Slowly, then, he rose to his feet, dusting off the back of his jeans with the flat of his hand, then rubbing the hand on his thigh as if to clean it before he shook hands with her. She held back, refused him her hand.
“It’s me, Lannie.”
“I know,” he said. She could see he’d forgotten her, and she almost wilted and gave up, staring back at him. Then he let air out through his nostrils as if he’d been holding his breath a long time, ever since she’d come up to him.
“You better sit down.” She hesitated a long moment, then, shrugging her shoulders, sat down facing him in the cool shadows under the line of spruces. “I don’t have much time,” he said.
She kept looking at him, drinking in his face, his hair, the length of his arms and legs, his powerful shoulders.
“I’ve missed you,” she said, but her voice came out choked and too soft, as if she hadn’t spoken for a week, which she practically hadn’t. Not since she’d stopped off in Calgary to visit her brother and sister. She cleared her throat. She could see him trying to say that he’d missed her too, but she could tell he couldn’t make himself say the words. And anyway, he hadn’t missed her, she was pretty sure of that. “I came to find you,” she said. “I wanted to see you again.” He grinned at her, easy, as if she were a potential girlfriend. She hated him for it. “I … I —” but she couldn’t say out loud what she really wanted from him.
“How’re the other two doing?” he asked, and when she stared at him in astonishment at this question — the other two — she thought she saw a flush cross his tanned face. “I haven’t seen ‘em either for a while.”
“They’re okay,” she said finally. “Dick and Marie look after them.”
“I send them money,” he said, looking straight into her face so that she had to drop her eyes. He’d never sent any money to Iris and Barney, but then, there’d been no need to.
“They said you wrote to them sometimes.” She tried to say this neutrally, but in her own ears she sounded accusatory and she ducked her head, embarrassed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I wondered who it was in that car.”
“I —” she faltered again, struggling. She had to make her case, quickly, before he went away again. “Dad,” he was carefully looking away from her, toward the backyard now, and the view of the mountains. “I need you,” she said quietly. “A girl needs a father,” she added, trying to sound lighthearted, to lift the burden of her need from him. He turned his head quickly back toward her, his face filled with anger, and she was frightened, remembering suddenly shouting, broken furniture.
“I drink too much,” he told her, pointing to his chest. “I got no money. I got nothing for you.” Yet she didn’t really think he was trying to get rid of her, at least not yet.
“I’m not asking for much,” she said. This, of course, was a lie. “I have money.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Can I stay with you?” When he didn’t reply, she added quickly, “I mean, just for a while, a few days, that’s all.” She felt disarmed by him, a whining child again.
“You won’t like my place much. You won’t like how I live.”
“I don’t care,” she said. He thought for a moment, his uneaten sandwich in his hand.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ll give you the address. You can go there now. No use waiting for me here.” It was the way he said it that made her suspect him; plenty of time for her to look around, see what kind of man he was, that she didn’t want him for a father. He told her the address and how to find the house.
Walking away from him, knowing his eyes were probably on her as she retreated from his shady refuge under the trees, she was beginning to feel sick. But she forced herself to walk evenly, as if she weren’t in any hurry or under any particular stress, to get in her car and drive slowly away.
She was startled by how much his house looked like the one in Chinook they’d lived in when they were a family: a small frame structure needing paint, with a brown-tinged lawn and a few big trees in the backyard. She parked the car in front and went slowly up the sidewalk, onto the sagging wooden porch and inside. Someone was standing in the doorway at the end of the hall and she was so startled she almost shrieked. But then a woman’s voice asked, “Who are you?” and moving closer to her so that Lannie began to make out her face and figure: medium height, plump, her light brown hair pulled back in a short ponytail, her face neither pretty nor plain. An ordinary-looking woman.
“I didn’t know there was anybody here,” she said. “Dad said to come here to wait for him —”
“Dad?” the woman said, then in a different tone, tired, as if she might have known, “Dad.” The woman was wearing a pale pink shirt and slacks — a nurse’s uniform.
“Howard Stone. He’s my father.” The woman laughed a short bark, then said, “Come in.”
As she led the way into the kitchen, she said over her shoulder, “I’m Dierdre.” She stopped with her back to the sink and asked across the expanse of shining grey formica table that stood between them, “What’s your name?”
“Lannie.”
“I just made some lemonade — unless you’d rather have beer?” She went to the fridge, an old one, from the sixties or earlier with a rounded front, that stood humming noisily in the corner.
“Lemonade, please,” Lannie said. She’d only just realized how thirsty she was. “It’s hot out there.”
“Un-bear-able,” the woman said. “But it’s not too bad in here. The big trees help.” She opened the fridge door and reached inside bringing out a pitcher. “He never mentioned kids to me. But I sort of knew it, I guess. How many more?”
“Two,” Lannie said. “I’m the oldest.”
“Where’s the rest of ‘em?” she asked, setting the lemonade on the table. “Are they gonna show up on our doorstep too?”
“They’re both still in Calgary with the people who raised them,” she said. “Our mother died.”
“That I knew,” Dierdre said, setting out two glasses and filling them from the pitcher. “Sit. You might as well.” Lannie slowly pulled out a chair and sat down. Dierdre sat down too.
The small kitchen was spotless, scrubbed to a sterile shine. Even the plain white walls shone. It made Lannie think of T.S. Eliot, “We are the hollow men …” It seemed to her that her mother had been a poor housekeeper; in her memory there were always piles of things around and jam and egg yolk stuck to the table. How Lannie hated hyper-clean, white-walled houses like this one. And yet, in Saskatoon, she had kept her apartment just like this.
“How long have you — been together?” When she thought to look, she saw that Dierdre wore no wedding ring. In fact, she wasn’t a lot older than Lannie herself, but she had an air of weariness about her, as if she’d been around.
“Not long,” she said. “A year pretty soon.” Lannie thought six months, I bet. Dierdre looked up at the clock that hung on the wall high above the window over the sink. “I have to go to work. You’re welcome to stay till he gets home. Stay the night,” she added. “You’re his daughter, after all,” and she laughed again, that half-snort, filled with surprise. “The spare room’s off the stairs on the right. The bed’s made up. Make yourself at home. I gotta go to work.” She stood, set her empty glass in the sink, picked up her purse from the counter, and went slowly out into the hall. The screen door slapped shut behind her.
Lannie sat on in the kitchen listening to the clock tick. Eventually she stood and walked quietly through the house, room after room, downstairs and up. It didn’t take very long. Her father’s boots in a neat row in the bedroom closet beside Dierdre’s high heels and extra pair of nurse’s shoes. Why did this cleanliness, this order, this silence oppress her so? The father she remembered had been loud and violent — she’d seen him strike her mother more than once, even though she’d tried not to remember it. And now this, this — emptiness.
At six o’clock he still hadn’t returned. At seven she turned on the television set. The next thing s
he knew, Dierdre was leaning over her, saying her name.
“It’s after midnight, you might as well go up to bed. He isn’t coming home tonight.”
Very early on the morning of the third day, when Howard and Dierdre were both still sleeping, she’d packed her things and gone quietly away. She tried to leave them a note, but in the end, she found she had nothing to say, so she left the pencil beside the blank sheet of paper on the kitchen table. As she walked out of the house to her car, she felt hollow, light, as if she were filled with air.
“What are you doing here?” he asks her. “What are you up to?” Not even hello, she notes. She has stopped trembling.
“Cleaning up the place,” she says crisply. “I own it. I bought it.” He smiles sourly.
“You mean Iris bought it.”
“Yes.”
“You planning to move back in?” he asks, with a touch of uncertainty, and she sees it’s an attempt at a joke.
“Yes,” she says again, not knowing if she means it or not. He stops in surprise, then his face darkens and twists with anger. It’s a look she knows well; she’s been seeing it all these years in her dreams.
“You’re shaming me,” he says. “Right here in public. You’re shaming me, aren’t you.” He’s still coming toward her. She has the urge to run, and her mother’s face as she backed away from him comes back to her, but she stands where she is.
“If I am,” she says evenly, “it isn’t intentional.”
“I want you to stop. Just get back in that truck and drive away. I’ll burn this damn dump down!” She knows he won’t. He’ll go get drunk, maybe beat somebody up, that’s what he’ll do. Or he’ll run. She tries not to let him see the contempt she’s suddenly flooded with, because it is for herself as much as it’s for him. Hasn’t she been running all these years, too?
“What are you doing here?” she asks him instead, coldly. He stops again, as if she’s caught him by surprise. She can tell his first reaction is to yell at her, to work himself up to some action — a blow, a kick, a hole in the wall made with his fist. But he seems puzzled, as if he’s warning himself not to do any of those things, but doesn’t have any other alternatives. “Sit down,” she commands him. “Have a cup of coffee with me.” She walks away without waiting for an answer.
When she returns from the half-ton with the thermos and a mug, he’s sitting on the steps. She fills the mug and hands it to him, then fills the thermos cup and sets the thermos down on the ground. She crouches, facing him, in a patch of ragged wild grass she’s cleared of weeds, holding the thermos cup in both hands.
“I brought Dillon,” he says. “He’s coming down to Iris’s tonight, so you two can visit.”
“Are you staying?” She doesn’t look up, but she can feel him shrugging. She supposes that means yes.
“I quit,” he says. “I can do that same work for Luke — pay’s not as good, but —” He shrugs. She knows he almost said, But at least I’m home. He shifts, looks off down the street and back to her again. “What’s it like inside? A mess, I bet.” She clears her throat and drops her head. “I haven’t gone in yet.” She can feel his involuntary twitch of surprise.
She looks up at him to find him staring down the street, past the trees and the neat front lawns to where the hills rise roughly, white-streaked dun, toward the blue of the sky. It’s the direction where the ranch is, where he was raised with his half-sister Fay, and his half-brothers, Barney and Wesley, and fought them, and left.
“Why did you leave me?” she asks him. After all these years — twenty — since he went away and never came back, after all the times she yearned to ask him by letter, by phone, in person, in her dreams and her nightmares, from Eastern Canada, from Africa, from Europe, and never has, never dared, they seem the easiest words she has ever uttered. She squats there in the wild grass watching an ant crawl over her grubby sneaker and listens to the echo of her own question.
“I couldn’t look after you kids!” he says automatically, as if this is a question he has answered a thousand times already.
“Why did you never write or phone?”
He twists his head first one way and then the other. She looks up, just in time to see a look of — it’s anger, she recognizes that, it seems to be the only reaction he knows how to have — but his face is also so twisted into bewilderment, that she sees she is witnessing an unresolved anguish she never guessed he had. She can feel colour flooding her face now, her bowels have clenched and her stomach goes queasy. Abruptly, she sits on the ground, crushing dusty weeds under her.
“How do you think I felt?” he asks her. She forces herself to look back at him, not blinking, not looking away. He drops his eyes finally. “I wasn’t much of a husband,” he says. “When she died, I just wanted to get the hell away from here — away from this —” He throws his arm out violently, indicating the house behind him, the street, the town. Coffee slops out of the mug onto his thigh and he rubs at his jeans roughly. “They all blamed me. I knew it.” He says this abruptly, but in a quieter tone, as if he has given up his anger, and then he laughs, a quick, self-conscious snort, as if he has never told anybody this, and never thought he would.
“So you gave away your children,” she says. “And you left.”
They sit in silence while robins sing in the poplars that separate this lot from the next one and down at the end of the street somebody’s dog barks steadily. She feels as if, for the first time in years, her head is clear. She is sitting in the grass looking at her father: her real father, her only father. And he is big and violent and confused and incapable of kindness. He is a bad father, a hopelessly bad father.
She can see too that he feared Iris even more than he feared his “good” brother Barney’s censure. It was easier to forget his oldest daughter, easier not to think of her, than to keep coming back, having to face Iris and Barney’s contempt every time. He had mistreated her mother, his wife, and everyone knew it. He had been unreliable, often drunk, always emotionally unpredictable. And now, she knows what she has to say to him. She opens her mouth but no sound comes out. She tries again, her jaw trembling with the effort to make the words. He glances at her. She tries once more, forcing the sound through a tightened throat, from between lips that tremble.
“You have destroyed my life,” she tells him, as calmly as if she is remarking on the weather. She pulls herself to her knees, looking up into his weak, handsome, aging face. She can see the muscles in his upper arms bulging and wonders fleetingly if she should run. But no, he blinks rapidly, as if she has swung her fist at him, then his expression shuts down, stony. She thinks suddenly of all the men, total strangers, she picked up in bars and slept with, when she was an undergrad at university. She thinks of them without her usual horrified and sickened shame; she thinks of them instead as inevitable, as pathetic. “I have spent all these years wanting you to be my father, because I needed you so much. I couldn’t see that it was no use at all.”
Behind them the small, dilapidated house rises up in the morning sunshine, flecks of blue trim still hanging from its window ledges below the cracked panes. Inside her mother walked once, rocked her in her arms, in her high, sweet soprano sang her lullabies, fragments of which still enter her dreams, her mother’s fine, red-gold hair sliding down over her eye so that she tossed it back with a quick flick of her head. Her blue-green eyes with the reddish lashes and eyebrows, her soft, narrow lips, pinkish and cracked, her pert nose, her bosom, high and small, her thin arms and legs with the delicate, slender ankles Lannie has inherited, her almost transparent fair skin with its covering of tiny, faint freckles.
“She died from meningitis,” he says. She looks into his face and understands he has been seeing the same apparition she has. “It came on sudden — the doctor was away, nobody could do anything. By the time one came — three hours! — it was too late.” He shifts and stands up slowly to his full height, towering over her, his shadow spreading darkness over the house behind him. “I was a bad husband. M
aybe I been a lousy father too. But I didn’t kill her.” He tosses the coffee from his mug off to one side, into what was once a flower bed under the window where gold and orange marigolds and zinnias once bloomed, and drops the empty mug with a thud at her feet.
Then he strides away, down the cracked cement of the narrow sidewalk, past his dead brother’s truck to his own. He gets in, slamming the door hard, and drives away, gunning it so that the motor roars halfway down the block.
What she feels is such longing for her mother. It is as if all the years since her mother’s death she has held her longing in a hard-shelled nut tight inside her, that she has been squeezing smaller and smaller with the years, and now — ever since she got on that plane in Addis Ababa to head back to Canada, a crack has been developing in its shell, first tinier than a hair, then widening and descending its length. Now she feels that nut crack apart with a soundless boom like the earth’s layers shifting subterraneously, its contents spilling out and expanding. Her head is full of soundless roaring.
After long moments Lannie gets slowly to her feet. Staggering abruptly before she regains her balance, she walks the few feet to the stairs. They creak loudly as she goes up them and into the porch, past the sagging, cracked wooden outside door that sits half open, to the closed, locked door with the blue paint peeling from it that leads inside. She reaches into her shirt for the old-fashioned iron key she has hung on a cord around her neck. Fumbling, she lifts the cord over her head, weighs the key in her palm, grasps it and, her hand shaking so badly that the key chitters against the rusted metal plate, manages to insert it in the lock. It squeals, resisting her effort at first, before its voice lowers to a groan, and with a last rasp, clicks open.
“I didn’t expect you back so early,” Iris says, as Lannie comes into the kitchen. She glances at the clock — it’s early afternoon — and then at Lannie who is grubby with dirt and grass stains on her jeans and shirt and her hair stringy with sweat. Iris looks into Lannie’s face. “How’s the house coming?” she asks.
Garden of Eden Page 41
