After Alice (38 page)

Sidonie swims out into the lake in a wide arc. The water in the evening light waves green and gold around her, vanishing both to the north and south in rounded blue points. The hills curve, deeper blue, on both sides. The lake is a blue-green egg, herself the centre. That's a trick of perspective, though, thinking the lake is oval; it's really a long, narrow, hundred-kilometre snake, slightly curved, between a kilometre and five kilometres in width.

She swims out a hundred metres or so, then begins looping back, toward the cluster of pilings, which rise perhaps three metres from the water. There is still a ladder. She climbs it, not as quickly as she had done as a girl.

“Be careful, Miss,” one of the small boys perched above says to her. “There's broken pilings under the water.”

“Yes, there are,” she says.

When she pulls herself up, the boys leap from the posts. One plunges head first, another feet first, into the green and gold mirror below. In a few seconds, which seem longer, they emerge in little silver explosions of spray.

She knows she is showing off. But there is a point of honour here. She measures the distance, glances back at the others on the shore. Only Justin and Cynthia are watching her, though Justin nudges Tasha to look. She focuses on the clear jade surface, flexes her feet, raises her arms over her head, arches her back. The boys below her are quiet. She springs outward and upward. The air rushes by her only briefly (fifteen feet per second, she thinks) before she cuts cleanly into the water. The rush of water against her skin, the slowing, in the dim depths. Deep here, but she turns, thrusts with her feet, her thighs perfect machines in this element, follows her own trail of silver bubbles back into the light.

The next day Sidonie wakes with her arms and shoulders at once locked rigid and on fire from the repetitive motion of the picking. She can hardly pull a T-shirt over her head. But here is still a day's worth of cherries to pick.

The day is even hotter than before. She considers opening up the house to give everyone a place to escape the heat and to rest, but decides no, no. Everyone complains of sore shoulders and arms. Under the trees, she sees from her ladder Kevin massaging Celeste's wrists, pressing his lips to them.

Celeste laughing.

When they're picking in adjacent trees, Steve says to her, “I picked up this interesting book at a flea market. It's called
The
'60s: Montreal Thinks Big
. Do you know it? It's about architecture.”

She knows it, though she hasn't thought about it for years. She is not surprised by Steve's comment; Cynthia has told her that he buys and reads his way indiscriminately through boxes of secondhand books.

“It's really theoretical,” Steve says. “I can't get my head around a lot of it. But it mentions your husband — your late husband, I should say. Adam St. Regis. That's him, right? Same last name as Cynthia.”

Yes.

“I didn't know he worked on Habitat,” Steve says. “I've always been interested in that. I'd like to see it.”

“I lived in it,” Sidonie says. “From the time it was built until, oh, the mid-eighties. Adam lived there until he died.”

“I didn't know that!” Stephen says, and she thinks in his voice is something of the regret of a possible life. Her fault: she had abandoned him. As she had others. Will they continue to ambush her, these losses?

Coming in for a break, she finds the boys stretched out on the lawn, under the trees. “You can come up onto the porch,” she says. “It's cooler.” The younger boy, Cash, shows the whites of his eyes. “I'm scared to go near that house. I heard someone was murdered in there!”

“Where did you hear that?”

“My dad told us. My other dad.”

“Is it true?” the older boy, Fearon, asks. He is going to be good-looking, Sidonie thinks, with his clean jawline, his high cheekbones and deep-set, almond-shaped eyes, which are green, not black, and his dark hair and long thick eyelashes.

“Yes, it's true,” she admits.

“Who was it?”

“My sister,” she says. “Steve and Kevin and Cynthia's mother. Her name was Alice.” And as she says this, she feels a sigh, a release of air from the open front door.

“Did her old man do it?” Fearon asks, knowingly.

“Yes.”

“Did you used to live here, then?” Cash asks.

“Yes,” Sidonie says. “I was born in this house. And my sister too.”

“Did you have electricity?”

“Oh my goodness. Yes.”

“My grandma didn't, in her house,” Fearon says. “It must have been boring without computers or TV.”

“We had a record player,” Sidonie says. “And a radio. And we read books and magazines, and drew a lot. And spent a lot of time outside.”

“Fearon can draw,” Cash says.

“Not really,” Fearon says, but he is pleased.

“My dad, my real dad, is from here too,” Cashiel says. “Do you know him?”

“What is his name?”

“Greg Clare.”

“I know the Clares,” Sidonie says. “I went to school with Richard Clare.”

“He's our grandfather,” Cashiel says. Then looks at her sideways, warily. “He doesn't know us, though. He doesn't like that our dad got together with our mom.”

Fearon, next to him, scowls.

“I see,” Sidonie says.

Cashiel says, “He's rich, though. Our dad says. He's a property developer. He's made, like, a billion dollars. But we don't get any of it, eh.”

Fearon says, “I wouldn't take it anyhow.”

Something is expected of her. But what? She gets up, dusts off the seat of her khaki walking shorts, smooths the legs down. An old woman's shins, between the hem of the shorts and the tops of her grey socks and hiking boots. The skin translucent, the sharp bone shining through, the calves puckered and rope-veined. Whose old body?

“There are no ghosts in this house,” she says. “Many happy things took place here, and the house has stood empty a long time. It's not haunted, only empty.”

“You can have it,”
Sidonie says. “You can have Beauvoir. The land and the house.” She has made this offer before, when Father died, and Alice had rejected it. “I don't want it,” Alice had said. But now Sidonie makes it again. “It's yours if you want it.”

“I want it,” Alice says.

They have climbed up the granite outcropping to the north of the orchard, and are sitting on the sun-warmed rock. It's June and the trees are ranged below them in their rows of green foliage: the cherries dark, large-leafed; the peaches a bright sharp glossy green, tinged with pink; the leaves of the apple trees matte, a more countrified light green.

The lake below, a long pool of pale cool blue today — cornflower blue. Alice used to wear that colour. A glitter of wavelets drifts like a diamanté spray corsage. The mountains across the lake are a curtain of purple.

Alice says, “I do want it. But how will it work? How can we do this?”

“It's simple,” Sidonie says. “We get a lawyer and I sign it over.”

But Alice doesn't answer. She must have meant something else by her question.

It is 1973. Sidonie has come home to help Mother die. They do not say that: they say that she has come to help Mother. But Mother is dying. A nurse has come to stay with her so that she can die at home. Sidonie is paying for this. The hospital would be free, but on the day when it becomes apparent that Mother's pain has increased to a point of unmanageability, Mother weeps, and says that she doesn't want to be moved, doesn't want to go into hospital where everything will be strange.

“Mother has never been in the hospital,” Alice says. “She doesn't want to spend her last few days in there.”

Can this be true? But Alice is right; she and Sidonie were born at home, and none of them has ever gone to the hospital. Even Sidonie's broken ankle, when she fell from the shed roof, was set by Dr. Stewart right on the kitchen table.

“We were brought up in the nineteenth century,” she says to Alice.

On that day, Mother moans and moans and Alice, coming outside to where Sidonie is hoeing the garden (for it has all gone suddenly to weeds, with the last stage of Mother's illness), puts her face in her hands and rocks and moans as well, as if she were connected by strong but invisible threads to Mother. Dr. Stewart has been there earlier and given Mother a morphine shot, and there have been a few hours of respite. But it doesn't last, and Mother needs another one quickly, and the sheets need changing and washing.

“We need to call the ambulance,” Sidonie says sensibly. “Mother needs to be in the hospital now.”

But Alice cries and bangs her head against the porch posts, and Sidonie says: “Alright. A nurse.”

The nurse needs a hospital bed for Mother, and also an IV stand, various dressings and pads and disinfectants, which Sidonie brings home from town in the truck.

So now Mother lies in a light doze, and Sidonie and Alice are able to escape from the house. Alice goes home to do her own housework and feed her children, and Sidonie continues to work in the garden. Peas, lettuce, strawberries, radishes all to be picked. Watering and hoeing.

Alice comes up to Beauvoir every day, while the children are in school, and she and Sidonie clean and sort cupboards and take walks, long walks, through the orchard, to the lake, up through the bush, to the south, to the old gold mine, and to the old reservoir, which is shrinking: a new irrigation system has been constructed, one with underground pipes, and the reservoir, no longer in use, has diminished to a small pond, ringed with cattails and upstart poplars. The small ponds near the reservoir have already become dry marshes, and the water pipe, along with the glade of rainforest flora that ran alongside it, has completely disappeared.

There is a deep, peaceable silence between Sidonie and Alice, now. It is as if, with Mother dying, they have been born fresh into new, less irritated skins. Sidonie doesn't say this, doesn't comment or speak much. What is there to say? She has stepped out of her life temporarily, and has slipped into this one with such ease that she is only aware a sort of surprised gratitude. She goes days without thinking of Adam or of her job. When she does think of them, it is as if they are faraway places, stories she has been reading and may return to or not.

Alice, though, talks. She says, “Remember the year we had all that snow, and we made the big fort? And remember the storm, and the beach ball? Remember canning, all that work, and always so hot? Remember Hugh's hiking club?”

She says, “I am angry that it took so long to find out what was wrong with Cynthia. I got measles from the kids, you know, when I was pregnant with her. Her eardrums were damaged. The doctor up in Horsefly was practically useless, an old drunk. Dr. Stewart knew right away, when we moved back here. Cynthia's quite bright, you know. She's not retarded, like everyone says.”

Alice says, “People don't like Buck. He's so difficult. But he's a good man in some ways. He had a hard childhood — his father used to beat the crap out of him. But he tried to look after his brothers and Lottie, you know. And he's really patient with Cynthia.”

Alice and Sidonie pick and slice up the strawberries and put them in freezer bags in Mother's freezer, which will be Alice's freezer. Alice says, “You'll visit, won't you? You and Adam. You can come and stay with us any time.”

She says, “It'll be so good for the kids, to have this space. They'll be able to roam in the hills like we did.”

They climb Spion Kopje, and sit near the peak on the west slope, overlooking the range of mountains, the lake spread out below like a puddle of some rare liquid metal. Alice says, “I wasn't very nice to you when we were children. I can't explain why, but I regret it every day,” which is somehow horribly embarrassing for Sidonie to hear.

Alice says, “I'm sorry for what I said about Gordon Defoe. I know what happened. It wasn't your fault.”

She says, “I wanted to be an artist, you know. I wanted to go to art school. But Mother and Father didn't think that was a good idea. They thought I'd be corrupted, become a Bohemian, get pregnant and have abortions and die of TB in some squalid ghetto. And I didn't think I was good enough to make it.”

Alice talks about her failed year at college, her 1957 year in the education program at Victoria College. She says, “I never had enough time. Mother had set up for me to board with these people who made me work as an au pair every afternoon and evening and weekend, as well as pay rent. She thought it was a good deal, that we were getting a reduction on the rent. I found out from the other girls that I was being exploited. But Mother thought it would be a great thing; the husband was an officer at Naden and they had a hyphenated last name. I never had any time to study or have a social life. Even then I didn't do that badly. I failed my practicum because the examiner was an old biddy who took off points for me not drawing the window blinds to the same height, and my skirt being an inch too short.”

She says, “I'm going to take some art classes at the new college. Did you know that? Some drawing and painting classes. This fall, now that Cynthia's starting school. Do you think I'll be good enough?”

You've always been good enough, Sidonie thought.

She does not remember if she said this. She hopes she said it, but she cannot be sure she did.

One evening, that summer of 1973, Hugh, who is home for a visit, and his brother Graham come over with a pan of lemon bars that Mrs. Inglis has baked, and Masao and Walt drop by as well. The six of them sit on the porch in the long bright June evening, watching the bats and nighthawks, listening to the crickets, talking. Graham is in a good state. He makes his old dry elaborate jokes, and is gallant, mildly flirtatious towards Alice. Courtly, that's the word. And Hugh has stories about Brazil, where he is working now. Masao talks about the store and music, and Walt about the orchards, and all of them about politics. (The NDP: a good thing, on the whole, though the older folks don't think so.)