I'le Dor, page 25
“What are you looking for?” he asked, his words piercing the silence that was unbroken since they’d set out. After he’d read Guy’s notes the previous day, they’d returned to their separate cabins, he to an unexpected phone call from Susan and Libby had said she wanted to draw.
“My camera,” she said. “I think I’ll take some pictures and draw the scenes later. Before painting them. The mine. The main street. Even the graveyard.”
“Susan wants me to go to Montreal to see her,” he said quietly.
“Are you going?”
“Peut-être,” he said. “I need more time first.”
Why he wasn’t running there was a mystery to him. He wanted desperately for Susan to come back, but he sensed she wouldn’t stay long even if she did. Not with a man on the verge of fifty. All he did was work now. There was not much else he was interested in. Shooting moose in the fall. Listening to some of the local singers. He liked Richard Desjardins, but he had not been out to a club in ages. It was only Libby’s arrival that had made life seem appealing again, sparking memories that might have remained buried. And another woman’s body. She had wonderful breasts, still high and firm with such large nipples. Susan’s did not respond as much to his touch as they once had. Knowing what he would find as his fingers traced Libby’s body, but the mystery nonetheless of how another woman might respond to him, had intrigued him. Now that he knew, what was he left with? Guilt, he supposed, even as he knew that was ridiculous. Fear, perhaps, that Susan might find out. But so what if she did? He and Libby were old friends whose paths had crossed unexpectedly. But it was Guy Libby had come to see. Always it was Guy in the end, dead or alive, who marked out territory that excluded Lucien. Except with Susan. Lucien had never felt he came anything but first there. Until after Guy died and this other man turned up in town. Susan left not long after, just as abruptly as she had when she went off with the circus to get that abortion all those years ago. She came back then, but this time she had not intended to and she was a woman with a mind of her own. Oh God, he missed her. She never hesitated to light into him if he came in sloshed or had not helped with the children. Or said something that annoyed her. Whether it was about politics, religion, sex, or just some inane comment about the weather. It did not matter that they were part of that generation marred by all the unrealistic expectations of the fifties. Susan was tough. She stood her ground on everything. What had happened to them?
Libby said something and he had to ask her to repeat it. He hoped she hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t been listening.
“Sorry,” he said as he pulled up in front of Pharmacie Dion.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”
When he got out of the car, she slipped into the driver’s seat. As he turned the lock of the pharmacy door and picked up some papers just inside on the floor, he could hear the rumble of the car as she accelerated. It seemed as if he knew what was ahead of him and that everything was predictable. But how could he say that? He shook his head slightly, as though he were talking to someone not there. For the last year, nothing had been predictable. From Guy’s death to Susan’s departure to Libby’s arrival. About what might happen next, he had no idea. He could drop dead of a heart attack. Putting the bundle of mail and newspapers he was carrying on the counter, he hung his coat on a hook in his office. When he picked up the newspaper again, he spotted an advertisement for a holiday in California. On the trip to the conference there, he hadn’t had a chance to go wine tasting in the Napa Valley. If he went to Montreal to see Susan, he could suggest that trip to her. He was enveloped by a vision of him and Susan watching the sun go down over the Pacific and eating fresh citrus fruit, oranges and lemons that hung from branches outside a window.
Libby drove as if she had known all along she was going to go to St. Andrew’s, the small wooden Anglican church, covered with yellow asbestos shingles where she had unwillingly spent so much time in her childhood. If she didn’t go regularly, her mother had said she would be very unhappy. Libby had felt as a child that the church and religion were some kind of torture her parents had invented. It was not until she became enamoured of the old stone churches and cathedrals in England that it became clear to her that the practise of going to some church had not started with her mother and father. Even the monuments in the graveyard of her father’s ancestors, who were vicars at the small church in Titchfield, were from another century.
She parked the car beside the road and sat looking at the church where the minister had pinched her bottom, where she had once acted the part of Joseph. When she’d looked across at Cathy McNab, dressed as the pregnant Virgin Mary, they’d both burst out laughing. Libby’s mother was mortified when the two girls went on giggling and weren’t able to carry on with the pageant. Libby might have been six then. She could not remember. But there had been happy church-related moments, too. All the pork and bean suppers with booths where you fished with a rod, wondering what surprise was in store behind the large piece of cardboard over which your line dangled. It was exciting, never knowing what you might hook. The church was as much a centre of the community as the mine. She was married there. A whole album was filled with pictures, one of her going up the wooden steps with her dress flying in the wind, her father walking beside her. Her parents had approved of Barton. When the wedding party arrived back at the house on rue Champlain for the reception, one of the neighbours asked if her father had to sell the family’s furniture so Libby could get married. The extra chairs and tables were in the basement so the guests could move and dance freely. But Libby knew that her father would have sold all of it if that had been necessary. Marriage was important to both her parents; their daughters had to marry well so he and their mother would not have to worry. Although, they genuinely liked Barton. He and her father could sit and talk for hours and no one realized for a long time that he was as ill prepared as Libby was for marriage.
There were good times in the early years of that marriage. A honeymoon on the eastern seaboard, then to their first home, a townhouse at the end of a crescent where interns from all across North America, from as far afield as California and Texas, came for a year before going elsewhere for speciality training or to start a general practise. The only newlyweds, Libby and Barton came straight from the jubilant wedding in Ile d’Or to watermelon on the lawn of a colonial house in Williamsburg, Virginia to the complex of white coats and townhouses in the mid-western American car manufacturing city.
A train whistle from the tracks across the road left Libby sitting bolt upright in the middle of many nights. Especially when Barton was either at the hospital or sleeping soundly after his long hours. She sometimes studied the strange creature she awakened beside. He’s my husband, she thought. Barton Morley is my husband. During sleepless hours that year, she was baffled that she had done anything as irrevocable as linking her life with a man’s before she fully understood what she was doing. Watching the cars stream by as she waited for him to walk along the crescent with his stethoscope dangling on his chest like a necklace, she swung from delight to terror.
A scene flashed across her mind, Barton flat on his stomach, one arm over the edge of the bed. His white intern’s jacket was flung on a chair nearby and his shoes looked as if he’d dropped them as he fell across the bed. A ray of light crept through a broken slat in the Venetian blinds and across his legs. The sheet had fallen to the floor. As she watched, his arms flailed and he yelled for forceps. Told someone to stop. Please stop.
“STOP,” he finally screamed. “I’m not ready.”
She turned off the engine, opened the door and stood beside the car. The church seemed almost vacant now. When she got nearer and could read the sign, she noticed that it was no longer only an Anglican church, but was shared by other denominations. No doubt as the air force base closed a few years earlier and the English population dwindled, there were no longer enough people to support an Anglican parish. Nonetheless, St. Andrew’s was the place where she was christened, where she took her first communion. Odd that these landmarks should have pleased her mother so much when she had actually spent her own life in such doubt, something Libby wasn’t aware of until she was an adult. It came as a surprise when her mother told her recently that she thought Jesus was a very good man, but she was not sure what else she believed.
“What do you think, dear?”
As if Libby, who had not gone to church now for almost three decades, held some answers.
The sun was behind her now. Taking out her camera, Libby held it up to frame the church against pine trees in the background, against a rock that separated it from a path to the street where the general store and the movie theatre had stood. Clicking the button, she moved to take another from a different angle. She did not want to paint this, but wanted some kind of record, something that would fit into an album that she could look at that would evoke memories that might lead to the unexpected. You never knew how things would fit together. Who would have imagined that she would come back here to find Guy dead and Lucien married to Susan? She wondered what happened to Cathy. She supposed her sister might know. The last Libby had heard most of the McNabs were living on the west coast. If she were to take a tour across the country, she would probably find someone from Ile d’Or in almost every major town or city.
A car honked behind her and she turned to see Al’s taxi. He leaned out the window to holler at her. She waved and he honked again. When she looked puzzled, he turned off the ignition and came over to her.
“Lights on in the car,” he said. “Kills the battery.”
“Oh mon Dieu.” She went to turn them off. “Thanks, Al.”
“Hear you’re having dinner with Michelle.”
“I don’t believe it.” She shook her head. “You know everything.”
“Keeps me going.” He did not gossip, he assured her again. “Not Al Desjardins,” he added. “So, how’s it going at the cabin?”
Libby was not sure what he wanted to know, but she simply shrugged. “It’s a change from the city.” It was a change from having a teenager around, also. “Do you remember?” she asked. “They create a storm around them.” Paul moved through her life like a hurricane. Rosemary used to, in her own way, although by the time she reached her teen years she was quieter than Paul by any measure. It was certainly different now that her daughter was out in her own flat with a roommate and her room had become Libby’s studio. Her conversations with Rosemary moved around another axis, not one where Libby had to take on more than she was asked to. She was glad to have children, one outcome of matrimony she was pleased about. What would she have done in Australia when she was nineteen or twenty? She had not been any more ready for that than she had been for marriage.
51.
AS DAWN PACKED, occasional loud sighs emanated from the back room. She was going out to dinner in town, but she had hesitated about saying who her companion for the evening would be. It wasn’t something Michelle felt she could ask. Her daughter was a grown woman and if she chose to pick up strangers, she must know all the risks by now. When Dawn had told Michelle, it had freed up her evening to invite Libby over. It would be the first time either had been in the other’s home, she thought.
Leaning over, Michelle put a bottle of wine she’d bought in the bottom rack of the refrigerator. There was a red in the wine rack, one from France. She still liked the French wines best, although sometimes she would buy a German Riesling for a change. Not sure what she wanted to cook for dinner, she’d bought an assortment of vegetables and she considered what she would take out of the freezer. Dessert she wasn’t worried about since she always had ice cream on hand.
The telephone rang and a stranger’s voice spoke to her in a muffled voice.
“You have the wrong number,” Michelle said.
“I don’t think so,” the voice said.
Michelle couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Did you know Dominic St. Cyr?”
Michelle gasped. “Why?”
“I’m calling to let you know he was killed in a car accident. Your number was in his notebook.”
Michelle breathed in a deep sigh, knowing that for years she had longed for just such a call, heralding an existence in which she and the girls would not have to worry about their safety any longer. It frightened her to think her phone number had been in Dominic’s possession and she wondered how recently he’d obtained that information. And where he’d gotten it. Maybe he’d only just found it out.
Dawn came into the room and stared at her, sensing something was unusual about the call. For many families, even divorced ones, it would have been the worst news possible. There would have been tears flowing down Michelle’s face and soon down her daughter’s as well.
“What is it, Ma?” Dawn asked as she hung up.
“There was a car accident last night,” Michelle said. “Dominic was killed.”
Silence filled the room, like lava from a volcano finding all the nooks and crannies. It was an uneasy quiet, one into which Michelle did not know what words to offer. She didn’t like to jump up and down in jubilation, but that was how she had always thought she would feel at the advent of such news. Now it scarcely mattered. Although she’d still have to confess to a feeling of relief.
“You know what, Ma. He only did us harm. I’m glad it happened after I’d found him though because it cleared up so much for me. And it allowed me finally to come back here and have a real relationship with my mother.”
Michelle’s eyes filled. She would accept this gift with a prayer for Dominic’s soul. May he find peace, she thought. Somewhere.
“We’d better call Elise,” Dawn said.
“Do you want to?”
“Sure, Ma. You can speak to her, too.”
When they’d put down the receiver after talking with Elise, they sat quietly for a while. “Would you like me to stick around?” Dawn asked. “I’m not meeting anyone actually. I was just going to wander around and see who in town I might still know. I visited Grandma and Grandpère’s graves earlier. So odd to have them in different cemeteries. Although I suppose it’s just as it was when they were alive and going to different churches.”
“Thanks, Dawn,” Michelle said. “Libby is coming for dinner. Do you want to stay and meet her?”
“Do you still want her to come?”
“How do you feel about it?”
“It’s up to you, Ma.”
Michelle said she would call Libby, and then remembered there was no telephone at the cabin.
52.
IN THE PART of town where Michelle had settled, the houses were all new since Libby had lived in Ile d’Or. The streets were also unfamiliar, new ones carved out to create the area. Most of the houses, permanent mobile homes, were mainly white, set down on neatly divided small lots. Shutters in different hues distinguished some of the dwellings. There were rock gardens, occasional picket fences, and paved or pebbled driveways. Nothing except the rugged outcrops of rock suggested to Libby the town she had known so well. She had followed a short cut Lucien suggested to get there. Some time she would draw a large map with small diagrams to highlight specific sites. Obvious ones like the mine and St. Luc’s. The cabins on Lac Leboeuf. The Flamingo. The water tower.
Michelle opened the door.
Libby, seeing beyond her to a young woman in the kitchen, recalled the arrival of the daughter Michelle had told her about.
“Hello, Dawn,” Libby said as introductions followed greetings.
“Hi,” the young woman said. “I gather you’re one of the originals.”
“You could say,” Libby said. “Even before the railroad. Or roads, for that matter. Almost prehistoric.”
“Well, I didn’t mean that.”
Libby smiled, amused by the repartee, nonetheless noticed the other two women glance at each other as if unsure what to do.
“Libby,” Michelle said. “We had some shocking news just an hour ago and we’re still trying to absorb it. There was a phone call that my ex was killed in a car accident and…”
“Oh my goodness, would you rather I didn’t stay now?” Libby asked. “I don’t want to intrude. We can do this some other time.”
“Well, you’re here now.”
Libby backed toward the door.
“I don’t want this news to spoil anything for Dawn and me and her sister. I wish I could feel badly about it, but it’s the first time I’ve felt entirely safe in over twenty-five years. If it didn’t sound so strange, I’d say tonight could be a celebration.”
The sound of a radio rose in the background as they spoke. Libby couldn’t tell who the singer was, a clear contralto. She thought of the Dufresne home across the lane at the other end of town and how she’d wondered as a child what it might be like. She recalled a picture in an album buried somewhere in the basement in Toronto taken on the hill beside the Muir’s house with both her and Michelle sitting on a toboggan. Although she’d gone swimming and tobogganing with Michelle, both knew without words that the other’s house was off limits.
“Well, all right,” she said. “If at any point it feels you’d rather be alone together…” She left the sentence dangling.
Michelle opened a bottle of sauvignon and poured some into three wine glasses. Libby wondered if it would amount to sacrilege to propose a toast, then thought she could likely do so without mentioning the death that was causing some kind of subtle euphoria.
