All is Clam

by Hilary MacLeod

  Nathan felt a bit lightheaded.

  Lili lifted her arms above her head, palms together, and, elbows bending, brought her arms down and nestled her hands in prayer position against her chest.

  “Namaste.” She bowed slightly as she said it.

  She unwound effortlessly from her position, shook out her legs, rolled her head gently, and stood up. Her eyes were glazed. It took a moment for her to register Nathan’s presence. When she did, she smiled, the smile he always thought of as a promise of happiness.

  He wanted to hug her, but he’d learned not to. It would be an intrusion so soon after her meditation. She hadn’t made a big fuss about it the first time he’d invaded that space, but she had made it clear he must keep his distance. He’d learned to observe it. It was never long before she was his again.

  “Tea?” she asked now, her voice deep and slow, almost slurred. If you didn’t know her, didn’t know what she’d been up to, you might think she was drunk.

  She plugged in the kettle.

  “Make mine a coffee,” he said and sat down at the table.

  Soon they were having tea and coffee, along with muffins, made with spelt flour and healthful seeds. Nathan chewed his manfully, but it was just like eating a muffin that had been dropped in the sand, the grit jamming in between his teeth.

  “You were saying…?”

  He’d begun to tell her about the call from the stranger, when he’d stopped to allow his tongue to search for and excavate a poppy or sesame seed. Maybe some genuine sand.

  “I was saying…” Nathan made one last tongue-check, and slurped down the remainder of his coffee. “The guy’s gonna pay me fifty bucks an hour to be on call.”

  “All the time?”

  “No, just certain times. Like if he goes visiting somewhere, I’m to wait to bring him back – or be available to bring him back. I get paid for the waiting time.”

  “How long is he going to be here?”

  “I don’t know. He said at least a week.”

  “You could make a nice bit of Christmas money.”

  “I could.” He stood up. “I gotta meet the fella now.”

  “Who is he?”

  “No one I know. He said Oliver Sullivan.”

  “Oliver Sullivan,” Lili echoed as Nathan went out the front door.

  And then she said it again, frowning.

  “Oliver Sullivan.”

  Oliver Sullivan seemed to roll into the Hall, easing along like a slinky, one bit after another finding the ground and moving forward. He walked with fluidity, in spite of his short legs hidden by his fur coat and the robe underneath, so all you could see was a round head, a round torso – and feet, like Humpty Dumpty.

  “Santa Claus!” yelled out Millie Fraser, halting her stumbling step dance when Oliver entered the room.

  Oliver whipped off his hat, and bowed with a flourish. “At your service, young miss.”

  She screwed up her face and turned red.

  “You’re not Santa,” she screamed. “Santa has hair.”

  Oliver unwrapped his muffler.

  “And a beard. No, I’m not Santa, as you correctly deduce.”

  “Do doos? Mummy, he’s talking dirty.” She shoved her face into her mother’s skirts and clung to her.

  Hy sighed. She’d have to coax Millie into a performance now. Little Millie was, as her mother Fiona and grandmother Gladys were constantly repeating, “a sensitive child.”

  Hy climbed down from the stage.

  “We could use a Santa, if you’re offering.”

  It was Ben Mack’s job, but Hy knew he wouldn’t mind skipping it. He did it more as a duty than a pleasure, and he felt ridiculous in the outfit that was too small for him. The W.I. had bought the largest Santa suit they could get, but Ben was still too big, bigger than anyone else. The pants only just skimmed the top of the boots. The sleeves stopped at his elbows, and the buttons of the jacket strained at the front.

  On Oliver, the suit would probably pool on the floor, although his girth would take up some of the slack.

  Oliver said nothing. He’d often been asked to play Santa. He never had. Maybe this time he would. But not in that dreadful costume. In his own clothes. The Magician from the East. The cards had brought him here, and perhaps for this purpose. He extended his hand.

  “Oliver Sullivan.”

  Hy was immediately alert. Sullivan. The Sullivan legacy. Did he have something to do with it?

  After the rehearsal, Hy went up to Ian’s. She clicked on his keyboard. He’d been googling Jamieson. There was nothing much on screen. Just her status as a Mountie, and a reference to a seaweed bust in Frank, the satiric Halifax magazine. It referred to the thieves as “slime buckets” and the cops who failed to crack the case as “wet and weedy.”

  “Oh, God, does she know about this?”

  Ian shrugged.

  “I hope not.” There was more. A duck decoy roundup in Emerald. “She’d be mortified.”

  Why was Ian googling Jamieson? Was he interested? Hy sat down on the floor in front of the woodstove. As she gazed into the fire, she was reminded of the visit to Buddy’s shack, about Jamieson’s reaction to the ember falling from Buddy’s stove.

  “There must be more,” she said, jumping up. “There must be something we can find out. Something that makes her like she is.”

  Ian joined her, and they began googling a series of word combinations including “fire” and “Jamieson,” scrolling down the suggested links well past the first screens, until they found it. In the Toronto Public Library’s newspaper archives. Funny, thought Hy, unable to resist taking a poke at Ian who worshipped at the shrine of the Internet.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  Ian grunted, his attention almost fully absorbed by the screen, as if part of him had melted into it.

  “The Internet. Just amazing,” Hy shook her head. “Here it’s gone and taken us to the old-fashioned library archives.”

  “Mmmm.” Ian was scrolling the archives, but floating in the ether.

  “Yes, but it’s a lot faster,” he said, coming out of it as he found what they were looking for. The front page of the Toronto Star from 1978. The photograph took up almost all the space the headline didn’t. Just a few lines of the grim story and then over to page three.

  The photo was of a wood frame house engulfed in flames, two small children being carried out in the arms of firefighters. “Christmas Tragedy in Thunder Bay,” the headline read. And then the awful subhead: “Parents Die in Fire. Children saved by foolhardy firefighters.”

  “They never should’ve done it,” the Fire Chief was quoted as saying. “We’re glad they did, but there could have been four more lives lost, instead of just the two.”

  “Just the two?” The phrase caught Hy as it had Jamieson. It had haunted Jamieson for years. Just the two. Her parents. At six years old, she’d learned to shut down her emotions on that day. They were just too painful.

  It wasn’t until later, when she left, that Hy thought again of Ian’s googling Jamieson. He googled everyone, but he hadn’t googled her, Hy, until she’d let him – given him permission, in a moment of anger, to poke into her past.

  What they’d found out about Jamieson, Hy found very interesting. But she also found it interesting that Ian had wanted to know more about her before Hy arrived.

  Just how interested is he in Jane Jamieson?

  Do I care? Ian’s a friend. I shouldn’t feel possessive about a friend.

  Protective?

  Yes.

  Jamieson and Ian?

  It would be disastrous.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gus had watched Oliver arrive at Moira’s, from her vantage point in the purple rocker recliner next to the big picture window that framed the village centre. Her neighbour Estelle Joudry was busy pac
king Germaine’s suitcase for his hospital trip to Halifax, and her daughter and son-in-law had arrived to drive him over. With Estelle thus occupied, Gus had the satisfaction of knowing that she was the first to see Moira’s visitor when he arrived.

  Imagine, a man in a fur coat.

  She’d thought it then, and she thought it again as he came out of Moira’s door.

  Oliver was, perhaps, the most unusual sight she’d ever seen through this window, challenging the time her husband, Abel, had propelled through the window of his General Store when a propane tank exploded. He didn’t hurt a hair on his head, she never tired of saying. Except they all went white after that.

  Oliver seemed to be rolling down the path, two slippered feet just barely visible under his coat, two cats – cats! – wrapped around his neck. If he were coming here, as it soon became apparent that he was, he would have to leave them outside.

  Gus watched Oliver get in Nathan’s cab, and relaxed. Not here, then. She was relieved and disappointed. And she was wrong. Nathan pulled a U-turn, glided along a couple of hundred feet and turned into Mack’s lane. Oliver emerged from the vehicle like a furry marshmallow popping out of a bag, two cats clinging to it.

  Had Gus known there was a white rat up Oliver’s sleeve, she would have gotten up and locked the door. The Macks’ door was almost never locked, especially when there was a thunderstorm, in case anyone needed shelter. If they had, they would have found Gus sitting rigid and upright in her chair, coat on, handbag in hand, ready to exit at the first lightning strike.

  Oliver was not happy about the four concrete stairs. Carrying twenty pounds of cat didn’t make it easier. He shook them off his neck, and they jumped down to the ground, immediately sniffing the neighbourhood dogs, Toby and Newt, on the stoop.

  Oliver had been too young when he’d been here last to know the drill. He knocked on the door.

  No one knocked on the door in The Shores.

  “Come in,” Gus called out. “But leave those cats outside.”

  Oliver’s round head peered around the door.

  “Oh, but I can’t do that, Madam. They’re not used to it.”

  Gus sighed, easing herself out of her chair. Every day her limbs seemed stiffer than the day before. She shuffled over to the mudroom, holding the inner door, ready to slam it shut if need be.

  “Then bring them in here,” she said. “But leave them in here.”

  Oliver let the cats in the front door. They were about to dash into the kitchen, but Oliver held up his hand, in a command to stay where they were. White tried to jump back on him. Ginger wrapped himself around his legs. Oliver disentangled them and gently closed the door.

  The cats began to scratch the door. Oliver rolled his eyes. All this could have been prevented if she had just let them in.

  He turned to Gus.

  “Oliver Sullivan, ma’am.” He made a little bow. It never occurred to him to shake hands, not with a lady. It would never have occurred to her either.

  The cats stopped scratching. Gus and Oliver sat down, he in a rocker recliner like hers, only moss green.

  “Our Sullivans? Up the road?” Gus’s eyes burned with interest. She might get more information to add to her history of the village.

  “The very same.”

  “And so you’d be Eleanor’s sister Edie’s son.”

  “Correct.”

  “Rose Sullivan’s cousin.” Not a question. A statement of fact. Gus was on sure ground now, building herself a bridge of linkages.

  “Yes.” The path Gus was on was less certain for Oliver, more like a rope bridge than a fixed link. “What do you know of my family?”

  Gus shook her head.

  “They moved away. They all moved away to the Boston States. They came back home – it would be only once, I think, with you, as a young ’un.”

  Oliver nodded. “Four years old.”

  “Yes. I saw you with ice cream all over your face at the Strawberry Social.”

  Oliver didn’t remember that. Not at all. Odd, how other people held parts of your life in their memories, things that you didn’t recall yourself. Oliver would have been impressed at how many memories Gus held of her own and others.

  Gus saw something move inside Oliver’s sleeve.

  She looked at her own hand. It trembled, always, unless she supported it. But he shouldn’t have the shakes, a man of his age. No more than fifty.

  She looked back at his twitching sleeve.

  A set of whiskers emerged.

  Followed by a pointy white face.

  She shrieked and jumped up, moving faster than she had in twenty years, and went to fetch the fly swatter.

  Gus was trying to keep her eye on the rat, once Oliver had calmed her and got her to sit down again. He’d even tried to get her to make “friends” with Oscar. That didn’t work. Gus kept her eyes fixed on the sleeve from which the rat had emerged. Her pleasure in having a good old gossip with a visitor who had history at The Shores was dampened by the knowledge of the four-legged creature up his sleeve. And wondering what the cats might be up to in the mudroom. Would they relieve themselves in Abel’s boots? She smiled.

  “Well, I’ve taken enough of your time.” Oliver pushed himself out of the chair. He’d found out what he’d come to find out.

  There was a Rose Sullivan living in Wild Rose Cottage.

  Jamie was at Ian’s – again. He stopped in at Ian’s every time he went to the Hall. The cookies at Ian’s were good.

  “Moira makes them,” Ian had told him, jerking his head in the direction of Moira Toombs’ house.

  “You should marry her,” Jamie said, mouth full, crumbs sticking to his chin. He passed his sleeve across his mouth, and Ian, the confirmed bachelor, never even noticed the crumbs spilling to the floor. He sat down on the couch. Jamie was staring at the computer. It had never happened before, but Ian had not been on his computer for more than a day. He couldn’t answer the email from his nephew and he couldn’t do anything else if he didn’t. He was as frozen as the screen.

  Jamie clicked on the keyboard. The email came up.

  Unashamed, Jamie read it. Ian, electronically paralyzed, was unable to stop him. “Your brother’s in hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to see him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  What could he say to this child?

  “We haven’t spoken in many years.”

  “What?” Jamie’s eyes popped open.

  “If I had a brother, I would always talk to him. Why don’t you talk?”

  Ian ran a hand through the strands of hair still clinging to the top of his head.

  “We had a fight.”

  “Who won?”

  “Well I guess no one won.”

  “I guess not,” said Jamie, pulling his eyes off the computer screen.

  “It says he’s got Al…al…al…who? Is that a person?”

  “Alzheimer’s. It’s a disease.”

  “Oh. Is it bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why don’t you visit him?”

  “It’s a long story.” Ian hoped that would put Jamie off. Instead, the child plunked himself down beside him, placed a hand on Ian’s knee, and said, “Tell me, please.”

  “For a start, it means he wouldn’t even know who I was.”

  “Does that matter?”

  They sat like that for a long while. The child’s simple approach stirred something in Ian. He couldn’t do anything about Redmond yet. Not yet. But sometime, maybe.

  They ended with Jamie teaching Ian the latest games and tricks on his own computer, and Ian wondering how the child had learned his way so well around the technology.

  Ian had a secret wish he’d been born into this digital generation. He wasn’t,
like Jamie, a native. He was an immigrant. Well-educated, but not a natural. Not like Jamie. But Jamie was like few others, he suspected. A child genius perhaps.

  They stared at each other.

  Rose – and what looked like Buddha on her doorstep. A worldly Buddha, with a fur coat and hat. She appeared to him a worn-out Madonna, but the inside of this house was not a stable. It was a pigsty.

  A small rodent skittered by Oliver’s feet and out the door.

  One less. Rose shrugged her shoulders. “Mice,” she apologized, holding a hand out to him.

  “Oliver Sullivan,” he smiled as if he’d made a great joke.

  She smiled back. “Rose Fitzpatrick.”

  He raised his eyebrow. “Not mice?”

  She smiled again.

  “Not Sullivan?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Are we related?”

  He smiled. “I hope so.”

  She smiled, even more broadly.

  Jamie had come to see who was at the door. He liked to see her smile. She looked pretty when she smiled. Then he grinned, a big, startled grin, of shock and delight, as White emerged from Oliver’s fur collar, jumped down, stretched across the threshold, and began sniffing the floorboards.

  “Mice,” said Rose again, the smile gone, her eyes drawn to the dinginess of her life, exposed to this fabulous stranger. Ginger emerged from somewhere in the folds of the coat and hopped to the floor, then sauntered after his brother.

  Soon both were sitting upright in a corner of the room, eyes unswerving, staring at a hole in the wood trim, a genuine mouse hole shape.

  “Oh, dear,” said Rose, “I’ll have to plug that up.”

  “I’m not sure it will make much difference, my dear.”

  Oscar’s beady little nose and whiskers appeared from Oliver’s sleeve.

  Rose’s hands flew to her mouth, but didn’t manage to stifle the shriek. A rat. A white rat.

  Oliver’s pudgy forehead folded into its “V” of wrinkles.

  “Just a pet, my dear. No need to be afraid.”

  That’s what Jamie had been telling his mother about getting a snake, a boa constrictor that would eat all the rats in the house. Rose had explained that the snake wouldn’t eat more than about one a month – and what good would that be?