My life has been shaped by the sea—the frigid North Atlantic that surrounds Newfoundland. I was born here, and I’ll die here too. In fact, I’ve never once set foot off the island.
I come from lines of fisherfolk that run six generations deep, right back to the early settlers of Safe Harbour, a small town on the southern shore. My father spent his days combing the ocean for cod, and my mother’s hands were rarely free from silver scales and fish innards. It was Georgina and Patrick Delaney who taught me to appreciate the beauty of the ocean, to be grateful for its bounty, and to respect its power. I learned to fear and despise the ocean on my own.
My earliest memory is my mother’s voice. For the first decade of my life, she sang more than she talked. Hymns and sea shanties, folk tunes and radio hits of the day. I begged her constantly for “Lukey’s Boat,” its rhythmic beat and repetitive chant of “Aha, me boys a-riddle-i-day” delighting me whether belted out as the call to supper or whispered as a lullaby when I was sick. She was the soloist at our church and the life of every gathering: baptisms and funerals, garden parties and weddings—including her own. My grandmother loved to talk about my parents’ wedding, especially the part where my mother had sung her heart out while my father beamed at her over the bow of his fiddle. My grandmother also loved to talk about how it was music that first drew my parents together. In his childhood house, across the lane from my mother’s, my father began scraping the strings when his small hands were barely able to hold the instrument, and once his fingers grew nimble, he would stand at the open window and play, drawing my mother to his door like a Siren.
They married when they were just eighteen—common for devout Catholics in 1960. But unlike their neighbours, all of whom had gaggles of youngsters, I was their only child. I never knew exactly why, but every time I pleaded for a sibling, I could see even with young eyes it was a pain they shared. One day they sat me down and told me there would never be other children. My mother’s explanation was that it was God’s will, and it was not to be questioned. Apart from a baby sister or brother, I was given everything any child could want. Fried bread dough dripping with butter for breakfast. Hand-knit mittens and socks in every colour of the rainbow. Fiddle lessons and a song before bed. Saturday afternoons on my father’s boat. Undisturbed hours to poke about the tidal pools for seashells with my best friend, Annie Malone. I didn’t know we were poor. How could I when there was fresh, sweet cod alongside potatoes and carrots pulled from our garden on my dinner plate, when there was wood burning in the black iron stove in the corner and a warm coat hanging on the hook by the door. It all seemed solid and sure, protected and permanent.
Two weeks after my eleventh birthday, my father drowned while fishing a stormy sea, him and his two brothers swallowed up by the icy black water. They were honoured with a ceremonial burial—three empty pine caskets lowered side by side into the rocky soil while my mother sang “The Parting Glass,” my father’s favourite. Her voice was low and strained with a raspy timbre. I fixed my gaze toward the ocean while she sang, hoping that her voice had the power to bring him back to us. After the funeral, she stood at the water’s edge in the thick fog, her face taut and grim, and tossed his fiddle into the waves. She spent weeks in their bed, staring out the window and turning visitors away. I begged her to get up, to wash and eat, to walk with me to the shore, to sing to me, but she just laid her palm against my cheek and rolled away from me. When she finally emerged, I was frightened by this stooped, haggard stranger.
Before my father died, I’d rise every Christmas morning at dawn and tiptoe downstairs to dig into a red woollen sock filled with oranges and chocolates and hard peppermint candies. There was always a modest gift—a book and a deck of cards, hair barrettes and a trio of scented soaps. My mother would cook for days, pies and cakes and a golden turkey with silky gravy poured over turnip and soft cabbage. My teeth would ache from the sugar cookies and freshly baked bread sticky with molasses. At night, everyone in town who could carry a tune or play an instrument or tell a fine tale would squeeze in around our fire. That first Christmas without him, people still came, but only to bring plates of cold food wrapped in tea towels and hushed words of sympathy and encouragement. There was no music. The red sock was still filled and a gift from my mother (a pink scarf knitted by Mrs. Malone) still made its way to my hands, but there was no joy in it.
We didn’t have any family beyond each other. Like me, my mother was an only child. She was born when her mother was in her early forties and her father was almost fifty. Her mother died of cancer when I was a baby, and her father suffered a fatal heart attack a few years after. My father’s mother, also a widow, was consumed by her own grief and died less than a year after her sons were buried. The people of Safe Harbour stepped in to care for us. Hot suppers carried over by Mrs. Malone, clothes cast off by girls as they grew, bread and pies from other mothers, fish from other fathers, house repairs from other husbands. I mourned my father in private. I pressed his scratchy wool sweater to my face until it was soaked with tears and watched the sea every day, waiting for his fiddle to wash up on the shore. At night, I lay in my bed, sifting through my memories of him, always finding my way to the one I treasured above all others.
When I was five years old, I stood before the priest as he extended a thumb blackened with ashes and made the sign of the cross on my forehead. Then he said, “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” Later that evening, I sat with my parents at the dinner table, each of us with the stain of our faith on our skin, and I asked them why Father O’Leary had called me dust. My mother said he was talking about the circle of life, which made no sense to me. I looked to my father, and he said it was about going to heaven. All I knew about heaven was that it was some far-off place where “good people” like my granny and grandpa went after they died.
“Will I go to heaven too?”
My father reached out and stroked my cheek. “Indeed you will. But not for ages and ages.”
“Will it be dusty there?”
My father’s booming laugh echoed around the kitchen. “No, sweet girl. It’ll be exactly what you want it to be.”
“How will I know what I want it to be?”
“Just think about the place that makes you happiest, and that’s where you’ll go.”
After mulling it over, I landed on a day from the summer before, the day my father taught me to swim. Riding on his back just past the rocky shoal, then paddling back toward the shore, where my mother stood clapping and cheering me on. At bedtime, when my father came to my room to kiss me goodnight, I told him that after I died, I would live in the ocean. He laughed and said I’d made a fine choice. Then I asked him what place made him happiest. “Anywhere you are,” he said, and turned out the light.
My mother gradually returned to living, but she was unrecognizable to me. I waited for her to snap back into the woman she was, but she never did. She moved silently and slowly and kept to herself, and we lived in a house so muted and still that I often wished we’d both been lost with my father. I found some comfort in books. I’d race to the library van every Thursday afternoon and grab all old Mrs. McCarthy would let me carry, then lose myself over and over in the pages of Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden. But really it was school that carried me through. Kind and mindful teachers, gold stars and the letter A written in red pencil at the top of tests. School and Annie Malone.
Days after I learned about my tumour, Annie began to float up from the depths of my memory. Just a random flashback here (the two of us huddled together on a red toboggan as her brother Gordie pulled us through a Christmas snowfall), a vivid dream there (Annie as a teenager, blindfolded, wandering in a churchyard while calling my name). But over the last few weeks, she seemed to be stuck to me like a shadow. Spectre.
I reached for an old hardcover copy of Little Women on the side table next to the couch and found the small blue envelope I kept pressed between the pages. I pulled out the grainy black-and-white snapshot. I couldn’t recall when I’d last seen it. Ten years ago, maybe longer. It was crinkled and faded, but the image was still plain to see. A wide expanse of choppy ocean, a pebbled shore, and two downy-headed toddlers hiding behind their mothers’ knees. Faint blue handwriting across the back: “Frances and Annie, 1965.” Clear evidence that my dear friend from long ago was not some figment. The undeniable proof that regardless of how it had turned out between us, we had a shared beginning. Inextricable.
I woke with the photograph still in my hand. The apartment was dark and quiet. My back ached from the sagging sofa, and my heart ached from dredging the past. I poured myself a drop of whisky and climbed into bed.
What now? Shirley Bell had asked me. What now indeed. The Cleary house would be waiting for me in the morning. They would be my last clients. I had to tell them something and soon, but what exactly I hadn’t yet decided. Dr. Cleary was a shadow in that house and would hardly notice I was gone. Mrs. Cleary would find someone to step into my well-worn shoes easily enough. But then there was Edith. What a stark handle for such a merry girl. I was puzzled by how such a modern, vibrant mother had landed on it for her daughter until she gave me copies of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence for Christmas not long after I started working for her. Then I understood. Little Edie Cleary, now sixteen, under my watchful, admiring eye since she was eleven. Parting with her would be a different matter altogether.
By the time I got to work in the morning, I was twenty minutes late. I barrelled into the laundry room, threw in the first load, then marched to the kitchen. The remnants of breakfast were scattered about the room. Half-filled coffee cups on the island, two empty bowls and spoons on the table, crumbs on the counter in front of the toaster, but no signs of Edie’s morning milkshake. “Smoothie, Frances, it’s called a smoothie,” she’d always say, rolling her eyes. I made quick order of the place, then boiled the kettle for tea. I sat at the table and helped myself to a muffin. I wasn’t in the habit of making myself at home in the Cleary kitchen, but after the night I’d had and the frantic morning that followed, some liberty-taking was in order.
It had started in the wee hours, a dull throbbing in my head that quickly exploded into a searing pain, like someone had slammed a cleaver through my skull. I staggered to the bathroom, swallowed one of the pain pills they’d given me at the hospital—the ones I’d sworn up and down I didn’t need—and pressed a cold facecloth against my eyes. I rested my head on the pillow and took deep breaths until the pain began to retreat. I drifted off, then snapped awake again at three thirty, soaked in sweat. It was as if I could feel the tumour pulsing and expanding, spreading out over my brain like a big ugly squid. I’ve made a huge mistake, I thought. I should have relented and told them to cut it out. I struggled to breathe, and I felt the dark room closing in. I was sure that death had come for me, and all I could think about was that I would die alone. I curled up into a ball in my bed, sobbing like a child, longing for my mother, and wishing I still believed in God.
Then I heard a bird singing. I opened my eyes. The room was bright, and I was right again. I put my late-night hysterics down to the whisky and those blasted pills, which I also blamed for my forgetting to set the alarm, a first for me. I bolted out of bed, steadied myself against the dizziness, showered, and tore out of the apartment without so much as a sip of water. It was a wonder I’d made it here at all.
I’d been cleaning the Cleary house for almost five years. It was the best gig I ever had. It was a huge house but an easy one, a bright, modern bungalow with large open spaces and sparse furniture. No fussy antiques or intricate chandeliers, and surfaces that shone with a single wipe. Everything sleek and streamlined. Even when it wasn’t clean, it fooled you into thinking it was, and after I’d worked my magic, it glittered like Mrs. Cleary’s diamond rings.
They paid me twice my usual fee, compensation for the added duties of getting dinner started, running errands, and minding their sweet-tempered daughter while they were clocking in their fifty and sixty hours a week or jetting off somewhere for the weekend. He was a plastic surgeon, facelifts and big breasts and such, and she was the head of marketing at a publishing house, promoting local authors who were lately on the rise. She had an office (she called it her reading room) off the kitchen. It was full of bookshelves packed from end to end, from which I was welcome to borrow whatever I liked.
I’d first met Mrs. Cleary at my library, the one on Allandale Road, where I spent almost every spare moment of my time. I was in line at the desk, waiting to check out my weekly stack, when a tall, lean, beautifully dressed woman passed in front of me and kissed my librarian, Hillary, on both cheeks. They talked long enough for me to grow fidgety, then Hillary motioned for me to join them. “I wonder if you’d consider taking on a new client?” she’d asked. Client. Oh, how I liked the sound of that word, and I decided to adopt it immediately. As for new ones, I was more than open at the time. I’d been slogging it out at Mrs. Heneghan’s for nearly a decade. She’d had a massive stroke and had been silently staring at a hospital ceiling for a month, just waiting to stare at the ceiling in a care home. Poor woman. I’d been doing small day jobs while frantically looking for a full-time deal and was gearing up to start hitting the hotels again.
Hillary introduced me to her friend from university whose housekeeper had up and taken off for the mainland, leaving her desperate. “Positively desperate,” Liz Cleary said. When I told her that I could come have a look at her house, she reached for my hand, gripped it, and gave it a brisk shake. Her lips parted into a broad smile showing a set of big white teeth. Ferocious.
The visit with Mrs. Cleary was twenty minutes of her showing me around the house, my employment obviously a settled matter in her mind. She apologized several times for disarray apparent only to her. Apart from her daughter’s room, it was the most orderly house I’d ever seen. We ended in the bright white kitchen, where I noticed there were two dishwashers. You and I are going to get on just fine, I said silently to the house. As for Mrs. Cleary, I held off on my judgment of her.
Many a time I’d started off beautifully with the women—and they were always women—who hired me, only to have it unravel with no hope of reeling it back in. Like Mrs. Whelan, whose husband—that greasy man—was forever giving me the lusty eye. One day, I was down on my hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor, when she came in and found him hovering over me, staring at my raised rear end. I was fired on the spot—hustled out the back door, as if I were the dog defiling her home. I was mortified and furious. It wasn’t until later that evening that I realized she hadn’t paid me the forty dollars she owed me. I called her three times and left three polite messages, but I heard not a word from her. Six months of cleaning up after the two filthiest people I’d ever come across and that was the thanks I got. I saw her a few weeks later in the supermarket. As I stood behind her in the checkout line with two people between us, I fantasized about telling everyone within earshot about the revolting state of Mrs. Whelan’s house. She was never in any danger of such an outburst from me, though—I was better than that, and I needed my money. She paid the cashier and headed for the exit. I abandoned my cart and followed her outside. When I approached her in the parking lot, she was loading her groceries into the back of her car. I was still working up the nerve to speak when she gave me a withering look, and I knew I wasn’t steely enough to take her on. I held my tongue and walked away. If I saw her now, maybe I’d let my tongue wag however the hell it pleased.
THE TEA WAS MARVELLOUS. I held the cup with both hands, pretending this was my kitchen, my view of my manicured garden. The house was waiting, and time was wasting away, but the morning light was too lovely, the moment too precious to be hurried. Then my phone rang, and the moment was gone.
“Frances. Are you at the house yet?”
“Yes, Mrs. Cleary. I’m sorry to be a little late today. It won’t happen again.”
“Listen, I’m in a total bind. My boss has decided that I need to be in Halifax for a book event tonight, and Robert flew off to Vancouver for a conference this morning. Now I’m in a panic because Edie’s not feeling well. She was still in bed when I left.”
“Edie’s here?” I said, startled to realize that she’d been in the house all this time without me knowing. “It’s not anything serious, is it?”
“Between you and me, she’s probably just hungover. I know it’s ridiculously short notice, but is there any way you could stay over with her tonight and into tomorrow as well?”
“Yes, yes, of course I’ll stay with her. No problem whatsoever.”
“Frances, you’re a lifesaver. I’ll be back late tomorrow night. I’ll keep my phone on in case you need me.”
I hung up and quickly gulped down the last of my tea. I poured a glass of ginger ale, lined a bucket with a plastic bag, and headed toward Edie’s room. Hungover. Not likely. Every other young one in town maybe, but not Edie. I knocked softly and pushed her door open a crack. The floor was littered with clothes, the nightstand covered with glasses and plates, a streak of something dark across the white duvet. She was a riddle that girl, with her endless showers and pressed T-shirts, her precise handwriting and meticulously prepared schoolwork. But that room, I’d given up on it long ago.
She was sleeping on her back, her limp, dirty-blond hair fanned across the pillow, and the air whistled softly as it moved in and out of her open mouth. True, she was no beauty, her features somehow at odds with one another, but who was I to talk? All I saw were her warm brown eyes and her charming lopsided grin. “She’s just so plain,” her gorgeous mother said to her handsome father one morning as I was clearing away the dishes. I was stunned by Mrs. Cleary’s cruel assessment of Edie. The way I saw it, their beauty had somehow skipped over her skin and lodged somewhere deep inside of her, choosing to show itself in her intelligence and sharp wit, her kindness, her capacity for love and concern for others. What else mattered? Anyone with a beating heart could detect the uncommon goodness in that girl, but God forbid she be plain. Then Mrs. Cleary asked her husband what he thought could be done to “fix” Edie’s nose. And what, pray tell, could be done to fix you, Mrs. Cleary?
I’d not seen Edie sleeping like this since she was a child. Now she was more woman than girl, and the sight of her both touched and alarmed me. I’d never know her any older than this. I’d never know how she turned out, and the thought of that made me once again want to call the surgeon and tell him to start scrubbing his hands.
I carefully replaced an empty glass on her nightstand with the ginger ale and her wastebasket with the bucket, then shut the door. Nothing but tissues and chocolate bar wrappers in the wastebasket. A good sign, I thought, as I emptied it into the bin in the garage. A clump of tissues fell to the floor and a blue-and-white pen clattered across the concrete. I reached for it and tossed it on the pile. The moment it left my hand, I realized it wasn’t a pen at all. I’d seen the commercials often enough—the ones with the pretty young women laughing and celebrating. They never showed the weeping ones. I pulled it out of the bin and held it up to the light, that bold blue plus sign staring back at me. Ah, Edie, here’s a right pickle. This careful, clever girl snared in the oldest trap there was. I was the eyes and ears of that house, as I’d been of every house I’d cleaned, and nothing came to mind that would have warned of this. There was no boy. Well, clearly there was a boy—just not one I’d ever seen. Beads of sweat began to form along my hairline.
I wrapped the test stick in a white plastic bag, then another for good measure, and stuffed it down under all the rest of the smelly trash. I went back to the kitchen, then thought better of it, returned to the garage, fished the bag out, and slipped out the back door. I walked down the street, over a block, and put it in the trash can outside the convenience store. When I got back, Edie was standing in front of the open fridge.
“Good morning, Edie. Feeling any better?”
“Hey, Frances. Yeah, must be something going around.”
“Must be. Should I make you something to eat?”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
She shuffled away from the fridge and slumped down on a stool at the island, the spirit gone out of her. A swell of hectic energy rose in me, an intense need to step in and somehow make this right. I suspected that if I intervened in even the slightest way, we would both be somehow changed by it. The notion intrigued and terrified me. Precipice.
I laid my hand on the back of her head. She reached up and placed her hand over mine, sending a ribbon of electricity up my arm. I rarely experienced the touch of another person, and contact with this creature was a joy so profound that it was almost painful. Not long after I’d first met her, Edie fell off her bicycle. As I cleaned and bandaged her knee, mentally rehearsing what I’d say to her mother, she leaned forward and rested her little hands on my shoulders. My heart opened and leaked into my chest, and I feared I would burst into tears and scare the poor youngster to death. Now it was commonplace for her to wrap her arms around me whenever she felt like it, and for me to let her. If I had to choose only one thing I would truly miss about this life, it would be the embrace of young Edie Cleary.
I sent her back to her bed with toast and an orange, then made myself another cup of tea and took it outside. I started tallying the tasks for the day—laundry, dishes, grocery run—just to shift my thoughts away from that stick with the plus sign. Then I heard a voice, like a stranger mumbling in my ear. It had come and gone before I could make out exactly what was said.
I whipped my head around expecting to see Edie, but she wasn’t there. Just me and my teacup and my cigarette burned down to the filter. I laid the cup on the grass and took another look around the yard. It was one of those mornings bursting with the promise of the season to come. A blue sky streaked with cottony clouds. Not a breath of wind. A single bird twittering. The scent of soil and the sulphur of the match I’d struck.
“Frances. Calling Frances. Earth to Frances.”
I spun around, blinked, and brought Edie into focus.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look all spacey.”
I picked up my cup and walked toward her. “I’m fine. Just off in my head somewhere. I need to get at the rest of that laundry.”
She waved her hand in front of her face. “Oh my God. Were you smoking?”
“Never mind about me, worry about yourself.” I shooed her back into the house. “Go on back to bed and I’ll check on you shortly.”
I took my morning pill and changed into my cleaning clothes. By noon, I was almost caught up. I was folding sheets in the laundry room when I heard the voice again. I didn’t recognize it, but it was clear and unmistakable, as if it had come from a person standing beside me. Three breathy words: “Lay it down.”
I felt a familiar pressure begin to rise in my chest, that old harbinger of the panic I’d lived with for most of my life. I pressed my hand against my breastbone to try to tamp it down, then stood like a statue, horrified by the thought that the squid in my head had developed the power of speech. I lowered myself to the floor and rested my back against the cool metal of the washing machine. I gently kneaded my scalp, to what end I wasn’t sure, other than it felt good. I panted and waited for my chest to loosen. As I slowly found my breath, the pressure started to subside, and a morbid curiosity took its place. I’d heard of people with tumours like mine who developed special skills before their brains were entirely ravaged. Things like a photographic memory or clairvoyance. Perhaps the squid would bless me in a similar way. Or at least it might have the decency to tell me what to do next. “Lay what down?” I whispered to the empty room. I sat very still, listening intently for an answer, but I heard nothing. Well, now. Wasn’t this just grand. A grown woman slumped on a laundry room floor, waiting for the knot of deranged cells in her head to offer up a bit of sage advice. The absurdity of it hit me and I started to laugh—deep belly laughter that made me cross my legs for fear of wetting myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so hard. It left me feeling refreshed and oddly composed. If the squid had plans for driving me right round the bend today, then hard luck. I had a pregnant teenager on my hands, and losing my mind would just have to wait. I stood up, stuffed a load of towels in the dryer, then made my way toward Edie’s room.