Alligator - Lisa Moore [62]
You’re not here, Marty had said. He was an implacable man who kept his own counsel, but she saw she had wounded him. She took the children to the park and felt a lump in her jacket and there were her keys. She’d found her keys! She dug them out and put them on the picnic table beside her.
They had said she would die of a heart condition when she was twelve and she remembers being on a stretcher, feeling the vibrations of the wheels hitting the edge of each yellowish floor tile with a subtle nick.
How thoroughly she had succumbed to the anaesthetic. The engulfing blackness that followed the needle prick had felt like absolution for a potent sense of failure.
She marvels now, that at such a young age, she could have felt so intensely the pressures of impending financial disaster. Her father’s death had left them without any money, and her own operation meant she could not help at home.
They had almost lost her on the operating table and her mother went, during a snowstorm, down to Bowring’s to buy her a confirmation dress that would be suitable to wake her in. The dress she would wear in the casket. The dress was pointed out to her later, hanging in the window at Bowring’s; they returned it when it was clear she would recover. They couldn’t afford dresses if there wasn’t an occasion to wear them.
The sun was setting and she told the children: Down from the monkey bars, we’ll go get an ice cream.
They wandered back home, taking their time and later the moon came up on the empty park, filtering through the trees, glinting on her car keys.
COLLEEN
MR. DUFFY OF the destroyed bulldozers was a stubble-cheeked man in a blousy black and silver windbreaker and saggy jeans. His nose was shapeless and purplish at the nostrils. Colleen could see in his eyes a sort of intelligence she was unfamiliar with. An old-fashioned intelligence, more akin to cunning than what her mother had, which had to do with generosity.
He drained a can of cola, crunched it in his fist, and tossed it over Colleen’s shoulder. She felt a breeze from its flight into a pail behind her where it dinged and jangled.
Colleen understood at once she was out of her depth.
She thought of her mother in the food court below, absent-mindedly tearing the paper lids off six creamers and tipping them into her coffee.
The social worker who was facilitating wore silvery pantyhose that looked like frost. They whispered every time she crossed her legs. She plunked a leather briefcase on the table and flicked through her files until she found the one she needed, which she pulled out and spread on the table.
Now then, I am Ms. Drake, she said.
Ms. Drake’s sweater was pilled, tiny nubs of cotton clinging to the entire surface of her sweater. It meant she’d put it in the dryer. There was a whole history of resignation and maxed-out credit cards in her ugly sweater. Ms. Drake’s skin was sallow and full of pores, she had a faint moustache and a polyester skirt and she would not likely care too much about pine martens.
Colleen shifted in her chair.
She was suddenly certain Ms. Drake would not know what a pine marten was if it leapt up and bit her ass.
Colleen decided to sit up straight. She thought of Julia Butterfly Hill, who had lived in a tree for two years in the middle of a clear-cut in northern California. They had chopped down almost everything around her. They had shaved the earth of forest but Julia, a sort of wood nymph Amazon hippie creature, had stood her ground.
Ms. Drake cracked her knuckles, first in one hand, and then the other, while she perused Colleen’s file.
She jerked her head to the side, wincing, and there was another cracking sound. Then she shook her hands, making all the cartilage crackle wetly. Was it cartilage?
Julia Butterfly Hill had flowing hair to her bum and wore a woollen cap from South America. On the Net they showed her clinging to a branch as though it were a lover.
She might have been a model or a saint.