After the Fire Read online

  In her letters to him, she was never descriptive or amusing. She was always trying to account for herself without being too obvious about it. And to flatter him, she always asked his advice, not about anything really important, but about her car or the virtues of various savings plans. She was a dull, disappointing, and not even dutiful daughter.

  Karen slammed down her pen. Why did she have to live her life as a failure in other people’s imaginations? She liked her jobs, both of them, and they were useful in their own basic ways. She was learning to live alone, a task that mightn’t seem difficult to either parent for whom it was a natural choice. How much easier to be someone like Red, apparently found under a cabbage leaf, entirely on her own.

  This was a night the sea lions were never going to stop barking. The sound of them out there in the pass was friendly. If she had a dog making half that racket, she would be expected to do something about it. It was better to live in proximity to all that boisterous life being responsible for no one but herself.

  But what of desire? As pain and shame lessened, their anesthetic effect also could begin to wear off. She did not want her body to betray her into need. She would rather take a vow of celibacy.

  Chapter VII

  IT WAS RAINING ON the daffodils Milly had planted in a happier time. She was waiting for Henrietta to pick her up and take her to town on the morning ferry. The bag she had packed was very like the one she had carried with her three times before. But on those trips Forbes had bustled her out of the house and settled her into the car like a great fragile egg. He had liked being a little frightened for her; it intensified his sense of dependence and ownership. At those times the phrases “my wife” and “my child” tasted sweetest to him. He had left Milly precisely to avoid this sort of bitter parody of the past, this mortal beginning. A man with a full head of hair didn’t have to face aging as long as he put distance between himself and the wife of his youth.

  “I wish you bald!” Milly muttered and understood the ambition to become a witch, for only a witch could defeat the vigor of Forbes’ hair.

  Martin would fare less well, for Milly’s father had been bald. Martin’s was altogether a more modest masculinity, and perhaps he wouldn’t feel it necessary to refuse middle age. He was so tardy at being young that Milly often wondered if he’d get around to marrying at all. She was not impatient for grandchildren though she assumed she’d have to have them eventually.

  How on earth was she to go on living with nothing of her own to look forward to but physical breakdown, old age and death?

  “Your lovely daffodils,” Henrietta said as Milly got into the car.

  “Drenched,” Milly grumbled, for the sight of Henrietta’s glowing white hair, set off by an aquamarine scarf, made Milly’s own fading into age drabber still.

  “It’s supposed to clear later in the morning,” Henrietta said.

  “Bonnie can get to the hospital by noon tomorrow,” Milly said, “so there’s no reason for you to stay overnight.”

  “It’s easy enough for me to do,” Henrietta said.

  Of course, it would be. The Hawkinses’ Vancouver friends had rallied around Henrietta after Hart’s strokes. Forbes’ friends had rallied around him, though Milly had heard he wasn’t welcome in some circles with his child bride. Milly wasn’t welcome anywhere.

  “It would only make Bonnie wonder why she had to make the trip if you were there,” Milly said.

  “Just as you think,” Henrietta said in a tone which warned Milly that “just as she thought” was not something she could indulge in for the whole trip; Henrietta was preparing to be firm with her.

  “Good morning, Karen,” Henrietta said with genuine friendliness.

  In the passenger seat, Milly could risk silence. She had her three dollars ready.

  “Good morning,” Karen replied, her greeting narrowly focused on Henrietta.

  Chas Kidder had phoned Milly to say, “Only thing I found out for sure about that waitress is that she doesn’t like you any more than you like her.” Such gratuitous malice was something Milly hadn’t become used to no matter how often she was its target. An abandoned woman was like a dog you kicked when the real object of your wrath wasn’t available.

  Milly didn’t dislike Karen. It was just that she didn’t seem clearly enough one thing or another. If she was a Jap and wanted to be one despite blue eyes, she shouldn’t mix with white people, even trying to foist off that disgusting seaweed as a contribution. Forbes used to say of all the foreign restaurants that had sprung up all over Vancouver—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese—that they were run by a bunch of refugees trying to make poor peasant food exotic. “White folks eat meat,” he’d say with a mock Southern drawl. When they went out, Forbes always ordered steak.

  “The only reason,” Milly said as they waited in line to board the ferry, “young people on this island are vegetarian is that they’re too poor and too lazy to buy meat.”

  “Well, they think it’s better for them, too,” Henrietta said.

  “Rationalization,” Milly judged. “You know, I heard one of them say the other day that we weren’t meant to eat meat because we’re descendants of vegetarian apes! Next thing you know they’ll be saying that’s why we shouldn’t drive cars!”

  Henrietta laughed. “Most of our opinions don’t bear examining, do they?”

  “Most of theirs,” Milly corrected. “I was told a. horse doesn’t pollute the environment. ‘Horse shit!’ I said, ‘If I may quote my late husband.’”

  “There are only a few extremes,” Henrietta protested. “And they’re very young. Look at what’s left of our hippy population. They all have jobs. Most of them belong to the PTA.”

  “You side with the young because you didn’t have enough of your own to be overwhelmed by them,” Milly said. “One or another of mine always had a better way of doing things, a reason to criticize. I learned I had to shoot ’em the minute I saw the whites of their moral eyes. You take that Karen. She doesn’t know her place; she should be put in it.”

  Making such statements was like putting a green walnut into Henrietta’s mouth. Occasionally the taste overcame her manners and she spat it out. This morning her struggle for tolerance was plain on her face. But blander conversation wouldn’t be the distraction for Milly that she needed.

  All the while Milly carped and baited, another part of her mind was acutely observing the earlier spring dawn, the washed brightness of the arbutus leaves; even the sound of the tires on the wet pavement had a tart freshness. And now here, as they pulled out on the dock ready to board, half a dozen eagles played high in the clearing sky, remote from the hoi polloi of gulls, the emerging sun glancing off their common beauty. She could not help being reminded of how much she had loved this island before she had been marooned here, and she knew it wasn’t true that she’d go back to Vancouver in a minute given the opportunity. Aside from her own relative poverty which would make it impossible, aside from the shame of her abandonment so obvious to everyone there, there was simply this island, and it would break her heart never to see it again.

  “I’m afraid,” Milly suddenly confessed.

  Henrietta reached over and took her hand. Had Milly’s mother ever been so candidly comforting? Milly wouldn’t have let her, and she was surprised at herself now, her hand safe for the moment in Henrietta’s.

  The vulnerability of that confession and the simple gesture it required freed Henrietta’s sympathy from her impatience. She had to learn again and again that unkindness was commonly a mask of fear. Of course Milly was afraid. Who is not, going under the knife? And she was a relatively young woman to be so suddenly and dramatically redefined.

  There were a lot of articles these days about a woman’s loss of her sense of worth when a breast was removed, the visible scar there where the breast had been. Not much about menopause dealt with the shock of a hysterectomy, the mourning a woman must go through for the loss of her womb, marked only by a fine thin scar at the pubic hair line,
if Milly’s doctor had been correct when he told her she could still wear a bikini when it was over. All that men understood was the cosmetic loss. Breast amputation was more traumatic for them. The invisible mutilation meant nothing to them.

  “You will finally feel better for it,” Henrietta said, “but nobody should expect you to be glad.”

  “Bonnie will,” Milly said gloomily. “You can only be utilitarian about your body when it has its uses.”

  Henrietta understood that. Hart’s body now did nothing but prevent him from dying, a stubborn damaged thing which could still lumber his spirit with life. Oh, and she wanted it to and did not understand why simple flesh could be so dear.

  At the hospital, they discovered that Milly was assigned to a single room.

  “I can’t have that!” Milly protested. “I can’t afford it.”

  “It’s paid for,” the nurse explained.

  And there on the window sill were a dozen yellow roses.

  “I don’t know how he’s got the gall!” Milly exclaimed.

  “He’s doing what he can to help,” Henrietta said.

  “Do get out now, Hen, will you?” Milly wailed.

  Though Henrietta spent an hour with Hart at least twice a week, his physical appearance always came as a shock to her, her memory having sealed over the facts and healed her image of him between visits. Wholly accepting what had happened to him and who he was now might make visiting easier, but it would rob her of his companionship in her mind for all the time she was alone. She didn’t lie about his condition even to herself, but she put it out of her mind.

  Only when she was buying ice cream did she remember that the day before yesterday he wouldn’t eat it, had pushed her hand away like a petulant child as she tried to feed it to him. Was it the ice cream he didn’t want or the fact of her feeding him? He couldn’t feed himself, and his speech was too impaired to communicate more than an occasional negative like “no” or “bad.” His constant mood was irritation which could flare into anger when he had the energy. Maybe he was tired of peppermint. She bought a second pint of strawberry. If he didn’t like it, the other patients would.

  Hart shared a room with a man whose last name was Clay. People there called him Clay, the way Milly called her husband Forbes. With Milly it was a rudeness. In the nursing home, where first names and terms of endearment were ordinarily used, that last name sounded respectful. Clay was some years older than Hart and entirely bedridden, but his mind was still functioning. When he put his teeth in, he could make himself understood. Clay, in many ways, looked out for Hart, coaxed and encouraged him, called a nurse to head off impending trouble. Henrietta tried not to think what a purgatory it must be for a man like Clay to share all his waking hours with Hart.

  She would have made more of an effort to be a bright spot in Clay’s day, too, if Hart hadn’t been so plainly jealous, not as a man is jealous, more like a small child confronted with a new sibling. Hart didn’t know who she was, but he wanted all her attention.

  Henrietta tried to compare this experience with Hart to the mothering of a child still inaccurate at feeding itself, in command of only a few words, at risk of falling with every upright step. A child at that stage is not often content. Everything is struggle and frustration.

  Hart didn’t want either kind of ice cream, and Henrietta felt absurdly rejected. At least a child’s negative declarations of independence, however momentarily irritating or even wounding, were positive signs of development. Hart’s rejection of even that ordinary pleasure was a defeat.

  “Is he eating other things?” Henrietta asked as she turned the ice cream over to the nurse for other patients.

  “His appetite isn’t good,” the nurse admitted.

  Henrietta returned to Hart and sat quietly by him as he dozed in his wheelchair, his mouth slightly open, drool spilling down onto the collar of his robe. If she hadn’t known who he was, she wouldn’t have recognized him. She felt relieved of her own need of his company, this anonymous old man who did not want her mothering encouragement.

  Of course he didn’t. He had to teach himself how not to eat, not to speak, to practice indifference to the functions of his body which he could no longer master, and therefore indifference to those around him so addicted to life still that they could not help getting in the way of his dying. Even to soothe him was to betray his purpose.

  When her hour was up, she did not rouse Hart to tell him she must go. Clay watched her put on her coat.

  “You’re a good woman,” he said to her.

  Was all that was left of goodness being able to go without saying goodbye?

  “Thank you,” Henrietta said.

  It was a slow evening at the pub. The few senior citizens had come in early to eat their small portions of dinner, and most of the young men had finished a final beer before going home to eat. Only Adam and Riley still sat at the bar debating whether to have another drink or tonight’s special, a seafood platter of local scallops, shrimp, halibut, and salmon.

  “Eat first,” Karen encouraged.

  When she came back out of the kitchen, Red was sitting by herself at a small table, and outside Blackie could be heard complaining.

  “Maybe I could find her a bone,” Karen suggested.

  The cook protested that there must be a policy against canine customers, but Karen reminded him that even children could be served if they stayed outdoors, and he reluctantly produced a large knuckle of soup bone.

  “I don’t want to spoil her,” Red said doubtfully.

  “That or drive everybody else crazy,” Riley said, for Blackie’s yaps of protest had set Adam’s dog to howling in the closed cab of his truck.

  “Go on,” Karen encouraged. “Take it out to Blackie.”

  “Dumb name for a dog,” Adam said when Red had gone outside.

  “You be nice,” Karen said. “Red hasn’t come in here for a long time.”

  “Nobody’s missed her,” Adam said, rearing back on his barstool to display his shoulders.

  “I have,” Karen said fiercely. “And it’s a public place, not yours to take over.”

  “You don’t own it either,” Adam retorted.

  Before Karen could answer him again, Red was back at her table. She wanted chowder and bread.

  It made Karen uncomfortable, with the pub nearly empty, to have Adam and Riley sitting side by side at the bar in sullen silence while Red ate her solitary meal. In order to underline her solidarity with Red, Karen poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at Red’s table to drink it. She was glad of an excuse.

  “I really came in to ask you a favor,” Red said as she finished her soup.

  “Sure,” Karen said.

  “I want to learn how to drive.”

  “You want me to teach you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My car’s an automatic,” Karen said. “If you want to get an old clunker, you probably ought to learn to shift.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m not going to buy anything. I just want a license.”

  “Hen’s car is automatic,” Karen remembered, “if she ever needed you to drive that.”

  “Mrs. Forbes’ is, too,” Red said. “I didn’t want to ask her, and I was afraid I might scare Mrs. Hawkins to death.”

  “It isn’t hard,” Karen assured her, “nothing like training a dog if Sally knows what she’s talking about.”

  “That was nice of her,” Red said. “I liked her.”

  “Have you got the drivers’ manual?”

  “No,” Red said. “Do I need one?”

  “Yeah, and I can pick one up for you in Victoria tomorrow.”

  “Any chance of coffee over here?” Adam asked; he would usually have helped himself.

  “Sure,” Karen said, getting up.

  As she set cups up and poured them for Riley and Adam, she said, “I like you guys better when you’re human.”

  “You might try it yourself,” Adam suggested. “Ever phoned yourself up to see how busy you always
are?”

  “Hey, that’s a new one on me,” Riley said.

  “Right out of the late movie on TV last night,” Karen said.

  “Why always watch it alone?” Adam asked.

  Karen shrugged and turned away. Adam didn’t usually pressure her in this way, but, since Sally and Sarah had been here, he had begun to test her. She wasn’t sure how to handle it and didn’t want to. She had worked at being one of the boys for a year, and she wanted it to stay that way.

  The ferry parking lot between sailings was an ideal place for Karen to teach Red the basics of driving. They agreed to meet there on Wednesday and Friday mornings between the 8:10 departure of the ferry to the mainland and its arrival back at 10:20. Without a gearshift to manipulate, Red was confident enough for the road after the first hour, and she drove them to the store for morning coffee.

  It was an older crowd who gathered here, the first place where you might learn who had dropped dead at the bridge table last night, whose daughter was pregnant, or who had taken the money yesterday at the golf course. Over the months Karen hadn’t exactly been accepted here. She was more friendly with the younger women who worked behind the counter than with the other customers, but by now they expected her. The lack of greeting when she arrived with Red surprised her. Red seemed to take no notice.

  “No coffee?” Karen asked as Red waved a hand against the cup Karen was about to pour her.

  “I’ll get juice,” Red said.

  “How long do you have to live on this island before you turn into a health freak?” Karen asked amiably.

  “Until you get pregnant,” Red answered.

  Karen glanced around, but no one seemed to have heard the remark. She led them to an isolated corner before she asked almost in a whisper, “Are you?”

  Red nodded.

  Karen still did not dare pursue the subject until they were back in the car.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Have it,” Red said.

  “Do you want it?”