The Romantic (22 page)

I couldn’t believe he had read all those books.

His father’s study, next door, is about twice as big. Just as crowded though, just as tidy. On the wall are framed oil paintings of country scenes, similar to the shepherd picture only gloomier, and there’s a glass case holding butterflies that have pins stuck through their middles. When I first saw this case and returned to the kitchen saying I’d glanced into the room and noticed it (not quite true; I’d taken a few steps past the threshold) and that the butterflies were, to use Mrs. Richter’s favourite word,“wonderful,” she shrugged and said,“Wonderful when they are flying. It is not good to kill a thing just so you can look at it.”

Abel glanced up. “Father didn’t kill them.”

“No, no.” She patted his arm. “He did not. Of course he did not.”

The room that holds me longest is the master bedroom. Here’s where she sleeps. Here’s her dressing table, the burgundy skirt of which matches the velvet drapes. The furniture is all dark heavy wood, the large bedstead flaring out at the top corners like the hull of a Viking ship. The wallpaper has a pattern of what could be upside-down crowns, dark
green, and the bedspread is the same dark green with gold brocade trim. All fittingly and stirringly regal, provided you ignore the crooked hems on the drapes and the top of the dressing table, the mess there: an almost toothless comb, a brush jammed with hair, several broken elastic bands hardened into rinds, a cracked hand mirror, a white garter and a bunch of empty, dusty perfume bottles, these at least redeemed by the romance of their spired, coloured-glass tops.

At the back of the table are two framed photographs. Twice now, I have tiptoed into the room to look at them. The bigger of the two is a black-and-white portrait of her and Mr. Richter on their wedding day. Strange to see a bride so much taller than the groom. Strange to see her, who always dresses in reds and purples and oranges, dressed in white, although, of course, it would be stranger if she weren’t.

In front of this is a coloured picture of Abel at about four or five years old. Except for being smaller, he looks the same. He is wearing a short-sleeved white shirt under a green vest and is holding out his hand as if to catch a ball. You can tell from his eyes that his smile has been coaxed.

On Labour Day morning the weather turns. Since mid-July we’ve had nothing but tropical heat, almost every afternoon thunderclouds smoking out of the treetops and flexing into giant fists and hairdos before collapsing eastward. Then there’s a brief, hard rain, then blue sky again.

Now the sky looks cemented over. And it’s cold, too cold to leave the house without a jacket.

Still, we meet in the ravine as usual. We track raccoon
prints and search for fossils. Around noon a misty rain starts to fall, and we retrieve our Thermoses and lunch boxes and head for the cave.

We sit to one side of the entrance, where the light is best, and look out through the vines at what, to my mind anyway, is the dismal unravelling of the summer. There are piles of sticks here (whenever we find a long straight one, we bring it in), and after eating our sandwiches we get out our knives and start whittling spears.

It’s comfortable enough in this particular spot. Over the summer we’ve scraped away most of the dried dung from the floor and we’ve spread pine needles and ferns, and now the bats avoid flying directly overhead, even when we’re not here, it would seem, because there are rarely any fresh droppings. Today the entire colony clusters at the back. Every time the wind gusts in, they make an echoing rustie; otherwise they’re quiet.

I am miserable. For me, the last day of summer is always like the last day of life. I see myself tied to railway tracks, and the approaching train is being driven by Maureen Hellier. I say to Abel that I wish she would die: fall into a manhole or choke to death on a chicken bone. Finally Abel says,“Why don’t you just ignore her? That’s what I’d do.”

“Who cares what you’d do?” I mutter.

He glances up.

“Okay,” I say,“why don’t you just
ignore
Jerry Kochonowski? Why don’t you just waltz up to me tomorrow, and in front of everybody give me a big fat kiss!”

“Maybe nobody would care if we hung around together,” he says.

I stab my knife into the floor. “Are you crazy? Jerry twisted Donny Morgan’s arm and almost broke it that time all Donny did was give Brenda Slack an old India rubber ball. What do you think he’ll do to somebody like you? He’ll break your stupid neck, that’s what!”

Abel turns the stick in his hands. Carefully, as if it were dynamite.

I grab my knife. “So,” I say,“smarten up.”

For at least a quarter of an hour we work without speaking, then, feeling the chill, I say I want to start a fire with our shavings.

“Better not,” he says. “The smoke will upset the bats.”

There is nothing of resentment or hurt in his tone. If I’ve offended him, he’s over it, and this strikes me as so admirable, the mark of a nature so far above my own, that although I don’t care about upsetting the bats I refrain from insisting on the fire. I say, looking up,“I think they’re
already
upset.”

He goes to get the flashlight and shines it at the colony. Some of the bats flutter but none drops away and starts flying around, which is what normally happens when they sense the beam.

“They’re probably freezing to death,” I say.

He steps closer to the wall. “One of them’s hanging funny.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, no!”

“What?”

“It fell!”

I race over. He crouches and fixes it in the light. It has landed face down, a clump of sandy-coloured fur.

“Is it dead?” I ask.

He turns it over, and before I understand what that wrinkled growth on its stomach is, he says,“She’s got a baby.” And then,“She’s dead.”

“The baby?”

“Her. The mother. The baby’s breathing.”

Its entire body throbs. Instead of clutching the mother, it hangs backwards and holds on with its mouth, and I’m about to comment on the strangeness of this when I realize it’s attached to one of her nipples. I peer at the mother, who I think must be alive if she has milk. No, she’s dead, all right. The eyes are like apple seeds, lifeless. Her mouth is pulled back and I am unnerved to see teeth … all this time I thought there were only claws to worry about. “What happened?”

“She’s not bleeding.” He shines the light back at the colony. “Maybe she had a heart attack.”

“They knew,” I say. “They knew something bad was going to happen.”

He brings the beam down again. The baby squeaks. He says we’ve got to get it to his house right away and start feeding it with an eye dropper before it dehydrates. “Here,” handing me the flashlight. He picks up the mother and tries to tug the baby free. It grabs the mother’s fur with its hind claws.

“You’re shining the light in its face,” he growls, wrenching sideways, out of the beam.

“Sorry.” Never have I heard such an angry tone from him. I contemplate the circle of wall where the beam is now aimed, but when he gasps I swing the light back down. The baby is in his right hand, detached from the mother.

“I killed it,” he says softly, astonished.

“No.”

“I killed it. I pulled it too hard. I broke its neck.” He gapes at the tiny body.

“Are you sure?”

He straightens and walks over to our spot and sits, holding out his hands, each with its bat, as if anticipating some magic, or punishment. And then he starts to cry, a sound like choking.

“It got hurt from the fall,” I say, alarmed. “The way it was biting her, I think its neck was already broken.” I sit next to him. “It’s out of its misery,” I say. This was my mother’s pronouncement whenever she squashed a bug or whenever a pet of mine died, and although I always thought,“What misery?” I did feel a slight, if uncertain, comfort.

“Anyhow”—I switch off the light—“it would have needed its mother.”

Not that I’m certain of this, either.

Abel sets the bodies down, between his feet. He has stopped crying. “I should have just left it on her. I should have brought them home together.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I
should
have known.” He picks up the flashlight and shines it at the roof. The bats hang like ripe fruit. You almost expect the whole bunch to start dropping.

He sighs and switches the light off.

“It was only a bat,” I say.

“It knew how to fly,” he says. “It knew how to navigate by sonar.” He starts switching the flashlight on and off. “If I hadn’t touched them,” he says,“maybe the baby would
have let go of her after a while and another mother would have come down and rescued it.”

“Do they do that?”

“If you leave things alone, that’s better. There are scientists who think that. They think you should never interfere.”

He sounds so intelligent and lost. I say,“When I called you stupid. Before. I was just angry. You’re not stupid at all.”

He looks toward the mouth of the cave. “It’s stopped raining.”

“Are we going to bury them?”

“I guess.” He releases a shaky breath that goes straight to my heart. He says that if I wait here he’ll get the trowel.

As soon as he’s gone I switch on the flashlight and study the corpses. Fan out one of the mother’s wings. It’s like cooked chicken skin. “Poor thing,” I say, trying to summon more pity than I feel because I want to be as grief-stricken as he is.

Because I am furious with love. I am in love with him.

Sixteen days after my return from Vancouver, I miscarry. It’s three a.m. The alarm under my pillow has just gone off to wake me for my middle-of-the-night tea drink, and as I pull myself to a sitting position I feel the wetness between my legs. Four days ago, just in case, I began wearing sanitary napkins, but I’ve already bled through to the sheet. The cramps—is it possible?—are gone.

For what remains of the night, I sit at my desk and bleed. Every half-hour or so, after changing napkins, I investigate the soiled one for evidence of rudimentary life. What do I expect to find? A half-formed foot? An eyeball? There are promising clots. I sit back down at the desk and catch up on my math homework. My mind is lucid, the absence of pain as sharp as a recovered sense.

At eight o’clock I dress for school and eat breakfast, but as soon as my father leaves the house I return to my desk and do more homework until Mrs. Carver arrives. When I tell her the news she rushes to get a juice glass and has me hold it between my legs so that she can collect a sample. In the kitchen she adds water to the blood and then drains off the diluted portion and we both look at what’s left. She points to a yellow blob. “Placenta.”

It’s over. Still, I bleed heavily for three days. During this time I continue to go to school. I feel an urge to pay close
attention, I take reams of notes. At home I inventory my wardrobe. All the clothes of my mother’s that I can’t see myself wearing again—anything too fussy or pastel coloured—I return to her closet. I work fast. I
walk
fast. The time-bomb click of my heels going down the halls at school is an unexpected gratification.

On Friday night, with the bleeding almost over, the cramps return, as Mrs. Carver said they might. She said I wasn’t to worry, though, it would only be my womb shrinking.

The pain wakes me about an hour after I’ve fallen asleep. Next door I hear my father rattling his newspaper. I picture him holding a baby in his arms, his awkwardness and joy. My throat constricts.

“I killed it,” I think, awed. “I killed my own baby.”

I cry weakly, hampered by not wanting him to hear and because I have no right to this grief, which seems to be convulsing straight from my womb. How can Abel not feel something? How is it possible that his baby and I have been caught up in a bloody fight to the death and he hasn’t even felt the twinge that would drive him to pick up the phone?

I go to my desk and turn on the lamp. Pull down my underpants. From an exercise book I rip out a page and wipe one end of it between my legs.

The smear is like a banner. No, it’s like a rag!
A rag of dark red.

I wait a few minutes, waving the page and blowing on it, then I pull up my underpants, sit down, and where the now-dried smear is I write the word “Romance.” There’s no need to refer to Rimbaud’s poem—from reading Abel’s letter a hundred times I know it down to the exclamation
marks. In flowing, coiling letters intended to parody his calligraphic script, I write:

I read it over and start to laugh … a breathless, trembling, unnatural sound. I cover my mouth with my hands. I glance toward the mirror on the closet door and see a skinny, hunched-over person, eyes big as bowling balls, naked except for oversized underpants. Have I lost my mind? I don’t care. I grab the pen again and at the bottom of the
page scrawl: “?
WAS PREGNANTI I FLEW ALL THE WAY
OUT TO TELL YOU AND CAUGHT YOU NECKING WITH THAT SLUT!! SO I HAD ABORTION!!”
I draw an arrow to the smear,“
HERE’S WHAT’S LEFT OF THE
BABY!!”

I put the page in an envelope, address it and go back to bed. Despite the cramps, I sleep.

I mail the letter the next day. A week later the phone calls start, two and three a night for five nights straight. My father, instructed to say,“She doesn’t want to speak to you ever again,” then slam down the receiver, listens and makes sympathetic noises, says,“I’ll tell her, son, but she still won’t come to the phone,” and,“Maybe you should give her some time to sort herself out, some breathing space, I hate to think what all these calls must be costing.”