Free What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey Page A

I, red-faced and with bulging eyes, stood in the silver stream of light, breathing raggedly.
    “Sweet jeezes!” groaned Mother, and staggered back against the windowsill. Tearing out the door, I never looked back.
    Nothing was ever said about it. Not by Gran, Dad, or Mom. But Mother didn’t come the next day to sip tea or hot toddies with Gran. And when she did come, that wariness was foremost in her eyes when she looked at me, and her lips barely touched my cheek after she listened to my prayers that evening and kissed me good night.
    “I’m going to be a traveller,” I kept offering from my pillow by way of atonement. Getting nothing of the usual smiles of encouragement, I strained to touch her hand, wanting to avow my innocence, that I hadn’t been trying to spook her in the graveyard; had simply been playing dead, was all, and likewise, hadn’t meant to frighten her in the abandoned house. But Mother’s ghastly reaction when Chris and I rose from the grave like that, and then her staggering with fright at the sight of me inside the haunted house, and then never yelling at me for what I’d done or speaking a word of it to Gran or Dad, and her staying away from Gran’s like that—she’d never stayed away from Gran’s before, not even when Chris was sick or the baby was sick did she stay away from Gran’s—well, all these things measured so big somehow that my voice felt like a whisper in a windstorm, my innocence a matter of no consequence next to Mother’s fright.
    Now, seating myself on the edge of the hospital sofa, I touched my mother’s slender white hand resting on her lap, wondering how much I had contributed to its pallor. For it hadn’t been an easy fit, the coming together of me and Gran in Mother’s house. Wonderful, Father promised that last day in Cooney Arm as I reluctantly packed my bag, it would be wonderful—all of us eating and sleeping beneath the one roof finally, being a real family. And there would be a real school with real friends other than my brothers, and everything would be nice, he promised, smoothing my hair and kissing my face. But I felt his weightiness in the manner in which he held me so tight, as though I were a pillow for his own fears. And so’s not to burden him more I let him believe that I believed him, and started packing my room.
    Despite my wretchedness over leaving Gran’s house, it did feel like a real family that first day, pushing off from the shores of Cooney Arm, huddling towards each other, watching the beach, the meadow, falling away from us. And it was a moment that gave a good start to our all living together, for we’d been kind to each other those first few weeks, everyone helping the other unpack, and touching and speaking to each other gently as though we’d each been bruised by the one falling rock. And it suited me fine in the days to come that Mother was always hovering over Chris, fixing his hair, fixing his collar—mostly for the love of touching him, I always felt—for it was Father I coveted. Many times in Cooney Arm I pretended that Father belonged to me and Mother belonged to Chris, and that we all watched over Gran and Kyle, making for the perfect halves of the one family.
    Perhaps—as when Dad had halved his house in order to launch it from Cooney Arm—if the house had remained divided, allowing for each unit of this perfect family to remain on its own shelving, it might not have fallen in on itself—at least where me and Mother were concerned. But the house was already formed when I entered it, with Mother its crossbar, and Dad and the boys—and now me and Gran, too— forming her framework. In Gran’s house it was me who’d been foremost and centre, polishing its floors and windows since I’d been big enough to drag around a broom. And from the time I could swing an axe I was chopping kindling, lugging wood, and stogging that old stove so full that it singed the air with heat whenever Gran needed to bake bread, make soup,