Neverchangeable | Chapter 1

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Farley won't stop fucking around with his hunting knife. The sound sets my teeth on edge.

The bridge has transformed over the two years since I sold it, most of the change happening within the last one. The limestone has been reinforced, no longer crumbling at random intervals, and signs have been put up at both ends with detailed directions on how to get through the forest safely and with ease. Different trails are marked with either green, orange, or red lines to allow tourists to select their difficulty. None of the trails are truly difficult anymore, though. None, except the unmarked ones. Farley’s face twists in disdain when he sees the sign, wide and dummy-proof.

The developers had considered adding a look-out point in the middle of the bridge, the kind with a bolted-in set of white binoculars for tourists to look out at the horizon with. It was too late to pull it off in time for this season, Mrs. Developer said. She smiled broadly, “Let’s bring in some guests first for a few photo-ops. Build the excitement. Create a stir. A buzz. Everything’s online these days. Next summer, we’ll bring in the binoculars. Give the guests a reason to come back.”

Not that there’s much to see that you can’t with your own two eyes. Still, Mrs. Developer explained, people liked to look. A fruitless Where’s Waldo, unless you were clinically insane. That, or the type to believe in the ghost stories the development team nailed to the trees along the new, neatly trampled down trails. Those trails, stripped of its stones, rootless, castrated, were not the same ones Farley and I had stumbled through in the night as kids. These trails were pristine, manicured, virginal. The Ken dolls of hiking trails. Commercial, marketable, and family-friendly enough. Perfect for playing pretend at summer fun while on vacation in Canada’s first capital city. Perfect for making money. Good for the local economy is how Mrs. Developer pitched it, two Novembers ago after Dad was gone. She’d said, “Respectfully, sir, we’ve had our eyes on this property for a while now.”

In my head, I see Mrs. Developer’s eyes as they watch our family’s home from just above the murky pond at the edge of our back yard, like an alligator stalking its prey. In my fantasy, she watches Farley and I grow up over the years, once smaller than the JanSport backpacks we lugged up the school bus steps, then grungey teenagers, now grown men, Farley long gone, and I, loyal, here with Mama. Mrs. Developer watches Farley and I that night, from the safe confines of my mind, at the bonfire, the one before everyone left town for college. The last bonfire. I replay images of Mrs. Developer watching Farley and me, and feeling sorry for me all that time. I pant at the vision of her as a green-scaled fairy godmother emerging from the chartreuse waters, ready to bestow upon me a magical gift for being so patient, for putting up with life next to Farley all those damn years.

Mrs. Developer’s idea was simple: to create a fairytale forest full of haunted, enchanted adventure in one of Ontario’s oldest, ghostliest cities.

She laid out proof of the endeavour’s estimated profit, pointing at the success of local ghost tours, and the many establishments throughout Kingston which boasted of their old structures’ grisly pasts. Signs with the city’s history, laid flat into its prized export of limestone, peppered the just as limestone downtown, giving it a feeling of being perpetually grey, old, and haunted. With all this history around us, who were we to say the land my family lived on wasn't occupied by ghosts?

Mrs. Developer said she would hire a medium and a marketing team. Mrs. Developer and her team would nail up painted fairy doors and wooden signs with ghost stories embellished across them, sealed with plastic-flecked, sparkly resin. The money that was projected to be made was astronomical. Unimaginable. Which was why, Mrs. Developer said, she and her team were eager to pay a hefty price for the property, tucked away in a forest only fifteen minutes from the city’s center. Mrs. Developer, smelling of hairspray, incense, and powder leaned forward. She’d grabbed my hand with hers, the skin thin and cold. Her bright green eyes, heavy with mascara, stared into my soul. She said, “I know, you can’t put a price on family. I’m telling you, Mr. Savage, this will be the best thing for you and yours.”

She waved her hand over the abandoned farmland, the strangled and overgrown trails, the pond now more of a marsh. She waved her hand out like Vanna from Wheel of Fortune or a magician, revealing his trick. She raised her eyebrows at me, “You can’t really expect to keep up with all this. You can’t really expect to afford to.”

I tried to tell Mama this. She couldn’t understand. She asked, “But where will I live?”

I’d waved my hand over the farmland that Mama used to use as her grocery store, each row of vegetables a different aisle. My palm raised, I wave my hand over the trails Farley and I used to get lost on, the cemetery of dead pets, the pond I lost my virginity by. I point to the barn with Dad’s ashes sprinkled in the stables. I echo, “You can’t expect to keep up with all this. You can’t expect to afford to.”

Mama moved up to the cabin, the only piece of land we couldn’t sell to Mrs. Developer.

I don’t tell Farley any of this. Instead, I watch him flip his hunting knife, over and over again, like a figurine gymnast between his fingers. His eyes follow the strings of tourists, heads like fuzzy pills on yarn criss-crossing the hills to create a cat’s cradle over the new old landscape. The top of the hill, even from this angle, remains free of this tangled web of people. The unmarked trails.

Farley nods and puts away his hunting knife. The top of the hill is where we’re headed. Without waiting, he begins to walk the familiar trek across the long bridge, carefully and nimbly, like we used to have to when we were young; then surely, slowly, like the motions of an old man chewing a piece of steak he never imagined would one day be so dangerous to swallow.

Mama loved Farley from the moment she’d met him. She loved that he was so young and sad, so helpless and broken, like a baby bird’s wing. It at was that darned school field trip. We were six. Mama volunteered to be a chaperone. Mrs. Larkson had organized to take our class to the farm. Mama thought that was funny, me going to school to go see a barn when we already had one at home. She’d offered to Mrs. Larkson to help with showing the kids how to milk the cows, how to feed the goats, lift the hens and carefully snatch their eggs.

On the bus, I’d shown Mama my seat, the one I’d been assigned to share with Farley at the start of the school year. He was a quiet kid. A weirdo. He smelled bad, too. Samson and Savage were squished next to each other on Mrs. Larkson’s alphabetized class list, though, and so we were smushed together on the bus. I’d walk into school smelling like Farley’s Dad’s cigarettes. Only Farley had the cigarette burns. Mama nearly squealed when she saw the cigarette burns. She’d pressed Farley to her side real close the rest of the trip. When we were dropped off at home, she asked Farley for his home address. She said we would pick him up at noon on Sunday after church and that he could play with all the chickens he liked at our barn at home. Mama promised him a hot, cooked meal, my top bunk bed, and a clean change of my clothes for school the next morning. Casually, cruelly, without looking at me once, Mama offered Farley my life.

Problem was, I kind of liked Farley too. Liked him the way I loved Mama. Intensely, with a little bit of hate mixed in. And the bigger problem was, the longer I was around both of them, the more those emotions intensified. It grew so big, that sticky ball of feeling, with nowhere to put it down, until all I could do was swallow it whole like a viper swallowing down an egg. I’d unhinge my jaw and force out a sound like laughter, but the whole time, there’d be the egg. Swallowing, swallowing, glp, swallowed.

Farley pulls out a pack of cigarettes and lights one. He leans back while he walks. His hands are mangled. Thick scars slash across red-purple, reptilian skin. His nails are yellow at the tips, lined with black seams from years of pinching and smoking tobacco. When he looks away, I can see the traces of living outdoors, fine-line tattoos from the wind and sun, spread across his prematurely leathered face.

He points at the solar-paneled fairy lights nailed to the bridge. He says, “Didn’t have any of that when we crossed this bridge last. Just Jack’s dumb wooden markers he’d carve in the middle of the night. Like a damn madman.”

Farley stops walking. We’re in the middle of the bridge, where the white binoculars are supposed to go in next summer, and where Dad’s first marker still was last summer. There’s a twinkling, resin-encrusted plank of wood there now. Farley’s eyes travel over the words on the sign, the story Mrs. Developer’s medium had intuited etched beneath the polymer.

Last summer, Mrs. Developer had allowed me to come with her as she toured the medium through the forest, after the property was first purchased. Mrs. Developer had said since Mama and I would be in the cabin, anyways, it only made sense we knew what was going on down here. She’d winked, “Being neighbours and all.”

The medium was Mrs. Developer’s twin sister, and her name was Madame Liliana. The only physical difference between them was their eye colour. Madame Liliana’s eyes were grey and blue, darker, plainer than Mrs. Developer’s emerald irises, but struck like lightning when she cracked her voice through the air all the same. When Madame Liliana stepped onto the bridge, the forest held its breath. The water was still. Charged. Electric. Mrs. Developer smiled over at me. She whispered, “Lili’s good. Lili’s the real thing.”

Lili raised her hands above her head and closed her eyes. Her fingers accused the sky. Her voice was like hardened honey, viscous and raspy at the back of her throat. She spoke at the clouds. She demanded, “Tell me your story, spirit. What story should I tell for you?”

Eyes still closed, she reached into a small bag on her hip. She pinched out three charms, the way Farley used to pinch tobacco out of a Ziploc bag in the front seat of Dad’s truck. Madame Lili opened her eyes and studied the silver charms in her palm. She squinted, picked them up one by one, held them close up to her face, inhaled each one, sucked on it, and stuck it back in her sack until her hands were empty again. She turned to Mrs. Developer and I. She began,

“There once was a young maiden who wandered freely around these waters. Her hair was long and her eyes were soft. She told stories to herself and the fish flitting below the surface of the river. A young hunter overheard her one day and, enchanted, followed her from the cover of the trees all along the shore. They walked for three days like that, the hunter following the maiden, until they stopped at the old penitentiary. The hunter watched her walk in and waited for her return. It was upon her return that he planned to confess his love for her. He waited and waited, watched the limestone cage from afar, waited until the season began to change. He walked home alone, heartbroken. On the second day of his journey back to his cabin in the woods, he heard a voice, like a lullaby, through the air. He tried to follow it, knowing it to be the young maiden’s, but could not locate her anywhere. He traveled up and down the shore, in figure-eights around the woods, until he was delirious with longing. He was so enchanted by her voice, he could not hear her words, directing him home. He fell to his knees at the water, begging her to reveal herself and embrace him, before tying a rock to his ankle and rolling into the gentle midnight waves. The young maiden wants you to look for the hunter, and if you see him, blow out a kiss on her behalf. The young maiden also wants you to know that if you hear her while walking this bridge… you didn’t.”

Mrs. Developer clapped her hands so that it echoed across the forest. She smiled, “Brilliant, Lili. Just Brilliant.”

Becca’s face by the bonfire that night twenty years ago appeared in the reflection of the water below the bridge, surrounded by waves instead of flames.

Farley finishes reading the sign with Madame Liliana’s story, the story of the young maiden and the hunter. He throws the butt of his cigarette over the ledge of the bridge and keeps walking towards the castrated trail.

I blow a kiss on to the water. I pull out my cell phone and open up the security camera app. I stare into a screen of grainy blackness, only a clumpy shadow of night vision white crumpled in the corner, and my reflection in the glass staring back at me.

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