The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  From where she was sitting on the deck, she could see the little dent in the fender of the Taurus. There was an old-fashioned pay phone in front of the office, or at least there had been one last time she noticed, and she decided to phone the police while it was on her mind. The pay phone was still there, but of course the person who answered asked for her plate number, which she didn’t know, and her name and driver’s licence number, and she had to explain that she didn’t have a driver’s licence but she had not been the one driving. It took ages to finally get to the story, and she gave them Nicholas’s name and said no, she didn’t have his licence number either. She said the damage wasn’t much, not more than a small dent, but that wasn’t the point of her call. It was the idea that the other driver had left without stopping. And he was a public figure, too, a TV personality. From the response she got after that, she figured there wouldn’t be any follow-up.

  When she got back to the cottage deck, she saw Peter cross the grass wearing his shorts and white socks and running shoes. His bush trail to the point was so narrow that you might not see it if you didn’t know it was there, and he stepped into the trees and was immediately out of sight. He almost looked like Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit disappearing in his white socks. She wondered how long it would be before he emerged again, or whether he would come back across the bay in his canoe.

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat on the deck, but it must have been well over an hour before she saw Hannah and Nicholas coming up from the beach carrying shopping bags. They’d both bought bathing suits at Dot’s because they didn’t have suits with them. Hannah showed Estella hers, an orange bikini, and Estella was a bit taken aback at how little of it there was. Both Hannah and Nicholas had bought T-shirts with “Lake Claire” on them, and they’d bought one for her, too. It was likely a redundant present, Nicholas said, since she was sure to have a dozen of them.

  No, Estella said, she didn’t, not one; in all her years of coming here, she had never once bought a souvenir T-shirt. She held it up and examined the picture printed behind the letters on the white cotton: the lake and the paddlewheeler at sunset. They all pulled their T-shirts on over their clothes, and then Nicholas lit the charcoal barbecue and cooked a chicken. They ate chicken and potato salad at the chrome set in the cottage in their matching T-shirts, on the mismatched plates with their chipped rims and faded blue windmills. The chicken was delicious. Estella was surprised that Nicholas was such a good cook, although she wasn’t sure why that should have surprised her, perhaps just because Jack wasn’t.

  Through the window, she saw a canoe out in the bay, coming from the point. It was Peter. Before long he came up from the beach with the canoe balanced on his shoulders, his head underneath somewhere. He could still manage it at his age.

  “That’s Peter Boone under there,” she said.

  The canoe passed by the window and then was gone around the corner.

  By the time they’d finished supper and had the dishes done, it was getting dark. Hannah and Nicholas went for a swim and Estella could hear them laughing through the trees. She got herself ready for bed and she was under the covers before they came back. It was comforting to hear them speaking quietly in the other room. She thought they were making tea.

  After they went to bed, she could hear Peter’s music drifting faintly from the marina. She fell asleep to the sound of it.

  IT WAS ALL reassuringly familiar in the morning light. The varnished plywood walls of the room, the frosted-glass light shade above the bed, the open closet where she’d hung her rain jacket and velour track suit, the curtains on the window with their pattern of cherries with their stems crossed, a squirrel chattering outside in one of the trees. She lay in bed under the red plaid wool blankets and felt a calm sense of gratitude that everything was as it should be, including herself.

  She got out of bed and put on her track suit, since it was still early enough for the air to be chilly. If the Diamonds in the other room had been Lydia and Mercy she might not have bothered to get dressed right away, but she didn’t want Nicholas and Hannah to see her in her nightgown. When she found the living room empty, she took care to be extra quiet so she wouldn’t wake them up, but then she saw that the other bedroom door was ajar, and the room was empty, the beds already made. She checked the time: it was nine o’clock. She couldn’t believe that she had slept so late, and that she hadn’t heard Nicholas and Hannah moving around.

  She looked in the cupboard to see what they’d bought for breakfast and saw a variety pack of cereal boxes with several missing. She didn’t know they still made variety packs. She chose Rice Krispies, thinking that if Hannah was like the other children she had known, she would want the ones with the most sugar. She found a jar of instant coffee and she plugged in the kettle before sitting at the table with her cereal. There was a bowl of fruit in the middle of the table, oranges and bananas, with a note tucked beneath it saying that Hannah and Nicholas had gone for a walk. The window by the table looked out over the deck and the grass. Through the trees beyond she could see the lake glistening in the morning light.

  She peeled an orange and pulled it into sections. As she ate them one by one, she flipped open a new-looking sketchbook that had been left on the table. On the first page, she found a pencil sketch of the spruce tree overhanging the beach. She wondered if it was Nicholas’s, but then she saw that Hannah had signed her name in tiny letters. She was looking at the pencil markings, and admiring the skill for a girl so young, when strange-looking, big-eyed cartoon creatures began to emerge from between the drawing’s branches. For a moment she thought she was seeing things because they were so well-disguised, expertly hidden in the tree. She closed the sketchbook, thinking it was private and she probably should not have opened it.

  When she was finished her breakfast, she took her coffee out to the deck. She saw that the bumper of her car had been polished, the dust wiped off. Nicholas must have done that, feeling responsible, she supposed, even though it had been the other driver’s fault. She watched a couple walk across the grass with a dog and a small child, a boy. The child kept stopping to pick things up, and then he would hand them to his father, who stuffed whatever they were in his pockets. Estella watched the father fish them out and throw them away again whenever the boy wasn’t looking.

  Just then Peter walked by wearing his tool belt and carrying a sheet of glass. When he saw Estella he stopped to say hello, and she invited him to sit with her and have a cup of coffee.

  “It’s instant,” she said, knowing that instant was his coffee of choice.

  He said he couldn’t stop, he was on his way to fix a window in Lawren Harris, but if Estella was still there in half an hour, he would come back. After he rounded the corner and she couldn’t see him anymore, a woman stepped out onto a deck several cottages down—the one with all the bunk beds in one big bedroom, De Grandmaison it was called—and she looked right at Estella with her hands on her hips, and then turned away without waving. At one time, that cottage would have housed Andrew and Harmony and their five kids, but it wasn’t the best one if you wanted actual bedrooms. She wondered if the woman had been ousted from Emily Carr to make room for her.

  Half an hour later, Peter was back, but just to tell her that a shower was leaking in one of the cottages, and he had to get to that right away. She saw him looking at the little enamelled loon she had pinned to her jacket.

  “I think it must have been my mother’s,” she said.

  Then she pointed out the dent in her car, and told him what had happened. He gave it a look and said he had a way to get dents out, and he left to exchange his carpentry tools for his plumbing supplies.

  It was ten-thirty before Hannah and Nicolas came back up from the beach. They’d walked all the way to the campground, Nicholas said, where a river spilled into the lake, and there were people fishing off a bridge, and a young moose crossed the river right in front of them and then turned around and looked back at everyone.

  “I swear he was t
elling us all to get out of his backyard,” Nicholas said.

  Then he said he was going to have a quick nap since he hadn’t slept very well, and Hannah went to get one of the mountain bicycles they had at the office for the guests to borrow. She had noticed the trail out to the point. Estella was concerned about her going alone and told her to make lots of noise to scare off bears, but Hannah said she wasn’t afraid. Estella tried to remember what she’d been like at Hannah’s age. There’d been nothing to fear since she’d rarely been without at least one of her brothers.

  When Hannah got back an hour later Nicholas was still sleeping. By this time, Estella had moved inside, and Hannah sat down at the table with her and told her she hadn’t seen a bear or anything else. Just trees, with a glimpse of the lake once in a while. She kept looking at the door to the bedroom, as though waiting for her father to wake up.

  Estella tried to think of things to talk to Hannah about. She wondered if she might ask her about the drawing—there was no doubt the girl had talent—but would she be upset that Estella had looked at her sketchbook? Might she want to walk to the village for ice cream, just the two of them? They could leave Nicholas a note.

  Out of the blue, Hannah started to cry.

  “Oh my, what’s wrong?” Estella asked. It was unexpected, this girl crying, the one who had not been afraid of bears just minutes ago.

  Hannah would not tell Estella what was wrong. She dropped her head and hung her hands loosely at her side and sobbed. When she did, she looked so much younger, like a very young child.

  Estella didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to comfort a crying girl.

  She got up to get Hannah a glass of water and set it down in front of her. Nicholas came from the bedroom then, running his fingers through his hair in an attempt to tame a cowlick. When he saw that Hannah was crying, he went to her as though he knew what was wrong without having to ask, and he wrapped his arms around her.

  Estella left them alone and went back outside. She saw that her cane was leaning against the railing, and so she took it and walked across the grass to the old spruce tree. She looked up through the branches and tried to imagine Hannah’s creatures and where the idea might have come from, but she saw only boughs laden with cones.

  By the time she got back to the cabin, the crisis seemed to have passed, and Nicholas had set a plate of tuna sandwiches on the table. After lunch, they all walked around the compound and Estella told them which Diamond families had stayed in which cottages . . . at least the generations she could remember. She stopped in front of Lawren Harris, where Peter had finished installing the new window and was now painting the trim orange. He told them the Caiges planned to paint the window trim on all the cabins orange, although he wasn’t sure there was any point if they were going to lose the lease. Estella told Nicholas that this was the cottage where Jack and Rose had stayed with the boys.

  After their tour of the compound, Nicholas and Hannah said they were going for a swim, and Nicholas urged her to come down to the beach with them. He had discovered a beach umbrella in the closet, and he said he could set it up for her so she would be out of the sun.

  Hannah went into the bedroom first to change into her suit while Nicholas waited. Estella did not at first plan to wear a bathing suit, but she decided to change, even if only her toes were going to touch the water. She was looking for the purple suit when she remembered that she’d brought the old two-piece instead. As she looked at the makeshift repair job she almost gave up, but she decided it didn’t matter since she would be covering it.

  She sat on the edge of her bed and got herself into the suit. The top was fine. She was smaller now but the way it tied at the neck made it adjustable. The bottoms were a bit loose in the legs, but the drawstring felt secure enough. She looked in the mirror on the back of the door and was momentarily fascinated by the image of an ancient, sagging body in a vintage swimsuit, like a strangely pornographic photograph, but the fascination wore off when she remembered it was herself she was looking at. She pulled her shorts and her Lake Claire T-shirt overtop, and then she sat on the bed and strapped her feet into her sandals.

  Hannah was already waiting in the living room. She was wearing her T-shirt over her suit, too, and Estella could see the orange straps tied behind her neck.

  When Nicholas was ready, they all walked across the grass toward the water. Hannah carried a plastic bag with towels while Nicholas carried the chairs and the umbrella. Estella had her cane, even though she did not feel that she needed it. In the last year, someone—Peter?—had installed a set of wooden stairs by the old spruce tree so there was no more clambering down the sandy slope. She descended easily. The water was calm and the narrow beach was deserted, although they could see in the distance that the big public beach was packed with people. A merganser bobbed on the surface close by, jabbing its bill at something.

  Nicholas twisted the umbrella into the sand and set the canvas chairs beneath it. Estella sank into one, and immediately undid the Velcro straps on her sandals so she could kick them off and feel the sand under her feet.

  “Will you be all right here if we go for a swim?” Nicholas asked.

  “Of course,” Estella said. “Last one in’s a rotten egg.”

  They peeled off their T-shirts and ran for the water. Hannah shrieked as she hit waist deep, and then she dove under and came up laughing with her long bangs in her eyes. Nicholas too went under and swam beneath the surface, away from the shore. Then they were swimming side by side, out to where Estella knew the bottom dropped off.

  “Be careful, it gets deep,” she called, like any one of the Diamond mothers who’d sat here day after day, supervising children in the water, surrounded in the sand by towels and snacks and beach toys. She could see that Nicholas and Hannah were both good swimmers, and they swam the way she used to, with even strokes and strong kicks. She was pleased that Hannah was such a good swimmer. When they were out over their heads, they stopped and waved at Estella, and for a while they did somersaults and dolphin dives, and then they turned and swam away, parallel to the shore, just as she once had. She could see their arms rising and disappearing, one after the other, Hannah in front and Nicholas following.

  Could she, she wondered, just step into the water and get her feet wet? Swimming—the proper kind—was out of the question, but her body remembered the feel of the water and at that moment yearned for it.

  She lifted her T-shirt over her head and then stood and took off her shorts. Her legs were white in the sunlight, and she could see the map of veins under her skin, as though she were translucent. She couldn’t imagine whiter skin, and for a moment she forgot what she was doing and stood staring down at herself. The body, she thought, was endlessly intriguing if you could look past it being your own.

  She took off her glasses. Without them, she couldn’t see Nicholas and Hannah, or tell whether they were still swimming away from her or were on their way back. She stepped down to the beach and stood where the water lapped at her toes. It was warmer than she’d thought it would be. She stepped in, up to her ankles, her knees, and then she stopped and felt the sandy bottom, wiggled her toes, let them dig into the sand. A school of minnows approached and she could feel the tickling on her skin. She reached down and splashed water on herself, trying to decide if she would be foolish to go deeper, to let herself fall forward, swim a stroke or two, put her face in, her neck, and feel that rush of coolness when the top of her head hit the water.

  It would be foolish, she thought, but she did it anyway. She walked in up to her waist, and she relaxed her knees, lowered herself, and let the water rise. And then she lost her balance and she did fall forward, her face right in the water, and she came up sputtering, but once again on her feet. She lay back and let herself float, looked at the sky, moved her legs just enough to keep them from sinking. The sun was bright overhead, and she had to close her eyes again to keep from being blinded. Even with them closed she could see the sun’s afterimage.

&
nbsp; She didn’t last very long in the water. She began to feel the chill, and as soon as she did, she was desperate to get out. She got her feet back on the bottom, but she found it was a lot more work walking out than it had been walking in. The lake shimmered all around her, and it was hard to judge where the surface was. She held her arms out for balance and still she staggered and almost fell several times, but she finally made it back to the hard-packed sand of the shoreline. When she was safely on the beach, she stood to catch her breath, and then she readjusted her sagging bathing suit bottom. She had a moment of remembering the suit when it was new, and how young she had been, even though she had already resigned herself to middle age, post Clarence Angell. She’d worn the two-piece and briefly driven a white Mustang before becoming, once and for all, the old maid of the children’s card game.

  She heard someone cough, and she looked toward the sound and saw Peter Boone sitting on the new stairs by the spruce tree. She was immediately self-conscious about the bathing suit, although she tried to not to show it as she walked carefully to her chair and pulled on her T-shirt.

  “You scare me, Missus,” Peter said.

  She knew he wasn’t talking about the two-piece, although that was an amusing possibility. He meant that she might have needed help, to be rescued. He spoke from experience because he had rescued her the previous summer when she’d thought she’d seen Lonny going into the bush, and she’d gone after him. Peter had found her on her rear end on the trail, unable to get up, after she’d tripped over a tree root. He’d actually carried her out, like some kind of he-man, which he had never in his life been. She’d worried he was going to have a heart attack.