We flew from Amsterdam to St. John’s, connecting through Halifax. It was mid-afternoon when we arrived, weary from the flight, though we had slept through most of it. As the plane made its approach to the airport over Cape Spear and Signal Hill, I cast back to our departure from Schiphol, where we’d bade goodbye to Rachel’s sisters just outside security.
“This is goodbye,” Gloria said. “We’ve never been much of a foursome, but it breaks my heart to have to say that I doubt the four of us will ever be together again. I have a going-away present for you, Rachel.”
“We’ll meet again,” Rachel said, but her tone was so perfunctory that a surge of sadness for her filled my throat.
Gloria drew three white envelopes out of her purse, each of them inscribed with one of her sisters’ names. “I was going to give one of these to Carmen and Bethany when we got back to Cape Town, but it seems like the right thing to hand them out all at once. One wedding band and one engagement ring for each of you. I don’t want you to ever wear them. They are mementoes of my three ex-husbands, and they are worth quite a lot of money. I didn’t look for, or accept, a penny from any of those men when I left them. I preferred to start over without any baggage. Starting over is my specialty. But I didn’t want to give them their rings back or sell them. I haven’t been able to decide what to do with them until now.”
She stood directly in front of Carmen and handed an envelope to her, then did the same with Bethany and Rachel. “I love you all,” she said. “You might not believe it, but I do.”
“What a weird present,” Carmen said as she stared at the envelope in her hands.
Gloria smiled fondly at her, her eyes welling up with tears. “Carmen, we used to hold hands when we walked home from school in Rondebosch. I bet you don’t remember that.”
Carmen shook her head and looked again at the envelope, as if it might help her remember.
“Bethany,” Gloria said, “maybe those rings will come in handy when the baby’s born.” Bethany smiled at her.
Gloria turned to Rachel. “Please, please remember me, baby sister, and please don’t judge me too severely.”
“I love you,” Rachel said. “And I think you’re wrong. The four of us will meet again. Why wouldn’t we?”
Gloria wiped tears away with the heels of both hands. “You may be the closest thing to a baby that I ever have, baby sister. I hope not, but who knows?”
They huddled together in a hug, and I couldn’t help feeling like an intruder. I wasn’t one of the van Hout sisters. I wasn’t a woman. A terrible thing had happened to Rachel when I had yet to meet her. What happened to Rachel happened to no one but Rachel. What happened to Gloria and Bethany and Carmen happened to them, to each of them, alone. Their sisterhood conferred commonality upon them in everything but this. They were not sister victims or any other kind of foursome. Each of them was absolute, entire unto herself. The same crime committed countless times does not become a single crime. Each of the sisters had her own story, much of which was unknowable to the others. And to me.
Word of the murders of the van Houts reached home before we did. The house was empty but for Mom when we got there. I told her everything I knew, except for the part that Gloria had played in her parents’ deaths. Mom could tell there was more to the story. My eyes gave me away. Hers gave her away. But it was Rachel she hugged first.
Then we told her of our plans to move to the mainland, and she said she had long known that I wouldn’t stay in Newfoundland. “We’re spoiling your perfect record of keeping your children near, Jennie,” Rachel said.
“Rachel,” Mom said, “you’ll get over the loss of your parents somehow. With Wade’s help and God’s, not that I’m making comparisons. The two of you will visit us just as often as you would have if none of it had ever happened, and we’ll visit you if we can. You’re going to the mainland, not to the moon. My son is in love with you, and he’s never been in love before. You’re in love with him, and you’ve never been in love before. So keep at it. You’ll never get it right. No one ever has. But there it is.”
I knew that, after we were gone, after my father and sisters had come home and gone to bed, she would sit at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes, nursing a glass of rye and ginger. And then she would go out on the front steps with her cigarettes, her ashtray and her glass, and look up at the stars until she couldn’t see them anymore.
My brothers and I had often come home hours after midnight to find her there, waiting for whichever one of us was out so late she couldn’t sleep, waiting for Dad’s car or a taxicab or the police to pull into the driveway at the bottom of the hill.
By the time we’d got inside, she’d be in bed, too fed up with us to say good night. But she would be the first one in the kitchen in the morning, making breakfast for the early risers, who would have been astonished if she wasn’t there, and she would still be there when we, who had come home late, finally got up, and she would make us breakfast too and never say a word about the night before.
Until we left for Toronto, we stayed with my parents, sleeping in separate bedrooms that had been my older brothers’. We borrowed Dad’s car when we could and drove to St. John’s. We avoided Freshwater Road, Rachel saying she never wanted to set eyes on 44 again. We went to the university campus and had lunch at the picnic table where we’d spent so many summer nights. Spring had come early but there was not yet much heat in the sun, so we huddled together over a Thermos of coffee and some sandwiches my mother made.
“In June, it will be two years since we met,” I said.
“It seems a lot longer,” Rachel said as she surveyed the distant hills of Petty Harbour. “Let’s never get married. Let’s live in sin forever.”
It was the most that ever passed between us by way of a proposal. I accepted.
From The Arelliad
DEAR WADE (1985)
These lines of verse, The Ballad kind,
are still those of an anguished mind—
or so it seems, I can’t be sure;
they read unlike they read before,
and I don’t feel as I once did
while writing The Arelliad.
I write for me now, and for Them:
He taught me to—but I’m not Him.
I hope you don’t regret the day
you saw me and I looked away
when we were in the library,
or wish that I had not looked back
the second night among the stacks,
or that, when I broke up with you,
I did just what you hoped I’d do—
when you were starting to move on,
I turned up in your life again.
It isn’t often words I lack
(sometimes they come by sneak attack)
but I was stuck for words that night
and needed time to get them right.
Will you cast back in fifty years
and wish I’d never climbed those stairs
to the garret that September?
Will you be sad when you remember
and wonder how things would have been
if I had not come back again?
Will you resent me, Wade, come then,
and think of things that might have been?
—
Sometimes my words are all I have—
more often they have me, my love.
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t give
to give them up and simply live.
I know that that will never be…
you know and yet you still love me.
But there are things you mustn’t know
(what happens when the west wind blows),
the scars I hope will never show,
the smudge of blue on my left hand
that you will never understand:
the scars of little Rachel Lee,
the things I cannot let you see,
the crime of Glormenethalee.
I couldn’t stand to see you go;
you know the pain, I know you do.
I wouldn’t hold up like you did;
I’d go back to the yellow wood
and give myself to Claws von Snout
and never, never come back out…
You think the things I say are true—
it isn’t fair, I know, I do.
The lens through which I’ve seen my life—
a restoration of belief
would be difficult enough,
but to begin at twenty-three,
feel happy to be Rachel Lee—
I have to try but not just yet.
I know that not all men are bad;
I think that some are like your dad.
Your mother trusted me with you—
it might destroy her if she knew.
I mustn’t sentimentalize:
a heart of gold and, oh, so wise—
but she saw more than you could see
the first time she locked eyes with me.
I’ll do my best, it might take years
to read some book that isn’t Hers,
or write uninfluenced by Him.
The words come when I summon them
but don’t do what I tell them to;
someday they will, I promise you.
I shouldn’t promise anything:
I still fear what the night will bring.
There’s so much that I haven’t done;
I lost the knack of having fun.
I think I had it way back when,
but maybe not, not even then.
I don’t feel like remembering.
The future, then, let’s think of that…
but then again, I’d rather not;
I’d rather count the things we’ve got.
We have each other, first of all,
the shadows on the bedroom wall…
the sounds that came from the canal,
the children running on the bridge,
the humming of the garret fridge.
It isn’t hard to find the good—
let’s look for it, I think we should.
The casement curtains rise and fall;
there’s hardly any breeze at all.
In Newfoundland there is no war,
no midnight knocks on neighbours’ doors,
no fear that, next, they’ll knock on yours—
not that the past has been undone,
but this is now and that was then.
—
But this is now, it’s all we have:
how good it is to be alive
when you are only twenty-five;
how wonderful to be in love
at any age in any time;
the lines still scan, the words still rhyme.
Ten years of yellow have gone by
but now, perhaps, another sky
is showing through the yellow cloud
(dishonesty is not allowed).
I don’t know what more I can do
than dedicate my life to you,
and dedicate my life to Them,
my literary heroines.
There is a watch I have to keep
with you beside me, sound asleep.
There is a pledge I have to make:
I’ll be the one who stays awake,
the one who’s ever vigilant
(this is what your mother meant).
I looked away once, not again:
I’ll guard you with my soul and then
I’ll guard you with it when I’m gone.