A Walk Through a Window (10 page)

“Yer brothers used to play there, too. Tanned the hide of that young Al when he knocked over one of the old grave markers. An imp, that ’un. Paddled his behind more than once.”

He mumbled a little more, but Darby snuck out the door. There was no way he had been talking to her. For one thing, she didn’t have any brothers. She paused on the second step, the image of his face still in her mind—eyes
distant—even a little lost. Darby sighed. This was one complicated visit.

She hopped on her skateboard and sped down to the library and spent a full hour looking up the history of northern Canada. Darby hadn’t been to the public library in Toronto in at least the past year, and here she was in the Charlottetown library twice in one week.

Unheard of.

It was more than a little scary how real that hallucination had seemed, but Darby decided she must have subconsciously known most of the facts from work she had studied at school. Maybe in grade four or five? She seemed to remember a unit on the Inuit, but she didn’t remember learning a lot.

The row of computers along the wall were all busy, so Darby turned to a staff member. When she asked for help finding information about the earliest people who came to Canada, the woman laughed.

“Oh, I’m not teasing you, dear,” she said kindly, in response to the look on Darby’s face. “It’s just that before the European explorers came to North America, we don’t have a written record of the history of the people who lived here. It’s considered prehistory, actually.”

She rummaged around and found Darby a book on the Beothuk, a very old culture that had been wiped out by diseases the explorers brought with them. She also handed Darby a book written by some professor who had a theory that the way the first native people came to North America was over a land bridge on the Bering Strait.

“It’s a bit of a tough read,” said the librarian, “but basically, he believes that the first nations people came to North America more than twelve thousand years ago across a frozen land bridge in the very northern part of Canada. This was before anybody was writing things down, mind you, so I’m not sure we will ever know the truth.”

“It says here they followed the herds of caribou,” Darby said slowly, reading the book jacket. “Can they tell from fossils, maybe?”

That sent the librarian off in yet another direction. By the end of the hour Darby had enough books to read for a year. She glanced over as someone stepped away from a computer on the end—she figured a few sheets of information from Google would have been a lot lighter to carry home. But the librarian had done so much work; Darby sat down to leaf through a few volumes in the big stack.

It was weird, though, because as Darby turned the pages, a lot of what she saw seemed strangely familiar. She read how the pile of stones the people left behind to show the way they had travelled was called an
inuksuk
. The book said
inuksuit
might have also been used to show nomadic people the way when they were travelling through the north. And an
inuksuk
has even been used as a modern-day symbol for the Olympic games.

After reading for an hour, Darby started to feel a bit sick, so she closed the books and piled them all on the cart. Her head wasn’t really aching like before, but she still couldn’t make sense out of her experience and it made her stomach upset. There was no denying she’d had a migraine. Even thinking about it made her stomach
turn a little, remembering how bad it was. But could a migraine make her feel like she was being chased by a polar bear, or imagine she was sitting in an ice-house with people from another age and culture?

As Darby walked out of the library, she caught sight of Shawnie’s poster inside a display case. Along with the poster were some samples of her work, but Darby’s eyes were drawn like magnets to a tiny stone bowl sitting beside a little basket and some other small woven pieces. Darby dropped to her knees and peered into the case. The bowl looked so familiar—where had she seen it before? Maybe it would be a good idea to take Nan next door for tea, after all.

Darby had hoped that talking to the doctor would give her more answers, but when she asked him about seeing things during a migraine, he talked about spots and distorted vision. She could feel her impatience rising—nothing he said shed any real light on what she had been through. She asked if bumping her head would have given her a concussion, but apparently she didn’t show any of the signs. The doctor smiled at her and said the road to adulthood is a rocky one. He added he was sure Darby had suffered from a common migraine. She rubbed her temple, remembering the sensation like an axe chopping through her skull. Nothing common about that feeling—at least not for Darby.

If he’d been wading through the snow with me, I bet he wouldn’t be so quick to blame the experience on a so-called common migraine
, she thought.

After the appointment, Darby skated back home and dug out the helmet her mom had packed for her. Whether
the doctor believed it was a concussion or not, she didn’t ever want to have a headache like that one again.

Darby spent the next few days poring over her library books and making notes in her journal. When she slowed down enough to check, she realized she had generated enough material to write an entire essay on the people of the North. But she still didn’t know what any of this had to do with her. And on top of that, she hadn’t been on her skateboard since she’d come back from the doctor’s office. She piled the books on Nan’s table by the door and grabbed her board.

Hanging out in the sunshine practising ollies off the curb made her feel a whole lot better. After an hour, she had figured out the foot placement, pushing down as hard and fast as she could on the back end and dragging the board into the air with her feet as she leapt up. She still couldn’t get the board to flip in the air, but it felt good to have made so much progress.

Yesterday’s experience seemed so fresh when Darby was reading about life in the North; but outside, gliding along in the summer sun, polar bears and northern people seemed a lot further away.

After another hour, she headed in the front door for some of Nan’s lemonade. Gramps was still sitting on the porch with his scrapbooks. Darby stopped to look at one as she bent to put away her skateboard, and a picture caught her eye. It looked like it had been cut out of a
newspaper: a group of young men all in uniform. She’d seen a few of Gramps’s scrapbooks around the house and they all seemed to relate to his time in the war, so this was no surprise. But someone had drawn on this picture. Circles and crosses. The page almost looked like a tic-tac-toe game.

Darby leaned over his shoulder and peered at the picture. “Who’s that, Gramps?” she asked, pointing at the face of one young man who was heavily crossed out. “I can’t see his face with the x on it.”

She regretted saying anything as soon as the words were out of her mouth, because she could feel Gramps’s shoulders stiffen. But when he spoke his voice was soft.

“This is my old unit, kiddo. I seem to remember this picture being taken shipside in the harbour, before we set off for Korea.”

“But why have you drawn on everyone’s faces? How can you tell who is who?”

He shrugged and didn’t answer right away.

“I never forget a face, kiddo. Some came home and some didn’t. I don’t need a goddamned picture to remind me. I remember every face in that unit.”

Afterwards, Darby realized she probably should have left it at that. In the back of her mind, she could tell he was starting to get upset, but the picture really had caught her interest and she was curious.

“Okay,” she said, leaning across the table, “who is that guy, then?” Darby pointed to a man in the second row whose face was heavily crossed off. “Or that guy?”

Suddenly, Gramps pushed his chair from the table
with such explosive force that his scrapbooks went flying, scattering all over the porch floor. His chair toppled behind him and Darby was so startled she jumped back with a squeak, narrowly avoiding having her toes crunched by the falling chair.

Gramps was standing looking at her, his eyes blazing in a face that had paled to the colour of sour cream.

“How dare you?” he said, his voice low and dangerous. “How dare ye touch the faces of those men?”

His voice started to rise now, and spit was flying from his mouth as he spoke. “Those men are my brothers. Harry Johnson lives on Cameron Street. His face is gone. His FACE IS GONE!”

Gramps’s own face had changed colour from sheet white to brilliant red in the space of a single sentence. Darby had no idea what to do. She just wanted to get away. But she was stuck in one corner of the porch with the table that Gramps had pushed aside jammed into her legs.

“Gramps,” she began, but he was past listening.

“Who are ye to speak about these men?” he roared. “Who are you? Identify yourself IMMEDIATELY!”

Darby’s mouth had gone completely dry. She tried to say something but couldn’t get any words to come out. She feared the old man was going to burst a blood vessel, or kill her, or both, when Nan stepped into the porch. She stepped right in front of Gramps and placed one hand on each side of his face.

He looked at her in fury for a moment, and then without a word he suddenly curled into her arms, sobbing
like a baby. She rubbed his back while he cried and shot Darby a sympathetic glance over his shaking shoulders.

Darby closed her mouth and swallowed convulsively. In under a minute the day had suddenly darkened in spite of the late-afternoon sun outside. Gramps’s sobs tapered off and she managed to quietly work her way out from behind the table. She put her hand on the screen door and Nan gave her an apologetic little smile.

“Time for tea, Vern,” she said to Gramps as she steered him into the house. “I need you to open the new box of oatcakes …”

The rest of her words were lost to Darby as she fled out the front door.

She was half a block down the street before she realized she’d left her skateboard on the porch.

Darby sank down to sit on the curb. What was going on with Gramps? She’d heard of old people losing their marbles, but this was so weird and awful. Her stomach felt like a mass of snakes were coiling and squeezing inside and she wished she were at home, far away from the old man.
Now I know why Dad never came back here
, she thought.

A door slammed behind her, and with her twitchy nerves on edge, she jumped right to her feet. She had been sitting in front of one of the houses that was built almost right up against the street. No front lawn—just a screened-in porch and stairs. It was cranberry red with blue and grey trim around the porch and gables, and the breeze was rustling a fat bed of tiger lilies against the sidewalk. A woman stood on the steps by the front porch.

“Sorry,” Darby blurted.

The woman grinned broadly at Darby. “For what, may I ask?”

Darby didn’t know what to say. Sorry for sitting on a public street in front of your house? Sorry for having such a weird grandfather? Her mouth opened to speak but nothing came out. In the end, the woman took pity on her and laughed.

“Don’t be silly. You can sit there any time you like.” She stepped down off the porch. “You’re Darby, aren’t you? Vern and Etta’s new granddaughter?”

It was Darby’s turn to laugh a little. “Not exactly new,” she said. It felt so good to be talking to someone normal that she started babbling. “I mean, I’m thirteen, so I’ve been around for a long time. But I’ve only been here a week and a half, even though it seems like longer. I really live in Toronto, and I’m just visiting while my parents are renovating our house.”

The woman nodded, still smiling a little. She looked like she was somewhere in her early twenties. She wore her long hair in two loose braids and she tucked a flyaway strand behind one ear as she spoke. “Renovating, eh? That’s a bummer. But you get to spend time on the Island for the summer, so that’s a bonus. And your grandparents are such great people.”

Man, did she have that wrong. But before Darby could straighten her out she spoke again.

“Speaking of renovations, I’ve been meaning to drop by ever since you got here, but I’ve been so busy at work. I’ve got something I think you might like.”

Darby felt baffled. Something for her?

The woman walked down her steps and heaved the large, black leather bag she’d been carrying into the passenger side of her car. It was a little Smart Car, bright red, so it almost matched her house. There was really only room inside for the bag and the woman. Darby closed the car door for her automatically.

“Thanks, Darby.” She grinned again. “Good Gaelic name you’ve got there. I’ll drop by after dinner tonight. See you then!”

She hopped in the front seat of her car and drove off.

Darby leaned against the splintery wood of the hydro pole and watched her go. She’d been so busy spilling her own life story that she’d forgotten to ask the woman’s name. There had been a UPEI parking sticker in the back window of her car. Maybe she was a student at the university. Darby resolved to ask Nan about the woman later on—when she got the courage to go back to the house.