Two weeks was all it took when Eldon died. It was the spring of his seventy-eighth year. He’d had congestive heart failure for years, growing weaker and weaker as time went on, struggling to breathe, until he collapsed while eating breakfast one day. Caroline called the ambulance and followed in her car to the hospital. Day by day he failed, until all he did was sleep. Caroline sat at his bedside, watching the rise and fall of his sunken chest, holding her breath when he did, long seconds where she thought it was over, that she might be free to go home, until he gasped and started up again. On a few occasions he called out Becca’s name. Caroline leaned in close, whispering into his ear. “Do you know, Eldon? Do you know where she is?”
Eldon and Elvina had always known of Becca’s whereabouts and they kept it from Caroline like a pair of conspirators, even when she cried and begged them to tell her. It was Elvina who insisted they send Becca away; she was the one who came up with the plan and came over to pack Becca’s things. She told Caroline that Becca wanted nothing to do with her. And besides, the shame of Becca’s illegitimate child would tarnish their good name, Elvina said, so it was decided that the baby would be put up for adoption; Caroline’s first grandchild given away like an unwanted puppy and raised by complete strangers on the farthest edge of the country.
There was an aunt in Victoria, a sister of Elvina’s by the name of Irene, whom Caroline had never met. She guessed that’s where Becca was sent. Irene had escaped her hard-scrabble life on the farm by boarding a train in the twenties and riding it over the Rockies until she came to the ocean, settling there, never to return to the prairies. As far as Caroline knew, Irene had never married. With the help of a persistent telephone operator, she called every Farr in the book until a woman, who she could have sworn was Elvina — so similar was the haughty voice of Aunt Irene — answered the phone. No, Rebecca was not there, Irene told her each time she called. Caroline assumed Irene was lying to her, purposely keeping her from speaking to Becca on orders from Elvina, perhaps. She called for weeks, always getting the same denial, and finally Caroline screamed at the woman, demanding to speak to her daughter, but Irene refused. The next day, the number was disconnected, the new number unlisted, and she never spoke to Irene over the telephone again. But she always remembered Irene’s words before she last hung up the phone.
“Rebecca doesn’t want to speak to you. You’ve destroyed her life and she wants nothing to do with you. You’re dead to her. Now leave us alone.”
SARAH
On a Saturday morning in late August, Sarah swings by Sunny Haven to drop off the book she’s been carrying around. A few residents are already in the dining room, bibs on, waiting at the tables for breakfast while the aroma of coffee and toast hangs in the air.
“Hey, Mrs. B.,” Cara says as Sarah walks in. “You’re early this morning. I don’t think we even have your dad dressed yet.” She’s standing behind the front desk, plucking half-dead red roses out of a vase.
“That’s all right. It’s actually Caroline I’m here to see.”
Cara tosses the dripping flowers into a wastebasket and comes out from behind the desk. “Oh, about Caroline,” she says quietly. “She’s had a rough week; she’s been so restless, awake and calling out during the night. I think she’s started having nightmares, although she won’t say she is or she isn’t. You know her, all prim and proper, she thinks she’s being a bother if she complains about any little thing.”
“Has she had any changes to medication? That happened once to my father.”
Cara returns to the desk and flips the page on a chart. “Doesn’t look like it.”
As they make their way down the hall to Caroline’s room, Cara tells Sarah how disoriented Caroline seemed this morning. “She was barely awake, and possibly still dreaming, but she grabbed onto my hand and kept asking, ‘Where is she? Where has she gone?’ I’m worried about her. I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, but who else can I tell? You’re the only one who ever stops in to visit her, except for her lawyer those few times. There’s no one listed on her family contact info, either, although I gather she has a daughter somewhere.”
They walk on in silence, past a frail woman bent nearly in two, clutching the wall rail, making her way down the hall on her own. Tufts of white hair poke out from her pearly pink scalp and Sarah is reminded of a doll Toni once gave a haircut to.
“Do you think that’s who Mrs. Webb was calling for? The daughter?” Cara stops beside Caroline’s room. She is awake, sitting in her wheelchair, an afghan tucked over her lap. Across the hall, Sarah’s father is still in bed, the comforter pulled up under his chin. They medicate him for the night, Sarah knows, and she questions the necessity of the sleeping pills. “He’s still sleeping like a log,” Cara says, motioning to Sarah’s father. “I guess I’ll dress Simon first then I’ll come back and wake up your dad.”
When Sarah walks into Caroline’s room, the corners of Caroline’s mouth barely tilt up. She looks unwell; her skin has taken on an unhealthy pallor with grey-blue shadows beneath her eyes.
Sarah sits down on the bed and pulls the book from her purse. “I picked this out for you. Something you can read a story at a time, if you like.”
“Perhaps a new book will perk me up. I’ve just finished the romance novel someone left behind in the lounge. What a waste of eyesight it was! All those heaving bosoms.” Caroline looks pleased as she flips through the pages. “I love story collections. You can flip through, find one you like and read them in any order you please. And look at the size of these words! I won’t even need to use my reading glass.” She pauses, running her finger down the list of titles. “Have you read these? This one sounds interesting. My Mother’s Dream.”
“I’ve read so many of her short stories but I can’t say I remember that one.”
“With all the thoughts I’ve had swimming around in my mind, waking me up at all hours and keeping me awake, I could write such a story myself. I wonder if dreaming night after night about your dead mother is some sort of omen that you’re about to die.” Caroline pauses and looks at Sarah sharply. “You’ve never heard that, have you?” She lays the book on her lap. “If there’s one thing in abundance in this place it’s too much time to think. There was a time I believed I’d be happy to have no dishes to wash or meals to prepare, no socks to darn or floors to sweep, but it’s terrible, sitting here all day with nothing to do.”
“But at least you’re able to read and crochet, to understand what it is you’re listening to on TV. And you know you’re here, today, not living back in 1952.” Sarah glances across the hallway at her sleeping father.
“Oh, of course,” Caroline says gently. She sighs. “Yes, I should be thankful for the blessings I have. It’s just that I’ve been thinking about my mother so often these days and then dreaming about her at night. I could swear I saw her in my room last night, sitting right where you are. It’s as if she has a message for me, like there’s something she wants me to do.”
Sarah senses that something is wrong; she can almost feel Caroline’s agitation. “What could she possibly want you to do?”
Caroline plucks at a loose stitch on the afghan and loops it around her finger. “The same thing I’ve wanted all these years, I suppose. The only thing I have left to do on this earth. I need to find her.”
It’s Becca she’s talking about, not her mother. “You have no idea where she is, do you?”
Caroline gives Sarah a long look. “I haven’t known for forty years. It was Elvina and Eldon who sent her away. I believe she was in Victoria with Eldon’s aunt in the beginning. Elvina told me she had letters from Rebecca, but she’d never let me see them. She’d tell me a tidbit about her every now and then — where she was working or going to school. Finally, I decided I needed to see her for myself, so I went to B.C. to find her.” Caroline pauses and shrugs her thin shoulders. “But I never did. And then Elvina died and Eldon didn’t seem to care much one way or another where Becca might be, and I couldn’t blame him.
Why should he?” She pauses again. “I know she didn’t contact you in the first few years after she left but, later, did Becca ever try to get in touch with you?”
Sarah shakes her head. “I always hoped she might try to see me if she was home. I kept waiting for her to phone or send me a letter. But eventually I figured she must have heard about me and Jack, and after that I didn’t expect her to call. I knew things were over between Becca and me. Just like it was for us once Jack and I got together.”
They both sit in silence for a few moments and Sarah assumes Caroline, too, is remembering the afternoon she told Caroline she was dating Jack. They’d looked at each other sadly and Caroline reached across the table where she’d just laid out the tea things. She took Sarah’s hand. “I suppose this means the end of our visits, then.”
“I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but my loyalty has to lie with Jack.” It wouldn’t be easy to give up her visits with Caroline, who had been there when she needed guidance and advice.
“I understand. There are some mistakes that simply can’t be forgiven.” Caroline’s voice cracked.
Caroline finally breaks the long pause, bringing them both back to this moment. “Becca never came home. Not even once. I thought she might come when Elvina died, but Eldon phoned Irene to let her know, and he told me neither one of them was going to travel all the way from B.C. for a funeral. Irene had never been back to see Elvina while she was alive, why should she come now? And it was because of me, Eldon said, that Becca chose to stay away.”
Sarah moves off the bed, kneels at Caroline’s feet and takes hold of her hand, the skin so fragile it’s almost translucent; if she squeezes too hard Sarah thinks it will crack like a thin layer of spring ice. “I don’t understand. She was angry with you because you didn’t approve of her and Jack. But it wasn’t your decision to send her away. Why couldn’t she eventually forgive you?”
“Oh, she’d seen the ways Eldon could punish me,” Caroline says. “She was doing the same thing. Making me pay.”
But Sarah needs to understand. When Becca married and had children of her own, surely she would have forgiven her mother and wanted to see her again. “It doesn’t make sense that she would stay so angry with you. Especially as you and Eldon grew older, why wouldn’t she want to come home?”
“I … I can’t say,” Caroline falters, bowing her head, and a few moments pass by. Sarah senses there’s something Caroline’s not telling her and when Caroline looks up, she is crying, tears sliding down her cheeks.
Across the hall, Sarah sees Cara with her father, shoving one of his arms into the sleeve of a checkered shirt. She reaches for a tissue and presses it into Caroline’s hand. “I’ll just leave you now,” she says gently. “I see my father’s awake. Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”
Caroline reaches up with one bony hand and clutches Sarah’s jeans at the knee.
“Yes. Yes, there is something you can do. It’s your help I need. I want you to help me find my daughter.”
When the telephone rings at four in the morning, Sarah is immediately awake. Jason called before midnight, Allison was in labour, and about time, too; she was six days overdue. Jack grunts and rolls over, oblivious, so Sarah clambers over him and races to pick up the phone. It is Jason with wonderful news. They have another grandchild, a wee girl this time, healthy and strong, eight pounds, fourteen ounces, and twenty-one inches long. No name yet, but both baby and mother are fine.
Sarah looks in on Connor, asleep in Allison’s old room. One of the socks he insists on wearing to bed has worked its way off and Boo, Toni’s old bear, limp from too many spins in the washer, is wedged under his arm. Sarah kisses the bare little foot and pulls the quilt up from the foot of the bed.
A patch of moonlight is spilled on her side of the bed and she crawls back into it beside Jack. The window is open and there is a breeze; the blinds click against the casing like slow drips of rain. She tosses and turns, unable to sleep, thoughts of her own lost babies coming to mind. There were two in four years before Allison was born. She lost them both at the end of their first trimesters; the devastation she felt each time was immeasurable. Another miscarriage followed between Allison and Maeve and she started to believe her unwelcoming womb could only carry girls, that each swept-away baby must have been a boy. When she mentioned it to the doctor, she was told it was an old wives’ tale, that there was no scientific evidence to support such a theory. But Sarah had heard similar stories from other heartbroken women and she believed it was true.
Sarah is dreaming, warm plump fingers holding her hand, and she thinks it might be Jack’s boy, lost long ago. She’s searching her mind, names flitting through, but she can’t seem to find one that fits. When she opens her eyes, Connor is standing beside her, clasping her fingers with Boo tucked under his arm.
Later, as she’s pouring milk into Connor’s cereal, Jack comes in from outside, moving across the kitchen with wide, quick steps like he does when something’s gone wrong outside.
“Everything okay?” Sarah puts the carton back in the fridge while Jack rummages in the junk drawer next to the stove.
“Need a short bungee cord to close up the gate.”
Sarah frowns. “There’s nothing wrong with the gate.”
“The clasp is loose and it opens if you hit it just right.” He motions to Connor and lowers his voice. “I saw him get through it yesterday with Misty. It’s not safe for either of them to be out of the yard.” He explains that Shorty had just been over to tell him he’d found their new pup, just six months old, dead near the barn. Torn open from flank to tail.
“Bad enough it’s killing calves out in the pastures, now it’s cocky enough to come right into a yard. The pup didn’t even bark; Shorty and Lois never heard a thing.”
Connor’s picking soggy pink and yellow O’s from his spoon and lining them up on the table. They still have the fence around the house and Sarah has always been comfortable leaving Connor to play in his sandbox under the maples, although she had no idea he knew how to open the gate.
Jack pulls a speckled green cord from the back of the drawer. “Keep your eye on him. Don’t let him outside on his own.”
They decide to go to the hospital to see Allison and the new baby in an hour, after Jack changes the broken sickles on Anton’s swather. Sarah settles Connor with a colouring book and crayons, and brings her laptop to the kitchen table. She hesitates before typing Becca’s name into the box in the middle of the white screen and hitting images. Immediately it flashes rows of faces, dozens of women named Rebecca Webb, although at first glance most are too young to be the Becca she’s looking for. After scrolling through a few sites, she realizes she needs an account to search some of them so she opens Facebook instead and searches for Becca’s name, studying all the faces of the Rebeccas she finds there. She returns to the search engine and clicks on some of the links, reading obituaries and various articles from as far away as Australia. It occurs to her Becca might have a different surname, if she ever married — few young women kept their maiden names back in those days — so she gives up and turns her attention to a search for the baby. There’s a massive amount of information on adoption, pages and pages. She discovers limitations on who can request such personal information and she is overwhelmed at the complexity of the problem. This promise she’s made to Caroline is going to be next to impossible to keep.
* * *
The elevator doors slide open on the third floor and a nurse asks Connor, who is holding a helium-filled foil balloon, if he’s here to visit a new brother or sister.
Connor just stands and stares, tongue-tied, although he chattered all the way to town from the back seat, listing all the toys he was going to share with his new baby sister. They pass through the double doors into the ward and pause first to look through the nursery windows, but there are no babies there. When they arrive at Allison’s room, they find Jason dozing in a chair and Allison holding her diaper-clad baby against her bare chest
. Skin to skin, they call it, a new concept they’ve come up with since Sarah’s girls were born. In those days, she was shown how to swaddle them properly, rolling them up snug and tight, and keeping them that way.
Allison has the blissful, lazy look of a mother drunk on love for her child but her eyes light up when she sees Connor. She shifts a little, patting the bed, and Jack lifts Connor up for a look. The baby has jet-black hair and, although Jack says it’s too early to tell, Sarah thinks she looks like Allison. She has the same pretty ears, delicately shaped and flat to her head.
“What have you decided to call her?” Sarah asks.
“Emma Dawn,” Allison says, stroking the baby’s soft cheek. “Isn’t that just perfect for her? And isn’t she the most precious little girl you’ve ever seen?”
As precious as you and your sisters, Sarah thinks. She remembers gazing down at her own newborn daughters, thinking each of them the most beautiful baby in the world.
“Do you want to hold her?” Allison pulls the sleeping Emma away from her chest and Sarah nestles her in the crook of her own arm. Emma’s tiny eyelids quiver, her mouth round and puckered as a bellybutton. Jack looks over Sarah’s shoulder, his arm circling her waist.
* * *
In the truck on the way home, Jack is in such high spirits Sarah decides to tell him about her recent visits with Caroline. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road but Sarah notices his jaw tighten when she says Caroline’s name.
A Strange Kind of Comfort Page 25