Once We Had a Country (4 page)

“I’ll talk to him,” says Brid coolly.

Maggie feels a shamefaced pleasure at what she’s done, knowing this woman won’t put up with toxic fumes and polluted wells. She follows her into the house and finds it’s over even before she reaches the kitchen. The whole exchange—more of a shouted monologue, really—grows louder as she approaches. She hears Brid say, “Pauline and I are sleeping in the camper until you get it fixed.” Then Brid glides back down the hall, trailing Pauline behind her. As they pass, Brid’s eyes glint at Maggie with satisfaction.

In the kitchen, Fletcher leans against the counter and Maggie returns to cleaning surfaces.

“I’m going to drive into Virgil,” he declares after a while. “See if there’s a gas repairman.” Maggie pushes her sponge across the table and nods.

After he leaves the room, she hears the thud of cases and boxes being set down in the foyer, along with snatches
of conversation between him and Brid. Eventually the camper’s engine starts, then fades, and he’s gone. There’s no sign of Brid and Pauline either, only a quiet that grows thicker with the heat, and a yellow blotch that taunts Maggie from the middle of the floor. On her knees, she scrubs hard at it until she discovers it has crept onto her hands, jaundicing her skin, the blotch not a material thing at all but a macula of light thrown there by a square of stained glass above the mud room door.

Following a sudden inclination, she tosses her sponge into the sink and goes to the foyer. Among the unloaded contents of the van she finds the shoulder bag holding the Super 8 camera. Taking it up to the bedroom she recently occupied with Fletcher, she closes the door behind her, loads a fresh film cartridge, and starts to record, casting the lens methodically about her. The mattress, the pile of sheets, the crack running clear across the plaster ceiling. From the belly of the mechanism comes the soft whirr of film unspooling and respooling, first dark, now etched with light. Beyond this hum there’s nothing to indicate that a miracle is taking place, that the device is absorbing the visible world. When the film runs out, she sets the camera on the mattress feeling purged, ready to clean again.

The bedrooms take her over an hour. She has almost finished the last one when Brid appears with a duffle bag in hand.

“The toilet isn’t working,” she says. “It stinks to high heaven in there.”

“There’s an outhouse in the backyard,” Maggie replies.

“Fletcher better not expect me to tolerate this sort of thing just because I’m on the payroll.” Brid pushes her sunglasses up on her nose. “I didn’t come for the money. I came to raise Pauline in a nice place.”

“I thought you came because the army can’t arrest Wale up here.”

“Yeah, but I only want him around because Pauline will do better with her dad in the picture.”

Brid heads back downstairs, then comes and goes at intervals, carrying boxes and bags with Pauline in tow. Each time she passes, Maggie waits to hear some further grievance, but there’s little more said. Maggie has just started in on the dining room when Fletcher returns from Virgil with a box of doughnuts, a load of painting supplies, and the news that it will be two days before someone can drive out to investigate the gas smell.

Unfolded on the bedroom floor beside the mattress, the letter seems to glow in the moonlight. The mattress where she lies sags in the middle toward Fletcher’s snoring body. She can’t sleep. The room is hot as an oven and it’s only the first night of June. This can’t possibly be Canada.

It was a mistake to reread the letter so close to turning in. She’d found it waiting in her mailbox two days ago when she returned to give her landlord the keys for her emptied apartment. She was already late to help Fletcher load the camper, but she tore open the envelope right there in the lobby and read what was inside, marvelled at the way her father had tried to make it sound as if she was missing out.

Now her heart has softened. He sounds so lonely. Maybe she should write back, or at least she could send the new address. No, she swore she wouldn’t. If she writes, she’ll start thinking about him, and if she does that, she’ll just worry about him all the time. She spent the first eighteen
years of her life putting him before herself, then another five feeling guilty about leaving him in Syracuse. All that time he didn’t shy away from insinuating that she’d committed a crime by going to Boston and, later, by leaving the Church. He’s no longer the man she remembers; he’s what Gran would call a nutter. But then, when it comes to religion, Gran is a nutter too.

Maggie has begun another attempt at sleep when a noise comes from the hallway. It sounds like footsteps. Brid going to the bathroom? But the toilet’s broken, and Brid’s sleeping in the camper with Pauline. Maggie thinks of waking Fletcher and doesn’t. What if she’s just hearing things? She rises and goes to the door. There are no lights on in the hall, only the moon coming through a window at the far end.

“Brid?” she whispers.

Trailing her hand against the wall, she makes her way to the next bedroom and fumbles for the light switch. A flood of yellow stabs her eyes. The room is empty. Returning to the dark hallway, she goes on to the next room, her ears pricking at every creak of the floorboards beneath her. Another light switch, another melting of shadows. Nothing there.

Then she hears footsteps, moving toward the stairs. She’s unable to call Fletcher’s name, can’t scream, afraid of revealing herself. Finally she edges into the hallway, which now seems even darker than before. Nobody there. At the top of the stairs, she peers down into blackness.

“Brid?” she says.

Someone is standing at the bottom. The figure doesn’t move or speak. Maggie can feel eyes on her. She should call out. She should find the nearest light switch. She turns to
look for it, and when she turns back, the figure’s gone. For a long time she stares down until she’s sure.

In bed, she lies shaking, unsure whether she imagined it all. Eventually Fletcher stirs.

“You okay?” he murmurs.

“I thought I heard someone downstairs.” She doesn’t want to admit she saw someone too; it wouldn’t sound believable.

“Just now?” He starts out of bed, wearing nothing, and heads for the door.

“I looked,” she calls after him. “There’s nobody.” The thought of him going naked through the house in search of phantoms makes the whole thing seem ridiculous.

“It could have been Brid,” he says. “Shit, if someone’s down there—” He starts to pull on a pair of pants.

“I was probably imagining it.”

“Stay here, okay?”

“Okay.”

She listens as he descends the stairs. After a few minutes he returns, shaking his head, removes the pants, and slides back into bed.

“I don’t want you feeling creeped out,” he says, putting his arms around her. “Tomorrow we’ll buy a chain for the door. I’ll replace the window at the back.”

She kisses him, and in a few minutes he’s asleep again, snoring while she lies staring at the crack in the ceiling.

Her imagination playing tricks. It had to be. Because for a moment she could have sworn the figure at the bottom of the stairs was her father.

When she wakes up in the morning, Fletcher’s still asleep, so she dresses silently. Downstairs, Brid is already at work cleaning the kitchen cupboards, her sunglasses hiding her eyes and offering no reflection, only a depthless surface that eats the light. Pauline sits at the table drawing with crayons on a piece of cardboard.

“How did you sleep?” Maggie asks.

“It was ninety degrees and we were in a van,” says Brid. “You figure it out.”

“You didn’t come into the house last night?”

Brid shakes her head, apparently uninterested in why Maggie would pose such a question. Instead, she asks her if she’ll watch Pauline for a while. Brid says the kid’s driving her nuts. Pauline abandons her crayoning to observe them both with a stern expression, giving no indication of what she’s done to send her mother round the bend. The only thing out of place is a smear of something orange on her cheek, crayon or marmalade. Her curly-haired doll sits slumped beside her.

Maggie looks deep within herself and is unable to dredge up the least desire to babysit. The mere idea of it reminds her too much of the little grade two students she left behind in Boston, their clutching fingers and shrill demands, their expectation that she could make everything right for them simply because she was the adult in the room. But her bladder is full and she can’t be bothered inventing excuses.

“Pauline, why don’t you and I go outside?” she says, trying to sound keen. The girl doesn’t move.

“Go with Auntie Maggs before Mommy has a fit,” says Brid.

Pauline drops from her chair and crosses the room to take Maggie’s hand. Just before she does, she turns back and returns to the table for her doll. “Come along, Buddy!” she says reprovingly. “Before Mommy has a fit.”

Brid has said she named Pauline after her own father, a Harvard professor who, according to Brid, is a second-rate mathematician and a first-rate asshole, and who disowned Brid when Pauline came along. Maggie hasn’t yet found the right moment to ask Brid why she would name her daughter after such a person. Certainly Pauline isn’t an asshole, at least not yet. It’s true she seldom laughs and is prone to tantrums, but you can’t really say a three-year-old has a personality, can you? She’s only a little bundle of flesh and sensory impressions. The students in Maggie’s class were more than twice as old, yet this is how she tried to think of them, not wanting to take against them too much. What age must a child reach before you can start to dislike it legitimately? Nine? Ten? In high school, Maggie once babysat a ten-year-old boy who was definitely a first-rate asshole.