Once We Had a Country (33 page)

Next begins the sequence of Pauline leading the tour of the farmhouse. During summer screenings of this reel, Maggie focused on taking in the rooms’ appearance, totting up the improvements made to them. This time her attention’s drawn to the girl, who cavorts through the frame with a painful innocence. Maggie glances at Brid.

“It’s okay,” Brid says, her gaze fixed on the screen. “I can handle it.” But her face is wretched.

From that point on, Maggie watches each scene imagining how Brid must see it. There’s Pauline playing with Fletcher in the barracks, then the breakfast after Wale’s arrival, with all Brid’s eagerness to please him on display. Until now, watching this sequence, Maggie has only ever thought of Brid as pestering, but there she is making everyone a meal with neither help nor gratitude.

Beside her, Brid is crying. “I was such a bitch,” she whispers. Maggie moves to turn off the projector, but Brid tells her not to stop it. “I can take it, really. Come here, will you?” She unzips the sleeping bag and opens the flap as if turning a page. Maggie sits down next to her, and Brid puts an arm around her waist.

With amazing precision, the film matches Maggie’s memories from the summer, not just in terms of what she remembers but in the way she recalls it. There are the
same jump-cuts and freeze-frames, the same lack of depth and texture. It’s as if the contents of her brain have been assembled by her former self while she bent over the editing machine.

Before she’s conscious of what has happened, they’ve reached the crucial scene in the final reel. A second later, just as she expects the appearance of Fletcher naked in the bedroom, she’s plunged into a shot of the baseball game. It’s what he told her he’d done, yet it’s still astonishing.

Then she remembers the final, added clip about to greet them.

“We can stop it here,” she says, hurrying to turn off the projector.

“Yeah,” says Brid. “I don’t know if I could handle that bit with Pauline and the dead birds.”

Maggie can’t believe what she’s hearing. “You’ve watched it?”

“At Fletcher’s last month,” says Brid, seeming unperturbed. “He had some friends over to screen the whole thing. You know, for laughs.”

Immediately she can picture it: Fletcher in his parents’ recreation room with his fraternity pals and Brid, maybe a few Boston debutantes thrown in for good measure, all of them in hysterics from his stories about that crazy chick and her camera, nobody mentioning his own attempt at filmmaking. Maggie slumps across the sleeping bag and lies on her stomach with the floor hard against her cheek.

“He never really cared about this place, did he?” she says. “Or about me. He just wanted to get away from his dad.”

“He did care,” says Brid. “He was all broke up after the news about the baby.”

Maggie hears this and can’t suppress her irritation. “Why does everyone say it like that? There was no baby.”

“Oh.” Brid seems doubtful. “Well, Fletcher thinks there was.” Brid sees her confusion and adds, “He figured you had an abortion.”

Maggie lifts her head, then lets it fall, the veins in her temples throbbing. “How could he think that?” It seems impossible. “I explained to him what happened.”

“You were so sure you were pregnant, and then suddenly you weren’t,” says Brid.

Maggie scrambles to reconfigure October in her memory. She only ever worried about him thinking she’d faked it.

“He wasn’t ever going to come back, was he?” she says. “Even if there was a baby.” It’s something she realized long ago, but still a gloom falls on her. She remembers the doctor’s consultation room, the news of the test result, and the man’s pity along with his disbelief. “At first the doctor thought I’d had an abortion too.” She winces at the recollection. “I stopped smoking, took vitamins …”

“Of course, honey. Nobody’s blaming you.”

“I never really wanted to be a mother,” Maggie finds herself saying. “Didn’t know the first thing about raising a child—” Abruptly she realizes how these words might be heard by Brid, and to change the subject she asks, “Did you think I got rid of it?”

“Oh sure,” Brid replies. “But I thought you did it because it was Wale’s.” She speaks in a breezy way, as if there’s nothing at stake in what she’s saying.

“How could you think that?” exclaims Maggie.

“Look at the movie.” Brid points to the blank wall. “The bastard’s always watching you. You seem pretty keen on him, too, the way the camera stays on his face.”

Maggie sits up and tries not to look away from Brid as she speaks. “Honestly, there was nothing.” There’s a temptation to say more, but they’ve reached dangerous territory and she needs to get them onto something else. Still, to her horror, she hears herself ask, “Have you heard from him?”

“Not once since he left.” Brid’s face grows suspicious.

“Why, have you?”

Maggie shakes her head and Brid’s attention drifts away. When it returns, there’s a plaintive note in her voice. “He liked this place, you know. He was always saying good things about it. About you, too.”

Maggie feels her face go red. “I never heard him say anything nice. He only ever made fun of the farm—and of me.”

“That’s Wale. He finds something he likes, he kicks the tires a lot.” Brid smirks in a way that seems to hurt her. “I tried not to be jealous. I was glad, really. Figured he might stay around longer because of you. So much for that, huh?”

Maggie tries to transmit some sort of empathy through her eyes, but Brid appears uncomfortable being looked at in such a manner.

“Sweetie, what are we going to do here?” she says. “You can’t just wait all winter for George Ray to come back. Is it a Catholic thing, this devotion to misery?”

Maggie frowns and turns away.

“Say something, would you?” implores Brid. “God, you drive me crazy, the way you just sit there.”

Maggie can’t help herself. “I drive
you
crazy? The things you say to me—”

“I only say them so you’ll respond.” Brid flops onto her back, then lies there with her chest rising and falling for so long Maggie wonders if she’s gone to sleep. “There were nights,” says Brid, breaking the illusion, “awful nights, the last couple of months, when I thought about calling you. A few times I almost did.”

“You should have,” says Maggie. She reaches down to push Brid’s hair out of her eyes, but Brid seems not to notice.

“No, that kind of phone call is like heroin. Do it once and you can’t stop. Soon nobody answers and you don’t have any friends left to call.” Her gaze starts on a wandering path around the room. “Weird being back without Pauline. In the summer I was terrified she’d drown in the creek. At first she cried for hours in that camper van, but I wouldn’t let her into the house because of the gas, remember? She thinks my name is Bread. Isn’t that funny?”

Maggie wants to be supportive, to leave behind her own petty self and enter Brid’s sadness with her, but she can’t quite do it. Reeling through her is the thought that Fletcher thinks she got rid of their child. She needs to be alone to deal with it. Looking toward the door, she hopes for George Ray to appear, to save her and Brid from whatever is about to come.

“Don’t worry,” says Brid. “I’m not going to freak out.”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“You were. You’re wondering where George Ray is.” She seems more resigned than offended. “I wish I could
keep it inside like you, with the surface all shiny and perfect, but I can’t. I’m like that wall.”

She gestures to the claw marks where Fletcher threw the reels. Maggie has always thought of the wall as purely white, but as she studies it now, imperfections reveal themselves: stains and cracks, and a long vertical line where a joist behind the drywall has swollen. She wonders why Brid, who knows her so well in certain respects, who sometimes appears to read her thoughts, should fail to recognize how Maggie might be a bit like that wall too.

That night, Brid beats her fists against her mattress. The world is a rotten place. She wants to kill herself, and she says it’s because she watched that goddamned film. Maggie sits at her bedside and responds to every twitch and moan with a hand on her back. After a time Brid calls for Elliot. When he appears, she squeezes him until he struggles away and hops off the bed. Brid reaches after him and gives a hitched sob.

It’s close to midnight before Maggie slides into her own bed next to George Ray. They fall into exhausted, muffled sex. A month ago she imagined that making love in these final days would gain an added tenderness, but she’s so tired that it feels as though the two of them are strangers.

That night, she dreams she’s her father. Or rather, she’s in her father’s person, lost in the jungle with Yia Pao’s son, following the same muddy goat track she has imagined in waking life. Holding the child makes balancing treacherous. Then it comes to her that the baby isn’t Yia Pao’s; it’s
hers. Her father took the child to Laos, and now it’s in her arms. She looks for chances to leave the trail and save them both, knowing what lies ahead, but her legs are compelled along the path. She starts watching for tripwires while the baby wriggles in her arms, growing smaller until it’s no bigger than a mouse and scampers from her grasp.

The telephone wakes her, ringing and ringing with nobody to answer it. George Ray is no longer in the bed beside her. Even though she takes her time going downstairs, her mind still half tethered to the world of the dream, the ringing doesn’t stop, so that when she picks up the phone, she’s thinking there must be some technical malfunction. After she says hello, a woman speaks to her in George Ray’s accent.

“Is this Miss Dunne? Miss Dunne, my name is Velma Ransom. I’m sorry for disturbing you. Please, may I talk to George Ray?”

The voice is calm and civil, knowing no grievance, feeling no betrayal.

“Yes, of course. Wait, I’ll find him.” Putting down the receiver, she leaves the house and meets George Ray halfway across the lawn. There’s a pair of buckets in his hands. “It’s your wife. On the phone. She sounds so lovely!”

He frowns, sets down the buckets, and hurries past her toward the house. From the mud room door she hears him talking angrily, almost shouting, louder than she’s ever heard him speak, in sentences she doesn’t understand.

“George Ray,” she says from the doorway, not daring to enter the room, and he looks up as if mystified by her presence.

“What is it?” There’s no affection in his voice.

“Call back.”

“Why?” He seems bewildered by the idea.

“It’s expensive for her to phone here. Hang up and call her back.”

“Expensive. Yes,” he says, quieter now. “Thank you. That’s just what I was telling her.” He seems to say it partly for Maggie’s sake, partly for the woman at the other end of the line. Then he tells his wife he’ll ring her back in a moment. Once he has set down the phone, he calls Maggie’s name, but by that time she’s upstairs and doesn’t answer. Let him come and find her if he wants. She waits and waits, willing his arrival so hard she gets a headache, so hard it’s a surprise when an hour has passed and still he isn’t there.

T
wenty-four hours before George Ray is due to depart, he enters the kitchen to tell them there’s more graffiti on the wall. This time it says
YANKEES GO HOME
. Hearing this, Maggie just laughs; the message seems safely impersonal, clichéd. Brid is less sanguine. She vows to resume her nighttime patrols, and she only grows more adamant when Maggie says she doesn’t want her in the orchard on her own. Then, after lunch, George Ray tells Maggie he’s going to spend the afternoon working. There are saplings that need attention if they’re to survive the winter, and he wants to earn his final day’s wages honestly. When Maggie suggests working alongside him, he points out that someone has to mind Brid, and reluctantly she agrees, so Brid and Maggie stay indoors playing cards. At one point Brid asks why they can’t just spend the afternoon helping him, and
Maggie finds herself replying that he prefers to be on his own. It strikes her as a lie and the truth at the same time.

At least he comes in for dinner. Then it’s Brid who’s reluctant to join them, saying she doesn’t want to get in the way of their final supper together. She has to be cajoled into sitting down. Even after she does, it’s a miserable meal, with Brid poking at her lasagna and George Ray idly swirling the wine in his glass.

“Don’t drink this stuff in Newcross,” he says. “Could be the last till next summer.” He downs it in one long swallow. After dinner he insists on washing the dishes and Brid grabs the towel to dry, so Maggie’s left at the table blowing ripples across the surface of her tea.

“Hey!” cries Brid angrily as Maggie’s in the middle of a sip. At first she thinks it’s something she’s done; then she sees Brid running into the mud room. “There’s somebody out there. Hey!” In her bare feet and nightie, Brid charges into the yard.

By the time they get their shoes on to follow, she’s disappeared. Neither George Ray nor Maggie has thought to grab a flashlight, so once they enter the orchard, the way becomes treacherous. They’re crossing flat ground, yet it seems to rise like a mountain beneath them. The blinking lights of the radio towers on the horizon have the coldness of stars. Maggie keeps thinking they’ve found Brid and turns out to be wrong. The kneeling figure is just a propane tank; the person swinging from a rope is a rubber tire.

Before Brid comes into sight, they hear her cursing as she bumps into things. Once they reach her, Maggie hugs her with relief.

“He’s out here,” says Brid.

Maggie looks around and sees only the farmhouse lights along with a bright blue moon fending off clouds. When she asks who it is, Brid says she doesn’t know, and Maggie can’t help but feel doubtful. “Just one person? Are you sure—”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Could have been a deer,” says George Ray.

“You think I don’t know the difference?”

He gazes into the night. “No good being out here without lights. Best call the police.”

Maggie agrees and suggests they go back to the house. Brid says she isn’t leaving when someone’s on the property.

“You’re not even wearing shoes—” Maggie begins.