CHAPTER 6

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“CHERIE! CHERIE! COME!”

It turns her stomach, the thought of her all alone out here. Poor Cherie, lost as the sun begins to drop. The coyotes prey on roaming pets. Soon she’ll hear their distant, eerie calls in the darkness.

“Cherie!” she cries down the street. Barking erupts from a neighbouring home. She’s hopeful for a second, even though it is the deep bark of a much larger breed. She curses her weary legs for not being able to carry her as far as she wants to go and her cloudy eyes for not seeing as well as they should.

There’s a drop of blood on the sidewalk, just one drop, but it rattles her. Cherie is hurt. She cut herself on something and now she’s limping and frightened. Vivian touches her nose. It’s bleeding. She’s bleeding. It’s her blood on the sidewalk. She pulls out a tissue and dabs at it until it stops. It isn’t serious. Must be the dry air.

A flashy black car pulls up alongside her. A young man gets out. She recognizes him, but she can’t place him. What was his name? She smiles out of politeness and calls out for her dog again.

“Cherie!”

He approaches. “Did you lose someone?”

She stares at his sharp features and then looks down the street again. “My dog, Cherie.”

“What kind of dog is she?”

“She’s a ...” She brushes the lost thought away with her hand. “My husband must’ve left the gate open.”

He follows her down the road a short way, semi-scanning the front yards as she does.

“Thanks again for your help with Pam. She believed the story about kids breaking her window. She let me take care of the damage. I don’t think she’d ever forgive me if she knew the truth.”

Vivian looks at him as though he might be soft in the head. He doesn’t appear to notice.

“I have to run. I’m supposed to be meeting Frank’s lawyer and I’m already late. Is anyone helping you look for your dog?”

“My husband,” Vivian mutters.

“I hope you find her. I’ll keep an eye out.”

Vivian stretches to look over a neighbour’s hedge. “Cherie?” She releases a long, shrill whistle.

“I owe you one,” he says, but he leaves too quickly to catch her response: “Everyone in this town owes me one.”

Shortly after the young man drive off, Tim pulls up and tells her to get in. He’s taking her home. Not Tim. Tony. Todd. He says he’s found Cherie. Vivian peers into the car. No sign of Cherie.

“She’s at home,” Todd says, not very convincingly.

Vivian squints at him, trying to focus on his little lying eyes. He’s always playing tricks on her, and he isn’t as gentle as he used to be. If she doesn’t get in the damn car, he’ll probably drag her in. He’s so much stronger than she is now. Was he always? She’s suddenly too tired to argue.

Stuart is sitting in their living room, a glass of whiskey in one hand and one of Todd’s fat books in the other, his grey curls ruffled because he plays with his hair when he concentrates. No doubt it’s about a great battle. Stuart and his father share an interest in books about great battles, even though the pair of them would have been shot for cowardice if they’d actually been in one.

“Life is full of battles,” she remarks as she approaches. “Why do you need ... these?”

Stuart looks across at his father. The pair of them, with their sneaky little looks just because she forgets the odd word.

“When did you get here?” she asks her son.

He hesitates and glances at his father again. “Last night. Don’t you remember?”

One of their traps. Trying to trick her into being confused. “Of course, I remember. There’s nothing ...”

She trails off because the words have gone. Fizzled out like her interest in the useless people surrounding her.

She turns to Todd. “Have you spoken to the reference people yet?”

He quietly corrects her. “The refuse people.”

“Have you?”

Todd doesn’t say anything. Stuart looks at him. “What’s she talking about?”

She keeps her voice raised. She isn’t afraid of them. “Do it, Todd. Make sure it happens.”

“I am, and it will,” Todd says meekly. “But for now I need you to rest, Vivian. You’re very tired.”

He’s right, she realizes, tired again, and that in itself annoys her. He passes her two little pills and a glass of water and she asks what they are for. “The doctor wants you to take them.” Lacking the energy to argue, she swallows them in one gulp.

Todd leads her to the living room sofa. In front of her is the mantelpiece and the wall of family portraits, old and new. The largest photograph in the most lavish frame takes centre spot. The man in the photograph is her father, there for appearances. She stares at his image as her drowsy eyes try to fight the exhaustion that washes over her.

In the photograph, Father has the appearance of a man other men looked up to, and he was. Suited and clean-shaven with neat blonde hair. He was only middle-aged then, when Vivian was a girl, and already at the helm of the Stapleton Coalmine. Mother hung that photograph above the mantelpiece in Vivian’s childhood home and it remained there until her death. Todd had put it in the “keep” pile when he and Vivian sorted through Mother’s things. Vivian thought about transferring it to the trash pile, but Todd would have asked questions she didn’t want to answer. So, now Father sits above her mantelpiece in the spot that Todd arranged for him. Father’s eyes are smiling, almost smirking. At her.

Summer vacations are long and thick in the Stapleton heat. Vivian attends school in Vancouver, but she returns home during every break. The local kids are strangers and Father is always away. Mother busies herself with housework and only really focuses her attention on Vivian when she yanks a comb through her unruly brown curls. Vivian’s closest companion is Ruby, the horse Father bought for her 12^th birthday.

Ruby is a beautiful horse. She’s an Appaloosa with a chestnut head and a white back flecked with chestnut spots. Vivian feeds her carrots in the paddock and gently strokes her long snout.

“Vivian!”

Father’s bellowing voice. She turns excitedly to see his figure at the front steps of their grand house. Pale skin and pale hair; a little heavier on every visit but the way he carries the weight only makes him look stronger. These are the best days; the days he comes home. He works so hard, Mother says. He travels a lot. He attends very important meetings in Vancouver, Mother has explained, but he never visits Vivian while she’s at school there. Vivian doesn’t think anything of it. Parents don’t visit their children at school, not unless there’s some sort of family emergency.

It had started during the war, Father’s gradual disappearance from their home, or at least that was the first excuse for his absence that Vivian could remember. He didn’t fight overseas but he was very involved in the war effort, Mother said, though neither of her parents ever went into detail about his work. It must have been important. He was an important man. But when the war finally ended, he continued to keep his distance.

Father holds his suit jacket and dimpled hat over one arm and his fat leather briefcase in his other hand. Vivian scrambles over the fence and runs towards him as he waits. “Father!” she shouts happily. He is unmoved. Father says too much fussing ruins children. It makes them weak. Vivian will run into him anyway and throw her arms around his broad chest. He’ll let her do that once. Then he’ll straighten his tie and clear his throat, which means “back to business,” and he will do the talking and she will listen as well as she can and Mother will make sure they have a very pleasant dinner so he will come back sooner.

Vivian can’t resist one question, just one. “Can we go for ice cream?”

She loves ice cream, but more than that, she loves the feeling of striding around Stapleton with him at her side. Some men tip their hats at him when he marches by. Others make space for him as though he is the boss, even out there on the sidewalk. Father runs the coalmine, and that makes him King of Stapleton. It’s a powerful feeling, to walk beside him. It isn’t the same when she walks around town with Mother, who is so meek people barely notice she’s there.

Father ignores her request, and when she stretches her arms around him, he pushes her back firmly. “Come inside.”

Nothing feels particularly odd to Vivian until she skips into the dining room. Mother is seated in her usual spot as though she is about to have dinner, but it is mid-afternoon. Mother’s eyes are wet and she is dabbing them delicately with a handkerchief. Vivian looks at her father but he offers no explanation. “Sit down,” he says. She sits in her chair opposite Mother but Father doesn’t join them. He stands at the foot of the table and looks down on them. Mother is a petite woman and Father’s shadow seems to swallow them both.

“Your mother and I are separating.”

Mother weeps a little more forcefully, then covers her mouth with her handkerchief to stifle the sound.

“Why?” Vivian asks, more confused than traumatised at that moment.

“That is not your concern,” he says.

Mother lets out a few more sniffles.

Father sighs impatiently. “There’s no need to make a fuss. You can continue to live here, at least until you are an adult or until your mother remarries.”

“I’ll never remarry,” Mother says, sobbing. “What an awful thing to say.”

She and Mother are being abandoned. They have no choice in it. He decides everything. He always has. They are lost in his shadow and Vivian has to get away from him, into the light. She leaves the table without asking his permission. He walks out.

Mother cries for days afterwards. She calls her sisters but they won’t talk to her. A divorced woman. In their family. One evening, sherry on her breath, she sits Vivian in front of her and drags a comb through her hair. She pulls at the knots so hard Vivian’s scalp burns.

“I lost the boy. He was stillborn.”

A heavy silence falls between them. Mother tugs at another tangle.

“Then you came along, and you were a girl. Your father couldn’t forgive us. It’s my fault.”

That was the first and last time Mother mentioned Vivian’s brother. Vivian never asked why Mother thought his death was her fault, or if they had decided on a name, or where they buried him. But she thought of him sometimes; the tiny being who never took a breath and left a great big scar across her childhood.

Vivian decides if she wants to be happy, she ought to be more like Father. She must be the one making the decisions. If not, she’ll be the person things just happen to. She’s not like Mother.

“Where’s Father?”

Todd blinks at her a couple of times and Vivian registers this other place, this real place, with the mantelpiece and the dead people trapped inside photographs.

“I mean ... never mind.”

He pulls out a tissue and starts dabbing at her face. She shoves his hand away.

“What are you doing?”

“Your nose is bleeding. Must be the dry air.”

She grabs the red dotted tissue from him and dabs her own nose. She hates being treated like a child.