18

She never got to see Marty after. She waited too long. He was admitted to the Health Sciences on Monday, and she put it off for a day or two. Finally on Thursday she packed her bag for the drive into St. John’s. Then the phone rang. It was Marty’s wife to say he was gone.

“I’m so sorry, Esther,” said Joyce.

“And all that time we wasted dragging him into St. John’s,” she said. “We should have left him to die in bed.”

“Arthur died in his bed,” said Joyce.

“Anyway, we’re leaving today. Take him back home.”

Joyce kept packing. But now she’d be driving to Cape St. Rose. After so many years.

//////

She set the bag in the front hall and called Donna across the street to water the plants.

“Father O’Rourke is back,” said Donna.

“What do you mean?”

“Back in town.”

“Not back with the church?”

“No, no. That’s all over.”

Joyce couldn’t imagine Father O’Rourke showing his face again. Nobody could have such gall.

“Where did you hear this, Donna?”

“It was all the talk when I dropped Cathy at school. They said he’s back to look after a few things, and it was all a misunderstanding. He didn’t run away with the Philpot woman from the choir. He left his vocation according to, you know, all the correct procedures.”

“But of course he ran off with her. They had the room together in Clarenville.”

“People are saying that’s all lies.”

“But where’s the Philpot woman?”

“No sign of her. I suppose her family knows.”

“But Donna, surely…”

“I suspect what happened was, she thought better of it. An ex-priest, and not a very good-looking one either. I’d say she had her fun and moved on.”

Joyce needed food before the long drive. Bacon and eggs. She still couldn’t believe Father O’Rourke would show his face again. When he and the Philpot woman disappeared in August, people had been grateful it was a grown woman he’d taken up with. Not like the sick priests who prey on little boys, or those disgusting Christian Brothers who ought to be shot.

//////

Joyce didn’t mind the four-hour drive, even with the wind leaning into the car and the little gusts of dry snow. But the overpass down to the Cape nearly killed her. It took a big turn and climbed up to loop back over the highway, with the wind coming hard and nothing to break it. There was a thin layer of snow with little curved peaks, and she slowed as she hit ice patches, until one of those patches sent the car fishtailing. She whipped the steering wheel this way and that, and her mind stupidly called up a scrap of an old song. It repeated in her head until finally she came to rest sideways, with the back bumper kissing the guardrail. She was shaking and cold—suddenly the car was frigid—and she didn’t know how long she sat there before a man tapped on her window. Joyce was singing to herself as she rolled down the window. There was a noise behind him, which turned out be an idling pickup. She said she was fine. He wanted to know where she was going, and insisted on driving her there, with his wife following in the truck. Joyce said there was no need, but she was grateful for the company. During the drive he asked a lot of questions about her family. “So’s I can place you,” he said. She answered the questions until he said, “Yes, my dear, sure I know your crowd.”

At the old house, the fellow and his wife insisted on going in and paying their respects to Esther. Of course, they stayed for a cup of tea and mentioned how they found Joyce with her car askew in the middle of the road, singing to herself. So for the rest of the weekend, Joyce was treated like a frail old lady on the brink. They wouldn’t let her help with anything. She was spirited away from the wake when the late-night drinkers took over—“You don’t want any part of that dirty old crowd,” said Esther—and treated regally at the reception following the service. Her privileged status allowed Esther to avoid her most of the time.

In nearly fifty years since she’d left, Joyce had never been back home. She had always imagined her desertion as a dramatic episode. The girl who boarded the train and never looked back. Resented and envied for escaping the place, which crippled those left behind as surely as poison in the well water.

But of course the Cape turned out to be no different than anywhere else. Everyone left. Emptying out was the ordinary business of outport Newfoundland. There was a teacher and two students, a school janitor with not much to do, and a crowd of old folks lining up to see the nurse who passed through every Friday. The church was closed, her father’s old store long abandoned. Joyce couldn’t imagine why anyone would stay at all. Or why anyone had put down stakes in the first place, for that matter.

She met a man who said he remembered Joyce as a girl, coming around with deliveries from the store.

“Everyone’s looking for a resettlement offer,” said the man. “Take the money and buy a house somewhere. Or pocket the money and move in with the kids. But we’re not small enough to get the government money yet, and not expensive enough. Those little islands, serviced by the ferries? Cost a fortune. Government can’t wait to close them up.”

“Would everyone want to leave?”

“Here? I’d say everyone would come around to it. What about Gander? Wasn’t there talk that the airport was finished?”

“It’s doing nicely these days, I think.”

“How do they make a go of it?”

“Private jets, you know, and air freight and the military. Emergency landings too.” Joyce wasn’t sure exactly how the airport managed to stay in business.

“Another one of Joey Smallwood’s boondoggles,” said the man. “Along with his chocolate bars and his hockey sticks and the rest of it.”

“But Smallwood had nothing to do with Gander.”

“He had his hand in everything.”

At the funeral she had a good chat with the younger cousins on her father’s side. Most of their kids were in Edmonton. Joyce talked about how she had almost moved to Edmonton once. TCA was looking for ticket agents to transfer out west, to Edmonton and Winnipeg. But then she met Arthur.

She told Esther how Father O’Rourke had run away with the Philpot woman from the choir, and then come back.

“They’ve got no shame,” said Esther. “You won’t see me back in church after today. Not until I’m in my own box.”

The shaking from the near-accident persisted all weekend, right through the burial and the careful drive back. A steady vibration inside, as if her bones were ringing. It stopped when she got home. Then it flared up again, coming at her for a few minutes at a time, and waking her at night.

Donna dropped by to return the house key. “Bill O’Rourke is gone back to school,” she said. “Gone to do welding.”

“Who?”

“Father O’Rourke. He’s going to get his welding certificate and make a fortune offshore.”

“What kind of fortune?”

“With Hibernia, I imagine. The rigs.”

Father O’Rourke. Had she really taken Holy Communion from a man out for his welding certificate? Joyce wanted to say she would never set foot in church again. But she had made such vows before, and always drifted back. So she held her tongue.

//////

A week after Marty passed, she still hadn’t told Herbert. She called, and caught him in the middle of his new job. At a bakery, of all places. Joyce had never known him to show an interest in the kitchen. He said he would call back in an hour. She put on her laundry from the trip and went through the pantry to clear out a few forgotten cans and bag them for the food bank.

The hour was up by then, so she sat at the kitchen table, next to the telephone on the wall.

When Herbert called, she said, “Your Uncle Martin passed away last week.”

“I never knew him, did I?”

“No. We fell out of touch.”

“You had that picture, though, of the two of you. Was he sick for long?”

“Oh, for ages. He finally got married a few years ago, and I started getting Christmas cards from his wife. There was always a report on his health, and it was never good.”

“Did you see him before he died?”

“I meant to. It happened very quickly.” But then, she had also missed her father’s death, and hadn’t young Herbert carried out his move to Toronto when they all knew Arthur was in his final weeks? “Esther was with him, that’s his wife. And she has a girl from her first marriage, who was there as well.”

“So no cousins on your side.”

“No. It’s a good thing they’re not counting on the Pelleys of Cape St. Rose to keep Newfoundland populated. We’ve done poorly on that front.”

After a while she asked about the divorce, and he said it was finally done. No children, and no assets to speak of. A simple division. But Herbert didn’t sound relieved or renewed. He was still wounded, still enumerating his grievances.

“I hear she’s moving to North Bay. Trying to get back with the guy she had before me.”

“What she does is nothing to you anymore.”

“Just interesting that she’s showing her true colours. I heard there was another guy she’s been out with too.”

So nothing much had changed. A young woman was still held to account for her boyfriends, and it was treated like the only part of her story that mattered. But a man might be on a spree all over town, and people thought it hardly worth remarking on. Oh, by the way, he’s having it off with so-and-so now…

He asked about the funeral. She didn’t mention the incident on the overpass, or the shaking and how it had stayed with her. Joyce had no idea how long she might have been sitting there, the car sideways across both lanes, singing, before the tap on her window.

“Was it strange to be back there, after so many years away?” asked Herbert.

“It’s not half the size it used to be. Your grandfather’s old shop is long gone.” She had known the Cape at a glance. The pebbled shoreline. The landwash with its fringe of kelp and shining blobs of beached jellyfish. The salt-stained streets and houses retreating from the sea, backing right up to the crooked trees screwed into the face of Bald Hill.

“The weather was raw,” she said. “I almost forgot about that. How the wind comes in off the water. Everyone walks around with their faces scrunched up against it.”

//////

Two days later Herbert called again. “Have you given it any thought, Mom? What I said about maybe selling the house and moving in somewhere so you’re not alone all the time?”

They hadn’t talked about any such thing, and Joyce was about to tell him so. But she hesitated. It sounded familiar, as if she had been rehearsing thoughts for this very conversation. The shaking inside started. She lifted a hand to see if she was shaking on the outside as well, and yes, it trembled a bit.

Perhaps he had said something about moving, and she just forgot.

“Give me a few weeks to think about it,” she said.

“You’re lucky, with Dad’s pension. Dad did very well. I saw Gander on the news the other night.”

“What for?”

“It was a nice story about 9/11, and all the flights that had nowhere to go because the Americans closed the airports. And you guys put up thousands of people, fed them and looked after them. Most of them never even heard of Newfoundland before.”

“Oh. Well, I was away that week, I believe.” She had been home all week. Hadn’t gone out much, and hadn’t answered the phone either, for fear that someone would ask her to take in strangers. She wanted no part of it. When it was over and the stranded planes were sent on their way, she could feel the town empty out and the silence descend. She could feel it from inside the house, without even cracking the door.

“How’s Leah?” she asked.

“You and I were talking about my divorce already.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Her mind was misplacing things, so exhausted was she from the trip.

“Are you alright, Mom?”

“The drive down to the Cape, it was hard. Middle of winter.”

They finished the call, and Joyce ran a bath. She locked the bathroom door behind her, because you never know. The heat was almost too much, billowing steam around her. It would soon be time to get out of the house. The pipes were always banging behind the sink, like they used to in the old hotel at the airport. Shingles were blowing off the roof, and the fellow Anstey who ploughed the driveway every winter wasn’t as prompt as he used to be, not since his wife left him. She wouldn’t share any of this with Herbert. Not yet, or he’d be down here to rush her along.

It must have been Arthur who taught her what to do when the back end of a car starts waving about. Cut the wheels in the same direction. Or did the body have an instrument that automatically took control for such moments? A finely tuned bundle of nerves that could read and correct dangerous shifts in momentum.

The song came back to her as she rolled wrinkled toes over the faucet. Not the song, but just the one line. May this bliss never end. Over and over it had played in her head, for as long as it took her to stop the vehicle. May this bliss never end.

She couldn’t recall the title of the song, or any of the other words. But she remembered the day she got it right. The band was setting up in one of the usual rooms—likely the Airport Club—and a few of the men were passing the bottle around. Christmas, maybe? Joyce was testing her microphone with a few lines from that song, whatever it was, when she was jarred by the realization that she had been singing it wrong all along. It wasn’t just about heartbreak. It was about loving the heartbreak. She had to sing it as a woman abandoned and suicidal, but also more alive than she had ever been during the affair itself. In that moment, she knew exactly how to shape the words. It might have been a passing thing, long gone the next time she reached for it. But she had it in that moment. What a shame they were only rehearsing, with no crowd of dancers to share it with. But of course it would have been lost on them.