Light spilled from an open doorway and then we were inside, like arriving at the station all over again. Noise and light and so many people. A woman with a very round face put it close to mine and said, “You poor child.” She led me through a doorway and up some stairs, into the quiet, and maybe I was already asleep; the next moment I knew was one with daylight around the edges of a patterned window shade, another soft bed in another strange room and my clothes laid neatly on a chair, where I could see them, my boots tucked underneath.
Last summer, when she was still well, Edie came down to breakfast and told us she wanted to be called Edith from now on. “I’m not a child anymore,” she said, and if we forgot, she refused to answer, and wouldn’t even look at Angus when he said that since Edie didn’t seem to be around, he’d have to eat her pie too. That stubborn streak that I know so well, when she sets her mind on something; she’s so much like my brother Alan, in that way. The time he decided to be a cowboy he spent hours in the fenced field with a coiled rope, trying to throw a loop over our horse’s head. I watched him until it was so dark I could barely make out the glimmer of his shirt, the rope snaking out and falling empty to the ground.
There are days now when Edie’s fractious as a teething baby. Kicks at the covers, then pulls them up again, tosses her book to the floor. She flicks away my suggestions—a coddled egg, a game of Twenty Questions, or trying new styles for her tangled hair. “I can’t bear it,” she says. “I’m so tired of opening my eyes and finding that I’m still here.”
It takes me a long, cold moment to understand what she
means. “Oh Edie,” I say, and she yanks the covers up over her head, her muffled voice saying, “Go away. That’s not even my
name
.”
She’s right to be cross and I know very well how important this business of names can be. My own was for my mother’s young sister and she always said that my eyes were like hers, though I couldn’t know for myself. In the only photograph, now burned and gone, my aunt Isabella was already dead, those eyes fallen shut, and her cheekbones sharp in her face. On her sad days my mother stroked my hair and said how much I reminded her and I hated the thought of it, living out a dead girl’s life. Wished, always, for a name all my own, one not trailing anything behind it. I understand it differently now, though, and if Edie had been a boy I would have given her both my brothers’ names. A little piece of them carrying on, and maybe whenever I opened the back door and called,
Ross Alan, time for supper
, maybe all three would have come running.
No one buttered my bread for me, in my new home on Pembroke Street, and no one threw strange arms around me, hugging me until I nearly broke. Mostly they left me to find my own way to fit, gave me simple tasks, shaking out a mat or laying the table, until I learned how they did things, knew on my own when to stir up the stove, and where to put the clean dishes. Those first days it seemed that every time a door opened, someone new came through. Even the building was confusing, actually two separate houses, though it looked like one from the front. The right side was for Ben and his family and the other, where I was, for my three aunts and their new lodger, Jack, and sometimes my other uncle, Charlie, when he was having a difficulty.
The house was built by two brothers who married two sisters, or so Uncle Charlie told me. That part was probably true, but he had so many stories, and he told me that one long before my aunts explained how you could know which ones were real. “Don’t let on,” they said, and they told me he always smoothed his right eyebrow before he told a lie. “Everybody has a sign like that, if you look for it,” my aunt Nan said, and she said Charlie’s was quite obvious and that’s why he was always losing at cards, another thing I hadn’t known. She said that she didn’t have a sign, because she never told lies, but even without Aunt Kez’s snort I would have known that wasn’t true. When I began to practise letters from the telegraph manual Ben gave me, they both said the code was far too complicated for them ever to have wanted to learn. But that time the new minister came to call, Aunt Kez tapped a rude word with the sugar tongs as she dropped three lumps into his cup, and Aunt Nan had to run from the parlour, coughing hard into her hand.
Uncle Charlie said he’d forgotten the names of the brothers who built the house, and he didn’t remember what business they’d been in together. A successful one, it must have been, and they built their new houses side by side, and carried their sister brides through the gleaming front doors. Together they planted a white lilac bush in the middle of the shared backyard, and each year its soft scent reached farther and farther into the houses, through every open window. The sister brides were always visiting back and forth, and after the first winter, when they complained so much about having to lace up their boots every time, their husbands built a closed-in passage that joined the houses at the front. In time there were children, and first one then the other built extra rooms out the back. But they
left an open space for the lilac, and when the sisters were busy inside, they could still wave to each other through its blossoms.
“But nothing lasts forever,” Uncle Charlie said. “Well, you know that as well as anyone.” There was a falling-out, between the brother husbands or the sister wives, and they boarded up the doors at either end of the connecting passageway. “It was just there,” he said, pointing in the front hallway. “Do you see the outline, under the paper?” When I couldn’t, he said that just showed what a good and permanent job they’d done, but even that wasn’t enough, because they still sometimes glimpsed each other through the facing windows, especially in winter, when the lilac branches were bare. So they shuttered those windows, and the houses became so dark that they were all, even the children, in danger of losing their eyesight. “Don’t look at me like that,” Uncle Charlie said. “I’m just telling you what I know.” He said that Aunt Edith’s father, who had been a very sharp businessman before his accident on the bridge, somehow heard of the dire situation, and bought the double house for a good price. And the two families moved as far east and as far west as they could, so they’d never have to see each other again.
Edie used to love that story, and when she was younger we carried it on farther. Imagining that at some point, maybe when they were very old and hobbling along with canes, the husbands and wives would come face to face on a busy street, and all would be forgiven. Or maybe their grandchildren or great-grandchildren would meet each other, far in the future, and without knowing why, become the best of friends. After Uncle Charlie told me about it, all those years ago, I kept thinking about that boarded-up passageway and wondering why I hadn’t noticed that the house from the outside didn’t quite
match the inside. In the front hall I ran my fingertips over every inch of the place he’d pointed to, and thought I could trace the outlines of the secret. Though I knew it would have to be completely dark, when I thought of that space I pictured filtered light, and had a sense of something waiting, a connection that could be made again.
The green manual Ben gave me was filled with his own scribbles and underlinings, and with it he set me up an old key to practise on. Maybe it wasn’t a plan, but that gave a point to my days, something for my mind to draw in to; it eased my way. I spent hours at the little table in my room, shaking out my hand when it cramped, and then grasping the key again.
The fingers and thumb borrow their force from the hand and wrist, which should move directly up and down through a distance of about three-quarters of an inch
; I began to see how everything was connected, how even my muscles could learn a new way to carry on. All the sounds in the world became messages as I learned the six principles, dots and dashes and longer ones, and I couldn’t believe I’d been deaf to them all my life. The tapping of a wooden spoon on the side of a pot, feet on a sidewalk, a blind pull against a windowpane. I thought of those still days in our clearing, a woodpecker somewhere close in a tree, and wondered what conversations, what warnings I might have missed. Like a child learning to read, I could soon pluck out the letters, then learned to hear them together, to understand the words, the sentences they made. But it took me longer to realize that even the spaces between words made a pattern, and could tell you something different.
The rhythm of the house was easier to learn, coffee boiled black as tar in the morning, and not a word spoken until the
cups were half empty. Aunt Clare and Jack usually left in a flurry, almost late for their classes, trailing papers and long scarves and rushing back at least once for something forgotten. When they were really gone Aunt Nan pushed herself up from the table and tied on her apron, and I went with Aunt Kez to do the shopping. She named every street, told me who lived in the houses we passed and which shops they avoided, and why. Maybe that wasn’t a plan either, but I began to know where I was, and the noisy city, so different from all I’d known, began to seem like something I could manage. But there were times, walking through the park, when the sudden scent of pine trees swept me back, and I almost cried out with the pain of it. Times when I woke in the morning and closed my eyes again, trying to see the rough-hewn boards, the knots and swirls that had once been just above me, trying to hear the rattle of the poker in the stove, and my parents’ easy voices floating up the open stair. I pictured my little room, and the rest of the cabin, every single thing in it, as if I really thought that if I could imagine it, complete and exact, I would find myself back there.
Like it had been for the sister brides, there was constant visiting between our households, and through the last leaves the children often beckoned from their facing windows. There were already four of them when I came to live there, though it took me some days to be sure. George was the oldest, the one who had come running out of the dark, and then Daisy, and Sandy Mac. And the little one those three called Spot, because what they’d really hoped for was a dog. Fanny and Sally came later, so there was always a baby with chafed red cheeks being passed from arm to arm. A young girl came in to do the laundry, but otherwise it was all Aunt Edith, doing six things at
once but hardly ever frazzled, her apron strings tied and her hair held smooth by ivory combs. “All serene,” she used to say, stepping over a tumble of building blocks to reach the steaming kettle; impossible to know if it was a joke or a prayer.
My other aunts called it
Going to the wild side
, and it was exactly like that in the other house. Always someone banging on a pot or chasing around the kitchen table, crumbs ground in everywhere and a different child standing on a stool, splashing and scrubbing at the everyday dishes. Of course there was wailing and tussling and name-calling, and though it must have happened, I never saw Aunt Edith raise a hand; she had a way of saying a child’s name that cut across any ruckus. What my cousins hated most was being left out of things; that was the punishment, being sent to a gloomy corner of the parlour, with the door left ajar so they could still hear, but faintly, all they were missing. More than once, hours later, someone would remember, and whichever child would be found fast asleep, curled up in the corner by the plant stand. “What a terrible mother,” my uncle said then, resting his hand on Aunt Edith’s shoulder, but it was clear that he didn’t mean it.
I hold that double house in my mind; maybe all of us do, who lived there. Traces floating through the dreams of my cousins, so young when they left, and maybe flickering for years behind Jack’s blank stare. Even my Edie has a version of it, from the stories I’ve told her, and from the photograph that was taken the first summer I lived there. All of us sitting on the front steps, laughing because baby Spot has just given a rolling, adult-sounding belch.
Edie always wanted me to take her to see it, when we went to the city, but my aunts said there was no point, it was
so rundown, so changed. And now, of course, it’s gone completely, knocked down with its neighbours to make way for the new courthouse. Aunt Clare said once that it was as if some monster were trailing them through the city, smashing along behind and destroying every place that had meant anything to them. The narrow house where they’d all been born was gone too, along with most of that block, replaced by the expansion of the department store where Uncle Charlie still works, strolling the floor with his measuring tape draped around his neck. He told us once that when the new part first opened he used to try to work out where the old house had been. Their kitchen floor hovering, as near as he could tell, just about at chin height in the Notions section. He said that sometimes, when he climbed the stairs, he expected to see the door to his old room instead of the display of toy guitars and bugles and drums. That was just cruel, he said, but he got used to it.
Weeks passed on Pembroke Street; the leaves flared and dropped from the trees while I did my tasks and tapped my letters, and then slow, fat flakes of snow fell through the grey air. Once we dragged two sleds to the park with all the children and went down the hill in different combinations. Aunt Nan fell off in a tumble of skirts and when George and Daisy tried to help her they all ended up rolling on the ground, right to the bottom, and Aunt Edith laughed so hard she almost dropped the baby. Long evenings came, and I held a skein of red wool between my spread hands while Aunt Kez rolled it up. She’d decided to make hats for Daisy and Sandy Mac, a pair of warm mittens for George, and while we worked she told me a story about Uncle Charlie and a slingshot. When it was done I said, “What about Uncle Alan, where does he live?” and the red ball dropped and
unrolled across the floor. “Well, that’s two shocks you’ve given me,” Aunt Kez said, as she began to roll it up again.
Wee Alan, she told me, was the first-born, but he’d died on the ship, just days after leaving the Old Country. So long ago that my father was a baby himself, and now no one living would have seen the white shroud or heard the splash, would remember the way the ocean stretched all around, under the chilly sky. Which meant that I couldn’t have remembered, as I thought I did, my father telling stories about him, the way he sometimes did about Ben and Charlie, who were clearly very much alive. That was a puzzle, but even stranger was the second thing Kez said—that these were the first words I’d spoken since the fire. At first I thought she was teasing, the way I’d learned she often did, but Aunt Nan put her soft hand on my shoulder, and said that it was so. And the red wool scratched as it wound again from my fingers.