by Susan White
Jodie leaned over and squeezed Rachel’s shoulders. “You’re giving your father something more to motivate his recovery. You’re allowing your grandmother and aunts a chance to meet a part of their family that has been missing. You don’t have to do anything but let yourself enjoy the trip. No one can tell you how it will work out, but you can be proud of doing your part. Amelia will be driving back no matter how your visit goes. Just go and let whatever happens, happen.”
Rachel laid her head on Jodie’s shoulder and together they watched the crimson ball of the sun setting over the lake.
The Jimmy was packed and everyone was sitting in the kitchen having a special good-bye breakfast. Jodie had made waffles and Zac had cooked ham drenched in maple syrup. Amelia was compiling long lists for them and bobbing up and down out of her chair like a yo-yo. “The twins have a dentist appointment on July 11. Don’t forget to check for potato bugs as the plants get bigger. Look under the leaves for the eggs; you have to get those, not just the hard-shelled adults.”
“Amelia,” Jodie broke in authoritatively. “We are no stranger to the Colorado potato beetle and besides, I think you put that on at least two of our lists.” Jodie dropped a waffle on her plate and gave her a quick hug. “Sit still and eat.”
Rachel was putting the last few items in the cooler. “It looks like we have enough food here for the whole trip!” she laughed.
“Buy enough bread at the market on Saturdays to do the week,” Amelia continued. “Don’t try to make the bread, Jodie. You’ll have enough to do trying to feed this bunch without trying to make bread.”
“Maybe I’ll make it,” Zac said. “I expect I’ll be eating most of my meals here.” He rubbed the top of Raymond’s head. “Someone has to help this guy run this funny farm.”
“I’m going to call every night, no matter where we are,” Amelia rambled on. “If I don’t get a hold of you I’ll leave a message. You can always call my cell phone if you need to for any reason. Dr. Hollway’s number is by the phone.”
“Don’t worry so much, Amelia,” Zac said as he led her toward the open door. “We’ll be fine. We will look forward to hearing about your travels every night. Now get in the Jimmy and get going!”
Amelia pulled the Jimmy up to the gas pumps at the Irving station in Welsford. Rachel got out and started filling up the tank. The station attendant began washing the windshield.
“Where are you ladies headed on this beautiful day?” he asked.
“We’re driving across Canada,” Rachel replied.
“Get out of town!” he said.
“That’s what we’re doing,” laughed Amelia as she went in to pay for the gas.
“So it’s just you and your grandmother driving all the way across the country?” the attendant asked Rachel as they waited for Amelia to return.
“Yep!” Rachel didn’t bother to correct the man. She just reached into the backseat, grabbed an apple from the cooler, and refastened her seatbelt.
Amelia did most of the talking during the first three hours of the drive. She spouted all the New Brunswick trivia she could muster and kept the conversation going with only a few words from Rachel. They stopped briefly to look at the Hartland covered bridge and Amelia told Rachel that the bridge had been opened on July 4, 1901, and it was 1,282 feet long. But the last hour of the drive was tortuous. The upbeat feeling Rachel had felt when they left this morning was not what she felt now. All she wanted was to be home at the lake.
Finally Amelia turned the car off the highway and headed into the driveway of the hotel they’d booked for the night, called the Happy Club Motel. Maybe a place with “happy club” in its name will perk me up, Rachel thought to herself as Amelia got out of the car to check them in.
The woman behind the counter was very pleasant, but Amelia thought she seemed to linger too long staring at the bumps on her face. The woman asked her a bunch of simple registration questions, things like her name, how many guests were in her party, her street address and postal code. But the answers were stuck in Amelia’s throat as if she were being asked to bare her soul. Her license plate number? She had no idea. Credit card? She didn’t have a credit card. She had never needed one. Maybe she should have gotten one before taking this trip. She was going to pay with cash. She finally got the key for room 10 from the woman and hurried out to get Rachel and the suitcases.
“The first motel was built in 1925 in San Luis Obispo, California,” Amelia said as she and Rachel dropped their bags on the floor of the hotel room. “It was called the Mo-tel Inn. Mo-tel was an abbreviation of motor and hotel.”
“Let’s take a walk and find somewhere to eat supper,” she continued. “I’m stiff from driving all day. I haven’t sat still that long for years. I’ll get used to it after a few days, I suppose. We’ll drive longer tomorrow, and we’ll stop on the other side of Montreal tomorrow night.”
The phone rang six times before Jodie answered it.
“I was just taking the clothes off the line when I heard the phone ringing,” she told Rachel. “Peter Totten dropped off three piglets today and Zac and Raymond are working on a yard for them so the pigs can come in and out of the shed. Crystal and Chelsea have hardly left the pig shed. They’ve named the piglets Lavendar, Lilac, and Larry, but Zac and Raymond are calling them Breakfast, Lunch, and Supper.”
The twins got on the phone and talked to Amelia and then Rachel spoke to Jodie again before they hung up the phone. Rachel’s feeling of homesickness was even stronger than it had been earlier and she wished she was back home in her own room, not in a room at the Happy Club Motel. She picked up the TV remote and started scrolling through the channel guide, looking for something to take her mind off where she was and where she was heading.
It was a beautiful sunny day and the air was already hot when they exited the Tim Horton’s drive-thru at seven o’clock. Amelia had wanted to get an early start on a long day of driving. The thought of driving through Montreal was worrying her a lot—all that traffic and the numerous road changes were a lot to handle, especially for someone who hadn’t driven through a city in over thirty years. She kept telling herself she’d be fine—she was just going to take her time and follow the map that Jodie had printed off for her. Montreal would probably be the biggest challenge of the whole drive and at least she would get that over with at the start of the trip.
Rachel tore a piece off her bagel and took a bite. She had dreamed about her father last night. In the dream he was walking ahead of her in a field and she couldn’t see his face. She was trying to catch up with him, but he just kept walking faster. She tried calling his name, but the sound of her voice was lost in the wind and she couldn’t get his attention. She had woken up around four o’clock in the morning and laid awake for a long while afterwards, trying to get the dream off her mind.
“The province of Quebec is three times the size of France.” Amelia’s voice broke into Rachel’s reverie and brought her back to the present.
“My parents were never married,” Rachel said. “Garnham was my mom’s last name, and her mom disowned her when she had me. How can a mother disown her own kid? She hated my father. The first time I ever saw my mom’s mother was at the funeral. I wanted to ask her that day if she wanted to own my mother again now that she was dead. I was hoping she didn’t want to own me, but I didn’t have to worry about that.”
Rachel stared out the window and wiped the tears that were slowly dripping down her cheeks. She had forgotten all about that and wondered why it had come to mind now.
“My parents weren’t married either,” Amelia said. “I don’t even know who my father was. My grandmother raised me. The last time I saw my mother I was about ten years old. She used to visit once or twice a year, but when I was ten she just stopped coming.”
“I wonder how big the pigs will be when we get home,” Rachel said, deliberately trying to change the subject. “The raspberries wi
ll be ready when we get back, won’t they?”
“Yes, probably,” Amelia answered. “We usually have raspberries by the end of July. We should make sure we get a good meat and vegetable meal at suppertime tonight. And let’s try to find a hotel with a pool so you can go for a swim.”
They drove on chatting about harmless topics—chickens, sunflowers, the garden—until they stopped for lunch. They said nothing more about mothers or grandmothers.
The traffic through Montreal took all of Amelia’s attention. She gripped the wheel tightly as she navigated through the busy highways. As soon as they got out of the most congested area, Amelia pulled over and laid her head down on the steering wheel.
“In 1910, the magician Harry Houdini was the first solo pilot to fly a plane in Australia,” she said after a few minutes. “He taught himself to drive an automobile just so he could drive out to the airfield and then he never drove again.”
After checking into the motel Rachel and Amelia ate supper at the restaurant next door and then called home. Everyone took turns talking to them. Amelia described the horror of driving through Montreal to Zac and he asked Rachel afterwards how she’d managed as the passenger. Jodie told them that she’d cooked the first of the peas for supper and raved about how good the hot milk cake that Chelsea made for dessert had been. Raymond told them that he and Zac had picked up a field of hay at the Fullertons’ this afternoon and they still had to unload the wagon. Then he played his newly learned rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar as Amelia held the phone out so that Rachel could hear it, too. Crystal told Rachel she’d put a doll’s bonnet on one of the pigs and took its picture.
After they hung up the phone, Rachel and Amelia headed down to the pool. It was just a small one, with the deep end only being five feet, but it felt wonderful to them both to be swimming again. Rachel counted her laps as she swam the length of the pool. She promised herself she’d make it to twenty. Each time she started underwater she pretended she was plunging into the lake. Amelia finished her quick swim and bundled up on a lounge chair on the pool deck to read while she waited for Rachel to finish.
“I only have two laps left, Amelia,” Rachel called out.
Rachel pulled herself up out of the water and wrapped herself in the scratchy hotel towel, thinking about the long day she and Amelia had ahead of them tomorrow. After my long swim, maybe I’ll sleep soundly tonight, she thought as she followed Amelia to their room. I hope my dreams are of fresh peas, haylofts, and pigs wearing bonnets.
“Cows and cornfields have a home within Ottawa’s city limits at the 1,200-acre Central Experimental Farm,” Amelia shared as she and Rachel filled up a bag with cobs of corn from one of the stands at the ByWard Market in Ottawa. After spending most of the afternoon at the Canadian War Museum, they were now strolling the aisles at the market to pick up some food for dinner.
Once they paid for their corn, Rachel and Amelia headed back to the Jimmy. Their plan was to drive a little bit longer and then find a motel to stop at for the night. On their way out of the city, they drove by the Chateau Laurier, one of the most expensive hotels in Ottawa. As they passed the hotel’s grand entrance, Amelia said, “I guess we won’t be staying there. They probably wouldn’t let us cook our corn in one of their fancy suites.”
About an hour later they pulled into the entryway of the Colonial Fireside Inn in Pembroke. They were able to get a room with kitchen facilities, so they checked in and cooked their corn in a big pot on the tiny hotel-room stove. Once it was finished, they carried it outside to eat at a nearby picnic table.
“This corn isn’t as good as the stuff we grew last year,” Rachel commented, buttering her third piece. “By the time we get home, ours will just be getting ripe, won’t it?”
Home. Rachel liked the sound of that. It was still surprising to her that she felt so settled at Amelia’s. She thought of how homesick she was now, how much she wanted to be back at the farm, swimming, cooking, and even weeding the garden. Every other time that she’d felt homesick in the past five years it had been for her old house on Regent Street. The feelings had always been wrapped up with the deep sadness she felt, the longing for her mother and her brother, and the awful pit of shame she kept pushed down so she wouldn’t have to think about it. But today her thoughts of home had taken her to the end of Walton Lake Road. They took her to her room up over the kitchen and to the smells of food cooking on the wood stove. They took her to the lake, its sights and sounds clear in her mind.
“What was your mother’s name, Amelia?” Rachel wasn’t sure what had made her ask that or why it even mattered.
“Her name was Vivian,” Amelia answered.
Rachel said nothing more, taking the pause and the look on Amelia’s face as an indication that she did not want to say anything more about her mother. Rachel was sorry she had asked the question. She started hulling and cutting up the strawberries, filling two Styrofoam cups.
“My mother was beautiful,” Amelia continued after a few minutes of silence. “Every time she came to the farm she was dressed in fancy clothes and her hair and makeup were perfect. She would usually drive up with some strange man we had never seen before and she never stayed very long. It was as if she was afraid she would get dirty or her hair would get out of place. She would sometimes stay for a meal, and I always insisted on serving her, trying to impress her with my grown-up ways. But she never seemed to notice me at all. The visits always ended the same way: she would ask Gram for money and leave in a hurry, giving me a quick hug before taking off. I always stood there wishing she would take me with her, or at least stay longer.”
“Is your mother still alive?” Rachel asked hesitantly.
“I don’t think so, but I really don’t know,” Amelia answered. “The last time we saw her was September 1964. She just disappeared after that. My grandmother tried for years to find her, but as far as I know she never did. I gave up the thought of ever seeing her again years ago. She was never a mother to me in any sense of the word, but it took me a long time to come to terms with that.”
Rachel didn’t know what to say to Amelia. It must have been terrible not knowing where your mother was and feeling like she never cared enough about you to stay and look after you. At least she had always known her own mother had loved her. Her mom had always taken good care of her and Caleb. And above everything else, Rachel knew her mother had not left her on purpose. She knew what had taken her mother away from her, and she knew it was all her fault.
It was raining as Rachel and Amelia left Pembroke early the next morning. They stopped at a grocery store to replenish their cooler with lunch and snack foods, and then headed toward Sault Ste. Marie. Rachel was determined to keep the conversation away from serious stuff today, and it seemed like Amelia was thinking the same thing. They spent the morning talking about trivial things, and as usual Amelia punctuated their chat with random facts whenever she could: Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first. An average four-year-old asks 437 questions a day. Napoleon Bonaparte constructed his battle plans in a sandbox. If you attempted to count stars in the galaxy at a rate of one every second, it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.
After their conversation died out, they occupied their time by playing a game of finding all the letters of the alphabet in order on signs on the side of the highway. X and Z were the hardest ones to find.
Around one o’clock, they stopped at the Big Nickel monument in Sudbury. They walked around the giant coin and took some pictures of themselves in front of it, and then found a grassy spot to sit down and eat their lunch. About an hour later, they packed up their cooler and got back in the car for another long drive.
Both Rachel and Amelia remained fairly quiet on the long stretch of highway that afternoon. At around seven o’clock they finally rolled into Sault Ste. Marie, where they checked into the Skyline Motel and then headed straight to Swiss Chalet for sup
per. After dinner they called home, and then turned on the TV. By the end of their third episode of Golden Girls, both Rachel and Amelia were fast asleep in their beds.
The next morning’s drive seemed longer than usual to Rachel because there wasn’t much to see except for trees, rocks, and water. She and Amelia stopped at Obatanga Provincial Park around two o’clock for a late lunch. They ate by a large lake, and despite the swarm of mosquitoes hovering overhead, Rachel changed into her bathing suit and went for a quick swim. She ran right in and swam out over her head and back in again several times. Burnfield Lake was beautiful, but it felt nothing like her lake.
The afternoon drive seemed to go by quicker, and Rachel and Amelia were in good spirits when they arrived in Marathon around suppertime. They bought Chinese take-out at Wok with Chow Restaurant and took it to their room in the Travelodge Motel, moving quickly as the woman at the desk had told them to watch out for bears. They called home, left a message when no one answered, and went to bed early.
The next afternoon Rachel and Amelia stopped at the Terry Fox Monument outside of Thunder Bay. They asked someone to take their picture as they stood beside the monument, pointing at the New Brunswick crest. Then they drove on to Ignace, where they settled into a small room at the Trading Post Motel.
Rachel and Amelia entered the lobby of the Winnipeg View Motel to register for their room. The woman behind the counter stared rudely at Amelia’s face, obviously horrified.
“Is that contagious?” she asked loudly.
“No,” Amelia responded calmly. “I have Neurofibromatosis. It’s not infectious. It’s caused by a mutated gene.”
Amelia filled in the hotel registration form, not showing that the woman’s insensitive remark had bothered her at all, then took the room key and walked away quickly.
“We are in the middle of the country, and the middle of the continent as well,” Amelia told Rachel as they carried their suitcases up the stairs to their room. “Winnipeg has many claims to fame. Monty Hall, the host of the game show ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’ was born in Winnipeg. Winnie-the-Pooh was named after Winnipeg by a Canadian lieutenant in the Fort Garry Horse Militia. And Winnipeg is the Slurpee capital of the world. The citizens of this city consume 400,000 Slurpees a month, even during the cold winter months—and Winnipeg has some of the coldest weather in the country!”