Liberty Street (14 page)

Then Dooley gets drunk in the bar again and says more scandalous things about Tobias—calls him a selfish bastard who had no use for his own daughter, Dooley's mother, no wonder she left. Tobias was a tyrant, he says. Just ask the students he'd bullied over the years. He calls Esme a gold digger before he drinks so much that he gets himself thrown out of the bar, and the police find him passed out on the street and put him in the drunk tank for the night. When the story gets back to Esme, she changes her mind about
splitting the estate with him. She decides that he doesn't deserve anything after all, that Tobias was right. It's appalling, she says, to think that he's so disrespectful and making up wicked stories, and he hadn't even had the decency to come to his grandfather's funeral. It's unforgiveable, whatever unfairness he believes he suffered.

In September, there's an early snowstorm. It snows all day, big wet flakes, and that evening Esme phones the farm and asks Frances's mother if she can come into town right away. It's late and the roads are slippery, but Esme sounds desperate, so Alice goes. When she gets there, Esme tells her that she'd opened the door to see if her cat had come from the minister's house for one of his visits, and there Dooley was, on the step, his hair long and unkempt, dangerous-looking, snow falling around him. They'd stared at each other, and Esme was trying to get up the nerve to ask him in for a heart-to-heart when the cat appeared and ran into the house between her legs and she lost her balance and almost fell. At least she thought it was the cat. She didn't
think
Dooley had pushed her. He'd reached out his hand then, and it was dark and she couldn't tell what he was doing, and she was afraid and had slammed and locked the door. Then later, she saw three or four young men on the lawn in the darkness, flinging snowballs at the house. When they broke the kitchen window, Esme called Frances's mother and then the RCMP. The culprits had taken off by the time an officer got there. It was dark out, the policeman said. Did Mrs. Sullivan know for sure it was Dooley? Sounded like something younger kids—bored and looking for trouble—might do. The police officer was young enough to be a kid himself, Esme said afterward, but maybe he was right. She hadn't actually seen Dooley on the lawn.

Nonetheless, Frances's mother decides that Esme shouldn't stay there alone, at least not as long as Dooley is in town. Alice packs a big suitcase and moves Esme out to the farm. Esme doesn't argue with the plan. Frances takes the top bunk in her room and Esme sleeps on the bottom. That very night, Dooley breaks into Tobias's house and falls asleep drunk on Esme's bed, then lights the mattress on fire with his cigarette and barely manages to get out alive. Half of the house is burned away, gone, and with it most of Esme's belongings. When Frances walks by the house the next day at lunch hour—the snow now melting—she finds lots of people gawking at the blackened walls and broken windows and a roof partially collapsed into the bedroom where the firemen had chopped holes in it. Even one of the evergreen trees in the yard is scorched. A few days later, when the house has cooled down and the firemen say Esme can go in to see if there is anything she wants to retrieve, they find that the only room that didn't receive significant fire or water damage is the kitchen. The china and cutlery and cooking pots are salvageable, although they smell like smoke. Even the cookbooks are not too badly off. But Esme doesn't want them, so they get boxed up and sent to the church rummage along with any other odds and ends that survived the fire. The rest goes to the dump in the back of Frances's father's truck before the house gets bulldozed.

What a scandal the fire is, the biggest thing to happen in town for years—perhaps since the night Silas Chance died and Dooley crashed his red truck into the bridge. Dooley is arrested for breaking and entering, although the police aren't sure the charge will stick because there was no restraining order and the house had been Dooley's childhood home. He
has to stay in jail until his court appearance, and even after that no one he knows has any money to pay his bail. Frances's father goes to see him and tells him that Esme is prepared to settle the will and provide him immediately with a cheque if he agrees to leave town and leave her alone. Dooley accepts. The charges are dropped, the fire is called an accident, and Dooley leaves Elliot with a good-sized inheritance in the form of a bank draft. The lawyer advises Esme to write her own will, which she does. There's a fight over insurance, one headache after another. The company doesn't want to pay because Dooley lit the fire with a cigarette. Eventually, the insurance comes through and it all gets settled.

In spite of Alice's belief that Esme's troubles are the result of a marriage that was ill advised to begin with, she invites her to stay with them at the farm. They can't send her back to live in the rental because the United Church minister is not going anywhere, no matter what people think of his hair. The teenagers in town apparently like him. He holds singalongs in the church basement. Alice asks Frances if she minds Esme sleeping in her room. Old people are restless. Is Esme keeping her awake? Frances says no. She likes sharing her room with Esme, even though she snores and sighs in her sleep and gets up several times a night to go to the bathroom. Frances listens sometimes to make sure Esme is asleep and not dead like Tobias in the car, or not lying there thinking she should never have followed Tobias Sullivan to Elliot. She feels a bit like a mother hen.

On Remembrance Day weekend, the temperature drops and the snow begins to fall in earnest. Frances and Esme watch winter's arrival through the living room window and Frances says, “I'm the tallest girl in my class now. I wish I wasn't.”

“There's nothing wrong with height,” Esme says. “Fashion models are as tall as giraffes, you know.”

Then she asks Frances what she would like to be when she finishes school. Frances says the first thing that pops into her head: “I don't know. A hairdresser, I guess. You can go to beauty school in Yellowhead. I heard someone say that.”

“A hairdresser?” Esme says. “I must say I wasn't expecting that. I thought for sure you'd want to be a teacher, or perhaps a newspaper reporter.”

“No,” Frances says, suddenly convinced that hairdressing is it, what she's meant for. “I want to learn how to make curly hair straight and red hair blonde. Everyone will love me for it.”

Esme laughs and says, “Well, if you do go to beauty school, I'm pretty sure you'll become famous. Hairdresser to the stars, that's my prediction, although you're only thirteen and I imagine you'll change your mind. Tell you what, though. I've left you money in my will for school tuition, and you can do whatever you want. That's what girls should do. Whatever they want.”

There's a freshly baked chocolate cake on the kitchen counter, made by Esme. They sit at the table and have two slices of cake each.

“For our figures,” Esme says.

E
SME LIVES FOR
only another six months. She falls while carrying a load of laundry from the bedroom, breaks her other hip, and ends up first in the hospital and then in the nursing home, and then back in the hospital when it's determined she has pneumonia. A month later, she's gone. Frances visits her a few days before she dies, and Esme opens her eyes and
says, “Ah, Frances, we are all such mysteries to one another.” They are the last words she says.

Tobias's estate is hardly settled, and then it's all muddled up with Esme's estate. Some of her money goes to Frances's parents (for her keep, their kindness, and Frances's education, she had directed in the will). The rest goes to charities. At least she'd already settled with Dooley. Frances's father says they'd never be able to find him now. He's disappeared. No one has heard from him.

It takes no time at all for Frances's room to look as though Esme were never in it. Frances and her mother go through Esme's clothes and take them to the rummage box at the church. They run into the minister and he tells Frances she should come to the teen club. Frances says no thanks, even though she is now thirteen and is curious about what happens at a teen club.

One day Alice comes home from the post office and says she heard that Dooley Sullivan was selling drugs in the city and died.

“You don't live that lifestyle for long without it killing you,” she says. She believes Dooley should have gone to jail for burning down Tobias's house. He got off too easy. They have rehabilitation programs in jail, and maybe the discipline would have helped him. “I'm tempted to think good riddance,” she says, “but you can't really when someone was so obviously troubled.”

Frances is not listening, has not heard anything after the word “died.” She's thinking about the heart—her own—no longer beating, the air around her not feeding her lungs the way it should, the light in the room dimming, dimming as though it might go out altogether:
Dooley can't be dead, not Dooley Sullivan.

But she knows he can be.

At school the next day, she sits at her desk not listening to the teacher.
Something is wrong
, she thinks, because how can a boy drive a car into a bridge and go crazy and burn down a house with a cigarette and end up dead, and no one seems to care? She remembers Dooley jumping out the window—in the very same eighth-grade classroom that is now her own—and wonders what happened between then and the day he died. She can't stop thinking about him. How did he die? Who was he with? Where is he buried?

She asks the teacher if she can change seats so she's in the row of desks next to the windows. She sometimes stares out
that
window—Dooley's window—and pictures Dooley tumbling into nothing, disappearing. She remembers him pulling her out from under the table to dance. Whose fault is it, what happened to Dooley?

The rest of the school year is sadness and grief because Dooley died, Esme died, everyone dies in the end. Mixed up with longing to be a child again, to be the girl who took off her white socks and stuck her shoe in a slice of lemon pie. Longing to be the girl discovered by Dooley Sullivan and danced around the room before her father stepped in. Before her body changed without permission and she shot up
like a weed
and grew into a girl with periods and breasts, and even still the boys don't seem to like her. She hates them all, girls too, the whole class.

The school year finally comes to an end.

On the last day of June, the report cards are handed out and the grade eight students find that the teacher has written something thoughtful about each of them. They hand their cards around and compare the teacher's notes about their potential, her predictions for their paths in life. Frances
doesn't show anyone her report card, but she listens as the others read their fortunes aloud to one another. Caroline Smith is caring and compassionate. Her future: something to do with children. Myrna Samples: Myrna is a take-charge girl. She will be an organizer, perhaps in business or bookkeeping. (Ha ha. Frances knows that all Myrna Samples wants to do is marry some boy named Buddy Hynde from another town.) Daphne Rose: Daphne is very sociable; retail sales might be her calling. Jimmy Gulka: Jimmy is destined for great things in the science world. (Frances still hates Jimmy Gulka because of figure skating.)

Frances's report card is almost an essay compared to the others'. It says,
We all know Frances is a smart girl with plenty of potential. She knows it herself. What she does with that is up to her. She needs to get out of her own way. Her future: Frances, anything will be possible once you decide to buckle down
!

That's that, then
, Frances thinks. Caroline is the golden girl. Jimmy Gulka the boy most likely. She, Frances, is the wild card, a girl
with potential
—which means the girl most likely to disappoint. She shoves her report card into a plastic bag with the other papers and scribblers she's expected to take home, and collects her jacket from the cloakroom.

Says goodbye to Dooley's window and moves on.

T
HE ROADS THAT
would take me to Elliot were familiar, even though I had not travelled them for many years: east on the number one highway, north to Yellowhead—the town I'd thought of as a metropolis before I saw a real city—farther north on an increasingly narrow gravel road, then east again on a truck route that would eventually lead me to my hometown. Four hours of driving to a part of the province so far off the beaten trail that most people—even those who live in Saskatchewan—will never see it.

The day was hot, unusually so for the end of May. I lowered the driver's window partway, but the air outside was hotter still and I resorted to air conditioning. It was hard to believe such heat would morph back into arctic cold in five short months, and the first winter storm would turn the landscape into a frozen wilderness. I thought once again of the night I'd met Ian, when the snowfall had surprised everyone because it was so early in the season, and all the weather announcers on every radio and TV channel said the same thing: “If this is any indication, folks, we're in for a long winter.”

We were at an invitation-only party to celebrate the opening of the brand-new city hall. Ian was there with his girlfriend (soon to be his ex-girlfriend) and I was there alone, wearing the black dress I'd been talked into by a sales clerk
when she told me I had the figure for it. Not everyone did, she said, not for that dress. The dress made me feel flirtatious, a word I barely knew the meaning of.

We were introduced by a colleague—“Frances Moon, Ian Bonder”—who told Ian that I worked in the city's water treatment department, and that Ian was a brilliant pension actuary who, despite his age, was already developing quite a reputation for himself as an expert in the area of ethics. I heard the words “brilliant” and “actuary” and “ethics,” and compared them to my own bland job description, “works in the water treatment department.” I was thinking about how that sounded—did it hold any cachet at all, or would Ian think I was a billing clerk, and if so, did that matter?—when my co-worker left to follow a waiter with a tray of appetizers, and I found myself alone with the handsome young financial analyst whose girlfriend was busy flirting with someone else. I thought,
I will never again see this man who is a decade my junior
, and that, together with the dress and the wine, gave me licence to behave in a way that was uncharacteristic for the woman I had turned myself into. We sat under an umbrella tree on a bench in the lobby of the new building, watching Ian's soon-to-be-ex attach herself to a city councillor. We discussed the probable cost of the twenty-foot-tall trees, which made the lobby look like a conservatory. We talked about the early snowstorm that was blowing itself into a blizzard outside, and the next day's public bonfire and wiener roast, which would have to be cancelled because of the storm. Earlier in the evening, before the snow began to fly, there were people protesting the private party as the guests arrived. I'd felt guilty walking past them.

I said to Ian—I suppose because of that word “ethics”—“I
don't feel quite right about being here. The free wine and all this food. The rumours about the unreported costs of the building. I know people here who swear the rumours are true.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And they've pushed back the timeline on the new water treatment plant to pay for their excess. That's not the official reason, but that's what my sources tell me when I complain about the new plant being behind schedule.”

I thought he might ask me more about my work then, but instead he was amused by the idea that I had sources.

“So, Mr. Ethics,” I said, “what do you think about all that? I think I should have joined the protesters outside, but then I had this new dress.”

What had gotten into me? I was showing off.

He laughed at the comment about the dress, and said he'd heard the same rumours and thought the party was an outrageous waste of public money, but since he wasn't going to be joining the protestors, that made him a hypocrite, which was not very ethical.

“Thank you for bringing that up,” he said, “and making me feel unprincipled.”

At that moment, we saw the councillor to whom Ian's girlfriend had been talking leave the crowded lobby and walk toward a bank of elevators. I wondered if Ian would leave the bench then and retrieve her, but he didn't. Instead he said, “This is it. She'll look around for me, and if she doesn't see me, she'll follow him.”

We watched as she waited a few minutes, scanned the room, and then made her way through the crowd to the elevators. Ian seemed more curious than hurt or angry. It was as though we were observing an experiment, something in a
petri dish. I was a person of science. I understood this kind of observation.

“What now?” I asked.

“I think we can guess what now, don't you? A tumble in the councillor's office. On his desk maybe, like in the movies.”

“Seriously,” I said. “What now for you? What will you do?”

“Take back the present I bought her. It's her birthday next week.”

“Don't you feel terrible?”

He shrugged. “She's experiencing no ethical dilemma whatsoever. I'm well rid of her, don't you think?”

“Well, yes, I do think. But still.”

I looked at Ian then and saw resignation, and I saw the two of us for what we were: a young man, and a woman approaching middle age who had had too much to drink and was wearing a dress she probably should not have bought.

“People shouldn't do these things to each other,” I said.

“No, they shouldn't,” he said. “But this is small potatoes. At least there's no wedding ring and no children. Probably why there shouldn't ever be. It's all too tenuous.”

“You're too young to talk like that,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “Do you want to mingle? I don't, but you should if you want.”

“I think I'll just go home.”

“There's a blizzard raging.”

“There always is.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know. I've had too much to drink.”

“Then we should call cabs.”

I agreed. I noted his use of the plural “cabs,” and I knew two cabs were the best way to end this evening.

But we left in the same taxi after all, because thanks to the storm, we'd had to wait an hour for one to arrive, an hour that I enjoyed as much as any I'd ever spent with a man I'd just met. There was a TV set mounted in the foyer where we waited with our coats on, and we watched
Saturday Night Live
and saw Sinéad O'Connor rip up the photo of the pope. The TV was muted, so we couldn't make out what she was saying before she held up the photo and tore it into pieces. Ian said he thought he picked out the word “evil.”

“Maybe it wasn't as crazy as it looked,” he said.

When a taxi finally pulled up in front of city hall, we both got in, not knowing when or if another would come, and then we had to get out again and push—me in my high-heeled shoes, since I had not had the sense to wear boots—because the taxi got stuck in the snow, which was building into huge drifts. When we finally arrived at my apartment, our feet were frozen and we were both laughing. The whole night now seemed crazy, even Ian's breakup. It crossed my mind that he might be expecting me to invite him inside, but I didn't, and he didn't ask and I was relieved, because to sleep with him impulsively was something the old Frances would have done.

I woke up hungover and wondering just how embarrassed I ought to be about my behaviour the night before, and feeling enormously thankful that I was waking up alone. I vowed that I would never drink too much, or wear that dress, again. I had once cut to ribbons a dress that I wanted to be rid of, and I was tempted to do the same to the black dress, but once more I thought, That's what the old Frances would do. This Frances can cover the dress with a dry cleaner's bag and hang it in the closet and look at it once in a while to be reminded of a lesson learned.

So that's what I did. Lesson learned, I thought as I hung the dress at the back of my closet (eventually I gave it to a thrift shop). Then I went back to bed and slept most of the day.

Ian called a few days later, having got my number from the colleague who'd introduced us, and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner.

I decided to be blunt and avoid future humiliation. “You're too young for me,” I said.

“What's age got to do with anything?”

“You're on the rebound.”

“I get the feeling you are too.”

Funny, I thought, it was kind of true. I'd been on the rebound pretty much since I left Elliot.

I agreed to meet him for dinner. We began to see each other—once a week at first, and then more often, spending the night at his house or my apartment. Our compatibility was confirmed when we discovered we both liked to don bedroom slippers as soon as we walked in the door from work. Mine were crocheted, purchased at the farmer's market, and his were leather, the kind Mr. Rogers might wear. He was in the habit of cooking dinner in his suit minus the jacket, wearing slippers and an apron, which he began to do for me while I sat with a glass of wine and put my blue-and-green-mottled feet on the coffee table. We talked while he cooked, the facts of our current lives, the goings-on at our places of work. I stopped thinking about the age difference.

Six months after we met, I moved into his house. He had to convince me. I was worried it was too soon. There was no talk of marriage, and by that I was relieved. The night before I moved in, while we were eating pizza in my dismantled
apartment, he said to me, “I feel I should be honest about something. I don't want to have children.”

I didn't have to think before I answered. “You're safe with me, then,” I said. “No desire to have kids. No desire to get married. My happiness is dependent on neither.”

Free and clear, I thought. There was no further mention of children or marriage.

Until five years later, when Ian asked over dinner, a pasta dish with shrimp and lemon in a cream sauce—just when I'd been about to ask him how he kept the cream from curdling—“You
could
still have a child, right? A woman over forty can still have a child?”

I set down my fork and looked at him. I had no idea that he'd changed his mind about children, although it was now dawning on me why he'd been showing such interest in the babies born to various co-workers. Within the last week, someone named Gary had had a baby girl. I'd thought Ian was telling me about his day—
no computers because of a system crash, of all days for the new intern to start . . . lunch at that new coffee shop, you know the one . . . and oh, Gary and his wife had a baby girl, they're thrilled, over the moon . . .
It had all been leading up to the baby. They'd named her Ella after a special aunt.

“A baby is not a good idea,” I said. “You're the actuary. The odds increase drastically after a woman is forty. It could have Down's syndrome.”

“But not necessarily. There are tests.”

“You've tied yourself to an older woman, Ian.”

“We haven't exactly tied ourselves to each other, have we? I wonder if we should. Maybe we should get married.”

Married.

I didn't reply. I got up and left the room, abandoning my
plate of perfectly uncurdled pasta, which had suddenly lost its appeal. Upset because he'd caught me off guard, suggested the impossible, disrupted the stability I thought I'd found. I could hear the echo of another man's voice asking a similar question in a similar way:
I wonder if you might want . . .

Ian followed me, saying, “Frances, what the hell? I just asked you to marry me.”

I was thinking,
I'm already married
, but I spoke three different words: “No. Just no.”

For a while after, I worried that we, or perhaps I, had ruined everything, but we managed to drift back into our comfortable lives, baby talk thankfully forgotten, or so I'd thought. The years went by. We bought a new couch for the living room. We added on to the house and built a deck in the yard and bought a good barbecue. We talked about getting a dog but decided against it because we'd begun to travel, to go on winter holidays. The day I turned fifty, we had a few friends over for a fall barbecue—Ian's friends really, but I liked them—and we toasted the future, growing old together. I joked that it would not exactly be
together
, since I would get there first, and Ian replied that I'd be able to shop for both of us and get the senior's discount.

I held up my wineglass and clinked it against his. “Here's to me, with a Sears shopping cart full of bargain toilet paper and men's socks and underwear.”

Everyone laughed. We were good.

And then Ireland, when something inexplicable came over me.

And something came over Ian, and he announced that he was returning home early with or without me, an ultimatum. I had immediately known the terms: that I open the
door to a locked room, giving him permission to look around, remove drop cloths, flip latches, peek into cubbyholes, turn back clocks. I didn't know if a key to that room even existed, but if it did, I was not going to use it in his presence, and I was certainly not letting him in that room without me going through its contents first.

That is what I was thinking when I made the decision to go hill walking.

It's what I was still thinking as I drove toward Elliot for the first time in many years, cold air blasting at me from the air-conditioning vents, my T-shirt sticking to the leather seat back anyway.

What would I find when I got there?

I did not know.

And nor did I know that something as commonplace as a rusty nail was about to send me down a hallway of locked doors, which would swing in every direction before I could even lay a hand on them.