The Eliot Girls (22 page)

“You have delusions of grandeur,” said Dougie.

“I have ambition.”

“Don't worry, lovebug,” said Whitney. “If you fall in, I'll get naked with you and bring you back to life.”

“The other side is just ice,” Dougie said. “You won't even be able to land, you crazy bitch.”

“Ah, but yes I will, because Audrey will be over there to catch my hand.” Arabella met Audrey's eye and smiled.

Audrey saw it all, in that smile: the challenge glimmering there, like the tiny diamond studs in Arabella's ears. Arabella took off her coat, and Audrey's eyes followed hers across the distance. If there was a moment for refusal, this was it. But Audrey found herself crossing the bridge and finding her footing on the icy slope. Cold water seeped into her shoes as her feet sank into the sludge of wet leaves. “Look alive, Brindle,” Arabella called. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, then took a few steps back and made an arching leap high across the river. The girls on the other side were cheering, but Audrey barely heard them, absorbed as she was in studying Arabella's flight. Even in the air, her face was poised and tranquil, betraying no exertion. Her right foot landed on a bundle of twigs, and a second later her left came down on a patch of ice, then slid an inch, and she teetered, trying to catch her balance. Audrey reached out to grab her right hand, but her own grip on the ground was failing her, and Arabella's weight was pulling her back. As she dug her feet in and yanked, she felt, for a second—although she didn't review this feeling and what it meant until later—as though Arabella was trying to jerk her off balance, back into the river. Arabella started laughing, and with an involuntary grunt that made Audrey wonder if it wouldn't have been preferable to fall in the water, she redoubled her exertion, falling back on her bottom as Arabella landed firmly ashore. She was on her hands and knees, but still laughing.

“That was priceless,” Whitney called. “You looked just like Ms. Crispe, trying to heave her up.”

Arabella got up, brushing off her knees. Her hair was wild and wind blown, and she had tucked a leaf behind her ear like a flower. “Your turn,” she said.

“What?”

“It's. Your. Turn,” she said.

Audrey stared at her in disbelief.

“Whit will catch you when you land,” she said. “She's got the pipes for it.”

The thought crossed Audrey's mind that this was all part of an elaborate game they'd planned beforehand, orchestrated to land her in the freezing river.

“Come on,” Arabella said. “Are you waiting for wings?”

Audrey resigned herself to whatever was going to happen. There could be satisfaction in plunging into the freezing water, the grand failure of it, a surrender, finally, to the inescapability of humiliation. The fight was too exhausting. Tiny flakes of wet snow began to fall as Audrey threw off her long navy coat, took a running leap, and landed just at the edge of the shore, one foot in the water. Whitney stood on the bank, hands on her hips, in no way ready to catch her. “Oopsie,” she said.

“Guess you won't make the cross-country team,” Dougie added.

As Audrey pulled her foot out of the frigid boggy shoreline and tried to shake the excess water out of her shoe, the girls were already on their way to the bridge, where Arabella stood with Audrey's coat and bag. “I'd say nice try, but trying is useless,” she said, thrusting Audrey's things at her. “Either you do it or you don't.”

“It's going to be dark soon,” Dougie said, peering up at the lavender sky.

As Audrey buttoned her coat, Arabella, Whitney, and Dougie started walking away. From the end of the bridge, Arabella pointed in the direction they'd just travelled. “You'll want to go back that way to get to the bus,” she said.

“Aren't you guys going?” Audrey asked.

“We're going to Whit's house,” Arabella replied. “It's just up there.”

“All you have to do is follow the path,” Dougie said, her voice wavering with a hint of apology. “It'll only take you about ten minutes.”

“Do you need a chaperone?” Whitney asked.

Audrey estimated that she had about fifteen minutes before she would be stumbling through the obscurity of evening. “Of course not,” she replied.

Before long, the girls' voices had receded entirely. The walk was longer than they had said, and Audrey's outlook was bleak. The wind ripped through the inadequate wool coat her mother kept promising to replace. The glacial puddle in her shoe swished with her every step, and her wet toes were numb. A glance at her cellphone confirmed her suspicion that the battery was dead; she wasn't sure which bus would take her to the subway. Reaching a fork in the path, she puzzled over which direction led to the parking lot, and as she continued on, she grew certain that she had chosen the wrong way. The sound of her own footsteps, resonating in the sepulchral air, seemed to announce the arrival of some horrible fate.

She vowed this would be the final such mistake she would make. Would she never learn to control her hope? She sat on an ice-encrusted log, took off her shoe, and poured out the water. Yes, she had conceived of a future in which she was truly friends with Arabella, Whitney, and Dougie. She had not extinguished that obstinate wish. But she saw now that there would be no turning point. They were not friends now, nor would they ever be. There would be no victory of mischief, no marvellous iniquity, Audrey could pull off that would change this.

And just like that, a new feeling came over her in a powerful rush. It was a deviant elation, an emotion so unfamiliar that it took her a minute to identify it. Glancing up through the outstretched arms of the winter trees, she felt fearless for the first time in recent memory. What madcap joy, all the more pure for being irrational, and the desolate chill of the valley only fed it. All the sensations that had been so unpleasant just seconds before—the hacking wind, her freezing foot—had morphed into their opposites. It was as though she had sunk deep enough into her sadness to find a rare and mysterious harmony between loneliness and freedom. If only, she thought, she could die in a moment just like this, caring about nothing. The woods around her were dark, but she felt no call to move on, to return to the light-speckled metropolis just visible above her.

It was then that Audrey's deep breaths were joined by the sound of approaching footsteps. Turning, she saw the unmistakable figure of Arabella.

“Why don't you come to my house?” Arabella said, barely breaking her stride. “You can dry off there.”

And Audrey was back in the world, just like that.

 

HENRY PARTED THE SHABBY
orange curtains to peer out at the subsiding snowfall, then drew them again across the dirty window. Someone had made a cursory attempt at cleaning the glass, creating a spotless circle like a porthole in the centre while the periphery remained smudged with the grubby accumulation of motel life: mud splatters kicked up by spinning car tires, dust from the gravel parking lot, a cracking splotch of bird shit. A crumpled Kit Kat wrapper lay on the outside windowsill. Henry stood in front of the window for a moment, holding the side of each curtain in his hands, his head bowed. His posture made Ruth think of a priest outside a confessional: humourless and quietly full of his own secrets.

When he had suggested finding a motel room after last period, Ruth had been quick to agree. She was still reeling over the interminable length of the Christmas holidays. She had known that her separation from Henry would feel rotten, but she hadn't anticipated how toxic her own longing would become. Thinking about him was a torment—she was certain the contemplation was one-sided—and she had been barely able to contain her grumpiness, even on Christmas day. When he had come to her classroom after lunch, she hadn't even made a show of mulling over her availability.

“Is it snowing?” she said.

“It's just stopping. We should probably leave extra time for getting back, just in case.”

“Of course.”

He returned to bed and lay down, his head on her stomach. There was a pain in her gut that his weight was pressing, but she didn't dare ask him to move. Outside, a green minivan with a struggling muffler pulled into the lot. It was visible through the gap where the curtains refused to meet, and beyond its rusting roof, Ruth could see the cars on Lakeshore whipping past. She thought of Richard driving by (he wouldn't, of course, not at this end of the city), how it would never occur to him, if he glanced at the sun-bleached grey sign, the unshovelled sidewalks, the blue glow of the small television in the office, that his wife was inside, that she had ever been, or would ever be, in such a place. The idea of her displacement was exhilarating. She wondered if there had ever been a moment in her life when she felt so free—even when she was a teenager, when being free was the perpetual condition of life, automatic and therefore unnoticed. The feeling had to do with being in an anonymous place, an unappealing place. She wouldn't have felt so exultant in a beautiful room with Henry, with French doors opening onto the wide ocean, a private balcony with a rose bush growing along its wrought-iron railings. Such loveliness would undermine them, render them an ordinary, inauthentic thing, just one more undistinguished facet of a beautiful tableau.

“I think the woman across the street from me may have died,” Ruth said, “but I don't know how to check because I don't know her name. The house is for sale.”

“That doesn't mean that she's died,” he said, handing her the full glass of cloudy water from the night table. On the rim of the glass was a very faint lip print, not lipstick but the memory of lipstick.

“She's nowhere to be seen. The house is dark at all hours. I used to see her light on upstairs in the middle of the night.”

Henry reached for a second glass and drained it, then settled under the sheet next to her, closing his eyes.

“I saw her just last week. She seemed fine.” She felt, as she often did, that he was barely listening to her. Even at his most ardent, she felt that there was another part of him not fully engaged—that he was not so much surrendering as committing himself to the appearance of surrender, and that she was not so much a participant as a witness—and no matter how much he was next to her, on top of her, no matter how many facts she knew about his life (not many, at that), there would always be this spectral self behind him, ironic and unsentimental, shaking his head wryly, needing nothing. About that Henry she could know nothing at all.

He stifled a yawn.

“Are you going to sleep?” she said, hitting him lightly.

“No, no.” He propped himself up on the pillows, still lying more than sitting, but seeming moderately more alert.

“I can't believe I don't know her name,” she continued. “She's lived there as long as we have. Audrey's trick-or-treated at her house. Even fifteen years ago, she was the old woman across the street.” She put her water down, untouched, on top of a
Reader's Digest
someone had left on the nightstand. “Doesn't that strike you as wrong?”

“Do you have to socialize just because you live near one another?”

“There's socializing, and then there's acknowledgment of your shared humanity. It seems terrible that I don't know her name.”

“Terrible might be an overstatement.”

She thought of her grandmother's death nearly thirty years before. While she lay dying upstairs, already ghostly behind her oxygen mask, Ruth had taken a trip down to the cafeteria with her grandfather. There she was supposed to be distracting him with cheerful conversation, but of course distraction had been impossible. Halfway through his black coffee, which he had been drinking with painstaking slowness, he broke off, nodding as though he had just remembered something. “We've been married for sixty years,” he said. She must have said something in response, offered some kind of inadequate sympathy, but what she recalled was feeling rather blank, discomfited by his sorrow. She had not been an exceptionally callous teenager, but she had been unable to comprehend sixty years with someone coming to an end, being near the end of your own life and knowing that you're going the rest, the worst, most undignified part of it, alone. It was not until the beginning of her own marriage that she had a flash of understanding how he must have felt.

She wanted to ask Henry how one lived at the end of one's life, when there was no expanse left to make corrections, no horizon on which to pin one's hopes, but he was glancing away again, towards the watch on the nightstand. “That poor woman died alone,” she said.

He regarded the ceiling with monk-like impassivity. “Most do,” he said.

There was always this comedown, as though they had spent too much time together. It wasn't even thirty minutes since they'd arrived. She tried to hold on to his whimper of surrender at the end of sex, but it was a memory she couldn't quite tap into. Her mistake, she understood, had been letting things get here too quickly. She thought of the very beginning, that night in the staff room, and she saw that even though she was always wanting more—even now, as he peeked at his watch for the fifth or sixth time—having less had been infinitely more satisfying. Perhaps all she had really needed was something to anticipate outside her own life. After that first kiss, she should have pulled away, said no, and when he returned, said no again. This failure to prolong anticipation had been a strategic error, an amateur's misstep.

From somewhere came the sound of music, and Ruth realized the radio was on at a low volume. She had noticed the static while they had made love, and she'd been distracted by it, unable to figure out the source of the noise. Henry fiddled with the knob, tuning more precisely into a station, and the song, Led Zeppelin's “Going to California,” made her smile.

“That was quite a performance this morning, wasn't it?”