Tracks

For the twelfth time in two days I watch as Laura shreds her vocal chords screaming and still she’ll take no drugs. Her eyes are hooded with exhaustion, her hair a wet mass on her sticky forehead. It was a twenty-two hour delivery, most of which she spent foodless and hunched over a birthing stool in the biggest suite at Tsi Non:we Ionnakeratstha Ona:grahsta. She wanted a natural delivery, she’d said. If she could feel the conception she sure as shit was going to feel the birth. That was Laura. Ever crude and to the point.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hosp−”

“How many times do I have to tell you? No no no no no no. No. Heck, Roy!”

The camera shrinks away. It focuses on me spitting encouragement through the pulsing crush of Laura’s grip. I glimpse up at the camera—at Roy—and give a pained smile. Back then I didn’t know for sure that I couldn’t conceive but I had my suspicions.

I fast forward to the end, when Sherry is finally in her arms. Laura looks tired as hell, but when the camera comes for a close-up, she swats it away. “You’re not allowed to catch my wrinkles on camera just because I gave birth to your kid.”

There’s a time lapse. When the camera starts again Laura’s made up like some eager starlet. But she’s not looking at the camera from beneath pristine eyelashes or blowing kisses the way she would when she was young. She’s looking down at Sherry. Every touch and gesture is full of yearning, for both the present and the future. Tracing Sherry’s veins with her fingers like she’s following a map. Like in those small trails of blue, peeking from beneath crystalline skin, Laura saw their lives: love and anger, tenderness and humour, pain and envy. Like Laura saw their worlds—separate but interlocking: two halves of a Venn diagram.

No one watching could have seen anything but a mother and a daughter, each absolutely smitten, adoring and sizing one another up. I’m not sure I see anything different now but I continually find myself trying. Nothing ever really comes out of the blue. There must be shifting eyes somewhere in the grainy footage, a hesitation, a smile held a moment too long.

“Em.” Tom is standing in the doorway in a too-big black suit. He’s holding my black pumps and watching me, a question on his face. I wish he would just ask it.

“Is it time?”

He nods. I stop the video, get up and grab my shoes.

There is a persistent musty smell in the viewing room. It’s hidden well beneath strangers’ perfumes and plug-in deodorizers but it’s there. I imagine it’s the smell of formaldehyde or death, though I’ve never really smelled either. I haven’t been to a funeral since Uncle Rob’s and that doesn’t really count. I was so young; for all I remember I wasn’t there at all. Laura said she remembered everything, from the music (“Fucking Garth Brooks”) to the “huge ass mole” on the priest’s chin. I didn’t consider it at the time but it was strange a priest was there. Mom said when she and Uncle Rob were at the Mush Hole together, he was constantly in trouble, back-talking the priests and refusing to speak English and biting the unlucky teacher tasked with cutting his long, black Indian hair to a more “civilized” length. They beat him so he hated them; he hated them so they beat him. And yet at the end of his life a priest was praying over his Mohawk soul.

Twenty years later I’m at this funeral. Three generations—almost an entire family—gone, all put to rest courtesy of Styres Funeral Home. Laura planned her funeral shortly after she and Roy were married. It should have set off alarm bells but it didn’t. At least her preparations have helped Roy. All he’s had to do is nod, mute.

The room is orderly enough. Chairs arranged with absurd precision. I have the feeling that were I to take a ruler and measure the distance between each one, I’d come up with the same number every time. There must be some sort of science to grief, some manual funeral home directors adhere to, detailing the most manageable chair arrangement or flower placement for friends and family of the deceased. Everything is too calculated: the beige wallpaper, the overstuffed couches, the pre-packaged condolences.

Aunt Chelsea is at the podium, mascara that took thirty minutes of applying and re-applying to perfection now sliding, sap-like, down her cheek. Otherwise she is composed, wearing the stiff proud pout of a once-great general facing a war tribunal. Her voice is level and dry.

“Laura was such a smart girl. Rob loved her so much. When we lost him she was four. It was…difficult. But she was strong.”

“Smart.” “Strong.” Adjectives any parent could slap on the dead child they didn’t care to know. I look around for evidence of skepticism. Not even a raised eyebrow. No one is thinking about Aunt Chelsea and Laura’s relationship, which was tempestuous at best. In the face of death, ugly truths are redacted.

As long as I can remember every conversation between them had notes of danger—as though any minute they’d collapse into fists and fire. I don’t remember Laura ever mentioning Aunt Chelsea with anything resembling love. Even when she was six and should have still been under her mother’s spell, she ignored her almost constantly, called her “Chelsea” with satisfaction.

I remember in grade nine when she was asked to prom by Mark Hanson, a white twenty-year old senior with a car and nipple rings. She was one of the only ninth graders going—probably one of the only kids from the rez going, too—a fact she loved to remind us, dangling it in front of our faces like a succulent piece of fruit. Laura couldn’t do anything without thoroughly pissing off her mother, though, so she decided to wear Aunt Chelsea’s low-cut red cocktail dress—the expensive one she bought herself in Toronto to celebrate graduating from nursing school. The way Laura told it, she sauntered home drunk at 3:00 a.m. wearing Mark’s leather jacket and swinging her panties around her finger. She greeted her mother with a smile, slurring, “Guess who’s a woman now?” before throwing up on the kitchen floor.

“You should’ve seen her face, Em,” she’d said, laughing. “I’ve never heard her scream so loud. And all for that ugly dress! Never mind her piss-drunk daughter shooting vomit like a fucking sprinkler.”

But a month after prom, when it became obvious that Mark Hanson’s “gravity’s as good as birth control” claim was bullshit, Aunt Chelsea didn’t yell or tell her she had it coming, even if she thought it. She calmly described Laura’s options, then asked what she wanted to do. When abortion was chosen, Aunt Chelsea didn’t flinch or grimace in that self-satisfied way she usually did when Laura chose anything. She diligently set about doing all the work: finding a clinic, booking the appointment in Toronto, borrowing a car to drive us there. All Laura did the week before the procedure was talk about Mark. He hadn’t even looked in her direction since prom.

“I’m gonna keep the fetus so I can send it to him. Like in a little jar. Oh! I should put a fake birth certificate in the bag, init? You know, like, ‘Mark Hanson Jr. was aborted on this day, child to a naïve girl and a small-dicked asshole.’”

“You haven’t been naïve since kindergarten.” “Maybe I should send it to his mom. She’d already be pissed enough an Indian snagged up her son, but wouldn’t it be great if she was one of those crazy pro-lifers? Like with the signs and bombs and stuff? She might actually kill Mark. Save me the trouble.”

But when the day came she didn’t even mention Mark. She didn’t say anything at all. Afterwards she cried against her mother’s chest for almost an hour. It was strange to watch them in that embrace, as though they were any mother and daughter at any moment in history, timeless.

 

Laura never really mentioned the abortion to me after it happened and out of respect for her, I never mentioned it either. I only heard her reference it once in an offhand kind of way the day Sherry was born. I didn’t hear it when she said it, I must have been talking to Roy or Aunt Chelsea. It was something I noticed when I watched the video. The camera is on her bedside table. It only catches the pale curtain’s flutter, but I imagine her gazing down at Sherry, maybe touching her nose with a manicured nail. Then you hear it.

“I get to keep you.”

The first time I noticed it I rewound the tape to make sure that’s actually what she said. Each time I heard it I felt sick. Even all those years later, on what was supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life, tragedy was playing in the background. She put on a good show but she couldn’t forget. She couldn’t escape. Until she did.

Maybe Laura was trying to atone for her sins. Sacrifice the child she chose for the child she didn’t. Maybe that was a clue. A dot I should have connected. As though hearing those words the first time could stop the train that was, months later, barreling forward.

 

Aunt Chelsea’s voice has gotten thicker, the tears faster. She wobbles on her heels. Mom gets up and quietly approaches.

“It’s okay, Chels.” She tries to lead her away by the hand. Aunt Chelsea only clutches the podium tighter as she continues to melt into the wood. Her cries are guttural, inhuman. She knows she wasn’t a good mother—the type who’d stay up all night and watch movies with Laura, or ask what she wanted to do with her life and really listen. She wasn’t the type of mother a daughter would come to when terrified by her own thoughts.

Had Laura seen this, she would have offered a bemused cliché. “Better late than never.” As if time is infinite and lives don’t end. What good is remorse now? It might as well be never.

I lean towards Tom. “I need a cigarette.” He moves to get up and I stop him quick with a shake of my head. Any time I’m alone for more than ten minutes he calls to me, or peeks his head in, or comes along with a cup of coffee or a bowl of corn soup. It’s suffocating.

I stand in the doorway and inhale deeply. Freshly-shorn grass and charred hotdogs from a fundraising barbecue across the street. Evidence that other lives continue, unchanged. A slow nausea creeps up, stops short at my esophagus.

The only other person outside is a woman wearing a simple black dress. About my age. White, blonde. She’s whispering into her phone with her back turned. As the screen door clicks shut she turns around sharply and thrusts her phone into her purse, her eyebrows squeezed in agitation.

“Sorry.” I pull out a cigarette and try to light it. My hands are shaky and imprecise.

The woman looks wary for a moment, then all creases smooth.

“It’s okay. I was looking for a reason to hang up anyway.”

I raise an eyebrow and she rolls her eyes. “Ex-boyfriend,” she offers.

I nod, focusing on my still unlit cigarette. Once, twice, three times, four and still no flame. The woman reaches into her purse, pulls out a red lighter and flicks its head ablaze without hesitation. In a moment the end of my cigarette’s aglow.

“Thanks,” I say as I inhale. “No problem.”

I can feel her eyes darting back to me as she digs through her purse. I wonder what she sees. Looking in the mirror hasn’t really occurred to me lately. I could have grown crow’s feet overnight. My lips could have decided once and for all they were done pretending, leaving me frowning forever. I’ve seen other people like that. Old Mohawk women with faces like scored leather. They couldn’t have always been that way. They must have been happy once, even beautiful, before some event came down on them with such unrelenting force that the smiling ended.

Laura, of course, will remain young, beautiful, tragic.

“You couldn’t handle it in there, either, huh?” the woman asks.

“Nope.”

She lights her own cigarette and takes a drag. Her nails are a familiar shade of pink. Showy and grossly inappropriate for a funeral.

“Viva la Vulva?”

The woman looks down at her hands and laughs. “It always sounds so much worse when said out loud like that.”

“I’m not really a nail polish kind of girl.” I hesitate for a moment, then puff out, “But Laura liked that one.”

“Is that right? I take it you and Laura were close?” I let the silence ring for a moment, observing her. She’s too put together, too eager. I shrug. “Not really.” The woman turns in towards me. Her eyes are shrewd, calculating like a jungle cat’s, her face angular and lean. Her voice drops to a whisper.

“Listen, I have a favour to ask. My name’s April Hopkins and I’m a reporter for The Star. I know you said you didn’t know Laura very well, but I could really use a few quotes. If I could just ask you a couple questions—”

“How’d you find out about this?”

She gives a thin smile. “Just a hunch.”

That’s bullshit. Nothing was publicized. The funeral’s in downtown Ohsweken, a full hundred kilometres from where Roy and Laura lived. None of Laura’s flaky friends—of which she had many—were notified. Aunt Chelsea’s sticking pretty faithfully to this mourning mother routine. And Roy would never have talked to this reporter. He hasn’t talked to anyone, really.

So then who was the sell out?

“I know it’s probably really hard for you in light of the circumstances. But this can be your chance to set the record straight. Show people the real Laura.”

Before I can even respond she pulls out a notepad and starts rifling through the pages.

“I’m going to be honest with you. A lot of people I’ve talked to are saying a lot of really awful things. Kayley Blatchford has gone on the record calling her a sadist. Something about getting in a lot of fights in college, really messing her knuckles up. Made it sound like a form of self-mutilation.”

“Well then she obviously doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘sadist,’ does she? Laura got those scars in grade eight playing too much bloody knuckles.”

“Really?” She fishes through her purse for a notebook and starts scribbling immediately. “Now you see why I need more opinions. It’s hard to find balance with a story like this. People want a monster, so they create a monster. Especially with the whole race thing.” She says it in such a careless, blasé way, the way people do when they don’t have to consider the whole race thing in their everyday lives. She’s right, though. I’ve seen it. Figures from Laura’s past rematerializing in print and on tape, spinning a common tale of a troubled girl. I knew that people would talk; they did enough when she was alive. But for some reason every time another person came forward I felt attacked. Like I was the one being picked apart and analyzed.

Laura would have loved this. I can imagine her laughing, egging rumours on with some exaggerated truth or outright lie. Always building her own myth, disregarding how it affected those around her.

That doesn’t explain Sherry, though. Laura was different when she had her. She prided herself on being a good mom. Took up baby massage and breastfed, I want to say something that shows this. Even something as simple as, “Laura was a fantastic mother. She loved her daughter.” But I can’t. Maybe the reporters and pundits are right. Maybe our family is “predisposed to violence.” Maybe our people are “naturally self-destructive.”

The reporter leans in closer. “Will you help me help Laura? Please?”

People begin pouring out the door. April gives only a cursory glance to the other mourners. Her focus is me. I haven’t had much experience with reporters but I can tell this woman’s very good at her job. She’s going to get her balanced quote—if that’s what she even wants—with or without me.

I see Mom propping up Aunt Chelsea. Tom walks closely behind them, hands up, as though spotting.

I turn and grab Tom’s arm. “Is it over? Where are they?”

He glances between me and April, then back towards the door. “He won’t let them leave yet.”

“What?” Tom shrugs and backs away, leaving me once again with the reporter with the camera lens eyes.

“Sorry, did he just say—”

I look April straight in the face and, bluntly, as though my words were a hammer striking a nail, say “Fuck you.”

 

There are two matching caskets: one large, one small, both closed. There is one picture: a portrait of Laura and Sherry four months after the birth. They look so much alike. Their eyes are a matching shade of amber, their hair is smooth and straight and black. Laura refused to wear matching outfits, so their dresses clash fantastically. Both look beautiful and somehow amused, Sherry already sporting the ironic smirk it took Laura years to perfect. I want to move forward and touch the caskets but my muscles stick. I want to say something meaningful but nothing comes.

“What did you tell her?” Angry, accusatory. So unlike any voice I’ve heard I’m almost convinced I’ve imagined it. Then I turn and see Roy standing in the corner, his face a mass of puffy pink.

This is the first time I’ve seen him since the night it happened. I went straight over and saw him crumpled in a heap in the corner of Sherry’s nursery, her just-used sheets ripped from her mattress and held tight against his nose. “I can still smell her.” He repeated it over and over. I pulled a chair from another room and sat. It seemed wrong to sit in the rocking chair.

“What did you say to her, Em?” I stay very still.

“Who?”

“April from The Star.”

My muscles release, slightly. “Nothing.”

He exhales. “She’s been following me for days trying to convince me I owe everyone a quote.”

So that was how April conducted her investigative journalism: stalking. No one actually told her anything. Everyone was loyal.

“You should call the cops. Get a restraining order or something.”

“No point.”

I can understand why Roy hasn’t talked in days. These conversations are painful, not cathartic. We’re trying to talk like we normally would but it’s a poor imitation. We can’t even say their names. And yet by not talking about it we’re still talking about it. Laura: forever the centre of attention. How she always managed to creep into conversations, even when she wasn’t there, will always be a mystery to me. She was the gel in so many relationships.

Her whole relationship with Roy was the centrepiece of college gossip. Before Roy, all of Laura’s flings were interchangeable. Big sturdy barrels of men with stamina and little else. The closest she ever came to loving a boy was drunkenly tattooing a high school boyfriend’s name on her shoulder after graduation. She never bothered to cover it after they broke up.

Roy was something else altogether. He was the quiet, studious roommate of some moron she was dating in college. The night Laura met Roy, Bryan drank three pitchers of beer by himself. On their way back to his apartment he collapsed. She dragged his two-hundred-and-thirty pound frame to the door, swearing and grunting the whole time. As she rifled through his pockets for keys, Roy opened the door: wiry, pale, freckled. Between the two of them, they managed to get Bryan inside. Then Roy offered to make Laura a French press of coffee. And that’s when she said she knew.

“Not once did he look down my shirt. And I was wearing my black tank top—you know, the one with the sequins? Cleavage everywhere, and here he is, asking me my opinions on Akira Kurosawa. Like he actually thought a rez girl like me would know anything about Akira Fucking Kurosawa.”

She seemed amazed that there was a man alive who would want to spend four hours talking to her without the promise of sex. That there was a man alive who could see her as a person.

I’m not sure he did, though. Roy marrying Laura was like the nerd finally bagging the head cheerleader. For all his reverence for her, I think Roy both recognized and relished this. It was almost grotesque the way they showed one another off: he with his gorgeous, glowing Pocahottie, she with her white, sure-to-earn-six-figures sugar daddy.

 

When they announced their engagement six months later it was met with hard cynicism. Typical Laura, everyone back home thought, riding a whim to get attention. I thought so, too, until their wedding day. We were in the back room waiting for our cue to leave, she in her white gown. She turned to me, her face pursed.

“Em. What if he finally realizes he’s marrying me and just leaves?”

Their marriage was more than an impulse. It was a dive into the dark and she was terrified.

And yet she left him, willingly, taking everything with her.

I reach over, feel the crisp linen of Roy’s sleeve— “Don’t.” He brushes my hand off. It was stupid of me to think he could handle these kinds of interactions. I can’t even imagine how he could get dressed, much less put up with condolences from strangers. I try to get him to look into my face but he won’t.

“These past few days all I could think about was talking to you. I had a list of questions. A whole god- damn speech. But now that you’re in front of me…”

“Maybe this isn’t the right time for this,” I say. Roy rubs his hands over his face. I feel a numbness creeping up my knees. I shouldn’t have worn such high heels.

“I don’t want you there. It doesn’t seem right.” For a moment the room seems to tilt.

“What do you mean? You don’t want me where?” He blinks and blinks.

“You don’t want me where, Roy?”

“The burial. The reception after. I didn’t really want you here, but you’re her cousin. Her best friend. People would ask questions.”

“But…nothing happened.”

Roy looks inflamed. Sharp words are waiting to be said, I can tell. I hope he says them. I hope they draw blood. There’s been enough pretending for the sake of saving face. We did what we were supposed to. All the tip-toeing, the planning…all of it was for nothing. I never got to taste second-hand red wine on his tongue or feel his slender fingers between my thighs. I never will. I shouldn’t feel resentment—not now, of all times—and yet here it is, crippling and noxious.

He looks directly at me and his face is set. “Please. Don’t. Come.”

 

Every five to ten minutes the high-pitched shriek sounds. The wheels are stopped by force. Violent, desperate, like the last moment of struggle before surrender. The subway train smashes to a halt: doors open, people rush, bells chime, doors close. The station left barren.

With traffic it took me two and a half hours to drive here, ten minutes to find parking. St. George. One of the busiest subway stations in Toronto. Isolating even at capacity. It’s a depressing shade of green—one I imagine I’d find peeling from the walls of a crack house bathroom on the Trail.

I lean out, well past the platform’s yellow line. When I turn back eyes are on me, some wide and worried, some dull and uncaring. People watch and watch but do never do anything.

It happened here, at the centre of two lines. A crossroad, of sorts. Was that intentional? I know I need to stop. There’s no meaning in these walls or their placement on a map. Only she knows why she chose this place, if it was even a choice at all.

No two accounts are the same, but all agree she wheeled Sherry off the elevator in that obscenely expensive stroller she loved so much. Either she didn’t say anything or she cooed to Sherry as she moved to the end of the platform. The train going Northbound wailed its way into the station. Sherry started to cry. Laura picked her up and clutched her to her chest, kissing her or trying to shush her or looking maudlin. The air started to shift, another whistling could be heard.

The TV screen said the next train Southbound would be arriving in less than a minute. Some people thought she was just peeking down the tunnel to see the train, the way people do. Others said she looked distraught. At the last minute she shifted Sherry onto her hip as she took off her purse and thrust it into the seat of the stroller. Or she wasn’t wearing a purse. Then she turned her back towards the oncoming train, hugged Sherry tight, and stepped sideways off the platform.

I didn’t notice her unhappiness. I was too busy parceling pieces of her perfect life to take for myself. She practically told me her plans right there on the phone and I hung up. Hung up to meet her husband in Burlington—the halfway point between our homes, our families. Back then, of course, I told myself it wasn’t cheating. It was easy enough to believe; our skin barely touched. When it did, though, those slight, soft strokes were everything to me. Amazing that something so small could be so erotic. I lived for the chance that we’d brush hands under the table. Even as it was happening to me I put myself above it. Roy and I were doing things the right way. We were going to keep collateral damage to a minimum.

That last time we talked Laura was going on about Sue Stevenson, soon to be Sue Kristoff. She had just sent Laura an invitation to her wedding and Laura was micro-analyzing the handwritten postscript. Apparently “Vlad and I would love for you to come. We have so much catching up to do!” was code for “I married someone richer and want to rub it in your face.” “Maybe she really does want to see you and catch up. She was your roommate. You guys were close.”

“We were not. Sue and all those white trust fund bitches don’t make friends. They gather audiences. I could call every one of them right now and tell them I’m going to kill myself and they’d just laugh and ramble on about how they used to cut themselves in eighth grade.”

I laughed, the way I always did.

“I’m serious. And it’s really fucking sad when you think about it.”

“Look, I got to go. I’m supposed to meet Tom for dinner in ten. We can trash all your old friends tomorrow. I’ll call you around, say, 4?”

“Oh. Okay. Emily?”

“Yeah?”

Something big was bothering her. She never used my full name. I could hear her ragged breathing as I feverously applied red lipstick in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Speak now or forever hold your peace.” I meant for it to be playful.

“Forget it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I don’t remember what I ate for dinner that night, what I wore, what lie I told Tom to get out of the house. I don’t remember anything that Roy and I talked about. But I remember the hollow of her voice, or at least I tell myself I do.

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Photo by Flickr user Chris Brown