Paige sat up in bed, threw the duvet off her legs, and marched down the hall to the bathroom for the third time. She stunned herself with the sudden brightness of the light over the vanity, turned around, hiked up her nightie, and sat down on the toilet. Leaning forward, she perched her face in her hands, blocking out the light, and willed herself to pee. Finally, she reached out and turned on the tap for encouragement, as her mother had done for her when she was small, and after a minute or so managed to let out the tiniest trickle. Paige felt hardly relieved but it was better than nothing.
Back in her bed, she rolled on to her right side and faced the wall. After a few minutes she curled herself into the fetal position, knees pulled up towards her stomach, and imagined that, like a gardener pinches his garden hose as he moves between shrubs, she was clinching her bladder in half, to hold back the urgency, the immediacy, of water. She gripped her left hand between her knees, creating pressure there, to avoid feeling it so urgently in her bladder.
Paige knew this was no physical malady. She’d been checked for a urinary tract infection. The persistent desire for the toilet only occurred at night, when she was trying to sleep. Some nights she rose from her bed five or six times before the urge gave way to exhaustion. She tried to think of other things – of anything else – but eventually her mind would wander back to her bladder, and the slightest flutter would betray her, and she would have to get up again.
She assumed the phase would pass. Just like the others. Her mother referred to these episodes as twitches: some word she had picked out of a Raising Your Teenage Daughter book, no doubt. Luckily for Paige this particular twitch was not visible to anyone else – as several of the others had been – like the time she’d pulled out all her eyelashes, or when she’d chewed and peeled all the skin off from around her thumbnails. It didn’t show, except perhaps in the dark circles under Paige’s eyes, and in the awakening of her family members each time the toilet flushed, some nights well into the early hours of the morning.
If only she could have abided leaving the yellowed water in the toilet bowl until morning, she might have avoided having to explain these circumstances to her mother. Her mother, who, Paige knew, relished these small inadequacies in her daughter’s character.
“You need to learn to meditate,” her mother insisted.
“I don’t think this is a sleep thing, Mum.”
“Well then you’ve got to learn to turn your brain off.”
“Right.”
•
Paige’s mother was the kind of woman who organized her underwear drawer before a dinner party. This made Paige anxious: though her own unmentionables went into her drawer neatly folded, they always emerged tangled, over-starched, and wrinkled. What did this say about her? Sometimes she imagined houseguests, women with long pink nails, combing through those private places, looking down their noses at panties with thin waistbands and worn crotches and making all sorts of assumptions based on their findings.
•
Paige rolled to her left side and adjusted the sheet so that it lay flat between her thighs. She couldn’t stand her bare legs touching when she was trying to fall asleep. The skin from one leg would stick to the other as her body warmed under the duvet; it was like sitting next to someone whose elbow crossed over a shared armrest.
She could hear the bug zapper through the open east-facing window, a faint purplish light filtered in from outside and flickered each time an insect was electrocuted. Moths were the most entertaining, as they were large, and tended to struggle against the current for several seconds before finally succumbing to the shock. Paige surmised that these moths must be the size of her fist, or bigger, the size of a large rodent, perhaps, and was grateful that they were outside and she was in.
Did she lock the front door? She thought back to the moment she had turned the porch lights off. Did she lock the door then? She tried to imagine her own hand, turning the deadbolt. She is so good at imagining things, she cannot tell if it’s a real memory or not.
•
The absence of locks makes Paige anxious. More than anxious. She is terrified that she will be walked in on. Not by her cousins, even though they are all boys. Years of shared baths, running naked through the sprinkler on the front lawn, and early evening skinny dips have desensitized Paige to any embarrassment in that regard.
It’s a fear quite apart from her cousins. A fear that raises the hairs on her arms, and strains her ears for the sound of footsteps approaching from down the hall. It’s the kind of fear that makes her hairline sweat, and gives her butterflies in her gut. Her whole life she’s been told that butterflies are supposed to be a sign of excitement, of good things to come, but she’s never experienced them that way.
She watches each morning as her granddad wanders, seemingly lost, aimless, through his kitchen, asking, “Is there salt?” Paige is sure, quite sure, that he will forget she is there and residing in the small room at the top of the stairs. She is sure he will blast through the unlocked door, looking for salt, or a book, or a screwdriver, and she will be unclothed, changing from her bathing suit, or into her pajamas. If she can, she changes beneath her towel down at the water before she walks back to the cottage. But this is only successful some of the time, as the mums require the children to have a full shower with soap and shampoo every two or three days – depending on the humidity. Depending on whether any of them have come into contact with tree sap, which seems to happen frequently.
She is sure that one night she awoke, bleary-eyed and slightly dazed, to find Granddad rustling through the top drawer of the dresser in her room. She is quite sure this was not a dream but she was too afraid to ask in the morning if he had found what he was looking for. She might have to admit that she hadn’t dreamed it, or embarrass him because, in all likelihood, he really hadn’t realized she was there.
Like the time she can still recall, when she was very young, and had run to him, excited about his arrival at Christmas dinner, and accidentally, because of her height, collided with his groin. She distinctly remembers the old brown corduroys – the corduroys and the unpleasant, toxic scent of mothballs. She had run away then, and had had to be coaxed back downstairs. It might have been after that incident that she became increasingly wary of her granddad.
When she unblocks that memory she still feels the heat in her cheeks as she replays his over-exaggerated groan. She observes as she backs away from him, the slight, mocking smile that twitches at the corners of his mouth. He doubles over, like the clown mime she’s seen on the television, cupping the front of his trousers.
•
Paige woke up and for a brief moment forgot where she was. She had managed to slide down off her pillow and settle towards the bottom of the bed. She could feel the footboard with her toes. She focused on the slanted ceiling above her. She thought at first that she was home in Toronto, then, wondered if she was with her mother on Christian Island. Finally, she cleared the sleep from her eyes and assured herself that she was in her own bed at her family’s cabin.
She reached through the darkness for her mobile phone and squinted as the screen brightened. 4 AM. She quickly got up and closed the window; the temperature had plummeted in the night. The bug zapper was silent though the purple light glowed eerily from between the trees. She returned to her bed and pulled the extra quilt off her feet, up to her chin.
She looked at her phone again. There were three text messages from her mother. She opened the first: Hi Pumpkin, Can you bring the extra set of keys for my car when you come? I left the veal cutlets in the car at the ferry launch and I don’t want to leave them in there too long.
She quickly scanned the other texts, the contents of which were a single list of household items: extra heavy-duty bin liners, the portable shop vacuum, and the gallon of bleach from beside the washing machine…after “recipe box,” her mother had suggested: Sleeping bag, pillow for yourself, suitable clothing.
The last email was short: You really won’t believe it until you see it. The hole in the floor…it could gobble you up.
•
The summer cousin Fred decides to carry Paige’s one-year-old brother Braden around by his neck is the same summer Fred’s older brother Spencer runs around calling everyone an idiot.
“It’s their holiday too,” Auntie Greer tells Paige’s mum.
One afternoon when Paige isn’t quarrelling with her cousins they pull the old dinghy out of the cellar and blow it up on the lawn. It takes them an hour, taking turns exhaling into the massive rubber boat. Paige can feel the nerves in her cheeks stretching, and the tendons in her eyeballs straining.
Fred says, “When I grow up, I’m going to collect banana peels like Granddad.” Spencer cuffs him over the head and says, “You’re an idiot.”
Paige doesn’t really know what Fred is talking about because she has been told that Granddad collects old newspapers.
One afternoon at the beach on the other side of the island, Fred, Spencer, and Paige decide that it’s a good idea to jump in the water and then roll in the sand. Paige cries and cries later, sitting naked in the ancient bathtub, as her mother berates her and scrubs and scrubs her scalp raw with Pert Plus, the shampoo that comes in a bottle that looks like a fish but smells like watermelon. Paige is crying, not just at the pain, but because the sand washed out of her cousins’ short boy hair immediately, whereas it seemed to cling to hers, knotting and pulling the more her mother scrubs.
That’s the summer she realizes the phantom named “Eliot” is the same as her granddad. She can’t figure out why her mum and her aunt keep referring to him by his name, instead of “Dad.” On the phone with Bryce, who is far away, they seem to say his name even more than necessary, at every possible interval. Sometimes they mention, “Jude,” and Paige knows that’s her nanny. But Eliot and Jude don’t seem to go together the way Paige thinks names should: like Paige and Braden; Spencer and Fred; or Elsie, Greer, and Bryce. She rolls her grandparents’ names over her tongue, under her breath. Each time the rhythm stumbles over itself. She can’t make them fit.
•
The next morning, in the kitchen, Paige made coffee and collected the various items her mother had requested. A new text had come through earlier in the morning with another list of things to bring; Paige was sure it would not be the last of the day.
She packed up her car, a small Volkswagen Golf, and poured her coffee into a travel mug. She checked three times that she had turned off the coffee machine before finally locking up the cottage and leaving the spare set of keys in the lantern outside.
Paige turned the radio on to a local station, one that played Top 40 music. It was the only station that would last her until she got to Cedar Point, where she would then catch the ferry. The day was overcast and damp. Paige anticipated a bleak drive: small towns like Wasaga, Elmvale, and LaFontaine, that entertained tourists in the summer during beach season and the winter during ski season, were suspended, at this time of year, in a bleary limbo.
•
Paige visualizes an alternative childhood, where instead of being Paige, she is her mother and aunts’ familiar; watching from a corner, or hovering like one does over scenes in a dream. This liminality allows Paige to transition back through the stories she’s heard growing up:
To the time Greer stuffs raisins up her nose and runs through the house, pursued by Paige’s nan, who keeps losing the end off the fly swatter every time she whacks Greer across the buttocks; raisins fly out of Greer’s nose each time the fly swatter comes whizzing down through the air.
To the time Bryce leaves her new Mary Janes at a neighbor’s house and, realizing only at bath time, runs nude through the neighborhood streets to retrieve them.
•
She parked near the sloping cement driveway that the ferry would dock at and turned off the ignition. This was the first time she’d been back to the Island in more than ten years.
She knew her way to Wedgewood the same way she knew in recurring dreams how to find the secret rooms in her house that didn’t exist in waking life. It was like playing back an old film, and trying to anticipate what some younger self, in the recesses of her mind, already knew. She would drive to Wedgewood and hope someone was there to meet her.
A man wearing a hi-vis vest walked past the car and, figuring he was a ferry attendant, she rolled down the window and asked, “How long until the next boat?” The man shrugged and continued walking. She was embarrassed; everyone wore hunter orange in this part of the province.
Two loud horn blasts sounded from across the straight, signaling the ferry’s departure from the Island side. She had twenty minutes. She pulled her mobile phone out of her sweater pocket and reviewed her mother’s texts.
The veal cutlets.
Paige retrieved the extra set of keys from the cup holder and strolled across to the far end of the mostly vacant lot where her mother’s car was parked. She passed the mossy embankment near the water’s edge and observed the Canadian Geese, huddled in their nests. Their feathers blew across the parking lot, settling into the small pools of water that had collected in various potholes.
Weeds from the lakebed had been trawled and pulled up, like entrails, onto the small, pebbled beach. Paige could smell the algae and rotting herbage as she passed.
Standing at her mother’s hatchback, Paige flicked casually through the rest of her emails, to be sure she wasn’t meant to bring anything else from the car.
The hole in the floor…it could gobble you up.
It would be cleared by now, the rubble thrown away, or at least moved to another room. She still couldn’t believe her granddad had fallen through the kitchen floor – fallen through the floor where he was then crushed beneath the weight of his own hoard. Days after receiving the news, she still didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
How had they got him out? She envisioned some sort of pulley system, like those she had seen used to cast beached whales back off into the water. She’d once witnessed the same belts being used on a dead whale that had been found washed ashore at Balmedie Beach, in Aberdeen, when she’d been at university. When the crane had lifted, the flesh had come away from the bones in a cascade of blubber and blood that had swirled and bubbled in the surf. When she’d got back to her flat she’d realized her white running shoes were flecked with red.
Paige unlocked the car and opened the trunk. The interior was filled with dead air from being closed up for two days. She retrieved the plastic bag of veal cutlets that had fallen into the left wheel well and turned back towards the water: the ferry was approaching. She closed and locked the doors, and crossed back to her car with the bag of meat held tightly in her hand.
•
When the ferry arrived she was surprised to find it had not brought any cars or passengers with it from the Island. She waited until the ferry attendant waved her forward before shifting into first and slowly pulling up to the bow. Though, she supposed, ferries had neither a bow nor a stern.
She perched herself on the hood of her car, cradling her coffee mug between her hands. As the ferry drew closer, the Island seemed to convex outwards across the water. Using the lighthouse as a point of reference, she searched the treetops for Wedgewood’s peaked roof, and began to rehearse in her head the conversations that were likely to take place over the next several days.
“Mum meant for me to have the mirror, I know it,” her mother might say.
Then Auntie Greer would respond, “Well now just wait a minute. Did she ever say that?”
And her mother would probably say, “Oh yes. Of course.” But no one would really believe her.
And Bryce would whine, “I feel uncomfortable with that. Wedgewood belongs to all of us.”
Her mother would probably say, “I did my time.”
And Auntie Greer would say, “We all did.”
Paige would hold her breath, waiting for the tension to seep out of the room. Then, she would be pulled aside and spoken to by each of them individually. These women of hers, brimming with rhetoric from a lifetime of observed manipulation, would carefully and eloquently persuade Paige of who was right and who was wrong; who was right and who was nuts.
•
Out of a tall clump of cedar trees ahead, a flock of birds erupted, startled perhaps by the ferry’s engine, or something in the undergrowth. Starlings. Paige watched as they wove and wound above the tree line, dipping and darting together, one fluid mass.
Interrupted, perhaps by some lone gull, the flock suddenly split into three curling fingers, flowing outwards, away from the pulsing centre. She tried to follow each one, to keep all three streams in view, but one had flown west over the island, one had flown north above her head, and the other had streamed in the direction of the mainland.
The ferry jilted her forward as it docked in the slip, so she quickly walked round to the driver’s door, seated herself, and turned her keys. A moment later, the ferry attendant rounded the side of her car and directed her forward with a lazy wave. As she released the clutch she peered up through her windshield, scanning the sky for starlings; it was empty except for the dark, still ranks of hanging clouds over the strait, heavy with rain.
Emily Kathryn Utter is in the third year of her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen, on the northeast coast of Scotland. She has had short stories published in Causeway/Cabsair, where she is now an editor, Queen’s University’s The Lamp, and an extract from her novel, Wedgewood, was recently published by GUTS Magazine. Emily is originally from Hamilton, Canada.