Girl Runner (18 page)

Olive turns the handle on the door, gently pushes it open, calling out, “It’s just me, Olive, and my sisters, come to see how you are.”

The girl who lies in our grandmother’s bed rolls her face on the pillow to see us. It is a hot day, but she has pulled the sheet to her chin. It occurs to me that she may not be decently dressed underneath it. I spy on one of the wooden chairs her folded dress and hat, and her good shoes are placed neatly underneath. The girl looks as if she does not care about much of anything. She looks quite blank, preoccupied. She pulls her bare arms out from under the sheet and rests them silently on her stomach, her mouth and forehead twisted, as if she is struggling not to make a sound.

Olive quickly pulls over the other wooden chair and sits beside the bed, leaning to touch the girl’s hand. “Are you in some pain?” she asks quietly.

“Something’s happening,” says the girl.

“Well, then. My mother’s help is doing the trick,” says Olive.

“Will it hurt?” the girl whispers. Her eyes are full of fear.

Olive doesn’t answer, not exactly. Instead she promises, “We will stay with you. We will be with you.”

I am impressed. Olive could be our mother, she is so sure, so confident. Cora makes a noise with her mouth closed, a
hmpf
, a scoffing sound. I give her a poke, make a face at her.
Stop it.
Cora stares at me unblinking, pretending she’s done nothing.

The room is too hot, and I go to the window and open it. “Maybe we’ll catch a bit of breeze,” I say, trying to be cheerful. I still do not understand what has made the girl sick, nor what is happening to her. I stand by the window with my arms hanging at my side, wondering how else I might help. Cora stands in the doorway like a statue. When our eyes meet, she crosses her arms over her front, her legs slightly apart, like a sentry. She won’t enter the room.

“Cora, Aggie,” says Olive, without turning her attention from the girl, “could you brew some tea, please, as Mother suggested, with fresh garlic? I will stay with”—she pauses fractionally before saying the girl’s name, as if she’s afraid she’s betraying her privacy by naming her at all—“Betty.”

“Might as well put the cakes in to bake,” I tell Cora as she fills the kettle and sets it to boil on the big stove in the summer kitchen.

“You don’t know what that girl did, do you,” says Cora in a steady tone that I recognize. She is about to tell me something that I don’t want to hear, and she’s relishing the moment.

Silently, I walk away from her into the kitchen to fetch the filled cake pans.

“That girl has a baby in her stomach that she doesn’t want.”

I walk the cake pans right past Cora, who is hovering in the way. I push her aside with my elbow, but she only shrugs and follows me closely. My elbow is a sign of weakness. She knows she’s upset me, and she’s pleased.

“Our mother is helping that girl kill her baby.”

My hands shake as I set the pans on top of the hot stove, beside the rattling kettle, and open the oven door.

“And now we’re supposed to help kill the baby too.”

“You’re lying.” I turn on her, oven door hanging open and cake bottoms beginning to cook on the stovetop.

Cora says nothing. She doesn’t need to.

“How big is the baby?” I whisper, thinking of the only infant I’ve ever seen up close, when I was no more than five myself, and Little Robbie was born to Edith and Carson.

Cora doesn’t know. She looks suddenly not quite so certain.

“Have you seen the babies? What does Mother do with them? Does she bury them? Why is the girl’s stomach so flat? Shouldn’t it be very big for a baby to fit inside it?”

Cora cannot answer me. She doesn’t know.

“You think you know, but you don’t!” I am flustered and hot from the oven, which I suddenly remember is open, and I shove the pans in and slam it shut. The kettle begins to steam. Using a thick flannel pad, I carry the boiling kettle past Cora and into the kitchen, and begin to prepare the tea, as directed, with smashed fresh garlic mixed with the dried herbs, slowly pouring the hot water over top.

When everything is ready, I make up a tray with a pretty embroidered tea towel, and a china cup, and a small bowl of honey, and a little spoon that came from our grandmother. Something in me wants to make the tray look pretty, like I would for any guest.

Cora follows me.

“You’re helping her,” she whispers accusingly.

In truth, it would never occur to me not to help the girl, or Olive, or most especially my mother. Mother has told us what we are to do. I cannot imagine choosing to defy her wishes. The alternative is quite impossible to fathom—inconceivable, you might say, though under the circumstances, I should probably not put it that way.

I carry the tray through the parlour and the open door to the bedroom, and set it onto the dresser just inside the door, where my mother keeps sheets and bedding fresh smelling with sprigs of lavender. The girl is rocking her head from side to side on the pillow. She does not look well. Her forehead is wet.

“Make up a basin with cool water and some clean cloths for compresses.” Olive speaks quick and low. Her voice remains calm, but her eyes, as they meet mine, are worried. I can feel my heart beating faster. I understand why my mother has kept me from the Granny Room until now. This is what she’s been hiding from me: illness, fear, the suffering of strangers.

I push past Cora, who stands like a stone in the doorway, and run for a basin. I’m back as quickly as I can come, and have to push past Cora again, water sloshing onto both of our dresses. I frown at her, but she doesn’t budge, and won’t even look at me. I’m not sure who or what she’s looking at, exactly. I place the basin on the wood floorboards.

“Shut the door,” says Olive. Cora doesn’t move. “Shut the door!” Olive raises her voice, and Cora challenges her in silent refusal. “In or out, Cora, make up your mind!” Cora hesitates, and Olive stands, suddenly furious, and pushes her out of the way and leans onto the door to close it, with some difficulty, as Cora appears to be leaning back. As soon as the door is shut, and Olive returned to the girl’s side, Cora opens the door. I can see that Olive might strike her, she’s that angry, but Cora simply steps inside and pulls the door shut behind her.

Why?
I mouth the word.

We soak the cloths, Olive and I, and begin bathing the girl’s face and arms. Olive moves the sheet to wash down her legs. I have never touched another person’s body before, not like this, and I am surprised by how pliable she seems, how easy it is to lift and position her limbs, and how she responds to our touch—she relaxes against it. I feel for a moment that this is going to turn out just fine, whatever
this
is. But then the girl almost sits up, sharply. Her stomach is hurting her, and it must hurt very much, for her eyes are full of fear. I realize that blood is pooling from under her hips, spreading on the sheet, and I stare at Olive.

Olive’s eyes open wide, but her instructions give the impression of calm.

“Lie back down, gently now,” to the girl. And to me: “Lift just now, just here, and . . .” Olive opens the drawers for more sheets—I see that Mother is keeping old sheets in these drawers, not new, not nice, these are torn and mended and stained and greying with age. Olive spreads the old sheets under the girl. The smell of lavender rises thickly. I am grateful for the sleepy perfumed scent, which fights against the raw animal smell of fresh blood.

Olive presses on the girl’s stomach, kneading it with one hand, the other holding the girl’s hand, bringing forth more blood.

“Stop!” I whisper frantically.

“This is how it is done,” says Olive. “This is how I’ve seen Mother do it.”

“What is happening?”

“You are killing her baby,” says Cora.

At that, the girl makes a sound, her first, just a quiet helpless cry that comes from her throat as if she can’t stop it, though she wants to. Tears stream out of the corners of her eyes, but she forces herself to stay silent inside her fear. I think,
you are being very brave
, but I don’t say it out loud. I hope she can hear my thoughts, read my eyes.

“We are not doing harm,” says Olive firmly. “She is suffering a miscarriage. She needs our help.”

I look across the girl’s body, which lies between us, into Olive’s eyes, and I believe her. Almost. I believe her enough. I can’t decide, just then, whether it matters that I believe Olive’s version or Cora’s, because what matters is that Mother has told me to help, and so I must help. Besides, I am here and helping, and now I want to, no matter what. I feel that I couldn’t leave. It is the girl I’m thinking of, not the girl’s baby, that is true, and perhaps it is unfair of me, and unimaginative, but it is the girl who is suffering, and whose suffering I want to soothe. I keep washing her cheeks and brow, and her arms, rinsing out the cloth, washing again. I’m running the wrung-out cloth over her hand when she turns it palm up and wraps her fingers around mine. That is when I understand: she wants something steady and strong to hold on to. It is a want that I can answer. I let her hold my hand. I stop daubing her. My other hand folds on top of hers.

Olive checks under the sheet from time to time. I look away, to give the girl what little privacy I can.

“We need another basin,” Olive tells Cora, but Cora won’t go. She is the witness in the corner, the angel of stone, the truth teller. Olive must go herself. In the moments that Olive is gone, Cora and I face each other across the room.

The room is silent and still, except for our breathing. And then I am holding my breath until Olive returns, briskly, prepared for what’s next. Into the basin goes some fleshy unformed dark red tissue that looks livery. I stare quite hard, while pretending not to, but I can’t find a baby in that basin. I can’t find anything that looks human, or shaped, or recognizable. I can’t find anything but clotted blood. I see Cora looking too. She seems surprised. I think she expected to see a whole baby come out of the girl.

“We’ll just keep pressing and kneading, until it’s all clear,” says Olive. “But you may sit up now. You must have some tea.”

Olive discreetly washes her bloody hands in the basin of cool water, curlicues of colour spin out, and the liquid swirls a pale pink. I try to pull my hand from the girl’s, in order to pour the tea, but the girl holds on. She wants to tell me something. I shake my head to warn her that Cora is in the room, and Cora is not someone with whom you want a secret shared.

“He said he’d marry me. I don’t want to marry him. I don’t want to see him ever again.”

Shhhh, says Olive. Hush.

“Can you help me?”

I don’t know what she means. We’ve helped her, surely. What more can we do?

And then I know. We can do nothing more. This is it. This is all Mother can do too, and the room knows it, and the house around us, and the heat of summer, and the promise of the turning seasons. The distant smell of acrid smoke knows it: a summons from the burnt-up crumb cakes in the oven, which beg watching by the girls who bake them, for it is never boys who bake cakes.

Later, when we are getting supper on and waiting for Mother to come home, Cora points out there is blood on the back of my dress. But it’s not the girl’s. It’s my monthlies, returned.

That is my first story.

T
HE SECOND STORY
is mine, all mine. Because I too have been the girl in the Granny Room, lying abed, shivering, in need of my mother’s merciful help. I will keep this story short. It is too sad to stand up under the weight of words. I will tell it thin and plain, if I tell it at all. There is no one alive, now, who knows the story, and only a few knew it, ever.

I’ll tell only what I’ve spent my life promising: that I regret nothing. And it will be a lie, of a kind. But it is also the truth.

“
YOU DON
’
T KNOW ME,
” says the woman in Edith’s kitchen, “at least not very well. My name is Nancy. I should have introduced myself earlier.” Nancy, she says. Well, I know this kitchen, don’t think I don’t, untidy as ever.

“I’m very sorry to disturb you,” I say firmly. “I will leave now.”

“You’re not done with your tea!” The girl is flustered.

“We’ve still got footage to shoot,” explains the young man.

“Take me home,” I demand, clear as a storm on the horizon.

“Won’t you stay?” says the woman. “I’m sorry I’ve upset you.”

“It’s your story we want to tell,” the girl insists.

Everyone crowding in on me. A crowd of crows. Well, well, well. What makes them think my story is theirs to tell? What makes them think I’ll cooperate any further? Don’t they know—they are dealing with an expert in the telling of other people’s stories.

Edith, I say to the woman who has got me by the hands with her strong, fine-boned fingers, no rings, dry and calloused. Edith, I’m very sorry to have come here, and I will be going now.

“Miss Smart, my name is Nancy.”

So you say. In Edith’s kitchen. With Edith’s mess all around you.

“Miss Smart, I’m sorry to tell you that your sister Edith is no longer alive. She died many years ago. She is buried in the New Arran churchyard if you ever want to visit. We could take you.”

Edith is dead? I do not mean to say this out loud. I do not mean to look old and confused.

“Yes, Edith is dead, Miss Smart.”

Ah. Like everyone else.

“This would be the perfect time to tell her,” says the young man, his camera eager to see me weep.

The woman won’t let go of my hands. She insists on burdening a person: “Miss Smart, my name is Nancy, and I’ve got something very important to tell you.” Her name is Nancy, so she says. “Miss Smart, you’re not alone in the world. That’s what we want to tell you, me and Kaley and Max—we were your neighbours, yes, but we weren’t just that. We’re family. I moved back to my family’s farm after the divorce. The house had stood empty so many years, I thought it might have fallen down, but no such luck. You can see that it stands yet.

“Your sister Edith was my grandmother, Miss Smart. That’s why I was so—surprised, I guess. Disappointed. About the coffee cake. When we were kin. I should let it go. It’s ancient history now.”

I shake my head. I’m remembering a burnt-up loaf of crumb cake, meant for Edith, could that be what the woman means?

But she won’t stop her talking.

“My mother moved in with Grandma Edith when I was ten—not that she wanted to. Too much talk in a place like this, she said. But she came back to look after her mother. She was a good daughter. Like my kids. Yes, you are, both of you. I was a teenager when Edith died. And then we got the heck off the farm, me and Mama. We flew like birds across the country till we reached the ocean. I never imagined coming back. To this. Place. But here I am.”

“You’re Edith’s.” That’s what you’re saying.

“Yes. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“You’re Edith’s?” Prove it. Can you hear my fury? It pours from me, fear distilled. My hands slam down onto the tabletop.

“I know there was a rift somewhere along the line,” says the woman stiffly. “Mama didn’t know what had happened. And Grandma Edith never said a word wrong about you, Aganetha, though she wasn’t fond of your sister—I’ve forgotten her name—but who would be? I wasn’t half-fond of her either, when we’d meet in town. ‘How is your poor grandmother keeping these days?’ she’d beetle for me, digging around. ‘And do you see your father from time to time?’ A person who liked to poke a person where it hurt. Still, and all, she took the coffee cake and invited me in, and you weren’t a force of welcome, exactly, it must be said.”

“Mom,” says the boy in a tone of warning.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I can’t let it go. Silly, isn’t it?” The woman pauses, but only for the time it takes to sigh. “I know there was a rift between you and Edith. But it shouldn’t matter now, should it, after all these years?”

“Ask Edith.”

“Edith is gone, Miss Smart. I’m sorry. She died many years ago now.”

THE WOMAN ISN
’
T DONE,
even with Edith buried. She tells me, as if I don’t know: “You weren’t at the funeral. Your sister came to the reception afterward—uncommonly friendly, she was, but my mother didn’t trust it. Mama said there was no love lost between Edith and her Smart sisters.”

“Half-sisters.” I gut out the words, but the woman doesn’t hear me. She is slowing down, now that she’s poured out what she means to say, drifting as she remembers out loud. Nancy’s her name, so she says. I mouth it to try to keep it with me. “For your sister Edith’s funeral, my mother and I filled the church hall with flowers from Edith’s own garden,” Nancy says. “Edith was a great gardener in her old age.”

Edith, a great gardener! My mouth opens in steady, pounding revolt. Pshaw. There’s my proof. You must be speaking of another Edith, not my sister. Edith was no gardener. Edith never coaxed a living thing from the soil under this house.

I THINK I KNOW
at the moment of conception: I feel a pinch, like a sleeve snagging on a branch, the thread pulling loose, the story unravelling. Too late.

Oh! No.

Over me, I can make out the vaguest contours of Johnny’s face in the room that’s gone dark since we began. Our silence amidst our movements is mutual, choked, giddy. I do not mean to cry out.

“Are you quite fine?” His concern fills me to bursting. I pull his face down into my neck, so he won’t see. I don’t answer him otherwise. We breathe together and I am glad. I am foolish in my joy.

Already Johnny grunts and presses upright. Already he flips over and jackknifes his body, leaps to his feet, dressing quickly in the dark. He laughs as he stumbles into his pant leg, hopping across the wood boards of the floor, nearly toppling.

“Hush! Johnny! The girls will hear you.”

“I thought they were out.”

“That was hours ago. I’m sure I heard them come in.”

But all of this is beside the point. What am I to do? Already the bedsheets are cooling where his body has been. Already I feel a regret I can’t express, even to myself. I know—I do not love him as much as I should. Desire is not love. It cools as soon as it is slaked.

We are the sum of our actions, and of our inactions, yes, that is easy enough to understand. What comes harder is finding ourselves the sum of our emotions, which flicker, altered by experience, by the things we cannot bear to tell ourselves, by the trouble we accrue, the flattening and tamping down as we learn how not to be hurt. As we learn protection and the easiest means of protection.

I am not ready for Johnny to leave the room.

But he goes to the door, and unlocks it. Returns and bends over me for the briefest kiss, as if this will cure me. I roll onto my side, away from him, but he seems not to notice, and away he goes. I hear him thumping down the stairs.

I hear voices in the kitchen, below, rising as lightly as a swirl of fallen leaves caught in an up current. He’s staying. He isn’t going home yet. He’s in the kitchen, where he’s found the girls. He’s laughing with Glad, who loves to laugh.

I am the furthest thing from laughter, a sour sombreness preventing me from rising and cleaning myself and dressing and jauntily wandering down the stairs to join them. I think,
What is wrong with me?

I decide: this is a mistake I’ll only make once.

What can Johnny say in protest? Nothing to persuade me again.

I TAKE MYSELF
to visit Tattie, the woman who is not George’s wife, the mother of his children, and the secret he’s asked me to keep from the rest of our family. I knock on their door during the day, guessing George will not be there, and he is not.

“Tattie,” I say, without much in the way of pleasantries. “How does it feel to be . . . with child?”

Tattie nurses her littlest. She says, “Are you worried, then?”

It is not a question that needs reply.

She says, “Does he love you enough to marry you?”

“I just need to know how it feels,” I say.

Tattie laughs a little, wryly. “You’ll be tired like you’d like to die, and”—she touches her breast with her free hand—“you’ll hurt, and maybe some pains here”—she presses her stomach—“and it won’t be long before you start swelling up. And then you’ll know and so will everyone else.”

“Is it the boy from the photos in the newspaper?” she asks me after a pause. “Handsome. Does he love you?”

“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”

“Then you’ll want him to ask you to marry him.”

I nod. I haven’t thought of how to do that, but I see she’s right—it won’t be up to me to do the asking, my job is to maneuver him into the position to do so.

A tiny crack of fear opens, somewhere in the back of my mind. I can’t do this.

Tattie is watching me. I can see her doubt.

“Not every man is like your brother,” she says proudly, and I recognize with surprise that she is complimenting George on his fidelity. George, my brother, who keeps her and the children in this sagging row house, who lives at the racetrack, who drinks steadily when he has the chance, and sleeps steadily when he does not. George, who’s never offered her the protection of marriage, who swears up and down that love is all that matters—when it’s clear, to me, that he’s holding out, hedging his bets, like he always has, like he always will.

“He owned up to what’s his,” she says. “Every night, he comes home to us.”

I try to smile in return, but it is a struggle. The truth is, I am a terrible actress—stiff, unnatural—even after my training, or perhaps my training is to blame.
Enunciate! Smile with your eyes! Be emphatic!
What good are these tools of the trade against Tattie’s pretty face, sallow and anemic, her wild gypsy hair? She wears no wedding ring, and my mother and father have never heard of her existence, but she seems to believe she has enough—as much as she deserves, or even more. I see why I’ve wanted to come here. I see that I cannot be like Tattie.

“Well,” I say, “it’s probably nothing. Just a bit of a flu.”

She nods. The kettle comes to a boil and steam fills the little room. “Could you get that, please?” She is occupied by the infant at her breast.

I pour boiling water over black leaves, steeped many times over, in a cracked teapot. We drink the weak stew unsweetened, and we do not speak of my trouble again. So I count her among those who do not know.

SHE IS MY BEST FRIEND;
still, I don’t tell Glad.

I haul myself out of the water and sit down, hard, on the slick tiles, my head between my knees at the edge of the pool. Glad swims close, pulls herself up by her elbows, and clambers to my side. She kneels and pets my wet hair. “Are you all right?”

This is November, late into the month that I’ve always loved least, nagging and spindled and dull, pressed for light and colour. There is nothing to do in November but wait.

I think: I’m dying. I’m dying or I’m pregnant, one or the other, and I don’t even care which.

“Are you okay?”

“Dizzy,” I mumble, although dizzy is the least of it. I am sick, through and through, all the way to my bones.

Glad gets me towelled off and changed. She gets me home to our apartment, and tucked into my bed. She boils water for tea, but brews it too weak. I’m feeling better and do not complain. When Johnny comes hurrying up the stairs, banging open the door to my bedroom, I’ve heard his approach and I pretend to be asleep under blankets pulled high.

“She’s got the flu, she’s resting,” I hear Glad tell him. She is just a little bit out of breath. Protective. She leads him out of my dark room.

Olive brings me broth. For three days, I lie in my bed. I can’t think what else to do, too unwell to escape the apartment and run against the bitter wind and shrinking light. Bone-crushing weariness washes over me in cycles, so that I feel briefly better and allow myself to consider the possibility that I’ve guessed wrong, only to be swung back toward sickness, made worse by the feeling of certainty. This is what is happening. This is going to be my story.

I gag into my pillow.

“You haven’t got a fever, so that’s good.” Olive sits on the side of my bed, home from work, and wearing her smeared apron scented of chocolate. The smell makes me gag. She strokes my cheek. I think she is trying to be reassuring. But she is our mother’s daughter too, and when I turn to look at her—directly at her—I tell her with my eyes, and she reads my diagnosis.
No, I haven’t got a fever, have I, Olive.

“Oh, Aggie.”

We hold hands. She does not ask me what I am going to do. She is our mother’s daughter. She waits instead for me to tell her what I am going to do.

I push my way out from under the unwashed blankets. “I haven’t talked to him,” I say, standing and wandering about the room, feeling caged, mildly frantic, weakly reaching for the cool plaster wall.

“You need to eat more, drink more. You’ll feel better.”

“I’m getting dressed, and I’m coming downstairs,” I say.

Unfortunately it is Glad’s night to cook: fried fatty slices of ham served with onions, slightly burnt.

I am surprised to find Johnny at our table too. He is waiting, holding out his plate with an expectant look on his face. Glad stands at the stove wearing a pink polka-dotted apron trimmed with frills. She does not look quite exactly like herself, though I can’t say precisely why not. I have the sensation that I’ve stumbled onto an illicit scene, even though everyone is fully clothed and Olive has come down before me, and sits at the table too, waiting her turn.

Glad serves Johnny first, stabbing a dry hank of ham out of the pan and scooping blackened onions on top.