4/12: White Lies

12/12 Short Stories in 2017

4/12

word count: 2500 words

prompt: a white lie 

White Lies

part 1 can be found here

part 2 can be found here. 
part 3 can be found here.

"Whatever is in the water recoils suddenly"

Three hours north of Hamilton, Cameron ran out of gas.

The old Volvo stalled. Cameron had a moment of disconnect, staring at the fuel gauge as if it might change its mind. The highway rose steadily into the exposed granite of the Canadian Shield; the Volvo’s deceleration was swift. He punched his four-ways, though the road was deserted, and rolled to a stop on the shoulder.

“Damn.”

He felt a surge of disgust. Some escape this was. Cameron got out of the car, stood there. There was no sound except the ding of the car telling him the door was open. He slammed the door shut, and was enveloped by silence. The spring-cool air was still but the promise of summer heat waited in the smell of the trees and the grass.

He took the gas can from the trunk and began to walk.

*

“Come down from there, Cameron.”

His father was at the bottom of the stairs. Cameron, aged six, had been caught half-way up this time, the farthest he’d managed since Mummy had stopped coming down from her room.

“I want to see Mummy,” Cameron said.

“Mummy’s not feeling well, sweetie, come back down.” Daddy had his hand out. “I need your help. We have to bake the cake for your birthday party. You can break the eggs for me.”

Cameron looked up the stairs. His parent’s bedroom door was shut. No one had gone in in days. Daddy slept on a camp cot in Cameron’s room, now.

“When will she come out?” he asked. He asked every day. Every day, his father gave him the same answer.

“As soon as she’s better, sweetie. Come on.”

Cameron took his father’s hand.

 *

When Cameron and Rob had been kids, the family had come up here for summer holidays, renting a cottage on the bay for a couple of weeks every summer. They’d spent days on the beach, evenings in front of a campfire, and there’d been kids up and down the shore and games of Manhunt and trips to Picnic Island for ice cream.

They’d not come since Mum, of course.

The phone in his back pocket vibrated. Van was texting again. Cam read the message, her fifth since he’d left that morning.

*I’m fine* Cameron sent back.

*about time you texted us back*

Cam snorted. That was Rob scolding him, not Van.

The long, lazy bend in the highway straightened and began to descend. A breeze came up, carrying with it the scent of the bay. The water was concealed yet by a forest of pine, but the scent of it was unmistakeable. Unforgettable.

*you’ll never guess where I am, Rob* he sent.

The smell was straight from their childhood, before everything had changed. Before they knew loss or hurt.

Or fear.

 *

The water was running.

Cameron had promised Daddy he wouldn’t bug Mummy. Straight upstairs to pick out a book and then back down. But the water was running. It had been running the whole time he’d stood in his room trying to choose between “Captain Underpants” and “The Day My Butt Went Psycho”. It was running, still, as Cameron stood on the landing outside his parent’s room.

There was an expanding half-moon of damp on the carpet outside the door. Cameron bent and touched it with one finger. It was warm.

“Mummy?”

Downstairs, Daddy was in the kitchen cleaning up the dishes from the birthday party. There had been cake with seven candles and ice cream and friends and presents, but Mummy had not come down. Cameron had felt her upstairs the entire time; there was a big empty place at his party that only Mummy could fill. “How’s Jess feeling?” one of the other mums had asked Daddy. “Still under the weather,” Daddy had said, and at the same time he had squeezed Cameron’s shoulder as if he were trying to keep from saying something else. Daddy was full of unspoken words. Daddy whispered them all night in his sleep.

“Mummy, there’s water.” The carpet felt nicely squishy, but Daddy was going to be very angry.

“Mummy?” Cameron knocked on the door. To his surprise, the door swung open.

Cameron froze. The door was only open a few centimetres, but that was more than he’d seen in a week. He stuck his face into the opening. It was hot in the room. It smelled of wet carpet and the beginnings of mould. But it also smelled of his parents, and then Cameron heard something. A splash. Mummy was in the tub! Cameron pushed his face further into the room. The blinds were down.

“Mummy?”

Daddy had been very clear. They were to stay out of Mummy’s room. But here the door was open and Mommy was having a bath, not sick in bed like Daddy had said.

Mummy must be feeling better.

Cameron pushed his whole head through the door. The bed was a lumpy shadow beneath the window. There was a glint of reflection in the mirror on the wall. The clock radio had fallen on the floor. It blinked 12:00 repeatedly. Daddy was still making noise in the kitchen. Cameron went into the room.

The carpet squelched under his feet. As his eyes adjusted, Cameron saw that Mummy had dropped her clothes all over the floor, in exactly the same way she always told Cameron not to. He picked up a sock. It dripped warm water down the front of his pyjama pants. It felt slick and thick under his fingers, like it were made out of jelly. Cameron, who’d been uneasy because he was breaking a rule, felt a new pressure in his bladder and a lightness in his tummy.

“Mummy?”

The blinds in the bathroom were shut, too. Long thin lines of daylight slashed the wall, softened by billowing steam. The water on the tile floor gleamed darkly. There was another splash, and the water shut off.

“Cameron?” Her voice, and yet not. It came from the bathroom, from the air around him, soft against the skin of his neck, a tickle at the base of his skull. “Oh, sweetheart, why are you here?” She was gentle, but those were definitely her hands turning him away, hands he couldn’t see, pressure on both his thin shoulders, a feeling coming over him that no matter what, he wasn’t to go any further. He wasn’t to go into the bathroom. He wasn’t to –

PAUL.

Not a voice, that, no sound at all, but then Daddy’s feet quick and thumping on the stairs.

“Cameron!” Daddy called. Urgent, trying not to sound frightened but Cameron, perhaps it’s instinct, knows fear when he hears it. And Cameron is caught between his father’s fear and his mother’s, but his mother is closer, so he goes to her. He splashes through the water on the bathroom floor, to the huge tub in the corner which Mummy always thought ridiculously huge. The water brims the edge, slops over the side, and whatever is in the water recoils suddenly

PAUL!

But then responds to Cameron’s screech by reaching for him, murmurs his name in the room on his skin in his skull in his head, and as the figure touches him his bladder releases and Daddy is in the bathroom, scooping him up and away.

“Don’t touch him!” Daddy yells.

And Cameron can feel Daddy’s heart hammering in his chest, but he can’t see, because Daddy is pressing Cameron’s head to his shoulder. And Daddy is taking Cameron out of the room and down the stairs and somewhere Cameron dropped the sock-that-wasn’t-a-sock and brother Robbie is at the table eating another piece of cake only he’s dropped his fork and he’s started to cry.

*

Matchedash Bay was impossibly blue in the May sunshine. Cameron walked across the motorway and down the embankment. Cameron remembered canoeing with Mum on Matchedash Bay, the last summer they had come up here. They had rented a boat and lifejackets for an hour, just the two of them.

“Don’t you just love the water, Cam?” she had asked.

*

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Daddy said. He had both boys on his knees, arms around them. He’d gotten Cameron into dry pyjamas, and had cut more cake. It sat untouched on three forlorn plates. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Robbie sniffled. Cameron stared at his hands. Daddy had washed them clean, but they still felt sticky. His skin was pale, like Mummy who was in the tub, all thin and unzipped.

“What’s wrong with Mummy?” Robbie had asked, sitting at the kitchen table while Daddy had run the water for Cameron. Cameron had resisted the water, but Daddy insisted, and at last Cameron had let his father wash his hands clean.

“She’s very sick, Robbie.”

Cameron closed his eyes. The shape in the tub upstairs refused to put itself fully together. It was banded in light and shadow and steam. It had moved lightning-quick, like a fish, or a dolphin, or had that been the water itself? He began to shake. Daddy’s arm squeezed him so tightly he thought he wouldn’t ever catch his breath.

“Is she going to get better?”

Cameron felt Daddy’s chin move against his head as he nodded. “Sure, sweetie, sure she’ll get better. She just needs some time. We need to give her some time.”

And they had sat there a while, cake untouched. From upstairs came the sound of running water. Cameron saw a movement from the corner of his eye. A large droplet had formed on the ceiling in the dining room. Water dropped, plop, onto the dining room table.

“We should take a trip, yeah?” Daddy said suddenly. “Go see your aunt. Wouldn’t that be nice? To go visit Aunt Sharon?”

Cameron pulled back. Robbie was wide-eyed. The brothers looked at one another, and something complicit passed between them. 

“I like Aunt Sharon,” Robbie said. He made it a question. Cameron nodded.

Daddy hugged them both. “That’s what we’ll do then. It’ll be an adventure. Just we three men.”

Another drop of water hit the table.

*

Cameron felt it again, after he’d filled up the gas can and gone in to pay, that certainty that he was being watched. There was a message waiting.

It wasn’t here in the shop. He waited in line, a large bottle of water tucked under his arm. The woman at the front of the line was digging exact change out of her purse. Someone behind Cameron sighed loudly, and when the woman with the change apologised for holding up the line, the clerk assured her it was fine. Cam waited, flicking his card back and forth in his hand. Finally, he paid for the petrol, took the receipt (checking to be sure, but no, his messages were always written by hand) and walked outside. There was a candy wrapper on the ground but, no, that wasn’t it.

Cameron walked through the parking lot. The gas can was heavy. It was going to be tough slog back to the car. Cameron wondered if anyone here was heading back the way he’d come. The woman with the exact change was pulling out near him. He considered waving her down and asking for a ride, but no woman liked being waved down by a random guy. There was a man standing by the curb, talking into his phone. Beside him waited a mid-sized pickup truck, the name of a landscaping company on the side of it. Cameron took a hesitant step in that direction at the same time as the man saw him. There was an instant of recognition, as they realised that they’d both had the same thought at the exact same time. Cameron laughed, and, after a second, the man laughed, too.

“That looks heavy,” he called out. “North or south?”

“South,” Cameron said. 

“You’d better hop in then.”

“Fantastic!” Cameron said. And there was the message. He knew it instantly. A flyer, caught behind the rear wheel of the truck. Cameron’s grin widened. There were compensations, he thought. Mum was gone, gone horribly. Dad, too, was gone, for all intents and purposes. Now Rob and Van, not gone exactly, but out of the picture now as far as Cameron was concerned. But this, this guiding hand, these messages over the years, they always remained. Cameron had a rush of hope and felt immediately lighter. It was like having his own guardian angel. Everything was going to be okay.

“You coming, or what?”

“Yeah!” Cameron scooped the flyer up as he passed, folding it and stuffing it into his jacket. The passenger door swung open. “This is great, I can’t thank you enough.”

“Anytime,” the man said. “South you said?”

“About five k.”

“Well then, we’ll get you back in no time.”

 *

Karen had seen the young man arrive at the station with the empty gas can. Poor him, she’d thought, because this was definitely a case of a picture telling a thousand words. She hoped he hadn’t walked far. She briefly considered offering him a ride back to his car, but… for all she refused to live her life in fear, it paid to be careful. She replaced the gas cap and went inside, paid cash to get rid of all the change dumped in the bottom of her bag. Then, out to the car and with luck she’d be back at the cottage in time for a beer on the dock before the kids began complaining about being hungry.

Afterward, she remembered doing it, of course she did. It’s only the every-day things we let slip, and what happened next was hardly every-day. She remembered it, but she never said a word about it when she got home. How stupid would it sound, saying it out loud? But later, after it all came out, she wondered if telling someone would have made a difference.

But that day at the petrol station, it had been so simple. There was no other way to explain it, except that one minute she was alone in the car, the next minute she was not. It was a woman, or had been a woman. Karen felt her fear as completely as if she were feeling it herself. Karen grabbed the first thing she could find to write with, a broken green crayon one of the kids had dropped in the back seat. There was an old flyer in the passenger foot well. Karen smoothed it out, listened to the woman (who was calmer, now that Karen was doing as she’d asked) and wrote what she was told.

“Now what?” Karen wondered out loud. ““If that’s what you want.”  She opened the window, let the flyer slip away as she drove out of the parking lot. By then, the presence had gone.

An hour later, settled on the dock with a beer in her hand, collar up against the wind, Karen thought about what she’d written. Who’s Cameron? she wondered, and, Which man isn’t he to trust?  

 Thanks to Mia Joubert Botha and writerswrite.co.za for setting up 12 Short Stories in 2017. Click here for chapter 1, here for chapter 2, and here for chapter 3.