The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  I said, “Yesterday.”

  “The day before,” said Cynthia. “Meg wasn’t playing. Nobody got it.”

  “The deer on the truck,” said Andrew.

  “It was a lady deer, because it didn’t have antlers, and it was an American and it was dead,” Cynthia said.

  Andrew said, “I think it’s kind of morbid, being a dead deer.”

  “I got it,” said Meg.

  Cynthia said, “I think I know what morbid is. It’s depressing.”

  Helena, an old silver-mining town, looked forlorn to us even in the morning sunlight. Then Bozeman and Billings, not forlorn in the slightest – energetic, strung-out towns, with miles of blinding tinsel fluttering over used-car lots. We got too tired and hot even to play Who Am I? These busy, prosaic cities reminded me of similar places in Ontario, and I thought about what was really waiting there – the great tombstone furniture of Roger and Caroline’s dining room, the dinners for which I must iron the children’s dresses and warn them about forks, and then the other table a hundred miles away, the jokes of my father’s crew. The pleasures I had been thinking of – looking at the countryside or drinking a Coke in an old-fashioned drugstore with fans and a high, pressed-tin ceiling – would have to be snatched in between.

  “Meg’s asleep,” Cynthia said. “She’s so hot. She makes me hot in the same seat with her.”

  “I hope she isn’t feverish,” I said, not turning around.

  What are we doing this for, I thought, and the answer came – to show off. To give Andrew’s mother and my father the pleasure of seeing their grandchildren. That was our duty. But beyond that we wanted to show them something. What strenuous children we were, Andrew and I, what relentless seekers of approbation. It was as if at some point we had received an unforgettable, indigestible message – that we were far from satisfactory, and that the most commonplace success in life was probably beyond us. Roger dealt out such messages, of course – that was his style – but Andrew’s mother, my own mother and father couldn’t have meant to do so. All they meant to tell us was “Watch out. Get along.” My father, when I was in high school, teased me that I was getting to think I was so smart I would never find a boyfriend. He would have forgotten that in a week. I never forgot it. Andrew and I didn’t forget things. We took umbrage.

  “I wish there was a beach,” said Cynthia.

  “There probably is one,” Andrew said. “Right around the next curve.”

  “There isn’t any curve,” she said, sounding insulted.

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I wish there was some more lemonade.”

  “I will just wave my magic wand and produce some,” I said. “Okay, Cynthia? Would you rather have grape juice? Will I do a beach while I’m at it?”

  She was silent, and soon I felt repentant. “Maybe in the next town there might be a pool,” I said. I looked at the map. “In Miles City. Anyway, there’ll be something cool to drink.”

  “How far is it?” Andrew said.

  “Not so far,” I said. “Thirty miles, about.”

  “In Miles City,” said Cynthia, in the tones of an incantation, “there is a beautiful blue swimming pool for children, and a park with lovely trees.”

  Andrew said to me, “You could have started something.”

  But there was a pool. There was a park, too, though not quite the oasis of Cynthia’s fantasy. Prairie trees with thin leaves – cotton-woods and poplars – worn grass, and a high wire fence around the pool. Within this fence, a wall, not yet completed, of cement blocks. There were no shouts or splashes; over the entrance I saw a sign that said the pool was closed every day from noon until two o’clock. It was then twenty-five after twelve.

  Nevertheless I called out, “Is anybody there?” I thought somebody must be around, because there was a small truck parked near the entrance. On the side of the truck were these words: “We have Brains, to fix your Drains. (We have Roto-Rooter too.)”

  A girl came out, wearing a red lifeguard’s shirt over her bathing suit. “Sorry, we’re closed.”

  “We were just driving through,” I said.

  “We close every day from twelve until two. It’s on the sign.” She was eating a sandwich.

  “I saw the sign,” I said. “But this is the first water we’ve seen for so long, and the children are awfully hot, and I wondered if they could just dip in and out – just five minutes. We’d watch them.”

  A boy came into sight, behind her. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the words “Roto-Rooter” on it.

  I was going to say that we were driving from British Columbia to Ontario, but I remembered that Canadian place names usually meant nothing to Americans. “We’re driving right across the country,” I said. “We haven’t time to wait for the pool to open. We were just hoping the children could get cooled off.”

  Cynthia came running up barefoot behind me. “Mother. Mother, where is my bathing suit?” Then she stopped, sensing the serious adult negotiations. Meg was climbing out of the car – just wakened, with her top pulled up and her shorts pulled down, showing her pink stomach.

  “Is it just those two?” the girl said.

  “Just the two. We’ll watch them.”

  “I can’t let any adults in. If it’s just the two, I guess I could watch them. I’m having my lunch.” She said to Cynthia, “Do you want to come in the pool?”

  “Yes, please,” said Cynthia firmly.

  Meg looked at the ground.

  “Just a short time, because the pool is really closed,” I said. “We appreciate this very much,” I said to the girl.

  “Well, I can eat my lunch out there, if it’s just the two of them.” She looked toward the car as if she thought I might try to spring some more children on her.

  When I found Cynthia’s bathing suit, she took it into the changing room. She would not permit anybody, even Meg, to see her naked. I changed Meg, who stood on the front seat of the car. She had a pink cotton bathing suit with straps that crossed and buttoned. There were ruffles across the bottom.

  “She is hot,” I said. “But I don’t think she’s feverish.”

  I loved helping Meg to dress or undress, because her body still had the solid unself-consciousness, the sweet indifference, something of the milky smell, of a baby’s body. Cynthia’s body had long ago been pared down, shaped and altered, into Cynthia. We all liked to hug Meg, press and nuzzle her. Sometimes she would scowl and beat us off, and this forthright independence, this ferocious bashfulness, simply made her more appealing, more apt to be tormented and tickled in the way of family love.

  Andrew and I sat in the car with the windows open. I could hear a radio playing, and thought it must belong to the girl or her boyfriend. I was thirsty, and got out of the car to look for a concession stand, or perhaps a soft-drink machine, somewhere in the park. I was wearing shorts, and the backs of my legs were slick with sweat. I saw a drinking fountain at the other side of the park and was walking toward it in a roundabout way, keeping to the shade of the trees. No place became real till you got out of the car. Dazed with the heat, with the sun on the blistered houses, the pavement, the burned grass, I walked slowly. I paid attention to a squashed leaf, ground a Popsicle stick under the heel of my sandal, squinted at a trash can strapped to a tree. This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you’ve been driving for a long time – you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of your being there to see them.

  Where are the children?

  I turned around and moved quickly, not quite running, to a part of the fence beyond which the cement wall was not completed. I could see some of the pool. I saw Cynthia, standing about waist-deep in the water, fluttering her hands on the surface and discreetly watching something at the end of the pool, which I could not see. I thought by her pose, her discretion, the look on her face, that she must be watching some byplay between the lifeguard and her boyfriend. I couldn’t see Meg. But I thought she m
ust be playing in the shallow water – both the shallow and deep ends of the pool were out of my sight.

  “Cynthia!” I had to call twice before she knew where my voice was coming from. “Cynthia! Where’s Meg?”

  It always seems to me, when I recall this scene, that Cynthia turns very gracefully toward me, then turns all around in the water – making me think of a ballerina on point – and spreads her arms in a gesture of the stage. “Dis-ap-peared!”

  Cynthia was naturally graceful, and she did take dancing lessons, so these movements may have been as I have described. She did say “Disappeared” after looking all around the pool, but the strangely artificial style of speech and gesture, the lack of urgency, is more likely my invention. The fear I felt instantly when I couldn’t see Meg – even while I was telling myself she must be in the shallower water – must have made Cynthia’s movements seem unbearably slow and inappropriate to me, and the tone in which she could say “Disappeared” before the implications struck her (or was she covering, at once, some ever-ready guilt?) was heard by me as quite exquisitely, monstrously self-possessed.

  I cried out for Andrew, and the lifeguard came into view. She was pointing toward the deep end of the pool, saying, “What’s that?”

  There, just within my view, a cluster of pink ruffles appeared, a bouquet, beneath the surface of the water. Why would a lifeguard stop and point, why would she ask what that was, why didn’t she just dive into the water and swim to it? She didn’t swim; she ran all the way around the edge of the pool. But by that time Andrew was over the fence. So many things seemed not quite plausible – Cynthia’s behavior, then the lifeguard’s – and now I had the impression that Andrew jumped with one bound over this fence, which seemed about seven feet high. He must have climbed it very quickly, getting a grip on the wire.

  I could not jump or climb it, so I ran to the entrance, where there was a sort of lattice gate, locked. It was not very high, and I did pull myself over it. I ran through the cement corridors, through the disinfectant pool for your feet, and came out on the edge of the pool.

  The drama was over.

  Andrew had got to Meg first, and had pulled her out of the water. He just had to reach over and grab her, because she was swimming somehow, with her head underwater – she was moving toward the edge of the pool. He was carrying her now, and the lifeguard was trotting along behind. Cynthia had climbed out of the water and was running to meet them. The only person aloof from the situation was the boyfriend, who had stayed on the bench at the shallow end, drinking a milkshake. He smiled at me, and I thought that unfeeling of him, even though the danger was past. He may have meant it kindly. I noticed that he had not turned the radio off, just down.

  Meg had not swallowed any water. She hadn’t even scared herself. Her hair was plastered to her head and her eyes were wide open, golden with amazement.

  “I was getting the comb,” she said. “I didn’t know it was deep.”

  Andrew said, “She was swimming! She was swimming by herself. I saw her bathing suit in the water and then I saw her swimming.”

  “She nearly drowned,” Cynthia said. “Didn’t she? Meg nearly drowned.”

  “I don’t know how it could have happened,” said the lifeguard. “One moment she was there, and the next she wasn’t.”

  What had happened was that Meg had climbed out of the water at the shallow end and run along the edge of the pool toward the deep end. She saw a comb that somebody had dropped lying on the bottom. She crouched down and reached in to pick it up, quite deceived about the depth of the water. She went over the edge and slipped into the pool, making such a light splash that nobody heard – not the lifeguard, who was kissing her boyfriend, or Cynthia, who was watching them. That must have been the moment under the trees when I thought, Where are the children? It must have been the same moment. At that moment, Meg was slipping, surprised, into the treacherously clear blue water.

  “It’s okay,” I said to the lifeguard, who was nearly crying. “She can move pretty fast.” (Though that wasn’t what we usually said about Meg at all. We said she thought everything over and took her time.)

  “You swam, Meg,” said Cynthia, in a congratulatory way. (She told us about the kissing later.)

  “I didn’t know it was deep,” Meg said. “I didn’t drown.”

  We had lunch at a take-out place, eating hamburgers and fries at a picnic table not far from the highway. In my excitement, I forgot to get Meg a plain hamburger, and had to scrape off the relish and mustard with plastic spoons, then wipe the meat with a paper napkin, before she would eat it. I took advantage of the trash can there to clean out the car. Then we resumed driving east, with the car windows open in front. Cynthia and Meg fell asleep in the back seat.

  Andrew and I talked quietly about what had happened. Suppose I hadn’t had the impulse just at that moment to check on the children? Suppose we had gone uptown to get drinks, as we had thought of doing? How had Andrew got over the fence? Did he jump or climb? (He couldn’t remember.) How had he reached Meg so quickly? And think of the lifeguard not watching. And Cynthia, taken up with the kissing. Not seeing anything else. Not seeing Meg drop over the edge.

  Disappeared.

  But she swam. She held her breath and came up swimming.

  What a chain of lucky links.

  That was all we spoke about – luck. But I was compelled to picture the opposite. At this moment, we could have been filling out forms. Meg removed from us, Meg’s body being prepared for shipment. To Vancouver – where we had never noticed such a thing as a graveyard – or to Ontario? The scribbled drawings she had made this morning would still be in the back seat of the car. How could this be borne all at once, how did people bear it? The plump, sweet shoulders and hands and feet, the fine brown hair, the rather satisfied, secretive expression – all exactly the same as when she had been alive. The most ordinary tragedy. A child drowned in a swimming pool at noon on a sunny day. Things tidied up quickly. The pool opens as usual at two o’clock. The lifeguard is a bit shaken up and gets the afternoon off. She drives away with her boyfriend in the Roto-Rooter truck. The body sealed away in some kind of shipping coffin. Sedatives, phone calls, arrangements. Such a sudden vacancy, a blind sinking and shifting. Waking up groggy from the pills, thinking for a moment it wasn’t true. Thinking if only we hadn’t stopped, if only we hadn’t taken this route, if only they hadn’t let us use the pool. Probably no one would ever have known about the comb.

  There’s something trashy about this kind of imagining, isn’t there? Something shameful. Laying your finger on the wire to get the safe shock, feeling a bit of what it’s like, then pulling back. I believed that Andrew was more scrupulous than I about such things, and that at this moment he was really trying to think about something else.

  When I stood apart from my parents at Steve Gauley’s funeral and watched them, and had this new, unpleasant feeling about them, I thought that I was understanding something about them for the first time. It was a deadly serious thing. I was understanding that they were implicated. Their big, stiff, dressed-up bodies did not stand between me and sudden death, or any kind of death. They gave consent. So it seemed. They gave consent to the death of children and to my death not by anything they said or thought but by the very fact that they had made children – they had made me. They had made me, and for that reason my death – however grieved they were, however they carried on – would seem to them anything but impossible or unnatural. This was a fact, and even then I knew they were not to blame.

  But I did blame them. I charged them with effrontery, hypocrisy. On Steve Gauley’s behalf, and on behalf of all children, who knew that by rights they should have sprung up free, to live a new, superior kind of life, not to be caught in the snares of vanquished grown-ups, with their sex and funerals.

  Steve Gauley drowned, people said, because he was next thing to an orphan and was let run free. If he had been warned enough and given chores to do and kept in check, he wouldn’t have fallen fr
om an untrustworthy tree branch into a spring pond, a full gravel pit near the river – he wouldn’t have drowned. He was neglected, he was free, so he drowned. And his father took it as an accident, such as might happen to a dog. He didn’t have a good suit for the funeral, and he didn’t bow his head for the prayers. But he was the only grownup that I let off the hook. He was the only one I didn’t see giving consent. He couldn’t prevent anything, but he wasn’t implicated in anything, either – not like the others, saying the Lord’s Prayer in their unnaturally weighted voices, oozing religion and dishonor.

  At Glendive, not far from the North Dakota border, we had a choice – either to continue on the interstate or head northeast, toward Williston, taking Route 16, then some secondary roads that would get us back to Highway 2.

  We agreed that the interstate would be faster, and that it was important for us not to spend too much time – that is, money – on the road. Nevertheless we decided to cut back to Highway 2.

  “I just like the idea of it better,” I said.

  Andrew said, “That’s because it’s what we planned to do in the beginning.”

  “We missed seeing Kalispell and Havre. And Wolf Point. I like the name.”

  “We’ll see them on the way back.”

  Andrew’s saying “on the way back” was a surprising pleasure to me. Of course, I had believed that we would be coming back, with our car and our lives and our family intact, having covered all that distance, having dealt somehow with those loyalties and problems, held ourselves up for inspection in such a foolhardy way. But it was a relief to hear him say it.

  “What I can’t get over,” said Andrew, “is how you got the signal. It’s got to be some kind of extra sense that mothers have.”

  Partly I wanted to believe that, to bask in my extra sense. Partly I wanted to warn him – to warn everybody – never to count on it.

  “What I can’t understand,” I said, “is how you got over the fence.”

  “Neither can I.”

  So we went on, with the two in the back seat trusting us, because of no choice, and we ourselves trusting to be forgiven, in time, for everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever was flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous – all our natural, and particular, mistakes.