Sunny Dreams by Alison Preston Page A

because everything else going on in that house is infinitely worse than broken arms,” said my dad. “That’s what it sounds like to me. Imagine her saying she would pass the message on to the family lawyer!”
    “Perhaps the family lawyer is also a family friend,” said Helen.
    “Perhaps,” said my dad.
    No one called back.
    The next day Helen and I prepared the spare room for Jackson: aired the mattress and the bedspread in the still of early morning during a lull between dusty winds, fitted the bed with clean sheets, chose a few books we thought might interest him. We even put a vase of poppies on the dresser. Helen fetched his knapsack from the tent and rested it at the end of the bed. The knapsack tempted me with its plump contents and secret folds.
    That evening, Helen went to the church to help organize tables for a rummage sale. Dad was in the backyard with Benoit. I could hear their hammers and the odd pocket of conversation. I didn’t catch much.
    Dad: Blah, Mrs. Shirt seems to be blah, blah…
    Benoit: He has not blah, blah…about his life blah…We mostly talk about blah, blah….
    My dad was obviously trying to pump Benoit for information about the Shirts, but Benoit either had little to give up or he was good at keeping things to himself. I suspected a bit of both.
    After I finished doing the dishes I went upstairs and stared at Jackson’s knapsack through the open door of his room. There was a tear in the new material that needed sewing up. He wouldn’t get very far without losing something, the state it was in. That would be my excuse if I got caught entering the room and emptying the knapsack out on the bedspread: mending intentions.
    It was mostly clothes that made up the bulk. The other contents were few. There were two pocket books that looked to have a western flavour — cowboy stories. And a tattered bible. I opened it to the cover page and found this inscription: To Jackson, from Mummy, 1924 . Maybe she gave it to him the year he headed off to school with the Jesuits. He didn’t seem like a bible reader now, but carrying the book with him didn’t necessarily mean that he was. He may just have wanted to bring something of his mother with him, odd duck though she seemed to be. It sounded possible from what Jackson had said that she was a full-fledged lunatic.
    One page stuck out a little further than the others and when I examined it I found that it wasn’t a page at all, but a photograph of a slender young boy that was tucked in for safekeeping. His hair was slicked back from his sad delicate features and he was dressed in his Sunday best. A thin current of recognition zigged through my brain. Was it Jackson in earlier times?
    I turned the picture over and found the same writing that inscribed the bible: “Bertram” (1935) , it read. It must be Jackson’s younger brother, I thought. He hadn’t said he didn’t have any younger brothers or sisters, just older. Bert. Bert Shirt! No wonder he had a sad look about his eyes. That couldn’t be an easy name to live with. What had his parents been thinking when they named him? And why on earth was his name in quotation marks?
    The rest of the stuff was uninteresting: clothes, hankies, dull pencils, a notebook with no writing in it, cigarette papers, tobacco, two packages of ready-made cigarettes, a comb, shaving gear, an old Juicy Fruit wrapper, a package of Sen-sen, a toothbrush. I stuffed it all back into the knapsack along with the cowboy books. Then I looked at the photograph a little longer before placing it back inside the bible and the bible inside the knapsack.
    There was something weird about that little boy besides his name. And those quotation marks bothered me. I wondered what Bert was doing while his family disappeared around him. Was he in Mrs. Dunning’s care? I couldn’t ask Jackson or he’d know I’d been snooping.

Chapter 9
     
    Benny took off just one day after Jackson was released from the hospital. The garage was