Scare the Light Away

by Vicki Delany

  Chapter 3

  “You’re back.”

  “Indeed I am.”

  My sister blocked the entrance to her house, hands resting firmly on her flat, bony hips. Her bitter, pinched face was as familiar to me as if I’d last seen it this morning. But the combined effects of weather and hard work had beaten the skin into leather, and the brittle brown eyes were collapsing into bags on her cheeks. Her hair was the same shade of fake blond as always, but the lush, thick locks were now only a memory, and patches of pink scalp shone through the thin, bleached hair.

  Underneath the stiffly ironed apron, she wore a proper suit with pantyhose and pumps. A tiny string of cheap, fake pearls was wrapped around her crepe-paper neck. She was eleven years older than I.

  “Why didn’t you tell Dad I was coming?”

  “I did. He must have forgotten.”

  “Right.”

  I was afraid I was going to have to push her aside and elbow my way into her house, but then my father bustled up, brimming with platitudes about how wonderful to have his two daughters together again, and Shirley stepped aside to allow me entry.

  I hadn’t been to this house before. It wasn’t the hovel she and Al lived in when they had finally moved out of his parents’ place, but a neat, although tiny, modern bungalow not far from the center of Hope River.

  The screen door leading off the living room opened and Al stepped through, carrying a vicious-looking barbecue fork. The scent of burning flesh drifted in behind him. He smiled broadly and wrapped me in a fierce hug.

  “Rebecca. Look at you now. Still the beauty of the family after all these years. Doesn’t she look great, Shirl? Just great.”

  “I’ll finish setting the table,” my sister said.

  “It’s nice to see you, Al.”

  In our youth he’d been painfully thin and cursed with the greasiest hair any of us had ever seen. Everyone knows an Al Smithers. So nerdy that even the mention of his last name would instantly have the “in” crowd in giggles. Every small town has a loser, and Al personified it for Hope River. But nerdy Al Smithers managed to knock up my sister (not that a McKenzie amounted to any great catch), and thus here he was, all these years later, the scrawny frame replaced by a substantial beer belly, bowing and scraping in his tiny living room.

  “Let me get you a drink? What’ll you have?”

  “A glass of white wine?”

  “Sure, sure. And a beer for you, Bob?”

  We settled into sagging chairs while Al fetched the drinks.

  “To family.” My dad offered a toast. Mom had told me that Dad now had “control over” his drinking. I could slap Al for offering him a beer. But it wasn’t my business—I was only here for a couple of days, and then I’d be well out of it.

  Al and I nodded and raised our glasses. “To family,” he said. I swallowed heavily.

  “Our first barbecue of the year,” Al announced proudly, hurrying back to attend to his duties. “With the weather being so nice after all that rain we’ve been having.”

  Living on the West Coast, making rivers of money and having no children, my husband Ray and I had become accustomed to eating only the freshest of foods usually prepared in one of the city’s best restaurants. I have become quite the “foodie.” So much so that I had forgotten what bad food tasted like. Al’s steak was thin, cooked to the consistency of shoe leather, and drowned in commercial barbecue sauce, the potato salad slimy with bottled mayonnaise. Shirley stared sullenly into her lap, merely pushing her food around her plate although Al chowed down enough for the both of them. I forced myself to keep on eating although the food stuck in my throat. Dad babbled on as cheerfully as he always did, even in far tenser situations than this.

  But one thing was certainly different from the old days: Although Al offered another round, Dad refused and made that one drink last right through the meal.

  And my mother was missing. Her calm, caring presence wasn’t here to cast a loving blanket over the troubled undercurrents.

  But no torment lasts forever and dinner finally ended.

  To make way for the worst torment of them all.

  We traveled together in the SUV. It being the largest, by far, and Dad eager as a schoolboy to show it off. He was a strange man, my father. As a child and then a teenager I never knew whether he really didn’t understand the hurricanes of emotion that were constantly rolling through his family or whether he simply didn’t care. Here he was leading us all out the door, chattering on about the speed and horsepower of my rental. What Dad doesn’t know, he makes up.

  Watson’s had undergone quite a transformation since I’d seen it last. Perfect rows of carefully pruned tea roses were stirring themselves back to life, and crisply pruned hedges lined the neat brick path. Not only Watson’s, but the entire downtown of North Ridge, the larger town to the north of our own Hope River, was light-years from the town I left so long ago. Someone, or something, had brought money into this once almost abandoned Near-North Ontario town.

  A smiling woman in a severe gray, pinstriped suit, long dark hair pulled back into a skin-stretching bun, stood at the door to greet us. “This way, please,” she said, her young voice forced into deep and somber tones. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

  I followed my family into Watson’s Funeral Home.

  Chapter 4

  Diary of Miss Janet Green. January 14, 1944

  Mrs. Robert McKenzie. Mrs. Robert McKenzie. That sounds so perfectly wonderful. Last night we went to a dance in town with Bob’s best mate Charlie and Charlie’s date Louise, who is Mrs. Bridges’ niece, come up from London to stay with her grandparents for the duration of the war. It’s safer, they say, out here in the countryside. Charlie and Bob were walking us to the bus when Bob took my arm and we dropped back a bit.Then he asked me if I would marry him. I said “Yes” so loudly, I was sure that the whole of Surrey would hear me. I am to be married! Mrs. Robert McKenzie. I can’t wait to tell Dad and Aunt Betty. She has gone to London for a fortnight’s visit to her and Dad’s sister Joan, who got word that her second son, Raymond, has been killed in Italy. And that after losing her Arthur, named in honor of my own dad, in North Africa last year. Two of my cousins, gone. I remember when we traveled on the train to London that Christmas before Mum left. They were horrid boys, Raymond and Arthur. I cried and told Mum and Dad I wanted to go home. Mum hit me and told me I was a foolish girl and I would never get a husband if I didn’t learn how to be nice to boys. Things have changed so quickly. Is it the war, I wonder? Or do things always change? Must be the war. Dad has lived in this village for his whole life, and his parents before him. Aunt Betty escaped for a while. She went up to London. I was only little then, but I remember Granny saying she would never speak to Betty again. And she never did. Granny died the next winter—as if the devil was getting back at her for making such an evil promise. But Aunt Betty came back, and now she keeps house for my dad and me.

  What was I saying? Oh yes. I’m not that plain little girl any more. I’m seventeen years old and engaged to be married and Raymond and Arthur are dead. I wish I could tell Mum, tell her I am going to be married.

  I told Bob that I don’t want to tell Dad before Aunt Betty. So we will wait until next Tuesday, when she comes home. They will be so happy for me! In the meanwhile Bob will start whatever it is that he has to do to get us married. It is such a dreadfully complicated process. I would love to just skip down to the rectory one sunny Sunday and ask the Vicar to marry us. But Bob has to fill out all sorts of papers, and talk to his commanding officer, who I hear is a perfectly horrid brute. Bob said he might even want to meet me before he gives us permission. I hope not! I would be simply terrified!

  I want to get married today!

  Chapter 5

  “Reverend Wyatt’s come home a day early from his conference to take the funeral,” my father said, slathering strawberry jam onto his toast. “We coulda had the visiting Reverend, but your mom, she and Mr. Wyatt were real close these past few years. He
knows she’d want him to be there.”

  I poured hot water into the old brown betty. The handle was cracked, the lid broken into several pieces and badly glued back together. It wasn’t one of the procession of traditional brown teapots I remembered from my youth, but it seemed like an old friend nonetheless. My mom, English to her core, loved her teapots. Earlier, scrounging through the unfamiliar cupboards searching for breakfast ingredients and utensils, I had uncovered the gift I sent her for her birthday a few years ago: a replica of an English cottage, cast in the mould of a teapot. Unwrapped, it lay abandoned in the dark recesses of the cupboard. In other circumstances my feelings might have been hurt, but they weren’t. I should have known that she would discard it as a modern frivolity. I smiled as I imagined her steeping her afternoon cup of tea in the chipped brown betty while she contemplated what she would do with this monstrosity of a gift.

  If she had known I was coming, it would have been laid out in pride of place.

  I haven’t eaten bacon and fried eggs for more years than I can count, but there was no granola, yogurt, or even bagels in my mother’s kitchen. I like a big breakfast, so along with Dad’s meal I prepared a serving for myself. I tentatively lifted a slice of crispy bacon to my lips, telling my inner diet cop to ignore the fat and calorie content. It tasted rather good. I took another bite.

  “I’m so glad you’re home, Rebecca.” Dad smiled at me through a mouthful of fried egg. “I trust you can stay a while.”

  “I’ve taken time off work, Dad.” An extended leave of absence, in fact. After the hours I’d put in since Ray’s death, they owed me something. (Of course, I’d left my father’s phone number with my secretary and brought my laptop computer so that I could dial into the office every day.)

  “Good.” He turned his attention to his breakfast, scooping up a bit of runny egg yolk with a thin slice of toast. What my mother called a “soldier.” Sampson thumped her tail on the floor and watched the food with wide eyes.

  “Always liked a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said finally, placing his knife and fork neatly in the center of the scraped-clean plate. “When I was a young man. But your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Insisted on making tea. Every day of her life, ’cepting when she were in hospital having you kids.”

  “You could have made your own coffee.”

  He looked genuinely astonished. “Now why would I have done that?”

  I shrugged and tossed Sampson a piece of toast. She would have preferred bacon, but she accepted the toast with an air of offended grace.

  “She didn’t much cling to her English ways, your mom. She tried to fit in real well to how we do things here. But she wouldn’t give up that tea.” His old eyes clouded over with sorrow. I walked over to him and placed one hand on his shoulder. It was all I had in me to give him.

  He gripped my hand with his own, worn by work and lined by age. “Don’t know how I’m gonna manage without her, girl.”

  “I know, Dad. I know. I’ll make coffee tomorrow. More bacon?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Embarrassed, he rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to wipe away the traces of emotion. My dad had certainly not been raised to show his feelings. Exactly the opposite. “Too bad Jimmy didn’t make it to Watson’s last night. He should be by this morning.”

  I sat back down and the cracked vinyl squeaked under my weight. I stirred milk into my tea. “Where’s Jimmy living?”

  “In the big house.”

  “Mom didn’t tell me that. I assumed you sold it years ago. It’s bigger than this place. If you didn’t sell it, why didn’t you move in there when Grandpa died?”

  “Not mine to sell. Dad left it to Jimmy.”

  “And you didn’t object to that?”

  “Nothing to object to, girl. It was his home. He could do with it as he wanted.”

  “Even after he’s dead?”

  “Specially then.”

  We finished our breakfast, the silence broken only by the patter of Sampson’s toenails on the linoleum and the thumping of her tail as she snuggled up to her new friend’s legs.

  “Got any plans for today?” I rose to clear the table.

  “Thought I’d drop in at the Legion after lunch. Play a bit of snooker.”

  “Okay. I have some work to do. Do you mind if I plug my computer into the phone line in the living room?”

  “Sure,” Dad said. “You got that Internet on your computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you show me how it works sometime?”

  “You’ve never been on the Internet?” In my world that was like saying you’d never driven in a car, nor seen a television.

  “Woulda liked to give it a try. But your mom, she said we didn’t need it.”

  “That’s too bad. She could have kept in touch with some of her family in England or her old war bride friends. E-mail makes it so easy.”

  “She didn’t want much to do with any outsiders,” Dad mumbled. “Said we were her family now.”

  Too ashamed, more likely. I bit back the words. I hadn’t come here to fight ancient battles.

  He pulled his cap down from the hook by the back door. “Going for a walk. Up to the big house. Talk to Jimmy. You wanna come?”

  “No.”

  “Your dog would like a walk.”

  Sampson was already in position in front of the door, her expressive brown eyes wide and expectant, a happy smile on her face. It would take a bulldozer to move her out of the way.

  “Take the leash, but you won’t need it. She’ll be good.”

  “Maybe we can have Shirley and Al, Jimmy and Aileen over for dinner tomorrow?”

  I stared at him.

  “Give Shirley a treat. Not to have to cook after work. You and Jimmy can have a visit.”

  “Shirley has to work? The day before her mother’s funeral?” I was horrified.

  His turn to stare, as he might at a creature from another planet. As perhaps I’d become. I certainly hoped so: I’d spent thirty years trying to. “Don’t work, she don’t get paid. It’s been hard for them, with Al out of work all this winter.”

  “Oh, all right. Do I have to cook?”

  “If’n you don’t want peanut butter on toast.”

  I finished loading the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and tidied up the kitchen. My dad was going to have a very hard time indeed coping without my mother. I’d never seen him wash a dish or boil an egg in his life. Apparently nothing much had changed while I was away, if peanut butter on toast made up the extent of his culinary repertoire. He’d probably end up moving in with Shirley and Al. They must have the room, now that their daughters were long married and out of the house. Poor Shirley.

  Poor Dad.

  I quickly cleared space on the coffee table in the living room to make room for my computer and papers. My parents had modernized the house nicely, but they hadn’t stretched quite as far as a CD player. The music center consisted of a tape deck and that relic of a bygone era, a turntable. I popped the Indigo Girls into my Discman and settled the headphones over my ears. A copy of the local newspaper, still the Gazette, several days old, caught my eye. I settled back to read and listen to the music while the laptop booted up and dialed my company’s Internet connection. Poor Shirley, going to work tomorrow—the day before her mother’s funeral. But on the other hand Shirley wasn’t spending her Sunday morning dialing into the office to pick up whatever mail had accumulated since Friday afternoon.

  Old economy versus new economy.

  Pick your poison.

  The paper lay open to the sports page. The senior baseball team of Wilfred Laurier High School, my alma mater, had been thoroughly trounced by the team from North Bay. It was a good while later, after getting through all my e-mail, that I finally flipped to the front page. A girl, pretty in a generic, modern teenage way, stared out at me from what could be nothing other than her school photo. A breathless, screaming headline reported Still no trace of Jennifer. Search continues.


  Jennifer Taylor, a grade twelve student at the same school as the losing baseball team, had not been seen since leaving the house of a friend last Thursday evening. The friend had stood on the front porch watching as Jennifer took a shortcut through the woods for home. She was described as last seen wearing a blue wool coat with matching cap and scarf. In Vancouver I wouldn’t have given the article more than a cursory glance. Common enough, unfortunately. But up here, in small-town Ontario? I stared into her eyes, reduced to no more than dots of black and white in the poor photograph, and then read on. There was no sign that the girl had run away. The paper described her as a good student who never gave her parents “a minute of trouble.” The friend didn’t notice anything amiss with Jennifer that day, and the girl gave no indication of being unhappy at home or school. That meant nothing—what do friends know? Or teachers? Of what really goes on in families? And certainly not police officers, nor newspaper reporters. How could they know to what lengths a young girl would go to hide the depth of her pain? I looked at Jennifer’s eyes one more time, as if I could find a clue hidden in the grainy newspaper photograph. Not that she would tell me anything, had she anything to tell. I was an adult now. One of “them.”

  Sampson barked once at the back door, and my father’s heavy footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs. I slipped the paper under a pile of sports magazines, shut down the Internet connection, and removed the headphones.

  “Get down, Sampson. You’re a mess.” I leapt up to hustle the mud-encrusted dog back into the kitchen. “Wipe her paws off with a towel, Dad, before letting her in. Look at the mess she’s made.”

  “Nothing but a bit of mud.” He pulled his own rubber boots off and placed them neatly on the back step. “Won’t hurt nothing.”

  Not if you don’t have to clean it up.

  Sampson sat politely and offered one paw after another for attention. “Have a nice walk?” I asked.