For a moment, Mieka and I stood looking down at the girls. “Taylor’s dream has come true,” I said. “All week, she’s been talking about having Madeleine bunk in with her.”
Mieka’s expression was impish. “Do you want to make my dream come true?”
“If I can.”
She lowered her voice. “Let me put up Maddy’s crib in here, so I can spend a night alone with her father.”
“It would be my pleasure,” I said.
We walked outside together to get the crib. Mieka opened the back gate on their Volvo wagon, then peered up at the sky. “Looks like it might clear off.”
I moved closer to her. “I feel very blessed tonight.”
My daughter’s face was uncharacteristically grave. “So do I.”
For a moment we were silent, then I said, “Greg told me that Ariel was pregnant.”
My daughter’s eyes widened. “You didn’t know?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m glad she felt close enough to you to tell you.”
“And it was just a fluke we’d become friends again,” she said sadly. “I was ringing the bells after Maddy was born to make sure that everyone I’d ever known heard the good news.”
“Your dad and I did the same thing when you were born. Unfortunately, that was before e-mail. When I saw our long-distance bill the next month, I cried for an hour.”
Mieka laughed softly. “Poor Mum. Anyway, most people just e-mailed back, but Ariel sent a beautiful box of books: Madeline, of course, but also Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She also sent Maddy a note. It was so poignant. Ariel said that these had been her favourite books when she was a little girl. She said she hoped Maddy would forgive her for reading them before she sent them, but she wanted to get back to a time when she was happy. Of course, as soon as I read the note, I called her. I was all raging hormones – Earth Mother, certain I could fix everything. Mum, Ariel was so different than I thought she would be.”
“How did you think she would be?”
My daughter shrugged. “Dismissive?”
“Why would she be dismissive?”
My daughter rolled her eyes. “Mum, Ariel had a Ph. D. before she was twenty-seven, and as you remember only too well, I dropped out of university halfway through my second year.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Most of the time, no, but Ariel was always so perfect.” Mieka pulled the portable crib out of the car and slammed down the gate. “Do you want to hear a nasty little admission? When I heard Ariel had a job in your department, I was jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“I had this image of you and her chatting away about world affairs and going to lectures together. You know, like the daughter you always wanted.”
I touched her arm. “Mieka, you’re the daughter I always wanted.”
Unexpectedly, her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, I know that most of the time, but sometimes I wonder if…”
“If what?”
“If nothing. I must be PMS -ing. Anyway, that first time I phoned her, Ariel didn’t talk much about herself at all, but she had a lot of questions about me. She wanted to know if I’d felt more connected to life since I’d had Maddy. And she wanted to know – and this is truly bizarre – how you reacted when I dropped out of school.”
“Why would she care about that?”
“I don’t know… She never mentioned it again. After that we mostly e-mailed each other. She had a bunch of theoretical questions about pregnancy – just girlfriend stuff – and then she phoned at Easter and made the big announcement. Two weekends ago, she came up to Saskatoon with an ultrasound photo of her baby. She’d brought Madeleine a gift – a German teddy bear. Ariel said the bear’s name was Serendipity, and she hoped it would always remind Maddy to pay attention to lucky interventions in her life.”
My daughter was fighting tears. So was I.
“This just keeps getting worse,” I said. “When Howard and I drove out to tell Charlie yesterday, I didn’t realize that he’d lost Ariel and their baby.”
Mieka didn’t respond, but even in the sepia light of early evening, I could read the truth in her face.
“Charlie wasn’t the father,” I said.
The shake of her head was almost indiscernible. “No,” she said. “The baby wasn’t Charlie’s.”
“Whose then?”
“I don’t know. But Mum, somehow I had the sense that the father was someone who just contributed. Ariel was so determined to have a child.”
“To take her back to the time when she was happy?”
Mieka bit her lip and nodded affirmation.
My daughter and I put up the portable crib beside the big bed and tucked the girls in. When we came back to the living room, there were muted cheers.
“Finally!” Angus groaned. “Listen up, you two, Greg has found something he swears is totally cool.”
I stopped in my tracks. “If it’s a board game, I’m going to go back there and crawl in next to Maddy.”
“Not a board game,” said Greg. “A game of exploration in which we test the limits of the human psyche to endure suspense.” His accent became plummy, with each vowel lovingly elongated. “We invite you to a weekend with the Master of the Macabre, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock. It appears our hosts here at Katepwa own the complete Hitchcock oeuvre.”
“I’m up for anything that doesn’t have a Teletubby in it,” said Mieka.
“I thought,” said my son-in-law, “that we would begin with that a paean to the virtues of voyeurism, Rear Window.”
“Never heard of it,” said Angus.
“I’ve never even heard of Alfred Hitchcock,” said Eli.
“Well, hold on to your popcorn,” said Greg, “because you’re in for an experience that will explode your kernels.”
In the first minutes after Greg slid Rear Window into the VCR, I had the sinking feeling that, like many of us who had been glorious in the fifties, the movie had aged badly. The sets were undeniably cheesy, Grace Kelly’s uptown accent grated, and Eli and Angus wondered loudly about Jimmy Stewart’s sanity in ignoring a woman who, despite her pearls and addiction to cocktail dresses, was clearly a hottie. But it wasn’t long before we were all seduced by the possibility of murder in the apartment across the way. By the time Jimmy had snagged the murderer and Grace had snagged Jimmy, everyone in the room was a Hitchcock convert. As the closing credits rolled, Angus said, “That really was cool. When we get home, I’m going to get some serious binoculars.”
“Over my dead body,” I said, and everyone groaned.
I awoke the next morning to my granddaughter’s hungry howls. As I padded into Mieka and Greg’s room with her, I noticed the glow of what looked suspiciously like dawn outside the windows. I crossed my fingers. If we were lucky, climatologist Tara Lavallee was going to have to do another 180 on her holiday-weekend forecast. Fifteen minutes later, when I took a noticeably heavier and happier Madeleine from her mother’s arms and headed for the kitchen, sunshine was pouring through the skylight. The gods were smiling. It was going to be a banner day.
Over breakfast, we floated possibilities. After agonizing between the pull of two highly desirable options, Taylor went with Greg and the boys to fish, and Mieka, Madeleine, and I drove to Lebret to a teashop that was famous for its rhubarb pie and local crafts. When we met back at the cottage for lunch, everyone except Greg had caught their limit, and Mieka had spent a week’s profits from her business on hand-woven willow picnic baskets and placemats the colour of marigolds. That night we had a fish-fry, sucked in our breath with amazement at the fireworks, then came back inside to watch Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant dangle from Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest . Eli and Angus decided they were up for a double feature and watched Psycho till two. Madeleine slept through the night again, and the next morning Madeleine’s mother came to the breakfast table with the Mona Lisa smile of a woman savouring the pleasures of being well and truly loved.
Sunday was a blue and golden beach day, and we soaked up every blue and golden moment. At suppertime, Eli supervised a wiener roast at the outdoor fireplace, and that night we watched Vertigo.