorite place to go. They said this because of the boxcars. The boxcars sat on a single set of railway tracks that came from the meatpacking plant. The tracks didn’t go anywhere. They just stopped in the weeds. Maybe the tracks got torn up when the city got built around the meatpacking plant. I knew that at one time those boxcars had carried chickens and pork chops all over the prairies.

Now there were no tracks left to lead the boxcars and no engines to pull them. The boxcars simply sat motionless and empty with grass and weeds growing on all sides. It looked almost as if they were old or lost or trying to hide. I couldn’t help but think that the boxcars were glad they didn’t have to do their nasty job anymore, carrying dead bodies, all carved up.

Whatever their former use, Annie’s brothers found those boxcars irresistible. They wanted to build them into a large fort but they couldn’t figure out a way to move them, of course.

I was glad. I wanted to leave them the way they were, a reminder of a time past. They were full of mystery and secrets and the sad longing of animals transformed from living things to lumps of meat wrapped in waxed brown paper. Being near them was like being near a church.

We ate meat in our house. We weren’t vegetarians or Quakers or anything. We were Catholics and Catholics eat meat except on Fridays and during Lent. Then they eat fish. One more thing about Catholics is that they aren’t big on saying grace. They prefer acts of contrition and Stations of the Cross. At least, so it seemed to me.

But there was the one prayer we always said before we ate meat. We thanked the animals for giving their lives for our supper. It was my dad who had started that ritual. I thought it was a lovely one. I had heard that Indians did that, too. Maybe we were part Indian and part German. I wasn’t sure. In the 40s you didn’t talk much about ancestry. Not if you were German, or even part German. Even if you were the good kind.

I hoped the boys wouldn’t actually go inside the boxcars. I knew I wouldn’t be able to, not actually enter one. It would be like entering a graveyard. The voices of pigs and chickens and small calves would call out to us, and what would be really spooky, is that only I would be able to hear their cries. The thought of it made my stomach bloat up. I began to burp. Burping made me think of Mathew, the baby brother with the big head.

I glanced at Annie. She knew what I was thinking. She may have been skinny, but she wasn’t dumb. She gave me a look that said, “Don’t you dare say a word.” I tried to give her a nod, but she looked away. Maybe a nod would have been too obvious. Henri, one of the twins, watched everyone like a hawk.

It was getting quite late, the boxcars were casting strange thin shadows into the grass.

“Let’s climb them,” said Marcel, the brother in the wagon always pulled by the beautiful golden retriever named Mufflow. The other brothers looked at each other in amazement. Henri snickered. It was a nervous kind of sound.

“You can’t climb,” Henri’s twin said. Several of the brothers nodded in agreement.

“We ain’t carrin’ you up there.” A statement of fact, from Frank.

“I know, you climb,” Marcel said.

The brothers hesitated. I couldn’t believe it. They were afraid.

Marcel looked at me. And suddenly I got it. He wanted me, all of us to climb the boxcars for him. He couldn’t, so he wanted us to. He wanted to watch us and pretend he was the one climbing to the top.

I made a move towards the end boxcar, the one nearest us. I reached up. I couldn’t reach the ladder. Marcel bumped his wagon up and down. He didn’t say a word but his wagon spoke of the urgency of his need. Mufflow, the golden retriever whined.

Mufflow moved the wagon forward. If I stood on the wagon, I could reach the bottom of the ladder. I could pull myself up and climb to the top. Mufflow was amazing.

Frank saw what I was about to do.

“I lead,” he said as he pushed past me.

One by one the boys and I climbed the rusty ladder which clung to the side of the box car. Annie stood by her brother who was tied to the wagon. Mufflow whined.

Marcel was the kind of kid who didn’t like to talk much. He preferred to use his wagon for walking and talking. Now the wagon was still. Like an old man, it watched along with the boy and his dog and his sister. Marcel was still as we climbed. He wasn’t even carving. He was imagining. He was imagining himself climbing and running along the boxcar, the soft wind blowing against his face and arms and bare legs.

Crouching low, our weight low, we edged our way to a central position, our hands clutching the roof. Slowly, slowly, we let go of the safety of the rough texture.

Holding our breath, we stood straight up. Risking all, we walked slowly across the length of the boxcar, our faces pinched with fear, our hearts racing. We reached the end of the boxcar, turned and returned to our starting place. We crouched again to a sitting position, twisting our bodies around, our legs searching for that first perilous ladder rung. Step by step we eased our way to safety.

Worn out from the excitement, we threw ourselves in the tall weeds that grew between the plant building and the tracks. We’d done it!

Sharing our triumph, Marcel jumped his wagon up and down, he and that wagon talking fast. Mufflow barked.

Just as our breathing was returning to normal and we lay hidden in the sweet clover and wild oats, feeling as though we had cheated death, we heard some guy shout, “I see you kids. Just let me catch you on that train. You’ll kill yourselves. Damn brats. Just let me catch you.” He turned and lurched towards the meat packing plant.

I was sure I could smell blood on him. Cold blood, blood from the place where they hang the bodies of huge animals.

None of us liked him. The boys did not appreciate being threatened. We looked at one another. And we knew.

Silent as soldiers on a secret mission we moved in single file towards the boxcars. No one spoke. No one led. We simply moved in unison towards our mission. One by one we climbed the ladder. One by one we stood and ran the length of the car. And then suddenly, without warning, Frank sailed through the air and landed safely to the next box car three feet away. Beneath Frank lay the ugly steel of connection rods.

Jump, jump, jump, each one of us followed suit. If anyone would have been watching as night closed in, they would have seen the shadows of ten small children sailing from box car to box car. Each of us knew if any one of us fell, we all would. As we jumped it was as if we were standing back in the tall grass watching ourselves.

It was the first time I can remember being able to do something and see myself do it at the same time. Without warning, I had an awful thought. I wondered if I would be able to see myself fall. And could I see myself feeling pain, or fainting?

I imagined a silver thread connecting me to each of those brothers. I imagined us falling in unison, fainting one after another. In my mind, we became silver shapes of smoke in the night, ghosts of our former selves.

And then I knew, without question, I knew it wouldn’t happen. We wouldn’t fall.

Held together by the silver thread we would move, safe and sure, one long chain of life. And I was part of that chain. I belonged. I would do anything for those boys. Anything.

It was dark by the time we got home. Mom and Grandfather were waiting. They hadn’t eaten yet. The supper was waiting, warm, in the oven.

I had the urge to tell them about the boys, about climbing the box cars, running along them, jumping from one to the other, miles up in the air, like ghosts, ghosts with silver threads joining us. But I knew it wasn’t a thing to tell.

I knew, too, that I didn’t want to. It was a secret. My secret. I had a secret all my own. I fell asleep right at the kitchen table. It was a thing that happened to me. I’d get excited about something, really scared or really happy, and all of a sudden, I’d be asleep. I couldn’t understand it. When sleep was the last thing I could imagine myself doing, that’s when it would happen. Out I’d go.

I remember Mom carrying me to the little cot in the porch. Her arms were strong. I felt light in those arms. I felt as if I were made of air. It was like the feeling I’d had on the boxcars, that light as air feeling. It was wonderful. I fell asleep knowing I was the luckiest person alive.

Two days later we headed back. I was so excited I could hardly breathe. Could we do it again? Why not? We were the Forsay gang.

“You’ve got to climb up. You’ve got to come with us,” I whispered to Annie.

“I have to stay with Marcel.”

I let her have it. She hadn’t made me swim. I wouldn’t make her climb. We were switching deals. Friends do that.

We marched past the furniture making shop where my dad used to work. I almost told them about his working there. I almost told them my whole damn life story I was feeling so cocky. I was feeling so good.

We were heading towards the back of the meat packing plant when we saw it. It must have escaped from the plant. It ran in wild darting bursts. It made an awful noise. It was more like a low screaming than anything I had ever heard. I didn’t think a chicken could make a noise like that.

Mufflow began to whine when he saw it. Mufflow wanted to chase that chicken, but he was too well trained to do that. He knew his job was to haul Marcel around, to keep Marcel safe. It wasn’t his job to chase a chicken who was running for its life.

But for some reason the boys were sure it was their job. We all began to chase after the terrified chicken.

My stomach went into a tight knot at the sight of that chicken running in frantic circles seeking a way out, a way away, seeking safety, seeking life.

My memory flipped to the farm, to my grandmother and the baby chicks in boxes under warm lights, chicks that would be raised to lay eggs, chicks who would grow to have names and live with my grandmother and her pet crow and her pet bear on the farm.

I couldn’t somehow imagine this thing, this dirty, tortured, terrified thing as having ever lived in a warm box next to dozens of other newborn chicks.

One of the brothers had found a stick, he’d broken the end with a snap to make it sharp. “Let’s get it,” he shouted.

The chase excited us. We began to scream, a blood lust urging us on. We picked up sticks, any weapon we could find. I felt in fierce competition to be first, to get to the chicken first, to be the one who captured it.

I could imagine myself handing the chicken to Frank. I could imagine his smile.

I felt myself tug at Annie’s skirt and heard it rip in my hands. I pushed her aside, out of the way. I was a good foot taller than she was. I pushed my way through the boys, fighting my way to the bird. It flew in a sort of arc and landed on a parked truck. I pounded the truck with my fist, the chicken leaped down.

It ran frantically towards a small crate. It was making dreadful sounds. It jumped in the crate to escape us. We had it trapped. I reached in and grabbed. I pulled out a handful of feathers. There was blood on my arm.

Annie and the brothers surrounded the cage. The chicken faced us. Its eyes were bright, its beak open. Its chest heaved. I could see its tongue in its beak. The tongue was bright red. I stopped. I couldn’t move.

“Kill it!” from Frank, the oldest, the leader of the gang, the one with all the power, the one who dyed his red hair blonde.

Annie had a stick in her hand. She poked it into the cage. It hit the bird. The chicken jumped back, hurt. It had nowhere to go.

“Kill it!” The order, again. I couldn’t move. “Marie!” Frank handed me a piece of broken board. The end was jagged. There was a nail on the board.

I pushed the board into the crate, toward the chicken. The other brothers joined me. We threw rocks, we poked sticks, we screamed. And finally it was dead.

I looked at Frank. He took the stick from my hand. He raised it high and gave a war whoop. All the others gave a war whoop. Even Annie. Even Marcel who so rarely spoke.

I started to scream. I just stood there, my mouth open and screams coming out of me.

Frank reached down and took my face in his hands. He pushed my face against his jacket. He held me there, with a strange tenderness. The screams turned to sobs.

They let me ride in the wagon with Marcel. No one mocked me because I had screamed. No one had told me to shut up. I had killed the chicken. It had been my rite of passage. As Grandfather had predicted, it had demanded the spilling of blood.

From that day on, Annie and the brothers joined me in the great and secret pursuit of chocolate. It became our obsession.

Why we decided to make it secret I don’t know. But adults, that is adults familiar to us, like uncles, aunts, parents, were not privy to our obsession. We owned it. It was ours.

We looked everywhere. We tried Mrs. Lily’s garbage again, but there was no chocolate, just more oatmeal and discarded clothing. Annie found a sequined blouse, red, gorgeous. She decided to wear it over her clothes. She wore it everywhere. We were sure it would bring us luck.

We tried requesting chocolate from people who lived in other cities, cities like San Francisco, or Toronto, cities where stores had rows of shelves full of chocolate. Cities where there was more than one store, one hotel. We wrote to a Forsay cousin in Winnipeg, but she never answered us. We wrote to the mayor, but he didn’t answer, either. I don’t remember whose idea that was. Marcel’s I think. Mrs. Forsay had written about getting financial aid for an operation to fix what was wrong with Marcel’s heart, and the mayor had answered. He hadn’t provided the assistance, but he had written how sorry he was about Marcel’s heart.

Henri came up with the plan to casually suggest to Mr. McConnel that he order chocolate bars and sell them at the counter.

Mr. Mc Connel wasn’t a man you could easily convince of anything. He was pretty set in his ways. Mom said he was a disappointed man, a man who had wanted to be a dancer and had to run the family store instead.

I believed the story. Mr. Mc Connel never smiled and he always wore shiny black patent leather shoes.

He and my mother had something in common, they both loved dancing and they both loved shoes. And though they both had nice shoes, they rarely got to dance.

The brothers didn’t like Mr. McConnel. They resented the way he always watched them when they came into his store. They felt he didn’t trust them.

He was right. They weren’t to be trusted. I knew that. They didn’t mind stealing things if they had the chance. I was sure they’d steal us some chocolate if we had the chance. But we didn’t have the chance.

‘Why not order some damn chocolate bars,” Frank suggested one day. “Why not sell them?”

“I don’t buy or sell chocolate bars,” Mr. McConnel said. “I sell ice cream and sodas. I sell canned goods and nails. Not chocolate. And I don’t like little boys telling me what to do. And I don’t like them to swear in my store.”

Frank hated being called a little boy. He knocked over a whole box of nails on his way out. “So sorry,” he said. But we all knew he had meant to do it.

One day Annie and I were in the store buying ten cans of soup for her mom when a salesman came in with a sample box. A sample box of chocolate bars.

“Chocolate bars. Chocolate bars,” I screamed.

Five cents a piece,” the salesman said. “They’ll sell like hotcakes!” I recognized the voice. I looked up. It was Margaret’s dad. It was Mr. Simpson.

He handed one out towards me. He was going to give it to me. I moved away. I couldn’t take it. I was so afraid his hand would touch mine. He smiled. But the smile wasn’t real. It was full of something I might have called resentment, but the word wouldn’t have been quite right. When I turned seven, Grandpa gave me the most wonderful book, a combination of a dictionary and quotations, Roget’s Thesaurus. It made me fall in love with words. It made me almost fanatical about words. I became obsessed with the idea of finding the right word for the situation. But I couldn’t find the right word for that smile.

He left the chocolate bars with Mr. McConnel.

“Give back the soup,” I shouted. “Give back the soup.”

We’d had just enough money for soup. Not a penny more. No mad money. Nothing.

“We want to give back one can of soup,” Annie said, taking the can out of the bag.

“The note said ten tins,” Mr. McConnell said. He didn’t say it mean or anything. Just matter-of-fact. Mrs. Forsay always wrote notes. She didn’t trust her children any more than Mr. McConnell did.

“Give us the damn chocolate,” Annie threatened. All her brothers swore. I had never heard her swear before.

I grabbed the sack and pulled Annie away. “Hurry, I said, spit flying out of my mouth. “We have to hurry.”

“Well be back,” I shouted.

We ran home like little maniacs. We ran so fast we ripped the sack holding the tomato soup. One can fell out. We left it.

I began to scream. I began to feel happy, wild. Annie felt it. She began to scream, too. Wild, happy, almost out of our minds.

I took the money out of Mom’s purse. I didn’t take time to ask. I knew it would be ok. I knew there wasn’t much time. There were only six chocolate bars. Six.

We raced back to Mr. McConnel’s. We threw our nickels on the counter. We waited. There were no chocolate bars on the counter.

Mr. McConnel approached us. I noticed his apron was very clean. His patent leather shoes shone. I couldn’t have cared less about those things, but I noticed them and I remember vividly noticing them. I was in a state of high alert. I was close to having my ,obsession realized.

“Chocolate,” we said in unison. “We came for our chocolate.”

“I don’t sell chocolate,” he said. “I told you.”

“But the sample. The sample Mr. Simpson left. The chocolate bars, six of them, five cents each.”

“I don’t sell chocolate,” he repeated and we knew that was that. We had no idea what he had done or would do with the chocolate. We didn’t know if he would take them home to his mother, or if he would eat them all himself. All we knew for sure is that he wasn’t going to sell us any to us.

The day ended badly. No chocolate. That night I said my prayer for chocolate. I repeated it night after night. But the prayers were never answered.

Just when the brothers were wanting to abandon the search for chocolate, it happened.

Mr. McConnell in his clean apron and polished patent leather shoes walked out of the back door of his store carrying a box. He tossed it on the ground near, but not in his garbage container.

A box full of O Henry chocolate bars.

Was he out of his mind? Did he get another sample and just got so mad he threw them out? Mr. McConnell was a stubborn man, a disappointed man. Was he stubborn and disappointed enough to throw away chocolate bars?

I’m still not sure which one of us really saw the box of O Henry’s first. I think I did. Annie said she had. We watched him go back into the store.

We lowered our voices, diverted our eyes. We even started to walk away.

And then, I darted. Before Marcel, the sickly brother in the wagon had time to warn me to be careful.

I threw the box of chocolate into the wagon and we raced down the alley, on fire, alive with our daring. Our luck. Our victory! We were warriors again.

We didn’t stop running until we reached the gopher fields near the oldest house on the edge of Main Street.

We giggled. We chirped. We sorted out the chocolate bars.

I was so excited my ears were ringing. I began to burp. For a fleeting moment I wondered if baby Mathew had ever tasted chocolate? For a fleeting moment I thought of saving some for him.

“Maybe they dropped off a truck.”

“It’s not stealing.”

“They weren’t in the store.”

“How many are there?”

There were enough for all of us to have three whole O’Henry bars apiece. And still have three left over. We decided to share those equally. One third each.

I began to argue. I had taken all the risk. I had raced into McConnel’s yard. I had grabbed the box, thrown it into the wagon. I had noticed them first. I should get more.

Annie protested that she had seen them first. But Frank was holding the box. He gave each of us our three bars. Three whole bars of chocolate. Three.

Marcel counted them out. I quit arguing. No one was listening anyway.

I unwrapped my first O’Henry. I ate it in two bites. I’m not sure I tasted it.

The second, I munched with my front teeth, trying not to stop. I was trying to get as much in my mouth as I could. I was trying to get all that chocolate and nuts and caramel into my mouth at once.

My cheeks were full. I almost choked. The taste was perfect. Wonderful. Better than I’d remembered.

The third one, I ate more slowly. Sucking the chocolate. Nibbling the nuts. Eating those nuts one at a time. I was down to the slick, sweet nougat. I began to move it in and out of my mouth, wanting to savour until it disappeared.

Frank, the oldest brother, in charge of the box, in charge of the dividing, took out his knife. He carefully measured, carefully began to cut.

The nougat was sweet and wonderful melting on my tongue, making my mouth ache with its deep, delicious sweetness.

Frank let out a sharp yelp. He threw the chocolate bar in the ditch.

Worms!

I stopped sucking. I pulled the candy out of my mouth. I looked down at the smooth finger of nougat, of what was left. Worms all right. One actually moved. I threw it down, a thing alive and awful, a thing part of which was inside of me.

No one spoke on the way home. I was agonizing over the fact I had made such a big deal about my being the one who had seen Mr. McConnel throw out the wormy chocolate bars.

When Annie and the brothers headed down the street towards their boarding house I said in as loud a voice as I dared, “You saw them first. Annie, you said you saw them first.”

They walked away in single file, Frank leading, Marcel being pulled in the wagon, Annie at the tail end as always. No one said goodbye.

“You hugged me,” I screamed at Frank.

“Are you crazy?” he said in a cold tone, not bothering to turn around, not bothering to look at me. His tone denied the acceptance in the moment he had pulled me to his chest to stop my sobs.

“She’s crazy,” one of them repeated.

No one turned around. They talked about me as if I weren’t there. I watched them go. I waited for Annie to turn around, to wave, to say I wasn’t crazy.

She never did. I wanted to yell, “You live in a whore house.” I did say it, three or four times, but so softly I could barely hear myself.

I knew absolutely it was the end of me and the Forsay gang. And I knew I was being punished. I knew I had done terrible things to get into this gang and now I was being punished.

Aunt Beryle had told me about punishment. You were always punished. Always. And I deserved it. I deserved all the punishment that might come my way.

I was convinced those worms were alive in my stomach. I could feel them growing bigger, more numerous. And I knew why. The vivid memory of the open beak and red tongue of the tormented, helpless chicken was why.

I became obsessed. I’d open my mouth wide and peer into the bathroom mirror, checking for worms. I’d heard stomach worms liked warm, bright light. I had heard, too, that if you held a piece of meat in your mouth the worms would crawl up out to get the meat, out into the warm bright light.

I had heard that they preferred raw meat to cooked. The thought of it made me feel so sick I had to sit down.

It took me four days to get up the courage to actually try it. I waited for a day when Mom would be making hamburgers. I took a big hunk of raw ground beef from the fridge. I carried it to the bathroom. I was only wearing my underwear. I was sweating. My underarms felt slippery.

I locked the bathroom door. I opened my mouth wide. I climbed on the ledge of the vanity positioning myself so I could see into the mirror. I pointed my grandfather’s heavy-duty flashlight into the mirror so that it reflected into my mouth. I held the raw meat loosely between my teeth. I turned on the flashlight.

I fainted.

When I woke up, Grandfather was standing over me. His face was grey. He was pulling at me, weakly, as he leaned against the sink. The door was open behind him, it hung at an angle where Grandfather had broken in.

My mouth was still full of raw meat. I threw up into the toilet. Grandfather patted my back.

Grandfather and I sat together on the bathroom floor, too exhausted to move.

I wiped my mouth with the good towel with gold lettering stitched right into the hem. It was the one Mom saved for guests. Grandfather said it was okay because we never got guests anyway.

Besides, it was the only one I could reach without getting up and I didn’t feel like getting up. Neither did Grandfather.

I told Grandfather about the worms, about God’s punishing me. Grandfather told me not to worry, worms didn’t work that way. Neither did God. And what would God have to punish me for?

I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him the things I had done to get into the gang.

When Mom came home from nursing Mathew and other sick babies, she found us fast asleep on the bathroom floor.

Chapter Five: Mufflow

Those worms haunted me all summer. I was right, they had driven the brothers away. Nobody said anything, but they never came around any more. I didn’t dare go over to their house, not after being so stupid and shouting to Frank about his hugging me.

Annie still hung out with me, sometimes, not often, only when the brothers dumped her. I noticed that they didn’t take her with them as often as they had before. I was sure she blamed me. Why not? It was my fault.

We had a weird sort of ritual about getting together. She’d go out on her step when the brothers weren’t there and I’d wander over. “Waiting for somebody?” I’d ask, hoping each time she’d say she was waiting for me.

“Nope,” was always her reply. So I’d stand there for a minute, start to leave and she’d come along in a bored, almost mad at me way. We’d go off together, pretending not to have planned it, pretending it was an accident and we might as well be together since we were going in the same direction at the same time.

Something strange happened, that I didn’t really notice at first. Annie became careful not to touch me. Not even accidentally. At first I thought it was my imagination. Could it really be true that she didn’t want to touch me? That she couldn’t stand to?

However she felt, it became a strict rule between us. No touching. It was a rule we both obeyed.

Mid August. A day not unlike the day I had first met Annie and her brothers, earlier that summer.

As was happening so often, Annie was sitting alone on the step. No brothers in sight. When I came near her, she made the same suggestion she had made that day which now seemed so long ago. She suggested we go swimming. She didn’t say it with words, she just headed towards the river and I followed as though I had also planned to go to the river.

I sat on the bank watching her as I had before. But this time I had the urge to be in the water. I forgot all about the threat of leeches, of huge ancient fish with skin like the skin of sharks. This time I jumped right into the Saskatchewan River.

I had a brief moment of fear that it had been a trick, that the brothers had instructed her to lure me to the river with the thought of drowning me. Or worse yet, she wanted to do it herself. She was so mad at me for messing up the summer that she wanted me dead.

I could almost imagine her pushing my head under. I could imagine my struggling to get away. But she would taunt me, force me deeper, deeper into the river, into the treacherous current that would sweep me away. I struggled to keep the stupid thoughts away. I tried to think of candy floss and pumpkins at the fair. I loved the fair.

And of course, she made no move to harm me and somehow I learned to swim. Somehow, I moved my arms and legs the way Annie was moving hers, and I managed to keep myself afloat.

The August sun was hot and for days on end the river was perfect for swimming. Corn grew as tall as a man, green, full of thick leaves, heavy with foot long ears of yellow cobs.

Tomatoes ripened red and sweet until they burst. Men prepared for harvest, prepared to work their tractors and threshers into the night. The women prepared to feed the men, to rub their tired shoulders.

We decided to swim what was left of the summer away. Mom even gave me permission to swim in the river. She realized all the kids did it and she had learned that Annie was an excellent swimmer. Annie had a natural gift for it. Mom felt I would be safe so long as I was swimming with Annie.

We found an old log. We jumped off that old log a hundred times, landing in the cool clean water of the Saskatchewan River. We didn’t touch one another as we scrambled on and off like puppies.

We swam and jumped each day for hours. Then Annie had what Mom would call a turn of heart. Annie decided, somehow, that she could touch me provided it was underwater. Underwater touching was not taboo.

Neither of us said these things. But the rules of our relationship were very clear. And it was as if they were written in stone. Annie was doing all the writing.

She also decided it would be a good idea to teach me to float on my back. It was the one thing I simply could not make myself do. I could not let myself relax. I could not let go of the idea that my head would sink, pulling the rest of me down.

On my stomach, I could dog paddle. On my stomach, I could stay afloat. On my stomach I could see where I was going.

That was the other terrible danger in floating on your back. You had no idea where you were going. You could be heading for a rock, a tree fallen into the river, a bunch of bugs floating in a moving circle.

You could be heading into deeper water. Troubled water. Currents.

Annie assured me that none of these things would happen. She would be watching. She would be standing under me, holding me, guiding me, protecting me.

She also insisted that until I mastered the art of getting my face wet, I would never be a swimmer. No swimmer ever swam with her face out of the water all the time. It was ridiculous.

She taught me to puff out my stomach, hold air in my lungs, make myself a floating balloon.

At first I was afraid to try, afraid to lie back into the water, let myself sink a little. But with Annie’s skinny arms under me, her voice coaxing, explaining, assuring, I finally managed to do it.

Just for a moment, I let go, I puffed out my stomach, I relaxed. I floated.

My eyes were pinched closed, afraid of the wash of water that might rush over my face, scaring me, making me jerk my head upright, bring my body sinking to the bottom.

But as time went on and I relaxed more, held the air in my stomach longer, I began to really float. I opened my eyes.

It was wonderful. The blue sky, the enormous puffs of cloud.

I loved it. I floated all that day. I became the Queen of floating. Annie even laughed. She hadn’t laughed with me or about me for a long time. I laughed, too. Floating on my back, I laughed and my head dipped a bit and I took in a big gulp of water. But I managed to stay afloat. I gained my composure and puffed up my stomach and my vision cleared and I was the Queen of floating once again.

I imagined myself a dragon, ancient, with silver scales and green wings. I imagined myself capable of magic. I imagined that I could swim and fly. I imagined that I could make things happen. Wonderful things. I could help people. I could heal them if they were sick. As I floated, the sun sunk into the sea and the day began to end in perfect harmony.

Finally, it was time for the long walk home. I was reluctant to leave. I didn’t want to leave my dragon body; the perfect place I’d been. But Annie was in charge, and off we went, Annie walking ahead of me on the old river road. She found the odd blue berry and popped it into her mouth.

She looked so small in her thin yellow bathing suit, Miss Sophie’s red sequenced blouse over it, her hair still sticking to her head. Wavy bits of air moved up beside her. Wavy bits of hot air from the soft black tar-based road. The moving air made Annie look like someone from another place, a place far away from me.

She turned and looked at me, gave me a half smile, walked on. Her lips were stained from some of the berries she had picked. It only added to her strangeness. All the sense of dragoness drained away. I was just a girl again.

I wondered if Annie would ever really be my friend again. I felt alone, behind her. I thought of stopping, letting her walk away, far away from me. I wondered if she’d notice.

How much I wanted to rush up to her, to take her hand, her hand in mine, outside of the water. Away from the rules, her rules. I began to walk faster, to catch up to her.

I decided to reach out and touch her, to tap her a little hard, on the shoulder. I started to do it. I reached out, almost, almost touching her, when I almost tripped on something. I looked down.

There on the road lay a big Jersey Milk chocolate bar in white wrapping, the letters gold and full of promise. It was impossible. Were chocolate bars dropping out of the sky? Was I imagining it? How could someone have dropped it? Here, for us to see? Maybe it was a trick. Maybe the brothers had planted it. I had to quit thinking everything was a trick. I was going to drive myself crazy.

I picked it up, slowly, almost in slow motion. I handed it to Annie, still pale and steamy in the heat waves coming off the hot pavement.

I moved as if caught in a dream.

She turned her head. Her hair was beginning to dry in the sun. A piece of hair fell forward, across her cheek. She brushed the hair away. She moved her hand towards the giant Jersey Milk. She opened the silver paper. She smelled it. She handed it back to me.

“What should we do?” Annie said in a voice that sounded far, far away, from somewhere in an old-fashioned movie, black and white, with static, crackling sound.

“Eat it,” I whispered. My voice was soft, low, serious. “I think we should eat it,” I repeated.

“No.” Annie took the chocolate away from me.

I stared at the rich chocolate melting on its silvery tray, melting in Annie’s hands.

I could smell it. I imagined its taste. My mouth was all wet with the smell of it. I opened my mouth.

Annie moved the melting chocolate a bit closer for me to inspect.

It lay there, rich, dark, delicious, soft and flat enough to guarantee the absence of worms. I sniffed deep. I stared hard. All I could see and smell was chocolate. Warm. Rich. Melting in the sun.

And I wanted it. All my old hope came back. All my old memory and need of chocolate.

Mouth open, I reached my face towards the silver paper. My tongue sought the warm sticky bitter sweet perfect taste of chocolate. I closed my eyes.

I felt the soft warm creamy chocolate touch my tongue, move up past my lips, across my cheek.

I opened my eyes, pulled back, startled, as Annie drew the chocolate away. She had brushed it against me as she’d moved.

She hurled my piece of heaven into the cool clear waters of the Saskatchewan River.

Annie looked at me. She smiled. “There,” she said, as if she’d saved me. She put her arm around my waist. I put my arm over her shoulder. I was still a good foot taller than she was.

We walked home that way.

When we got home Mom was talking to Mrs. Forsay. What could be wrong? They never talked to one another. Never that we knew anyway. I imagined all sorts of things.

Maybe Mom was telling Mrs. Forsay something about the worms. Or about Mathew. Maybe she was trying to talk Mrs. Forsay into visiting Mathew, telling her that he loved visitors, that we visited him all the time, that we read poetry and sang to him.

In fact, all the hospital now knew that Mathew heard and understood a lot more than they had suspected. Mathew was not a vegetable with a huge head. Mathew had feelings just like people with small heads, just like people with necks strong enough to hold up their own heads.

They found this out about Mathew when Mom’s special duty responsibilities switched from the baby ward to maternity. Mrs. Forsay’s baby became so agitated that they were afraid he would break his own neck, even with the restraints.

Mom knew why. There was no one to sing to him. No one to read him stories. She transferred back and he calmed right down.

That baby whose brain was drowning wasn’t supposed to be able to see or hear and know if anyone was in the room. He couldn’t eat. Tubes fed him. But he missed my mom. He missed her singing to him when she came into his room. He missed her touching his hand.

Maybe I wasn’t part of the Forsay gang. But I was falling in love with the Forsay baby. My mom and I were closer to that baby than anyone in the family. Not one person in the family ever came to see that baby. Not one.

That had made me so sad and it made me mad, too. Mom said not to judge them. It was easier for us. He wasn’t our baby. But that just made me sadder.

I wondered, could that be what they were talking about? Had something happened to Mathew? Had he broken his neck?

They looked serious, but not mad, not upset. No one was crying.

Mom was giving Mrs. Forsay a pamphlet she had picked up at work. A doctor was coming from a famous hospital in Boston. He was coming here to open a new hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan where the university was located.

This doctor was a heart specialist. Maybe he could help Marcel. Just maybe he could.

We all went to the lecture. Mufflow pulled Marcel in the wagon as usual. Normally a dog would not be allowed into the Orpheum Theatre which is where the lecture was being given. But Mufflow was a working dog. Mufflow was always with Marcel. The boy couldn’t go anywhere without him. And wouldn’t want to. Marcel loved Mufflow more than anything in the world.

I could understand that. Mufflow was marvelous. He was so strong and so smart and so beautiful. He could do almost anything. He could even fetch things for Marcel. Not things like other dogs, sticks or balls.

No, Mufflow would bring Marcel clothes and books, things he needed, things he couldn’t get up and get for himself.

Everyone knew that the boy and the dog were a unit. No one would have dreamed of separating them. Certainly not the ushers to the theatre where a doctor was going to talk about the disease that kept Marcel weak and vulnerable, that made Mufflow a necessary part of his life.

The doctor talked about the wonders of modern medicine. He talked about good diet and exercise. He told people not to smoke. He was trying to teach people how to take care of their hearts by living healthy lives.

I looked around. Almost all the men in the theatre were smoking. Even a few of the women were smoking. I couldn’t imagine they appreciated what the doctor was saying. I couldn’t imagine they were taking him too seriously.

After the talk, he opened up the floor for questions. What a weird thing to announce, that he was opening up the floor.

I pictured the floor opening up and all of us sliding into the basement, but that felt too much like the pictures of Hell and damnation that I saw in Catechism, so I closed the floor up right away and decided to ask Grandfather what the phrase meant. After the lecture I would do just that. I was sure Grandfather would agree it was a ridiculous turn of phrase.

Mrs. Forsay stood up. An usher handed her a microphone. Her hands shook as she took it. “Can you help my son?” she asked.

The doctor peered into the audience. He could see Marcel in the wagon. He could see Mufflow by his side.

“Is that your boy?” he asked.

Mrs. Forsay couldn’t really answer. She had begun to cry. She was so nervous and so hopeful that the tears just started to come.

The doctor hesitated. In that hesitation I knew he didn’t want to deal with this tired looking woman with a son who had to be pulled in a wagon. He wanted to talk about his pet project – healthy living. But what could he do? He invited the mother and son onto the stage.

Mrs. Forsay shook her head, she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to stand up in front of all these people. Mom helped her. My mom took her arm and up they went, Mufflow and Marcel following them.

The wagon couldn’t go up the stairs, so two ushers had to carry Marcel up. This worried Mufflow who whined and fussed, keeping very close to Marcel, almost touching him, carefully watching what the ushers were doing to his boy and his wagon.

Everyone clapped. And somehow Mrs. Forsay told her son’s story. He had been born with a hole in his heart. He couldn’t do things other boys could do. He was weak and fragile. He couldn’t even exert himself enough to run and play. He had to be pulled in a wagon and his legs had become too weak too carry him. Soon his legs wouldn’t work at all. And every day, they worried that the hole in his heart would cause his chest cavity to fill up with blood, would cause him to die.

Marcel coughed nervously. Mufflow shifted his weight from one foot to the other when Marcel coughed. Mufflow could feel Marcel’s discomfort. He could feel his pain.

The doctor listened carefully. He nodded as Mrs. Forsay talked, he looked at Marcel seriously. He spoke about how physiotherapy and exercise were necessary to keeping Marcel’s legs and back strong. Then he explained to the audience that what Marcel most likely had was a congenital heart disease called a septal defect which was a hole in the wall that separates either the upper or lower chambers of the heart causing blood to leak from one atrium or ventricle to the other.

Because Marcel sometimes had a hard time breathing, he probably also suffered from pulmonary valve stenosis which prevents the lungs from getting enough oxygen.

Marcel looked scared. He wasn’t used to people looking at him, talking about his heart, about his blood leaking. He began to cry. You could tell he didn’t want to, you could tell it was absolutely the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

Mufflow began to cry to, first a low whine and then a howl. It made the doctor laugh.

I was in the audience with Mom and Grandfather and Annie and the brothers. Annie wasn’t wearing the sequenced blouse. Her mother said not to at this important event. I had to agree.

The fact that it was an important event didn’t seem to stop the doctor from laughing at Mufflow. I didn’t think it was the best thing for the doctor to do. There was no humor in this situation that I could see. Even if the doctor did see some humor, he shouldn’t have laughed. I didn’t like this doctor. Neither did Mufflow. When the doctor began to laugh, Mufflow growled at him. That just made the doctor laugh more.

When he laughed, several people in the audience laughed to. I couldn’t believe it. Here was this poor kid bawling because people were using big words to describe what was wrong with his heart, a heart with a hole or two and they were laughing.

The doctor must have sensed that it wasn’t really a good idea to get the audience laughing. He might also have been afraid that Mufflow was going to bite him, which I was secretly wishing he would do. Normally Golden Retrievers aren’t biting kinds of dogs. But when it came to protecting his master, Mufflow was a Rottweiler. A Rottweiler with a machine gun.

The doctor began to talk about what could be done. He told Mrs. Forsay that Marcel probably needed open-heart surgery if the defect could not be repaired using a catheter-based procedure. Some surgeries would repair the defect completely. Other surgeries would improve her child’s health but might not completely repair the defect. Open-heart surgeries that might correct the defect included closing the holes with sutures or with a patch. He added that a good surgeon might decrease blood flow to the lungs by placing a band around the pulmonary artery.

I couldn’t believe what the doctor was doing. He was talking about Marcel as if he weren’t there. He was talking about surgery and what it might or might not do. He was talking as if he liked the sound of the words, the importance of the words. Words most people didn’t use or understand.

He puffed his chest out as he talked.

And then he invited his wife and daughter to the stage. He thanked Mrs. Forsay for coming up as if to dismiss her.

The doctor’s wife and daughter walked on the stage. They were wearing beautiful clothes. The daughter was about twelve. She was big boned and dark haired. Her hair was braided and crossed over the crown of her head. It made her look bold and sophisticated.

The doctor announced that his own daughter had been born with a congenital heart defect. And here she was, proof of the success of open heart surgery and healthy living. She exercised every day for one hour. She ate fresh fruit and vegetables. The daughter looked out into the audience. She looked at Marcel. He was still crying. She looked away.

“Can you do it? Can you do it to my Marcel?” Mrs. Forsay repeated as they left the stage. The ushers escorted her out. They carried Marcel out. Mufflow and the wagon followed. The wagon bumped as Mufflow hurried down the stairs.

We all thought it was the last we would hear from the famous doctor from Boston who could cure Marcel if he wanted to. The doctor who could perform the surgery Marcel needed, if only Mrs. Forsay could save up enough money.

‘How is she going to do that?” Mom asked Grandfather. “In that two bit joint of hers?”

Two bit joint? I wasn’t sure what that meant. I went outside and looked at the Forsay house. For the first time I noticed that it needed paint badly. The window sashes were broken and the steps leading to the main door were rotting. Two boards had been nailed across the original steps to prevent folks from falling through.

How was it I had never noticed this before? How was it that I had always thought the place so fine?

No, it was clear open heart surgery was out of the question.

Out of the question until Mrs. Lily carefully made her way up those patched up steps.

Mrs. Lily had been in the audience. Mrs. Lily had heard what the doctor had to say. She had seen Marcel, had seen him cry. She had seen something else too. She had seen Mufflow.

And she wanted him.

Everyone knew that Mrs. Lily was the prettiest and the richest widow in town. What only a few knew was that she was also one of the most frightened.

Mrs. Lily was frightened of most everything. I hated to admit it, but I could understand that. I was afraid of a few things myself. Things would flash into my head and make me afraid. It was why I worried so much.

But I wasn’t as afraid as Mrs. Lily. Mrs. Lily rarely left her house. She was afraid of being run over. She was afraid of catching germs. She was afraid of drowning. And she was afraid of burglars.

She had alarm systems installed all over the house. She had phoned the police so many times requesting that a squad car come by to investigate a strange noise or a mysterious passer-by that they had to install a special line for her. Mrs. Lily donated a lot of money to the police charity raffle, so they didn’t mind.

Mrs. Lily had a proposition for Mrs. Forsay. It was simple. It was an easy request to honor. Mrs. Lily wanted just one thing in exchange for the money to send Marcel to the hospital in Saskatoon where the doctor could put a patch on his heart.

What she wanted was Mufflow, Marcel’s dog.

Mrs. Forsay made the deal right there on their broken step.

She didn’t tell Marcel the deal. She only told him what he needed to know. She only told him that a miracle had happened and he was going to go to Saskatoon for the operation. He was going to get well.

Of course Marcel was excited and terrified. Mrs. Forsay accompanied him to the hospital. She stayed in a motel not far away. All was paid for by the generosity of Mrs. Lily.

After the surgery, which the famous doctor deemed a huge success, Marcel’s picture was in the Prince Albert Daily Herald. Mom saved it for Mrs. Forsay. In the picture the doctor stood by Marcel’s bed. So did a physiotherapist. The article was more about healthy living than the miracle of Marcel’s new lease on life. There were a few words about Marcel, how he had a wonderful gift. He could carve anything. He could bring life to a stick, a stone, a piece of wax. Marcel may have had a hole in his heart, but he had magic fingers.

They stayed for two weeks. Each day Marcel grew stronger. And then, it was time to come home.

Mrs. Forsay had confided in Mom about Mrs. Lily and the bargain. I guess she had to tell someone. She had to ask someone if she had done the right thing. Mom was a nurse, she had told Mrs. Forsay about the doctor. Mom would know that Mrs. Forsay had done the only thing she could do.

Mom agreed. “There was no real choice,” Mom had assured her.

I could imagine their trip home in the train. I could imagine how Marcel would be looking forward to seeing Mufflow. I was sure he was picturing how he and Mufflow would be able to run and play together, free, free of the wagon, free of the fear of death. And somehow I felt that Marcel would not want to be part of the gang so much anymore. I knew that things would change for him in many ways. He and Mufflow would want to be together. They would be their own gang.

I imagined, too, what Mrs. Forsay would be thinking. I imagined that she might try to tell Marcel about the bargain. I imagined she would try to find a way, but no way would come.

I had been right.

We could hear Marcel calling Mufflow. We could hear him right through the open windows and the thin walls of the ‘L’, the ‘L’ that was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer.

And then we heard the cries, the cries of agony and sorrow. Those cries told me the truth, the truth that I had known. The truth that neither Mrs. Forsay nor my mom had known. That Marcel would rather be pulled forever in his wagon, that he would rather die young, before his time, than be separated from Mufflow.

I cried with him. I sobbed with him, for him. I went to see Mathew as was becoming my custom when I was troubled. I told Mathew all about it. I knew Mathew would feel sorrow for the brother he had never met.

Mom took a strange tact to try to comfort me. “Mufflow wouldn’t live forever,” she reasoned. “He is already four years old. Dogs don’t live as long as little boys.”

“He would have lived as long as that little boy,” I said. “He would have.”

“Not now, not now,” mother said. “And that’s a good thing. Marie, that’s a good thing.”

But she was wrong. It wasn’t a good thing. Marcel was wearing himself out. He was crying and pining so much that his little heart wasn’t healing. He was having trouble breathing. He was coughing a lot. There was blood in his spit. He stopped eating. He stopped carving. He couldn’t stand being alive without Mufflow.

That’s when Grandfather and I hatched the plan. Now all we had to do was convince Mom.

It wasn’t hard. She had heard the sounds of sorrow coming from the Forsay house. I think she was even beginning to doubt her decision to bring the Forsays to the Orpheum Theatre to hear the famous doctor from Boston in the first place.

We phoned Mrs. Lily and made an appointment. Mom said she had something important to tell her. Something she had just learned at the hospital.

Mrs. Lily received us in her parlour at five o’clock. The closest I had ever been to Mrs. Lily’s was the garbage in her back lane. The garbage hadn’t prepared me for this. The parlour was magnificent.

Velvet couches sat on polished hard wood floors. The floors had patterns in them, made of different colors of wood. Thick rugs lay in areas over the polished hard wood floors.

A huge marble fire-place dominated a corner of the room. No fire roared in that beautiful fire-place. It was summer. But then, it wouldn’t have been lit in the winter-time either. Mrs. Lily was afraid of fire. That came as no surprise.

Mufflow sat obediently at Mrs. Lily’s feet. I thought he might be thin and ragged. I thought he would have been suffering as much as Marcel. He seemed fine. I looked more closely, frowning.

Mrs. Lily saw me look at the dog. Maybe she thought I was surprised that he didn’t move, didn’t get up to greet us. “He’s on medication,” she explained. “He couldn’t settle down. He kept trying to run away. I had a run for him built in the basement. He never leaves the house.”

I couldn’t imagine him being much of a guard dog on medication, but I didn’t say anything. Mrs. Lily wasn’t exactly reasonable about the things she was afraid of or how she protected herself from them.

I looked closer at Mufflow. His eyes were dull. He reminded me of monkeys in cages at the zoo. I hated the zoo. I hated to see the deadness in the eyes of the monkeys.

Grandfather’s oldest friend had had a pet monkey named Art. That monkey was so playful, so full of fun. His eyes were mischievous. His eyes laughed even though he could not.

Only humans can do that. I had read somewhere that only humans can laugh. It is a sure sign of their superiority.

When Grandfather’s friend died, his children put his monkey in the zoo. Grandfather and I had visited that monkey. It was the first time and the last time I ever went to a zoo. When I looked into the eyes of that monkey, the dull, dead eyes, I just wanted to go home.

On the way home I thought about humans being the only ones able to laugh. How did we know? Maybe animals had another way to laugh, a way we weren’t smart enough to recognize. Or maybe they didn’t laugh around us.

They cried though. They cried around us. Maybe it was because we were so good at that. We were so good at making them cry, but not so good at making them laugh.

Looking at Mufflow, at his eyes, made me want to cry. Mom realized I was about to start. She gave my hand a jerk.

“I thought we should tell you,” she said to Mrs. Lily in a serious tone. “I thought you should know.”

Mrs. Lily leaned forward. She was paying attention to what my mom was saying. She wanted to know what she should know.

I was looking at Mufflow. I was holding my breath.

“There has been an outbreak of rabies. And Mufflow has never been vaccinated.” Mom paused. “He may be a carrier.”

“A carrier?”

“It could irrupt at any time,” Mom warned. “He could go rabid. He could bite you and if he did, nothing could save you. Nothing.”

Mrs. Lily stared at the dog. Her face was red.

“Save me?” she said in a small voice. “Save me from what?”

“Madness,” I said. “You go stark raving mad!”

Mom nodded in agreement.

“But there’s no guarantee it will happen,” Mom added. “He might be fine.” She paused with what Grandfather would call a very pregnant pause. “Or he might not.”

It was suppertime when we arrived at the Forsay doorstep. Mufflow ran ahead of us. He wasn’t as co-ordinated as usual, with the medication still in him, but he managed to reach up and open the door with his teeth. Marcel had trained him to do that. Mufflow was the smartest dog in the world. Even on medication, he was still the smartest dog in the world.

As he bounded in the house and up the stairs towards Marcel’s room, Mom and I turned to go. There was no need for anyone to know what had brought Mufflow back to his young master. Mrs. Lily would never venture out and up the Forsay’s rickety steps. She would never bother about it again. She might install another alarm system, or even hire a human guard. But one thing for sure, it wouldn’t be a dog. One thing for darn sure, it wouldn’t be Mufflow.

When we entered the ‘L’ we smelled pancakes. Grandfather had made us pancakes. He was having a good spell. It might even be in remission. His cancer was sleeping. Every night I prayed that it would sleep for a very long time, a Rip van Winkle amount of time. God would listen to this prayer, I was sure.

Grandfather made wonderful pancakes, with beaten egg whites. They tasted like angel food cake.

We ate the pancakes with maple syrup, real maple syrup from Maple trees in Montreal. And bacon. Before we ate, we held hands and Grandfather said grace. “We give thanks to the animal who . . .” Our prayer was cut off by the sound of an animal howling. The medication had worn off. Mufflow was howling, crying, and I’m sure, I’m absolutely sure, he was laughing. Laughing with joy.

Chapter Six: Mathew

“We’ll have to move! I told you we’d have to move”. It was my response to the news that my father was coming home. It was proof that I had been right all along. It was proof that he had been in the war and now was returning to us. It was proof that he had been kept alive on milk and bread by the beautiful French maiden. And now he had remembered, and he was returning to us.

“We’ll see,” Mom said.

‘We’ll see.’ What was she saying? Three people could barely live in the ‘L’. Four people were out of the question. And my father made four.

I had a great surprise for him. Actually, the surprise came as a result of my episode with the flashlight and the worms. Grandfather told Mom about my craving for chocolate and between the two of them, they got me over a dozen different varieties, and a whole box of chocolates, Cadbury’s. It had dozens of different kinds of chocolates in it and a map which described and named each chocolate and told you what was inside, caramel, Turkish delight, cherries, creamy fudge. There was a picture of a kitten on the box’s cover.

I had read that Cadbury himself had painted some of the original pictures on the original boxes of chocolate. Imagine! And he had built places for his workers to exercise, way back in Victorian times. I figured that doctor from Boston would have really liked Mr. Cadbury. He would have liked his focus on healthy living. I doubted that Mr. Cadbury would have liked him, but you never know about these things.

Now you would have imagined that I would have gobbled up those chocolate bars and chocolates just as soon as I got them. But I didn’t. I put them in my dresser drawer along with my underwear and socks and those silly nylon pajamas I got for the pajama party where I threw up and went home.

I was saving those chocolates and chocolate bars. I was saving them for when my dad came home. I hadn’t had to wait long.

Labor day, the first Monday in September right after school started, my dad arrived in a taxi.

He came to tell us he was alive and well and had been living in Edmonton. Not France, Edmonton. He came for another reason. Mom and Grandfather suspected the other reason. I did not.

I was so glad to see my dad I wouldn’t allow any worry or doubt to get in the way. I didn’t ask him any questions, nothing about the war, about where he’d been and why he hadn’t come home sooner. I didn’t ask how could it have been Edmonton.

I ran to my room and brought them out, the dozen chocolate bars, the box of chocolates. I handed them to my dad. He looked surprised. He looked at Mom.

“She’s been saving them, waiting,” she said. She couldn’t say much more. She looked sad and mad and ready to cry and hit him in the head with a hammer.

My dad’s face went red when she said I’d been saving them.

“I, I really wanted chocolate,” I confessed. “For us.” He gathered them up in his big beautiful hands. He wore a white shirt and black slacks. He was dangerously handsome. He took my hand and walked me outside.

We didn’t have much of a yard. He seemed to be looking for a place to sit, a place where we could eat our chocolate. We settled for a spot between the poplars where the Forsay gang and I had worn a bit of a path when we were still a gang, before the worms.

Mom brought us a blanket and two mugs of coffee. Coffee for me, too, and not all milk either. “Coffee goes good with chocolate,” she explained. I wouldn’t know. Dad looked at her as if he were asking her to join us, but she walked back to the ‘L’.

“You two need some time,” she threw over her shoulder.

We ate the box of chocolates. Dad said it would make us sick to eat the chocolate bars, too. “Save some, honey.”

I said we could eat more tomorrow. He didn’t agree or disagree. I so wanted him to say, “Ok, and then we can get more chocolates. We can eat and eat for days and weeks and months and years. We will become the chocolate eaters.” But he didn’t say that at all.

It took us over an hour to eat the chocolates. We didn’t eat them all at once. We didn’t say much. We just ate and munched and chewed and looked at one another. It was as if we were studying one another, memorizing each other, attentive to each detail, each movement. I saw how one side of his mouth moved a bit higher than the other when he smiled. I saw how his eyebrows could move when the rest of his face stayed still. I could do that. I could raise one eyebrow at a time, too.

He was looking right at me when I decided to try it. I raised my right eyebrow. The rest of my face was still. He raised his eyebrow. The right one. Just like me.

Then he stuck out his tongue. It was rolled like a leaf. I stuck out my tongue. Mine rolled like a leaf, too.

We laughed. We ate a few more chocolates. I told him my new name was Maria. I had given it to myself and I rather liked it. I told him I was going to use it when I went to school. I hadn’t really gone to school yet. Not real school, school out at the farm, schools as moved about taking care of my grandmother, and then his father, my grandfather. But never in one place, never in a real city school, with strange kids. I told him I didn’t know much about kids. I hadn’t had a lot of kid experience.

He just listened. The listening seemed to make him sad. “I’m sorry,” he said, as if it were his fault.

We stayed outside until almost dusk. It was warm. My dad wasn’t a big talker. He had a small note pad and short yellow pencil. He told me the pencil was a number 2. That meant the lead in the pencil was soft and it was good to draw with. He asked me if I would like him to draw me a picture.

“I would,” I said. It seemed to be an important decision.

“Anything special?” he asked.

“Me,” I said. “And you. I would like a picture of us.”

He sighed. He sat for a while longer, saying nothing. Then he began to sketch. He looked at me as he drew. He kept looking and drawing. He asked me to tilt my head to the side as though I were resting on someone’s shoulder. I tilted until my neck ached.

He handed me the yellow paper with his sketch on it. It was a picture of me in his arms. He was carrying me. You couldn’t see his face, just the back of his head, his tall back and strong shoulders. My arms were around his neck. My head was leaning on his shoulder. You could see my face and hands. My eyes were open. I didn’t look sleepy. I didn’t look sad. I didn’t look scared. I looked like a girl a bit too big to be carried who was happy to be in the arms of her father. The child in the picture was at peace.

The child in the picture felt the way I had felt that day floating on my back in the Saskatchewan River feeling like an ancient dragon with silver scales.

My father stood up. He opened up his arms and he carried me into the house. I was seven years old and for the first and only time in my life I was being carried by my father. My own, real, true father. I wanted the yard to be bigger. I wanted us to be in a meadow. I wanted the walk to the house to last forever.

When we got into the ‘L’, I slipped out of his arms and reached up and gave him a kiss on the lips. They were soft and warm and a bit startled. They almost withdrew, and then they yielded and he hugged me and I hugged him and he said the strangest thing.

He said, “Good-bye my beautiful little Maria. Don’t forget me.”

My mother was there, in the kitchen. She was wearing a soft cotton print dress, with small blue butterflies on a pale yellow background. Her hair was a light reddish blonde and she wore it in soft curls around her face. She had on her favorite sweetpea perfume.

My father was wearing black slacks and a white perfectly pressed shirt just as I saw him wear in all the pictures of him.

“Bye, Rose. Good luck, hon.” he said to my mom. He took his hat off the kitchen table and headed for the door.

“Bye, Eddie.” My mom’s voice was resigned. She stood there and didn’t do a thing. She didn’t run after him, beg him to come back. She didn’t scream at him or throw things. She just stood there.

Grandfather was sitting on a kitchen chair. My father bent down and kissed his cheek. My grandfather’s skin was as thin as rose petals. I knew my father would notice that. I knew it would make him sad to see his father grow so old and frail.

If he felt those things, he didn’t mention them. He just continued to walk away from us. He walked out of the yard and down the lane.

He looked so tall and handsome, just the back of him, walking away. The night was full of stars. The poplar trees cast shadows the sky was so bright with stars and a full moon.

He was heading for the bus station. He wasn’t carrying a suite case or anything. He didn’t have a coat.

I learned later that he sat all night in the bus station. The bus arrived at 7 am and took him back to Edmonton and the woman who was waiting for him.

Grandfather tried to soothe my mother about his son’s leaving, this time, for good. My dad had been gone for a long time, over three years. Yet, there had always remained the mystery of his return. Now the mystery was over and hope was gone. It seemed to shock my mother.

When the shock wore off, she was furious.

For weeks after that I would spend hours trying to make up what it would be like to see him again. I would try to imagine myself going to Edmonton to find him. I could imagine myself as a young woman, dressed in a smart red suit.

I would try to imagine what he would be like. I would picture his face badly scarred from some injury I couldn’t name, maybe a burn or bad acne. He would be living in an awful apartment.

I’d imagine myself going up to the apartment and knocking. I’d knock and knock and finally a woman would answer. She would be old and sloppy, nothing like my mother. I would ask to see my father.

But before she could call him, he would appear. He’d take me in his arms and we’d leave. We’d leave together and come back to my mother.

But the stories I imagined never felt right. They never felt as though they’d happen, and so I’d try again. Whatever I imagined, it never felt true. He’d had to go to this woman, out of duty or love or something I didn’t understand, and it had ruined him in all my daydreams.

Mom cautioned me about daydreaming about him. She reminded me of the fact that he had abandoned us. That he’d left us sitting and worrying for three years. Mom seemed to have a lot of bad pictures of Dad in her head. I think she thought it would be better for me if I had bad pictures too. I think she thought I could forget him easier. That I wouldn’t hope for something that could never happen.

It was the one thing they did not agree upon. Grandfather worked hard to change the bad pictures of Dad that Mom and I began carrying around in our heads. He didn’t think bad pictures were good for us.

He knew that I had heard about Dad’s stealing money from his own store before I was born. He knew I’d heard about his drinking and his loose wandering ways. My father had a reputation for being many things, a musician, a poet, and an irresponsible husband.

“Remember the time he brought you all the roses?” Grandfather asked Mom.

“It was the hottest day in July, our second anniversary.” Mom said as matter-of-factly as she could.

“He went all the way to Saskatoon to get them. Ninety-seven miles on a day that was so dry and hot you could fry an egg on the sidewalk,” Grandfather reminded her. But she didn’t need reminding.

“So he hitched himself a ride on an ice truck and sat back there with the ice, his arms full of roses,” Mom said, her voice getting thick and syrupy with the memory of it. “His legs were blue with cold by the time they got here.”

“He was in bed with a cold for two days.” Grandfather said this as if he would scold father if he could, but you could tell he was just a little proud of his son’s romantic ways. Proud and sad. It was one of those kind of traits. You loved it, but it was what ruined everything.

“The whole house smelled of roses.”

“The whole house.”

They told the story with such feeling I was sure I could remember that smell, too, and the coldness of my father’s legs, cold that you could feel right through the black slacks.

The story melted my mom’s anger at my father. But when the anger left, a sadness that was much worse took its place.

Grandfather and I had been playing cards as they told the story of the roses delivered on ice. We continued to play. Mom went to the room she and Grandfather shared. We knew she wanted to be alone. She had no place that was hers, not in the ‘L’. So Grandfather and I sat up while she “composed herself”.

Grandfather and I could hear Mom move quietly about the room. We heard the closet door open and close. We heard her turn on the radio, find Benny Goodman and his band. We heard the stool in front of the dressing table move out, ever so softly.

“Is Mom going out?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It sounds as if she’s getting dressed to go out,” I said.

“I don’t think so. Let her be. Maybe I’ll lie down a bit in your room, if you don’t mind,” he said.

I sat listening to the music float to the kitchen from the bed-room. I could hear her moving about.

And then somehow, at that moment, I knew what Mom was doing. I knew she was dancing. I knew she had put on her best dress. I knew she had fixed her hair up, put on makeup.

I knew my Mom was all dressed up, all alone, in her and Grandfather’s room, dancing.

I couldn’t stand it. I crept up to the door, opened it a crack, standing outside, watching this private moment, one she wanted to share with a man who wasn’t there. There she was, in her best red dress, with her best pair of high heels, her hair all piled up, held in place with her ebony combs.

She wore ruby earrings.

I walked into the room. I walked into her arms. I had never danced before.

As if we had been doing it all our lives, my mom and I danced about that tiny room. When Benny Goodman and his dance band had played its last song, my mom reached over and turned off the radio. We didn’t stop dancing. She hummed softly. We kept moving to the memory of the music. We did that for quite a while. Finally, my mom spoke. “It’s okay now,” she said. I kissed her cheek and went to bed.

I cried myself to sleep and that night I dreamed of being a family, a big family, a family with lots of kids and a dad.

When I awoke, it was almost noon.

Mom was home, she’d had a call from the hospital that Mathew wasn’t doing too well.

“ I think we should go and see him,” I said.

He was quite feverish when we got there. They feared pneumonia. It was hard to keep his lungs clear when he was so unable to move about.

I sat with him for a few hours. I’m not sure if he knew I was there or not. Then I left and marched over to Annie’s house.

Annie was sitting on the porch steps. Her brothers were nowhere in sight. “Annie,” I told her. “I have some bad news.”

Annie looked at me as if I were from Mars. “I’ve had enough bad news for a life time,” she said. She looked old. She looked as if someone had given her a black eye.

Someone had given her a black eye. It was her brother, Frank. She had told a girl in school that Frank had red hair; that he died it blonde so that he could be like the rest of the family. Frank had been so furious, he’d hit Annie right in the eye with his fist. He could have blinded her.

She looked so sad. She looked sad and mad and hurt. I hated to give her more bad news. But I felt I had to.

“Mathew is very sick,” I said.

“I know that. He was born sick.”

“More than that,” I tried to explain. “I think you should visit him. I think you should say good-bye.”

Annie got up and walked toward the front door. I followed her. She opened the door and tried to shut it in my face. “Go home,” she insisted. “No one asked you here.” She was acting really angry. She was acting afraid.

“You have to see him.” I wasn’t going to let it go.

“I can’t,” Annie said and she started to cry. She sobbed loud and hard the way someone does who has kept a sorrow inside herself for a very long time.

“I’m the one made him sick.”

It was so untrue. Mathew was born with water on his brain. It had nothing to do with Annie. “It’s not true,” I told her. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

But she didn’t believe me. She explained through her hysterical sobbing how she had gone up to see the baby when he was brought home. She had looked at the baby with the big floppy head. She had poked her finger at the head. She didn’t know why. She just poked it because it looked as if, as if she could.

I understood what she meant. When I first saw Mathew his head reminded me of dough.

“I poked my finger into his head,” Annie cried, her voice growing even more hysterical. And I made a dent. It went right into his brain. And now he has brain damage. Now he can’t eat or sit or anything.

Mrs. Forsay came out. She wanted to know what all the fuss was about.

“Annie thinks she made Mathew sick,” I explained.

Mrs. Forsay looked sad and troubled. She took Annie inside. “We’ll see you later,” she said to me.

The next day they all came over to see me. The whole family, Mrs. Forsay, Mr. Forsay the brothers.

“We’d like to visit Mathew,” they said.

Mom and I took them to the hospital. We were all a bit nervous.

I wanted Mathew to recognize them. I wanted him to know that his was his mom and dad and brothers and sister. But how could he?

The nurses had prepared Mathew for the visit. They had him dressed in a nice clean nightie, with soft blankets. They had the lights low, to soften the look.

But nothing had really prepared them to see the big baby, so helpless, his head braced with two large bandages to prevent him from moving and breaking his own neck with the weight of that head

Mrs. Forsay began to weep. Her husband had to leave. He wasn’t the kind of man who would cry in front of his children. The situation was just too emotional for him.

Annie was the only one who came forward. She took Mathew’s hand. She began to speak to him.

“Maria tells me you like people to sing to you, Mathew,” she whispered. “She tells me that she and her mom sing to you all the time.”

Annie began to sing in her tiny voice, a voice as blond as her hair. A voice the color of straw and the sound of wind, a voice at once old and almost as yet unborn.

Mathew’s big head swayed a bit toward the sound of Annie’s voice. The whole family crowded around him. His eyes opened wide. I watched his eyes fill with fear. His head lurched wickedly to the side. And then he fell back, still, his eyes closed.

“He’s fallen asleep,” Mrs. Forsay whispered. I didn’t say anything. I knew Mathew was not asleep.

“I’m sorry, Mathew,” Annie whispered. “I’m sorry I never came.”

They stayed for over an hour, the whole family, just sitting there. Finally Mr. Forsay joined them. They stayed until Mom told the it was time for her to feed Mathew. But she knew. She just didn’t want the Forsays to know.

They held a funeral in the Catholic Church. Mom and Grandpa and I were invited to sit with the family. The priest said a prayer about innocence and being with God and then he said what a sweet child Mathew was and how sad it was that he was taken so young, but now he was an little angel. It didn’t feel right. The priest hadn’t even met Mathew. How could he talk about him?

Mr. Forsay got up and thanked everyone for coming and he invited them to the Legion Hall for tea after the burial ceremony. He said he wanted to thank two people especially. He wanted to thank his neighbor Rose Hackle and her daughter Maria who had taken such good care of his son. His voice caught and he almost cried when he said that. But he controlled himself.

“Maria was his friend. And I want to thank her for that.”

And then he made the strangest request. He asked my mother to come up and sing the song that Mathew loved. My mom wasn’t a professional singer. In fact, her voice was often off key. It was soft and had a slight quiver when she sang.

But that day, in the church, with the Forsay family watching and everyone listening, my mother got up from the pew, leaned over the coffin of baby Mathew and sang in her quavering voice as if she had been doing it all her life.

“It’s jus a little street where old friends meet. I’d like to wander back some day.” It was one of her favorite songs. She had sung it to Mathew often.

At the reception, the family stood to greet the people who had never met Mathew but had come to pay their respects none-the-less. Most were church going folks.

Mr. and Mrs. Forsay stood next to the children. There was a chair for Marcel with his bad leg. And next to Annie, standing beside her, as if a real member of the family, as if a sister to Annie and to the brothers, I stood. Invited to be there. As a family member.

I shook hands, and said “thank-you,” just as they did. I wiped away tears and told people how much I loved Mathew. Everyone had heard the story.

“God bless you and your mother, Maria,” they said.

At the burial site, they lowered Mathew into the ground. I had never seen a person going into the ground before. I couldn’t watch. It was horrible.

I almost fainted. The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. Mom let me sleep with her that night. I think she was afraid I’d have bad dreams. I did. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. I had pushed it out of my mind. Somehow I had pushed it out of my mind. Somehow I had pretended, along with the Forsays, that Mathew had not broken his own neck. I kept going over it again and again in my mind, that awful moment. The sound of Annie’s straw voice, the family forming a dark circle, closing in on the frightened baby who had no idea these people were his mother and father, his brothers and sister.

Now all I could think of was that it was my fault. Everything was all my fault. I had wished for chocolate and got worms. I had wished for my Dad and he ‘d come to say good-bye. I worst of all, I had wished for the Forsays to love Mathew and now he was dead.

When I woke up, I had the deepest need to visit the grave. Mom agreed to come with me. She knew I was feeling horrible. She thought it was because Mathew was gone. It was true, but it was more than that. So much more. I brought a bouquet of white lilies. Lilies reminded me of Grandmother. I was sure Mathew would like them. And maybe the lilies could say how sorry I was.

It wasn’t easy finding the grave. There were so many graves. We had just been there, but following the procession. Now it was so different. Neither my mom nor I could remember where it was. There was a grave map. Can you imagine, a map where all the graves were and all the people’s names. But even with the grave map it was hard to find Mathew.

When we did, we saw his tombstone. It was an angel child with Mathew’s name carved into the stone. Under his name were the words, ‘Beloved son, beloved brother, beloved friend.”

Beloved friend. The words should have brought me the greatest joy. But they didn’t. I began to sob. I wanted to scratch my face. I wanted to make myself bleed. “What’s wrong with me?” I needed to know. “What’s wrong with me, Mama?”

My God, Marie, nothing, nothing. You’re my angel.

“Sometimes I think part of me is missing.

Mom held me close and I confessed the worst fear of all. “I think, when he saw them, all around him, all those strangers, he was afraid. He was confused and afraid. That’s why he raised his head that way, the way we thought he never could. And that’s how his neck got broken.”

“It was just a matter of time, Marie. He was living on borrowed time. He had pneumonia.”

“Am I, Mom? Am I living on borrowed time?”

“Marie, why would you say that?”

“Sometimes I have dreams. Dreams about dying, about jumping out of a car and dying”.

“You were his friend, Marie, and you gave his family a great gift.”

“But it killed him.”

“Maybe, maybe it did. But it doesn’t change the truth. He was dying. His family got to say good-bye. And mostly, sweet Marie, you were his friend. Nothing can change that. Nothing.

“Do you think Mathew would still want me as a friend, if he’d had a choice?”

Mom thought for a while. It scared me. Usually she jumped at answers, assuring me even before my worry left my mouth. Maybe she was trying to find the right words to tell me that Mathew would not have wanted me as a friend.

“I know Mathew had a little bit of real life, as short as it was, because of us, Marie, and because of you, he got to give a gift to his family. There wasn’t much that Mathew could do, but you let him do that. I think that if Mathew had been able to think that out, to plan that, he would have made things happen exactly as they did.

“He’d kill himself, to let them feel better?”

“I’d do it for you.” My mom said and I knew it was true. “And you, you’d do it for me.” And I knew that was true, too. I would.

“I hope you won’t have to,” I said and leaned heavily into her arms.

“Ssh, ssh,” she cooed. “You need to stop thinking. Just accept, accept life. It will be a lot easier.”

“Accept what?”

“The way things are.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. And you know, I don’t think I ever did.