Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

Teresa had resolved to go in peace when the figure ceased walking, turned and looked up at her. The Devil’s face housed in a shape of pity. Teresa watched Frances raise her arms in triumph, a mocking smile twisting her lips, and hiss the name “Teresa”. Teresa swung the rifle through a hundred and eighty degrees, caught it with her shoulder, aimed and fired. The demon jerked back and flopped like a rag doll.

Now Teresa is suspended with the smoking rifle floating out in front of her, trying to get ahold of what she’s done.

Hector is exhausted by the time he’s in Adelaide and Ginger’s kitchen.

“Hector, honey, just settle down now, we’re going to go find Teresa, okay?”

Ginger has already headed over to check Teresa’s house. It’s alarming. Hector does not go places unattended. But he won’t settle down.

“Hector, did something happen to Teresa?”

He shakes his head “no” in a way that’s understood only to those who know him. Then he nods his head “yes” twice as urgently till finally it dawns on him. He points. Up to the top of Adelaide’s kitchen cupboard.

“What is it, Hector? You want something? There’s nothin up there, b’y, what d’you want?”

He gives a series of frustrated groans but does not lower his pointing arm, though it begins to waver. Adelaide shrugs, moves to the counter and is halfway climbed onto it when she freezes in recognition.

“Oh Jesus, Hector.”

She turns and he nods solemnly, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“Good boy, Hector,” she says as she grabs her sweater, “stay here with the kids,” and she’s out the door.

Teresa starts breathing again and the rifle regains its weight against her shoulder and in her hands. It’s done. Her heart starts making a racket in an effort to wake up her mind. She reaches out, grasps the barrel in both hands and hurls the rifle end over end onto the beach below, where it discharges again in a hail of pebbles. This second shot is the one she hears, and it sets her running like a starting pistol in the ears of a sprinter. She pounds along the cliff, running and running, she doesn’t think where until she swings with the rail tracks towards New Waterford, and still all she knows is what she sees flashing by, not what she intends. Number 12 Colliery, colossally idle to her right, the little company houses, whipping by like telephone polls past a steamed-up train. She’s not running like a lady, she’s running like a champion. The next thing she notices is that she’s bounding up the steps of New Waterford General Hospital, and from this she surmises that she has come to get help for the girl she has killed.

Thundering towards New Waterford beside Ginger in his truck, Adelaide shouts, “Stop!”

It’s Hector’s bike lying near the tracks on the ocean side of the road. Adelaide hops down from the truck before it has rolled to a stop and dashes across. Ginger follows and joins her where she’s standing at the edge of the cliff staring down.

“Oh my Lord.”

Trixie is curled around Frances’s head. She has spent the ten minutes since the shooting painfully kneading Frances’s scalp with her never-trimmed claws. Two people have come sliding down the hill and now they’re crunching towards her and Frances.

At their approach, Frances repeats the words she has been mumbling, “Ow. Trixie, stop it.”

Frances’s eyes have gone to slits, the only colour on her face is her tiny nose mole, she has become scrawny once more, a little woman in a big dress.

In each hand there is a stone of equal weight. It is time for sleep.

“Should we move her?”

“We ain’t got much of a choice,” Adelaide replies.

It’s hard to know where the wound is and therefore where to take hold and lift her up because there’s so much blood. Trixie keeps kneading and for once she can’t stop talking. Ginger slips his arms under Frances and lifts her carefully. She’s so clearly not faking this time that he wonders again how he could possibly have bought her earlier performances. He decides to give himself a break and admit that she is a great actress. Adelaide picks up the rifle and they start back up the slope. Trixie follows, her eyes full of mendicant pleading. She watches the truck pull away, then streaks across the field for home.

Frances bleeds into Adelaide’s dress with her feet resting across Ginger’s knees. He tries for a compromise between speed and smoothness.

Teresa has been given a cup of tea in the front hall of New Waterford General Hospital. The head nursing sister was the first to come across her. If it had been that nice young intern from away, the hysterical woman would have been given a shot in the vein instead of a cup of tea. The head nurse, however, has noticed that, whether they drink the tea or not, the mere act of reaching out to receive something that must not be spilled seems to have a profoundly calming effect on all but the downright insane.

“Now dear, if the girl is dead, why does she need an ambulance?”

Teresa balances the teacup in both hands and puts her first real sentence together since the shooting, “There’s a chance she may still be alive. She’s down by the shore. She’s been shot.”

This is an example of how tea can work better than narcotic oblivion.

The head nurse rises immediately and swishes away to get the ball rolling. Teresa adds, “I shot her.”

Nurse hears her, thinks, “First things first,” and keeps walking towards Emergency.

The wasted ambulance is dispatched in time to narrowly avoid a collision with Ginger’s truck, Ginger having abandoned smoothness in favour of speed. Frances’s eyes have started to go fishy, and though Adelaide and Ginger have been shouting to her throughout the brief drive, Adelaide had no way of knowing that pricking Frances’s scalp might keep her from slipping away.

Teresa has raised the teacup to her lips for a first sip when Adelaide breaks through the front doors and hollers, “Can we get some service around here?” Two young nurses run to support Adelaide, who is soaked in blood, and she snaps, “Not for me!” She swivels to indicate Ginger coming through the doors carrying Frances, and catches sight of Teresa hunched in a chair against the wall, drinking tea. The head nurse returns on silent shoes. She has a trained eye so she walks past Adelaide without turning a hair, takes Frances from Ginger’s dripping arms and carries her to meet the gurney now hurtling towards them powered by the two younger sisters. Nurse lays Frances down on the move, they ram through a set of swinging doors and disappear into the operating theatre.

Luckily the head nurse was in the war. She has a way with bullet wounds.

This time, Lily hasn’t a clue where Frances might be. Ambrose has not come through. Mercedes shoos Trixie from the wingback chair to find a smear of blood in her place. Still wet.

“Trixie, come back here.”

But everyone knows cats don’t come. Mercedes searches the house till she finds Trixie in the cellar between the furnace and the wall. If anything has happened to the cat, Frances will be devastated.

“Come here, Trixie.”

No.

Mercedes reaches but Trixie scurries farther back. Mercedes goes up to the kitchen and returns with a saucer of salted kippers, but that’s the bait Frances always used to get Trixie in trouble.

Lily joins in the effort. “She might come if you speak Arabic.”

Mercedes has a kink in her neck. “Oh for heaven’s sake, Lily —”

“Trixie. Inshallah.”

Trixie puts forth a paw.

“Trixie,” says Mercedes, “taa’i la hown, Habibti … ya Helwi.”

Trixie slinks forward.

Mercedes examines Trixie on the kitchen counter — “Te’berini” — daubing the blood with a damp cloth until it becomes clear “There’s no wound.”