Chapter 11 Rachel #2
The house was indeed so comfortable that the lack of AC hadn’t ever bothered Rachel, save on two scorching nights—one when she was ten, the other when she was seventeen—where the very air felt bogged down with sweat and fire.
On those occasions, she and Dora had retreated out onto the back porch and slept in the chaise longues beneath the stars as a chorus of crickets and the rhythmic rush of the waves lulled them to sleep.
It’s a Victorian house, built just after the turn of the century when the kitchen, not the room that housed the television, was the heartbeat of the home.
Cream-coloured cabinets line the walls on three sides, with a large maple prep table in the centre, the same wood used for the countertops.
Burnished copper pots hang from a rack on the ceiling and glint in the light of the sunset framed in the large windows at the back of the house, overlooking the lake.
As she drops her purse on the kitchen prep table, her eyes fall on yesterday’s pile of mail.
She flips through the bank statements, bills, and flyers, and finally, a letter with a familiar return address.
Without opening it, she scoops it up with the flyers and dumps the lot in the recycling bin by the back door.
The Gawkers—and now the letter—haven’t helped Rachel’s anxiety, and she knows she’ll need something to calm her nerves tonight, or she’ll have no hope of a decent sleep before what’s sure to be another marathon shift tomorrow.
She pauses for a moment, then makes her way toward a pocket door to the right of the stove, which opens onto the small, narrow scullery.
She flicks on the light, illuminating the rows of pantry staples: bags of flour, canned beans, crackers, and two dozen large Mason jars full of dried herbs.
The deep, floor-to-ceiling shelves along one side combined with Dora’s small stature had required the installation of a library ladder to allow her to reach the top.
Rachel pushes it gently aside with a light rumble and pulls out the herbs she needs: valerian, chamomile, passionflower, and spearmint.
She turns around and sets them down with a clink on the small counter beside the sink, reaching for Dora’s mortar and pestle.
Her mind wanders, as it sometimes does when she’s in the scullery, back to one of her mother’s visits years ago.
Her grandmother had ground up other herbs for Mary that time.
For her nerves, she’d told Rachel. But the pennyroyal and black cohosh she’d crushed on that occasion weren’t meant for anxious thoughts and racing hearts, Rachel knows now.
The herbs had always been Dora’s specialty. Tea, specifically. She believed there wasn’t much the right tisane couldn’t cure.
OCTOBER, 1977
Mary had arrived on the doorstep just after midnight, the favoured hour of anyone wishing to move about unnoticed.
When Rachel woke up on Saturday morning, she stumbled downstairs to find her mother seated at the kitchen table, thin fingers curled around a mug.
Her hair was different than the last time she’d dropped in, at least a year ago.
It was longer now, falling nearly past her armpits in dark, loose waves that looked in need of a brush.
Her eyelids were heavy, lined in some kind of kohl the colour of trouble.
“Hey,” she said to Rachel, who had stopped short at the sight of her.
Rachel’s eyes flicked to Dora, who had just turned around from the sink and was bringing a plate of waffles to the table.
She always made them when Mary showed up, because Rachel had once loved them.
Dora thought it helped comfort her for the upcoming inevitable stress of Mary’s visit, but the gesture had long ago coiled back in on itself like a foolish snake. Rachel couldn’t stand them now.
Her grandmother nodded at her, nudging a response.
“Hi,” Rachel said.
“You’ve gotten bigger.”
“Yeah.”
Rachel took the empty seat beside her mother and forked a couple of waffles onto her plate, drowning them in maple syrup. She ate as quickly as she could, sparing curious glances at Mary as she and Dora made conversation that went mostly over Rachel’s head.
“Can I be excused?” she asked Dora when she’d finished.
“Yes. Go rinse your plate and then you can watch cartoons in the living room if you like. There’s a good girl.”
Rachel did as she was told, then made a beeline for the television set to turn on Looney Tunes. She watched it for a while, but at the sound of raised voices, crept around the corner and stood in the shadows.
“Are you pregnant again?” Dora asked.
Mary was silent but for the sound of her foot tapping against the metal stool on which she was seated.
Rachel’s breath caught. She knew that word, “pregnant.” Her grandmother used it when she talked about the rabbits that liked to nest beneath the rhubarb bushes.
Her mother was having a baby. She might have a brother or sister.
“How far along are you?”
“About a month, I think.”
“You think?” Dora asked darkly.
“Yeah. Maybe two,” Mary said.
“Who is the father this time? Do you know?”
“Ron Lister.”
“And he is…?”
Mary paused. “A friend of a friend.”
Silence again.
“What’s the postal code for your most recent address, Mary?” Dora asked.
Mary scoffed. “What—?”
“You cannot raise a child hopping from couch to couch and bed to bed. Children need stability, and—”
“So because I can’t remember my fucking postal code, that makes me an unfit mother?”
“No,” Dora said, her tone rising, then dropping again to almost a whisper.
“And don’t you dare swear at me in my own house, child.
Your erratic behaviour is what makes you an unfit mother.
Your taste in men. Your constant lies and manipulation make you an unfit caregiver for Rachel or any other child. ”
“Mama, stop—”
“Why you don’t take steps to prevent yourself from falling pregnant in the first place is beyond my comprehension. You’re just one crisis after another. Do you think you could manage to be responsible one day out of your life? Ever?”
Mary was quiet for a while. “I could get settled, though, before this one comes. Get my own place. I could—”
“It may not even come,” Dora said. “You lost the last one.”
“But if it sticks—”
“If it sticks, you would be wise to get rid of it.”
“I don’t want to get rid of it. Maybe it’s what I need, Mama. Maybe it could set me straight.”
“Like Rachel set you straight? Or the one before her?” Dora’s tone was ice now, and Rachel froze at the mention of her name.
She thought of the other girls in her class, the ones whose mothers dropped them off in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon with promises of freshly baked cookies waiting at home.
She never heard those mothers use swear words.
They turned up for school concerts and track meets and cheered on their kids.
They were like a whole different breed of mother to Rachel, so disparate from her own experience that she couldn’t even compare them.
They were like daisies and roses; one simple and pure and bright, the other thorny and particular and quick to wilt.
She wished her mother could just be like the others, wondered why she wasn’t.
But her grandmother had just said it was all Rachel’s fault, and she felt something wither inside.
“I could take her with me this time,” Mary said, and Rachel’s heart began to race.
No. Please no!
“She could help with the baby—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dora snapped. “She is a baby, Mary. She’s still a child, not a nanny! And you know you are not allowed to take her anywhere.”
“But what if you said it was all right?”
“I will never do such a thing. For Christ’s sake, listen to yourself.”
Rachel blanched. She’d never heard her grandmother take the Lord’s name in vain before.
And the thought of having to leave with her mother terrified her.
The first time Mary had left, Dora said, Rachel was three.
She came back again, a couple of years later, and stayed for nine months, until Rachel started preschool.
And then she was gone again. She’d never moved back in in any real sense, and Dora always referred to the time Mary did spend there as “visits.” Some were longer, a few months here and there, and some were shorter.
But it always ended in arguments, slammed doors and bitterness.
Mary didn’t stay long this time, either.
Only a few weeks. She didn’t even stay for Christmas.
She slept a lot of the time, mostly during the day.
She seemed to prefer the dark. Her exchanges with Rachel were limited and awkward, Mary only paying her daughter any attention when she had nothing else to do.
When she did, it was as though her mind were darting around from thought to thought, as unsettled and transitory as a hummingbird.
The night before her mother slammed the screen door behind her with a clap and sped off down the street in her rusting white Falcon, Rachel had woken up to the sound of sobbing from the bathroom on the other side of the wall.
She lay awake for several minutes, wondering what to do.
She knew the cries were Mary’s, not Dora’s.
She had never seen Dora cry, not even when her eighteen-year-old cat Gracie had died the previous spring.
Pushing back the covers, she crept from her bed out into the dim hallway.
A strip of yellow light illuminated the crack beneath the bathroom door.
She hesitated, then knocked quietly. The door opened a second later and there was her mother, kneeling on the white-and-black-tiled floor, which was smeared with blood.
Rachel recoiled. It was all over her legs and hands, and the light from the bathroom shone on the dark tracks down the hall from Mary’s bedroom, too.
Rachel gasped. “What happened? Are you okay?”
Mary’s face crumpled as she swiped at the blood with a bath towel. She shook her head.
Rachel knew something about periods. She’d read the library’s copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. A swooping fear overtook her as she wondered whether this was what it would look like when her time finally came.
“Come here,” Mary said, reaching her blood-streaked hands out to her daughter. Rachel didn’t want to, but she stepped over and Mary wrapped her arms tightly around her. Rachel stiffened. Her mother had never hugged her before. Not that she could recall, anyway.
After a moment, Mary let go, sniffling and breathing hard. “Oh,” she said, looking at Rachel. “You’ve got blood on you.”
“What happened?” Rachel asked again. “Is it your period?”
Her mother looked at her with swollen eyes. “Something like that. The baby’s gone. We need to clean up.”
“I should get Gran,” Rachel said.
She turned to leave, but Mary reached over and shut the door, boxing Rachel inside. She was truly frightened now.
Mary shoved the shower curtain aside with a swish and turned on the water, then took Rachel’s hand and led her over. “Get in.”
“But my pyjamas—”
“Just get in, we’ll clean them. We need to be clean.”
Rachel didn’t like it, but she stepped into the tub, squinting a little under the heavy spray of hot water.
Mary climbed in after her and pulled the curtain closed, leaving a bloody print behind on the fabric.
She put her head under the water and shut her eyes against the stream.
Rachel stood in front of her, water ricocheting uncomfortably into her eyes off her mother’s body as she watched pink trails of blood course down the drain.
After a moment, Mary knelt down to her eye level.
“That witch did this, you know,” she said, nodding knowingly. “She’s always trying to punish me. You remember this, Rachel.”
Rachel would indeed remember it. And Mary wouldn’t turn up again for another three years.