The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  Well, then came a development that could have been foreseen and probably was, but not by my father. I don’t know if it happened to any of the other volunteers. I do know, though I don’t remember it, that my father wept and for a whole day followed my mother around the house, not letting her out of his sight and refusing to believe her. And, instead of telling him anything to make him feel better, she told him something that made him feel worse.

  She told him that the baby was Neal’s.

  Was she sure?

  Absolutely. She had been keeping track.

  What happened then?

  My father gave up weeping. He had to get back to work. My mother packed up our things and took us to live with Neal in the trailer he had found, out in the country. She said afterwards that she had wept too. But she said also that she had felt alive. Maybe for the first time in her life, truly alive. She felt as if she had been given a chance; she had started her life all over again. She’d walked out on her silver and her china and her decorating scheme and her flower garden and even on the books in her bookcase. She would live now, not read. She’d left her clothes hanging in the closet and her high-heeled shoes in their shoe trees. Her diamond ring and her wedding ring on the dresser. Her silk nightdresses in their drawer. She meant to go around naked at least some of the time in the country, as long as the weather stayed warm.

  That didn’t work out, because when she tried it Caro went and hid in her cot and even Neal said he wasn’t crazy about the idea.

  What did he think of all this? Neal. His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.

  I am suspicious of people who talk like this, but I can’t say that I have a right to be.

  He was not really an actor. He had got into acting, he said, as an experiment. To see what he could find out about himself. In college, before he dropped out, he had performed as part of the Chorus in Oedipus Rex. He had liked that – the giving yourself over, blending with others. Then one day, on the street in Toronto, he ran into a friend who was on his way to try out for a summer job with a new small-town theater company. He went along, having nothing better to do, and ended up getting the job, while the other fellow didn’t. He would play Banquo. Sometimes they make Banquo’s Ghost visible, sometimes not. This time they wanted a visible version and Neal was the right size. An excellent size. A solid ghost.

  He had been thinking of wintering in our town anyway, before my mother sprang her surprise. He had already spotted the trailer. He had enough carpentry experience to pick up work renovating the theater, which would see him through till spring. That was as far ahead as he liked to think.

  Caro didn’t even have to change schools. She was picked up by the school bus at the end of the short lane that ran alongside the gravel pit. She had to make friends with the country children, and perhaps explain some things to the town children who had been her friends the year before, but if she had any difficulty with that I never heard about it.

  Blitzee was always waiting by the road for her to come home.

  I didn’t go to kindergarten, because my mother didn’t have a car. But I didn’t mind doing without other children. Caro, when she got home, was enough for me. And my mother was often in a playful mood. As soon as it snowed that winter she and I built a snowman and she asked, “Shall we call it Neal?” I said okay, and we stuck various things on it to make it funny. Then we decided that I would run out of the house when his car came and say, Here’s Neal, here’s Neal, but be pointing up at the snowman. Which I did, but Neal got out of the car mad and yelled that he could have run me over.

  That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.

  Those short winter days must have seemed strange to me – in town, the lights came on at dusk. But children get used to changes. Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again – I just wondered where it had gone.

  My mother’s good times with Neal went on into the night. If I woke up and had to go to the bathroom, I’d call for her. She would come happily but not in any hurry, with some piece of cloth or a scarf wrapped around her – also a smell that I associated with candlelight and music. And love.

  Something did happen that was not so reassuring, but I didn’t try to make much sense of it at the time. Blitzee, our dog, was not very big, but she didn’t seem small enough to fit under Caro’s coat. I don’t know how Caro managed to do it. Not once but twice. She hid the dog under her coat on the school bus, and then, instead of going straight to school, she took Blitzee back to our old house in town, which was less than a block away. That was where my father found the dog, on the winter porch, which was not locked, when he came home for his solitary lunch. There was great surprise that she had got there, found her way home like a dog in a story. Caro made the biggest fuss, and claimed not to have seen the dog at all that morning. But then she made the mistake of trying it again, maybe a week later, and this time, though nobody on the bus or at school suspected her, our mother did.

  I can’t remember if our father brought Blitzee back to us. I can’t imagine him in the trailer or at the door of the trailer or even on the road to it. Maybe Neal went to the house in town and picked her up. Not that that’s any easier to imagine.

  If I’ve made it sound as though Caro was unhappy or scheming all the time, that isn’t the truth. As I’ve said, she did try to make me talk about things, at night in bed, but she wasn’t constantly airing grievances. It wasn’t her nature to be sulky. She was far too keen on making a good impression. She liked people to like her; she liked to stir up the air in a room with the promise of something you could even call merriment. She thought more about that than I did.

  She was the one who most took after our mother, I think now.

  There must have been some probing about what she’d done with the dog. I think I can remember some of it. “I did it for a trick.”

  “Do you want to go and live with your father?”

  I believe that was asked, and I believe she said no.

  I didn’t ask her anything. What she had done didn’t seem strange to me. That’s probably how it is with younger children – nothing that the strangely powerful older child does seems out of the ordinary.

  Our mail was deposited in a tin box on a post, down by the road. My mother and I would walk there every day, unless it was particularly stormy, to see what had been left for us. We did this after I got up from my nap. Sometimes it was the only time we went outside all day. In the morning, we watched children’s television shows – or she read while I watched. (She had not given up reading for very long.) We heated up some canned soup for lunch, then I went down for my nap while she read some more. She was quite big with the baby now and it stirred around in her stomach, so that I could feel it. Its name was going to be Brandy – already was Brandy – whether it was a boy or a girl.

  One day when we were going down the lane for the mail, and were in fact not far from the box, my mother stopped and stood quite still.

  “Quiet,” she said to me, though I hadn’t said a word and wasn’t even playing the shuffling game with my boots in the snow.

  “I was being quiet,” I said.

  “Shush. Turn around.”

  “But we didn’t get the mail.”

  “Never mind. Just walk.”

  Then I noticed that Blitzee, who was always with us, just behind or ahead of us, wasn’t there anymore. Another dog was, on the opposite side of the road, a few feet from the mailbox.

  My mother phoned the theater as soon as we got home and let in Blitzee, who was waiting for us. Nobody answered. She phoned the school and asked someone to tell the bus driver to drive Caro up to the door. It turned out that the driver couldn’t do that, because it had snowed since Neal last plowed the lane, but he – the driver – did watch until she got to the house. There was no wolf to be seen by that time.

  Neal was of the opinion that there never had been one. And
if there had been, he said, it would have been no danger to us, weak as it was probably from hibernation.

  Caro said that wolves did not hibernate. “We learned about them in school.”

  Our mother wanted Neal to get a gun.

  “You think I’m going to get a gun and go and shoot a goddam poor mother wolf who has probably got a bunch of babies back in the bush and is just trying to protect them, the way you’re trying to protect yours?” he said quietly.

  Caro said, “Only two. They only have two at a time.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m talking to your mother.”

  “You don’t know that,” my mother said. “You don’t know if it’s got hungry cubs or anything.”

  I had never thought she’d talk to him like that.

  He said, “Easy. Easy. Let’s just think a bit. Guns are a terrible thing. If I went and got a gun, then what would I be saying? That Vietnam was okay? That I might as well have gone to Vietnam?”

  “You’re not an American.”

  “You’re not going to rile me.”

  This is more or less what they said, and it ended up with Neal not having to get a gun. We never saw the wolf again, if it was a wolf. I think my mother stopped going to get the mail, but she may have become too big to be comfortable doing that anyway.

  The snow dwindled magically. The trees were still bare of leaves and my mother made Caro wear her coat in the mornings, but she came home after school dragging it behind her.

  My mother said that the baby had got to be twins, but the doctor said it wasn’t.

  “Great. Great,” Neal said, all in favor of the twins idea. “What do doctors know.”

  The gravel pit had filled to its brim with melted snow and rain, so that Caro had to edge around it on her way to catch the school bus. It was a little lake, still and dazzling under the clear sky. Caro asked with not much hope if we could play in it.

  Our mother said not to be crazy. “It must be twenty feet deep,” she said.

  Neal said, “Maybe ten.”

  Caro said, “Right around the edge it wouldn’t be.”

  Our mother said yes it was. “It just drops off,” she said. “It’s not like going in at the beach, for fuck’s sake. Just stay away from it.”

  She had started saying “fuck” quite a lot, perhaps more than Neal did, and in a more exasperated tone of voice.

  “Should we keep the dog away from it, too?” she asked him.

  Neal said that that wasn’t a problem. “Dogs can swim.”

  A Saturday. Caro watched The Friendly Giant with me and made comments that spoiled it. Neal was lying on the couch, which unfolded into his and my mother’s bed. He was smoking his kind of cigarettes, which could not be smoked at work so had to be made the most of on weekends. Caro sometimes bothered him, asking to try one. Once he had let her, but told her not to tell our mother.

  I was there, though, so I told.

  There was alarm, though not quite a row.

  “You know he’d have those kids out of here like a shot,” our mother said. “Never again.”

  “Never again,” Neal said agreeably. “So what if he feeds them poison Rice Krispies crap?”

  In the beginning, we hadn’t seen our father at all. Then, after Christmas, a plan had been worked out for Saturdays. Our mother always asked afterwards if we had had a good time. I always said yes, and meant it, because I thought that if you went to a movie or to look at Lake Huron, or ate in a restaurant, that meant that you had had a good time. Caro said yes, too, but in a tone of voice that suggested that it was none of our mother’s business. Then my father went on a winter holiday to Cuba (my mother remarked on this with some surprise and maybe approval) and came back with a lingering sort of flu that caused the visits to lapse. They were supposed to resume in the spring, but so far they hadn’t.

  After the television was turned off, Caro and I were sent outside to run around, as our mother said, and get some fresh air. We took the dog with us.

  When we got outside, the first thing we did was loosen and let trail the scarves our mother had wrapped around our necks. (The fact was, though we may not have put the two things together, the deeper she got into her pregnancy the more she slipped back into behaving like an ordinary mother, at least when it was a matter of scarves we didn’t need or regular meals. There was not so much championing of wild ways as there had been in the fall.) Caro asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I didn’t know. This was a formality on her part but the honest truth on mine. We let the dog lead us, anyway, and Blitzee’s idea was to go and look at the gravel pit. The wind was whipping the water up into little waves, and very soon we got cold, so we wound our scarves back around our necks.

  I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.

  I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.

  That the dog had fallen into the water.

  The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.

  Blitzee. Drownded.

  Drowned.

  But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.

  She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.

  I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t. I also remembered that Neal had said dogs didn’t drown.

  Caro instructed me to do as I was told.

  Why?

  I may have said that, or I may have just stood there not obeying and trying to work up another argument.

  In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned towards the trailer by then – I must have done so.

  When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not towards the trailer but back towards the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming towards her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy – nothing required of me, after all.

  What I really did was make my way up the little incline towards the trailer. And when I got there I sat down. Just as if there had been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.

  I know this because it’s a fact. I don’t know, however, what my plan was or what I was thinking. I was waiting, maybe, for the next act in Caro’s drama. Or in the dog’s.

  I don’t know if I sat there for five minutes. More? Less? It wasn’t too cold.

  I went to see a professional person about this once and she convinced me – for a time, she convinced me – that I must have tried the door of the trailer and found it locked. Locked because my mother and Neal were having sex and had locked it against interruptions. If I’d banged on the door they would have been angry. The counsellor was satisfied to bring me to this conclusion, and I was satisfied, too. For a while. But I no longer think that was true. I don’t think they would have locked the door, because I know that once they didn’t and Caro walked in and they laughed at the look on her face.

  Maybe I remembered that Neal had said that dogs did not drown, which meant that Caro’s rescue of Blitzee would not be necessary. Therefore she herself wouldn’t be able to carry out her game. So many games, with Caro.

  Did I think she could swim? At nine, many children can. And in fact it turned out that she’d had one lesson the summer before, but then we had moved to the trailer and she hadn’t taken any more. She may have thought she could manage well enough. And
I may indeed have thought that she could do anything she wanted to.

  The counsellor did not suggest that I might have been sick of carrying out Caro’s orders, but the thought did occur to me. It doesn’t quite seem right, though. If I’d been older, maybe. At the time, I still expected her to fill my world.

  How long did I sit there? Likely not long. And it’s possible that I did knock. After a while. After a minute or two. In any case, my mother did, at some point, open the door, for no reason. A presentiment.

  Next thing, I am inside. My mother is yelling at Neal and trying to make him understand something. He is getting to his feet and standing there speaking to her, touching her, with such mildness and gentleness and consolation. But that is not what my mother wants at all and she tears herself away from him and runs out the door. He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet. His big helpless-looking toes.

  I think he says something to me with a singsong sadness in his voice. Strange.

  Beyond that I have no details.

  My mother didn’t throw herself into the water. She didn’t go into labor from the shock. My brother, Brent, was not born until a week or ten days after the funeral, and he was a full-term infant. Where she was while she waited for the birth to happen I do not know. Perhaps she was kept in the hospital and sedated as much as possible under the circumstances.

  I remember the day of the funeral quite well. A very pleasant and comfortable woman I didn’t know – her name was Josie – took me on an expedition. We visited some swings and a sort of dollhouse that was large enough for me to go inside, and we ate a lunch of my favorite treats, but not enough to make me sick. Josie was somebody I got to know very well later on. She was a friend my father had made in Cuba, and after the divorce she became my stepmother, his second wife.

  My mother recovered. She had to. There was Brent to look after and, most of the time, me. I believe I stayed with my father and Josie while she got settled in the house that she planned to live in for the rest of her life. I don’t remember being there with Brent until he was big enough to sit up in his high chair.