Girl Runner

by Carrie Snyder

  “Thank you.” She opens the cover and thumbs through the pages. I think I see her lift the book toward her nose to inhale its scent. She is distracted and already bored with me. I would have to call her unwell, although she does not seem mad, nor has she on any visit I’ve made since first coming, a year or so after her trial.

  We were both of us uncomfortable during that first encounter. When I think of it now, we were both so young. And yet we knew of things that other people, most people, did not. And we were kin, I always felt that, no matter the letter of the law.

  She asked me on that visit: could I find her children for her?

  No, I said, no more than I could find them for myself.

  She drifted after that, and she has drifted during every visit since, and yet I come and sit on her bed, and ask her how she is. It seems to me that someone must. Tattie has told me things, here and there, and I’ve collected them. I have in mind that I will write for her an obituary, as I’ve done for so many others. I know that her mother died when she was just a girl, that she did not get along with her father, that she scorned the care of her younger siblings, that she would not “work like a horse,” as her father demanded, and that she would not do her duty for duty’s sake alone. That is not how she puts it, exactly, but it is how I take it.

  “I loved horses,” she has said on more than one occasion. Her father was a smithy, and she lived around the animals from a young age.

  “Why?” I ask, of the horses.

  She looks at me with contempt, for not already knowing. “Because they were wild things tamed and trapped, as I was.”

  As you are, I think, but refrain from saying out loud.

  Today she withdraws into silence and I see that she is already drifting from me. I let myself drift from her too. I look out the window at the sky, grass, and trees. It is 1951, and my own mother has recently died. I am permitting myself, in this room, to think of my mother, to let myself go, just a little bit. My eyes sting and I dig around in my purse for a handkerchief to blow my nose.

  Tattie sighs deeply. Her eyes gaze vacantly at the door, which is ajar.

  “Tattie,” I say, leaning forward. Always a small woman, she has become almost insubstantial, while I’ve grown to be something of a scarecrow, bony, stretched thin and long. I touch her hands with mine, and she startles and stares at me, disturbed into this moment, this room.

  I say, “My mother has passed on, George’s stepmother. A good woman.”

  She squeezes my hands in response and I am moved by her sympathy.

  “You’ll wonder why I did it, as a mother,” she says, “but I did it as a mother. You wouldn’t know, not being one yourself, but your own mother would understand.”

  “Yes,” I say, to encourage her. She has never spoken of that day, nor have I tried to shake memories from her, let alone explanations.

  I can’t decide whether she seems entirely rational, as we stare at each other, or entirely mad.

  “I knew they would be taken from me. A woman like me, unmarried, alone, how could I keep my children? They would be taken from me. I did try to think of another way to keep them. I did my best. But there was no other way and so I made a plan. I was going to take them with me, that’s all. It’s all I wanted.”

  “The boy came and fetched me, with his baby sister,” I say.

  “He fought me,” she says simply. “He got away.”

  Oh.

  “He was to be the first.”

  “Please, you don’t have to tell me anything more.”

  “‘Don’t move, Mama, don’t do anything, I’ll come back with help.’”

  And I wonder, sitting across from her, holding her hands in my own, if I will be able to come back to visit her again, or whether she will sit and stare at the door and wait for me in vain. I don’t know.

  I let her hold my hands, but I say, “Let’s be quiet, now, there’s a good girl,” like she’s a child. If I treat her like a child it is easier to be gentle when what I feel is rough, harsh. Stupid woman! I think. It is not that hard to give up a child. You just make up your mind and you let that child go. You just do it.

  LUKIVNY, TATIANA. On February 13, 1963, after a long decline. “Tattie” was born in Russia, in 1909, location and precise date unknown, and shortly thereafter came to Montreal, Canada, with her family, then to Toronto where she wed George Smart and became mother to four. Mr. Smart succumbed to illness (1931), a loss from which Tattie never recovered. She was predeceased by two daughters, Margaret (age four), and Cecily (age three). If you have information regarding Tattie’s two other children, Rob (born 1924) and Judy (born 1931), it is requested that you contact A. F. Smart at the following P.O. Box. All confidences kept.

  Replies: none.

  Confidences kept: all.

  19

  What Remains

  I DON’T RECALL the lane going this far. We rise and fall as if plunging through waves. I am fortunate that I’ve never suffered seasickness. I’ve always had a sturdy constitution.

  I see the field gone fallow, gone to weed.

  We’re slowing at the top of the hill overlooking the pond. You should step on the gas, I lean forward to tell the girl. But where is the water—is it gone? I had a brother who drowned in that pond. His name was, his name was—James. There is a shallow indentation in the dirt. A person wouldn’t know a pond had ever been there, but for the lighthouse towering beside it. But this makes no sense. Why build a tall lighthouse beside a puddle of a farm pond? I am surprised to recall that it was mostly completed when Father stopped his work. The boards went unpainted and are grey with weather, but the shape of the structure is unmistakable, and I see its purpose.

  It has taken me all these years, but I see now as the tires spin, and the young man beside me observes, “We’re stuck,” as the woman on the other side says, “Never say never!” as the girl jams her foot into the gas pedal with increasing futility, that the lighthouse was meant to guide us home safely. All comers. All goers.

  My father was calling us back home.

  Well. Here I am, safe in this sinking ship as ever I’ll be.

  The boy has not stopped filming.

  “It won’t go,” the girl says in disbelief, lifting her foot off the gas pedal, silencing the whirring tires, giving up. “I can’t make it go.” She bends her head briefly, then turns to address me, carrying upon her shoulders some small shame. “Miss Smart, this is going to sound really bad, but I have to tell you. We’re broke—I’m broke. I can’t afford to keep training. That’s why we brought you here, that’s why we’re making this movie, that’s why we need you to sell your land. We need you to sell your land, Miss Smart. I’m sorry, Mom, but I’m just going to tell her. What do I have to lose? Our farm is only worth something if you sell it.”

  The woman beside me shifts uncomfortably. I wonder—does she want to sell what’s hers? “There’s your dad,” the woman says mildly.

  “Dad.” The girl is scornful but does not elaborate.

  “I only meant,” says the woman, “that we must not put this all on Miss Smart. It is a big decision to make. To sell land. Family land.”

  We are quiet for a bit.

  Then the girl turns again and says, “Miss Smart, there’s a developer who wants this land, ours too. He’s got a plan. Lighthouse Commons, it’s going to be called. But he won’t buy Mom’s land unless you’re selling too. Max and I—me and Max—and Mom—we . . . we looked really hard for you. Mom called I don’t know how many nursing homes in, like, a hundred-kilometre radius. Maybe you didn’t want to be found. Maybe we’re not who you want, but—”

  “Kaley,” her mother interrupts gently.

  “You know what. What does it matter?—I might not even make these Games.” The girl grips the wheel, turns away from us, muttering to herself.

  “You’ll make these Games,” the boy tells her. “Why else are we making this movie?”

  “You think it’s that easy? Decide to, and I will? Find the money, and I will?”
She whacks the steering wheel with her hands. She roars. I like that. She opens the car door and leaves it swinging wide as she leaps into the mud and she runs.

  “Oh, Kales.” The young man, who must be Max, sighs.

  “Too much pressure on her,” says the woman. “I think we’re all pushing her too hard.” She climbs out of the car and closes her door gently, and the other one, before setting off after the girl, but heavily, not hurrying.

  The boy waits to disagree till she’s gone. Then he says, perhaps to me, “It isn’t us, it’s Kaley. None of this is us. It’s all her.”

  I lean for the handle of the door nearest me, and tug on it. I hook my imprisoned fingers around the polished metal. I’ve never been more sure of anything. I push with thickened hands and the door gives way. I won’t fall out. I’m swinging my frozen legs and kicking, and creaking bone by bone to standing. Sinking in the muddy spring field, clutching at the roof of the car to stop myself from toppling, I clear my head in the late afternoon light that angles down over the ancient row of sugar maples, and I clear my throat to call, “What was her name?”

  The words are coming through, ringing like a bell, straight from my brain to my mouth.

  The boy is at my side, the girl’s brother—Max. “They can’t hear you,” he says.

  “She’s a good runner? Very good?”

  “She’s amazing! She’s run the fastest Canadian women’s time this season, and she’ll only get better if she gets the chance. She needs time, but honestly, Miss Smart, Kaley’s, like, the best. Just not everyone sees it.”

  He stops. It seems he can only look at me through the lens of his camera.

  “What was her name?” I ask again.

  “Kaley, you mean?”

  “No. No.”

  “Nancy’s my mom. I’m Max, remember?”

  No! The final piece of proof. Her name, her name, her name! Edith’s girl.

  “You mean, my grandmother? She died a long time ago, like Mom said. I don’t remember her at all. She was called Fannie, I think. But it was short for something else.”

  She was called Fannie. I don’t need to know anything else.

  “Look—Kaley’s coming back, I knew she would,” he says. “Sometimes she just needs to run. It’s like her answer for everything.” He trains his camera across the field and we watch the girl stride effortlessly up and down the rises, stray weeds batted down as she makes her path. Her mother stands between us, as mothers do, watching, in a posture of adoration. She glances at us as if to say, Isn’t my daughter wonderful? Isn’t she remarkable? Do you see what I see?

  I, sinking into mud, feel my bones trembling, a shaking up my spine. I haven’t stood on my own for this long for years and I’m mildly exhilarated. No—make that wildly exhilarated.

  The girl is coming back to me. I can’t wait.

  I let go of the car and take a step, and another.

  “THERE IS NOT a great deal of time to wait,” Mother says, leaning over me, whispering. “When the early months have passed, the baby is quite settled and will grow regardless. Do you understand?”

  I understand.

  “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  “I know. Let me help.”

  It is then that Cora comes into the room. She does not exactly burst in, just enters briskly without knocking, and takes over. “Mother, you’ve agreed not to do this anymore.”

  My mother moves out of Cora’s way, silently.

  Cora comes directly to me, where I lie, and begins pressing her fingers and palm into my lower abdomen, like my mother has done, only harder, harsher. I wince. “Three months, I’d guess,” she tells me. “As Mother’s likely already said. You can stay here. We’ve had girls stay regularly since you and Olive left for Toronto. We can always find a place for the baby, so don’t worry about that. Mother?”

  “Yes, Cora.” Her tone is flat, neither question nor reply.

  “You’ll find things much changed around here,” says Cora, addressing me. “If you stay, that is. You’ll find this place is not what you remember it to be.”

  But when Cora goes, my mother leans down and whispers, “What do you want, child? I will help you.”

  And I find I do not want to fight Cora. I want to wait for Johnny to follow me. I want to wait.

  As you wish, Aganetha.

  Cora is wrong. Home is as I remember it, changed, yes, but only by the thinnest layer of strangeness. The plaster walls are poked full of holes, Father’s wires tunnelling deep, tying the house together, but the windmill turns atop the barn, and the woods are quiet, and I may walk where I wish, despite my ungainly body, though I take care to stay out of sight. If I hear footsteps on the path, I hurry the other way, or hide, crashing deeper into the woods, trying to lose myself in brush and bramble.

  I drape myself in a heavy plaid shawl. I pin my thickening hair to my skull in braided coils and brush it out at night in the stillness of the back room so that it floats around me like a cloud.

  My sister Fannie visits. I can hardly be surprised, and find myself grateful, comforted, anticipating her surprise arrivals like I would those of a friend. She comes through the holes Father has bored in the walls and I wake to find her nearby in the room, gazing out the window into the unlit night.

  I tell her that I will name the baby for her, should it be a girl. This is wrong of me. I have agreed not to keep the baby. But I wait in hope that Johnny might change his mind and come for me, although I do not write to him and ask. The Johnny I wait for is not the Johnny I left, you will understand. He is an attractively vague character in a story I’m telling myself, a figure both much embellished and entirely emptied out. I imagine myself too like Tattie, nursing this infant in a cramped room hidden away from the world and I begin to understand how Tattie might be happy, or at least agree to the situation, and not be miserable in it, because she has her baby in her arms, her little ones around her, gathered near.

  My mother has a plan. Cora does not like it, because she thinks it will cause talk and trouble. My mother disagrees, and to quell Cora’s arguments, I promise to accede all claim: the baby will never know of me.

  “It is a great gift you’re giving,” my mother tells me.

  But when I make my promise, I’ve given nothing at all. It is possible that I agree to the plan only because I keep on believing, against all logic and evidence, that Johnny will come.

  I AM WALKING the woods, a fat and aching vessel, the baby’s weight stirring my insides, when I hear a distinct pop, like a bottle of champagne uncorking—a sound that reminds me of the luxury of victory—and warm water rushes down my legs in a splash that quickly eases to a trickle. At almost the very same instant, my belly is seized with a tightening, and pain radiates from a tiny central point that I can almost see, somewhere deep inside. The exit point.

  I find that I am not afraid.

  I find that what I want is to stop right here in the woods, on hands and knees, to crawl just off the path, into the trilliums, and do this all by myself. It seems a challenge that should be managed alone, a private roaring urge that only I can understand well enough to answer. I feel as if I were made for this. And perhaps I would birth my baby all by myself, and perhaps the ending of this story would be quite different, but instead I hear footsteps hurrying along on the path, and my instinct is to waddle away from their approach as quickly as I can manage. Someone is coming, as happens only rarely, from the town to the farm, and I must not be seen. I hurry, pausing only during the most intense crescendos of pain, and soon I am out of the shelter of the trees, and running past the barn and to the house. If this can be called running.

  Strangely, it is Edith, I learn, who has come along the path behind me.

  I have not seen Edith during all this time. I tell myself I haven’t been avoiding her, but it isn’t true. I’ve been avoiding her. I’ve been avoiding everyone, of course, but most especially I’ve been avoiding Edith. And here is Edith, tracking me, just out of sight, stopping by the house on her way from to
wn to home, coming the long way ’round.

  And so this story goes as it has been planned by others, not by me.

  I crouch on hands and knees beside the bed on the hard floor, wishing I were in the woods, on soft earth. “Edith’s here.” Cora raps on the door to the Granny Room but does not enter. The noises I am making are unmistakable.

  My mother leaves my side for a moment, returns. It is just the two of us. “You are doing so well,” she tells me. Palm on forehead. Palm on the bones of my lower back.

  I’ve lost myself inside the familiarity of pain. The discipline of birth is similar to training and racing. Both are explorations of extremity, the sensation of leaving the physical self by means of pain. How can I explain? You give what you have in you to give. You may have more than you know, and you can only know how much, exactly, by slamming head-on against the limits of toleration. This is easier done once you’ve accepted what needs to happen. Once you cease worrying about how you look, or who you might be, and you simply are.

  I am muscles, strength, opening. I am rest, utterly at ease, waiting. I am efficient, powerful. The pressure will split me, but I bear down against it. I always run fastest when I’m pushing against a wind. I am pushing. Anyone might be in the room and I do not care. But I think it is just my mother. Just her. Her finger hooking under the caught shoulder, her voice suddenly risen to urgent command. She shifts me—push, no matter what you’re feeling, push, push, push—and we shake the baby loose.

  What do I know? I flood with joy. I collapse. I laugh and I cry.

  Cora is in the room. She pulls me onto the bed, flat on my back, and she is taking care of something unpleasant. Apparently my work is not yet done. “Push,” she instructs, kneading my belly, which is slack and barren like a flaccid sack. She is tugging something from me and it releases all at once, in a gush, a rush. I’m suddenly overcome with nausea, and I gag and retch into a basin that Cora provides for me.

  I haven’t even heard the kitten cry of the baby. She is rushed from the room in my mother’s arms immediately, the cord between us cut. I do not see her.