Verna fetched two dusty tumblers sporting ancient lipstick stains on their rims — one coral, the other vermillion. Fishing around in her overalls, she retrieved the tail of her T-shirt and discreetly wiped the insides of the glasses before pouring each of them a drink. “Cheers!” She raised her glass.
“Cheers!”
“Cheers!”
They drank.
“Why do you have the lights off?” Verna asked.
“Saving on electricity,” Carmen explained breezily. “Saving the planet. Meditating. Actually I don’t want to blow a fuse while I’m test-driving my new smoke eater. The electrical in this building isn’t exactly what you’d call up to code.”
Verna listened. From somewhere within the shadowy confines of the office, an air purifier hissed; the stench of tobacco that dominated the room was edged by the metallic smell the purifier exuded.
“Doesn’t it do a great job?” Carmen was enthusiastic. “It arrived yesterday from down south. Some outfit in St. Catharines. The things they can do these days! I tell you! Technology. But, hey!” She snapped her fingers. “I almost forgot. There was somebody come by here looking for the cottage, Verna. Yeah. About an hour ago. I was busy presenting the offer, so I just gave him directions.”
Verna was puzzled. “I wonder who that could be. Nobody knows I’m up here. Except for Dad’s next-door neighbour in Toronto.” Nobody knows because there is nobody to know, she thought ruefully. I could be the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust and I would not be more alone than I am now. Sad, but true. “Did he give a name?”
Carmen shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “He was driving a pick-up, though. Sort of a dark green.”
“Hey, I wonder if it’s that guy you saw this morning.”
“What guy?” asked Carmen.
“A guy snooping around the lake.”
“Wow! You think?” Verna turned to Carmen. “Was he wearing a flannel shirt?”
“Maybe.”
“And a baseball hat?”
“Definitely.”
“What colour was the shirt?”
“I can’t remember,” said Carmen. “To tell the truth, I didn’t pay much attention to him. Just told him how to get to the cottage and that was it.”
“Oh, my God,” cried Verna, panicking. “Romy and Granny! Winonah, we have to get home!”
As the Volvo emerged from the laneway, they spotted the mud-encrusted hunter-green truck parked next to the Impala at a slight angle. In its cargo compartment was a jumble of tools and equipment — spreaders, aerators, and seeders, and a lawnmower — against which were piled shovels, spades, and rakes of various descriptions. Winonah read aloud the decal on the tailgate: GOOSEN’S ORGANIC LANDSCAPING. RECOMMENDED BY MOTHER NATURE.
“That’s a late-model Toyota Tacoma,” Winonah observed admiringly. “Nice ride.”
“Goosen,” fretted Verna. The name pricked at her memory like a tickle in the throat — a small, but compelling irritant. “Goosen — why do I know that name?” Pulling the Volvo up alongside the truck, she threw it into park and climbed out, followed by Winonah. “Hello,” she called, coming around the front of the truck. She half-walked, half-ran to the steps leading to the cottage, followed by Winonah. “Granny, are you there? Romy?”
Jude exploded into joyous barking from the screened-in porch. She heard the scramble of his claws across the wooden floor.
“Hey, Jude!” Verna bounded up the steps, Winonah on her heels, and flung open the porch door. A second later, eighty pounds of enthusiastic, wet dog hit her square in the kneecaps. Knocked off balance, she staggered back into Winonah, causing the handywoman to pitch backwards. Twisting to one side to avoid coming down on her tailbone, Winonah came down hard on her knees instead. Then Verna toppled on top of her. Winonah collapsed under her weight and the two of them lay there for a moment, Winonah face down, Verna face up, while Jude, delighted, pranced about the resulting heap.
The floor creaked. The sound of footsteps.
“Are you all right?”
Verna cranked her head to the right: scuffed work boots with steel toes and the frayed bottoms of faded blue jeans. She looked up — a lanky, boyish-looking young woman wearing a blue baseball cap and a faded green-and-navy Maine guide shirt came into view. Her tanned face was devoid of makeup, her dark, thick eyebrows appeared never to have been plucked, and the hair that poked out from under her cap was short, dirty-blond, and choppy.
“I think so,” Verna managed.
“Speak for yourself!” Winonah fumed. “I’m suffocating!”
“Oh, stop complaining!” Verna rolled off the handywoman and onto the grass.
“Here,” said the stranger, squatting down and extending a hand to her. It was her left hand, rough, calloused, and soil-stained, the fingernails chewed short and dirty. Verna took it gingerly and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet.
Winonah climbed up on her knees. “Geeze, Verna, how much do you weigh?”
“How much do I weigh?” Verna snapped. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black!”
“Verna! Winonah! Stop your fighting! We got company.” The ragged voice of Granny from somewhere within the bowels of the porch. “Go on, girl. Tell her who you are. I forget.”
“It’s Paisley,” the girl said. “Paisley Goosen.”
It was as though the name had thrown a spanner into Verna’s works and sent her into sudden cognitive arrest. Her faculties, such as they were, came screeching to a screaming halt. She stared at the girl, dry mouthed and gawping — gawping again! — like a fish on a dock.
“You know, Auntie Verna,” the girl said, her brow furrowed, her dark, small eyes — the colour of blueberries — pleading. “My mother was your sister.”
“I came across Granddad’s obituary in the Globe and Mail,” Paisley explained. She and Verna sat on the porch drinking coffee. After putting away the groceries, Winonah decided that Granny had had enough excitement for one day and that she was taking her back to the rez. This was not, however, until after they had prepared for themselves a small feast of fish sticks, beans and wieners, and Eskimo Pies.
“See you tomorrow!” Granny called gaily.
Verna winced at the mention of Donald’s obituary. One of his former students, now a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, had written a glowing tribute to Donald that had appeared in the Globe and Mail’s“Lives Lived” feature in the week following his death. “A beloved teacher who had communicated his passion for Canadian history and the Canadian wilderness to generations of high-school students, blah, blah, blah …” Mrs. Rothman had rung up to ask whether Verna had seen it. In fact, she had missed it entirely. She had skimmed that day’s paper as she always did. She had even skimmed the section of the paper in which it appeared. But her eyes had bounced off her father’s obituary like a stone skipped across water. It had not occurred to her that the individual described as “Inspirational teacher” and “Authentic Canadian” might be so humble and unimportant a man as her father and so she had not registered the name “Donald Macoun” when it appeared in conjunction with these tributes. By the time Mrs. Rothman called (and to her shame), Verna had recycled that issue of the paper, so her neighbour cut it out and left it for her in her father’s mailbox.
“Ah, yes,” she said now. “The obituary.”
“Actually it was my partner who spotted it,” said Paisley. “The obit.”
“Who?” asked Verna.
“My partner.”
“Your partner in the landscaping company?”
“No, my life partner.”
Life partner, Verna thought. So that was what they were calling them these days. She wondered what sort of man would be attracted to a woman so, well, androgynous as Paisley. And it was not just her appearance. It was her manner, as well — how she walked with just that hint of low-slung swagger, the way she was sitting at that very moment, her knees falling casually open, feet planted, sharp elbows on her thighs, and rough hands clasped as sh
e stared out at the lake; the matter-of-fact way she smoked (another smoker!) and cracked her knuckles and her neck. It was easy to see how Carmen had mistaken her for a man.
“It was a great tribute,” Paisley ventured. “Even though I didn’t really know him … I don’t know. It made me feel proud to know that he was my grandfather.”
“Me, too,” said Verna. “That he was my father.” In fact it had surprised her, or, to be more precise, surprised and saddened her — that someone she did not know, someone who claimed to speak for many others whom she also did not know, had felt so strongly about her father. She had found Donald’s preoccupation with history tiresome, his fascination with the natural world nerdy in the extreme. What others perceived as positive attributes, she had seen as foibles — sometimes charming and endearing, more often annoying.
“I mean, I sort of knew him,” Paisley continued. “I have a dim memory of him.”
When would she have last seen Donald? Verna wondered. Probably the same time Verna had last seen the children, before Fern took off out west. That would have been back in ’85 or ’86, before the various fathers of Fern’s children had begun to pick them off, one by one, starting with Tai. She peered at Paisley and thought for the first time that she saw in the rangy young woman — all elbows and hipbones, all collarbones and knees and shoulder blades — the forthright tomboy she had been. Defiant and very dirty. Fern had not been a big believer in baths.
“I remember you, too,” said Paisley resolutely, forging ahead. “I remember you yelling at us for walking on the furniture.”
“You were little savages,” Verna told her. After all, why lie? “And I had just had those chairs re-caned at very great expense. Your father … that was Ben, wasn’t it? Ben the woodworker?” She had been turning that one over and over in her mind — whose daughter Paisley was. Because Fern had had so many men — not just the fathers of her children, but others, as well, tucked into the spaces in between. After a while, last names just dropped off and Fern’s men had become for Verna and Donald, “Ben the Woodworker,” or “Paul the Painter,” or “Hindi Jag,” or “Kenny, the Jesus Freak,” or “Brian, the Waiter.” “How is he anyway? Ben?”
“He died last year,” said Paisley. Verna could see that she was a solemn young woman. There was a heaviness about her, as though she carried around with her invisible items of great weight. “M.S.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Verna.
Paisley shrugged; she looked anguished. “He had a good life. Except for the last couple of years. They were pretty crappy.” She blinked back tears and rubbed her nose and then her eyes with her sleeve. “He was a good father though. I’m grateful for that.”
“There’s a table he made upstairs,” Verna remembered — a feeble effort to cheer the girl up. “A beautiful one carved out of oak. Maybe you would like it.”
“I have a whole house full of beautiful furniture that he made out of oak,” Paisley told her dejectedly.
“Well, of course you do.”
They sat silently for a moment. Verna stroked Jude’s bumpy head, her mind stuck in cognitive malfunction, gears grinding, while Paisley stared intently out at the lake as though she expected it to do something. Then the girl cleared her throat. “And Mom?” she asked. “The obituary said that Granddad was survived by you. Just you. It didn’t mention her. It didn’t mention any of us …”
Here it comes, Verna thought. What I’ve been waiting for. What I’ve been dreading. The mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Again. She reminded herself of a dung beetle, only her ball, the one she rolled through life, that seemed to be getting bigger by the day, was a stinking aggregate of remorse. She sagged into the chair, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and hopped aboard a whole new groundswell of freshly minted guilt. “Your mother died four years ago,” she said. “Cancer. Cervical cancer.” She waited a beat, then launched into her apology, “I’m so sorry, Paisley. We didn’t know how to get in touch with you. We should have tried harder. I should have tried harder. I feel just terrible about it.” Why did the words sound so hollow, as though she were shouting them through cupped hands from the bottom of a well? What was it Donald used to say? “When it comes to children, you pay now or pay later. You never don’t pay.” Well, she was paying now and they weren’t even her children. And wasn’t that just typical — Fern skipping out and leaving her to pick up the tab?
“I know she’s dead,” Paisley told her. “My partner looked online on the government site — the public records site.”
Verna opened her eyes and stared at her. “You can do that?”
“Well, you have to buy a subscription,” Paisley replied glumly. “So I drove to Toronto and went to the house on Indian Crescent and knocked on the door. A neighbour heard me and came out.”
“Mrs. Rothman?” Mrs. Rothman, thought Verna — a Jewish version of the Greek chorus who greeted visitors to the Indian Crescent house with a doleful, “Lo! She has gone to northern Ontario to scatter the ashes of her sainted father and prodigal sister! You wouldn’t believe how much that dog eats.”
“She told me that you had come up here, that you were going to scatter Granddad’s ashes. And Mom’s. That’s why I came. Dropped everything and came north. I remember this place, you know. I was here a couple of times when I was a kid. I knew it was just outside Greater Gammage and that I could ask once I got that far. I thought I might be in time.”
“In time for what?”
“To scatter her ashes,” Paisley replied. “And to get some answers.”
“Well, as it turns out, you are in luck,” said Verna. “At least as far as the ashes go. Granny didn’t tell you?”
Paisley shook her head. “She was on about something. Her school days, I think. Something to do with kids getting frostbite and having their toes cut off. To be honest, I couldn’t follow it. And I was … you know … nervous about meeting you, about being here again after so many years. I was pretty distracted.”
“We were going to scatter them today, but there was an accident and …” Suddenly Verna remembered Romy. “Heavens!” She clapped her hand over her mouth.
Paisley looked startled. “What?”
“Romy! I forgot all about Romy!”
“Romy?”
“Your little sister Romy.”
Paisley looked stricken. “Don’t tell me she’s dead, too!”
“No, no! Of course not,” Verna assured her. “Well, not yet anyway. No, she’s right upstairs. Sleeping. In your mom’s bedroom. She sort of fell in the lake today. Long story. “
Paisley blanched. She swallowed. “Really?” she said, sounding a bit strangled. “Romy’s here? Little Roo?”
Verna winced at Fern’s nickname for Romy. “She arrived yesterday,” she said. “I know! Let’s go wake her up!”
Verna paused just outside of Fern’s bedroom door. Taking hold of Paisley’s arm and drawing her close, she whispered, “I have to warn you. She looks pretty … you know … terrible.”
Paisley stared at her, confused. “What?” she whispered back. “Terrible? Why?”
“Are you talking about me?” A voice from within the room. Apparently Romy had awoken from her nap. She sounded weak and aggrieved.
Verna grimaced at Paisley, shook her head, neutralized her expression, and opened the door. There was Romy, huddled in the rattan Peacock chair with the heavy Indian tapestry wrapped around her. “You’re up!”
“Duh!” Romy replied listlessly. She peered past Verna into the hall where Paisley, suddenly shy, was hanging back. “Who’s that?”
Verna took Paisley by the arm and steered her into the room. “It’s your sister,” she said. “Your sister Paisley. Come up from … where have you come up from, Paisley?”
“Port Hope.”
“Port Hope,” Verna repeated.
“My sister?” Romy blinked. She looked bewildered. “Really? My big sister Paisley?”
Paisley took a step forward, then halted — it was as if she wanted to rush to Romy a
nd embrace her, but was unsure what the occasion required, what would be allowed her. Instead she wrung her hands. “Yeah,” she croaked. “Do you remember me?”
Romy gulped and shook her head. She drew the Indian tapestry tighter around her, up to her chin. “No,” she said in a small voice. “But I’ve thought about you. I’ve pictured you.”
“I remember you,” said Paisley. “You were — what? — four when I last saw you. Little Roo. Mommy’s Little Roo.” A lone sob escaped her — “Yeep!” — and dangled potently on the air. She lumbered across the room and awkwardly gathered up the bundled-up bones that was Romy in a big bear hug.
“Ooph!” managed Romy.
“Now, isn’t this a nice surprise?” asked Verna. She sounded like somebody’s grandmother, maybe, but definitely not like herself. She sat down on the bed, feeling extraneous.
Contact having been achieved, Paisley released Romy and stepped back. Her expression turned solicitous; doubtless she had been able to surmise that the body beneath the tapestry was little more than skin and bones. “Are you all right, Little Roo?” she asked. “Because you don’t look so good.”
In fact, Romy looked ghastly. Her skin was the faintly bluish-white resembling the colour of whey; her eyes the slippery colour of boiled eggs on the verge of going bad.
“All right?” Romy laughed weakly. “Well, if you want to know the truth, not really. My electrolytes are unbalanced and it’s making my heart act all funny.”
“Your heart?” demanded Verna.
“Funny?” asked Paisley. “What do you mean — funny?”
“Flip-flopping,” said Romy.
“Your heart?” Verna repeated. “Flip-flopping?” That didn’t sound good. In fact, that sounded really bad.
“As in … what?” Paisley knelt beside the chair. “As in palpitations?”
Romy gulped. She nodded. “Yeah. And I feel kind of dizzy.”
“Oh, my God!” Verna cried. “She’s having a heart attack. Twenty-one years old and she’s having a bloody goddamned heart attack!” Fragments of a song popular in her youth burst out of locked storage and into her consciousness. Something about white lace and promises. Who the hell had sung that? The Carpenters? Of course, it was the Carpenters — Karen and Richard. Karen Carpenter — an anorexic icon, an anorexia role model, a pioneer on the forefront of eating disorders. Karen Carpenter, who died at a ridiculously young age of a heart attack. What to do? What to do? Oh, right: call 911! “Paisley,” she croaked, “call 911!”
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