No answer.
I find some tissue in my bag to dab Zack’s blood with. I know lips are dirty and swarm with germs, but lips also heal. Lips are superior to science. I kiss Zack’s scratch and his sobs let up some.
I go back and pick up the game. Phone rings. Another call for Gordon, this about saw logs. “He’s with some of the crews up on the mountain fixing something that broke with one of the turbines,” I tell this caller. “You ever want something to fill up your time, get you some windmills.”
The caller chuckles. Caller is an older feller I’ve known all my life, some relation to my father and to my stepfather, Reuben. George Lampron. Not much of a talker in person. But on the phone, you can get him to make a few noises. On the phone, a person can’t just stare. So George explains what he wants to tell Gordon and I write it all down, all eleven words, and when I hang up, Jane is standing there. Her black eyes cut right through me. “I’m bored,” she says. As she speaks the word bored, her eyelids lower, and her chin raises ever so subtly, a gesture for the most spoiled of the rich.
I say, “Help me get Zack’s cat scratch to heal. You know, like distract him.”
She just keeps looking at my face.
I say, “You know who I mean, Jane? Zack . . . my little kid over there.” I nod at Zack, who is in the open doorway to the piazza staring sadly after the cat. He loves cats. But his chubby squeezy little hands do not appeal to cats. He looks so cute in those pants. What a set of clothes my kids each got! I’m not into sewin’ that much unless it’s art like the man-sized Godzilla that sits in a rocker in the West Parlor, which was designed and manufactured by yours truly. But some of them here just love to sew, just to sew. What they aren’t making for my kids, it’s other stuff being passed down, all stuff in good shape. Clothes come at us like a big high tide. Right now, he’s in these sailboat-print bibbed shorts, yellow and red. The chubby dimpled look of his legs just about melts me.
I say, “Zack, come here, sweetie. Jane and I have some more love for your scratch to heal. Dr. Jane and Dr. Mumma will help!” I say this joyously and run and grab Zack, whose face is still tear-streaked but who now explodes into husky manly laughter, wonderful rolling laughs, and I carry him to Jane. He is heavy. He is big for only two. A big solid beautiful child with kinda dark chestnutty hair and gray eyes and a significant nose that will someday be striking with those gray eyes. You gotta admit that the ways you give your children generosity, gentleness, resistance to lies and crap are no longer important to most people. They say these are things that could keep your son or daughter from success. But good looks, a good-looking huggable gray-eyed man in funny pants, will always be in fashion, will always be a hot item.
I am so pleased that Jane lowers her face, her long dark ringlets flopping, and kisses Zack on the top of his head. A really sweet kiss. She smiles at him and she says rather firmly, with a professional distance, “Get well now.” And Zack smiles at her and laughs but then frowns and points toward the door. “Kitty scraffit roing-in . . . he wid hurt you.”
Jane says to me, “What else you got?” She goes over to the satchel and pulls out a book, a Settlement-made book by Faye Sears when she used to hang out here daytimes.
Phone rings. I answer it. A girl. Early twenties. Maybe younger. Asks for Gordon. I tell her about the turbine problem. She asks me who I am. I hesitate. I say, “Who is this?”
“Hannah Sturgeon.”
“Are you a CSA?” I ask. “No,” she replies. Just a plain simple no.
“If you leave a message, Gordon will get back to you.” I guess I sound rude. But I can hear Gordon’s voice reminding us all, “Social workers, media . . . do not talk to them.” And then there’s the deeper thing. The shadow with bodiless hands that chokes my throat. The exhaustion of waking up each day infinitely betrayed. By him.
“Is it my mum?” Jane is asking behind me. I lower myself down into Gordon’s desk chair and slide my hand down Jane’s neck to her back and hold her to me and when she lets me do this, I hug harder and very motheringly as Hannah Sturgeon explains she is looking for her husband, who left this morning to bring a compressor to the Settlement. “Oh,” I say. “That’s probably where he is. Up at the Settlement. This is Gordon’s house on Heart’s Content Road.” And she asks what the phone number is up there and I explain there is no phone up there and so we get that all straight and hang up in a friendly way.
Jane now pulls away as I stand up and return the phone to its cradle and Zack is pulling books from the satchel and little papier-mâché French 1400s cathedrals and Jane is standing again with her arms crossed, her black eyes hard on my face, chin raised. “I’m bored.”
I try all the games. Jane gives a really tired indulgent “Yes” to each one, refuses to help set up, then once it’s all set up, she says casually, “Guess I don’t want to play that one, either. What else do you have in here?” and drives a hand roughly through the satchel, pitching books and little cathedrals onto the floor. “That’s stupid.” “That’s stupid.” “That’s stupid,” she is saying matter-of-factly as each thing goes matter-of-factly to the floor.
I suggest we play cards. When I suggest War, she agrees eagerly. She says she has played that before. She even kind of chuckles to herself, remembering something, as I am shuffling and counting out all the cards into two equal piles.
Four plays into the game, she has won the first three plays, but then I win one, so she tosses her cards so they skid across the table, some dropping into my lap. She holds her forehead. “This is the worst day of my life,” she says. “So boring.” She sighs. Keeping her head down. Then she raises her face slowly, calculatingly, her very long golden fingers flick out at me as if to summon a bark from a trained seal. “Do you have a car, whatever-your-name-is?”
“My name is Bonnie Loo. And I often have use of a car, but not today.”
“Let’s go to McDonald’s. I’m so hungry.”
“I have a snack planned for nine o’clock and then a pretty snazzy lunch. Gabe is coming down with a basket at noon.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Yuh, I can imagine.”
“It’s really nice thick soup. Chicken noodle.”
Jane rolls her eyes. “Sure. With chickens in it.”
I say, “Chicken soup has chicken in it. Always has.”
“Never mind,” she says, standing up. “I don’t want any. I want to go to McDonald’s. That’s all there is to it.”
I look across the table, up at her. She isn’t looking at me, she’s just kind of picking her fingernails, which are short, chewed, kid-looking fingernails, but you can imagine them to be long and painted coral. I am speechless.
“Well?” she says.
I say, “Gabe and his friends will bring the basket at noon. But at nine, some of the girls will come down with a snack. Some apples. It’s only eight-thirty right now, Jane. Gotta give them time to pick the damn things. Imagine. Fresh apples. Still crispy from the trees. Can’t get any better than that.”
She sneers. “Gross.”
“You’ve been getting too much sugar. Today will be sugar-free.”
“No!” she shouts and this
