“No, sorry, dear. I just know they left in a hurry.”
“Okay, thanks.”
A cat appeared from around the side of the house.
“Pearl?” Danny said.
“Do you know her?” said the woman.
“Yes, I do.”
“Her name is Pearl?”
“Yes.”
“The rental agent said they couldn’t take her, so we offered to let her stay on. She’s no trouble. In fact, she’s a good mouser.”
“’Kay, good,” he said.
Pearl came towards him, and he crouched down and held out his hand. She looked at him steadily as he scratched under her chin. He imagined that she was saying, Where are they, Danny, where did they go?
47
Danny and Barbara wound through the quiet Sunday streets in the old DeSoto. It was her idea. They were going to see Cookie’s grave.
The headstone no longer seemed important. He’d let his mother have her way. It was the only thing he could think of to give her: the opposite of going against her.
They parked and walked the short distance through freshly fallen snow. Barbara used a cane. It took him a moment or two to register what he was looking at. It was a different stone, one of a lighter hue. And on it were the words: Cookie Ruby Blue. All the other information was the same, but Cordelia was gone.
She put her hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Danny.”
There it was again.
“You don’t have to keep saying you’re sorry.”
“Don’t I?”
“No. Once was lots.”
“But there are so many things…”
Yes, there are. “It’s okay,” he said.
“Danny?”
“Yes?”
“About your dad?”
“Yes?”
“There are some things...that I can’t explain. It’s not that I don’t want to. I just can’t. If I ever I find that I can...”
The words he wanted from her weren’t present in her world. Maybe they never would be. There was nothing he could do about that.
“I’m pretty sure I saw him,” Danny said. “My dad, I mean.”
He told her about the powder-blue Cadillac and how the man had stood by James’s grave on his birthday, on their birthday. And he told her that he knew he’d been there the day they buried Cookie.
“I want to meet him, Mum.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“May we please move James over so he lies beside Cookie?” Danny said.
“Yes,” said Barbara. “We’ll see about that too.”
48
The winter of ’64–’65 was cloudier than usual — darker — but maybe Danny just saw it that way. The light seemed to fall in a different way on the hockey rink, on the toboggan hill — more aslant somehow.
Paul drifted back into his life. When Danny looked back he couldn’t remember the details of how that happened. He did remember that neither of them spoke at all of the past spring, summer, or fall.
He thought about looking for Janine, but never as more than an idea. There was barely a starting point. He was certain the Children’s Aid Society had everything to do with their vanishing, but he thought he knew Jake and Janine well enough to know that if they were running, they wouldn’t be found. And even if he did find her, what would he have to tell her, to ask of her?
Besides, his dreams of her were at the little house on Lyndale and on the streets of Norwood where they had walked and planned and fought. And at the river. That was where he wanted to see her, not somewhere else.
Epilogue
The scent of lilac and lily-of-the-valley fills the air on a warm Saturday in spring of 2006. After his daily visit to his father at the Riverview Health Centre Daniel walks downtown from his home in the Norwood Flats. Outside Into the Music on McDermot Avenue he leans down to pat a Jack Russell terrier. It doesn’t look to have any other breeds in it, unlike his long-ago Russell, the best dog he ever had. This dog licks his hand. Daniel lets it.
“She’ll lick your hand all day if you let her.” It’s a woman’s voice.
When he looks into her face he sees someone about his own age. Her lines are cut deep.
“Danny?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know me.”
And then he does. It’s the voice. There is still the tiniest trace of a French accent combined now with something new, from a new place, perhaps. And then, when he tries harder, he sees her inside the weathered skin.
“Janine.”
“You got tall,” she says.
They don’t embrace. There’s a remnant left from all those years ago that precludes hugging.
“Let’s get a drink,” she says.
They sit outside at the King’s Head so there is a place for her dog.
Daniel goes inside for the drinks: a pint for her, a half for him. The pub is almost empty. It’s not quite lunchtime. At the outside tables a few young people are scattered, beautiful in their youth, in spite of their piercings and black hair and ubiquitous tattoos.
“What’s her name?” Daniel says when they’re settled. “Your dog, I mean.”
“Jack.” The dog looks up at her, and she smiles.
Her smile is the same as it was, with its downward edges. It reminds him that he never got to kiss her.
“It was either Jack or Russell,” she says, “so we opted for Jack.”
That is about as close as they get to the summer of ’64.
It’s there, like a presence at the table, but they don’t talk about any of it.
“We?” he says.
“Me and my dad. When I came up to visit him a few years ago we decided to get him a dog to keep him company.”
“Is he…?”
“No. He died on Monday. I’ve been here for a month or so. Lung cancer finally got him, but he smoked for over sixty years before it did.”
She chuckles. “He never even tried to give it up.”
Daniel pictures Jake in his undershirt, the filterless cigarette permanently attached to his lip, squinting at them from behind the screen door.
“What about you?” she says.
“My mum died a long time ago,” says Daniel. “But not before she got me in touch with my dad. He’s still alive. I see him almost every day.”
“That’s good,” said Janine. “How about Aunt Dot?”
Another tap on the shoulder of 1964.
“She’s long gone.” Daniel smiled. “Good old Aunt Dot.”
There are more catch-up words, nutshell words. Janine lived most of her life in Austin, Texas. She married a musician down there, then another, and then yet another. The last marriage took. Stephen is her husband’s name, and he still plays gigs around the Austin area.
“I sewed mainly,” she says. “Waited tables and sewed. I still sew for certain people, special clothes you know, mostly for bands, musicians.”
“Seamstress for the band,” says Daniel, and they smile, both knowing the lyric from the old song.
“Kids?” he says.
“No, no kids.”
A little gust of wind blows through and lifts her white hair off her forehead. She is one of those people with the right skin tone for white hair. She looks just fine.
“The time never seemed right,” she says. Lights a cigarette and coughs. “What about you?”
Daniel is married to a woman named Marsha, and they have three kids: two girls, Jean and Lara, and a boy, James, all grown. Lara is expecting a baby, his first grandchild. He has had a long career as an engineer, a builder of bridges. He’s still working. Marsha taught home economics at Nelson Mac for many years after the kids were in school, but is retired now. She grows her own vegetables; she’s a fine cook.
“Maybe
a little too fine,” he says and grins, in reference to the way he has filled out over the years.
“You look good,” says Janine.
He doesn’t tell her that people call him Daniel now because he wants to hear her say his old name again.
Please say it.
Does she know that Rock Sand died in a car crash before he was out of his teens, or that Birchdale Betty went to jail for extorting large sums of money from elderly widows?
He wants to ask her where they went that fall, she and her dad, and why. He decides it would be prying.
She looks into his eyes and says nothing.
As lives go, they knew each other for a very short time. Wrong as it had been — what they planned, what they did and didn’t do — Daniel had believed that for a few moments in time they’d been on the same wavelength, on the same live wire. It had been something, really something. For him.
He feels a movement underneath the table and looks down to see Jack settling her chin next to his sandalled foot.
When Janine goes inside for more beer, Daniel speaks to the dog.
“I loved her once, Jack,” he says. “My, how I loved her. But she let me down, man. She truly let me down.”
About the Author
Alison Preston was born and raised in Winnipeg. After trying on a number of other Canadian cities, she returned to her hometown, where she currently resides. All of her books are set in the Norwood Flats area of Winnipeg, including The Rain Barrel Baby, The Geranium Girls, Cherry Bites, Sunny Dreams, and The Girl in the Wall.
A graduate of the University of Winnipeg, and a letter carrier for twenty-eight years, Alison won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction for The Girl in the Wall and has been twice nominated for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer, following the publications of The Rain Barrel Baby (Signature Editions) and her first novel, A Blue and Golden Year (Turnstone Press). She was also shortlisted for the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award for Cherry Bites and the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher for Sunny Dreams.
Visit Alison’s website at: www.alisonpreston.com
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