Maybe she should have gone back to teaching after that first bleak Christmas without Jerry so that she would now have that to preoccupy her. Martin and Emily had tried to make the season a little cheerier and she had spent the day with them and their grown children. There had been stories and memories and Emily had been very kind. “Would you like to spend the night?” she had asked. Sue had been surprised at Emily’s thoughtfulness, having become so accustomed to the raised eyebrow or dismissive tone that had so often revealed itself when Sue was around.
“Thanks, Emily,” she had said. “But if you two would walk me back to my place, that would make me feel comfortable with going home for the night.”
They had done that and the next day had called to see how she was doing. January would have been a convenient time to pick up with the students, but it was only two months after Jerry’s death. She had not been able to do it. Also, she had wanted to keep on painting. And if Thomas contacted her to have time for him for what she thought a selfish reason, the sense that in the presence of someone so similar to her husband part of Jerry was still there. Now, she felt herself in a vacuum, except for all the paperwork that had to be attended to in dealing with Jerry’s estate. Fortunately, Martin was executor.
Eventually, Sue called the psychic’s office. It was the end of January by then, although she found it hard to keep track of time. She had told the principal she would like to return to teach in the fall. She had thanked him for the leave of absence, knowing that the last thing she had needed as Jerry hovered near death had been to deal with teenagers and the pressures of preparing lessons and marking papers. Now, she felt it would all come crashing in on her if she went back too early.
She spoke to the woman who made appointments, not surprised this time to find the psychic booked well in advance. But when the woman said she would call if there were a cancellation, Sue thought that possible and in less than two weeks, it happened.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” the woman said. “At two o’clock.”
The address was a mere few blocks away from where Sue lived, but she had not walked by Jonker’s office since the day she had first gone there. She thought there was a tall maple in the patch of yard between the front door and the sidewalk and that she would see the high branches of that tree through his bay window. Even bare, awaiting the appearance of tiny buds, it likely had a stark beauty. But what she recalled and wanted to see again were the bright colours of the paintings and photographs on his walls.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
The next day, she would climb the steps to the door of the brick building again, and then continue to the second floor. It had not changed her life the first time, nor even made her feel good, but his comments had stayed with her.
2.
SNOW SWIRLED IN THE WIND like genies escaping from bottles. Hans pulled his collar up as he stumbled along the path he had shovelled from the house to the barn. He had not liked living in a city where houses often seemed to press in and obscure the sky. Even with his whiskers encased in tiny bits of ice, he had no regrets about moving to the country. Heather was the one to suggest buying a farm when they had talked about finding a house with a bit more land. Since she had expressed no interest before, he had been surprised. But then, Heather was always full of surprises. Her English accent normally so refined then turned into a caricature as she leapt across the bed imitating some American western she had seen. Yelling that she would lasso him and, “Watch out buddy, you’re going to get laid.” Although, come to think of it, she had not done that for a long time.
“I want chickens,” she had said. “Chickens and roosters and peacocks and piglets and…”
“Do you have any idea how much work it is to farm?” He had grown up on the family farm in the Netherlands.
“We needn’t be farmers. We could find a place where someone already uses the land.”
“Well, I’d like to do a bit of farming,” he had said. The thought of it had created visions of new calves, fresh eggs, walks across sun-stroked fields, tomatoes ripening. “Just not all of it.”
So fifteen years ago, they had found this house, built of stone and buried in the hills behind a screen of trees. From the road you could not see it or the long driveway that circled to the front door. In the summer, flowers grew up through the steps, tall purple and pink hollyhocks that looked as if there might be a fairy tale waiting. Behind that was a large barn where the horses Heather had wanted had their stalls.
“I’m going to be a jockey,” she had said.
He had almost laughed, had wanted to tell her she was too tall, but then decided to keep quiet. He admired her spunk. Especially when she started to do jumps and enter competitions. Heather had never lived on a farm, but she had learned to ride where she grew up in the south of England, something she had convinced her parents was so important that she would spend her own money on lessons.
Before long, she and Hans had also started to board and groom other horses to cover some of their expenses.
“You could teach people to ride,” Heather said.
“No. I’m going to go on doing readings. And I’ll be a gentleman farmer.”
Not quite as it turned out, the gentleman part. There was never enough money to hire help. So, every morning, he was up to his ankles in dung. But as he entered the barn, he savoured the earthy odour of animals, the sweet scent of hay. He also had a small henhouse where he collected eggs for omelettes. French toast. Pancakes. At first, he put on weight, but soon the work was enough to keep him trim. They planted a vegetable garden in summer with all that they needed for the season, green vines twirling upward to meet the sun. Or crawling along the earth in tendrils to birth cucumbers and zucchini. When they made relish with the tomatoes, all the neighbours received a jar.
When Hans returned to the house, Heather was at the counter in the kitchen. She glanced over at him with a slight frown as he brushed snow from his beard.
“I’m going to fly to London,” she said, flinging her long fair hair over her shoulders. “And take a train to Devon.”
He draped his coat on a hook over a heat vent. “In February?” he asked.
Her parents lived in a village outside Exeter where her father was the postmaster. They were getting older and she went to visit each year in early spring.
She sat down with a cup of coffee at the large wooden table in the centre of the room, tapping her fingers in time to unheard music that seemed to float around her.
“Why now?” he asked when she did not respond to his first question.
“My mother needs me,” she said.
“Why haven’t you mentioned it?” He liked visiting her family. But she was sometimes inscrutable. Before he figured it out, she would often be out on one of the horses, riding off into the woods or down the road as it got dark. He wished she would say more. It was an ongoing tug of war between them, that he wanted her to be more forthcoming. And she figured, like some of his clients, that he ought to know.
“I didn’t know either,” she said. “Until Dad called this morning.”
“So fill me in.” He sat down at the table across from her.
A tinge of red crept across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. “I’m worried,” she said. “Dad said Mum isn’t taking her prescription. And she won’t use her hearing aid.”
Hans sighed. “I’d like to go with you. I really would. But I don’t think we can afford it right now.”
“It’s all right,” Heather said.
“It doesn’t feel that way to me.”
She stood up and moved around the kitchen in the hurried way she always did before she left to head into her job in the city. He watched her as she picked up her purse and put on her coat, waiting for her to say something else. She did not.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I told you,” she said.
“I get the
feeling there’s more to it.”
“You always do.” She shook her head and raised her hand to her mouth to blow a kiss to him as she opened the door
“I always do what?” he asked, but she was already out of earshot.
When Hans left three hours later, rush hour traffic was over. Snow still blew across the highway and just before he reached the 401, he hit a patch of black ice and began to skid. He tried to stay in his own lane and as the car edged over onto the other side, he was relieved no other vehicles were close enough for him to hit. As he coasted forward, the tires gradually regained a grip on the road.
After that, he drove more carefully than usual and was already tired when he arrived at the office in Toronto. Grateful to rest for half an hour before his first appointment, he put his feet up on the small table in front of his chair. His clients were booked for Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons. His mornings started early on the farm when he milked two cows and fed the horses, chickens, and goats before he left for the city. He closed his eyes and waited for his mind to become blank. Instead, he thought of Heather. There was a chill in his marriage and he could not figure out what was happening. He wondered if it might have been there for a while without him noticing it. When he tried to think about that, nothing particular emerged. He must clear his mind or the images that emerged from whoever sat across from him would be blocked. It was only with that blank slate that the rhythm of his day in the office would begin to unfold well.
He heard shuffling that seemed to come from the waiting area on the other side of the wall. His first client? He breathed deeply and moved toward the door. When he opened it, he saw a young woman who had come a few times before, the last visit about a year ago. She would want to know what most people did. About her boyfriend. Would she find a new job? About her health. Mainly, his clients seemed to seek reassurance. If they knew how uncertain his own life was most days, they would not want it from him. After she was seated across from him, he saw her furniture in another city and told her she would move there.
“I don’t think so,” she said without hesitation. “I don’t want to leave Toronto.”
“Well, you’re going to,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I’m not going to.”
Then why had she come? He had things to tell her and she did not want to hear them. This was often how people reacted, but it never ceased to surprise him. “You’re going to,” he repeated. “There’ll be work there in your field and you’ll be given a car to drive.”
“I don’t think so,” she said again.
“Well, let me know when it happens,” Hans said, almost as if he were throwing up his hands. But he saw something more. “A silver car.”
“Yeah, sure.” Ironic tone.
“Yeah, sure.” Certainty.
Nonetheless, she continued to be resistant to most of what he told her. At the end of the reading, he handed her the tape. If she listened later, she would be surprised at how much would transpire and for all he knew would call to tell him. Some did.
As he said goodbye, he listened to the sound of her footsteps going down the stairs, then to the front door below that closed with a bang. Going over to the bay window, he reached his arms above his head and let out a sigh. His work was exhausting when there was so much resistance. Sometimes, he would say he could not do a reading for that person and forego payment. “You’ll have to be more receptive,” he might say. “Come back if you are.” But he figured this woman might find the information useful when the offer came in. She would at the very least be prepared for it.
As he continued to stare out the window, his eyes were drawn to a woman approaching from the west. Her walk looked familiar and this made him curious. When he heard footsteps enter the waiting room and the rustle of a magazine, he was alert. What is it about her? When he invited her into his office and she sat down across from him, he knew she had been there before. She twisted her hands in her lap and he could see her wedding ring, something about a husband who was ill. And he knew what had happened since then had altogether changed her life.
“I often stand and look out at the trees and the sky,” he said. “And the people. When I saw you on the street just now, I knew you were coming to see me.”
“Maybe you recognized me,” she said.
He rarely recalled much about anyone until they had come more than once or twice. “Yes,” he said. “But just something superficial, like the way you walked. And you might have been going somewhere else.” Years before, a man had sat in that same chair, eyeing Hans piercingly, and speaking in a rapid staccato that Hans had found uncomfortable. He had wanted the man to leave. At the end of the session, he had handed over the tape and quickly ushered the man to the door. A few months later, there had been some confusion surrounding his bank account and when he got to the bottom of it, this man had been forging his signature. The police arrested the man, but Hans never figured out what had been taken from his office to make him vulnerable. He had theories. A letter he could not find that he had signed and left out ready to put in an envelope? He had often wondered how the man had known anything about his banking account.
But Hans did not feel there was anything sinister about Sue even though he felt uneasy. It was strange that seeing her approach on the street had inexplicably filled up some emptiness in him, a void that had begun to open around the time his sister, Anna, had died in Amsterdam. She had been the sibling closest in age to him. The one he had loved the most of all in his family, so often was she his ally when they were children. Heather, busy with her new job at the hospital when Anna died, had not been able to go to the funeral or seemed fully aware of the extent of his sorrow. Sometimes of late, Heather seemed so remote, like a hawk, circling. Maybe it had been a mistake to marry someone fifteen years younger. He had had children in his first marriage and had not wanted them in his second. Men might marry because the woman wanted a child, but, in some ways, he had married Heather because she had not. Already with a daughter who was a young teenager when they had met, she was fine with having one child and glad that Hans had wanted to raise Vivian with her. Hans had loved Heather for her spontaneity, her plucky sense of adventure, her love of hollyhocks and horses, and for Vivian, if truth be told. He had not minded starting over with a teenager.
He saw Sue look around at the hangings on his walls and recalled how carefully she had inspected them the first time. Now, her eyes were on the shells he had gathered on beaches in the Caribbean and Florida. Some day, she would use bits of what she was observing in a painting.
“So,” he said, turning on the recorder. “Everything’s changing. Everything. Your work, where you live, and the people you know. But you’ll be all right.” He told her that although she would return to work, she would continue to find a way to create images on canvas. And listen to music.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know where it comes from,” he said.
“Then how do you know?”
“I get something about whoever sits down in front of me.”
“You get something,” she said. “What in the world does that mean?”
“Only once I didn’t and then discovered that the man had AIDS and didn’t have much time ahead of him.”
“So you drew a blank.”
“You could say so.”
“I did.”
“But you have plenty of time. And what you’re doing and will do is to question everything. The whole pot will get stirred.”
“What does that mean?’
“I just tell you what I get. I don’t know what it means.” He was irritated with her and did not mean for her to know that, worried it was apparent in his tone. People always seemed to think he ought to know, either some fact about them or the meaning of what he did actually know. For him that was irrelevant and if he looked for more it might block the channels for the images and sounds that arrived nat
urally. If she did not understand anything thus far, she certainly would not understand that either. “But I do know you’re now a widow,” he said. “And that’s a big change already. It’s huge.”
“I didn’t believe what you said when I came the first time,” she said.
“No, I could tell. But you do now, I guess, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“You said there would be someone like a son. And after my husband died, I had a phone call from a young man who said Jerry was his father. I didn’t know what to do, but when Thomas said he wanted to see me, I said yes. Not at first, but later.”
“Of course,” Hans said.
“But it wasn’t as if I knew he existed.”
“Well,” he said. “You knew.”
Hans could feel that resistance, the distrust again. What did she think she was paying for?
“Why didn’t Jerry tell me? It’s not as if he didn’t have an opportunity. Now I think I lived all those years with a stranger.”
“Everyone has some secrets. It doesn’t necessarily make them strangers.”
She hesitated. “When Thomas came to see me, he looked just like Jerry did when he was younger,” she said. “He’d never seen his father. As we talked, there was an instant rapport between us. But then, he disappeared again. I don’t know why.”
“He’ll come back.” So this was what she was seeking to know this time, he thought. He looked down at the tape machine to make sure it was recording.
“How do you know? You must have some idea.”
Would I Lie to You Page 7
