Girl Runner (24 page)

NOW YOU COME HOME, AGGIE
?
says Cora.
Now that there’s no one to look after? Now that you’ve no unpleasant duties waiting? Now that it’s only me and the house? Who says I want you now? Who says you’re welcome? Your name might be on the deed but this farm doesn’t belong to you. You left home. You left like everyone else did. Didn’t that make them sad? Didn’t that make them weep? What would you know, Aggie, what would you know about giving up everything?

WHAT
’
S A WEEK,
a month, a year or forty? It vanishes too.

Slowly, steadily, we empty and shutter room after room until our lives shrink to the space we can manage to occupy. We inhabit no more than we can. Even that can seem too much. One day in winter, I shutter the Granny Room. I empty out the drawers and hang the sheets over the window and door.

Lavender.
Crumbling in my stiff fingers, mouldy. Dust.

THE GIRL
’
S EYES
meet mine in the rearview mirror. “Miss Smart, do you know you have a lawyer? Max and Mother have been to see him, and we don’t think he’s got your best interests at heart.”

A lawyer, yes, well, I’d forgotten. That would be Peter’s son, the doctor’s boy? His office the same his father kept clinic in, and there are papers to sign, my hand trembling with age not nerves, while Peter’s boy looks on. That would explain who’s been paying for the home that is not a home, which bothers me when it crosses my mind. I always paid my own way.

“I always paid my own way,” I tell the girl, but she mistakes my meaning.

“It’s different now, Miss Smart. You don’t know how much it costs—there’s coaching, physio, massage. There’s vitamin supplements, travel expenses, gear, gym time, you have no idea, or I can’t compete. I’m trying to get to Rotterdam, Miss Smart. If I can lower my time there, I’ll make the team, and I’m close. I think I can do it.”

I hear the words, but it’s like the girl is speaking a different language. The rules have changed from my day, she’s saying. It isn’t the same. The path is cluttered with obstacles. The obstacles are lit up in dollar signs.

I would like to tell her what matters, but I know better than to attempt it. She may be right, and it all comes down to the money. Who am I to argue? If I paid my own way, as I claim, who, then, was Mr. P. T. Pallister? I was lucky, as much as I was anything.

But still I say to her, It’s the running that counts.

We are coming out around the barn, the field opens before us, and I begin to run the old familiar path. No one sees me running. But I do, each step unfolding in my mind, shaking my body, jarring and rattling it, and carrying me along. This is what it feels like: a catalogue of dull pain from ankle to shin to knee to hip to shoulder. The breath comes hard at first, rough, but will smooth into a rhythm. And when I’ve been running for a while, only then, the thoughts settle into sense.

I am remembering the races, stealthily entered in my middle years, when I ran with a hood shadowing my face, my hair cropped wiry and short, so that I could pass as a man competing at a distance from which women were barred. Look up my times. In my fifties and sixties, as A. F. Smart, I ran Boston, Chicago, New York, Hamilton. Why did I do it? Why race, when I could run from here to the lake and back in a single day, and often did, leaving Cora at home to mutter and fret? I would carry along boiled eggs, walnuts, and homemade sweetened ginger water.

Somehow it never went out of me—the desire to compete, to line up against others, win or lose, part of a rhythm larger than myself. One turning wheel in a crowd of effort.

If the girl is mine, as she claims, she’ll get to Rotterdam, if she wants to. But it won’t be money that buys her the race she intends to run.

WHEN GEORGE DIES,
I do not hear of it immediately. In dying, George leaves behind Tattie, the mother of his four children, my nephew and nieces. Tattie, short for Tatiana. I believe her to be younger, even, than I am. She sends the eldest to tell me about my brother’s passing, but I am not at home. I am at the
Toronto Daily Star
, working the job found for me by Miss Gibb’s favour. My brother has died and I do not know because I am in a windowless office downtown transcribing copy for a reporter who has been on the scene of a factory fire—suspected arson—and the landlady tells me nothing.

The following day, the boy comes again, this time to ask for money for the burial, and the day after that to say a man has been by their house with a letter that Tattie cannot read, and still the landlady does not say a word of it. Placidly, she serves up her fatty cuts of meat and soft mealy potatoes, inquiring whether I’d like seconds, without a hint that anything might be amiss. I plan to visit George on Sunday, when I’m free, if I can stomach it, and as I’m not sure that I can, it does not occur to me to visit any sooner.

The boy comes a fourth time. On this occasion, he is sent by his mother to tell me that someone in a dark suit is going to take him and his sisters away.

I hear nothing of any of this.

Perhaps the boy does not know he may leave a message with the landlady, and asks for me only to flee when told I’m not in. Perhaps the landlady thinks the child is a stray. Perhaps—and I consider this the most likely possibility—she believes that the ragged child is beneath me, beneath my interest. She has ideas about glamour and style, and she seems perpetually to imagine me a fine young lady in a fur coat, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

I almost cannot bear to think of Tattie waiting, waiting, each time, for the boy to return home. I can’t bear to think of the silence ascribed to me. The help denied.

On the Sunday, at last, the boy finds me home. This time he is carrying his baby sister in his arms. I hear his story, all in a rush, a cascading urgency of need. There isn’t time to question the landlady; I’ll state my case against her silently, by leaving before month’s end without notice, even if it means abandoning the hard, velvet-covered chairs. What does anything matter? All in a rush, I learn of my brother’s death and pauper’s burial, and of the letter that Tattie cannot read, and the man in the dark suit who has clearly terrified the boy with his threats. All of this tumbles out of the child in one long exhalation.

We hurry along the dirty streets. The first leaves of the season are falling from the trees, brown and ugly, swirling around our feet as we run, the child just ahead of me. Burdened by the infant, he refuses my help, and keeps a stoical businesslike pace that I admire.

We enter through the garden gate, the late-summer fruit hanging heavy and overripe and bug-bored on the weary tomato plants. A patch of lettuce has gone to seed.

The boy climbs the back steps almost wearily, like an old man, and hesitates, after all that rush, at the door. I look at him and try the handle. It isn’t locked. Inside, we hear a strange cry, thin as gruel, persistent as life itself. I take heart. I open the door. The strange cry is silenced.

“Tattie, I’m here! I’ve come! It’s Aggie, your sister,” I call as we stand on the threshold, our eyes adjusting to the dark room. I want her to know that I think of her as a sister. I want her to feel centred inside the embrace of family, even a family like ours, that with its instinct for secrecy does not know she exists.

There is no answer and the strange cry is silenced.

It is only one room, as I’ve said already. The room is dark. Along the wall nearest us is a small kitchen area, a few cupboards, a low shelf for preparing food, a greasy cook stove that warms the space in winter. The infant in the boy’s arms has begun to whimper.

I see the children first. They could be asleep, flat on their backs, lying on the wide board floor with a pillow beside them. But they are not asleep. And that is when I see Tattie kneeling in the corner, head bent as if in prayer.

A calm enters my body with the efficiency and speed of an injected drug. I push the boy behind me, toward the open door, I say, “Run!”

I move as if I know exactly what to do. I approach Tattie.

“Give me that,” I command, and take from her willing hand the heavy knife with which she’s been nicking her wrist, unable to make the first cut.

“I can’t live,” she tells me in an urgent, private whisper, but I won’t hear it. The calm floods out of me as I turn my back on her. That is when I see the boy. He hasn’t gone. He stands in the doorway, a shadow against the light of day.

The boy, he can’t be more than seven. The summer I first arrived in Toronto, he was an infant.

I remember meeting him, when George decides I am ready for it. I remember meeting them, I should say: the babe in arms, and the girl in whose arms the babe lay.

“I got something to show you, Aggie. It’s a secret. You won’t tell?”

I understand secrets. Our house is the location of many kept, and never told.

I agree.

George and I are walking in the street, as there are no sidewalks here. The houses are crammed together—shacks, I think. I push the thought down.

“You won’t tell Olive. Promise.” Olive will have nothing to do with George, in any case. She does not like him.

“I won’t tell Olive. What is it George?”

He grins suddenly, ear to ear. “You’ll see.” Whatever his secret, it makes him happy.

We enter without knocking at a house split into two sections, no porch, no steps, a rough door scraping across the dirt, one window, broken and covered with a nailed board. I hear the baby’s cry as my eyes adjust to the dim interior. A chilly room, a bed on the floor. This is where they are. The girl rises quickly, straightens her skirt, sweeps her fingers through her hair.

“This here’s Aggie, my little sister,” George says. It surprises me to hear his voice busting with pride. “Aggie, this is Tattie. Tattie, show Aggie my son, Rob, we call him.”

Tattie cradles the baby expertly, lifting and displaying him against her chest. He is big enough to hold up his head, and he is surprisingly chubby, filled out like a properly fed baby should be, toothless and chortling. Instinctively, I reach for him, and he jumps as if he wants to meet me too.

I hold him squashed against me, under my chin. I breathe in his musty spoiled-milk warmth, his graceless rubbery limbs flailing, his tiny fingers and toes clutching for my hair, my dress. I suppose I get a bit lost in him. Maybe it is kinship—love. My brother’s son.

“You’re married! Why ever didn’t you tell us?” I say at last, looking up to see the two of them watching me, leaning against each other. She has her arms wrapped around his chest in a posture of intimacy to which I have never been witness, certainly not between my mother and father, not even when Fannie walked into the corn with our brother-in-law. I feel my face go hot. I have misunderstood. I have blundered.

It should have been obvious: George is not married to this girl. This girl, the mother of his child, is not his wife.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“Who needs it?” says George. He kisses Tattie, or she reaches up to kiss him, full on the mouth. I feel like I am glimpsing through a window a scene I am not meant to be witness to—compelling, illicit. I stare down at the lovely lightly curling black hairs on the baby’s head. He is beginning to fuss, for which I am thankful. I hop him up and down in my arms and walk the room, away from them, humming his name into his hair.

“She looks broody,” says Tattie.

“Maybe she’ll take him home,” says George. “It’ll be just the two of us again.”

“Oh, Georgie.”

I assume they are joking, but I disapprove nevertheless. I bring the baby over to them, and pass him, wriggling, into Tattie’s arms. “He’s perfect,” I say.

“Isn’t he?”

Isn’t he? He remains perfect in my eyes as he stands on the threshold of that other room, seven years on. He is a small child, stunted by diet, rickety, all jutting wrists and ankles. He holds his baby sister like a package he can be trusted never to drop, no matter what comes.

I don’t want him to fear the knife I’m holding, but what am I to do? He’s waiting for me. I cross the small room in three leaping strides and push the boy in front of me, out into the back garden. Rows of houses crowd around, intrusive, indifferent.

We are quite stunned, I think. The baby arches her back and howls. I toss the knife—an ordinary kitchen tool with a blunt blade—in among the fruiting plants overgrown with weeds.

“Police! Murder! Help!”

The boy, he hears the word
police
—or is it
murder
? I should not have used that word, nor this tone, entirely hysterical—and he takes off running. Good, I think, forgetting, briefly, that he is only a child and in my charge. “Police! Police!” There flies the boy, the baby in his arms, disappearing down the alleyway. After a moment’s confusion, I tear after him. He knows all of the neighbourhood’s hiding places; but he can’t outrun me. I follow at a small distance, keeping him within sight.

I want to let him go, to let him lose me. I can feel what he is feeling—or so I imagine. I can feel the world collapsing around us. I can feel the weight of the baby, like an anchor, like an extra heart. I can feel the need to run, to keep just ahead of everything that is falling like an avalanche behind our passage—if only he can keep ahead of it, he can outwit destruction. He can hide out. He can keep what little is his.

But I know it will never do to let the child go, not like this. I track him until finally he is too weary to continue. I catch them in my arms. I hold on for as long as I can, and then I can’t anymore. It is my duty to let go.

Isn’t it?

It is only later that I wonder why it didn’t occur to me to go along with him, to sweep them up in my care and escape, the three of us. Surely I could have outrun any threat. We could have made our own fugitive family, somewhere else.

Instead the baby, and the boy, both are taken from me. Their only legal relation is their mother, now a murderess. I am prevented from making a claim, as the children are not considered my legal relations. The state will see to it that the children receive care. All I can do is hope the boy forgets everything that came before. I hope he begins life anew, as the infant surely can. To comfort myself, I imagine them adopted into families of wealth and prosperity, I give them tennis lessons, and pressed white shirts, and the smell of roast chicken with rosemary wafting from a clean kitchen streaming with light.

Every day during the trial, which is less than a week in length, I attend in the courtroom. In the evenings, I work the graveyard shift at the newspaper, writing headlines and photo captions for the morning edition. I sleep little but take care each morning to arrive in the courtroom neatly attired with my hair pinned into a bun. When it is my turn to be called as a witness, I reply in plain statements of fact. I identify myself as a friend. Do I believe my friend to have been mad? Surely it was a mad act, I say, with no rational explanation.

I try to catch Tattie’s eye, to tell her through mine—but what? What would I tell her, if I could?