“What power,” she’d say, laughing, grinning up at him from the comfort of a pillow or mounting him, taking his shoulders in her hands for balance.
* * *
THE SECOND TIME Meg hitchhiked home, in early summer, she had Matthew in tow and they went first to Bill and Margaret in town. This time they were expected, although not by Bill and Margaret.
A young woman wearing cowboy boots had stopped to pick them up from a corner in downtown London. They had got the morning off to do some shopping on their own for clothes when the stores weren’t crowded. This was a big deal, a big responsibility that they had earned with mature behaviour and an eager willingness to help Richard with his little jobs. They were supposed to take a city bus out to the workshop at eleven but after Meg told Matthew what they could do and how much fun it would be, they decided they didn’t want to get on that bus.
The woman in the cowboy boots dropped them off at the end of Wellington Street where it meets the 401, and when Meg asked with the door hanging open which way they should go now, the woman pointed to the ramp. They walked the long curve down to the highway, staying safely to the side, off the pavement, and before long they were picked up by a trucker who was just coming off the ramp himself.
As soon as they were up and into his cab, the trucker could see what he had on his hands. He asked them if there might be someone looking for them right now, and when Meg politely said no and told him honestly where they lived and where they worked and less honestly that they had the day off and had been invited to visit her grandparents, he didn’t necessarily buy in, but he let it be. They seemed smart enough to him. In spite of her size the girl was pretty, she had a perky little face and a great rack. And he thought the kid looked like he could almost take care of himself.
He veered off the 401 onto the 402, telling them about Michigan and Chicago, about his wife and kids in Windsor. He let them play with the radio. After forty-five minutes, when they were coming up to the turn-off for the town they said they were going to, he told them as much as he’d like to he couldn’t take the time to make a detour. He dropped them and watched them walk up the ramp to the old two-lane, waited the five minutes it took for someone to stop. The someone was Margaret’s longtime friend Angela Johnston, who was just coming back from Sarnia where she’d had an appointment with a chiropractor. She recognized Meg before she stopped for them because, except for her size, she was just so much like Andrea, her colouring, her mouth especially. She had seen her close up at Margaret’s once before an evening of bridge when she’d come in with her dad to pick Bill up for a hockey game down at the arena. In the car, when Meg asked if Angela could take them to the Chambers house, she said she would be pleased to do that. She said she knew Bill and Margaret, they were her grandparents, wasn’t that right? She assumed correctly that Meg didn’t know her from Eve.
Bill’s car wasn’t in the driveway so Angela got out and went to the back door with them, which made Meg quite angry, she could tell. But they found Margaret home. She told Margaret what she knew, the 402, the trucker who waited until she picked them up. Then she accepted Margaret’s gratitude and left, knowing she would be counted on to keep her mouth shut about this.
Margaret called Andy, who said that they had been expecting the kids there, that they’d got a call from Richard this time, and that they would be right in to get Meg. She said she had better hang up and call Richard back and then she’d better phone Matthew’s parents in London, which was another number she didn’t have to look up now. Matthew’s parents seemed to Andy and Paul to be very fine people. They hadn’t overreacted at all the year before when the kids were first discovered and they might have, they would have been forgiven a bit of shouting, a bit of protective rage. Perhaps they, too, were tired. Perhaps they too had long ago given rage its chance and found the returns negligible.
Paul backed the truck out of the drive shed to pick Andy up at the front door of the farmhouse and after she climbed in and was belted up he smiled over at her. “We can do this,” he said. “We’ve done harder things.”
Andy didn’t say anything. She was remembering when Meg was younger, when she was Meagan, and how easy things had become when they could finally make her obey them just by asking, how she used to grin proudly and say, “I’m going to do what I’m told,” accepting it as just another skill she’d learned, an accomplishment.
And she was thinking about the last time Meg had pulled this stunt, the effect it had had on them, the comfort of touch gone, the possibility of its absence unforeseen and astonishing, as if all through these long years the comfort had been not their own creation at all but only a visitor to their bed.
When they were very young, it had been so easy to tell Paul that she loved him, to watch him shine when she used the words. If she’d known then what she knew now, she would have said instead, I trust you, Paul. It’s trust. Meaning, these are the naked, sweaty, only times when the world is safe for me. Meaning, it’s not love that makes it so fine, so reckless, it’s trust that makes our skin shine in a dark bed.
But it was love everyone believed they wanted. Love was supposed to make the world go round. And what a big job that was. How could she ever hope to make trust measure up to love?
They were passing the Fulbright farm, just minutes from the turn-off onto the highway into town, when two things happened. First, although Paul was driving as he always drove, which was just a bit too fast, he saw in his rear-view mirror that they were being tailgated by a red pick-up. Watching in the mirror, he asked, “Whose truck do you suppose that is?”
Andy turned around to look but she didn’t recognize the truck either, nor did she know the driver, who was alone in the cab. When the truck came alongside them, taking its time passing, they got a good look at the driver’s unknown but uncommonly serious profile, and then they saw something they found even more difficult to believe. An elderly, well-dressed woman with thin white hair was getting a very rough ride back in the truck bed. She seemed to be trying one more time and with great difficulty to sit up straight, but she couldn’t get purchase, her arms were not strong enough. Seeing her struggle, Paul laid on the horn. When the driver picked up speed, Paul yelled, “Asshole,” and laid on the horn again, pounding it with his fist to make himself understood.
Excited by the blaring of the horn, the Fulbrights’ new dog, a black Lab who had been sitting in the shade of the barn watching, waiting for some action, came tearing out onto the road barking. The dog wasn’t exactly a pup but it wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to know how to run after a truck and stay clear at the same time, and in an attempt to accommodate the dog’s inexperience Paul swerved. Swerving, he braked too hard and lost control of the truck.
Normally, he would not have taken the dog into account at all. He would have kept the truck moving at a steady speed because this was what charging farm dogs expected from you. He’d learned this at fifteen behind the wheel of Bill’s 1952 Ford Fairlane and he had never in the thirty years since run over a dog.
The truck jumped the ditch and came to rest on its side, stopped there by a substantial old maple.
* * *
ANDY CAME TO consciousness still belted in. She could hear a woman crying, crying out as if from some distance, and she thought, Oh, that poor woman, and then the sound got louder, closer, and she recognized it as you might recognize a friend approaching down a country lane on a dark night. It was her own voice calling out for Paul.
Opening her eyes she could see, and almost could have touched if she’d thought to move her hands, the solid blunt mass of a tree, ridges of grey bark. She could feel her own weight against the seat belt. And the sharp sting of a hundred small cuts. Shards of glass had pierced her face and her scalp and her arms, she could see the blood trickling across the skin on her bare arms, feel it seeping into her eyes. And she could taste it. A man was climbing up across the hood to get to her, taking his footholds on the bent frame of the windshield, which had shattered and collapsed.
>
Ed Fulbright got her door pulled open and her seat belt cut but as small as she was he couldn’t hold her. She fell down onto Paul’s body. She had no way to stop herself. Ed had to ask her to try to turn toward him, to try to give him her hands, and when she was able to do this, to turn and reach out for him, he gave her a smile of encouragement.
As soon as Ed had her laid out on the side of the road, his wife was there carrying a blanket and sheets in one arm and a shotgun in the other hand. Amy Fulbright nodded toward the barn, where the dog was curled up and panting hard, refusing to look at them, and handed Ed the gun. Then she knelt down beside Andy in the gravel and covered her with the blanket. She began to rip some of the sheet into strips, starting the rips with her teeth, and as she pulled the shards of glass from Andy’s face, she brought the cloth to the cuts to soak up the streaming blood. Pressing very gently, smoothing Andy’s hair, she said, “I’ve called the ambulance. They’ll be here soon. But I think you’re all right.”
Andy didn’t want this woman’s care, this soothing, didn’t want the hands trailing over her arms and her face and her neck. She wanted an answer to the question, the only question.
Amy Fulbright composed herself and said that Ed didn’t think he could or should try to get at Paul. She said that because Ed was afraid to move him she didn’t know for sure but likely Paul was just still unconscious, likely he was just more badly hurt. She said, “We’ll pray for that,” and bowed her head, covered her entire face with her large hand, and began to mumble.
When the gun went off, even though Amy Fulbright was the one who knew it was coming, who had insisted it be done, she jumped nearly out of her skin. Andy didn’t flinch. She had gone into shock and she stayed there.
* * *
THE POLICE CAME to the kitchen door, two of them. Meg was there immediately, with Matthew right behind her, but Bill let them in. When the police said what they had to say, Meg dropped to the floor wailing and Matthew backed himself up against the stove, his hands raised in front of his face for protection. Bill turned from them all to sit down at the table, his seventy-four-year-old body collapsing in on itself, becoming instantly and permanently smaller. He sat very still, clasped one shaking hand in the other. His face was calm, his mouth closed. His eyes were wide open and fierce, focused on something that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Margaret came into the kitchen knowing nothing, assuming this commotion would be about Meg. When she looked down at Bill sitting at his place at the table, she thought, He’s lost his sight, what’s the hell’s going on, he’s gone blind. And then she took in the uniforms in her kitchen and realized the kind of thing it must be. She knew that there was only a certain kind of news that came this way. “You are going to have to tell it to me too,” she told them.
The police let themselves out, but even after they were gone, Bill would not let her touch him. He said he was finished with God. He said he understood now that he’d thought he was finished when Sylvia died but all the time since he’d been holding out the possibility, he had left some room in his doubt for doubt itself. He told her it wasn’t disbelief he felt this time. Disbelief meant you allowed yourself to hope for something and then found you couldn’t believe in it. Climbing the stairs, he called back loudly that God was only a black hopeless hole, God was nothing.
Margaret made all her phone calls. When she was finished she called Angela Johnston to please come back over to stay with Meg and Matthew until Matthew’s mother could get there and then to sit with the wailing Meg until Daphne or Patrick arrived from London. She didn’t know if Angela could manage this, but there was no one else she wanted to ask. And then she drove alone into the hospital in Sarnia.
Sitting behind the wheel on the four-lane highway, for the first time in all her driving life made uneasy by the semis that one after another gained on her and then thundered slowly, stupidly past, she thought, I don’t know how to live the next few days of my life. I do not know how. She sobbed hard around each of these simple words, wrenched finally, now that there was no one to witness the wrenching. It didn’t stop after five miles, or ten. It didn’t end until she was in the hospital parking lot, where it had to end. She turned off the ignition and took the deepest possible breath. She wiped her face dry with a Kleenex and tidied her hair with her fingers and then she adjusted the rear-view mirror to try a brief smile. The smile was a horror, as false as anything she’d ever seen. But in the horror she was able to anticipate, able to prepare herself, for Andy’s larger grief. Her own sorrow would be as nothing. That was the truth of it.
She found Andy in a ward. Her mother was there with her, sitting on a chair close to the bed, stroking the sheet over Andy’s shoulders. Margaret found another chair and watched quietly while Andy’s mother tended to her, watched her bring the water glass to Andy’s mouth. The few nurses hurrying around the hall clearly had little time for anything but the wounds, the dressings and bandages. They were kind enough and respectfully gentle and they moved quietly but they could only do so much.
When Margaret thought Andy was ready, she told her what she knew, that they had been told that Paul was alive when they got him out of the truck, that he lived for a while in the ambulance. But he hadn’t regained consciousness, hadn’t spoken. “So we’ve got that,” she said. “The suffering he didn’t have to go through.”
“The old woman in the truck,” Andy said, her words slurred with sedative. “He was so mad. He died angry.” They didn’t know what she meant and they didn’t ask.
Later in the afternoon, when Neil and Carol and Krissy came into the room, Margaret stood up and said she’d best go home.
Patrick and Mary were the first to arrive in town. Right after she’d got the call from Patrick at work, Mary had phoned Stephen at McGill and then gone to the high school to pull the other two, and by the time they got back to the house on Piccadilly, Patrick was there, locked in the upstairs bathroom with the shower running, although when he came out he was still in his suit and bone dry. She’d heard him, his dry screams, when she was walking to the front door with the key in her hand. They were packed in half an hour and on the road. Patrick had not wanted to let her drive. She’d had to take the keys from his fist and lead him around to the passenger door. She’d had to do up his seat belt.
When they got to the house they thanked Angela and sent her home and soon Daphne arrived with Maggie and Jill. Murray and his wife Kate were driving from Toronto, he had told Margaret they should be there around nine or ten that night. Patrick went out to the golf course motel to arrange for rooms.
Margaret had called Sarah in Vancouver and she was trying to get on a flight. Sarah had been planning to come home in a couple of months to show off her baby and Margaret had told her on the phone that maybe she shouldn’t come now, not alone, it was such a long flight she should check with her doctor and do what was best, that they would understand if it was better for her to come later, after the baby was safely born. But Sarah had said no, she would be there. She’d get on the first available flight.
After a dazed supper of scrambled eggs and toast, Margaret tucked Meg into Daphne’s bed, which was where she liked to be, making her promise to sleep. Someone turned the television on and, one by one, Patrick and Neil drove all the cars uptown to gas them up and run them through the carwash. Just before eleven, Daphne and the girls went out to sleep at Paul and Andy’s, to check on things as much as anything because Krissy had decided to stay at the hospital overnight with Andy, sleeping if she had to on one of the plastic couches in the waiting room. The others went out to the golf course motel because there wasn’t room for everyone any more and because Rebecca, Patrick and Mary’s youngest and only daughter, was afraid of Meg at the best of times.
The next morning Patrick and Neil took Andy’s mother into Sarnia to get Andy from the hospital. When Margaret called, the hospital had told her today or tomorrow, depending on what she was going home to, whether there would be any help at home. They hadn’t mentioned c
lothes and Margaret didn’t think of clothes until Patrick had backed out of the driveway and was halfway down the street, too late. She had told Patrick and Neil to bring Andy back to her, that her mother should stay too, maybe on the McKellars’ rollaway. She was sure of just two things: that Andy’s kids would need her help in ways no one could begin to anticipate, and that Andy would be strong enough to give it to them only if she was cared for herself.
Krissy had sat awake all night beside her sedated mother. In the morning, when she sensed the others coming into the room behind her, she stood up and walked straight into Patrick’s arms. She told them a nurse had given Andy another shot of something at midnight and that she had finally fallen asleep around two. They had just made her wake up. A breakfast tray sat untouched on the table at the foot of the bed and she was supposed to be getting another sponge bath. Andy was curled on her side, dressed to go home in her bloody clothes, shivering.
Neil half carried his mother from the wheelchair to the car, and making his way through the heavy city traffic, Patrick told them that Margaret wanted Andy there, that Andy’s mother was to come too, that he hoped this would be all right.
Murray and Daphne had volunteered to make the airport run. Murray had been able to tell her at the kitchen table how wonderful Maggie and Jill were, because this was something he could say in front of anyone, but as soon as they were in the car and belted up he said it again. “You are doing such a job.”
“They are wonderful in themselves,” Daphne told him. “It’s possible that you and I don’t even matter all that much.”
They were both in a stupor. Murray took the old highway because he said they had lots of time and this was a chance to get a few minutes away from it. They didn’t talk for miles and then Daphne told him that every time she looked down at her hands they were clenched. “My palms are sliced with fingernail marks,” she said, examining her open hands. “These extra little curving moon lines cutting across the normal lines, what are they called?” She did know the names. “The heart line,” she said. “The head line. The health line. The life line. The fate line.”
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