I'le Dor, page 26
“To being together again,” Michelle said, relieved that there was no more to fear from a dangerous man. Most of all this toast was for her daughter and her own release from an abyss of uncertainty. “And to friendship.”
“Yes,” Libby said.
They sipped quietly, Dawn watching the two older women for a while before going to the kitchen. “Tell me what needs doing, Ma,” she called.
Michelle poured more wine. It was as if this would be the one chance she would get to set some record straight for posterity. It was like that here. You waited to get your clearance to go underground and then wondered why it ever struck you that was something you wanted to do.
“My father never got over Francine’s death.”
“I can understand that,” Libby said. “I would imagine it’s impossible to get over something like that.”
“He lost money gambling. He almost had to sell The Flamingo. They said he had other women. Then my mother had a breast removed and he thought she was going to die. Maybe he thought it was his fault.”
“Did he talk about it?” Libby asked.
“Not that generation. Men didn’t talk.” Michelle stood up and went to a counter between the living room and the long narrow kitchen. “Need any help?” she asked her daughter.
“Everything is ready to go,” Dawn said. “I think I’ll go for a walk. I’ll be back soon.” She carried a plate with crackers, cheese, pâté and black olives into the room before she put on her jacket and tied a bright red scarf around her neck.
Libby spread pâté on one cracker and brie on another, the second cracker shattering on her napkin. She smiled as she tasted the pâté. When the telephone rang, Michelle answered. Trying not to listen, Libby wandered over to the shelves beside the stereo where she found a copy of Kamouraska and then a fashion magazine with a woman in a tight black outfit and gold earrings on the cover. She was startled when Michelle spoke to her.
“Blanche says Paul Paquin is coming to town.”
Oh yes, Libby recalled. Al’s, the taxi driver’s, wife. Sister of Thérèse, who had worked for Libby’s mother. It was like everything else that had happened, everyone in town seemed to know. “Yes, his son told me he was coming,” she said, not adding that she was going to have dinner with Paul, although it seemed clear that it was something people would soon hear about.
“Blanche is going to have some people over. She asked me to invite you. And Nick, too.”
Long strands of philodendron woven through a lattice on the doorframe between the living area and the kitchen created the effect of an arbour. After a half hour of nibbling and chatting, Michelle beckoned Libby to the table. She took another bottle of wine and poured it into glasses on the place mats.
“Un Beaujolais,” she said. Her hand shook a little. “Help yourself to crudités.”
Sliced carrots and mushrooms were arranged on a leaf of endive with some slivers of white turnip. The vinaigrette was smooth, with just the right amount of Dijon and black pepper. When the telephone rang again, Michelle sighed as she leaned backward to reach for the receiver on the set on the wall.
“Oui, bonjour.” Her head jerked as she heard the voice on the other end. “Non, il n’est pas ici.” He isn’t here. She talked in monosyllables and when she hung up, her eyes kept sliding away from Libby.
“That was Susan,” she said finally. “Calling from Montreal. She asked me to give you a message. She said to stay away from Lucien.”
“I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t know I’m here,” Libby said. “But how does she know I’m at your place?”
“She doesn’t.”
“I didn’t come here to see Lucien,” Libby said. “But I found a lonely man whose wife had left him. A man trying to find out what his life means. If Susan doesn’t want anyone else to know about that, she should be here with him.” She had to hide her discomfort, an old feeling that if Susan told her what to do, she might have to do it.
“All she asked was that I give you the message. I suppose I could have said I wouldn’t, but I likely would have told you about it anyway.”
Eyes fixed on a crucifix with Jesus in a white gown on a gold background hanging on the wall above the kitchen door, Michelle breathed in and out slowly
“If Susan has any other messages for me, tell her to leave a number and I’ll call her,” Libby said.
“I don’t want to get in the middle.” Michelle paused, and then changed the subject. “I remember I could see the window of your room from our back porch. I used to go with some of the kids who played Nicky Nicky Nine Doors. Do you remember that, knocking on doors and disappearing before anyone answered? Once when I got home, after all the other kids had gone, I sat on the back steps. There was someone on a ladder looking in your window and I crept as close as I could to see who it was. When I saw it was Lucien, I figured you weren’t in any danger.”
“Lucien?” Libby said. “You mean the peeping tom I thought might have been one of the guys from the bunkhouses was Lucien? Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m just telling you.”
“All the nightmares I had about that. I wonder if Guy knew. When I saw someone out there, I called him. I was terrified. He was very quiet after he saw the ladder. I thought he was worried about me, but maybe it was the Dion’s ladder. No, it wasn’t. I remember it as one Dad kept to climb up to fix windows. Although he almost never did it himself. Mum had to phone the mine for someone to come. Lucien? I mean, I can’t understand that. Why would he want to spy on me?”
The door opened and Dawn came in again, her hair tousled, her eyes teary. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I need to be with people who love me.”
Michelle hung her daughter’s coat up, reaching out to Dawn.
Libby got up and moved toward the door.
“But you’ve scarcely eaten.”
“You two need to be alone together.”
53.
THE ROAD HAD a thin cover of new snow on it that had fallen since Libby went out earlier. When she passed Lucien’s cabin, all the lights were off. A deer on the side of the road appeared in the beam of her headlights and she stopped the car while it disappeared into the bush. Then she drove on to park beside a sign with DION on it in red letters painted at an angle as if by someone who was intoxicated. She stood for a moment on the porch, looking for the Big Dipper. Across the lake, the wind rose and the tops of trees swayed in the moonlight, suggesting a storm before morning
Inside she turned on lights, the radio, and the heater before sitting down at a table with a plastic cover she’d wiped off carefully after each meal so she could set out either her art supplies or cutlery and dishes. Now she lit a candle and turned off the light to stare at the flame. When she crawled into her sleeping bag, it was as if she were a teenager once more in her room on the main floor, terrified that someone might try to get in. She got up and pulled a blanket around her, breathing deeply. “I’m forty-six years old,” she whispered. “I’m in a cabin at Lac Leboeuf. Rosemary and Paul are in Toronto.” She was frightened, but she was also angry. How dare Lucien have done that? When she finally zipped up the sleeping bag again, she knew that in the morning she would confront him.
As she sat on the couch in Lucien’s cabin after sleeping fitfully all night, watching him take eggs out of the refrigerator, she could no longer restrain her anger.
“I can’t believe that you would have put a ladder to my window when I was a teenager and climbed it to look in on me,” she blurted out. “The nerve. The gall.” She continued to tell him all that she’d been told. But she didn’t mention Susan’s call to Michelle.
“Couldn’t have been me,” he said, flipping the eggs as if he didn’t have any worries.
“Michelle didn’t make it up,” she said. “C’mon, Lucien. She saw you.” Libby eyed him curiously. He obviously was not going to admit to it.
On a shelf up above the snowshoes, she noticed a gun she had not seen before. It looked like her mother’s old 410; the one Charlotte Muir had used to shoot partridge. She stood up, took it down and checked to make sure it was not loaded. It felt as if her father were watching. His approval seemed to permeate the room; after all good soldiers ought to know, her father would have said. It was the same kind of gun her mother had taken down from the front hall cupboard while her father pounded on the door, garbling his words, shouting to be let in.
“What are you doing?” Lucien asked. Qu’est-ce que tu fait?
“Will you teach me to shoot?”
“You know how.”
“That was Sheila. She was the one who went hunting with Mum. I was away at school by then.”
“Why do you want to learn now?”
“Because I don’t know how.” And if she couldn’t trust even Lucien, who could she trust?
He took her mug and rinsed it under the tap to wash the dark coffee grounds down the drain. Reaching up to put the 410 back on the shelf, she swore softly. “Maudit.” Why couldn’t Lucien comprehend that an unknown person in the shadows at her bedroom window all those years ago had been terrifying? It could even be why, so many years later, she still remembered the incident. Instead he poured orange juice into two glasses with red stripes around the tops and started to lift the eggs onto a large plate.
“I’ll show you how to shoot tin cans off tree stumps,” he said finally.
She shrugged. That would do, but she didn’t say so.
“I hear you’re having dinner with Paul Paquin.”
“No secrets in this place,” she said. “Yes, I am. He’s coming to town.”
“You know, one night Guy went to his door in a raincoat. Paul’s wife was sitting in a rocking chair near the fireplace, likely watching Les Plouffes on television. Colette liked that program. Guy went inside and stood by the fire, dripping water on the floor. He opened his coat. It was all he was wearing. When Colette shrieked, Paul came into the room. He punched Guy on the nose and told him never to come back to their house. He chased him down the street with a rifle. Of course, Guy was drunk. But they never spoke again.”
“I kept trying to figure out why they weren’t speaking,” Libby said. “I thought it might have something to do with politics. You know, Paul the civil servant and Guy the radical separatist.”
“It’s Paul who’s the separatist. Guy didn’t care about politics. That bit about the FLQ — that was a dream, it never happened.”
After breakfast, he handed her the keys to the car. He had to get to the pharmacy. “You drive,” he said. When she got in behind the wheel, he sat down on the passenger side and turned on the radio to a newscast. “To hear the weather,” he said.
Libby backed away from the side of the cabin onto the road that led out to the highway.
“I do remember putting a ladder under your bedroom window,” he said. “I should have confessed to that a long time ago. I’m sorry. It was against your fence. The light was on in your room so I carried it around and peeked in. It wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t going to hurt you. Or do anything at all. I just wanted to see what you were doing.”
“Do you have any idea how much you frightened me? And it stays with you, too, you know. That fear.”
“I was a kid. A boy curious about a girl,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“And I could have been naked.”
“I thought about that, too.” He smiled before he continued. “Actually I hoped you were. But I was disappointed. And you must have known someone was there because you slipped out of your room. I couldn’t figure out where you were. Then Guy came. I guess you phoned him. Later he told me he’d found my lighter underneath the ladder. He almost killed me that night. If Papa hadn’t come in with lipstick on his collar, he might have.”
“Guy knew?” she asked, dismayed. It had never dawned on her that he could have known. She wondered why he’d never told her.
“He figured it out.”
Libby didn’t ask him how Guy had done that. Or why he never told her. Maybe Lucien didn’t know anyway. Instead she remembered the message from Susan to stay away from Lucien. As if it all might be connected.
“Guy was smart, wasn’t he? Like Susan. She called Michelle when I was there.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I don’t know,” Libby said. She still felt embarrassed about sleeping with him, as if she’d had an affair with a married man. And that man happened to be married to Susan who was, unexpectedly, still her nemesis. “I’m telling you now. And she must still care for you. She sent me a message to stay away from you. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“Mon Dieu,” he said “What do I do now?”
“I have no idea.” Of course she didn’t, Libby thought. And had she, it would have been tactful of her not to mention it.
54.
THERE WAS A note on the floor inside his room when Nick arrived at the bunkhouse. He was surprised to see it was a message from Michelle, carefully printed. Al and Blanche Desjardins are going to have a party. They’ve asked me to invite you. He was glad he hadn’t gone beyond creating lists in his head for a gathering at The Flamingo, knowing it was a conceit on his part to think he could plan it and anticipate people he hadn’t seen in years would turn up. He was relieved at the prospect of Al and Blanche creating the atmosphere. There would be gaiety and laughter. He would offer to bring some of the booze.
As he turned back the quilt, he thought it wasn’t quite so bad here as sleeping alone in the large bed in Toronto where he still felt so acutely the vast emptiness on the left side where Marie had slept. Her indentation was still there in the mattress, not as deep as his own on the other side, but still unmistakable. Here the bed was narrow and it wasn’t one in which he imagined anyone else with him. He threw his clothes on a chair in the corner and crawled under the sheet and quilt, intending to read for a while. But after a few minutes he turned out the light and rolled onto his stomach, one hand down the side and the other up over his head. His feet dangled over the end, something he could avoid in a larger bed by sleeping crosswise at an angle.
It was in this position that he began to think once more of eventually going back to Toronto. He couldn’t simply pack a suitcase and vanish; he had a well-established life in the metropolis. Nor would he want to. There was Diana. He longed to see his slim and worldly-wise daughter, to hear her delighted laughter. Not that long ago, he’d rung her doorbell with a package of sushi to share and he could almost hear the timbre of her warm response still. Diana never let him get away with much and he liked that about her also.
“Dad,” she would say. “What are you? A troglodyte?”
Well, maybe he was on the verge of becoming some kind of prehistoric cave dweller at times, but Diana wouldn’t let that happen. She was the one who had suggested he take up dancing.
“You must be crazy,” he said.
“Well, Mum said you were a good dancer in university.”
“Why were you talking to your mother about me and dancing?”
“I wasn’t talking about you, Dad. I just remember that she often said that.”
“Well, forget it,” he said.
But he hadn’t. Maybe he would try swing again. There must be a place for doing that in Toronto. Maybe he’d dust off his foxtrot, even take some lessons. He couldn’t imagine appearing at some dance and asking a woman to go out onto the floor with him until he knew a few steps reasonably well. The waltz was another he thought he might be able to pick up again. Would there be enough room for dancing at the Desjardins’ party? When he was a teenager, they did the polka at the Rialto, which must have been one of the dances he’d had with Michelle. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought he would ask her.
55.
LIBBY WALKED ALONG the frozen lake, lifting each foot and planting it down carefully in steps that would disappear in falling snow almost before she walked back to the cabin. Once inside, she settled down in a wicker chair with her sketchpad and dark pencils, sketching the lake and overhanging branches and jotting down ideas about colour and perspective. Soon there were pages spread across the table, filled with her scribbles.
You could see so many colours in snow when the sun was shining, she thought. Some paintings by the Group of Seven still amazed her because of the pink, blue, and purple shades shimmering in the snow. Gradually she had also learned how to capture some of the luminous quality that made winter a season with its own hues and textures.
She thought that Lucien might find the road still open when he returned from the drugstore, but it might well be covered by morning. What did he do when that happened? she wondered. And how would she get into town for dinner with Paul Paquin who had left a message for her the previous day confirming that Jacques would drive out to pick her up? It seemed increasingly likely that might prove impossible. She picked up one of her pencils to draw the white fluff building up on the branches and lying in soft drifts against the cabin. She thought of going outside and lying down on the ground and raising her arms in large circles to make angel’s wings as she had as a child. Once Arthur White had counted all the angels in the snow.
“Remarkable, Elizabeth,” he’d said. “But then, you are an angel.”
If he had ever tried it, there would still have been angels. Only bigger. But she had not said so. She had never wanted to say anything to hurt Mr. White. Too kind for anyone to want to be mean to him, it still baffled her that he had become so despondent that he’d shot himself. Unlike Guy, he’d left no clues that she could recall, except the gifts he’d given away to the neighbourhood children.
