A Good House (29 page)

When Meg was four or five and just beginning to hide under the combine, to run deep into the rows of corn and deliberately try to hurt the barn cats that followed her, to bust nearly everything she touched, to eat so fast she choked herself, Paul and Andy tried to discipline her with a sharp tone of voice or a quick slap on the hand or on her little squirming rear end. But Bill had intervened. It was the first and only time he had ever done such a thing with any of his kids. He told Paul he was likely going to have to find another way. “We'll help you,” he said. “Margaret and I will be here to help you. And your brother and sisters will help you.” The drugs had started then. The doctor experimented until he found something strong enough to keep Meg steady but not dopey and for quite a while the drugs had done the trick.

Watching Paul and Andy and Meg approach the back door now, Bill asked himself one more time what God could possibly mean with all this bullshit. He knew there was no God to wonder about, had known this since the North Atlantic, since Sylvia, but that didn't change things. He still caught himself asking. And not less often as he got older, but more often. He thought maybe it was a kind of weakness, like his legs going, or the hair all over his body turning white.

Opening the door he opened his arms to his granddaughter, knowing his own hug would be overpowered, braced for the strength of her arms. “Meg o' my heart,” he said. “What the hell are you doing home?” He grinned and stood back to look up at her. “Have you quit your job or did you get yourself fired?”

Meg laughed down at her grandfather and stomped her feet on her grandmother's doormat. “I got rides home. Three of them. All the way.”

As they took off their coats, Margaret made the pot of tea and got a Pepsi out of the fridge for Meg, which she poured into one of the indestructible glass mugs they still had from 1972, the year the town celebrated its centennial. She set Meg's drink on the table, an invitation for her to sit down.

Leaning forward over his tea, Paul said to Bill, “She hitchhiked. They didn't know she was gone until she was halfway home.”

Margaret lifted Meg's ball cap from her head and took it onto her own lap. “You'll go back in the morning, sweetheart,” she said, meaning to say, Listen to Grandma, this is acceptable to us only as a one-time-only whim, a lark. “They need you at that home,” she said. “I could see that. You were helping Richard paint the back hall when your grandfather and I dropped in to see you in the summer. You could hardly take the time to visit. Do you remember?”

Meg looked at them, each of them, one at a time, turning not just her eyes but her whole head. “Richard always makes me and Matthew do the hard stuff for him, the shit work. Matthew says he pisses us off.” Matthew was Meg's friend at the home.

“And Richard is lucky to have you,” Bill said. “He told me that. He told me you did a good job of whatever you put your hand to.”

This was a lie but Bill thought, So arrest me. Tonight was going to be one more of those nights they'd just have to get through. Maybe he would go in tomorrow with Paul and they could talk together to this Richard, find out just what jobs needed doing, what kind of jobs they were, find out who was on a salary at that home and who wasn't, who was maybe picking up a bit of extra cash by saying he'd paint the back hall for instance. Although he did believe work was good for Meg. About the only thing that was.

“So everybody wants me to stay there,” Meg said.

“Oh, no question in my mind at all,” Margaret said, cheerfully. “You can do all kinds of things in the city that you can't do on the farm. And with people your own age.”

Meg didn't say yes, she hardly ever said yes, but she didn't say no so they left it there. Margaret poured more tea for herself and Andy. Bill got out the rye and the Coke and two more of the centennial mugs because Meg liked everyone to use them. Meg put on her hat and her jacket and went out into the backyard to walk down to the creek, which was running slow under the bare branches of the willows, and perfectly safe. Bill had often taken her back to the creek when she was small, to show her the wonders, the surprises, and to teach her how to keep herself safe near water.

Bill poured Paul his drink, asking, “What's she been up to?”

“I have no idea,” Paul said. “Likely more of the same. They want us both to come in tomorrow for a talk.”

“They want us both?” Andy asked. “You didn't tell me that.” She laid her head down on the table. “They'll want her on stronger drugs,” she said. “She's going to be so souped up she won't even know her own name.”

Margaret stroked Andy's hair, combed through the grey-blond streaks with her fingers. “Such a time,” she said. “Such a time.”

Sitting, waiting for Andy to lift her head, Paul was telling himself to smile, to make the effort. Just a quick we-can-get-through-this kind of smile. Waiting, he realized that they likely smiled a lot less for each other now than they did for other people, people they didn't even like much, and why should that be?

Meg rode back in the truck bed on the way home. When she was small she rode there with her old dog Stanley as often as they'd let her, both of them happy, full of themselves, barking for the fun of it.

Before she went up to bed Margaret called Patrick and Murray and Daphne and Sarah, to tell them. She didn't expect them to rush home, she didn't expect them to do anything. Paul and Andy could handle this on their own. But she believed the others should be told.

She had long ago taken it on herself to make sure these kids stayed aware of each other. And she shared the good news as quickly as the bad, never exaggerated, never betrayed a confidence, not even to their father.

*   *   *

IN THE MORNING
, Paul and Andy took Meg back into London, first to the group home to change her clothes and then across town to the workshop. After they'd delivered her into the safe hands of Mrs. Bradley, who chastised Meg, told her that her work was waiting and that she would have to move fast to get caught up because they had a new contract coming in that afternoon, they drove back over to the home to talk to Richard.

It wasn't aggression this time, it was sex. When Richard said the word they both knew they had been waiting to hear it, prepared to hear it, for a long time. When she'd hit puberty they had tried to anticipate her behaviour, they had talked with each other and with the doctor about the difficulty the most common urges would cause her. Since then they'd hoped her apparent disinterest was either the result of the mix of drugs she'd been on almost all her life, or hormonal, because why shouldn't her unhappy hormones be screwed up too? But it seemed they had just been lucky. And now it seemed they weren't.

The boy in question was one of the other residents at the group home. It was her friend Matthew. Richard said that when he caught them in the basement, just getting started, Meg spoke right up, told him that Matthew loved her and that she loved him. She'd looked to Matthew to back her up but he had gathered his shirt in his hands, was hiding his face in it, crying, embarrassed to be naked in front of Richard. Finally, as if to explain everything, Meg said, “It's my fault, Richard. It's my fault because I like it so much.”

Richard told Paul and Andy that he had seen no evidence of birth control. Meg's city doctor hadn't put her on the pill because he would have been the one handing them out to her every morning and of course she hadn't been sterilized or anything and he was certainly not recommending that. He said he had no reason to believe that Matthew could be trusted with condoms. And what did they think?

Of course Matthew's parents had to be told. It was easy enough to agree to that.

In the end, both Meg and Matthew were allowed to stay. They were told they could be friends, that everyone understood how much they needed each other's friendship, which was a good thing, a normal thing, but they shouldn't go down to the basement any more, not alone. The deal was that they would both be given something to quiet their needs and Meg would take the pill, to be doubly sure.

At home, the doctor told Paul and Andy that he was sorry he hadn't anticipated or recognized Meg's enthusiasm. He said the new drug would work with Meg's other drugs to further blunt her aggression, which could only be a good thing for her, and that it would not necessarily kill her capacity for ordinary affection.

Meg and Matthew both claimed they understood. They were supposed to be friends. Just friends. They began to volunteer to do the supper dishes and a little later they started to do their wash together again in the basement, mixing whites with whites and darks with darks, being sure to talk a lot and really loudly because Richard or someone would be standing up there listening. They volunteered to rake the twigs and the dead grass off the lawn in the spring and as a reward they were allowed to go downtown on their own to see a movie starring Jack Nicholson, who was Meg's favourite actor because he was both handsome and out of his mind. At the workshop they were inseparable, most of the time allowing the Down's syndrome boy who'd taken a shine to Meg to hang around with them, taking him along if they were going to the lunchroom or outside on a break to sit in the sun, to lean against the warm brick wall at the side of the building and neck.

Their public touching was soft and discreet. In Mrs. Bradley's opinion, it was in fact charming. If they engaged in anything more forceful, if they found a way through the haze of pharmaceuticals handed to them in little paper cups each morning, they weren't talking.

For a while after this business, Paul and Andy themselves stopped making love. Andy had always called it that, making love, refusing to use the other words even in the midst of their slippery, lusty acrobatics. When they were just starting out, before they were married, she'd said that was what they did, they crawled into an empty place where no love existed and made it, created it every new time from nothing but themselves.

“What power,” she'd say, laughing, grinning up at him from the comfort of a pillow or mounting him, taking his shoulders in her hands for balance.

*   *   *

THE SECOND TIME
Meg hitchhiked home, in early summer, she had Matthew in tow and they went first to Bill and Margaret in town. This time they were expected, although not by Bill and Margaret.

A young woman wearing cowboy boots had stopped to pick them up from a corner in downtown London. They had got the morning off to do some shopping on their own for clothes when the stores weren't crowded. This was a big deal, a big responsibility that they had earned with mature behaviour and an eager willingness to help Richard with his little jobs. They were supposed to take a city bus out to the workshop at eleven but after Meg told Matthew what they could do and how much fun it would be, they decided they didn't want to get on that bus.

The woman in the cowboy boots dropped them off at the end of Wellington Street where it meets the 401, and when Meg asked with the door hanging open which way they should go now, the woman pointed to the ramp. They walked the long curve down to the highway, staying safely to the side, off the pavement, and before long they were picked up by a trucker who was just coming off the ramp himself.

As soon as they were up and into his cab, the trucker could see what he had on his hands. He asked them if there might be someone looking for them right now, and when Meg politely said no and told him honestly where they lived and where they worked and less honestly that they had the day off and had been invited to visit her grandparents, he didn't necessarily buy in, but he let it be. They seemed smart enough to him. In spite of her size the girl was pretty, she had a perky little face and a great rack. And he thought the kid looked like he could almost take care of himself.

He veered off the 401 onto the 402, telling them about Michigan and Chicago, about his wife and kids in Windsor. He let them play with the radio. After forty-five minutes, when they were coming up to the turn-off for the town they said they were going to, he told them as much as he'd like to he couldn't take the time to make a detour. He dropped them and watched them walk up the ramp to the old two-lane, waited the five minutes it took for someone to stop. The someone was Margaret's longtime friend Angela Johnston, who was just coming back from Sarnia where she'd had an appointment with a chiropractor. She recognized Meg before she stopped for them because, except for her size, she was just so much like Andrea, her colouring, her mouth especially. She had seen her close up at Margaret's once before an evening of bridge when she'd come in with her dad to pick Bill up for a hockey game down at the arena. In the car, when Meg asked if Angela could take them to the Chambers house, she said she would be pleased to do that. She said she knew Bill and Margaret, they were her grandparents, wasn't that right? She assumed correctly that Meg didn't know her from Eve.

Bill's car wasn't in the driveway so Angela got out and went to the back door with them, which made Meg quite angry, she could tell. But they found Margaret home. She told Margaret what she knew, the 402, the trucker who waited until she picked them up. Then she accepted Margaret's gratitude and left, knowing she would be counted on to keep her mouth shut about this.

Margaret called Andy, who said that they had been expecting the kids there, that they'd got a call from Richard this time, and that they would be right in to get Meg. She said she had better hang up and call Richard back and then she'd better phone Matthew's parents in London, which was another number she didn't have to look up now. Matthew's parents seemed to Andy and Paul to be very fine people. They hadn't overreacted at all the year before when the kids were first discovered and they might have, they would have been forgiven a bit of shouting, a bit of protective rage. Perhaps they, too, were tired. Perhaps they too had long ago given rage its chance and found the returns negligible.