After Alice (28 page)

Sidonie wishes that Masao would send her a comical message. Masao and Alice really don't do much with the Hiking Club anymore, anyway, now that they are fifteen. And Graham has left it too. Only Hugh still leads them through their important lessons: Sidonie, Walt, the little Clares.

Masao turns quickly and begins to walk away after the men, but with a backwards glance at the house. He is looking for Alice, Sidonie knows. Masao is Alice's friend: not at school, where boys and girls don't play, but in the orchard.

Mr. Tanaka is Masao's uncle, and Masao lives with him, because his parents are dead. Did they die in the war? Sidonie has a vague queasy idea about this.

Masao and Mr. Tanaka are Japanese, and the Japanese were the enemy. Is that true?

She wakes;
she is confused for a moment by the darkness, the hardness of the foam mattress. Then, remembering, calls out. The girl has gone. Where? But then, a minute or two later, she is back. Drink, now.

The pruning fires
burn all night, with one or two of the men to tend them. The green wood burns smokily, and Father likes to get the burning over with. Sidonie, kneeling on her bed to peer out the window, sees the fires dotted across the hillside. Dark human shapes are silhouetted against the flames, moving this way and that.

It looks like a battle scene from the old newsreels. It looks like something from a fairy tale, or from one of Father's stories, dimly remembered. A sort of memory that is located not inside her head, but somewhere in the pit of her stomach. It's connected to a fear that something bad is going to happen, a sort of panic.

Something has awakened her: where is Alice? She has sensed rather than seen Alice moving around the darkness of their shared room pulling on clothing.

“Shhh,” Alice had said, when Sidonie had raised her head. “Going to the outhouse.” Sidonie had sunk back on her pillow. Alice sometimes went outside to use the outhouse in the night; she didn't like to flush the toilet and disturb Mother and Father, she said. Sidonie would rather wet the bed than go outside in the dark, but Alice is not afraid.

Sidonie had almost subsided back into sleep, but a stray recognition had burrowed into her consciousness. Hadn't she heard the jingling of a belt buckle? In fact, now she is more awake, hadn't she heard the entire suite of sounds produced by someone pulling on trousers, zipping them, belting them snugly? Had Alice really put on trousers to go to the outhouse?

The thought worries her now as she kneels on the bed. She feels for her lamp, for the switch. But it's impossible for her to turn the little knob; her hands shake. Instead, she waits, listening for Alice to turn the handle of the back door and slip back up the stairs to their room.

The longer she waits, the more awake she grows. Should she call her parents? How long has Alice been? The last time she had woken to Alice's absence and had fearfully knocked on her parents' door, they'd been really cross, and so had Alice, coming in from the toilet. “I've been gone two minutes!” What had seemed half a night to Sidonie. Now she can't trust herself, her own sense of time.

She tries counting to sixty five times. Sits up again to look out the window. Figures move eerily, silhouetted against the nearest fire. Is one of them Alice?

Her heart beats too quickly. What if Alice has been kidnapped, has fallen down the outhouse drop? Which would be worse: to rouse her parents again in false alarm, or to wake up in the morning to find Alice gone, dead even? She tries to imagine Alice murdered, but can only picture her lying somewhere, incapacitated by a twisted ankle, berating Sidonie furiously for not having had the sense this time to get help.

Then she remembers the belt-buckle jingle, the zipper. She must check about Alice's trousers. This time, she's able to get the lamp switched on. She pulls up Alice's blankets, rummages through the heaped clothing, through the garments hanging in the wardrobe. Ah — there's a pair of heavy gabardine legs. But doesn't Alice own two pairs of trousers?

Sidonie sits on the end of Alice's bed for a moment. Then, suddenly, she's sleepy again. The question of Alice's trousers (
trews,
Alice likes to call them, mimicking English novels) suddenly becoming irrelevant in her fuzzy brain. She thinks: I'll just lie down for a moment with the light off.

When she wakes in the morning, Alice is asleep in the other bed, her pale yellow hair tangled, obscuring her face, and Sidonie doesn't remember the middle-of-the-night sortie, or ascertain how many pairs of trousers Alice owns, until days later.

If their parents find out, the world will come apart.

She makes a deal
with the girl: they will drive into town, get some groceries. They will check in at Sidonie's house (have showers, Sidonie thinks, but doesn't say). Tasha will call her parents. (She has, she says, lost her cell phone.) Sidonie will leave a message for Cynthia.

They will drive into town, and then they'll come back.

But when she tries to stand up, she cannot. She is dizzy. She vomits without having time to reach a basin. Possibly it is food poisoning. Possibly the well: she has drawn water to wash dishes in, and perhaps has not boiled it long enough.

She becomes more and more ill. Tasha is alarmed; she wants to contact someone. But Sidonie resists. It will pass. It's just a bug. She'll survive.

She drifts. Tasha brings her bottled water, ginger ale. She wakes to vomit, to struggle to a pail — she cannot reach the outside toilet.

She sleeps. The rain stops; the sun comes out and beats through the unshuttered windows of the dining room. The sun percolates through her lids to enter her unconscious mind. Too bright. She dreams of light: hot, insistent yellow light.

It's Sidonie's job to do the chickens, though it's Mother who sets a dozen eggs under the broody hens every spring when the chickens are laying extra. When the chicks hatch, they stay in a screen-covered crate in front of the kitchen window until they are pullets, because so many things would like to eat them. It's surprising how the chicks grow: they are the same, the same, the same, for the first few days: penny-brown fluff with round heads and fourtoed feet and tiny serrated combs, and then suddenly one day they have pin feathers at their wing tips, and before you know it, they are not chicks anymore, but hens and roosters, and they do not seem even related to the chicks you remember, but another sort of creature entirely.

Sidonie feeds and waters the hens and chicks, and collects the eggs twice a day: morning and evening. “No meals until the beasts have had theirs,” Father always says, and Sidonie and Alice must dress and go out early in the morning to feed the animals before breakfast, and then again before supper. Mother has to do the goat, and Sidonie is glad it's not her, as the goat is not friendly. Alice feeds the barn cats, though not too much, because they are supposed to catch the mice. Once they had rabbits, but a dog scared them, and the mother ate the babies, so no more. Alice did the rabbits.

When it's really cold out and the mornings are dark, nobody wants to go outside to scoop food from the bins with chilled numb fingers, to slosh water into gumboots. But then it is especially important to take care of the animals. Especially, they must always have fresh water, even when the water freezes up solid overnight in the bowls.

So by the time they wash up and have breakfast — porridge in winter, toast in summer — and make their lunches and set off on the mile walk to school, they have all done a number of chores, especially in fruit season.

Once Bonnie Pruitt said “Uggh! You smell of chicken manure!” so Sidonie washes very, very well in the mornings. In winter, her hands scab over and bleed because of her eczema, but she still must make sure that not one bit of chicken essence sticks to her.

Red Mite,
Leaf Roller, Oyster Shell.

Woolly Aphid, Perennial Canker.

Crown Rot, Die Back, Drought Spot, Fire Blight.

Powdery Mildew, Codling Moth.

It's a ditty to sing walking up the hill from school. An incantation.

These are the names of some of the pests that have to be watched for vigilantly, treated for, again and again. Some are insects and some are fungi. If you do not treat them, the fruit will be lower grade or too damaged for anything but juice. Then you will get less money for the crop.

Sidonie and Father hold the white square of cloth under the tree: Sidonie holds one corner in each hand, and Father, whose hands are bigger, holds both of the remaining two corners in one hand. With the other, he whacks the branches with his walking stick. Then Father rolls the cloth up, and they take it to the shed and shake it into a white enamel tray, and Sidonie and Father sort and count the insects. And Father has other counting traps: rolls of corrugated paper wrapped around the trunks of the apple trees; sticky paper wrapped around limbs; little boxes with funnel entrances. The white cloth used to be one of Sidonie's nappies. The bugs have to be counted so that Father knows when to spray and what kind of spray to use. Sidonie asks, why not just spray every week with all of the sprays? Father laughs: some people do that, he says. But sprays are expensive. And they are not good to put into the air and the ground, so we try to use as little as possible.

Father also picks up a sheet of paper from the packing house that tells him about spraying for the coddling moth. Sometimes he agrees with the paper and sometimes not. The paper says on it: “Summerland Research Station.” Sidonie knows where Summerland is: you have to take the ferry across the lake and then drive along the other side of the lake half the day. Father says: they are too far south to be accurate for us. Wait a day or two.

This is who Father is: he knows more than the scientists at the Summerland Research Station.

The girl,
Tasha, is holding her head, wiping her face with a steaming cloth.

Drink this, Tasha says. The bolus of sugared water, the ginger tang of it like the bite of chrysanthemum rolling past her lips, tongue. A glittering ball, cool as glass marbles. The cells on her palate smoothed. She can smell vomit, the sweet decay of it, and something worse. Dirt. She is dirty. A hot rise of shame, but she cannot move.

Further back, yet: She is four or five, not yet in school. Spending the day at Walter's house. Mr. Rilke is running water through the sprayer to clean it. It's hot, and the children sit under the spray, the fine mist delicious on the skin, the sulphur smell seguing from repulsive to enticing. The mist running bright yellow at first, then paler, paler, until clear.

Sidonie has yellow spots on her bathing suit, and her hair feels oily. “Never mind,” says Mrs. Rilke. “It'll wash out, a little lye soap and water, tell your mother.”

Where is Mother?

Father appears when it is suppertime. He appears suddenly in the Rilke's orchard, where they are playing, the way grown-ups do. Suddenly and with towering fury.

“What is this?” he shouts. “Idiots, you! Arsenic of lead! You poison your own children!” Sidonie is hurried home:
schnell, schnell
. Alice is told to take Sidonie to the wash house and scrub her down thoroughly, but Alice cries. “I don't want it on my hands!” (Where is Mother?) It is Father who pours the heated water, again and again, over Sidonie's lathered head and body, his hand making a lid to keep the suds from her eyes, his anger gone now. Didn't Sidonie know that the spray is poisonous? Why,
bitte
, did she think that she was kept indoors when the sprayer came to the orchard? To keep out of Mr. Tanaka's way? Wrong! And why did Mr. Tanaka wear the big hat and the mask over the eyes and mouth? Because of the heat? Wrong again!

What lies in the soil, in the water: the transgressions of the past.

She needs a bath,
hot food, clean clothes. They return to her house, Tasha driving: Sidonie does not trust herself not to pass out.

When they arrive, Cynthia is at the house. She has been sorting through some papers, is wearing glasses, over which she looks sternly as Sidonie comes in the door.

“I've arranged for a disaster company to come and fix you up,” she says.

“Okay,” Sidonie says.

“They'll get rid of the water, replace the drywall and carpets, deal with the mould, and paint. It'll be covered by your insurance. Your friend Hugh's been calling, trying to find you. I told him you'd get back within a couple of days.”

“Okay,” Sidonie says, feeling foolish. (Feeling rescued.)

“As for you,” Cynthia says, looking at Tasha, “You're very lucky. You have very patient parents.”

Tasha looks mulish: she reminds Sidonie, suddenly, of someone. Herself, of course.

“I'm going to drive you home right now,” Cynthia says to Tasha. “You can load some of these boxes into my car for me.”

The look Cynthia gives Sidonie on her way out is not pleasant.

Something has irrevocably shifted between Cynthia and herself.

LEDGER