by Gail Bowen
When I opened my eyes, I was back forty years in the brick house Sally and Nina and Desmond Love had lived in on Russell Hill Road in Toronto. On Nina’s night table, faces carefully painted into expressions of gentility, were those emblems of nineteenth-century womanhood, Meg, Jo, Amy, Beth, and Marmee from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. An American dollmaker had produced the dolls in the late 1940s. The woman’s name was Madame Alexander, and the dolls had become famous. Nina had gone to New York especially to buy a set for Sally’s fifth birthday.
“I see you replaced Amy,” I said.
“Yes,” said Nina, straightening the ribbon on the Marmee doll’s hair.
A memory. A room full of little girls in party dresses and patent leather shoes, clustered around the dolls, watching. And Nina with that same gesture. “You see, this is Marmee, the mother doll. She’s a mother like me, and these are her girls. This one with the brown eyes and the strawberry blond hair is Meg. She’s the oldest, and this one with the brown hair and the plaid rickrack on her petticoat is Jo – she likes to read, like our Jo does, and this is Amy, she’s Marmee’s little artist, like you, Sally, and she has beautiful blond hair just like …”
But Sally wasn’t listening any more. Her face dark with fury, she grabbed the Amy doll by the ankles and smashed her china face against the edge of the table. Her voice had been shrill with hysteria. “She is not me. I am my own Sally Love,” and she’d hurtled blindly past all her birthday guests and out of the room.
In this room, now, Nina was talking. “Yes. I replaced her, and she cost a small fortune, but Taylor’s worth it. She’s such a bright little girl, and she’s like you were, Jo; she wants to learn. It’s fun to do things for her. She’s going to grow up to be a beautiful and gracious woman.”
“Like her grandmother,” I said.
Nina’s face shone with happiness. “Thank you, Jo. That means a lot. Everyone needs to feel valued. I haven’t had enough of that feeling lately.” She shrugged. “But no self-pity. It’s Christmas. And I have wonderful things to look forward to in the new year.” She took both my hands in hers. “Come on, let’s sit down for a minute. I have some news.”
We sat down facing one another on the edge of her bed. I could smell the light flowery scent of her perfume. Always the same perfume – Joy. “A woman’s perfume is her signature, Jo.” That’s what she’d told me. The glow from the lamp on the night table enclosed us in a pool of yellow light, shutting out the darkness.
“Stuart’s asked me to move here permanently,” she said. “When I came, we’d agreed to try the arrangement until Sally came to her senses, but I think we all know that’s not going to happen. Stuart thinks Taylor needs a mother or at least someone to take the place of a mother in her life. Jo, it took me three seconds to give him my answer. I’ve put my house in Toronto on the market. It looks as if you and Stuart are stuck with me.”
I felt my heart sink. “That’s great news,” I said weakly.
Puzzled, Nina looked at me. “I thought you’d be thrilled, Jo. I know I was, at the thought that after all these years, you and I’d be in the same city again, able to pick up the phone and meet for lunch or tea or go for a walk.”
“I am thrilled,” I said. “One of the best Christmas gifts I could have would be having you here permanently. It’s just … has anyone thought about what Sally might want in all of this?”
“Sally always thinks enough about Sally for all of us,” Nina said sharply. “Damn it, Jo, she made her decision when she walked out on Stuart and Taylor. She didn’t go alone you know. She went with a student of hers, a boy of seventeen. It didn’t last, of course. Do you know the joke that went around the gallery? ‘Someone told Sally Love it was time she thought about having another child. So she went out and had herself a seventeen-year-old boy.’ You should have seen Stuart’s face the first time he heard that. He came home looking like a whipped dog. No, Jo, we haven’t given much thought to Sally in all this, or perhaps I can put it more acceptably, we’ve given her about as much thought as she gave us.” Her face, usually so expressive, was a mask.
I reached out to embrace her, and she turned away. “Nina, don’t,” I said. “Don’t be angry at me.”
She took my hands in hers again. “I could never be angry at you, Jo.”
“And don’t be angry at Sally. She wants what’s best for Taylor, too. And she has her own worries right now. Did you hear her gallery burned down last night?”
“Of course. It was all over this evening’s paper. Stu thinks it must have been some sort of retaliation for Erotobiography. Sally’s always chosen to live on the edge, Jo. And if you live on the edge, you have to accept consequences. I’m just glad she’s out of this house. It wouldn’t have been much of a Christmas for Taylor being stalked by a lunatic.” She stood up and smoothed her hair. “I don’t want to talk about this any more. Come on, let’s go downstairs. We have one last Christmas Eve surprise.”
We came back to a scene of perfect holiday harmony. The boys and Stu were sprawled on the floor in front of the fireplace looking at baseball cards, and Mieka and Taylor were sitting side by side at the coffee table, drawing butterflies.
It was Nina who broke the spell.
“All right, Taylor,” she said. “Time to come into the dining room for the big moment.”
“The next event calls for champagne,” Stuart said, filling five glasses and splashing two more. “Now you Kilbourns stand right there in front of the French doors, and I’ll go back into the dining room and let you know when we’re ready.”
The kids and I stood obediently, with that self-conscious air of celebration that comes when you’re holding a glass of champagne. Someone turned off the lights; the doors to the dining room were flung open, and we were confronted with the extravagance of the Lachlan family Christmas tree.
It was a plantation pine, full and ceiling high; its fragrant, soft needles had the fresh green of new growth, but everything else was pink. There were dozens of dusty pink velvet bows tied to the branches, and each of them held a shining pink globe. And there were candles, pink, lit candles that sputtered a fatal hairbreadth away from pine needles, and there were pink roses, real ones suspended from the pine branches in tiny vials of water that glistened in the candlelight. Beside the tree, Stu and Nina and Taylor stood, hands linked. “We wish you a merry Christmas,” they sang in their thin, unprofessional voices, and I felt a sense of dread so knife-sharp it sent the room spinning.
“Steady,” Peter said, and I felt his arm around my shoulder. The moment passed, and in seconds, we were all drinking champagne and exclaiming over the tree.
Twenty minutes later, Taylor’s stocking hung with care and the last holiday embraces exchanged, the children and I were walking along the river bank toward the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The church was packed, and we had to sit on a bench at the back. Beside us Mary, Joseph and a real baby sat waiting for their cue. I knew the girl playing Mary. She had borrowed our tape recorder at the beginning of school and gone out to the dump to do a project on all the reusable things people throw out. The local TV station had heard about it, and I’d seen her on the evening news, standing on a mountain of garbage, swatting at flies and telling us that time was running out for the environment. A real firebrand. At the front of the church a boy in a white surplice and Reeboks started to sing “Once in Royal David’s City” and Mary stood up, adjusted her baby, shook Joseph’s comforting arm off her shoulder and strode up the centre aisle. A Mary for our times.
It was a good service. Hilda McCourt had been right about the beauty of Charpentier’s “Midnight Mass” for Christmas, and as we left St. John the Divine’s, I felt happy and at peace. The anxiety that had been gnawing at me since Nina told me about her plans to move to Saskatoon was gone. That night when, stockings filled and breakfast table set, I finally crawled into bed, I fell into an easy sleep.
But not an untroubled one. Sometime in that night I dreamed a terrible dream. I was in Stuart Lachla
n’s house, and Sally was there with me. There was a Christmas tree with candles, and Sally was lighting them, very carelessly thrusting a lighted taper in among the branches. I kept pleading with her to be careful, but she just laughed and said, “It’s not my problem.” With the terrible inevitability of a dream, the tree caught fire, and as I looked through the burning branches, I could see Nina’s face. My legs were leaden, but finally, blinded by smoke, I pushed through the fire to get to her. Then we were outside somewhere and I was holding Nina, but it was dark and I was frantic because I couldn’t see if she was all right. Finally, I put her down in the snow, crouched beside her and lit a match. But the face on the woman in the snow wasn’t Nina’s. It was Sally’s. Her clothes had burned away, and her wonderful blond hair was just a charred frizz around her face, but her open eyes were still bright with defiance. And that was a strange thing because I knew she was dead.
CHAPTER
5
When I opened my eyes Christmas morning, the porcelain doll Sally had given me was on my nightstand looking back at me. I must have left it there when I’d gone to wash my hair after I got back from womanswork. That morning as I looked into the doll’s bright, unseeing eyes, it seemed as if my dream of fire and death had been carried over into the waking world, and I was uneasy. But after I’d showered and dressed, I felt better. It had, after all, been only a dream.
When I went downstairs, the kids were sitting in the living room trying to be cool about the fact that there were presents under the tree and it was Christmas morning. As soon as he saw me, Angus called out the name on the first present, and in the usual amazingly short time, the room was filled with empty boxes and wrapping paper and ribbons and it was over for another year.
Around noon, I called Sally’s studio. There was no answer, and I felt edgy. But when Nina called early in the afternoon to wish us happiness, she said Sally was sitting in their living room, and I stopped worrying. We ate around five. Peter’s girlfriend, Christy, had spent the day with us, and when we came in from cleaning up the kitchen, the boys were already taking down the tree.
“Oh,” Christy said, “it seems so soon.”
“We’re leaving after breakfast tomorrow. There won’t be anybody here to look at it,” Peter said, and he began wrapping the lights around a cone of newspaper. “A woman on Good Morning, Canada showed how to do this,” he said. “It’s supposed to keep them from getting tangled.”
“I’ve certainly tangled enough in my time,” I said.
He smiled. “It’s because you don’t watch enough television.” Then he looked up. “It was a great Christmas wasn’t it, Christy?”
I looked at her standing in the doorway. She was wearing a Christmas sweatshirt under a pair of red overalls, and she was flushed with happiness. I expected her to answer him with her usual headlong rush of superlatives, but she looked at me and said simply, “It was the best Christmas I ever had,” and I could see why Peter was beginning to care so much for her.
“Pete,” I said, “be a good guy and show Christy and me how to make those paper cones. I hate it when you kids know more than I do.”
The next morning as we started for Greenwater everybody was in a rotten mood. Mieka and Greg had almost cancelled because Greg was coming down with a cold; Peter was angry because, at the last minute, Christy had decided to go to Minneapolis with friends instead of coming north with us. Angus was worrying about the dogs languishing at the vet’s, and I was worrying because everybody was so miserable. To top it all off, the weather had warmed up dramatically.
When I went out to the car for a last-minute check, Pete was clicking the new skis into the rooftop carrier.
“I wonder if we’re even going to need these,” he said gloomily.
I looked around. The sun was shining hard, and patches of snow on our front lawn were already fragile, melting, blue under white.
“Of course we’ll need them,” I said. “This is Saskatchewan. We’ll need skis, and before the week’s out, we’ll need raincoats, and we’ll probably even wish we’d brought our bathing suits along.” I ruffled his hair. “This is God’s country. Have a little faith, kid.”
He was just beginning to smile when Angus came barrelling through the front door saying Sally was on the phone.
As I went inside, I felt oddly relieved. I picked up the receiver.
“So,” I said, “how was your Christmas?”
“It was a real jingle bell,” she said. “How long have you got?”
“The kids are packing up the car. About five minutes.”
“Okay, in five minutes. First, I didn’t take your advice. Couldn’t wait to break the news to Stu that I wanted to take Taylor. I told him right after we ate. Lousy timing in that mausoleum with that tree straight out of decorator hell.” Her voice dropped. “Honestly, Jo, what did you think of that tree?”
“I thought it was a little excessive.”
On the other end of the phone, she mimicked my words. “ ‘A little excessive.’ Oh, yes, indeed. Anyway, I should have waited till Stu was alone because there was Nina giving him massive infusions of backbone and making subtle remarks about the problems I bring on myself because of my questionable lifestyle and my odd friends.”
“Come on, Sal,” I said. “Be fair here. There are problems, and Nina’s stepped right into the middle of them. She’s doing the best she can.”
For a minute Sally’s irony vanished. “Jesus, Jo, are you ever going to wake up to that woman?” Then she laughed. “Okay, okay, I withdraw that. I don’t want you mad at me, too. You’re the only sane person I know. Clea seems to be in deep waters again. Last night Stu caught her in the bushes in front of his house with a video camera whirring away. I think I’m going to have to do something about her, after all.”
“Sally, be careful. Clea sounds as if she’s beyond a woman-to-woman chat; you might just do her more harm than good. She needs professional help.”
“Who doesn’t?” Sally said grimly. “Maybe we can find a shrink who’ll give us a group rate. I could use a little understanding myself. I’m beginning to think the world has declared open season on Sally Love. I haven’t finished telling you about my Christmas. The battle with Stu and Nina was just for openers. When I came back to the studio, there was this box on my doorstep – all wrapped in shiny paper, very pretty and Christmassy. So I took it inside and opened it – it was full of used sanitary napkins. There was a note saying that since I seemed to like filth … well, you get the idea.”
“Oh, Sally, no!”
“Look, let’s be grateful. It didn’t explode or bite. Hold on, there’s more. I took my little prezzy out to the trash, and when I came back in, Izaak was slumped against my front door, full of the Christmas spirit and about a quart of Scotch. He spent last night here, passed out on my sleeping bag. But I wasn’t lonely because Clea was lurking around out front all night with her Brownie.” She was laughing, but it sounded awful to me.
“Sally, why don’t you give yourself a break. Go to a hotel for a few days, or better yet, we’re going to be out of this house in twenty minutes. Come and stay here away from everything. You can take care of whatever business you have to deal with during the day and get some peace at night. The dogs are already at the kennel, so you won’t even have them to bug you. And we’re both past the stage where a sleeping bag is an adventure. Wouldn’t it be nice to sleep in a real bed?”
“Would it ever,” she said wearily. “You’ve got yourself a houseguest. Leave the keys in the mailbox.”
“They’ll be there,” I said. “Have fun. And I’m sorry about your Christmas. Next year will be better.”
“Promise?” she said.
“Promise,” I said, and hung up.
As soon as we arrived in Greenwater, the cloud that had been hanging over us seemed to vanish. Greg’s cold didn’t materialize. Peter and Angus snapped out of their funks, and the temperature dipped. The skies were clear; the sun shining through the tree branches made antler patterns on the
snow, and the ski trails were hard packed and fast.
Every morning we woke to birdsong, the smell of last night’s fire and the bite of northern cold. Our days developed a pattern. As soon as we cleaned up after breakfast, we’d cross-country ski. When we got tired, we’d hike the nature trails and Angus would read the small metal plates that told us what we were seeing: beaver dams, aspen stands, places where carpenter ants had made their intricate inlay on tree trunks and fallen branches.
“Think of a world without decay,” he would read in his serious, declaiming voice. “Think of it. Every animal that died and every tree that fell would lie there forever. Decay is essential to the recycling of energy and nutrients through successive generations of organisms.”
At noon, we’d go back to the cabin, and Mieka and I would make a fire and the boys would make soup in the old white and blue enamelled cooking pot. After lunch, we’d dry our boots in front of the fire and argue lazily about whether we’d ski in the afternoon or skate or just take the binoculars and a bag of peanuts and look for squirrels and birds.
We’d eat early, and by seven o’clock I’d be in my room working on my book about Andy Boychuk and trying to block out the sounds of the kids laughing and fighting over cards or Monopoly. By ten o’clock we’d all be in bed. The good life.
Until the last day of the old year, the day we left Greenwater, I felt immune to the ugly things that life sometimes coughs up. Then the immunity ended.
I’d given my two guys and Mieka’s Greg new hockey sticks and Oilers jerseys for Christmas, and the morning before we left they headed off to the little inlet down the hill from our cabin for one last game of shinny. After Mieka and I had checked the cabin to make sure everything was packed, we went down to the lake to watch. It was good to stand breathing in the piny air and listening to the sounds of skates slicing the ice and Angus’s running commentary on the game:
“A perfect pass from Harris to Angus Kilbourn – right to his stick, deked the defenceman. Peter Kilbourn’s not looking happy. It’s back to Harris. He’s shooting for the corner. It’s a blistering slapshot but it’s not enough – Angus Kilbourn’s in there …”
