A Bright House

Jenny at work for the remainder of her shift, felt ballerina light on her feet. Without realizing it, she couldn’t help but to gently run her tongue back and forth across a bottom lip still tingled with a kiss so unexpected and wonderful as to be nearing miracle territory. It may have been her over-thinking nature, once upon a time, to analyze every moment of what had taken place between her and Ray, perhaps to worry that he drove away into a growing confusion over what he had done, and begun. Not this Jenny. She felt like a long forgotten houseplant, withering to a parched brown demise atop a dusty corner shelf, that had been discovered and watered. The evening, and Ray’s phone call that he had arrived safely, couldn’t happen fast enough. Hands on the old diner clock, moving quicker after Ray’s visit. Hands in her imagination, taking their sweet time, becoming familiar with every inch of her. A long dormant passion was stirring. She had to dare to hope that Ray Townes would willingly travel this new path of theirs.

Why was it so easy to believe that old saying, “too good to be true”? Back within the hell of the first months without her husband, nary a clue as to what had actually happened to him, it was easiest of all to suspect that she would never see him again. The most fervent part of her, the prayer-making hopeful aspect, lost battle after battle to the odd harsh comfort of wearily accepting the worst.

Jenny was a result of a horrible act carried out by her biological parents. She would carry those raw fear triggers for the rest of her life, and she knew it, wanted to prevail over it, but fell repeatedly into the primal chill of that lifelong influence. The foster parents hadn’t been much better, especially the man and monster of the house, whose eyes betrayed the filth of his thoughts when Jenny reached puberty. Though so many other young women had suffered far worse at the hands of these sick-minded men, his constant staring, “accidental” touching, the increasing malevolent attention as she blossomed, bled black ink into her already well developed shadow world.

He was verbally abusive toward her foster mother, and possibly much more, though the woman never wore the evidence of such upon her face or arms. Jenny made it a habit to lock the bathroom door behind her, and on the one occasion when she forgot, he just happened to “accidentally” enter as she was stepping into the bathtub. “OH, shit, I’m sorry” he said, eyes immediately on her breasts and then lower... she’d gasped and reached for a towel to cover herself, turning to give those beast eyes a look at her buttocks. All these years later, as she walked home from work and tripped back into the abyss of recollection, the evil vibrations of the room that evening were capable of returning full force.

“You didn’t hear the water running?” she had almost shrieked, seeing his leering focus as it moved from her feet to the cleavage then covered by the towel. He stared, openly and with palpable threat even as he pretended to offer apologetic energy - “I’m sorry, Jenny. It won’t happen again.” That was a summer night when she was eighteen. He was right. It didn’t ever happen again. Jenny had begun to date a handsome young classmate named Scott, who was absolutely smitten with her in the most devoted way a girl her age could wish for. Her fear compelled her to share the situation and in particular the bathroom intrusion, though Scott would not become her lover until the following year... they had clicked and grown spiritually intimate from the moment that their mutual attraction became evident.

Scott, a strapping young man and gallant beyond his years, sought out Jenny’s tormentor the very next day. He went to where Jenny told him the monster was employed, a used-car lot, and found the man alone in a sea of automobiles just moments after a potential purchaser had departed. Scott hadn’t met this man prior to walking up with a determined thin-lipped stride; he later told Jenny that before he spoke, based solely on Scott’s body language as he approached between the rows of cars, the monster blanched.

“Listen, you creepy son of a bitch” Scott told him from two feet away, “You’ve heard Jenny mention me. I’m her boyfriend, Scott, and if you ever lay a hand on her, or bother her again...” the foster father, a short stocky balding mid-forties example of suburban male misery, couldn’t even begin to speak back. Had he not been knocked cold by a wickedly delivered straight right to the jaw that nobody witnessed for the sea of cars, the words of his choosing would have blended indignant bluffing and cowardice. He might have uttered the false denial of a true monster, almost believing his own bullshit. Something along the lines of “what the hell are you talking about? Who do you think YOU are, talking to me like this? I’m the one who busts his ass to put food on her plate, a roof over her head, an education in her brain. I’m the one who saved her from life as an orphan.”

Scott’s passion, romantic-exuberant young love for the pretty Jenny who would later become his bride, separated the would-be abuser from his senses and any words that may have issued forth. He fell between two cars like a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes. Scott, still trembling from the built-up anger and even admittedly some fear, quick-looked around the lot and beat it on out of there. That was the end of Jenny’s torment, and in fact the incident was never mentioned by anyone other than Scott, just once in the telling of it to his love. It wouldn’t be too many more months before she left that house to get her own little apartment and begin the trajectory to marriage.

Jenny lived these memories during her walk south on DeGrassi street, then wondered why she had even gone there. Was it a residual guilt over Scott? It was true, strangely so, that the “arrival” of Ray Townes had displaced a great deal of the pain once daily announced in the litany of Scott, Scott, Scott. It was also true that with a new feeling blossomed within for another man, she was placing her most vulnerable self on the line. For all the unquestionable beauty of being in love, it brought with it pain to one degree or another... as she walked and thought these things, it wasn’t hard to push the calendar forward. To wonder at where the months would take her and Ray. Could it even work? He was no fan of Toronto, and had made that quite clear. What if they became lovers, fell deeply into each other, and he asked her to move to Saskatchewan? Would she do it? The question was mildly shocking, given that Toronto had no true hold over her. In some way, though, even in her speculating forward to a future with Townes, leaving Ontario would be an act of finality with regards to Scott.

When Jenny reached the top of her quirky little street, Victorian row houses attached and pulling each other backward into a westward slope, she felt it powerfully: that morning had marked a huge change within her life. Where Ray’s kitchen declaration of “I could love you” had planted a seed of an idea, his time to think whilst home in the prairies and then his kiss and the tender touch of his hands holding hers... this was the seed made fertile, breaking open inside Jenny. No matter their harvest, it was going to grow now.

She reached the front door to her home, unlocked it, and then entered a different possibility than the one she had left behind when leaving for work. Of course, swept up in myriad thoughts and hopes, fears and warnings, she wouldn’t have had the mental focus to tune into Ray’s own intention to sell his family farm. “I am getting so ahead of myself” she spoke to the dining room on her way through, then caught sight of Ray’s pretty marble against the baseboard and wanted to throw herself into dancing abandon.

Northwest and plenty of miles away from the woman he had kissed, Ray Townes drove along a mostly barren stretch of route 9. It was a “King’s Highway” not really fit for a king, with buckled asphalt and an array of potholes, not to mention more roadkill than any one narrow two lane route should acquire. Porcupines seemed the least fortunate, followed by pungent skunks, jackrabbits, other lifeless lumps beyond identification. Ray had settled into a distinctly odd mood. His thoughts were impossibly scattered in the aftermath of encountering the Mohawk elder named Nelson Brant. He wanted to decipher the code within that meeting, to apply it wherever it was most meant to fit.

How much of who we are is shaped by our genome? Is a white collar worker of Cree descent any less Cree than his brother who still hunts and fishes the land of his ancestors? Just how much of who we view ourselves to be, what we stand for as souls, is dictated to by the blood in our veins? The tires hummed and Ray’s thoughts were all strands framed within query; no answers seemed forthcoming as he felt himself both in the Buick and also tripping through shades of otherness. One way of thinking about Delsin as his DNA contributor, was to want to know everything possible about the man as though it could shed new light upon Ray as a growing child and his immediate affinity for nature. His Townes parents had been hard working and very direct people; for them, the land was survival. It was there to be toiled over, manipulated into crops for money. There were no romantic words from the man who raised Ray as a son, for he was a serious soul of few spoken observations that were not directly related to farming and survival. For him, the weather was God.

Melinda Townes, on the other hand, embodied a dichotomous blend of stern focus with glimpses of a romantic poetic soul who seemed trapped out of place. That had always been the young boy’s feeling about his mother, whom he dearly loved and hated to see unhappy. She was a certain way in the presence of her husband, and during the long hours of his toil in the fields or when taking care of business in Regina, would reveal her secret self to young Ray through little chinks in her armor. A lost, distant stare through a kitchen window. Extended periods of silence that would last entire afternoons. “Mommy needs quiet time.” It was a knowledge that her son would have felt even without his growing ability to see beyond the immediate. Child to parent, there are fewer filters in place. Life has yet to construct emotional obstacles. This thread of thoughts had begun for Townes in the Buick on route 9 as a dual way of approaching the conundrum of Delsin as his biological father, and yet he had lost himself to the detour of one track...

(a sign proclaiming the distance to Kincardine placed him a half hour away)

Perhaps the healthiest approach for Ray would be to let it all go. Three adults who were directly involved in his existing, all of them gone. Whoever he had shaped himself to be, was a primarily happy spirit. He hadn’t walked a dark path and his energy was devoted to serving life with gratitude and humility. He could be opening new wounds here. Reducing the sum of his being in order to find out who he really is...? This thought arrived in tandem with the roadside visual of an entire family of skunks that had been wiped from existence by a machine that was not a part of skunk history until a century ago. Changes. Soon after the sight of those sadly erased creatures, Ray noted a beautifully backlit old barn to his right. It was sagging to the southeast, down to tall grasses and waiting earth. Warped planks allowed sharp edged rays of sunlight to shoot through the old structure in a fanning ball of golden stunning, and Ray wanted to brake to stop but kept driving because someone had come up behind him. It is meant that way. A few blinks of the eye, timed to balance me.

The vehicle passed him. Once again Ray was alone for the visible expanse of the weather beaten rural route, and he liked the solitude. How would he transition out of this cocoon and into psychic professional mode? This, beginning to feel like a misstep on his part. The flatness of his sight... the timing of something so sweet between he and Jenny versus the odd unsettled energy surrounding these past few days. A tiny flash crossed behind his eyelids during a series of blinks as he rounded an arc into slanting sun for a half mile before the road curved back again. It was a sideways-moving series of numbers, not unlike a bar code, bathed in an aura of diffused light. They were childlike, as though a symbolic representation of Ray seeking patterns. Is it all really so obvious? What human leap of faith is it to believe that “this pattern cannot merely be a coincidence”?

It was confusing and yet simple. Ray had been “shown” that the perceived flatness of his clairvoyance had been of his own construction. That collapsing barn back there, replete with god-rays exploding through its timbres... it, too, had been a message. Some of the most important signs were of a maddening brevity, but designed to be so. Had Ray not been pressed forward by the car coming up on his tail, he would have pulled over to admire the vision. That then may have been the lesser of impacts.

Which brought him back to Jenny. There, within the boiling of his disparate thought strands, a place by comparison sweetly solid in a foundation of potential. Ray was opened enough to the ways of a weave to consider that the sun-bursted barn had perhaps been a moment when Jenny had thought something romantic and hopeful about the two of them. If he so decided upon that as the reality, it would indeed imprint as such. Ray thought back to the wheeled machine that had stopped the lives of four skunks, and then viewed himself from within the Buick, an operator of machinery to cover distances more “efficiently” than otherwise. The world was speeding up. Time was a more precious commodity. Getting “there” faster had become paramount. Actually, Ray was a universe machine. He, a bundle of neural hardware to seek and copy arbitrary patterns. He was also a time traveler, already dead, already in love, already reborn into a new representational universe.

Ray headed toward Kincardine with his foot pressed to a pedal that fed fuel into an engine that turned wheels to enable a time travelling device to propel itself into time at a rate of speed greater than the illusion of a slower rate. Ray headed toward Kincardine with his mind returning to a city street near a diner where he had offered his tenderness and vulnerability to a mirror disguised as a woman. Ray headed toward Kincardine with the blueprint of his genetic code cracked open like the final frame of a murder mystery matinee. As other vehicles began to share the road with him, he increasingly tunnel-visioned himself into a cocoon of aloneness. He wondered if his emotional energy still lingered on the surface of a sitting rock beside his favorite bend of the north Saskatchewan river. He wondered if the personal frontier of making love to a woman would live up to his suddenly exploding anticipation. And he wondered if it mattered at all, that his father had been a mysterious Cree native who had chosen to abandon his child and lover.

Lake Huron came into view; a world-filling rim of churning iron grey with ragged white caps, and Townes had a pang that seemed bidden from a previous life. No vision to accompany the chest tightening feel of it; just a powerful “recognition”... it could quite easily be the newly discovered awareness of First Nation blood within him. It suddenly felt preposterous to be there, driving into a vast unknown, exposing himself in all frailty to whatever was summoning him to this foreign place with its vanished people. Jenny was back there, strong and sweet, damaged and healing before his very eyes; a welcoming energy that held more promise than anything he had ever thought possible for him as a man. Ray experienced a bursting urge to pull over, call her immediately, tell her “hold on, I’ll be there soon.” Turn the car around. Back to Bright street. Jenny in her kitchen. In my arms. Another sweet kiss. More opening of hearts. To her bed. Freed of clothing and layers of metaphoric noise that we acquire and tolerate, come to actually need, just the two of us face to face, naked. I want to look at her for hours. I want to feel the heat of our bodies pressed into one. I need to replace all of her years of pain with only love. Need to glow with her. She is my waiting, done.

Ray entered the limits of Kincardine’s township. The turnoff from route 9 fed into a medium sized main street that ran parallel to the vast and frigid lake. Downtown was oriented along a north-south corridor. Here the streets were sleepy as well, though busier than those of Clifford, Mildmay, and Paisley. People didn’t openly stare at the stranger who sat at a red light with the windows rolled up. Some took note of him, as locals will do in a community of six thousand, where watching out for each other is as natural as whiteouts from the mighty Huron. Five blocks along, the braided half-Cree clairvoyant in a rental car noticed a distant grouping of gas station, car dealership, and motel signs. The Days Inn would more than suffice, and Ray’s mood lifted a little when he cleared the last set of traffic lights and decided to turn the radio back on for a few minutes. The dial found mostly static and talk shows before something blared to life from a station called CKNX.

Any citizen of Kincardine with curious eyes to notice a newcomer rolling by long before tourist season arrives, might have also noted the loud music booming from the Skylark, and perhaps the huge grin on its driver’s face.

“Jenny, Jenny, who can I turn to? You give me something I can hold onto...”

Ray pulled into the parking lot of a smallish Days Inn that wearily presented itself in a classic 1950s style motel exterior. He continued to grin and nod along with the great-odds-against song... “Jenny, I got your number. I need to make you mine...”

and as the chorus emulated that earlier sunburst barn, Ray couldn’t wait to hear her voice but first sang along -

“eight six seven five three oh nine”