The Last Woman (32 page)

He turns to the waist-high goldenrod beside the road. At his first blow, a single stalk droops. At his second, it droops a little farther. The tool is next to useless, but he goes on hacking, first with one hand, then with two, until after an hour he has cleared an area around home plate.

That night he dreams of the field as it used to be: the smoothly gravelled infield, the baselines running white toward distant trees. He is standing at the plate with a bat in his hands. Facing him on the pitcher’s mound is an unusually tall man with a cap pulled down over his eyes. The giant wears a grey uniform, but his exposed hands and forearms, and the lower part of his face, are red. Taking a ball from his mouth, he begins his windup – throws one leg over his shoulder, peeks out between his own knees, takes another ball from his ear –

Billy wakes laughing.

The next day, it is early afternoon by the time he starts off with his weed-whacker. Fifty yards from the diamond, he hears voices and sees, in the centre of the outfield, three men swinging scythes, laying down weeds with rhythmic, hushing strokes. In the shade near third base, Eileen Masse, sitting in a lawn chair, tilts a pitcher over the cups held out by a group of children.

He steps out of sight, and is about to walk off, when his sister appears pushing a lawn mower down the road. “Didn’t want you to have
all
the fun,” she says as she rattles
past. He follows her along the edge of the diamond and stands talking with her and Eileen, aware the whole time of the men working in the outfield. “We thought you could use some help,” Eileen says, nodding at his weed-whacker. “
That
puny thing.” Her big face beams at him, slit-eyed. He had thought the Masse family was set against him, because they had opposed his pursuit of the land claim. But it seems they’ve got past that. Roy Masse is coming in from the field. He has to leave for the Harbour, he says. Billy takes Roy’s scythe and, putting it over his shoulder, walks out, into the sun.

When he gets back to the house, the sight of Ann Scott strolling across the rock surprises him: he hasn’t thought of her for hours. She regards him without expression as she approaches, and he has the sense she is testing her idea of him against her experience: this sweating, shirtless man with a strange, orange-handled tool in his hand.

“Whatever have you been up to with that thing?” There’s an archness in her voice, as if he could only be doing something trivial, amusing. He shakes his head. He does not want to tell her.

They go into the house together, and after he sponges off, they undress on either side of his bed. There is a distance between them, and their love-making is fierce, impersonal, as if they had agreed to put aside who they are, who they
think
they are, and come together as strangers. Then they lie in a companionable torpor.
Reaching out, he lazily traces the curve where her back spreads into her hips: a place he loves.

Later, they walk to a cove near his house. She strips to her bra and panties and swims off, while he washes in the shallows. Gazing over the water, he watches her stroke briskly toward an island. So much strength and confidence in her; he feels his weakness in comparison. She is far off now, just a flashing of arms and legs. Regretting his neediness, he watches as she swims behind a rock, and goes on watching until, smaller now, she appears on the other side.

She swims back and strides from the water, looking happy and invigorated. They lie on towels on the warm rock. Directly overhead, the pines hold long, indented shards of sky.

He wants to go up to Silver Lake, he tells her.

“I thought you said it would be all clear-cut there now. Do you really want to see that again. Isn’t it what started all this?”

“’Have to see what’s happened to the cabin.” He knows it’s probably a ruin now. But he has to see it anyway. Because it is his.

She opens a can of beans, and they sit outside on two chairs, passing it back and forth.

“I told Richard I needed some space,” she says after a while. “But I’m not sure how much he understands that. He’s in pretty bad shape –

“I’m going to live at the cottage, at least for the time
being,” she continues. “It feels good to be there, except for missing Rowan. He’s coming tomorrow for a week. He hates the situation – well, he
should
hate it. He’s not sleeping very well – wet his bed twice. Oh, God!” She gives him a look of exhausted candour.
See, this is what I am
.

Billy leans forward, elbows on knees, his head in his hands. So much pain, and he’s helped make it.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “You’re not going to have a madwoman on your hands. I’m not expecting you to do anything about this.”

He looks up in surprise. It’s not what he’s been thinking. Not at all. She’s gone back to the beans now, briskly scraping in the can with her spoon.

L
ate August. The Old Woman River has shrunk to a putrid trickle; on Ann and Richard’s street the lawns have turned to straw. Richard sits on the edge of their bed, in the hum of the air conditioner. Across the dimming room, Ann’s mirror glints above her dresser. Getting up, he begins to pace. It is never worse than when the boy is with Ann at Inverness and their big house expands around him. Evenings, loath to come home, he is tempted to eat downtown, but not wanting people to see him on his own – it is bad to fail, worse to be seen failing – he usually grazes from his own fridge and drinks a bottle of Merlot from his own cellar, and tries to work: surrendering eventually to the call of the TV in the den, and the buttons of
the remote that allow at least a modicum of control as he dismisses in rapid sequence the preening talk-show host, the weatherman scrawling on his transparent board, the milling of a crowd in some distant city, stopping, finally, (who knows why?) at a scuba diver swimming, dreamlike, among spires of pink coral. He has thought of finding a woman to go out with, to go to bed with – a statement of his independence, proof that
he’s
all right – but although he has looked at women, he has not approached any. He wants only Ann. He’s confessed to her in a phone call that he’s not paid her the attention or respect she deserves – sentiments of deep sincerity, born of loss. What hollows him is her reluctance to respond at any length. He suspects she has already made up her mind about him and is merely hearing him out for kindness’ sake.

Doug Parsons has taken him out a couple of times for drinks. But his easy optimism – “In a month you’ll be over it,” “plenty more fish in the sea” – hides an instinctive avoidance of anything “emotional.” Despite his longing to talk only about Ann, he is relieved to be carried off into safer topics like the latest machinations in Ottawa or Doug’s search for the perfect boat. Yet while the distraction is welcome, he is beginning to realize he has reached early middle age without a single close friend.

He paces in the room they once shared. Stopping before her closet, he flicks a switch, illuminating the hanging mass of her clothes. Seizing a dress, he pulls it out and brings it to his nose but can smell only the lingering tartness of dry cleaner. They had bought it in Paris.

He remembered her modelling it for him, in an expensive shop on the Right Bank where he sat on a low hassock and the saleswoman swanned about in her snotty Parisian way – they both laughed afterwards. Ann, he thought, was happy. But he wonders now. How much of her “happiness” was something to make him feel his own gesture in taking her to Paris was not wasted? Yet wasn’t this, still, a kind of love – wanting to protect him from her sadness? While he was trying to take care of her, wasn’t she, in her way, taking care of him? For a moment, he holds the dress, then abruptly throws it aside.

He goes over to her dresser and begins to open drawers. Socks, bras, underwear – all in the usual tangle. A small sewing kit. A sleeping mask. A box of oil pastels. A smooth, perfectly round stone. A postcard picture of the Grand Canyon, its red depths seamed with a tiny river. It is the topmost of a packet of Billy’s cards, saved all these years. An aerial view of Wheeling, WVA. A large fish held by a boy. A transport truck. A McDonald’s restaurant.
Writing this in an abandoned house. Rain dripping on my feet. Wish I was there
.

He starts to rip up the card, thinks better of it, and shoves the whole pack into the drawer. Digging farther, he finds a black artist’s notebook. It has been years since he has seen her writing in it. He opens it, tilting it toward the failing light from the window.

Erica says it might help if I write here. I hardly know what to write. So I’m doing this for my therapist. As I do other things for other people. Do I do anything for myself any more? My painting – but I’m not even sure of that. I lived for it once. Now I stand staring at the canvas. No ideas, no feeling. Why do I try? Am I trying to please somebody else? I think sometimes of my father. He’s usually enthusiastic about my work, though I don’t think he gets it at all. “How did it go today? Any breakthroughs?” Already moving on to something else… Yet it matters terribly to me what he thinks – even more than Richard. If Dad frowns at a painting, my heart sinks – and can stay sunk for days. So I avoid showing him paintings, but tell him it’s going fine. Which means these days that I’m lying to him. I lie to Richard too – pretend I’m making progress. And painting used to be like a bird singing
.

Spied on Rowan today. I just got suddenly, awfully, worried about him. I was trying to paint, and I just knew he was in trouble. As if he had just stopped existing. I drove down to the school and sat across the road in the car. I thought, If he’s in trouble in the school, people will know, an ambulance will come. But what if he’s not there! Totally crazy. I knew it was crazy, but I couldn’t stop
.

So I went to the office and gave them an excuse about needing to see him. The principal went down the hall with me and knocked on the kindergarten door. When Rowan came out, I could see in an instant he was all right. I wanted to fall on him, weep with relief. When the principal left, I took him down the hall and told him I wanted him to have some money. “Just in case,” I said, and I gave him a five-dollar bill. It was all I could think of
.

I could see I had alarmed him. Maybe he lives over the same kind of abyss I do. Maybe I’ve put it in him – some huge unspoken fear. I’m always imagining the worst, which would be losing him. Erica said once: Be careful of thoughts. They have power
.

It’s London. I know. If I care to stop, really stop and feel what’s there – it’s there. All the time
.

Erica thinks I should get over London. She doesn’t know how hard I’ve tried. A woman’s body is her own, men shouldn’t decide for us, it’s not a child at that stage – I believe all that. For months at a time, I’m convinced. Then one day, rain falling, or I’m alone in the car, waiting for Rowan to come out of school, and it hits me. Her. I always think of it as a girl. The life I ended. I see little girls going past with their mothers and I think, That might have been her. Us
.

Erica believes I should think of her as myself – she’s the self I haven’t let live. This seems reasonable, and I’ve had some dreams that supported it – the little girl in the park. Red hat. The seagull
.

But then, why this guilt sometimes – a stone in my chest. And the wondering about what she would be like. The sense of the life she might have lived – that I deprived her of
.

The future is real too. We say it doesn’t exist, but when someone dies, they are deprived of the future. I cut a piece of the future away
.

Dr. Break (what a name for a doctor!) gave me the test results in his office. I was so upset I phoned my mother in Montreal
.

Please don’t tell Dad
. She wanted me to come to Montreal. But she was as confused as I was, I could tell. She did tell my father. One day he walked into my room and told me in no uncertain terms I wasn’t to see Billy again. He’d already forbidden it once, after catching us that day coming down from my bedroom. I was terrified of his anger. I didn’t see it often, but when he let it out – nuclear
.

I think I was always afraid of his rage even when I hadn’t seen it. But I went up to Mad Jack’s again, everything in me trembling. I didn’t tell Billy I was pregnant. I didn’t want to hear him say, Let’s get married. I didn’t want to see him happy about it – because he would have been. Women on Pine Island don’t have abortions. They just don’t. I couldn’t have married him. I had no place for a baby
.