The Romantic Read online

  Where does faith like that come from? How do some people live their entire lives trusting everything to turn out for the best? “The darkest hour is always before the dawn,” they like to point out. Even if that’s true, so what? Nature isn’t the same as human nature. They say,“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Really? Tell that to a starving child.

  Or at least clarify it, say,“Whatever doesn’t kill you might make you stronger if it doesn’t kill you.”

  And yet.

  And yet, in the women’s washroom, I shut myself in a stall and sit crying on the toilet, flushing to muffle the sound and telling myself,“It’ll get better, it’ll get better,” and eventually a thin cloud of optimism falls over me. I leave the washroom and sit on a bench where I look at people with a tenderness I don’t remember ever having felt before. “They were all babies once,” I think. When the bleakness strikes (after seeing one too many couples kiss each other goodbye) I return to the stall and cry until another cloud of optimism falls, then I sit on the same bench and get back to watching people lovingly. At some point I search out the restaurant and buy a grilled-cheese sandwich and a glass of root beer. The shaggy hair of an elderly man seated several tables away makes me think of the mad-scientist doctor in Buffalo. I keep forgetting about him and the possibility of having an abortion. It’s a lifeline, but a gory one, like being thrown somebody’s intestines.

  Around ten o’clock, with the airport almost empty, I lie on a bench and try to sleep. I can’t get comfortable. I go outside to the taxi stand and ask a driver to take me to a nearby hotel. He takes me across town to a pink-stuccoed place called the Water’s Edge. “Everywhere close is all booked up,” he says.

  I don’t bother asking how he would know. I say,“Are we by the ocean?”

  He waves his cigarette at the passenger window. “Ocean’s that way.”

  The Water’s Edge is all booked up, too. “Except for the ridiculously overpriced not to mention hideous honeymoon suite,” says the effeminate clerk. “And I don’t suppose you’d be wanting that.”

  “As it happens,” I say,“I would.”

  He turns the register toward me and hands me the pen. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  I write my mother’s name. “Is it an ocean view?”

  “Oh, brother. Here we go.”

  I wait.

  “Oh, it’s not you. It’s the owner. His name is Waters, James Waters, so in his deranged mind he had every right to give this dump its misleading name. Can you believe the gall of the man? People who’ve booked from out of town, some of them just blow up. At me, of course: ‘What do you mean, five miles from the ocean!’ I could just shoot him in the head. Many times.” He hands me my key. “Top floor. Room ten-fourteen. You can’t miss it—the door’s plastered in little red hearts. I do not recommend the full-service breakfast.”

  On a gigantic bed under a lumpy red satin coverlet, I cry and thrash, but this time the cloud of optimism fails to materialize. Something resembling its silver lining does instead, a hard metallic feeling. I sit up and take off the ballet slippers. Here and there spots of blood have seeped through the Band-Aids. “Bastard,” I mutter, as if Abel were directly responsible.

  I look at myself in the mirror over the desk. I don’t even know who that person is: the smashed eyes, the swollen mouth.

  “I could just shoot him in the head,” I say to her. “Many times.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I keep stopping. I’ll be fine for a couple of hundred yards, then I’ll start worrying about my bangs being too short and whether or not I brushed my teeth this morning, and I can’t go on.

  Abel must think I’m still reeling from the hobo. When I stop, he doesn’t ask why, he uses the opportunity to study tree bark with his magnifying glass or to turn over rocks, and even though his tactfulness is connected to the wrong event, it gets me moving again. This is what I dreamed of and schemed for, this invitation to his house, but I feel lured by invisible forces. I look around for signs of luck, good or bad. He thinks I’m looking for the hobo. “He’s gone,” he says. “He’s miles away by now.”

  We leave the cool olive light of the ravine and emerge into the hot white glare of the subdivision. The streets are empty. Still, it’s a risk for him to be seen with a girl. “You go on ahead,” I say. “I’ll meet you at your house.”

  He glances around. “Okay.” He knows what I’m talking about.

  When he’s about half a block ahead of me, I resume walking. He reaches our street and cuts through the Fosters’ lawn. I stay on the pavement, as I’m sure he means me to. I pass my house. In a kind of trance, nostalgic for a safer time, I give it a long look. By now he’s under his carport and waving at me to make a run for it.

  We go along the side of his house. Somebody—her?—is pounding out a military march on the piano as if to usher us onto the property. We enter the back yard. One half, the half where we are, is a vegetable garden. The other is like the moon, all baked mud and craters owing to the dog, who, at the sight of us, bounds to a corner and starts digging another hole. A wall of pink rose bushes separates the two halves. By the cabbages, breathless, I stop.

  Abel has opened the screen door. ‘You can come in,” he says.

  “Who’s playing the piano?”

  “My mother.”

  Mother, not mom. It makes her sound so unapproachable. The playing breaks off.

  “If you want to,” he says uncertainly. Too late. She has flared up behind him, a pillar of fire in a long burnt-orange skirt and an orange-and-red-striped blouse. Covering her hair is a red kerchief knotted at the front, cleaning-lady style.

  “A visitor!” she cries, opening the door wider. “Abel, who is your little friend?”

  “Louise,” he murmurs. He slides the straps of the knapsack off his shoulders, and at the verge of my own turmoil I am aware of his. She has embarrassed him by saying “little friend,” or maybe just by her loud voice and clothes and her thick accent, which, with me there, must seem all the louder and thicker (in the same way that my mother’s beauty never really struck me until I noticed somebody else looking at her).

  “Louise who?” She is smiling, squinting, betraying no sign of having seen me before.

  “Louise Kirk,” Abel says. “From down the street. The house with the blue spruce out front.”

  “Oh, yes! Yes! Louise Kirk from the blue-spruce house! But this is wonderful! Well, Louise! Come in, come in! Before all the biting flies do!”

  I walk past the tomatoes, the lettuces. I ascend the wooden steps, up the centre where the grey paint has worn off. My arm brushes her skirt. “No!” she screams, and my knees buckle.

  And then what happens? I’m not sure. My memory of the next half-hour or so feels unreliable and scrappy, adulterated by later knowledge. I don’t collapse at her feet or otherwise disgrace myself, I know that. (Even as I teeter on the threshold I realize that it’s the dog she’s screaming at.) I can see myself in the house, Abel and me sitting on one side of the kitchen table, her on the other, a small electric fan moving the tendrils of hair that escape her kerchief. There is milk in a cut-crystal pitcher, and something sweet on a china plate, there must be: homemade cherry strudel or her apple tarts; she never worried about us spoiling our supper. I do remember marvelling at the ornate wooden table and chairs, dining-room furniture in anyone else’s house, and at the Oriental carpet underneath, except I wouldn’t have thought “Oriental” but rather “old-fashioned.” That kitchen’s perpetual state of unwashed dishes, baking in progress, mud-caked vegetables tumbling from quart baskets, the wallpaper with its pattern of tiny bluebells, the stacks of yellowed newspapers, the framed needlepoint pictures of farm animals (sheep, cow, horse, goat) hanging one above another in a crooked line between the sideboard and the fridge … all this I’d have taken note of and been pleased by, drawn as I was—and still am in kitchens—to upheaval and congestion.

  As for conversation, I remember that it’s entirely betw
een her and Abel at first, and that she touches his hair the whole time, running her fingers through it with an obvious pleasure I can’t blame her for. He doesn’t seem to mind this; he hardly seems aware of it. He’s very interested in what’s she’s telling him, something to do with a piece of piano music she heard on the radio that morning. Watching her play with his hair, I drift away from their voices. It gives me a start when she suddenly sits up straight and declares,“Abel, you know, is a gifted pianist!” He blushes. But she is looking at me now, giving me her full attention.

  What does she say? For some reason I’ve blanked it out. I suppose she asks do I like school, what’s my favourite subject (“lesson” she’d have said, as she did in later conversations, and I’d have hesitated, unsure of what was meant until Abel supplied the right word). I remember what we don’t talk about. We don’t talk about the man, as I suspected and hoped would be the case, and we don’t talk about my mother, although my circumstances are known because when I leave it’s with a basket of carrots for my “house lady.” Here I am, in a position to deliver one of my lonely-orphan speeches, but I falter, something I’ve never before considered having struck me, and that is the possibility of other mothers thinking my mother didn’t run off, no mother would do that, she must have been driven off. By me! I can just hear Mrs. Dingwall saying,“Louise always moped around. Louise was an awful disappointment to Grace.”

  If only my mother had been bitten by a rabid dog or murdered by fancy Dan. I remember this, all right, this yearning for my mother to be dead, and dead spectacularly.

  I leave, as I said, with a basket of carrots. Also with Abel’s instructions to meet him tomorrow morning at nine o’clock in the sumach grove. Nine o’clock, the sumach grove. Every morning for what remains of the summer, that’s the time and place of our rendezvous.

  Nothing keeps us away, not thunderstorms, not my migraines, not his mother’s grocery shopping, which, now that I can go into her house, I no longer feel compelled to monitor. We are confederates, Abel and I, secret agents. We take care never to be seen together, developing ploys far more extravagant than the intelligence and antagonism of his enemies call for, but subterfuge is a habit with both of us and, besides, the threat of him getting beaten up is real enough, more so in my mind than in his.

  I let him lead the way. I never thought we could be friends, but since we apparently are, I am determined to win him completely. I want him to more than like me, I want him to pine for me, to wish I could be his sister. His mother is already treating me like family, saying “Louise, sit down in your chair” when we go to his house for something to eat before supper. With her, I am still too shy to say much, and yet I love sitting in my chair at that table, it’s my reward for being fearless and nice around Abel all day. She works on a needlepoint picture of a pig and tells us how she has been occupying herself since Abel left the house that morning: she ironed Mr. Richter’s shirts, she tied back the rose bushes, and so on. She can talk for long stretches without demanding a response or even our attention, and since her thick accent causes me to miss some of what she says anyway, and since Abel is usually immersed in a book or a. ‘National Geographic magazine, I feel free to look around—at the pots and pans hanging from hooks above the stove, at the collection of beer steins on the sideboard, at her, her kind eyes and fascinating nose, her wide, naturally red lips and her broad, quick hand working the needle.

  Every once in a while she’ll stop, look up, smile with an expression of fresh pleasure and then, because Abel goes on reading, she’ll fix on me and say,“Louise!”

  ‘Yes,” I say, heart racing.

  “What did you have for lunch?” or,“Are the red-winged blackbirds still in the cattails?” Some friendly, easy-to-answer question restricted to the day’s events.

  I keep my responses short, out of real timidity but also in order to appear timid. I defer to Abel. Let her see that if she adopted me, I wouldn’t try to hog all her attention.

  Regardless of my ulterior motives, my big plans, it makes sense to defer to Abel, especially in the ravine. He knows where everything is down there, how it all works. It’s as if the ravine were an old mansion I’d thought was empty, making do with bare floors and no furniture while he was sliding back panels onto rooms crammed with treasures, onto attics inhabited by ghosts … or bats. I’m thinking of the cave now. He takes me there that first morning. We get to it by climbing up to a ledge covered in stinging nettles except for a narrow path he cleared himself. Inside, there’s a heavy, musty smell, not unpleasant. It’s hard to see anything but I have a sense of walls soaring up.

  “It’s huge,” I say.

  “It doesn’t go far back,” he says. “It isn’t even really a cave. There aren’t any real caves in southern Ontario. But I call it a cave.”

  “I would call it a cave,” I say loyally.

  “Listen.”

  “What?”

  “Hear that? That rustling?”

  “What is it?”

  “Bats.”

  My hands fly to my hair.

  “A small colony.” He turns away. “I’ve got a flashlight I keep in here.”

  “No!” Some of them are squeaking now. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “I can see.” What I mean is, I don’t want them to see me.

  He notices where my hands have gone. “That’s just an old wives’ tale,” he says. “They’re spectacular flyers. They use sonar, which is sending out a pulse of sound and listening for the echo. It’s better than eyes. And they don’t drink your blood like everyone thinks. Only vampire bats do that. These are little brown bats. They eat insects.”

  “Do they mind us being here?”

  “We probably make them a bit nervous.”

  “Maybe we should go, then.” I start backing toward the entrance, something that feels like seed husks crunching under my feet. “If they’re nervous.”

  “Okay. But isn’t it neat?”

  Is he crazy? Did he really think I’d want to turn this place into my new fort? ‘Yeah,” I say. “Is it ever.”

  He’s not a crazy, I know that. He’s a boy. He’s a smart boy, smarter than anyone I’ve ever met, including my father, whom my mother used to call an egghead, smarter than Mrs. Richter, who (in occasional unbesotted moments, I must admit) is a bit dense about certain things, such as where Abel sneaks off to in the middle of the night, and how to manoeuvre herself and her bundle buggy through the Dominion store turnstile. Abel has no such gaps in his intelligence, none that I can find, unless his overestimation of my intelligence is a gap, but I don’t think it is, I think it’s just that he doesn’t know much about girls.

  He’s very polite with me, very serious. A couple of times a day I get a lecture about something I’ve noticed or, more often, something I’ve passed by without noticing. I don’t mind. For one thing, he hardly talks otherwise. For another, most of what he says is useful and reassuring, such as that the juice from a jewelweed stem, if you rub it on a rash, takes away the itch, or that chicory root can be used to make a type of coffee that his mother prefers to normal coffee (so naturally I plunder the roots of every chicory plant we come across). He promises that there are no rattlesnakes in this part of the province. He says that if we ever ran out of food because of some catastrophe such as World War Three—an event he seems to take far more seriously than he does an attack by the school bullies—we could live on dandelion greens, fiddleheads, raspberries, mushrooms, boiled cattail roots and small game.

  And yet the threat of the bullies is nothing he dismisses. Except he won’t call them bullies, he shrinks from applying even mildly offensive names to anyone. He says “five boys approaching at four o’clock,” some sort of neutral, military report. For him, the adversary is not the invading person, it is the invasion, and therefore by modifying my terms (calling a lone hiker “an advance guard” instead of “a crazy-looking guy with a beard”) I can get him to fall in with my fantasy of our being surrounded on all sides by hostile forces.

  Even the
men who work at the sludge factory we steer clear of. From the way several of them hold their cigarettes between their thumbs and forefingers, and because they all spend a lot of time sitting outside at the picnic table, looking around, looking up at the sky, I’ve pegged them for a spy ring. Abel has his doubts but he goes along. (He also has his doubts about his father being a spy, although he considered the possibility when I came right out and asked if the rumours were true. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “Nobody ever phones him, and he never has to go out all of a sudden after supper.”)

  We study the men through the big old binoculars Abel keeps wrapped in an oilcloth rag and stuffed in a hollow log across the river from the factory. He has about a half-dozen of these cubbyholes around the ravine, in other logs and abandoned fox burrows. They’re where he stores things he doesn’t want to carry around all day: food, water, stones, a trowel, gardening gloves (to wear while cutting back nettles) and a book called The Tracker’s Companion. So now I do likewise, hiding my knapsack, Thermos and lunch box in the other end of his lunch log. At the rear of the bat cave, along with the flashlight, he keeps a collection of maple-sapling spears whittled to perfect points. The second time we visit the cave he brings the longest one out onto the ledge and lets me hold it.

  “Wow,” I say. “You could kill somebody with this!” I make a stabbing motion. “Take that!”

  “It’s more for hunting game,” he murmurs.

  “Hunting enemies,” I say.

  Since he’s the leader, however, our strategy is entirely defensive. We constantly reconnoitre, ranging up and down the slopes about thirty feet apart and communicating with each other by means of caws and hoots. To cross the river we avoid the footbridge and swing over on a wild-grape vine. Under the vine, in the muck of the riverbank, we dig booby traps, not very deep ones (we only have the trowel), but a person chasing us might step in them and trip and be held up for a few seconds. Because it rains almost every afternoon, a short violent downpour, we redig and re-roof the traps every morning. We search the bank for footprints. We search everywhere for animal droppings, or scat, as Abel calls it—human, fox, raccoon, squirrel, skunk, rabbit—checking our findings against the turd-pile drawings in The Tracker’s Companion. I find these drawings shocking, though I refrain from saying so. Nor do I act disgusted when he pokes a stick at raccoon turds to see if they contain dung beetles. Many of them do. I say what he wants to hear: that the beetles are beautiful. By August, having been obliged to study enough of them, having seen how some shine blue and others purple, I can almost say this honestly.