A Good House (28 page)

Paul didn't talk much about his little project and no one pushed him, not even Grandma Ferguson. He guessed they were waiting for some finished product they could hold in their hands, and dispute.

Even after twenty-six years of marriage, Andy was still very small and this pleased Paul because it made her body so available to him. And she was still outgoing, easily friendly with people. She was tired of course. She had been tired since the summer Meg was born. Neil and Krissy had always been good with Meg and still were, but they had a perfect right to get on with their own lives.

With a bit of help from Paul and Andy, Neil and his wife Carol had bought a house in town down near the arena, which Carol called the big old dilapidated monster but lived in quite happily, talking nonstop to her toddlers as she painted all the rooms, commandeered a crew to jack up the porch and got the yard in shape. Krissy was in Sarnia working as a dental assistant, making pretty good money as far as Paul could tell. Although there were guys around now and then, she hadn't yet found anyone permanent. Paul believed privately that Krissy might be a bit headstrong, independent, perhaps to her own detriment. Most of her friends were the same. Once he had heard a bunch of them, all of them flashy, long-legged, good-looking girls, sitting around on the front step talking about not getting married until they were at least thirty, not giving up their freedom one split second before they absolutely had to. Privately he hoped that Krissy would settle soon, that she would find someone good enough to make her want to break away from these friends and get a young start, a head start, as he and Andy had. Independent or not, he didn't like to think about her alone. It made no sense to him.

Usually he left this kind of thing to Andy. She would come up with a way to describe Krissy's situation, a way to make it sound right, like it was nothing to worry about. Once in a while he wondered if he and Neil and Krissy didn't just dance to Andy's tune but then he would pull back from that line of thought. There were worse things than listening to a smart woman.

Meg, their youngest, was twenty-three. She was living at the group home in London now. Like Neil, like Paul himself, she was extremely tall, but where Paul and Neil were lanky, Meg was bulk. She'd got really big when she hit puberty, and although Andy had trimmed her down with more vegetables and less meat, had stopped baking altogether, since she'd left them she had filled out again. She was heavier and stronger by far than her brother or her father.

Given her circumstances, Meg got along well enough. She could talk with people if she felt like it, if she decided she liked them, and when she was home to visit she could work with Paul in the barn. There was no question of her going out into the fields because today the fields meant massive machinery, the fields were about as close to industrial as you could get.

They had held Meg at home as long as they could, the teachers at the school in town doing their best to keep her occupied with some bit of busywork at the back of the room while the other kids progressed. The parents of her classmates, many of whom Paul and Andy knew or had known one way or the other, were ready to understand Meg's limitations, her frustration, they were ready to understand almost anything theoretically, but when the fights started, when their sons and sometimes their daughters started to come home with broken glasses and torn clothes and bloodied noses, they'd had to complain. And who could blame them? Certainly not Paul and Andy.

They got the chance to put Meg in a group home in London when she was thirteen. Their names had been submitted by their family doctor, the fourth young guy from somewhere else who had taken over what everyone still called Cooper's practice, which meant they were contacted, sent information. They had decided to try the home, at least for a while, and it had worked out. A group of people from London with problems of their own had put the thing in motion, got their hands on a good chunk of government money to get it up and running. It was in an older, ordinary residential neighbourhood and from the outside it looked like just a really big brick house. It looked like the kind of ridiculously oversized new-money house that was going up regularly in the suburbs.

Meg had liked it there at first, or said she did. They had a young staff to run the place, to teach the kids things, normalization, it was called, how to go shopping for groceries, how to go to the dentist, how to have your parents come for lunch on Saturdays. Their meds were strictly supervised and they were often taken out on excursions in a van donated by the Kinsmen, which was fine except for the big sign on the van advertising exactly who was inside it.

Every morning through the week all ten residents, six young men and four young women, Paul wasn't supposed to call them kids, were packed into the van and delivered to a sheltered workshop where they sat at long tables with a hundred other similar souls to do contract piecework for 3M or some small local company. They were paid, the point being that their work was worth something, but not much, a token really. Most of the money from the contracts went back into the place itself because there was a large staff. A lot of individual attention had to be available to each worker.

Paul and Andy were allowed to visit while Meg worked and from the start they had wanted to make these visits. People were stupid and cruel, all the time, people who should know better, adults as often as kids. You got to recognize that, to watch for it, if you had a daughter like Meg.

For the first few years a former army man had managed the workshop but now a Mrs. Bradley was very much in charge. She was a British woman in very high heels with orangish hair that she puffed up and sprayed way too thoroughly every morning, who was nevertheless polite and forthright in her comments to Paul and Andy. She said Meg was aggressive, yes, but they often saw that in their clientele and she could be distracted, she could be calmed, and when she was calm she was a very good worker. And the others were learning to keep their distance and never to tease Meg. In fact there was one boy, a Down's syndrome boy, who had taken a shine to her, who followed her around like a puppy, who liked to sit beside her at breaks and when they ate their lunch. Mrs. Bradley told Paul and Andy that Meg was extremely patient with this boy, very understanding. She said Meg had an enormous heart.

Paul and Andy visited the group home too. During their first visit they were led upstairs to see Meg's room, which she shared with the three other girls. It was large enough and bright enough, but after they'd had a cup of tea downstairs in the oversized, beautifully furnished living room, as soon as they were in the truck on the way home, Andy erupted into a small rage, turning on Paul to ask, Lord, didn't he notice? She said the room was just horrible, that it needed a good cleaning, a good airing, that it smelled of old food and sweat and stale underwear. She said she would give anything to be let loose for an afternoon in that bedroom.

On their next Saturday visit, sitting on Meg's bed, trying not to look perturbed, Andy asked Richard, the supervisor who was on duty that day, why didn't he either stand over them and make them do it or get someone in to do it for them? She told him she could see no reason for them to live like that. But Richard just looked around the room and shrugged his shoulders. The girls were expected to do their own wash and to keep their room clean. That was the rule. They were pretty slack, sure, but according to Richard the idea was that they themselves would get sick of the mess and the smell, he believed they were capable of getting sick of it, and then they'd clean it up. And anyway, he didn't think it was particularly bad. “Maybe you should see my bedroom,” he said.

They didn't go in quite so often after that visit, maybe once a month, once every six weeks. At home, hoping to help Andy get used to things as they were now, Paul told her that Meg was absolutely safe and cared for and at least slightly happy some of the time and that this was likely as good as it was going to get. “You don't have to think about her so often,” he told her. “She can make a life for herself there. And better there than here with us. There is nothing for her here.” He didn't know if he believed any of this to be true, but it was important to him that Andy believed it.

Meg came home every Christmas and for a couple of weeks in the summer, and any time Krissy or Neil and Carol and the kids were going to be around for a few days someone drove in to get her. Later on she would fall to them. Everyone knew this.

*   *   *

WHEN MEG HITCHHIKED
home the first time, on a Tuesday afternoon in the late fall of 1985, Paul and Andy had just got back from Bill and Margaret's and were sitting in the breakfast nook having a coffee together, talking about their mutual suspicion that something was up with Patrick and Mary, that they were in trouble, and that as usual Margaret knew more than she was willing to say. Margaret
had
been willing to say that Sarah, who would no longer answer to Sally, had called the night before from Vancouver to tell them that she and Rob had decided to get pregnant.

Sarah and Rob had been out in Vancouver nearly four years. Rob was an English software engineer who had come over from London just before they met to take a big job with one company and then, six months after they were married, unsatisfied, he'd moved to another company and they had been transferred west. After Margaret had told Paul and Andy her bit of news, that it looked as if she was finally going to be a grandmother in her own right, she confessed that she had been almost ready to accept that there wouldn't be any babies because Rob didn't appear to be big on family, his own or anyone else's. And then she said it was likely just the waiting that had thrown her off, the idea that a woman could bide her time and then decide to do it when she felt ready. “A modern convenience,” she'd called it.

Paul saw Meg first because he was facing the window and then they watched together as she ran up the long laneway toward the house, a large woman running like a child, her strides clumsy, her arms wild, clouds of cold panting breath bursting from her mouth as she ran. Her new jacket was wide open to the wind, her Blue Jays hat pushed firmly down on her head.

She had been dropped off at the end of the lane by a grey Chrysler, they could see the car waiting out there for her safe welcome. She turned back several times to wave at the driver, a lone male, who returned her wave and honked the horn several times.

Andy went to the door and opened it, letting in the cold air, and when Meg saw them she stopped running and began to walk in long strides across the frozen grass. She stopped once to bend over to catch her breath, lifted her head to look up at them, grinned her widest grin. Paul waved at the driver of the grey Chrysler, signalling that it was all right, he could carry on.

Slumped down on the step, Meg said to Andy, “I came home. I got rides home.” She was so proud of herself.

“Who was that man?” Andy asked. “Did he tell you his name?”

“Mr. Brown,” Meg said. “That was Mr. Brown from Sarnia.”

Andy hesitated but not for long. “He didn't touch you or say anything creepy, did he?”

Meg had been taught that she was vulnerable to strangers, to unkindness and worse, that she had to understand this and work to protect herself from it. “Nobody touches me unless I say so,” she said. She made a tight fist in front of her face and shook it hard. She knew what her fist could do because when she was nine and very annoyed with Neil one morning, getting ready for school, she'd knocked him out cold in the back hall.

They took her in and Andy got started calming her while Paul dialled the phone. Meg pulled her cat's cradle out of her jacket pocket and began to work it.

Richard was the head supervisor at the home now and he said he had been calling them and that he'd been just about ready to call again. He said Meg hadn't got in the van after work, that there was a new driver who wasn't used to everyone yet. He said Meg must have been hiding because no one noticed that she wasn't around, and by the time he'd got hold of Mrs. Bradley, who was home herself by then and who had no idea that Meg hadn't got on the bus with the others, they knew they had lost her. He said nothing like this had ever happened before and that he was so sorry. And was Meg all right?

Paul didn't see any point to anger. “I think she had herself a fine time getting home,” he said. “I'll bring her back in the morning.”

Richard said that would be appreciated. And then he asked could Andy come along too because he had been planning to call them anyway to come in for a talk, and maybe this would be as good a time as any.

Paul said fine and hung up. He assumed it would be something about aggression again, maybe shoving some of the other people around, yelling, maybe throwing another wrench through a window. Likely it was time for a trip to the doctor to ask one more time about upping Meg's downers.

Andy cooked sloppy joes and apple crisp and after supper Meg pushed back her chair and announced that she wanted to go into town to see Grandma and Grandpa. Everything about her, the way she sat forward in her chair, the way she held her chin up and out, told them, If you won't take me, I'll get there on my own, I know how to do it now. They took the truck. Meg sat in the middle between them and played with the radio, played air guitar when she found a station she liked.

Sitting at her kitchen table doing a crossword, Margaret heard the truck and, knowing the sound, walked to the sink to fill the kettle. Just before she looked out the window she thought, This is odd, they just left here three hours ago, and then she looked. Bill was in the living room watching television and she called loudly to him, “Bill, come out here. Something's wrong. Meg's home.”

When she was born, that summer they were out at Dunworkin, none of them had any way to know precisely what Meg's future might hold, but Bill had a sense of it, from the war, he told himself, because he had seen things you couldn't imagine. Because he'd had to accept things no one should have to accept and say nothing.