I had to look at everything differently then, every outing, every conversation; I had to understand that I was somehow not the person I thought I was. I thought about how quickly I’d come to know the house and its people, the sounds of the city and the different look to the light. How little time it had taken before I could walk without even noticing the lump of hard-packed earth still tucked in my shoe. That night, before I slept, I thought about how everything was starting again, and I vowed to be good and kind, as if I always had been.
February
In the mornings the children call out to each other, as they make their way to the school, and it’s really not that long ago
that Edie was one of them, linking arms with her friends with no thought at all that there might be someone trapped behind a window. Not long since my aunts’ last visit, when we hired a buggy for a drive in the countryside and Edie fell asleep with her cheeks flushed with health, not fever, while over her bobbing head Nan whispered about Charlie’s latest trouble. It’s been months, not years, yet that day seems as distant as a story, and I suppose that’s the only way to bear it. People get used to all kinds of things, don’t they? They move house, lose limbs, lose their sight, and if the time before was just as clear, I don’t suppose they could go on. Each time a new building rises in the city, raw and strange, it quickly becomes familiar, and when people walk by they may still have the idea, but only the idea, of what was there. The tall trees or the row of houses with painted front doors.
It’s like that when I think of the time before Edie got sick, and it’s hard to imagine our days back then, the routine of shopping, of cleaning and cooking. I do the minimum now, needing to be within earshot, and the grocer’s boy brings what I’ve ordered, speaking into our new telephone that’s meant to be only for station business. I don’t know what Angus is doing about all his paperwork, but he’s home now in the evenings, and sits and talks with Edie, or reads to her, while I clear up what’s left from our meal. I sleep quite comfortably on the parlour sofa, that we moved into the kitchen to make space for Edie’s bed; when I climb the stairs now it’s only to run the duster quickly around or to fetch something that I need, and it’s like another world. So empty and still, so abandoned.
“Tell me again about my name,” Edie says. “How it jumped right into your head when you saw me.” And it’s true, I knew
right away I would name her for Aunt Edith, so sunny and strong, the best charm I could imagine. When she was six months old we rode the train to the city for Easter, and everyone made such a fuss over her chuffie cheeks, her two sharp teeth. Aunt Edith had a little cough she was afraid of passing on, and just watched while my aunts took turns holding her, watched Uncle Charlie dance her around, waving her wooden rattle. My cousins clapped her hands and bounced her on their bony knees, pulling faces to hear her gurgling laugh and tiring her out so she slept right through the night. In the morning Angus touched my cheek and said, “Maybe that’s the secret, maybe we need to have a whole houseful of children.”
I can hardly bear to think of that giddy time, when we still thought everything was possible. As foolish as the boastful tailor, sewing his magic coat and not hearing the Elfin Queen’s laughter, her plan unfolding with every stitch. We had two sons in the years that followed, but they didn’t survive. The first I held and wept over, touched the smooth blue eyelids that never opened. With the second I heard a thin mewl and the midwives’ shocked whispers, as I sank into a dark place of pain and fever. When I came back to myself I understood that no other child of mine would be allowed to live, and even without the doctor’s warning to Angus, everything between us would have changed. And it torments me still, that the charm I intended was really a curse.
Aunt Edith’s cough got worse and it wore her out; she could barely leave her bed by the time our Edie let go of our fingers and began to walk on her own. When the latest doctors told Ben that the only hope was a warmer climate, he found a new position in California, and everything changed
so quickly. It was an expensive business to move them all, and my aunts convinced him that the only thing was to sell the double house, and most of the heavy old furniture that they wouldn’t need. With Clare married and settled in Washington there was just more empty space in the old house, and Charlie could squeeze in anywhere if he needed to. So really, they told Ben, their new small place was just right, and only a trolley ride away from everything.
At first it seemed that the doctors had been right. Aunt Edith wrote that she was a bit tired still but so much better, and the children were running wild and sounding like little Yankees already. Kez and Nan began to talk about taking a trip out there to see the white house on the hillside, dip their toes in the ocean. But then there was a telegram from Ben, followed by a long letter describing how Edith had slipped away. They buried her, as he said she’d wanted, under that strange, bright sun.
My aunts assumed that they’d all come back, that something close to the old life would start again.
Perhaps
, Ben wrote, but there’d been so much upheaval for the children already.
Perhaps
, but first there were projects he had to see through. He talked about coming to visit, or sending Daisy and George for the summer, though it was such a long way for them to travel on their own. There were notes from the children inside every letter, that of course became shorter and shorter. One from Sandy was just a scribbled drawing of their new dog; “Looks more like a donkey,” Kez said, when she took it from her bag to show me.
“Look who I found,” Angus says, kicking snow off his boots as he comes through the door with Ida and Becky right behind
him, unwinding their long scarves to reveal their healthy pink faces.
“We made a cake,” they say together, holding it out, still warm through the white cloth that wraps it. Much too rich for an invalid’s diet, but no one hears me say that. Angus rubs and claps his hands as he leads the way to the parlour, where Edie squeals and the giggling starts; I know those girls, they can keep it up for hours.
“What?” Angus says, back in the kitchen, and I turn away with the cake knife. “They’ll cheer her up.”
When I say that they’ll wear her out, he makes a little
tch
through his teeth and says that then she’ll rest, as if it was that easy. “I don’t want to argue,” he says, touching my cheek with his still-cold hand, and he drapes the dishtowel over his arm and carries the cake into the parlour. He pretends to stumble in the doorway, the plate waving wildly and the little forks rattling, and the girls all laugh and Edie says, “Oh,
Daddy
.”
Something eases in me then, and I remember what a revelation it was, when she was born, to watch him pacing the floor with her, bending to whisper in her tiny ear. The two of them in their own magic circle, with the songs and jokes and rituals that still aren’t for anyone else. When Edie was two or three they played a game they called
Schedule
, that started with Angus reading out the names of places from the list tacked up by the back door. “Where are you going today, madam?” he’d say. “Hamilton? Yp-si-lan-ti? Pough-keep-sie?” Adding outlandish names until she could barely breathe for laughing. Then he dropped to his hands and knees, saying, “Last call for Schenec-tady. All aboard for Kalamazoo!” and that was the signal for Edie to fling herself on his broad back, and they went round and round the kitchen and the parlour like that,
until he chuffed them into a heap on the Turkey carpet. His own laughter as free as hers and his face, when he looked up at me, wide open like the boy I never knew.
I’d like to believe that I somehow discerned that boy from the start, and recognized an essential goodness beneath his confident look, his practised, flirting talk. But I know that I was besotted, and not capable of any kind of sober thought like that. I would have followed him anywhere, borne anything; I would have clung to his feet as he tried to shake me off, if that was the way it had been. That hunger is gone and I don’t exactly miss it, though I miss feeling anything so strongly that isn’t dread. It’s hard not to think of her as another person, the girl I was, clinging to each glance, each smile. Our hands so close to touching, when I laid the message slips down on his desk, that I could feel the leaping spark.
I was seventeen that spring, and time played tricks. The new buds on the trees seemed to hold forever, unopened, as I walked through the soft light to the office on Wellington, and through different light, home again. In between was a strange world, with its own language to learn, new faces and names, and the other girls like cruel sisters, letting me make errors and be chastised for them, while they watched with their sly little eyes. I told myself that it was because I was the manager’s niece that they left space around me in the tiny room where we ate our dinner, and there was so much going on in our house on Pembroke Street that I didn’t need to be included in their talk, or in their Sunday outings.
Then one day I met Angus by chance, on King Street, surprised that he knew who I was. The next day, in the park, he said that he liked that I wasn’t a chatterbox, and I realized that
everything had been transformed once again, that I was living a new, charmed life where even my tongue-tied state was a choice, and something in my favour. His strong fingers worked the pins from my hair and combed it out; before long he was saying that he adored everything about me and I became that girl, the one that Angus adored. The one who wasn’t anything like the others. Away from him the hours dragged, but the hands on his pocket watch raced when we met on Sundays, making our way to the deepest thickets in the park, or following the sandy stream back from the place where it spilled into the lake. All the secret places he led me to, and sometimes, at the office, he would whisper,
Tonight
, when we passed in the stairway, and that was the slowest time of all. The long way home and the longer evening, listening to the settling house until it was safe to make my silent way down the back stairs.
I was right about the girls’ visit, all that whispering and laughter. Edie fell asleep not long after they’d gone, and though her forehead stayed cool, she didn’t wake properly until the next afternoon. She said that she’d dreamt she was in California, though she didn’t know how she knew that’s where it was. But the streets were narrow and all the houses were white and then a dream-thing happened and she was up above, looking down, and California became an island with a collar of sand; she could see the white waves breaking all around. Then everything changed again and it became a painting she was looking at, in a sunny room. “Because we were talking about it, I suppose,” she says. She wants to see the postcards and the pictures of her American cousins, and I tell her I’ll fetch the album and her keepsake box, if she promises to eat the broth I’ve heated.
It might have been a year after Aunt Edith died, or not even that long, when Ben wrote that he’d decided to marry again, a widow they’d both known, with a young son of her own. Her name was Robina, a thing that made Kez sniff and say she and Nan had best go out there after all, and see for themselves how things were. They sent postcards from the station stops along the way. Buffalo and Chicago, Omaha. On the back of one, Nan drew a stick figure saying
Ow!
to show how she kept falling from her berth.
Our first son was not long in his grave when they went away and I was distracted, settling into our bigger house and keeping track of Edie, who was of an age where everything was a danger. But still it shames me to realize how little thought I gave to their journey, to how difficult it would have been, in all kinds of ways. “Didn’t we have a time,” they said when they were back, giving Edie a beautiful big shell, and showing the photographs they’d taken, which, they said, didn’t give you any idea of the
heat
.
One photograph was of the new house, taken from far away to fit it all in. One was of Robina with her son, who was, they said, a sturdy,
frowning
little fellow. Robina wore a large hat and it was difficult to make out her face, but she was quite
pleasant
, Nan said, and the children seemed easy enough with her. They were settled enough, happy enough, each with his own room, and the yard so long you’d need one of Clare’s telescopes to see the end of it. Of course the older ones were long past coddling and fussing over, and they seemed to be always coming and going, to school or to parties or lessons of some kind. In fact, my aunts said, everyone was very
busy
in California; they saw the ocean and they saw mountains, but they hardly saw Ben at all, and when they did he didn’t seem
like himself, somehow. Though one night when Robina was too tired they sat up late, telling old stories that made them all laugh and teasing him about the way he talked now, like some kind of
mongrel
.
Kez and Nan came back, with their photographs and souvenirs and stories;
Didn’t we have a time
, they said. And I looked and I listened, but I wish I’d spared a thought for how overwhelmed they must have been there, how out of place. I’d lived in their household for years, after all; I knew how they talked, all the meaning that hummed just beneath what was actually said. I should have thought about how it was for them, to find that the younger children didn’t remember them at all, that the older ones were polite but not very interested, caught up in their new lives, new friends. In California, Kez said, there wasn’t even time for stories. Robina didn’t want the little ones frightened, and the others preferred to run around in the yard, or hit a ball with a stick.
I wish I had thought about that, and acknowledged it in some way, though if I’d actually said, Kez wouldn’t have thanked me for it.
Spilt milk
, she would have said, in her matter-of-fact way, as if it had never been important to her. As if she never thought about those grey afternoons on Pembroke Street when the children piled onto her bed, and she took off her shoes and stockings and let the smallest ones play with her crooked, bony toes.