Spectral Evidence

“Do you guise?” she asked me, a moment later. Then explained, spurred by my obvious bafflement: “Put on a face, I mean—make masks, pretend.”

“Like...play dress-up, is that it? or like for Hallowe’en?”

“Aye, that: all Hallows. Samhain Night.”

“Well, sure, I guess. Don’t you?”

“Aye, ever. We call it the glamour.”

“The glamour?”

“So I said.”

Leaf and I played for what didn’t seem like hours, but when I realized the sun was going down, I started back. “You could come for dinner,” I offered, not actually knowing if that would be okay with my grandmother or not. But she just shook her shaggy head, solemnly.

“I’m wanted home,” she said. “And besides...no, better not.”

“You can come anytime,” I said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Or you, up here.”

“I’m starting school soon. Will I see you there?”

“Not too likely.”

“...Tomorrow, then. Here.”

She laughed again. “Aye,” she said. “If I don’t see you, first.”

—

You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this, no doubt. Like, what’s the damn point, Nuala? And then you maybe remember what I let slip about my mother, back there—what I grazed over, more like, without explanation—and think, annoyed: More about that, that’s what I’d like to know. Not all this backwoods Stand By Me crap—“it was the best of summers, it was the worst of summers...” I mean, Jesus.

Well, at the time, for me, my mother had already disappeared. None of us would know anything more until six months later, when two nice officers from the Ontario Provincial Police came asking whether or not we’d had contact with her since a month previously. We were as surprised as anybody else to discover she’d apparently left that boyfriend of hers the same way she’d left us, except far more precipitately: without warning, in the middle of the night, leaving all of her stuff behind. None of which kept the OPP from making him their primary suspect; he had a record, after all, though most of it was for minor drug charges and public intoxication.

A year after that, some hikers exploring the fens around Chaste found her purse nestled high in a tree. Inside was her wallet, most of her hair and a few of her teeth, fresh enough to get DNA from the pulp and roots. My mother’s boyfriend was arrested, protesting vociferously. The Crown argued that he probably threw her down a Hell Hole, of which there are several in Chaste’s vicinity, though why he didn’t do the same with her purse was never explored. That they found a thriving grow-op inside his garage probably didn’t help.

He’s been in jail for over ten years now, up at the Kingston Pen. I was asked to make a victim’s statement at his first parole hearing, but I told them it would upset me too much, which they accepted. I was later informed that he did not, in fact, make parole, because he’d been caught multiple times holding drugs for other inmates.

These are the facts. The truth, so far as I’ve since been able to figure it, is rather more slippery, and difficult to prove—as it often is. But here, in particular...

Much like beer brewed in eggshells, what came next is definitely odd enough to merit comment, no matter how old you might be.

—

At school I soon fell in with a little group of kids my age. Still, I always found a reason to sneak off and meet up with Leaf, at least a couple days a week. She showed me paths I could never find again on my own, taking us all around the area: to the Lake, the dumps out back of the Sidderstane cannery, even that overgrown ghost village by the Dourvale Shore my new friends talked about in whispers. one afternoon in October, we sat together inside a saltbox house whose interior had fallen to ruin, leaving only the outermost portions: four windowless walls, crooked and rickety, held together mainly with vines. Two trees grew up through the middle, where the floor used to be, and their branches made a sort of roof.

“And where’s she now?” Leaf asked.

“Don’t know,” I replied. Then added, quickly, as though to convince myself: “Don’t much care, either. She never bothered to call since we got here, never even bothered to write...I mean, not like she doesn’t know where we are. She just doesn’t give a heck, so screw her.”

Leaf nodded. “Mothers shouldn’t leave,” she said. “It’s not right.”

I laughed, bitter. “I’m okay without one, I guess,” I said. “So, what about your Mom? She nice?”

“Oh, I love her dearly. Her, my brothers and sisters, our cousins...”

“No Dad?”