Thirteen Shells Read online

  “Faster, Dad!” she bellows, kicking hard at the back of Dad’s seat.

  “What the hell?” Dad shouts. But the car’s already turning the corner, south off Cashel Street.

  The day they move into the new house is bright white with summer. At five-thirty in the morning Dad rents a truck with a sliding door, picks up Kremski on the way. Kremski’s already sweating. He gobbles the toasted cheese Mum gives him wrapped in a cloth napkin and puffs a rolled cigarette; paint freckles his shirt and shoes. Kremski works at jobs like building a fence or shovelling snow, but, like Dad, his real job is making paintings. Or sometimes sculptures, out of garbage scraps. Dad and Kremski laugh and grunt and get drenched loading the truck. Shell gets to ride between Dad and Kremski on the way to Cashel Street, so high she can see right down into passing cars.

  Mum pulls up in the Dart, the back seat full of pottery boxes. The front door key is in an envelope in the bottom of her purse where she can never find it. Dad and Kremski already have the couch on the boulevard. Mum opens the door. Dust speckles the sunlight sliding in through the windows that Shark Nose took the blinds from even though he wasn’t supposed to. For five whole days Mum and Shell have scrubbed away at the smells and stains of Shark Nose and those boys that weren’t adopted but only fostered, which means Shark Nose’ll be their dad until he decides he’s had enough. Because who wants a son with a hairy lip? No, no: harelip. A birth defect that makes him look like a rabbit, except rabbits are soft and gentle.

  “I hate that boy,” Shell told Mum when it was time to bleach the basement. And she told her again and again until it turned into red-hot chanting.

  It is too stuffy upstairs for sleeping, and though Dad really insists, Shell won’t let anyone sleep in the cool basement. “Harelip is down there hiding.” Behind the furnace. “I heard him laugh. I heard him open a bottle of pop.”

  Dad says Shell is being unreasonable. “It’s our place now.” Shell lies between Mum and Dad on their double mattress in what will be the living room, tossing and shifting among the sticky sheets and the silver-blue light falling through bare windows. A few times Shell wakes, blinking through a night so quiet and still they could be camping. Her eyes adjust to the dark — shadowed walls, lion-foot chair; the pine tree in the corner is just a teetering stack of milk crates. The silence and heat weigh equally heavy; waiting for one or both to break, she falls back asleep again.

  Dad gets up first and takes his coffee outside. Mum can’t find the porridge pot or the toaster, so she soaks sliced rye in beaten egg and fries each piece golden. There is jam and syrup on the harvest table that Dad and Kremski lugged in yesterday, a slab of cheddar for protein.

  “Call your dad in.” Mum bends into the oven with a plate of bread. The dishes are the cornflower ones Mum never uses because Dad doesn’t like that fancy English stuff, but everything else is still packed.

  And because Shell’s sandals have likewise disappeared among the boxes and bags, rolls of curtains, piles of cushions, she runs outside barefoot.

  “Shell!” Mum’s cry fades with the slam of the screen door.

  Down the rough steps, over the sandy patio stones, and onto coarse lawn, Shell jumps over fallen walnuts and the patches of turned soil where Dad has already started to garden. From up on the garage comes the click-clock of Dad’s hammer. The yard, Mum says, is three or four times as big as the one they left behind. Shell can’t have a swing set of her own, so she’s going to make Mum ask if she can play on the one next door, and then Dad can cut a hole in the fence so she doesn’t have to go around to the front every time. Are there kids living there? Mum doesn’t think so. Then why have a swing? Maybe there were kids once but they’re grown up and gone. Gone where? Where is that place grown-ups disappear?

  Click-clock. Dad’s hammer echoes. Shell twirls — one loop, two — towards the ladder propped against the garage that Dad already calls “the studio.” Then, there: up ahead in the grass, a sudden sparkle. Mid-stride, the sparkle becomes a glint, then a jagged circle of emerald. It glows, dazzles. And it’s too late: Shell’s right foot lands hard. A sharp spike sinks deep into the meaty ball. She freezes, impaled by a pain beyond pain, like a thousand yellow-jacket stings all at once.

  The back door seems to slam even before Shell cries out. Mum’s clogs pound down the steps, across the lawn, and then Mum is drawing Shell into her body. She grips Shell’s foot and pulls out the biting. Dad is there. Like a baby, Shell is draped in his arms. Below her, the ground shakes as Dad races across the yard and into the Dart, where Mum is already waiting with an armful of tea towels. She holds Shell on her lap and wraps Shell’s foot. Down there, on the other side of the basement windows through which Shell can barely see, the harelip boy would have chugged a Mountain Dew and then broken the bottle — smash — on the concrete floor. His foster brothers, atop their roll-aways and wheezing for air, would have watched him, learning. Before wrapping the shard in a rag, he would have held it up to the bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs, like Dad when he examines slides. Then, maybe on the very day they packed up the school buses and moved out, he planted the broken end of the bottle in the grass, spikes upright. Maybe if she prays to God for him, the boy will get his rabbit face fixed and be regular enough a good mum and dad will want him. Then he’ll really feel sorry for hurting Shell and one day come back to Cashel Street to say so.

  Dad strings the Mexican hammock between two black walnuts and Mum cocoons Shell inside, propping her bandaged foot high upon a bedroom pillow. A cheese sandwich and a glass of milk teeter on a stool just in reach. Dad, above, rocks the hammock, slow as breeze.

  “Eighteen is a lucky number,” he says of the stitches closing up her foot. “One day you’ll be eighteen.”

  When she’s eighteen, Shell knows she’ll remember Dad saying that, like she’ll remember the way the sun above turns the walnut leaves into lace, and how good the bread and cheese tastes, sweet with mayonnaise. The painkiller tablets make it all fuzzy. Inside fuzz, outside fuzz.

  When Shell opens her eyes again, Dad is digging up sod along the fence. Fresh washing stretches from porch to studio, above Shell’s backyard bed. One, two, three, four tea towels brown with bloodstains.

  “Look.” From a wooden quart basket splotched with strawberry picking, Dad pulls a perfect circle of green glass. The circle is edged in spikes, curving up like mammoth tusks. Above the hammock, bed sheets and pillowcases float past, the rusty line squawking.

  Dad says the glass is old. It had been buried in the backyard for a while. His gardening churned it up. Dad says that a long time ago there were no garbage trucks, so if something broke, people dug a hole and buried it. “That was it. Forgotten.”

  So they live on a dump?

  “A midden,” Dad says. Everyone had one. “Many in the world have them still.” Dad lets Shell run her finger along the razor jaws of the glass.

  “Mountain Dew,” Shell says. “The same green.”

  Now Dad says Shell is being silly. “Green was the normal colour of glass back when this house was built.” Along with the glass, Dad found a blackened spoon and some long, rusty nails, a few triangles of dinner plates, cornflower like Mum’s. Unlike the clean green glass, each of these other bits is covered in hard dirt. “You just make sure you wear shoes, kiddo.” Dad sets the basket on the wooden bench they brought from their old backyard and then picks up his shovel.

  The hammock loses its sway. Behind Shell, someplace she can’t see, Dad’s shovel breaks deep into the dry grass, in search of fertile soil. Laundry lemon floats through the air. The back door squeaks open and Mum comes out with a basket at her hip. Through her eyelashes, Shell watches Mum lean over the porch rail. The undersides of Mum’s arms do that jiggle as she pulls in bed sheets, Dad’s crisp jeans, the tea towels with splotches of browned blood Mum will cut into rags. Shell wants Mum to watch Shell falling asleep. But Mum is looking somewhere far away from the Mexican hammock
. Once, in Mum’s bottom drawer, Shell found a smoke-and-cream photo of a little girl with a ringlet down her forehead. There was another of a teenager with Mum’s thick dark hair piled high on her head, a cigarette between her fingers, beads around a lean neck, spotted with Mum’s same moles.

  “I lived twenty-eight years before you were born, Shell,” Mum had said, tucking the picture back under a pile of peach-coloured underwear folded into the same squares as Dad’s and Shell’s are too. Mum is like the backyard garden, smooth on the surface but with surprises hidden deep.

  After supper, when the street lights come on, Dad piggybacks Shell up to the small room in the front that is hers now. Her bed and dresser are in place, curtains hung, and Mum has already unpacked some of Shell’s clothes and toys. The horsehair button box that was once Mum’s but became Shell’s after she played with it without permission and broke the hinges on the lid is on the dresser. Cream silk lines the interior, empty apart from three brass buttons, a spool of pink thread, and a headless toy soldier Shell found by the tracks. Shell tucks the broken glass she took from Dad’s basket inside the button box. Then the box goes under the bed, behind puzzles and board games, a tea set, and an Eaton’s bag full of dolls she doesn’t like anymore.

  The heat has broken. The box fan in Mum and Dad’s window circulates the air, like blood in a body. Cars pass, pushing and pulling shadows. And the house’s silence speaks so loud Shell cannot hear Mum and Dad in the living room below.

  By the wedge of hall light spilling across her bed, Shell unwinds the damp bandage from her foot. The stitches along the ball make a long, tight insect. And though there is a deep itch inside, the pain is gone. Because Mum had to cancel her swimming lessons, Dad’s going to rig up the wading pool tomorrow. She can dangle her foot over the edge. Oh, and Kremski’s coming to help Dad tear up more of the grass. They’ve got to get the basil in. While Kremski rolls one of his Drums, Shell will tell him about the hospital and show him the piece of glass Dad thinks is still in the berry basket. Will Kremski know what a hairy lip is? Somewhere a car horn blares — once, twice — lonesome and long. Though Mum hates them, Shell misses the burly CNs that used to rumble down the railroad tracks so far, now, from their new house.

  Fiddleheads

  Dad doesn’t stop working on the house from the first summer they move into Cashel Street. Under the crumbly carpet, the floors are bright blond hardwood and then the bathroom gets stuccoed and tiled and fitted with a new tub that is an antique with claw feet that Mum complains is too deep and expensive to fill. Spring comes. Dad gets his pointy shovel out and the tomatoes go in. The scaffold he puts up along the driveway side of the house goes all the way to the roof. Dad works all by himself or with Kremski, who’ll stay for dinner after. Shell helps too, passing Dad nails and stirring away the skin on the top of the paint. The studio is a studio now and not at all a bus garage. Shell even gets to write her name with a stick in the wet concrete Dad pours in front of the studio door. He says it will be there forever.

  Each morning after breakfast, Mum and Dad put on clogs and carry the last of the coffee across the yard into the studio, warm from the overnight firing. They are still in there, aprons on, radio going, when Shell comes home from grade one for beans and toast and lunchtime news. After school they are back turning pots on their wheel, and when dinner’s done and Shell is supposed to be doing homework, she watches through their bedroom window as Mum and Dad move from wedging table to wheel to kiln, loading in a glaze fire.

  The studio shelves fill with Mum and Dad’s pots — stoneware ashtrays, onion soup bowls, goblets in celadon green — but Mum still takes in mending and once a week teaches adults at the community centre how to glaze and then Dad gets some gardening work in the north end of Somerset. Doctors and lawyers and professors live there. The woman who hires Dad is an engineer, though not the kind that drives a train. Someone who buys Mum and Dad’s pottery gave the woman Dad’s name. Dad says the woman’s garden is twice as big as their own. Now, though, when she should be planting and keeping the earth moist, she’s gone to Vancouver to visit her daughter.

  Shell had answered when the woman called then listened from the kitchen while Dad laughed and joked with her and said her name as often as possible: Olivia. Dad doesn’t call Mum anything but “you” and “her” and “your mother.” If Mum’s friends at the co-op store didn’t call Mum by her first name, no one in the whole world would. And instead of looking at Dad or saying hi or giving him a kiss like in glossy ads for margarine, Mum’s eyes are always down in her lap or her back is turned to him, scrubbing borscht beets in the kitchen sink.

  Along with the wage for planting and watering, weeding and cutting the grass, Dad can bring home all the crops he wants, which, this being the start of spring, isn’t much. But after he’s been there once or twice, Dad says fiddleheads are coming up in droves in the ravine behind Olivia’s. If he gets enough, he can sell them to the French restaurant downtown. Mum laughs at how something only poor folks once scavenged is now so gourmet. Fiddleheads are bitter, nasty things you can never get clean of grit, and she bets Shell dollars to doughnuts Shell won’t like them either.

  “Do they really look like fiddles?”

  Dad says Shell will soon find out. And then he reads her a recipe for fiddleheads with wild rice and salmon. “Native people ate them in the spring, Shell, all along the east coast. Now we will too.”

  On Saturday, Mum’s volunteering at the co-op. Shell can come help measure raw nuts into bags and twist on the ties and listen to Mum talk to all her friends who come in for the weekend kefir shipment, but instead she goes with Dad to Olivia’s. If they wait any longer, the fiddleheads will be gone. Or, not gone; they will be ferns. Mum packs cheddar and rye sandwiches, a Thermos of coffee for Dad, and one of milk for Shell. Dad goes north, past the university and the big new shopping mall that Dad vows never to set foot in. A science show is on the radio. When an expert says it’s true that robins can hear worms moving in the soil, Dad cranks the volume way up. “That’s why they lean in close to the ground…Shell — are you listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look!” A robin, on Shell’s side, is stamping its feet on a lawn, mimicking the sound of rain just like the radio scientist said. Then it cocks its head and lays an ear to the earth. All the mealy worms it has tricked will be racing to the surface in search of moisture. Dad steers with only one hand so he can lean across Shell for a better look, his beard brushing her cheek. The Dart veers into the outside lane. A car horn blares.

  “Dad!”

  Dad turns down the radio, straightening the wheel. “Wow.” He shakes his head. “Imagine that, Shell. What’s it sound like to actually hear worms?”

  When they turn onto Sumac Valley Road, the sidewalks end. And so do the streets: it’s all lanes and trails and avenues now.

  Dad helps Shell read the names out loud — “Periwinkle Path, Trembling Aspen Terrace, Iroquois Lane.”

  “The names are for things we’ve destroyed in this country, Shell,” Dad says, shaking his head. “Native people, plants, trees.”

  Dad makes the world make sense like that, and Shell always feels smarter and sad after.

  The houses are set way back from the curb and lawns are bright green like the turfed shelves at Thrifty Mart where they display fruit. Bushes have been cut into cones or spirals, and there are Union Jacks and Canada flags flying, and the driveways, of which many are crescent-shaped, are mostly inset with brick. Red cars, black cars, silver cars shine like armour. Any For Sale sign on a front lawn has a sticker that says pool.

  Olivia’s street, Mohawk, is really a “court” and doesn’t look nearly as nice as Sumac Valley. Her house is way at the far end, set deep in its own nook, and the style is called “ranch,” which means there’s only one floor, or maybe one and a half, and a big basement. Dad says ranch houses are American and not only ugly but wasteful when it comes to heating. Olivia
has neighbours on one side only, a yellow-brick with red double doors. Each door has a brass lion head knocker; the rings in their mouths would make good bracelets.

  Dad eases the Dart up the driveway’s fresh black asphalt. There’s an opening within the forsythia — brightest buttercup — at the end. After a grassy slope, they are in the back. The glass doors of a walkout basement are concealed with oatmeal drapery. A concrete patio is roofed with a main-floor balcony that spans the back of the house. Like their yard on Cashel Street, Olivia’s is mostly vegetable patch. Squares and rectangles of soil that Dad has turned for Olivia — fresh and black, studded with white eyes of stone — are framed with tough orange mums and a ruffle of stiff green plastic. Seed packs stuck to Popsicle sticks show photographs of carrots, potatoes, peppers, peas, zucchini. Beyond the plateau of the garden, a stretch of grass ends like a cliff, at the bottom of which the ravine starts in. A net of high chain-link fencing contains thick treed shadows and cool sapphire dark. Dad says, “You’d think you were in Algonquin down in there.” A forest right in the city. Or a city right in the forest, but a forest that is a ghost now.

  Olivia’s tool shed is made of brick and could be a nice house for one girl and most of her stuff. Dad gets Shell a weeding fork and leather gloves and a rubber bushel basket. She can weed the lawn and anything in the vegetable beds that shouldn’t be there. Along the wooden fence between Olivia’s and the neighbour’s there’s a crop of knee-high nettle. She squats, gets her gloves around a prickled neck, and tugs. One-two-three. Dad is behind her. He grabs her tool, strikes it deep into the earth, right at the nettle’s shaft, pulling back in a single sharp twist.

  “Right down to the root, Shell.” Dad shakes the dirt from the hairy roots and tosses the weed into the basket. “Okay?” Then, with a pitchfork and a sack of potting soil, he disappears through the forsythia and into the front.