Turtle Valley (10 page)

I lifted Jeremy into the cart and pushed him into the store as my mother held onto the side to steady herself. Ezra followed behind.

“I’m going to gather a few things on my own,” he said. He put a coin in one of the carts inside the store and pulled it smoothly from the stack.

My mother stood next to me as I watched him head down the aisle. “He’s not shopping with us?”

“Where’s Daddy going?”

I turned my cart to push it in the opposite direction. “I don’t know what he’s doing.”

Mom followed Jeremy and me. “There were times when my father couldn’t drive,” she said, “and either my mother or I had to drive him to town. He hated that. He said it made him feel useless. A woman didn’t drive then if there was a man in the car.” She nodded back at Ezra. “I imagine this is all so very hard for him.”

I turned the cart down the baking aisle and Mom picked up a small bag of pastry flour for the pie she wanted to make for Dad. “In any case, in a year or two none of this will seem so bad,” she said. “My mother always said that time was like a great flour sifter.”

“Flour sifter?” I thought of my grandmother’s flour sifter that my mother still used, the handle that turned the flour over the screen.

“You sift flour not only to get rid of lumps and impurities,” said Mom, “but to aerate the flour as well, so you can measure it
accurately. Measure unsifted flour and you’ll have a dense cake indeed. My mother used to say that time works like that: it not only sifts out the lumps—takes the sting out of events that seemed so painful at the time—but it allows you to measure those events properly, with some perspective.”

“I keep thinking if I just did things differently, handled Ezra differently, then we wouldn’t argue.”

She shook her head. “I remember a day when my mother and I took tea and scones out to my father. He was working on a well near that stand of cottonwood, yet another site where he said he was going to build a house for my mother. As he climbed out of that hole to have his lunch he was grey and shaky, but he wouldn’t stop digging. ‘You need to rest,’ my mother told him, just like you told Ezra he needed rest just now. That’s all she said. But he yelled at her. ‘You just don’t want me to finish,’ he said. ‘You want me to look bad in front of the neighbours, so it proves what you’ve been saying about me all along, that I’ll never build this house. You think I’m useless.’ It was a thing she would never say, of course, even if she thought it. As I picked wildflowers in the grasses next to her, she reassured him that yes, she knew he’d finish the house, that yes, she loved him for it, using the tone of voice a mother uses when her child has an upset.”

As she told this story, I saw my grandparents in my mind’s eye, as if from a distance, their hands gesturing in argument. My grandfather’s hands were clenched mountain cliffs, and my grandmother’s were at first trees, outspread, imploring, and then two trays, palms open as if serving a way forward. My grandfather took both her hands in his, and it was within those prayerful hands that the whole of my own future was contained.
Those hands as rough as wood, the desperation with which they clung to her, a drowning man’s.

“What was wrong with him?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything for a time and then, “There were a lot of things wrong.”

“Daddy!” Jeremy called out and we both turned.

Ezra stood between bins heaped with green peppers and bananas, caught at an intersection where a man was filling a water jug from a dispenser. The man blocked the aisle to the dairy section, causing a traffic jam, and my husband, stalled by indecision, was unable to navigate his cart through those other shoppers. Women with children in their buggies and old men with baskets over their arms passed him. I lifted Jeremy onto my hip, to leave the cart with my mother, and slipped through the congestion to come up behind Ezra. “Why don’t you just go?” I asked.

“Go, go, go!” Jeremy said.

“I’m waiting for the passengers to scurry out of my way.”

“You’ll wait forever. Just say
Excuse me,
then step out in front of someone.” I demonstrated with Jeremy in my arms. But Ezra didn’t follow; he stood where he was, watching the other shoppers march by. Bombarded and confused by the terrific business of the store, he turned his head to every sound. I felt my irritation slip into resignation, and I took the lead, as I did every day in the dance that was our lives. I put Jeremy in Ezra’s cart and headed through the store with Ezra following behind. “How about you sit on the bench by the door with your cart while we finish shopping?” I said, knowing that he wouldn’t argue now, and he didn’t. He shuffled beside Jeremy and me like a dutiful sentry through the maze of carts, shoppers, and grocery displays, to the bench by the door.

MY MOTHER WAS IN THE
pet-food aisle when I found her, instructing a pimpled young man on which flat of cat food to take down from the shelf. The clerk set the flat under the shopping cart and reached for another. “You must have a lot of cats,” he said.

“Five,” said my mother. Not exactly the truth of the matter; more than a dozen had greeted me that morning when I stepped outside.

I smiled to allow the clerk to leave. “You have quite a bit of cat food at home already, Mom.” Her cupboards were full of the stuff.

“I’m just stocking up. It was on sale.”

“Why don’t we pick out some fruit for Dad and head home? I think we’re all getting tired.”

I hooked my mother’s arm within my own and pushed my son in the cart to the produce aisle, and together we paraded among the oranges, chose fragrant Fuji apples, and squeezed avocados until my mother came across a plastic one that squeaked in protest. The produce manager had put it there, evidently, to stop customers from bruising his merchandise. “These grow in pairs,” I told her, holding two ripe avocados. “On trees they call testicle trees.” We laughed and for that moment, at least, my father’s illness, Ezra’s seizure and confusion, and the fire on the mountain were all but forgotten.

MY SON CRIED OUT
and I listened from my parents’ room a moment to see if he would fall back to sleep, but when he let out a frightened howl, I ran into Val’s old room and found him thrashing in the bed as if frantically trying to find something, or to escape. I left the door open so I would have enough light to see what was going on. He was sweating and his eyes were wide open, terrified. “Mommy! Mommy!” In the second single bed my mother whistled in her sleep, her eyes half open and moving eerily within dream, apparently deaf to his cries.

“What is it?” I said, and I wrapped my arms around him, but he pushed me away.

“Make him go away!” he cried.

“Who? Who’s scaring you?”

“Mommy! Make him go away!”

“I’m right here.” I held his face. “Look at me, I’m right here!”

But he was lost in some dark place and couldn’t find me. He slid from the bed to the floor and tossed about there, in the shadows, calling for me. “Go away!” he yelled.

I sat on the floor beside him, not trying to touch him any more because I knew from what I had read that holding him would only agitate him further. He had experienced night terrors here in this house during previous visits, though never at home. I assumed that the excitement and wear of travel triggered them. I knew that in the morning he would remember nothing of it. But that knowledge offered little comfort as he thrashed about beside me. He was so afraid and there was nothing I could do for him. He pushed himself backward into the corner of the room, trying to flee whatever chased him, and I followed him there, staying close, murmuring over and over,
I’m here, I’m here,
even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

After a time Ezra shuffled into the room in his underwear and T-shirt. “You need a stop?” he asked.

“I’m okay.”

“You don’t think I’m capable of gentling him?”

I threw up my hands. “I can’t reach him,” I said. “I can’t pull him out of it!”

He put a hand to his temple. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I came here to help, not to add to your load.”

I squeezed his hand to say it was all right, and let go.

“How about I dawdle with you awhile?” He sat on the floor
and wrapped an arm around me and I felt myself relax a little into him.

“Do you remember,” I said, “in the hospital, just after your stroke, when you couldn’t quite wake up?” I had to talk him up to the surface; he was like a spider trapped in a bathtub, the sides too shiny to climb. “One night you told me,
I’m drowning in mushroom soup.”
I laughed, a little, but Ezra didn’t laugh with me. We had both laughed at the time. It
had
to be funny then, otherwise it would have scared us both to death.

Ezra nodded at my mother. “I don’t know how she can gather her slumber.” She startled in her sleep as Jeremy called out, her eyes fluttering, but she didn’t wake.

“I imagine it’s the sleeping pills she’s taking. It worries me that they knock her out like that.”

“Weird,” Ezra said, pointing at my mother and then at Jeremy. “It’s like they’re singing the same dream.”

Indeed, just a moment before Jeremy’s cries rose back up to screams, my mother’s face tensed as if in pain and her arms and legs jerked repeatedly—as dogs do when they run in their dreams—as if she was trying to escape. “Go away!” Jeremy cried.

Ezra rubbed his forehead. “The racket’s too hard,” he said. “I need to go back to bed.”

“I understand. It’s okay.”

I wished that he had chosen to stay despite my protests, that he had continued to hold me as we waited out this storm. But he touched my shoulder and left the room.

From my corner next to Jeremy, I watched my mother for a few minutes, the fear in her brow, her half-open eyes moving in dream. I glanced into the shadows where she looked, almost expecting to see what frightened her so. Then her face
relaxed and her eyes closed, and just like that, Jeremy’s screams ended as well. I carried him to the bed, covered him with a sheet, and smoothed his sweaty forehead until I was sure he was fast asleep. So like the barn cats, terrorized by a chasing coyote one minute, snoozing on the porch the next.

I closed the bedroom door behind me and went into the kitchen to look out the window at the fire. As I watched, trees ignited and candled, flaring in the night, as the fire progressed along the ridge and down the slope. A U-Haul van and truck and trailer passed by the farm in the night, neighbours from up the valley rushing the contents of their homes out of the path of the fire. I ached for these uprooted souls as I ached for myself. Since our move to Cochrane, I had felt disoriented; it was the feeling of waking in a strange hotel and not knowing where I was. I had in fact awoken from sleep in our rented house thinking I was in my home in Chilliwack. I soon figured out where I was, but the odd feeling that accompanied this experience lingered. It was as if my soul hadn’t caught up with me yet, as if it had stalwartly refused to leave what had been home for more than a decade and, its leash now pulled taut, was forced to follow me in this venture. There were those stories of pets that had found their way home over great distances despite outrageous odds. I thought of my soul in this way, as a lost cat struggling through unfamiliar territory to find its owner, and I tried to help it along. I unpacked boxes in that tiny rented house, searching for those dear possessions that defined who I was: the originals of the cartoons I had drawn for the
Salmon Arm Observer
when I worked there as a junior reporter; the tiny yellow cap Jeremy had worn in the hospital the day he was born, before the nurse had bathed him; the
little heart-shaped silver pin with a pink rhinestone at its centre that had belonged to my grandmother; the raku vase that held my pens on my writing desk, the only vestige of Jude that I kept in my house. I foraged through the litter of moving, hunting for the familiar, searching for my lost self.

“Jeremy okay?” Val said from my parents’ room, and I joined her there.

“Night terrors,” I said. “He’s back to sleep.”

“I remember you having those on occasion when I came home for visits. Awful to watch.”

I picked up a garbage bag as Val swept a pile of debris into the dustpan. “Those sleeping pills really knock Mom out,” I said. “She slept through all of Jeremy’s crying.”

She nodded. “They worry me as well. I was thinking that we should set Mom up in the parlour for the duration. Make it easier on her, and you.” She yawned. “We should get some sleep ourselves. What is it, eleven o’clock?”

“Twelve-thirty.”

I stuffed yet another handful of mouldering paper into the bag. In order to make room for the hospital bed, Val and I had been sorting through the contents of this room for most of the day and into the night, ever since I had driven my mother, Ezra, and Jeremy home from town, and yet all around us bags of my mother’s writings were stacked higgledy-piggledy to waist level. Both Val and I stopped our sorting from time to time to scan the letters, but there was nothing scandalous in what I read. One letter described one of my father’s visits to the hospital, and my mother’s fears as she waited in the emergency room with him. Another letter, all seven pages of it, chronicled the birthing of a litter of kittens.