She pushes open the café door and sees them before they see her: Adam leaning toward the child, across a little table. Cynthia looking at him, talking, her lips and hands and eyes alive. Sidonie had stopped still at that moment; something like happiness had come to a gentle simmer in the region of her thorax.
That she remembers. Then, after, the doubt that had kept her awake at night. Should they have had a child of their own? Clearly, Adam is a model father-figure: patient, respectful, engaged. All of the right things. She had thought. . . . But no; he has taken to Cynthia living with them as if it were just what he had been waiting for. Now he leaves the campus by three, walks the short distance to the school for the deaf to meet Cynthia, and the two of them go home together, sometimes stopping at Café Vienne, sometimes at the park to feed the ducks, to kick through the leaves, to ride the swings. They do the marketing together, Adam and Cynthia, on these afternoons. After a time, Cynthia makes friends among the other day-children; it is Adam who then orchestrates visits, who joins the parents’ advisory association, who serves tea and sandwiches to Cynthia and her friends. Adam who indulges the passions for the latest Barbie, who finds and funds the drawing and horseback and swimming lessons.
What this means for Sidonie is something complex, something it takes her a few years to work out. First there is the guilt, as always: at not being the one to parent her sister’s child, that she has somehow profited at Alice’s expense; then, forced to admit that the arrangement works, that she is happy, coming home to the apartment to an evening of reading journals only temporarily punctured by decorous games of Monopoly or gin rummy. No use telling herself that she has done Alice a good turn, taking Cynthia in, that Cynthia has bloomed in Montreal in a way that would have provided Alice with great satisfaction. She feels Alice’s angry ghost breathing down her neck, even when she is happiest. Especially when she is happiest. Mine, mine, the ghost says. You have no right. My daughter.
And there is some humiliation in this quick adaptation too. Sidonie is capable of recognizing that. There’s an argument that Adam has required this emotional contact, this companionship, for years, and she has been able neither to recognize nor to fulfill this need. Or: Adam prefers to interact with the child rather than with his wife; she has more to offer than Sidonie does. But even if those interpretations are possible, there is no reason to accept them, to take the situation personally. No need to respond with fear or jealousy. It simply is the state of things. It is good for the child and for her husband.
Nevertheless, an austerity falls over her, a stiff and threadbare cloak.
She writes a paper on emotional ataxia in children with autism. Then a book. She is invited to conferences as guest speaker. She is offered a distinguished research chair at the largest and most prestigious Canadian university, which she does consider, but turns down.
She retreats into herself, so slowly that she doesn’t notice at first. When she does notice, she feels a sadness, but acceptance: the unfolding that happened in her early months with Adam has naturally reversed itself.
It is easy to step away, to let those live connections crust over, calcify.
Cynthia does bloom. When she is fourteen, the principal of her school calls a conference with Adam and Cynthia and recommends that Cynthia be enrolled in regular high school in the September term.
“That’s been tried,” Sidonie says, flatly. “Cynthia was in regular school before she came here. She was in the special education class with the mentally handicapped children. She didn’t learn anything, and she was taunted and shunned by the other children. I don’t see how returning her to that environment is a good option.”
But no, the principal argues. Cynthia is ready to move through normal classes. She will, of course, have an aide who will sign for her. But there is hope that she’ll be able to function on her very own, soon. Her lip-reading is improving rapidly, and the new hearing aids work remarkably well.
The principal is a woman in her fifties with improbably uniform auburn hair and a jacket with immense shoulder pads. Sidonie thinks that she has more theory than experience.
“We’ll consider it,” she says, discouragingly.
Adam is perplexed, a little angry even. “Isn’t this what we want for Cynthia? Integration into mainstream society? The freedom and acceptance that comes with that?”
Sidonie could tell him something about mainstream society and acceptance. She says, “You don’t know what it’s like, being different. Having a noticeable handicap. You don’t know how cruel adolescents can be.”
“This isn’t Marshall’s Landing,” Adam says.
There’s a wound there, Sidonie perceives, but she will not acknowledge it. She closes her mouth.
“If I didn’t know you better,” Adam says, “I’d think you were sulking.”
“I don’t sulk,” Sidonie says.
“I know,” Adam says. “But you’ve withdrawn. Have I offended you?”
She is lucky, lucky to be married to Adam, who will reason things out, and not respond emotionally, she reminds herself.
“I don’t know what to do,” Sidonie says. “I can only make decisions for Cynthia based on my own experience and knowledge, and you’ve called those into question. I’m lost.”
Adam says, “You don’t, you know, have to make decisions that way. You can trust me sometimes.”
So they had argued, and she had given in, against her better judgment.
In 1985, Sidonie and Cynthia fly west for the first time since leaving Marshall’s Landing. Since Alice’s funeral. Cynthia is excited; after they leave the airport, driving north the few kilometres to Marshall’s Landing, Cynthia presses her nose against the car window. “But I remember this,” she exclaims, over and over. “The orchards and that old boat on the side of the highway. I remember that! And here’s the turn — oh, and my old school!”
“Mine too,” Sidonie says, and Cynthia is surprised.
They are back in the valley for Stephen’s wedding. Stephen is marrying Debbie, a local girl. She is not prepossessing, Sidonie thinks; she’s pretty enough, beneath the teased-out bob of hair, the bangs, the black-rimmed eyes that all of the young women seem to affect these days. But she is not — not educated or cultured or graceful. Not exceptional. Then again, Stephen himself is not exactly impressive. He has a bad haircut, bad skin. He slouches, wears cheap clothes. Is loud when he ought to be circumspect, and sullen when he ought to be gracious.
In the days before the wedding, she drives Cynthia around, and they visit their old haunts, and drop in on friends. Cynthia is seventeen, in her last year of high school. The apple trees are in blossom; the hillsides awash in pale green and white. She is enchanted.
Stephen and Debbie are going to move to Edmonton after the wedding. It’s hard to get work anywhere, with the recession, but Debbie’s uncle has a construction business, and Stephen with his recently earned electrical ticket will be apprenticing with his company.
Debbie’s father says that Steve is a good worker. “There’s nothing that boy won’t turn a hand to,” he says. Debbie’s mother says, “I hope they won’t start a family too soon. Things are so uncertain.” She wants Debbie to get some training as a practical nurse or physiotherapist. Sidonie has the feeling that something is required of her, in loco parentis, by way of response, but she can’t decide what it is. She is not sure how celebratory she ought to be acting. Stephen and Debbie have lived together for over a year, and she understands that the wedding has been promoted by Debbie’s parents, as a prerequisite for Debbie moving with Stephen to Edmonton. Well, that’s fair enough; they are looking out for their daughter’s interests, and don’t want her to be abandoned in a strange city, after investing a portion of her youth in the relationship.
“And you are completely responsible for Steve’s sister?” Debbie’s father asks. “You don’t expect Steve to contribute?”
Completely responsible, yes. And then she understands what is expected.
She says privately t
o Stephen, “I’d like to give you a little cash to get started in Edmonton.”
Stephen is embarrassed, to his credit. “You’ve done so much for us already,” he says. “Taking on Cynthia too. I never would have thought she could have come so far. You’ve already been so generous.”
Generous, no. How much less could she have done?
Two days before Steve’s wedding, she and Alice’s offspring meet at a chain restaurant in a strip plaza along the highway. The downtown area appears evacuated, but a few new franchises have sprung up along Highway 97 north of the city. At this dinner, Debbie is not present — she is working — so it’s just the five of them: Stephen, Kevin, Paul, Cynthia, and Sidonie herself, who is paying for it, and feels a little like the unwelcome fairy godmother. The boys, adults now, are all deferential towards her, though, she feels, they are less comfortable in her presence than they would be if she were not there. Stephen is deferential and grateful, Kevin deferential and obsequious, Paul deferential and wary. Cynthia, who hasn’t seen her brothers in ten years, is, naturally, fascinated by them. Her head goes back and forth as they talk, as if she’s watching a three-way table tennis match. She takes a lot of trouble over her articulation as well: none of the lazy slushy consonants and gargled vowels that she gets away with at home. And the boys — Sidonie watches them closely — show no signs of their former torment of Cynthia. Stephen draws her out almost avuncularly with questions about school and hobbies; Paul falls into a conversation with her about popular music and bands (they both, it seems, have formed tastes for the same groups, independently); even Kevin sets out to entertain Cynthia, with self-deprecating stories of his work. She watches them closely. She doesn’t trust any of them, these wild boys. Who are half Buck. Half Buck and half Alice.
They do not discuss or even mention their parents.
But when Kevin and Paul offer to take Cynthia with them for the evening, and Cynthia’s eager face is turned to her, she assents.
“No bars,” she says. “Your sister is only seventeen.”
Where do they go? She hears later from Cynthia: to a stag party for Steve. Yes, at a bar. Cynthia an honourary brother for the occasion. “Were there strippers?” she asks, when Cynthia bubbles out the account of the evening.
“Just one,” Cynthia says, laughing. “She taught me some moves — wanna see?”
Cynthia goes shopping at the mall with Debbie and her bridesmaids (really lame, Cynthia says; stuff that was old hat in Montreal two years ago), and hiking in the hills with Steve and Paul, out in a boat with Paul and his friends. To a beach party, with a fire, but no swimming; it’s April. Cynthia stays overnight at Stephen and Debbie’s, and another night (without Sidonie’s prior knowledge) at Paul’s shared basement suite, where, it seems, a multitude of unemployed or semi-employed young men live.
Nobody seems to be really employed, though Paul has a job as a night cashier in a twenty-four-hour convenience store, and Kevin, Sid-onie understands, works as a fry cook in a greasy spoon at the coast.
Cynthia comes back from Paul’s reeking of cannabis and glowing. “I didn’t smoke,” she says. But that’s not what Sidonie is worried about.
It is convenient that Cynthia is occupying herself happily; Sid-onie has time to do things she needs to do. She tends her parents’ and Alice’s graves, in the little cemetery near the airport. She stops by the church. There is a new vicar, who tells her that Mr. Erskine has retired, but doesn’t know where he’s living. The church looks shabby, its roof shingles curling up, its stucco peeling. Its window frames need paint.
She goes to visit Masao, but finds him gone, the shop sold, now a hardware store.
Up and down the hills of the lake country, the cherries and peaches are in bloom. But in some of the orchards, she can see that the trees are badly overgrown, unpruned. In others, the trees are dying, and have been left to gnarl and choke, instead of being bulldozed to make room for new; in others still, a battlefield of stumps lies rotting in the glittering April sun, nobody having burned them or replanted.
She visits the Red and White, and finds the shelves stocked with dusty, sun-faded cans. Mrs. Gable is not there, only a young woman who must be one of the McCartneys or Platts, given her blank, small-mouthed face and whitish hair.
All of the stores and houses seem abandoned, even if they are inhabited. There is a general look of disrepair.
She drives up over the rainbow hill and sees, first, the Sans Souci driveway with a “For Sale” sign, and then Beauvoir with half its west slope lying fallow, so that it looks like it has forgotten to get dressed.
Walt is apologetic. “The prices,” he says. Sidonie says she knows. Walt’s son has gone to Fort McMurray to try his luck there. Walt is operating his own orchards and Beauvoir on a skeleton crew: old drunks, he says, and the Quebecois kids who hitchhike out here in the summer.
“Are you paying too much for the lease?” Sidonie asks. That is the deal she set up with Walt, ten years ago: he’d continue to run the Beauvoir orchards, but rather than being paid, would lease them and keep the profits. She had wanted to set up a fixed income for her nephews, and so had asked for a flat rate, instead of twenty-five percent, the usual arrangement. Now Sidonie wonders if Walter has come off worse in the deal.
“Not too much, but if you adjusted the price for inflation, I wouldn’t be able to pay,” he says.
The land is worth too much. But also, in 1983, too little: prices have dropped.
Sidonie wonders if it would be a good time to withdraw something from their savings and put in into Beauvoir. It is disturbing to see the land lying bare, unplanted. Even in tight times, the orchards were replanted, because it took a decade for a tree to mature enough to become productive. There was always the future. If the price of apples went up, you did not want to be waiting for your trees to mature.
Walt is apologetic about the house, too. “I have to warn you,” he says, turning the key in the lock. The house is vacant, Sidonie knows. Walt had to evict the last tenants, forcibly, and hasn’t put any in since. “It’s a bit of a mess,” Walt says, but she still isn’t prepared for the interior.
A desecration. Sidonie has to will herself not to faint or vomit. She had known it would be bad; Walter had telephoned her, described some of the damage, long distance. But she had not pictured anything like this.
It is irredeemable, she thinks. Lock it up and abandon it. Set fire to it.
Walt says, “The roof is still good, the one we put on five years ago. And the frame and foundations still solid. It will keep.”
She makes one more visit, to Mrs. Inglis, who’s in a nursing home in town.
“Graham died too, you know,” Mrs. Inglis says.
“Yes,’ Sidonie says. “I heard.”
Mrs. Inglis is blind. She wears dark glasses, but fancy ones, with large red frames, as if she were at the beach. She has put on lipstick, and is wearing a summer frock in a peach and jade print, and holds out her hand to Sidonie as if she’s come over for tea; as if she’ll come the next week, and the next.
“Did you ever go to Italy?” she asks Sidonie, and Sidonie confesses that she has not.
“I would have liked to have seen Alice’s children growing up,” Mrs. Inglis says, but she refuses Sidonie’s invitation to Stephen’s wedding. “But thank you, my darling,” she says, and holds Sidonie’s hand.
Into Sidonie’s head, a rush of images: Mrs. Inglis’s exquisitely flamboyant hats, her fruity laughing voice, her generous waist. She has been like a warm plum cake, a fire in the grate. But now Mr. Inglis is dead, and Graham. Sidonie’s parents, Alice, Mr. Ramsay. Dr. Stewart. The Erskines and the Rilkes, Walt’s parents. Mr. Tanaka.
All of those people who knew her and remember her gone now. And who is she then? For a person’s life, Sidonie thinks suddenly, is a kind of bubble, given shape by other bubbles around it. Too fragile to survive more than an instant after the others have burst their walls and disappeared.
That is what it is like to be Mrs. Ingli
s.
In March of 1980, at the age of forty-three, Graham Inglis had, while apparently in one of his lucid periods, his medications working for once, unearthed a very old package of gopher bait — strychnine — in one of the orchard sheds. Hugh had told her this, over the telephone: it had been too late to come back for the funeral. It appeared that Graham had come upon the gopher bait accidentally, while looking for some kittens. The kittens had been birthed in the shed, and had fallen or crawled through a hole in the floorboards to the crawlspace. Graham and Mrs. Inglis had heard them mewing, seen the mother cat running back and forth and around the shed, calling. You know how my mother is about cats, Hugh had said. Sidonie had known: the Inglises had kept, at one time, more than thirty cats, most of the orchard or barn cats, Mrs. Inglis being notoriously unable to drown a kitten or turn away a litter left in a box on her porch.
Graham, acting as his mother’s eyes and hands, had moved the rust-streaked ladders out of the shed, one by one, had pried up the trap door, and crawled down into the dry, sandy storage space beneath the shed and carried out the kittens — four of them — in the front of his sweater.
He must have found the strychnine in the crawlspace. Mrs. Inglis remembered that they had used to keep the more dangerous pesticides in there, years before. Of course, every sharp implement or poisonous substance had been removed from the house and outbuildings when Graham had become ill. But the crawlspace had somehow been forgotten, overlooked.
Graham had probably secreted it in his pocket; Mrs. Inglis hadn’t been able to see much, then, but she’d have been able to see the suspicious box in his hand. Graham had said nothing. Had gone to see a movie with Mrs. Inglis: Being There, with Peter Sellers. He had described what was happening on the screen to his mother.
In his room later, Graham had written a short note that said only “I’m sorry. I do know this is best.” He had put a rolled blanket against the bottom of the door connecting his room and his mother’s — she slept between him and the rest of the house — and put his radio on, as he always did to fall asleep.
After Alice Page 22