The South End

I hoped whoever dared him to jump faced the consequences. Maybe there was more than one. A gaggle. A coven. A murder. They all stood on deck in various degrees of drunkenness. One of them even filmed it on their phone and gave it to the news: Kevin Newland, alone in the black ocean, its secrets circling beneath, ever closer, the frigid water sobering him to the reality of his situation; the cruise ship drifting away, its light growing fainter with every frantic minute. His hope would have exhausted along with his body. A lonely, cruel death. The Bedford police released a statement that the Bahamian authorities were putting every resource into finding the Canadian star athlete teen lost at sea. Boats, helicopters, drones. Until they called it off. Until. 

Nothing ever happened in Bedford, they said. Until it did. Until. Except it did, all the time. I read the paper every day looking for news on Lucy. The day they called the search off, there were two stories about Kevin, one about the Thrift Store bake sale to help send the peewee team to Toronto to see the Leafs play the Blackhawks, and one about the fire at the old Miller farm. Nothing about Lucy. Not long before Kevin Newland jumped into the sea and all the king’s horses, et cetera, my cousin Lucy fell through a Lucy-sized hole in the ground, and we never saw her again.

The day before Kevin Newland’s funeral, we went back as a family to the RCMP station. The South End was quiet. Sad houses and sad cars. There was only one way out of the South End, Walkins Road, and despite all the growth everywhere else in Bedford, it remained wild grassland that seemed to grow more and more every day, like Bedford was trying to push the South End away. 

Downtown was sleeping except for the coffee places. Laura’s Coffee had a line-up out the door for the cinnamon buns, and the Tim Horton’s drive-through was full. There was talk of a Starbucks coming soon.

Grandpa wouldn’t go into the RCMP station, so he stayed in the car like a getaway driver. He had gone to residential school— like my mom—and didn’t spend any more time with the Law than he had to. My mom went in with us and Auntie, Lucy’s mom. There were no windows. Mom always left a window in the house open, even when it was damn cold. I think she wanted to know she could get out if she had to. It was so bright inside. There was a low hum that came from either the lights or the engine of the Law, hidden somewhere beneath the floor.

Auntie and Mom went to the desk, and us kids took a seat on the cold plastic chairs. On the side table were some Highlights magazines and a colouring book, but no crayons. I turned the pages in my magazine, stopping on Double Check, two pictures side-by-side that looked identical at first glance. The game was to spot the differences between the two pictures. This one was a birthday party. In the first picture, there were three red balloons. In the second picture, there were only two. In the first picture, the birthday boy was holding a present without a bow. In the second picture, the present had a big white bow. In the first picture, a little girl was standing by the tall birthday cake. In the second picture, she was gone. Maybe that’s where Lucy was, I thought, in a second Bedford like this one but different. I looked under my chair. Maybe the second Bedford was upside down which was why I had never seen it.

She wasn’t under there, but I did see her on the wall. Her photo was on a poster with a dozen or more native kids and women. MISSING. Most of the kids were smiling in their pictures, but Lucy looked serious like she knew where this photo would end up. A lot of the posters were curled at the edges and yellowed. Lucy’s was fresh and crisp. 

Auntie was crying. The Law Woman said there was no update to give, no new leads. Auntie grew huge, puffed up by her voice until I thought she would burst through the walls. Mom went up there but couldn’t make her small again. Law Men picked her up even though she was so big and said they were taking her to calm down, and she wasn’t under arrest. My Mom started to get big, and Mike started crying. I took him outside to sit with Grandpa in the car, and Carol and Cassie followed. Grandpa let us work the windshield wipers and listen to whatever we wanted to on the radio while we waited for Mom to bring Auntie out. 

On the day of Kevin Newland’s funeral, Mom asked me later to go get some groceries for Auntie, so I rode my bike, taking a shortcut to Archer’s Foods, which passed by the St. Anne’s Church. The parking lot was full. People parked along both sides of the road and walked as they did for the ball games in the summer up at Agassie Fields. I got a weird feeling in my belly, magnetic-like because it pulled me into the church. It felt like I was a part of something, and this is what this something did. It mourned. Behind the church, a bank of dark clouds bubbled on the horizon because when someone like Kevin died in the movies, even the sky was sad, and everyone walked with black umbrellas to the grieving person’s house to eat neat little triangle sandwiches and say they were sorry. They brought flowers and cards, and food. Until.

There weren’t any open seats, so I stood at the back amidst the throng of latecomers. 

Why didn’t they just drop anchor? 

Because at that speed, it would’ve torn the ship apart, dumbass.

Such a shame. Whole life ahead of him. Wasn’t supposed to be this way.

I saw him play in that game against Breckenridge. Supernatural. 

They should name the gym after him.

This was the second time I had been inside the church. When I was little, I found a dead fox out on Walkins. The way it was eaten away offended me, so I buried it. They did that for dead people in movies, so why should animals not get the same treatment? I made a little cross out of sticks because I thought that was a symbol for dead things, so imagine my confusion when I went to church for the first and only time—after a sleepover at my friend Tommy’s, I went with his family to not seem bad—and there was the giant cross. I couldn’t understand why people would come every Sunday just to sit and celebrate death. Now, there Christ was, behind Father Elgin, more divine than the fox. Nothing had eaten any of him. 

Father Elgin talked for a while, so much more about God than Kevin. I wondered whose funeral it was. The crowd nodded in unison, undulating waves. I saw them around town, buying groceries, putting gas in their cars, waving to each other as they jogged across the street to MacNeill’s for a pack of smokes and a scratch and win, just doing their daily thing. Until. Some of them cried now, all of them dressed in clothes reserved for sitting under Christ, different from the clothes they’d wear to a party, I imagined. There would be more colour at a party. Colour at a funeral was like cursing in the church. I didn’t have Christ-sitting clothes, just my jeans and the faded Black Sabbath t-shirt that used to belong to my cousin Mac. 

Kevin and I went to different schools, and I only met him once. A bunch of us were out on a Friday, roaming the night after seeing a movie. I had on the new runners that I’d saved for months mowing grass, heaving garbage, and cleaning up scrap. They were impossibly white with a shock of red on them. I walked as carefully as I could because I didn’t want them to get dirty. Tommy said we were close to Kevin’s house, and we didn’t have anything better to do, so we knocked on the door. Kevin was downstairs in his room, painting. He was listening to music that seemed to match the painting like the songs had colour, and it wasn’t enough to hear them. You had to see them too. He kind of paid attention to us, laughing at the odd joke or saying yeah or uh huh, but he kept on painting, the songs filling up a wide canvas.

I came back from the bathroom, and everyone had left already. My shoes were gone. The ones left for me by the door were way too small and had unicorns on them. Lucy. Kevin let me borrow a pair of his from a closet full of them and walked with me to find everybody. He asked me what it was like at the other school. He’d only been in the gym to beat the crap out of our team at basketball. I told him it was fine. I hadn’t been to his school either, but it had been repainted the previous spring and had a new electronic sign out front.

We found them at the playground. Lucy was on the merry-go-round, scuffing the toes of my new shoes in the dirt to slow herself down. I yelled at her and pulled the shoes off of her right there on the merry-go-round. Kevin just waited for his shoes, said bye to everyone, and went back to finish his painting. Lucy sulked the whole way home. Maybe if I let her have the shoes, she could’ve run out of whatever place she was in. 

"That's the thing," Father Elgin said, "about grief. You can do it at a distance. You can support your loved ones, your children, your peers. You can grieve by talking or without having to talk to anyone. But the thing is, there's no one to talk to at times like this. There is no one to talk to about things like grief but God.”

I hadn’t tried talking to God. If anyone knew where Lucy ended up after falling through the Lucy-sized hole, it would be God, I supposed. I tried talking to Lucy. Not like Auntie, though. One night she was out back of her place, screaming for Lucy like she was late for dinner, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t answer me either.  

I closed my eyes and talked to God. Hey God, it’s me. Jonah. We haven’t talked before. Have you seen Lucy? You would know if you had. She has pigtails that aren’t quite right because she insists on doing them herself, and she laughs a lot, but she also has sad eyes like Grandpa. Have you seen her? 

Everyone was singing. I opened my eyes, but Lucy wasn’t there. I hadn’t thought about the upside-down world, the one from Double Check in the Highlights magazine. There would be another church, but there would be differences. Maybe Lucy was at that church with the people in town. The cross would be upside down—that would be one of the differences—so all the death had poured out of it. It would be a party. Everyone would be wearing colourful clothes and singing a happy song because Lucy had come back. She would be smiling, her pigtails looking neat because Auntie had done them. Everyone would gather around Lucy to tell stories and keep her warm and safe until it was time to go home. Until. 

Auntie's front door was unlocked, and she was asleep on the couch. I put the groceries away, and before I left I drew the curtains to the picture window that looked out at the road. There would probably be one of those sad processions of black cars like in the movies. I didn't want her to see that if she woke up.