Chapter 8 Rachel #2
She glances at Julie, whose face is still pink. She’s nervous about this, doesn’t want to bear responsibility for this incident. No one likes to wear a mistake, but especially not an organized introvert like Julie. Rachel understands that.
“You two go ahead and get started. I just need to, uh, excuse me.” Rachel stands and walks to the tiny washroom to her right, shuts the door behind her.
A ferocious panic attack has been building since they arrived, and she needs to succumb to it in private before it overtakes her in front of the others.
Though the claustrophobia of this bathroom does nothing to help.
It’s about four feet square, like an airplane washroom, and reeks of that slimy pink institutional hand soap elementary schools use.
But Rachel clutches the edge of the miniature sink and leans over it, finding her own brown eyes in the mirror. She doesn’t have time for this. And yet, is she surprised?
She closes her eyes and tries to regulate her breaths, pacing them to the countdown in her head.
Breathe in…10…breathe out. Breathe in…9…breathe out. Breathe in…8…
Of all the places an unknown body could turn up, it just had to be the Millgate Cemetery.
JULY, 1975
During the longest stretch of time Rachel could remember her mother, Mary, returning home for, she came with Rachel and her grandmother to church every Sunday. Dora was a gentle and loving caregiver whose only rules were related to safety or righteousness.
Call when you get someplace.
Don’t walk alone at night.
Never take the Lord’s name in vain.
Church every Sunday, barring illness or death.
There wasn’t much Dora seemed capable of making Mary do if she didn’t want to, but going to church seemed almost voluntary for her.
It was only in her adulthood that Rachel finally understood that perhaps her mercurial mother was reaching into the earth in search of her own roots during those visits, grasping at whatever might have helped her to steady herself after the latest bad boyfriend, job loss, or arrest for some petty crime for which someone else was—of course and invariably—entirely to blame.
Mary was, by both Dora’s account and Rachel’s own experience, incapable of accepting responsibility for herself no matter the circumstances, opting instead to defend even the most egregious of her own decisions with dismissive obstinacy while she holed herself up in her childhood bedroom with Gordon Lightfoot on the turntable.
One warm Sunday morning in late June, the summer Rachel was eight, she found herself pressed thigh to thigh between her mother and grandmother on a hard pew at Millgate Methodist Church.
On her right, Dora smelled of lily-of-the-valley perfume layered over Ivory soap.
On her left, incense and cigarettes clung to Mary’s old blue blouse with the lacy trim, pulled from the back of her closet and ironed by Dora the night before.
Rachel shifted uncomfortably in her own buttercream polka-dot dress as sweat trickled down her back.
She looked up at the old ceiling fan in the centre of the church as Reverend Holland droned on.
It was churning slower than a merry-go-round, cutting through the humidity with all the efficacy of a spoon into a frozen watermelon.
Finally, a last round of prayers were said, heads were bowed, the organ played and the overheated flock was freed out into the breeze of the pasture.
The Methodist church was the nucleus of the little town of Millgate, and only a ten- or fifteen-minute drive from their house in Bayfield.
Dora had attended the church with Rachel’s grandfather Walter from the time they were married, and his family’s rear ends had polished those pews for at least two generations before that.
He was buried on the west side of the cemetery, and Rachel sighed with relief as she exited the church, feet turned in the direction of his headstone.
They visited his gravesite every Sunday after the service.
When they finished, Dora always took a short walk around the cemetery on her own, saying she needed to clear her head of grief in the fresh air.
Rachel was happy to wait for her in the car, sneaking Werther’s candies from the glovebox.
She sometimes felt guilty about not staying longer at her grandfather’s stone, but she hated the way her grandmother lingered over it with a determined vehemence, as though she might bring him back to life if only she could grieve hard enough, pray hard enough.
She also found it eerie that the stone listed her grandmother’s name, too, ready and waiting for her, like some macabre passport poised for a date stamp upon entry.
DOROTHEA “DORA” MACKENZIE
Wife and mother
1925—
Cemeteries gave Rachel the creeps; all those dead and rotting bodies beneath their feet.
And the fact that there was a children’s section…
she didn’t even know what to make of that.
She’d only ever heard about old people dying.
Her grandmother had told her to stay away from the children’s area, and Rachel didn’t need telling twice.
Rachel’s stomach grumbled its protest now as she fantasized about the turkey sandwiches and lemonade that awaited them at home.
She fanned herself, shading her eyes from the sun as her grandmother said a silent prayer beside her.
Mary hung back ten feet from the headstone as though worried the ground might cave right in beneath her.
Her eyes stayed on her feet as sweat beaded above her lips, which were painted with a slick of Revlon—the Cherries in the Snow shade of raspberry pink she’d swiped from Harper’s Drugstore when she thought Rachel wasn’t looking.
She seemed even less interested in her father’s grave than Rachel was, which wasn’t new.
Aside from rage and contempt, Rachel had rarely seen her mother express any sort of emotion. Certainly not grief, or true sadness.
“Superstitious,” Dora had once called Mary with a curt shake of the head, which led Rachel to understand that superstition must be some foolish thing, because Dora said Mary was always doing and thinking foolish things, always looking for explanations in wild and unlikely places.
One time, a couple of years before, Mary had come home at the Civic Holiday long weekend and taken Rachel to a fair up in Goderich.
They’d had one ride on the Ferris wheel before Mary pressed a paper cone of cotton candy into Rachel’s surprised and delighted hand and told her to wait outside a lamp-lit tent while she ducked behind a curtain to speak to a lady who could predict her future.
She’d emerged ten minutes later in a state of euphoria, shoved the last bit of Rachel’s cotton candy into her own mouth and knelt to face her daughter.
Everything’s going to be okay now, she’d said, her tongue stained pink as a rose petal. And I’m going to stick around this time, I promise.
Two days later, she was gone again.
But now she was back. Maybe to stay this time, she said, and Rachel couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or not.
“Amen,” Dora said now after finishing her prayer.
“Amen,” Rachel parroted, not having thought two words about the man buried there.
She’d never met her grandfather, who died before Rachel was born.
To her, he existed only in the aging photographs in brass frames on the living room walls and the fireplace mantel, and in the occasional story her grandmother spun over Sunday dinner or a game of cards on the back porch.
He’d drunk himself to death, Mary had told her, but Dora always maintained he’d had some sort of cardiovascular defect.
“It was his heart that killed him,” she said.
Rachel looked up from his headstone to see the minister, Reverend Holland, striding toward them down the nearest path.
He raised a slim hand in greeting. He was built like a grasshopper, all long limbs and big eyes in a narrow skull.
His black pulpit robe must have cooked him like a Dutch oven in this heat.
A white stole embroidered with gold crosses fluttered in the welcome midday breeze.
“I thought I saw you, Miss Mackenzie,” he said, voice projecting to Mary over the headstones, just as it did over the heads of his parishioners in the tiny church. “It has been a while since you’ve joined us.”