Anna From Away

by D. R. MacDonald

  “You shouldn’t be alone down here so much,” she said, shouldering Lorna at the door.

  “Aren’t you alone yourself?”

  “Not all the time,” she said. “Anyway I’ve got me girl.” She peered into the front parlour Anna never used. “My boyfriend wanted to rent this house. I’m glad he didn’t. Too close to home.”

  “Listen, let me drive you.”

  “Oh, it’s not that far.”

  “Really, I’d like to. The weather’s turning bitter and Lorna has a cold.”

  “When doesn’t she? It’s winter.”

  Breagh lived in a small house not far before the dirt road ended, up a hill that hid the sea down behind it. A glittering four-wheel-drive pickup Anna had seen at the house by the wharf was parked aslant, just off the driveway, its huge wheels sunk in the snow. “Oh, Jesus, Billy Buchanan is here,” Breagh muttered. “He comes around on his own, buddy of Livingstone’s. I bet he’s in there with a beer in his hand.”

  “He just walks in?”

  “If I’m there or not.”

  “You don’t lock up?”

  “Who comes down here, Anna? No drugs or money in our house.”

  A hand, clutching a green bottle, parted the parlour curtain and Anna could just make out a man’s face there. “I wouldn’t care for that myself,” Anna said.

  “Oh, I can handle him, he’s a little thick. It’s that I’m sort of tied up with Livingstone Campbell, and Billy comes here to meet him sometimes. They’re partners in one thing or another, I don’t ask. Anyway, Mr. Campbell is a no-show today. You see, Anna,” Breagh said, hoisting Lorna to her shoulder and opening the door, “Livingstone is not for everyday. He’s a sort of occasion, and sometimes it’s a good occasion and sometimes it isn’t. But he’s putting money up for our shop, and he always brings my darling a present. Doesn’t he, sweetheart?” Lorna nodded thoughtfully. “Anna, come inside for a cup of tea. Billy’s leaving.”

  “All right, yes. I’d like that.” They waited by the car as Billy approached, waving his beer amiably. A stained peacoat was unbuttoned from a proud belly draped in a black T-shirt with a Kiss logo. He had a head of tight, uncombed curls that would keep him boyish for a long time.

  “Liv been around, Bree?”

  “He’s hung up in Sydney, Billy. Business, he says. This is Anna and she lives down the road.”

  “How are you now, Anna? Listen, Bree, tell Liv we got a deal on the boat, me and the other fellas. Okay? She’s a pretty good one.”

  “Going to sail around the world, Billy? Fish?”

  “The world hereabouts, good enough. Motor anyway, not sail. From California, are you, Anna? Jesus, I’d like to go there sometime. Visit like. I lack the money, right now.”

  “I’m living here now,” Anna said.

  “Not much to do on Saturday nights, this time of year, eh?”

  “I didn’t really come for Saturdays.”

  “Which house is yours?”

  “The old red one, above the point. It’s hidden from the road.”

  “Yeah … I know it. Didn’t know they rented it out.”

  “Livingstone knew, if you didn’t,” Breagh said.

  “Did he? Ah, well, never know what that fella’s up to do we? See yous later.” Billy tossed the empty bottle into the trees.

  “Billy!” Breagh yelled, but he grinned, shrugged and climbed into his hefty pickup, muscle trucks Chet called them, its huge chrome grille fierce against a purple-black paint job and more glaring chrome. The engine rumbled to life and the big tires backed it out of the snow with ease.

  “He might grow up—someday,” Breagh said. “Hangs on Livingstone’s every word.”

  She toured Anna through the house she was hoping to fill with antiques, one here, one there, local things, she said, from the Island, so many had been carted away to the States when country people here didn’t care about them.

  “I never had family things, I mean that were really mine, from my own people, you know?”

  “My mother never cared about them. I have a couple things from my dad.”

  There was a hanging oil lamp Breagh was proud of, with a parlour shade of white glass ringed with crystal pendants. Her sewing table, a pine drop-leaf, she’d bought from a lady bound for the old-age home.

  “Uncle Red gave me those pressback chairs and a commode in my bedroom. He made the big table.” She had her eye on old pieces in his house, if she could soften him out of them. “What’s an old bachelor like him need with a big pine cupboard? He says, I store memories in it. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Do you see him much?” Anna said.

  “He’s kind of closed himself away, Red Murdock has. No woodwork out of him for months. He was making a big desk for Livingstone. Expecting some money to burn, I suppose, Liv is like that. I always wanted me a fancy desk, he says, all kinds of special drawers and stuff. You going to do big business on it? I asked him. Exactly, he says, you pegged it, girl.”

  Breagh’s furnishings gave the house a warmth Anna envied. She’d framed textiles and hung them on the walls, in wonderful colours and tones and textures that mirrored the clothes she was sewing, the second-hand fabrics piled on a table, hanging from wall hooks. They drank their tea slowly while Breagh told her about the road, how lonely it could be, she’d go off to Sydney now and then for a few days and stay with a cousin. “It’s a thin place when the snow flies, Anna.” Lorna plopped a storybook in her mother’s lap and laid her head there, it was naptime, and Anna said her thanks and goodbyes, pleased at this chance to linger with this little family of women. Lorna and her mother had dispelled the sepia atmosphere that seemed to colour Anna’s house some days, an unknown but insistent past, long after she had first slid the key into the front door lock on a freezing February afternoon.

  Driving home, she missed Melissa’s girls, their lively visits, tumbling cheerfully into her studio where she always set them up with paper, coloured pencils, a project to draw, some arrangement of animal figurines or flowers or odds-and-ends objects. But they were not her daughters, they ate her cookies and went home with their mother, there was nothing of Anna they would carry into their futures but some loving guidance as their hands tried to show the world as they saw it, felt it. Anna was not with them in the odd hours, the small, defining moments of their lives. That was the privilege of a mother.

  Although she could not put a face to any name on a mailbox, she felt a bit less the outsider, she had visited and been visited. On the high side of the road, the gentle foothill accommodated a quiet house set back, here, there, barely visible or lost to sight, as the road curved, rose, fell toward Anna’s. They were few and looked shut down in the wild, white, constricted fields, the bare hardwoods stark, hemmed in by spruce rising densely up the mountain before forest gave way to a steep, almost treeless slope.

  She passed a dented mailbox: M.D. MacLennan in worn lettering. Her reclusive neighbour? His house, like hers, lay on the sea side, hidden by woods.

  Someone coming on foot? Not MacLennan but the man she’d seen that night on the road, still in his long black topcoat, bare-headed, the black hair, collar of a white shirt, necktie (Connie something?). It was as if he had never stopped walking since that night on the way back from the bridge. Despite his solemn expression, he waved mechanically without looking at her and she returned it. Did he remember her car? Not likely. The moonlit bridge shuddered through her, her helpless stumbling toward the dog.

  Her own driveway snaked through snow-dusted spruce, and at the sight of the house, Anna sank with loneliness. Oh, that unexpected company, it had tilted her sideways. Breagh, her golden red hair, her sea-green eyes, yet no yearning, it seemed, even with her looks, to flee this tiny place. Did she ever question what had come her way, the available options and possibilities? But hadn’t Anna, in her own ways, acquiesced, even as the 1960s offered women a better shake? Yes, she had kept her name when she married, but along with it old attitudes that tied her down for far too long. Lorn
a there in the kitchen murmuring to herself in her own language, contented with found toys, what future for her?

  Anna had a sudden, unexpected urge to call her husband, to reach for that exasperating but familiar link. Only twice had she weakened, the second time on a dreary Saturday evening when she longed for the frivolity of a weekend, that well-earned letting go.Long-distance, on a bad line, she wanted to find him appealing again, to joke with him, to hear gossip, to feel, in the gentle give and take of catching up, tension dissolve: but it was all voice, little was given by either of them, nothing new. She could feel Alicia Snow infusing whatever he said. They might have been distant relations touching base, no intimacy exchanged, no troubling information, no tender subjects broached, just a mutual, courteous coolness that depressed her deeply after she hung up.

  Had Chet accepted that she was gone, separate from him now? It had hurt to think that he was carrying on smoothly with his own life, with a young woman, that Anna’s absence might not matter anymore at all. When she was ill or down, he had taken care of her, he was good at that, he brought her medicine in bed, favourite food when she was hungry, lemon tea, the New York Times on Sunday. He fixed her broken things, if he could. She thought he did so because she mattered to him. Her mistake was believing that she mattered more than any other woman ever could, and so the infidelities she got wind of did not hurt her much, they were no deeper than her own, they burned out quickly before anyone’s house caught fire.

  All this of course was before Alicia Snow, the girl (as Anna preferred to think of her) Chet met at a health club where he was fighting off middle age. After a few weeks of flirtation (She’s fun to talk to, he said, that’s all), Alicia persuaded him to join her on a caving venture, she was a spelunker and loved those labyrinthine, slithering, squeezing, ill-lit explorations underground. Chet, however, was violently claustrophobic, he could have a panic attack trying to get free of a turtleneck sweater. But he saw this as a test, he told Anna, he could not beg out of it, and by then Anna knew he was willing to do nearly anything to get closer to Alicia Snow.

  So she led him into the caves where passageways grew narrower and more constricted, and Chet’s heart rate rose, although he didn’t let on. Alicia knew these caves and he found that he liked putting himself in her hands until they reached a short tunnel-like passage so tight that she said, casually, We’ll have to remove our clothes to get through this one, the tolerances are critical. She unbuttoned her shirt in a businesslike way while Chet crouched there, stunned at the prospect yet excited by the bizarre setting of her striptease. Later, he recounted this to Anna in detail (why not? no harm), read to her a rapturous passage he’d written about Alicia’s nude body in the niggardly light as she squirmed her way into the rocks, and then, naked himself, dizzy, his following her, faint with terror and desire. It was primal, mystical, he confessed (he was prone to confession, he found it liberating), and it sealed something terribly important between them, him and Alicia, and he (as a writer, Anna) was proud he finally had the language to embrace it on the page. I’m not sure that’s where you’re embracing it, Anna said, and the symbolism is rather strained.

  But now, here where she had placed herself at great remove, her sarcasm seemed threadbare, hardly adequate a response to what he’d been clearly telling her: she should have said something straight and honest to him—Chet, admit it, you’re helplessly infatuated with this woman, don’t make her sound like nothing but a muse. But she hadn’t wanted to admit herself how serious the situation was.

  Once inside the house, surrounded by her sketches and drawings, her slowly growing montage of this place, the urge passed, if she phoned Chet again, she would sound indeed as he’d predicted—lonely, and over her head. She could not explain the dog to him even if she wanted to, not anymore, it was a story she might share with a lover. Anna and Chet. Even now his name had a tangled resonance. Man and wife so long, too long, if loosely, over twenty years. She could not blame him terribly for falling in love with a young woman. Who wouldn’t want to relive that kind of emotion? But he squandered on that affair all the passion and attention he could muster in middle age, and that hurt Anna the most—the extravagant attention, and the memory of receiving it herself. She had been the object of his romance once, of the pleasure he took in them both. And she could never forgive what he’d said to her in the heat of an argument: I wanted to fall in love again, like I did with you, you see, Anna, I wanted that long lovely dive when you can barely catch your breath.

  She diverted herself instead by reading the closing paragraph of a Melissa letter she had saved, planning a reply: There’s a new kind of correspondence on the scene now, by the way, called electronic mail, goes through the computer, it’s catching on. I’ll have to give in soon. Wouldn’t touch you where you are, I’m sure. Over at the college now, Roger says students expect him to be on it, you mean you don’t have email? they’ll say. He grumbles, can’t ignore it like a telephone, there it is on his damn screen. Computer stuff coming out so fast, can’t keep up, don’t want to keep up, here we are, whirling through the last decade of the century. Remember when we saw 2001: A Space Odyssey years back? Seemed way way in the future then, didn’t it? Maybe you feel closer to older times, being where you are. Anyway, I miss you a lot, so do Emma and Lilli (when is Anna coming back? they’re always asking), I think of you there by yourself. I couldn’t do it. The tulip trees are blooming, gorgeous.

  Somewhere in her belongings she had stashed, all but forgotten until now, a joint Chet had pressed upon her before she left, There will be a day you’ll want this, Anna. She was tempted to dig it out, but it would be one-and-done, a little diversion, a conversation with herself, a possibly amusing high, with engaging but maybe unsettling insights, even, as it sometimes was, aphrodisiacal. She had her fantasies, her teasing memories, and she didn’t want to kindle them right now, when afterward the rest of the day would yawn with impossibilities. She hoped there would not be a time when she’d need it more, but there might be.

  She bustled about the kitchen stove, clanging pots, a frying pan, the noise beat back any need to hear his voice, to be embraced by the familiar ambience of that town, where her life had touched his life every day—mutual friends, places, figures of comment, politics, benchmarks, allusions, jokes, music. Affairs. Her own were just play. Weren’t they? Maybe there was no such thing as just play, not where love was bound up in it. Had she given him, without realizing it, a licence to seek love, opened a door behind which waited Alicia Snow?

  But I am here, Anna said, here.

  Breagh had left her phone number on a scrap of drawing paper but Anna did not recognize her name at first: she’d thought it would be spelled Bria. It was like coming upon a little etching on a stone—unexpected, rich with place.

  She hauled a bucket of stove ashes to the back porch, then, in a snowy wind, she split kindling with an axe. Standing up, she thought she could make out a boat, a rare sight, no more than a swaying profile in the swirling snow of the strait. To the west, the pond was merging into the whiteness around it, the ice, with its dark stains, veiling over. Anna carried an armload of kindling into her room. Okay, she said, gorging the Warm Morning with wood. I’m okay.

  Cash? Damn scarce here in the country, in them days, Donald John said. When I was a little fella, an old bachelor run a small store over home. Didn’t have much there. He was getting on and he needed a certain kind of help, so he paid me thirty-five cents a week for to bring him a jar of milk in the morning and put drops in his eyes. You see, he drank that goddamn red liniment, so he was going blind. He got into that when he was peddling medical products, I think. When soda pop came in, he had no cooler, so he stored it in a gunny sack in that little cellar under the floor. If you wanted a bottle of pop, he’d open the hatch and haul it up on a rope. He’d go down there himself sometimes to drink liniment, sit with his back to the cool wall with a dipper of water handy. It burned on the way down, you see, so he had to take it with water. If the hatch was open wh
en I come in, I’d know he was down there. Nothing was giving him much bother. Here’s your milk, Charlie! I’d yell. Sometimes he could climb up that ladder, sometimes he just stayed where he was. Chain-Lightning Charlie. Thirty-five cents. Damn glad to get it.

  VI.

  RED MURDOCK SMELLED PISS in the room as soon as he opened his eyes. His face burned, like he was a kid again shamed by wet sheets. He lay there without moving but he felt no dampness. Ah, last night he’d dug out an old chamber pot, first time since, Lord, before he took up the old pantry with a toilet and a tub. Something to be said for that china pot handy on the floor, after you’d been drinking, just stand up dreamy, do it, and then back you fell, catching sleep up where you left it. Yes.

  But it shouldn’t get around, using a pot when he didn’t have to. Codgers did that, drinkers. In the old days the smell of your life was here in the bedroom, and you might die here too, laid out on cold boards in the parlour by your own people, the ones who loved you, the nearest, they washed you, after death, readied your body. Who in a house now could do that hard and distasteful act? Waked, and buried you.

  He took hold of his sleeping cock, more in confirmation than in lust. He had tried not to think of Rosaire that way, it seemed disrespectful to her those first months she was gone, to his love for her. But yet, yet, the long, lovely curve of her back, her mouth on his, on him, the taste of her in a rumple of bedclothes kept coming into him, this mattered. And why not? She loved the long, deep, naked hug as much as he did, the groan of a kiss. But all this was grief too—joys gone, terribly missed.

  “Cloud, you old bugger,” Murdock said, his voice rough with sleep. The cat slept at the foot of the bed sometimes, not near the pillow as he had at Rosaire’s. Murdock had come to like the weight of him there when he woke in the night, that solid little body at his feet. Sometimes awake in the dark he thought he could hear a faint, comforting purr. The cat swished its tail but didn’t move, studying Murdock with owlish yellow eyes. They had grieved together, the cat sitting on its belly for hours with its paws tucked neatly under its chest, not really sleeping, but rather inert, its eyes half-shut in a kind of trance that Murdock understood perfectly—turned into itself tight because it could not be touched by the one who’d loved it most. “I suppose you’re hungry, you little bear?”