A Girl Named Janie

Ever since Bluesy died, it was just Martha and the girl. She didn’t want her anymore, but what to do, what to do. Five months without Bluesy, if the girl disappeared too, maybe the superintendent would ask questions, maybe the girl would cry and kick up a fuss, maybe better to leave well enough alone.

“Do you have them all?” Martha asked for the tenth time, to be sure the girl knew how mad she was about what all of them damned books.

“Yes, mama.”

“Don’t do that.” Martha tweaked some skin inside the girl’s arm; she didn’t want people on the bus to hear the girl call her mama. Even though Bluesy had said she should be the girl’s mother if she wanted, and he’d be her father, Martha didn’t want that, she’d wanted her own baby didn’t she, and even though she didn’t know exactly how long she’d been on this godforsaken planet, there weren’t enough years in her head that she could be the girl’s mother.

“All the books?” Martha squeezed a little harder, a reminder that if she lied, or if the girl ever stole money to buy stupid books again there’d be trouble, lots of it.

The girl nodded until her glasses tipped off the end of her nose.

They sat in their regular seats on the bus, which they picked up at the bottom of their 28-storey apartment building. Martha wrapped up in Bluesy’s big coat and the girl already too big inside Martha’s old rain jacket. Bluesy had said it was better the girl was registered at a school aways away from the apartment, to scatter suspicion, but the girl should never take the bus on her own. He’d screwed in a mailbox to an empty building beside the bakery on Dundas Street West, painted the last name on the outside, and she picked up the mail once a week.

Eleven going on twelve, the girl needed an excessive amount of stimulation for someone who didn’t speak for the first year. She’d stolen forty dollars from the emergency tin on Tuesday morning, spent every penny of it at the book fair. The girl would get all that money back or end up dead like Bluesy.

Mrs. Mirelli, the stout sullen secretary from Junction Public School got on at Runnymede Road. She pressed her cane into the foot of the young man who sat in one of the front seats. As he stood, he pulled an orange foam earphone away from his head, said sorry before returning to the rhythmic head bobbing.

Martha averted her gaze. If her eyes connected with Mrs. Mirelli’s again, she feared what might happen. Despite her grumpy nature, Mrs. Mirelli had skin like mashed potatoes, smelled of armpits and a fabric softener, which made Martha feral when she first met her five years ago. It was like the devil had taken hold of her, Bluesy said, try as he might to hold her back, Martha had to, just had to press her nose into Mrs. Mirelli’s armpits. The woman had fallen into her chair which rolled right back into a filing cabinet, knocking a plant off the top, spilling dry soil and terracotta chips all over the office floor.

“Have you got the bag that came with the books?”

“Yes, ma – Martha.”

The girl opened the plastic Scholastic bag for Martha to check the books, and she smelled it. The familiar metallic stink of blood and butt crack.

Martha snatched the bag from the girl and stared down at the beige uniform pants. Clearly the girl had stuffed some amount of toilet paper down there, but she’d bled right through.

Mrs. Mirelli held out her hand for the girl’s assistance when they reached the bus stop. It wasn’t that she couldn’t stand on her own, Mrs. Mirelli found it difficult to flip her fat hip over the steel bar and needed a good tug.

“Are you not coming with me?”

On a snowy day last winter, Mrs. Mirelli had asked the girl to walk with her down the road toward the school, since then she expected the girl to be her crutch.

“We’re going to the No Frills first,” Martha said.

“I forgot my lunch.” The girl shrugged, helped Mrs. Mirelli to her feet.

Besides Martha the girl was the only other one to pick up her role in the improvised game of life. Bluesy had tested the girl every day for a week before he agreed to send her to school. What if a policeman asks if she’s a lost girl, what if someone says she looks like someone they know, or maybe if they said your name is Jessica Fleming instead of what it is.

I’m not going to tell them anything about anything, Bluesy. I promise.

Her quick thinking made her Bluesy’s favourite, but it didn’t change her future. The future for girls like her was clear. When she bleeds, she leaves.

Martha closed her eyes, tried to find the direction forward inside the darkness. She cupped her hands over the light blue frames Bluesy bought at Walmart ten years ago.

“Are you coming?” Mrs. Mirelli insisted on holding her hand out to the girl again.

“Mrs. Mirelli, didn’t you hear me?” The girl said. “We’re going to No Frills.” The girl knew better than to insult Mrs. Mirelli’s hearing.

It didn’t matter how many years Mrs. Mirelli had clomped around the school like the Koolaid man’s whore wife, she needed to think they were friends. Martha squeezed the girl’s thigh, hard.

“You better not be late,” Mrs. Mirelli said.

Bluesy got rid of the girls when they reached puberty because the men on the other side of the VHS camera didn’t like girls who stank of blood. Except Martha of course because she was the most special girl in the entire world, and he said he’d hang on to her forever because she made a piss stain look like sunshine.

What was she supposed to do now? What would she do if she didn’t have the girl to take care of?

When most of the bus emptied at the coffee shop, Martha held the girl’s hand, murmured that everything was going to be okay, but she didn’t mean it. Martha needed to get the girl back to the apartment, wash her up and send her home.

“Are you mad at me?” the girl cried, swiped her nose with the back of her bent wrist.

“Stop crying, stupid.”

This is all Bluesy’s fault. He’d promised the girl was the last one, and if he was still here, he’d send the girl away and they’d have their own baby girl, for real, and he’d unfold that map on the kitchen table, circle all the cities in Canada, she’d close her eyes and drop a finger and wherever it landed that’s where they’d go to live forever. No more girls, no more video camera.

He promised.

She didn’t mean to stab him in the eye. When he opened the map, she’d been imagining the skin stretching above her belly button, she decorated a nursery in her head, counted all the money she saved that she would use to buy new Corelle dishes, ones that matched. Instead, he’d pointed to Kenora, said there was a girl there whose mother choked back cock like she was in an eating contest, twice he almost had the kid in his cab, this close he’d said.

“You promised the girl was the last one,” Martha said.

He slapped her so hard that her face smacked the freezer door, the yellow butcher knife on the counter smiled at her like one of those faces on the outside of a Happy Meal.

She was gonna tell him she was sick and tired of him smacking her like that; with a baby coming he couldn’t do it no more, but he bent down to untie his boots, and the butcher knife went right in his eye.

“We have to go to the Shoppers to get tampons,” Martha said.

“What are tampons?”

A man sitting behind the bus driver looked up from his book and Martha gave him the mind your own business or I’ll punch your fucking lights out stare.

Martha rang the bell, and they got off at Pacific Avenue. They were in and out of the drugstore in time to jump on the westbound bus.

“Why can’t I go back to school?” the girl plonked down on the seat, and all Martha could think about was the bloody toilet paper pressing up against her body.

“We have to clean you up.” Martha punctuated each whispered syllable.

They were halfway back to the apartment when the girl hiccoughed, and then snivelled out, “You aren’t going to send me away, are you?”

The girl only watched one other girl go home but the dramatic exit had reinforced her good behaviour, and she’d gotten into her crate every night after supper without Bluesy having to give her the hairy eyeball. She still slept in there sometimes even though Martha said she could sleep on the couch if she wanted.

It didn’t matter what the girl said or how many buckets of tears came out of her eyes, Martha’s brain had gone flippidy-doo-da-day and whenever her eyes landed on a spot on the bus, she couldn’t see a thing. If she breathed any faster the bus would run out of air. Her hands itched so bad she chomped on her palms like a corncob.

The girl smelled of dirty crotch, fabric softener and armpits.

Bluesy didn’t die straight away. He pulled the knife out, plugged up the hole with his dirty socks and wrapped his head with a skipping rope. The girl had been reading all her big girl books from the school library tucked in the crate beside her. The girl never said a thing for the three days he moaned on the couch. She knew how to make tea and open a can of beans, which was a good thing since Martha didn’t move from the chair across from Bluesy. The girl fed Martha maple flavoured baked beans on toast and they waited for Bluesy to die, instead of watching Home Improvement or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

When he finally stopped breathing, Martha told the girl he was still sleeping. After she’d dropped the girl at school, she returned home, cut him up in the bathtub with the yellow butcher knife and a hammer. After she wrapped him in garbage bags, packed him into a suitcase that she found outside the garbage chute, she removed the mattress from the bed. There were six plastic bags filled with secret papers he’d hidden in the box spring. She shoved those in between his two feet.

“I can do it,” the girl said, feet spread between the toilet seat and the pedestal sink.

The girl’s voice was a distant incomprehensible noise, like the radio stuck between two stations. She went from clothed to naked, from dirty to clean, from holding the applicator with the string dangling while reading the paper insert, to washing her hands at the bathroom sink. The girl had plugged herself up without any help from Martha.

Martha hadn’t replaced the shower curtain. A half empty pack of toilet paper still sat in the middle of the tub. The yellow rug hugging the toilet bowl, flipped at the corner revealed a blood stain on the rubber backing she hadn’t been able to scrub out.

“Can I go back to school?”

Martha shook her head and took the girl by the hand.

“You said you’d always protect me, that you’d always be my mama,” the girl said, “Martha please.”

Bluesy said all that, not Martha. Martha wasn’t even her real name.

“You have to go home,” Martha said.

“They’re dead,” the girl said, “My family died. In the fire.”

The girl was right. The girl’s house burned to the ground, but only after Bluesy had done the old switcheroo.

With Bluesy stuffed inside, Martha had dragged the suitcase with one wheel all the way to the tracks. She’d squeezed through the opening in the wire fence, trundled over the rails until she pushed the case down the embankment on the other side. It was raining that night, and every few inches, the dirt she’d dug up turned to mud and streamed into the hole. Just before the first morning commuter train screeched past, Bluesy’s grave had finally been flattened. Martha scattered garbage and pebbles all over him.

Now here she was digging him up.

“Don’t leave me,” the girl said, “I’m sorry I forgot the books.”

The books. Had the girl left the books on the bus? At Shoppers?

“Please mama. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t care about those books. Martha hadn’t even cared this morning when she made a stink about it. She only told her she had to return them because that’s what Bluesy would have done. They had plenty of money. Men from all over – mostly other truck drivers and certain types he could spot from a hundred miles away – sent cheques and wire transfers because after Bluesy sold them about the videotapes, he told them that he’d tell their wives about their perverted proclivities if they didn’t pay the monthly membership fee. There was over twenty grand in the bank account.

Martha banged on the crate with the broom. That’s how Bluesy trained the little girls to stop their sobbing. Never took more than a week or so before they liked it better in there than in the living room with Bluesy and his video camera.

The girl climbed into her crate.

Martha waited for the last commuter train to pass before she started digging with the serving spoons from the kitchen drawer. It took her two hours of constant jabbing and scraping before she saw the handle of the suitcase, then another half hour until she could wiggle it free. She wanted the plastic bags. Inside there’d be notes about the girl. She emptied the slimy, stinky bags onto the grass, with her digested dinner after that, and she shoved as many of the papers and photographs into her pockets as she could. She left Bluesy out because it didn’t matter if they found him, not anymore.

Back at the apartment, the girl was asleep, curled into the corner of her extra-large dog crate. The bedroom walls and the window were covered from corner to corner with thick soundproofing eggcrate foam. An extension cord ran from the hall to the room, a tall lamp illuminated the space. There were three other dog crates, empty, stacked in the opposite corner. One of them had been Martha’s. She knew which was hers because of the red ribbon knotted around the catch.

Before the sun came up the next morning, Martha banged the crate with the broom and opened the door. Martha had spread out the fake red and white cards on the kitchen table, the health cards, the birth certificates, all the driver’s licenses with dead men’s names. When she closed her eyes, she could see the girl’s back, her blackened arms and legs wrapped around Bluesy as he entered the apartment six years ago. He’d saved her from a fire in Emeryville, he said. When the girl’s mother refused to play ball, he doused the house with gasoline, but only after one of the video club members gave Bluesy a body from the morgue he’d tucked into the girl’s bed.

Martha didn’t have a mother, he said, and he didn’t have to light her house on fire. She’d once overheard Bluesy on the phone tell a member that the easiest girl he got was the one in Peterborough, that he’d bought a wife for a 2-4 of Molson Canadian and a few hundred bucks American.

“It’s you,” the girl said, examining a photograph.

Martha snatched it from her hand, tucked the photo of her and her dad into the front of her dress.

“And Mabelle.” Another photo showed the last girl who went home, lying on a blue shag rug cuddling a giant grey poodle.

“Stop it,” Martha finally said, “keep your grimy hands to yourself.”

When Martha finally found what she was looking for, she dragged the girl out of her crate and folded a page of handwritten notes with two photographs paperclipped to the top into the back pocket of the girl’s green school bag. She stuffed the bag with all her clothes along with the box of tampons they bought yesterday.

After she emptied the bank account, Martha and the girl took the subway to Union Station. She bought a ticket for the first train to Windsor.

“When you get there, you have to tell the first police officer you see about Bluesy.”

“About how he saved me?”

“No stupid.”

Martha didn’t know when her tears started, but she’d rubbed the skin around her eyes raw, snot poured out of her nose and her mouth puckered like a thirsty crack in dry mud. The girl climbed on to the train, took the first seat, and put two hands on the window, pleading for Martha to not let her go. The whistle blew and Martha panicked. She jumped aboard, wrapped her arms around the girl, and pressed her nose into her neck, Vaseline and strawberry shampoo.

“I’ll never forget you,” Martha said.

Across the street from Union Station, taxicabs lined up outside the Royal York Hotel. She opened the back door of the first one.

“Will you drive me to Peterborough?”

“The city?” The driver threw an arm over the front bench seat and watched her counting out hundred-dollar bills.

“I’ll pay you two hundred dollars,” she said.

While the man drove, she examined the photographs, a faded Polaroid of a mother holding a baby. Bluesy had obliterated the woman’s face with a ballpoint pen. The woman wore a yellow t-shirt that said, Everything’s Fine in ’79, the mother’s hands gripping the baby’s toes, the white flabby flesh of her arms pressed against the baby’s legs. Another photo of a family outside a church, a young girl who knew the smell of the arm wrapped around her shoulders, who felt its weight, the warmth of the sun reflecting off her face, who believed a man when he said he’d drive her to see her mother, a year dead by then, a girl who didn’t like the sound of her father crying all day and night, who dreamed about coming back home to surprise him with her mother, not dead after all. A girl named Janie.