From the Chrysalis (51 page)

Chapter 36

Homecoming

Melville residence, Trenton, January 2, 1973:

Surfacing from a deep sleep, she squinted at a small leather folding alarm clock in Mel’s parents’ guest room. For the first time in three weeks she felt almost rested. Dace was safe. He was listed as one of Canada’s Ten Most Wanted Men, according to the
Star
, but safer than he’d ever been in prison, where Savage or one his henchmen would have gotten him for sure.
 

Dace’s last message, courtesy of a very cold biker passing through Trenton, was in her purse by the bed.
Monarch butterflies make a perilous journey,
was all it said. When nobody was looking, she took the paper out of her purse and touched it with her lips, thankful she still had some of his hair in her pockets so that when she closed her eyes and touched it, she could pretend he was there.

Everything was beige in the Melville guest room except a single-sized corduroy bedspread in a deep, chocolate brown. The clock sat on top of a three tiered metal bookcase crammed with literary erotica Mel’s parents must have been too enlightened to purge:
Fanny Hill, Harriet Marwood, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, My Life and Loves, The Pearl, Tropic of Cancer, Story of O
…The room had belonged to Mel’s older brother George, who was now a high school librarian in Toronto.

It was nearly 11:30 a.m. on January 2 and they were leaving Trenton to go back to school, though Mel’s mother worried about the snow. His father was already back in the Outpatient Department at Memorial. Classes were starting tomorrow and Mel couldn’t miss Chemistry, not if he expected to get into Med School in two years.
 

Surprised to have anything on her mind besides Dace and her pregnancy, Liza found she was still mildly curious about her marks. Somehow she’d met all her deadlines with just a couple of extensions, performing on remote control. The phrase “personal problems” had done the trick. People had their own problems. They didn’t need to know anything more. The Sociology professor was the only one who had said he was sorry about her cousin. He’d even suggested another lawyer who could launch an appeal. Dace had been fed up with appealing, though.

“Give him time,“ Uncle Norm had counselled, but that wasn’t what he was really saying.
Where is he, Liza?
He had begged so often that she was almost afraid to call again. He was reckless in love, just like his son, but they had to be careful; his phone might be tapped.

Stretching her arms and legs, she flexed her toes beneath the comforting weight of wool blankets that smelled of mothballs. Mel had come to visit her during the night.
Oh God, how could she say no again when he’d been so kind?
But she had so much on her mind.

She pulled the blankets up to her chin and although it was becoming more difficult, she lay on her back and listened to the voices in the next room. Mel’s grandmother had been hanging around her son’s house all New Year’s Day, picking over the carcass of a second seasonal turkey. Why was she back in the kitchen talking to his mother? At almost eighty, Liza expected the old woman to be tucked up under a hand crocheted afghan, watching
All My Children
after all the visiting back and forth the day before.
 

Mel’s mother looked like a middle-aged woman badly in need of a rest from her mother-in-law and assorted relatives, not to mention her unexpected houseguest, Liza Devereux, who had been there a week.
Thank God they’re gone,
she had muttered when the last guest had departed just after 11:30 p.m. She was left with just Liza and Mel, who were still trying to poke life into the fireplace, when they really should have been safely ensconced in their separate beds.

“She’s getting a belly. She didn’t look like that when we saw her at Hallowe’en,” Granny announced, probably louder than she intended because she had lost most of the hearing in her left ear.

Liza held her breath and waited. There was nothing wrong with
her
hearing. Mel’s parents lived in a five bedroom split level house with a swimming pool in the backyard, even though they were quite close to Lake Ontario. The guest room was only separated from the kitchen by a narrow hallway and a breakfast nook at the back of the house. Grandma had probably entered the kitchen through the rear door from her own yard, which happened to be next door. The Melvilles were always fussing about the possibility of her falling into the pool.

Mel’s mother’s voice was a little harder to catch. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. She’s so thin. Too thin, if you ask me. I could stand to lose a few pounds, but if that girl swallows a cookie, it shows.” She was talking louder and more emphatically than usual. Liza could almost envision the poor woman’s face:
The police came here on Boxing Day looking for an escaped convict and now this?

“Well, somebody has to say something. Didn’t you see her picking her way down the steps when we went to the Wagners for a drink? She walks like a pregnant woman.”

Mel, or somebody, came into the kitchen then, because the two women stopped talking. The next thing Liza knew, he had burst into her room and was kneeling by the bed. She might have felt a little frightened then, except he was wearing his Levis and nothing else and he looked so earnest and sweet that she just wanted to take him in her arms.
 

“When were you going to tell me?” he asked, tugging the blankets out of her hands and down to her waist. Although his face was usually easy to read, she had no idea what he was thinking now.

“After the trial. I don’t know. Then it was after Christmas. When I was sure it was real,” she whispered, placing her hand on her heart. It felt as if it had almost stopped beating, though she could see Mel’s kicking in his naked chest. His uncombed hair was wild around his head and he looked like he hadn’t shaved for days, probably the result of several New Year’s celebrations with his old high school friends rather than anything he’d heard in the kitchen. Her own shoulder-length hair was a knotted mess due to his nocturnal visit.

“I should have known. Your tits are so big,” he said, moving his hands up under her flannel pajama top, capturing both breasts and crushing them gently together. The nipples were browner and nearly as large as the tips of his thumbs. When a familiar surge of desire betrayed her, she crossed her legs.

“Oh, how would you know, Mel? We didn’t sleep together until well into the fall.”
And only once,
she thought.

“Right. And during the trial you were so burnt out, we didn’t make love at all. Actually, I was real surprised when you showed up Christmas night, looking like God knows what … although I guess with Dace on the lam you got scared.” He sighed. “Some doctor I’d make.” He tugged her pajama bottoms down and stared hard at the slightly softer belly beneath her navel, although she doubted he could see the slightest bulge, not when she was lying almost flat on her back. If he measured her fundus, though, her uterus was bound to feel enlarged.

 
“Look at me, Liza,” he said. She shivered as he ran his hands over her torso then stopped and squeezed her breasts tighter this time, rolling the tender nipples between his forefingers and his thumbs. She made a small noise, somewhere between a sob and a moan.
 

“
Shh
,” he whispered, covering her mouth with his. “They’ll hear.” She quieted down immediately. The idea of Mel’s mother or grandmother knocking on the door or bursting into the room was just too much to bear. “We have options,” he told her, and she saw tears in his eyes. “Every problem has a solution.”
 

She was still crying soundlessly, but the word “
we”
thrilled her immeasurably. Maybe there
was
a solution. Maybe she didn’t have to do this alone. She sat up a little, wrapped her arms around his long, lean body, put her head on his shoulder and sighed.

But she also heard what he hadn’t said. “I know abortion is an option,” she confessed. “Especially now that it’s legal in Ontario. But it’s too late.”
 

“Too late? Already? But didn’t you have any clues? Missed periods? Nausea? You were sick through that farce of a trial, but I thought—”

“I thought the trial was making me sick. The way those men died … I didn’t want to think.”
And Dace,
she thought,
I was so scared. And probably would be now, if my hormones weren’t tricking me into this beatific baby calm.

“Jesus, Liza, how could you be so careless with your health? But I suppose it’s as much my fault as yours. Maybe the condom leaked at Hallowe’en. We were both kind of out of it.” He stroked her hair. “Have you been to the Student Health Services? Do you know how many weeks?”
 

She looked away. “About eighteen,” she blurted.

Mel was quick, too quick at math, quicker than she ever would be. “Not mine,” he confirmed immediately, burying his wet face in her neck.

“Not yours,” she agreed.

Still, he got up off the floor and lay beside her on his brother’s narrow bed. His tears had stopped hers cold, but she also felt something akin to peace. Even relief. They stared at the ceiling, side by side, until he went through the night table drawer and came up with a pack of Marlboros. Liza was surprised to see him smoking tobacco, but she didn’t say anything.
 

The front door to the house slammed. His mother and his grandmother must have gone out to give them some privacy. Finally.

“When you were away in Europe,” she started to say.

“I don’t need to know everything, Liza. I don’t own you now and I didn’t then. No wonder you wouldn’t sleep with me last year. He’s the one who’s away, though. A jailbird—or at least he will be when they catch up with him in a few days.”

“No.”

“And sure, he’ll get a little more time. And be out in two or three years. Or less. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? And what will you do then? What can you do? He’s your family as well as your …”

Liza took a deep breath. “I’ll do what I should have done in the first place,” she admitted. “And it’s not because of the riot, although I know, deep down in my heart, he’s innocent of murder. Even his lawyer thinks so. He was quoted as saying as much in the
Spectator
just last week.”

“Yeah, yeah, I saw that. So why then?”

“Because he’s a recidivist!” She clenched her fingers in her hair with frustration. “God, I hate that word!”

“A
what?
Oh, you mean you’re scared he’ll re-offend.”

“Well, that’s what he’s done so far,” she whispered, a small sob caught in her throat. “And I still don’t know why. I tried to give him up the last time he went to jail, but I couldn’t. I had to be there for him during the trial. He had no one else.”

“Goddamn it, Liza, he had his father! Maybe he couldn’t tolerate the inside of the courtroom as well as you could, but from what you tell me, the man has spent a fortune on him over the years.”

Mel smoked two more cigarettes, staring into space. When he spoke again, his voice was soft but decisive. “I’ll marry you then. Like you said, you have no choice. You have to give up on him. Your only crime is that you’ve waited so long to do what’s right. But that doesn’t mean I have to give up on you. And as for my family, well, it’s been done before. We’ll put my name on the baby’s birth certificate.”

“You can’t!” she cried, but when she raised herself over his chest and looked into his eyes, she saw that he could. A well-loved boy like Mel, almost twenty-one, probably did have the inner resources to grow up in a blink.

“But what about school?”

He shrugged. “We’ll figure something out. Do you think my parents are going to toss my education out the window because of you? Oh, my father might bluster, but they can afford it and they’ll pave the way. I’m their baby, their last hope. If we get married right away and move into the Married Students Residence, you can probably finish your year, too. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You really should. The baby’s due in what, June? You can finish your year and maybe take some part-time courses next year. A cakewalk for an ambitious girl like you.”