After the Fire

by Jane Rule

  She lowered the ramp. The first car off the boat, instead of proceeding along the dock, stopped where she stood.

  “Hey, Karen!”

  There were Sally and Sarah, two friends of Peggy’s who hadn’t been paired a year ago when Karen had left Vancouver.

  “You’ll have to move along,” Karen said, frantically gesturing.

  “Sure, but we want to see you.”

  “Pull off up there on the road by the big map,” Karen instructed.

  The driver of the car behind them honked impatiently and glared at Karen as he passed. No islander would ever do that, Karen reassured herself with her now firmly in place island prejudice against tourists. No islander would stop like that with a ferry attendant either, except in an emergency. What on earth were Sally and Sarah doing on this island in the middle of winter?

  Karen saw the few cars onto the ferry and walked reluctantly back up the ramp.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “We brought our sleeping bags. We thought maybe we could crash with you,” Sally said, arching her ample eyebrows.

  “I don’t have much room,” Karen said doubtfully, “and I have to work at the pub tonight.”

  “Great!” Sally said. “We can go to the pub.”

  “It’s not really your sort of pub,” Karen warned them.

  “All the better. Local color,” Sarah said.

  So they followed Karen back to work where she settled them at a small corner table, out of the main traffic. Karen was glad it was an unusually busy evening. She didn’t want to seem to ignore them, but she didn’t want to encourage their familiarity with all the island watching. Fear had dried her mouth and dampened her shirt. Among the locals, Sally and Sarah called no particular attention to themselves in their jeans and hiking boots. But, if they began to behave as if they were on home turf, Karen couldn’t imagine what might happen.

  “Hey, what about introducing us to your friends?” Adam asked with the same light in his eye as Karen put down his pint of beer.

  “They’re … a … sure,” Karen said.

  Sally and Sarah watched with open amusement as Karen tried to cover her embarrassment with off-handed introductions. Fortunately their table was too small for Adam and Riley to sit down, and the men lacked the immediate confidence with city women to suggest that Sally and Sarah join them.

  Karen could decline for them the drinks various young men offered to buy, but, as the evening progressed, they had to decline offers to dance themselves. They were finally talked into a game of darts and were inexperienced enough to seem acceptable.

  “If they’re staying with you,” Adam suggested, “why don’t we take a couple of cases to your place?”

  “This is all the party I can handle tonight, Adam,” Karen said. “I’ve been working, remember?”

  Reluctantly the men turned away.

  “I can’t believe this,” Sarah said, getting into the car. “I haven’t had to beat off the troops since high school!”

  Back at her cottage, Karen was surprised and oddly gratified by their expressions of approval. She had almost forgotten her own first delight in the place with its homely, comfortable furniture, its shelves of books, driftwood, and sea shells, its large stone fireplace. Now, though it was late, she built a fire as if it were her habit, and she remembered that the couch made into a bed for which there were sheets and blankets.

  “No wonder you haven’t told anyone about this!” Sarah said. “You’d have all of Vancouver over here every weekend.”

  “And that’s the water right out there,” Sally said, peering through the night-darkened window.

  “I couldn’t believe it when you were just standing there in your ferry uniform,” Sarah said. “This is so un-you.”

  “Why do you say that?” Karen said.

  “I didn’t think you’d ever wear trousers. And two jobs? Peggy won’t believe it. It would be easier for her to believe you were shacked up with one of those guys at the pub.”

  Karen turned away as if distracted by some domestic concern to avoid exposing her consternation.

  “Oh, Sarah,” Sally said, “you make it sound as if we’re on a spying mission for Peggy.”

  “I know you’re not,” Karen said quietly. “If she were at all curious, she’d come to see for herself.”

  “Are there any women on the island?” Sally asked.

  “Oh sure,” Karen answered casually.

  “There didn’t seem to be all that many at the pub,” Sarah said. “I mean, where’s your social life?”

  “That’s the social life here. And fire practice and the ferries. You can’t expect it to be like the city.”

  “How often do you come to Vancouver?” Sally asked. “We couldn’t find anyone who had seen you.”

  “I don’t go,” Karen admitted. “When I need something in town, I go to Victoria.”

  “Are we as bad as all that?” Sally asked gently.

  “No,” Karen said. “It was just that I realized you were all Peggy’s friends.”

  “Only because you always took such a back seat,” Sarah protested. “Nobody could really get to know you.”

  “Well, Peggy couldn’t stand any competition, could she?” Sally asked.

  Karen felt the faint tug of that old requirement to defend Peggy against the charge of egocentricity which, if it had some justice in it, was usually prompted by jealousy of Peggy’s good looks, money, and charm. It was no longer necessary for Karen to display that steady loyalty. If she hadn’t learned to live alone, she had learned to live without Peggy.

  Reluctant as she was to have these two in her house, prying at the edge of her loneliness, what they had just revealed to her gave her new confidence. Then, as she lay in her own bed, listening to the quiet sounds of their lovemaking punctuated by the popping and collapsing fire, she felt her defenses burning away like her very skin. Even here in her own house, she was alone in the cold and dark while two people she hardly knew usurped the center.

  Milly also lay alone in the dawn-resisting night. She was bleeding great clots of blood as she did every month now. The human body didn’t manage its seasons as prettily as some dying trees. In their final season they bloom extravagantly to throw one final mighty shower of seeds before they stand shorn of life and yet newly useful to the crows, ravens and eagles perched on their bare branches to survey the scene below.

  Sometimes Milly speculated about being born into an earlier time when she would have gone on having children, so many of them that she would not have had the time or mind to be disappointed in them individually. At least her body would have felt useful. So briefly in the whole span of life had it been an object of desire and an ornament of power, so briefly even childbearing for all these bleeding years.

  “Tumors,” the doctor had told her. “Fibroid tumors, not malignant, but they should come out.”

  A hysterectomy. She was to be delivered of her sex. Why did she mind? Why did she keep putting it off? Milly wanted something in her life to end naturally. Nothing did. You didn’t even any longer see in an obituary “of natural causes.” Either the cause was not mentioned or it was cautionary, “of lung cancer,” “of heart disease,” “of AIDS.” So it was redundant to think of coming to a bad end. Everything, everyone did.

  It wasn’t sex Milly missed or even human company. Her humiliations were easier to bear unobserved, and without interference she was imaginatively self-indulgent. The terrible loss for Milly was her power to attract because in her day she had been able to stop a man in his tracks, turn him round ten times and head him off in any direction she pleased. What were any of the trophies of that power—the jewels, the fur coats, the expensive holidays—compared to the power itself?

  Milly hadn’t been a beauty. She had seen how beauty could age and still charm. Henrietta would go on managing that to her last days. Milly had never been charming. She had simply been a woman men had wanted and wanted badly. Well, some men, and perhaps those weren’t the ki
nd to marry.

  Forbes hadn’t lied to her. For years he really hadn’t been able to live without her. Then he could—only because he couldn’t live without another woman. Milly could always have lived without him, but not in the comfort she enjoyed and he provided. Even at the beginning—and how could one help feeling it?—there had been a small measure of contempt in her affection for Forbes. Passionate men are as dependent as small children. But she’d never mocked him with it, nor had she taunted him about his thinning hair and bulging stomach. His own power didn’t lie in his aging body but in his pocketbook. Milly had always had a healthy regard for that until it provided her with no more than subsistence in this summer shack well out of the way of the life Forbes continued to lead.

  Milly struggled out of bed and walked carefully to the bathroom. So much in the habit of the experience, she was still shocked at the amount of blood. She was terrified of making a mess, sure she would be blamed for some obscure crime she couldn’t deny, for they would have the body, hers. She sat on the toilet weak and weeping.

  She mustn’t put it off any longer, but she couldn’t go through it alone. She’d long since given up hope that anything could bring Forbes back to her, concerned and contrite. She would have to ask her daughter to come from Toronto to be with her, just through the operation and the first few days. Once Milly came back to the island, there was plenty of help.

  As she settled herself back in bed, she looked at the clock: 5:00 a.m. If she phoned Bonnie now, Milly could catch her before she went to work.

  “Oh, Mother, what are you doing up at this hour?” Bonnie asked, concern and annoyance in her voice.

  As Milly described her circumstance, she was aware of melodramatizing it. She didn’t, for instance, make it clear that the tumors were benign.

  “But shouldn’t it be done at once?” Bonnie asked. “Isn’t it dangerous to wait?”

  “I just couldn’t face it alone,” Milly said.

  “Well, no, of course not. You don’t mind if I discuss this with Daddy, do you? He should help—financially anyway.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” Milly said, as she heard the quality of sound change and knew, even at this hour, there were listeners who would spread the news of her distress from one end of the island to the other.

  “Mother, I’m really sorry. It does seem rotten luck.”

  “That’s the only kind there is,” Milly said, but her gloom was gone.

  For the first time Bonnie had agreed to something without protest, without excuse, without trying to modify the request out of all usefulness. All the moral suasion, needy pleading and even anger Bonnie had been able to ignore before, but not this … this mortal power. At forty-five Milly was too young to use it often, but this operation would give her a chance to test a new hold she might have on her children if she used it skillfully.

  Milly resisted the temptation to phone her son and say, “I may be dying.” But the time would come when she would be as irresistible to her children as she had been to their father. She would not even have to make any effort. She might not even recognize them. Like Henrietta faithful to her Hart, Milly’s children would come. Meanwhile, Bonnie was coming, and probably Forbes would pay her way.

  Chapter V

  KAREN WOKE TO THE smell of coffee brewing and did not know for a moment where she was or even who she was, a child again secure in the adult command of morning. How long ago could that have been? She hadn’t smelled coffee being made since her parents were together. Once her mother had left them, her father reverted to tea though he never drank anything but English Breakfast.

  How simply all signs of her timid little mother had been banished from their life and with what a sharp ache she returned to Karen now, not as a separate identity but as that part of Karen which had been so easily banished from Peggy’s life.

  The brewing coffee didn’t call her welcome; it tempted her instead to dress quickly and slip out the back way to go for coffee and a sweet roll at the store where she was expected if not overtly welcomed.

  Sally and Sarah would only suppose she was off to her ferry duties and make themselves the more at home. How easy, even mindless that was when there were two of you. Yet why should Karen let them drive her away without even knowing they had? It was, after all, her house, her coffee, and, if she didn’t join them, they’d soon be rummaging around in her meager supplies to find something to eat.

  “Good morning,” Sally said, standing in the doorway of the bedroom. “Could I bring you a cup of coffee?”

  “Oh, no thanks,” Karen said, running a nervous hand through her hair. “I’ll be out in a minute. There’s bread in the freezer for toast, but I’m afraid there isn’t much else …”

  “We brought our own,” Sally said. “I’m about to cook some bacon.”

  It was a relief that she wouldn’t have to suggest a public breakfast. Though they’d been perfectly well behaved at the pub last night, Karen didn’t want to push that luck.

  As she dressed, the smell of bacon was a simple pleasure. The fact that Sally, whom Karen liked a good deal more than she did Sarah, had brought it and was cooking it made Karen feel less invaded and taken advantage of.

  “This is such a neat little place!” Sally exclaimed as she dished up breakfast for the three of them. “Do you have to work today?”

  “Only at the pub tonight.”

  “One night of that is about all I can take,” Sarah said.

  “Imagine: Saturday night by the fire,” Sally said.

  Karen had not only imagined it but suffered through it until she had learned to escape into work.

  “Well, for the novelty of it,” Sarah said tentatively.

  Sarah was very easily bored, but she managed to make that trait an asset, hanging it around her neck like an invitation or a challenge. Not many women had been able to resist taking Sarah up on it for a night or a month or a year. Nobody lasted longer than that, not because Sarah turned them out but because they finally ran out of ideas and energy.

  Since Karen had neither the confidence nor the ambition to distract or entertain, Sarah’s charm was lost on her. Sally’s hearty good nature and natural hopefulness, in other circumstances, would have touched Karen, but she was wary of anyone so willing to waste her talents on patently incurable lethargy, like deciding to devote your life to curing the common cold. It would be kinder to the community at large if a Sarah and a Karen could be permanently paired, Karen thought ruefully, locking the bored and the boring away together out of harm’s way.

  “Could you maybe tell us some of the places we ought to see?” Sally asked.

  “If you’re not working,” Sarah suggested, “why don’t you show us around?”

  “I guess I could,” Karen said. “At least it isn’t raining.”

  In fact the sun that morning held the promise of spring, though the wind off the water was sharp as they set off on the beach walk Karen had proposed as the most scenic way to reach a small shore park where a bit of gorse was always in bloom. It was also the way least likely for them to meet other islanders at this time of year, for they inclined to turn their backs on the sea until it was time to gather seaweed for their gardens and get their boats ready to put back into the water.

  “I’ve always heard about the Gulf Islands,” Sally said, “but this is the first time I’ve ever been on one.”

  “You’re such a ski fanatic,” Sarah said, “you forget there are things to do on your own two feet.”

  “What made you decide to come here?” Sally asked Karen.

  Karen shrugged.

  “Peggy said she thought some of your people were from around here,” Sarah said.

  Not family but people; Peggy would have put it that way. She had tried very hard to make Karen exotic, worthy of her taste.

  “I just like it here,” Karen said. “That’s all.”

  Sarah skidded on a mossy rock, and Sally offered a steadying hand which Sarah then kept in hers. There was nothing really scandalous about two
young women holding hands as they walked along the shore, but it made Karen uneasy. The only house they crossed in front of belonged to Henrietta Hawkins, a woman unlikely to jump to conclusions, but Karen cared about Henrietta’s good opinion. Why didn’t Sally and Sarah understand that this holiday territory for them was now home to Karen? She didn’t want it polluted with innuendoes about herself. Surely one of the few rewards of living alone should be the end of defensive secrecy.

  “What’s the hurry?” Sarah called.

  Karen had put a hundred yards between herself and them by the time she was scrambling over the rocks on the beach below Henrietta’s house, and she kept right on going, pretending to be deafened by the wind. When she reached the sloping rock shore of the park, she climbed up to a bench where she could sit and wait for them.

  Out across the strait, Mount Baker glinted in the sun like a huge helping of ice cream.

  “Well, I’m glad there’s some place to sit down!” Sarah said, collapsing next to Karen.

  A black puppy with large feet appeared on the grass verge above them and began to bark. When Sally laughed at it and clapped her hands, it came skidding down the rock, tail wagging. Just as it reached Sally and rolled over on its back, Red appeared above them, calling, “Blackie! Blackie!” But the pup was far too enamored of its new friend to pay any attention. Red shrugged and came down slowly over the slippery surface.

  “I didn’t know you had a puppy, Red,” Karen called to her.

  “Only got her yesterday,” Red said.

  “These are friends of mine from town, Sally and Sarah.”

  Red nodded to them and turned back to Karen. “You wouldn’t know anything about training a dog, would you?”

  Karen, who had never had pets, suddenly wished she did know something about them. She had to shake her head.

  “I know a bit,” Sally said, as she played tug-of-war over a piece of bark with Blackie. “She’s still too young to learn much.”