She wanted to tell him how alike they were, how brave in their willingness to confront the inexplicable, terrible events at the very centre of their lives, or his life, anyway. In her case, it was just the after-effects that were harmful, and even then it was an optional kind of harm, like a frightening book you could pick up and put down at will, the kind of book her grandmother liked, perhaps for that very reason. Julian gave her a look of such fear and distaste she couldn’t speak. His eyes were watchful — lupine, was that the word? And the wolf was trapped, or thought it was. But it wasn’t her. He didn’t need to be afraid of her.
He started to walk away and, unthinking, she caught at his sleeve and he swung around, his teeth gleaming wolfishly in the darkness — it seemed suddenly dark, as if they were in an enclosure in a wood, the chill vault of the sky immeasurably far off. She thought of the lane behind his house, the shadows there. She thought of that dark, anonymous figure pushing her over in the snow. But this was not that figure. This was Julian. He put his face close to hers. You, he said. He hissed at her that if she had something to say, she could see him during his office hours. Yes, she said, yes, she was sorry. Sorry, she repeated, but he was gone.
Lydia went to the Ash Wednesday service at her father’s church, where she knelt at the altar to have her forehead smudged with ash: a sign of our mortality and penitence. It was a little silvery cicatrix, a third eye, tracking, tracking. It saw everything. Behind the altar the assistant-priest wafted here and there in her beautiful embroidered surplice, her hair in spiky little tufts around her head. Her name was Iris. That week she came to Lydia’s house for dinner. She’d been a financial adviser or a stockbroker or something, and now she was a newly ordained priest and also a vegetarian, something Lydia’s mother hadn’t known until they sat down to a dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Iris ran her fingers nervously through her spiky hair. She was having a hard time, she said to Lydia’s father as she took a tiny spoonful of mashed potatoes, a very hard time, reconciling her spirituality with the exigencies of daily parish life. Oh, my, she said, putting down her fork. All those personalities, the neediness, the bickering about this prayer book versus that one, a sung liturgy versus a spoken liturgy, kneeling versus standing. It was all so political, and she just wasn’t a very political person.
How do you cope? she said to Lydia’s father.
You’ll adjust, he said. He went to place his hand on hers, then took it away. He assured Iris that in time she’d acquire a thicker skin. Iris gave him a grateful look.
Lydia’s grandmother pointed her fork at Iris. You’re mistaken if you think religion is harmless, she said. It’s not just lambs and choirs and candlelight, you know. You should read Julian Huxley, Iris, you really should. Not Aldous, but Julian, the famous biologist. Of course, religion has given us better architecture than biology has, I’ll grant you. And better music. But biology is truer, in my opinion, and a whole lot more useful. Did Phillip tell you my father was a preacher, too? You must pry the story out of him some day. I was deeply hurt when my only child became a preacher. His father and I had hoped he’d go into architecture or engineering.
She smiled. Tell me, Iris, do you have children?
No, said Iris in a small voice.
Mother, please, Lydia’s father said. He took a deep, uneven breath. To Lydia’s mother he said, perhaps Iris would like a little more water.
No, thank you, said Iris. Then: Yes, that would be nice.
Lydia’s mother pushed back her chair and got up and went into the kitchen. She walked as if she were aboard a ship. Lydia, too, felt the unsteadiness, like weather balloons launched in unpredictable currents. And indeed that evening it began to snow heavily. Highly unusual, Lydia’s father said, so close to spring. Later, when Iris was leaving, he walked her down the driveway to her car.
Phillip is clearing the snow off her windshield with his sleeve, Lydia’s mother reported, parting the curtains a little. He’s opening her door for her, she said. He’s going to slip and fall, if he doesn’t watch out. He should have a coat on. She sat down heavily and opened the newspaper and then folded it up and put it on the table beside her. When Lydia’s father came in, stamping his feet on the rug, Lydia thought there was going to be an argument, a confrontation. Even Lydia and her grandmother would be in for it. The walls would shimmer and dissolve, the room would fill up with lost souls: her great-grandfather, the woman from the café singing her Janis Joplin songs, Declan, Julian, his child in his arms. At last, at last, stillness would be shattered, molecules would arrange themselves into new forms, new shapes, perhaps permanently. Her grandmother must have thought this a possibility, too. She sat up straighter in her chair. She moistened her lips. She looked first at her son and then at Lydia’s mother.
Lydia remained where she was, near the door to the kitchen. She felt in herself something triumphant and flailing, needy, yet replete, satisfied, because these were her people, this was her family. Many small things would happen in her life. There would be an accretion of small events. It would, she imagined, be like climbing steps that were slightly too shallow and numerous, and reaching a high place where she could look down, and it would be beautiful and scary, and she’d want to let go, she would have that chance; it would be hers to make.
She missed Declan. He’d sent her a single postcard from Dublin. Cool country, he wrote, beautiful and weird: like you.
In the spring Lydia’s father’s long-awaited, long-deferred appointment as archdeacon was at last confirmed. Her parents had to sell their house and prepare to move to another diocese. Lydia’s mother had to leave her job. At the same time, Lydia’s grandmother suffered a small stroke, possibly a series of small strokes. She was in the hospital and then, instead of moving into the new rectory in Victoria with Lydia’s parents, she went into a nursing home run by the church, where, Lydia’s mother said, she’d get the care she needed.
Lydia visited her grandmother almost every day. Pauline would be waiting for her in the hall, leaning on her walker, which she called Our Lady of the Sorrows. She showed Lydia the things she’d made in art therapy class, scoffing at her attempts to glue beads to fabric and braid strips of felt into whatever. What folly, she said, making angry little dabs with the glue stick. The nursing home was like prison, she said, or, worse, kindergarten. At night she got up and walked the halls, causing the night staff to mistake her for a ghost. Boo! she’d say, fluttering her hands. The director of the nursing home mentioned this behaviour to Lydia’s father. His mother frightened the other residents, she said, with quite sensational accounts of mass murder, shootings, infernos. It was not unusual for people of that age to invent such stories.
She’s quite a character, Lydia’s father had said weakly.
We are all going there eventually, the nurse said. We are all going to that strange place. Lydia’s father was delighted with this. He repeated it to Lydia several times when they happened to meet at the nursing home. They were waiting in the main hall for Lydia’s grandmother to wake from a nap. Along the opposite wall each closed door had on it a photograph of the room’s occupant. Behind Lydia was a wall of glass that looked out onto a fenced area with a security gate and an empty fish pond covered with netting.
Years ago, Lydia’s father said, when he was a kid, his mother had been a notorious insomniac. Nothing could cure her, not pills or warm milky drinks or meditation, all of which were tried. She’d be up until dawn, reading or playing cards, listening to music. Often his father stayed awake, keeping her company. They would waltz around the room in their nightclothes. He’d wake up and watch them from behind a door, alarmed and intrigued by what he saw. By day his mother was a dynamic, energetic person — of whom he was a little frightened, to be honest — but at night she was fragile, agitated. No doubt she should have received help, trauma counselling, Lydia’s father said. Once, briefly, she’d consulted a psychiatrist, he believed. But there was a lot she’d suppressed.
When I was about fifteen, Lydia’s father
said, my dad told me he’d done some detective work in the town where Pauline had lived. He’d talked to a few long-time residents. He’d read old newspaper accounts. To his surprise he’d discovered my mother’s version of events was not the only one. Not the factual one. For one thing, the bank where Pauline worked closed early on Wednesdays. She was at home when her father arrived. From what the police constable deduced, Pauline’s father must have shot her sister and Pauline caught her in her arms, or she collapsed against Pauline, and they fell together to the floor. One particularly lurid newspaper account had the young constable saying there was so much blood he’d had to peel Pauline’s hair and dress off the floor.
Lydia tried to look out the window, but the sun got in her eyes.
A woman in a pink nylon smock came by with a teacart. She handed Lydia’s father a cup of tea. He stared at it, bemused, although in life, in his professional life, women were always handing him cups of tea, he should be used to it by now, Lydia thought. His eyes shone with humility and fear. Fear that someone, somewhere, might fail to see him for what he was: a good man, a genuinely good and kindly man, devoid of malice or discontent or any other sin. And Lydia had to be the same. If not, everything would unravel and stop making sense; the world would get as cold and dangerous as it really was; there would be an abyss and people would fall into it and they would be crushed. And she knew this. It was what her grandmother kept telling her.
Beside her, her father smiled warmly at a small, hunched woman in a wheelchair, who tilted her head back and gave him a cold, ferocious stare. His smile wavered. Oh dear, Lydia, he said. What a conversation we seem to be having. Then he quoted:
What voice can my invention find to say
So soft, precise, and scrupulous a word
You shall not take it for another sword?
Now that’s definitely Elinor Wylie, he said. I’m sure of it. He went and knocked softly at Lydia’s grandmother’s door. He pushed it open and looked in. Ah, she’s awake, he said.
Sometimes Pauline pretended to be asleep, but really her mind was working at a great rate and then it would shut off, she’d cease to exist; it was like a preamble to non-existence. When she was young, she and her brother and sister would play quietly for hours on the back porch, keeping out of their father’s way. Through the window they could see him with his Bible open on the kitchen table, scribbling his annotations. Their mother would be going back and forth from the counter to the stove. There would be this little sizzle in the air, kerosene lamps, wood sparks from the fire, a state of flux and indeterminacy that nevertheless gave a small light. Pauline remembered their first house burning to the ground. They’d camped in a tent. They’d cooked over an open fire and bathed in a river. Her father had said fire was a brand and what it marked was marked forever.
She wanted to know: could it be as simple as that? Pure bad luck, poison in the well water? Her father called himself a preacher; he’d never been ordained, but he had a little church and a staunch following. He used to practice his sermons outdoors, preaching to the trees and the wind. When Pauline was small she’d hidden in the long grass and spied on him. She’d stare up at the sky and try to imagine God looking down on the world and all the people like grains of sand, separate but the same. Or not the same: distinct, but too small to be differentiated one from the other. That was what being God would feel like, she’d thought: sand and grit under your fingernails, the beginning of a fever.
The house had two windows like eyes. There was a lean-to and a stack of firewood infested with deer mice and there was a cat to catch the mice. Her father made a pet of it and fed it table scraps and it lost interest in mice.
She remembered the police constable, Henry Morgan, and his beautiful dark-haired sister, Jane. She remembered Jane’s camera, a George Eastman field-view camera, with black fabric bellows and a mahogany case. How Pauline had coveted that camera, which to her had represented everything she desired: freedom, independence, art, a life of her own. She remembered that, on the day Henry and Jane drove her out to her house, the camera had been beside her in the car, its eye sealed up, its brass hinges gleaming. Henry said, Take your time, Pauline. If you need anything, give a shout. They let her go inside, while they waited on the steps.
She’d walked from room to room. The house had been cleaned, but still, she could tell. In the kitchen she stood at the window. Snow falling, wind in the chimney, a truck or car going past on the road. She imagined her father in the room, putting a bowl of food on the floor for his cat, straightening a chair, tentatively moving her brother’s exercise book, left open on the table, as if he were searching for something he’d misplaced. She imagined turning and their eyes meeting and then she’d look away. She went outside and the icy air came at her tenderly, as if it had the utmost regard for her plight. She saw the cat near the fence. She asked Henry Morgan to please catch it for her. He ran, his long black coat billowing out, but the cat disappeared into the trees and she never saw it again. Henry and Jane took her back to the boarding house. Henry walked her to the door. Is there anyone we can get to stay with you? he’d asked. No. There is no one, she’d said.
One night Henry and Jane came to her door. Pauline had been asleep. Jane’s face was rosy from the cold, her hair in little damp tendrils. Henry removed his coat and pulled back the blankets and lay beside Pauline. He lifted her nightgown and began to make love to her, not roughly, but as if it were a duty, one of the lesser-known police duties he was compelled to undertake from time to time. He took her hand from her eyes. She was ashamed of her thinness, her ribs visible, the pallor of her skin. Jane sat on the bed and gently stroked Pauline’s arm and eased the tangles from her hair. Where Jane and Henry touched her, Pauline became new, restored, transcendent. She thought: I am like them. In fact, she was like anyone; she was human, she was herself. She remembered how she used to write down her father’s sermons as he dictated them to her, about how some would get victory over the beast, the image of the beast, and how they would stand on a sea of glass and their breasts would be girded with golden girdles. She could hear a dog barking, a shout, everything distant and safe, going on as it was meant to.
Before dawn, Jane and Henry left. Pauline got up and went to the window and scraped at the frost with her thumbnail, at the tiny, crystalline grains, which felt like sand but melted away in her fingers, and she understood — she thought she understood — that transience was a property also of things unseen, such as grief, sorrow, love. Loss was terrible, phantasmagorical and yet plain, unadorned, serviceable. It could, presumably, be survived.
That day she packed her few personal belongings into an old cloth valise that had belonged to her mother. She went to the bank where she’d worked and withdrew her savings, just enough for a one-way ticket to Vancouver. Once she was on the train she felt calm, yet eager, full of anticipation, and she was content just to sit quietly and watch as the miles went by and snow fell without cessation in the dark forests.
Lydia, kneeling at the altar at her father’s church, began to think of Julian. Almost in a trance she pictured him going into his house, at that very moment. Someone would have been there, caring for the child, and that person would leave, and Julian would go to a window with the child in his arms and look out at the rain and the dark sky. He’d remember, for no particular reason, Lydia creeping around in the lane behind his house and he’d try to work out what could have possessed her to behave like that — what had been in that girl’s peculiar little mind? Lydia imagined that she went to his house again and he saw her and let her in. They would stand there in each other’s arms, silent in their shared knowledge of what could happen in the world and indeed did happen, continually, without respite: acts of passion and bile, regret and love. At the same time, she’d see how ordinary the room was, a book open on the table, a coffee cup. A place of shelter. Yet there would be in that house the memory of tragedy, of loss. It would linger in the air, she would breathe it in. She’d have a sense, also, of the child’s presence
, the child deeply asleep in its crib in another room, dreaming something quite contrary to Lydia’s dream, something necessary to its own survival.
FELT SKIES
WHEN I WENT BACK to the town where my mother, Bethany, and I had once lived, I wasn’t surprised to see our house was gone. The lot was a dump. But I was happy to see that some of Bethany’s garden remained: the hardier trees and shrubs, a hedge of western red cedar, unkempt, but grown impressively tall and lush. I remembered how Bethany would dig trees out of wild land and cart them home in the trunk of our car. She’d go around to nurseries and persuade the owners to give her their ailing or misshapen specimens, which she’d then plant and coax back to health. Where the sun was hottest, she’d planted heather, lavender, and roses. She liked everything about roses: the fabulous colours and intricate, perfectly arranged petals, the fragrance, the serrated leaves like little arrows, even the hurtful, distressingly numerous thorns.
The reason I was here wasn’t important. I just was. It was a perfect spring day. I was standing near a trio of tulips, satiny-black, fat as goblets, blooming with surprising vigour near what remained of the house foundations.
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