Carter yelled from his bedroom.
“What, Carter?”
“Can I go to Amanda’s?”
He’d asked this twenty times since breakfast with a litany of variations. Can I get a trampoline? Can we get a hose to shoot water? Can we get a basement with a ping pong table? Sarah felt ridden with guilt, treating him yesterday to lunch and a movie that she couldn’t afford. A play date was impossible. His friends were at the daycare, paying customers, happily somersaulting and chasing each other with water guns. She’d taken him to the pool instead. At home, they’d dressed like pirates, played Go Fish, painted rocks. But there was a resignation in him that she couldn’t deny, a growing recognition that his life had been taken away. All he really wanted was to be back where they were.
Still, she had a job interview on Friday, by video conference. She had applied without hope, not yet in possession of the nursing credentials they asked for, and when the exuberant woman from HR called, she nearly dropped the phone. I’m sorry, who is this, she made her repeat twice, Carter bellowing in the background for another cheese string. Yes certainly, Friday morning at ten, she managed to stutter before the woman could change her mind.
It was a large company with a fancy website, boasting of care and compassion towards clients and a loyalty program for employees, the position full-time and at eight dollars more an hour than she’d been making. The job description centred around daily living activities—toileting, bathing, dressing, feeding, visiting, socializing, sorting out medication—no mention of dirty floors or dirty laundry. Over a thousand bucks more a month to focus on what she was good at, enough to buy Carter decent school clothes and before and after school care.
She’d rehearsed the interview while she pushed Carter on the swing and cleaned behind his ears in the bathtub and scrubbed the grass stains out of his sweatpants. If they asked why she left her last position, she would smile brightly and lie, tell them she was moving back to the city so that her son could enrol in French Immersion.
She hoped it would be enough. She would do the interview in her bedroom, set up the card table near the window where the light would be best, make it look like she was behind a proper desk. She would wear makeup and a freshly ironed blouse, tame her out-of-control curls, plunk Carter in front of the TV with a lapful of snacks and pray that he would leave her alone for however long it took to talk her way into their new life.
For now, she had trouble catching her breath. “Let’s go to the park,” she announced, making it sound like it was exactly where they should be.
Carter stopped in his tracks. “Again? Really?”
“Why not.”
There were no other cars in the parking lot. Two boys, older, nine or ten perhaps, were swinging along the overhead bars, thatches of unruly hair white from the summer sun. Carter ran ahead and stepped onto the balance beam, turning to the boys every few seconds with a proud look what I can do smile.
She knew enough not to hover when there were older boys to impress, so she sat on the steel bench. The heat was oppressive, the sky shiny grey, the sun a hazy disc hidden behind the sheet of smoke that had travelled across provinces from the latest forest fire. It was so dry and hot she could light a match and set the whole world ablaze.
A Volkswagen lurched to a stop in the spot beside hers. Sarah recognized it from Prairie View. Rachel. There she was, slamming her door, hurrying towards her, a blur of wild colour against the dull backdrop.
Sarah stood wearily and waved. Carter barrelled towards Rachel, took her hand, and dragged her towards the bench, her sandals slapping in the gravel, her floppy purse slapping against the folds of her hallucinogenic blouse. By the time the two got to her, Rachel’s face was shiny with sweat, her breath coming in short puffs.
“I didn’t know how to find you,” Rachel sputtered. “I’ve been searching everywhere. Every place I could think of. Even the post office.”
Sarah was confused. “Well, you found us. It’s good to see you.” Although suffering was stamped across Rachel’s face, in the creases around her mouth and beneath her puffy eyes. Sarah’s bucket was near empty, and she didn’t think she could conjure the strength to do any good.
The bigger boys had moved onto the giant net climber, Carter’s favourite, the ropes layered in a way where the child is supposed to tumble down rather than fall straight to the ground.
“Can I go?” Carter said, as if he’d been summoned to the bench in the first place.
“Of course you can go,” Sarah said.
When he skipped away to join them, the two women sat. Sarah took a deep breath to steady herself, nearly choking on a lungful of smoke-filled air. “How are you, Rachel? This must be such a hard time with your mom gone.”
Rachel dug through her purse for a Kleenex and blew her nose pitifully. “I want you to know that I’m sorry,” she said. “So very sorry.”
“I’m sure,” Sarah said, her throat raspy and raw. She should have kept Carter indoors like the air quality report advised. “I’m sorry too, Rachel. We’re never really ready for loss, even when we know it’s coming.”
“It’s all my fault. I’m a horrible person.”
So this was the way it would be. “Don’t ever say that,” Sarah said in her nurse’s voice. “None of this is your fault. You’ve been a wonderful daughter, so kind to your mom when she needed you the most.”
“No, it’s not that.” Rachel’s voice was inflected with something Sarah hadn’t heard before. Fear, perhaps. She couldn’t understand it.
“It’s worse.” Rachel sucked in her breath as if steadying herself to let out something she’d been holding in for too long. “Much worse.”
Sarah crossed her knees and swung her leg back and forth. She felt drained and blank with waiting.
Finally, Rachel started up again, like an old motor cranking to life. “I have something to tell you. It’s hard.”
So, tell me already.
“I’m the one they’ve been looking for. All those things that went missing. It was me. I took them.”
Sarah blinked several times, as if that would help her make sense of what she’d just heard.
“Sorry?”
“It was me. It was me. It was me,” Rachel said, her voice trailing off.
Sarah instinctively shrunk from the woman, unable to look at her. “I don’t understand.”
“That makes two of us.”
She ran through the past weeks in her head. Picking up pieces, dropping them, fragments of conversations, that horrible staff meeting, Violet’s lost look without her doll, Dorothy’s accusing scowl. “Edith’s quilt? Mazie’s pearls?”
Rachel sobbed, “All of it.”
Sarah leaned over, clutching her knees. She felt like she was going to be sick. She’d left Carter in that woman’s care. She looked frantically towards her son to be sure he was still there. He’d made it to the third row of the rope climber, one of the boys reaching out, pulling him higher.
Rachel touched Sarah’s arm, and Sarah batted away her hand. “How could you do it? Not once, but over and over. I trusted you. We all trusted you.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why.”
“Well, you must know something. You’re the one who’s done these awful things.”
“I can’t explain.”
Sarah could feel the flush move up from her chest to the tips of her ears. “Not good enough! A damn hummingbird. What on Earth could you possibly want with it?”
“I don’t know how to tell you. It’s like it offered itself into my hand. Like it called out my name and it would be wrong to just leave it hanging in another person’s window. There’s no logic, no right answer. It could have just as easily been something else.”
“But you took the things most important to people. That’s not random.”
“I didn’t mean to. Something comes over me. It comes from a place of . . . desperation. A need I can’t control—like gulping for air—and if I have the thing, it will fix me. It will stop the despair. And for a minute, I feel a sense of euphoria, like I’m on top of the world. The shame comes later. I can’t even describe the depth of it. I hate myself for being weak and giving in and make a promise to myself that it will stop. Only it doesn’t.”
Carter was at the top of the climber, a dizzying height, yelling wildly. She wanted to run to him with arms outstretched, to catch him if he fell, but her rubbery legs had melded to the bench. And he was safer where he was than near this mad woman. “You’ve done this before? Stolen?”
Rachel blew her nose, her Kleenex crumpled and soggy. “I was better for a while. I thought it was behind me, I truly did. And it was. I’d finished with all that. Until I came back here.”
“I lost my job because of you.”
“I never dreamed such a thing could happen. I feel sick about it.”
“And what about Billy? You were his friend. This will devastate him.”
Rachel started a new round of sobbing, louder this time. It was as if the whole bench shook with the force of her grief. Sarah looked towards Carter, worried he’d rush over like Superman, but he and the white-haired boys were ensconced in their own drama, shouting and laughing as they scrambled down the ropes and raced to the slides, a blur of motion.
Sarah sat rod straight and listened to Rachel’s frantic bursts of breath, her breasts rising, then falling, then rising again. It took considerable time before the sobs died out. It occurred to her that this woman had never known happiness. Maybe small moments of contentment, but never for long, never true joy.
“You have to stop doing this,” she said more gently than she felt. Hate and pity were hard to hold on to at the same time.
Rachel raised her shoulders, nodding vehemently. “I know.”
“And you have to give everything back. You still have their things, right?”
“I do. And I will.”
“How?”
“It’s all in a box. It’s in my car now. I’m going to take it to Prairie View.”
She could hardly trust her. “When?”
Rachel closed her hand around her arm and Sarah let it stay. “Today, on my way out. I have to leave this place.”
Sarah nodded. If you dug in the dirt, scratched deep, this town shared plenty of blame for the woman she’d become. It could hardly give her what she needed now. It couldn’t give Sarah what she needed either.
Rachel dug through her purse and pulled out a small purple satin bag with a ribbon drawstring. “This is for you,” she said, carefully laying it in her lap.
Sarah eyed the bag suspiciously.
“I didn’t steal it if that’s what you’re thinking. It was a present from my grandma.”
Sarah reluctantly loosened the ribbon and unwrapped the layers of faded cloth to find a teardrop opal on a silver chain.
Rachel stared longingly at the gift she was giving. “I’ve had this since I was a little girl. My grandma was wearing it when she carried me to bed. She told me I had her eyes. The next morning it was tucked in her handkerchief under my pillow. It was her last visit; my father saw to that.”
The opal had a rich pearly lustre, the chain as delicate as silver thread. “Why are you giving this to me, Rachel? This should be something you keep.”
“I don’t need a pendant to remember her. And I want this for you.”
“But why?”
“Because of your kindness. Because of the way you’ve treated me. Because it’s all I have to give.”
Sarah looked down at her hands. Slowly, reluctantly, she lifted the pendant to her throat. With trembling fingers, she opened the clasp and felt it click into place.
Rachel’s eyes glistened. “It looks beautiful. I won’t forget you.”
Sarah had to look away, afraid she might cry herself. The weight of the stone near her heart felt too heavy.
“I should go,” Rachel said, gathering her purse, pulling herself up.
“Yes. You should go,” she heard herself say. She closed her eyes, kneading her temples with the tips of her fingers. When she opened her eyes again, Carter was at her side, sweaty and panting, the older boys whizzing across the field on their shiny bikes.
“Aw,” he whined miserably. “How come Rachel left too?”
She gathered her son into her arms and held him so tight he yelped in protest. “Show me how you can climb the pole?” she whispered. She cupped his hand in hers, letting him drag her away from that sad, hurtful place.