Mud Girl

One Good Thing

You can be friendly with someone for only so long before you start to know them, and they know you. Aba Zytka Jones and Horace Boyd have known each other through her three high school years, as long as she’s been riding his bus home down River Road. Time I really knew something about her, thinks Horace. Time to put my hand out. There’s something not right here. He’s thought that for a long time now. Can’t quite put a finger on what it is, though. She’s always alone. She’s always on time – that’s not right, not at her age, when just about anything can get in the way of your path: a giggly friend, a boy...especially a boy.

Come to think of it, he’s never seen Abi with a friend, boy or girl. Horace wonders if Abi even notices the boy with the shaggy yellow hair who sits in the back. He knows the boy sees her, and knows the boy has a worry knot on his forehead when he looks at Abi. Of course, such a worry knot doesn’t necessarily mean anything romantic – if anyone even knows that word these days, he thinks. But it means something. ‘No, it’s not right. And it’s the last day before summer. Today, I’ll say something. There’s no time like Right Now. The summer is long when you’re sixteen.’ He remembers that. These thoughts and more go through the head of Horace, the bus driver.

Abi, on the other hand, would prefer to keep the friendship – such as it is – as it is. Horace can be the bus driver. She can be the passenger. His is a face she can count on. The reason she’s always on time for his bus is simply that she likes him. She’s on time for other things because her mother – God Rest Her Feet – taught her to be on time. She likes to sit and talk with Horace. He is the one good thing about the bus ride home. Sometimes, he’s the one good thing about her day.

Abi’s not good at judging age. She does know that Horace has quite a lot of grey hair, and some amazing lines that spill out from his eyes and curve down his cheeks. She thought he’d be somebody’s Grandpa, but he told her no, and he laughed. I look that old, do I? Apparently, he’s never had kids. Seems a waste, Abi thinks. She always sits across from Horace on the seat near the door so they can talk – at least until a really old person comes along or somebody with a baby or a white cane or what-have-you. What-have-you is a Horace phrase for sure.

Last day of school today, he says as she pulls aboard, knapsack heavy on her back. She meant to throw out most of the school junk before leaving, but the vice principal stopped her, wanted to talk, and she would have missed the bus. He just had to tell her what a wonderful student she could be, and how much he looks forward to seeing her in the fall. Only one more year, he reminded her. He must suspect she’d like to quit.

Guess I won’t be seeing you for a while. Horace pulls a bag of juice berries from his pocket and hands them to her. The familiar gift makes her feel almost old, and a lump that feels oddly of regret pushes its way into her throat. She wishes suddenly that it wasn’t the last day of the school year, with summer stretching ahead. For ten months she’s been able to spend most of her days away from home, but now the days are going to be long, and they’re going to be spent with a man who used to be her father, but is now a stranger.

The juice berries taste good, and Abi offers Horace one. He puts it in his mouth and pushes it into a cheek before speaking. What have you got planned for the summer?

Such a normal question; if he only knew.

Thought I’d fly down to Australia, or look for my mother along the Nile...or was that the Amazon...maybe do a bicycle trip down the coast...tell Pops he can take me to Disneyland now...

I was thinking it’s time to find a job.Abi watches the road. Heading east, they’ve left the town of Ladner, and rising on the south are concrete buildings: the Industrial Park they call that area, with an ice rink at one end, and a few small coffee shops for the employees who work in all those ugly, square buildings.

On the driver’s side, to the north, is the Fraser River, a tidal river and salty. At this time the tide is down, and with the windows open she can smell the briny odour and the mud – the smell that says home for her; an ocean smell, out of place this far inland.

You’re going to find a job? Horace turns to look at her for a quick moment, then his eyes go back to the road. He’s a good driver, Horace, careful – not like some.

I’ll be seventeen later in the fall. I should have had a job last year. Sixteen is old enough for a few things: old enough to quit school; old enough to have a job; almost old enough to leave home. A job would be a start.

Horace has turned back to her, and he’s been looking at her for so long he’s making her nervous after all. But his hands begin to turn the wheel even before his eyes are back on the road. He does know every curve. Soon they’ll pass the little convenience store, the cedar mill, the paint store. Then it’ll just be scrubby fields and the odd old house.

Hmm, is all Horace says. Then: You do have that look.

What’s that?

That look of wanting to be somewhere else.

She turns away, toward the river. She didn’t think anyone could see that.

It’s okay, he goes on. Now, speaking for myself, I take long journeys by train. That’s how I travel.

You don’t travel! Horace hasn’t gone anywhere on holiday as long as she’s known him.

He grins. More lines spread over his face. All the time! He laughs. I have my own train – tunnels, bridges, stations to stop at, forests to go through, hills to climb. It’s in my yard, front and back. My neighbour figures that’s why I don’t have a wife. Maybe you’ve seen it? Just up from the corner of Trunk and Fifth? A thought comes to him: a way to hold out his hand.

You should come and see! he says, and he strikes the steering wheel in excitement. Yes! Do that. Do come and see my train! He pulls into a stop with something of a flourish, and the door swings open. All aboard! he calls out, exactly as a train conductor would.

Horace rises from his seat to help an old woman, and Abi stands and makes her way through the crowd to the back so the woman can take her seat.

Abi?

She can hear Horace behind her, but she doesn’t answer. He has to stretch to see to the back of the bus in his rear-view mirror, and he can see her slight form as she wraps her arm around the pole near the back door. Always so on-her-own. Oh, maybe he shouldn’t have said what he did. These days, it’s so tough just to be friendly to someone.

In the meantime, Abi’s thinking: now, why did he have to go and do that? They’re just bus friends, nothing more. But he’s going to ruin it. She doesn’t want to know where he lives, but even more than that, she doesn’t want him to know where she lives. She’s managed to hold that secret for this long. Besides, she’s never met an adult with a toy train. Every adult has some weirdness – her dad has his messages, her mum had her tomato plants...but a toy train?

Nobody rings the bell for her usual stop, not even Abi. But Horace brakes anyway, waits for her to climb off. Bye, Abi! he calls out. Come visit over the summer!

She’s glad for the people between them, standing and chatting. She tells herself that Horace can’t possibly hear, even if she did say something. She climbs down from the bottom step and stands, as always, until the bus is out of sight, and the diesel smell is replaced by the cedar of the mill.

She walks along the gravel edge. Cars pass, and long dragging trucks. Their tires growl and the air tries to pull her into the rubber molars. She holds her arms across her chest, head down, almost to the next bus stop. From there, Abi’s house is across the street and four metres from the roadway. The front of the house sits on the bank of the river, and the bank is steep, so there is a narrow wooden bridge that reaches to the front porch for when it’s muddy. Out back, the house rests on pilings, heavy and stained and standing in river mud when the tide’s down, and in swirling water when it’s up.

She crosses the bridge and the door slams shut behind her; that same pull of air from yet another truck. Her father, in his chair in the middle of the room, doesn’t seem to hear or to feel the sway of the floor.

Bairn

Once Abi found a pamphlet – can’t remember where exactly – Expanding Your Vocabulary . The pamphlet promised that if you expanded your vocabulary, you could go anywhere you wanted. Of course, she knows that’s not true. When you’re a teenager, in high school, you can’t go anywhere. But still. Now and then she looks up words because she likes the thought. Usually she carries the falling-apart paperback dictionary on the twenty-minute morning bus trip – so different from Horace’s afternoon bus – full of morning silence and perfume strong enough to last until five o’clock. Makes her wish there was a school bus on this road, instead of just the regular bus. Makes her wonder about the adult thing. Makes her think about being sixteen – and how close it is to being one of these soldiers in overcoats, armed with briefcase and cell phone. Lipstick smacked on. But with a school bus it would be a matter of time, a short time, before someone would say something, and they’d come poking around and take her away to some place, to a foster home maybe. Someplace where no one really cares about you, or worse, someone might hurt you—a place chosen for you by people who don’t know you, a place that might be in the newspaper someday, with a big ugly headline over it. Or maybe it wouldn’t be in the papers; maybe it would be a place where secrets happen.

Sometimes, Abi is convinced, the only reason she looks up new words is to distract her from the old.

Here’s one, in the dictionary. Bairn. A child. Funny how when she thinks of it she can only hear the word wee in front of it. Wee bairn. The dictionary says the word is related to the verb bear, but all she can think of is the noun, and an angry she-bear protecting her...wee bairn. Abi likes that mental picture of a fighting mother-bear. She wishes it had more in common with the picture of her own mother, which is not bear-like at all.

Somebody gave Mum a New Age baby name book when she was pregnant. The first name in the girl section was Aba, which means born on Thursday. Abi was actually born at one in the morning on Friday, but by then her mother had spent twenty-four hours thinking she’d be born on Thursday for sure, and she said, Close enough. Zytka was the last name in the girl section, so that’s her second name. Abi suspects her mother never looked at the rest of the book.

Of course, she’d never asked her. She’d never thought of that until it was too late. There were many questions Abi hadn’t asked. Some she’d thought of before, and some have popped into her mind over this past year. The biggest is: Why?

Why did you leave, Mum?

Abi tries to come up with the answer. Because I had to. It could be like one of those games you play with a little kid. Why did you have to... It could go on forever. Abi suspects that her mother could even tell her why and Abi still wouldn’t know the real answer. Not an answer that satisfies. But maybe she has pieces of answers – enough pieces to put together even. She knows a few things.

Just in Case

Abi knows that when Mum said ‘blue’ she meant the pale blue of the early morning sky, or perhaps the blue of china plates people might hang on walls. Abi wondered – after Dad painted the back of the house – how it was that he didn’t know that. How could he bring home that blinding colour? What had he called it – a mistint?

That’s someone else’s colour gone bad, Mum had said, in that frighteningly calm voice she had sometimes.

Dad hadn’t seemed to notice the voice. It’s the luck of the thing, he said. I walk in, I say I’m looking for the most beautiful blue for the most beautiful woman on the earth, and they show me this, and it’s the only blue they have. I figure it’s destiny.

Not everything that falls across your path is destiny, Mum said. Sometimes what falls across your path is just there to trip you.

Abi can remember what Dad’s face looked like then. It was as if Mum had walked over and shaken him.

But all she shook was her head, looking sorrowfully at him, then at the back of the house. Abi can still remember her like that: clinging to the railing on the dock as it moved in the river, head shaking over the blue. Next time you choose paint chips, she said, you bring them home, we discuss together, we choose together, then back to the paint store where they make up the colour. If a mistake happens someone else can buy it. It can be their mistint.

Dad hadn’t gone to the paint store, hadn’t chosen paint chips. The front and the sides of the house remained white and the back blazed blue and that’s how it was.

Mary, he’d say on occasion, where’s your sense of adventure?

Brought me as far across the Atlantic as this side of Canada, then left me for someone else, would be her answer.

But Abi, listening, wasn’t at all convinced that her mother had ever had a sense of adventure. A sense of something, yes, but it wasn’t adventure. What had brought her to Canada from Britain? What had caused her to stay in Canada? Abi knew the answer to the second question: Dad.

Abi would hear these exchanges between them and feel dread. What bothered her most was that she couldn’t take sides.

Now she could take a side; that was one of her first thoughts when they discovered Mum had left. But she couldn’t. She didn’t want a side; she wanted an answer.

Here is another piece about her mother: she loved this place, this narrow greenhouse, with its one bench, and three shelves, and glass. Most of the glass is broken. She even loved it like that, though she cried when the first piece broke, one of two times Abi ever saw her cry.

The greenhouse sits on one of two connected small docks that float at the end of the wharf. The wharf starts as a wooden walkway by the front door, goes down the side of the house, and runs all the way into the river water at the back of the house. The first dock is connected with enormous hinges, so that it can move with the tide, and the greenhouse dock is attached to that.

Her mother asked her dad to attach extra chains to hold the greenhouse in place – just in case, she said. She said that often. She grew those spindly tomato plants and fried up their green fruit in the fall. Abi doesn’t remember any red ones ever. So many little seed containers, the size of a thumb. Her mother always planted too many seeds, and they’d come up all white stems, looking like grubs, until they collapsed in despair. Maybe if Mum had realized she loved this place and she could just sit here with her coffee – she didn’t have to try to grow all those stupid things –maybe things would have been different. Sometimes Abi comes here and thinks about that: just why did her mother grow all those sad, stupid plants. Other times she sits here, pries pieces of broken glass from the window frames, drops them through the floorboards into the river, and makes a wish. The glass sinks; it’s not like her dad’s bottles, plastic and floating. The bottles with their messages in them are wishes themselves. No, Abi uses her mother’s glass, and makes a wish. She always wishes the same thing, even when she tries to think of something new.

I wish...

Knock, knock!

Abi jumps at the spoken words. Wishes don’t come true. And even if they did, it would never be this quick.

Knock! The voice is chirpy, bird-like. Abi stares out at the river for one more moment, and puts together a mental picture of this person: a woman; skinny (chicken legs, definitely); hair like feathers and close to her scalp; a sharp nose; eyes like burnt raisins in gingerbread.

Knock, knock! This time someone actually taps on the wooden door frame. You could think that’s brave or you could think that’s stupid. Of course a piece of glass falls and smashes on the slats of the floor.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

Abi turns around, but can see only the top of the person’s head. She’s bent over trying to pick up the glass. Such a useless thing to do. Makes Abi feel sorry for her. But the thin hair on the top of her head makes Abi feel even more. There is something very sorry about a balding woman. Then the woman looks up and Abi can see that she was so wrong about the eyes. They are steadfast.

Such an odd old word, and perfect for these eyes that are clear and do hold Abi fast. They’re a bit unnerving, really. Abi feels grateful that the rest of this woman is soft and round. Otherwise those eyes would be too much.

The glass falls between the boards and spins to the water below.

No one answered the door, says the woman. So I thought I’d come around to the back.

She was going to say yard, wasn’t she?

You knocked on the front door? How brave after all.

She looks embarrassed. I tried the window, too. A bit.

She means she had to pound. Heck, if she broke it, he’d never notice.

The television was on, she says.

Full blast.

The traffic is very loud. So she did see him, there in his chair. Those eyes wouldn’t miss a thing. She doesn’t have to defend him, though, does she? With her face all twisted, as if she has to feel badly for him?

But the traffic is loud, so loud that sometimes late at night, if a high-speed car comes chasing around the curve, Abi braces herself: this is it, this time it will come through the front wall.

The woman says nothing about Dad in his chair. Instead, she looks around. Could be nice if it was fixed up a bit, no? Did she notice the decrepit car bench seat on the small front porch? The peeling paint on the windowsills? I think it’s beyond that. Uh-oh. The eyes are suddenly even more clear as she looks