Four September 1996 #2
Inside, I placed some of the wood, cut just before my grandmother passed, near the stove.
I gathered the leaves I’d previously discarded and a few twigs and started a fire.
I still had a Zippo lighter from the days when I used to smoke pot.
Smoke filled the house, and I moved to open the door wider.
I coughed and wondered if, then feared, I might burn the place down, but eventually the smoke subsided and made its way up the stone chimney.
I boiled some water on the stove, and as I watched the pot, I heard my grandmother’s voice.
A watched pot never boils. So I left it there to heat and walked around the outside, marvelling in the scent of woodsmoke, something so rare in the city.
It was something that, until that moment, I hadn’t realized I’d missed.
An animal, perhaps a raccoon, had dug under the walls and likely had a nest somewhere, probably in the crawl space underneath the house.
The house also had an attic, a small space where there was only enough room to insulate with horsehair and no more.
I pushed on one of the window frames from the outside and it shifted slightly.
Some of the windowpanes had started to rot around the edges.
Seeing the state of the house and knowing she had not called me to help her broke my heart.
When I got back inside, the water was warm but not boiling.
Perfect for cleaning. I only had water and paper towel, but I cleaned the kitchen as best I could.
With each turn of my head, I could see my past. I saw the ghost of a Christmas tree in the corner, lit and covered in tinsel.
I saw my Kiju sitting in her chair, yarn wrapped around her fingers, humming along with a song on the radio.
I looked to the far wall, to pictures of me from infancy to eighteen, now crooked and covered with so much dust I had a hard time making out my own face.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to no one. And no one responded. The quiet held my words. “So sorry.”
The second night, I slept in my car again.
Two nights in a row sleeping in a car reminded me of my age.
I woke to the sounds of my bones creaking and snapping; my neck, without the support of a proper pillow, was tight and sore.
I hadn’t thought this out in any reasonable way, and instead of unpacking the U-Haul, I let it sit in the yard, unopened, and used my purse as a pillow and a sweater as a blanket.
I went back inside, the key more forgiving this time.
I laid my head down on the table. I could smell the bread, pies, the sharp scent of homemade sauerkraut.
The scuffling of animals out in the backyard, the scent of lilacs in late spring, the ghostly creaking of hardwood trees in winter, comforted by the green mass of the softwoods.
I could smell the campfires and the scent of apples in the fall, I could hear Big Ben laugh.
I could hear the fights that occasionally broke out after too much drink and grudges long held.
As I closed my eyes, I saw the branches of the birthing tree reaching out in the dark, and I wanted to gently walk into its embrace, to let it hold me and bring me home.
To really bring me home, to where my grandmother was still alive, to where women came to the door in the middle of the night scared and excited to give birth.
To a place where Big Ben and Sally came to pick apples, to where John would pull up in his father’s truck to take me on a drive to the shore.
But none of that was real. Kiju was gone and the apple pickers had stopped coming just after I’d left, and no one had been born under the tree in so very long.
It was all gone, everything that brought joy was gone, and I felt incredibly sorry for myself in those moments.
“Pull yourself together, Aliet,” I said. I stood, my hands on my hips. As I listened to a mouse scurry through the walls, I knew there was work to be done.
I headed to the diner in town, the one unmarked by age, everything the way it had always been, the way it had been that night John and I shared fried chicken and a Coke. And in a moment of nostalgia, I ordered the same thing we’d ordered that night. I even ordered a slice of pie, to go.
I sat at the window and watched the occasional car and people go by.
In a small town after dinner, the world becomes quiet.
People tucked away in their houses, eating dinner, children playing soccer or baseball, teenagers finding places to do what teenagers do.
Myself and another couple, younger than me by a decade or more, were the only ones in the diner.
Someone had called for takeout and the greasy paper bags sat on the counter, waiting. The chicken was salty and delicious.
“Aliet?”
I heard a voice that was vaguely familiar, then looked up into a face that was very familiar.
“Susan. Oh my god.”
I am not a person prone to outbursts of joy.
But I couldn’t help it. Here she was, fully formed, Susan standing in front of me.
She hadn’t aged. Where I found grey in my hair and new wrinkles each morning, the mirror an enemy of youth, Susan looked pretty much the same as she had the last time I saw her.
The skin under her eyes may have been a little darker, but her face looked the same.
I stood up and she wrapped her arms around me. She laughed. Her Susan laugh.
“My god, woman, you’re going to squeeze the life outta me.”
I let go and stood back. “It’s just so good to see you. Sit down.” I waved my hand at the empty chair. “So how have you been?”
We talked for a few minutes. She ordered a Coke and stole french fries off my plate.
I’ve been accused, more than once, of being closed off and cold, but I prefer to think of myself as participating in a lifelong act of self-preservation.
It is far easier to keep people at a distance than it is to let them into your life, to risk loving them, and then lose them.
But sitting in the diner in the town where I was raised, with someone I thought I had lost to time, I opened up and, to my amazement, felt something akin to joy.
I learned that she had married the same guy she dated in university, had four kids before she was thirty, and moved to Victoria with her naval husband.
He’d retired after twenty-five years and they’d decided to move home.
They’d bought a small farm halfway up the mountain and she worked at the high school now as the librarian.
She’d quickly abandoned nursing school in favour of English literature, and as I look back on it, I think this may have been where we started to drift away from one another.
Her husband fiddled with things, she said, as she rolled her eyes.
She had a barn full of half-finished wood projects and reconstructed antique farming tools.
The only thing her husband was good at, and consistent with, was cooking, and she let him.
“Got an extra twenty-five pounds around the midsection, but wouldn’t trade it for anything.” She patted her stomach and laughed.
“It’s hard to believe that we are old enough that one of us is retired.”
“I’m not retired, only my husband is. But I suppose I could stop working if I wanted to, but what would I do with myself?”
It was comforting, the way we fell into conversation.
Despite the decades, seeing Susan there in that diner was a relief, a welcome home I hadn’t anticipated.
A very real, very human link, back to this place where I’d been born, been raised.
Someone who knew about teas and babies. Who remembered Kiju and John, and had once declared herself to be my best friend for life. Maybe I wasn’t alone.
The waitress came over and handed her the two paper bags from the counter.
“Still have two teens at home,” she said as she paid the server. “I gotta go, but we need to get together. I think we have some catching up to do.”
“Well, I’m staying at the old house. Come by any time.”
“I heard that the town wants to condemn it now that Kiju is gone. I wanted to tell you to let you know about the state of it, but I had no way of getting hold of you. I heard through the grapevine that Kiju had tried to keep up with it, but as she got older . . .” Her voice trailed off and I had the familiar pang of guilt.
“I’m going to fix it up. It deserves to be lived in. Out of my mind probably, moving back here.”
“Well, let me know if you want help—I would love a project. Get me out of the house and away from George. Sometimes he drives me crazy.” She winked and turned to leave. “I’ll be by. You can count on that.” The door closed behind her, and I saw her slide into the driver’s seat of a white minivan.