Juno
By Olivia Murphy-Major
There is a little dirt road they take on foot. A two-by-two line of children, the most responsible two up front, those who know the way. They go each day in the Fall and Spring. It is Spring now—perhaps the first calendar day of Spring, Elsie thinks. Elsie brings up the rear, her hands often on the shoulders of the two children in front of her, keeping them on track. “One, two, one, two,” she sometimes chants, to get them into the rhythm of their footsteps, until they spot a newt in need of rescue or a stick that must be thrown over the guard rail, and Elsie must try another tack. Her fear is that one day, all of them will disperse at the same moment, in different directions, and she’ll have to run and grab the slowest ones, gather them in her arms and hold tight, yell at the others in a tone that balances severity and love, and try to convince them to come back. This is a dream she has sometimes, and it has often led her to think (though she’d never admit it) about which child is most worth saving. If there was only one she could lunge at and keep from running into the woods, which would it be? Elsie doesn’t know.
When they arrive at the brook Elsie does a headcount—all fourteen (thank god). She locates her stump, which is higher up on the river bank, so she can watch the children poke around. The stump is damp, but Elsie does not mind. She ties her raincoat around her waist and sits, slouching, because there is no one to see her poor posture but the children, and the worst they can do is say something brutally honest about it.
The brook is at a healthy bubble from the snowmelt and the rain they had days ago. The air smells of moss, thawing earth, wet wood, and still has a cold bite to it. Elsie breathes deeply, as if gulping water. The children have made their groups—there are no enemies on this outing, because it is the first of the season, and there is too much to rejoice in. Sometimes the children arrange themselves into groups on either side of the brook and have a battle of words. This time, each group or pair putters around, picking up this or that, going about things civilly. Isla is the first to remember Elsie is there.
“Miss Elsie,” she says, pushing the hair from her face with her palm. “This is for you.”
Isla holds a small spring flower; a violet.
“Thank you, Isla,” Elsie says, taking the flower from her hand and smiling. They both admire it—the cool, purple petals, one still curled into the centre.
Elsie looks up and sees that the cold has made Isla’s nose run.
“Here,” Elsie says, and gathers up the fabric of her sleeve, holding it up to Isla’s nose and wiping away the moisture. Isla closes her eyes and leans her face closer to Elsie’s.
Later in the afternoon, Elsie watches the children from an adirondack chair in the school’s yard. She hears a car pull into the lot, and guesses that whomever it is will hear the children’s voices and come around back. Lucy, Isla’s mother, is the one who unlatches the gate and walks over to Elsie. She is wearing a blue sweater, and her hair is done up in a twist so that her neck is visible—long and pale, almost aristocratic, Elsie thinks, but settles on the word elegant instead. As she gets closer, Elsie notices dark circles beneath her eyes.
Elsie pulls up another adirondack chair, and Lucy sits. Isla is crouched in the corner of the yard, too preoccupied with a bug to notice that her mother is there. Elsie and Lucy address one another with hello, how are you, fine, thanks, and then they watch the children. One of the boys has taken a wheelbarrow from the shed, and he and another boy are taking turns wheeling one another around.
“I like that you aren't doing anything about that,” Lucy says, pointing toward the boys.
“Oh. Should I be? They seem alright.”
“No, I mean it, it’s low-stakes. If one of them gets hurt he learns something. Isla’s had other teachers who were very overbearing. It seems like you let them figure some things out on their own.”
Elsie smiles, but says nothing. She listens to the chatter of sparrows in the bushes.
Lucy lights a cigarette.
“I can't smoke around my daughter,” she says, then laughs. “Not this one, not Isla, my other older daughter. She’s quitting. To be a flight attendant. Apparently you can't smoke when you're locked in an airplane up in the sky at all hours of the day.”
Elsie laughs.
“Why, can’t they just crack a window at high altitude?” she jokes, and both of the women laugh. It feels good, Elsie thinks, to make jokes with an adult.
Isla notices her mother and comes running toward them with her hands cupped. Her long auburn hair streams behind her and she keeps her eyes fixed on her cupped hands as she runs. When she gets to them she breathes heavily and looks at her mother with a wide, gap toothed grin on her face. Her top two front teeth are missing, and as a trick at lunchtime, Isla often shoots water through the gap as if she were a whale.
“What’s that?” Lucy asks, gesturing toward Isla’s hands.
“A bug. I named it Juno, like the planet.”
Isla opens her hands just a crack to let both of them see. Inside is a narrow-bodied beetle with two black spots on its grey back. The bug rotates its antenna but is otherwise still.
“Juno isn’t a planet, honey, maybe you're thinking of Jupiter,” Lucy says, bending to put her cigarette out on the ground.
Because of its stillness, Isla has opened her hands so that only one hand holds the beetle, and with the other she pets the beetle’s back with her pointer finger.
“She likes it. Juno loves pets,” Isla says. She brings her face closer to study its markings. Lucy reaches forward and tucks a strand of Isla’s hair behind her ear, which is red from the cold and her running around.
The beetle makes a loud clicking noise that startles the three of them, and Isla grimaces as it leaps from her hands.
“No!” she yells, getting down on her hands and knees to pick up the bug again, but it jumps higher, farther away from her.
“Come here,” she pleads, but the bug is too fast. It leaps across the lawn and up against the wooden fence before it stops jumping and disappears into the grass. Isla pats her hands on the ground—lightly, so that if she touched the beetle she would not squish it—and crawls across the grass. Then she sinks back on her heels and begins to cry.
“Juno,” she whines.
“Come here, sweetie, it’s okay,” Lucy tells her. “Maybe he’ll come back.”
“She! Juno is a girl!” Isla yells. She picks herself up off of the ground, brushing the dirt off of her knees, and storms into the building, slamming the door on her way inside.
Both women stay still, deciding, without speaking, to leave Isla alone. This is what is best for children, Elsie thinks—for them to feel their sadness or anger in the distance they’ve created for themselves, letting them emerge from it in that place, alone. There is a silence that fills the space then, after the door slamming. Elsie feels it swell in the air—she has a peaceful awareness of the quiet, and closes her eyes.
“Her grandmother is dying,” Lucy says.
Elsie opens her eyes and turns in her chair to look at Lucy. She has large, green eyes, like Isla’s, and angular features that make her a distinct beauty.
“It's my mother. She’s living with us, in the house, and it's very hard for Isla. She just doesn’t understand.”
Elsie doesn't say anything. She is thinking of the walk to the brook, she is trying to remember where she put the violet Isla gave her. In her raincoat pocket, Elsie realizes; it’s right there. She reaches her hand in, just to make sure, and there it is. She feels the thin stem.
“Most kids have a thing that dies before,” Lucy continues, “you know, like a practice death, like a dog or goldfish or something. She hasn’t had that.”
If this were a child, Elsie would hold their hand.
“I’m so sorry,” Elsie says. “Death is so difficult. To have her in your home, too, that must be so… difficult.”
Elsie feels herself blush.
“It isn’t so bad. I mean at first it’s like getting hit by a bus but then it’s sort of normal.”
“How do you mean?” Elsie asks. She shifts her gaze back onto the lawn. The sunlight has taken on a golden colour, and it falls at a slant through the wooden fence, making long yellow stripes across the lawn. Some of the children are hopping from shadow to shadow.
“Well the way I think of it is like a river,” Lucy says, “Like I have to go into this river and I wade in, say, to my ankles, and it's so cold it's unbearable to think about going in up to my knees until I do, and so on and so on.”
Elsie thinks of her own mother, who died years ago. She thinks of grief as a river, she imagines the chill of the water shocking her skin. She pictures herself in the river up to her elbows, she sees the sparkling surface of the water in front of her. Elsie thinks it is beautiful that the human mind can do such things, can make sense of phenomena that seem beyond understanding, and do so by painting vivid pictures in one’s head. But soon the clean, clear symbol of the river dissolves, and Elsie pictures sunfish. She imagines a glimpse of one getting caught by a current, being turned on its side so she can see the scales catch the light before the body becomes vertical again, and therefore invisible to her.
She remembers what it was like to watch her mother get worse. Her body thinning, her hair falling out. Elsie remembers a particular day toward the end, sitting beside her mother’s hospital bed. Elsie had placed her hands on her mother’s body, felt her skin, the way the hipbone jutted out in a sharp, unsettling arc. She remembers her mother’s body differently—the body she had when she was around thirty-five, that’s how she remembers her—and this moment in the hospital bed is suspended in a time of its own. Her body failing was such a strange thing for the two of them to come to terms with, both being stubborn, and wanting to know one another for infinite chapters of their lives. It was too soon, Elsie knows, but she has a warm feeling, a gratitude that it is over—for both herself and her mother.
“Do you have children?” Lucy asks.
“No,” Elsie says. “This is enough for me. For right now. Until I meet someone.”
“Ah,” says Lucy. She takes a deep breath. “Well, you're so good with them, as far as I can see. Isla told me she wants you to be a mommy.”
Elsie feels surrounded by tenderness. She watches the children, who have begun to arrange themselves in a circle (which is more like an oval) for duck-duck-goose. Looking at them, Elsie remembers a day with her mother at an apple orchard. The way the light is falling, Elsie thinks, is what reminds her. She remembers getting lunch before they were supposed to go apple picking. She remembers picnic tables sticky with melted ice cream, spilled soda, maybe barbecue sauce. There was an outdoor brick oven which they made the pizzas in, and Elsie watched the smoke curl up into the air and make ripples of heat. She drank Coca-Cola straight from the can, and ate a slice of woodfired cheese pizza. But her mother, Elsie realised, was not there. There were plenty of tourists and farmers milling about the orchard’s outbuilding, and their laughter and enjoyment of the weather sent Elsie into a panic. Where was her mother? Did anyone care? Elsie’s eyes settled on the grove of apple trees. She decided that her mother must have gone in without her, to pick apples, so she got up and made her way toward the grove. At first, Elsie was calm and determined, marching along row by row, looking for the yellow pattern and flutter of her mother’s sundress. But Elsie could not find her. There were only strangers in the rows, focused on picking the best apples. There was the sweet smell of the rotting apples that had fallen to the ground. The light had begun to turn golden, and made elongated shadows of the tree branches. Elsie lost track of which row she was in (she had started off counting), and soon she was so far in that she did not know which direction would take her back to the picnic tables. Then Elsie began to cry. She gathered up the denim of her jeans in her fists and wept. It was not long then before she felt arms around her, smelled the perfume-y scent of her mother’s skin, and felt the familiar cheek against hers.
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