me down until I came to my senses!
When he turned Nessie off, I kept begging him to put the headlights back on. I knew I was being a baby. It wasn’t entirely dark. For some inexplicable reason random lights flashed about like homeless fireflies. But Angus said no, it would drain the battery, better to use the army flashlight. Before I could stop him, he was clinging to the doorframe, inching back to the trunk. Mud lunged at his knees. When I pulled him back in, he graciously draped a blanket over my shoulders. Ever the gentleman. Huddled warm and safe, clutching a torch so big I had to use two hands, I remember thinking, ‘Thank God for country bumpkins.’ (How many city slickers keep Hudson’s Bay blankets and army flashlights in their trunks as a matter of course? We were raised to respect weather. We had to. We’d seen it kill. So much for us rubes. We weren’t drowning in their stupid subway.)
I don’t know how long it took. It felt like hours. I might have slept a little. The floor flooded. Angus said if it got any higher we’d have to take our chances on the roof. It got as high as my ankles would have been if they weren’t tucked into his lap. Then, in the dead of night, the wind and the water dropped. Angus murmured, ‘Thank goodness for small blessings!’ That’s when I cried. It’s one of the few things I ever remember Daddy saying. He said it about me. (Janie understands, but it’s the one part of this whole thing I could never tell Mumsie. I heard my daddy in his voice.)
Eventually we could see the embankment again. Less than twenty feet away, in water the ugliest shade of brown, things were still churning by, most of it unidentifiable debris. When it passed the wide beam of our flashlight, you wished you hadn’t seen it: a pressback chair, a baby’s crib. The worst was the dog. We heard him before we saw him, a spaniel surfing along the edge of the water, clinging to a set of stairs from someone’s front porch. Without thinking, Angus opened the window and whistled, ‘Here, boy! Come, boy!’ The dog jumped in, so close to the edge we were sure he’d make it, ‘You can do it, boy!’ A brown wave swept him under. ‘I killed him,’ Angus mumbled. ‘He’s dead because of me.’ What could I say to that?
At some point, we ate the apples. I remember wondering about the Scout, hoping he’d made it safely home. The water had all but receded when we saw a light in the east. Angus read my thoughts and said he hoped these wise men were bearing whisky. We giggled even harder when we saw it was a boat. Imagine rowing down the middle of Lake Shore Boulevard! They tied up to a telephone pole, expecting us to board, but Angus said no, he wanted to drive. They looked at his boat of a car and agreed to help him try. I paddled the accelerator as our Good Samaritans got sprayed with mud, rocking us from behind. (Just like the snowdrifts between the house and the barn, I told myself. Should be as easy as Mumsie’s Five-Minute Pie!)
We headed the last few miles skiing through swamp, driving right up over sidewalks and front lawns. Any path in a storm. I don’t think we ever said her name. (We should have figured that any hurricane that could wipe out bridges and swallow Packards could do a great deal worse to a rickety old trailer, but we were so cold and tired and just plain done that we weren’t thinking, period.) It was almost light and we were almost there when Angus joked that Gladys, being Gladys, had no doubt made a pot of hot chocolate, drank the whole pot, and made some more. We could all but taste it! That’s why the police cordon at the foot of Brown’s Line took us so much by surprise. Fire trucks. Ambulances. A policeman who said no, we couldn’t go farther. Angus jumped out. ‘Of course we can! She lives there,’ he yelled, pointing back at my face in the car. ‘She lives there with my sister!’
I’ll always remember the even look in that officer’s eyes. His voice so soft and slow as he gripped Angus by the shoulder, ‘Not anymore, son. Not anymore.’
He took us to the Red Cross truck. A nurse gave us coffee. I was taking my first sip when the officer said the storm had decimated the trailer park and all the little cottages around it and handed us a survivor list. No Gladys. We read it three times. No G. Campbell. He said the injured had been taken to St. Joe’s Hospital. No sister on that list either. No roommate. No best friend since kindergarten. But Angus stayed calm. Clear. Efficient. He gave his mom’s number, his work number, Mumsie’s number and my work number. He gave a description: Age twenty-three. Blond hair, five-foot-four, hazel eyes. Distinguishing features: Green cat’s-eye glasses. A chipped tooth, earned smiling all the way to the ground riding a two-wheeler for the first time, age nine. Occupation: Student, Lakeshore School of Beauty. He asked me what she weighed and I lied. (Mumsie told me later not to feel guilty, said it was the least I could do for poor Gladys, who’d always been a wee bit porky.) Angus shook the officer’s hand. And then he just stood there, looking out at the first silver rays of dawn. I had to call him back to the car.
Then he drove. Fast. Wild. Much wilder than necessary. To God-knows-where-but-I-don’t. Not home. To some back street in Mimico, some deserted factory parking lot too near the creek for my liking. He slammed to a stop and began to shake. He wouldn’t meet my eye. He jumped out, stood there lost, then opened the back door. I waited. Then I joined him.
Blood? Blood on his hands? No, preserves. He was eating it with his fingers. All five of them. Scooping sweetness as if he were starving. I wished he’d say something; I wished I could. He held out a finger, ‘Try it.’ I licked and he crumpled his mother’s note in his other hand. Then with two hands, he tore it to pieces. Jam looks even more like blood on paper. He began to cry. So I held him.
I held on when tears turned to kisses. When kisses deepened, I returned them. When his hands, hands that had been so professional on the steering wheel, so calm writing his sister’s name, so respectful shaking the officer’s hand, when those hands got mean, ripped my blouse and tore my skirt, I’m sure I asked him to stop. Sure but not certain. All I’m certain of is that as light crept into the car, not ten feet away, a shape slowly shifted clear. What’s that line in the Bible? ‘And the void became substance, became words.’ Something like that.
Maybe the floating shape had been a sheep because this shape was unarguably a cow, a very dead, very bloated cow, upside down in a factory parking lot in Mimico, a beast on her back with two feet pointing skyward and two broken beneath her. With jelly brown eyes, she watches me. When I should be sleeping, I watch her watching me. Dead eyes quiver with each thrust.
And this place isn’t any better. The only decent person in here is the night cleaner, an older man with the musical name of Carmelito Trigliani. At night he comes into my room, pats my hand and says notta to dwell on dark things. He says the sleepawalking comes froma da dark things. Thatta a wedding is justa da ticket! There’s a’nothing like a bella bride to cheera us up! (He talks like that, in exclamation points with anna accent!) He put his hand on my shoulder before the nurses wheeled me from my big red brick building to the small red brick building, the one with a rubber floor, ‘Trusta him, the doctore. He knows whatsa best.’
When Mumsie heard about the electroshock, she said, ‘Good, if we’re lucky a few thousand volts will solve all our problems.’ But I overheard her complaining to Janie. Mumsie kept insisting that it’s not her fault, that even a good cow may have a bad calf, that at least she got one daughter right. To my face she says that women have nothing but their bodies to bargain with, and now that I’ve played all my cards, the only sure bet is to put that ring on my finger, right quick. Janie nods. They’re all so certain they must be right. They’re all so right they must be certain. They take me on walks by the lake. To see water. The stupid cows.
But hurricanes have eyes. And that Hazel, she was one smart cookie. She took one look at Toronto the Good and what did she do? She flooded the subway. One of their precious tunnels collapsed. They think if they repair it quickly I’ll forget, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I was reborn in a hurricane; I’ve got second sight. I’m plugged into the quivering universe. She will be a girl. I will give her Gladys’s locket and Granny’s name. Will she ever see Inverness? I hope so. See, I’m not crazy; I don’t claim to know everything.
Here’s
