“Come on, Leo. You liked it, I could tell.”
“I saved your life.”
“My fuzzy arse, you did.”
He falters, not wanting to take it in just yet.
“What about your daddy, you can’t go back, he’ll kill you.”
She goes all haughty and upper-crust. “My father has never laid a hand on me.” He lets her go. A light appears around the bend. Frances walks towards it.
He never does see who or how many have come for her. Of everything, perhaps he’s most ashamed of staying behind, cowering in reliance on her promise not to tell. But what would happen to his family if he were killed here tonight? Disgrace and destitution.
At the thought of his family, Ginger emerges from what seems to him now to have been a narcotic haze. There in the dripping mine, his head feels clear and whole for the first time in he doesn’t know how long. Since New York. His heart is heavy, leaking and frayed, but it is his own. He feels acutely present in every particle of his body and his body is more worn than it was last time he looked — like the body of a loved one, long thought dead, who returns looking older but so much more like himself than anything recorded in memory or photographs. He is filled with the joy and sorrow of the reunion with himself. Forgiveness.
The sun is about to show. The rifle jiggles on Adelaide’s knees and she can’t help a yawn. Teresa exchanges a look with Wilfrid Beel. Wilf says, “There’s a hunting cabin down this road I used to use, if it’s still there it’s a likely spot —”
“Never mind, Wilf,” says Adelaide. “Let’s go home, he’s probably there waiting on me by now.”
Teresa is relieved. They’ve been driving Addy around all night wearing her out with dirt roads, they drove halfway to Meat Cove, and it’s finally worked. Teresa wasn’t worried that their search would turn up anything. She just wanted to keep Adelaide away from the Piper house with that rifle. She’s got a short wick, her sister-in-law, God love her. No good telling her that Ginger wouldn’t touch that ghost of a girl with a ten-foot pole.
Adelaide is right. When they pull up in front of her house it’s light enough to see through the windows of the locked double doors that Ginger’s truck is safely inside the garage.
When Frances greeted Lily and Mercedes in the mine she just said, “Did you bring the car?”
Mercedes was so relieved she didn’t at first notice Lily straying round the bend whence Frances had appeared. “Lily, we’re going home now.”
“What about the man?”
“He has his own vehicle,” answered Mercedes. She did not wish to see what lay around the bend. It was enough for her that Frances was content to leave it behind.
Once home, Frances refuses to take a bath, “I had one last night.” When Mercedes tries her strong-arm matron thing, Frances resists like a cat, clinging hands and feet to the sides of the tub till Mercedes gives up. Then Frances washes her hands, her face and feet while Mercedes stands waiting with a fresh towel.
“Are you in love with him?”
Frances just snorts.
“Do you plan to see him again?”
“What, are you jealous, Mercedes?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Maybe you’re a lezzy, Mercedes, did you ever think of that? Have you tried it? Want to? We could.” Frances laughs without finding it funny, nothing seems that funny any more, she has a delicious tired feeling creeping up.
“Are you hungry?” asks Mercedes.
“Yes.”
“I’ll make us some cinnamon toast.” And she turns to leave.
“Mercedes?”
Mercedes pauses in the bathroom door but does not turn. Frances continues, “I’m going to be good from now on. I’m going to have a healthy baby.”
Mercedes takes a breath and lowers her head.
“Mercedes?”
“Yes?”
“Can we have cocoa too?”
“Of course.”
“Come in for a cuppa?”
Wilf and Teresa politely decline. Adelaide enters her house, dog-tired.
Ginger has made tea and tea biscuits, and he is freshly bathed and changed. He says to his wife, “Addy, I’m going to tell you everything, and then you can tell me if you want me to leave.”
“Gimme a cuppa tea first, Leo.” She sinks onto a kitchen chair with a physical relief that would make sense if she had spent the night walking instead of driving.
By the end of his story Adelaide’s freckles are more prominent than before, but that could be because she’s tired. He breaks the silence that follows with “You want me to go?”
“No.”
“I can only stay if you can forgive me, otherwise there’s no point.”
She looks at him across the tea. It’s as though a mist had cleared from his face. He’s back. She gets a retroactive shiver at the thought of how he’s been lost and wandering in a wilderness not his own.
“Can you forgive yourself?” she asks.
“I think I have. Because, you see, she’s gone right out of me.”
“I believe you.”
“But do you forgive me?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said —”
“I forgive you.” She never cries. So when she does, the tears are hot pepper.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She wraps him up with her long muscles, graceful bone blades, reddish halo. “Don’t ever leave me.”
“I never, never will.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
She runs a hand over his half-inch of soft rough hair, squeezes his shoulders, loses her narrowness in the fold of his belly and feels her back supported by his arms, which are as strong as they look. They hold each other and think about all their children and feel in themselves no limit to what they can make together, what they can give to each other. She slips her hands onto his hips. Upstairs the baby awakens. Morning.
A New and Glorious Morn
Across town, Camille makes her first pot of tea as a widow. The word isn’t in yet about her son but she knows about the loss of her husband. A very young Mountie banged on the door just before midnight. She hadn’t been going to open up for him, thinking it was a raid; then she figured, what’s the difference? It’s not as though her husband has kept her in the style to which a successful gin-slinger’s wife might reasonably expect to become accustomed. So she opened up and the Mountie said with a long face, “I’m sorry, missus, but I have some bad news for you.” Then he came out with the anticlimax of a lifetime.
The first of Camille’s sons to arrive home had difficulty opening the front door against the weight of her steamer trunk.
“Ma, what’s going on?”
She lumbered down the stairs with a hatbox in one hand and a suitcase containing her wedding gown in the other. “Your father’s dead, I’m going home.”
Now Camille fixes a cup of tea the way Pa likes it and carries it up the stairs to his bedroom. It’s dawn. He doesn’t know she’s here. She’s going to surprise him.
Mercedes sits on the piano bench and watches James until his eyes snap open at dawn. It’s a habit he got in the war. She takes a reading on his position.
“What do you remember from last night?”
James blinks, crystal-blue and innocent.
“Wake up,” she says. The last thing Mercedes wants right now is to see him as a tousled little boy. He jerks to a sitting position, where he finds his headache waiting for him. It tightens over his scalp and he ages the forty years back to reality.
“What happened?” he asks.
“You got drunk and fell.”
He winces and looks at the floor. Then he remembers, “Where’s Frances?”