Cool Water

by Dianne Warren

  Not something he wants to think about, Mrs. Bulin’s behind, and neither does he want to think about her in his house, collecting information, sniffing for mould in the fridge, running her finger over surfaces to check for dust. He’ll have to hose the sweaty horse down later, he thinks, after Mrs. Bulin is gone, which won’t be long if he can help it. He leads the horse into the pen, and the horse pulls toward the water bucket. Lee removes the saddle and bridle and turns him loose. The horse takes a long drink and then goes looking for a good spot to roll. He snorts and paws at the dust in a few different spots, then drops to the ground and stretches and rolls the full length of one side of his body, flips himself over and does the same on the other side. He stands and shakes, dirt now coated to his hide. Even his head is covered in black dirt. He looks like a chimney sweep, Lee thinks, tossing a substantial forkload of hay over the top rail. Then he takes the saddle and bridle and drops them just inside the barn door, saving the cleaning for later. The pad is wet with sweat and he hangs it over a stall divider to dry.

  When Lee gets back to the house he finds Mrs. Bulin sitting on a kitchen chair. She’s staring at the stack of mail on the sideboard, her stock-in-trade. She’s distracted, uncomfortable. She fidgets in her chair. She doesn’t look as though she’s been snooping around, which surprises Lee. He thought for sure he’d find her with her nose in a cup-board. He takes old George’s hat off and lays it on the counter.

  “I’ll make tea,” Lee says. “Unless you’d like something else.” Although he doesn’t have much else. He’s saving the beer in the fridge for himself.

  “Tea would be fine,” she says. “Lovely.”

  As Lee puts the kettle on, she says, “That’s quite a sunburn you’ve got. You should use sunscreen. Robert Redford looks like an old leather boot now. He used to be so good-looking.”

  Lee can feel the sunburn on his face and the back of his neck, he doesn’t need Mrs. Bulin to point it out. He gets a couple of clean mugs out of the cupboard and puts them on the table.

  “That cowboy movie,” Mrs. Bulin says. “I saw it at the drive-in, a long time ago. I guess he’s still good-looking for his age, when you think about it.”

  Lee has no idea what movie she’s talking about. She looks down at her hands and grows silent—Mrs. Bulin, silent— and Lee wonders with a touch of alarm, What could it be, the reason she drove out here?

  Then she says, “It’s about Astrid. You know I see things, don’t you. At the post office.”

  Lee nods.

  “I see people every day, I see what comes in the mail. I get blamed for spreading rumours, Lee, but I can keep secrets. I’m actually very good at keeping secrets.” She stops.

  Lee doesn’t prompt. He’s standing by the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  “This has been bothering me,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “I believe Astrid thought of me as a friend. We shared a secret, just the two of us, although we never spoke about it, not once.”

  And then Lee knows. He knows that whatever Mrs. Bulin has to say, it will be about his mother. Not Astrid, but his real mother. He places one hand on the porcelain stovetop, but it’s hot from the burner and so he removes it again. Sticks it casually in his back pocket.

  “Go on,” he says.

  “Near the end, I visited Astrid in the hospital, and she kept talking about work she had to do. Baking. Ironing. Laundry piled on the clothes dryer. I kept saying to her, ‘It’s fine, Astrid. You don’t need to worry about that. It’s all taken care of.’” Mrs. Bulin looks at Lee. “Is it all right, me telling you this?”

  Lee nods. He doesn’t know if it’s all right or not. His mind is all over the place with questions about what Mrs. Bulin might know. Mrs. Bulin, of all people.

  “Even though Astrid was in a fog,” Mrs. Bulin continues, “she knew she wasn’t going home again, and so she asked me if I would come here, to the farm, and at first I thought she wanted me to come and do chores. By this time, with the drugs and such, I didn’t think it mattered who she was talking to—me, a nurse, a neighbour—but then I realized she wasn’t talking about chores, and she knew it was me by her bed. There was something she wanted done, and it had to be me.” She looks at Lee, who is now watching her carefully, waiting, his heart skipping beats, or maybe it only seems to be. “She asked me to come out here and find a box in her closet. An old candy box.”

  A candy box. Lee thinks about the closet, the one in Astrid’s bedroom, the same closet that holds the blue velvet watch box. He can see the candy box, knows exactly where it is.

  “I was supposed to find it and burn it,” Mrs. Bulin says, “and she was so insistent and upset that finally I told her I had already done as she asked. I said I’d found the box and burned it, and she relaxed then. Settled right down. Only I was lying, of course.”

  She looks at Lee. “So that’s it. And now it’s been bothering me, the same way it bothered her. That I didn’t do it when I said I did. I thought about coming out here when you weren’t home and finding it, but I couldn’t do that. So then I decided to just tell you. And when I got here tonight and you weren’t home I thought again about what she’d asked me to do and how I could still make good on my promise, but that just didn’t seem right. I suppose I decided the candy box was something you should know about.”

  The kettle is boiling. Lee looks for the teapot but it’s not on the counter where Astrid used to keep it. He doesn’t usually make a pot of tea for himself, just puts a tea bag in a mug. His eye lands once again on the silver tea service and he hears Astrid’s voice, For company, use the silver tea service, and so he does. He takes the pot out of the oak cabinet and rinses it out at the sink, and then drops a tea bag in. Even though the pot is tarnished. He carries it to the table and places it in the middle.

  “Do you have any idea what’s in this box?” Mrs. Bulin asks.

  “No,” Lee says. He imagines things: photographs, adoption papers, mailing addresses and telephone numbers. “Do you?”

  “I believe I do,” she says. “But I’ll leave this with you now. I’ve done what I thought I should. I hope I did the right thing.” She stands up from her chair. “Thanks for the offer of tea but I think you’ll need time to yourself.”

  Lee doesn’t know what to say. He feels neither gratitude nor animosity toward Mrs. Bulin, just that she has been a messenger, delivering an old package that he suspected was out there somewhere in the world but would never arrive in his hands.

  She stands but seems not quite ready to go. She says, again, “It still bothers me that I told Astrid a lie, but I was trying to make things easy for her. ‘Don’t you fuss, Astrid,’ I said. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I baked bread and I did the ironing. I cooked Lee a big pot of stew and I put that box you’re worried about in the burning barrel and lit a match to it. So everything’s been taken care of.’ That’s what I said to her.”

  She’s still looking at him, waiting. Lee thinks he’s no better at this than Lester was. Talking. Alleviating guilt, his own or anyone else’s. He says, “You can make me that stew anytime you want.”

  Mrs. Bulin says, “You don’t know what you’re asking. I can’t make a good stew for love nor money.” It’s left hanging, whether or not that part of the lie will be annulled.

  After Mrs. Bulin leaves, Lee pushes his chair from the table and climbs the stairs to Astrid and Lester’s bedroom. As he stands in front of the closet door, he thinks of the candy box as a gift that you get to open at a designated time. He doesn’t know if this is the time or not. He feels a strange sense of euphoria, like he did out in the sand, in the hot sun. Whatever is in the box, he decides, he has to know, and he opens the closet door.

  And there it is, where he knew it would be, under a neat little pile of pillowcases, the special ones with the crocheted edges. The box is an ordinary old chocolate box, the kind Astrid used to save for storing odds and ends before she discovered snap-top plastic containers. It cries out with secrecy, the way it’s plac
ed underneath the linens. Why had he not realized before? Lee’s heart begins to beat faster again as he lifts the pillowcases, sets them aside and then reaches for the box.

  It contains a half-dozen or so postcards wrapped in an elastic band. Lee removes the postcards and then sets the box back on the shelf. The ancient elastic band crumbles and the cards, seven of them, fall open in his hands. He sees that they all have the same photo on the front—an old three-storey building with some kind of ivy clinging to the red bricks, a sign over the doorway reading kelsey hotel. When he examines the printed caption on the back, he learns that the hotel is in Winnipeg. The postmarks are over twenty years old, dating from the time of his childhood. Lee knows without reading a word that the messages, neatly written and never signed, are from his mother.

  He carries the cards to Astrid and Lester’s bed, his heart beating wildly now, and sits down and tries to read the messages even though his vision is blurred. He tries to stay cool. None of this really matters now, he tells himself, he’s simply curious. He can’t focus, but he keeps trying, and gradually he’s able to read and translate the writing into words. The first card contains eight lines of the children’s verse “Pease Porridge Hot,” which he knows by heart. He goes through the cards and sees they each contain a verse. “Ladybird, Ladybird,” he knows that one too. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” “Ride a Cock Horse.” “Old King Cole.” “The Owl and the Pussycat.” And, finally, “The North Wind Doth Blow.” Six or eight lines of verse, no signature. He recognizes them all, every verse, from Astrid’s bedtime recitations. He shuffles the cards and reads them again, savouring the familiar words.

  Lee looks at his hands and can’t believe how they’re shaking. He becomes conscious of his breathing, too conscious, and it seems that he’s getting it wrong as he tries to breathe properly, too shallow, too deep. How, he wonders, can you get breathing wrong, something that you’ve done without thinking all your life? He feels dizzy and lies back on the bed. The cards are on his chest, too heavy, much heavier than seven postcards should be, and he swipes them off, sends them flying to the floor. He tells himself to breathe, the same way he told Shiloh Dolson to breathe when he got bucked off the horse, he can hear his own voice, breathe, breathe, and he manages to get himself calmed down and the weight lifts off his chest and he’s able to sit up and think again. He pieces together the journey that took the postcards from his mother’s hand to Astrid’s closet, at the same time thinking, For a few minutes there I was almost dead. He wonders if that’s what Shiloh thought once he got his breath back.

  Lee picks up the cards and this time he sorts them according to the dates on the postmarks and reads them carefully once more, in the order they arrived. It’s as though Astrid and his mother are in the room with him, Astrid’s voice, his mother’s hand. His mother had sent the cards hoping that Astrid would read them aloud and there would be some kind of connection among the three of them. And Astrid had complied. Although she hadn’t read the cards aloud or showed them to Lee, she’d recited the verses, all seven, over and over again at countless bedtimes, until Lee outgrew them and lost interest.

  No sooner has Lee pieced this together than the anger comes, unbelievable anger, at a woman who wanted to disappear but not completely, who would take the time to write a postcard but not to actually show up. Anger on Astrid’s behalf, because these cards arriving in the mail must have frightened her, tormented her with the possibility that Lee’s mother would show up and perhaps take Lee away. And then anger at Astrid for keeping the cards a secret, and anger at himself for being angry with a woman who had loved him like her own. Thoughts of the post office and Mrs. Bulin, the worry that she must have caused Astrid—who almost always got the mail, rarely Lester—because anyone will read the back of a postcard, and especially Mrs. Bulin, who took the term public mail literally. What looks had been exchanged between Astrid and Mrs. Bulin over the postcards, and had Mrs. Bulin really kept the secret the way she’d claimed? She’d lied to Astrid on her deathbed. How could she be trusted? Instantly, Lee is sure that everyone knew about the cards, everyone but him, and he tosses them to the floor again like a child having a tantrum.

  Immediately sorry. The cards are precious. He picks them up carefully, one by one, thinking, Winnipeg. So his mother wasn’t in California, or Norway. Winnipeg is not very far away at all, she might still be there, people live in the same place for twenty years, lots of people, most people. He could go there. He could find this Kelsey Hotel. Someone, an old front-desk clerk perhaps, might remember her, might remember a woman writing nursery rhymes on postcards and dropping them in the hotel mail. Or maybe she is the front-desk clerk, maybe she was an employee at the hotel and still is, that’s possible too.

  But why? Why would he want to go there and try to find her, for what purpose? A woman who abandoned him in the same way that Cracker’s previous owner left him on the side of the road and drove away heartlessly, or perhaps not heartlessly, but drove away all the same. What good can possibly come of knowing? Lee asks himself as he turns the postcards over in his hands, looking at the picture of the hotel, examining the neat handwriting, the blue ink, the missing signatures.

  As Lee sits on the edge of Astrid and Lester’s bed flipping through the cards again and again, he thinks about Astrid sitting in this same room, thinking the same tangled thoughts and feeling the same confusion as the postcards arrived, one after another, with no clue as to the sender’s intentions. She must have agonized about what to tell Lee, whether to tell him at all. Perhaps she hadn’t told even Lester and had wondered, as Lee just did, What good can possibly come of knowing? And when the cards stopped coming she’d put them in the candy box and hidden them in the closet, and left the decision about what to do with them until later. And then she’d forgotten about them until she was on her deathbed and she remembered the cards in a fog of thinking about chores and responsibilities, and that’s when she’d asked Mrs. Bulin to take care of the box so that Lee wouldn’t find it and blame her for keeping the secret.

  Which he would never do, blame Astrid for anything, the way she had cared for him so unconditionally, loving mother, just as her headstone described her.

  He puts the postcards back in the box, and then returns them to their place in the closet, under the pillowcases. He thinks of Astrid again, thinks about the trouble she must have felt as she added each new postcard to the others and wrapped them all up with an elastic band. Her fear that Lee’s mother—whoever she was—would someday take back the child she’d left in the porch, the one Astrid had mistaken for a tomcat. How his life could have been different.

  He can’t imagine any other life. He doesn’t want to. He wants only to be Lee Torgeson. He wants only to be here. Before he closes the closet door he runs his hand over the blue velvet box on the shelf above. The watch box. Together, the two boxes remind Lee of secrets, one he kept, and one that was kept from him. They seem, in a way that makes no real sense, to cancel each other out. He picks up the watch box, opens it and stares at the satiny lining. It was the worst thing he’d ever done in childhood, breaking the watch and throwing it in the sand and then lying about it. He takes the old watch he found on the trail out of his pocket and puts it in the box. Then he closes the lid and returns it to the closet shelf.

  He goes back downstairs, hesitates briefly, and then calls Directory Assistance. Even though he knows it’s too late and nothing will come of it. His heart beats normally. The operator tells him there’s no listing for the Kelsey Hotel but there’s a listing for the Kelsey Care Centre with the same address as the one on the postcards. Lee calls, and the person who answers tells him that the care centre is, in fact, on the site of the old hotel. The hotel itself was torn down fifteen years earlier.

  So that’s it, Lee thinks. The trail ends.

  Lee is suddenly so tired that all he can think about is his bed. The horse will have to wait until tomorrow for his bath. He goes outside to fill Cracker’s dish with kibble, and when he steps back into th
e porch his eye lands on the spot where Astrid found the laundry basket all those years ago, and he stares at it, but only for a second or two.

  He doesn’t bother with a bath for himself either, he’s too tired, but when he goes to bed his mind won’t stop working. It’s still not completely dark outside, and even with the curtains drawn there’s too much light in the room. When he closes his eyes he sees miles and miles of yellow sand passing beneath him, and old postcards scattering like a deck of cards. The dog barks and the sound seems to be coming from under his bed. Lee hears the cattle, the coyotes, every sound intensified, right in the room with him. His body aches and his saddle sores burn. He can’t get comfortable.

  For the second night in a row, he gives up on sleep and goes downstairs to the kitchen, and is faced once again with Astrid’s tarnished teapot. The word samovar pops into his head, the image of a teapot in the sand, and the caption The Persian samovar, whether simple or elaborate, is an essential item of hospitality and hot tea is enjoyed no matter how temporary a desert encampment might be. He resolves to clean Astrid’s tea service, take care of it, and in doing so, make it his. Surely he can figure out how to do this. He roots through the bottles of cleaning products in the cupboard under the sink, and he actually finds a jar that claims to be silver polish. He reads the instructions and goes to work.

  Subtopia

  “I broke my arm, Daddy,” Daisy says from the couch as Blaine and Shiloh come through the door.

  Shiloh is in front, and then Blaine, carrying the rifle. It’s past the children’s bedtime, that of the youngest ones at least, but Vicki has let them stay up for her own sake, frantic as she was about her absent husband and son. The house smells of Pizza Pops.

  “Where did you find him?” Vicki asks Blaine. “He’s been gone all day.”

  “Walking home,” is all Blaine says.

  Shiloh immediately goes downstairs to his room, and within minutes his CD player is blasting. Blaine leans the rifle against the wall and sits at the dining room table, the one that belonged to his mother, without saying anything more to Vicki, without acknowledging Daisy and her cast.