Ten Thousand Truths (13 page)

After they hung up the phone, Rachel and Amelia headed down to the pool. It was just a small one, with the deep end only being five feet, but it felt wonderful to them both to be swimming again. Rachel counted her laps as she swam the length of the pool. She promised herself she'd make it to twenty. Each time she started underwater she pretended she was plunging into the lake. Amelia finished her quick swim and bundled up on a lounge chair on the pool deck to read while she waited for Rachel to finish.

“I only have two laps left, Amelia,” Rachel called out.

Rachel pulled herself up out of the water and wrapped herself in the scratchy hotel towel, thinking about the long day she and Amelia had ahead of them tomorrow.
After my long swim, maybe I'll sleep soundly tonight
, she thought as she followed Amelia to their room.
I hope my dreams are of fresh peas, haylofts, and pigs wearing bonnets.

“Cows and cornfields have a home within Ottawa's city limits at the 1,200-acre Central Experimental Farm,” Amelia shared as she and Rachel filled up a bag with cobs of corn from one of the stands at the ByWard Market in Ottawa. After spending most of the afternoon at the Canadian War Museum, they were now strolling the aisles at the market to pick up some food for dinner.

Once they paid for their corn, Rachel and Amelia headed back to the Jimmy. Their plan was to drive a little bit longer and then find a motel to stop at for the night. On their way out of the city, they drove by the Chateau Laurier, one of the most expensive hotels in Ottawa. As they passed the hotel's grand entrance, Amelia said, “I guess we won't be staying there. They probably wouldn't let us cook our corn in one of their fancy suites.”

About an hour later they pulled into the entryway of the Colonial Fireside Inn in Pembroke. They were able to get a room with kitchen facilities, so they checked in and cooked their corn in a big pot on the tiny hotel-room stove. Once it was finished, they carried it outside to eat at a nearby picnic table.

“This corn isn't as good as the stuff we grew last year,” Rachel commented, buttering her third piece. “By the time we get home, ours will just be getting ripe, won't it?”

Home.
Rachel liked the sound of that. It was still surprising to her that she felt so settled at Amelia's. She thought of how homesick she was now, how much she wanted to be back at the farm, swimming, cooking, and even weeding the garden. Every other time that she'd felt homesick in the past five years it had been for her old house on Regent Street. The feelings had always been wrapped up with the deep sadness she felt, the longing for her mother and her brother, and the awful pit of shame she kept pushed down so she wouldn't have to think about it. But today her thoughts of home had taken her to the end of Walton Lake Road. They took her to her room up over the kitchen and to the smells of food cooking on the wood stove. They took her to the lake, its sights and sounds clear in her mind.

“What was your mother's name, Amelia?” Rachel wasn't sure what had made her ask that or why it even mattered.

“Her name was Vivian,” Amelia answered.

Rachel said nothing more, taking the pause and the look on Amelia's face as an indication that she did not want to say anything more about her mother. Rachel was sorry she had asked the question. She started hulling and cutting up the strawberries, filling two Styrofoam cups.

“My mother was beautiful,” Amelia continued after a few minutes of silence. “Every time she came to the farm she was dressed in fancy clothes and her hair and makeup were perfect. She would usually drive up with some strange man we had never seen before and she never stayed very long. It was as if she was afraid she would get dirty or her hair would get out of place. She would sometimes stay for a meal, and I always insisted on serving her, trying to impress her with my grown-up ways. But she never seemed to notice me at all. The visits always ended the same way: she would ask Gram for money and leave in a hurry, giving me a quick hug before taking off. I always stood there wishing she would take me with her, or at least stay longer.”

“Is your mother still alive?” Rachel asked hesitantly.

“I don't think so, but I really don't know,” Amelia answered. “The last time we saw her was September 1964. She just disappeared after that. My grandmother tried for years to find her, but as far as I know she never did. I gave up the thought of ever seeing her again years ago. She was never a mother to me in any sense of the word, but it took me a long time to come to terms with that.”

Rachel didn't know what to say to Amelia. It must have been terrible not knowing where your mother was and feeling like she never cared enough about you to stay and look after you. At least she had always known her own mother had loved her. Her mom had always taken good care of her and Caleb. And above everything else, Rachel knew her mother had not left her on purpose. She knew what had taken her mother away from her, and she knew it was all her fault.

It was raining as Rachel and Amelia left Pembroke early the next morning. They stopped at a grocery store to replenish their cooler with lunch and snack foods, and then headed toward Sault Ste. Marie. Rachel was determined to keep the conversation away from serious stuff today, and it seemed like Amelia was thinking the same thing. They spent the morning talking about trivial things, and as usual Amelia punctuated their chat with random facts whenever she could: Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first. An average four-year-old asks 437 questions a day. Napoleon Bonaparte constructed his battle plans in a sandbox. If you attempted to count stars in the galaxy at a rate of one every second, it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.

After their conversation died out, they occupied their time by playing a game of finding all the letters of the alphabet in order on signs on the side of the highway. X and Z were the hardest ones to find.

Around one o'clock, they stopped at the Big Nickel monument in Sudbury. They walked around the giant coin and took some pictures of themselves in front of it, and then found a grassy spot to sit down and eat their lunch. About an hour later, they packed up their cooler and got back in the car for another long drive.

Both Rachel and Amelia remained fairly quiet on the long stretch of highway that afternoon. At around seven o'clock they finally rolled into Sault Ste. Marie, where they checked into the Skyline Motel and then headed straight to Swiss Chalet for supper. After dinner they called home, and then turned on the TV. By the end of their third episode of
Golden Girls
, both Rachel and Amelia were fast asleep in their beds.

The next morning's drive seemed longer than usual to Rachel because there wasn't much to see except for trees, rocks, and water. She and Amelia stopped at Obatanga Provincial Park around two o'clock for a late lunch. They ate by a large lake, and despite the swarm of mosquitoes hovering overhead, Rachel changed into her bathing suit and went for a quick swim. She ran right in and swam out over her head and back in again several times. Burnfield Lake was beautiful, but it felt nothing like her lake.

The afternoon drive seemed to go by quicker, and Rachel and Amelia were in good spirits when they arrived in Marathon around suppertime. They bought Chinese take-out at Wok with Chow Restaurant and took it to their room in the Travelodge Motel, moving quickly as the woman at the desk had told them to watch out for bears. They called home, left a message when no one answered, and went to bed early.

The next afternoon Rachel and Amelia stopped at the Terry Fox Monument outside of Thunder Bay. They asked someone to take their picture as they stood beside the monument, pointing at the New Brunswick crest. Then they drove on to Ignace, where they settled into a small room at the Trading Post Motel.

Rachel and Amelia entered the lobby of the Winnipeg View Motel to register for their room. The woman behind the counter stared rudely at Amelia's face, obviously horrified.

“Is that contagious?” she asked loudly.

“No,” Amelia responded calmly. “I have Neurofibromatosis. It's not infectious. It's caused by a mutated gene.”

Amelia filled in the hotel registration form, not showing that the woman's insensitive remark had bothered her at all, then took the room key and walked away quickly.

“We are in the middle of the country, and the middle of the continent as well,” Amelia told Rachel as they carried their suitcases up the stairs to their room. “Winnipeg has many claims to fame. Monty Hall, the host of the game show ‘Let's Make a Deal,' was born in Winnipeg. Winnie-the-Pooh was named after Winnipeg by a Canadian lieutenant in the Fort Garry Horse Militia. And Winnipeg is the Slurpee capital of the world. The citizens of this city consume 400,000 Slurpees a month, even during the cold winter months—and Winnipeg has some of the coldest weather in the country!”

Rachel could see that Amelia's frenzied recitation of Winnipeg trivia was covering what she was really feeling. “That woman was very mean to ask you that,” she said as they stepped into their room on the second floor. “It was very rude.”

“I could say that I'm used to that reaction,” Amelia said, putting her suitcase down and turning around to face Rachel. “But of course I'm not, since I chose to hole up for thirty years and not let anyone see my face.”

“You should have asked to speak to her boss. She had no business asking you that.”

“When I was young I had light brown spots on my face and nobody knew why. My grandmother had never seen anyone else with them and the doctor had no idea what caused them. If I got them from a parent it must have been the father I never knew, because my mother certainly never had anything like them on her face. I remember staring at them and wondering if that was why my mother didn't want me. She was so beautiful and I thought she probably couldn't stand to have such an ugly daughter. When I became a teenager people started telling me I was pretty. My friends would tell me I should be a model or an actress. I had never been told that before and I became obsessed with my looks. I started wearing makeup to cover the brown spots and I was always fixing my hair and fussing over my clothes. I got more and more caught up in how I looked. Then there was the Miss Saint John pageant. All my friends kept telling me that if I won, it would be the springboard to a modeling career. By that time I had already finished my social work degree and was happily working at the Protestant Orphans Home in Saint John, but I entered the competition, vainly believing what my friends were telling me. I won and that just made me more obsessed with my looks.”

Rachel propped herself up on the bed, putting two pillows behind her head, while Amelia continued to talk.

“I was engaged once, you know. I met a very nice young man named Sheldon in university and we dated for a few months. He proposed to me on the night before the pageant, surprising me with a beautiful diamond ring. I was caught up in the whirlwind of the whole thing and was sure that he only loved me for my looks, because deep down I felt like he didn't even really know me. I had never taken him to meet my grandmother and hadn't told him anything about my mother. After I won the title of Miss Saint John, I was so full of myself that I didn't even see that this was a problem. Then Gram got sick and I had to go home to take care of her for a few weeks. During that time, my condition began to get worse. The brown blotches on my face started turning into clusters of bumps that I couldn't conceal with makeup. I pushed all my friends away and wouldn't take Sheldon's calls when he tried to reach me. After it became clear that the bumps were not going away, I finally called him and told him that I didn't love him and that I wouldn't marry him. I mailed the diamond ring back to him, and after a few weeks he gave up trying to talk to me. My friends quickly forgot me and I put all my energies into looking after Gram until she died about a year later. Then I called my boss and asked if it would be possible to take in foster children. By that time the orphanage had closed and there were lots of kids who needed homes.” Amelia stood up and straightened out her clothes, then walked over to the sink and washed her face. “But that's enough about that,” she said as she picked up a towel to dry off. “Let's call room service and order something really delicious for supper. Pass me the menu in that folder on the bedside table, would you?”

The prairie landscape was so much different than the rugged terrain of Ontario. As they travelled down the flat open highways, Rachel and Amelia both felt the excitement of getting closer to their destination. They were going to stay at Jason and Megan's in Calgary for five days and then head on to Golden.

After registering at the Super 8 motel in Regina and taking their suitcases into their room, Rachel and Amelia went to a nearby A&W restaurant and ordered takeout before heading back to the room to call Jodie and the kids.

The phone call home was upsetting for Amelia. Jodie told her that the night before, Chelsea had woken up from a nightmare and it had taken a really long time to calm her down. She had been hysterical and had cried violently for a long time, constantly asking for Amelia. In her disturbed state she couldn't grasp the fact that Amelia wasn't there, and Jodie had been worried she would make herself sick with her crying. Seeing her sister like that had of course upset Crystal, and Jodie had needed to call Zac to come and help comfort them.

“I should never have left them,” Amelia told Rachel after she hung up the phone. “Chelsea hasn't had a bad night for quite a while, but I should have known that if she did she would need me to be there. When they first came to Walton Lake, we went through that almost every night. Sometimes both of them would wake up at the same time, but even if it was just one of them, the other would always wake up and panic when she heard the other. For months they wouldn't let me touch them, and they'd go crazy if I tried. I'd have to let them exhaust themselves before I could get anywhere near them. It took such a long time to gain their trust.”