She suspected he was still drinking. She could hear the sound of ice in a glass. She didn’t know what to say. Was the separation a good or a bad thing?
He made it clear that it was bad.
“I’m losing my girls, Estella. All three of them. Four, if you count the dog. I’m losing everything. I’m supposed to drive back to Calgary alone. How am I going to do that? Get back in my car and leave my girls behind? I don’t think I can do it. She claims it’s a trial separation, just until the end of August, but I don’t believe she’s planning to come back to Calgary at all. She’ll stay, and the girls will go to a new school, and if I’m lucky I’ll see them a few times a year. They’ll forget me.”
He broke down. She heard a sob, then a catch as he tried to hold back another. A pause and then, “Hannah, she’s the one I worry about the most. She’s at that age. She’s very vulnerable. Marie doesn’t seem to understand how vulnerable she is.”
This is dreadful, Estella thought. She sat up in her chair and tried to muster whatever capacity she had left to say something useful. Old people were supposed to be wise. What wisdom did she have?
“Nicholas,” she said, “this is very difficult, I know, but you have to pull yourself together. For your girls.”
She was surprised by her voice, the authority in it. It was her old teacher voice. But she’d said nothing of substance. Pull yourself together. What did that mean? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that sounds inadequate as far as advice goes, but truly, unless you’re on death’s door, it will get better. The pain is temporary.”
“How did I not see this coming?” he said. “I’ll tell you how big a fool you’re talking to. I thought we were happy. How could I have been so wrong about that?”
“Maybe you weren’t wrong,” Estella said.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure I was, but here, you tell me. Two weeks ago, Paris’s sixth birthday. The poor kid’s party had to be cancelled at the last minute because of an outbreak of measles at school, but she was a trooper. She said she’d just as soon go to a movie as long as we bought her a really good present to make up for the missed party, so the four of us got in the car and went to the movie she picked, some superhero cartoon. And what are the odds, it turned out the whole mall had been shut down because of a gas leak. Again, she said she didn’t care, why didn’t we pick up McDonald’s and have a picnic in the park? So we went to McDonald’s and got Big Macs and fries at the drive-through, and we went to the river, and we’d no sooner found a picnic table than the sky opened up. We ended up eating our McDonald’s in a car in the parking lot, the rain coming down so hard you couldn’t see out the windshield. Poor, poor Paris, I thought. How could so many things go wrong on one kid’s birthday? And then Paris held up a soggy french fry and stuffed it in her mouth and said, ‘This has been the best birthday ever!’ Marie burst out laughing, and then Hannah, and me, and we were the Swiss Family Robinson. Lost maybe, but happy. And Paris looked so damned adorable in her purple tutu.
“So yes, anyone watching from outside the car would have thought we were happy. But we weren’t, apparently, because Hannah told me so. When I went to her room later to say good night, she was lying in the dark with only her night light on, and I said, ‘Wasn’t that great that we managed to have such a good day when everything went wrong?’ and Hannah said it wasn’t a good day, it was a shitty day, and don’t pretend I hadn’t noticed that she’d faked it for Paris’s sake. And then I thought, maybe Marie faked it too. And Paris, maybe even Paris faked it, and I was the only one stupid enough to think we’d had fun. And I wondered, what else don’t I know? Hannah’s night light, for one thing. Why would an eleven-year-old choose a night light the shape of a human skull out of all the others on the store shelf? Why not a crescent moon, or a banana, or a kitten smiling like the Cheshire Cat? Why had there been no talking her out of that skull?”
Estella tried to picture the night light. It sounded like a Hallowe’en decoration. She could hear Nicholas refilling his glass, and the sound of ice clinking. She wanted to tell him to stop, put the bottle away, pour it down the sink, but he began to talk again.
“After that, I took the dog for a walk. It was still raining, and while we were walking the power went out. I knew the whole neighbourhood was down because I couldn’t see any big-screen TVs through the neighbours’ windows. Total blackout. Just a few solar garden lights. I decided to head for home because I thought the kids might be scared. I knew there was a flashlight somewhere. Marie would know where it was, I thought, Marie knows everything. And then I thought, Marie probably knows what my future is, too, and she just hasn’t told me yet.
“The house was dark when I got home. I found a towel and dried the dog off and stripped out of my wet clothes and wrapped myself in the same towel. I smelled like a wet dog. Then I went looking for a flashlight and I found one in a kitchen drawer, a mini-light on a key ring, but at least I could walk around the house with it.
“I found Marie in Paris’s room. Paris was asleep and Marie was on the floor next to the bed, and she did have a proper flashlight, but she had it switched off and was sitting in the dark. Her back was against the bed and she had Paris’s tutu in her hands and she was caressing it, as though she had Paris in her lap, sleeping. I switched off my light because I couldn’t stand to look. I stood there in the dark until Marie said, ‘What are we doing?’ I told her that I didn’t know, but that if she did, maybe it was time she told me. She started to cry and said that guilt was killing her, knowing that she would never again have my respect. It would have been easier, she said, if I hadn’t so readily forgiven her. You can guess what she’d done—an affair, of course, so predictable—but it had been months before and I had forgiven her. But I hated her for saying that about the guilt killing her, as though she was the one who deserved sympathy. And then she said she had a plan, and she and the girls would spend the summer in Winnipeg. I found out the next day that she was already packed. She had packed before she bothered to tell me.”
He stopped talking, and Estella heard the rhythmic clinking of ice again. Then he swore, as though he’d spilled his drink, or splashed it on the arm of his chair.
“Nicholas,” she said, “put the glass down. Put it down right now. You’re drunk, and that’s not doing you any good. I’m not going to say anything more as long as you have that drink in your hand.”
He told her that he was setting it down. It grew quiet on his end of the line.
“All right, then.” She took a breath and said, “I don’t know you and Marie. I don’t know what to say about your future or what you should do. But I do know this: if you live long enough, you’ll survive the loss of almost everyone, and then you’ll know the meaning of the word loss.”
The minute she said it, she regretted it. She was talking about herself, feeling sorry for herself, and what good would that do a young man who was in the midst of his own family crisis? She had probably just made it worse. She was suddenly so tired. She was an old woman. What could she possibly say that would help?
“Nicholas,” she said, “I’m afraid I have to go now.”
He apologized for calling her then, for having had too many drinks, for burdening her with his problems. He said good night and hung up.
She sat with the phone in her hand and thought, At one time I was a smart woman.
She turned off the TV and the lights, and at that moment a car pulled up out front. It was that boyfriend, Kayla’s daughter’s, and a terrible racket started. Car doors slamming, shouting, a fight, the girl’s high-pitched voice. She couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the boyfriend was shouting, “Fuck you, then. Fuck you!”
Estella went to the window and drew back the curtains just in time to see Kayla come running out with a broom as though she were about to break up a dogfight, and she chased the boyfriend down the sidewalk with it. Then she grabbed her daughter by the arm and dragged her into the house. The boyfriend looked toward Estella’s window, and she quickly let the curtains
fall together.
She heard the car drive off, tires squealing on the pavement.
Nothing like that ever happened on this block in the old days, she thought, barring the night she’d broken up with Clarence Angell under the street lamp.
She went upstairs to get ready for bed, hoping the boyfriend wasn’t in a gang. When she switched on the bathroom light, she saw that Emyflor had everything polished to a shine. There was a grab bar screwed to the rim of the bathtub now—Emyflor’s idea—and Estella didn’t know how she’d ever got in and out of the tub without it. As she brushed her teeth, she wondered if Nicholas would phone again in a few days to let her know he was back in Calgary, or whether she had given him such pointless advice that she would never hear from him again.
She spat in the sink and then looked in the mirror and thought what a constant surprise it was to see such an old woman staring back.
SHE WOKE UP when it was barely light thinking she could hear singing in the hallway outside her bedroom door. It was the train porter. He had a tenor voice, clear and melodious. He was singing “Blueberry Hill.”
She got up and looked but there was no one there, so she padded back across the hardwood floor in her bare feet and slipped into bed again. She must have been dreaming. She sometimes couldn’t tell the difference.
Eugene, that was his name. How had she managed to remember after all these years when she often forgot what day of the week it was? He had not been important in her life, although losing your virginity to a train porter when you were past thirty, practically under the nose of your family, had to be at least notable. The “night of the porter” was one of those memories that had lately popped into her head out of nowhere and seemed not to be clouded by time. It was as though moments of her life were happening all over again, and all at once, and she found herself wondering what kind of life Eugene had had, and whether he’d become a psychologist or had continued working for the railroad. She had known him for all of a few hours and she and Eugene had never been a possibility, but still she wondered what had become of him.
She dozed off, and when she woke up for the second time she didn’t know where she was. She lay in bed listening to the murmurs of people talking—a doctor and a nurse, perhaps—and thinking the worst must have happened, that she’d had some kind of fall or illness and Lydia had moved her to a home, and not a very good one, at that. She stared at a strip of wallpaper that appeared to be peeling from the top where it met the ceiling. What an ugly choice of wallpaper, and what a disgrace that it was in such bad condition.
But where exactly was she? It didn’t look like a nursing home. Those places were painted pale-green or beige, like hospital rooms. They had easy-to-mop floors, not hardwood and area rugs, and blinds rather than curtains. This appeared to be a room in an old house. The window had proper drapes, although they were dated.
Those drapes look familiar, she thought.
The voices in the hall started up again and she realized they were talking about the Diamonds, saying things that weren’t true: that Oliver Diamond had stolen the brick plant from the Texan, Nathaniel Thick, killed him really, because he’d committed suicide in the end. And Estella Diamond. What had she been thinking when she tore the family apart with that talk of a lawsuit?
Estella Diamond.
That was her.
A woman’s voice: Estella was not as lily-white as everyone thought, you know. Clarence Angell knew what she was like, but he would have had her as a wife anyway. He bought her an expensive ring and she threw it in his face. That’s how high and mighty Estella was, that she thought she could do better than Clarence Angell.
Is that so? Estella thought, and she sat up and threw back the covers, feeling more than a little indignant. She marched to the door and opened it, but when she looked out she saw that no one was there. She stared into the hallway and thought it looked just like her own house. The same chiffonier against the wall across from the bathroom, the one that held the tablecloths and napkins. The bathroom door in the same place, and the other doors, three of them, that led to the bedrooms: her parents’ room and the other two her brothers had shared. The window at the end of the hallway that looked out over the backyard.
It was her house.
She did not know how the people talking could have disappeared so quickly. She did not know how they could have got inside.
There was only one answer.
They had not been there.
She felt tremendous relief that Lydia hadn’t stuck her in some dreadful home, and at the same time she feared that she was finally losing her mind altogether.
She went back to bed and lay down again, and as her head cleared, she slowly began to recognize things in the room: a watercolour painting that she herself had done, the dressing table she had moved from her parents’ room, the curtains on the window that she had chosen in a drapery shop. No wonder they had looked familiar.
My bedroom, she thought, that’s where I am, and her eye returned to the painting, which was not very good, and then the wallpaper, the tiny green leaves on a cream background that had finally replaced the sea of pink she’d disliked so much. It was time to paper again, she thought. She could do it herself, with Emyflor’s help. She lay in bed for fifteen minutes before she sat up again, and she wondered whether her legs would hold her, but they felt fine. There was a mirror on the dresser, and when she looked she knew it was her looking back, Estella Diamond, and there was not much wrong with her except that she was old.
Her bedside clock told her it was only 5:30. She remembered that this was the day Lydia was picking her up for their trip to Lake Claire, and she had another moment of confusion when she looked around her room and she did not see her bag packed and waiting. Perhaps she had taken it downstairs already, but she didn’t remember doing that. She kept a little calendar on her bedside table—the one the bank sent her every year at Christmas—and each morning she crossed off the day. There it was, the last Thursday in June with an X through it, so today was the Friday before the long weekend, the day they had planned to travel to the lake. She picked up the pen beside the calendar and crossed off Friday. Then she got up and looked in the closet, and there was her suitcase. She knew right away when she picked it up that it was empty, but she lifted it to the bed anyway and opened it, just to be sure. Not a thing inside, not even a bobby pin, because she was always very particular about cleaning it out after every trip.
She began to throw things in the suitcase. She didn’t need to think about what she was taking because she took the same things every year: shorts, trousers, a velour track suit, assorted T-shirts, underwear and socks, a flannel nightgown because it was always cool at night, a heavy sweater, her walking sandals, and her Tilley hat. She would have liked to have included a second track suit—the nice dark-green one with the little stars down the seams of the pants—but she was conscious of keeping the weight of her bag down. From the bathroom she retrieved her bottle of Aspirin and her Tums and she added them to the suitcase. Then she laid her watercolour supplies on top, all neatly contained in a wooden box. She used them only once a year to paint a Lake Claire sunset or perhaps a forest scene. She’d taken up watercolour painting again when she closed the factory and realized she needed a hobby, but she was still no artist.
Back to the bathroom for her toiletry bag. Sunscreen, deodorant, face cream, toothbrush. She packed the bag and zipped it up.
A bathing suit, she thought, just in case. She hadn’t worn a bathing suit in years but she always took one along. She went on a search of her dresser drawers and found her purple one-piece with the slimming panel. A bit of bright yellow caught her eye at the bottom of the drawer, and when she pushed a stack of obsolete T-shirts out of the way, there was the Mondrian two-piece. It had held its colour and the fabric was still good, but the elastic was shot. She studied the gaping waistband and wondered if it was beyond repair. She remembered buying the suit, and how she had loved the colours. She laid it on top of the dresser, not quite abl
e to throw it out, and packed the purple suit.
When she couldn’t think of anything she’d missed, she washed and dressed and brushed her hair, and then she made her way downstairs, lifting and resting her suitcase with each step until she reached the bottom. She checked the time and was surprised to see that it was still only 7:30. After draping her rain jacket over her suitcase, she went to the kitchen to have a bite of breakfast. Lydia never arrived before 10:00, so she’d lost no time by forgetting to pack. Last year it had been noon before they’d got away. She hoped Lydia would remember to bring the cooler with the groceries in it. One year they’d packed it at Estella’s and then Lydia had forgotten it on the front porch, and they’d arrived home to a cooler full of rotten produce and pork chops with a crow sitting on top as though it were guarding a cache. Lydia had blamed Estella, of course. Estella had thrown the whole thing out without opening it.
After breakfast, Estella took her coffee outside and sat in the wicker chair. Kayla was already in her yard in her gardening gloves and she waved at Estella.
“You’re up early,” she called. No sign of upset over the daughter’s boyfriend the night before last, when she’d chased him away with a broom.
“Off to the lake,” Estella said, as though this was another year like all the others and there were many more to come.
“Oh,” Kayla said, sounding surprised. “I’ll keep my eye on the house, if you like.”
“Not necessary,” Estella said. “It’s just a few days. Emyflor will be looking after the house.” Then she lied and said Emyflor would be staying overnight. She didn’t want that boyfriend finding out the house was empty.
“I hope you have a nice time,” Kayla said.
She approached the fence separating their yards and said, “No need to worry about this now, but we were wondering . . . my husband and I . . . if we might trim the branches on your apple tree for you.” She pointed to the branch that was hanging over their side of the fence. “It’s creating a lot of shade. The flower bed on our side doesn’t get much sun. But like I said, no need to decide now. Just think about it. It’s not the right time anyway. In the fall, after the sap is down.”
The Diamond House Page 26