by Mary Swan
And always there’s the changing water, the sky in all its seasons. Lives overlapping through years and years, and we’re part of it for our own brief time, but comforted, or at least I am, by knowing it will go on and on. Even the young ones, who couldn’t wait to leave, come back from wherever they’ve ended up, take off their shoes and walk through the sand, sometimes holding their own children by the hand. On the train home from our appointment in the city, Edie said that she’d realized she no longer missed it. The bustle and the entertainments, the crowds of people who didn’t know the first thing about you. She said that maybe a place like Inverhaven was better, like a family in the way everyone knew everything about everyone else and you could be whoever you were, and know that you still belonged.
There are so many things that bind us, and I couldn’t have known that first day, but I soon learned what it meant to feel the first warm sun, after a hard winter. How giddy people become, when the snow begins its trickling melt, doors thrown open and scarves and layers shed, turning their faces up to the pale sky. There’s still a party in the town hall every April, all kinds of wildness and laughter, not just for the promise of warmer weather, or so I think, but relief at coming through once again. All winters are hard here, and everything more difficult, from leaving the warm nest of your bed to making your way home again, with the setting sun blood-red on the snow. The dark comes sooner and sooner, months when the whole world is a dead and gloomy place, and those clear blue days that make your skin tingle are too rare to be more than a cruel reminder. I’ve known that from other places but not felt it the same way. Here there are also the storms that blow up, days on end with the wind beating and howling, the woodpile dwindling, and people driven deeper into their own dark thoughts.
I suppose it’s there in all of us, that darkness, though in some it’s buried deeper. Like those circus parades I used to photograph, all glitter and big smiles, but when you look harder, stand closer, you see the cracks in the thick face paint, the tears and the soil on those flowing capes. There can be a desperate need to keep busy, to fill our days and our minds with lists and entertainments, with errands and news of any kind, about anyone. A need to be in company, to seal up any crack with talk and tasks, with feuds and jokes, anything to muffle the call of the long white field, to keep from seeing every rafter, every bare tree limb, as a place to sling a rope. Maybe that’s what happened with Bella in the end; much as she wanted to, I don’t think even Edie believed that the sleeping draft was an accident.
This morning I climbed the old steps, and I walked to the place where the Lakeview once stood; I walked down the main street, along Centre Street and all the others, out to the station and back again. I walked until my feet were sore, my legs so tired, and then I went back to Robbie’s house, climbed the stairs and closed the door to the room where I stay. It was meant to be for a short time, when my plans for the Lakeview were gone, but it was harder than I thought to work out what to do next, and took longer. Things happened last winter, I know, but when I try to remember it seems like all I did was look out through the new window while the snow fell, unfamiliar mounded shapes in the yard and I had no idea what would be revealed when the spring thaw came.
Last week Maggie’s great-nephew wrote, and offered me work at the new hotel, getting things prepared and running smoothly for the opening next spring. “What a nerve,” Edie said, but I’ve been thinking about it, principles and pride being luxuries I’ve rarely been able to afford. Robbie and Edie have done everything to make me comfortable here, make me welcome, and I know I am, but I don’t think they understand how it feels, living at the edges of other people’s lives. Not a thing I know how to explain without seeming ungrateful, but I’ve had my eye on a narrow storefront on the main street, where Lily Trimble has her hat shop. People say she can’t hold on much longer, can’t keep up with the changing styles and the way it’s so easy now for people to do their shopping in bigger places.
If I had a wage from the hotel, along with what I’ve been able to put aside over the years, it would be enough to cover the lease and set it up as a little studio, with space for me to sleep and cook at the back. I know everyone owns a camera these days, but there are still special occasions to mark, and events, and I’m sure Stinson will take prints for the newspaper. I’ll feel better there, I know I will, on my own and with all my things, my equipment unpacked from the boxes now piled in a corner of Robbie’s parlour. I’ll put up all my pictures again, and maybe enlarge one or two to go in the window. Though I would never have thought it, lately I’ve been wishing that I had that photograph of Sam and me, the one where we’re laughing, with our heads close together. For a long time I couldn’t remember, but there was a time we were exactly like that.
I haven’t mentioned my plan for the studio to Robbie, or to Edie. They’d think it too difficult, too uncertain, not understand why I might want it, a woman my age sleeping on a cot behind a curtain. They’d point out, carefully and kindly, that I’m going to need more help, not less, that they’d worry. They mean well, I know they do, and I’ve always found it hardest to deal with people who have good intentions. It’s different because they’re family, but I learned long ago that people who think they know what’s best for you usually don’t. Sometimes they march you up a gangway, and set you loose in a vast, empty sea.
Edie tapped on my door at lunchtime, but I said I was resting; before she went away she reminded me that we needed to let the surgeon know, as if I might have forgotten. It’s not the thought of a knife in my eye, though it’s not surprising that’s what she thinks, and Robbie too. And it’s not the small chance the operation won’t work, or even make things worse; there’s nothing I can do about that. I know I’ll do it in the end, but I’m not quite ready. When the surgeon explained about my vision like a tunnel, what I thought of was looking through the lens of a camera, the way everything else disappears and you see so clearly the small, perfect view that’s left. The thing that’s exactly what you want it to be.
I heard my grandsons come raucous through the door downstairs, their voices smashing together as they argued about one pushing the other, and unfairly winning the race up the front steps, until Edie rapped hard on the stove. In some ways I feel I knew them better before I moved into the middle of their lives. Not that they behaved better, I don’t mean that, but we used to take long walks together, and they asked me all kinds of questions, as small boys do, and listened to my answers. Little Stevie wondered once if seagulls recognized each other, if they looked as different to each other as people did, and then we talked about how people have two eyes, a nose and a mouth, but don’t look anything the same. “And two arms and two legs,” Stevie said, and his brother said, “Not everyone, stupid,” and they called each other stupid for a while, as they sometimes did. Edie says if they have another child she hopes it will be a girl; she asked me once if I’d been just a little disappointed when Robbie was born, but I told her that instead I’d been so relieved.
All through the afternoon I kept thinking that I should get up, that I should splash water on my face and tidy my hair, go down and eat the meal I knew Edie would have set aside for me. She’s a good girl, is Edie, and a caring one, and there’s not much, except spiders, that frightens her. When she sets her mind on something it’s not often she can be knocked off course. With a decision to make she sits down with a piece of paper, columns for plus and for minus; that’s a thing Robbie teases her about and she can laugh at herself too. Edie’s known sorrow and hardship, like everyone, but I’ve always admired the way she gets on with things. People like to say that suffering makes you stronger, as if that’s a reason for it, but I don’t believe there’s a reason and no point in looking for one. Things happen, and they can bowl you right over, but what can you do but go on? It’s harder for some, though I didn’t always understand that. Hard not to cling to it, the wrong or the loss, as if letting go would be some kind of betrayal. As if that would make it a trivial thing, make you someone who didn�
�t matter at all.
I meant to get up, but instead I drifted through thoughts that turned into dreams and back again, different light when I opened my eyes, changing shadows. Still aware of the noises, slamming doors and the boys home again from school, Robbie’s deep voice, the scrape of a spoon in a pot. The sounds of lives going on but at a remove and muffled by my closed door. Then I opened my eyes into silence, the shadows reaching farther on the ceiling, and knew that I’d slept deeply but had no idea how long. Downstairs the dishes stood clean in the rack, no one there, and I thought maybe they’d taken the boys to the early show, thought I’d half heard talk about that. There was no plate warming but I wasn’t a bit hungry, so I carried on out the door.
Outside it was earlier than it had seemed, but the only people about were just shapes turning the corner far down the street; I tried to remember what picture had been advertised on the stand outside the Verity that must have drawn so many to see it. And though it was a different season, I was reminded of the walks I used to take in the weeks before Robbie was born, at the hour when everyone was making their way home. The streets lined with solid brick houses, lamplight glowing in the windows, and how lucky I felt to have found this place, where people stayed warm and together.
I’d intended to walk to the bluff, but I found myself on the winding harbour road, moving faster as I went down but my legs weren’t too tired, my feet barely touching the ground. I carried on along the beach, wrapping my shawl a little tighter against the breeze coming off the lake, and there was a faint sound of music that must have been the town band practising in the bandshell near the top of the rickety stairs. The autumn sky was a tumble of clouds, all shades of purple, of grey, with a glow near the horizon where the sun must have been. A great peace settled on me, and I remembered the girl who had felt the same thing, on the bench near the edge of the bluff up above me. The girl who couldn’t have known, no matter what she told herself, that things would turn out all right.
The music would be louder, up there where she was, and I thought maybe she could see the waves crashing, but only imagine the sound they were making. I’m the same person, I know that, but it was as if she was hovering at the edge of my vision, where I couldn’t quite see her. I thought of all the things that had happened, and all she remembered. I thought of all the times she imagined a flicker of white sail, far out where the water is a clean line at the sky, and suddenly there were no gaps, everything flowed, and the ship was right there, or we were. Blue sky and the sound of a sharp prow, swishing through calm water, and the sun shining down on the spray that seemed to hang in separate droplets in the air. Nothing but light, and then we’re skimming along too, with that spray in our hair, we’re sailing away.
AFTERMATH
Children are planting their shoots
that will become the forest
they’ll get lost in, terribly, when they grow up.
—YEHUDA AMICHAI
That summer she sometimes came home in the long dusk, with her fingers stained green from pulling weeds in other people’s gardens. A small trowel held loosely in one hand and limp bits clinging to her shoes, threaded through her grey hair. “There you are, Edie,” Uncle Robbie said, “just in time for The Whistler.” As if he hadn’t been pacing, and peering out the screen door. As if he hadn’t just finished saying, “Another ten minutes, son, and we’ll go find her.” I’m not your son, Alan thought, though it didn’t matter. Uncle Robbie wasn’t even his uncle, Aunt Edie not his aunt, but some kind of cousin on his father’s side. His mother had explained it when she drove him to the station, but he’d been too angry to listen.
I am the Whistler and I know many things, for I walk by night. He sat on the floor, close to the radio, and it was a good story, nothing quite as it seemed. The Whistler knew everything, he always did, but he revealed it slowly and in the end no one was blameless, everyone got what they deserved. When it was over Alan said good night and they smiled up at him from their chairs, the batty old woman and the one-armed man, and he didn’t know how he’d survive it; the war was over but he was a prisoner in a town so small he could walk down every street in less time than it took to go around a city block, trapped in a strange house with people he’d never heard of, who didn’t know a thing about him either. He climbed the stairs into stuffier air and his hands hung heavy at his sides, as thick and clumsy as his father’s were, his brain just as empty.
There were fathers who had come back with medals and fathers who hadn’t come back at all, and then there was Alan’s father, sometimes sleeping in his hospital bed and sometimes sitting in a chair in the noisy room at the end of the dull green hallway. He was still a big man, his knees bumping the underside of a muddy brown table, the top of it scraped and scarred. His thick white fingers pushing around the oversized pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes he said horsey and sometimes yup yup yup, but mostly he said nothing at all. Most times he didn’t even look at them, not even when Alan’s mother said his name, touched his cheek with the palm of her hand.
Once a week, for as long as Alan could remember, his mother painted on a bright red smile and backed the big humped car out of the garage while he stood behind, directing her right and left. Sometimes he thought about doing it wrong, thought about the screaming scrape of metal on brick, but his mother was counting on him; she told him so all the time. On those days the hard knot in his stomach was there when he first opened his eyes and clenched tighter and tighter as they crept through the streets, his mother hunched, peering through her thick glasses with her chin almost touching the steering wheel. His job to call out the street signs, although she had to know the way by now. “Here we are already,” she always said, when the hospital came into view, dark brick and creaking trees and sometimes people outside, nodding and drooling in their chairs. That was the only good thing about being sent away, Alan thought, not having to go through those Sunday visits.
What happened first was a fight in the schoolyard, a boy with crooked teeth who questioned Alan’s story about the charge on the Nazi machine gun, his father the last one standing, with enemy bodies thick on the ground. That boy had whimpered like a girl when the principal rolled up his sleeves, and if it had been one of those sappy stories their teacher made them read, the strapping would have been a bond between them. But it wasn’t like that. The other boy whimpered but Alan stood straight while his palms burned white-hot, not able to make a fist for a week. Stood straight like a proper soldier, not one who fell from the back of a truck and hit his head on a rock in the road. One who didn’t even make it out of the country.
Other things happened after that, and when summer came he woke up angry every long day. He mowed their tiny lawn and drank lemonade while his mother answered telephones in an office downtown, threw himself on the bed in his stuffy room, the plaid blanket scratchy beneath his legs. “What did you and your pals get up to today?” she always said, when they sat down at the dinner table, and he shrugged and said, “Just stuff.” He started sneaking money from her wallet, just enough for the bus and a movie, and stood in line with the oldies with their sticks and canes, their money folded into small squares in little zippered purses. Even the best shows had mushy parts and he made quiet retching noises in the dark, like he would have done louder if he’d had a friend who was sitting beside him.
One Saturday morning he stuffed two comics under his shirt, and tried to saunter out the door of the shop on the corner; the owner marched him home with a tight grip on the scruff of his neck and his mother cried and said she didn’t understand, said it wasn’t like him at all. When the man left she said didn’t she have enough to worry about, couldn’t he think about someone else for a change, and Alan slammed the kitchen door so hard that things rattled on the shelves. He slammed his feet down too, walking around the block, but that didn’t change anything and in the end he threw himself down in the coarse, dusty grass in the vacant lot two streets over, rolled and stared up at the sun in the hard blue sky until he had to close his eyes.
When he opened them again he felt weak as a flutter of cloth, walking back past long-shadowed cars in all the driveways. All the fathers home and sitting at the heads of all the tables and mumbling words, maybe prayers, that floated out through the open windows. He would say he was sorry and he was sorry, would have said it, but his mother had already made arrangements. She said it would be good for him, a summer by the lake, and they were family, these people, not strangers, and happy to have him. The pieces of a fallen teacup were lying on a soft cloth on the table, beside a jar of glue and a little pile of toothpicks, and his bag was already half packed on his bed.
The next day he sprawled in his seat on the train, swearing to himself that he wouldn’t touch the lunch she’d made, but once they’d left the city, clanking between the back sides of houses, all the mess and clutter, once they’d picked up speed through empty countryside he was terribly hungry and he took out the sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, wrapped in that special way of hers, folded and neat and no chance for anything to spill out. He had a hard time swallowing at first, but it got easier. The trip took several hours, nothing to see but fields and trees and sometimes a dusty truck, waiting at a crossing as they blasted through. Once two boys and a girl leaning on a fence and waving, as if anyone would wave back. The train slowed for every small station, shuddering along the length of the platform before it stopped, and he saw the people who were waiting for someone, the way their faces changed from nothing at all to spreading smiles, as if a switch had been flicked. The first time his own lips moved, stupidly thinking they were smiling at him.