Authors: Jason McIntyre
The window’s dribbling pattern laid intricate line work across her troubled face.
Bending over the sink, after Oliver had left, she had simply let loose and wept. Her tears had fallen into the sink’s basin, a tinkling pattern of hollow metal pattered by rain. At their hog farm, north of Edan, her own mother, Bea, used to have a saying that she would repeat aloud as she wet a rag with her spit and pressed it to Sadie’s brow or Sicily’s cheek, or her own black eye. This was after Pop-Sammy had thrown a punch or a saucer from the kitchen table. She wanted to leave more than anything, Sadie knew, but she never did. Couldn’t, Sadie supposed. Just couldn’t get the courage to walk on. And instead, Beatrice died on the same day as her husband—in his house and while his breakfast sat burned on the stove top.
“
Nevermore is what’s in store,” Mum had used to say as she would wet that old standby rag, one which had long before been permanently stained pink. And in the kitchen across from Lake Charlemagne, under her breath, Sadie repeated her mother’s mantra through a set of stiff lips. But she was thankful it had only been a whisper when she heard the front screen door bang behind her. She quickly wiped at her wet face and turned about to find Daniela had come in looking for Zeb.
The girl’s arrival was like a nail in a coffin, but in Zeb who still stood half concealed in the bathroom off the kitchen, the black shingles of anger were gone. Sadie couldn’t even bring herself to be angry. She was worn, weathered, and resigned.
So all she did was move further passed Daniela who stood looking startled. Sadie passed the threshold and went into the living room. Here she was, looking out at the flat-deck boat with its fading trail in the water. And she raised a tentative arm to wave back at her husband while her other arm tenderly laid across her stomach.
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The Druid fell to her knees.
The streams of sobs came like rancid poison pouring from the corners of her eyes. A painting is like a living breathing beast; it goes where it wants, it becomes what it wants. Zeb had known this for years but the Druid was just discovering the form’s secret. In this portrait of Zeb’s she saw herself, or rather Malin Holmsund, the Druid’s most recent quarry.
But beyond that, she saw the eyebrows and eye line of Malin’s father fused with her own now grown-up features. For the Malin-part of the Druid it was the first time she had seen such a similarity with her father, though she had stared at her own face for years and wished for his strength and for any hint that he was still with her.
It wracked her with guilt and sadness. And she remembered the terrible end they had come to, both her parents. The Druid couldn’t help it; she was simply struck down by the hallucination contained on the brightly painted canvas. The face stared up at her and it became her father. He tried to speak and in her head, in a squall of countless voices, she heard it, distinct and prickly with clarity.
Time for the news, baby daughter. Gather ‘round. Time for the news.
Her sight was hazy, her arm stung where the palette knife had drawn a dull and thick slash. Her head ached at a dry point of throbbing where the tea kettle had struck her. But she didn’t feel that. Only this. Only the voices in that image on the painted surface.
It became several things then, one after the next, without warning, like a living slide-show she never thought she would have to suffer through again.
All these lives in her head,
all these people
, they all babbled, squirmed, and bled together, like the oil color had come alive. It was a mortal being, flowing with undrying wetness, never solidifying. It was an unrelenting countenance, a set of successive and terrible reminders of all she had seen and tried to push past.
The picture was the girl who used to ride on the back of Clutch’s motorcycle along stretches of California beach. The roar of the engine was in her eyes and her hair was tousled by the coastal breeze. It was a wife and daughters in Stoughton where thirty wonderful years of life in a new land had come...and passed. It was Malin’s mom and dad, in their house in Stockholm and it was Will Nash’s two little boys with golden hair like cherubs. As evening light surmounted that of the day, they were swinging in the yard on the store-bought set their new father had put together for them.
And then the painting was her own little girls; the two princesses asleep on each other’s shoulders in the back of the shiny chrome and yellow Thunderbird. It was their mother too, with dark eyes and knowing smile. It was her with rounded belly ready to bring a third daughter into the world.
It was her...
The shadows of a thousand dark-feathered birds thrashed and volleyed across her and the room’s walls deformed and became maligned by the spider-glass of a dying window pane, but she saw none of it. She had fallen to the living room floor, unaware of everything except that full and vacant world inside the liquid paint. The bawling came and came and the Druid couldn’t stop it, not even as Zeb found his way up the stairs and away from her.
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Daniella’s legs were long and white. She rested the back of her hip against the tailgate of the Ford truck, only the bed of which remained, and those legs had a wet, smooth shine on them. Like they’d been shaved that morning, or freshly waxed.
Her eyes were on Zeb as he, under a mat of messy little-boy hair that fell in his eyes, bent down and traced a finger through the dirt, twigs and scraggly grass carpet bed of the clearing.
“
What do you drawing?” she asked him, crossing her bare arms against her chest and the white top she was wearing.
“
Your name.”
A breeze came, through the trees and through the girl, as Zeb finished the last stroke on
the
a
.
She stiffened, and Zeb saw a sheet of gooseflesh rise on her perfect white legs as he got up from his knees and dusted the filth from his hands. “Do you ever miss home?” he asked her. “Your real home. Where you come from. Ever miss it?”
“
Yes,” she said. “And no.”
She tightened her arms against her breasts, the chill moving up to her bare shoulders now too. She searched her limited vocabulary. “I miss my mum and dad...sometimes.” Her English was passable but coarse at points, jerky. “But...what is that ex-pression? The Here...and...The...Now? One must concen-trate...on the...present. Correct?”
“
Yeah...” Zeb said, looking past her at the multitudes of waxy green and dark khaki leaves rustling in the trees, having heard that expression somewhere before: The here and now.
That sound, of the wind in his ears moving through the leaves like that, was so lonely sounding to him. He squinted his eyes. She watched him and then spoke again, after formulating the sentence in English in her head.
“Do you have...dreams?”
“
Naw, not really...”
“
But...you think about the...fu-ture? Do you have those dreams?”
“
Never really thought about it.”
“
This is why I come. This is why I...am...here. For my dreams. Here...in this country...you can ‘Do Anything. Be Anything’ you...dream. No?”
Her face was immediately strained and he said to her, “You look mad.”
“
No. Only worried...” Her eyes left him. “Mum used to tell sister Calita and me...we each were to given gifts from God. The gift to Calita given was hope. To Daniela, mum said, was given worry...She always would laugh to that...What is that expression? “The cross that I bear?” That is my worry: a gift and...a cross.”
Zeb smiled at Daniela, not really understanding, but he saw that her eyes matched the sky past the treetops surrounding their clearing. She smiled back and, no longer shivering, she joined him on the narrow path back to the cottage.
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Zeb launched upwards, skipping steps, winding around the corner at the top of the stairway like a top. He moved down the narrow hallway towards his parents’ bedroom thinking that neither upstairs room had a lock on its door. But his parents’ room contained a small vanity set—a low table and a chair. He swung the door shut behind him, and with a hand steadier than he thought it should be, he propped the chair’s back under the door knob. For the time being, he was sealed in.
The crying from downstairs had faded sometime in the last few seconds and now he was unsure where the Druid was. Still in the living room, near the painting? For a second, he fought the desire to flop on the bed and try dreaming this all away. He remained standing, legs crooked, listening. Waiting for darkness to sheath him had never worked before. And now the Druid was a part of Malin. She was not coming back. And for that, Zeb wanted to let loose and bawl.
He half expected her to explode against the bedroom door with the same force as the dark-skinned stranger had in his father’s bedroom in Vaughan. Maybe she had already crept up the stairs after her tearful ruse. Maybe the thin door would be dealt a blow and the guarding chair propped under the knob would snap like a model made of toothpicks. Then the panels of the door would burst into soft wooden splinters of off-white and blonde. Cedar flecks would catch in his hair and on his clothes. And then, through the fluttering storm of wood flakes, the Druid—
inside Malin
—would barge into the room, snap him up and take what she wanted.
Wishing that he would have had the nerve and presence of mind to dive forward and snag the car keys from the tile floor instead of retreating backwards up the stairs, he finally sat on the edge of the bed, a tensile creature ready to spring up again. Adrenaline was pumping in his veins and he felt like, if the Druid did ravage the door, he would at least put up a fight.
But then he sagged, staring at his only exit with his heart rattling in his chest. This was all madness. He needed to gain clarity. He heard Malin, still with him in some sense, telling him to keep breathing, to move forward. To
blink backwards
.
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The Druid came back from the dead at North York Hospital that morning, head no longer buzzing, but still heavy with a surreal weight. The crippling view of Katie Becks had been pushed a little further down but, as usual, there was something new to take its place. Luckily, Malin’s haunted core was less weighty, less overpowering.
As Malin, saved from a heart seizure by the officers on the scene where she was attacked in her car from behind, she slipped out of the hospital’s emergency area. North of downtown, a bus had glided on glare ice and careened into a set of cars waiting at a traffic light. That chaos swarmed through the automatic double-doors and down the hallways of North York where EMTs brought in patients with broken bones and bloody foreheads. The overwrought doctors and nurses pushed gurneys and called out for assistance and in the confusion, she left nearly unnoticed.
She caught herself hoping that Willem Nash’s boys were not in that stray bus or any of the cars it slid into—she found herself hoping a lot of things that didn’t make much sense.
Out to Edan and towards the Redfield summer home with instructions still fresh in Malin’s mind, she had argued back and forth, had volleyed for control of her sanity. She had tried not to panic, had fought to tread water in an ocean of names and faces. They were ganging up on her. Dozens of lives she had ended—or
watched
as they ended—vied for attention and they all had a voice that needed hearing. In her throat a sickly bile rose for almost the whole drive north. She could feel it threatening and more than once, as the separate wills inside faced-off, she thought about just spinning off the road. As she closed the wrought gates behind her, one voice, a voice that sounded so much like Jewels Fairweather, had piped up. The Gatekeeper tried his damndest to keep her hands off those black iron bars but the effort couldn’t get its grip. Yet, by the time the Druid had climbed the steps of the deck and reached Zeb at his front door, Fairweather’s will and his stance as savior was in full command. The words that came from her mouth were his.
To Zeb, the Druid was saying “I found you,” but Jewels Fairweather was saying, “
...and you’re safe.
” Fairweather was pleading with Zeb but the Druid was the Wolf in Grandmother’s clothing.
Fairweather: “The Druid. He’s gone.”
The Druid: “
I came for you.
”
Fairweather: “You have to get your things
and we have to go.
”
Somewhere inside, the Druid, feeling ill, had toyed with the notion of just letting it all come to a dead stop. Like she had nearly done in Zeb’s back bedroom the morning after the Yonge Street confrontation, she nearly just rolled over and called it an end.
But she surged back from the brink.
She overtook that Fairweather saint. And for the moment, she silenced him.
And now she was bleeding. On her knees with the battle raging inside her still. The lump on her head and the gash on her arm had been pain-free but now she could feel them fresh and alive with a crawling sting. With tears still blurring her sight, she gathered up the canvas stack, and piled on paint tubes like a platter of food. Then she ascended the stairs, balancing her serving tray and choking on her last guilty sobs.
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Blink backwards
. Zeb tensed. He took breath into his lungs—the stale air of the upstairs room which hadn’t been freshened from the outside in a few years at least.
Blink backwards
. He snapped his eyes shut and in the darkness of his closed-off world he caught the familiar squeaking and creaking of the stairs. But the movement was slow, methodical. Then there was nothing.
He heard the stairs again, but the movement sounded like a descent this time. He kept his eyes clamped tight and remembered Malin saying those words, sharing her little trick, in the back yard in Vaughan. His yard, where the trees had once been magic castles and the shrubs had once been hideaway forts, and out here, at the summer house, he had been preoccupied by the same childhood adventures, had made up the same stories. But out here, in the wide open next to the lake, they always seemed to have a greater simplicity. Today was no exception.