Border songs

42

MADELINE’S HEAD felt severed from her body. She had no awareness of time or place or even self. Her first fingerhold was recognizing Brandon’s voice spluttering through the phone, asking if she still lived in “the old Damant place.”
By the look of the dust-swirled air and the smoke-smeared ceiling, the answer was yes. Then she noticed her sweat and realized she’d overslept. The next thing he said came through remarkably clear, yanking her upright and making immediate, head-throbbing sense.
After hanging up, she tried desperately to connect Brandon’s words to reality and stumbled over clothes through the debris of another forgettable smoke-out. An enormous black fly slammed itself suicidally into a small windowpane. She peeled back the kitchen curtain and saw a Volvo hurtle past on Zero and then the feed truck across the ditch on the far side of Boundary. Beside it was the unmistakable silhouette of Brandon Vanderkool, slouching like a sunflower over some apple-faced man breaking his neck to talk up to him. And behind him, fanned out in formation and also staring up at him, were his three devout strays, the wiener dog, the little shepherd and the old Lab.
Shit! She could move only so fast without the vertigo kicking in. She pulled on some pants and stuffed clothes, books and pans into garbage bags, taking anything that was clearly hers. Everything else stayed. She guzzled from the tap and glanced at the wall clock. Five minutes had already whirled past. Two trucks roared along Zero, their backdraft shaking the house.
She reached into the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink for her large toiletries bag and panicked at its lack of heft, frantically unzipping it and staring inside at nothing. Then she clawed through shampoos, soaps and deodorants, but it wasn’t there. Had she moved it again? She checked every stash she’d ever used or even thought about—under the couch, in the duct behind the heating vent, in the cabinets above the fridge, behind the panel in the office closet. F*ck! She’d lost another six minutes. She had to get out now, now! She grabbed the three garbage bags and scurried barefoot from the house.
She stared at the smashed front-left panel of her Maxima, the cause of which she couldn’t pinpoint, and after looking east and west for Mounties—Brandon’s back to her—she sped down Zero and crunched into her father’s gravel as an angry face from last night floated through her head, shouting that she’d run a red right before he’d slid into her. She parked behind the fence and speed-dialed Fisher to give him one loud sentence: “A truck just fell into the goddamn tunnel you never told me about!” Then she ran to the sliding door on her father’s deck with a throat so dry it hurt.
A frenetic piano melody rang out from the basement while she drank from the faucet until she felt human again. She finally descended into the paint-fumed cellar, which was cluttered with canvases splashed with blacks, blues, yellows, golds, greens and browns all in similar swirling dashes, one horrific imitation after another of van Gogh’s famous last painting of a flock of blackbirds flying over farmlands into a menacing sky.
Her father choked, blushed and clutched his bony chest, his pinched face and spindly arms all so remarkably paint-splotched that he looked like a living rendition of the painting he was struggling to replicate. But from his stricken expression, Madeline realized she looked even worse.
He dropped his brush and swung his childlike arms around her, wet paint and all, her relief rising like anesthesia until she cried loud enough to compete with Glenn Gould’s desperate piano.


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