TWENTY-TWO

After Martha Jane left with Colin, Kate had a choice to make. She could stay in London alone, or she could sail home on the next Cunard steamer, another three-week journey back after a three-week journey there for five days in the U.K. It was a tempting thought: her cozy bed instead of the lumpy cot at Miss Featherton’s, the safe streets of Fort William, her part-time job at the seamstress’s. Maybe even Walter, if she hadn’t already lost him for good. But she stayed on.

It felt different being in the city on her own, and she ventured away from the tourist attractions, taking photos of the double-decker buses, the sleek black cabs, the tall, narrow houses – so unlike the buses, cabs, and houses back home. Often she just sat and stared in awe at the beautiful girls of Kensington and Covent Garden, with their short skirts and shorter hair – they seemed so light, so free. London in 1969 had a terrifying, crazy spark to it, an electricity, and Kate could feel something reigniting in herself as well.

After three weeks in London alone, one evening she returned to her room to discover that Miss Featherton had accidentally given it to another guest. Kate can still remember walking in and finding Lydia sitting there on the bed in a diaphanous nightgown, brushing her long brown hair and smoking a cigarette. “I knew Miss Featherbrain gave me the wrong room, but I decided I just had to stay and meet the woman who wears this beautiful dress,” she said, gesturing to a garment strewn over the foot of the bed.

“I sewed it myself,” Kate said, feeling herself blush, although the world in which she sewed dresses seemed very far away.

But Lydia smiled, tossing aside her hairbrush and clapping her hands. “That’s even better!” she said. “Please tell me you also like brandy because I just happen to have some stashed in my suitcase.”

So they drank the brandy and sat up talking until dawn. Lydia was from Toronto, but she had been living in Spain for the previous four months. She was a poet and an artist, and had stories of travelling with street musicians, learning to dance flamenco, living in a tent in the Sierra Morena. And although next to all of Lydia’s extraordinary experiences, Kate felt like her life had been as insubstantial as a dandelion pod on the wind, she told her own stories, and Lydia listened – her eyes bright, her hair falling in waves on either side of her face. Kate talked about the farm, about Walter, and, as the sun rose and her defences crumbled, about falling through the ice at Chippewa. She had never met anyone like Lydia, or someone who made her feel so completely like herself.

With the city waking up around them, Lydia stretched her long, brown legs across Kate’s lap and crossed her ankles, arched her neck as she leaned back on arms as willowy as reeds on a riverbank. “Let’s go to Brighton,” she said.

“When?” asked Kate.

“Right now,” said Lydia with a mischievous grin.

So they took the bus to Brighton and found a room above a pool hall, but they were hardly ever in it. They sunbathed on the beach and sat outside the Palace Pier, Lydia drawing portraits of strangers and trying to sell them for money. At night they danced on the sand to the music playing in the clubs along the boardwalk, and later, to the rhythm of the waves. Lydia taught her flamenco floreos, twisting her wrists in the air adentro and afuera – into her body, and out to the world – holding her back straight as a pin, her eyes shadowy and dark under the pale light of the moon.

When Lydia had made enough money from her sketches, she took Kate to the fortune teller’s to have their palms read, in a booth set up beside the pier on the beach, festooned with gold bunting and closed off with thick purple velvet curtains. The fortune teller wore a cheap turban and smelled of garlic, and spoke with a thick Eastern European accent that Kate suspected was faked. She told Kate that she would live a long and happy life with a man with sandy-coloured hair, and Kate couldn’t help but think about Walter, back home in Fort William – probably engaged to Frances Halliday by now and forgetting all about her. It gave her an ache in her chest when she thought about it, but the pain was distant and muted, more like the memory of pain than pain itself. After only a few weeks away, it already felt as though her entire life in Canada had been just a dream.

When it was Lydia’s turn, the fortune teller glanced down at Lydia’s palm and then abruptly sent her away, refusing to tell her anything or to take her money. The girls laughed about it, spilling out of the booth and onto the beach in a fit of giggles, but the botched reading did cast an ominous shadow over the rest of their time in Brighton, as though they both were half waiting for something terrible to happen.

“What happened, Nana?”

Kate shakes her head, trying to bring herself back to the present. Car, road, trip, girl. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” she says.

The girl is driving now, although she seems tense, her hands clutching the steering thing very close to the top, the way they teach you to do when you first learn how to drive. Does the girl even have a driver’s licence? Kate suddenly feels very impotent and weak. She wraps her arms around herself, then gasps at the stabbing pain. She remembers now that her ribs are broken; how she broke them is quite hazy, although she knows she didn’t just break them raking the yard or falling down a flight of stairs. Her broken ribs are somehow the source of this strange lightness in her body. If this were a movie, she would somehow be able to transmit this lightness to the girl, who looks like she might break down any minute and cry. Where is her mother? Does she know where they are? Where are they?

They stop to get gas. Neither of them knows where the lever is to open the tank. “Isn’t this your car?” the girl asks, exasperated. Eventually they find it, where it has always been. The girl uses Kate’s money card to fill up, then buys them licorice, Cokes, and gum in the store. Don’t I have to sign for this? Is she signing for me? When Kate asks the girl, she just stares at her like she’s stupid. “You have a PIN code, remember, Nana?” Kate is sure she does remember, but right now she has no idea what a PIN code is. She tells the girl she is all right to drive, and the girl seems relieved. Driving is one thing Kate can still do well, her earlier mishap notwithstanding. And it has always been her refuge. All those times during the early years of their marriage when everything seemed too much to handle, when it all felt so out of control, she would just get in her car and drive. To Geraldton, to Wawa, to Hearst, all those tiny outposts along deserted highways, or across the border into Manitoba, or Minnesota, or Wisconsin. Stopping to eat, sleeping in her car. Thinking, or not thinking, about anything but the road. Never planning to drive to any specific destination. Just driving.

Driving is all she has. If she can’t drive, she might as well die.

Back on the highway, they pass a sign announcing they are in Lutsen, and Kate suddenly knows where they are. They used to take the girls skiing here when they were young, sometimes with their neighbours from Victor Street – March breaks and long weekends spent in cozy log cabins in front of crackling fireplaces, with hot chocolate for the kids and warm spiced wine for the grown-ups. The kids would fall asleep exhausted in their beds at night, all windburnt cheeks and aching muscles and quietly throbbing hearts. The year that they installed the outdoor hot tub, Kate remembers running with her daughters through the snow in their bathing suits before submerging themselves in the scalding-hot water, steam rising off their frozen skin as they dared each other to do it again. One year – the first year with the boy, when Walter refused to come with them – it was so warm out that they had a barbecue, the boy flipping steaks on the deck of their chalet in his shorts and clunky winter boots. Another year, they got snowed in for two days and all five of them played an ancient game of Trivial Pursuit that no one knew any of the answers to, until the girl’s mother got fed up and threw the game board into the fire.

Sometimes Kate wonders, did these things really happen, or is she just imagining them? How can she be expected to trust her memories when they are as slippery as fish in her hands? Sometimes they seem too good to be true, too picture-perfect, all this beautiful familial bliss. She knows there must have been dark times, but they are harder to recall from beneath the debris of her ramshackle mind, so she usually gives up trying. Maybe everything she remembers is false, anyway. Maybe her memories have all been stolen and replaced with fake ones, and the ones that can’t be replaced simply disappear.

—

Kate had always assumed that after they left Brighton they would return to London and Miss Featherton’s, but Lydia had other plans. “I’ve always wanted to see Paris in the spring,” she said one rainy afternoon as they sat in the pool hall below their room, playing cards and drinking terrible coffee.

“It sounds wonderful,” Kate said, her heart breaking into a thousand pieces, imagining trudging back through the streets of London by herself. “I’m sure you’ll have a great time.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Don’t even pretend you’re not coming with me,” she said. “You’re the only one who can understand my terrible French.”

They hitchhiked from Brighton to Dover in the cab of a truck and then caught the ferry to Calais, where they met a young Frenchman named Luc with a speech impediment, a trust fund, and a car. He drove them to Paris and dropped them right beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where they sat for hours watching the traffic driving around Place Charles de Gaulle, Lydia using her actually quite-passable French to ask strangers if they wanted her to sketch their portrait. “I never imagined that I would ever be in Paris,” Kate said that night as they wandered the narrow streets of the fourteenth arrondissement, past brightly lit cafés and secretive little alleyways, searching for a place to stay. “I always thought it was like Oz or Never Never Land. One of those places that doesn’t really exist.” She paused, watching a woman with flaming red hair speed by on an equally red moped. “A place that you could only visit if you had an imagination.”

“It is a place you can only visit if you have an imagination,” Lydia said, linking her arm with Kate’s. “And surprise! You’re here.”

London. Of course. How ridiculous that it’s while she’s thinking of Paris that she remembers her granddaughter’s name is London. It’s a name that’s been on Kate’s lips for sixteen years. When Kate named her own daughters, she gave them the most extravagantly beautiful, elaborately luxurious names she could come up with – Veronica and Serafina. How could she have forgotten those, too? When she thinks of those names, Kate pictures angels. But then they had to go and shorten them, extracting syllables as though they could just mould better names from the pieces. Nicki and Finn. Kate is quite sure she never gave birth to a Nicki or a Finn.

“London,” Kate says. “What’s our plan?”

She says this because it might sound as though she knows what is going on – as if she knows their general mission, but not the specifics. It’s funny how clever she is at hiding how dumb she has actually become.

“I don’t know yet,” London says. “I was hoping you could help me come up with one.”

This is not the answer Kate was hoping for. Maybe London doesn’t remember what they are doing either, and is trying to put the ball back into Kate’s court, which is Kate’s tactic: don’t answer anything directly, just lob it back in the most ambiguous way possible so they can’t tell that you don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s a trick that Kate has mastered, although it’s not exactly something she’s proud of.

“Well,” Kate says. “Let me see.” She is stalling for time, pretending to think, but the way that London is watching her is distracting. It’s as if she is expecting Kate to have all the answers. Kate is not sure what she’s done to convince this girl that she knows what she is doing, or that she is her ally, or that she is in any way qualified to make plans about anything. But somehow she has, and London needs Kate to guide her. This much she can see.

“How do you think we’re going to find him?” London asks, and now Kate is faced with an entirely new task, an entirely new puzzle to solve. Who is “him”? Why are they searching for him? She’s trying to think of the answers, but she’s also trying to keep her eye on the car path. If she ends up in a field again, she might as well call one of her daughters to come and take them home.

—

In Paris, Lydia and Kate stayed at a guest house owned by a woman named Madame Clou, who might as well have been a French Miss Featherton. Again, they spent their days visiting the tourist sites – the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Eiffel Tower – but instead of going in, they sat outside and tried to sell Lydia’s sketches. One even slower than typical day as they sat on a bench on the Champs-Élysées, Kate caught Lydia staring at her own reflection in the window of the boulangerie on the other side of the sidewalk. “I’m waiting for the day that I disappear,” Lydia said, and Kate thought back to that day in Brighton, the flash of panic on Lydia’s face when the fortune teller refused to tell her fortune. Kate knew nothing of palm reading, but she also instinctively knew there wasn’t anything in those lines worth getting worked up over. She took Lydia’s hand.

“She was frightened of you,” she said, running her finger over the thick line bisecting Lydia’s palm. “She could tell you have great powers of intuition and instinct, and she knew that if she tried to sell you a line about your fortune, you would call her out as the fraud that she is.”

Lydia let her hand linger in Kate’s as she mulled over her words. Then she smiled. “I think you’re the one with the great power of intuition,” she said. Kate’s stomach tumbled over itself as she became aware of the weight of Lydia’s hand in hers, the heat of her skin, the shape of her wrist as it curved delicately away from her palm.

“I’m hungry,” says London.

Kate squints through the windshield, trying to orient herself, and a sign tells her they are now in Two Harbours. “We could stop at McDonald’s,” she suggests. “There’s one right up here.”

“Are you kidding?” London says. “McDonald’s is, like, the worst place on the planet. Do you know how much environmental destruction they’re basically completely responsible for? Anyone who eats at McDonald’s should be, like, reincarnated as a cow or something, so they can know what it’s like to be slaughtered for meat.”

“Oh,” says Kate. She has no idea what London is talking about. All she knows is that when London was small and her mother would leave her with Kate so she could party with her friends, the only thing that would keep London from screaming all night long was a Happy Meal. But Kate gives in and takes her instead to a café that sells ten-dollar sandwiches filled with ingredients she has never heard of, or if she has, she has forgotten what they are.

Food – what things are called, what they taste like – is something that Kate has lost touch with, to the point that she can only make maybe half a dozen simple meals. When she shops for food, she goes to the exact places in the store where she knows she can find the things she buys every week, and avoids the aisles that contain the multitudes of foods that she used to enjoy and now has no clue what they are. She covers this up by telling people that she can only eat certain things, that strange spices and sauces make her ill, that she will take everything plain. But she knows in the past she used to be an adventurous eater. Walter will tell her, “Oh, you used to love this,” and she’ll stare blankly into space, trying to picture what this is, what shape it takes on a plate, what sensations it produces on the tongue. But it is gone, all of it, and so she sticks to bread and cheese and butter, apples and potatoes and carrots, chicken and eggs and yogurt.

But now Kate is eating something called prosciutto sandwiched into something called a ciabatta and smothered in something called balsamic vinaigrette, which she can only remember by checking the receipt the woman behind the counter gave to London after she paid with Kate’s credit card. The flavours are too salty, too tangy for her tongue. When London gets up to go to the washroom, Kate wraps up the rest of her sandwich in her napkin and tucks it into her purse. She can’t bring herself to throw it away – it is, after all, a ten-dollar sandwich – but maybe where they are going she can find someone who is hungry who might want to take it. London’s sandwich is supposedly roasted vegetables, although from where Kate is sitting she can’t see one vegetable she recognizes. London has also ordered a drink called a chai latte. Kate sneaks a sip and the flavour is so strong she can’t even swallow it. She is still holding it in her mouth when London comes back, so Kate makes a motion towards the door and runs for the bathroom, where she spits it out in the sink and then splashes cold water on her face as though that is going to make the taste go away. Back at the table London looks at her quizzically, but doesn’t ask if she’s okay – Kate suspects that the ins and outs of her grandmother’s digestive issues are not something London is interested in discussing over a meal.

—

One rainy afternoon when they were stuck inside their room at Madame Clou’s with nothing to do but read the same books and listen to the same records, Lydia presented Kate with a book on palm reading she’d bought at a used bookstore. They spent the afternoon lounging on pillows on the floor, poring over the book, memorizing the diagrams, figuring out what the lines were called and what they signified. The most important thing, the book stressed, was to instill faith in your clients by using the right terminology, which was all the book could really teach you. After that, your success as a fortune teller hinged on your ability to read people, not palms.

Kate was surprised that a book that was supposed to teach her how to be a palm reader was actually confirming that the entire discipline was basically a sham. “It’s an art, not a science,” said Lydia, her head resting on Kate’s stomach as she held the book open above her head. “And like with all art, there has to be talent. Either you have it or you don’t.”

Kate snatched the book from Lydia and slammed it shut. “That’s not true,” she said. Having been raised with a strict Protestant work ethic, Kate found it hard to fathom something that you could not work at to achieve. “All I need is practice.”

Lydia turned her head to gaze at Kate’s face, her cheekbone bumping against the bottom of Kate’s rib cage, sending a pleasant vibration through her body. “So let’s get you some practice,” she said.

They dashed across the street to Café d’Esprit. The baker, Jules, had been very kind to them over the weeks, giving them day-old croissants and letting them occupy a table by the window for hours for the price of only one espresso. “Jules,” Kate said breathlessly as they swept in from the street, closing the door on the rainstorm behind them. “Did you know that before I came here, I had never even tried espresso or croissants? And now I’m pretty sure I can’t live without them.”

“Oui, Katherine,” said Jules wearily. “You tell me every time you come in.”

“You saved my life with coffee and pastries, Jules,” Kate said solemnly, taking his coarse, flour-dusted hand in her own. Behind her, she could hear Lydia snickering. “Please, let me repay you by reading your palm for you.”

Kate sat Jules down at a table, and in her most authoritative fortune-teller voice, she tried to read him. She spoke of a long life line, broken by an illness later in life that would be fought and conquered. She told him his marriage line revealed a wife and two children, and his success line revealed financial hardship and then finally stability. She showed him the Ring of Solomon, and how its depth indicated that he was, at that very moment, hesitating at a very significant fork in the road, and that deep down he knew which path he should choose. She told him that the proximity of the ring to his heart line meant that if he followed his heart, the choice would be the right one. She said all this without looking once at Lydia, for she knew if she did she would burst out laughing.

When she finished, she was startled to discover that Jules was crying. With shaking hands, he lit a cigarette, and minutes went by before he was able to speak. When he did, it was in French, which he never spoke with Kate or Lydia – as though his emotions were too complex for him to express in such a prosaic language as English. Then he got up from the table, went to the kitchen, and brought out a whole cake – round and tall and covered with a cloud of pristine white frosting. That was when Kate realized that the future was something everyone was afraid of, even if they didn’t feel, as she had ever since that day at Chippewa, as though they were living on borrowed time.

“I guess you have the gift,” Lydia said as they dashed back to their room, giggling and holding on to each other to keep from slipping in their waterlogged shoes. They put on a Sly and the Family Stone record and danced around the room while the rain pelted the window, eating the cake with their hands and drinking from a cheap bottle of champagne that Lydia had bought when they first arrived in Paris.

Later, when the cake and champagne were finished, they lay next to each other on the bed they shared, their hands still sticky with icing as they held their palms side by side above their heads, comparing the lines. The room was dark, the lines barely visible, but as Kate looked from her palm to Lydia’s, she suddenly realized what the fortune teller in Brighton had seen. “The future doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said, her heart pounding as she shifted onto her side to face Lydia.

Lydia rolled over, too. “You’re right. The only thing that matters is now,” she said, pressing her palm against Kate’s. They fell asleep with their fingers intertwined, and when they woke the next morning, eyes fluttering open in the dusty haze of the breaking dawn filtering in through the window, their hands were fused together, bonded by icing and the heat of their own skin.

“You are so beautiful,” Lydia whispered.

No one had ever said those words to Kate before, in that voice. Their faces were so close that she could see the fine spray of freckles across the tops of Lydia’s cheeks, the delicate creases between her eyebrows above the bridge of her nose. Before she could stop herself, she leaned in and kissed Lydia. And Lydia, in all her infinite, indescribable radiance, kissed her back.

Kate felt so free in Paris. But maybe freedom is all relative. Right now, she feels free because she is driving, she is in a foreign country, and she has an inkling that no one knows where she and London are. She tries her memory exercises again. There are pieces that come to her. She was hurt somehow. Was London with her when she got hurt? No, that can’t be right. She remembers a young man in a uniform, but she doesn’t know what kind. She remembers falling, but that is nothing new. She dreams of falling every night, waking herself with a start, panting in her bed next to Walter as the breeze blows through the bedroom window. No, whether she fell or not will remain a mystery.

London is pressing buttons on her phone, and Kate wonders for a moment if she should tell her to call her mother, just to let her know where they are. But even Kate knows that to do that would be to break this tenuous bond between her and her granddaughter, a bond that is the only thing tethering her to reality at this moment. She doesn’t want to lose London’s trust. So she just continues to drive.