UNCLE LESLIE WAS waiting for us when we got back to Agnes’s house.
“I found her car,” he said.
“Come on in,” said Agnes, and we went inside where she made tea. She brought out biscuits and homemade jam and we sat at the kitchen table.
“I asked around about your mom,” Uncle Leslie began again. “A fellow over here said, ‘That lady with the red hair that drove the Chevy station wagon?’ He said he knew a guy who bought the car about three years ago. Over near Dultso. So I drove over to see him. He said he bought it from a man, dark-haired guy, maybe Japanese, he said. Told him the car had been well cared-for by his wife. And it was. Still in beautiful shape. I bought it from him.”
Agnes started to laugh.
“You what?” I said.
“You in need of another car?” Agnes said.
“I bought it for you, Maggie. You’re going to need a car, you and Jenny and the baby. You can’t be hitchhiking around the countryside with a baby.”
“Uncle Leslie, I …”
“No, don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear it. By rights the car is yours. And I got it for a song.”
I called Jenny from Agnes’s house. She sounded so much better, the worry that clutched my stomach uncoiled a little.
“She’s a happy baby,” Jenny said.
“Like her name.”
“It makes it easier for me. Sister Anne got us a stroller. Ginger calls it a pram. We’ve been out walking. The roses are all in bloom. But I can’t wait to come home.”
I swallowed. What did she mean?
“Mag?”
“Yeah, I know, Jenny. Hey, you won’t believe this.” And I told her about the car.
“That old car,” Jenny said. “I loved that car.”
Driving in that car with Mom always felt like escaping. We hit the road with no one to answer to. We were unaccountable and unaccounted for. There were strings of days when even Dad wouldn’t know where to find us. Powdered milk and canned meat, no toilets, no beds or doors.
I used to pity the people we passed along the way, especially the women. I pitied Mrs. Duncan yawning behind the counter at the Nakenitses Lake store. As I paid for my Orange Crush, I could feel in her eyes that she wanted to escape, too. Sometimes I said to Mom, “Do you think she’s jealous?”
“Sure she is. Who wouldn’t be?” she always said and I wonder now if she was serious. I should ask Jenny, but at the time, I believed her.
We napped under the sheltering branches of giant spruce trees and made tea from rosehips and spruce needles, and sweetened it with honey. Mom kept some one-gallon glass jugs in the car and she knew where there were springs grown round with graceful willow. We knelt in the thick moss and caught the water in the jugs as it bubbled out. We swam naked in remote lakes and creeks. We sunbathed on warm rock, like wood nymphs, Mom said. Sometimes she called Jenny and me “the little people.”
“Who are the little people?” Jenny asked.
“They’re the secret ones who live in an underground world that can only be entered at the water’s edge. They like it if you leave them little gifts of candy and cloth.” Sometimes she gave us a bright kerchief to tie to a branch near the water.
“But you don’t want to get too friendly with them,” she warned. “If you do, they’ll steal you away to live with them for seven years.”
And then, when we returned to the car, there was the sun-baked vinyl smell of it, the warmth, like a nest.
Uncle Leslie brought the car over to Agnes’s. I wanted to be happy to see it, but any trip we made now in the station wagon would not be an escape. A net of memory was tightening around me.