“Hey!” he said, and gave her a quick hug, only noticing as he drew back that her expression was less friendly than quizzical.
“Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
She looked flustered. “Nothing, I guess. You’re still helping out? That’s nice.” It was a poor recovery; obviously she found his presence unexpected and strange.
“Well, not all the time or anything,” he answered lamely, wondering, even as he spoke, why he was acting like it was something to be ashamed of. “Grace hasn’t mentioned it?”
“No,” Azra said, “she hasn’t.”
Together they absorbed the implications of this remark. The only way he could think to end the awkward pause was to tell her he had to be going.
Back at the apartment, he resolved not to call or visit Grace unless she specifically asked him to, and felt a flush of shame whose source he couldn’t explain. Should he feel bad for having been there in a time of need?
But it turned out he couldn’t keep the resolution. He enjoyed the time he spent with the two of them, and he and Grace were getting along well. There was no reason, he told himself, that they couldn’t be friends. The following weekend, he called her up and proposed various plans for an afternoon outing. This was what Martine would have expected: an exhibit at the museum, or a new children’s movie, or he could teach them how to fly a kite. He had researched the possibilities beforehand.
Grace sounded touched but puzzled. “That seems pretty ambitious,” she said. “We’re more like not-goers. Not-doers. Sometimes we go to the park.”
This took him aback. “So what do you usually do on the weekends? Or used to, I mean, before the accident.”
Every child he knew — and this included his niece and nephews — faced a battery of activities and playdates on Saturdays and Sundays. They started playing competitive sports before they were five, and their lives were enriched by music lessons and art classes as soon as they could walk. For Grace to buck the trend so completely was not, he thought, quite like her. Then again, maybe he didn’t really know what she was like.
“Not much,” she said. “Why don’t you come over?”
So he did. Grace sat on the couch, as she had throughout her recovery, surrounded by a disassembled newspaper, some unanswered mail, a mug of tea, and a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. Sarah lay in front of her on the carpet, working on a jigsaw puzzle, her long blond hair in two braids. In the kitchen, talk-radio voices debated some issue, though Grace didn’t seem to be listening.
She offered him a cup of tea, a snack, maybe a book — should he have thought to bring one himself? — all of which he declined. Instead he sat opposite the two of them in an armchair, with the front section of The Globe and Mail in his lap. He was thinking that this was the most feminine scene he had ever witnessed in his life. Maybe his mother would have liked to have a Saturday like this, instead of taking him and Malcolm to the park and watching them beat each other over the head with sticks.
The atmosphere felt so serene that he was surprised to notice Grace staring worriedly at her daughter. He knew she was still concerned that the accident had marked her psychologically, but if this were so, the damage was subtle and well concealed. Sarah was lying on her stomach, wearing blue jeans and a white sweatshirt, her legs kicked up in the air. She had pushed her puzzle aside and was reading a book, propping her chin on her hands, her eyes so close to the pages that they were almost crossing. Mitch waited for Grace to scold her — his mother certainly would have — but she didn’t.
“What’s institutionalized?” Sarah asked. It was clearly an adult book, and Mitch wondered if she should’ve been reading it.
Grace, however, seemed unfazed. “What’s the context?”
“The girl was institutionalized against her will, and she stayed under doctors’ supervision for five years.”
“Okay,” Grace said. “So if it was against her will, what does that imply?”
“That someone else put her somewhere.”
“Good. And if there are doctors there?”
“That the somewhere is like a hospital?”
“Excellent. To be institutionalized is to be placed in a facility, often a hospital, when you can’t care for yourself.”
“My father was institutionalized.”
Mitch looked up. It was the first time he had heard the father mentioned.
“No, he wasn’t, Sarah. He was never institutionalized.”
“But he was sick.”
“That’s right. He was sick, and he died.”
“In a hospital.”
“In a — oh, I see what you mean.” Grace’s tone was very calm. If the subject upset her, she didn’t show it. “Usually, to be institutionalized means in a mental-health facility or a prison, something like that.”
“And my father wasn’t in any of those.”
“No, honey,” Grace said, “he wasn’t.”
Sarah went back to her book. Grace looked up and her eyes skated over Mitch’s. The expression on her face was one he had seen before: part guilt, part pain, part unidentifiable something else. As if she were listening to some inner voice, some call that no one else could hear.
A few minutes later, tiring of the book, Sarah asked Mitch to play with her. Flattered, he got down on his knees, but she shook her head and led him into her room. Holding his hand, she showed him around and explained everything in great detaiclass="underline" her dolls, her schoolbooks, her winter clothes, her summer clothes. She had a collection of seashells she had brought back from a holiday in Prince Edward Island, and another of barrettes that she’d been adding to, she told him very seriously, “her entire life.” She held out a piggy bank and asked him to guess how much it weighed.
“Heavy,” he said. “Maybe five pounds.”
“Lots of money in there,” she said airily. “I’ve been putting it away for a rainy day.”
“Very responsible of you.”
“I’m mature for my age,” she said. “My teacher told Grace. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did.”
This was an affectation, he knew, calling her mother by her name, to tell him she was grown up. Was this childish flirting? Certainly it made him uncomfortable. His niece, Emily, was a tomboy, and his nephews were hooligans who cared only about hockey and wrestling. A simple fake-out punch to the gut was all it took to get the ball rolling with those three. It was like playing with a bunch of puppies, all laughter and flung-out limbs. Sarah was a different animal altogether.
“Here,” she said, “look at this.”
On her tiptoes, she pulled a shoebox off a shelf, then sat down on her bed and balanced it on her lap. He sat down next to her, and she opened it with a ceremonial gesture that made clear it was the most important thing in the room.
“What’s this?”
“This,” she whispered, “is the rainy day.”
He couldn’t tell, at first, what it was; it looked like a box of litter and dirt, with some paper envelopes and tiny, shriveled objects nested in tissue.
She took things out one by one and placed them in his hand. “These are seeds for forget-me-nots. These are seeds for daisies. This is a tulip bulb. This is an iris. This is freesia. This is clematis.”
“You’ve got a whole flower garden in here.”
“No. These are just the seeds and bulbs,” she said impatiently. “I save my allowance and buy them from a catalog. Next spring we’re going to plant them in the back. We were going to do it last year but I didn’t have enough money yet. Since my birthday I have enough. And there’s more in the bank. In the summer we can get live plants.”
His hands were overflowing with bulbs and envelopes. She put the box in his lap, and he started placing them carefully back inside.