April 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
“Mum, since you’re up . . . ”
Sonia turned to Rose and saw in her daughter’s eyes the doubt she’d been seeing there so often recently. What happened to the constant child she’d been? Sensible Rose, who let propriety and order rule her life, was willing to give up on a person because she fell apart a little bit? Rose’s problem was that she expected life to stay the same from one moment to the next. Well, there was no same anymore.
Sonia returned her attention to Buddy, who needed something. Needed help.
But Rose didn’t go away.
“Mum?” Rose bent down with Kate, crowding Sonia and the dog. What did she want?
“Mama?” Kate tugged at Rose’s sleeve. Kate had been doing this so much lately, asking for her mother, or asking for the kind of reassurance mothers give but which Sonia was fairly certain Stella hadn’t been able to offer.
“Darling girl,” said Rose, and stood up with Kate in her arms, forget-ting Sonia.
Sonia poured warm diluted milk into a pie pan and attempted to feed it to Buddy by the stove. She felt unmoored, torn between relief and redundancy. What was her role, if Rose was going to be the mother of the family?
She cooed over Buddy and petted him. But the dog took none of the liquid from the pan.
She filled a baby bottle with milk, set the nipple into place and screwed the cap on. Then she set the bottle in a pan of water on the stove and sat in the rocker to wait. Beside her, Buddy strained to breathe.
She tested a drop of milk against her wrist. Perfect — warm as blood. She shook the bottle to release a drop and nudged the nipple against Buddy’s chapped pink and charcoal lips.
But Buddy didn’t take the nipple. He didn’t move, didn’t blink.
She shook the bottle and pushed it into place again. Nothing. Was there no way to get some liquid into him?
A day made so little difference, and so much.
Buddy languished by the stove, seemingly unable to eat. Frances was up, desperately trying to nurse him into life. Rose was clinging helplessly to Kate.
Outside, the world had turned sharply green.
Rain had melted so much snow overnight that grass was visible in front of the house. Blackbirds stalked the yard, puffed up with pride over their glossy, iridescent heads and the rudder-shaped tails they dragged behind them like wedding trains, their cockiness all at odds with their high, strangled voices (like a clothesline being pulled) and the witless way they looked at you with their one bright staring eye. Sonia loved their enthusiasm. Squeak, they said, and she focused all her attention out the window at them, tried to block out Rose, who would not stop fantasizing about her date with Ray Vermeer. We’ll do this, we’ll do that, she kept saying, and Ray will be perfect. It seemed that she’d forgotten Stella. Since Frances got up and took over with Buddy, Rose had forgotten him too.
Ray, Ray, Ray, she said, and she was like those feathered drinking birds you set on the edge of a glass: up and down, up and down they bob their blown glass heads.
There was never silence anymore; Rose filled it up. Sonia yearned for silence.
But then she was sorry for what she’d wished when Rose went suddenly quiet, staring out the kitchen window, and Evvie’s truck pulled in the lane.
Evvie, Rose breathed, and she scuttled back to her room.
Evvie came in loaded down with a box of Stella’s dresses. “Someone may as well get the use of these,” he said, and set the big box on the kitchen couch. The bottom was muddy from having been in the back of his truck. “Mmmm,” he said, sniffing the air. “Smells like boiled dinner.”
Frances screwed up her face and rolled her eyes. “Of course, you’re welcome to stay for dinner,” she had to say, then caught her breath.
“Nah,” said Evvie. “Ate already.” He walked across the kitchen in his boots and bent down to pet Buddy, who opened his eyes and lifted his chin. Then Evvie turned back to Sonia. “You should give the dog some of that broth.”
In the hall, Kate called Mama! Mama! She tore into the kitchen dragging a sock with a block inside it. She ran straight at Evvie — then pulled up short. Mama, she said softly, sadly. She nudged Evvie’s knee, then whipped around and ran out of the room again.
Evvie nodded at Sonia, turned toward Buddy again. “Put that meat juice on a rag and squeeze it in his mouth. He’s not looking great.”
Then he stood and turned and went out the door.
“Oh — ” Rose said, lifting one of the dresses from the box and holding it up in front of her body. “Look.”
Rose held the dress, a shiny champagne shirtwaist Sonia had never seen before, and Frances fell —
Later, Rose marvelled that she fell “like a stone” to the floor. Her voice was rich with awe, as though fainting were an accomplishment of some kind. What Frances was good at.
As Frances lay on the floor and Rose knelt beside her, it seemed to Sonia that Stella spoke —
. . . always a whirlwind of noise. At the dinner table, all trying to talk at once . . . how it is — was — most of the time . . . there’re so many of us, and each one trying to sort out something different.
I missed that noise, when I moved away with Evvie.
She knew it wasn’t Stella’s voice she heard, but rather some version of her own. She was desperate, she realized, to know that her daughter had been happy, even briefly.
This must be why older people spoke so reverently of peace. Mary Walt invoked the word at Stella’s memorial, and Cece and Mae chimed in, “Someday, dear, you will see she’s in a good place now.” Sonia had imagined they meant something churchy by their canned assurances. Not simply, Stella is free of all that troubled her.
Rose patted Frances’s hand as she came to, and suddenly Sonia understood how many of her mothering tasks she’d handed off to her girls.
She hadn’t known Stella as well as she should have, and now she was letting go of Rose and Frances too. As children they’d been so needy and she’d been so very busy.
But wasn’t this how it had to be? They were all going to leave. They were leaving from the moment they were born, each one of her unique and incomprehensible children.
“When you come right down to it,” Rose liked to say, “it is impossible to know another person.”
Now Rose was distracted by the clothes in the box, so many of which she’d never seen before. Frances rested on the kitchen cot, and Sonia sat beside her. Frances patted her hand as though she were the one who had fallen.
Later, Cece and Mae arrived, and Dan, still baffled and amazed, told the story of his discovery of Buddy.
“Well, somehow he got out on us. He got himself into a culvert and he must have fell asleep. Then it snowed. The plow came by. Buddy got buried under all that snow. I only found him by accident when I was digging out the lane.”
Dan said nothing about the look in Buddy’s eyes, the way the light had fallen on him, the uncanny colour of the walls in his snow cave. Maybe Dan hadn’t noticed any of those things, but Sonia believed he had.
Cece and Mae listened quietly to Dan. When he was through, Mae said, “It’s something he was able to last that long, without food or water.”
“I guess he wasn’t thirsty. He was licking snow.”
Cece nodded and that was the end of the conversation, but it seemed for a moment that Cece and Mae were waiting for Dan to say something more.
The first time Sonia heard him tell this story, Dan was in the milk room with Rob. Dan washing out the separator and Rob drying its parts with one of the towels kept specifically for that purpose. She’d come in to get cream for dinner. She waited while Dan spoke. Rob’s hands, with their bony, blue-veined look, made her think of Buddy in the culvert, then of Stella, lost in Toronto or somewhere else. And Dan’s voice, so fraught and full of wonder, seemed to contain every nuance of the conflicting emotions she felt. “I dunno,” she said into the silence after Dan stopped speaking, as though in answer to some question he or Rob had asked. Both boys looked at her. They’d forgotten — or had never noticed — she was there.
It seemed to her then that Dan’s bafflement confirmed what Rose asserted all along: there is no way to understand the events of life, not any more than you can fathom the mind of another person.
After Evvie left, Rose dipped up a ladleful of liquid from the boiled dinner and bathed a clean dishcloth in the meaty broth. She put a pie plate under Buddy’s chin and squeezed the liquid from the dishcloth over his dry, lolling tongue. His withered body vibrated as though from a shock. He moved his jaws. Rose squeezed some more broth, and Buddy raised his head and blinked at Rose. “Oh, Buddy,” she said. “You’re alive again!”
She dampened the cloth and squeezed more broth. Sonia could hear him swallow. It seemed to cause him pain. Rose squeezed the cloth and Sonia stared at the point where they connected, Rose and Buddy, willing him to live. Buddy made a rasping noise, and Rose went very still. “Don’t worry, Mum,” she said. “The liquid will lubricate his throat.”
Later, Sonia lay on the cot, breathing in the musty odour from the box of dresses. She could smell the dresses, their history, yet all she could see was Evvie with the box.
It was Stella’s face she yearned for.
When the girls were little, they liked to play a game called Dress Up and Pretend, and the roles Stella favoured were traditional ones, informed by what she knew. Dress up and pretend to be a mother, dress up and pretend to be a bride. Rose used to dress up and pretend to go out dancing, what she most wanted to do. Frances liked to dress a different way each time, and she never performed the same roles as her sisters. Dress up and pretend to be a lawyer. Dress up and pretend to be a vet, dispensing stern advice to farmers and fawning sympathy toward the cats from the barn. Dress up and pretend to be a science teacher, like lucky Dan’s good science teacher, Una Hearne.
As a child, Sonia’s favourite thing was to dress up and pretend to be his own self, Inspector Sherlock Holmes. It wasn’t the idea of detecting she liked; it was the hat, a hand-me-down from her Montreal neighbour’s English husband, who had always been a smartly dressed gentleman. In that hat Sonia felt grown and powerful and full of knowledge, nothing like her real self.
The first time Stella brought Evvie home, Sonia watched him closely. Stella was keyed up, as though his presence at the table were an honour of some kind. Sonia wanted to say: Evvie’s not the Queen of England! Of course, she would never be so rude.
Evvie dominated that first supper and the hours after. He made himself at home — sitting down without being invited to do so, stretching out his legs, gazing frankly all around. Dan and Sonia asked questions — not many — and he answered them: Age twenty-one, same as Stella. Parents George and Loleta, a Trainor from Pisquid. Home a mixed farm in Martinvale with a dozen head of cattle, a flock of chickens and a half a dozen hogs.
Dan and Rose behaved as though they liked him. But for no reason she could name, Sonia thought: He’s a brazen, cocky bastard. She didn’t like the way he held his shoulders back, or the way he looked her in the eye and blinked unsmilingly at Stella.
What did Stella see in him?
Sonia believed Rob and Dan would say “brazen and cocky” too. But later she learned she was wrong about this. Mysteriously, Dan liked him. Rob did not.
During dinner, Evvie talked when he was spoken to and otherwise just ate. He ate ravenously, but no one commented. After dinner, when Stella served the rhubarb pie she’d made, with tea for the family and coffee for Evvie, he claimed Sonia’s rocker by the stove and went on about the old Hickman farm he planned to buy, down the road. So Stella can be near her family. Making this remark, he grinned unctuously around the room and Sonia began to really worry. Something was wrong with the way Evvie went about things. At the time — even now — she couldn’t name the thing that set her teeth on edge. But it was there.
Other dinners followed. Evvie always dominated the room, as though because he was the eldest male he should assume the place of patriarch. But that place still belonged to Max. Even Dan never tried to take it over.
Was it only this that bothered her: that Evvie wanted to take control? Or was there something else?
After Stella and Evvie married and set up their own house, Stella was always home alone whenever anyone dropped by. Evvie disappeared for long stretches and no one knew where he went. He never seemed to be around when Stella needed help with Kate. Rose said once she’d seen Evvie slam a door and yell at Stella, and Frances said, Aha! But Rose said nothing more, had seen nothing more, as far as Sonia knew.
The weather on the day of Rose’s date with Ray was beautifully mild. But the evening of that day a fog rolled in, enclosing Prospect valley and all the roads out of it in a cool, thick mist that snuck inside the house and settled like dew. (That strange fog was a sign, Rose said later. Mum, why did you let me go out in it?)
Frances had burned something horrible in the oven, a science project of some kind. The smell was so bad that Rose had to help Frances get the storm panes off so they could open the kitchen windows to clear the air.
After that, Rose complained she felt smothered and chilly. Her rayon blouse clung unattractively to her arms and her wool skirt smelled of sheep. “Wear your coat,” Sonia suggested. But Rose was tired of her winter coat (which was wool in any case and would smell no better damp than the skirt). Rose mentioned Stella’s gabardine Toronto car coat. “Remember how she looked in it? Like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
They’d gone through the box of clothes soon after Evvie brought it over. For Sonia it was a relief to handle them, but she could not bear to listen as Frances and Rose debated what to do. “Stella will want these,” she said, “when she comes home.” But Rose made a job of it, selecting things to save for Kate and things to give away.
In the end, Rose said, it wasn’t a difficult task because the clothes had lost their lustre. They were only fabric after all. Unfolded slightly crumpled from the box, none of Stella’s things looked the way they had looked on Stella — unremarkable Stella, who had been transformed by the quality articles she’d brought back from Toronto.
The car coat hadn’t been in the box. Maybe Stella gave it away in one of her impulsive fits of generosity, Rose said. Maybe we all imagined it.
No, Sonia thought. She took it with her.
Ray appeared as promised on the spot of six. He stood grinning on the step in a shiny leather jacket, the porch light gleaming off his grease-combed hair. He looked like Johnny Cash: brash and handsome, but oddly vulnerable too. Sonia explained to him that Rose would be out right away. She said it was really better not to come in. “Frances cooked something nasty in the oven.”
“Burnt mouse, it smells like,” Ray suggested. He stepped across the threshold.
Rose, who’d opted to change her skirt and blouse, was nearly ready. “Just wait right there,” Sonia said.
Ray smiled. “All right,” he said. He swung off his coat and stepped inside, passing quickly through the empty kitchen into the living room, plopping down beside Rob and Buddy in front of the television.
Sonia racked her brain: what more could she have done?
Ray talked at quiet Rob. Coloured television! he exclaimed. He’d seen a set in Charlottetown. Rob wouldn’t believe the difference colour made. You have to get one! Save your pennies for it!
Poor Rob. He didn’t have a dollar to call his own, and even if he had, he would never waste it on a frivolity like television.
Rose said Ray had lectured her like this too.
Lately he’d been on about Switchboard. He wanted Rose to move to town, and Switchboard was a way. A relative of his — he’d said her name: Chevette Gallant — was giving up her switchboard job, which Ray had gotten for her. The telephone company would need a replacement and he could easily put in a word with Blondie McLean, his friend who managed all the girls, that is, the operators.
You’ll love it! Ray said continually.
After one of Ray’s long phone calls, Rose had sought out Sonia for advice. “Mum,” she said, “I don’t know what to do!” The house was quiet and Rose’s panic bloomed in the silence.
She worried he would eventually wear her down. Already she almost didn’t care, she said. She just wished to hear no more about the friend with the job. This was the awful part, the greasy friend and the job interview, which Rose dreaded.
Sonia nodded, and Rose went on talking as though unable to stop. The work itself she believed she’d like. She’d seen the switchboard in the village, and could imagine the one in Charlottetown as the same, only larger. The switchboard in the village with its hundreds of plugs and tangled mass of crossing wires that always wanted sorting out was utterly compelling to Rose. But it would be better to get on at the switchboard in town. Ray had told her about the coming change to dial telephones and how soon only jobs for the operators in Charlottetown would remain.
But first there was the interview to get through, then the move to town, and before all that, figuring out what to do about Kate. Because Frances was going to university in the fall. If Rose left too, Sonia would have to look after Kate all alone.
Rose looked at Sonia, and Sonia bit her lip.
When Rose mentioned this difficulty to Ray, she said, he brushed it off. He could find Rose a little car to get to work in, he said, as though transportation were her main concern.
You can pay on the instalment plan, he’d said, and winked.
Rose demonstrated this manoeuvre, squinting one eye as though in pain, and Sonia laughed. She didn’t understand how Rose could make fun of Ray and date him at the same time. Perhaps this question played across her face. “Don’t worry, Mum. It’s just for now,” Rose said.
Sonia thought about telling Rose she was making a mistake. Nothing is ever just for now. Our impulses have consequences.
But of course Rose would not want to be told what to do.
Sonia thought about the times one of her girls had gotten into trouble — or just barely missed out on getting into trouble — because of just this kind of impulsive choice.
Frances sometimes got around with Marina Cray’s son Lyman, who knew every type of badness a person could get up to. He knew what went on in the back room of Joe Gormely’s corner store, how to get to the poison mushroom field behind Norm and Elva Corrigan’s place, where to find the bootlegger on the Sandy Cape Road and when people met to play cards for money at Virgil Rooney’s house. Frances had once been stranded with him out in Peakes after dark and forced to walk through miles of marshy, half-frozen fields until she came to a house with a telephone. A lot of Lyman’s ideas revealed their badness from the start, but it always seemed as if Frances would have a moment of weakness and go along with them anyway.
Someone almost died after a fight up east and Lyman had been there. Marina had said, “He wouldn’t hurt another person. He’s just young, drawn to wherever the action is.”
But Sonia believed Lyman’s talent for trouble was contagious, and she didn’t want her daughters to catch it. What if Ray was the same?
The problem was that Frances and Rose could both be too accommodating.
And of course for Rose there was more at stake than whatever trouble Ray might get her into. There was also Kate.
Rose complained that Kate cried Mama, Mama all day long but was calmed if Rob or Frances or anyone picked her up. Of course she was. Rose was not Kate’s mama any more than Buddy the dog or the cows in the barn, whose velvet noses she so loved to be held up to pet.
But Sonia was not Kate’s mother either. And Sonia was no good at being a mother, as Stella’s disappearance clearly demonstrated.
She was afraid of looking after Kate on her own.
“What are you worried about, Mum?” Rose said when Sonia voiced this concern. “You looked after all of us.”
This was precisely what made Sonia anxious.
Some mother, Max had said, so many times. She could hear him still. And why? Because she’d wanted to protect her children? Because she dared put their needs before his? The first years with Stella were hard, but when Dan was born something crucial had clicked into place. And then it became easier to know what they needed after Max was gone. Before, life had been governed by his continual hurry and his need to be the centre of attention.
“Thanks for listening, Mum,” Rose said, and Sonia nodded, not certain how she had helped but reassured by the calm on her daughter’s face.
Rose wanted Sonia to listen again after her date with Ray. Sonia paid attention: this detailed reporting was so out of character for Rose.
Sonia was worried about Rose. Has he confused you? she wondered. Are you who you were before?
It seemed to Sonia that Rose had left her self behind and migrated into this extroverted personality that fit her as badly as someone else’s tailored suit.
But maybe this unfamiliar person was Rose. Or an aspect of Rose that Sonia didn’t know. Again she wondered if she knew her own children at all.
“Mum?” Rose said.
Sonia turned her attention to her daughter again. I can immerse myself, she thought, so that when Rose tells her story I have a chance of understanding.
In the car Ray turned frequently to grin at her, Rose said, and she marvelled at the way the sun seemed to rise out of the earth as they drove toward higher ground. Often when it was foggy in Prospect valley, it was perfectly nice elsewhere. That day, golden light reflected off the windows of homes and barns, sifted through trees and hedgerows and glittered at the edges of the road where the weeds were wet. Even weeds can be beautiful if you look at them in the right light, don’t you think, Mum? Rose said.
The date would not start until they got to town, Rose believed. She hoped to be taken out to dance at the Rollaway Club downtown.
But the date was on a Friday — and dances at the Rollaway were held on Saturdays. Don’t worry, Sonia had said the week before, when Rose broached this problem. You’ll have fun.
But Rose did not exactly have fun.
Ray parked outside a smoke shop on Elm Avenue, a shop Rose had never noticed on her few previous trips to town. Leaving her on the sidewalk, Ray ran into this shop to buy a pack of cigarettes. As she stood waiting, watching fond-looking couples and pairs of businessmen in suits stroll past, Rose realized this was not an auspicious beginning to the evening. She would have liked for Ray to sweep her into a restaurant on his arm, gently pushing her ahead of him the way men did in films when walking into public places with their gals.
Ray is no movie star, Sonia thought, when Rose told this part.
After the cigarettes, he took her by the arm and guided her around the streets of town. “Town,” Sonia said, and thought of Montreal. How small her life had become.
For a few minutes, Rose said, it was interesting to stroll around with Ray. She enjoyed peering in the window of Adela’s Millinery with its ranks of tiny cardboard boxes filled with silk flowers, satin ribbons and tiny, brightly coloured papier mâché birds. She’d never seen the shop before, and she would have loved to go in and discuss the design for a hat with Adela — if Adela was the delicate older lady bowing her head behind the counter. Instead, Ray led her to the Town and Country, where they ate a plain meal of ham steak with canned green peas and soggy chips. Rose had tea and Ray had beer with his.
Afterward, there was a visit to what Ray called his club, where men sat astride battered stools at a long counter and were offered clear and amber beverages in chunky tumblers. Ray consumed several of these while Rose waited. All the while he talked about Switchboard, and the apartment she might get if she lived in town, and how they would go out like this on weekend nights.
Sonia could picture this scene easily. She imagined that Ray touched Rose’s knee as he spoke, and tried to put an arm around her waist, and that Rose shrugged these gestures off.
After, Rose said, Ray drove her by the Island Telephone Company, a boxy brick building whose third and highest floor was brightly lit against the dark. That’s where the long-distance operators work, he explained.
Then they detoured to the other side of town, and he showed her where he lived, gesturing down a narrow street. But there was nothing she could see. Ray’s street did not have lights.
On the long drive home, Rose gazed out onto the grey, moonlit fields while Ray talked about his car, a lacklustre Chrysler Imperial that he insisted was “only borrowed from a friend.” His own vehicle was a new Ford Mustang coupe, he said, “Candy Red in colour.”
But it was “presently in the shop.”
This was simple boasting, so far as Sonia could see.
But Ray was not all bad, Rose insisted. He had positive qualities. He was enthusiastic. He thought about Rose’s future. That must count for something.
“Maybe,” Sonia said.
The drive back home had frightened Rose. The car was big and cold, and there was black ice on the road. Rose wished for summer: Ray drove too fast. Near Scotchfort he jammed on the brakes to keep from hitting an animal on the road. In the pale glow of the headlight beams, Rose saw it dash into the ditch, eyes all aflame: a small black fox with a pure white tail.
Ray whispered, Silver fox.
Thilver, the word came out. Ray was drunk.
A few miles farther on, the car swerved off the pavement. Ray hauled it back. But by now all Rose could think was: I never want to do this drive again.
Perhaps she did want to live in town.
Maybe I want to be one of those women who stay up at night answering long-distance calls from across the Island and around the world, she said.
Connected, Sonia thought, but alone in a wire-and-button world.
Yes, Rose said, eventually she wanted to earn money of her own, to rent her own apartment, to buy stylish clothes and shoes and a made-to-order hat from Adela’s, if she wished. She wanted to avoid this driving back and forth, except to visit home and family and Kate. When Sonia was ready to look after Kate, Rose qualified. “When you’re ready, Mum. Okay?”
Sonia nodded. But how could she think about Rose leaving? About looking after Kate alone? And soon Frances would leave too —
Rose was still talking. Pay attention, Sonia thought. She hasn’t left yet.
Ray had his good qualities, Rose said. She could rhyme them off. He was handsome. You could say he was handsome. He was strong, with dark, wavy hair and a squared-off jaw that made him seem simultaneously dangerous and reliable. He could carry on a conversation with anyone. He was never worried or afraid, so far as anyone could see. He was persistent. He tried to do nice things for Rose. Someday, for sure, he would take her dancing at the Rollaway Club.
She said she’d liked how they had walked from street to street, looking into shops, sitting down for drinks at various establishments. They had taken in the town. How theatrical it had all been, she said later — the look of the shops, the people out and about, the liveliness. She had never been in town on a Friday night. There was something freeing about walking around in town when other people were out, also walking. It felt like she was part of an event.
Talking it all out, she said she had felt buoyed by possibility. Sonia could imagine this feeling too.
Rose said, “Maybe that was what Toronto was like for Stella.”
Is like, Sonia thought. Maybe that’s what Toronto is like for Stella.
Rose went to bed then, and Sonia stepped outside.
The night had grown black and the stars pressing down from within that darkness seemed to her uncomfortably numerous, and at the same time too faint to be of any use.
October 1941. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
Sonia dreamed of the sandhills all that fall. She dreamed of people around her, busy with work and friendship and dancing in the evenings. She dreamed of women friends bending their heads intimately toward her own, sharing stories and advice. On the sandhills in the evenings the light was yellow and orange, so warm it erased even the chill from the onshore wind. It was impossible to see beyond this light given out by camp stoves and lanterns and bonfires. But in that circle of light was all she needed. Pete was there, tending to whatever required his attention. Max’s cut arm. A boy in a sling. Someone’s baby. She would look at him, or speak, and he would turn, smiling, toward her.
The dreams became a habit. She could return to that world by imagining the feeling of sand against her skin, or the sound of waves. She began to crave sleep like a drug.
But she woke from the dreams feeling unrefreshed, more tired than if she hadn’t slept at all. In the mornings, up before Max, when out the window there was barely enough light to see, she could hear crows calling overhead as they flew from their roosts in the woods to their feeding grounds on the fields. This was how she knew, every morning, that something had gone badly wrong. On Surplus Island, in her sandy bed, she’d woken to the keening of gulls and the high, competing calls of terns — their vibrant, confident voices. Now she felt soft cotton sheets above and beneath her and the restrictive weight of three wool blankets, and she tore herself from the pull of sleep only with great reluctance.
The strangest thing had been losing touch with people she’d begun to know — Marg and George Proffit, Grenfell Hillyard and the fishermen who sometimes put in at Surplus Island to gather or repair their traps. All these people knew her as a person with an important job to do. At the farm, she was only Max’s wife, stuck at home. She knew no one, and no one knew who she was or what she could do.
She missed the daily rituals she’d established: lighting the lamp at dusk and extinguishing it at dawn, pulling closed the canvas drapes that shielded the powerful lens from sunlight, polishing the reflector until it shone. She missed the expanse of sea and sky, the lines of sight she’d had, the way subtle ocean colours changed from hour to hour and with the weather. She missed her independence.
The letter she sent to DOT had failed completely. So far as she was able, she’d followed regulations: Use the special, lined memo paper. Write on one side only. Address only one topic per letter.
It was her topic that proved troubling. No, they wouldn’t have a woman lighthouse keeper. If Max didn’t want the post, fine. There were men who could take over from him. Plenty of men wanted to help their country but weren’t able, for one reason or another, to go overseas.
She felt sorry about this response. But in the end, she realized, it wouldn’t have mattered what DOT had said. In two months, a baby would be born.
If the baby was a boy, she’d call him Daniel, for her father.
She had no girl’s name. She wanted a girl, but how awful to bring another girl into this world. Girls had so little choice in life. They could dream and hope, but what they did was up to men — fathers or bosses or husbands.
Sometimes in her dreams of the sandhills Pete would appear with a child. Her child. They would be holding hands, walking through the surf, and when they saw Sonia, the child would break away from Pete and run to her. Nothing was like life. Not the serenity of the scene. Not the relaxed look of certainty on Pete’s face. Not the fact that Pete cared for this child, which in the dream was his as well as hers, but which in reality of course belonged to Max.
She loved the dream. The little girl had champagne-coloured curls and a warm, understanding smile. She forgave Sonia for whatever mistakes she had made. Slipping out of bed to build up the fire and put water on for tea, Sonia marvelled at the way her life had changed. This farm, cold, empty, landlocked, was becoming more familiar with every passing day. Whenever she made a set of curtains, or a meal, or dressed the bed, she performed an act of commitment to the place, and by extension to her husband, Max. This was how familiarity worked: it bred commitment against a person’s will. Soon she would no longer dream of life away. Pete and the sandhills would become for her what they had always really been: a figment of imagination, nothing more.
Sonia gave birth at the end of a fall so long and mild that bales of straw left out on the fields grew tender green caps of seedling oats.
She experienced a dreamless night of physical discomfort, then woke to a clear realization of pain. The cramps were dull at first. She believed she could endure them. She let Max get up to make the tea, saying nothing. She would wait as long as she could, keep this to herself. Throughout the morning Max kept coming into the house from the barn, certain something was happening in spite of her many denials. She refused to drive to the hospital in town. It’s not time, she said.
By noon, there was no way to carry on alone. She was sick in a basin, the pain so unrelenting now there was no evading it. Max went for Lil, who had been a midwife to other women in the community, and when Lil came into the house, Sonia felt a sudden lightening of the weight she carried in her mind. She would get through this agony with Lil’s hand on her back, Lil’s whispered words and the damp cloth Lil smoothed across her face.
A gentle breeze across the sandhills became a constant wind, whirled up into a ferocious storm, threw sand and crashing salt-sharp waves on everything, destroyed buildings, wharves and boats, chased inhabitants away.
Still, when the storm abated, the naked dunes would be fine and strong. They were a glory in and of themselves.
At first the baby cried reluctantly.
Sonia was amazed. She felt torn up emotionally — how was this infant so able to restrain herself?
The tiny creature looked around, gazing into her mother’s eyes, and Lil’s, as though there were worlds available to her inside each of them.
She was so fiercely alive and yet so fragile.
Sonia felt profoundly incapable of looking after her.
You’ll be fine, Lil said.
But Lil meant physically. Your body will survive, she meant.
At Lil’s suggestion, they named her for the sky when she was born. It had been a clear, cold night. The first really cold evening of that winter. Stars hung thickly overhead, their light exploding as though through holes in a heavy blanket.
It’s weighted, Sonia thought, bearing down on us, the piercing white points of it boring into me.
In the morning, every surface was covered in a fine skiff of dry snow and still one star shone in the high, pale sky.
“Stella,” Lil said.
To Sonia that one star seemed a sign that the winter would go on forever.
Her despair came on quickly. That first look in Stella’s slate-blue eyes had been a slap. You’re not fit, it had said, and nothing Lil or Max or anyone could say would change that clean, sharp truth. She plodded through the tasks required of her, but she didn’t actually want to touch or hold that baby Lil had named, as she thought of Stella then. Something was in the way, some blockage or barrier between Sonia and the pale, strange infant she was supposed to love. There was nothing Sonia could do to change this. But she fed the baby and kept it clean and put it down to sleep. And Max came in to check on them — came in early from his work to hold the baby in the rocker, if she was awake, or to tidy up the house and try to jolly Sonia out of what must have seemed a deep, unfathomable sorrow.
Max’s tenderness with the child seemed to Sonia as improbable as her own apathy, those first days. In the baby’s presence his face flared like a lantern touched with flame. She could almost hear the breathy rush of fuel and the sudden, unsubtle gasp of ignition. Max was captivated and Sonia felt mystified by this — and plagued with guilt. What was wrong with her that suddenly seemed right with him?
Lil began to come by more often in the weeks after Stella’s birth. At first she kept her visits short, taking time only to gather dirty laundry to take back to her own house or to put dishes of food in the icebox, and to sit with Stella in the rocker by the stove so Sonia could have her “rest.” Apart from feeding Stella, Sonia did nothing all day but rest, yet it seemed that she was always tired.
One morning Lil found Stella bawling in her crib, her bedding and clothes a sodden mess — and Sonia crumpled like a rag, screaming silently, eyes wild, hands pressed against her ears.
Lil saw to Stella first, soothing her with sugar water dripped from her little finger. While she changed Stella’s clothes and diaper, Sonia came up and reached for her.
“I am not so far gone I can entirely forget to feed my baby!”
Lil made the tea that morning, oatmeal and eggs to nourish Sonia and a lunch for Max. Then, for months afterward, Lil came back each morning, and gradually Sonia overcame some of her hopelessness — or sorrow, or grief — whatever it was that had stood between herself and motherhood. Lil was not the one to judge.
Sonia overheard Lil on the telephone one day: It’s quite an adjustment for her. She’s never had to be responsible for anything before.
She was surprised by the simplicity of this practical assessment. Lil had not expressed anger, or hurt, or (as Sonia’s own mother had recently written) disappointment. She had spoken in a soft, forgiving voice.
How comforting this was. Because of course Sonia had been charged with responsibility before. She’d been the keeper of Surplus Island Light Station. She’d been a negligent and inattentive keeper, much of the time. A failure at lighthouse keeping. But she’d done it.
Lil didn’t care. Lightkeeping was not the same as motherhood. Learning to be a mother takes time, she said. And you need support.
In this way Sonia came to understand that Lil intended to stay by her side, and this meant that she, Sonia, was not alone.
July 1943. Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.
Sonia followed a path through marram-covered dunes to a beach so crowded she barely recognized it.
Beside her, a flame-haired woman in a ruby swimsuit swept her arms over a small, attentive group — Waddya say, kids? Let’s get wet! Last one in — then she ran like a child, sand flying, hair flying, towing five young men behind her on an invisible string.
All around, people were living it up, paired off in couples or massed in knots of giggling girls. No one was alone, and no one else had a child clinging to her hand, so far as Sonia could see. What did other parents do — leave their children home?
The sand was bleached white, glittering, and the crowd a whirl of movement and colour. Cobalt jars of Nivea lay wherever they’d been tossed onto red-and-white-striped, ash grey blankets.
Sweating, open bottles lay everywhere. The sugary gold of ginger ale and the lovely underwater green of 7UP. Stubby brown beers half buried in the dry blond sand.
People lounged among the dunes, their clothing bundled into makeshift pillows, teasing, laughing at each other’s jokes, smoking cigarettes, enthralled by secrets or gossip they shared.
Small flocks of sandpipers swept over the crowd like a breeze of air, setting down in the flotsam and falling up into the sky again, their fluid movements governed by wind or whim or, perhaps, no force at all.
This beach seemed dull to Sonia, compared to the shore of Surplus Island. It had been tamed by habitation, like Sonia herself, bound, now, to a family she barely understood. Every day Max spoke to her about the baby and the farm. (His pride, disappointments, anxieties. She’s smart like me, not you. There’s no money in a farm. Grain better sell this year!) So few of his words reached her. Stella was eighteen months old. Sonia pretended affection in the hope that she would eventually learn to love the child.
She worried Stella would grow up maimed by inattention. She worried she wouldn’t love the second baby she now knew she carried. But she hoped things would be different this time around.
Stella spied a jellyfish and tried to pick it up. “No, no!” Sonia cried. The creature was a delicate pale puce all through, like grape juice watered down. “Mummy! Pretty!” Stella said, reaching for it, and Sonia realized with a sudden hit of pleasure that her daughter possessed a love of colour like her own.
Something softened in Sonia then. But she pushed the feeling back.
On the high tide line, small shells and bits of driftwood from broken lobster pots swam among waves of dry seaweed. Stella played amongst these, selecting shells and setting them in little piles, while beside her Sonia watched the sea.
The empty sea. Boring and still, from a civilian perspective. She didn’t know this particular stretch of shore or the fishermen whose boats were visible on the horizon, so the view was as inaccessible as a foreign word whose meaning she could not decode.
She consulted her watch.
Max had promised to collect them at three o’clock, but that meant an hour more to wait. She was tired of lying around doing nothing, and now the sky was starting to cloud over.
“Shall we play at the edge, sweetie, or go in the water?”
“No!” Stella stacked shells determinedly, building a tiny tower.
Sonia stood. If she walked away, Stella would follow her. She couldn’t stand to sit still a moment longer.
“Mama!” Stella flung a shell from her hand and grabbed for Sonia.
“Let’s just take a little walk.”
“O-tay!”
What a relief: Stella was having a compliant day.
Sonia turned to face away from the crowds. They’d walk up the shore and perhaps by the time they walked back down Max would have arrived to take them home.
But before she’d taken a step, Stella bent to grab the shell she’d tossed away, hauling down on her mother’s arm, then relaxing her hold as she straightened up.
“Let’s go now,” Sonia said.
“No!” Stella dug her heels into the sand.
Sonia hesitated, torn between following her plan and giving in to Stella, who looked ready to have a spectacular tantrum. Gently, Stella tugged her daughter’s arm again, and just as she did, a firm adult hand pressed Sonia’s opposite shoulder.
Max, she thought. For an instant she felt torn two ways at once.
“Hello.”
Sonia loosened her grip on Stella’s hand and turned around, confused. She knew that voice.
“Sonia,” Pete whispered.
She blinked, narrowed her eyes. Was this real?
“I saw you from over there.” He pointed back toward the crowd of people, clotted up now in a single mass.
Something about him had changed.
“And who are you?” He touched the top of Stella’s head and Stella turned her face up and gazed curiously into his eyes.
“I thought you weren’t ever coming back.” She spoke so quickly it came out sounding like an accusation.
“I never said that.”
“No?”
She thought defensively, I remember every word you ever said to me.
This wasn’t true, of course. She had no idea what he’d said the last time they’d been together. She could remember distinctly how she’d felt, but not — she realized now — the actual words he’d spoken. She had been too panicked to think.
“Sonia,” he whispered, “she’s a beautiful little girl. She looks just like you.”
Max found them in the water, splashing with Stella. The sun had gone behind a bank of clouds, but the air was still quite warm. “Doctor Pete!” Max smiled as he approached, and the two men shook hands.
“Not ‘Doctor’ anymore, actually,” Pete said. “I gave that up.”
“No!” Max glanced at the scar on his arm. Sonia could see what he was thinking. You didn’t just give up a skill once you’d mastered it.
“Anyway,” said Pete. He started to walk away. “I left my clothes back there.” He pointed toward the crowd up the beach.
“Good to see you, Doc. Uh, Pete.”
Sonia dove into the water. Now that Max was here, she could leave Stella for a moment. As fast as she was able, she swam out past the sandbar.
Pete had kept saying her name, as though he couldn’t quite believe his luck. Yet he was the one who’d left. He left everything, it seemed. He said he’d given up medicine after something went wrong in a delivery room.
“It was an emergency Caesarean,” he’d said. “I kept dwelling on the person behind the green drapes instead of what I was supposed to do. In surgery, a doctor can’t be distracted like that. Part of the function of drapes is to keep the surgeon from seeing the person whose body he has to cut into. The mind resists harming another human being.”
The mind resists harming another human being. (Was that true of everyone?)
He’d had to leave the operating theatre. He quit that day. He said he didn’t know what he was going to do instead. He was working as a clerk in a bookstore for the year. In another month he might go back to school, he wasn’t sure.
He asked many questions, but she answered only one or two. She couldn’t confide in him about her difficulty being a mother to Stella — he thought Stella was adorable. She couldn’t discuss Max. What else was there? Finally they’d gone with Stella into the water. Pete held Stella’s hand and jumped over little waves, clowning for her.
For months after, she would summon up this encounter, rearranging it, changing her responses, or his.
The image of Pete holding Stella in his arms impressed on her mind like a brand.
May 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
Rose professed ambivalence, but she was still swayed by Ray. She let him take her into town to be interviewed, and she accepted the switchboard job when it was offered.
“Congratulations,” Sonia said, but now she was worried. As Rose’s life changed, so would her own.
She watched Rose strip off nylons and her good skirt and put on what she called her “comfies,” wool work socks and worn jeans. “This is what we need, Mum,” Rose said. “It’s what I need, and it’s what you need too. Kate is so sweet. She likes you. You’ll have fun.”
It’s what you need.
Sonia remembered Max saying something like that to her, one desperate day in Stella’s first year. Lil had not been by and dishes were piling up, laundry, clutter. Sonia’s hair wasn’t washed, her head hurt, her breasts ached. Stella was crying.
“You need to keep up,” he’d said. “You. Not me. This is your job.”
After the first week, he’d lost interest in Stella. She was a job now. Sonia’s, not his.
Later, when Max became more insistent, and Sonia began to feel she needed to leave, he spoke as though he’d changed his mind about Stella. “You go!” he’d said. “You’re not taking the baby. You’re a terrible mother anyway!”
He’d barred the way to Stella’s room, and Sonia knew by the look in his eyes that he meant to hurt her if she took another step toward him.
She couldn’t leave Stella. So she stayed.
She couldn’t have left anyway. She was pregnant again.
After that, for a long time, she was afraid to need them, these children he could take from her.
He was warm one day, cruel the next. And if he did the least little thing to comfort her, Sonia would forgive him weeks of brutality. Forgive and forget.
The things she forgot.
His raging; doors slammed, his fists put through them; objects thrown, broken, thrown at her. Was it her fault?
You made me do it!
She had repaired the damage, swept up the glass, erased the memories. Only the kids did not forget. “Why don’t they like me?” he’d asked once. “My own children!”
She hadn’t dared to answer.
Other people seemed to like him. Neighbours, farmers, other men. Had they noticed his hardness? Perhaps they had not.
Rose got drives with Harry McLellan, into town and home again. Harry McLellan worked for the government, so he said she didn’t need to help him pay for gas. Once he was sick and Rose had to drive herself in their balky truck, but mostly her journeys to work were smooth and only her absence was notable.
Sonia found looking after Kate both familiar and strange. Her own children had never been so clingy or so vocal as Kate, who seemed to want solitude and companionship simultaneously. Sonia felt she was doing something wrong, but Rose said firmly, “Mum, she looks perfect to me.”
One Saturday, Frances stayed home with Kate while Rose took Sonia into town, to show off where she worked. They left the truck behind the Island Telephone Company, in a parking lot Sonia had never noticed. Seeing the city through Rose’s eyes, she thought, made it look brand new.
Rose opened a door in the back of the building and they climbed three flights of stairs. At the top, beside a dark, unlabelled door, Rose turned to smile at Sonia. Then she pushed the door open. “Ta-da!” she said, walking through.
Ta-da.
Together, they examined the high, dark room with its funny smell — dust on the mechanisms burning off? — and met the dozen women who sat together at the high boards lined with rows of button plugs and wires and heavy headphone sets and Bakelite switches. There was one sign in the stark room — Positively No Smoking — and a noise — part buzz, part hum — composed, it seemed, of the voices of hundreds of people talking all at once on the telephone lines.
The atmosphere, simultaneously electric and still, gave Sonia the jitters. “How claustrophobic,” she remarked, and Rose frowned and pursed her lips. But she walked Sonia to the chair she used and encouraged her to sit down. “Try it, Mum,” she said. “Who would you like to call?”
Rose produced not a local phone book but the big Island one and Sonia wondered where to begin.
She thought for a minute, then she opened the book.
Rose whipped plugs out of numbered holes and Sonia inserted them in others. “Hello, hello?” she said.
And then, like a miracle, it happened.
A woman in Borden who worked on the ferry said, “Yes, I seen her, dear. A lovely young woman. And didn’t she have one walleye? She was going to Toronto.”
Sonia made calls to Toronto until her voice went hoarse. Rose helped, expertly connecting and disconnecting the distant lines. Afterward they went together to the Purity Dairy counter, where Rose bought two chocolate shakes that they savoured while looking out at all the city people performing their lives along the unfamiliar little street.
Rose was quiet, and Sonia felt an exhilarating rush of certainty.
For weeks she’d spent entire evenings cloistered in her room, trying to imagine Stella’s new life based on the fragments of stories she had told about Toronto. Now, as she looked out at the vibrant people on the street, she found she could picture Stella among the crowd.
When they got back home, Frances called out, “How was your shopping day?” and with Kate in her arms, came into the porch.
Rose glanced up. Then she shrieked, “What have you been doing?”
“Sitting on the kitchen couch, reading books,” Frances said. “What’s your problem?”
But Sonia saw it too: Kate had a bruise developing below one eye and a scrape across her cheek.
“Oh, heavens!” Frances said. “I didn’t see!”
Rose narrowed her eyes. “I don’t understand how you can fail to notice what’s smack in front of you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you actually watch Katie when you babysit?” Rose reached for her niece. She studied Kate’s face for a moment, then set her down. “How did this happen, Frances? How did you let this happen?”
“It’s not my fault! She ran into the cupboard door.”
“You know Kate’s clumsy. You’re supposed to watch her.”
Sonia couldn’t imagine that Frances had neglected Kate. It was true Kate was clumsy.
But it was such a big bruise.
Instead of defending herself, Frances said, “If we knew Stella was unhappy and did nothing, does that mean we’re to blame for what happened to her?”
Rose threw up her hands. “Frances, life is not deep or complicated. It’s simple. And you’ll be happier if you live it that way.”
But Rose was wrong: life was complicated.
The next day, Dan brought the mail when he came in for tea, and he saw a bill from Island Telephones.
“You have to stop, Mum,” he said. “These phone calls are costing too much money.”
“We have to keep looking!”
“Mum, that woman in Borden was wrong. She told you what you wanted to hear. Remember, you talked about Stella to all those people who work on the ferry. They live in Borden too. This woman knew the story before you called. She probably just wanted you to feel better.”
Sonia was silent, marvelling that Dan could be so harsh.
“Mum, Stella didn’t run away. Think about it. She would never have left Kate.”
Dan was so definite, so certain. But wasn’t certainty the thing they’d all lost? Stella, whom they felt they knew, turned out to have done something utterly unpredictable. Now Dan was behaving like a stranger too. Gentle Dan, who had never spoken sternly to her before, sounded like Max or Evvie.
But Dan isn’t cruel, she reminded herself, and he would hate to be characterized that way.
She turned to him. And he lowered his voice — though not enough to sound like the gentle son she thought she knew.
“Okay. Okay, Mum. She ran away. Let’s say she did. Don’t you think she’ll come home when she’s ready? Isn’t it her decision? How are you going to help by chasing after her?”
Sonia felt rattled for hours.
But by mid-afternoon she was on the phone again, working her way from one Toronto ladies’ rooming house to the next.
Rose’s supervisor, Miss Annette Sauer, had given Sonia a Toronto telephone book. Only two years old, she’d said as she handed it over. She’d winked and promised, You ask for me, dear. I’ll put those calls through.
Sonia was thinking about that wink and what she hoped it meant — free long-distance calls to Toronto. Could Annette Sauer really do that? How many calls would it be okay to make? — when she happened to glance down and see Kate walk into the table edge, for all the world as though it wasn’t there.
My God, she thought, I can’t look after anyone! She’d been staring right at Kate, and she hadn’t seen what was about to happen.
Kate screamed, and Rose came running.
Sonia picked Kate up. “Mama!” Kate said, and burst into tears. She’d scratched her other cheek.
Rose put the facts together then: like her mother, it seemed Kate couldn’t see.
Mama, Mama! Kate would cry — but if she bumped into Rose or Rob or Sonia she would correct herself immediately. Rose, Rob-Rob, Gramma. She was all right once she figured out who was who. But she walked into things — chairs, table legs, door frames — and she tripped over toys she’d left scattered on the floor. She sat too close to the television. She rubbed her eyes continually. It added up.
“Eye doctor,” Rose said. “I’ll take care of this.” She snatched the phone and wound the crank.
Later, Rose apologized to Sonia for her brusqueness. “I was just worried about Kate.”
She had an idea, she said. “Why don’t you come with me to work one day? There are usually two or three empty chairs. You could make as many calls to Toronto as you like.”
For some reason this uncharacteristic kindness from Rose was worse than any of Dan’s harsh directives.
She’d been a fool. What point was there in trying to find a daughter who’d run away from home? What if she was the person Stella didn’t want to see?
Dan was right. The only way was to wait for Stella to decide.
The day of Kate’s examination, Frances drove the truck and Rose held Kate. Sonia saw them off. Rose procrastinated in the lane, fussing over the truck in an attempt to redirect her worry that something serious was wrong with Kate’s eyes. They all remembered Stella as a girl, stumbling around.
“Do you think the tires are low?” she said, kicking at each one.
But Frances would not be diverted. “Don’t worry, Rose. Kate couldn’t have congenital blindness because Stella wasn’t born that way.” Stella’s eye was injured when the hay mower threw a bolt. “A definite accident,” Frances said.
Rose and Frances pondered this bad fortune. Stella’s injury hadn’t carried down to Kate, but something had. Some curse.
Look at us, Sonia thought: staring at our feet, trying to outpace the bad luck of Stella’s disappearance and failing to take proper care of the child she left behind.
She felt shamed.
She handed Rose a Thermos of tea to share with Frances, a box of crackers and a small bottle of milk for Kate. As she stepped back from the truck, Rose wound up the passenger side window and her earlier words came back to Sonia: Life’s not deep or complicated. It’s simple. You’ll be happier if —
What did Rose know? She was barely out of childhood herself.
But Sonia resolved to pay attention.
Life’s not deep or complicated.
Okay. Maybe Rose was right.
When they returned, Frances told the story:
The optometrist’s office was shabbier than she’d imagined. In the waiting room a receptionist sat behind a narrow desk in a starkly empty room lit only by a weak bulb and a smudged window that looked out onto a parking lot. There was a picture on one wall, a filing cabinet with a dying plant on top and four hard chairs for patients. Two were occupied, so Rose held Kate in her lap, which made her squirm and whine. An older lady with a cane offered to give up her chair to Kate, but Frances stood to circumvent this. Kate leapt up and stood by Frances until Rose coaxed her to sit down. Then she leapt up again. In this way, half an hour passed.
In the examining room, Frances stood again while Rose held Kate. “You’re a big, grown-up girl,” Rose said, but Kate refused to sit by herself in the cushioned vinyl examination chair.
Anyone would have been afraid, Frances said. It was a sickly green and bristled all over with buttons and levers and complicated instruments attached to folding arms.
Kate cried and flopped dramatically to the floor.
Without hesitating, the doctor knelt beside her and whispered in her ear. He seemed to enfold Kate for a moment. When he stepped away, Kate climbed compliantly into the chair, transformed. The optometrist had performed a magic spell. In one hand Kate clutched a tiny teddy bear, in the other, a strand of licorice. A grin spread across her face.
After his examination, the optometrist offered Rose a well-worn card bearing, among others, the word disease, and a massive illuminated eye, to which he gestured with a pen.
“Here you can see the elongation I described. This is the reason she has trouble with her vision. It’s a common problem. Perhaps it’s unusually, hmmm . . . acute . . . in this case — ”
Rose made a faint, sorrowful sound. For a moment Frances worried she was going to cry.
“However!” The optometrist sat up higher in his chair and looked carefully at them. “With correction,” he said slowly, “I believe that Kate will see almost as well as you or me.”
“Correction?” Rose said. “Are you going to operate?”
“No, dear! Nothing so drastic as that. We’re going to make a pair of little glasses for her.”
Rose sighed with relief. But almost right away she slumped again.
“She’s barely even two. How will we convince her to keep them on?”
“I’m sure she’ll want to wear them, when she realizes she can see.”
In the truck all the way home, Frances said, they sang aloud, out of a sense of profound relief.
June 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
For what Rose insisted to Ray was their last date, he took her nowhere.
They sat together in the living room on an airless Saturday afternoon, watching television and drinking tea. This, Rose insisted, was what she wanted. She did not admit to Ray that his reckless driving frightened her. She’d been out with him four times. After her resolution, she kept giving in. But now she was determined to resist.
Rob sat with them for a while, Buddy wove in and out of the room, and while Sonia fretted and measured and boiled, and washed and filled jars with rhubarb jam, Frances spent those hours looking after Kate — playing hide-and-seek, giving her a bath, reading books, then lounging on her bed, singing lullabies until Kate fell asleep.
After Ray left, Rose tidied the living room and the kitchen, then went down to the root cellar with some of Sonia’s finished jam. Sonia heard a shriek from the cellar, and a few minutes later Rose came up with a salamander in an old canning jar. She pressed the jar into Frances’s hands. “You can study him,” she said, “and then preserve him, like those frogs at school. Or,” she said — seeing the look on her sister’s face — “you could set him free out in the woods.”
Sonia and Frances looked through the wavy glass, beyond the word Jewel, at the mucousy black and yellow creature sealed inside. An ordinary spotted salamander.
“Ambystoma maculatum,” Frances said.
His name was Sammy, Sonia knew. Frances had been visiting him in the cellar for several years. As soon as Rose left the room, she went downstairs and released him back into the cold room, where he belonged.
Later that fall, Frances would be reminded of Sammy when for the first time she faced a frog cut open on a pan in a laboratory at the university. The creature’s thin skin and damp, irregularly mottled look became conflated in her mind not only with Sammy but also with the friends in biology class who could not understand how a frog looked like a salamander, and why it might matter that either had died. For Frances, this visceral but undeniable response marked the end of her pursuit of science. Things die, someone said, and Frances lashed out at her friends, whom eventually she lost along with science. Oh, Stella, she’d cried, not understanding why.
Sonia knew it was a delayed reaction to all that had happened.
All along, she’d expected Frances to react emotionally. Decide, Stella, Sonia’d said, again and again. For your sister’s sake, if not your own, decide to come home.
She did not know what to say to Frances herself.
July 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
Combing through boxes in the attic for old baby things that might fit Kate, Sonia came across some drawings and scraps of wool pictures she’d made in her youth. She’d forgotten they existed. Totems from her other life.
She took them down to the kitchen to look at, and became transfixed. The pictures were dense with colour and intricate pattern, mesmerizing. She felt proud to have made them, but deflated too. Something essential was missing.
“Mum,” Frances said.
Sonia hadn’t heard her come in.
“Oh, how beautiful!” Frances gestured toward the tiny, brightly coloured landscapes Sonia held in her hands.
Were they beautiful? Sonia couldn’t imagine how she had accomplished such impossibly detailed work, yet the images would not come clear. It was hard to tell where one colour ended and another began. In her memory, she thought they had meant something more. She squinted and blinked.
“Mum!” Frances said. “Look at you! You’re as bad as Kate! You need to have your eyes examined!”
Was that it? Just that her vision had become less acute?
She tried drawing clouds and some of her lines came back. The vividness of their shapes. The poignant vulnerability of their outer curves.
But only the darkest of lines worked. She found she couldn’t render gradations. She couldn’t draw subtlety. Were her eyes really that bad?
She moved on to objects around the house, vistas in the garden, the fields, the woods. She borrowed Kate’s crayons so she could experiment with colour. But the wax shades were stubbornly dull, and impossible to blend.
She could imagine the pictures she wanted to draw, but she could not render on paper what she envisioned, never mind the emotion behind it.
Still, she kept trying, the days of summer blurring into a haze of meaningless black marks as they flew by.
August 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
And then the light changed, the season turned. Cool days, haying nearly over, the weather stable, the orchard quieter now in the early morning, a scent of honey wafting from the August apple trees.
One Saturday, Kate came into the kitchen while Sonia sat at the table peeling apples for a pie. “Mama,” Kate said, though she could see Sonia perfectly well. She leaned over Sonia’s leg, folding her body rag-doll fashion so that her head lolled upside down against Sonia’s thigh. Her glasses fell off, and she let the cloth doll in her hand fall down after them. It was her nap time.
“Your glasses, Katie,” Sonia said, and Kate slid to the floor so she could reach her glasses and put them on again, a procedure she practised a thousand times a day. The glasses were scratched because Kate treated them the same way she used her supple, springy two-year-old body — with perfect confidence and utter disregard.
Now she grabbed Sonia’s waistband and hauled herself into Sonia’s lap. Sonia helped.
“Gramma,” she said. She’d left her doll on the floor, but she clutched her glasses in one sticky fist. She held them out to Sonia. She tried to press them onto Sonia’s face, but was too tired to unfold the frames. Gently, Sonia took them from her, and Kate flopped against her chest and consented to be carried to bed for a nap.
The following Monday, Rose took the day off work to look after Kate, and Sonia dressed in her going-to-town blouse, her long black skirt and the low-heeled pumps she wore to weddings, wakes and funerals. In these clothes she felt taller, more confident — but impatient too. So often an unwelcome gloom descended when she dressed to go out. There seemed no way to combat this. Sometimes she regretted things she said under the influence of this mood, so the best thing was to remain silent as long as possible. She tried this now, getting into the truck with Dan, who normally practised silence like breath anyway.
Dan found the optometrist’s office near the new Massey Ferguson dealer he planned to visit, on the edge of town, in a dismal single-storey building clad in siding stained red from blowing soil. Bleak windows, trash scattered in the parking lot. On the outer door a divided sign read A. Llewellyn, Optometry and Royal Drugs, just as Rose had said it would. Inside, a short hallway opened onto two more doors. One led into a little drugstore, the other into an almost empty waiting room: four chairs and a desk, behind which sat a woman doing figures in a ledger. Posters of giant red-veined eyeballs decorated the wall behind her. Sonia ducked outside, waved to Dan behind the wheel of their truck, returned, and gave her name to the woman at the desk.
Hours later, it seemed, Sonia was startled out of a daydream about wool fleece and tools with which to work it — a set of hand carders and a drop spindle made of birch or cherry wood.
“Mrs. MacAusland, you may go in.”
She stood and walked in the direction of the receptionist’s outstretched arm.
Even opened wide, the door to the optometrist’s office did not admit enough light to illuminate the features of the darkened room. Sonia felt her way toward a metal office chair and lowered her body into it.
“Hello, Sonia.”
He spoke so softly she wasn’t sure at first that she’d heard her name correctly. Sonia, not Mrs. MacAusland. She peered toward the place the voice came from. But he wasn’t there — he’d moved.
The room was utterly dark. He was beside her now. A small lamp came on.
First, a mannerism she recognized: the way he pushed his hair back from his forehead with the flat of his hand. Then, those penetrating eyes.
But what was he doing here?
He was looking at her. More than looking — studying.
She felt she didn’t want him to.
Where was A. Llewellyn, whose name was on the sign?
But he must be the optometrist.
She shifted her eyes away.
His office was chaos, as messy as her own room in the weeks after Stella disappeared.
She hadn’t imagined his life like this. In her mind, she now realized, he remained a twenty-three-year-old medical student, an aspiring surgeon, untroubled, ambitious and confident.
“Sonia?”
She looked at him again. How focused he was.
“I’m sorry about your daughter.”
That snapped her back into the moment.
“I thought of calling you . . . ”
All this time, they’d lived in separate worlds.
“I didn’t know you’d moved back,” she said.
“I came home after Angus Llewellyn died. A year ago. Listen, I know this is strange . . . ”
What was strange were the feelings that came rushing back. How compelling he was. How abandoned she’d felt when he left.
She felt conflicted. At the same time, something in her calmed. Just by the fact of his presence.
Now she imagined his hands on her face.
He was asking her something. What had he said?
She was still angry with him. She could feel it. But she was not only angry. She closed her eyes.
He’d left her when she needed him. And all those years with Max, years of regret, imagining Pete was the one person who could have changed her life.
Experimentally, she remembered his hands on her face, and her own on his.
Her head began to spin.
“Will you look at me, Sonia?”
She opened her eyes, focused, saw the careless stacks of paper on his office floor and thought: This is not what he wanted to do with his life. He’d always insisted he wanted to perform surgery because it was the purest form of medicine. She’d been amused by this stubborn certainty, which seemed a vital part of his character. When they’d met on Cavendish Beach in 1943, he’d seemed lost. But she’d felt sure he’d find his way back to himself. Now she wondered if he ever did.
He touched her shoulder. Automatically, she recoiled. Who was he? Did she know who he was?
His expression hardened.
She read his face, which seemed to say, So that’s how this is going to be.
He turned off the little lamp.
He made her look through a set of lenses at a faint, lighted point on the far wall. At the same time he leaned so close that she could feel his breath, as he peered at her eye through a ridiculously oversized magnifying glass. He lifted her eyelid with his fingertip. This hurt. “Do you mind?” he said. He gave her a stick with a big circle on it, like a large flat lollipop, and asked her to hold it in front of one eye and say whenever she could read the letters on a card he’d hung across the room.
He did not ask another personal question. He moved slowly around the room. He set his hand not on her back but on the back of her chair.
He gazed at her face. She looked away.
He said, “Dear Sonia . . .”
He said nothing.
He paced the room.
He left, not closing the door behind him. He did not turn on a light.
She remembered how Frances and Rose had described Kate’s wonderful optometrist, and his fascinating office, jam-packed with things. How smart he was, they said. His complicated instruments and machines. She’d put all that down to girlish hysteria.
She remembered the way Max had looked at him, the day they met. Pete standing too close to her, Max with his pulsing arm wrapped in a bloody pillowcase, humiliated and angry. She remembered Max’s visits to the light. Pete gone by then — yet undeniably present — intruding, making Max seem insufficient.
He wore a rumpled soft shirt and his hair was the same, long and still dark, while her own had silvered like winter hay.
But he spoke more slowly and moved more carefully than he had then. He was, she realized, forty-eight years old. Mature, at least in years.
His eyes were grey, but in some lights, she remembered, they could look green or blue.
She remembered his unpredictability — arriving and disappearing according to his own mysterious schedule.
And she was startled by his familiarity. The way he touched his hand to his chin. The way he leaned forward when he spoke, his voice so soft, especially in the dark.
Did she know him, or not?
She heard the door opening, his footsteps, the squeak of his stool — he turned toward her — and then he was silent.
This was something she remembered, this courteous way of using silence to create space for her.
She thought, It was him I craved, not just some alternative to Max.
But she was older now. She did not want to be driven by any craving she could resist.
“Sonia?”
She opened her eyes.
“How long have you had difficulty seeing what’s in front of you?”
Ha!
His eyes were as intensely alive with curiosity as she remembered.
“How long have you been unable to do close work?” He looked in her eyes. His own were bright, liquid, mobile.
“Is your vision blurred? Are things obscure?” Absently, he flicked through the lenses in his machine. “Do you close your eyes against bright light?” Again, he was studying her face.
It was hard to answer his questions because it was hard to look at him. What could she do but remain silent and nod her head?
Her throat felt dry.
“Do you have double vision? Do images recur after you’ve closed your eyes or turned away from them?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Sonia?” He touched her arm and this time, though she wanted to, she did not pull away.
“Do you suffer pain? Can you see in the dark?”
He said she needed two different kinds of glasses — one pair for close work and another for distance vision. He said, It’s time you saw the world around you! He said this in a tone of evangelical zeal, gesturing with a practised flourish. A line he used on all his patients. He’d always liked lines.
He said he was going to take her somewhere when her distance glasses came in — an outing to test her new eyesight. He insisted that she agree. He extracted this promise before he allowed her to leave.
She agreed because she believed nothing would come of it. Too much time had passed to start up such an ambiguous friendship again.
After, Dan wanted to take her to Eaton’s. He wanted to look at washers, he said.
She laughed. As if they could afford a new washing machine!
“With some of the Farm Credit money,” he said. “When it comes in.”
“Dan,” she said reproachfully. She shook her head.
But then she had an idea. Since they’d come all the way to town, maybe she would like to call in at the wool shop —
He could not argue with this. He waited in the truck while she went in. But the wool shop carried no fleece or roving, only commercial yarns, too uniformly spun. Her hand hovered over one uninteresting skein after another. A clerk came up. “You’re new to all this?” She tried to show Sonia scarf and mitten patterns. In the end Sonia felt she couldn’t leave without purchasing something, so she settled for a skein of grey sheep’s wool imported from the mainland.
She wasn’t satisfied, but she could not say as much to Dan, who would not have understood.
The grey wool triggered something, though. Later, Frances would say, Okay, Mum. I’m off. Dan said Lyman’s looking for me, and this would register with Sonia only faintly, more as a tangential worry than an immediate concern. Instead, Sonia wondered, could she get wool fleece somewhere? Might Cece or Eddie know a farmer who kept sheep? The colour swatches, pencil sketches and drawings in her hands were her only immediate concern.
Okay, Mum. I’m off. Lyman, Frances would say, and Sonia would hear only, Okay, Mum — would think only of her plans for work.
Eddie said, “Sheep’s wool? Hmmm. We’ll talk to Willie MacPherson on the Whim Road. Jump in.” And he held open his truck door, ready to make the trip that instant.
They drove at his usual leisurely pace, Eddie chattering and gesturing all the while, other vehicles passing on the straights, the windows open for air and to let in the scents of other farmers’ crops. That lad has quite a crop of sow thistle, Eddie would exclaim, slowing right down. Would you look at that!
Driving with Eddie was like taking a holiday. He made the world look new.
How she loved him.
He was the brother she never had, a sweet counterbalance to all those years with Max, who never chatted, never drove slowly, never dropped his work to address her smallest wish.
They sailed through Cardross corner, took the long way to Montague. Finally Eddie said, “We’re here!” and pulled into a narrow, scratchily overgrown lane. Willie MacPherson was digging postholes when they arrived, a hot, tiring job. He stopped to greet Eddie, and Eddie easily charmed him into taking an hour to find Sonia the raw wool she needed and to make a pot of ferociously strong tea.
Come back any time, Willie MacPherson said when they handed him their empty mugs, and Eddie winked as if to say, I know it’s weird, but she’s dear to me. This sweetness, manifest so unselfishly in Eddie, ought to have kept Pete from her mind, but instead her memories of their visit intensified. Eddie talked all the way home, and shamefully she heard nothing, his voice no more than a soothing murmur in her ear. Sonia, Pete said. Sonia, Sonia . . .
The wool, when she handled it, released a wet, sweet odour like earth, or the woods after rain. She washed it and dried it and carded it as best she could with two old curry combs.
As her hands worked with the wool, her mind returned of its own accord to Pete. She remembered his observations about Stella.
“She would have seen everything you see,” he said, “just less vividly.”
He’d talked about Stella as he peered into Sonia’s eyes. It was not a conversation, and he’d asked no questions, just delivered information. It was like he was speaking to himself.
“At first they would have concentrated on trying to repair the damaged eye, bandaging it so it would heal and treating it to prevent infection. They would have checked the other eye to see that it was good, and then corrected for any slight myopia and astigmatism, like your granddaughter Kate has. If her eye was damaged irreparably, of course there is an additional problem: the loss of an eye means the loss of depth perception.”
The loss of depth perception. Was this his way of offering reassurance?
Later, as she wondered how to spin the carded wool, her dream of the wool shop came back, with its fantasy drop spindle made of cherry wood. Then Dan taking her to the real wool shop, with its unimaginative selection. Then Dan’s voice, bright with what she’d thought of as foolhardy generosity, when he’d wanted to buy her a washing machine. How can we afford it! she’d scoffed.
Dan had said, We’ll use some of the Farm Credit money, when it comes in.
Now she realized: if they could buy a washer with some of that Farm Credit money, they could buy a train ticket to Toronto, to look for Stella.
She knew what Dan would say, because he’d said it already. She’ll come home when she’s ready. Don’t go chasing after her.
Damn you, she thought. She wasn’t sure if she meant Dan or Stella. Or herself.
But the smell of the wool — its animal, foresty richness.
The feel of the wool. And the seductive whisper she could hear when she rubbed it between her fingers.
She thought of Mme Chevalier, and the sometimes funny, sometimes true things she’d said: Never draw three lines when one will do! Colour is like seasoning — strive for clarity, do not blend. Live for art; don’t expect art to live for you. Think with your heart, not your head.
Mme Chevalier had said Sonia’s pictures were like Berthe Morisot’s, pretty but scalpel sharp. You have a gift, she’d said, never give it up. How disappointed Mme Chevalier would be, to see her now.
Sonia caressed her pliant carded wool. Why couldn’t an artwork be more than a picture? Why couldn’t it have fragrance too? And textures from the woods and the sea?
She thought of moss she’d gather, of pinning seaweed on her clothesline to dry, of spruce needles, and pine, and lichen and the barks of different trees. Cordgrass, rabbit wool, skeleton leaves. She could bind things into place, weave them through, work with raw fleece, leave out yarn entirely.
She put on her boots and jacket and emptied the canvas shoulder bag she stored clothespins in. She got scissors from the kitchen drawer and a small folding saw of Dan’s from his tool kit in the barn. One day, she would find a word for what she sought — dimensionality. Now, she considered Pete’s account of Stella’s eyes.
What is depth perception? If it’s what gives us a rounded, fleshed-out world — did that mean Stella saw a monotonous, paper-flat one? Is it the difference between life and the mere impression of a life? Sonia imagined it was flying compared to sitting still; outside compared to in; the difference between a garden and a seed in the hand; instead of a series of faded photographs, life itself.
Why did this, of all things, have to be what Stella lost?
She remembered now — Stella always did one thing at a time. How impatient Rose used to get with her slowness. She never combined chores as Rose so expertly did. In this way she was exactly like Max: ponderous, deliberate. What would you know of life, she wondered, taking it like that?
Stella could not really see. What must that have been like?
Sonia closed one eye and tried to imagine how the world might have looked to her daughter. The boring flatness of every surface.
She pictured Stella on the ice, hearing the sound of different thicknesses of ice under her feet, smelling open water. How sensuous this might have been, how exhilarating to apprehend the world so fully. Was this why Stella began to go around without her glasses?
Did she wish to be completely blind? When she closed her eyes, did she audition blindness the way some girls audition boys?
Sonia tried to imagine what Stella might have noticed. The smell of her house, the sound of big insects, such as bees, and smaller ones — a spider on a cobweb — the smell of mice in the walls, the way different objects felt to the touch. How to distinguish approaching people by their footsteps and to predict changes in the weather by scents on the air. How snow would muffle sound.
All of these were things to which Sonia too could pay attention. She could learn what Stella had learned that enabled her to get away.
She closed her eyes. It was the kind of day that encouraged speed — high cloud and a light breeze. Branches whipped by as she walked. She slowed down, noticed the crunch of dry leaves and twigs beneath her feet, felt the surprising give of mossy ground, resistance elsewhere. Scattered stone, the upbraiding feel of it against her toe. The sorrowful fragrance of the forest floor and the sharp, seductive tang of var and spruce. Rhythmic birdsong overhead, but everywhere the unevenness of the earth.
She put her hands out straight in front of her. She felt the canvas bag, with her scissors and Dan’s little saw, bang against her hip. She heard the high, clear, strident voice of a jay.
And then she was on the ground. Something had tripped her up. A tree root? She felt the sting of a scrape on her ankle bone. She opened her eyes, drew her legs up, brushed leaf litter and dark, peaty earth from the palms of both hands. She closed her eyes again. She put a hand on each thigh to lever herself upright. Resumed her walk, slower this time.
The hardships Stella must have faced. And she was not completely blind. She’d had ten percent vision in one eye, forty or fifty in the other. But the criticism she took. Frances’s impatience. Rose continually yelling at her over something spilled or knocked out of place. And always Stella drifting silently away.
Stella had paid closer attention to other people’s emotional states than either Rose or Frances did. But criticism affected her more. Except for Evvie’s, which she accepted, it seemed, as her due.
Sonia felt a flood of outrage at the thought of Evvie targeting Stella, cutting her down. You idiot! she heard him say. You stupid cow!
Where had this come from?
And then, without warning, Evvie grabbed her throat, and Sonia gagged and tripped.
What was that scratching, sharp instrument he’d used? Not his hands alone. A knife? From surprise, her strength failed, and she fell to her knees. Stupid bitch! she heard. Get up! The voice enraged.
But the voice was not Evvie, she realized. It was Max.
She put a hand to her throat.
And then she opened her eyes. She’d been attacked by a branch.
But now the idea was planted. And her feeling of helplessness when she’d felt attacked made her wonder, What did Evvie do?
She turned, her canvas satchel still empty except for her cutting tools, and ran east, across the stubble field.
She found Eddie behind his barn, chopping wood. He seemed to listen carefully, but did he understand? When he said, “But do you have proof?” her knees began to liquefy. “Okay,” he said. “You want me to, I’ll show the bastard.” Then he got in his truck and drove away fast and she thought, What now?
Marina gave her a square on a plate, and poured them each a cup of tea.
“Yes, of course it’s possible Evvie harmed Stella,” Marina said. “Even likely.” She raised an eyebrow. “We all know that, don’t we?”
But Sonia hadn’t known. Not really. She hadn’t allowed herself to know.
Marina said, “Have the police questioned him thoroughly?”
“They say they did. They say they have no evidence. Maybe they would have some, if I hadn’t kept them at such a distance for so long.” Sonia stretched her hands across Marina’s table. Rubbed its scuffed, waxed surface. Pressed down, looked up. “Marina, what’s wrong with me? In the woods just now, I imagined Evvie tried to hurt me. I heard his voice. He was as real to me as you are now. Then it wasn’t him. It was Max.”
Marina said, “Mmmm.”
“Pardon?”
“Well, it would have been, wouldn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Sonia! You and your kids were over here for the night so many times.”
Sonia felt her body go cold. She held it perfectly still.
“At least three times you were over here. I felt like wringing his neck myself.”
Sonia shook her head. “No,” she said. But then a thought arrived: Marina would never lie.
“Love, he hit you and he threatened you and you were scared to stay at home. You brought the kids here. How can you have forgotten all that?” The look on Marina’s face now — deep concern, something seriously wrong.
Sonia tried to picture this. All of them in Marina’s little house. Kids sleeping on wool puffs or blankets on the floor. The image did not make sense. “I don’t remember. Are you sure?”
Marina sat back in her chair. She looked baffled now.
A moment came back. Max holding a two-by-four, screaming at her, the muscles in his arms quaking violently. Sonia frozen in place, baby Stella by her side. Had she imagined this? It seemed like a dream. But it must have been memory, real. She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Wait. I remember one time.”
Marina nodded, rubbed her chin with her hand, a gesture that evoked Eddie Mack.
And that brought back a second thing: Max losing to Eddie at cards, chasing Eddie out of the house and screaming hoarsely after him, You sonofabitch cheating bastard.
Sonia felt her sense of balance let go. She grabbed the table. Her throat constricted and her chest would not expand. Her heart beat weakly but too fast. She pushed her cup of tea away and leaned her head against her hands.
Marina remained in her chair. They were quiet for a long time.
Marina began to move about her kitchen. She said, “Would you like another cup of tea, dear?” She assembled the tea things, her back to Sonia, her movements slow and sure.
Sonia wondered, What other memories have I suppressed? What’s true, and what’s not?
That was the worst thing, the doubt she felt.
After a while Marina began to speak. “Remember the fence Max built when he and Eddie had that falling-out? Remember the way he used to hurl things around? The way he used to shout at people! There’s never any need of that. Never.”
Scenes came flooding back. Images like dreams. Max firing a wrench into the engine of their truck, the round and open ends of it turning over each other as it spiralled forward, the growl and smash when it hit home. A plate shattered on the floor and Rose kneeling immediately among the shards, sweeping scrambled eggs and china into a dustpan while overhead Max raged. Sonia pleading with him — It’s all right. It’s all right — and Rose stiff with fear.
Max didn’t smile in anger in the disturbing way Evvie did. But the look he wore when he disagreed with something she or one of the boys had said: his face transformed by this ferocious hardening.
Sonia said, “But Marina, it was my fault — ”
“No!” Marina set down her mug of tea, and it splashed across the table. “You let things go, sure. Max wanted his way, what could you do but give it to him? We all did it. I did, with Lyman’s father. You never met George, but he was the same as Max, always expecting something done — or else. Woman! he’d say. I can still hear him. Woman! And then he’d wait. Whatever it was he wanted — supper on the table, a drink in his hand, sugar for his tea — he’d just roar and I’d jump right up. If he hadn’t died like Max did, at an early age, I hope I would have boxed his ears and left by now.”
Sonia pictured this, Marina with her hands in fists, raising them to her husband’s ears.
Marina leaned forward over the spilt tea, her eyes focused and still. Her softness vanished. She spoke forcefully. “We have to stand up for ourselves, don’t we? Or how will our daughters learn to? How will your daughters, Sonia? Have you thought about that?”
“I told Ed that I think Evvie did it. I think he pushed her.”
“There now. That’ll help.” Marina grinned. “Eddie gets things done.”
Sonia thought of a phrase she’d heard on the radio news, vigilante justice. She wasn’t sure she understood its meaning, but she’d heard in the announcer’s polished voice a tone of condemnation.
“There now,” Marina said, beside her now. And Sonia realized she’d lost track of time, as in the days after Stella’s disappearance.
But Stella hadn’t disappeared. She was gone. Gone. Now and forever.
How could this have happened? There was no sense in the world.
“There,” Marina said, time swallowed up again.
Sonia took away what Marina had said. She stored it, then she retrieved and thought about one grain of information at a time. Max hitting her. The words he’d yelled. How she’d run away to Marina’s with the kids.
Other memories came back — a child’s voice, Dan’s or Rob’s, saying, Why is Dad mad? The relief she felt when he died, and her guilt and confusion over that. You’re in shock, people said, but she wasn’t. She knew shock, from other times: the move inland, leaving Surplus light. It wasn’t shock she’d felt. It was elation.
Sonia walked toward home, entranced by the smell of the fields, by birdsong and insect sounds, distracted by the pleasure of sun on her skin and the liquid, bubbling voices of bobolinks undulating over the bright, cut hayfields.
She saw Evvie in his field before she noticed the RCMP cruiser parked in his lane. He looked like he was poised to take off. Hey, she almost shouted.
The officers walked through the muddy part of the headland in their good leather lace-up boots, lifting their feet like ladies and cursing as they came for him. Evvie looked toward the river.
Sonia could hear them. Everett Corcoran? they demanded as they approached. Everett Corcoran? The big one yanked a set of shiny handcuffs off his hip and flicked the bracelets open as he walked.
Why did they want him? Had they really listened to what Eddie told them?
“Aw, shit,” Evvie said, and the officers led him like a sickly calf to their car.
Sonia could imagine his desperate thought: Shoulda run.
A cloud of effervescent birds flew by, their song following after, and she felt something light bubble in her own throat, a blockage dissolving.