CLARA
She thought she’d dreamed the man but she hadn’t; in the morning his car was still there. She had a sudden panic about Moses. What if the man found him? What if he didn’t like cats? He might kill him! The cans of cat food, Moses’s feeding bowl, the litter box—all of them were in the mud room. A can lasted two days and it was just luck that there wasn’t half a can of cat food in the fridge right now. If the man hadn’t noticed the cans already he soon would and he’d know Moses was there. Clara imagined him tracking Moses down. Searching. Peering behind furniture and under beds, on and on until he found him. Moses, terrified, backed into a corner, eyes blazing, back arched, mouth stretched wide in a silent scream of terror.
She would have to move his things. She’d have to sneak in while the man was out and grab them, and put them…Where would she put them? Moses couldn’t come into her house because her mother was allergic to him. The garage. She would put them in her parents’ garage. She could feed him in there too.
Except she couldn’t, that first morning, because the man was still in the house when the time came to set off for school. Which meant that Moses was going to be hungry all day. It brought back the panicky feeling until Clara remembered what a good hunter he was. He was forever bringing home dead birds. (Clara didn’t like it but Mrs. Orchard said cats were hunters. “It’s in their natures, Clara. It’s part of being a cat.”) Still, Moses would think she’d forgotten him, he’d think he’d been abandoned.
Worry about Moses joined worry about Rose and Mrs. Orchard, and the three worries churned inside her all day. They gave her a stomach ache and she wasn’t able to concentrate on a thing Mrs. Quinn said.
Since Rose’s disappearance Mrs. Quinn had been especially nice to Clara. She could be strict, and if you weren’t paying attention she’d tell you off, but Clara couldn’t pay attention now no matter how hard she tried, and Mrs. Quinn didn’t tell her off and didn’t ask her any questions in class and also didn’t ask her about Rose’s disappearance, all of which were good.
Clara’s friends did mention it. Mostly in the playground at recess and lunchtime.
Ruth said breathlessly (she had a new skipping rope and was trying to do one hundred skips in a row), “Mommy says (breath) your sister’s wild (breath) and she was asking for trouble.”
Susan, head tipped curiously to one side, asked, “Why did she run away? Were your parents mean to her?”
Sharon asked, tugging at her hair, which was long and blonde and formed itself into ringlets which she hated, “Was she having a baby? ’Cause she went around with boys a lot, didn’t she?”
Jenny, Clara’s best friend, whispered, “Don’t worry, I’m still your friend. I’ll always be your friend, no matter what anyone says,” in a pleased way that made Clara not want to be friends with her anymore.
She took to staying close to the school steps during breaks, drawing pictures of Moses in the dust with a stick. Two round circles, a small one with two ears, two eyes, a nose and a mouth with three whiskers each side, on top of a large one with a tail and two feet. That was how you were supposed to draw cats. She drew the pictures and erased them with her foot again and again. That way she didn’t have to look at anyone.
When she got home the man’s car was still there. That didn’t necessarily mean he was, though. He could have walked into town or he could have gone down to the beach; she should wait and see. Her mother wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room so Clara went upstairs. The door to her parents’ bedroom was closed but as she hesitated outside it her mother’s voice said, “Hello, sweetheart, come in.”
Clara opened the door. The curtains were drawn so the room was dark but she could make out the shape of her mother in the bed.
“I’m just having a little lie-down,” her mother said. There was a smile in her voice but you could tell it was just pretend. “I’m a bit tired. But I’ll get up soon and get your supper. How was school?”
“OK,” Clara said.
“Good. I’ll get up in a few minutes.”
“Are you all right, Mommy?”
“Yes, I’m fine. You go back downstairs now. I’ll get up soon.”
Clara went down to the living room and took up her vigil, this time at the side window. She made sure she was mostly hidden by the edge of the curtain so that the man wouldn’t see her if he looked out of Mrs. Orchard’s window. It was thirteen days since Rose had left, which was almost two weeks. Last night she’d heard her mother say furiously to her father, “You know what’s hardest to take? Your optimism. Your continual, everlasting optimism, based on nothing! As if we were on some sort of picnic!”
There was a pause and then her father said, so quietly Clara could hardly hear him, “Di, I’m just trying to get through this. Just like you.”
“It is not just like me and don’t pretend it is! You weren’t the one who had the row with her! You never are, you leave all that to me so that you can play the kind, understanding father! So now you can tell yourself it’s not your fault she left! You are not to blame! So don’t pretend you’re going through what I’m going through!”
Clara listened, everything in her clenched so hard it ached. Mom and Dad are really, really upset, she said to Rose inside her head, Rose out there in the world somewhere, beyond anywhere Clara had ever been. You have to come back, Rosie. Please come back.
There was no sign of anyone next door and she was just about to chance going over to remove Moses’s things when the man wandered into Mrs. Orchard’s living room eating a cookie. You weren’t supposed to walk around when you were eating, you’d get crumbs all over the floor, you were supposed to sit down at a table until you were finished.
The man went over to the bookcase and stood looking at Mrs. Orchard’s books. His back was to Clara but when he turned his head she could see his jaws moving. If Moses was in the house (though probably he wasn’t, he’d probably escaped to the garden and the woods beyond) he’d be under the sofa, watching the crumbs fall, watching the man’s feet walking back and forth on Mrs. Orchard’s floor. Wishing, as Clara wished, that he would go. Go and stay gone. Then Mrs. Orchard would come home and Rose would come home and life would go back to normal.
Finally, having finished his cookie, the man went out. He didn’t take the car, he walked down the drive to the road and then turned left and headed into town. Clara waited a few minutes in case he changed his mind, then took Mrs. Orchard’s keys and crept over to the house. She couldn’t help creeping, even though she knew the man wasn’t there. She used the back door—the mud room door—because that was where Moses’s things were and also because that meant she didn’t have to go into the kitchen or hall or living room, all of them danger spots, and if she heard the man coming back she could slip out without running into him.
There was no fence between their backyards, just a row of trees, so she didn’t have to go around the front of the house at all. In the mud room she gathered up Moses’s bowl and the cans of cat food (there were only three left, she’d have to ask her mother to buy some more) and took them over to her own garage. She put them in the corner, where her father wouldn’t run over them when he drove in. Then she went back for the litter box. She’d have to tempt Moses into the garage with a bowl of food; he didn’t like strange places.
The plan worked perfectly up to the point where it went wrong. She’d forgotten about opening the cans. Mrs. Orchard’s electric can opener was fastened to the wall in the kitchen and Clara was frightened to go into the kitchen. If the man had left the door between the hall and the kitchen open he’d see her as soon as he walked through the front door. She went back to her own house and got her mother’s manual can opener and took it outside, but she couldn’t get the sharp point to puncture the can. She tried again and again until her hand hurt and her body got so anxious it forgot how to breathe.
She went into the kitchen to ask her mother to do it but her mother was still in bed. Clara went back outside and sat down on the kitchen doorstep, still holding the can. She couldn’t think what to do. But then Moses appeared and sat down beside her, which was unusual and very nice of him. He sat neatly, his tail wrapped around his feet, and watched two crows on the roof of the garage. The crows watched him back. Every now and then one of them would jump up and down and scream at him but Moses didn’t even blink. It occurred to Clara that he wasn’t showing as much interest in the can of cat food as he should be, given that he’d had no breakfast. Which could only mean he’d been killing things. She had to feed him regularly so he wouldn’t kill things.
The two of them sat side by side, birdwatching, and Clara’s breathing gradually returned to normal. Finally she steeled herself and said to Moses, “We have to go into Mrs. Orchard’s kitchen and use her can opener, and we have to do it right now or he might come back.” She stood up and so did Moses and they crossed the two backyards. Clara unlocked Mrs. Orchard’s mud room door again and stepped inside with Moses at her heels. She listened for a moment, heart thumping, but Moses slipped past her into the kitchen, which meant the man definitely wasn’t there. Clara went in on tiptoe nonetheless. She crossed the kitchen floor, held the can of cat food up to the opener so that the magnet grabbed it, and switched it on—then instantly switched it off again, her heart leaping with fright. She hadn’t realized it made such a noise. She listened. No footsteps. No sound of keys in locks. Moses was winding himself around her legs, birds forgotten.
“You have to listen really hard,” Clara whispered to him. “You have to tell me if he’s coming. Do you understand?” Moses stopped circling her legs clockwise and started circling counter-clockwise to see if that sped things up.
She switched on the machine again and held her breath while it opened the can. Then she grabbed the can and the two of them fled.
Days went by. At home things got worse. The house seemed to be getting tighter somehow, or maybe, Clara thought, she herself was getting tighter. Sometimes it felt as if there was no air in the house. There wasn’t a single minute of the day when things felt normal.
At school she sat at her desk and looked at the blackboard when Mrs. Quinn wrote on it, and listened to her when she was speaking, and didn’t see or hear a word.
Then something happened. One afternoon on her way home she saw Dan Karakas up ahead, standing by the side of the road. It was a stretch of road where there weren’t any houses either side, just woods, so there was no reason to be there unless you were walking home from school, which he wouldn’t have been; he was Rose’s age and was in her class at the high school. His father was a farmer and the family lived a long way out of town so like all the kids who lived out in the sticks, Dan took the school bus there and back. This afternoon he must have got off the bus miles before he should have.
He didn’t seem to be going anywhere, though. He was just standing there, a cigarette in one hand, as if he were waiting for someone. It couldn’t be Clara he was waiting for, though; older boys wouldn’t be seen dead talking with younger kids, particularly girls.
She kept walking towards him. Rose liked Dan, she remembered now. Or rather, she didn’t despise him. She’d said at least he wasn’t a moron like all the other boys.
“Hi,” he said as Clara got near.
Clara stopped in surprise because he said it as if he knew her and wanted to speak to her. She’d never even met him; she only knew who he was because Rose had pointed him out to her once, and that was from a distance. But he had quite a nice face, she decided. His hair was black and so thick it stood on end even though it was more than an inch long. He took a drag on his cigarette, dropped it and ground it into the dirt with his shoe. There were other butts scattered round him.
“Hi,” she said uncertainly. Did he really want to speak to her or should she walk on?
“You’re Clara, right?”
She nodded.
“I was just wondering,” he said, not looking at her, scuffing at a stone with the toe of his shoe. “If you’d heard anything from Rose. Like, if she’d sent you a card or a message or something.”
Clara’s eyes opened wide—how did he know about Rose saying she’d send a message?
“Have you?” he said, glancing at her quickly, then back down.
“No,” Clara said. Then a thought came into her mind: maybe he was a messenger! Maybe Rose was sending her a message through him.
“Have you?” she asked, suddenly breathless with hope.
Dan kicked the stone hard and it popped out of the ground and rolled onto the road. He scooped it back with his foot and kicked it into the trees. “No,” he said. “I just thought you might have. You haven’t heard anything at all?”
“No,” Clara said. And then, because finally here was someone she could tell, she said, “She told me she’d send me a message but she hasn’t.”
He nodded. “Yeah. She said she’d send me one too. We worked out she should send it to Rick Steel so my parents wouldn’t wonder who I was getting a letter from, and then he’d give it to me. He has a pen pal in Toronto, so his parents would think it was from him. But Rick hasn’t had a letter or anything.”
She stared at him, a hot, bitter feeling rising inside her. He was trying to make her think Rose loved him, which was a lie, because Rose told her everything and she’d never even mentioned him except that one time when she’d said he wasn’t a moron. Rose would only send a message to someone she trusted and really, really loved, like Clara. And anyway, when would Rose have told him she was leaving? She couldn’t have known she was going to have the worst-ever fight with their mother that day.
“When?” Clara said flatly.
“When what?”
“When did she tell you she was going?”
“The day she left. The evening she left. She came to the farm. She asked if I wanted to go with her. I couldn’t. It’s harvest. I can’t leave my dad to do the harvest on his own, he couldn’t manage. But I said I’d come when the crops were in. She was going to write and tell me where she was.”
Inside Clara’s head everything spun round. Rose had asked him to go with her? For a moment she couldn’t get any words out. Then she said, “I’m going home now.”
“Oh,” he said, giving her a quick, puzzled look. “OK.”
When she’d been walking for a minute or two she heard footsteps running and Dan caught up with her.
“Hey, Clara,” he said. She kept walking, but so did he. “Hey, look, I’m sorry if I said something wrong, I only wanted to know if you’d heard from her. If she was OK.”
Clara kept going.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re mad about, but we need to keep in touch in case one of us hears something. If you ever want to speak to me, leave a note…” He hesitated. “Um, can you read and write yet?”
Clara stopped mid-stride and spun around. “Of course I can read and write! I’m almost eight!” Rose was wrong about him, he was a moron.
“Oh. OK, sorry. That’s great. What I was going to say is, if you want to get in touch with me give a note to Rick Steel’s sister. Her name’s…Milly or Molly or something. She’s in grade seven or eight. At your school. Do you know her?”
Reluctantly, Clara nodded. Molly was one of the big girls. Clara had never talked to her but she knew which one she was.
“Good,” Dan said. “And if I find out anything I’ll let you know through Milly too.”
“Her name’s Molly! She’s in grade eight!”
He kind-of smiled, which was rude because there was nothing funny about what she’d said. “OK, Molly,” he said. Then he said, “Bye,” and turned around and walked back the other way.
The only good thing about the man next door was that he went out every evening around six o’clock and stayed out for at least an hour. Unless it was raining, he went on foot. Clara guessed he went to the Hot Potato for supper because he was a man and men didn’t know how to cook. There were dirty plates and bowls and teacups littering the kitchen counter when she went in to open Moses’s cat food, but they would be from breakfast and lunch. They made the kitchen look messy, which in turn made Clara fidgety; she had to stop herself from dragging over a chair to kneel on and washing them and putting them away in the cupboards where they belonged. Mrs. Orchard never left anything lying around.
Clara’s bedtime was seven o’clock (sometimes she could stretch it to half-past), so she had a whole hour during which she could safely go next door to play with Moses and keep him from being lonely. She still fed him in the garage, but she wasn’t so worried about going into Mrs. Orchard’s kitchen or living room now because the man always followed the same routine.
She and Moses had a routine, too: after Moses had eaten his supper, the two of them would go into the living room, where Moses would watch for the mouse and Clara would wander around looking at things. The four boxes were still in the middle of the floor. They were taped closed with wide brown tape so Clara couldn’t look inside them. They had writing on them, though. It was messy and it took her a while to work out what it said but finally she managed. One box said Living Room; one said Clothes, Typewriter; the third said Books, Papers; and the last one said Misc or Miso, she wasn’t sure which and she didn’t know what either word meant.
Sometimes she sat in the armchair that had always been hers when she and Mrs. Orchard were having a cup of tea or a glass of lemonade. There was a little table beside it at exactly the right height to put down your drink plus a small plate with a cookie on it, but now there was no tea or lemonade and no cookie because the man had eaten them all. This particular day, which was the day after she’d met Dan Karakas, she was so anxious it was hard to sit still, and sitting there on her own, without Mrs. Orchard in the other chair, gave her an ache in her chest, so she was on the point of getting up when Moses did another very unusual thing; he abandoned the mouse, jumped onto Clara’s chair, curled up in her lap and started to purr. Clara was so surprised and so pleased her mouth fell open. She’d heard him purr before—it was really loud—but she’d never felt it. It made her whole body vibrate as if she was purring too.
She knew going into the house was still risky, of course; the man could change his mind and come home at any time. But apart from listening for him, there was nothing else she could do if she was to keep her promise to Mrs. Orchard. She’d tried to get Moses to move into the garage altogether—she’d asked her mother for an old towel and arranged it on the concrete floor for him to use as a bed—but he wasn’t having it. The next-best thing would have been for him to stay outside but he wasn’t having that, either, and anyway it was getting too cold for him to stay out at night, even in the garage. He insisted on living exactly where he’d always lived, in Mrs. Orchard’s living room.
Clara decided he was waiting for Mrs. Orchard in the same way that she was waiting for Rose. In Moses’s mind abandoning the house would be abandoning Mrs. Orchard. Clara understood that perfectly. She also understood why he spent almost all his time under the sofa nowadays except when she was there. He was permanently scared. So was she. She was more afraid every day and she didn’t even know what of.
Nine days after he moved into Mrs. Orchard’s house and twenty-one days after Rose left, the man brought some empty boxes into the living room and started putting Mrs. Orchard’s things into them. Things he had no right to touch, let alone move from their places. If he packed them up, that meant he was going to take them out of the house without asking Mrs. Orchard. And that meant he was a thief.
Fortunately it was a Saturday, so Clara wasn’t at school and saw him do it.
“Mommy,” she shouted. She ran into the kitchen. “Mommy! The man is stealing Mrs. Orchard’s things!”
Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table looking at this week’s copy of the Temiskaming Speaker. Not the front page, one of the inside pages. Down near the bottom was a picture of Rose. Underneath the picture were the words, “Solace Girl Still Missing,” and underneath that there was about an inch of type. The same picture had been in the Speaker last week, but bigger. The week before that, it had been on the front page and bigger still, with the headline “Have You Seen Rose?” and details about when she’d disappeared.
Clara’s mother looked up at her and smiled bleakly. “It’s already old news, you see,” she said. “They’ve moved on to the next big thing. The price of corn.”
You could tell by her mother’s face that her head was so full of Rose there wasn’t room for a single other thing. Clara wanted to put her arms around her, and she also wanted to scream at her. Her father had gone down to North Bay to ask people if they’d seen Rose. He went out after school every day as well as on Saturdays and Sundays, to every town in every direction. Clara wanted him to be at home; she didn’t want to be alone in the house with her mother’s despair. But often he didn’t return until after Clara was asleep.
She went back to the living room. The man was taking the ornaments off the mantelpiece: a pair of brass candlesticks (he put the candles in the box loose, so they were sure to get broken); a glass bowl with a picture of a sled pulled by huskies somehow inside the glass; and a loon carved out of black stone. In a smaller, separate box he put an ornate clock with Roman numerals (Mrs. Orchard had told her they were Roman and showed her how to count to a hundred with them), and a wood carving (Clara’s favourite thing in the house after Moses) of four old men seated around a table smoking pipes and playing cards, all of them perfect right down to the creases in their shirts and the tiny thread-like laces in their boots.
The man carefully wrapped the clock and the wood carvings (each old man came separately, complete with his chair and a handful of cards) in newspaper before putting them into their box. Then he went over to the table with Mrs. Orchard’s photos on it (her photos of her husband, her most precious things!), selected three of them, and packed them carefully away too.
Everything else he just bundled up roughly. You could tell he didn’t care what happened to those things. When he’d finished everything but the books he straightened up, rubbed his back with both hands, looked at his watch (it was almost six) and went out, as usual, for his supper.
A few minutes after the man left, the worst thing of all happened. It should have been the best thing: Clara’s father arrived home earlier than she’d expected. When she saw his car turn into the driveway she rushed into the hall to meet him.
“Daddy!” she said, opening the door for him. “The man is stealing Mrs. Orchard’s things!”
“Hello, Little,” her father said. “What was that again?” He looked grey and exhausted but she didn’t care.
“The man next door is stealing all of Mrs. Orchard’s things! He’s putting them in boxes and he’s going to take them away!”
“Oh,” her father said absently, putting the car keys down on the hall table. “Well, I guess it’s up to him.”
Clara was stunned. What did that mean? How could it be up to him?
“But they’re Mrs. Orchard’s things! When she gets home from the hospital she’ll want them!”
Her father looked at her. After a minute, when he didn’t speak, Clara drew in a very big breath and said it again—shouted, in fact. “They’re Mrs. Orchard’s things!”
Her father squatted down and put his hands on her arms. He said gently, “Clara, you’re getting all worked up over nothing. You mustn’t worry about the man next door. He’s…” her father hesitated, “he’s sort of looking after the house for Mrs. Orchard. She won’t mind. I promise you, she won’t mind.”
“She will mind! She loves her things! You don’t know her like I do, I know she loves them!” Suddenly she was crying, great choking sobs, which she never did, because Rose, who loved her, so hated her crying. But Rose was gone and no one knew where, and they all pretended everything was all right instead of telling her the truth. Everybody, everybody lied to her, even Mrs. Orchard, who had said she’d be home soon and she wasn’t, and now a thief was taking all her things and no one even cared.
Her father tried to pull her to him to comfort her but she jerked herself away. “You’re telling lies! You don’t know her! I know her! I know she wants her things! You’re telling lies! You’re a liar!”
Her father stood up. He said, “That’s enough now, Clara. I know you’re upset, but you mustn’t speak like that.”
Suddenly he looked past her, and she turned and saw that her mother had come into the hall and the two of them were looking at each other over Clara’s head. Her mother was looking a question and when Clara glanced back at her father she saw him give a fractional shake of his head.
“You’re liars!” Clara shouted. “Liars! Liars! Liars!”
She sat on her bed and tore at a fingernail with her teeth. She bit it until there was no sticking-out bit of nail left, just raw pink skin with a tiny rim of blood.