“You should go round where she can see you, ma’am,” says Lily.
Teresa crosses to the right side of the bed thinking how much Lily looks like her singer-girl mother.
“Teresa.” Frances’s voice is mostly air.
“Yes?”
Teresa reluctantly crouches down until she’s squatting at the side of the bed — she is not going to kneel, no matter what she has done. She looks into Frances’s close-up eyes. Hazel. Rather, brown with broken bits of green lodged or floating.
“Teresa. Tell me about my mother.”
“… I didn’t know your mother.”
“You came to her funeral.”
“Yes.”
“You must have known her a bit.”
“A little bit.”
“What did you know?”
Teresa takes a breath. “I felt sorry for her, that’s all,” and she is surprised to find sorrow in her throat. For whom? Someone she never even knew.
“You gave me a candy.”
“I did?”
“Peppermint licorice.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“I had blonde hair then.”
Teresa thought the blonde had been the other one, the one she’s just been praying with. “You were too small to remember that.”
“I remember everything.”
Frances closes her eyes for a moment, retaining the picture of Teresa’s magnificent face on the insides of her lids. Teresa waits. She looks for the little girl to whom she gave the candy. Frances opens her eyes again.
“And I remember you came and stood over my bed and touched my head so I wouldn’t be afraid.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“Who did, then?”
And Teresa does a nice little thing of the type she always meant to do but never did. “It was your mother, child.”
Frances closes her eyes till it seems she has fallen back asleep, then she smiles and says, “Thank you, Teresa.”
And falls asleep.
Downstairs, Mercedes paces with a gait slightly less formal than a military slow march. The reassuring footfall of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police interrupts the bagpipe lament in her head.
“Miss Piper?” He’s awfully young, isn’t he? “What seems to be the trouble?”
Mercedes arches one eyebrow slightly, foreshadowing the type of schoolteacher she is destined to become.
“My sister is in critical condition with a bullet wound inflicted by the woman you see sitting there.” She gestures without looking.
The Mountie looks at Adelaide and asks, taking out his notebook, “Is that correct, ma’am?”
Mercedes snaps, “Of course it’s correct, look at their clothes!”
And as she turns she finally reads their bloodstains and cross-references them with the spotlessness of the woman upstairs. “Oh my God.” Her scaffolding of pride collapses and her face falls so far that even Adelaide might begin to forgive her, but there’s no time for that because Mercedes is travelling up the stairs, leaving the Mountie at a bit of a loss. He turns to Adelaide, “Ma’am, I’ll have to ask you to come with me down to the —”
“In a minute, b’y,” she says, brushing by him and up the stairs.
Ginger follows, then so does the Mountie. It’s been a rough couple of days for the rookie. Last night he broke the news to a woman of her husband’s death in a car wreck and she took it like a weather report. Today he failed to obtain evidence of illegal alcohol production and just now he nearly fainted — he can handle the sight of blood so long as he isn’t ambushed by it. He follows the procession up the stairs, determined to redeem himself with an arrest.
Mercedes is running now, slipping on beeswax, she reaches out and catches the doorjamb of the recovery room, propels herself through, sees the curtained bed at the far end standing like a draped chalice. She hurries towards it praying. There’s a sound coming from within. The head nurse sees the look in Mercedes’ eyes at twenty feet, rises, sets aside her racing form and catches Mercedes’ wrists before she can tear at the curtains. Mercedes starts breathing again under nurse’s iron gaze, and listens. Someone is singing. The head nurse releases Mercedes and gently parts the curtains.
Teresa towers over Frances, singing softly, a West Indian lullaby. One hand rests lightly on Frances’s forehead. Frances and Lily and Trixie are all asleep. Nurse and Mercedes look on and are joined by Adelaide, then Ginger, then the Mountie. “Now, what seems —” Mercedes silences him with a look.
Teresa finishes the song. She turns to the constable. “I’m ready to go.”
Lily and Trixie open their eyes. Teresa goes to move from the bed but is prevented by Frances’s grip on her hand. Frances, her face still marked from the self-administered beating of the day before, turns to her audience filling the parted curtains and speaks, “Mercedes?”
Why does Frances suddenly have an English accent, wonders Lily.
“I am truly sorry to have brought shame and anguish upon my family. Officer, arrest me, do your worst, for finding myself with child and without a husband, I betook me to the brink of the roiling deep where I did shoot myself. O, that I had died.”
Frances turns her face upstage and allows a sob to escape her. Then the nurse clears the sick-room. “Show’s over, folks.”
And that’s how Frances took Teresa’s hate away.
Nine and a half months later, Teresa gives birth to a perfect baby girl she calls Adele Claire. Adelaide was right. Hector still works.
Book 7. THE BULLET
Blessed Art Thou amongst Women
The head nurse’s stitches were a thing of beauty. They’ve been out for a month or so now, leaving only a shy smile below Frances’s ribcage on her right side. It is the sly widening of this smile that indicates forces at work within Frances. She strokes her belly and returns the smile, Hello.
Mercedes notes with approval, “You’re putting on weight.” Frances has just risen from the steaming bathtub and Mercedes has wrapped her in a big towel warm from the radiator. It’s the first of November but Mercedes has been burning coal since “the accident” in July, knowing Frances to be prone to chills. And Frances has permitted herself to be immersed, bathed and dried, docile as a drugged child.
It’s been so peaceful, Frances’s convalescence. She sits at the table without jittering and eats large meals. She smiles instead of grinning. She has ceased her roaming and spends the days under a light blanket on the veranda and, when well enough, strolling of an evening to the sea cliff with Lily and Trixie. Frances has become clean and soft, sweet to smell. And her face. It is fuller. Her eyes are calm, no longer furtive. The white stripe across her nose, emblem of glee, has not appeared, not once. She has breasts. Ripe. At their centres, mauve haloes resolve into walnut erections, the only part of her body not in lush repose. And her hair-of-all-directions has begun to shine. A bonnet of crackling copper lights and pure blonde threads. Frances is pretty. Yes, that’s what it is.
“It’s been four months, high time I had something to show,” replies Frances, tranquil beneath the comb Mercedes is drawing through her wet curls. Mercedes stops, looks down and plucks a golden strand from the comb.
“Frances, that’s not possible.”
The nurse told Mercedes that, what with the shooting, nature would take care of Frances’s predicament. It would be like a particularly bad period. Mercedes has been waiting for Frances’s cramps to start, but Frances must have suffered in silence, because how could she possibly still be —