Northwest Passages Page 23

  But Peggy was insistent. If Paul would go with her while she collected some clothing and personal items, she would be grateful; she would arrange with a moving company for everything else to be packed up and put into storage until she had found somewhere to live. She had clearly made up her mind, and although he did not agree with her, Paul did not argue the point any further.

  They went up early in the morning, the first day after the search had been called off. Peggy worked quickly, packing up the things she wanted to take with her, while Paul cleared out the food from the fridge and cupboards. When everything had been loaded into his SUV he went round the cabin, making sure that everything was shut off and locked up, while Peggy waited outside.

  Now, in the daylight, with the sun high overhead and birds wheeling against the blue of the sky, everything looked peaceful. A gentle wind ruffled the branches of the trees, and a piece of paper fluttered along—left by one of the searchers, no doubt. It blew across the grass, and landed in the middle of one of the pathways. Out of habit, she walked over to where it lay, picked it up, and put it in her pocket.

  She looked up at the hills above her, then back at the cabin, realising that this was the same spot where she had seen—or thought she had seen—Jack on the afternoon he had disappeared. She shivered slightly, even though the day was hot, and started towards the SUV, anxious to be gone.

  It was as she moved away that she saw it, a glint of something metallic at the edge of the path near her foot. She bent down and picked it up. A Swiss Army watch, silver, with a worn black leather band. Although she knew what she would find, she looked at the face. The hands showed ten past five.

  When Paul came out and locked the front door, his aunt was already in the SUV. She did not look back as he drove away.

  THE HIDING PLACE

  Allie found the hiding place when she had almost given up looking. And it was so safe, so dark and quiet, that no one would ever find her, and she wondered why she had not thought of it before.

  She needed somewhere to hide herself away; away from the Words and, even worse, the sullen Silences which hung over the bright little house with its three bedrooms and finished basement and neatly kept lawn. At least, it had been neatly kept once; now the grass overlapping the plastic edging, and the dandelions sprouting up like miniature islands in a sea of green, were another source of the Words and the Silences.

  The yellow patches were filling in, which Allie thought was something her parents—especially her father—should be happy about. “Witch peas”, her father had called them once, when Allie was only three and he had thought she was inside the house, and Allie, intrigued, had gone looking for the magic vegetables in the back yard. But she found no magic, only the bare yellow patches to which she had grown accustomed, and when she asked her father about the witch peas he gave a snort of disgust and said “Not witch peas, bitch pee, from that dog of your mother’s.” That had been the signal for her mother to leap to Sadie’s defence: she was only a dog, it wasn’t her fault, she didn’t know any better. Her father had muttered something, and her mother had demanded, her voice growing shrill, that he repeat what he’d said, and he had replied “If I’d meant for you to hear it I would have said it louder”, and then her mother had said “If you didn’t want me to hear it then you shouldn’t have said it in the first place, and anyway I heard what you said”, and her father had said coldly “Then why did you ask me to repeat it?”, and then they had sent Allie to her room, and the Words had started again, the Words that had been a constant backdrop, like a radio that no one ever turned off, for as long as Allie could remember. She wondered if there had ever been a time with just words. She would have to ask Maddie.

  She was in her room now, lying on her bed and looking up at the stipples on the ceiling, seeing if she could find a new pattern in them; perhaps Sadie. She wished that Sadie was still alive; she might have helped, a little. She wanted to ask if they could get a new dog—maybe a puppy like Pamela’s family had just got—but she had already asked that once, three months earlier, and her mother had rounded on her, furious, demanding to know how she could ask that so soon after Sadie . . . after Maddie . . . and then her mother’s face had crumpled up like a tissue, and she had started to cry.

  Allie wondered if her mother would cry like that over her.

  There was nowhere in her room in which to hide; nowhere that she considered a good enough spot. There was no space under the bed, or beside the dresser, and her cupboard was full. Besides, it was too obvious a place, and too bright, crammed as it was with clothes and toys and games, and her own stuffies and the ones that Maddie, six years older, wasn’t using anymore.

  She had taken them from Maddie’s room, one by one, after Maddie’s accident, and no one had noticed. She had considered Maddie’s room as a hiding place, but only briefly: she knew the trouble she would be in if she got caught. She had been found in there once before, by her mother, who had first become angry—“How dare you come in here!”—and had then started crying—“Your poor sister, she loves this room”—and Allie knew better than to be found there again. She did not want to contribute to the Words or the Silences any more than she already did.

  The neighbourhood offered no help. The suburban rows of neatly laid out streets and carefully planned green spaces left nowhere to hide, could even have been built with this fact in mind. “We will have no secret places here,” a stern and forbidding voice might have said, like the voice of the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz before Toto pulled back the curtain.

  This made Allie think of Sadie again. She wondered if dogs went to heaven when they died, and if that was where Sadie was now. She wondered if Sadie was lonely, without her and Maddie.

  Allie rolled over onto her tummy, still considering the problem of the hiding place. She could not ask her parents, or her teacher Ms. Cameron, who was always trying to be understanding—Allie hated that word—and who would not understand at all. Other children, she suspected, would be no help. They would keep their own hiding places as secret from her as they would from everyone else, even if they deigned to speak with her, which they did less and less these days.

  That left Maddie. She never really had a chance to talk to Maddie, even if Maddie had been able to talk to her, which she hadn’t, not since The Accident, and anyway she was never alone with Maddie anymore. Allie wondered if Maddie had had her own hiding place when she was Allie’s age, and if so where it was. She had never shared it, even though they had once shared everything. They even seemed to know each other’s thoughts; Allie would sometimes be thinking something and Maddie would come out and say it and they would both laugh while their parents looked on, bemused. There had also been secret, silent games, the silence so different from the one which enveloped the house and seemed to weigh everything down, like the accumulated dust of hundreds of thousands of dead Words.

  The shared thoughts and secret games had stopped now, since The Accident. Allie had thought that, since their thoughts and games needed no words, they might have continued; but Maddie lay on her unnaturally neat hospital bed, silent in all ways, despite Allie’s efforts to draw her out on the occasions—strained and formal, broken by her mother’s crying and her father’s anger—when she was able to visit. Maybe if her parents hadn’t been there Maddie would have been more forthcoming.

  Still, perhaps one day soon Maddie would be able to provide an answer, somehow. She looked at the clock on her dresser, considered the time, then rolled off the bed and went downstairs, where the Silence was thickest, where she knew her parents would be.

  Her father was standing on one side of the kitchen counter, her mother facing him from across the room, the car keys on the work surface between them. The air was full of Words unsaid but perfectly understood, a well-rehearsed conversation that both knew by heart. Allie looked at the keys, then from one parent to the other.

  “Can I come with you today?”

  “No.” The word came without hesitation from her father, while her mother
said automatically “What’s wrong with that sentence?”

  “Can I please come with you today?”

  “No!” Her father looked angry and, Allie thought, a little embarrassed, while her mother’s eyes gleamed with—anger? pleasure? some unholy mixture of both? No matter. With all the cunning of a six-year-old who immediately senses weakness, Allie turned to her mother. “Please, Mom, can I come with you today? I promise I’ll be good, and I won’t touch anything, and I’ll be very quiet.”

  Her father started to say something, but her mother overrode him. “Why not?” She smiled then, but her teeth remained hidden behind her tight lips, and the smile did not reach her eyes. “We can all do something together; be a proper little family.”

  “But Caitlin is coming over to . . . ”

  “I’ll call and tell her we don’t need a babysitter today.” The smile that wasn’t a smile flashed again. “And it will save us a little money. As you’re always telling me, every penny counts now.”

  Her mother drove, as she always did these days, ever since The Accident, making a point of checking all the mirrors and over both shoulders before backing up or changing lanes, while her father fidgeted in the passenger seat and stared out the window. Allie didn’t like this car as much as their old one, but she had learned not to say that more than the once. At one point her father said “You can go a bit faster, you know,” and her mother replied carefully “I’m the one driving, thank you. And we don’t want any more accidents, do we?” and her father subsided into silence.

  When they got home her mother said she was too tired to cook supper. There was some leftover lasagna in the fridge and they could have that; she was going to bed.

  Allie escaped as soon after the meal as she could, eager to pore over the day’s events. There had been a moment in the hospital when she had been left alone with Maddie—her parents had gone outside to speak with a doctor—and while her sister had still not been able to talk, she had managed to give Allie the answer she was looking for. And it had been so very simple; the answer had been lying there in front of her all along.

  She bathed herself after supper, tiptoed into her parents’ room and kissed her mother, then said goodnight to her father in the living-room. He had a glass of something beside him which he tried to hide when she came in; but when he saw it was Allie he placed the tumbler back on the table beside his chair. She leaned in for a hug and he held her to him for a moment, in a big bear hug, the type of hug he hadn’t seemed to be able to give for some time. His breath smelled the way it used to, too. It had stopped smelling that way for a time; Allie suspected that her mother would have more Words if she knew it smelled like that again. Or perhaps she knew, and that was what caused the Silences.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” her father whispered. When Allie drew her head back she saw that he was crying. “I’m so sorry for everything. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him for a moment. “Will it get better?”

  “I hope so.”

  “But do you think it will?”

  “I don’t know, Allie. I just don’t know.”

  Allie lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling. The stipples were obscured by darkness now; she couldn’t make out any patterns. She thought about the hiding place. She didn’t know when would be the best time to test it out. Now that she had found it, she was reluctant to take advantage of it. It could be dangerous, and there was no one she could ask. Maybe she should wait until the next time she could see Maddie again, see if her sister could tell her a little more.

  Voices from downstairs. Her mother had obviously woken up and was in the living-room with her father. She could hear their voices through the heating ducts; only isolated Words, but none that she had not heard many times before over the last four months, and she could reconstruct the conversation easily enough. “Drinking again”, “accident”, “sorry”, and “you’ll never change” figured largely, punctuated by tears, shrill cries, and the sound of something breaking. The slam of the front door made the house shake.

  Allie took a deep breath. She would not wait until she could see Maddie again. She would go now.

  The doctors at the hospital were full of reassuring words, but underneath there was a sense that something had happened for which they did not have a name. Allie was not responding—yet—but they were sure it was only a mater of time. A specialist was on the way, and a child psychologist. Until they arrived there was nothing more that could be done. At least she did not seem to be in any pain.

  A nurse with a kind face and tired brown eyes stepped out of a hospital room and closed the door softly behind her. She glanced down the hallway to where the parents were standing, and smoothed a strand of hair behind her right ear. She considered having a word with them, but decided against it. They were obviously distraught enough, and it was not as if she had anything positive to report about Maddie. There had been a moment, earlier in the evening, when the machines keeping her alive had alerted the nurse to a possible change, but by the time she had arrived in the room everything was the same as it had been for the past four months. She had written it up, and would talk to them later, when they were less upset.

  Such a terrible shame, she thought. Both daughters in here now.

  Allie had found the perfect hiding place. And it was so safe, so dark and quiet, that no one would ever find her.

  She wondered why she had not thought of it before.

  She was glad she could talk to Maddie again. They had so much to catch up on, so many lovely secrets to share.

  AFTER

  “‘Once upon a time there lived a gentleman who, having lost his first wife, of whom he had been exceedingly fond, married again, thinking that by this means he should be as happy as before.’ Do sit still and stop fussing, Saville. See? You have quite disarranged my dress.”

  “Do all fairy tales begin ‘Once upon a time’?”

  “Yes, they mostly do. ‘He had, by his first wife, a daughter of unparalleled goodness and sweetness, whom the second wife promised to love as her own. However, no sooner were the wedding ceremonies over than the stepmother began to show herself in her true colours. She could not bear the good qualities of her husband’s daughter, the less because . . . ’ ”

  “Mama is not your mama, is she? She is your stepmama, like the fairy tale.”

  “Yes. ‘ . . . because she made her own daughters appear the more odious. She employed her in the meanest work of the establishment, and caused her to sleep in a sorry garret at the top of the house, on a poor straw mattress which . . . ’ ”

  “Do all fairy tales end with ‘happily ever after’?”

  “If you do not stop interrupting me, we shall never finish the story.”

  “But do they?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  This is not a fairy tale.

  “Once upon a time” is, for the girl, past midnight; the clocks, out of unison, have told her so, and the last chimes have been absorbed into the fabric of the house and the silence of the cold, wet night. She turns slightly in the narrow bed in her room on the top floor of the house, her rough white nightdress chafing slightly against her skin, and imagines that she can feel, through mattress and bedclothes and gown, the razor which she placed there several days earlier. She wonders for how many more nights it will remain there. It has not thus far been missed, but it will be.

  She reaches down to rub her right leg, still sore after she stumbled on the walk to Beckington made earlier in the day at her stepmother’s behest, to pay a bill which was due. Glad of the excuse to leave the house, she had nonetheless asked why one of the servants could not go to pay it, to which her stepmother had replied that the servants were all busy. “Now that you are home from school, you must not expect to be waited on hand and foot, a great healthy girl like you.” She had placed her hands on her rounded belly, full and ripe, and the girl had looked away. “I would go, but the doctor has ordered me to rest, with my confinement so close upon me. In another month
’s time there will be much more to be done about the house, and I shall need all your assistance. The devil makes work for idle hands, and you must see to it that you occupy both your mind and body, lest you suffer the same fate as your mother. The taint of madness was in her, and you must ensure that it finds no foothold in you.”

  The girl’s hands clench, and for a moment a touch of colour burns in her pale face. It is another to add to the collection of remarks—cold, cutting, dismissive—which she has been storing up for months, years beyond counting, for at sixteen her life seems to be a place where months and years have no meaning. Instead it is divided into two parts: Before and After. In Before there were her mother and father, two sisters and two brothers and herself, all sleeping on the same floor, the servants above and below. In After there are three sisters still, but only one brother; the other, having turned his back on the family upon learning of his father’s remarriage, had died alone in a foreign land. The four remaining siblings, clinging together like survivors of shipwreck, now sleep on the second floor, with the servants; the middle floor, with its thicker carpets, richer furnishings, larger rooms, is reserved for her father and stepmother and the children of their union, two nondescript girls and Saville, almost four and looking like a cherub, with his bright round face and yellow curls, the pet of the household. Her father is proud of his golden son, and looks at the remaining son of his first marriage with disapproval, heaping words of opprobrium on his head, forcing the boy to wheel Saville about in a pram like a nursemaid or a prating girl.

  The spark of anger flares up in her again, brighter this time, and a red glow burns before her eyes, so bright that she feels it must illuminate the dark room. She closes her eyes against it and forces her hands to unclench, her breathing to slow, the red glow to fade to a dim spark. She has had ample practice in such matters. When she opens her eyes once more, she notes without surprise that the gentleman is standing inside the plain wooden door of her room, regarding her. She raises herself on one elbow.