When the light began to fade, uneasiness seeped back into my body. The day had been nice and I was afraid of the talk that was to come. After the dishes, we went out to the porch again.
“I love this time of day,” Rita said. “My muscles are aching, so I know I’ve done something. And there’s the moon rising. It’s so peaceful. I think about the work I did, what I’ll do tomorrow. I wouldn’t change it, you know.”
“I want to have a farm someday.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. With Jenny and her baby. My niece.”
“Huh,” she said. “Jenny had a baby?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh.”
Some bats dived in the dark, and the dog lifted his head to look up then settled back into sleep. The lighted house cast a glow into the yard.
“Maggie,” Rita said. It was the first time she had called me Maggie in a long time. “You might as well tell me why you came and get it over with.”
I considered ways to begin. But there was really only one question. “Do you know where my mother is?”
“No. Where?” said Rita.
“No. It’s a real question. I want to know if you know where she is.”
“Why on earth would I know where your mother is?”
I didn’t answer. Agnes had said I should come to see Rita and I hadn’t thought about asking why.
“You were best friends.”
“Were we? Oh god, Maggie, this is so unpleasant. What’s to be gained by dredging it up?”
“What’s to be gained?” I felt my face burn. “Maybe you didn’t understand my question.”
“Maybe I didn’t.”
We sat there, the house, the porch, the moon, the trees, and I burned and she burned and my heart beat furiously and I thought of leaving, on foot if I had to, then thought how ridiculous it would be to replay that scene.
After a few minutes, I calmed enough to think of a new tack. “Why did you and Mom fight that night? Why did we leave?”
Rita didn’t speak and when I looked over at her, she appeared to be crying. “Christ I need a scotch,” she said. She got up, and went into the house and came back with a large glass.
“The problem is I’m going to come out looking badly in this. No way around it.” She sipped the scotch. “Forgive me if I’m not too enthused about dragging myself through the mud.”
I almost said, “I’m not asking about you.” People who live alone become selfish, I thought. Bea was selfish in the same way, even though she wasn’t exactly alone. Maybe it was because Bea and Rita had no children. Mothers give and bend, even when they get nothing in return. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
“What do you remember about that night?” Rita said, after another swallow of scotch. “What did Irene tell you?”
I was momentarily confused. Irene, the woman who was my mother.
“I was sleeping in the car that night.”
“I’d forgotten that.”
“You and Mom fought earlier in the day.”
“She’d been out all night. I hadn’t had a moment’s sleep. I was worried sick. I mean the gall of it just sent me. You might not want to hear this, Maggie, but it was so irresponsible. She’s a mother and she’s got two little girls and she’s off gallivanting all night. The only reason she could get away with it was because she trusted me to cover for her. And she was just so smug, coming home in the middle of the afternoon with her clothes all wrinkled. I could smell the stink of that man on her.”
I felt like I’d been punched. “That can’t be right.”
“Damn right. It wasn’t right.”
“Who was he?”
Rita sipped her scotch and stared out at the night. The silence yawned. A bird called in the woods, and another answered.
“Who was the man?”
“She was pretending, that’s what she was doing. And she was cowardly. I couldn’t forgive her.”
“Rita, who was the man?”
She didn’t answer.
I got up from my chair and went inside. In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face. Rita’s anger had smouldered all this time and I was poking it back to life. Whoever the man was, he was getting Mom’s attention, and Rita wasn’t.
I settled back into my chair. The bottle of scotch was now sitting beside Rita’s lawn chair.
“I loved her,” she said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You mean, like.…”
“Yes like that.”
“I …”
“Maybe you’ve never heard of such a thing. Well, it’s more common than you think. I’m just a normal woman who loved a woman, who just happens to be your mother.”
I couldn’t have said anything if I’d tried.
“I told her that night. That’s why she ran. But she knew long before that. She just pretended she didn’t. It was more convenient.”
I didn’t know what to say. My head was buzzing like the bugs crowding around the porch light. Rita sat there sullenly nursing her scotch. She was still angry, after all this time.
“But did you see her again?” I finally asked.
“She sent me a letter. A fucking letter. Not even a page long. I opened it, hoping maybe she had come to her senses. She would apologize. But no, it was excuses, ‘if I understood et cetera, et cetera.’ Why bother? Why bother to write someone that kind of letter? Why bother to read it? Waste of paper. Today, when you drove into the yard, I thought for a minute that it was her, at last. Pathetic.”
She was drunk now and I supposed it would all come out, all the bile. Maybe it would be good for her.
“I’m going to tell you something you don’t seem to know,” I said.
“All right.”
I had scared her a little. I could hear it in her voice.
“The last time we saw Mom was the day after we left here.”
“What do you mean?”
“That night you fought. We drove away. We went to Williams Lake and she left us there.”
“With your father’s friends.”
“That’s right. The Edwards. We haven’t seen her since. She sent some letters, some money, but then even that stopped. For all I know she’s dead.”
Rita seemed suddenly sober. She shook her head. “That’s not possible.” She stared at me as if I’d take it back. When I said nothing, she got up and lurched inside. I could hear her through the screen door, in the washroom, vomiting.
Minutes passed. I began to feel a chill in the night air. I went inside and put the kettle on. Muffled noises came from the bathroom. In the cupboard I found a box of tea. I warmed the pot and dropped in the bags. When she still didn’t come out, I went to the door and knocked. “Are you okay?” I said. “I’m making tea.”
“Thanks,” I heard. I went to get the kettle.
Several more minutes passed before she came out.
She lowered herself into a chair at the table and I put the tea in front of her. She inhaled the steam, her hands wrapped around the mug. I sipped mine and could think of nothing to say.
“Maggie,” she finally began. “I didn’t know.”
“But you know more than you’re saying.”
“Yes, you’re right. I do.”
It was my turn to be scared.
Her hands shook as she lifted the mug to sip the tea. “She came to see me one more time. It was January. I’d got the letter in October and then she showed up one day in January. It was stinking cold. Deep snow. The roads were in no shape. I hadn’t even cleared my driveway. She was driving a pickup truck. She didn’t have the station wagon any more. She said she’d sold it. The truck wasn’t that good, that’s why I remember. I was worried about her driving around the freezing countryside in that hunk of junk. The battery was for shit. I gave her jumper cables. Well anyway,” Rita waved her hand. “She was pregnant, Maggie.”
Something happened next, but how can I tell it? Something, nothing, I don’t remember. I beli
eve I did nothing. I believe I sat. Some storm raged inside me, lightning, treetops exploding in flame. The cage of my body somehow contained it.
“She asked me to take in you girls,” said Rita. “She said it would be temporary, but she’d left you too long at the Edwards. She didn’t know them well and she’d never meant it to be that long. She offered to pay me. I said no. Or wait. Let me think now for a minute. What I said was, ‘Am I just your pal who helps you out whenever you have an emergency? Is that all I’m good for?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know why I imagined you would help me. You’re a selfish woman. A selfish, lonely, bitter woman and that’s what you’ll always be.’ If I’m remembering right.”
“But why did she have to leave us?” My voice was someone else’s. It hovered high above my body and drilled and drilled like a woodpecker and I had the strangest feeling, my body a shaking whirling blizzard, and I thought of Jenny—that maybe that was what it was like for her now.
Rita said, “His name was Emil. She said he needed her.”
“What about us? We needed her,” I said. It croaked out of me like the squawk of broken bird.
I found myself out on the Nakenitses Lake Road, howling. It was getting light in the east. I was suddenly just there on the road, walking hard and howling. I don’t know how I got there but I had covered quite a bit of ground. I saw headlights coming towards me. A woman picked me up, not Rita. She had a blanket and she wrapped me and she spoke softly. She was kind. I don’t know who she was. Still don’t. She took me back to Rita’s and Rita thanked her. Rita put me in her own bed. She gave me hot milk and she sat with me while I drank it. Then she turned off the light and left me.
[ THIRTY ]
WHAT I COULDN’T GET OVER when I listened to the story Rita told me the next day, what I can’t get over still, is that she would know this at all, and we wouldn’t. How could a stranger come into our mother’s life and, after just a few months, know more about her than her own children? I had this image of Mom as a lake, with Jenny and me bobbing around on her surface, never dreaming, never even wondering about the green depths beneath us.
Rita had brought me a cup of tea when I woke up and said, “Breakfast is on the table.” We ate in silence. When we were done, she said, “After you’re cleaned up, come on outside.”
I could hear the ring of the axe as I stepped onto the porch. She was splitting wood. I joined her at the woodpile and she handed me a pair of gloves, then looked across the meadow at the mountains and said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I often think how lucky I am to have this piece of land, and when I wake up in the morning the most complicated thing I have to do is split up a pile a wood. Did you know I used to live in the city? I was a teacher.”
“You?” I said.
“You’re shocked, I see.” She drove the axe into the chopping block and took off her gloves. “Well, I don’t blame you. Obviously, I’m not doing it anymore. But yes, I went to Teachers’ College in Saskatchewan. Then I taught up north for a year and I hated every minute of it. So I applied for another teaching job in Vancouver and I got it. It was such a change from northern Saskatchewan, and at first I liked it. I went out to plays and movies and I spent a lot of time at the library.
“But then I started to miss the north. I read books about it. I read this one book called Driftwood Valley. I’ll lend it to you if you want. It’s about a woman and her husband who go into the wilderness in British Columbia. Just north of here. And they build a cabin and live there. I decided I wanted to do that. Without the husband. I could see my life, ten years, twenty years of it day after day and only the summers to do what I wanted. I realized I didn’t really like kids. It just infuriated me how little sense they made. No offence. But you’re not really a kid anymore. I wanted to get away. I wanted to be left alone.”
“Why did you become a teacher in the first place?” I asked.
“Survival. I had to survive. It was that or get married and there was no way I was going to do that.” She put her gloves back on. “I found this place for sale. It came with the mail delivery job. It seemed made for me. Come on Maggie, help me stack this pile. I’ve had the night to sleep on it and I’ve decided to tell you everything I know. You and Jenny have been fending for yourselves all this time—you’re old enough to know.”
We worked through the morning, as the sun beat down on us, growing hotter as it rose overhead. Dust and bark chips clung to the glaze of sweat on our arms. I tried to focus on stacking, fitting each log neatly into the pile, and not on the image I kept getting of Mom sitting in a cabin somewhere feeding lunch to a baby, a baby who would be about three years old.
Then I latched on instead to what Rita had said about the crappy old truck with the bad battery. Maybe she had had an accident. Maybe she’d gone off the road, been buried in snow and never found. Or maybe the truck had stalled out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. She’d been driving to us, after she left Rita, and when she couldn’t get the truck going, she’d broken the golden rule of survival: leaving the shelter of the truck and trying to walk out.
I stopped to drink the mug of water Rita brought. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I wanted to tell Rita to forget about telling me what she knew. I wanted to call Uncle Leslie and get the hell out of there, go back to Jenny and tell her a story that would protect her, instead of destroying her.
—
“I know we must seem old to you,” Rita said. We were eating our lunch in the shade on the porch. Rita had poured herself a glass of berry wine. “I’m a bit older, but your Mom is only, what, thirty-two?”
“If she’s still alive,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“She could be dead. For all we know.”
“Don’t even think it, Maggie. Don’t think the worst.”
I wanted to say, “That’s not the worst.” But I didn’t.
“My point is, when Irene got pregnant with Jenny she was sixteen.”
“Jenny is sixteen.”
“That’s right and you see how young she is, and probably scared.”
“She’s in the hospital.”
“With the baby?”
“She had the baby a month ago.”
“So why is she still in the hospital? Don’t play guessing games with me, Maggie. I’m trying my best.”
I told Rita what had happened to Jenny and after she heard it, she said, “So. It’s even more important that I tell you.”
She refilled her glass. “You need to know about Emil. I’m not going to hide anything from you, but you’ll have to be patient, Maggie. I’m going to tell it in my own time, the way I remember her telling me. She told me once that she wanted to tell you girls someday, when you were old enough. I think that ship has sailed.” This is what Rita told me.
—
Irene had met Emil in Bella Coola. After she quit school in Williams Lake, she headed west until she couldn’t go any farther. She got a job in a café. She didn’t know anyone. The cloud in Bella Coola was depressing, hanging low like smoke in the valley if there was no wind. To Irene, coming from the dry sunny plateau, it seemed like there was always something coming from the sky, rain or snow or just the feeling of rain sometimes. Sometimes the east wind howled down there like they’d all be swept out to sea. She was probably lonely.
Emil came in for lunch every day. He was from the Prairies and must not have known very many people himself. He always came in alone. He always had the same thing, the homemade soup and a grilled cheese sandwich and a pot of tea. They had this routine, where she’d say the usual? And he’d say the usual. It was a little game they played.
Emil talked to her, but his talk was a bit odd, it didn’t seem ordinary and yet in some ways, it was dead ordinary. He’d comment on what she was wearing, even when she rarely wore anything other than flannel shirts and jeans. He’d comment on the folds of the shirt, for instance, the way the fabric fell softly from her shoulders, maybe the pattern of the plaid. He’d notice the way the cheese
melted in his sandwich and spilled over the bread. When she brought him his order he’d point that out. And he’d say, This is the best sandwich ever. I think you are the queen of grilled cheese sandwiches. The queen of grilled cheese sandwiches, of all things. But she was sixteen and his oddness appealed to her. That and the fact that he was so interested in everything she did.
He told her about the places he went in his boat, the Elsa. A white-shell beach with old totem poles hiding in the trees. You could pick clams and mussels and feed yourself on salmonberries and trout. When the tide is out, the table is set, that was the expression he used. Old Indian villages, no one there in the summer, just the ravens and bears and once in a while a cougar. That appealed to her.
Of course when Irene told Rita the stories, Rita thought Emil was long gone out of the picture. She’d been out on a boat around there once, and had often thought of going back. But it had scared her a bit, the ocean. She didn’t think she was the coastal type.
Irene didn’t know anything about boats or the ocean either. She didn’t know a clam from a mussel.
What she liked about Emil was that he was kind. She talked about his eyes. How soft and kind they were, his long eyelashes. He was older than her by about ten years, in his mid-twenties. At first, she didn’t think of him romantically. But she liked his stories and the intensity of him. He wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met. Come and visit me on the Elsa, Emil said one day. And one day she went.
They walked down to the dock where he was moored. He had restored the boat himself. It struck her that it looked fresh, like it hadn’t been out on the water much, painted white with a fresh blue stripe and Elsa lettered on the hull. He kept herbs in clay pots on the deck and she noticed that. She noticed his clothes drying on a line. Maybe she fell in love with the boat first.
Emil told her he had first seen the boat for sale at the dock in Bella Coola—it was a thirty-five-foot gillnetter, in need of repair. Someone had brought it up from Steveston and then run out of money. But Emil’s father was a carpenter and he’d worked at that himself for a few years. He liked that kind of work. So he’d bought it and done the repairs, then added his own touches. He’d built a cabin behind the wheelhouse. He’d made a narrow table and shelves and polished the wood to a gleam. Everything had a place. There was a little oil stove and a row of four green mugs hanging on hooks. She fixated on the mugs for some reason. They were translucent green, the colour of seawater, and every time she used one she thought how ordinary and beautiful they were. She loved the compact order of that little boat, and she imagined how it would be, bobbing in the ocean at night, snug in the cabin, drinking tea from a sea-green mug.
Shelter Page 22