Here So Far Away

by Hadley Dyer

  “So? Aurora was your plan, not mine. You decided it was perfect for all of us, and it might be, but I’m not sure yet.”

  “Funny how you seemed sure before you started going with Keith.”

  She pointed an accusatory finger. “You’re acting like a jealous boyfriend. Why is it okay if I follow you, but not if I follow him?”

  “Don’t you get it? I’m always standing up for you, Lise. Always. And you’re supposed to stand up for me. But it’s like . . . it’s almost like it’s more important to you to be popular with the jocks and the Elevens.”

  “You know what your problem is? You’ve never had a boyfriend, so you don’t know what it takes to be in a relationship.”

  “Please! You have a new boyfriend every year, and every year he’s the one. Until the next one. Jesus, do you think you’re going to be dating Keith for more than two minutes after graduation? The guy who didn’t offer you a tomato sandwich? There are millions of other guys out there—billions.”

  “So you don’t like Keith, is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying you’ll be able to do a lot better than him when we get out of this place, maybe some theater guy who can do the directing for you while you grow a backbone.”

  There it was. The un-take-back-able thing.

  Lisa ground her cigarette into a bare patch of sand and stood up. “Or maybe I could do better than you,” she said.

  Something in the Way

  Eleven

  September 1992

  That Saturday, one of the volunteers from the heritage society burst into the lighthouse with four women in tow. “George, these fine ladies are writers from the city, here for some weekend culture,” she gushed. “I’ve been telling them the lighthouse has a very storied history.”

  “Are any of you writing about lighthouses?” I asked.

  “Who knows what the day could inspire!” the heritage lady said, herding them along.

  She took them on the Tour of No Return. Every floorboard, every nail, every windowpane and latch. “Now, we’re not entirely certain, but we think this notch in the wall might have been made by the original lighthouse keeper. Oh, what triumph or sorrow did lead that man to leave his literal mark upon the structure of this magnificent monument?”

  I was pretty sure the notch had come from someone—someone me-like—opening the door to the service room too hard and slamming the knob into the wall.

  As I polished the glass in the lantern room, I pondered how long it would be before someone tried to hurl herself through it. At first, the women were just eyeballing one another and trying not to laugh. Until the restlessness kicked in. The helplessness. The despair. One of them was massaging her stomach like it was sore, which gave me the in. I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “Do you need to go lie down?”

  She was confused for a second then beamed. “I have a pain!” she announced. “A terrible pain! I must go lie down in the car!”

  “I’ll help you!” another woman said. “In case it’s something serious!” She disappeared down the steps without even looking back to see if her friend was following.

  The others seemed pained too—pained that they hadn’t been quicker on the draw.

  I followed the two women downstairs. “It’s either big-time gas or another gallbladder attack,” the one clasping her belly said as they power-walked toward the door.

  “We can only save the others if it’s gallbladder.”

  Two minutes later: a loud trumpeting from the car.

  “Well, it’s not gallbladder,” I muttered to myself.

  They didn’t come back in.

  The sun had swung around to the west behind a veil of fog by the time the heritage lady released her remaining hostages and left me to close up the lighthouse.

  I was trying not to think about how much the two escapees were like Lisa and me. I’d thought that we’d be like that forever, that we’d grow up and she’d get married and I’d travel the world and we’d end up back where we started, singing opera to Thompson’s clerks to get free samples. Only, in a better mall.

  You will, I told myself. It’s just been five days. Four of them spent sitting awkwardly on opposite sides of classrooms, staggering our trips to our lockers, which were a few doors apart. It sucked, but it wasn’t step-on-a-pebble-surprise-your-foot’s-amputated suckage. Most friends fight and get over it, right? Bill once nearly knocked Sid’s head off with a golf ball after Sid said the T. rex on the miniature course was a dead ringer for Tracy. If anything, we were overdue.

  Cut it out, Frances. Think about something else.

  Like the pig standing behind the Town Car in the lighthouse driveway as though it were waiting to board a bus. I was no girl detective, but I supposed this was the one that Francis had been in search of.

  “Git!” I said. “G’on, pig, git!”

  Because it would understand me if I sounded like a cast member on Hee Haw? The pig gazed into the middle distance. I clapped my hands, whistled, took a run at it.

  It shuffled around to Abe’s side. Stared at the door expectantly.

  “Like I’m driving you. It’s not physically possible for you to wedge yourself in there,” I said, opening the door to check.

  It did. Wedged itself in there good, settling with a smug snuffle.

  The farmhouse on the ridge looked like it was floating on the mist. I had no intention of offering my services to the old farmer as my mother had suggested, had a feeling that if I was foolish enough to go within one hundred feet of Constable Francis McAdams, it would be my blood he’d be wearing next. Seventeen, he’d said, like it was a dirty word.

  “Seventeen and a half,” I muttered as I gave the pig’s barrel-sized rear a shove and closed the door. Well, almost. If I were eighteen, he wouldn’t have recoiled so, as if seven months would make such a big difference.

  The reflection in my rearview mirror was all pig, and Abe protested as we climbed the ridge toward the farm. He could take five hundred evenly distributed pounds of people, but this was pretty arse-heavy, even for a Town Car.

  The farmhouse was in the old “Queen Anne” style, or trying to be. No turret, just double-decker bay windows topped with a domed roof, like the crown of an old birdcage. It had an enclosed porch beside the bays on the front like the one we had at home, an open veranda on the side that overlooked the fields, and a single-story extension poking out from the back. The house seemed to have been built one section at a time, grand ideas improvised along the way. But the soft yellow paint and white trim were timeworn, the roof of the weathered barn coated with rust. As I pulled into the drive, I could see the barn was built right into the slope so that you could climb up and enter the hayloft at ground level.

  An old man was sitting on the porch steps. He was wearing cartoonishly baggy jeans held up by suspenders and what might have been a pajama top. “Look who got himself a chauffeur!” he declared. “Thank you kindly. Where did you find him?”

  “Down at the lighthouse,” I said, opening the door for my passenger, who dislodged himself from the car with a loud grunt. “I work there, if you ever want a tour.”

  “That’s my land—or it was. Gave the heritage people that piece; most of the rest is rented out. Not the blueberry patch over thataways, and help yourself, by the way. Course, Shaggy’s mind isn’t what it used to be, so he can’t keep it all straight.”

  The old man opened the porch door, and to my astonishment, the pig walked up the steps and right into the house. “Do you always let him indoors?” I asked.

  “I suppose you think that’s unhygienic.”

  “Not at all. Only . . . I’m sorry, but doesn’t he go all over the floor?”

  “No—he don’t. He goes to the door when he needs out, like any intelligent creature.”

  “Sorry,” I said again. “George Warren. Unintelligent creature.”

  His deeply wrinkled face creased even more around his eyes, while his mouth—which had the caved-in look of teeth that were missing or
ground down—spread into a thin crescent of delight. “I know who you are: Sergeant Warren’s daughter. My boarder was at your house for lunch the other day. Said the Warrens had two kids and one was quite a handful. You the handful?”

  Son of a—

  “Oh,” he said. “I think you are.”

  “My brother. Killed a hundred men just for looking at him funny.”

  “That so? How about you?”

  “Maybe three?”

  He laughed.

  I was holding two fistfuls of garlic mustard that I’d ripped from the side of the driveway on autopilot. My mother had a special hate for garlic mustard. “Do you mind that I’m pulling up these weeds, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Rupert Fraser, but you call me Rupert. You got energy, if you don’t mind me saying. The constable does too. Did you see that foot bouncing up and down?”

  “He did rattle the table a couple of times during lunch.” And the table at Long Fellows. I had a memory flash of his shin rubbing against mine. “Well, it was good to meet you, Rupert. And Shaggy. I could tell straightaway that he isn’t—he ain’t no eatin’ pig, is he?”

  Rupert chuckled. “No, he ain’t. I’d invite you in for a longer visit, but the house isn’t suitable for company.”

  “Some other time,” I said. “I’m guessing this won’t be the last I see of Shaggy.”

  I thought I was going to make a clean getaway, but the cop car sped past me moments after I left the driveway. He did a U-turn, turned on his lights.

  I pulled over and got out. I wasn’t talking to the Constable through the window like a criminal.

  “That idea of your mother’s,” he said, taking off his hat and wiping his forehead, “I’m sorry, but it’s not happening.”

  He looked so strange in his uniform. It was hard to connect this man, with his buzzed head and ill-fitting pants, to the one I’d made out with in the sun-drenched lantern room and the soupy darkness at the bottom of the sea. He seemed leaner, more sinewy than I remembered. I hadn’t noticed before how smooth and tan and tidy his hands were. An actor’s hands. And his ears were kind of big.

  Bill was right: say the wrong things, melt like wax.

  “I was returning the pig,” I said. “You ought to put him on a leash or something.”

  “Oh. Thanks. There’s a pen for him, but it needs repairing.”

  “I owed you one for not telling my parents about everything.”

  “I was concerned that Paul would come down like a hammer, exceeding what I personally consider was the seriousness of the crime.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Not your crime, the bartender’s. What he did was lax. What you did was stupid.”

  “Hey. I know you wouldn’t have hooked up with me if you’d known how old I am, but guess what? I wouldn’t have hooked up with you either, not if I’d known who you were. Why didn’t you say you were an RCMP officer?”

  “Because . . .”

  “Alrighty, as long as you had a good reason.”

  “Because I was off duty. Because pretty soon everyone is going to know me as the cop. I just wanted to be myself a while longer and, I don’t know, get a feel for the place, as a civilian.”

  I wished I could say I didn’t get it, but I had been living in an RCMP officer’s house my entire life. Things would be different for him now.

  He glanced over at the farmhouse, then back at me. “No. I knew you were too young for me. Even if you were twenty, you would be too young. But the first thing you said to me was funny.” He slapped his hat against his leg. “And I wanted to hear what else you had to say.”

  With that, he got back into his car, pulled another U-ey, and drove away.

  Twelve

  When I got back from my morning run, soaked with sweat after forty-five punishing minutes to nudge another half pound from my thighs, Mum was sitting at the kitchen table, bills and bank statements spread out around her. Dad was across from her in his wheelchair, his face a brick wall.

  “Are we satisfied?” he said.

  “Not exactly. You been drawing on our savings.”

  “I sent a little Joanna’s way. To help with the new grandkid.”

  “Mortgage payment’s higher than I thought.”

  “You thought wrong. Happens.”

  Mum tried to smile, but now her lips were pressed together so tightly they’d disappeared, like they always did whenever she was nervous or mad at Matthew and me.

  “Dad, don’t you have whatchacallits? Benefits?”

  “I’m still bringing home the bacon. Course, we don’t know what job I’ll be going back to, if any.”

  “When will you find out?”

  “How about you give me a minute to learn how to walk on the prosthetic before you make me run?”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  My parents had never really talked about money in front of us kids before. We didn’t waste it, but no one seemed to seriously worry about it either. Mum cut out coupons, like everyone else’s mother did, bought new clothes for herself about as often as we updated our furniture, which was when something wore out completely, but I’d always thought that came from having grown up in a big family in a cabin on the south mountain. Dad once told me that the pipes sometimes froze and if my granddad couldn’t afford to get them fixed for a while, which was usually the case, Mum and her brothers would have to cut a hole in the ice to collect drinking water from the river.

  The dryer timer buzzed. Mum pushed back her chair and rose stiffly, taking small, urgent steps across the kitchen like she was trying—well, like she was trying not to crap her pants. Had I ever seen Mum look that worried before?

  “Don’t let her get you worked up about this,” Dad said as she went down the basement stairs. “This is exactly why you have savings, so the money is there if you need it.”

  I sat in Mum’s chair and took a big gulp of the lukewarm coffee she’d left behind, wiping my mouth on the collar of my damp T-shirt and wishing I could peek inside the blue bank books with their silver embossed logos. I wasn’t sure how much was in my university fund or how much I needed, but since my parents had been matching every dollar I handed over to them since I’d started working at the lighthouse, I assumed we’d have at least the first year or two covered before I even stepped foot on a campus. “Dad, if you can’t go back to work, will we have to live off my school money?”

  “It’s not like I’d retire. I’m footless, not brainless. But no, we’re not touching that.”

  “Will it be enough?”

  “You’ll be fine for tuition, and for books, student fees, and all that. I just don’t know how exactly we’ll manage residence. Unless you go to Noel and live at home.”

  “Dad, I don’t want to be a jerk—”

  “Never a promising start to a sentence—”

  “But it doesn’t seem right to choose a school because it’s the closest.”

  That was a big fat reason not to choose it.

  “It would be different if there was some special program you wanted to do and you had the grades to get in and it was a hike from here. Then we could talk about getting a loan, though you know how your mother feels about debt. You don’t need a fancy college if we’re talking about a run-of-the-mill degree.”

  “There is a special program that I want to get into.”

  There was no special program; I just didn’t want the idea of Noel too fixed in my father’s mind. What let you see the world? I zip-lined through the possibilities like I was taking a word association test: explorer—tour guide—flight attendant—pilot—air force—soldier—war correspondent—

  “Journalism,” I said. And conveniently: “They offer it at Aurora.”

  “So you’ll apply to Aurora.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll say it again: I don’t want you to worry, kiddo. But let’s think before you send out applications willy-nilly. You could spend money on fees that won’t amount to anything.”

  “Maybe if you did your physical th
erapy,” Matthew said quietly, “you could be back to work sooner than you think.”

  I hadn’t noticed him hanging on the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room.

  “I do it when you’re at school,” Dad said, gathering up the paperwork. “Perhaps you two might deign to head that way before the next millennium, so I can get on with it.”

  Since we didn’t have much homework that afternoon, I decided to take the Bickersons back to Pierre’s with me to finish my clothes shopping.

  “Aargh,” Nat said, kicking the car door closed as a strong breeze whipped half of her hair out of its bun. Another gust brought the whole thing down. Now she was windmilling her arms like she was trying to punch everything in the universe.

  “Are you fighting the wind?” Bill said.

  “You go to all this trouble to get yourself put together and then it has to mess it up every time.”

  “Your hair was already falling out of its thingy.”

  Only because Nat had spent twenty minutes pulling out selected strands one by one so that they framed her face just so. She swatted her bangs out of her eyes. “Stop defending it!”

  Bill gave me an exasperated look. Nat had been especially Natty for the past week, partly because of my fight with Lisa, partly because of what’d happened with Doug, who she was avoiding. And when Nat got to cranking, she tended to crank on Bill, who was Teflon enough to take it.

  “Who doesn’t resent the wind?” I said, pushing open the door for them.

  Bill gave Nat a little shove inside. “That should be the title of your autobiography.”

  Nat wasn’t a big fan of Pierre’s so her mood didn’t improve as we sifted through the bins. “Have you heard from Sid?” I asked.

  “Couple of postcards.”

  “Only one for me.”

  Course, I’d only written to him twice.

  This wasn’t surprising. Sid’s parents sent him to a different camp every summer and we wouldn’t hear from him the whole time he was gone, but then he’d be back and it was like he’d never left. He was like a windup toy: you could drop him anywhere and he’d keep on walking.