A Walk Through a Window

by kc dyer

  “This is Ms. Fraser from the social services department,” Nan said, her voice sounding artificially bright. “Darby is our granddaughter, from Toronto.”

  “Ah—from away, are you?” Ms. Fraser said with a smile. “I’m actually just leaving, but it is nice to meet you all the same.” She turned to Nan.

  “Thank you so much for the tea, Mrs. Christopher. I’m glad to see you have things so under control. You’ll let me know if anything changes or if you need a helping hand, won’t you? I’m just a phone call away!”

  She wiggled her fingers at Darby and Nan ushered her out the front door.

  Darby poured herself a glass of milk and sat down at the table. Nan came in and marched over to the cookie jar, dropped two snickerdoodles on a plate and set it in front of her granddaughter.

  “That woman was so irritating,” she said, yanking a chair into place, and then in a high, sing-song voice: “I’m just a phone call away!”

  “Nan!” Darby laughed. “Are you making fun of that poor lady?”

  Nan arched her eyebrow. “Oh, the woman means well, I’m sure. She’s only doing her job. It seems the Charlottetown Fire Department filed a report with senior social services when they had to help Gramps out of the tree that time. They wanted to make sure that Gramps was not ‘out of control,’ as she so delicately put it.”

  “Sheesh, Nan—that was more than a month ago.”

  “I know. Ms. Fraser is proof that even good intentions move slowly when a civil servant is involved. But I told her that Gramps is just fine. He is under Dr. Brian’s care and there is nothing to worry about.”

  “A civil servant? Does that mean she works for servant’s wages?”

  Nan laughed. “Not these days, my dear. It just means she works for one of the levels of government. My guess is it’s the busy-body level.”

  Nan bustled out of the room to relieve her frustrations by cleaning the bathroom and Darby stayed at the table, finishing her cookies and thinking. Spying Gramps on the back porch, she went out to offer him the last snickerdoodle. He was looking for his glasses.

  Darby had spent a lot of time on this visit looking for Gramps’s glasses, mostly because Gramps’s idea of looking for something was bawling “Etta!” and grumbling until the item was found. Gramps had several pairs of glasses. Most of them were the fifteen-dollar drugstore variety with magnifying lenses and spectacularly ugly frames. But he also had a pair of regular glasses that didn’t look quite as dorky as the others, and of course those were the ones that got lost.

  For some reason that morning, Nan was extra upset by the loss of the glasses. “He’s just getting more scatterbrained by the day,” she whispered to Darby.

  Darby blamed Ms. Fraser’s visit, of course. She had freaked Nan out.

  “Anybody can lose a pair of glasses, Nan. My dad loses his all the time. We usually find them on his head.”

  Nan didn’t feel better until the glasses were actually found. They turned up on top of the fridge. When Darby pulled them down, Nan suddenly remembered that she had put them up there when she was bleaching the sink after Ms. Fraser’s visit.

  Of course, this made Gramps very happy, but it left Nan more worried than ever. What if her memory was going, too?

  Darby shook her head and went to gather her swimsuit and towel. Quite clearly, she was not the first and only Dark-side Darby.

  Worries aside, Nan’s beach trip was all arranged, and so that afternoon they headed out, safely deposited by Ernie at a beach that Gramps chose himself.

  Darby stuck a toe in the water and it was pretty chilly. Still, looking around, she decided Gramps was right—this was a good choice for a beach. It was near Stanhope, which is one of the most popular beaches on the north shore of the Island, but even in the middle of a hot August afternoon, there was almost nobody around.

  They’d climbed from the parking lot, over boardwalks built to protect the sand dunes and down to the beach. The sand stretched out, flat and rusty red as far as Darby could see in both directions. Way down at the end, she could just spy the very top of an old lighthouse. Off shore, a little a fishing boat bobbed gently at its moorings. For the first two hours, the only other visitors had been a single other family, sitting a good distance down the beach.

  “I hate the dunes,” Gramps grumbled. “Too much sand in my shoes.”

  “The dunes are protected now, Vern,” Nan said, adjusting her giant sun hat. “You’re not supposed to step off the boardwalks. Besides, this spot is perfect. The sand is flat and it won’t get into your shoes at all. Now just help yourself to a drink out of that cooler and enjoy the day.”

  Darby felt a rush of sympathy for Gramps on this one. But Nan had the firm belief that a person can’t visit PEI and not go to the beach. So when she arranged for Ernie to drive the family on his afternoon off from being a cabbie, what was a girl to do? Agreeing with a big fake smile on her face was the only option. Gramps contributed by suggesting a location he remembered from who knows when, and grumbling about every part of the day. Darby wanted to join him, but Nan had gone to a lot of trouble. And after Ms. Fraser’s visit, Darby didn’t want to add to Nan’s problems.

  The truth was, though, at home in Toronto, Darby was generally more of a pool girl. There were a couple of pretty decent swimming pools in the area and that’s really as close to the beach as she was ever interested in getting. But the afternoon wasn’t going too badly, and she had high hopes that Gramps would only last an hour or so more under the sun before he demanded to go home. Then maybe Darby would have a few minutes to chase down Gabe after all.

  She turned back to her reading. She’d brought a couple of library books and Nan had even supplied an ancient beach chair to sit on. Looking at the pile beside her, Darby decided the total number of books she had read in her life was easily doubled by the reading she had done over the summer. Every librarian in the downtown branch knew her by name.

  Nan had Gramps put up an umbrella and the two of them sat underneath it with the odd, excellent posture of old folks. Darby had just managed to plunge back into the smallpox rosters from the quarantine stations on Grosse-Île when family-style trouble arrived in the form of a woman with three little kids.

  With the whole beach stretched out empty before them, Darby expected the family to pick a nice, open place to spread out. Instead, they set up right in front of Gramps’s umbrella, the kids dumping a huge pile of plastic buckets and toys practically on Darby’s feet and then proceeding to fight over them.

  Gramps looked over at Darby and rolled his eyes. Compadrés in beach torture, she thought, and smiled back at him.

  “Why don’t you try having a quick swim, dear?” Nan suggested. Darby jumped up, thinking a swim might be just the thing to speed them all out of there.

  The woman plopped her fat baby boy on the sand. “April!” she called. “Juniper! Let’s build a sand castle, girls.”

  Darby could see Gramps examining his shoes as the sand sprayed over him. She carefully set the library books out of harm’s way and ran into the low waves lapping the shore.

  The water temperature was pretty cool, but once she was in it was okay. Darby kept a wary eye out for jellyfish. Those little purple blobs she’d seen in the ocean seemed a lot bigger when a person was actually in the water with them. She tried a regular front crawl stroke to begin with, but the strong taste of salt water in her mouth soon had her switching over to the old head-above-the-water flail. She decided a ten-minute dip would cover her in Nan’s eyes, and it was likely Gramps would be nothing but grateful. Ernie was due back soon, anyway, so Darby hoped the trip wouldn’t last too much longer.

  Unfortunately, as soon as she hit the water, both of the little girls from the proximity-challenged family on the beach decided to jump in as well. While the mother scrambled to put a life jacket on one of them, the other one was screaming to get in. Darby paddled farther out and was floating on her back for a minute, mostly to keep her ears under water to cut some of the noise, when she
noticed a sudden flurry of activity in the water.

  She was out deep enough that her feet couldn’t quite touch the bottom, so she tried to remember how to tread water while she figured out what was going on. It took a minute to coordinate her legs and arms, but once she had it nailed she glanced over toward the beach. Nan’s umbrella was flying through the air. This was so strange, Darby stopped treading and flailed her way closer to try to find a spot where she might actually be able to put her feet down.

  A second or two later a sandbar rose up under the water. Darby dug her toes in and pulled herself over to where it was shallow enough to stand. She had actually floated quite a way out, so when she looked back it took a few seconds to see what was happening at that distance. She could see Nan standing beside the upturned umbrella, but she was making no attempt to set it upright. In fact, Nan started running toward the shore. Where was Gramps?

  Darby suddenly spotted a white head bobbing in the waves. She dove off the sandbar and, salty mouth or not, did her best front crawl toward him.

  All she could think was Gramps can’t swim, Gramps can’t swim. But in the minute or two it took her to get back to the beach, everyone was safely back on shore again. Another strike against Dark-side Darby, worrying about nothing, as usual.

  Darby staggered out of the water to find the mother holding one of her screaming kids and running at Gramps, who was pulling the other one, kicking and also screaming, out of the water.

  Nan was standing at the shoreline, and Darby could hear Gramps calling to her. “I’ve got her, Etta—she’s all right, don’t worry about a thing.”

  The mother looked relieved as she reached for the child from Gramps’s arms. “Thank you so much, sir. I think she would have been fine, but I was so busy getting the jacket on April, I didn’t see her run in.”

  But Gramps pulled the kid away from the mother with a kind smile, and turned to Nan. “Here’s Allie, Etta. I told you she’d be fine. I brought her back to you, just like I promised.”

  Nan was gesturing wildly at Gramps, trying to get him to hand the child back to her mother. Her face was very red and she looked close to tears. “This little girl is called Juniper, Vern. She belongs to this lady. Please hand her back to her mother.”

  Gramps looked puzzled, and by that time the lady was nervous enough to snatch the little girl out of his hands.

  In the few seconds it took Darby to try to understand what was going on, something happened to time. She couldn’t explain it, any more than she would ever be able to tell her new teacher how she spent her summer holidays. Thinking about it afterwards, Darby realized it was probably just in her mind. But at the time it was like one of those dreams where she’d suddenly lost her ability to run and everything goes into slow motion. Like that, except a million times worse.

  Darby heard the mother say, “Come along, April, let’s move our things down the beach,” and she had time to feel resentful about how clueless she was about Gramps’s good intentions. Darby bent to grab her towel and try to straighten up the umbrella. Behind her, Nan had walked over, put her hand on the woman’s arm and was whispering something apologetically. Darby caught sight of Ernie coming across the beach and had time to wonder why he had broken into a run when she turned to see Gramps fall like a log—straight forward into the ocean.

  Ernie, Nan and Darby all got to Gramps at the same time, and Ernie turned him over and pulled his face out of the water.

  Gramps’s skin was pale; his lips so white they were almost blue. He gasped like a fish, just once. “Allie is safe now, Etta,” he said, but he didn’t look at Nan. He didn’t look at anyone. All at once, he just wasn’t there anymore.

  And time started up again.

  Ernie tossed Darby his cell phone. “Just push the button with the red letter ‘E,’ kid,” he said, grunting a little as he pulled Gramps further out of the water. “It’ll go straight through to the ambulance.”

  Ernie dropped down on his knees in the wet sand and started giving Gramps CPR. He stopped only to tell Darby the directions to relay to the ambulance crew. The woman with the children stood off to one side, trying to hold her baby and keep the two girls away. In the end, Nan took one of the little girls in her own arms when the kid mistook what was happening for a game and tried to jump on Gramps’s legs. It was sickening, but Nan stayed completely calm.

  By the time Darby snapped the cell phone shut, she could hear the sirens in the distance. She ran to get the paramedics from the parking lot, and they came flying behind her back across the boardwalk and then the sand, carrying a portable canvas stretcher.

  Ernie didn’t stop trying to help Gramps breathe until one of the paramedics actually pulled him off.

  Where’s Gabe? Darby thought wildly. As if he could do anything. Not even the paramedics could help, no matter how hard they tried. Gramps was gone.

  Nan followed the paramedics over the dunes to the ambulance, and they watched Gramps get loaded onto a proper stretcher inside. One of the paramedics then helped Nan into the back.

  “You ride with me, Darby,” Ernie said. He had somehow managed to hoist all the gear up and was standing in the parking lot beside the ambulance. When Darby looked at him, she saw he had a bit of sand stuck to his face, beside his mouth.

  The doors slammed closed on the ambulance.

  “Ernie,” Darby grabbed his arm. “Who is Allie?”

  “You’d best talk to your Nan about that, dear,” he said and threw all their beach gear into his trunk.

  Darby sat on the front porch with Nan that night, as she told the story of her little girl, lost—drowned—before she was even two years old. The child had been named Alice after her great-grandmother, but Vernon Christopher had taken one look at his baby girl and she had been Allie from that moment on. She was the apple of her daddy’s eye, and he spent every minute he was away from work with her.

  “One afternoon, your gramps offered to take her for a while so I could have a nap,” Nan said. “You know your dad’s birthday is in September? Well, he was about a month away from being born. It was a hot day, just like this one, and Gramps took her to a park not too far from here.”

  “The one just down Forsyth Street?” Darby asked.

  Nan shook her head. Her eyes were red and she clutched a tissue in one hand, but Darby hadn’t seen her cry a single tear. “No. The park was closer to the other side of town where we lived in those days. It’s gone now.”

  She paused for a minute.

  “You don’t have to tell me now,” Darby said. “This has been such a hard day.”

  Nan reached over and hugged her granddaughter tightly. “I am so sorry for that, love.”

  “Nan! Please don’t say sorry. Nothing that happened today was your fault.”

  Nan looked at Darby closely. “I haven’t heard Vern mention Allie’s name in more than thirty years,” she said, and smiled a little. “This summer was supposed to be a lovely holiday for you and a break for your parents,” she said softly. “And instead, I am the one who had the best time, because it has given me the chance to get to know you.”

  “I’m glad I came,” Darby said. “I’ve learned a lot, too.”

  “It was just a little nap, in the end,” she said, and for a minute Darby thought she was talking about herself, all those years ago. “He dozed off on the bench at the park. She climbed out of her pram and ended up in the wading pool.”

  “Oh, Nan.” Darby didn’t know what to say.

  “He never spoke her name again until today.” Nan closed her eyes and leaned her head onto the porch railing.

  Darby didn’t say a word.

  After that, Nan told Darby some things she already knew, or guessed. That Nan and Gramps had gone on to have three boys. And that the boys grew up knowing they had once had an older sister, but no details had ever been discussed. She told Darby how, for reasons she never understood, Gramps was always hardest on Darby’s dad, the first boy born after the loss of his only girl.

  Late that nig
ht, when everyone had gone, Darby lay awake and listened to her grandmother weep at last, over her own loss—the man she had loved for more than fifty years.

  The sound of the doorbell woke Darby the next morning. It might as well have been a starter’s pistol. A steady stream of women poured in, each overflowing with kindness and ready to help.

  Darby decided this was a good thing. Ladies sat with Nan and made lists and telephone calls, and pot after pot after pot of hot tea.

  She had at least five different women offer to make her breakfast. After refusing for what felt like the fiftieth time, Darby grabbed a banana and escaped to the back porch.

  With the door closed, all she could hear was the hum of a bee in what was left of the raspberries. All the bustle was a good thing for Nan. Her friends had closed ranks, her sisters were organizing everyone and everything, and in the little Darby had seen of her, she seemed back to the old Nan. Not a tissue or a red eye in sight.

  But all the bustle was too much for Darby. She wasn’t hungry, but she couldn’t remember ever longing more for the taste of porridge in her life.

  She left the skateboard on the front porch for once. It wasn’t worth having to walk past Nan’s honour guard. She cut through the hedge in the yard and walked down the lane that came out at the back of Gabe’s place. There was a spot where the hedge parted at one end, and she pushed through and into the secret garden.

  Gabe was nowhere in sight. Maybe he was gone for good. Darby’s parents were due to arrive tomorrow, and then there would be the funeral. And after that, they would take her home.

  Strange how it didn’t feel so much like home anymore.

  She looked up at the blue house. Nan had said it had been a different colour when Gramps was born here. And now he was dead.