[   TWENTY-THREE   ]

I DID WRITE TO JENNY. It wasn’t my finest moment. She didn’t keep the letter, thank God. She ignored most of what I had to say, which included, if I remember right, the phrase “give your head a shake.” But she kept what she could use. That meant taking my advice about talking to Sister Anne, who I saw as my sensible ally.

Sister Anne surprised me by not trying to talk her out of it. I expected more from her, a persuasive argument. But instead she told Jenny, “Inform yourself.” And this became Jenny’s motto.

Then Jenny changed her mind about John and wrote to him care of his parents’ house in Williams Lake. She made it clear that the only thing she really needed from him was money. She said she would pay him back. John got the letter eventually. He was in Northern California, picking fruit, washing dishes and playing saxophone and piano in bands wherever he could find them. The first cheque he sent was for $200. “Don’t say you’ll pay me back,” he wrote. “I don’t want you to.”

Sister Anne also took Jenny to write the test for her beginner’s licence, and then she took her out for drives in the evening. Jenny told me she practised parallel parking down in the shipping yards, between some big containers.

“I drove down Granville today!” she wrote in one letter and drew a little happy face beside it.

You can’t die of shame, Jenny. If you could, I’d be dead. Christmas was coming and what I should have done was go to Vancouver to be with my sister. Bea was taking the bus to White Rock to spend the holiday with her sister.

“If you want to come along with me on the bus, I’ll buy you a ticket,” she said. “The home will allow visitors for Christmas.” I didn’t ask her how she knew.

“No,” I said. “I’ll stay here. They need me at the gas station.” Not true, of course. I was just too mad at Jenny for deciding to keep the baby to make the sacrifice of a riding a bus for twelve hours with Bea. And also too worried. I carried around the constant hope that Mom would pull up in front of Bea’s house with her grin and her strong legs and her kiss. My fourteenth birthday had passed without word from her. But Christmas seemed like a time when she might come. We needed her now more than ever and if there was such a thing as mother’s instinct, maybe she would know. I was afraid to be away and miss her. She could slip away again, not knowing that we weren’t okay.

“Suit yourself,” Beatrice said and went about pulling her little white suitcase out from under the bed, wiping the dust off it and folding clothes I’d never seen her wear in a neat pile on the couch. Beatrice had two sets of clothes she wore all the time, navy stretch slacks and an off-white cardigan or grey stretch slacks and a green cardigan. But it turned out she had a closet full of other things: pastel pantsuits and crepe blouses with bows and paisley scarves. She talked to herself as she packed. She had started doing that soon after Jenny left, little things like, “It could use dry cleaning.” And “Where did I leave my umbrella?” It irritated me, but then everything she did irritated me, even the condiments she kept in the fridge but never used. Ancient relishes, mint sauce and HP Sauce—they must eventually go bad, like after three years. She put her suitcase by the door two days before her departure.

I should try to think of something kind to say. I should be more generous, but I was happy to see her go. Having someone else’s house to yourself is not the same as having your own. Still, a stifling cloud of rage and unspoken accusations lifted from me the moment she was down the steps. I made hot chocolate and watched Get Smart with my feet on the coffee table. I smoked a stale cigarette, one of Jenny’s. There was no alcohol in the house. I thought briefly that it might be fun to get some, then I decided it would involve talking to people, so I dropped the idea.

All the snow had melted over the previous week. Everyone who had come through the gas station said something about it being a green Christmas. But I didn’t mind. I didn’t want it to feel like Christmas at all. Then the morning after Bea left, Christmas Eve, it started to snow, so light that three customers in a row said, “Is that snow?” and I said yes, as if I was the authority. By noon, when the flakes were coming down like apple blossoms, I had to listen to every second person say that they guessed it would be a white Christmas after all.

I kept expecting Mom to drive in. Every crunch of tires on the gravel made me look up. Why I thought she would come to that gas station where I happened to be working, I don’t know. I suppose I thought someone would have told her.

Bob closed up at three o’clock and I walked back to the house through the falling snow. It was sticky enough to make a snowman. I had a pork chop to fry up and I made instant mashed potatoes and a can of creamed corn to go with it. Dark already, the snow coming down steadily, I felt like I was being buried. I turned on Bea’s silver Christmas tree on top of the TV, although I hated it, both its chintzy falseness and the fact that she put it on top of the TV. It just reinforced how pathetic her life was, the TV the centre of her world. Jenny once asked Mom why we didn’t have a TV and Mom said, “You mean overlooking the fact that we don’t have a fridge or a dryer either? We could have a TV, if it was important enough to us.”

But I liked the coloured light that Bea’s tree threw. Not a fire, but a memory of a fire, Christmas Eve playing cards by the light of the lantern and Mom bringing us a plate of biscuits with fresh cream and blackberry jam. Where did she get the cream? What plans did she make for the day, following some dream she had for all of us together on Christmas Eve? The woodsmoke perfume. Snow angels later, all four of us, Dad giggling. Looking up at the stars, the night so clear and cold. I don’t know how old I was, but even then I knew to hold on to it. I understood how fragile it was.

I looked out the window at the quiet street. Fallen snow had turned the neighbours’ cars into weird tall shapes. More was falling, and it blurred under a porchlight like a cloud of insects hovering.

I went to the phone and dialled information. “I’m looking for Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Vancouver,” I said.

“I’m sorry? What is the name you’re looking for?” said the operator.

“Our Lady of Perpetual Help. That’s the name.”

“Hold on please. There’s an Our Lady of Perpetual Help church. Is that the number you want?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry miss, that’s the only number I have. Merry Christmas,” said the operator.

Bea’s backyard was a bowl of deep snow capped by sky thick with reflected light. It was only a city backyard and Christmas was all wrong but I couldn’t help seeing how beautiful it was. I put on my parka and went out the door. I found the snow shovel and began a pile right in the middle of the yard. Music floated from a neighbour’s house. I hoped they didn’t know Bea was away and that they wouldn’t see me, alone out there. I piled and packed, piled and packed, took off my parka and worked in my sweatshirt. I stopped to make hot chocolate, sat on the back step and drank it, thinking of Vern, who had gone to his Mom’s for the holidays.

Voices on the street, happy shouts and car doors slamming. Then the commotion of revved engine and spinning tires and shouted directions. “Straighten your wheels. Okay, put her in reverse. Give her some juice. Again.” Then quiet, deep, even here. It must be late.

I began to dig a tunnel into the pile. After a while, I got the flashlight and went to the shed for a smaller shovel. Sweeping the dark corners with the flashlight beam, I saw her travelling fast, too fast on a snow-plugged road, her muscular hands gripping the wheel, headlights cutting through thick falling snow. She’d like a cigarette. There’d be no one there to roll it for her and you couldn’t stop on a road like that or you’d get stuck for sure. Her thermos of tea would be between her legs, the tea only lukewarm by now.

I locked the shed. If anything came down the street, I’d hear it. But nothing was moving. Not even out on the highway.

It was early morning, not yet light, by the time I finished the snow cave. I found a candle, stuck it on a little snow shelf inside and lit it. It was better in here. Christmas day had come. No one in the world knew how my arms ached, or how pale the light of the candle was against snow crystal walls.

I wonder now how deep a person’s grief can go. Jenny never mentioned that Christmas, not in the letters she wrote afterwards, not ever. But I wonder if leaving her alone there like I did altered her, and if it led to what came later.