by Donna Milner
‘Jen, how is she really? I mean, how long—?’
‘It’s hard to tell,’ she says, the professional tones of a doctor’s voice overtake her words as she relates the prognosis. ‘She’s weak, but she could still rally or, well, we just don’t know. Don’t wait too long, Mom.’
‘I’m taking the six a.m. bus,’ I tell her. ‘It should arrive at the junction at nine tomorrow night. Can you pick me up?’
The turnoff from the Trans-Canada Highway is thirty miles north of Atwood. The bus will only stop on that lonely piece of highway if someone is waiting for connecting passengers.
‘Of course I’ll be there.’ Jenny says. ‘We can stop in at the hospital and see Gram on the way home.’
‘Good,’ I say then hesitate. ‘I’m going to stay in town at the Alpine Inn though.’
‘Why?’ she asks. The doctor’s voice is gone now, replaced by the whine of a daughter’s hurt feelings. ‘We have lots of room in our new house, Mom. You haven’t even seen it yet.’
‘I know, and I will. I will. It’s just that I can walk next door to the hospital from the Bed and Breakfast.’
‘You can use one of our cars while you’re here.’ When I don’t reply right away she adds with an impatient sigh, ‘You can’t even see the farm from where we’ve built our house.’
I know. I know exactly where her new house is.
‘Please. Please just understand for now, Jenny. I want to stay in town. Just pick me up, okay?’
‘All right,’ she says with resignation. ‘We can argue about it on the drive into town.’ There’s a moment’s silence on the line before she adds, ‘There’s something else I need to talk to you about, Mom.’
My empty stomach lurches. I manage to keep my voice even as I ask, ‘What is it?’
‘Not on the phone.’
Back in bed I am unable to sleep. I am tempted to get up and read to pass the night away. God, I’m finally turning into my mother. I wish I had her faith at times like this. And her belief in the power of prayer. But I lost that a long time ago.
Beside me Vern’s even breathing fills the quiet while I fight the images of my estranged family.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I couldn’t imagine my family wouldn’t always be together. There was a time when all I wanted was to be with my oldest brother, Boyer, whom I idolized during my childhood. Back then, my favourite part of the day was sitting in his room playing ‘penny words’ – a spelling game Boyer had taught me as soon as I was old enough to talk. And in the evening lying in bed listening to my mother playing my favourite song on the piano downstairs in the parlour.
When I was young I thought she had made up that song just for me. And whenever I asked her, no matter what she was doing, my mother would always, always, stop and sit down at the piano and play ‘Love Me Tender’.
I can almost hear it now as the north wind plays through the branches of the fir trees outside our bedroom window.
The alarm rings. As if he has been waiting for it Vern sits up. He pulls back the covers and swings his legs over the side of the bed with slow deliberate movements. I know he thinks I’m still asleep. This has become our morning routine, Vern getting up first and letting me sleep until after he takes his shower and makes the coffee.
‘There’s a bus as six,’ I say as I climb out of bed. I explain the schedule as I follow him into the bathroom. He offers once again to drive me.
‘At least to the Cache Creek junction,’ he says as he glances up from the sink. ‘It will save you the wait there. This way you can get a few more hours of sleep before you go.’
I pull out my make-up case and begin tossing in toiletries. ‘I can sleep on the bus,’ I tell him, but even as I say it I know it’s not true.
Vern squeezes the tube too hard and white toothpaste spurts into the sink. ‘I want to be there for you, Natalie,’ he says. ‘I’d like to meet your mother before she—’ he bites off the word before it escapes from his mouth. ‘While I still have the chance.’
I stiffen. ‘There’s lots of time, I’m sure. I’ll call you when I get there. When I know more.’
Vern raises his eyebrows. ‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘Stubborn,’ he mutters with a mouthful of toothpaste. But his eyes smile back at me.
I stand at my sink and study him in the mirror while I brush my teeth.
We’ve been together for almost ten years now, married for seven of those years. He was the one who pushed for marriage. I resisted.
Given my track record, I warned him, I wasn’t a very good bet. ‘If you don’t get married, you don’t get divorced,’ I told him.
After two failed marriages I wasn’t anxious to try a third.
‘You just hadn’t met the right one until now,’ Vern insisted. Eventually he wore me down.
We met while I was living in Vancouver. Early one rainy morning we ran into each other on the Stanley Park seawall. Literally. We were both about to pass slower joggers from opposite directions when Vern’s elbow clipped mine and sent me sprawling onto the wet blacktop. After that we began greeting each other on our morning runs. Before long we fell into an easy routine of running together. That led to after-run coffees at Starbuck’s on Denman Street and then to dating.
Besides running, we found we shared a passion for reading, sushi, and oldies music. Before long he infected me with his passion for fly-fishing.
Vern was a widower. He had sold his logging company on Vancouver Island to move closer to the clinic where his wife eventually lost her battle with breast cancer. Afterwards he remained in Vancouver to re-assess his life.
When we first met he was in the throes of starting his tree-planting contracting and consulting company.
‘It’s karma,’ he joked, ‘from forest-destroyer to forest-restorer.’
Now as I watch him brush his teeth, I am still taken by how handsome he is. Vern is five-foot ten, not much taller than I am, perhaps three inches at the most. At fifty-five he still wears jeans without embarrassment, although lately I have begun to notice a thickening around the waist. He blames it on his too-successful business, which requires him to spend more time in the office and less in the field.
His olive skin, thick dark hair, and black-brown eyes hint of First Nations ancestry somewhere back down the line.
‘When I retire, I’ll take up genealogy and trace my roots,’ he once said with his lop-sided grin.
Vern’s mouth is asymmetrical. The thinner left side of his lip rises higher than the right and twitches when he is smiling. It can be difficult to tell if his smile is genuine, or if he is trying not to smirk. And it can be rather unnerving; it would be easy to doubt his sincerity – if it weren’t Vern.
I think this little tic adds to, rather than takes away from, his rugged good looks. I can see that I’m not the only one who finds him attractive. Sometimes, when we meet women, or even men, for the first time, I catch that flicker, that what’s-he-doing-with-her look in their eyes. Sometimes I wonder myself.
Vern says it was my independence he was attracted to. Now he calls it stubbornness.
He leans over the sink to spit. As he straightens up he catches me studying him in the mirror. ‘What?’
I open my mouth, a word or two away from giving into the temptation to accept his offer. How easy it would be to have him come with me, take care of me. But I have never burdened him with my past. It’s too late to start now.
I reach up and stroke his cheek. ‘Nothing,’ I say then turn away to switch on the walk-in closet light.
As I rummage through my underwear drawer I am suddenly startled by the thought of what to wear to a funeral.
My mother’s funeral. Vern’s unspoken thought is more reality than probability.
The idea of attending a ceremony in St Anthony’s Church, of sitting in the front pew while a priest’s monotonous voice chants the ceremony and speaks of my mother’s life, is almost too much. I stand in the middle of my closet, under
pants in one hand, and bras in the other, and hold my breath to stifle the sneeze I feel building between my eyes.
At the downtown bus depot, Vern unloads my suitcase from the back of his pick-up truck. Pink light from the streetlamp filters down through the grey stillness of the early morning air. The smell of pulp, a rotten egg aroma, intensified by the heavy autumn mist, hugs our bodies. Long-time residents of Prince George seem to be immune to the pungent smell from the pulp mill; sometimes even I forget it. But on fall mornings when cold, dense air, presses down on the sleeping city, the odour is so thick I can almost taste it.
As if he has read my mind, Vern wrinkles his nose. ‘Mephitic,’ he says referring to the noxious odour.
And as clearly as if I could turn around and see him standing in the morning fog, I can hear Boyer’s youthful voice saying, ‘Well, there’s a ten-penny word for you, Nat.’
Inside at the counter I ask for a ticket to Atwood. The sleepy-looking attendant wears a blue-striped shirt with a name embroidered in red on her pocket. Brenda.
‘Atwood?’ Brenda repeats. It’s obvious she has never heard of it. Why should she have? The old mining town, turned ski-resort, with a population of less than three thousand, is not exactly a prime destination. She punches the computer keys, her ink-stained fingers moving with a studied effort. Her eyebrows raise and I assume she’s located it. ‘One way or return?’
‘Return,’ I tell her. Oh, yes, return. Soon, I hope. Then I realize what soon could mean, and I feel the guilt of wishing to hasten my mother’s demise.
‘One hundred and forty dollars,’ she says and attacks the computer again. She is all efficiency now, back in familiar territory. ‘You have a two hour wait in Cache Creek …’
After I purchase my ticket I rejoin Vern outside. He has placed my suitcase in front of the only occupied bus stall. A young couple stands nearby, huddled in the cold, saying their goodbyes. White puffs of breath fill the air between them. The bus doors are closed and I can’t see through the blackened windows. I hope the bus isn’t crowded. I don’t want to have to sit next to anyone and make small talk.
‘I want to be there for you,’ Vern says again. He takes my hands as he searches my eyes. ‘At least promise me you will let me come down and get you.’
I slip the return ticket into my pocket as he takes me into his arms.
‘I feel like I’m losing you,’ he murmurs into my hair.
‘I’m just anxious to get going,’ I say and start to pull away.
‘Not just this morning,’ he says. ‘Lately I feel like you’re getting ready to bolt.’ He releases me, then steps back with a crooked smile. He holds his arms out in an open-handed gesture of surrender. He won’t keep me against my will, I know, but he’ll do his best to interrupt this dance of leaving.
That is Vern. His strength is what has kept me with him this long, his strength in being able to let go. But he’s right. It’s just a matter of time. This is what I do. I run. I leave. He’s the first man to recognize this, or the first one to place it in the light where we both have to look at it. And he’s the first one who will not be surprised when I go.
The bus driver strides out from wherever it is bus drivers hide at these stops. He walks with the swagger of someone who, for the moment, has the destiny of others in his hands. The semantics of his job pull him back to the reality of the morning as he lifts the sliding luggage compartment doors and begins to throw bags into the belly of the bus.
Behind me the bus doors fold open with a mechanical sigh. I put my arms around Vern for a final hug. He hangs on for a moment after I let go.
A part of me wants to tell him I’ll call for him when the time comes. That I will cry on his shoulder, lean on his strong body. But we both know it wouldn’t be true. Besides, I tell myself, there’s no need for him to be there. He only knows my mother from what I have told him. And she doesn’t know him at all. My mother gave up on the men in my life after my second husband. And for the last five years she’s been too busy dying.
Chapter Six
I PLACE MY hand on the window in a silent wave to Vern as the bus backs away from the Greyhound station. He stands motionless beneath the neon sign, his shoulders hunched in his jacket, his hands thrust into his jean pockets. As his figure recedes into the morning mist I think about long ago summer mornings when I stood watching a bus pull away with my daughter on board. And I remember feeling that same sense of sadness and panic I now read on Vern’s face.
When Jenny was ten years old I gave into my mother’s pleas to let her spend part of her summers at the farm. I couldn’t deny my daughter the chance to know her family. They were all she had besides me. Jenny’s father died when she was seven. He had no family to offer her. The men in my life were loving and loved by Jenny, but they had no shared history, no roots. Her uncles, Morgan and Carl, so different, so inseparable, both live on Queen Charlotte Island, off the West Coast. Jenny has seen them only sporadically over the years. Their infrequent visits were filled with laughter, joking and teasing. They bounced their only niece between them, jostling for her attention and adoration during their brief stops. But for the most part, while Jenny was growing up, I was it, the only real family she had. I was not enough.
While I continued to find excuses not to return to Atwood, Jenny became my surrogate. The buffer between me, and Mom and Boyer. And every summer, after I put her on the bus, I began to worry that while she was there she would hear the old gossip. When she returned at the end of each visit I listened carefully as she shared her adventures. I listened and watched for any hint of a change in how she saw me; any sign of disappointment in finding out I wasn’t who she thought I was.
The Greyhound bus pulls onto the highway, and just like every time I return to Atwood, I fight the panic I feel rising in my chest. I’ve only been back twice since Jenny settled there. Both times I stole into town like a thief and stayed cooped up in her rented house by the hospital, hardly seeing the light of day. Each afternoon Jenny brought Mom over to visit – as if I was the one who was the invalid. I ventured outside only for my daily runs.
In the early mornings, in the half-light of dawn, I ran north along the highway, avoiding the streets of the sleeping town. I wore a hooded jacket and kept my head down whenever a car approached. Still, it’s unlikely that anyone old enough to remember the Ward Dairy Farm would recognize this lean, middle-aged woman as the chubby farmer’s daughter who once delivered milk to their doors. And certainly no one would see any resemblance to the only Wards left in Atwood now, Mom and Boyer; or to the town’s newest doctor.
I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. Jenny’s words haunt me. What is it that she needs to talk to me about? What can be so important that she can’t discuss it on the phone? If it isn’t about Mom, then is this finally the conversation I’ve been avoiding?
I knew someday I would have to fill in the blanks for her – the circumstances that created this fractured family of ours. But the years passed and she has never asked. And I have managed to push aside any temporary feeling that the moment was right. Maybe the time has come to tell her the truths, the secrets, as I know them, or have imagined them. All of it. The forgivable and the unforgivable.
Chapter Seven
THE SHATTERING OF our family did not occur gradually. There was no drawn-out series of events that could be pointed to and blamed. No slow motion accident to be replayed and pondered over. It came suddenly. The irreversible tragedy of errors was accomplished in the course of a few long-ago summer days. It left everyone in our family with their own secret version of what happened. And the rest of their lives to come to terms with it. Whatever conclusion each of us came to, we kept it to ourselves.
If I could go back and rearrange the past, if I could erase that July afternoon, would I? Would I change everything that happened afterward, have it so he never became part of our lives?
I would. Of course I would. But the past cannot be altered; it can only be lived with. Or buried.
; On that July afternoon I watched Mom unlatch the gate. For a moment I wondered if she knew when she hired him, that the young man who stood on the other side of the fence was one of those ‘long-haired freaks’, as my father called them. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be around when Dad, and my brothers, came back with the next load of hay.
Only a few days before, as Mom cleaned her freshly gathered eggs in the kitchen sink, she had mentioned that Dr Benjamin Spock was encouraging young Americans to resist the draft.
My father sat at the table rolling cigarettes. He looked up and raised one eyebrow. ‘I wonder what he thinks would have happened if the fathers and grandfathers of those boys had thought that way?’ he said to Mom’s back.
Mom placed the last egg in the carton, turned and smiled at Dad. ‘He just wants to see the babies he helped raise have a chance to grow up.’
My father snorted. ‘Those babies have grown up to be a bunch of spoiled, greasy-haired hooligans, who stand under a peace banner because they don’t have the guts to fight for their country,’ he said. He ran his tongue along the paper of a freshly rolled cigarette.
Boyer, who was twenty-three at the time, sat at the opposite end of the table. He looked at my father over the rim of his coffee cup. In that quiet voice of his he said, ‘It’s about choices. The very existence of the draft takes away their democratic right to choose. It looks to me like those who are saying no are taking a stand for democracy.’ He added, ‘At least they have the chance to take a stand on something; to be involved in something larger than themselves.’
And now here was someone walking into our lives who looked as if he had done just that.
He was dressed like no one I knew. Instead of the denim or plaid snap-button shirts my father and brothers wore, a beige Indian cotton tunic hung loose over dark bell-bottom pants. Instead of cowboy boots, he wore leather moccasins. A carved wood emblem – a peace sign, I would learn later – dangled from a leather cord around his neck. His hair, the sun-streaked yellow of a hayfield drying in the sun, hung loose around his shoulders.