The Rain Barrel Baby (3 page)

1956

“It kinda goes to me,” the kid says and the saleslady laughs.

The mother has taken her downtown to buy something to wear for the first day of grade one. The dress is covered with butterflies and the kid loves it. A tiny net butterfly perches on the black velvet belt. Perfect.

Suddenly, in the middle of the new clothes, her mother disappears and ladies hover. They know all about it.

“Your mummy had to go for a ride, dear, in a car. These nice men will take you home. They know where you live.”

“Can’t I go with my mum?” the kid asks.

“Don’t worry, honey. She’ll be fine. There was just a little misunderstanding. I’m sure that’s all it was. You go now with the nice men.”

“What about the butterfly dress?” she asks.

“We’ll keep it for you, dear, and you and your mum can come back for it.”

An ice-cream cone appears in her hand and she rides home in a black and white car. The nice men are police.

They don’t go back for the dress and a few days later a girl in her class wears it to school.

The kid cries, right there at her desk.

“What is it, dear?” the teacher asks. “What’s wrong?”

But she can’t say. She doesn’t have the words to describe what’s wrong. She can’t even make a start.

The Present

Emma kissed her pillow. Then she kissed her arm. She hadn’t kissed a boy yet, but she hoped to soon.

Emma and Delia had explored each other’s bodies pretty thoroughly, but they hadn’t kissed. They hadn’t wanted to.

Delia had given her the idea about practising on her pillow and on her arm. She had already kissed a boy and said it was really great. Emma believed her and couldn’t wait. She wished her arm didn’t have quite so many freckles.

She had a picture of the boy she wanted to kiss: Donald Griffiths. He was in her home room at school and when they’d had their pictures taken she had asked him for one. Her bravery had astonished her. She thought she camouflaged her desire fairly well in the hubbub of laughter and trading going on when their school pictures arrived.

He didn’t seem surprised, just smiled and said, “Sure. Can I have one of you too?”

Emma suspected he had asked just to be polite but she gave him one and wrote on the back: To Donald, from Emma Foote. He didn’t write anything on the back of his, which was a little disappointing, but she hadn’t wanted to force him into anything further.

Emma loved Donald and thought about him all the time. Delia knew how she felt and was pretty good at encouraging her and cheering her up when she felt there was no hope.

Emma had decided that she would let Donald touch her breasts after they had kissed several times on different occasions. That’s if he wanted to. Her breasts weren’t very big but he might want to anyway. She figured it was okay to go that far and wanted badly for it to happen. She was pretty definite about not doing anything more than that though.

What she had done with Delia didn’t really count. It was more for educational purposes.

And what she did on her own was something else entirely. She did that now as she imagined kissing Donald. She kissed his picture but that didn’t work as well as her arm. It was too flat and smooth.

Afterwards she thought about her science project. Her idea was to build a volcano that would actually erupt. It wouldn’t be easy but she figured it was something she could pull off. Maybe her dad would help. Maybe Donald would help! He was a bit of a science geek.

If only my breasts were a little larger, Emma thought, and pushed them together, making a feeble cleavage. It hurt, so she let go and turned sideways to look in the mirror. Oh well, at least I don’t have wiener breasts. That was Delia’s expression. Her mum had wiener breasts, so Delia figured she was doomed to the same fate. They weren’t wieners yet, though. It was more of an older woman’s thing.

Ivy Grace sat on a park bench outside The Forks Market. She faced the river and beyond it the beauty of Old Saint Boniface, but her eyes didn’t take it in; she was contemplating her next move. For two years, four months, one day, fifteen hours and — she looked at her watch — fourteen minutes, she had been working on her plan, and it was falling into place. Actually, she had begun long before that, she just hadn’t realized it. She’d known she was working towards something, probably since the day she walked out of her mother’s house twenty-nine years ago, but she hadn’t known what. It hadn’t come clear all at once, far from it.

But now, she had completed the first steps and it was time to move on. She thought back to the Saturday morning, two and a third years ago, when she had gotten started. In the practical sense.

On that day, when the plan shaped itself in her mind, Ivy had stood admiring herself, the result of her efforts, in her full-length mirror. She smiled slowly, worked at it. She knew the smile was important.

Her notebook had lain open on her desk and she’d gone over to consult it: Admire self in mirror. Okay. Practise smiling so it includes eyes. Okay.

Next came something she didn’t like to do. Pray. It was important. She would be lost without her prayers, without whatever it was she prayed to, telling her what to write in her notebook. It was just that she hated the process. She wished she could just open the book each day and find the words neatly in place.

Praying hurt — her stomach mostly. And sometimes it made her throat ache. The trouble was, sometimes the hurt wouldn’t go away but would stick with her all day. Even into the night.

Her sleep used to be as deep and black as death when she had been seeing Dr. Braun. He gave her pills — pills for this, pills for that. They worked, but she didn’t like the man. She had given him up and with him her sound sleeps.

It had to be done, so she did it. Knelt by her bed, laid her head on the soft sweet scent of the goose down comforter, carefully, so as not to disturb her hair or face. It didn’t take long for the words to come. They started and ended abruptly. The voice that spoke to her was female, familiar, but nothing she could tie a name to. So she made one up. Gruck. It fit. Sometimes she thought of it simply as G. That morning, as always, G gave her the words to get her through that day and part way through the next.

Ivy wrote the words from G with pencil in backhand till she filled one page of her notebook. Then she went back to where she began, to double check her next move. The writing was almost unreadable: Scout out a man, any man.

Sometimes she wished Gruck would give her more complete information, the hows and the wheres. But that part was left up to her. Ivy supposed there was a reason for this, so didn’t question it, just wished sometimes it could be easier.

For instance, it was awfully early in the day to find a man in the sense that she knew G wanted her to find one. But she would have to try. It was for the men that she took such care with her appearance. G insisted on it.

The bars weren’t open yet. The supermarket, she supposed, and if that didn’t work she could try an art gallery or a museum.

She erased the sentence declaring the task at hand.

At the Safeway things went much more easily than she had anticipated.

“I never know how to pick a cantaloupe,” she said, holding the round fruit helplessly in both hands, squeezing gently.

“Here. Let me help.” The man jumped in as she knew he would. He had a white puppy tucked into his coat.

The rest was easy, except for the part where she insisted that he not use any protection. That had put him off, just for a bit, and he’d thought she was strange.

Well, she was strange and she was also fixin’ to die. That was the way she liked to think of it, to phrase it.

Now, all this time later, she had what she had been looking for and it was time for the next step. Frank Foote didn’t know it, but he was the key.

Ivy stood up and gazed upon the river that had drawn her there in the first place. Across the water the spires of Saint Boniface caught her eye. So sharp. It distressed her to look at them, but at the same time, she couldn’t tear her eyes away.

Frank stopped in to see Greta on his way home from work on Monday to tell her that there was no news about the rain barrel baby. She didn’t seem to care. In fact, she didn’t want to talk about that baby at all.

“Would you like a glass of wine, Frank? I’ve got some open.”

Frank didn’t like to drink on weekdays if he could help it. “That’d be nice,” he said.

He could celebrate not having to answer the questions of a more inquisitive person, questions like: was she born dead; did she drown; did she suffer much?

Greta placed a glass of Italian red in Frank’s hand and he settled himself across from her at the kitchen table.

There were at least one hundred cherry tarts cooling on racks right there in front of him. He would have loved to scarf down a couple of those, but he knew they were for business purposes and didn’t like to ask. Surely she would offer! Or maybe she made the exact number required and there was no room for casual munching.

“Did I tell you that my daughter is a nurse?” Greta asked.

“Pardon me?”

“My daughter. She’s a nurse. She got in touch with me a few years back.” Greta’s face was shiny and red, as though she had scrubbed it too hard.

“I filled out a form ages ago at the Provincial Registry, you know, in case my daughter was looking for me? My baby girl? Nothing ever came of that, but she found me on her own.”

“You met her then? You saw her?” Frank wondered if Greta was a booze hound.

“Well, no, I didn’t. It was a bit of a disappointment really. She wrote me a letter, but she didn’t want to see me. The letter was on River City Health Centre stationery. That’s where she said she was a nurse. She didn’t want me to know where she lived, I guess.”

The cat, Ailsa, wound her way around Frank’s legs. He reached down to scratch her forehead.

“Her last name is Mallet,” Greta said. “And her first name’s still Jane. I was pleased about that. They must have thought it was good enough to keep. I phoned every Mallet in the phone book, but none of them knew what I was talking about.”

“How did she find you if she didn’t sign on at the Registry?” Frank stroked Ailsa’s soft gray fur. The cat stood with her two front paws on Frank’s thigh.

“Simple,” Greta said. “In 1968, when I gave her away, my name was written on the adoption order. She must have seen it at some point. And I’m in the phone book.

“I phoned River City looking for her. But they told me that they didn’t have a nurse there named Jane Mallet. I guess she lied to me about that.”

Greta drank greedily from her glass and poured herself some more. Frank was just approaching his first sip.

“I believe she is a nurse, though,” Greta said. “Why would she make that up? She probably just didn’t want me to know how to get in touch with her. I mean, she would hate me, wouldn’t she?”

Frank drank.

“I tried every hospital in town. No one had a Nurse Jane Mallet. But she could be a private nurse, couldn’t she? Or something like that.”

“Yes,” Frank said. “Or she could be in another city.”

“Yeah. Something like that. She got in touch once more, just last year, by phone that time. Just wanted me to know she was happily married and still successfully employed, I guess. That was about all she talked about.”

“Is she still going by the name Mallet?” Frank asked.

“I think so. That’s what she called herself. Jane Mallet.”

Greta drained her glass again and watched Frank from under heavy eyelids. “She talked kinda funny, Jane did.”

“What do you mean, funny?” Frank asked. And what’s the matter with your eyes? But he kept that question to himself. He didn’t want her bursting into tears. Frank was pretty sure she was swacked, even though her words came out crisp around the edges.

“Sort of slow,” Greta said. “As though she had to think really hard about each word.”

She got up from the table and walked around behind Frank. She leaned into him until his head was cushioned between her breasts. One for each ear. He remembered what it had been like to bury his face in those breasts. It seemed like a hundred years ago. Greta’s breasts were far and away the biggest ones he’d ever dealt with. Pneumatic. He’d enjoyed it very much, he recalled now.

“Frank, would you like to have sex with me?” Crisp words. She caressed his hair with gentle fingers.

Shudders ran through him and he leapt to his feet startling Ailsa and knocking over his chair. He had very little room to manoeuvre.

“I’m sure that’d be very nice, Greta, but I’m married and I should get going.”

She laughed.

Frank stared at her body inside her summer dress.

She undid a few buttons.

Frank reached out and then stopped. “I can’t do this.”

She took his hand and covered her face with it.

“You have beautiful hands, Frank. I love big hands.”

She ran her tongue the length of his middle finger and took it in her mouth. She sucked it gently to the last knuckle holding his eyes all the while.

He groaned and reached out with his other hand to touch her hair. It was so soft. Rain water. Tinged with…

“Oh, God, Greta. I’d really love to, but I can’t.” He pulled his hand away. “I gotta go now. I’ll be in touch.”

She smiled and so did he.

As he walked down the street toward his house he felt her mouth swallowing his finger. He looked at it. It was still wet. It felt different from his other fingers. He pictured licking her and biting her and fucking her till he was spent. He loved that she had looked at him. Denise always looked away.

It would have been so easy. But the consequences could be anything but. Greta was unpredictable. He imagined her phoning, sending letters, befriending Denise and threatening to tell her if he didn’t fuck her more often or let her act out her wildest fantasies in his presence.

Frank chuckled to himself. He liked that Greta wanted him and he was pleased with himself for turning her down.

He’d run out of there so fast there’d been no chance for her to offer him a cherry tart for the road. Oh well. He was pretty sure there was a Sara Lee cake in the freezer at home. That’d have to do.