“What did I do?”
“You know what you did.”
“I – what –”
“Oh, be quiet. Would you just try and get along for the rest of the day?” She sighed. “And on Christmas, no less! What would Jesus think?”
I frowned. “Nothing, I expect.”
“Believe me, He’s none too impressed by your behaviour.”
I laughed.
“What are you laughing at?”
“At you.” I squinted at her face, for she had gone on a little ahead of me. “You were joking, weren’t you?”
“No.”
“You don’t really believe in all that?” I asked, forgetting all about my own prayer, issued from the sofa of the abandoned house on Shealittle Road, after a particularly difficult night. I forgot, too, that it had somehow been answered.
“Of course I do,” said Thea.
I shrugged. “Whatever lets you sleep at night.”
“That’s out of line, Katie.”
“I’m sorry.”
She crossed her arms. “What do you believe in, if you don’t believe in that?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose.”
I went to the riverbank, and watched the water flowing by so quickly, even while the pond nearby was covered in ice. “I don’t see the point of believing in something,” I added, “if it’s only to make myself feel better.”
“Well, what if it’s true?”
“You don’t know that it is?”
“It was a hypothetical question.”
“So you know that it isn’t?”
She came to stand by me, and put her arm through mine. “You’ve always loved to stare at that river,” she said quietly. “What do you see that you like so much?”
“I don’t know,” I said; though of course I did know, and proceeded to explain it quite as well as I could. “Just the way it moves, never stopping; even when there’s a rock in the way, it only splits in two and keeps going. You could put something big in the way, something to keep the water from flowing – but the second you moved it, it would just keep on again, like nothing had ever happened at all.”
“Is that how you wish you could be?”
“I’m not talking about me. I was talking about the river.”
“Is that what you really think? Or is that just what you’re trying to make me think?”
“Why would I try to make you think anything?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Because you’re an incorrigible liar.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. You don’t do it to hurt; you do it to help. Well, you’re trying to help yourself, but you usually just end up hurting.” She kissed my cheek, and asked, “Don’t you think that very odd?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Whatever lets you sleep at night,” she mimicked.
I looked back at the river. It was not, that I was only just beginning to see what she meant; for, quite naturally, I already known. Things seldom simply dawned upon me that way, as if from nowhere at all. I knew them from the start, and they sat forever inside my brain, brewing, growing stagnant, and then rotting away. My evasiveness was meant to draw everyone away from the smell.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Thea.
“Why even ask?”
“I want to know.”
“You already do.”
She smiled at me; and her eyes were free from any and all traces of doubt. If only for a brief moment, I was somewhat envious of her; and so I smiled back as best I could, gave her a kiss, and then turned around to lead her down the path, where we soon found the others walking back towards us.
“How’s my big boy?” I asked, taking the baby from Kerry. His little cheeks were flushed, and he was smiling widely.
“What happened to you?” Kerry asked. “We just looked back, and you were gone.”
“We took a detour,” I said.
Myrne rolled his eyes at me. “It doesn’t count as a detour, if you don’t go in a different direction. You just stopped.”
“Fine, then. We stopped.”
“That’s better.”
Kerry looked from one to the other of us. “We’re never going to win with you two, are we?”
“I don’t think so, Kerry,” said Thea.
Myrne and I smiled at each other.
Chapter 46
By eight o’clock that night, Mary-Anne was fast asleep on the sofa. Joseph was snoring softly on Kerry’s shoulder; so she went to deposit him into his crib. Then she went to collect Mary-Anne, and carried her up the stairs to their room.
“Good night,” she said, walking past us at the hearth.
“Good night,” echoed mine and Thea’s voices.
Myrne said nothing at all. He was staring into the fire, his elbows on his knees, looking more pensive than I had ever seen him.
Thea yawned loudly, then. (I’m sure that it was feigned.)
“Too much fresh air, I think,” she said. “I’m going to bed.”
She looked at me, and then at Myrne. I nodded.
Once she had gone, I looked again at Myrne, who seemed not even to know that I was sitting beside him.
“Meniah?”
He shook himself. “Still awake, Kate?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“What time is it?”
“A quarter past eight.”
He nodded, and turned back to the fire.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said.
“You don’t sound so sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Did you have a good day?”
“Sure.”
I sighed impatiently. “If you insist on being difficult, I’m not going to talk to you anymore.”
He looked at me, and despite his words, there was none of what I knew of him in his expression.
“You’re mean,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to you, anyway.”
“Well, if that’s how you feel about it –”
I made to rise from my chair.
“Wait a second,” he said.
I sat back down.
“I’m sorry if I was unpleasant today,” he said, having turned his face away from me again.
“Not any more so than usual.”
“You’re lying.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to tell you so.”
“That’s nice of you.”
I made a face. “You never call me nice. You must not be feeling well.”
He rubbed his hands together, then ran his fingers through his hair.
“I should cut that for you.”
“What?”
“Your hair. I should cut it for you.”
He shook his head. “No. I like it this way.”
“You’d look less like a girl.”
“Maybe I like looking like a girl.” He scratched his head. “No, wait, I said that wrong. Just never mind.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, you make a very pretty girl.”
“It doesn’t, actually.”
We sat for a minute or two, just looking into the hearth, watching the flames grow smaller and smaller, until the light which emanated from them was too dim to be of much use, and the heat that resulted was near nonexistent.
But neither of us moved to stoke the fire.
I knew that something weighed upon his mind; but I knew that I could not make him speak. I could only wait, and wait, as the hands of the clock continued to creep, and as I began to grow drowsy.
I was just nodding off in my chair, with my chin falling down to my chest, when he spoke. It was a good thing the fire had burned down so low, because he scared me so badly, I almost fell into it.
“Last year wasn’t so bad,” he said. “We were all . . . out of place. And it was so soon after all that had happened, I suppose I was still numb. This is just – well, it’s the closest I’ve been to a real family, sinc
e I lost mine.”
As far from sympathetic as it may have been, I had never thought much about what people Myrne may have left behind. (Though I suppose it did not help, that he had never even so much as hinted at their existence.)
“Do you want to talk about them?” I asked.
He looked uncertain.
“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. But I’ll listen if you do.”
It took him several long moments to begin – but finally he did.
“She was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen,” he said. “Her name was Penny, and I met her when I was sixteen. My ma didn’t like her, right from the start.”
It took him a little longer to resume.
“I knew I wanted to marry her, the first time I saw her. I don’t think she was so sure as I was – but I convinced her in time.”
“How long did that take?”
“We were both eighteen, when we got married.”
“It didn’t take too long, then.”
“Two years.”
“Ah, well. Sixteen is too young to get married, anyway.”
“Lots of people get married when they’re sixteen.”
“That doesn’t mean that they should.”
He smiled, and started to seem like he was brightening a bit. It was as if there had been pieces of himself, floating high above him; and as he talked, they were settling back down to their proper places.
“How old were you, when you met Thea?” he asked.
“Twenty-two. The same age you are now.”
“That was only three years ago.”
“I know. And it’s even more to say that we spent nearly two of them apart.”
“How long did it take you to convince her of you?”
“I’m not entirely sure that that’s the way it went – but it took a few months.”
“Better than me, then.”
“I don’t really know if it counts, as I didn’t have to do much of anything.”
“Well, anyway – we waited until we were eighteen. Both of her parents had died by then, and I left my ma’s house to go and find one with her. I was working in a printing press at the time, but we never would have been able to afford a place, had it not been for the money Penny’s parents left her. We found a little house not too far from mine. Ma was glad of being able to see me so often still; but not of the fact that she had to talk to Penny so much.”
“Why didn’t she like her?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably because she came from more money than I did.”
“How much more money?”
“Let’s just say . . . a lot. I could have quit my job – but I didn’t want to have to say, that I let my wife pay for everything we owned. I wanted to be able to buy things for her, too.”
“That was very honourable of you.”
“Well, it just made my ma angrier. As hard as I worked, as long as I worked, I never would have been able to save as much as Penny already had. Not that I cared. I loved her so much, she couldn’t do anything to hurt my pride. Just Ma’s.”
“She never got to like her at all?”
“No,” said Myrne, a tear rolling down his cheek. “I suppose that mothers have a sense about those kinds of things.”
“What do you mean?”
He waved his hand at me. “I’ll get to it when I get to it. Anyway, it was months before we even thought about doing anything other than what we were doing – though, I suppose you could say that we never got a chance to think about it at all. When she told me that she was going to have a baby, she was just as surprised as I was.”
“You had a baby?”
I could tell that he was thinking of the past, and that he was letting himself become lost in it. His voice was almost dreamy when he answered.
“Aye,” he said. “A beautiful baby boy. His name was Jacob.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. I could feel the pain of his loss, even from where I was sitting. It was still fresh, like salt in a nasty wound.
I suppose that a wound like that never heals.
“He was so perfect,” Myrne said. “Absolutely everything about him was perfect. His face, his eyes, his smile. He had a wonderful smile.”
“He probably got it from you.”
He flashed me a grin, as if only to prove me right.
“He made me so happy,” he said. “I didn’t think that anybody could make me happier than Penny, but the two of them together . . . By God, I was the luckiest man alive!”
I was not sure how to work up to it; but I had a feeling that he wanted to tell me. So I just went on with it. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “what happened to them?”
He looked back into the fire. “I came home from work one day, and they were gone.”
“What?”
“They were just gone. I went all round the house, and then out into the yard. I went to my ma’s house, to make sure that they weren’t there.” He sighed. “Which made it all the more uncomfortable, when I went back home and found the note on the table, telling me that she’d gone away with the blacksmith who lived next-door.”
I tried not to let my mouth fall open.
“I would have burned that note, so no one ever knew – but Ma followed me home, after I told her Penny was missing. She saw the note before I could hide it. I wish I could say that she didn’t gloat, or tell me that she had told me so – but she did both of those things.”
He shrugged his shoulders; and his eyes were very wide. “I don’t know what I did wrong. What could I have possibly done that was so bad, to make her take my son away from me? I don’t know where he is, whether or not he’s all right – if he’s even alive. God knows what could have happened to them, running off with that brute.”
“She never wrote you, never told you anything of Jacob?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing.”
“I really am sorry, Meniah.”
He waved his hand again. “Don’t be sorry. I should have seen it; I should have listened to Ma. I lost my job, and then my house. I was living with Ma when she died.”
I watched his face, as shining tears began to steal into his eyes. He turned his head, and wiped his face with his sleeve, determined not to let me see him till he had dried his face sufficiently.
“Hey now,” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t have to do that. You should know by now – if you can cry in front of anybody, you can cry in front of me.”
He looked a little embarrassed; but also a little bit glad. “You certainly saw enough of it when we were in prison,” he said.
“You know,” I said, “you never even told me how you ended up there. You know what happened to me.”
“Well, it’s not quite as interesting.”
“Oh, come off it. Just get on.”
“Well,” he said again, “I suppose it was my own fault, really. After Penny left, and Ma died, I lost control of myself. I just didn’t care about anything.”
“What did you do?”
“I punched an Englishman. Square in the face.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Was it worth it?”
“Probably not,” he said. “But at least I met you. My first and only real friend.”
“Oh, Meniah – you’re not my friend! You’re my family.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“I am not. You’re the brother I never had.”
He pulled at his ear, looking self-conscious. “Really?”
“Yes, really. Why would I lie?”
“Because I’m sad and pathetic.”
I looked at him seriously. “I think that all of us have felt a little pathetic, from time to time – especially these past years. It’s hard not to think about what happened, because it will never really go away. But I do think, that things could be much worse than they are. Don’t you?”
“I suppose they could.”
“Well, there you go. Now go to bed, before you star
t feeling sad and pathetic again.”
He smirked at me, having obviously regained most of what confidence he had lost over the course of the day. “I’d tell you to do the same,” he said, “but you always look sad and pathetic.”
“Is that a shot?”
“It certainly is.”
“I’d hit you, if I wasn’t exhausted.”
“I’d hit you harder.”
“I’m telling you, Meniah – you’re really going to eat your words, one of these days. You’ll be sporting a very nice black eye, too.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he replied. Surprising me, he rose from his chair, and kissed my cheek, before disappearing into his tiny bedroom.
I sat there for a long time, thinking of the brief story Myrne had told. All these months; all the jokes; all the times he had smiled and laughed, making fun of me as if there could be nothing in the world more important. He had held so much, so far down, for so long – and I simply could not wrap my head around it.
I could not help but think, of those three poor souls who rested under that roof, that night – who had lost all or most of everything they had had.
Then I thought of myself, and of all that I had experienced, and all that I had seen; to end up right back home. All I had loved, and all I had cherished, surrounded me still. In the bed to which I now hastened, lay the only thing which I could not have stood to lose.
And so I did not feel, if I should have been perfectly honest, very sorry for myself.
Chapter 47
The next few days were of little event. We welcomed in the new year, each of us hoping that it would bring brighter and happier things, than those which had filled the year that was presently passing away.
“Out with 1917!” Myrne shouted, throwing open the door at the back of the parlour, and emphatically heaving something invisible out into the snow.
“Now go and get the new one!” Mary-Anne said to him.
He ran outside; raced for a little alongside Dolly; and the turned around and ran back.
“It was hard to catch,” he said, handing something (as indiscernible as 1917 had appeared to be) to Mary-Anne. “But I caught it all the same. Now, keep it in your pocket, and don’t lose it.”
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