A Walk Through a Window

by kc dyer

  But Nan had caved and the two of them were sitting in the screened porch so they could enjoy the night air without being eaten alive. Darby had been given official flyswatter duty, but so far they’d managed to keep them all outside the screens.

  “You’re not up playing your new video game,” said Nan, sipping her sherry.

  “You said I can’t drink Coke in my room,” Darby reminded her.

  Nan grinned an evil little smile. “We old grannies have ways of keeping our granddaughters nearby,” she said.

  Darby laughed. “I was just kidding, anyway. It was really nice of Fiona to give me that stuff. My wrists are still a little sore from playing with it so much the other day.”

  She spotted a fly that had made it in past the screen and introduced it to eternity with the swatter.

  “That Fiona is a lovely girl,” said Nan when Darby sat down. “I’d almost forgotten about the connection between our families.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of cool having a sort-of cousin I didn’t even know about.”

  “When family names change it makes it hard to keep track.” Nan suddenly looked at her granddaughter sharply. “You do know my maiden name, don’t you dear?”

  Talk about putting a person on the spot. Darby thought fast.

  “Um—is it Urquhart?” she said, flailing wildly.

  Nan laughed. “Nice guess, but that’s your grandfather’s family, dear. No—it’s Darby.”

  Her granddaughter looked at her blankly. “Darby? Your name was Etta Darby?”

  “It still is,” she said. “Or rather, it is Etta Darby Christopher. I am the youngest of three girls, my dear, and by the time I was born, they couldn’t be bothered to think up a middle name for me. So when I married, I kept my maiden name as my middle name. And when you were born, I think your mother liked the sound of it, and here you are.”

  “Wow,” Darby said, and she meant it. “I’m kinda mad my mom and dad didn’t tell me this before. I mean, it’s so cool we share a name.”

  “It’s Irish,” said Nan, draining her glass. “My family, and Fiona’s, of course, came to Canada after the great famine. My great-grandmother arrived on a coffin ship. Her name was Alice.”

  Darby knocked her Coke bottle over. “Alice? You’re kidding me—her name was really Alice?”

  “Let me just get a cloth for that, dear,” Nan said. “I think I may have a refill, anyway.” She opened the door and turned back absently. “You know, I’ve always loved the name Alice.”

  Darby’s head practically exploded right on the spot. Could it be the same Alice? It was a common name. Every neuron in her brain began leaping fast and fierce, but before she could say a word, she noticed Nan’s eyes had filled with tears.

  “I’m sorry, Nan. It’s only a couple of drops,” Darby said, wiping up any evidence with the paper napkin Nan had handed her with the drink.

  “Oh, it’s not the spill, dear. Accidents happen in the best of regulated families.” She smiled a little. “I was just remembering Alice.”

  As more evidence of how stunned Darby was feeling, she asked: “Did she die?”

  Nan laughed a little at that brilliant remark. “Well, yes, she did die eventually, but not until she was an old lady. She was the only one in her family to survive the crossing from Ireland. I believe her brother made it over as well, but he died of tuberculosis shortly after they arrived. No, Alice lived a long life. She eventually married into another Irish family that was already living here on the Island. There were many Irish immigrants who came to Canada long before the great famine, but her story is as far back as I know within my own family heritage.”

  “Maybe I can find some records at the library tomorrow,” Darby said quickly. “It would probably help if you could remember the name of the ship Alice came on …”

  “I always loved the name Alice,” Nan said wistfully. “I once—”

  “Etta!” Gramps was bellowing from the living room. “Etta, the goddamned battery has fallen out of this remote and rolled under the chesterfield.”

  Nan slipped inside the house without another word.

  A billion questions and not an answer to be had. It was as bad as talking with Gabe.

  Darby slipped out the screen door, careful not to let a single member of the insect world get past her, and walked through the moon shadow cast by the oak tree in front of the house. The stars were a little less bright tonight than last, probably because a beautiful fingernail moon had risen. It hung like a white hammock in the sky, almost cradling the tiny gleam of Venus to one side.

  Could it be the same moon that had shone down on Alice and Pádraig on their coffin ship? Darby hoped the kind librarian would help her find out.

  Darby soon discovered that searching for information about a time in the past is a whole lot easier when there is a written record. Over the next few days she realized that she had the opposite problem from her hunt for clues into the lives of the people of the North. When she looked up the Irish Potato Famine in the computer catalogue at the library, hundreds of entries came up. There was way too much information. How would she ever find out what happened to Alice and Pádraig and the rest of the passengers on the Elizabeth?

  She spent a whole day looking at pictures of the coffin ships, including drawings and sketches of how cramped the quarters were below decks. People were crammed in like sardines. Darby remembered the awful smell that wafted up out of the stairwells and hatch covers. Every time she thought of little Ellen sleeping down there with her mother and the dead baby, her stomach clenched into a knot.

  Reading the text that accompanied the pictures, Darby discovered that some people lived through smallpox because they had once been exposed to something called cowpox. In fact, it was through this connection that doctors finally figured out how to come up with a vaccine. Darby sat back in her seat with a sigh. So maybe Ellen had a chance of survival, after all.

  She also learned that she was not the only one interested in looking at this information. The librarian, whose name tag said “Alfie,” called them genealogists and pointed out hundreds of web sites on the computer that helped people trace their heritage.

  Darby thought she had hit the jackpot when she found a web site listing ships that travelled out of Ireland during and after the famine, but after checking and rechecking the list, she still couldn’t find the Elizabeth named anywhere.

  “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” said Alfie when Darby asked her. “The reason life aboard those ships was so terrible was that most of them weren’t meant to carry people in the first place. They were supposed to carry cargo like coal or other minerals, and they just crammed the people on board to make extra money.”

  That had Captain Cameron written all over it. Darby remembered what he said about picking up lumber in Quebec. But it meant she might never find out about the people on the ship. Maybe she needed to buttonhole Nan for more details.

  Darby signed out a few books for extra reading and hurried home. Since she was banned from the skateboard, she practised her balance by carrying the books on her head. She managed to make it almost all the way up the front steps with a big fat book (boringly entitled Ireland in the Nineteenth Century) on her head when Nan dashed past. She had something khaki-coloured in her hands, and it was smoking. Darby followed her into the kitchen to find her dousing Gramps’s old military uniform in the sink.

  “He got lost in a television program on Scotland,” she said harriedly, “and he forgot he was in the middle of ironing his uniform.”

  Her hair was sticking up and she looked exasperated. “This is why I do the ironing around here, and don’t you forget it!”

  “Okay, Nan.”

  Since Darby hadn’t ever ironed anything in her life, she figured that agreeing was a pretty safe bet. She also decided it might be a good time to make herself scarce, so she grabbed one of the coffin ship books and Nan’s knobbly sweater to sit on, and headed out to the porch.

  Several hours later, Darby was deep
in the middle of copying out a passenger manifest from her book when Nan called from the kitchen.

  “I sent Gramps out into the garden an hour ago for a handful of the last raspberries, and he hasn’t come back in.”

  Visions of the cenotaph danced in Darby’s head. “Do you think he’s taken off, Nan?”

  “No, dear, I know he’s back there. I’ve been making pastry and I can see the gate from here, but I just hope he hasn’t dozed off in the sun.” She rolled her eyes. “You know how Gramps is about something like sunscreen. Stubborn doesn’t begin to describe it.”

  “Okay, I’ll go have a look.”

  Darby took the two glasses of lemonade that Nan pushed into her hands and elbowed her way out the screen door.

  She paused on the step to take in the warmth of the day. It was strange—after the journey on the Elizabeth, the headache had been so much milder than the first time, but the cold wouldn’t leave her, even with Nan’s sweater. After staggering home from Gabe’s back garden, it had taken at least half an hour under the shower to get warm. Unfortunately, this meant she used up all the hot water and Gramps had to yell for a while, just to get it out of his system. He seemed fine by breakfast the next day, though. Darby figured he’d forgotten all about it by then. Who said Alzheimer’s didn’t have its advantages?

  Looking around the garden, at first glance Darby reckoned Nan must have blinked. There was no sign of Gramps anywhere in the backyard. Both of the big Adirondack chairs were empty and he wasn’t in the garden, either. She was just going back in to report to Nan when something caught her eye near the raspberry bushes. It looked like a shoe.

  Sure enough, when she peeked into the spot Gramps had shown her a few weeks earlier, there he was. Most of the berries were gone—either picked or dried up—so the area underneath formed a little hollow that couldn’t really be seen from the house.

  It was dim and leafy and cool under there, so Darby set down the glasses and crawled in herself.

  “Hi, Gramps. Feel like a lemonade?”

  “Sure thing, kiddo. Bring it on in.”

  “Uh—are you sure, Gramps? Wouldn’t you rather drink it in your chair?”

  “No, sir. It’s like an oven out there, and if I sit in the sun, Etta will be after me to rub some of that stinking lotion on. Just bring it in here.”

  Darby crawled back out of the bushes and gave Nan a thumbs-up sign through the kitchen window, even though she felt a little anxious. She was not so worried about bringing him the drink, but she’d noticed he had two of his old scrapbooks with him and she didn’t want to ever live through a repeat of the big argument.

  She took a deep breath to steel herself before grabbing the glasses and a cork mat that had been sitting on the little table outside. Bending low, Darby passed them all through to Gramps in his raspberry cave.

  When she crawled back inside, she saw that Gramps had managed to find the trunk of a tree to lean on. He looked pretty comfortable, but it was weird to see him there. Sort of like some wrinkled-up little boy, hiding in his fort.

  Darby picked up her lemonade and prepared to knock it back in one gulp. Gramps had a faraway look in his eyes that she didn’t like at all.

  “Have ye ever found yourself in a situation you don’t understand, kiddo? Where ye feel like a fish out of water?”

  Darby darted a look at her grandfather, but his face was serene. She couldn’t think of a better way to describe her summer than those very words. She took a sip of lemonade instead of a gulp, and sat back a little.

  “You know,” he said, “I was only twenty when I first saw combat, and I felt like a goddamned beached fish the whole time I was there.”

  The strange thing was, when Gramps described his experiences going to war, he sounded almost as freaked out as Darby had been over the past few weeks. She adjusted her position so as not to get poked in the side by a raspberry root and listened to him talk.

  Darby didn’t know Gramps had been a pilot. He told her about seeing all the soldiers coming back after the Second World War when he was a kid, and how it made him think guys in uniform were the bravest men on the planet.

  “But in the end, the whole thing was a disappointment,” he said. “Even after more than fifty missions over China, being fired upon by MiG fighters—well, let’s just say there was no hero’s welcome for us when we returned.”

  Darby edged a little closer and glanced into one of Gramps’s scrapbooks. “I guess the war in Korea maybe didn’t seem as important as the Second World War?”

  He shifted his shoulders. “War isn’t a popularity contest, kiddo. In the end, it was the men I fought with I cared about the most. They were the ones who put their lives on the line.”

  Gramps ended up telling Darby stories all afternoon, pointing out guys in his scrapbook, and showing her where he flew his missions on a map he had tucked in the back. He didn’t give any sign that he knew she’d ever seen the scrapbooks before.

  Nan’s voice finally called through the kitchen window to tell them dinner was ready, so Darby crawled out of their spot under the bushes. She had to help Gramps up. Sitting under the raspberry bushes had made him pretty stiff and he really hobbled on his way over to the back door. He paused, and Darby could see him stop to stretch his back out a bit. She was right behind him with the empty glasses in one hand and his scrapbook under her arm.

  “Thanks for telling me about that stuff, Gramps. It’s so cool you were a pilot. Wait ’til I tell my friends at school.”

  He looked at Darby in a puzzled way. “You never made it to school, Allie. What are you talking about?” He walked into the house and refused to say another word for the rest of the evening.

  Later that night, she was up in her room writing down a few notes in her summer journal when there was a knock at Darby’s door. Nan stuck her head through the opening and smiled.

  “I thought I might find you playing on your new contraption,” she said, as she came in and closed the door.

  Darby laughed, but she closed her journal in a hurry. “I haven’t managed to play on it since that first night, Nan. Too busy, I guess.”

  Nan perched on the edge of the bed. “I see you are making good use of Michael Stevens’s basket,” she said. It was sitting on the bedside table. “That’s quite a collection.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Darby agreed. The smooth piece of the hearthstone from the Elizabeth nestled in the basket, alongside the other rocks.

  “You have chosen such beautiful colours,” she said. “Look how striking they look together. That pale green piece against the red sandstone. Even the broken grey shard looks beautiful in that basket.” She patted Darby’s hand gently. “But I didn’t come up here to talk about your rock collection. I just want to thank you. It was very kind of you to spend the afternoon with Gramps, dear.”

  “Actually, Nan, it was okay. He was telling me all about being a pilot and patrolling over China during the Korean War. I had no idea there even was a Korean War. At school we’ve only learned about the First and Second World Wars.”

  “Oh, your grandfather can really go on with his war stories. I remember he cut a very dashing figure in his uniform when he returned from his tour of duty.”

  Darby grinned. “Swept you off your feet, right, Nan?”

  She smiled and smoothed a wrinkle in her dress. “Well, yes, he did. I had a very romantic vision of life in those days. Things were so different than they are now, of course. Your Gramps just wanted to take care of me and our family.” Her voice faltered a little and she took on the same sort of faraway look that Darby had seen in Gramps’s eyes that afternoon.

  “One day, before he left for the Far East, he found me reading poetry in the graveyard.” She paused and her distant look changed to a positively evil grin. “Of course, I had my sister watching for him all along, so she signalled me when he was coming and I draped myself most becomingly over an old tombstone.”

  Darby grinned again. “Nan! You were trying to catch yourself a boyfrien
d.”

  She blinked her eyes at her granddaughter. “Gramps hasn’t figured it out to this day,” she said with a straight face. They both burst out laughing.

  Nan stood up and put her hand on the door. “I do want to thank you again, Darby. And I realized today that you have not been to the beach even once on this visit. I’m going to arrange a trip soon, I promise. We have to visit the shore before your parents arrive—they will be here next week!”

  “Oh—okay, Nan. Thanks.” A trip to the beach was the last thing on her mind. She needed to find Gabe and ask him about the Elizabeth.

  But Nan didn’t seem to notice the obvious lack of enthusiasm.

  “Wonderful. It will do us all good. You certainly can’t come to the Island and not even visit the beach.” She looked thoughtful. “You know, Gramps is not himself these days. A trip to the shore will cheer him up, too. I think he’s a bit lonely, though he doesn’t seem to want to go visit with his old cronies the way he used to. There are so few of them left, I guess.”

  “What about Ernie, the cab driver?” Darby asked.

  “Yes, Ernie is a dear. He’s almost ten years younger than Vern, though, and his only experience in the war was as a supply clerk, though you’d never know it to talk to him.” She smiled gently and opened the door.

  “When we got married, Darby, Vernon promised to look after me, and I him. He has cared for our family all these years and I plan to do the same for him as long as I can. Thank you for helping me do that this summer.”

  She closed the door softly and left Darby to her thoughts.

  The next morning, Gramps used up the last of the milk making his porridge, so he handed Darby enough money for milk and a pack of red licorice and sent her off to the corner store. Darby took the opportunity to skate past Gabe’s house before heading to the store, but there was no sign of anyone around, and all the windows were dark.

  By the time she glided back down the street with the milk under one arm, she noticed a strange car parked in front of Nan and Gramps’s house. She set down her skateboard quietly on the porch and walked around the back to put the milk away in the kitchen. Nan was sitting at the kitchen table talking with a lady Darby didn’t recognize.