It took my dad three days to discover we were gone. Sometimes my mother would leave dishes on the stove for my father to heat up, or he would order takeout if she was busy at church. With the upcoming first confessions, he thought she would be spending most of her time there. He only noticed on the Sunday when he went to Resurrection and didn’t see her or me in the choir. My mom told me this after she talked to him for the first time. He had called the police.
On the fridge was the church bulletin, held up with alphabet magnets like one of my pictures or report cards. He found it on the Sunday and searched it for a mother-daughter retreat or other function he hadn’t heard about. He read the whole thing three times and handed it to the officers as possible places to look for us. They asked him some questions, told him that Father Marcus had also disappeared, and that maybe finding one would help them to find the others. My father offered them some beer and they read the bulletin together. Under “Obituaries and Announcements” was my mother’s short and sweet article: “Rebecca Creely has moved on to greener pastures. She leaves behind her husband and asks him not to worry.” One of the policemen pointed it out. My father hadn’t noticed. She had used her maiden name.
Apparently he continued on fairly normally. Except for the chuckles when he walked by, my father’s routine didn’t change at all. He called me after a couple weeks, or I should say I did, and I told him that we were happy here. He said he was happy. I asked him if he was eating okay. He answered that the church was sending him food for the next while; he was well taken care of and had so many casseroles and cookies he would probably have to throw some to the birds. I told him I loved him. He said he was going to read the paper.
One of the women who baked for my father was a widow. Her husband had died in a car accident or something. They don’t talk about it much. She and my father were married within two years and the chuckles lessened. They were joined together by Father Brown one year before he retired. They replaced the other priest with a Canadian. My father calls and asks me the same questions he did six years ago. I tell him I skip rope and love to sing. I tell him I go to church.
None of us do. We still pray, but don’t go to church. I have a stepbrother from a previous marriage of Father Marcus’s. His name is Brio and he has the room beside me. We are learning how to cook together and go to the same school. I have let him touch my breasts the way we are taught to hold tomatoes under the tap. I know I should stop this, I’m only fifteen, but I don’t know if I can stop myself, and here, I don’t have to go to confession.
Wind Chimes
My father, my uncle and I, and two cousins who still lived in town, one nephew barely a man, carried the coffin down the main road to the Anglican graveyard. The plain oak casket, void of wreaths save a white rosebud cluster on each end, seemed too light on my shoulders. Though she wasn’t a heavy woman, she trod on the ground as if she were, and I fought back the urge to check inside the closed hatch to make sure she was actually dead. That night I woke my wife in tears and told her my mother was trapped, suffocating with stray cats and little boys twisted in car crashes — all buried alive, and I was supposed to be among them. A fever of 102 degrees, my wife informed me later. I shook as if caught in a bitter wind.
Though my mother wasn’t an Anglican, she’d remarked frequently on the beauty of the dark iron gate and the white oaks sheltering the local Anglican church’s graveyard, so my father thought it would be the best resting place for her. But she belonged to a different religion and was a congregation of one before I was born and became her disciple. She collected wind chimes. Dozens of wind chimes hung along the eavestroughs of our roof, clanging against each other. Some stayed up all year and some, frequently depending on colour, were reserved for particular seasons: rich orange and bright yellow for autumn, metals like steel or silver for winter, mauves and blues for spring, and whites or pinks for summer. The chimes all had secret hidden names, my mother claimed, names she couldn’t divulge to me out of respect, though I often asked her and she seemed pleased, tousling my hair or pinching my side playfully, when I tried to guess, offering up everything from Sally and Larry to Honey-Eyes or Acorn-Breath or Bee-Beauty. If you listen, she said, they will sing to you. You will understand. My mother believed death was twofold. “Two tunes for each soul,” she instructed. “One is for us and one is for the dead. Only they can hear that one.” The wind chimes’ songs filled me with a distant, unreachable ache, bearable only because she was beside me, my head in her lap on the porch.
Dead was a word I could understand, since I could spell it and use it in conversation. Uncle Billy is dead. Grandma Barnes and Great-Aunt Elisabeth are dead. But the first death I ever witnessed was the death of our dog. The collie, a stray that had latched on to our family before I was born, had no official name, just “Girl.” My mother said we didn’t need to name her, or put her on a leash. “Just as she was free to come, she must be free to leave.” Secretly, I called her Raisin, because she loved to eat raisins from my hands. When she got hit by the truck, I was astonished at how quick death was, how ordinary.
I watched my father from the driveway, a large man who moved slowly, kicking grey pebbles onto the street, the line between the beginning of the road and the place of death, a line of black tar I refused to cross. Raisin had been split open from her neck down to her tail by the impact of the front wheels. Her fur was matted with blood, her nose crushed to the point of disappearance. Incisors sliced through her cheeks. The trail of blood testified she had travelled several feet. She was worse than lifeless to me; she was shameful, punctured with tar and dirt, a damp banana peel, probably from the truck’s wheels, smashed across her stomach. Her body smelled like rotten milk. I counted three legs. Father scraped her up with a shovel into a trash bag, and carried her into Corner’s Field, a mile west from our home. I hoped the neighbours weren’t watching.
A silent man in general, my father’s silence during this affair was typical, unlike my mother, who could be heard wherever you happened to be in the house, humming and making rhythms with her hands on tabletops or feet on foot boards, swinging pots and pans, or ringing the small gold antique bell in the living room that she inherited from Great-Aunt Elisabeth. For my father, you walked with the dead only for the purpose of burying them. You kept your hands out of the matter after that.
Glistening with sweat on this humid evening, my mother reminisced about the dog’s fur, how it had a rough edge when you brushed her backside, how she licked water from the bowl starting from the outside rim, how she would jump at the maple trees when the leaves rustled. My mother drilled holes into some pennies with my father’s tools and strung them together with yellow twine. A metal coat hanger held the dozen pennies just below the green awning, directly above our wicker chairs where Raisin had loved to curl up at night. My mother made as many wind chimes as she bought. Her handmade ones were always simple as the penny-chime, formed with items from around our house: cheap jewellery beads or mismatched cutlery, odd screws and long dangling earrings, pigeon feathers or pine combs from our lawn. But she handled them with as much care as she did store- or flea-market-bought ones of silver or blown glass, with brass or crystal weights, oil-painted tops, or intricately whittled wood. The homemade chimes were my favourites because my mother would preach to me as she made and hung them.
“Take this one here,” she said, words slightly muffled by the twine she held in her mouth, one arm stretched out, the other struggling with scissors to snip it, chin jutting toward the sparkling stones excavated from an abandoned aquarium. One of her prettiest, the gold and silver flecks catching the light underneath the porch, it swayed easily in the wind, two gold Christmas reindeer bells tied underneath the lowest stones, an ocean-blue plastic Tupperware lid punctured with holes. “Your Uncle Danny once tried to rescue a little girl who fell through a melting lake near his house in Saskatchewan. Yes, there are lakes in Saskatchewan. Hills, too. He saw her arm rise above the water as he drove by. He jumped straight into the winter cold of that water. Unfortunately, she had already drowned.” I’d heard the story before, but didn’t mind. My mother had a story for each wind chime. She waved for me to take the scissors from her, and I did, imagining what it must have been like for Uncle Danny, who I had never