CLARA
She couldn’t move. She’d been about to put one of the little card players down where he belonged on the mantelpiece but her hand was frozen in space. The man didn’t look angry, though, and after a moment her fright ebbed away, leaving her feeling very cross.
“They aren’t your things!” she said fiercely, before he had time to say anything more.
The man looked startled. He said, “Um…as a matter of fact, they are.”
“They are not! They’re Mrs. Orchard’s!”
“They were Mrs. Orchard’s,” the man said cautiously. “But she left them to me.”
Clara didn’t know what he meant. She said, “What does ‘left them to me’ mean?”
The man thought for a minute. “It’s when people decide before they die who they want to have their things after they’re dead. Mrs. Orchard decided she wanted me to have her things.”
It didn’t make any sense. Clara said, “But she asked me to look after…” She was about to say “Moses” but caught herself in time. “She asked me to look after her things for her until she gets back. She’s in the hospital but she’ll be home soon, she said she wouldn’t be long.”
The man opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and looked out of the window, frowning. Watching him, several of the things he’d said, plus the fact that it had now been a very, very long time since Mrs. Orchard went into the hospital, plus the fact that her parents had been unconcerned when she’d told them about the man packing up Mrs. Orchard’s things, all came together in Clara’s brain and fused into a single, terrible thought.
“Is she dead?” she asked, her throat suddenly so tight the words had trouble getting out.
The man turned from the window. He looked worried. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry. I…assumed you knew that.”
There was a long silence while Clara tried to swallow this huge, impossible fact. There seemed no way to fit it into her mind. She knew what dead meant, she dimly remembered when Mrs. Orchard’s sister died. They’d put her in a box and dug a big hole in the ground and lowered the box into it and she’d somehow ended up in heaven. It meant Clara would never see Mrs. Orchard again. They wouldn’t have tea and cookies or watch Moses watch the mouse. She wouldn’t be able to play with the little carved men. Or play with Mo. What would happen to Mo?
“Did she want you to have Moses too?” she asked miserably.
“Moses?” the man said.
“Yes. Her cat. I’ve been looking after him.” Great hot tears were rolling down her cheeks, she hadn’t even felt them coming.
The man looked alarmed. He said rapidly, “No, she didn’t mention a cat—you can have him if you like. I haven’t seen a cat, though.”
“He’s hiding,” Clara said through a sob. “He doesn’t like strangers. But I can’t take him home because my mom’s allergic to him.”
“Oh,” the man said. “Well, we’ll work something out. Not now, though. You should go home now.”
“Can he stay here but be mine?”
“Sure. But…”
“Can I come here and play with him?”
The man hesitated. “I’m not sure about that. We’ll think about it later, you need to go home now. In fact I’ll come with you. I should have a word with your parents, tell them…about Mrs. Orchard…”
“They already know,” Clara said, realizing abruptly that they must. She put the little card player down with his friends where he belonged. “They know she’s dead. They didn’t tell me, that’s all. They pretended she was coming home. They lied to me.”
Her father sent her upstairs to get ready for bed so she didn’t hear what the man said, but after he left her father came up to her room. Clara was sitting on Rose’s bed.
“I’m sorry, Little,” her father said, standing in the rubble of Rose’s clothes strewn about on the floor. “I guess we should have told you sooner, Mommy and I. We were about to but with Rose…not being here, we thought it would make you too sad, so we waited…”
Clara knew he wanted her to get up and come over and wrap her arms around his legs and say it was OK, but it wasn’t OK. Nothing was OK.
He came and sat down beside her and put his arm around her. She was trying to understand how Mrs. Orchard could not be. There had been an old woman called Mrs. Orchard and now there wasn’t. How could that happen? After a while her father got up, kissed the top of her head and left. She heard him go into his bedroom and the low murmur of her parents’ voices.
There was something else, a realization, unnamed but connected to what she had just found out. It was hovering in the darkness at the back of her mind. Something to do with lies; her parents’ lies. Suddenly it swam forward: Rose. Rose might be dead too. Maybe her parents hadn’t told her, like they hadn’t told her about Mrs. Orchard. If she went and asked them now she knew what they’d say; they’d say Rose was fine, they were just a little worried about her because they didn’t know where she was, which was what they’d been saying ever since the day she left. Clara had assumed it was true, she had held on to that belief through all the weeks of worry. Rose was alive because her parents said so.
She couldn’t say that to herself anymore. She wouldn’t know if anything they said was true ever again. The idea made her chest shrink inwards until it was a tight, hard little knot like a walnut, so tight she couldn’t breathe. She bent forward, sitting on the edge of Rose’s bed, trying to get her breath, but it wouldn’t come, and wouldn’t come and there was a roaring sound in her ears like a hurricane, and the room went dark and she fell down and down and down and everything disappeared.
Dr. Christopherson was there. He smiled and put his hand on her forehead and smoothed her hair and said, “This is a tough time for you I know, Clara. You aren’t sick, you’re just very upset, which is understandable. I’m going to give you some medicine which will make you feel calm, OK?”
Her parents were standing behind him. They both smiled anxiously at her when she looked at them. The doctor gave her some medicine in a glass. It tasted strange but quite sweet and she was able to swallow it.
“Well done,” the doctor said when she’d finished. “We’re going downstairs now to talk but I’ll come back up before I leave just to check you’re feeling better. See if you can go to sleep, all right?”
Her father and the doctor went out but before following them her mother sat down on the bed beside her and tucked her in like she used to when Clara was little. She drew the blankets up around Clara’s shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Sleep well, sweetheart,” she whispered. Her eyes had great purple smudges round them and you could hear how hard she was trying to sound cheerful. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
After her mother had gone the medicine started to work and things got blurred around the edges, but just before Clara slid down into sleep she saw the man next door standing in Mrs. Orchard’s living room.
“Is she dead?” Clara asked him. He put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground and then out of the window, like he had before, and then he turned his head and looked directly at her, like he had before, and opened his mouth to tell her, but before he had a chance to say anything she was asleep.
She spent most of the weekend standing at the living-room windows. Quite often her mother and father came into the room and, to begin with, one or the other of them stood beside her, which Clara didn’t like because it made it harder to concentrate on willing Rose not to be dead and to come home. But after a while they stopped doing that and just sat on the sofa or in one of the chairs and read a book or watched TV. They didn’t normally do those things during the day, even on weekends, that was what evenings were for. Clara knew they came in to be with her. She wished they wouldn’t.
Her mother stayed up all day now. Clara saw her taking pills, so maybe Dr. Christopherson had given them to her to make her feel better.
For a week or so Mrs. Quinn let her stay in the classroom for recess and lunch hour if she wanted to, which Clara always did, but then one day it was sunny and unusually warm, and Mrs. Quinn said, “You know, Clara, I think it would be good for you to go outside today. It’s October, we won’t be having many more lovely days like this.”
Thursday was a lovely day too. Clara sat on the steps and drew Moses in the dust with a stick, like always. It had rained in the night and the sand had a crust which was pocked with tiny round dents as if the raindrops had been pebbles. The crust broke when she drew on it so Moses was ragged round the edges.
She hadn’t wanted to come out but it was a good thing she did because after just a few minutes Molly Steel came over from the little clutch of trees where the older girls huddled at recess to talk and giggle about boys.
“Hi,” Molly said, smiling at Clara. “Is it OK if I sit here for a minute?”
Clara nodded. She stopped drawing and put down her stick.
“You don’t have to stop,” Molly said. “That’s a good cat drawing. Is he your cat?”
Clara hesitated, then nodded.
“What’s his name?”
“Moses.”
“That’s a really good name. My name’s Molly, and I know yours. It’s Clara, right?”
Clara’s heart was beating very fast. Molly was Rick’s sister. Rick was a friend of Dan, the boy who thought Rose was in love with him and who said Rose was going to send him a message. Molly was supposed to tell Clara if Dan wanted to speak to her.
“My brother’s a friend of Dan Karakas,” Molly said. “You know Dan?”
“Is there a message?” Clara asked, not able to wait.
“I don’t know, but Rick says Dan wants to speak to you. He’s going to wait for you this afternoon after school. The same place as last time, he said. He wants you to be sure to go home the same way so you don’t miss him. You know where it is?”
“Yes.” It was on the road, not far from her house. It must be important. He wouldn’t want to walk home again if it wasn’t important.
The afternoon took a long time to be over. Then Mrs. Quinn kept them in late because someone had stolen someone else’s ruler and she was giving them time to confess. But whoever it was didn’t confess and finally Mrs. Quinn, by then very cross, had to let them all go home. Clara ran most of the way.
“Hi,” Dan said when she came up. He was smoking again as if he hadn’t stopped since last time. There were about a dozen butts scattered round his feet.
Clara said breathlessly, “Is there a message?”
He shook his head. “No. But I wanted to tell you something. Something real important. You can’t tell anyone, understand?”
“Yes.” Though she was so disappointed she found it hard to listen to what he was saying. Why was there still no message after all these weeks?
“If you told anyone it would get me into big trouble,” Dan said. “I’d probably get arrested. So promise you won’t tell anyone.”
“I promise.”
“Cross your heart.”
She crossed her heart.
“OK.” But then he didn’t seem to know how to say it, whatever it was. He looked off into the trees for a minute and then finally back at Clara.
“You know when Rose came to see me? The night she left? She asked me to come with her? I said no, ’cause it was harvest.” He stopped.
“You told me that last time.”
“Yeah, I was just reminding you, Clara! I was just reminding you in case you forgot, OK? What I have to tell you is, Rose told me where she was going, see? So I could join her after harvest. She said she was going to Toronto and she was going to go to the YWCA because there was sure to be one, she said, they’re in all the big cities and they’re real cheap. She said she’d spend the first couple of nights there. And then after she found somewhere else to stay, somewhere with other kids, she’d go back to the Y once a week to see if there were any letters from me. But also she’d write to Rick as soon as she moved to the new place and tell him the address so I could write to her there. And join her there later.”
He flicked the burnt-out cigarette butt away, shook out another—the last one in the pack—lit up, eyes narrowing against the smoke, and dragged so hard he started to cough.
Clara’s mind was swarming. Rose in Toronto. A huge city. There’d be hundreds of cars going by, even more than in Sudbury where their parents had taken them one Easter for a treat. Big buildings everywhere. Lots of strangers. Nobody Rose knew.
“Other thing she said,” Dan continued, “is she wasn’t going to use her real name in case someone came looking for her. Police or someone. She was going to call herself Rowena Jones. I don’t know why she chose that name, guess she just liked the sound of it and it had her initials. And also, so no one would recognize a picture of her if someone showed them one, she was going to cut her hair off, really short, short as mine, and stop wearing makeup.”
He took a drag, blew it out through his nose, looked at the ground. Clara was trying to imagine Rose with short hair and no makeup. She couldn’t do it.
“Thing is,” Dan said, looking up again, “she didn’t write. I’m not a great letter-writer myself, I’m not real good at that sort of stuff, but I wrote twice a week. Sunday and Wednesday. Posted it every Monday and Thursday. Getting more and more worried cause I never heard back.
“So last weekend I hitched down to Toronto. Took me the whole weekend to get there and back. I went to the YWCA and asked if they had any letters for Rowena Jones and the woman at the desk said yeah, they did. She wouldn’t let me have them but she showed me the envelopes and they were from me. All my letters were there. So Rose never collected even one. I asked if she’d stayed there, told the woman the dates, and she looked it up and said yes, one night. It was the night after—twenty-four hours after—Rose left here. So she didn’t make it to Toronto that first night, which she wouldn’t, it’s way too far, but she got there the next day.”
He studied Clara’s face. “I’m sorry to be telling you all this stuff, Clara. You’re just a little kid and I shouldn’t worry you. But I don’t know what to do. See, if the cops are looking for her they need to know where she went and when, and what name she was calling herself, and that she didn’t look like herself anymore. But thing is, she made me promise, cross my heart, not to tell anyone. I shouldn’t even be telling you but I just don’t know what to do and it’s driving me crazy, and I reckoned she’d think telling you was OK.”
Clara nodded. Dan looked relieved. He carried on.
“See the thing is, it’s withholding information. That’s a crime—withholding information from the cops. I could go to jail. Or they might even think I had something to do with her disappearing ’cause I was the last person to see her. The last person from round here anyway. But I promised her, cross my heart, I wouldn’t say anything to anyone. But it’s been more than five weeks now. I’m wondering should I tell them anyway, even if Rose never forgives me. Even if I go to jail for it. But jeez, jail. I mean, my parents…”
He finished his cigarette and ground it into the dirt at his feet. He checked the empty packet, peering into it closely as if a cigarette might be hiding in there, then scrunched it up and threw it into the bushes at the side of the road, which you weren’t supposed to do.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Should I break my promise?”
A promise is a promise, Rose said. Plus he’d crossed his heart, which made it impossible ever to break it no matter what. But if Rose was in trouble she might want Dan to break it so Sergeant Barnes could rescue her. But what if Sergeant Barnes put Dan in jail?
It was too big a problem, it made her feel panicky. “I don’t know,” Clara said around a fingernail.
“No,” Dan said. “I don’t either.”
After that there wasn’t anything to say so they both went home.
She went over to Mrs. Orchard’s house (only now it was Mr. Kane’s) as usual and gave Moses his supper. When he’d finished she sat down cross-legged on the floor and watched him fit himself into the corners of boxes—nowadays he was more interested in the boxes than the mouse. Up until then she’d been careful to leave before the man came home but this time she waited for him.
He stopped in the doorway when he saw her. He didn’t look exactly cross but he didn’t look happy to see her either. Moses had skedaddled when he heard the man’s step on the porch.
The man said with a sigh, “Look, Clara—your name’s Clara, not Clare, right?”
Clara nodded.
“So, Clara. I guess you’ve been playing with the cat?”
She didn’t hear the question properly because her head was full of the thing she needed to ask him, but she nodded again.
The man nodded too. He said, “That’s fine, and I know your mom and dad said it was OK for you to come over, and I’m happy for you to do that when I’m not here. But I prefer to be on my own when I’m at home. It’s not that you’re doing anything wrong, I just prefer being alone. So you should go now, OK?”
Clara let his words drift past her ears. When they stopped, she waited a few seconds to be sure he’d finished and then said, “If you knew something and you didn’t tell the police because you promised not to, but then you did tell them because it was really, really important, would they put you in jail?”