Sister Ignatia enters the bathroom carrying a large bucket of ice. Her demeanor is calm. She dumps the ice in the tub and shoves Elodie into it. Elodie tries to be stoic, but it’s freezing and she starts to wail.
Sister Ignatia reaches for the large wooden scrub brush under the sink—the one they use for cleaning the floors—and scrubs Elodie’s thighs until her flesh is raw.
“That should do it,” she mutters with satisfaction, and then she holds Elodie’s head under the tap. “Next time be more careful.”
Before leaving, she tosses a clean white nightgown at Elodie.
The door swings closed behind her. Alone at last, Elodie climbs out of the tub and puts on the nightgown. “I’m not crazy,” she whispers to her reflection in the mirror.
If she stops repeating it to herself, she may forget.
Chapter 20
Maggie
Maggie watches her mother sweep a pile of dirt into her dustpan and then dump the whole thing out the back door. “Those beasts never stop tracking filth inside this house,” she complains.
She means her children, the three youngest who still live in her house. Maggie has a sip of ice-cold lemonade and moans with pleasure. Her mother’s lemonade is made with fresh lemons, heaps of sugar, and a touch of honey for extra sweetness. The apple cake melts in her mouth, and Maman’s sublime cooking almost makes Maggie forget how miserable it was to live with her. It helps, too, that her mother treats her way better now that she’s married and someone else’s problem.
Maman pours herself a glass of lemonade, slices off an end of cake, and sits down facing Maggie. It’s Sunday afternoon. Roland and her father are in the maid’s quarters, drinking and puffing on cigars.
“How are you feeling?” Maman asks. “Still got the morning sickness? I had it for months. Terrible. Remember?”
Maggie’s been dreading this moment. She looks away. “I lost the baby.”
“Again?”
“Yes,” Maggie admits. “I saw a doctor, though.”
Roland arranged an appointment with a specialist, Dr. Surrey, in Montreal. He gave Maggie a D and C, which he claimed would at least clean her out. “There’s definitely residue in the uterus from one of the previous miscarriages,” he said. “Which would explain the trouble you had with the last pregnancy.”
“So you mean the residue from the first miscarriage might have caused the second?” Roland interjected. “And so on?”
“Absolutely.”
“I knew there was an explanation,” he said, pleased with himself.
“Miscarriages are quite common, Mrs. Larsson. They don’t mean anything is necessarily wrong. However, without a follow-up D and C to clean up all the tissue, there’s a greater chance of another miscarriage.”
Maggie’s uterus is clean now. The first miscarriage—a common, random thing—had likely caused the others. There’s nothing to worry about, Dr. Surrey assured her. All they have to do now is start trying again. Their chances are excellent.
“You’ll probably have a grandchild by next summer,” Maggie tells her mother, sounding more optimistic than she feels. “He gave me a D and C, which he said should fix everything.”
“How’s Roland taking it?”
Roland’s way is to make model trains and compulsively toil over teeny puzzle pieces and mostly to work. He’s started to leave the house a little bit earlier in the mornings and come home later than usual in the evenings. He often misses supper. Maggie has always known he’s uncomfortable being around her when she’s down. Her moods frighten him, make him squeamish. She’s learned this about him over the years: he needs everything in his life to be orderly and pleasant. He wants his wife to be perky and accommodating. She tries, but she’s discovered she’s a terrible actress.
In some ways he tricked her, pretending to love her ambition. Really, he only ever wanted her to have children. He’s very good at pretending, something she’s discovered gradually over the course of their marriage, by way of little crumbs of information he lets slip, usually when he’s had too much to drink. His father was a cold, stern Swede who did not like him. His mother tried to compensate and cover up the father’s disdain, right up until she died, leaving the two of them alone. Roland became a master at cultivating a veneer of cheeriness and normalcy, especially in an atmosphere of tension.
She wishes they could go back to the way they were, before they got so fixated on having a child. Roland is way more determined than she is, and it’s changed him. It’s put a strain on their friendship and affected the quality of their marriage—the very things she treasured most about their life together.
“He’s making you pay,” Maman says, picking at her cake.
“Who?”
“God.”
“Maybe I’m not supposed to have children,” Maggie says. “I wasn’t sure I wanted any at first.”
“No one really wants them,” Maman admits. “But what other choice is there?”
“Didn’t you want us?”
“Who thought about such things?” Maman says. “We just got pregnant. It’s what was done.”
“Why didn’t you keep my baby?” Maggie asks her mother. “You could have raised her as your own. You like babies.”
Maman frowns but doesn’t disagree.
“She could have stayed in our family.”
“Imagine what people would have said? You disappear for nine months and then all of a sudden I’ve got a new baby? The immaculate conception! Everyone would have known.”
“Everyone probably knew anyway.”
“What are you bringing this up for anyway?”
“Maybe she was my only chance at having a child.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I thought I could forget her,” Maggie says. “I did for a while, until I got pregnant again. And now . . . I don’t know. I think about her a lot lately. If it wasn’t for what happened—”
“Stop it.”
“Where did Daddy take her?”
“There was a foundling home nearby. It was the only place we knew of.”
“No infant was brought there in March.”
“How do you know?” Maman asks, her eyes narrowing.
“I spoke to a nun there.”
“You’ll never find her,” she says. “Trust me. They don’t want you to find her.”
“Who?”
“The church. Your father.” She finishes her cake. “Just have another one,” she says. “The odds are much better.”
After supper, Maggie goes outside by herself. She heads straight down to the cornfield, wanting to get lost in there. As she makes her way through the stalks, she’s able to breathe again. The air has the musky smell of ripe corn, a smell that instantly transplants her back to a time of romance and possibility, when her future felt as limitless as the stalks that seemed to grow right up into the sky.
A voice in the night startles her back to the present.
“Is that you?”
For a split second she thinks she’s dreaming. She hears the corn crunching beneath his boots. His keys jangling. She stands very still, waiting. And then she turns slowly and he’s there, filling the field like some beautiful hallucination. Just like in her fantasies.
“Hello, Maggie,” he says.
“Gabriel?”
He smiles at her as though they’re still teenagers and meeting here in secret. The decade of their separation dissolves and it’s just the two of them and the smell of the corn and the humid air and the tickle of husks and tassels against their ankles.
Chapter 21
Gabriel is twenty-seven. There’s virtually nothing left of the country boy he was. He’s filled out—his jaw is square, his shoulders broader, his muscles more defined. He’s paler, and his blond hair, once thick and long, is now shaved in a buzz cut that makes his beauty starker, more angular. He’s also bulkier in the chest and arms, probably from years of lifting heavy airplane parts. Maggie finds it hard to reconcile him with the boy he was a d
ecade ago, when they made love for the first time in this very spot.
She feels self-conscious, worrying about her appearance.
“How’ve you been?” he asks, his voice light and with no hint of a grudge.
She searches his face for a flicker of what he once felt for her, but there’s nothing there. He’s looking her over, the way men do. Nothing more.
“What are you doing here?” she asks him.
“What are you doing here?” he says. “This is my field.”
She smiles and he smiles, too.
“I’m visiting my parents,” she says. “I still come out to the field whenever I’m here.”
“I know you do.”
Has he seen her here? Watched her from a window? “What about you?” she asks. “Angèle told me you don’t come home much anymore.”
“That was a long time ago,” he says. “Clémentine needed some help on the farm. It’s harvesting time.”
“So you two have patched things up?”
“We’ve made amends,” he says.
“You’re still at Canadair?”
“Where else? The stock exchange?”
She laughs, but it comes out sounding shrill. She’s not sure he intended it to be funny.
“I’m also driving a cab at night,” he adds. “It’s extra money.”
He doesn’t ask her anything else about herself. They stand facing each other in silence, which magnifies the volume of the crickets around them.
“You’re married?” she says, trying to sound light.
“Yep.”
“Kids?”
“No,” he says. “Not for me. I don’t want any.”
A million different things go through her mind. Would he have wanted to raise her baby a decade ago—assuming it was his—or would he have fled the moment he knew she was pregnant?
“Do you want to go for a drink?” he asks her. He still hasn’t asked if she’s married or has kids. Maybe he knows from his sisters, town gossip. Maybe he doesn’t want to know.
Maggie glances toward her parents’ house, thinking about Roland holed up in the maid’s quarters with her father. “I’d better tell them,” she says, not being specific.
Back inside, she pounds on the door of her father’s sanctuary. It opens a crack and she’s immediately engulfed in smoke. Her father thrusts his head out, looking put out. Maggie glimpses Roland sitting in the leather armchair, his legs extended in front of him, a cigar in one hand and a glass of Crown Royal in the other. Mario Lanza is on the radio. “I’m going into town to meet Audrey for a drink,” she tells them.
“Shall I drive you?” Roland offers in a thick slur. Ready to jump in the car and take her wherever she needs to go.
He’s a good man, she thinks guiltily. If only he hadn’t changed. If only she’d met him first.
“You’re in no shape to drive on the country roads,” she says. “We’ll sleep here tonight. I’ll tell Maman to make up Peter’s old room for us.”
“Hard to believe it’s been ten years, eh?” Gabriel says over a pitcher of lukewarm draft. “I like your hair like that.”
He reaches out and touches it. Maggie sits very still as his fingers slide slowly down her natural waves. Then he pulls back and chugs some beer, as though the caress was a perfectly ordinary gesture. “So do you have kids?” he asks her.
“Not yet. We’re trying. I’ve had some setbacks—”
He nods but doesn’t offer any sympathy or encouragement the way most people do. She refills her glass.
“What’s your husband do?” he asks.
“He’s a banker.”
Gabriel lights a cigarette and exhales a straight line of smoke. “The Seed Man must be proud,” he says. “He’s English, obviously?”
“Are you still angry with me?”
“Why would I be?” he laughs. “We were kids.”
She doesn’t believe him.
“Do you have a picture of Annie?” she asks him. She’s curious, like wanting to stare at an accident.
“You know her name?” he says.
Maggie blushes. “Angèle mentioned it. She must be pretty.”
He shrugs. They finish off the pitcher and he orders another. She reaches for one of his cigarettes and he lights it for her with his Zippo. He flicks it shut with a swirl of his hand.
“So, here we are,” he says. “Married to other people.”
She opens her mouth to say something, but she’s not sure how to streamline all her feelings into a cohesive sentence. She looks into his eyes and is certain of one thing: she still wants him.
“As soon as I saw you tonight . . .” he says. “You still look so good.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I was hoping you’d gotten fat.”
“I wish it hadn’t taken us ten years to run into each other again,” she says, suddenly overwhelmed by an urge to confess everything—her pregnancy, the baby, the foundling home, even Yvon. She’s nearly drunk enough to do it, but in a moment of clarity, she decides to say nothing.
“Now what?” he says.
She shakes her head and they stare at each other for a long time, neither of them flinching or looking away. Maggie feels a spark of hope. For a quick moment, anything seems possible, but then a waitress comes by and Gabriel gestures for the bill. Maggie’s mood collapses. She takes another one of his cigarettes and leans in flirtatiously for a light. “Are you happy?” she asks him, holding his wrist to keep the flame steady.
“What kind of question is that?” he says, leaving some cash on the table. “Let’s go.”
She follows him outside and they head toward Bruce Street. Without uttering a word, he reaches for her hand and holds it as they walk. It doesn’t feel the least bit illicit; it feels natural and right.
“I wish we could just stay in this moment,” she says as they approach the Small Bros. building.
“Why can’t we?” he says, pulling her into the alley.
“What are you doing?”
He pushes her up against the brick wall. Without warning, he kisses her. What shocks her most about it is not his presumptuousness or even her own recklessness in responding, but her excitement. She’s kissed him so many times before, yet it feels as exhilarating as that first time.
He presses up against her, pinning her to the side of the building. Her arms instinctively go around his waist, one hand slipping under his shirt and sliding up his smooth back. But when his hand is suddenly under her skirt and traveling up her thigh, she pushes him away. “Stop.”
He ignores her.
“Stop!” she says again, her mouth against his ear.
He looks at her, surprised.
“We can’t do this,” she says. “Roland will be wondering where I am.”
“Roland,” Gabriel mutters, his fingers slipping between her legs, tugging at her panties.
“Please don’t,” she says weakly.
He stands back, glaring at her.
“This isn’t how I want this to happen,” she says.
“How do you want it to happen?” he asks angrily, adjusting his pants. “We’re married to other people.”
“Not cheating.”
“You’d like me to leave Annie so you feel better about fucking me?”
“Gabriel, don’t.”
“That’s not an option, Maggie.” He swears under his breath and then impulsively punches the brick wall behind her head. “Same old Maggie,” he says, shaking out his scraped hand. “Leading me on, flirting. But when it comes right down to it, you don’t really want to disrupt your privileged little life, you just want to know you can still get me. Go back to your goddamn banker.”
“I’d give anything for it to have all turned out differently!” she cries, her voice reverberating in the narrow alley. And the truth—hurled out into the night like that, so stark and inexorable—stops him. They both stay there, not sure what to do next.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m drunk. This was a mistake.”
The words land like knives. He walks her home, to the edge of the cornfield—the place they once hid together, made love and disappeared together, found and lost and found each other. She inhales deeply, not wanting to go inside. The air is humid and has that fragrance of high summer, a blend of dew, budding flowers, and fresh manure. The sky is starless. She realizes she’s crying, but Gabriel probably can’t see her tears in the dark.
Maybe this is for the best, she reasons. Lust is just a choke hold that renders the heart and mind completely powerless. At times, it has nearly destroyed her parents. She’s better off with Roland, who is—or at least was—her friend.
“Good night,” Gabriel says.
Without saying a word, she turns away from him and starts her climb up the hill.
“Hey!” he calls after her. “I work the day shift at Canadair till three fifteen.”
A dare.
Chapter 22
Maggie turns off the TV after Gunsmoke and goes upstairs to her bedroom. She removes her clothes, puts on her favorite white nightgown with the eyelet ruffle bib, and sits down on the edge of her bed to comb her hair. She gazes absently at the wallpaper—a red toile de Jouy depicting French pastoral scenes—and realizes she’s already sick of it. She still loves the room, though; it was one of the main reasons she wanted this house. It has a fireplace and coffered ceilings and a breathtaking view of the backyard.
She can hear Roland brushing his teeth and she knows what will be expected of her tonight. He’s going to emerge naked beneath his velour robe and peel the bedspread back in a neat triangle, just enough for him to slide under without disturbing it too much. Then he’ll lean across the bed and give her a minty, utilitarian kiss on the lips. She can practically smell the Colgate on his breath. Years of obligatory, anxiety-filled intercourse in an effort to procreate has accelerated the unraveling of their sex life.
“Duplessis is dead.”
“What?” she gasps, looking up to find Roland standing in the doorway of their en suite bathroom.
“I just heard it on the radio,” he says, his tone excited.
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