Southwesterly Winds
Elizabeth’s hand rested on the knob of the door, the cool metal pressed into her palm. She took a deep breath to prepare for whatever lay on the other side of the threshold. As she exhaled, she turned the knob and stepped inside the small two-bedroom home where she grew up. Her nose was immediately hit with the familiar smells of coffee brewing and cigarette smoke. From the door Elizabeth saw her mom sitting at the sturdy wooden kitchen table, a plume of smoke rising from her. Even though the noise of the door opening and closing spoke of Elizabeth’s arrival, her mom did not turn to greet her.
For a split second, Elizabeth saw the younger, livelier version of her mom that had existed two decades before. Back then, she had danced in that very same kitchen with her dad, her long straight jet-black hair swaying as she moved her head to the music that streamed in from the radio. She wore a dress that fanned out every time her dad twirled her. Sometimes in Elizabeth’s memory the dress was grey with a white floral print and other times it was blue with pink flowers, but she was in a dress, nonetheless. Her dad hummed the melody of the song that rang through the house while he spun her mom in the kitchen, and she laughed the kind of laugh that passes through the lips of a woman in love. He pulled her in close and kissed her, and she wasn’t mom in that moment, she was Terry-Lynn—a thirty-year-old girl who married a good man named Michael who danced her around the kitchen after a day of hard work. Elizabeth sat in the living room watching them while her brother Joel watched the television set.
Shortly after that night, Elizabeth’s dad died in a chainsaw accident. He was cutting down a tree configuration that is notoriously known as a widow-maker. They had called Michael in to that job specifically because he was the best at what he did. He felled trickier and larger trees in the past. But all the skill and experience did not stop the tree from doing what it would do.
The day he passed away, her mom called Elizabeth and her brother into the living room and broke the news. She said the words flatly and from a distance, as if she was telling the weather forecast over the kitchen radio to an invisible audience.
Your dad has died.
There are clouds being brought in by a southwesterly wind.
They say it was an accident.
There will be record breaking speeds of wind as the day progresses.
By the time they found him he was already gone.
We are looking at cooler temperatures for the foreseeable future.
Your grandma is coming to get you for a few days.
Her mother had not looked them in the eyes the entire time. Instead, she stared out the big front window above the sofa they sat on, her face unreadable. Joel, who was eight at the time, began to cry in his confusion and shock. Elizabeth turned to her mom to search for a cue of what to do, to see if this was even real. She was twelve years old and had no real concept of death. They had a fish that died once but that was the extent of her experience of loss. She was old enough to know that this meant she would never hold her father’s hand again, but she was too young to grasp what kind of time that death steals.
Her mom rose, she was expressionless as she turned away from them and walked down the hallway. Elizabeth still remembers the sound of her bedroom door closing that morning. Joel sobbed. Elizabeth put her arms around him and absorbed the shock of their father’s death quietly, without tears. She sat on the couch holding the crumpled ball of snot and tears Joel had become until their asu showed up.
At their grandma’s house that night, Elizabeth stood in front of the window and watched as the wind caused the skinny trees in the front yard to bend over sideways like they were trying to cling to the earth with their limbs. The wind whistled through windows and if you focused on the sound too long it sounded like screaming. Asu stood behind Elizabeth and put her arm around her shoulders. She pointed at the trees that swayed wildly in the wind.
“When a big wind like that comes, it’s carrying a spirit away. Your dad will make it to where he needs to be,” Asu said.
Elizabeth stood expressionless in front of the window. Two days after the funeral they returned home, and Elizabeth was faced with even more changes she couldn’t make sense of. Her mom refused to rise from her bed and had lost her words entirely. If her mom got out of bed to eat or use the toilet, it was when they were at school, because Elizabeth never saw her outside of the bedroom.
The first Monday morning Elizabeth woke up and stood at her mom’s door unsure if she should go in or not. She knocked softly and opened the door but did not make her way in.
“Mom?”
Her mom did not move.
“Mom, we have school today,” Elizabeth said softly, her words cautiously skating out into the distance between them. Nothing.
She backed away and shut the door. Elizabeth remembered thinking that her mom just needed more time, and she would show her how good she could take care of Joel. Her mom just needed rest and if Elizabeth was good enough, she would come back and her mother be the mom she was before. She went to the room that her and Joel shared and woke him up. Joel rubbed the sleep out his eyes with his small brown fingers.
From that point on Elizabeth and Joel fell into their own routine. She would wake up early, make them cereal and pour them glasses of orange juice, then she packed them a bologna sandwich and an apple for lunch. She even put the mustard in a smiley face pattern on Joel’s sandwiches, even though he never saw the inside of his sandwiches. At night she made no name noodles or a frozen TV dinner, but they only had that for the first five days. Asu dropped off a few bags of groceries, so they had a lot of easy-make food, but they went through it fast. When she noticed the milk was getting low, Elizabeth added water to it to make it last. Eventually there was no more watery milk, so they ate the cereal dry until there was no more cereal. They had bread ends with processed cheese folded in them for lunch one day and then just two slices of cheese the next. Joel looked in his lunch box and made a face but said nothing. Later that day when they got back from school, Elizabeth took forty dollars from her mom’s purse and sat Joel in front of the television with the strict instructions not to move until she got back. She walked down the street and waited for the bus she had seen go by a million times. It would be her first time on the bus, and she hid her panic behind her hunger.
When the bus pulled up, she didn’t have exact change for the fare and ended up overpaying by twenty-five cents. Once she was seated by the window, Elizabeth realized she had no idea how to get off the bus. She looked at the only other bus patron, a woman with short brown and grey hair seated close to the front. The woman was wearing some type of blue uniform with a hotel logo on it, worn white sneakers, and she looked tired. The lady held onto a black purse that sat on her lap and after a few minutes she raised her arm behind her and pulled a black string that ran along the bus’ window. When she pulled the cord, a noise went off and a red light behind the driver lit up. Shortly after the bus stopped and the woman exited the bus.
The town they lived in was small and it didn’t take long for Elizabeth to see every part of it as they snaked their way through city streets, picking other passengers up and dropping them off, until they were close to the only mall. Elizabeth knew there was a grocery store on the other side of the mall, so she reached up and pulled the plastic black string.
“Thank you,” she said to the driver as she got off the bus and the driver nodded his head back at her.
The fullness of the aisles made her eyes widen. She slowly walked through each corridor that was stacked high with colourful packages of cookies and crackers and wandered through the aisle of coolers filled with every type of frozen food. After she took a leisurely account of what was in the store and how much things cost, Elizabeth put away the grocery extravaganza daydreams and headed for the bakery section where she put a loaf of sliced white bread into her cart. She then continued around the store and grabbed a jug of milk, a bottle of orange juice, eggs, sliced cheese, two packages of bologna, noodles, four frozen food tray dinners that had brownies in them for dessert. She also grabbed Joel a box of his favourite sugary fruit snacks for his lunches and a bag of the salty chips she used to share with her dad. Elizabeth placed everything on the conveyor belt and as the total creeped upward, she felt her chest tighten.
“That will be forty dollars and sixty-three cents,” the lady behind the till said.
Elizabeth looked at the food packed in the bags.
“Uh, can you take those chips out please? I grabbed the wrong kind,” she said sheepishly.
“Of course I can, love,” the lady said with a smile and removed the chips from the total. “That will be thirty-eight seventy-five.”
Elizabeth pulled the two crumpled twenty-dollar bills from her pocket and gave them to the lady.
When she returned to the house successfully with the bags of food, she felt as if she had just experienced some rite of passage. She was happy because she did something she didn’t know she could do, but she was also sad because she didn’t want this to be her new normal. Elizabeth had no sense of what normal would look like and it terrified her. If she let herself think too hard about it she felt like she was back at her Asu’s, standing in front of the living room window, watching the trees attempt to cling to the earth while the wind screamed. Elizabeth tried not to think about it too much, and instead focused on what she needed to do for her and Joel.
“Can I have one of these?” Joel said, a toothless smile on his face, as he held up the box of snacks she bought for his lunches.
Elizabeth looked at him like she was about to turn his request down.
“Pleaaaase,” Joel squealed.
“Alright, just one. The rest is for school.”
Joel danced around the kitchen and took out a snack and returned to the living room to watch his show. It made Elizabeth happy to see him happy. After she put the groceries away, she walked down the hallway and stood in front of her mom’s bedroom door.
Elizabeth rested her hand on the knob and felt the coolness of the metal on her palm. She took a deep breath in and upon exhale she turned the knob and pushed the door open.
“Mom, I got groceries on my own today. You would be really proud. I picked really good things for us to eat. You should come out and see. I can make you a bologna sandwich the way you made it for us, Mom. I’ll fry it and everything,” Elizabeth said, as she kneeled at her mom’s bedside.
Her mom was on her back, eyes closed. She didn’t move from her position, but Elizabeth could tell she was awake.
“Joel was happy because I got those snacks he likes. You know the ones in the shape of little dinosaurs?”
Nothing.
“I took the bus all on my own all the way downtown. It was pretty easy once I figured it out.” Elizabeth stopped talking and let the silence settle between them. Her mom finally moved but she turned her body toward the other direction. Whatever invisible cord that ran through Elizabeth’s twelve-year-old body and tethered her to the earth broke in that moment. For the first time since her father died, she cried, and the tears came at such a force and speed she couldn’t have stopped them if she had tried. Elizabeth fell to the floor beside her mother’s bed and sobbed.
The storm arrived without notice.
A pain in her stomach caused her to pull into the fetal position.
Trees are being uprooted by high-speed winds.
She screamed from a deep place she didn’t know existed.
Please exercise caution during these turbulent times.
Elizabeth could barely breathe as she wailed and sobbed on the floor.
The sun will rise tomorrow at 7:29 a.m..
She didn’t feel her mom’s arms scoop her up and place her into her bed.
The sun will rise. The sun will rise. The sun will rise.
Elizabeth’s cries continued until she fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning, she woke in her mom’s bed to the sound of something happening outside the bedroom. Elizabeth walked into the kitchen, still half asleep and sat at the kitchen table. Through groggy eyes she watched her mom move about the room and wondered if she had entered directly into another dream. Her mom stood in front of the stove in a pink nightie, scrambling eggs, and smoking a cigarette. She did not turn to look at Elizabeth, but she grabbed a plate, and slid eggs and a piece of toast onto it and placed it in front of her at the table.
Before Elizabeth rose and sometime after Joel had fallen asleep, Terry-Lynn went into the bathroom with a pair of dull scissors they kept in the junk drawer alongside playing cards, batteries, and inconsequential mail. Terry-Lynn wrapped her fingers around the black handles and raised the heavy scissors to her thick black hair. She cut her hair to just below her chin to mark the loss of her husband. As the children slept inside the quiet house, she went out back and lit a fire in the pit and burned her hair with a small tobacco offering. From that moment forward she would never allow her hair to grow past her shoulders. Terry-Lynn came back that day, but she was forever altered. She refused to answer to Terry-Lynn, and would only respond to Terr, even by her mom and sisters. Although she would never say it out loud, Terr didn’t even like being called Mom anymore. Terr’s body said it all for her and over time the kids became smart enough to pick up on her slight wincing and tightening of the body. Eventually the only time they called her Mom was by mistake.
Terr didn’t dance in kitchens or throw her head back in laughter. Terr didn’t wear dresses with flowers on them. Terr said I love you sparingly. Terr said the words as if she believed they were a curse, or as if she herself was cursed. Terr listened to the news and the weather on the radio but turned it off when music played. Terr was a distorted echo of their mother. Terr was proof that sometimes only parts of us survive the storms that life brings to our doorsteps.
Elizabeth was glad to have her back, but she still missed the version of her mom that existed in the before times. This version often drifted away in the middle of conversations, her eyes glazing over, her face without emotion.
The southwesterly winds are blowing in again.
Photo graciously provided by L. Mitch Hodge from Unsplash.
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