Girl Runner (22 page)

THE INSIDE OF THE CAR
smells of forgotten sandwich crusts, spilled coffee, mouldering plastic.

Here is Fannie to warn me against folly, coming in through the car door, sliding behind the steering wheel.

Fannie! I’m so glad to see you!

But Fannie doesn’t hear me. She switches on the heater, blasting us with stale air. She is humming something to herself, a tune broken by a few scattered, sung words as she steers us along the road and turns into our lane, inching slowly onward.

I turn to the man beside me—so young, I’m amazed that he’s managed to grow hair on his face—and I say, Where are we going?

He stares at me through the remove of his camera. Someone squeezes my hand and whispers
There
,
there
—it’s a woman, a stranger, I’m sure of it, sitting on the other side of me, clucking her tongue. I try to hide my worry because I do not want to upset Fannie, who sits so straight in the driver’s seat.
I didn’t know you knew how to drive
, I say to Fannie—meaning it as a joke, as we have no automobile on the farm, no motorized equipment, not even a tractor. The joke crumbles.

Fannie?

She turns—she turns!—and I gasp.

Not Fannie. A girl. I’ve forgotten her name.

“What did she just call me?”

“Fannie, I think,” says the young man with the camera. “Stop turning around. Keep your eyes on the road.”

“It’s hardly a road,” the girl says.

“I’m sorry, Miss Smart,” the woman beside me leans in and says, “but the lane gets very bumpy back here. Hold on tight!” She reminds me of nurses, like Cora, who are forever telling you things you don’t want to hear in cheery, hectoring tones. “You’ll find very little has changed since you left, except that the town keeps creeping closer and closer. Nothing stops progress! The barn’s still standing, can you believe it? In that state. And the lighthouse. Such a unique addition to the property.”

“Who built it?” the boy asks, disembodied voice behind the camera. “And why?”

“Are you asking me?” says the woman. “Because I don’t have a clue.”

“Not you, Mom.” He’s mildly annoyed, the way that children are with their mothers these days; I’ve heard them at mealtimes when we’re bumping elbows over the pudding, edge creeping into their tone, not even trying to hide it. The expression of any emotion is acceptable these days. Everything aired in the open.

“Miss Smart.” The boy changes his tone to “cajoling,” and I have to smile. I pride myself on being impossible to cajole. “Miss Smart, do you know who built the lighthouse?”

I nod slowly, solemnly. Obviously, my father built it. His hand touched every building on this property. His hand and his mind’s eye.

“Why a lighthouse?”

I’m tired of the question. I’m tired, altogether. I don’t bother dredging up a reply that will satisfy neither of us.

Through the windscreen, beyond the girl’s hair, which is tucked neatly behind her ear, I can see the barn approaching, what’s left of it, and the lane leading out behind the barn where the horses pull the hay wagon up the sloped grassy hill and in through the big double doors at the rear, onto the main floor beside the mow where I help Father toss forkfuls of hay into the loft. It must be that I am very young, because I am sitting on my father’s shoulders, “helping,” my hands clutching his hair as he bends his knees to pitch another forkful, and my brother Robbie is tossing hay too, and Edith, and Fannie, Olive, and Cora, and even George, and my mother, all of us. We are all tossing forkfuls of hay and sneezing in the fine rain of dust.

“Bless you, Miss Smart.”

THE EDITOR,
not the chief but my superior at the news desk, calls me into his office. He taps his cigarette into the black plastic ashtray and says, “We’re thinking of assigning you something less taxing than what you’ve been doing for us, Miss Smart.” He calls me Miss Smart around the office, and I call him Mr. Stephens, and only after work when we meet up for the occasional late dinner, do we drop the pretence. “Something for our woman reader,” he adds.

“What do I know about your woman reader?” I stand right up, shoulders back. It’s happening to me, as I’ve feared. They’re moving me off my beloved beat covering crime, the most vicious and tragic our city has to offer, and the trials that aim to make amends and balance the scales, and cannot, because nothing could. I love my job. I earned it out of pluck and guts and diligence, and just listen to me—I’ve busted my posterior to keep it all these years.

“Well,” he hedges, flushing hot. “Being as you’re a woman.”

“You know me better than this.” I aim to keep my voice steady, that’s all.

“Or obits,” he hedges some more. “There’s an opening. Think about it.”

Unspoken, underneath, is the year, 1945, and the end of the war, and all these fine young men come home to find their jobs filled by women like me, and oughtn’t I do the right thing and move along to make room for a breadwinner? I’m just lucky, it goes without saying, that I’m not being shown the door. Which is where I’m headed right now, steam firing from my ears. I need to run this out.

“I’m sorry, Aggie,” he says in a low voice, calling me back. “You know that, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Stephens. I’m sure you are.”

“You’ll be brilliant at the obits. You’ll dig up all the good stuff.”

“I appreciate you saying so.” I hold myself ramrod straight, face blank, and I exit before he can call me back again, and try to make it up to me with some gesture I’ll despise—hopelessly ignorant of what I care about, and why.

From crime to obits. Sometimes I wonder: What’s the difference between the ordinary face of evil and the ordinary face of success? Is it a difference of narrative, fundamentally, rather than character? A story gone off the rails versus a story contained and controlled? My job on obits is to collect the vicissitudes of a life and to freeze them into sense. I work to make the facts stand still, stay put. I stop time. I sum a person up, beginning, middle, end.

This is easy to do badly, and easier yet if one has no conscience, but it is painful to do well, nailing someone’s feet to the floor. One begins to think about things like honour, like respect, like the shimmering necessity of not quite telling the truth.

Here’s something I’ll learn: when you’re dead, you don’t get to choose who’s telling your story. The friends and children and wives willing to be interviewed are not necessarily those most intimate with the deceased; sometimes they are those who wished to have been intimate, or who think themselves more intimate than they actually were, or who suffer from regret, or denial. Getting the honest truth about a person from those left behind is a conjuring act. There exist simple questions, the answers to which build a kind of structure, a skeleton, which can be clothed in a few telling or humorous details. How is a life shaped? By parentage, siblings, class and religion, by schooling, vocational choices, by friends, partnerships, children, by place and time, by illness and accident, and sometimes, but most rarely, by surprising choice.

Surprising choice proves hardest to come by. Most choices, even the disastrous ones, are predictable.

THE ACCIDENT WAS
no one’s fault. Our mother simply slipped getting out of a bath, struck her head, and died instantly. That is not a detail one would choose to place into an obituary, speaking professionally. A reader might find herself confronted, in imagination, by the long naked body of a stranger, prone between toilet and tub, and a reader might not appreciate the vision.

Though Cora is a nurse, she cannot save her. Cora is not to be blamed.

“Will Edith be at the funeral?” I ask, as I’ve been wanting to ever since stepping through the summer kitchen door late yesterday and seeing Cora in her dark stern blouse and slacks and not reaching for her. We are three of us, sisters, bumping into each other as we move from cupboard to drawer to sink in the kitchen, a room that once was large and seems to have shrunk over the years.

“I couldn’t say,” says Cora stiffly. “It’s a free country.”

Olive comes to stand behind me and strokes my hair, which I’ve kept long despite my years. I could be young again with her fingers waking my scalp. Olive has acquired an accent during her two decades away, in Australia. She no longer sounds precisely like herself. I can’t quite quantify what else the years have done to her, what has been added or subtracted, how the burn of the sun at the bottom of the world has altered what she sees when she looks around this room, but if I were urged to, I would make a case for Olive being bolder than she was, less concerned about appearances. This could make me love her more than I already do, and miss her even in this instant, with her standing here behind me. I know how soon she’ll be away again, and how far.

“And Edith’s daughter?” I go on. I can’t help myself, though I do manage not to say her name. I should stop, but I can’t.

“I know nothing,” says Cora, and she drops into a chair, as if she’s too tired to continue.

I press on. “You never hear, not a word?”

Cora lifts and drops her shoulders. But she won’t look at me. I think,
Even if she knows, she won’t say.

“Why? What’s happened? Aren’t you and Edith on good terms?” Olive presses Cora. “Living side by side all these years?”

“Edith doesn’t wish to speak to me. She wouldn’t accept a pie I’d baked if I carried it over on a gold platter,” says Cora.

“Well this is news,” says Olive, and her fingers pause at the ends of my hair, which she pulls into a clump, then lets fall.

Cora says, “I washed my hands of it long ago.”

“Aggie?” Olive bunches my hair into a wad, and drops it again.

But I have nothing to add to the conversation.

“Oh, yes, ask Aggie.” Cora pushes herself to standing, her knuckles folded over on the wooden tabletop, like she’s punishing herself for something. “It’s Aggie to blame. Ask her. She’ll tell you.”

I won’t. I’m forty-three goddam years of age, and I tower over this wrathful sister of mine, who flings the remains of our breakfast into the sink, and comes at the tabletop with a damp rag as if to smite all worldly crumbs and filth.

“Go ahead, talk! Talk behind my back,” Cora says, dragging on her big black rubber boots to march to the barn and look for Father, so that we can make him presentable before the service.

She slams the summer kitchen door so hard that it bounces open again, rather than shut. Olive and I look at each other and begin to laugh so wildly that we’re weeping, that it hurts, that I am left some while later with aching muscles in my throat and cheeks and abdomen. Contrary to Cora’s accusation, we do not talk behind her back, though perhaps this is not due to worthy application of morality, but only because I have nothing to add. I don’t know what has happened between Cora and Edith. Cora won’t tell me, nor Edith; and our mother was not a gossip.

But I am not to blame.

I LOOK FOR
Edith’s daughter, wondering whether I would recognize her, but she is not at the funeral—she would be a young woman by now, not a girl anymore. Edith and Carson come together, but arrive late, and must sit near the rear of the church. I glance over my shoulder.
They look like old people
, I think, unfairly, perhaps. He’s lost every trace of his hair, his pate shining and freckled, and she’s like a stranger to me, her pretty features grown angular rather than soft; but, of course, she has a different mother from mine, I think, as if that explains away everything.

Afterward we stand all in a row to receive the guests, Cora, then Father, then me, then Olive, then Edith and Carson. Cora is pleased with the turnout, but I am surprised there are not more guests—my mother caught half the county. Cora can’t stop saying how pleased she is. She repeats it until I stop believing she means it. Afterward we fall to eating the slices of pie that remain—shoofly, choked with raisins, and a glistening mincemeat that no one wants to try.

Edith and I find ourselves standing elbow to elbow holding matching tiny plates, lifting matching triangles of sugar and pastry to our teeth, chewing and swallowing.

“You are well?” I ask, hearing my own flat tone, my eyes darting sideways to meet and somehow avoid hers all in the same moment.

“I am not,” she replies, gazing straight ahead, as if I’m standing there, instead of here. “I will miss your mother.”

“She can’t be gone,” I hear myself saying, and I think, I could only say this to Edith, because Edith is like a stranger now, and it is the kind of thing you would say only to a stranger.

“I will miss her many cures,” says Edith. “I am not well.”

“No.” I don’t disagree. Edith has never, as far back as my memory can stretch, been well.

“Well,” she says, and I repeat it, perhaps with the upswing of a question. “Well?”

“I’m alone now,” Edith says, “like you. Children leave, you know. They grow up and leave you.”

My heart knocks against my ribs like a bird in the house, battering the walls. “You’ve got Carson,” I say.

She sighs. “That’s so.”

And that is all.

You wouldn’t think such a brief exchange would require so much from a person, but I am too tired to speak that night.

I rise stiff and aching in the morning, as if I’ve run for miles without stopping to stretch or eat or drink, and have collapsed and slept in a clump on the bare ground.

“Won’t you come home, now, Aggie?” Cora asks as I’m leaving.

“What?” I make no effort to disguise my surprise.

“I can’t manage him all by myself.”

Our father, she means.

It is September, the leaves on the trees green but tinged with rust, crumpling at the edges. Soon will come the winds of fall and the chill of winter, and I can’t even imagine it just now—returning home.

I’m bent over, packing my small suitcase. Can she see it on my face? How eager I am to be leaving, how my mood is already lightened to be so nearly gone? She doesn’t repeat her request.