A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  Paul and Andy visited the group home too. During their first visit they were led upstairs to see Meg’s room, which she shared with the three other girls. It was large enough and bright enough, but after they’d had a cup of tea downstairs in the oversized, beautifully furnished living room, as soon as they were in the truck on the way home, Andy erupted into a small rage, turning on Paul to ask, Lord, didn’t he notice? She said the room was just horrible, that it needed a good cleaning, a good airing, that it smelled of old food and sweat and stale underwear. She said she would give anything to be let loose for an afternoon in that bedroom.

  On their next Saturday visit, sitting on Meg’s bed, trying not to look perturbed, Andy asked Richard, the supervisor who was on duty that day, why didn’t he either stand over them and make them do it or get someone in to do it for them? She told him she could see no reason for them to live like that. But Richard just looked around the room and shrugged his shoulders. The girls were expected to do their own wash and to keep their room clean. That was the rule. They were pretty slack, sure, but according to Richard the idea was that they themselves would get sick of the mess and the smell, he believed they were capable of getting sick of it, and then they’d clean it up. And anyway, he didn’t think it was particularly bad. “Maybe you should see my bedroom,” he said.

  They didn’t go in quite so often after that visit, maybe once a month, once every six weeks. At home, hoping to help Andy get used to things as they were now, Paul told her that Meg was absolutely safe and cared for and at least slightly happy some of the time and that this was likely as good as it was going to get. “You don’t have to think about her so often,” he told her. “She can make a life for herself there. And better there than here with us. There is nothing for her here.” He didn’t know if he believed any of this to be true, but it was important to him that Andy believed it.

  Meg came home every Christmas and for a couple of weeks in the summer, and any time Krissy or Neil and Carol and the kids were going to be around for a few days someone drove in to get her. Later on she would fall to them. Everyone knew this.

  * * *

  WHEN MEG HITCHHIKED home the first time, on a Tuesday afternoon in the late fall of 1985, Paul and Andy had just got back from Bill and Margaret’s and were sitting in the breakfast nook having a coffee together, talking about their mutual suspicion that something was up with Patrick and Mary, that they were in trouble, and that as usual Margaret knew more than she was willing to say. Margaret had been willing to say that Sarah, who would no longer answer to Sally, had called the night before from Vancouver to tell them that she and Rob had decided to get pregnant.

  Sarah and Rob had been out in Vancouver nearly four years. Rob was an English software engineer who had come over from London just before they met to take a big job with one company and then, six months after they were married, unsatisfied, he’d moved to another company and they had been transferred west. After Margaret had told Paul and Andy her bit of news, that it looked as if she was finally going to be a grandmother in her own right, she confessed that she had been almost ready to accept that there wouldn’t be any babies because Rob didn’t appear to be big on family, his own or anyone else’s. And then she said it was likely just the waiting that had thrown her off, the idea that a woman could bide her time and then decide to do it when she felt ready. “A modern convenience,” she’d called it.

  Paul saw Meg first because he was facing the window and then they watched together as she ran up the long laneway toward the house, a large woman running like a child, her strides clumsy, her arms wild, clouds of cold panting breath bursting from her mouth as she ran. Her new jacket was wide open to the wind, her Blue Jays hat pushed firmly down on her head.

  She had been dropped off at the end of the lane by a grey Chrysler, they could see the car waiting out there for her safe welcome. She turned back several times to wave at the driver, a lone male, who returned her wave and honked the horn several times.

  Andy went to the door and opened it, letting in the cold air, and when Meg saw them she stopped running and began to walk in long strides across the frozen grass. She stopped once to bend over to catch her breath, lifted her head to look up at them, grinned her widest grin. Paul waved at the driver of the grey Chrysler, signalling that it was all right, he could carry on.

  Slumped down on the step, Meg said to Andy, “I came home. I got rides home.” She was so proud of herself.

  “Who was that man?” Andy asked. “Did he tell you his name?”

  “Mr. Brown,” Meg said. “That was Mr. Brown from Sarnia.”

  Andy hesitated but not for long. “He didn’t touch you or say anything creepy, did he?”

  Meg had been taught that she was vulnerable to strangers, to unkindness and worse, that she had to understand this and work to protect herself from it. “Nobody touches me unless I say so,” she said. She made a tight fist in front of her face and shook it hard. She knew what her fist could do because when she was nine and very annoyed with Neil one morning, getting ready for school, she’d knocked him out cold in the back hall.

  They took her in and Andy got started calming her while Paul dialled the phone. Meg pulled her cat’s cradle out of her jacket pocket and began to work it.

  Richard was the head supervisor at the home now and he said he had been calling them and that he’d been just about ready to call again. He said Meg hadn’t got in the van after work, that there was a new driver who wasn’t used to everyone yet. He said Meg must have been hiding because no one noticed that she wasn’t around, and by the time he’d got hold of Mrs. Bradley, who was home herself by then and who had no idea that Meg hadn’t got on the bus with the others, they knew they had lost her. He said nothing like this had ever happened before and that he was so sorry. And was Meg all right?

  Paul didn’t see any point to anger. “I think she had herself a fine time getting home,” he said. “I’ll bring her back in the morning.”

  Richard said that would be appreciated. And then he asked could Andy come along too because he had been planning to call them anyway to come in for a talk, and maybe this would be as good a time as any.

  Paul said fine and hung up. He assumed it would be something about aggression again, maybe shoving some of the other people around, yelling, maybe throwing another wrench through a window. Likely it was time for a trip to the doctor to ask one more time about upping Meg’s downers.

  Andy cooked sloppy joes and apple crisp and after supper Meg pushed back her chair and announced that she wanted to go into town to see Grandma and Grandpa. Everything about her, the way she sat forward in her chair, the way she held her chin up and out, told them, If you won’t take me, I’ll get there on my own, I know how to do it now. They took the truck. Meg sat in the middle between them and played with the radio, played air guitar when she found a station she liked.

  Sitting at her kitchen table doing a crossword, Margaret heard the truck and, knowing the sound, walked to the sink to fill the kettle. Just before she looked out the window she thought, This is odd, they just left here three hours ago, and then she looked. Bill was in the living room watching television and she called loudly to him, “Bill, come out here. Something’s wrong. Meg’s home.”

  When she was born, that summer they were out at Dunworkin, none of them had any way to know precisely what Meg’s future might hold, but Bill had a sense of it, from the war, he told himself, because he had seen things you couldn’t imagine. Because he’d had to accept things no one should have to accept and say nothing.

  When Meg was four or five and just beginning to hide under the combine, to run deep into the rows of corn and deliberately try to hurt the barn cats that followed her, to bust nearly everything she touched, to eat so fast she choked herself, Paul and Andy tried to discipline her with a sharp tone of voice or a quick slap on the hand or on her little squirming rear end. But Bill had intervened. It was the first and only time he had ever done such a thing with any of his kids. He told P
aul he was likely going to have to find another way. “We’ll help you,” he said. “Margaret and I will be here to help you. And your brother and sisters will help you.” The drugs had started then. The doctor experimented until he found something strong enough to keep Meg steady but not dopey and for quite a while the drugs had done the trick.

  Watching Paul and Andy and Meg approach the back door now, Bill asked himself one more time what God could possibly mean with all this bullshit. He knew there was no God to wonder about, had known this since the North Atlantic, since Sylvia, but that didn’t change things. He still caught himself asking. And not less often as he got older, but more often. He thought maybe it was a kind of weakness, like his legs going, or the hair all over his body turning white.

  Opening the door he opened his arms to his granddaughter, knowing his own hug would be overpowered, braced for the strength of her arms. “Meg o’ my heart,” he said. “What the hell are you doing home?” He grinned and stood back to look up at her. “Have you quit your job or did you get yourself fired?”

  Meg laughed down at her grandfather and stomped her feet on her grandmother’s doormat. “I got rides home. Three of them. All the way.”

  As they took off their coats, Margaret made the pot of tea and got a Pepsi out of the fridge for Meg, which she poured into one of the indestructible glass mugs they still had from 1972, the year the town celebrated its centennial. She set Meg’s drink on the table, an invitation for her to sit down.

  Leaning forward over his tea, Paul said to Bill, “She hitchhiked. They didn’t know she was gone until she was halfway home.”

  Margaret lifted Meg’s ball cap from her head and took it onto her own lap. “You’ll go back in the morning, sweetheart,” she said, meaning to say, Listen to Grandma, this is acceptable to us only as a one-time-only whim, a lark. “They need you at that home,” she said. “I could see that. You were helping Richard paint the back hall when your grandfather and I dropped in to see you in the summer. You could hardly take the time to visit. Do you remember?”

  Meg looked at them, each of them, one at a time, turning not just her eyes but her whole head. “Richard always makes me and Matthew do the hard stuff for him, the shit work. Matthew says he pisses us off.” Matthew was Meg’s friend at the home.

  “And Richard is lucky to have you,” Bill said. “He told me that. He told me you did a good job of whatever you put your hand to.”

  This was a lie but Bill thought, So arrest me. Tonight was going to be one more of those nights they’d just have to get through. Maybe he would go in tomorrow with Paul and they could talk together to this Richard, find out just what jobs needed doing, what kind of jobs they were, find out who was on a salary at that home and who wasn’t, who was maybe picking up a bit of extra cash by saying he’d paint the back hall for instance. Although he did believe work was good for Meg. About the only thing that was.

  “So everybody wants me to stay there,” Meg said.

  “Oh, no question in my mind at all,” Margaret said, cheerfully. “You can do all kinds of things in the city that you can’t do on the farm. And with people your own age.”

  Meg didn’t say yes, she hardly ever said yes, but she didn’t say no so they left it there. Margaret poured more tea for herself and Andy. Bill got out the rye and the Coke and two more of the centennial mugs because Meg liked everyone to use them. Meg put on her hat and her jacket and went out into the backyard to walk down to the creek, which was running slow under the bare branches of the willows, and perfectly safe. Bill had often taken her back to the creek when she was small, to show her the wonders, the surprises, and to teach her how to keep herself safe near water.

  Bill poured Paul his drink, asking, “What’s she been up to?”

  “I have no idea,” Paul said. “Likely more of the same. They want us both to come in tomorrow for a talk.”

  “They want us both?” Andy asked. “You didn’t tell me that.” She laid her head down on the table. “They’ll want her on stronger drugs,” she said. “She’s going to be so souped up she won’t even know her own name.”

  Margaret stroked Andy’s hair, combed through the grey-blond streaks with her fingers. “Such a time,” she said. “Such a time.”

  Sitting, waiting for Andy to lift her head, Paul was telling himself to smile, to make the effort. Just a quick we-can-get-through-this kind of smile. Waiting, he realized that they likely smiled a lot less for each other now than they did for other people, people they didn’t even like much, and why should that be?

  Meg rode back in the truck bed on the way home. When she was small she rode there with her old dog Stanley as often as they’d let her, both of them happy, full of themselves, barking for the fun of it.

  Before she went up to bed Margaret called Patrick and Murray and Daphne and Sarah, to tell them. She didn’t expect them to rush home, she didn’t expect them to do anything. Paul and Andy could handle this on their own. But she believed the others should be told.

  She had long ago taken it on herself to make sure these kids stayed aware of each other. And she shared the good news as quickly as the bad, never exaggerated, never betrayed a confidence, not even to their father.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING, Paul and Andy took Meg back into London, first to the group home to change her clothes and then across town to the workshop. After they’d delivered her into the safe hands of Mrs. Bradley, who chastised Meg, told her that her work was waiting and that she would have to move fast to get caught up because they had a new contract coming in that afternoon, they drove back over to the home to talk to Richard.

  It wasn’t aggression this time, it was sex. When Richard said the word they both knew they had been waiting to hear it, prepared to hear it, for a long time. When she’d hit puberty they had tried to anticipate her behaviour, they had talked with each other and with the doctor about the difficulty the most common urges would cause her. Since then they’d hoped her apparent disinterest was either the result of the mix of drugs she’d been on almost all her life, or hormonal, because why shouldn’t her unhappy hormones be screwed up too? But it seemed they had just been lucky. And now it seemed they weren’t.

  The boy in question was one of the other residents at the group home. It was her friend Matthew. Richard said that when he caught them in the basement, just getting started, Meg spoke right up, told him that Matthew loved her and that she loved him. She’d looked to Matthew to back her up but he had gathered his shirt in his hands, was hiding his face in it, crying, embarrassed to be naked in front of Richard. Finally, as if to explain everything, Meg said, “It’s my fault, Richard. It’s my fault because I like it so much.”

  Richard told Paul and Andy that he had seen no evidence of birth control. Meg’s city doctor hadn’t put her on the pill because he would have been the one handing them out to her every morning and of course she hadn’t been sterilized or anything and he was certainly not recommending that. He said he had no reason to believe that Matthew could be trusted with condoms. And what did they think?

  Of course Matthew’s parents had to be told. It was easy enough to agree to that.

  In the end, both Meg and Matthew were allowed to stay. They were told they could be friends, that everyone understood how much they needed each other’s friendship, which was a good thing, a normal thing, but they shouldn’t go down to the basement any more, not alone. The deal was that they would both be given something to quiet their needs and Meg would take the pill, to be doubly sure.

  At home, the doctor told Paul and Andy that he was sorry he hadn’t anticipated or recognized Meg’s enthusiasm. He said the new drug would work with Meg’s other drugs to further blunt her aggression, which could only be a good thing for her, and that it would not necessarily kill her capacity for ordinary affection.

  Meg and Matthew both claimed they understood. They were supposed to be friends. Just friends. They began to volunteer to do the supper dishes and a little later they started to do their wash
together again in the basement, mixing whites with whites and darks with darks, being sure to talk a lot and really loudly because Richard or someone would be standing up there listening. They volunteered to rake the twigs and the dead grass off the lawn in the spring and as a reward they were allowed to go downtown on their own to see a movie starring Jack Nicholson, who was Meg’s favourite actor because he was both handsome and out of his mind. At the workshop they were inseparable, most of the time allowing the Down’s syndrome boy who’d taken a shine to Meg to hang around with them, taking him along if they were going to the lunchroom or outside on a break to sit in the sun, to lean against the warm brick wall at the side of the building and neck.

  Their public touching was soft and discreet. In Mrs. Bradley’s opinion, it was in fact charming. If they engaged in anything more forceful, if they found a way through the haze of pharmaceuticals handed to them in little paper cups each morning, they weren’t talking.

  For a while after this business, Paul and Andy themselves stopped making love. Andy had always called it that, making love, refusing to use the other words even in the midst of their slippery, lusty acrobatics. When they were just starting out, before they were married, she’d said that was what they did, they crawled into an empty place where no love existed and made it, created it every new time from nothing but themselves.