“You used to live in London,” Frances says. “There must be lots of traffic there.”
“No one I knew in London owned a car,” Alice says, trying to find where she is on the map. “There was no petrol then. Gas, I mean.”
It’s warm and they both roll down their windows to catch a breeze. Frances sees a convenience store in the mall and asks if she can get them each a cold drink, and her mother says yes, go, and gives her some change from her purse. Frances returns with two bottles of Mountain Dew, opens the passenger door, and is about to slide in when she is approached by a blonde woman in white cowboy boots. At the same time, she sees a tall man with jet-black hair approach her mother’s side of the car, open the door, and ask her to step out.
“Would you mind getting into the back seat?” the blonde woman says to Frances. “Please.”
Frances feels her heart begin to beat a little faster and she looks to her mother to see what she should do, but her mother is getting into the back seat on the driver’s side while the man holds the seatback against the steering wheel for her. Frances doesn’t know what to do other than get in, trying not to spill the two open bottles of soda. For a moment, she wonders if the man and woman are undercover police officers in need of a car, like on television, but she soon realizes that that isn’t the case.
Once the couple are in the front seat and the doors are closed, the woman asks Frances’s mother, “Do you mind if I have a look in your purse?” but doesn’t wait for an answer before she starts rifling though it.
Frances waits. Waits for her mother to speak up, to give the pair a piece of her mind, to turn into the ferocious mother who once strangled a rooster and tell these tossers to get out of her car right this minute and hand her purse back.
It doesn’t happen.
“Don’t hurt us,” Alice says, her terrified voice sounding unfamiliar to Frances. “Please don’t hurt us.”
Then she goes silent and sits, frozen, staring at the back of the seat in front of her while the man plays with the radio dial and the woman empties her purse.
“No fags,” the woman says to the man. “I guess she doesn’t smoke.”
The man puts the car in gear and drives them first to a gas station to buy cigarettes, and next to a grocery store. While the man stays in the car with the captives, smoking, the woman goes inside with Alice’s wallet and returns with several bags of groceries and a box of diapers. Then they leave the parking lot, obviously on their way to someplace else.
Frances is so completely puzzled by her mother’s submissive behaviour that it becomes more frightening than the couple in the front seat, who are acting as though this is a day like any other. The woman talks to herself in such an ordinary way—“You know, I think I might have left a stove burner on. No, I remember now, I turned it off, I’m pretty sure”—while the man guides them through traffic as though he’s out for a routine day of running errands. Hey, Frances wants to say, we’re back here, in case you haven’t noticed, but she’s not quite brave enough, or sure enough that the two are simply stealing their money. She keeps sneaking glances at her mother, who appears to be almost catatonic, to have gone somewhere else.
“Say something to them,” she finally whispers, and her mother says, “Shush.” Then she reaches over and picks up Frances’s hand, which she hasn’t done in many years, and Frances immediately snatches it back. She knows what the gesture means—that her mother can’t think of a way to get them out of this, that they’re dependent on hand-holding to see them safe again. Her mother closes her eyes and seems to be praying, even though she doesn’t believe in God.
They stop next at a liquor store for a case of beer, then at Zellers for a plastic toy garage and a Barbie doll, and finally for takeaway Chinese food at a little hole of a place behind a bowling alley, as though they are simply shopping for everyday things. When Alice’s purse runs out of money, the woman turns to her and asks, “Do you have any more cash?” and Alice shakes her head no and says again, “Please don’t hurt us.”
The woman says, “Why would we do that? You’ve borrowed us your car. It’s a super car, by the way. Well maintained. Isn’t that right, hon?” Then she asks Frances, “You don’t have any money, do you? I don’t see a purse.” Frances says no, and then she finds the courage to say, “If I had one, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“Frances,” her mother says.
“And we didn’t borrow you our car,” Frances says. “You took it.”
“Be quiet, Frances, for God’s sake.” Her mother’s voice at such a high pitch, about to tip over into hysteria.
“Now, now,” the blonde woman says. “No squabbling in the back seat.” Then she turns to the driver again and says, “I guess that’s it for shopping. Anyway, we’re almost out of gas. We’d better get home and put the ice cream in the freezer. It’s likely melting.”
They drive to a sorry-looking house with an old couch in the front yard, stuffing spilling out of the cushions, and they both get out of the car, leaving the doors wide open, to unload their loot from the trunk. Then, for the first time since he got in the driver’s seat, the man speaks to Frances and her mother. He sticks his head back in the car and asks them if they want to come inside, where a party is promised.
Alice shakes her head.
The man turns to Frances and says, “How about you? Leave the old lady in the car and come inside for some fun?”
“No,” she says. She tries to sound defiant, but she’s not as brave with the man looking at her. What if he makes her come inside? “I’m not old enough for parties,” she says.
“Come on,” the man says. “Crawl over the old lady and come inside.”
And now Frances is scared, and she realizes that she is no match for an actual criminal.
“No,” she says.
The man says, “Okay, suit yourself.” He closes the car door and goes inside with an armload of shopping bags and beer. The woman follows him into the house with the groceries, leaving Alice and Frances in the back seat with the car running and Alice’s purse on the floor in the front.
As soon as they’re inside the house, Frances’s mother scrambles over the seat and into the front of the car as fast as she can, as though stepping outside might draw attention and bring the couple back out with more demands. She locks the doors and then slams the car into gear and takes off without having a clue what part of the city they’re in. Frances, still in the back seat, looks out the rear window to see if anyone is following, but no one is. Her mother drives straight ahead and flies through a stop sign, and when they come to a main street with traffic lights, she turns onto it and they fall into a busy line of traffic. When a gas station appears to their right, she pulls into the parking lot and stops.
She leaves the car and goes into the station, telling Frances to lock the doors after her.
She’s gone for twenty minutes. Frances realizes that she’s still holding the two bottles of Mountain Dew, but they’re warm now. She empties one of the sodas out the window onto the pavement and drinks the other, putting the empty bottles on the floor. Then she gets out of the car and slides back into the front seat. She doesn’t bother locking the doors and leaves the windows down because it’s so hot. There’s music blasting into the parking lot from a radio somewhere—Elvis Presley singing about the ghetto. Some kids a few years older than she is walk by the car without looking at her, city kids with long hair, even the boys, wearing leather sandals and cut-offs. They look different from anyone in Elliot. They might be hippies.
Frances picks the city map up off the floor and tries to figure out where they are by the street signs she can see on the corner. She thinks her mother must be inside calling the police. She tries to think what she will be able to tell them, what the couple looked like and other details—black hair, blonde, the white boots, the couch on the lawn in front of their house. The man might have been an Indian, but then again he might just have had black hair.
When her mother finally returns to the
car, she looks composed. She gets in, sees the map on Frances’s lap, and says, “Did you figure out where we are?”
“The turnoff to the airport should be ahead,” Frances says, pointing in the direction they’d been going. “Do we have enough gas to get home?” She already knows they don’t, but maybe her mother has a secret stash of money somewhere.
“We’ll see, won’t we?” her mother says, starting the car and rolling up her window. “I told you to lock the doors. Do it now, please. And roll up your window.”
“No one’s going to jump in the window while we’re driving.”
“Just do it,” her mother snaps. “Do what I tell you for once and don’t talk back.”
Frances locks the door but doesn’t roll up the window. It’s too hot. She’s beginning to feel sick from drinking warm pop.
“What did the police say?” she asks as they pull back into traffic.
Her mother doesn’t answer.
“We have no money,” Frances says. “How will we get home?”
“For God’s sake would you just . . . shut up. Please.”
“Sure, now’s a great time to get mad,” Frances says. “Maybe they would have left us alone if you’d got mad before they drove us all over and stole our money. Dad wouldn’t have got in the back seat just because they asked him to.” Then she tells her mother to pull over because she’s going to be sick, but Alice doesn’t, and Frances has to stick her head out the open window and vomit Mountain Dew onto the street.
“When you’re done,” Alice says, “close the window. I don’t care how hot it is.” Then she adds, “We are not going to speak of this. Ever. Do you understand?”
Frances doesn’t understand. At this moment, she feels not a drop of sympathy for her mother, no matter how frightened she had been. What kind of mother would let her daughter throw up out a car window without even stopping? She glares at her, but her mother’s eyes are fixed straight ahead, both hands tight on the steering wheel as though it might spin away if she loosens her grip.
When they arrive at the airport, they find Esme and Tobias waiting for them. After they get the old couple and their luggage into the car—Tobias in the back seat with Frances—Alice tells them that she’s just discovered she forgot her wallet at home and doesn’t have enough money to fill the car with gas. Tobias—looking ghastly ill, but still indignant that they wouldn’t let him join the tour—struggles to retrieve his wallet from his pocket and comes up with a twenty-dollar bill, and they find a gas station and then stop at an A&W so Frances can order a Teen Burger. No one else orders anything. Frances moves to the front seat between her mother and Esme so that Tobias can lie down in the back, and he’s asleep before they’re even out of the city. She eats only half of the burger. She can hear Tobias wheezing in his sleep. Frances’s mother says, as though she she’s trying to find something to talk about, “I’ve never been on a plane. Not once.”
“I suspected he wasn’t able for it,” Esme says. “I’m sorry to put you to this trouble.”
Frances can’t help it: with the half-eaten burger on her lap, she falls asleep, thinking about what she would have told the police had she had a chance to talk to them—the woman had blonde hair, the man black, she wore white boots.
When she wakes up, the car has stopped moving. It’s parked on the side of the road, and her mother and Esme are standing on the shoulder beside it like stunned ducks. The passenger-side door is wide open. Tobias is still sleeping in the back seat. Frances slides out of the car and asks what’s going on. “Have we run out of gas?” she asks. Her mother shakes her head and looks at Tobias.
“He’s passed on, Frances,” says Esme.
“Died,” her mother says. “Tobias has died.”
Frances looks. It’s true that Tobias isn’t wheezing anymore. He doesn’t seem to be breathing.
Her mother suddenly crumples right where she’s standing, sinks down on her knees in the gravel and weeds on the side of the road and sobs, choking out words that can’t be understood, wailing like a mourner at a funeral. Frances has never seen her mother behave in such a way. She and Esme look at each other, not knowing what to do, until Esme takes Alice’s elbow and lifts her to her feet, saying, “There, there, dear. You’ve had a bit of a shock. You don’t want people to hear you in the next town, do you? He had a good, long life, we have to remember that. Not such a bad way to go, is it? No suffering—it’s the way he would have wanted it.”
Alice regains her composure enough to find a packet of tissues in her purse and blow her nose, and then two people in a station wagon stop to see if they need help and suggest they drive to the nearest hospital, which is half an hour up the road. That’s what they do. Tobias is officially pronounced dead, and a funeral home is contacted to transport him back to Elliot.
When Frances and her mother finally get home to the farm, the story told to Frances’s dad is all about Tobias’s death and the subsequent arrangements they’d had to make. Frances waits for her mother to tell the other story—about the abduction—but she doesn’t. When her mother says, “I’m knackered to the bone, and I’m going to bed,” Frances realizes that she isn’t planning to tell it.
She says, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, just tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Basie asks.
“We were kidnapped in the city,” Frances says. “And robbed.”
Now Alice has to tell Basie what happened.
“And you didn’t call the police?” he says.
“I thought that’s what you were doing when we stopped,” Frances says.
“I was calming myself down for your sake,” Alice says, “I’m going to bed now, and no one is stopping me.”
After she’s gone, Frances’s father makes a pot of tea and pours her a cup.
“What kind of a city is that anyway?” he says.
Frances stirs sugar into her tea and says, “Hank Williams died in the back seat of a car, you know.”
“Did he now?”
Frances used to wonder about that, how someone could just die in a car without anyone noticing. Now she knows. She also used to wonder if anything could really frighten her mother. She has the answer to that too. She can’t get out of her head the picture of her mother wailing on the side of the road. She knows she wasn’t crying for Tobias Sullivan.
“I guess Mom was really scared,” she says.
She and her father finish their tea and go to bed.
The next morning, Alice insists on washing her car and scrubbing every inch of the interior with upholstery cleaner and Windex. Basie gets on the phone and calls the local RCMP, and they come immediately and take Alice’s statement. Basie has to convince her to take off her rubber gloves and sit down at the table with the officers and tell them what happened. Frances is there too, and the only thing she adds is that the woman was wearing white cowboy boots. The officers say they will send their report to the city police. When they call Alice, she refuses to talk to them.
“My wife is distraught,” Basie says, and that’s the end of it. They don’t call again.
Her mother mentions the couple just once in the days that follow. She says, “I suppose they’ve gotten away with it. Well, they’ll end up in jail someday anyway. I doubt they need my help with that.”
She begins to think of her mother as a different person. There was before. Now there’s after.
Frances begins to doubt that the rooster-strangling ever really happened.
AT TOBIAS’S FUNERAL, Frances overhears two women talking about Dooley, about whether he’ll come out of the woodwork to fight for his grandfather’s money. Later, back at Tobias’s house, Frances asks Esme if Dooley knows Tobias is dead. Esme says that no one seems to know where Dooley is. She put the word out to people he used to know in Elliot—the crowd he used to run with, she says—but she hasn’t heard from him.
And then Dooley does come back to Elliot. Frances wants to know everything that her parents learn about him. They hear that he’s moved into the basement
of an old friend’s house and has been seen around town drunk, and maybe even on drugs. In the hotel bar, when someone expresses condolences on the death of his grandfather, Dooley goes into a rage and says he’s not sorry at all, why should he be sorry about the death of an old man he could never please, no matter what he did? He would have been better off in a foster home, he claims. The story spreads around town. Esme says it’s not true that Tobias didn’t care about Dooley. The boy was troubled, couldn’t get past the fact that he’d been deserted by his mother, and then she died before he even had a chance to meet her. Terrible for a child, Esme says, but not Tobias’s fault. She asks Basie to go with her to a lawyer, and he’s dismayed when Esme tells the lawyer that although Tobias has left everything to her in his will, she would like to split the estate with Dooley. She doesn’t want people thinking she’s done Dooley out of an inheritance. The only stipulation is that she be allowed to live in the house as long as she’s able.
Then Dooley gets drunk in the bar again and says more scandalous things about Tobias—calls him a selfish bastard who had no use for his own daughter, Dooley’s mother, no wonder she left. Tobias was a tyrant, he says. Just ask the students he’d bullied over the years. He calls Esme a gold digger before he drinks so much that he gets himself thrown out of the bar, and the police find him passed out on the street and put him in the drunk tank for the night. When the story gets back to Esme, she changes her mind about splitting the estate with him. She decides that he doesn’t deserve anything after all, that Tobias was right. It’s appalling, she says, to think that he’s so disrespectful and making up wicked stories, and he hadn’t even had the decency to come to his grandfather’s funeral. It’s unforgiveable, whatever unfairness he believes he suffered.
In September, there’s an early snowstorm. It snows all day, big wet flakes, and that evening Esme phones the farm and asks Frances’s mother if she can come into town right away. It’s late and the roads are slippery, but Esme sounds desperate, so Alice goes. When she gets there, Esme tells her that she’d opened the door to see if her cat had come from the minister’s house for one of his visits, and there Dooley was, on the step, his hair long and unkempt, dangerous-looking, snow falling around him. They’d stared at each other, and Esme was trying to get up the nerve to ask him in for a heart-to-heart when the cat appeared and ran into the house between her legs and she lost her balance and almost fell. At least she thought it was the cat. She didn’t think Dooley had pushed her. He’d reached out his hand then, and it was dark and she couldn’t tell what he was doing, and she was afraid and had slammed and locked the door. Then later, she saw three or four young men on the lawn in the darkness, flinging snowballs at the house. When they broke the kitchen window, Esme called Frances’s mother and then the RCMP. The culprits had taken off by the time an officer got there. It was dark out, the policeman said. Did Mrs. Sullivan know for sure it was Dooley? Sounded like something younger kids—bored and looking for trouble—might do. The police officer was young enough to be a kid himself, Esme said afterward, but maybe he was right. She hadn’t actually seen Dooley on the lawn.
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