A Complicated Kindness

twenty-eight

I have a car, a Custom 500 Ford four-door, plenty of legroom. He’d taken it to the car wash before he disappeared and left it gleaming in the sunshine on the driveway.

How did he leave? Walk? Hitchhike? How do you leave a town with no train, no bus, no car?

I also have a French horn I plan on learning how to play, an Akai stereo and my records, Tash’s stuff, and an official looking note saying the house is mine.

All my dad left with was his new suit, his dipping bird, and the bible he’d had since he was a kid. He laid out all the information in a note he left on the kitchen table. How to deal with the sale of the house, how to change the oil in the car, not to get a basement apartment if I could help it, and to list my number with my first initial only. N, he wrote (in case I’d forgotten?), looking forward to that delicious meal you promised. I’ll give you a year or two or five to develop your system. In the meantime, we have work to do. Remember the affirmative words of Jesus, Nomi. Lo, I am with you always.

He left me a verse from Isaiah, the prophet of redemption: For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

I doubted that. But I liked it. I liked the way it sounded and the way it made me feel.

That N was nice. That mysterious fullness. I looked at it for a long, long time. I think he’d been aware of writing it when he wrote it. I think he might have slowed down when he wrote it, looked at it and smiled. It was what I had. It was a very loving N. He hadn’t needed to write it. I knew my first initial.

He’d written a PS too, another verse. And remember, when you are leaving, to brush the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.

Against whom, I wondered. Against what?

I sat in his yellow lawn chair for a while, staring at the highway, waiting, in case he’d change his mind. He was going to use his enormous lung capacity to climb mountains and clean the garbage off the top of them for a couple of years and I’d use mine to learn how to play the French horn properly. And if none of that worked out, we’d just breathe.

There was something else too. I’d just been excommunicated, shunned, banished, exiled, whatever you want to call it. If Ray wanted to keep his faith and stay in town…yeah, I’d have been a ghost to him, a kid he loved but couldn’t acknowledge. And it was comforting, in a fragile, loss-filled kind of way, to know that Ray had decided to keep the love alive in his imagination, and leave. That’s what people around here are forced to do if they aren’t strong enough to live without some kind of faith or strong enough to make a stand and change an entire system or overthrow a church. And who of us are that strong anyway? Not the Nickels, that’s for sure.

This weird thing happened to me while I waited for what I knew was not going to happen. I stared at stuff for a while and then I slowly started filling the car with my things trying not to make too much noise because it was still really early and people were sleeping and then the neighbour kid came out of her house in her summer nightgown and asked me if she could watch while I loaded the car and I said sure. She told me she was a sleepy snake. She asked if she could feel my head. She put her finger on her cheek and said she had a good idea.

Yeah? I said. Gonna clean your room? She said noooooo.

Gonna drink your milk? I asked. Noooooooo, she said. She started humming softly and dancing around the car in her little white nightie.

I have an idea, I have a good idea, she said, finger on her cheek the whole time. I dragged it out for a long time until I had loaded everything and was ready to go.

Come here, freak, I said. I spun her for a really long time in the front yard telling her shhhhhh whenever she shrieked or laughed. And after ten or fifteen minutes of spinning we both fell down on the wet grass and everything, the sky, the sun, the clouds, the branches overhead were swirling around and making me feel like throwing up so I closed my eyes and that’s when the odd thing happened. I started to see things in my town clearly, the pits, the fire on the water, Travis’s green hands playing his guitar, him whispering in my ear move with me, and the trampoline, and the old fairgrounds and the stuff written on the rodeo announcers’ booth and the lagoon and the cemetery, and the toboggan hut and the RK Ranch and the giant horses and my windowless school and my desk and American tourists and The Mouth and Main Street and the picnic table at the Sunset Diner, and Sheridan Klippenstein and everything, everything in town, the whole of East Village, and it didn’t seem so awful to me any more in that instant that I knew I’d probably never see it again except for every time I closed my eyes and then I saw my dad in his suit standing in front of the mirror at Schlitzking Clothing and his green eyes blinking behind his large glasses and a smile just beginning to form.

I thought about Menno Simons and what kind of childhood he must have had to want to lead people into a barren place to wait out the Rapture and block out the world and make them really believe that looking straight through a person like she wasn’t there, a person they’d loved like crazy all their lives, was the right thing to do. I thought about Lids in Eden having her brain electrified and I thought about that little piece of newspaper that had floated down into our town from some other place that had on it the words for the way things could have been. Which is what I’m calling my assignment. It’s got a nice ring to it even though it kind of reminds me of a Barbra Streisand song. I’ve put my name in the top right corner and I’ll be leaving it on your front porch. I’m assuming you’ll mark it INCOMPLETE, the word circled in red. I don’t need it back, Mr. Quiring, don’t worry. Feed it to the chickens. And please be kind to Lids.

It looks like I’m still trying to impress you with my story, as though it matters. I’m like a terminal patient still dreaming of the day I climb Everest. There’s a part of me that needs your approval and I don’t know why. Maybe it comes from being a teacher’s kid. Or maybe I just wanted you to think I was as creative as my sister. And maybe there’s a chance you’ll ask me to read my story to the class.

There were so many times I wanted to talk to you, but what could I say. Because in a whole bunch of perversely complicated ways I can understand your attraction to Trudie and hers to you but in another whole set of perversely complicated ways, I can’t. Where’s that guidance counsellor when I need her, eh?

You provided my family with an ending. You took to heart your own advice. You practised what you preached in class. Every story must have a beginning, middle and end. I’ve enclosed, with my “Flight of Our People” assignment, a copy of an excerpt from the last letter you wrote to your sad, sweet Trudie. Except that in this letter you don’t call her your sad, sweet Trudie any more. You don’t include any formal salutation at all. Seems a little harsh considering the “bottomless depths” of passion you originally felt. But things change. Stories unfold. Narrative arc and all that. You just begin.

I will tell Hans that you kept the key to Mrs. Klippenstein’s empty house and let yourself and several local men in, at night, to engage in adulterous activity. Whatever you say to refute my statements will not be believed, trust me.

You have a reputation in this town as being crazy, by which I mean demented, and your words are worthless. Will you reconsider?

Were you expecting her to take you back after calling her a nutcase and threatening to turn her over to The Mouth? You don’t think flowers would have been more effective?

I have a theory, though: It was grief that drew my mom to you and love that pulled her back. Love for Ray. And for me and for Tash. And for the perfect idea, at least, of us being together again. There are so many perfect ideas in this town. But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief. It does. Love is everything. It is the greatest of these. And I think that we all use whatever is in our power, whatever is within our reach, to attempt to keep alive the love we’ve felt. So, in a way, the only difference between you and me is that you reached out and used the church — there it was as it always has been, what a tradition — and I stayed at home, in bed, and closed my eyes.

Life being what it is, one dreams not of revenge. One just dreams. I could smell that hot June wind again — it was starting up for another day, blowing warm sweet promises, getting ready to break the hearts of all the Mennos in East Village one more time.

And that’s when the neighbour kid rolled over in the grass and put her arm around me and rubbed my bald head and I whispered thank you. I meant thank you to Ray for, in the midst of his own multitude of crap and bewilderment, knowing one true thing. That I would never have left him and that if I were ever to get out of that town, he would have to leave first. That’s two things, I heard him say. And the neighbour kid said you’re welcome, because she was a polite kid and thought I was talking to her. She was a good kid. We were all good kids. Amen. And then it was time for me to leave and for her to go home.

The idea of my mom leaving town to spare my dad the pain of having to choose between the church or her, knowing it would kill him, was the story I liked the best. The other possible ending to the story of my mom’s shunning was that it opened a door for her, a way out of this place, which raised the possibility that my mother had never really loved my father, or that she had loved him years ago but had since stopped loving him, or that she loved him but not more than the idea of being free. That it was just a convenient excuse. That could be the truth. I don’t know.

Did she have a thing with you because she was angry with Ray for keeping her in a town that she knew would inevitably break up her family? Did she live every day with the conundrum of wanting to raise her kids to be free and independent and of knowing that that’s just the kind of kid a town like this chews up and spits out every day like happy hour? The Mouth had suggested once that my mother might have killed herself out of guilt and regret. I think it was the ending he most enjoyed. The typically grim outcome that made sense to him.

Let’s be realistic, he said, which had made even my dad laugh out loud. But it did make me wonder. If she had planned to travel far away from this place why had she left her passport behind in the top drawer of her and my dad’s dresser? Was her body at the bottom of the Rat River, her hazel eyes wide open, staring in eternal mock horror at the flailing limbs of fifteen-year-olds being forced underwater in baptism by her brother, The Mouth? Or was she alive and well and selling Amway or something in some tourist town on the Eastern Seaboard? Or maybe she had finally managed to get to Israel and was working as a courier in Tel Aviv?

Had my dad really gone to pick garbage off mountains or was he also at the bottom of the Rat — no, I preferred the first story, the one about sacrifice and pain, because it presented opportunities, of being reunited, of being happy again, somewhere in the real world, our family, and because it was about everlasting love and that’s what I like to believe in. The stories that I have told myself are bleeding into a dream, finally, that is slowly coming true. I’ve learned, from living in this town, that stories are what matter, and that if we can believe them, I mean really believe them, we have a chance at redemption. East Village has given me the faith to believe in the possibility of a happy family reunion someday. Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life.

I put my leather bracelet between the doors of Clayton’s mom’s house and got back into the car. I knew she would find other ways of keeping Clayton alive in her imagination. I lit a Cap, pulled the seat up a little closer to the wheel, found a half-decent song on the radio, and drove.

That sounds good, right? Actually I haven’t dropped off the bracelet yet but I will. Soon. I’m pretty sure of that. I’ve got the car. All I have to do is sell the house. Good solid unfurnished bungalow. Perfect for families. Going cheap. Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was a little kid and how I loved to fall asleep in my bed breathing in the smell of freshly cut grass and listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.