My phone rings, but I don’t pick it up. Derrick has left three messages already. He wants to talk things over. He doesn’t say that he’s sorry, and I can’t tell whether he wants to see me or make sure I don’t cause any shit for him. I’m still pissed off. And it pisses me off even more that I still want to see him.
“Whatcha doing?” Becca has wandered over to where I’m working on the fence. She reminds me of a girl at the first foster home I lived in. I was twelve, she was four. We shared a room, and sometimes she crawled into my bed in the middle of the night, just lifted up the covers and climbed in next to me. She was always gone by morning, usually leaving behind a wet spot that I got shit for. I never told them it was her. I didn’t care; they could do what they wanted to me, it wouldn’t make a difference. I was quickly learning how to not feel anything. But I knew she cried at night, I knew she missed the warmth of her mother. I was glad when they switched her to another home. Not because I didn’t want her around, but because I heard that the family was going to adopt her. So I was glad, and only a little jealous. I was learning not to get attached to anyone.
“I’m painting,” I answered.
“Why?”
Because the cops caught me tagging and thought it would be a good idea to teach me a lesson by giving me a load of fucking useless work to do.
“To make the fence pretty.”
“White isn’t pretty.”
I dip the brush into the tin again and squish it along the board. “White is the prettiest color.”
Becca squints at the fence. I can tell she thinks that’s a load of shit.
“Nah!” She laughs. “White isn’t even a color! How can it be pretty?”
I sweep the brush back and forth. The old peeling paint has left a texture on the wood beneath that I can only see if I look closely. The spray paint patterns have been covered, the bright colors of my dragonfly. They’re in the past. They’re still there, but now all the scraping, all the sanding, all the priming, has made a blank canvas. I step back and look at the work I’ve done. I’m starting to see what can be. “Well, white’s the prettiest color because it’s really all colors; it’s magic.”
She looks at me like I have two heads.
“If you look real close, and if you believe in magic, you’ll see them all in there. They’re enchanted, just waiting to break free. Red and orange and yellow, green’s in there, and enough blue to fill the sky. Even purple, like Marty’s flowers.” I shake my head at her. “White is the prettiest color because it can be anything.”
She leans toward the fence. “It’s magic?”
“You bet,” I reply dipping my brush back into the tin.
The little girl stands watching me for a moment. She turns and walks back to the picnic table, where her little backpack lies propped against one of the legs, and I think that I’ve lost her. But she opens the zipper and drops the plastic princess inside, closes it up, and snaps the buckled strap over the top. She turns back to me and reaches for the paintbrush.
“My turn.”
42
Elizabeth
The faint smell of cigarette smoke drifts in my window. I can hear Marty whistling as he walks through the courtyard.
“See you found a helper,” he says.
“It seems little girls, like boys, will also covet a thing when it’s difficult to attain,” is the reply.
I actually laugh out loud. Damn, she’s as smart as I thought. It feels good to laugh.
I can hear Marty, too, enjoying her reply, his laughter robust and full and round. “I think Tom Sawyer found better helpers. Yours has managed to get more paint on herself and the ground than on the fence.”
Her reply is simple. “Shit!”
The whistling resumes and then fades.
I slide the window shut and wrap myself in a woolen cardigan before opening the door of my room and stepping into the quiet hallway. The wolf follows. As I expect.
43
Morgan
I put the lid back on the paint can and hammer it shut. It’s getting dark. I’ve cleaned up most of the mess and fixed the drips of paint that pooled at the bottom of the fence, but Becca is another story. She managed to get a few spots of “magic” on her clothes, and her hand and arm won’t be clean anytime soon. It looks like she’s wearing a white glove. Mr. Androsky seemed to think it was funny, and his son just sighed and shrugged it off.
The paint can leaves a ring of white on the newsprint when I pick it up, and it circles an old photograph of a ship. The black print stares up at me, the headline reading, “Divers Find 1926 Wreckage of Steamer off Edward Island.” I put down the paint, my hand brushing across the faded image, the word Kelowna and the year 1921 scrawled in one corner. I know Edward Island. I sit on the sidewalk and read.
Thunder Bay—A group of sport divers from Minnesota discovered the long-lost wreck of the steamer SS Kelowna southeast of Edward Island on Porphyry Shoal Saturday during a search for another more recent wreck reported in that area. The Kelowna disappeared during an early winter storm in 1926.
The divers, Jack Huffman and Terry Fraser, are part of a group cataloging the shipwrecks of Lake Superior and Isle Royale. In an interview with the Chronicle Journal on Sunday, Huffman described their surprise at discovering the Kelowna.
“She went down without a trace almost 80 years ago and was believed to have run aground off Isle Royale,” said Huffman. “We’ve spent years looking for the wreckage, and it was only by chance that we were diving near the spot where she lay, looking for a more recent ship that ran aground on Magnet Island in the fifties.”
The Kelowna was built in England in 1921 and was owned by the Chicago-based shipping company Larkin and Sons. The freighter was designed for use on the Great Lakes and was powered by a thousand-horsepower steam engine, but also rigged with two masts. She carried diverse freight from Montreal up the Great Lakes to Thunder Bay.
“Story was they were making one last trip of the season, and got caught,” said Huffman. He explained that the Kelowna passed through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie on December 4 with a mixed cargo of papermaking machinery, fencing wire, shoes, foodstuffs, piping, and tar paper. Unfortunately a massive storm began hammering Lake Superior the next day, and the freighter was last seen steaming toward Isle Royale, heavily coated with ice. Neither the boat, nor any of the 22 passengers or crew, were seen again.
Huffman and Firth plan several more dives on the wreck over the next few weeks, hoping to discover the cause of the sinking and to document the wreckage.
The newspaper is dated September 18, one week before I first came to Boreal Retirement Home. Only days before Miss Livingstone’s brother disappeared and his boat washed ashore near Silver Islet, near Porphyry. Near where the Kelowna went down. This doesn’t feel like a coincidence.
I tear the article from the page, fold it, and tuck it into my pocket.