Not long after we’d returned to the city Rita showed up at my apartment one afternoon, unannounced, a stack of library books cradled in one arm.
“I was wondering if I could work here for a while,” she said, not quite looking me in the eye.
The books’ grey, generic covers gave them the look of props, imitations of books. At the top of them, incongruously, was a tattered paperback.
“Everything okay at your place?”
“Yeah. I just needed to get out for a bit, that’s all.”
She set herself up at the kitchen table as she used to do in the fall, spreading her books around her, setting a writing pad out for notes. But when I came to look in on her, she had the paperback propped open inside one of the library books.
“You want a coffee or something?”
“Sure. Great.”
I hadn’t really talked to her much about Mr. Amherst’s death – it seemed like something that had lodged in her throat, some word, some tail-end of a thought, that she couldn’t get out. But I couldn’t find the right way to bring the matter up.
“I was meaning to ask you if you’re going to be all right for money now,” I said. “If it’s going to be a problem.”
“I don’t know. Mom didn’t really talk about it. I could always get a part-time job or something.”
“I should give you something to tide you over.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
But I went into my room then and there and made out a cheque to her. I wavered a moment over the amount, then settled on a thousand dollars. That was less than half of what I received every month from my cousins from the sort of mortgage they paid me to buy out my father’s share of the farm. But when I handed the cheque over to Rita I felt embarrassed at its apparent excess.
“I can’t accept this,” she said.
I felt like my father: emotion in him had always been translated across gifts, sums of money, sudden acts of excessive generosity.
“You don’t want to be working while you’re in school,” I said.
She eyed the cheque uncomfortably.
“I’ll work it off in the summer.”
“That’s fine.”
Evening came on. I invited Rita to stay for supper, pouring us wine from a gallon I’d brought from home. While I busied myself with pots and pans she sat chopping vegetables at the kitchen table with a careful, small-handed deliberateness. Between her and Elena, it was Elena, oddly, who was the more domestic one, who seemed more at home in a kitchen, who in their apartment would instinctively clear away glasses and ashtrays, re-establish order; whereas in Rita there was always a tentativeness about such things as if she had never quite grasped the essence of them.
“I was thinking about something you wrote in one of your letters from Africa,” she said. “About the first time we’d seen each other again after I’d gone to live with the Amhersts.”
I could still remember that reunion: it had been a year or more after she’d gone, and the Amhersts had come in their car to St. Mike’s to invite me to lunch after mass. In my memory of the event it had the feel of a scene from a movie, my father turning away from me at the church steps and then the waiting car, the shadow of Rita in back.
“You said you felt like you couldn’t reach me. That I was like a picture, that’s how you put it. That you knew there was something behind it but you couldn’t get at it.”
I was surprised I’d been as open as that, had always thought of our letters as more careful, more oblique.
“That more or less says it, I guess.”
“It was just – I don’t know. When I thought about all the things I didn’t understand back then, how stupid everything was.”
“You were only a kid,” I said.
“I know. It’s just sad, that’s all.”
We had our dinner in the living room, Rita taking her place at the end of the couch. We had got into the habit of eating there in the fall whenever she’d stayed for meals, to avoid the knocking together of elbows and knees at the cramped kitchen table.
“Sometimes I think how strange it is that I spent the first six years of my life on your father’s farm and then never saw it again,” Rita said. “Not once. I’ve never even gone past it. It’s like some fairy-tale place that stopped existing once I was gone, even though the whole time I was growing up it was there, just a couple of miles away. I have this picture of it in my head, how it was then, and it’s never changed. But it’s probably completely different now.”
“I could take you there one day, if you want.”
“Do you remember your neighbours from across the road? What was their name? They were so blond, almost white. I guess they were Mennonites.”
“The Dycks. We never had that much to do with them.”
“I went over there once, on my own. I remember it so clearly. I must have been about five – I just crossed the road like that, as if it had only just occurred to me that it was possible to do that, that there wasn’t some invisible wall holding me in. And then there I was in this completely new place, with that little red house they had, and the barn across from it, and the trees, those huge trees. A man came out from the house, this big, blond man with boots on – I knew I should have been afraid but he was smiling, and he came over and just picked me up as if I hadn’t done anything wrong at all, as if this was exactly where I was supposed to be. We went into a room in the barn that was full of pigeons – there must have been a hundred of them, it seemed like, up along the rafters and then in some nests that were built along the walls. He took me to one of the nests and there was a pigeon inside, and he moved her a bit to show me the eggs she was sitting on. He never said a word, at least that’s how I remember it. He just showed me these eggs as if he was sharing a secret with me.”
Outside, it had begun to snow. Great, fat flakes were falling against the windows and into the street, muffling the sound of traffic and the whirr of the streetcars as they passed.
“It’s funny how people remember things,” Rita said. “Like Elena. Some of the things she comes out with.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Some of the things she says about Dad, for instance.”
She had barely touched her food. She stared down at it now, moving it around on her plate with her fork.
“What kinds of things?”
“Just something she said. Not to me, to one of her friends. About our being adopted and all that.”
“That seems pretty indisputable.”
“It’s not that. It’s just how she put it.”
She was still staring down at her plate.
“It’s bothering you,” I said.
“It’s just – she made it seem like he was some kind of weirdo or something. Because we were girls and all that. The way he used to watch us sometimes.”
None of this accorded with what I knew of Mr. Amherst. He’d been such a harmless man, with his timid anecdotes and jokes, his boyish deference to his wife. Toward Rita and Elena he’d always seemed to maintain a sort of self-deprecatory pride as if they were special things he couldn’t quite account for, didn’t quite understand.
“Did he ever do anything to you?” I said. “I mean, touch you or anything.”
“No. That’s just it. It wasn’t anything like that.”
She still wouldn’t look at me.
“It was like she was taking him away from me,” she said. “It was like he was all I had but she was taking that too.”
She had started to cry. I went over and took her plate from her, and because she crumpled a bit then, because I could feel her body giving in to me, I sat down beside her and put an arm around her.
“She’s just angry at him, that’s all,” I said. “She’s angry at him for dying.”
We sat for a few minutes without speaking while she cried. She had turned in to me slightly so her head was resting against my shoulder. At some point, without even quite being aware what I was doing, I leaned in and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
“Are you going to be all right?” I said finally.
“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes. “Sorry about that.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
The snow was still falling when she left. I watched from the corner window as she made fresh tracks in it on the sidewalk before disappearing in its swirl toward home. For the longest time after she’d gone I could still feel the impress of her body against mine, the heat of her skin against my lips.
I dreamt that night, for the first time in months, of my father. He appeared rising out of the pond in which he had drowned himself, dripping algae and weeds like some underworld god, at once himself and not, at once the particular gloom he had been in my life and something more elemental, more general, the force of all fathers in their haunting, larger-than-life peculiarness. Afterwards, awake in the night, I thought of Rita cradled against me and it broke my heart to think of this need in us, this endless procession of fathers we turned ourselves over to as if we huddled still in some primal dark, guided only by the animal sense of what could protect us, and what could hurt.
Once as children, Rita and I had crouched in silence behind a row of packing crates in the barn to hide from my father. We’d heard his footsteps coming up while we were playing, and had hid, with no other motive than the fear that he should find us there, being children. Rita couldn’t have been much more than three at the time and yet she had crouched beside me in perfect, almost unbreathing stillness, so feral had been the awareness of danger in her. We could see my father like an enemy through the slits in the packing crates, could feel the barest tremble of earth as his steps moved near, then away; and then he was gone. Afterwards, I’d wanted to hold Rita in my arms and take her fear from her, make it small. But instead with a ten-year-old’s diffidence I’d simply helped her up roughly from her place, and sent her home.