The Hour of Bad Decisions (23 page)

Then she and Jack had tried miniature horses, brie fly and expensively, ending up worse off than when they had started. Then they bred black Labrador retrievers. That had all died off – and pretty quickly, too, as quickly as the last two litters of puppies when the power failed for two days in a March ice storm, their mothers disturbed and wandering away from the puppies, walking out of the kennels and around the dog runs, the dogs shaken by the noise of the clattering, ice-covered trees.

Soon there was just the house, the occasional liberation of shopping for groceries. The nights were too quiet, and the days were worse.

The tourist cabins had been one last desperate throw of the dice – Jack had built them without even complaining about the cost of the materials. Three small cabins in a line down one side of the field
towards the road, but they had been her idea, and then suddenly, her responsibility, too. There was something about the cabins, about the way they all lined up evenly below the house. It was all right, Margaret thought, when there were people staying there, when there would be cars or minivans in the three narrow driveways, when there were lights on at night. Otherwise, they looked oddly out of place, even though Jack had planted them as evenly as if they had been three more trees in the orchard.

He had done the framing for the concrete, had put up the stud walls and the gyproc, talking all the while to his green-bubbled level, lips barely moving. She had plastered and picked out paint, hung wallpaper, put down the floors and finished the trim. And for a while, it was like they were working together – but only until the three low buildings were finished. They shouldered the box springs and mattresses in together, painted the outsides of each cottage, and one night they sat on the floor in the cabin furthest from the farmhouse, drinking beer. Margaret looked across at Jack, and for a fleeting moment saw a glimpse of the boy she had fallen in love with.

“It looks good,” Margaret said, reaching out toward the newly-painted wall with one fingertip.

“This one could actually work,” he said, grinning. “We should celebrate.”

She was surprised how much she had missed his touch, how exquisitely good his hands felt on her bare hips – and she revelled in reuniting with her big, strong, eager boy.

But then, like a door slamming, things returned to normal, returned to worse than ever.

When winter came, he was out the door almost without speaking at seven in the morning, leaving the farmhouse as cold as it was when he got up. She would make her way down to the kitchen wrapped in a housecoat to light the kitchen stove, to try and coax some heat from newspaper and thin slivers of kindling. Once the fire was going, always a little smoke coming back into the room, she'd sit on a kitchen chair and draw her feet in up under her, under the edge of the housecoat, and wait until the metal of the stove started to warm the room and nibble away at the delicate frost flowers on the inside of the window glass. Then she would stand in the porch and smoke furiously, short, sharp breaths of cigarette smoke, hating every puff, absolutely unable to stop.

Spring, when it came, was a relief, even though the snow kept coming back – snow in April, again on the first of May, snow on Margaret's birthday, eight days deep into May when the first of the apple blossoms might appear in warmer years.

No one rented the cabins until the end of June, and even when they did, it was somehow disappointing: one evening, the yard in front of the cabins would be stuffed with kids and noise and the smoking barbecues, and the next, it would be empty again, as if someone had pulled the plug and all the noise had been sucked like water down the drain. They'd be gone, and Margaret would look out the window and
imagine that the swings on the swing set were still moving back and forth, so sudden was the change. It felt like they had built a way station on the highway, less a destination than a place where visitors stopped on an urgent journey to someplace else.

July was slow, August was practically still. Then the Forrestals arrived.

She took their credit card and gave them the keys in the small office she had made out of a desktop in a narrow closet by the stairs, thinking it was funny how being alone so often could make you notice so much about other people. Like the way Alicia would take a half-step sideways towards Dan as a matter of course as soon as you spoke to either of them. To Margaret, it didn't seem that the Alicia was possessive, as much as it seemed she was sheltering behind the slender, dark Dan.

Alicia's eyebrows were so blond they were virtually invisible, and it gave her narrow face an almost permanent look of puzzled surprise. She was willowy in the way that makes you think of fine hands folded, protectively praying in front of someone's chest. Dan was a good counterpoint – not a big man, really, but solid and dark-whiskered, as if he had to shave twice a day. They were from Halifax, just over an hour's drive, out of town for the weekend.

Walking out to the middle cabin, Margaret hoped they wouldn't mind that the dishes didn't match, that the glasses and silverware were a collection of remnants scratched up and bought cheap at yard sales and church bazaars, that the magazines were year-old
Maclean's
and decorating magazines with a thousand ideas for inexpensive quick-fixes.

The Forrestals drove down behind her slowly as she walked, making a short and formal procession, and there was a fleeting moment when she wondered what they thought of her legs. Just for a moment, really, a distracting thought as if a black fly had buzzed too close to her ear. Then the engine of the car was off, and Dan was pulling luggage from the trunk and Alicia was opening the door.

“I can pack you a lunch tomorrow,” Margaret said. “if you want to go exploring.”

“That would be nice,” Alicia nodded, and Margaret was only three strides back up the drive when she heard the door of the cabin close, and the snick of the doorknob turning inside, setting the lock.

In the morning, it was homemade white bread and roast chicken, heavy with mayonnaise and wrapped tight in Saran. No apples yet, but fleshy yellow plums, the kind that burst sweet and wet on your lips with the first bite. The fruit rich for only a few days, going past quickly when the skins turn transparent and the flesh goes soft.

Alicia came into the kitchen while Margaret was putting the picnic together, came in and leaned against the kitchen counter. Margaret noticed how slender her arms were, the way she crossed those arms carelessly so that it looked like her hands only met her elbows as an afterthought.

“Thanks,” Alicia said quietly, as if the words took tremendous effort. “It's awfully nice of you.”

“You and Dan should go down to Scott's Bay and look for agates,” Margaret said, looking at her own hands as she spread the mayonnaise. “The wind's off the water, and you'll be cooler. Take a sweater, though, it can be foggy with the wind in this direction.” She could imagine them on the beach, both in heavy sweaters, walking slowly along the angled gravel, watching for the bright quartzes, for the agates and amethyst and the brilliant orange crystals of zeelite. Margaret hadn't been there for years, but she could remember the narrow dirt road down to the beach, the way it ended just before the great grey dunes of small stones, the narrow, white-painted bridge, bowed up in the middle, that you walk across to get to the beach itself.

“Tides are fast there,” Margaret said, and she could have sworn that Alicia jumped at the sound of her voice – no, not jumped, but started, perhaps, the way horses suddenly lurch away, jangled, big, smooth legs suddenly awkward and akimbo. Margaret had to resist the urge to reach out for her.

“Sorry?” Alicia said.

“The tides,” Margaret said slowly. “The tides are fast out there. So you have to be careful.”

Margaret had a basket she had been saving for a picnic, a basket she had never used, and she took it down from the top of the cupboards where it had always been. She put in the sandwiches and fruit, and passed it to Alicia, and for a moment Margaret felt the cool smooth skin of Alicia's fingers.

“We'll do that,” Alicia said, and even after the couple had left, Margaret could see the map she had
drawn for them in her head, could imagine them driving down through Wolfville, through Canning, down to where the road began to bend around along the ocean because it had no other choice. In under the big elms that Dutch elm disease hadn't found yet, out past the low, slow brooks where the ducks worked the muddy water, their tailfeathers upright as they dipped, head down.

Sitting in the kitchen, she could picture the postcard-perfection of it: the fishing boats at the ends of their lead-lines, Cape Islanders all, settled hull-down into the deep red Minas Basin mud. Abandoned by the tide, waiting calmly for its resurrection. The deep green blades of dune grass, the fine-gravel beach that ran away at such a discrete angle that it looked as if it was actually level, so close to flat that the tide boiled in low and fast like one long, never-breaking shallow wave.

Margaret could imagine the rattle of the road gravel, thrown up under the car from the dirt road, the semaphore of pings and clangs, that rare and wonderful disordered song. And she could remember how long it had been since she had been on that road, one elbow out the window in the baking sun, the hot summer vinyl seat burning the backs of her thighs, a delta of dust growing out behind the car.

Then suddenly Alicia and Dan would take a left up the hill past the shotgun tarpaper shacks, past the mobile homes and the abandoned pickup trucks, onto the marginal ground where the orchards were scabby and stunted, short of sun. Up through where
the brooks had cut deep valleys in the soft red sandstone, where the maples would change in great flaming fury in the fall, where, for a few short weeks, the leaves would be almost too bright to look at. She could imagine them holding each other's hands, could imagine someone holding her hand.

Then suddenly they would be thrown out into the open, heading along the spine of the hill towards Scott's Bay. A row of abandoned, sheered-off wharf pilings, heading out into the sea below the tide line, their genesis forgotten.

No wonder in it at all, there on the narrow grey-black strip of asphalt through the head-high alders, no wonder save for the sudden discovery of the huge broad grey crescent of beach stone. No wonder except for the fact that, on hands and knees, the gravel is filled with scores of semi-precious stones, and occasionally, very occasionally, the strangely milky swirl of a lonely teardrop opal.

Alicia brought the basket back empty, and smiled.

“Thanks,” she said. “The beach was wonderful.”

But this was nothing Margaret didn't already know.

Later, when it began to get dark, the heat began to fall off the day. It fell away in sheets with the setting sun: one moment, as heavy and oppressive and damp as sweat; the next, the cool of sudden evening wind, gathering and racing out from under the trees where it had been sheltering, biding time.

Margaret sat on the steps of the back porch, feet apart, watching the sky wash through orange to
black. She shook a cigarette out of the pack, but this one she smoked slowly, drawing the smoke in and holding it for a moment before exhaling.

It was almost completely dark when the door to the Forrestal cabin opened. She watched, still smoking, as Dan came out on the porch and stretched. She inhaled, saw him stop and stare towards her, towards the suddenly-bright coal at the end of her cigarette. He started walking towards her, hands in his pockets.

“It's beautiful here,” he said when he reached the bottom of the steps. He pointed towards the cigarette. “Got another?” Margaret nodded, knowing Dan could barely see her in the gloom. She shook out a cigarette, passed it to him, and reached over with hers. He lit his and sat on the steps. Margaret leaned forward and rested her forearms on her knees. They sat quietly for a few moments.

“Don't smoke that much anymore,” Dan said. “Especially in front of Alicia.”

“She knows anyway,” Margaret said, knowing the way Jack would sometimes wrinkle up his forehead and nose when he came into the kitchen, even though she always smoked outside.

“Yeah, well, she pretends she doesn't. And I pretend I don't smoke,” he said. “It's a relationship built on mutual denial.”

They sat quietly, looking across the stubbled grass as car headlights swept down the road. The night insects were singing, and from the standing water behind the house, there were the high trilling peeps of small green frogs.

“It's hard not to love it here,” Dan said, breathing out smoke. The air was so still that it seemed to hum, to vibrate in the darkness.

“Can't stand it here any more,” Margaret said. “Even quiet can crush you.”

“I can't believe that,” Dan said. “I can't believe that you don't like it. I would.”

“Yeah, well, then I'll pretend I do. And you can pretend to believe me, and we can build something mutual on that,” Margaret said.

Margaret thought she saw the white flash of his teeth against his face for a moment, but in the dark she wasn't sure. He flicked the cigarette away, and they watched its ember tumble end over end away onto the driveway. Her cigarette landed along the edge of the grass.

She watched hers smouldering in the short grass, and knew she'd be the one to come out and collect both of the cold, charred filters in the early morning.

“Gotta get back,” Dan said, standing up and hitching his jeans up around his hips. She watched him walk away.

She stayed outside until the dew suddenly fell, until the night was cooler and there were tiny water droplets all over the painted steps, and the whole time the cars kept swinging by the gentle curve in the road out in front of her, kept swinging by, heading for somewhere more interesting.

Margaret could see them through the yellow-lit windows of their cabin, and Dan was standing behind her, behind Alicia, with his arms around her waist.
Then his hands were under her shirt and Alicia was leaning back, pushing against him and Margaret looked away again, down towards the road.