A Strange Kind of Comfort

by Gaylene Dutchyshen

  Caroline doesn’t remember Sarah turning off the light or maybe a black cloud’s crossed in front of the sun but her room’s suddenly as dark as a chapel with a single flickering flame. Sarah has a dull knife in her hand and she’s saluting the air, chanting in a voice barely above a whisper.

  “I release you beyond the mountains, beyond the seas.” Strange words.

  “I release you where people do not walk, where roosters do not crow, where the wind does not blow.” Not godly at all.

  “Do not drink red blood, dehydrate a white body, or strip a yellow bone.” Blood and bones.

  Sarah’s face is as smooth and relaxed as someone asleep, her motions trancelike, practised, although she says she’s never done this before. She places the bowl on the desk and takes up the cup she only minutes ago held over the flame. The wax slides easily from the cup into the water and Sarah leans in close for a look.

  Caroline catches her breath as she feels an unexpected pressure, a slow lean against the back of her heart. It lets up in the time it takes her to swallow another lungful of air then pushes again, harder this time, behind her left breast, and she pictures her pulsing heart shattering like a china cup. She lifts her hand to her chest and takes another deep breath, and the walls in her room start to spin, the crushing weight bearing down even more. She wonders if she’s having a heart attack. If only she could stand up, take a brisk walk, and get the blood pumping to where it is needed.

  “Caroline, are you all right?” Sarah is saying, crouching down in front of her chair.

  Caroline feels a hot wind roar in her ears, which she knows is beyond the realm of possibility, just as she knows her mother is not really here, but she sees her right there, sitting on the bed like a prim lady in church, and a fleeting thought slips into her mind: Is she here, now, to lead me away?

  Sarah again. Hovering over her. “Should I call the nurse?”

  “No, no, don’t.” The pressure is easing up, the tight belt around her heart slowly releasing. “I’ll be fine in a moment.” She’s grounded again, back in her everyday room, and, when she looks over, her mother is gone.

  “Could you hand me that glass of water?” she asks, and Sarah passes it over.

  When Caroline moves to give the glass back, Sarah is staring into the enamel bowl with a perplexed look on her face.

  “What happens now?” Caroline asks, peering up at her.

  “I have to tell you what I see.”

  “And?”

  “There are two shapes. One looks like a tree.” Sarah frowns. “But the other … I don’t know … it’s just a jagged lump. They both seem familiar, somehow, but there’s something I’m not seeing. It’s like a piece of the puzzle is missing.”

  Caroline’s heart flips in the quick way it used to when she thought Eldon might catch her in a lie. There is a missing piece, and it’s the secret she’s hidden all these years. Hadn’t Alice once said that secrets are impossible to contain forever? Like dandelion fluff, apt to drift away on a light wind to settle and bloom into someone else’s truth.

  “There’s something I need to tell you about that last day. About Becca,” Caroline says. The time has come. The Bilyks have the right to know that Becca is one of their own.

  Caroline’s voice cracks when she says her daughter’s name. “She was in such a state that day, pleading with me to understand. Didn’t I know what it felt like to be in love?” Caroline looks down, picks at a bit of loose skin at the base of a nail. “Of course I knew about love. I loved her father desperately.”

  There’s a soft tap at the door and Addie looks in but Sarah waves her away. “Becca was furious with me. She didn’t understand why I disapproved of Jack so strongly. She knew about Eldon’s opinion of the Bilyks but she couldn’t understand why I would be so opposed to a romance between them; she expected me to take her side against her father. She was carrying on in the kitchen that day, throwing cups from the cupboard and smashing them on the floor, insisting she would run off and marry Jack and there was nothing we could do. I told her it was impossible, she simply could not have anything more to do with this particular boy.”

  “Why? What did you have against Jack?”

  “It wasn’t Jack. It was something I’d done that Becca was being made to pay for. But I wouldn’t change a minute of it.” Tears flow freely down Caroline’s cheeks and she makes no effort to brush them away.

  The digital number flips on the clock; the usual sounds from the hallway beyond Caroline’s door are muted by a spell that seems to have fallen over the room.

  “Becca was hysterical so I slapped her.” She looks at Sarah, her eyes begging forgiveness. “I swear, before that day, I’d never lifted a hand to her. Becca was so shocked, she stumbled back, holding the palm of one hand against her face. She sank to the floor, sobbing, then looked up and told me there might be a baby. She was late by six weeks, but, like any young girl, she didn’t want to believe it. She’d already told Jack and he said they had no other choice but to get married. I couldn’t believe it.” Caroline wrings her hands. “I had planned to keep the secret from her for as long as I lived. What sense would there be in telling her? I thought she’d soon leave for the city, be as happy as I’d been to get away from the farm. She would make new friends. Meet someone else and forget about Jack. But I was so shocked when she told me about the baby, I blurted it out. I told her … that Jack was her cousin.”

  Caroline holds her hand over her mouth, stifling a cry. She is remembering Becca’s shocked face when she told her.

  “Her cousin?” Sarah says, still seeming confused.

  “Her father was Jack’s uncle,” Caroline says quietly. “Nick.” She covers her face with her hands. “I wasn’t able tell her how pure our love was, nothing at all like what she must have been thinking. She pushed me with all her might, called me every vile name you can think of. Told me she hated me. Then she ran off, and it wasn’t until later, when Elvina showed up, that I knew Becca didn’t even want to say goodbye. She never wanted to see me again. And I could hardly blame her. I turned the whole truth of her life on its head.”

  In the hallway, the wheels of a cart clatter by as an aide pushes it from room to room, handing out fresh pitchers of water.

  There. It’s done. I’m finally free of it.

  “So Eldon found out Becca wasn’t his child,” Sarah says.

  “I hoped he never would — Becca and I could have kept it between us if only I’d had time to explain — but she ran out. She must have gone straight to Eldon and told him. I stayed in the house the rest of that day, thinking eventually she’d cry herself out and come back. Eldon didn’t show up for supper either, but he came back just before dark. I was in my sewing room, keeping my hands busy, hemming a skirt. He grabbed me, picked up my shears from the sewing table and hacked off my hair. Threw it in clumps on the floor. Then he held the scissors against my throat — I thought he would kill me. He knew it all. About Nick. That Becca wasn’t his own daughter. And about Becca’s baby. I wasn’t fit to call myself a mother, he said, and he was sending Becca away. Then the next day, Jack showed up and told us he was prepared to marry her. Eldon pulled out his gun, told him he’d never see Becca again either.”

  Silence fills the room.

  “He punished me every day for the rest of his life,” Caroline finally says.

  “How did you —?”

  “Stay? Survive?” Caroline shakes her head. “What choice did I have? I had nowhere to go. And besides, every letter that came, every packet of mail, I was sure one day I’d find something from her. For the first few years, every time the phone rang, I raced for it, hoping I’d hear her voice. I stayed because I wanted to be there in the kitchen when she came through the door, to hug her, to hold her tight, to tell her I was so sorry.”

  Caroline is exhausted. She can scarcely speak. “That’s all I really want. I want her to come home so I can explain. I want the chance to earn her forgiveness.”

  SARAH

  It’s so
mething Sarah’s always wanted, too. An explanation and a chance to forgive her mother. She’s resented her all these years and she wants to be rid of the anger. Why would a child leave forever? Why would a mother? There is nothing that would ever keep Sarah from her daughters. No mistake or choice they could make would ever change or diminish her love for them. She could never leave them. It goes against nature for a child to forsake her mother just as it does for a mother to abandon her child. With the exception of abuse or neglect, no fight should be enough to sever those ties, no disagreement too great to not make amends. Why did her own mother leave and never come back? Why would Becca?

  Sarah takes another look at the wax shapes … and it is suddenly obvious. A place so familiar, she can’t believe she didn’t recognize it right away. Her tree near the river. A place that connects them both. The Bilyks and the Webbs.

  But what of the jagged lump?

  Impressions are flitting through her mind like frightened birds as she studies the second shape more closely. She’s always wondered about Becca’s sudden disappearance. Why did she leave without saying goodbye to her or contacting Jack — if she loved him so much — with a message?

  She picks up the rough piece and holds it on the tips of her fingers. There is a small marking like an irregular cross on its face. Jagged. Smooth. Limestone. Granite. Fist-sized or boulders. Churned up out of the earth then cast aside in a pile beneath the elm tree.

  And a thought, one that may have always been there, folded tight and stitched loosely to a dark corner of her mind, takes shape.

  What if Becca never left at all?

  It’s a perfect harvest day, the kind you might find on a picture in one of those calendars that grocery stores once gave away. Wispy white clouds like pulled-apart puffs of cotton stretch across a clear blue sky. Golden heads of wheat rattle in an autumn wind. Shorty is on his backhoe, the huge roaring machine grappling with the biggest boulders and setting them aside. He picks off the smaller rocks, one at a time, more and more carefully as he gets closer to the bottom. Once the earth is bare, he lowers the blade and tips it, removing slices of dirt. Sarah stands beside Jack, leaning into the hollow beneath his shoulder. She thinks she can hear the beat of his heart.

  Shorty continues probing, moving slowly along, removing scant bites of earth until they see a strip of tattered cloth. Jack jerks up his hand and stills it against the sky. Shorty stops and climbs out of the backhoe. Jack picks up his shovel and begins to dig, slowly, taking care with every scoop until he unearths the truth: yellowed bones, long and tapered. A human skull.

  Shorty walks back to the house to call the RCMP.

  “All this time, she was here.” Jack shakes his head. “It’s no wonder he never wanted us to knock the tree down and bury the stone pile. He couldn’t take the chance we might find her. The old bastard must have used a tractor to knock the rocks off on his side of the pile. Once he cleared them away, he dug a shallow grave. Laid her in it and covered her up then loaded the rocks back into the bucket and piled them back on. No one would ever think someone was buried here.”

  Sarah is quiet, overwhelmed by the extent of the cover-up. “Caroline told me he was out late that night,” she finally says. “Came in raging, piling all the blame for Becca leaving on her. And here he’d been, hiding his own tracks, while his mother came and packed up Becca’s clothes then went home to dream up a story real enough for everyone to believe.”

  “And he kept on piling,” Jack’s voice cracks. “More and more stones weighing her down.”

  Only three living souls had known Becca was dead and they all went to their graves with the secret. Sarah is struck with the pains Elvina took to conceal the truth. She’d involved her sister, Irene, in her scheme, each of them deceiving Caroline, making her believe it was her fault Becca had gone away. What had compelled Elvina to do it? Was it the public shame of Caroline’s secret being revealed, as Caroline was led to believe, or Eldon’s guilt of his crime? Would any mother do the same to protect her child? Would she?

  * * *

  Later, when Sarah tells Caroline they’ve found Becca’s body, her face seems to crack in two. Her mouth falls open. “She can’t have been dead all these years!” she cries.

  “I’m so sorry, Caroline.” Sarah gets down on her knees and puts her arms around Caroline’s fragile shoulders. She feels the old woman quake as the truth takes hold and she starts to sob.

  Tears trail down Sarah’s cheeks, too. Caroline needs time to mourn. All those lost years, Caroline believed Becca was alive and too angry with her to come home. Sarah’s thought the same about her own mother except she’s been the one holding on to the anger, blaming her mother for staying away. She never considered that maybe her mother wanted to come back but someone or something kept her from it. Maybe Mom died alone, long ago, too.

  “You’re absolutely sure?” Caroline is saying and Sarah leans back to sit on her heels. “The police are sure it’s Becca’s body you found?”

  “They’ll want a DNA sample from you, just to confirm it.”

  Minutes go by before Caroline pulls a tissue from her sleeve and dabs her eyes. “It’s my fault. If only she hadn’t found out Nick was her father, she’d be alive. I should have followed her out and told Eldon myself. He could have killed me instead.”

  “It must have been an accident,” Sarah insists, still unable to believe the gall of Eldon and his mother, pretending all those years Becca was really alive. No one, not even her own mother, considered Becca a missing person when Eldon and Elvina claimed she was living on the other side of the country. “Eldon could have gone to the police and explained.”

  “That wasn’t likely to happen. The whole sordid story would have come out and Elvina couldn’t let that happen. The Webb name and status meant more to her than all her money and that fancy new house. She’d come from nothing and couldn’t tarnish a reputation she’d spent her whole lifetime creating.”

  “So you think Eldon killed her intentionally?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Caroline said. “Eldon had a hair-trigger temper; she surely set it off when she told him she wasn’t his child. He would have flown into a rage, as he often did with me, although he’d never hit Becca before. He could have struck her, knocked her flat on the ground. She’d have meant no more to him at that moment than a stray dog.

  “I have no doubt in my mind he would have killed Nick, and me, too, had he ever found out about us. He was the kind of man who would do that. Eldon could never be bested by anyone, even in the smallest way. He always had to keep the upper hand. Who’s to say he didn’t choke the life out of her? He might have done it to take it out on me. It’s the ultimate punishment for a mother, isn’t it? Taking away her child?”

  Sarah can’t even contemplate that despicable possibility.

  “In any event, their cover-up kept me right where Eldon wanted me. When he asked me to marry him, he said he was going to keep me forever. He told me I could never leave him. But I would have if I’d known Becca was dead, and he knew that. He was my jailer and hope was my prison. Like always, Eldon got what he wanted.”

  The small funeral and subsequent interment is held at St. Michael’s. At Caroline’s request, Becca is laid to rest in the Bilyk plot beside her father.

  While the priest gives the closing prayer and blesses the casket for the last time, Sarah offers Caroline another tissue. She looks up from under the veil of her black hat, her eyes red-rimmed.

  “Are you okay?” Sarah asks, concerned about the way Caroline is slumped down in the wheelchair, the weight of this day more than she can bear.

  “I will be,” Caroline says. “Once this is over.”

  Addie comes up and leans down to give Caroline a hug. “She looks so tired,” she says to Sarah. “I think I should just take her back.” There’s a luncheon planned for the few guests at Sarah and Jack’s house, and Sarah agrees there’s no need for Caroline to come.

  “The last weeks have been just too much for her,
processing all that’s happened and then insisting on helping with the arrangements,” Sarah says quietly. After the forensic analysis of Becca’s remains, they learned the back of her skull had sustained blunt force trauma, the cause undetermined. Sarah and Addie help Caroline into the waiting van while the cars slowly leave and everyone heads back to the farm.

  Jack lingers beside the grave. Sarah comes up and puts her hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s not only Becca lying here,” Jack says. “My child died that day, too.”

  “I know.” Sarah hugs him. “I’m so sorry. We have to mourn for him, too.”

  “You said him,” Jack says, stepping back and looking down at her. “I’ve always felt it was a son I lost, but you’ve never said it before.”

  “All these years, in my mind, a little boy’s grown up ahead of our girls. He looks like you, with the same stubborn lift to his chin. I thought about him when each of the girls was born. When I lost the others.” Her voice wavers. “At every special occasion, there he was.”

  “I always thought losing him was punishment for getting fooled by Becca and going along with it when she offered herself up when all along it was you I really wanted. I’m so sorry for that. I’ll regret it till the day I die.”

  She steps back and gazes up at him. “At least now we know there never was a baby born and given away, but if there had been, I know I would have loved him. Because he was yours.”

  Jack touches the soft pad of her cheek with a rough finger. “I know it,” he says.

  In the distance, combines growl in the fields, gathering up the grain, the end of another cycle like all of the others. It’s the pattern of their lives, this ebb and flow of seasons.

  “I need you to know something, Sarah,” he finally says. “You’ve been the best wife I could have ever asked for. I know that everything you’ve ever done, you’ve done for me and the girls.”