Blackfly Season

19

THE MEMORIES WERE COMING thick and fast now; she couldn’t stop them. One moment she was yearning to remember more, the next moment she wanted nothing but oblivion. The nurses would give her Tylenol, but no more of the heavy-duty painkillers. She wanted to sleep, but it was the middle of the day and she was wide awake.

The patients’ lounge was noisy. Sophie, one of the suicide wannabes, had three blond witches visiting her and they were all giggling maniacally. Terri huddled in a corner with a Glamour magazine, but she couldn’t concentrate. The memories dropped into her mind in no order, unbidden, with stomach-flipping changes in intensity and obsessive repetition.

For example, the flies. For the hundredth time she was remembering the flies. Not just the ones that bit her, although she certainly remembered the itch and sting of bites on her forehead and ankles. Those flies were small, silent. But she could also hear the buzzing, thick and multi-layered, of other, fatter flies. Great clouds of them in the sunlight. Where had that been?

Then there was the train station. Kevin had come to meet her. He had been nervous, shifting from foot to foot as if they were strangers. Terri had known instantly that he was using again. She hadn’t confronted him about it right away, not there in the station with the crying children, and the drunks wobbling about, and a madwoman yelling incoherently.

Kevin’s place. Nothing but a camp bed and a rickety wooden table in a weird little cabin somewhere in the woods by a lake. Sunlight pouring in through the window, making the sweat glisten on Kevin’s brow.

“I know you’re using again,” Terri said. It just came out. She couldn’t bear to see him looking so furtive and guilty.

“I’m not mainlining. Whole reason I came back to Algonquin Bay was to get clean. I was happy growing up here. It kinda helped me get some clarity.”

“Kevin, I can see it in your face.”

“I’m just skin-popping,” he told her.

“Uh-huh. And where will that go?”

“It’s just something I have to do right now. I’m under a lot of stress.”

He’d had a pout on his face as he’d said it, a child who’s been chastised. A lot of girls found Kevin’s boyishness charming. Terri supposed she could see it. That curly hair—dark, not red like hers. Her brother looked like a guy who was up for a ball game, or for a night of poker, sometimes as if he might pull a frog from his pocket. Unfortunately, along with the boyishness came a lot of immaturity. He’d already done two years in a correctional facility. If he got caught trafficking, or even using, he could get sent away for a long, long time. There was no way she could so much as mention his name to the police, no matter how nice they were to her.

The camp. That’s what Kevin had called the place he shared out by the lake. Apparently, the collection of cabins had at one time been a summer camp for handicapped kids. Once upon a time the cabins might have been white, but now they were discoloured, sagging, sorry old huts that barely kept out the flies. He’d dug up a key for the cabin next to his and told Terri she could stay there, but only for a couple of nights. Red Bear didn’t like outsiders hanging around, even family.

“Isn’t it great?” Kevin said, waving his hand at the view of the lake, the overgrown baseball diamond. “Isn’t it fantastic? Look at that lake, Ter, it’s huge. We took a boat ride across it last week, and it took, like, an hour, even going really fast. You should see the stars from out there. Incredible.”

“You went for a boat ride at night? Why would you do that?”

“I don’t know. It was fun. Come on, Terri, you have to admit it’s pretty cool to have a whole camp for the summer.”

All Terri had discerned in the leaning huts and the rocky beach was the dispirited air of a place long abandoned. It had reminded her of photographs she’d seen of the Great Depression.

And what a collection of people living in it. Kevin and Red Bear and the dim guy with the funny tooth. Supposedly, there was some other character she’d never met. Kevin had never mentioned any of them in his occasional e-mails, a fact that made her suspicious of his new friends right from the start.

“Don’t you think it’s a little much for only four guys to live in?” she had said. “You could house forty people in all these cabins.”

“Naw,” Kevin said. “Most of them are ruined. There’s only maybe six you could live in.”

“Still. Four guys.”

Kevin walked her over to the biggest cabin, Red Bear’s, the only one with more than one room. It stood in a copse of birch trees, a miniature house with cedar siding and a broad window overlooking the lake. Hung from the ceiling were fly strips, where tiny creatures buzzed out their last moments of existence.

Red Bear had been completely charming. Or rather, everything he’d done and said certainly would have been charming, if it hadn’t also seemed a little too … overstated.

“Yes, Kevin has told me a lot about you,” he had said. His smile was like a theatre marquee. Those teeth. “He told me you were the perfect sister, and now I can see why.”

Well, right there, that didn’t ring true. It didn’t sound like anything Kevin would say about her, or anyone else for that matter.

Red Bear’s handshake was dry and firm. He was not a big man, but he was wide in the shoulders and it gave him a look of strength. His hair was so black it had gleams of blue in it, like crow feathers, and seemed to flash against his clothes. His shirt was so white you needed sunglasses to look at him.

“Come, I will read your cards,” he said. He offered them chairs at a large table of country pine, where he proceeded to set out cards in interesting patterns.

“Ace of diamonds,” he said. “This is perfect. A completely sunny outlook for you, Terri.”

Remembering someone’s name was supposed to be a mark of politeness, but Red Bear’s use of it made her uncomfortable.

“Financial outlook is favourable. Health, excellent. No enemies that I can see. You must really be the saint Kevin says you are.” This with a sidelong glance at Kevin, who smiled on cue, but Terri knew Kevin was not the sort to call his sister a saint. Why would he?

Snap, snap, snap. One after another, the cards went down. As Red Bear slotted each one into place, he made cheerful comments about Terri’s future. Then the jack of clubs slapped down across the king of hearts, and Red Bear’s manner changed.

“All right. A cloud on the horizon. A setback. Maybe something worse.”

His eyes had some kind of genetic defect, with almost pigmentless irises.

“Tell me,” Terri said when he hesitated. Not that she believed in cards, or reading palms or any of that New Age stuff, but she read her horoscope in the paper now and again just to see how far off it was. “Tell me,” she said again. “I can take it.”

“All right, Terri,” Red Bear said. He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. Biceps shifted under white sleeves. He spoke matter-of-factly, a doctor conveying bad news. “Everything I told you just now? Good health, good money, no problems, et cetera? All of that is true. All of that is yours …”

“But?”

He tapped the jack of clubs with a manicured finger. “This is a death card.”

“Hey, take it easy.” Kevin had been leaning on the table, chin on fist, almost asleep, but now he sat up. “You’re not supposed to tell people stuff like that.”

“Kevin,” Red Bear said quietly, “you’re overreacting.”

“You can’t just go round telling people they’re going to die. What are you trying to do? Freak her out? She’s my sister, man.”

“Will you listen to me?”

“It’s okay,” Terri said. “Relax, Kevin.”

Red Bear pointed again at the card. “It’s true. This is indeed a death card. But death in the cards does not necessarily mean death. It’s like death in a dream. It could just mean great change.” Red Bear gathered up the cards. “Please, let’s not be so solemn. I didn’t mean to upset you. I only tell you what I see—the possibilities. We’re all in control of our own lives.”

“I don’t like this card business,” Kevin said.

“That’s like not liking the weather,” Red Bear said. “Not liking it won’t improve it. Now, please, let’s cheer up. Your sister is here, it’s a sunny day, it’s no time to be gloomy.”

The cabin, the camp and Kevin dissolved, and Terri was back in the present, back in the patients’ lounge.

The girls on the other side of the room were collapsing in laughter. Their voices echoed off the tile walls and the plastic furnishings and hurt Terri’s ears. She shot them a dirty look, but then another memory flashed before her, obliterating the girls, the lounge, the hospital.

Waking up to sunlight sparkling in cascading water, miniature rainbows arcing in the spray. Waking up to the sound of falling water merging with the buzz of insects. The flies. There weren’t even that many of them. Just a handful buzzing around the hideous shape on the floor of the cave. And the smell. That evil smell. Where was that place? How had she got there? The memory was over, but even that split second was enough to send waves of fear and nausea coursing through her body.

“Are you all right?”

Terri looked up into the concerned face of a nurse’s aide.

“I need the washroom,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”