Instead (Dovetail Cove, 1979) (Dovetail Cove Series)

by Jason McIntyre

  Finally, Kath shifted her own position in the big leather club chair and spread the afghan out beside her. “Come here, boy,” she said and patted the big space beside her. “Come on up.”

  Danny took a step into the room, kneading the dishtowel in his knotted hands. “He’s too old, Kath—” Danny said, “He hasn’t been able to hop up there in years—”

  But to the surprise of both Farrah and her grandpa, the dog didn’t hesitate. It was a sloppy leap, with legs splayed awkwardly for a second, but the beast got up on the club chair and flopped happily with his head into Kathy’s lap. Again, he shut his eyes and chuffed out a happy breath at the woman’s hand rubbing all over him.

  Kath settled back and reached with a spare hand for the tea cup on the table beside her. She returned her gaze to the window and continued mumbling her sweet talk to the lab while she combed fingers across his coat and sipped from the cup that must have been cold by then.

  Farrah looked at Danny and smiled. They returned to the kitchen without a word between them. The dishes still needed to be done. He’d wash, and she’d dry.

  5.

  Danny put the radio on. They listened to that while the two of them drank a sherry and played a game of cards and Kath sat in the chair petting the grey nearly out of a most-contented lab. It was the station from the mainland and it was all kinds of things, “Crazy on You” gave way to Kenny Rogers knowing when to hold and when to fold, and then Joe Cocker letting everyone know he could get by with some help from his friends. As the evening hour wore on, the station turned to cantatas and symphonies. Farrah could tell that the Danny from years gone by would have hated this kind of ‘old lady music’ but this fella here, he was enjoying the moment too much. He even liked the music. He was tapping a toe when Farrah finally stood and said, “I’m wiped. Lots of driving today.”

  “Course,” Danny said. “You head up and I’ll be along in a few minutes. Kath?” He turned to the foyer and the open doorway to the den. Kath was still in there and when she shifted, it woke the dog who dazed for a moment or two before getting the hint. He got up from his warm spot on the afghan and hopped down before slowly making his way to his bedroom.

  “Ah-ah,” Danny said. “You’ll need to go out again, poochers. No way are you waking me up with a whimper at two a.m. Your bladder’s nearly as bad as mine now.”

  Kath gave a stretch and headed for the stairs. “Little Lady,” Danny said to his daughter, “I got you set up in the back bedroom. Clean sheets.” Kath knew the house well enough and headed up the stairs, making them creak.

  Her daughter followed her and helped her get pyjamas out of her suitcase and find her toothbrush. Farrah surprised even herself. The week or so with Danny had been excruciating from the standpoint of how quiet and slow everything was. Coming back to the island after a two-year absence had felt like time travel. The place hadn’t changed. Except that everything seemed to move even more painfully slowly. Grandpa included. And now, here was Mom, a woman who, by all accounts, should still be a vital woman in her early forties. But she tottered like a woman twenty or thirty years older than that.

  But Farrah didn’t mind. In this moment, with the blackness of the night out past the second-storey bedroom window, she just patiently waited for her mom to get what she needed, to get changed, and to climb into bed.

  Then Farrah tucked her in, like her mother had done for her thousands of time before Farrah had turned eleven, before the dark time when Mom had left the island and not come back for nearly ten years.

  6.

  Downstairs, Danny had let the dog out and back in again. Baz was gently snoring in the living room on his bed already. Danny stood leaning on the kitchen counter in the semi-dark of the room where only the stove light was on. Outside, the trees were grey spikes against mottled black and the odd twinkling star.

  “Another cold night,” he said. There was no central heat in the house but electric registers had been running upstairs so the nip was off the house. And the oven had heated up the main floor enough when they’d cooked the roast.

  Farrah came and stood by Danny, leaning on the back of one dining chair. When he finally turned to look at her, she saw tears in his eyes. “I’m so happy,” he said. “So happy to have both you Little Ladies here with me.”

  Threatening to break into tears herself, Farrah went to her grandpa and put her arms around his wide middle, “Oh, Gramps,” she said, burying her face into his shoulder, half smiling and half threatening to cry.

  From the nest in his shirt she said, “Do you think she’s going to be…okay?”

  Danny pulled the girl from him so he could look into her face. He held her shoulders firmly and said, “I do.” Then he added, “And so are you.”

  7.

  Farrah’s first night back in town, she bawled in her Grandpa Danny’s arms, cuddled into him in the big club chair in the den, the same as she had when she was four and had gotten stung by a bee while carelessly exploring the big property. It was a place that everyone in town had called “The Hellegarde Estate” for as long as Farrah could remember.

  She knew that Danny’s father had gotten the giant parcel at a steal many years before her own mother was born. It ran right up to the Predis property to the north and east. It was mainly wooded, and the lane that joined Danny’s place to town drove past it and out to the old ferry terminal.

  Danny and his wife, Grandma Kit, had moved back from the mainland as a young married couple so that Danny, a munitions expert in the war, could find work at the mine south of here. He quickly climbed the ranks, Farrah knew, mostly from what her Dad, Chief Doug Birkhead, had told her. Danny almost never talked about himself or those days. And he never talked about the war.

  With his expertise, he was the explosives lead at the mine for a number of years. He and Grandma Kit built a house on the property while Danny’s father lived out his remaining years in the original cottage. That second home had eventually been replaced by this one. Hazard pay racked up at the mine and he had a good pension and enough to retire early. After years of hearing damage and what he called his ‘mining lungs’—a form of Pneumoconiosis he’d developed over his career, Danny deserved to be at home and live out his last decades watching his granddaughter grow up.

  But, years after Grandma Kit died, some executive at the trust company made off with piles of the pension dollars from the mining company. And since the company had changed hands at least a half dozen times, there was no surety to Danny’s pension. The scattered nature of the retirees meant that there’d be no steam in taking a legal route for compensation.

  Grandpa Danny made a tough choice, Doug had told Farrah, but ensured that he could stay in the house. He closed a deal to parcel off a section of his dad’s land to some investors who wanted to build a new subdivision just north of the creek, still close to town but a fair distance from the hubbub. Since the deal closed, they’d built some homes but almost no one had bought into the dream. Years went by. The power plant went bust. The tourist industry in Dovetail Cove had dried up, just like the supply of fish and lobster. The place had gone into recession, and most who didn’t work for either the mine or the short rail were happy to simply make ends meet the last number of years. Out here, unless you worked one of the north crops, you rented rather than bought, and now those first houses between here and Predis Field all stood empty.

  But Danny was okay with it. He’d invested the take he made from the sale and would have enough to live. Instead of selling off something he loved to be destroyed and trampled, it was like he still got to keep it. In a way, that was. No one else moved in and the sections for subdivision were never razed nor completed. Just as well. He liked his privacy anyway, so not having many other folks out this way worked in his favour. Since Kit was gone, he’d grown accustomed to being alone. His only other relation was Doug, though not by blood, and he barely spoke with his son-in-law anymore, unless there was a need for the Police Chief on some kind of official business.

  Ther
e were issues between the two men, sure there were. His daughter had married the man. His daughter had had problems there and then, his daughter had been carted off from the younger man’s house and the younger man had made it clear that he didn’t want his wife back in that house.

  Issues, sure, that was one way to put it.

  As it was, when Farrah’s mom, the younger Kathy, was deemed ready to come home, it wasn’t her home she came back to. Instead, it was her dad’s at the Hellegarde Estate. And that caused further strain when Farrah had told her father, “If she’s not welcome at home, then I’ll stay with her at Gramps’ until she’s feeling ready to decide what’s next. You can find me there.”

  Where once he’d had his challenges with his wife, now Doug had them with his daughter instead. Farrah, Doug Birkhead had often thought, had grown into the stubbornness of her mother quite easily.

  8.

  In a half-awake, half-dream state, Farrah roused, but only gently.

  She thought she heard the scritch-scratch of Baz at the kitchen door, impatiently waiting to be led in after a slow exploration and relief somewhere in the snow-covered and sprawling yard.

  That led her tired mind on a mental journey with eyes still closed. She thought she was in the kitchen and she got up to float over to the kitchen door to let Bazzy back in. But when she opened that door, it fluttered off its hinges as if it was filled with helium and had never been attached by hinges at all. She reached one lazy hand for the dog’s foot towel, something that Gramps never insisted on until the snow turned their yard into mud.

  But it wasn’t there. The row of hooks was gone too. In fact, that whole wall had dissolved away to fine powdery nothingness. Instead of the wall, the hooks and towel, it was blackness, mottled and sprinkled with only a handful of stars.

  As she looked back to the open doorway, the blackness turned to full on sunshine, glinting on fresh snow. But there was no Baz.

  Instead, there were holes in the snow, offset and treading away from the kitchen door to the remainder of the snow-covered yard. Each depression was mottled with blackness around it, like someone had poured melted chocolate into each one. It wasn’t chocolate, of course. Bazzy had gotten into the garden to sniff and snuffle at the rotted vegetation. The mix of stark white with those muddy holes, those were the lab’s footprints, leading away from the house to that bleak hollow in the edge of the dark wood.

  She looked out to see where poochy had gone, but all she saw was the expanse of the yard and then, at that distance, the cold dark wood that started there and led to the creek and the area where the cookie-cutter houses and then Predis Field lay. The dark of that bleak wood made her shiver.

  And then she realized it wasn’t real. She was in Grandpa’s guest bedroom, the one she’d slept in since Christmas when she’d come to stay with him, nearly a week earlier than they’d planned when they knew Mom was getting out on the first of January.

  She rolled over and immediately, the world of her half-dream bled away. Instead, she was back in reality. It was the dark bedroom where the bed creaked and the windows frosted at their corners.

  But she heard the scritch-scratch again. Confused, she got up and went to the window. What on earth was that noise? After looking out at the jagged treetops she thought that it might be Baz at her bedroom door, wanting to be let in. If he wasn’t allowed to bother Danny for a nighttime pee, then maybe the mutt was smart enough to avoid a scolding and get Farrah to let him out.

  She went to the door and opened it. No Bazzy. Just the dark hallway, the oiled wood floor.

  But the scritch-scratching noise was there again. It was louder.

  Farrah looked left down the hallway to the main stairs. Dim moonlight shone through the end window, nothing more. Then she looked right. Scritch-scratch. She startled easily these days and she gave a jump when she saw Mom in the corner by the linen closet.

  The woman had her back to Farrah. Barefoot, in only her long nightgown, she was wiggling the door handle with one hand and scratching its panelling with fingernails on the other. Scritchy-scritchy-scratch.

  Farrah’s heart thudded. She reached for the hall light switch and flicked it on.

  She went to her mom and took her by the shoulders. In her sleepwalk fugue, Mom struggled against Farrah and the closet door. Like she had done in the car, the thin woman was mumbling. As she fought to get her mom to come away from the closet door and let go of the knob, Farrah was able to catch what her mom was saying.

  “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.”

  Farrah forced Mom around and looked into her face. “Mom, Mom! You’re dreaming. It’s me, it’s Farrah.”

  As she did that, two things occurred to her. One, a recollection from somewhere that it was a bad idea to wake someone in the midst of sleepwalking. Two, that Mom’s eyes were squeezed shut against something as she fought and batted the air and Farrah.

  Just as Farrah managed to cajole Mom down the hall a few steps, the woman’s eyes blew open. “Farrah!” she shouted. “Farrah! You have to know. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.”

  The woman was sweating and jaundiced in the yellow hall light. Her panic made Farrah’s heart trot. “Didn’t mean to what—?” Farrah asked, desperate for eye contact, even though Mom seemed to look right through her.

  “—Didn’t mean to hurt your father. It wasn’t me,” said the older woman. “I didn’t mean to—”

  As Farrah got Mom around the corner of her doorway and back towards her own bed, Kathy said more. “It wasn’t me. It was the redheaded man. He made me do it. He wanted to keep me.”

  9

  After getting Mom settled back in her bed, Farrah sat at the foot of it for a long time. She’d given Mom her bedtime pill hours ago and wondered, briefly, if she should give her another one. She decided not to. And, in a few minutes, it seemed like the right decision. The panting that Mom had done in the hallway fugue, it had reminded Farrah of Baz’s. But now that panting had transformed into a gentle, light snoring.

  She quietly got up, padded to the door, and looked back to ensure her squeaky rise from the mattress hadn’t uncoiled the work of getting Mom back to sleep.

  Instead of Kath doing the mothering, now it was Farrah’s turn.

  She headed down the hallway and peeked in on Grandpa Danny. He’d either not been disturbed or had gotten back to sleep easily enough. Farrah suspected the former. In the last week, Danny had often needed Farrah to repeat herself three or four times. She saw that he was reading her lips too. And that was with his hearing aids in and turned way up until their squeal could sometimes be heard across the room.

  Now, though, both aids sat in a dish on Danny’s bedside. For an old guy with a bad bladder, he’d certainly slept nicely through the drama.

  At the top of the stairs, Farrah could just make out the distant breathing of the dog down on his cushion in the living room. All her little ones were tucked back in. Now it was her turn.

  She creaked along the floorboards and went back into her room, thinking of how her half-sleeping mind had concocted a fairly convincing world where she’d opened the kitchen door to find Baz waiting to be let in. He hadn’t really been there. Only the dark, hollowed out woods with bleakness at their centre.

  Sleep didn’t come for a long time. It did, finally, but not before she rolled those words of her mother’s around in her tired mind six dozen times. They’d sprung an image in her head that she’d forgotten.

  Her mother had said, It wasn’t me. It was the redheaded man. He made me do it. He wanted me.

  10

  Light hit Farrah’s eyelids. Her throat hurt. How it could be so dry in here with all that snow outside, she didn’t know. Such snowfall wasn’t at all common on the island, not the same one she’d known for twenty years. Maybe those hippies in California were right. Maybe global warming was real.

  She lay awake with the sunshine streaming in. She smelled coffee and bacon. A radio was on downstairs. Before she moved, she remembered flashes
from last night and those moments of finding Mom in the hall and guiding her back to bed.

  That bled into a mental image of the redheaded man, a fellow she’d not thought of since the weeks when she’d been thrown from her bike on the wooded path out behind her house. She took a shiver from that. How often does a person truly think on events from when they were twelve?

  She heard her Mom calling.

  “Farrah!” Farrah remembered as a kid, how on Saturdays, her Mom would call from the master bedroom to Farrah. At three or four, Farrah would have already been playing with blocks or puzzles on her bedroom floor and she knew that Mommy was calling for a morning cuddle before she made breakfast. Farrah would climb into Mommy and Daddy’s bed and lay between them, avoiding Daddy’s whiskers but loving the feel of one big arm around her while Mommy basically gave a loose bear hug with her whole warm body.

  Certainly, Mom didn’t want that now. That was fifteen or sixteen years ago, and Farrah was a woman now. But it was strange how memories could flood back.

  —the redheaded man on the wood path.

  Mom called again. “Farrah…?”

  With a hop that threatened dizziness, Farrah bounded from the bed. It let out a metallic drawl and she reached for her housecoat on the back of the desk chair. Despite the loss of a couple hours’ sleep, she seemed fine enough this morning. Granted, all that light meant it was probably past eight or even pushing nine. She probably made up for the loss with a sleep-in.

  When she’d arrived and had her meltdown—there was really no other word for it—Grandpa Danny had assured her that she could stay. “Get as much sleep as you can. Eat everything you want,” he’d told her. And she knew he’d meant it. “This place is your holiday, Littlest Lady,” he’d said.