Sarah wakes to the patter of rain on the roof. Through the window, she can hear it splashing from the eaves into the rain barrel and, behind it, the low rumble of thunder. It’s the middle of August, the lull between haying and harvest, and Jack is still asleep although it’s eight o’clock. He must have turned off the alarm. She’s surprised she didn’t hear Toni getting ready for work. In a couple of weeks, she’ll be gone back to university and harvest will be in full swing. Sarah knows she should get out of bed and begin her day. There are cucumbers to pick and dill pickles to make, and Charlie is going to be here later today, flying in from Halifax. By the time he rents a car and drives out it will be nearly suppertime. It’s the second time he’s been home since their father went to live at Sunny Haven. Last time, Charlie stayed for nearly a week, going to town every day to spend time with their father, sitting with him outdoors in the gazebo, pushing checkers around a board. Their father remembered him then, his face lighting up when he saw him, although he’d forgotten that Charlie was married and had two grown boys. It saddens Sarah to think how devastated Charlie will be when their father looks him over with that blank, open-mouthed stare.
Sarah has always been close to Charlie. Her mother ignored him when they brought him home from the hospital. She stayed in her room with the door closed even when Charlie was wailing right across the hall. Sarah remembers Patrick coming home after school and thundering up the stairs to lift Charlie out of his crib, Charlie’s hiccupy sobs while Patrick patted his back and jounced him around the room.
Patrick spent that whole summer holiday in the house, making meals and washing clothes, while Paul helped their father in the repair shop. He showed Sarah how to heat a small pot of water on the stove before taking it off and putting the bottle in to warm. He taught her to squirt the milk on her wrist — it reminded her of the way Baba shot milk from Lou Anne’s teat to the waiting cats in the barn — before they gave it to Charlie. Before the start of school in September, Baba came with her basket of candles, vials of holy water, and herbs. She ripped open the curtains in her daughter’s room, roused her from bed, and sent Sarah and Brian downstairs with Patrick before firmly closing the door. Later, she blended a tea and forced Olivia to drink it. Even though Sarah’s mother eventually came around and began to function again, Baba’s ritual was unable to rekindle any motherly surge of love for Charlie or any of them. In the years that followed, it was Sarah who took on most of Charlie’s care.
Sarah believed that of all her children, her mother loved Patrick best. He was her first-born and the only one of her sons to look like the Petrenkos. Sarah used to think their mother had used up all her love on Patrick, with none left for the rest of them, and it made Sarah worry when she was pregnant with Maeve. Whenever she felt her roll or jab an elbow in her womb, she was reminded that another life, another human being, would soon be demanding her love. She found herself unable to imagine sharing the intense love she felt for Allison with another child. But when Maeve was born and Sarah saw her serious little face and that shock of red fuzzy hair, she fell in love all over again. How could she not have known that her love needn’t be doled out between both of her children in a measured way? Allison, Maeve, then Toni, and now Connor. So much love for each of them. Such was the infinite capacity of a mother’s heart.
“Hey, you,” Jack says, rolling over and noticing she’s awake. He’s never used any sort of pet name for her — not babe or honey or sweetie — and she often wonders why he can’t bring himself to use any such term of endearment. Sarah knew he was the strong, silent type when she married him but she wishes he would unlock a little piece of himself and reveal his feelings once in a while.
“Hey you, too,” Sarah says, sitting up and combing her hair with her fingers. “Eight o’clock and you’re still in bed on a Wednesday morning. Your dad will be pacing around, thinking there’s something wrong over here.”
Jack draws her in close and she nuzzles into his chest with his chin on her head. “Tough shit, what he thinks. Got something else in mind.” He brushes the top of her breasts with the tips of two fingers and, in that slight touch, Sarah’s body is on fire. He rakes her hair with his fingers and his lips find hers in a long, sweet kiss. Jack’s always been this way, gentle and slow to start, letting his passion build as though he has all the time in the world.
Sometimes, when she used to bring his supper out to the field in the early days before Allison was born, he’d idle down the tractor, climb down from the cab with that irresistible grin, and spread a burlap sack he carried around in the tractor onto a patch of earth. He’d slip his hand under her shirt and press himself against her then ease her down, taking care as he deliberately unfastened each button and slid off their jeans before moving over her then into her in the same languid way. She used to try to hurry things along, worried someone might see them from the road or Anton would happen by with the other tractor. But Jack would quiet her with a kiss. Time stood still and waited when they were together. It still does.
Afterward, as Sarah puts on the coffee, Jack comes into the kitchen, zipping up his jeans.
“Charlie’s coming today?”
“He should be here around five. Mid-week and no rush-hour traffic when he leaves the city, so he should make good time.”
“How long’s he staying?”
Sarah pops two slices of bread into the toaster. “He has to go back on Sunday. It’s a short visit, but it’s not like Dad’s going to know he’s here anyway. And at least he comes.”
“It’ll be good to see him. We can take him to the Foundation barbecue this weekend.”
Sarah nods and pours Jack’s coffee. “Addie and Tom will be glad to see him.”
Just then Anton appears in the doorway. “You’re finally up? I came and knocked on the door after Toni drove out of the yard.” He whacks his cane against the door jamb a few times. “Nobody up around here except Misty.”
Jack grins. “I was … up. Wasn’t I, Sarah?”
Sarah rolls her eyes and hides her smile from Anton. “You might as well sit down, Anton. Have a cuppa coffee.”
“You got any of those cinnamon buns left to go with the coffee? It’s been nearly three hours since I had my breakfast.”
Charlie arrives earlier than expected, pulling into the yard by four thirty. When he drives up in his rental car, Misty gets up and barks. Glancing out the window, Sarah sees Charlie fold himself out of the driver’s seat and open the rear door to reach into the back seat for a wheeled bag and a Styrofoam cooler. Charlie’s put on a few pounds and his reddish-blond hair has receded, exposing more of his broad forehead, and from a distance it looks as though a younger version of their father is strolling up to the house.
Sarah greets him at the door, Misty tangling around their legs. She takes the cooler from him and puts it on the table. Charlie pulls her in for a hug. “Hi, sis,” he says and Sarah can almost hear the lisp he had as a little boy, the way he used to call her Tharah.
“Get a pot of water on,” Charlie says, motioning to the cooler, which contains lobsters chilling on ice. “Fresh from the Atlantic. I’ll boil them up for supper.”
“The girls are going to love them,” Sarah says. “Jack … not so much.”
“He’s gotta figure out there’s more to life than steak and potatoes.” Charlie laughs.
“But you know he’s going to ask what kind of meat I’ve got to go with the lobster.”
“Even if it’s wieners, you’re bound to serve us all a gourmet-style meal. Only you can make magic with a handful of ingredients. Sometimes I wonder how you kept us all fed.”
Sarah wonders, too, remembering the usually empty fridge and sparse cans on the pantry shelves. It used to shame her to ask the butcher at Pipers’ for knuckle bones, telling him they were for the dog, when, in fact, she used to boil them up for broth. Baba had taught her how to stretch a few handfuls of pot barley and root vegetables into a hearty soup that, together with the two-day-old bread she bought for pennies from the bakery, could feed her hungry brothers.
It seemed to Sarah that her brothers had grown up impervious to the taint of the Coyle name. They didn’t seem to notice how the rich town kids looked down their noses at them and laughed at their second-hand clothes. Perhaps it was because they were boys; they were more likely to bloody a nose or blacken an eye if they were teased at school. Fists first, Paul had taught them, and they’d gained a reputation.
“You ever hear from the boys?” Charlie asks, as though he’s read her mind.
Sarah shakes her head. “I never hear from Brian and I’ve never tried to contact him. For all I know, he could be in jail. I guess eventually we’ll have to track him down. The day will come when Dad is gone and we’ll have to let him know.”
“Doubt he’d show up for his funeral, anyway, unless he expected there might be some money left to him. What about Paul? Do you think he’ll ever come back home?”
Sarah shrugs. “I’ve been trying to convince him to see Dad before it’s too late. Not that it’s going to change anything, but I think it would be good for Paul.”
“Did you ever wonder? Do you ever think how things might’ve been if Patrick hadn’t died? Maybe we would have been a half-assed normal family.”
“It wasn’t Patrick dying,” Sarah snaps. “It was Mom who tore this family apart.” When she says this, Sarah feels her scalp tighten as though someone’s come up behind her and grabbed a handful of her hair. It’s a visceral reaction she has whenever she thinks about the way they were abandoned. “She’s the one who took off.”
Charlie shrugs. “You ever think maybe she had a reason? Dad says she never was happy and things just got worse … after Patrick. She couldn’t forgive him for giving the boys that gun.”
Sarah doesn’t answer.
“We all buggered off eventually. Except you.” Charlie walks over and wraps his arms around her. “Our big little sister, the one who held our screwed-up family together.”
Their mother walked out two months to the day after Paul killed Patrick. The brothers had been hunting elk along the park line not far from Baba’s little farm. Joe had taught them how to shoot when they were just boys, thinking it was a skill they ought to know and one he couldn’t teach them in the confines of town. They’d drive out to the farm on weekends to practise, aiming at tin cans on fence posts. Olivia was dead set against it. She didn’t trust guns and didn’t see the need to shoot for sport, although she didn’t complain about the meat they brought home.
Although Sarah was only seven years old when it happened, the details of that day are burned in her mind. It was November and Paul and Pat, seventeen and eighteen years old, set out early, intending to set up in the blind they’d built in a tree on Baba’s pasture. It was illegal to enter the national park to hunt, illegal, too, to shoot elk without a licence, but it was done all the time by the farmers who lived along the mountain. It was their due, they thought, for the damage the elk did to the crops during the growing season. The boys had discovered a trail the elk and deer used to venture out of the forest. They had seen small herds there during the summer grazing on the groomed pasture.
Paul climbed up the blind while Patrick walked a ways down the trail, looking for tracks in the slight skiff of snow. While Paul loaded the rifle, waiting for Patrick to return, a female elk, fat from summer grass, emerged at the mouth of the trail, head up, sniffing. Paul couldn’t imagine what Patrick had done to force her out, and he couldn’t believe their good luck.
They’d made a bet on their way out that morning. Bragging rights to whoever bagged one first, along with the chance to ask Katherine Watts on a date. They both had been eyeing her up for months now and he wondered about that, as he lifted the rifle and took aim. Which one would take credit for the kill and go out with the pretty new town girl? Paul looked past the sight, scanning the woods for any sign of Patrick in his bright orange cap. Their father had taught them never to fire without knowing the other’s whereabouts, but where was he?
Just then, he caught a glimpse of his brother, downwind of the elk, behind her on the trail.
Pat had his arm up, waving it in the air, and Paul took this as a sign that Patrick wanted him to take the shot. His finger trembling on the trigger, he lined her up in his sight. A head shot. A perfect kill if he pulled this off. He fired and the elk went down. Her legs flailed, blood spurting from her neck, but, unbelievably, she rolled to her side and stood up. Staggering, she turned and fled into the thick stand of trees. Still momentarily stunned by the recoil, Paul cocked the rifle again and heard it click as the next bullet slid into the chamber. He quickly took a second shot and heard the ping as it ricocheted off a tree.
By the time the roar of the gunshot and the ringing cleared from his ears, the elk was gone. He could hear her in the distance, crashing through the underbrush. He waited a moment, expecting Patrick to emerge, ready to take the ribbing he was likely to get for letting such an easy target get away.
The rest was pieced together by the RCMP and the coroner. Paul, dazed and in shock, had driven himself to Baba’s, his shirt slick with Patrick’s blood. Eventually, they determined Patrick was struck by the errant second bullet and the shooting was ruled a tragic accident. Their mother never forgave their father for teaching the boys to shoot, and, in turn, their father held Paul responsible for taking Patrick’s life. Their lives spiralled downhill from there. Their mother left and their father hit the bottle more than ever, staying at work late, jabbering on to whomever would listen about the old days when their family was whole.
Charlie kisses the top of Sarah’s head. “Water under the bridge. We can’t rewrite history. Mom did what she did and Dad did his best with us crazy little buggers after that. It was hardest for you, I know that.”
“But if I just knew why. Why she never showed up, not once, in all these years. No phone calls. No letters. Wouldn’t any mother want to know how her own kids turned out?”
“You gotta let that go, Sarah. You’ll never know and you have to make your peace with it.”
She’s tried. She knows there must be a reason in much the same way she realizes she’ll likely never have the satisfaction of knowing what it is. Leaning into Charlie, she feels the beat of his heart, the warmth of his arms around her, and, for now, she lets it go.
Sarah is setting out a large Tupperware bowl of potato salad when Addie arrives with her coleslaw. Hughie Rankmore is flipping burgers on one of the huge grills they’ve borrowed from the Lions Club and Cady is hovering nearby, peeling paper wrappers from between the burgers before handing them off to Hughie.
“Where’s that baby brother of yours?” Addie asks as she plants a wooden spoon into her salad. “I’ve had two days off and I missed seeing him.”
“He’s around here somewhere. Lots of people have been coming up to talk to him. Friendlier than I ever recall toward one of the wild Coyle boys.”
“Everyone knows it was Brian who came up with the shit that got them into trouble.” Addie walks over to the galvanized trough full of ice and soft drinks and pulls out a Coke.
Hughie steps away from the grill and whistles through his teeth. The conversations die down as he welcomes everyone to the annual fundraiser and thanks the sponsors for the donations. Cady is at his side trying to keep her balance as she teeters on the rain-soaked turf in her ridiculous high heels. Hughie’s the chair of the Community Foundation but everyone knows it’s Cady who runs the show. She’s gazing off, staring at someone, and Sarah can tell she’s not paying any attention to what Hughie is saying. Suddenly Cady’s face lights up and she cracks a sly smile. When Sarah looks, she sees Jack has noticed Cady staring at him and he acknowledges her with a slight nod.
Later, after most of the crowd has drifted away and the food’s been cleared up, Charlie makes his way over to Sarah, who is tossing paper plates into a garbage bag. “I think I’ll head over to Sunny Haven to say goodbye to Dad. I’m planning to leave early and I won’t bother driving back to town in the morning.”
“It’s been good, having you here this week. It gave me a nice break.”
“I wish I wasn’t so far away and could do this more often.”
Addie comes over and gives Charlie a hug. “Next time bring out that wife of yours and those two boys. I haven’t seen them in ages.”
Cady is standing nearby and, overhearing this, hurries over. “Don’t run off before I even have a chance to say hello.” She extends her hand to Charlie. “You remember me, don’t you? Cady Rankmore?”
Charlie seems puzzled.
“Cady Hubley,” Sarah offers.
“Yes, you might remember me from school. I was a friend of your sister.”
Addie shoots Sarah a look and Sarah shakes her head. Unbelievable.
“Are you the one who was in jail?” Cady blurts out. “You Coyle boys looked so much alike, no one could ever tell you apart. My mother used to say that’s how you got away with so much. Who knew which one of you was getting into some sort of trouble?”
Charlie’s face reddens. “No, that would be Brian. But Paul and me, we’ve come a long way since those days.” He grins. “Haven’t raided a garden since 1974.”
“I heard you say you’re stopping at Sunny Haven to see your father,” Cady continues. “I suppose you’ve seen Caroline Webb since you’ve been here. And I wondered how that might have gone.”
“Why would that be any of your business?” Addie speaks up.
“Oh, considering the history, you know,” Cady says, with a slight shrug of one shoulder. “I heard that Caroline’s lawyer’s been to see her and I wonder if that’s got anything to do with Becca.” She glances at Sarah with a smug look. “I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s wondering what will happen when she comes back.”
Sarah can’t breathe. She feels as though the last bit of air has been squeezed out of her lungs. She reaches for Charlie’s hand, just to feel something tangible, but in her mounting distress, she can’t find it. It’s something they’ve all surely thought about, but no one’s said it out loud. What will happen when Becca comes back?
“What’s your reason for bringing this up?” Addie starts in. “There’s nothing …”
“When Becca comes back,” Sarah interrupts. She forces the words from her lips and it seems she’s listening to herself from a long way off, hearing her voice, foreign-sounding, like someone else is saying the words, careful and watchful of what comes out next. “When Becca comes back, we’ll all find out what she’s been up to all these years, won’t we?” She’s trembling now, the garbage bag rustling in her hands.
“And all those old rumours can be put to rest once and for all, can’t they, Sarah?” Cady’s face is impassive and Sarah realizes Cady is choosing her words, too. Picking the ones that can hurt her the most. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? The stories about the baby? Were they true?”
The panic rises up over Sarah again. She needs to stop this now.
Charlie’s looking at her. He’s heard the same rumours as everyone else in Ross Prairie, although he’s never asked her outright if they were true. It was a small town and there was so much speculation when Becca went off so suddenly. Lots of people didn’t believe Elvina’s story that she’d left early for college.
“What will you do, Sarah?” Cady looks down at the manicured nails on one hand. “What will Jack do?”
A scream is about to edge out, and Sarah wants so badly to let it but she steels herself against it. “Don’t you have anything better to do than spread rumours like we’re back in high school?” She drops the trash bag and takes Charlie’s hand. “That’s all those stories ever were. Rumours.” She wants to say more. Do more. Slap that self-righteous grin right off Cady’s face. Tell her to go straight to hell. But there’s no winning with Cady Rankmore, so she just walks away.
When she gets home, she wanders along the stone garden paths among her flowers until she settles her seething anger. She doesn’t know why she still lets Cady Rankmore get under her skin. She notices her favourite pink lilies need dividing so she finds her garden fork and sinks it into the soil, carefully extracting the main bulb. Tiny bulblets fall away and she replants each of them nearby. Only a few will catch and emerge next spring as hopeful shoots. The others will wither and die under the rich prairie loam.