A Walk Through a Window

by kc dyer

  And once again—she was gone.

  Darby woke up sometime later to find Nan standing beside her spot on the couch with a strange man. Before she had a chance to say a word, Nan explained he was a doctor who lived across the street. The guy was wearing shorts and an apron splashed with barbecue sauce. Nan must have pulled him away from his dinner.

  She stayed in her spot on the couch and listened to them talking beside the door.

  “Are you sure she’s going to be all right, Brian?” Nan said, her voice worried.

  The screen door creaked on its hinges. “I really don’t think you have any cause for concern, Etta,” he said, in what Darby recognized as the reassuring tone doctors always use. “There is no sign of physical trauma. She’s at the right age for getting a migraine—teenage hormones often play a big part. Migraines are terrible things, but they don’t cause any lasting damage and they are more common than you might think. Just bring her along to my office tomorrow when she’s feeling better and we’ll do a couple of standard tests.”

  The door slapped behind him, but only after Nan pushed a home-made apple pie into his hands.

  Darby couldn’t imagine her own mother ever giving a doctor an apple pie. Darby wasn’t even sure her mom knew how to bake. But then again, she’d never heard of a doctor who would do a house call in Toronto, especially wearing an apron that said “Kiss the Cook.”

  After he left, Nan helped Darby upstairs to her room. Darby was surprised to find Gramps sitting on her bed. He waited until she was finished in the bathroom and had her pyjamas on, and then he tucked her in and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Goodnight, kiddo. Sleep well.” That was it. He left and Darby heard him walking down the stairs, talking to Nan.

  It felt weird—but in a nice way. And at least he hadn’t called her Allie.

  The next morning, the first thing Darby saw was her school journal sitting on the table beside her bed. Her clock said it was only 6:30. No need to go downstairs just yet. When she sat up, she found her head wasn’t hurting at all anymore. In fact, she felt pretty good. She grabbed the journal, intending to write just a line or two to eliminate any feeling of homework guilt she might have—not that she had much. She started to write what she could remember about the people in the snow house. It might have been a hallucination, but it was pretty interesting all the same.

  Her memory seemed a little clearer now that her head had stopped aching, too. She remembered that long walk in the snow, climbing the hill and seeing the huge herd of caribou in the distance. She remembered touching the pile of boulders on the crest of the hill, and seeing how the rocks formed a sort of stone figure with two squat legs. And she remembered—

  Darby rolled out of bed to find the denim shorts she had been wearing yesterday. After much tossing of clothing from her drawers, she checked her laundry basket and sure enough, there they were.

  She jammed her hand into the pocket and pulled it out. In her palm sat a fragment of green stone. Darby ran her thumb over the surface. It had a strange texture to it, almost soft.

  Her memory told her she had picked up the stone from the base of the larger pile of stones. But if that was all a hallucination, how could it be lying in the palm of her hand?

  And what about Gabe’s rock? The one he gave her before the storm hit—the big rainstorm that should have ruined all of Nan’s white laundry. Nan hadn’t said a word about it, but then, she’d been worried because of her granddaughter’s headache.

  Darby remembered they’d been about to take shelter from the storm and Gabe had held out a rock. A piece of red sandstone, just like the green one Darby now held in her hand. He never told her what the rock was for, or why he held it out in the first place. She couldn’t even remember putting it in her pocket. But when she reached back in the pocket, there it was.

  And what about Gabriel? Mr. Mystery himself. Just a few days ago, Darby had thought Gabe might be the one kid in this weird little town she could actually talk to. But now she was not so sure.

  Darby lay back on the bed and put the rocks beside her on the pillowcase with the notebook. The few lines she had meant to write had turned into ten pages filled with wild scribbling. Rocks and strange friends and polar bears. Not that she would ever show it to anybody. She’s not that crazy. But it had felt good to write it down.

  The strangest thing about the whole experience was the passage of time. Darby had been—well, wherever she was—for at least one night. She slept there, for Pete’s sake. But the date on her watch had not changed. Could she have bashed the watch? It seemed to be running just fine, the seconds ticking away …

  The next thing Darby knew, it was eight o’clock and Nan was knocking gently on the door, asking if she might care for a little breakfast.

  When Darby called out a sleepy good morning, Nan’s worried face appeared around the corner of the door. “Are you feeling any better, dear?”

  “I’m fine, Nan. I guess it was just a migraine like that doctor said.”

  She tucked the rocks and her journal into a drawer. “And actually, I’m pretty hungry.”

  Nan opened the door wider and beamed at her granddaughter. Nan’s hair was sticking straight up and she looked like she hadn’t slept that much herself, but the relief on her face was obvious.

  “I’ve made pancakes for your breakfast, dear,” she whispered conspiratorially as they walked down the stairs. “Gramps might act a little out of sorts to miss his porridge, but I think the bacon may win him over.”

  As it turned out, Gramps was talking on the telephone when they entered the kitchen. He ruffled Darby’s hair a little as she walked past him and then waved her to a spot at the table. She sat down and got started on the pancakes before he had a chance to protest.

  “Nothing to worry about, Allan. She’s fine this morning. She’s sitting at the table eating your mother’s pancakes right now. I know, I know—but one day without porridge won’t kill her.”

  This was a shocker. Gramps was talking to her dad? Darby couldn’t remember her dad ever talking to Gramps on the phone. Nan, yes, but …

  Gramps winked at Darby. “Now, here’s Etta.”

  There is no explaining old people.

  Gramps sat down and tucked into his plate of pancakes and bacon. He didn’t even make a crack about the amount of syrup Darby was eating. Nan talked to Darby’s dad a while, adding her reassurances and even saying her granddaughter was good company to have around.

  Who knew?

  Nan shooed Darby away from the dishes, so she went out to the front step. Her stomach was full of pancakes and bacon and her skateboard was calling, but she had some serious thinking to do.

  Darby leaned back against the screen door and closed her eyes. She had never heard of migraine headaches bringing on visions. And yet the hallucination about the people in the cold was so vivid. She could still feel the snow crunching underfoot. How could people live like that? Did people really live like that?

  She opened her eyes. Not a snow house in sight. But if she wanted answers, she knew where to find the next best thing. No hope of Googling—no such thing as a computer under this roof. Instead, she hopped inside to ask permission and picked up her favourite means of transportation. Without a computer, there was only one place she might be able to get a few answers. The library.

  Nan had no chores planned for Darby because of the headache and seemed very pleased when Darby said she was heading to the library. “Just remember your doctor’s appointment this afternoon,” Nan said. “And if you pick up any books of poetry, you might want to bring them back to read in that little park across the street.”

  “Uh—I don’t really read much poetry, Nan,” Darby mumbled, as she slipped out front door.

  “That’s where I met her, y’know,” said Gramps. His voice startled Darby—she hadn’t known he was on the porch. He sat at the small table with an old scrapbook open in front of him.

  “Not really in the park, y’see, because there wasn’t a park there
in those days. Just the old graveyard. Yer mother had a notion in her head that reading poetry in the graveyard was a romantic endeavour.”

  “Not my mother. You mean Nan,” Darby said, but his eyes were distant and she wasn’t sure he’d heard.

  “Yer brothers used to play there, too. Tanned the hide of that young Al when he knocked over one of the old grave markers. An imp, that ’un. Paddled his behind more than once.”

  He mumbled a little more, but Darby snuck out the door. There was no way he had been talking to her. For one thing, she didn’t have any brothers. She paused on the second step, the image of his face still in her mind—eyes distant—even a little lost. Darby sighed. This was one complicated visit.

  She hopped on her skateboard and sped down to the library and spent a full hour looking up the history of northern Canada. Darby hadn’t been to the public library in Toronto in at least the past year, and here she was in the Charlottetown library twice in one week.

  Unheard of.

  It was more than a little scary how real that hallucination had seemed, but Darby decided she must have subconsciously known most of the facts from work she had studied at school. Maybe in grade four or five? She seemed to remember a unit on the Inuit, but she didn’t remember learning a lot.

  The row of computers along the wall were all busy, so Darby turned to a staff member. When she asked for help finding information about the earliest people who came to Canada, the woman laughed.

  “Oh, I’m not teasing you, dear,” she said kindly, in response to the look on Darby’s face. “It’s just that before the European explorers came to North America, we don’t have a written record of the history of the people who lived here. It’s considered prehistory, actually.”

  She rummaged around and found Darby a book on the Beothuk, a very old culture that had been wiped out by diseases the explorers brought with them. She also handed Darby a book written by some professor who had a theory that the way the first native people came to North America was over a land bridge on the Bering Strait.

  “It’s a bit of a tough read,” said the librarian, “but basically, he believes that the first nations people came to North America more than twelve thousand years ago across a frozen land bridge in the very northern part of Canada. This was before anybody was writing things down, mind you, so I’m not sure we will ever know the truth.”

  “It says here they followed the herds of caribou,” Darby said slowly, reading the book jacket. “Can they tell from fossils, maybe?”

  That sent the librarian off in yet another direction. By the end of the hour Darby had enough books to read for a year. She glanced over as someone stepped away from a computer on the end—she figured a few sheets of information from Google would have been a lot lighter to carry home. But the librarian had done so much work; Darby sat down to leaf through a few volumes in the big stack.

  It was weird, though, because as Darby turned the pages, a lot of what she saw seemed strangely familiar. She read how the pile of stones the people left behind to show the way they had travelled was called an inuksuk. The book said inuksuit might have also been used to show nomadic people the way when they were travelling through the north. And an inuksuk has even been used as a modern-day symbol for the Olympic games.

  After reading for an hour, Darby started to feel a bit sick, so she closed the books and piled them all on the cart. Her head wasn’t really aching like before, but she still couldn’t make sense out of her experience and it made her stomach upset. There was no denying she’d had a migraine. Even thinking about it made her stomach turn a little, remembering how bad it was. But could a migraine make her feel like she was being chased by a polar bear, or imagine she was sitting in an ice-house with people from another age and culture?

  As Darby walked out of the library, she caught sight of Shawnie’s poster inside a display case. Along with the poster were some samples of her work, but Darby’s eyes were drawn like magnets to a tiny stone bowl sitting beside a little basket and some other small woven pieces. Darby dropped to her knees and peered into the case. The bowl looked so familiar—where had she seen it before? Maybe it would be a good idea to take Nan next door for tea, after all.

  Darby had hoped that talking to the doctor would give her more answers, but when she asked him about seeing things during a migraine, he talked about spots and distorted vision. She could feel her impatience rising—nothing he said shed any real light on what she had been through. She asked if bumping her head would have given her a concussion, but apparently she didn’t show any of the signs. The doctor smiled at her and said the road to adulthood is a rocky one. He added he was sure Darby had suffered from a common migraine. She rubbed her temple, remembering the sensation like an axe chopping through her skull. Nothing common about that feeling—at least not for Darby.

  If he’d been wading through the snow with me, I bet he wouldn’t be so quick to blame the experience on a so-called common migraine, she thought.

  After the appointment, Darby skated back home and dug out the helmet her mom had packed for her. Whether the doctor believed it was a concussion or not, she didn’t ever want to have a headache like that one again.

  Darby spent the next few days poring over her library books and making notes in her journal. When she slowed down enough to check, she realized she had generated enough material to write an entire essay on the people of the North. But she still didn’t know what any of this had to do with her. And on top of that, she hadn’t been on her skateboard since she’d come back from the doctor’s office. She piled the books on Nan’s table by the door and grabbed her board.

  Hanging out in the sunshine practising ollies off the curb made her feel a whole lot better. After an hour, she had figured out the foot placement, pushing down as hard and fast as she could on the back end and dragging the board into the air with her feet as she leapt up. She still couldn’t get the board to flip in the air, but it felt good to have made so much progress.

  Yesterday’s experience seemed so fresh when Darby was reading about life in the North; but outside, gliding along in the summer sun, polar bears and northern people seemed a lot further away.

  After another hour, she headed in the front door for some of Nan’s lemonade. Gramps was still sitting on the porch with his scrapbooks. Darby stopped to look at one as she bent to put away her skateboard, and a picture caught her eye. It looked like it had been cut out of a newspaper: a group of young men all in uniform. She’d seen a few of Gramps’s scrapbooks around the house and they all seemed to relate to his time in the war, so this was no surprise. But someone had drawn on this picture. Circles and crosses. The page almost looked like a tic-tac-toe game.

  Darby leaned over his shoulder and peered at the picture. “Who’s that, Gramps?” she asked, pointing at the face of one young man who was heavily crossed out. “I can’t see his face with the x on it.”

  She regretted saying anything as soon as the words were out of her mouth, because she could feel Gramps’s shoulders stiffen. But when he spoke his voice was soft.

  “This is my old unit, kiddo. I seem to remember this picture being taken shipside in the harbour, before we set off for Korea.”

  “But why have you drawn on everyone’s faces? How can you tell who is who?”

  He shrugged and didn’t answer right away.

  “I never forget a face, kiddo. Some came home and some didn’t. I don’t need a goddamned picture to remind me. I remember every face in that unit.”

  Afterwards, Darby realized she probably should have left it at that. In the back of her mind, she could tell he was starting to get upset, but the picture really had caught her interest and she was curious.

  “Okay,” she said, leaning across the table, “who is that guy, then?” Darby pointed to a man in the second row whose face was heavily crossed off. “Or that guy?”

  Suddenly, Gramps pushed his chair from the table with such explosive force that his scrapbooks went flying, scattering all over the porch flo
or. His chair toppled behind him and Darby was so startled she jumped back with a squeak, narrowly avoiding having her toes crunched by the falling chair.

  Gramps was standing looking at her, his eyes blazing in a face that had paled to the colour of sour cream.

  “How dare you?” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “How dare ye touch the faces of those men?”

  His voice started to rise now, and spit was flying from his mouth as he spoke. “Those men are my brothers. Harry Johnson lives on Cameron Street. His face is gone. His FACE IS GONE!”

  Gramps’s own face had changed colour from sheet white to brilliant red in the space of a single sentence. Darby had no idea what to do. She just wanted to get away. But she was stuck in one corner of the porch with the table that Gramps had pushed aside jammed into her legs.

  “Gramps,” she began, but he was past listening.

  “Who are ye to speak about these men?” he roared. “Who are you? Identify yourself IMMEDIATELY!”

  Darby’s mouth had gone completely dry. She tried to say something but couldn’t get any words to come out. She feared the old man was going to burst a blood vessel, or kill her, or both, when Nan stepped into the porch. She stepped right in front of Gramps and placed one hand on each side of his face.

  He looked at her in fury for a moment, and then without a word he suddenly curled into her arms, sobbing like a baby. She rubbed his back while he cried and shot Darby a sympathetic glance over his shaking shoulders.

  Darby closed her mouth and swallowed convulsively. In under a minute the day had suddenly darkened in spite of the late-afternoon sun outside. Gramps’s sobs tapered off and she managed to quietly work her way out from behind the table. She put her hand on the screen door and Nan gave her an apologetic little smile.

  “Time for tea, Vern,” she said to Gramps as she steered him into the house. “I need you to open the new box of oatcakes …”