Ascending

Chapter 3

3

The nebulous voice on the other end of the phone could have been a woman’s or it could have been a man’s – in 1971, there was no call display. The number and the voice’s identity remained a mystery. “Is Michael Kane there?”

“We buried him today.” Scarlett Kane’s tone was flat as she spoke into the receiver.

“Oh, really?” The disguised voice gloated.

“Hang up,” urged her sister, and Scarlett settled the instrument onto its cradle.

Often thereafter when the clunky green wall phone rang, there was no one on the other end, or an amorphous voice asked for Michael Kane; for the first time the day of his funeral when she and the motley funeral entourage returned to the yellow rented house they had shared. It happened again, more often in the evening. Only once in the middle of the night.

Someone in the neighborhood bought a motorcycle and slammed its cacophony down the length of the street two blocks from her home. The engine’s intermittent bellow cruised the residential area where Scarlett lived, but she never saw the rider and she knew only from the smoky belch of the machine up and down the same streets after dusk that it had to be a resident of her neighborhood joyriding their fantasy into her darkest fears.

The ghostly sounds began with a scratching behind the walls and a hollow tick-tock by one of the windows in three-year-old Troy Kane’s bedroom. His curtains didn’t quite reach together in the center and the boy complained of a light in his room. The child awakened many a night with fantasies of blue moonbeams floating on dust motes at midnight illuminated by intermittent bursts of beams from an invisible torch.

“Mommy,” Troy confided to his mother in hushed tones while they were still in the yellow house, as the small robot he was constructing with his building blocks took shape, “A man’s outside my room at night. He shines a light in my room.”

Scarlett’s heart was small and shrunken within her, afraid of what she may find or have to do to protect the boy, but she checked that afternoon for footprints on the west side of the house, and sure enough, there were imprints in the soft earth by the honeysuckle bush in front of the window.

She consulted her Ouija board and crystals for omens rather than call the police right away, but found nothing helpful. Her late husband Michael’s workshop in the attached garage yielded a plethora of tools, some bills and receipts stuffed into an old tobacco can, but no clue as to who might want to hurt his family after the tragic motorbike accident that left her a single mom and many unanswered questions about secrets in the marriage.

Scarlett and her son continued to live in the rented house. Michael’s company paid her a substantial amount of life insurance after his death, but Scarlett feared at first that it wouldn’t go far enough to support a new home, even with the low cost of real estate in 1971. She invested the money and lived frugally on the interest for three more years until an older house in the working-class community of Calder was too much of a bargain to turn down.

In February of 1974, Scarlett bought a frame flat-roofed, two-bedroom dwelling with a back porch and partially finished basement, in the Calder area near the old Canadian National Railroad tracks. The fence leaned like a drunken soldier on a prostitute’s arm but the building appeared newly painted, blue as Scarlett’s eyes, and was neat and clean inside. Troy, now six years old, transferred to Calder School and started Grade One. They left behind them her friend Nancy Clarke and her son Troy’s best friend, Scott.

“I hate goodbyes,” Scarlett said to her friend after the two hired movers drove away with their sparse furniture and boxes in the rented truck. Scarlett’s dog Angus whined underfoot. She planned to take Rocker Patch with her, but left the dog and her parakeet with Nancy, promising to take them back someday.

She knew that she wouldn’t be back – knew in her bones that this was a break from the past and the game had changed. An abused wife, she would love herself, be herself, and shine despite those who never believed she could.

“You don’t have to say goodbye,” Nancy replied and scratched Angus under the chin. He thrust his wet muzzle into her hand and woofed softly.

“I’ll always have a bit of you and Troy with me. As well as Michael.” She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of Angus and Max as though they were my own. It’s not that I have anything else to do all day, with Jack away on the road all month. We don’t have pets of our own, so Angus will fit right in, won’t you, boy?”

The dog gazed up at Scarlett then at Nancy, as though he knew he had a new forever home with familiar friends. His loving brown eyes were shielded by grey brows. His tags sparkled from the red collar. He wagged his tail and whined.

“He loves you, mom,” Troy’s friend Scott commented, tipping the parakeet Max in his steel blue cage, and poured seed into the cup. Max squawked.

Scarlett drew six-year-old Troy to her in a careful hug. She reached out a hand to her friend and neighbor. “Thank you so much.”

“’Bye Scott. ‘Bye Mrs. Clarke.” Troy ran to Scott and punched him on the arm. “I’ll miss you.”

Michael and Scarlett Kane had lived in the rented house since before Troy was born. Her husband dead now for three years since that horrible morning when his motorbike crashed and burned under the overpass, Scarlett knew it was time to move on.

“This is a big step for us,” she said.

Nancy held her friend’s hand a moment longer. She reminded her, “If you fall, you’ll rise up even stronger because you’re a survivor. You’re not a victim. You’re in control of your life, sweetheart. There’s nothing you can’t achieve.”

“Life has knocked me down a few times,” Scarlett admitted. “I think I’ve learned in these last three years, though, to make lemon drop cocktails out of lemons. With a lemon twist! And then I learned to stop drinking after all that fun!”

Nancy laughed. “Atta girl! I was worried about your drinking after Michael died. You go get ‘em, honey.”

They left in the white Chevette that had replaced the Austin Healey Sprite. Angus howled when he saw them go, tried to follow, wagging his tail and straining at his leash, and Max chattered. They drove away and looked back only once, cementing the vision of their friends in their memories until after many years had passed. Awaited by a new home, new friends and neighbors, a new life, and a new school for Troy, her gut felt empty and aching, but there was also excitement.