The Rain Barrel Baby

by Alison Preston

  She finds these things and hides them in a satchel along with a length of heavy twine and some duct tape.

  She doesn’t know why. It has something to do with the muddled Squeaks that she hears inside her head. The Squeaks come separately from the other voice, Gruck, the one that comes when she prays. The Squeaks lead her in directions that she isn’t aware of till after the fact.

  For example: the duct tape. Where has it come from? She sees herself placing it carefully with her bag of pointed objects. But she can’t recall deciding she needed it or going to get it. The last thing she remembers is the Squeaks starting, and looking at her watch, she sees that was an hour and sixteen minutes ago. She has been lost inside the Squeaks for all that time and the result is a partially used roll of duct tape.

  CHAPTER 16

  1960

  “Shut up!” the mother shouts. It gets quiet then, too quiet, and she calls for her son. “Ray,” she calls. “Ray, come and see to your sister. The clumsy fool has fallen down the cellar stairs.”

  Ray comes running from his bedroom, dread in his heart. He thinks his little sister is dead when he sees her motionless body at the bottom of the steps. In his panic Ray believes for a second it is possible for him to turn this thing around. One of her arms is askew. The elbow is facing the wrong way. He sees her other arm, twisted behind her back and realizes that it is broken too. Two wrecked arms, at the very least. He looks back over his shoulder at the mother who speaks through a cloud of smoke.

  “Is she okay, Ray? I…I didn’t mean to push her so hard.”

  Ray is afraid to touch her in case he causes more damage where there is already far too much. “Call an ambulance, Mum. Hurry up!”

  “An ambulance,” she says. “Surely not.”

  “An ambulance, Mum. Right now!”

  CHAPTER 17

  The Present

  Emma was a Winnipeg Free Press delivery person. Her job grew easier and more pleasant as summer approached. Some mornings were so clear and still that she wondered if they were real. Or if she was real in them. She often felt detached, disconnected from the life of the world. It was like looking at a picture in the art gallery and wishing she was in it. That happened sometimes. And it happened walking down Lyndale Drive on her paper route.

  Why do I feel this way? she wondered. What’s holding me back? From the outside looking in I would probably appear to be a part of this scene. But I don’t feel it.

  There were dog-walkers and exercise freaks in the early morning. She loved the dogs and some of the people weren’t so bad. There was a fluffy white dog named Easy who was her favourite. He was some elaborate purebred and should have been a snob, but what did he know? So he leapt and squealed and received Emma’s attentions just like the mongrels. The man who walked Easy was nice too. His name was Rupe. Emma liked sharing the mornings with these two.

  Sometimes their cat came too. Emma envied them this. She wondered if she could teach her cat, Hugh, to follow along on her route. She doubted it.

  It was after Easy and Rupe were out of sight that Emma noticed the long car with its closed windows creeping along behind her. It seemed out of place in the morning streets and normal people didn’t drive that slowly. Except for Gus, and this was no Buick. It worried her.

  She wished Easy would appear again around the next bend in the road. Or even the Marlboro Man, as Emma had come to call him. He smoked while he walked and Emma got a kick out of him. But the Marlboro Man didn’t walk on Wednesdays.

  She felt sure by now that the car was connected to her in some way. But she also worried that maybe she was just being paranoid. And she didn’t want to embarrass herself with her own dark imagination. Time and again she found herself imagining the worst. Picturing death and pain and closed-up spaces. And her dad going out the door into the rain and never coming home. She saw herself by his grave at a policeman’s funeral, where they would give her his badge or hat or whatever they presented the wife with. Because of course the wife wouldn’t be there. Just Emma. And Sadie and Garth. And then she alone would be responsible for them. It would be just her.

  She finished up the last of her papers and started to make a beeline for home. The car had disappeared but still she felt uneasy and resented the urgent feeling that pushed her home in such a hurry. What was the point of being up at this hour if you couldn’t enjoy it?

  Her wagon rattled along behind her till she turned into her own yard and abandoned it on the lawn.

  “Hi, Mr. Olsen.” She waved to Gus who was digging in his front garden.

  “Howdy, Emma. Beautiful morning, eh?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She ran up the steps and into the house closing the door behind her against the cool spring air.

  Nobody was up yet. This was the time that she usually spent reading her copy of the newspaper. But she didn’t feel like it today. Just the deaths to see if Esme Jones’ longer obituary had turned up yet. It hadn’t.

  Gus had been thinking about the Lincoln Town Car from the other night. He couldn’t get it out of his head. He must make a point of speaking to Frank about it, although he realized what he had to say didn’t amount to much. Maybe he was making a mountain out of a molehill.

  Such a wisp of a girl, he thought, when Emma turned into her yard. Thirteen she was, but she looked like a child still, with her pale features and slight frame. He didn’t doubt that she would blossom soon. It all happened so fast at that age. But she seemed slow physically and Gus figured that must be a relief for Frank. He could imagine the anguish of being the father of a beautiful daughter that first boys and then men couldn’t wait to get their hands on. Poor Frank.

  CHAPTER 18

  Frank sat at his desk thinking about Jane Mallet. It was time to make a visit to the River City Health Centre. It had been called the River City Mental Hospital when Frank was a boy. And according to legend, it had started out as the River City Lunatic Asylum.

  He drove a few miles south of the city to the grand old structure on the banks of the Red. It’d had its very own dike built after the flood of 1950. New wings had been added to the original building in the sixties and again in the eighties. Administration was still located in the old part. Frank knew this because his work as a policeman had brought him here before.

  Frank loved old buildings. It was easy to pretend while he walked these halls that it was 1910 and he was sauntering toward the head nurse’s office to talk with her in her starched whites about the criminal lunatics under her care. He could be smoking a cigarette or even a cigar. Like Emma.

  The head psychiatric nurse was new. Her name was Norma Wayne and she didn’t look anything like the nurse Frank had conjured up in his mind’s eye.

  She didn’t try to hide her surprise when he inquired about a nurse named Jane Mallet.

  “We don’t have a nurse here by that name but we do have a patient.” She pulled up Jane’s file on her computer screen.

  “She’s been here a long time, our Jane.”

  “How long?”

  Nurse Wayne gave Frank a flirtatious smile but didn’t answer.

  “Do you think I could have a copy of her file to take away with me?” Frank asked.

  “Do you have a warrant?”

  “No.”

  She laughed. “Well then, no, you may not.”

  “May I look at it while I’m here?”

  “No. You may not.”

  “How about if you read it to me, Ms. Wayne?”

  She laughed again. “That sounds like the most fun idea so far but I’m afraid I can’t do that either. You know that, Inspector Foote.”

  “Frank. Please call me Frank.”

  “Okay, Frank. If you’ll call me Norma.”

  Norma was willing to admit that there wasn’t any record of the patient having been pregnant. “But that doesn’t rule it out,” she said. “More than once at my former place of employment a baby popped out unannounced. It wouldn’t surprise me. No, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

  Nurse N
orma Wayne sighed and smoothed her red skirt over her thighs. She sat up straight at a table that didn’t really qualify as a desk in Frank’s opinion. There were no drawers. Where would you hide your stuff?

  I guess head nurses don’t have to follow a dress code these days, he thought, as he took in the snugly fitting skirt and high heels. Far too high for a nurse. For any prairie person. They belonged in Bangkok.

  “I’d be lying if I said we were able to keep an eye on all the patients all the time.” Norma leaned back in her chair. “We quite simply can’t. There aren’t enough of us and it’s getting worse.”

  Frank could tell exactly what her breasts would look like naked. Nicely shaped, medium sized and supple.

  She caught him before he had a chance to determine if he was seeing her nipples or just a trick of the material in her silk shirt.

  She smiled as she adjusted her reading glasses on her toy soldier nose. Her nose was the one thing about her that wasn’t beautiful. It was a relief.

  “Sometimes I think the old way, sterilizing patients, wasn’t as barbaric as they make it sound,” she said.

  “It was a very small baby,” Frank said. “It wouldn’t have been hard to hide.”

  He didn’t want to hear any more of Nurse Wayne’s opinions. He’d rather think about her nose. It looked exactly like the cylindrical pieces of wood glued onto the faces in Garth’s wooden soldier camp.

  “Well, there you are, then.” She snipped off the words. “One more very small unwanted baby in the world.” She looked heavenwards, puffing a breath upwards so it lifted the fine hair of her bangs off her pretty forehead.

  She smelled like licorice.

  “I don’t know the half of it?” Frank guessed.

  “You said it, Frank. You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Would you mind checking to see if there was any trouble with Jane Mallet last October? Or if she had any passes out of here for a day or a weekend or whatever around that time?”

  Frank pressed on. He had established by now that Norma Wayne was a blabbermouth. She had to work very hard at not giving Frank the information he wanted.

  “Fra-ank.” She sang out his name. “You’re pushing me-ee.”

  “Yes, Norma, I am.” He smiled.

  “Okay. This is the last question I’m going to answer.” She fiddled on her keyboard. “Let’s see. Jane doesn’t get passes out of here. She could if there was someone to accompany her, but there isn’t. She’s a sad case, your Jane Mallet. She does go on excursions sometimes with a group from the hospital, swimming and whatnot. Those are fairly tightly supervised. Okay, October you say? No. No report of anything untoward.”

  “Was she sick around then at all? Did anyone come to visit her?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t know,” Nurse Wayne replied. “Look, Frank, I really can’t tell you anything else, unless you get the necessary paperwork. I’m going to leave you here for a few minutes while I see to a matter on one of the wards.” She winked. “I expect you to behave yourself while I’m gone.”

  A printer sat on the table next to the computer. Frank got it going and stuffed his briefcase with as many pages of Jane’s life as he could before hearing Norma’s cheery voice in the outer office. He stopped printing and turned off the machine. It clicked and sputtered to a halt as the doorknob turned and she swished into the room. She left the door ajar this time. The visit was over.

  Frank settled himself in his car and pulled the pages out of his briefcase. He read what he had.

  Mr. and Mrs. Mallet had been killed in a car crash on the August long weekend in 1969, on their way to a rock festival near Denver. A couple of weeks before Woodstock, Frank thought. Too bad they hadn’t driven east instead of west.

  The one-year-old girl, Jane, had been hurt but the file didn’t go into the nature of her injuries. After a lengthy hospital stay she was placed in a foster home while she awaited readoption. It never happened. Frank guessed that must have been because of the nature of her injuries; she was, after all, in a mental hospital. She spent the next seventeen years being shifted from foster home to foster home with the occasional stay in an institution.

  The piece of paper, the order of adoption from 1968 with her birth mother’s name on it, must have followed along with her for a while, at least till she was old enough to read it and understand what it meant.

  Grim, Frank thought. Very, very grim. Even without craziness bred in her bones or inflicted on her through injury, there was enough woe in the life of Jane Bower Mallet to turn her into a loon.

  She had lived at River City for approximately nine years. She had admitted herself in the fall of ’86 and been here ever since.

  Frank’s breath caught in his throat as he read on: In 1991 Jane Mallet had a complete hysterectomy after years of painful endometriosis.

  So much for his hunch.

  He found Jane in her room. She sat by a window gazing out at the big Manitoba sky. Frank wondered if it was the sky she saw or if she was looking at something else, a picture behind her eyes.

  She turned around to look at him. She looked her age, twenty-seven, but there was something odd about her. Her skin was so smooth. There wasn’t a line or a ripple, Frank realized, on a face untroubled by years of decision making and responsibility that form a part of a normal person’s life. Her face was a blank.

  Jane smiled like he was the only visitor she’d ever had. Her face lit up and Frank’s heart ached for this woman who was so alone through no fault of her own.

  “Hello, Jane,” Frank said.

  “Hello,” she said. “Are you the police?”

  “Why yes, I am,” Frank said. “How did you know?”

  “I know what you’re here for,” she said. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  She talked slowly, haltingly, just as Greta had said, with lots of pauses.

  “No, Jane dear, I certainly am not. Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Because I lied,” she said. “I lied to my real mother when I told her I was a nurse, when I told her I was married.”

  “Those are just tiny white lies, Jane. No one blames you for those. No. I just came to say hello really. I know your mother. She lives on my street. May I sit down a minute?”

  Frank straddled a chair across from her and peered into her face. “Why did you write to your mother, Jane?” he asked. “Why did you phone her?”

  “I dream about her. I dreamed her voice and I wanted to see if she really sounded that way, the way I dreamed.”

  “And did she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you like to see your mother, Jane?”

  “I don’t know.” She cast her eyes down. “Why are you looking at me?”

  “You look a bit like your mother,” Frank said. “Just a bit.”

  Frank would tell Greta about Jane; he was certain she would want to know. But not today. He was suddenly very tired today.

  CHAPTER 19

  Denise spent the night in and out of sleep. When morning came she felt a queasiness in her stomach and achy all over but she’d had worse awakenings.

  The curtains around her bed had been pushed back so when she sat up she could look both ways and see that all the other beds were occupied. Hers was in the middle, right across from the nursing station.

  She had no idea how long she had been here.

  Sun poured in the windows of the old building and landed on the two nurses at their station, some of it spilling over to one corner of Denise’s bed.

  “Good morning, Denise,” the one named Ralph called.

  An inkling of hope reared up and lay back down. Denise knew it was good that she woke up in this bed. She liked the small amount of routine that was provided for her here; she was good with routines.

  It had occurred to her on occasion that she would have been a good candidate for the army, with all those early risings, physical training drills, shiny boots and punishments. Or the headmistress of a girls’ school, or better yet,
the assistant headmistress. If she was going to do something properly she wanted someone else to tell her what it was. I am an unenviable person, thought Denise.

  The breakfast trays arrived and the smiling Ralph slid one onto her bedside table.

  “Thanks.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed a little too quickly and had to lie down again. She saw a stainless steel teapot on her tray and felt bile rise in her throat. Bracing herself on her elbows, she willed the vomit back down, tasting it.

  “Ralph, wait. They’ve sent me tea. Is it possible for me to get coffee? I really hate tea, especially first thing in the morning.”

  Ralph no longer had a smile on his face. Maybe it hadn’t been there in the first place.

  “Mmm, not really,” he said. “There should be some instant coffee in the lounge if you want to make some yourself.”

  Denise put on her robe and slippers and went through the double swinging doors into an empty hall.

  In the washroom she splashed cool water on her face. Looking in the mirror, she was surprised and grateful that she didn’t look worse. The skin around her eyes had a bruised look, but that had been there forever.

  She stuck out her tongue at her reflection. Turned it upside down. Her one trick. That’d be sure to impress someone.

  “You’re going to die,” she said. She leaned her forehead against the mirror. Her eyes hurt so badly she wanted to pluck them from their sockets and stomp on them. Burst and deflate them.

  “I could be blind,” she said. Blind would be better than this. No it wouldn’t. Please, God, I didn’t think that. Don’t make me blind.

  Denise vomited into the sink.

  Why am I so wide awake all of a sudden? she wondered. They must have had me on something and taken me off it.

  The last few days were a blur, images fighting for space at the front of her mind: a woman lying in her own filth, her own voice calling for a nurse. What day was it?