Fever (12 page)

Years later when she remembered this time in her life she knew that it had been a pivotal time. She remembered the vision which had told her clearly and finally how many pills she would take and that they wouldn’t be enough to kill her, and she remembered how Yvan had come and slept in her room that night. She wondered how he knew that that was the night she would need him, and if his act of kindness had made any difference or not. She thought it must have, though she didn’t see how, and she supposed she owed Yvan, who had somehow slipped out of her reach, her life.

The weakness, the sensation of struggling not to be drawn down into the blackness, into the bottomless depths of that dark, watery sea, she remembered only in dreams now and then. The weakness never returned, and the water in her dreams grew less black, eventually took on a greenish hue, there were even times when it was aquamarine and perfectly clear. But she sometimes saw in her dreams as she swam—yes, miracle of miracles, she swam, a mermaid now in this endlessly deep water—she sometimes saw far below her a shadow, the monstrous dark bulk of a huge sea creature, gliding effortlessly in the deep below her body.

At night the birds kept up a steady barrage of sound, a blending of all their whistles, chirps, cheeps, and trills, the volume of which swelled or diminished according to how many sparrows, wrens or swallows joined in or paused. Charlotte had never paid much attention to them before, but this summer she found herself lying in bed listening to them as the long northern twilight dragged on into the early northern dawn. She slept lightly, only now and then, and it seemed to her that it was never wholly dark and they were never wholly silent.

She lay and listened, naming each bird to herself as she picked out its sound: red-winged blackbird, magpie, robin, sometimes even the cry of a high-flying hawk or a night owl. With their house on the edge of the village, they heard many of the sounds people on farms in the country heard. The naming of the birds that sang soothed her: the pair of swallows swooping to their mud nest in the eaves above the kitchen window, the robin on the night-blue back lawn, the red-winged blackbird on the back fence, the hawk over Dave Traub’s wheatfield that began a few feet past the fence. As long as they sang their voices gave shape to the night.

Cindy had moved out. She had stuffed her jeans, a few shirts
and a dozen of her favourite tapes into her backpack one night when Charlotte and Jerry, Lyle and Dougie were eating supper in the kitchen and she had walked out.

“Bye,” she had said, as if she were going to the schoolyard for Softball practice. Jerry’s shout just before she shut the door, “If you go, don’t come back!” had had no effect on her. It was as if she hadn’t heard him, or he had said merely, “Take the garbage on your way out,” as he usually did to any of their three children as they went out the back door.

Stricken as Charlotte was, as new and unaccountable as all this was to her in what she knew to be her simple and ordinary life, although of course, it had never felt simple and ordinary to her, but satisfying and right, magical even, in what had seemed increasingly to be its pre-ordination, she suddenly knew that what Jerry had said was a cliché, it was banal, and even more dumbfounding, she had found herself wanting to laugh.

She had stopped herself only by clapping her hand over her mouth in what she knew too was a reasonable gesture under the circumstances; the circumstances being that Cindy was fifteen and had gone across town to live with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Rick, in the old shack he was squatting in next to the railroad tracks that no trains ever rolled down anymore. And neither of them had jobs or went to school. Charlotte didn’t know how they would survive.

After Cindy left, Jerry began to watch the Iran-Contra hearings on television. Because of his business, he was the local insurance agent, he felt he couldn’t afford to be political, so he had always been involved with politics as he had once remarked to her, on an informal level, behind the scenes, which meant he would talk politics only on weekend evenings when they had a few friends in for drinks downstairs in their family room. And then only in careful, mild generalities.

But now he was watching the hearings as if they were profoundly important to their lives in this prairie village far from that city in the United States that they had never seen. When finally Oliver North had come to the witness table, Jerry had stayed home from his office to watch, leaving the business to his assistant for what Charlotte had at first assumed would be only a half-day or so. But his presence at home on weekdays was so unusual, so inexplicable, that it was as it might have been if he had suddenly been taken seriously ill, and to Charlotte, the house felt weighted with danger.

The first morning he had stayed home Charlotte had followed him as he wandered, carrying his coffee cup, into the dim living room where she had pulled the curtains to keep out the heat. He bent and turned on the
tv
set.

“Aren’t you going to work?” she had asked, surprised. He was wearing a short-sleeved summer shirt, a tie, dress slacks, the clothes he always wore to his office in the summer. Jerry sat, balancing his coffee mug on the palm of one hand, the finger of the other hooked through the handle, not taking his eyes off the screen where Lieutenant-Colonel North’s pleasant face sprang from dot to screensize.

“They’re trying to find out if President Reagan knew about what they were up to with the Contras. If he was the one who ordered it,” he said.

“The who?” Charlotte asked, still disapproving, not quite believing he really would stay home. “Ordered what?” Jerry used the remote control to increase the volume. Colonel North was leaning forward staring at his questioner. Were there tears in his eyes?

“I hate lying, Counsel,” he said.

“But,” Charlotte said, raising her voice to be heard over North’s earnest, steady one, “we’re Canadians. What’s it got to do with
us?” Jerry still hadn’t looked at her. He set his coffee cup on the arm of his chair and with a gesture so familiar to her she hardly saw it, or rather, saw it for the first time in years, he used both hands to gently and carefully resettle his glasses over his ears.

Into the silence where Jerry’s explanation should have been, North said, “That’s why the government of the U.S. gave me a shredder.” Jerry laughed.

“I can’t figure this guy out. Either he’s completely crazy or he’s exactly what he says he is.” But he was sipping his coffee, his eyes still on the screen, and slowly his face was settling into that expression of silent and pained bewilderment he had been wearing lately. She couldn’t remember when she had first noticed it, but uncertainty on Jerry’s face disturbed Charlotte so deeply that she had gone back to the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to look at it.

Every day now the murmur of the
tv
set provided unwelcome background as she put the dishes in the dishwasher, a casserole in the oven for lunch, tidied the kitchen, and swept the floor. She took a cup of coffee outside into the back yard as soon as she could, so she wouldn’t have to listen to the faint voices coming from the living room. This morning, as she unfolded a lawn chair and set it in the shade, she realized she had gone out forgetting to first pour herself a cup of coffee, but she couldn’t be bothered to go back in. She could see Doug, her youngest child, and a couple of his friends with their bikes in the back lane two doors down. Their piping boy’s voices blended peacefully with the chatter of the birds in the trees in the back yards.

Ten o’clock and sweltering already. It must be ninety, she thought. Charlotte had paid no attention when the country had converted to metric and now her children spoke a different language than she did when it came to degrees and weight, volume and distance. Rather than trying to convert the children,
a hopeless job, she felt, with the school and the government against her, and unable to feel the new system had anything to do with her, she had not learned it, she had instead fallen silent when it came to the measurement of things.

On the other side of the white picket fence, Dave Traub’s field of spring wheat was soughing gently in the light breeze, a mottled green and gold as it slowly ripened in the dazzling light. A pair of robins were hopping through the spray from the sprinkler Lyle had set up for her on his way to his summer job at the grocery store. Noisy birds, robins, Charlotte thought. Their rusty breasts were puffed out and shiny and it seemed to her that their hops were heavy with a bright-eyed, knowing smugness. The swallows that were nesting under the eaves swooped away in unison like a pair of stunt flyers and perched on the back fence above the peonies to scold her for disturbing them.

Gradually, over the other chirps, warbles and trills coming from the maples and poplars that lined the back yard, she heard a bird song she didn’t recognize. It was a penetrating call, something like the coo of a dove, but harsher, and the coo was interspersed with a couple of quick, rhythmic chirps. It can’t be a pigeon, she thought. Pigeons don’t chirp. I’ll have to ask Jerry. Jerry was the village’s scoutmaster, he knew quite a lot about birds and their calls. She stared upward trying to find the bird that was making the strange call, but no matter how she craned her neck and turned her head this way and that, she couldn’t see which bird it was, through the clusters of big, shiny leaves. After a while it fell silent and she gave up trying to see it. She wished again that she had brought out a cup of coffee, but still didn’t move to go and get one.

Cindy had been gone since the day after Jerry had locked her in her room. Before that she had been gone for two days and had only come home, (Charlotte actually had no idea why she had
come home, maybe to have a bath), and Jerry had shouted at her, had almost struck her in the face, but had restrained himself at the last second, contenting himself with catching her pink cotton blouse in each hand. Charlotte could see his hands in perfect, microscopic detail still, she could see Cindy turning away from him, indifferent to his suddenly exploding rage, he had run at her and caught her shirt, bunching it over her shoulders in each fist and had half-dragged, half-pushed her up the stairs to her room and shoved her in. It was a wonder, Charlotte thought now, looking up again into the tree, that the blouse hadn’t torn or all the buttons popped off. Or did that blouse have buttons?

Cindy hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t made any noise. The only sounds in the house were the scuffling on the stairs, Jerry’s panting, Dougie’s sobbing downstairs in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Lyle and Charlotte had stood side by side and Charlotte knew, when she saw how white Lyle’s face was, that her face was too. It was a characteristic of her family, the Pratt’s, to go white-faced when ill or frightened or even angry, and Lyle was the child most like her.

Charlotte had stood at the bottom watching her husband wrestle her unresisting daughter up the stairs. She had found herself wanting to run up the stairs and kick Cindy, she had wanted to slap her till she cried and begged for mercy. She had wanted to cut off all Cindy’s perfect blonde hair. It seemed to her now that she ought to feel terrible for thinking such things about her only daughter, no matter what and even if it was only for an instant, but she didn’t. Or at least, she didn’t think she did. Cindy hadn’t even looked at Charlotte, hadn’t called to her for help.

When Charlotte lowered her eyes from the trees she was startled to see Jerry standing beside her looking out to the wheat field, still wearing that expression of pained bewilderment that she disliked so much.

“They had no authorization from Congress and they didn’t report to Congress,” he said. “They even planned to set up a secret government.” After a moment he pulled up another lawn chair and sat beside her. “They’re taking a recess right now,” he said. “I didn’t know it was so hot outside.”

“I don’t know how you can stand the heat in the living room,” she replied. “If you must watch, you should watch on the set in the basement.”

“They thought they had no accountability to anybody but themselves,” he went on. “How could they have thought that. The United States is supposed to be a democracy.”

“Listen!” Charlotte said. The strange bird had begun to sing again, a double coo, a couple of chirps, then the coo again. “What is that?”

“He keeps calling himself Ollie North,” Jerry said. “Not ‘I’ or ‘me,’ just ‘Ollie North.’ There’s something wrong with that, don’t you think?”

“Can you hear it? It’s not a pigeon, and we don’t get doves here—does that sound like a dove to you? I’ve never heard one.”

“He’s drinking something that looks like a coke. Beside him, at his witness table. Everybody else has water, but he’s got a coke. Or maybe it’s iced tea. I never thought of that. I bet it’s iced tea.”

The high-pitched, cheerful voices of Doug and his friends were coming closer down the lane.

“I’m going to get a drink of water,” Doug called. The other boys rode on by without stopping while Doug dropped his bike against the fence with a thump and came through the gate, leaving it open. Charlotte waited for Jerry to tell him to close it, but Jerry said nothing. Doug approached them, then stopped a couple of feet away.

“You should have on a cap,” Charlotte said to him. “It must be close to ninety.”

“You mean about thirty-five, Mom,” he said. “You always get it wrong.” Charlotte lifted her head again to look up through the branches of the tree behind her. Perhaps she would catch the bird unaware and would see it then. “I saw Cindy this morning,” Doug said. Jerry swung his head to Doug from where he had been staring at Dave’s wheat across the fence and Charlotte brought her eyes down from the leafy branches above her. “We were playing on the school grounds and she walked by with Rick.” He waited, looking only at Charlotte.

“Oh,” she said.

“She asked us what we were playing.” He studied Charlotte, his small forehead creased in a frown. He looks like a little old man, she thought and she reached for him, but he stepped back, away from her arms. “I asked her when she was coming home,” he said. He sounded angry. Perhaps he was about to cry, but no, he smoothed his forehead instead and lifted his chin. Beside her, Jerry hadn’t moved. “I hate that Rick,” Doug said.

“Did she say anything?” Charlotte asked.

“She just laughed.” He scratched a mosquito bite on his arm. His hair above his ears was damp with sweat and plastered to his skin in little curls. “I want her to come home,” he said, and swung his leg to kick at the grass.

“Don’t,” Charlotte said.

After he had thrust the chair he took from the bathroom under Cindy’s doorknob, the room had no lock, Jerry had come downstairs, his face grim, but taking the steps evenly, the way he always did. He had come into the kitchen, but instead of sitting in his chair, he had stood facing the fridge, leaning on it so that his forehead touched the fridge door, high up, near the top.

“My own daughter,” he said. “A whore.” Frightened, Charlotte had said quickly, “Not in front of the boys, Jerry.” She wanted him to sit down, she couldn’t stand the way he was leaning
against the fridge, but he had ignored her. He had stood like that for a long time while Charlotte, Doug and Lyle sat at the supper table beside him, and Charlotte could feel the cool metal of the fridge door against her own forehead and it had begun to ache. Lyle stood finally and plucked his cap from where he had hung it on the back of his chair.