ON MONDAY WHEN SHE CAME home from the office, there were lights on at the main house. She could see Jack in the bright rectangle of the kitchen window, and she knew that, were she to hurry up there now and say his name and open her arms and mean it, he would turn to her and she would have reached straight through to his heart. And yet, when she had climbed the stairs and was in the kitchen and had set down her bags, she could not do it.
He stood watching her reflection in the window, and she stood shielding her eyes against the bright ceiling light, the gleaming tiles and white appliances.
He turned. “All this distance, Maggie. We’re forgetting how to be with each other. You must know we can’t go on like this. If you need help, would you please just go and get it.”
“I have help. I have Michael, and I have Zach at the pain clinic. They are both very good.”
“And?”
“And nothing. These things take time.”
In the bright light her vision began to shimmer, and she closed her eyes and stood rigid for a while. Not now, she said to her eyebrow. Not bloody now. She groped in her purse and took out her sunglasses and put them on. In her own kitchen, in this brutal glare.
“Can we go in the living room, Jack? It’s too bright in here.”
“Sure. How are you doing with the headaches?”
“I am getting help with them too. How are you doing? What are you doing?”
“You know what I do, Margaret. I go down mine shafts and I design geophysics and study core samples. I miss Andrew, but keeping busy with what I’m good at helps me. You know all about that particular trick.”
In the living room they sat far apart on the same couch. There was a newspaper on the floor that Jack must have picked up. In the photo under the headline about the Camp David peace talks, Jimmy Carter stood side by side with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.
Jack looked at her. “How are you really, Margaret?” “Honestly? Sometimes not so good. There are long moments when the entire world slides away from me and all I can do is watch it recede. The other day I had this feeling even at the office, where I’m usually safe. I dream that it’s my fault. Not paying enough attention to him. Our boy, killed in some conflict halfway round the world that he had no need to be in. And then I think it’s because we didn’t help him plant his roots deep enough in common sense. You and I, Jack, we failed at that.”
He shifted on the couch and without looking at her he said, “You need to stop that, Margaret. Always the same litany, we did this and we did that. We neglected whatever. When in fact his mind was made up and he’d stopped listening to us years ago.”
Which was true, and she knew it.
All those young pilots in training at the Air Force base in the valley coming out to the coast, summer after summer. Young men not much older than he, and some of them already observers or even co-pilots. Andrew had always admired them from a distance, and when he was at university working toward his engineering degree, he made a few friends among them. Sometimes they’d visit, and they’d sit in her kitchen and she’d make lunches for them, proper young men with a calm confidence about them. Once in a while one or two of them would bunk in the boathouse for a summer weekend, and then some of them would invite Andrew to the base so he could watch the enormous Hercules C-130 machines taking off and landing. The RCAF was being re-organized; new units were being formed that were looking for pilots, and during his last year at university some of those units were prepared to enlist and train fit young men who hadn’t gone to the military college but had studied engineering.
One day they let him sit as an observer in a cockpit when a plane did a turn around the valley, and she’d never forget the expression of awe and wonder on his face when he described it to her and Jack.
All those young men in uniform, skilled and disciplined. Boys about to become pilots. That was what he wanted, and he would have succeeded. They offered to sign him up as a trainee even while he was still writing the last paper for his degree, and from that moment on there was nothing she could do any more. Nothing.
Not for war but for peace, he’d say to her more than once in the weeks and months that followed, to soften her. Peacekeeping missions, Mom, all of them. Bringing medicines and clothing and food to people who need help. What could be wrong with that? And he’d watch her face, not the way he’d done as a little boy, but more and more from an inner certainty and decidedness that she recognized only too well because it was in her also and always had been.
Jack stood up and opened the window and sat down again. A breeze stirred the leaves on the maple tree and cool air blew in.
From his place far away on the couch he said, “Wouldn’t it help you to look at it from his point of view for a change? Flying those amazing machines halfway around the world to exotic places, even into danger—yes, that’s part of it, and you rely on your training and your discipline. What a thrill it must have been for him, Margaret. Why not let him have that? And then from euphoria to nothingness in a few seconds. Sometimes I think we should all be so lucky.”
She reached for a tissue in the box on the end table and dabbed her eyes. After a while she said, “I know you think that. You’ve said it before, and it wasn’t any help then and it isn’t now.” She balled the tissue and held it in her fist. “But l want you to know that I’m hanging in with all my broken fingernails. Until I can see more clearly. I’m determined to. I just have to find a way.”
“I know, Margaret.”
“And it may take a while.”
For some time they sat in silence, then she stood up.
“I brought something from the Thai place. Let’s eat.”
She carried in plates and cutlery and set the cardboard containers on the bare table.
“What is it?”
“Chicken with rice and chestnuts and mushrooms.”
They passed the cardboard containers. The serving spoon. Twice their fingers touched. It was the closest they’d been in a long time, but the touch felt wrong to her. Too soon. Somehow inappropriate.
The watch on her wrist was still the good Swiss automatic he’d bought her years ago on an anniversary trip to New York. She looked from her hands to his, and the wedding band was still where she’d slipped it on his finger all those years ago.
She’d met him in her second year at Osgoode Hall Law School, at the cow gate at the Queen Street entrance. He was so engrossed in it, she had to stop and watch him operate it, crouching down to observe the assembly, the way the thing worked. A simple machine of enamelled cast iron, it seemed to her. She watched for a while because there was something she liked very much about him, perhaps the quality of his attention. She stepped closer. “Is there something wrong with it?”
He looked up. “What? No, no. Nothing’s wrong. It’s just this amazing piece of history. I mean, look at it. And could there really have been cows grazing here at one time? Cows, here?”
That had been the beginning. In order to find out everything she could about him, to see him clearly in a cool light, she held back for months and would not allow intimacies beyond perhaps a touch of fingers or a kiss on the cheek, but already she was crazy about him. She enjoyed talking with him because Jack talked straight from the heart and looked you in the eye, and unlike with many of her fellow students, everything he said seemed pure and there was nothing hidden in his words ever.
She brought him home and Father liked him as well, approved of him and of his plans for the future. A mining geologist he was going to be, not a soldier like his father and grandfather. As they sat at the dinner table in the house on Colin Avenue, she watched his hands shaping and describing strata and outcroppings to Father, and all the while her brain had stopped and she was imagining those very hands undressing her in some fine cool bedroom, and her undressing him. At that moment much of the fear about intimacy after Lakewood and Thérèse’s warnings in Paris about boys and men went out the window. Because here was the real thing, Jack Bradley and his power of attention, and Jack’s well-shaped hands and how would their touch feel on her skin?
She told Aileen about her mining geologist with the brown eyes and the good hands on the telephone from Toronto. So excited, both of them. Aileen was engaged to Don Patterson by then, who had steady work on fishing boats off the South Shore. They were doing it, said Aileen. Of course they were. It was so sweet that a few times she’d practically fainted. For birth control she was using the rhythm method, the Knaus-Ogino. Aileen said she’d done her research and under the right circumstances it was the best and she was very, very careful counting days and keeping an extra two days as buffers toward the middle. But in any case, they would be getting married as soon as they had saved enough money. By then Aileen had already passed her exams and she was a fully qualified nurse at Clearwater Hospital.
They agreed that the Thai food was good. An interesting flavour. All that coconut milk, probably. Jack talked about Argentina, and he was describing the silver mine going down and down four levels when the telephone rang. He stood up and went to answer it and then she heard him in the hallway. “All right,” he was saying. “I understand. I’ll check my schedule.”
He came back and sat down. “That was the Vancouver office about the forward core samples on the new silver mine. They want me to come out there for the evaluation.” He paused. “Unless you’d like me to stay here a day or two longer. I could probably arrange that.”
When she said nothing, he put his hands flat on the table and prepared to get up. But then he sat back again.
“Margaret,” he said. “We need to move on from where we are, where we are stuck. Can’t we do it together? As a team?”
He sat looking at her, waiting. After a while he shook his head. “You see. There it is again. Your silence. Your unwillingness to meet me halfway. And we used to be so close. We could talk about anything and work out every last problem. We’re mature and we can think. So let’s please help each other.”
Surely there was something she could be saying now. Should be wanting to say, if only she could see it clearly. Perhaps that she felt the same way but that she was lost and couldn’t find her way back. That she sometimes wished she were dead, and that what she felt was much deeper and older, and if Michael was right it was even primal and mostly female, with no way across the divide that she could see. And suddenly she could not breathe again…
Abruptly she pushed back her chair and stood up and touched her eyebrow.
“So would you like me to postpone British Columbia?” he said. “Stay a bit longer?”
“Maybe not just yet, Jack. But thank you.”
He sat watching her, and he never said another word while she fumbled up her plate and cutlery and took them to the kitchen and then picked up her briefcase and purse and hurried away, down the back stairs to be alone again.
She walked with the fingers of her left hand pressed to her eyebrow and talked to it. No, she told it. Not now. Please. But it was not listening and the pain expanded and became the red cloud, and then on the path near the cottage she fell but managed to get up and make it through the door. She dropped the briefcase and with her hand pressed to her mouth ran to the bathroom and in the dark fell to her knees by the toilet and vomited into the bowl. For a while she hung over the rim, then she let go and lay face down on the tiles with her feet out the door and her nails digging into the grouting for a finger hold or keep falling. She pressed the offending eyebrow to the hard ceramic chill and concentrated on the calm side of her brain.
After a while she rolled over and put the palms of her hands over her eyes to make it all even darker. Lying flat on her back in her black suit with her legs outstretched, like some thing fallen from a great height.
After a while she stirred and poked the emergency pill out of her jacket pocket. She bit on it and moved the crumbs under her tongue and let her arm fall to her side.
When the pain began to lessen she rolled over and stood up slowly. She turned on the small mirror light and took off her jacket and slapped away the floor dirt. She slapped angrily at the skirt too and then washed her hands and rinsed her face and mouth, refusing to look up into the mirror.
She could have talked more to him just now. Slowed herself down and said something kind when he offered to delay his trip for her. An explanation, but of what, using which words? And not with this pain coming.
So much change. If she were to step out the door now and look toward the elderberries, she’d see the spot where Jack and she made love for the first time. Finally letting go had been such an enormous event, so very daring and liberating at the same time.
Just down the slope a bit, in the grass.
Late summer, a Saturday night. They’d had dinner with his mother, who did not talk much any more—not since the event, as his father’s suicide had been called. After dessert they sat a while longer, then they excused themselves. He kissed his mother on the cheek and Margaret said, Thank you for dinner, Mrs. Bradley, and good night, and then they left her sitting at the table. Like a shell. Abandoned. Margaret paused at the door and, feeling guilty, turned back to say something more, but the woman was not looking at her and there was really nothing more to say. In the kitchen the maid, Anna Maria, was washing dishes and Margaret called out good night to her, and then like giddy children they hurried down the back stairs and along the path and past the cottage all in darkness, deeper into the garden.
Watching Jack across the dinner table talking to his mother, watching his face and seeing the care in it, she’d fallen in love with him all over again and she’d made the decision, or it had made itself. At one point Jack looked at her, and he must have seen it in her eyes or in her smile. And he stopped talking and got all red in the face and lost his train of thought.
And how perfect it was.
For a while she was still conflicted even though she knew it was a safe day, but how sweet even that, giving herself permission to let go. In the dark amid the scent of the grass, a sliver of moon and a million stars, starlight like milk on their skin. And his hands on her, finally. And hers on him, completely overwhelmed by all this.
How long ago? Not so very long. Not so long.