by Lucy Treloar
Not without some misgiving, in a calm spell, Cat and Girl and I left Alejandra, Luis and Josh to fend for theirselves while we went to the main to wait for the baby to come. I wondered if Josh might like to come, but Cat became vague. ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ and she put her hand to her belly and stroked it with her thumb. ‘He’s not really that interested.’ They weren’t together anymore, she said. ‘No fight. Actually, we haven’t talked about it. I’ll tell him. I will.’ She looked across the bay towards their house. ‘I honestly don’t know what I saw in him. I don’t even like him.’
‘He’s very good-looking.’
‘But so what? I think I went with him just to give Dad a fit. That worked. Everyone wanted him.’
‘You looked like you liked him.’
‘I must have for a while.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’ll sort itself out in its own time. One way or another.’
‘It won’t,’ she said.
I went walking around town for a change of scene, ignoring people’s sidelong glances. I happened to pass Hart’s place. Blackwater isn’t a large town – it wasn’t even before it started to whittle away. A walk around the harbour took me that way, I would like to be clear on that point. I had time to kill and a restlessness to be spent. Cat had gone inside herself and her waiting and had shut out the world.
‘You could walk around to your grandfather’s,’ I’d said. ‘See if it gets things moving.’
‘Why don’t you go see him? You’re the one who’s interested.’
‘I’m certainly not.’
She’d given me a sort of look, so I left, Girl at my side.
Now I stood in the shadow of a red maple I used to admire from our bedroom window. The house was neglected. The grass was too long – someone putting it off – and everything needed a lick of paint. It had been spruced up and painted butter yellow with white trim the last time I’d seen it, six or seven years before, under the influence of Hart’s new woman I presumed.
Cat was napping on the living room sofa when I returned. Doree was out. Girl went into the yard. Beyond her were the harbour and the clutter of dogwoods and picket fences and brick paths and houses close together – much the same as always, even with the changes: the water higher, the fishing boats fewer, that sort of thing. Girl pricked her ears at the sound of strange dogs or coydogs or coywolves or even wolfdogs, and melted into the shadows, heading towards the forests out of town, maybe searching for a mate. (I had a feeling she was coming into season. It was too late to stop her now.) There was a bird in the tree above, and another in the reeds. It was like a dream. People prefer to live like this, ignoring the things that might wake them, as if ignorance might force the world into returning to its proper course. I did once have the glancing thought that living on Wolfe was not so different.
Next morning, while I was putting the coffee on, wraiths of mist were lifting from the dewy grass, and Girl, back from her night of roaming, wandered curiously towards an old brown car behind a dogwood on the dirt road at the back of Doree’s. A woman was hunting through things in the trunk – plastic shopping bags and the small colourful bags that children like – which she dumped on the ground when she’d searched them. Softly, I whistled Girl back. A child poked its head from a window and the woman saw Girl. She took her phone from her pocket, and faced the house. It seemed as if she was looking at me, and I was on the point of waving. I heard Doree’s voice upstairs. Quite suddenly, the woman shoved the phone into her jeans, threw the bags into the car, shut the trunk softly, jumping to add her weight, and got in. The car pulled away quiet and easy.
Doree came down the stairs – there was one step on the turn that squeaked – and when she came in I was getting creamer from the fridge. She glanced from the window. ‘Oh, coffee. We’re going to need that. Cat’s pains are starting.’
I went in to see her late in the morning. She was moving restlessly from bed to window, pausing there to lean against the ledge, bowing her forehead to her arms and rocking and groaning, poor girl.
‘I want Claudie,’ Cat said. ‘I want her.’
‘I’ll see if I can . . . I can ring her. I think I’ve got her number, if it hasn’t changed.’ I put a hand to Cat’s back and felt the great humming energy at work in her.
‘I want it to stop,’ she said.
‘I know you do. I’ll get Claudie, okay?’ I went onto the landing, looking through the tree branches while the phone rang.
‘Mother?’ Claudie said in that wary way of hers.
‘It’s Cat,’ I said.
‘You’ve got her?’
‘I promised I wouldn’t say. And I haven’t got her. I didn’t have her before. I just know where she is.’
‘She’s on Wolfe?’
‘Not right now.’
‘How do you know where she is then?’
‘I’m not getting into that. Cat said she let you know she was safe. I told her she had to.’
‘Did you? And you trusted her? That girl—’
‘Did she leave you a letter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then. Not my business to betray a confidence. Did you wonder why I might be ringing?’
That got her going. How dare I keep her daughter from her, and so on. After a while she wound down and I took the phone to Cat and left them to it. When Cat began to groan again I went back. The phone was on the bed and Claudie’s voice was still pouring out of it. I picked it up.
‘It’s me.’
‘I want to come.’
‘Oh, good. Cat wanted you to.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘She must have said something. Can’t you hear her?’
‘She doesn’t want Rob there, she says.’
‘I believe not.’
‘Don’t,’ Claudie said. ‘Not one word.’
‘I said I believed you were right.’
‘She should be in a hospital.’
‘Too late for that. Can you come?’
‘He’d know.’
‘Claudie, you’re her mother. She’s the one you think of. He can look after himself.’
‘Don’t say it like that,’ she said. ‘Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Where could I be going?’
‘I don’t know. What do you do with yourself? Could you be helping someone move?’
She didn’t say anything but I could hear her breathing.
‘What if I need your help?’ I said.
‘Why would you?’
‘People do. Broke my leg. Laid up with pneumonia, cholera, typhoid, chemo, nervous breakdown. I don’t know. You’ll think of something. Take a bus.’
‘I’ll drive. Where are you?’
‘Blackwater. I’ll meet you at the docks. If I see Rob with you, I’m turning around. Cat doesn’t trust him.’
‘He’s her father. He’s got a right.’
‘No he doesn’t.’
‘Mother.’
‘Claudie.’
She made her sort of angry growling sound then. She was just my daughter and nothing to be frightened of, but she frightened me anyway with her sad fury. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there in the morning.’
I felt tired already.
Poor Cat kept on through the afternoon, and by dinner had a fevered look. She was grateful for ice chips and cold face washers and the drugs that Doree had got from ‘someone’. (That was Doree all over; she knew everyone it might be useful to know, and every such person owed her for some kindness.) It was late when I heard the baby’s cry.
Doree came out from Cat’s room. ‘All fine. Just going to clean up and make them nice. She’s perfect. Both of them are. A wee girl.’
I brought warm water and soft towels and clean sheets and took away the bloodied ones that Doree passed out, and quite late – stars were out over the harbour when
I passed the round lookout window – I went in to see Cat and the baby. She was holding her and kissing her cheek ever so softly, again and again. ‘Treasure. You are.’ She could hardly drag her eyes away.
‘Well, look at you two.’
‘That’s what I’m calling her.’
‘Treasure . . . That’s a good name.’ I sat on the edge of the bed. ‘What will Claudie think?’
‘She can just stick it up her patootie, or whatever she says.’
‘Patootie – oh, patootie. God, I haven’t heard that for a while.’ I laughed. They’d survived. I felt like running down the street. ‘Claudie always did like that word. How about Josh?’
‘Didn’t want me to have her, no interest, so he doesn’t get a say, does he, Treasure?’ She kissed the baby again. ‘Asshole. Not you sweetheart, that daddy of yours.’ She kissed the baby’s head and rubbed it with her cheek. Treasure’s eyelids and mouth fluttered but she slept on. ‘But let’s not mention that asshole again.’ Treasure was as dark as her mother, with a good bit of hair and eyelashes like sparse fans trembling on her cheeks.
‘Why that name?’
‘Because she is my treasure and I will always keep her safe. Nothing, no one, is going to stop me.’
‘I believe it.’ I sat on the edge of the bed, on Doree’s old childhood candlewick bedspread from Wolfe. ‘She’s a sweetheart all right. Remember that feeling. Hold it tight. Somehow it can wear away . . . They have other ideas.’ Cat looked fierce. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You’ll do it. I know you will.’
Cat pulled Treasure close, then slowly she passed her to me, as if all the time she was considering and reconsidering the wisdom of it. But she kept on and I felt the weight of the baby passing from Cat to me. Feeling Treasure in my own arms and looking at Cat’s face I remembered. She looked not light or loving or soft, but ferocious, like she knew things she hadn’t known before, and had been through something she didn’t know she could. No one can prepare you for it. You’ve been somewhere. Your body’s surprised you. Whatever you’ve felt before meant nothing. Nothing. This is the thing that matters. Nothing is more important; nothing explains more. You’re holding the world.
Claudie was in a mood. She never could stay still if she was upset. I dreaded what was to come even before I reached her. She was pacing the brick path and leaning against her slippery-looking car and pacing again as if she’d been there for hours instead of a few minutes. Her hair, which was the colour of dark honey, was long and waved about the golden skin of her face. Every bit of her was tended to. There was the push of her sleeve just so, a little way up, to reveal her wrist and her gold bangle. The silky fringes of her patterned scarf moved in the breeze. The laces of her boots weren’t tied, but I presumed that was a kind of casualness that let anyone who wondered know that fine clothes and the appearance of wealth were the least of her concerns. What, this old thing? every part of her seemed to say. (In case you are curious about my attire, I was in jeans with well-worn knees, a plaid shirt of Tobe’s with the arms cut out and a leather jacket I found in some island ruin when I was scouting around for new books.) It’s what she wanted. That’s the trouble: things you don’t expect arrive without invitation. She might learn one day, as I did. She ran at the world so straight and undaunted that she convinced me she knew what she was doing – like Cat had been doing all year. Well, she had a way to run yet.
‘Claudie,’ I said, when I got closer.
She allowed herself to be hugged. ‘Mother.’
When had I become Mother? ‘Come on, Claudie,’ I said. ‘Come meet your granddaughter.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not even forty. I’ve got friends my age with babies of their own. It’s embarrassing.’
‘It is a shock.’
‘You’re a great-grandmother.’
‘Please.’
‘You started it.’
The misery and worry on her face. I put my hands to her cheeks, and she let me. I stroked a blowing strand of hair back. ‘Let’s go see them. We won’t worry about the rest for now.’
Claudie’s boots made a tapping sound on the path, and even though she was a half head taller than me in her bare feet, a tall girl, she was slower – those preposterous heels. ‘They’re beautiful together. She’s something, that Cat. You should be proud of her.’
‘Don’t tell me what I should be.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m never sure what for, but I am anyway.’
We fell into silence, and kept walking, crossing Pork Street and Chewton, and then Claudie said, ‘It is pretty here,’ which was her way of apologising. It reminded me of my mother.
‘It is that.’
‘Quiet, though.’
‘Season’s finished. You don’t come here to see Hart?’
‘He comes for Christmas every other year, him and his new wife. Old wife.’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t know? I thought he would have said. They broke up.’
‘Poor Hart.’
‘Liar,’ Claudie said calmly.
I laughed, feeling suddenly lighter.
‘Mother,’ she said sternly, but she bumped against me and stayed there for a moment, almost friendly.
‘What happened?’ I said.
She gave me a sidelong look. ‘You’d have to ask Dad.’ We crossed another street. ‘If you ask me, he missed you and she knew it. She was just so pleasant. She was too much.’
‘Perhaps she was restful,’ I said. ‘Here.’ Doree’s house was all lace and flags and green shutters, and had myrtles and hydrangeas and sunflowers blaring outside. The whole street was done up in the same style, though different colours. (Everything on Wolfe is white, which I consider peaceful.)
‘Isn’t this – isn’t it Doree’s?’
‘It is.’
‘I should have known.’
I was glad for Doree’s sake that she wasn’t home. Claudie curled her lip at the gingham.
I went upstairs and poked my head in Cat’s door. ‘Claudie’s here.’
‘Better send her in.’
Claudie stayed for two nights. Mostly I remember the arguments. I would have returned to Wolfe to give her and Cat some time alone – and mostly to spare myself – but Cat wouldn’t hear of it. ‘She’ll kidnap us.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. She’s your mother.’
‘Exactly. She’ll call Dad. She won’t be able to help herself. You stay here, Kitty. No going out.’ She leaned forward – ‘I mean it,’ she hissed fiercely. ‘I’m trusting you.’
I didn’t hold out much hope for reconciliation between them, but I took the occasional laughter that gusted from Cat’s room as a good sign. Doree and I had a quiet dinner; Claudie took a tray up to Cat’s room and kept her company through the evening. Several times in the night I heard Treasure’s piercing wails and Cat’s murmuring replies.
By next morning, Claudie’s hair had collapsed and she’d pulled it back into a loose knot. We sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. ‘I like your hair like that,’ I said.
‘You would.’
She ate a piece of dry toast and went up to see Cat, her head, body and finally her feet being swallowed by the floor above as she climbed the stairs. There was the sound of her knocking, then quiet and then voices getting louder. Perhaps twenty minutes later she reappeared, her suede slides scuffing.
She came to the kitchen archway. ‘You must think this is all pretty funny. You must be just about killing yourself laughing inside.’
‘Why would I be doing that?’
‘I suppose you’d call it karma.’
‘I certainly would not. I don’t believe in such twaddle. Choice and free will is what I believe in.’
‘Twaddle, Mother.’ She couldn’t help a snorting laugh. She pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. ‘Hay fever.’ She moved about the kitchen as if she
was in a pinball machine. ‘She’s refusing to come with me. We could report her, you know that? As a delinquent minor. Would you like to know what she did?’
‘I know what they told me.’
‘They?’ she said. She wheeled around from the sink and came towards me. ‘You mean Josh? He’s on Wolfe too? I should have known. Vandalising golf courses. Burning the clubhouses, poisoning the greens, cutting the fences. His father is very important, you know.’
I don’t know how I stopped myself saying something about Josh’s father then, but I did. I remembered Cat’s list. I hung onto it hard.
Claudie folded her arms in that fancy way where the palm of one hand cradles the elbow of the other. I let her stew, and looked at the news and checked my emails, and began a reply to one. Claudie straightened the table runner. ‘I hate gingham,’ she said. ‘It’s just so . . . so phony.’
I didn’t reply.
‘I made sure she fitted in,’ Claudie said.
‘You can’t make them want what you want. I suppose we all try.’
‘You did what you did and you decided it was okay.’
‘So did you, and now it’s Cat’s turn.’
‘I hate it. She won’t come home, she won’t go back to school.’
‘Different issue.’ I poured some coffee and added hazelnut creamer, a mainland treat. ‘She’s like you. Both of you doing what you have to. I am sorry I got in your way.’
Claudie breathed rather loudly and wildly like there was plenty more to say. Finally, she wailed, ‘She’s a single mother.’
‘Oh, Claudie, who honestly cares? You’ve got a smart daughter and a healthy granddaughter. They just need some support.’
‘Well thank God I’ve got you here for the parenting advice.’
That was the first morning.
By next day Claudie’s gloss was entirely gone. She was thin and tired-looking – like a tall gaunt horse. She ate an egg white omelette for breakfast. She gathered crumbs on the table surface, and straightened a spoon and centred the vase of late summer flowers and began to rearrange them, stabbing the stalks into place. The tea towel hanging from the stove rail shifted as she passed. ‘My hair,’ she wailed, trying to smooth it. ‘This place.’ She yanked the lace curtain back and peered out.