“That must have been Abel. Where? Where did she see us?” But there could only have been the one place, and I answer for her. “At Bloor and Yonge.”
“In a park. You were smoking.”
“So?”
“A pipe.”
I find this entire turn of events incredible. “What would Mrs. Sawchuk know about that?”
“It was last June.”
“And she only just told you?”
“When I told her about the … the vomiting.”
“Well, for Mrs. Sawchuk’s information, smoking marijuana doesn’t make you throw up. You can tell her everything’s okay. I’m not a drug addict. I’m pregnant, that’s all. And I’m going to have an abortion.”
I start crying.
Mrs. Carver sits back on the bed and puts her arms around me. “Shh, shh, shh, shh,” she whispers. She extracts a wad of Kleenex from her sleeve and I blow my nose.
“I don’t know anything about babies,” I say. “I never babysat one. I’ve never even held one.”
She rubs my arm. “Are you sure?”
“I had a test. At the drug store.”
“How far along?”
“Two months.”
“Does Abel …?”
“No. And I’m not telling him, either.”
She points at the wall adjoining my father’s study.
“No, no, he has no idea.” I sink back against the headboard. “There’s a doctor in Buffalo. He doesn’t charge very much.”
She waves her hands. She doesn’t want to hear this.
“I’m getting rid of it,” I say warningly.
“I’ll do it!”
“Get rid of it?”
She nods. She looks alarmingly zealous.
“You’ll operate on me?”
“No! No!” Waving her hands again.
“How?”
“There’s a tea.”
A tea, it turns out, that she gave to her daughter, Stella, eleven years ago when Stella was pregnant out of wedlock. This is stunning news. Happily married Stella, whose childish voice asking over the long-distance crackle,“May I please speak to Mrs. Carver?” has led me to picture an even tinier, more nervous version of her mother. “Is it painful?” I ask, thinking that Stella’s nervousness may have begun after whatever the tea put her through.
Mrs. Carver shrugs. You get cramps (she digs her fists into her stomach) but you can control them by swallowing a spoonful of cod-liver oil every morning and by taking hot baths.
“How often do I take it?”
She holds up four fingers.
“Every four days? Every four hours. At night, too? How long before it starts to work?”
“Until you bleed.”
I sigh. “Okay, well, what does it taste like?”
“Bitter. Bad.”
“What’s in it?”
A disapproving look. She never tells anyone her ingredients.
So either I find my way to Buffalo and let a professional crackpot tug the baby out with tweezers (or whatever he does) but at least get the whole thing over with quickly, or I stay here and kill the baby slowly, with a secret potion that allows me to imagine I’m having a miscarriage and that, because of the cramps and the bitter, bad taste, offers a kind of penance.
Specifically, it tastes like horseradish and rotten eggs. And the cramps are constant, and she should have told me about the dizzy spells and sudden, clanging headaches. Walking, I fix my eyes on a spot in the middle distance so that I don’t stagger. Alice tries to take my arm, but I shake her off, she’s only drawing more attention to me, and I have the feeling that half the school must think I’m stoned. Alice thinks I miscarried on the flight out to Vancouver and am now in the throes of after-effects. (When it came down to it, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.) “I hogged the washroom for at least an hour,” I said. “The stewardess kept knocking on the door and asking if everything was all right.”
‘You poor thing,” Alice says,“to have to go through it all by yourself.”
“God was with me.”
“I know you’re being sarcastic. But He was. He is.”
In the evenings, in the kitchen of her apartment, Mrs. Carver brews enough tea to see me through the next day. We use a duo-Thermos method. When I get home from school I give her my empty Thermos, she replaces it with a full one. I then soak in a scalding bath, which not only eases the cramps but also, apparently, irritates the baby, or “it” as Mrs. Carver counsels we should say so that I don’t start forging a bond. Meanwhile, she prepares a douche meant to further irritate “it.” By the time I’ve finished my bath, the douche is in a miniature turkey baster on my bedside table, and I lie back and squirt into myself the warm, coffee-coloured, tar-smelling liquid, then stay there a while, keeping my legs raised. Afterwards, if I can muster the energy, I go down to the basement and skip rope. The whole point is to make “it” feel unwelcome. You can’t kill it this way but you can drive it to suicide.
My father thinks I’m suffering from menstrual complications and heartbreak. Mrs. Carver, uneasy about my telling an outright lie, said I should just steer clear of him, but I knew he wouldn’t be put off. He’s always on the lookout for a burst appendix, and here I am reeling from room to room, obsessively kneading the heels of my hands down my stomach (because why can’t I just push it out?). Nothing other than the (for him) mortifying subject of my period could have curtailed his craving to take my temperature. The supposed Dear John letter from Abel had him retreating even further. No questions, no indirect prying, only his big commiserating eyes falling on me at supper, trailing after me when we pass in the hall so that at these times my thoughts, affected by his presumption, teeter toward Abel, and beyond that, to a baby in a crib. Just for a split second, though, and then the cramps call me back.
The cramps keep me from sleeping more than two or three hours a night. In my dreams I’m covered in fur, my teeth are falling out. I have a recurring dream that instead of miscarrying I give birth to dozens of tiny babies who already talk in complete sentences but they’re no bigger than mice and they’re shrinking by the hour. I lose them in the cracks of our hardwood floor. I bundle them in winter clothes, line them up in a toboggan and send them down a steep hill. Chattering, they all go flying off. I paw madly through the snow and peer at pieces of grit, wondering,“Is that one?” The love and terror I feel in this dream vanish the instant I wake up. “I’m shaking,” I think with dull surprise. “I’m crying.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Toward the end of the Richters’ first summer in Greenwoods, I start to feel more relaxed at their house, enough so that if I need to use the bathroom I don’t go directly there and hurry back to the kitchen. I take my time. With an eye to one day living here, I look at things.
Outside the kitchen door, on the far wall, are sixteen framed black-and-white photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Richter’s relatives. Four rows, four photographs per row, every frame the same size and of the same dark wood, and the relatives more or less the same size as well, making for an impression of apartment-building windows and the residents all standing there looking out. Because they look so serious I assume, before being told otherwise, that they are from Mr. Richter’s side of the family. But more than half are from hers. All of them, his and hers, were either femmes fatales or artists of some sort, and many died sensationally. From her chair in the kitchen Mrs. Richter can see the wall, and one of the times I lingered there, she called out names and biographies:
“That one. No, top row. There. That is my mother, Greta. The same name as me. She had eight proposals of marriage. And there is my aunt Freda, sitting. You should have heard her sing, like a flute, but so sad. My father, he was always saying, ‘Freda could make a stone cry.’ She married a Frenchman and went to live in Marseilles. He had all this money and these houses but he was a bad man and gave her a disease you are too young to know about. She died a lunatic. That one? That is Mr. Richter’s great-uncle Otto. He wrote the story for an op
era. What do I mean, Abel?”
“Libretto,” Abel says. “It’s the same in English.”
“Libretto! You know. The words they sing. He wrote for fifteen years. Then the man he showed it to, the man who would make the show, he put his own name on it and took all the money. Poor Uncle Otto, he had no legs by this time, you can’t tell in the picture. He lost them in the First War. Then one day in the Second War this furniture falls on him—”
“A dresser,” Abel says.
“A big high dresser. The Allies were bombing the city, and crash, bang. So that is how he died.”
Farther along the wall is an oil painting of a shepherd and his sheep on a dirt road bowered by two enormous trees. It’s either dusk or dawn, the murky edges of the picture about to close in on the golden centre where the little group has halted. The shepherd, who is turned away, holds out his staff in a braced posture. Something down the road has startied him. What? Every time I look at the picture all my cravings and expectations and vague dreads blend into a hypnotic pining to find out what it is the shepherd has seen. If only he would turn around, I’d know. By the look on his face, I’d know.
When I turn around, I’m facing Abel’s room. After tearing myself away from the painting I usually stand in the doorway for a few moments and let myself be depressed by this shrine to his superior talent, intelligence and tidiness. For a small room it has a lot of excess furniture—two bookshelves, an upholstered wingback chair, an easel. On the wall beside the bed is a map of the world, and on the ceiling a map of the stars. The rest of the walls are papered in tacked-up paintings and drawings. Of insects and reptiles mostly, a few ferns and airplanes. All done by him. I couldn’t believe it when he told me that; I thought his father or some other adult must have been the artist.
I couldn’t believe he had read all those books.
His father’s study, next door, is about twice as big. Just as crowded though, just as tidy. On the wall are framed oil paintings of country scenes, similar to the shepherd picture only gloomier, and there’s a glass case holding butterflies that have pins stuck through their middles. When I first saw this case and returned to the kitchen saying I’d glanced into the room and noticed it (not quite true; I’d taken a few steps past the threshold) and that the butterflies were, to use Mrs. Richter’s favourite word,“wonderful,” she shrugged and said,“Wonderful when they are flying. It is not good to kill a thing just so you can look at it.”
Abel glanced up. “Father didn’t kill them.”
“No, no.” She patted his arm. “He did not. Of course he did not.”
The room that holds me longest is the master bedroom. Here’s where she sleeps. Here’s her dressing table, the burgundy skirt of which matches the velvet drapes. The furniture is all dark heavy wood, the large bedstead flaring out at the top corners like the hull of a Viking ship. The wallpaper has a pattern of what could be upside-down crowns, dark green, and the bedspread is the same dark green with gold brocade trim. All fittingly and stirringly regal, provided you ignore the crooked hems on the drapes and the top of the dressing table, the mess there: an almost toothless comb, a brush jammed with hair, several broken elastic bands hardened into rinds, a cracked hand mirror, a white garter and a bunch of empty, dusty perfume bottles, these at least redeemed by the romance of their spired, coloured-glass tops.
At the back of the table are two framed photographs. Twice now, I have tiptoed into the room to look at them. The bigger of the two is a black-and-white portrait of her and Mr. Richter on their wedding day. Strange to see a bride so much taller than the groom. Strange to see her, who always dresses in reds and purples and oranges, dressed in white, although, of course, it would be stranger if she weren’t.
In front of this is a coloured picture of Abel at about four or five years old. Except for being smaller, he looks the same. He is wearing a short-sleeved white shirt under a green vest and is holding out his hand as if to catch a ball. You can tell from his eyes that his smile has been coaxed.
On Labour Day morning the weather turns. Since mid-July we’ve had nothing but tropical heat, almost every afternoon thunderclouds smoking out of the treetops and flexing into giant fists and hairdos before collapsing eastward. Then there’s a brief, hard rain, then blue sky again.
Now the sky looks cemented over. And it’s cold, too cold to leave the house without a jacket.
Still, we meet in the ravine as usual. We track raccoon prints and search for fossils. Around noon a misty rain starts to fall, and we retrieve our Thermoses and lunch boxes and head for the cave.
We sit to one side of the entrance, where the light is best, and look out through the vines at what, to my mind anyway, is the dismal unravelling of the summer. There are piles of sticks here (whenever we find a long straight one, we bring it in), and after eating our sandwiches we get out our knives and start whittling spears.
It’s comfortable enough in this particular spot. Over the summer we’ve scraped away most of the dried dung from the floor and we’ve spread pine needles and ferns, and now the bats avoid flying directly overhead, even when we’re not here, it would seem, because there are rarely any fresh droppings. Today the entire colony clusters at the back. Every time the wind gusts in, they make an echoing rustie; otherwise they’re quiet.
I am miserable. For me, the last day of summer is always like the last day of life. I see myself tied to railway tracks, and the approaching train is being driven by Maureen Hellier. I say to Abel that I wish she would die: fall into a manhole or choke to death on a chicken bone. Finally Abel says,“Why don’t you just ignore her? That’s what I’d do.”
“Who cares what you’d do?” I mutter.
He glances up.
“Okay,” I say,“why don’t you just ignore Jerry Kochonowski? Why don’t you just waltz up to me tomorrow, and in front of everybody give me a big fat kiss!”
“Maybe nobody would care if we hung around together,” he says.
I stab my knife into the floor. “Are you crazy? Jerry twisted Donny Morgan’s arm and almost broke it that time all Donny did was give Brenda Slack an old India rubber ball. What do you think he’ll do to somebody like you? He’ll break your stupid neck, that’s what!”
Abel turns the stick in his hands. Carefully, as if it were dynamite.
I grab my knife. “So,” I say,“smarten up.”
For at least a quarter of an hour we work without speaking, then, feeling the chill, I say I want to start a fire with our shavings.
“Better not,” he says. “The smoke will upset the bats.”
There is nothing of resentment or hurt in his tone. If I’ve offended him, he’s over it, and this strikes me as so admirable, the mark of a nature so far above my own, that although I don’t care about upsetting the bats I refrain from insisting on the fire. I say, looking up,“I think they’re already upset.”
He goes to get the flashlight and shines it at the colony. Some of the bats flutter but none drops away and starts flying around, which is what normally happens when they sense the beam.
“They’re probably freezing to death,” I say.
He steps closer to the wall. “One of them’s hanging funny.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, no!”
“What?”
“It fell!”
I race over. He crouches and fixes it in the light. It has landed face down, a clump of sandy-coloured fur.
“Is it dead?” I ask.
He turns it over, and before I understand what that wrinkled growth on its stomach is, he says,“She’s got a baby.” And then,“She’s dead.”
“The baby?”
“Her. The mother. The baby’s breathing.”
Its entire body throbs. Instead of clutching the mother, it hangs backwards and holds on with its mouth, and I’m about to comment on the strangeness of this when I realize it’s attached to one of her nipples. I peer at the mother, who I think must be alive if she has milk. No, she’s dead, all right. The eyes ar
e like apple seeds, lifeless. Her mouth is pulled back and I am unnerved to see teeth … all this time I thought there were only claws to worry about. “What happened?”
“She’s not bleeding.” He shines the light back at the colony. “Maybe she had a heart attack.”
“They knew,” I say. “They knew something bad was going to happen.”
He brings the beam down again. The baby squeaks. He says we’ve got to get it to his house right away and start feeding it with an eye dropper before it dehydrates. “Here,” handing me the flashlight. He picks up the mother and tries to tug the baby free. It grabs the mother’s fur with its hind claws.
“You’re shining the light in its face,” he growls, wrenching sideways, out of the beam.
“Sorry.” Never have I heard such an angry tone from him. I contemplate the circle of wall where the beam is now aimed, but when he gasps I swing the light back down. The baby is in his right hand, detached from the mother.
“I killed it,” he says softly, astonished.
“No.”
“I killed it. I pulled it too hard. I broke its neck.” He gapes at the tiny body.
“Are you sure?”
He straightens and walks over to our spot and sits, holding out his hands, each with its bat, as if anticipating some magic, or punishment. And then he starts to cry, a sound like choking.
“It got hurt from the fall,” I say, alarmed. “The way it was biting her, I think its neck was already broken.” I sit next to him. “It’s out of its misery,” I say. This was my mother’s pronouncement whenever she squashed a bug or whenever a pet of mine died, and although I always thought,“What misery?” I did feel a slight, if uncertain, comfort.
“Anyhow”—I switch off the light—“it would have needed its mother.”
Not that I’m certain of this, either.
Abel sets the bodies down, between his feet. He has stopped crying. “I should have just left it on her. I should have brought them home together.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I should have known.” He picks up the flashlight and shines it at the roof. The bats hang like ripe fruit. You almost expect the whole bunch to start dropping.
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