Alma (12 page)

“Probably something to do with your job,” Clara guessed. “Maybe you’re getting a raise,” she said, smiling.

I don’t care about that, Alma told herself. I just hope Miss Lily isn’t mad at me for tricking her—trying to trick her—about Hattie Scrivener.

That afternoon, the sun finally broke through, reflecting brilliantly on the pearls of rain on the grass and trees and faded flowers in the gardens along Little Wharf Road. Alma and her mother, dressed for tea, walked slowly, enjoying the warmth of the day.

Alma’s stomach churned. What was the “important thing”? she wondered once again. Was it good-important or bad-important? Alma was thinking about how much she hated uncertainty when her mother knocked on the door. Since it wasn’t a workday but a social call, Alma didn’t enter immediately.

The door opened suddenly to reveal Miss Olivia. “Oh,” she burst out. “Oh!” Miss Olivia looked as if she had been wrestling with a ghost. Her face was ashen and drawn, her eyes blazing, her hair unkempt. “Come in! Come in!” she exclaimed. “I’m on the telephone. It’s Mother.” And, leaving the door open, she rushed back inside.

Alma followed her mother into the house. In the kitchen, Miss Olivia spoke into the telephone, nodding, raising her hand to her cheek, shaking her head.

“Something’s happened to Miss Lily,” Clara said.

“Yes, yes, all right,” Miss Olivia said into the telephone. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Goodbye.”

She hung up and placed her hand on her chest, as if to control her breathing. She sank into a chair.

“Miss Olivia, what’s happened?” Clara asked softly.

“It’s Mother. She’s at the hospital. Oh, what shall I do?”

Clara turned to Alma. “Alma, put the kettle on,” she commanded. “Do you know where everything is?”

She meant the tea things. “I … I think so,” Alma said.

Alma’s mother shucked off her coat and took one of the chairs. “Miss Olivia, tell me what happened,” she said, leaning forward.

As Alma, still in her jacket, filled the kettle and lit the gas, took down the teapot from the cupboard and spooned tea into it, Miss Olivia reported that her mother had been unable to rise from her bed that morning. Though awake, she seemed unaware of where she was, and wouldn’t—or couldn’t—speak.

“I telephoned for the ambulance,” Miss Olivia related, twisting her hanky in her hands.
“They wouldn’t let me accompany Mother. I had just called them when you arrived. Oh, it was an agony waiting here, unable to be with her, wondering if—”

Alma laid out three cups and poured the boiling water into the teapot, hoping that hot tea was really the magical cure-all her mother always said it was.

“They say I can see her now,” Miss Olivia concluded, winding down a little. Then she made to get to her feet. “I should be—”

“Take a little tea first,” Clara said, putting her hand on Miss Olivia’s arm. She pushed the milk and sugar toward her. “Did they tell you anything?”

“Only that Mother is stable,” Miss Olivia said, sitting down. “Whatever that means. She’s in Emergency.” She spooned sugar into her cup, added milk, stirred slowly, her hand trembling.

A dreadful cloud settled on Alma as she began to take in what was happening. The hospital! A person could die! She felt tears on her face.

“Mom!” she cried. “Is Miss Lily going to—?”

“Oh, you poor girl!” Miss Olivia sprang to life. She got up and rushed to Alma, put her
arms around her shoulders, held her. “I’m sure Mother will be all right.”

Alma’s sobs hit her like punches. She tried, but couldn’t stop her tears. It was her mother who said, “Come, come, Alma. Get hold of yourself. It does no good to cry.”

“I should be getting to the hospital,” Miss Olivia said, releasing Alma. “I need to get some things together.”

“Let us give you a hand,” Clara said. “And Miss Olivia, forgive me, but you may want to, er, spruce yourself up a bit before you go.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right. Thank you.”

Alma and her mother drank their tea. “What do you think will happen, Mom?” Alma asked, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Miss Lily is old, but she’s quite strong, don’t you think?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, then,” Clara said, as if that settled the matter for good.

Presently, Miss Olivia came down the stairs, a small bag in her hand. She looked more—normal now, Alma thought. Her hair was in place, face washed, a crisp blue dress under her grey cardigan. But she had forgotten her beads. She forced a smile.

“Alma, if you wouldn’t mind, could you collect Miss Lily’s reading glasses and her book from her study? They’re on the table by the ashtray.”

As her mother and Miss Olivia put on their coats, Alma ran down the hall and opened the study door. Without Miss Lily, the room’s silence seemed unnaturally deep. The fireplace was cold, littered with grey ash, the desks in shadow, Miss Lily’s chair empty and lifeless. Alma spotted the spectacles on the table beside a bookmarked copy of
Emma
. Jane Austen was one of Miss Lily’s favourites, Alma recalled. She took up the book and glasses, and as she turned toward the door, she caught sight of a stack of papers on the desk. A buff-coloured envelope lay across the papers at an angle, covering the middle of the page. On the envelope was typed a name and address that Alma recognized immediately—RR Hawkins’s publisher, Seabord Press.

Alma took a step nearer. Had Miss Lily written a new story? She read the bottom of the partly concealed page, easily making out the typed words “by RR Hawkins.” Yes! she thought. It’s true. RR Hawkins has broken her silence! Maybe I can be the first one to read it. If—when—Miss Lily gets out of the hospital, I’ll ask her.

Then Alma’s eyes rose to the top of the page above the envelope, and the words “THE DREAM-ARY.”

She froze. It couldn’t be, she told herself. There must be an explanation. Perhaps Miss Lily borrowed my title. That must be it. She fell ill before she could tell me. That was the reason for the invitation to tea—to ask permission. Alma carefully lifted the envelope and title page.

“‘SAM-U-ELLLL!’”
she read.

“Alma! Hurry up!”

Alma dashed from the room, numb and confused, and ran down the hall, the spectacles and novel in her hands.

T
he leaves of autumn blazed with glory, faded, and were swept away on chill, blustery winds. Winter crept slowly into Charlotte’s Bight. It was mid-December before the first snow, a spiteful two-day storm that left the town frosty and white and shivering. Not until the middle of January were the two rivers frozen all the way across, thick enough to permit skating and pick-up hockey games in the places where the wind kept the ice clear of snow.

Alma had seen Miss Lily only twice by the time Christmas arrived, in the hospital, a dreary place soaked in the odour of disinfectant and a churchlike reverent silence that seemed to
threaten rather than comfort. The author, struck down by a stroke, had looked frail, her body under the blankets thin and birdlike, her face collapsed and wan. She had not awakened either time, so Alma hadn’t heard her voice since that day in the park, so long ago.

Once, when Alma was walking with her mother along the harbour on a windy spring day, the water had captured her attention. The river’s current swept powerfully into the harbour, but the wind, blowing at gale force in the opposite direction, built high, choppy white-caps and whipped foam into the air. It was as if the waters in the estuary wanted to rush in two directions at once.

The commotion that had churned in Alma’s mind since that day in Miss Lily’s empty study was like the contrary waters of the harbour.

Alma had said nothing to anyone about finding “The Dream-ary” with Miss Lily’s name on the cover—“by RR Hawkins.” She knew that to tell was to accuse. But, in keeping her secret, she could not ask for help or share her torment. There
must
be an explanation, she kept telling herself.

Alma was beginning to learn the troublesome nature of secrets. You tucked them away
in your mind, because you couldn’t possibly think about them all day long, and you carried them with you. A secret was always there. There were some secrets that would fly out of the shadows, making your spirit soar when you remembered them. Others shambled into the light and snarled like an angry bear, and you shook with fear as you tried to shoo them away.

This secret was the worst kind, because it wasn’t a fact. It was a question. Had RR Hawkins taken Alma’s story? One answer made Alma burn with shame for misjudging her friend. The other filled her with sadness.

RR Hawkins, Miss Lily, was her friend. She liked being with Alma—the strolls to the park and harbour, the long Saturday-afternoon chats in the study, with the fire crackling and steam rising from the teacups. She had forgiven Alma for revealing her identity to Miss McAllister and the class. She had paid Alma’s wages even on those few days when Alma turned up at the Chenoweth house to find there were no letters to copy. She had introduced Alma to calligraphy and who knew how many books. Miss Lily would never do anything against Alma.

And yet Alma was unable to put aside the
notion that RR Hawkins, desperate to write again, had taken “The Dream-ary,” intending to publish it under her own name. Hadn’t she praised the tale more than once? Miss Lily would never compliment something just to be polite. She didn’t do anything just to be polite. It was one of the things Alma had grown to like about her. And hadn’t Miss Lily, that day in the park when she talked about the passion to write, hinted that she wished she could regain the passion? Did she think that “The Dreamary” was a ticket back to the world of writing? How could she take my story? Alma would ask herself, near tears, when she temporarily chose this explanation.

Was this why Miss Lily had fallen ill? Had she been overcome by guilt? Oh, what’s the answer? Alma asked herself a thousand times. The question harried her, chasing her this way and that like a frightened rabbit.

Miss Olivia had asked Alma to continue coming to the house twice a week to help her tidy and dust and mop. Alma had wanted to refuse, uncomfortable with the idea, but she felt she couldn’t. And as the winter wore on, the doubts Alma held slowly but inexorably overcame her faith in her stricken friend.

It’s the only explanation that makes sense, Alma concluded one day at the beginning of March. RR Hawkins took—stole—my story.

S
pring came early that year, and by the end of May, Mr. Strachan had begun to hold physical education class in the schoolyard—baseball, volleyball and relay races. Alma was receiving good marks and stood second in her class, right behind Louise Arsenault, who, against all expectations, both hers and Alma’s, had become Alma’s friend. They discovered they both loved Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories—Louise bragged that she had read all of them except
The Sign of the Four
. Alma had read that one the year before, but kept the fact to herself. The two new friends even wrote a mystery together, with only a few arguments about what should happen when. It
turned out, Alma discovered, that Louise wasn’t such a snob after all.

Clara had, over the winter, shown her leadership skill in the kitchen and dining room of the Liffey, and now administered the restaurant side of things while Conor ran the bar. “And don’t we make a great team,” Clara had told Alma when she announced the news of her promotion over a pasta dinner at the Fireside Café. “He knows nothing about food and I know less about drink.” Alma looked forward to the end of school when, her mother had promised, the two of them would take a trip, and stay with Alma’s father’s sister in Halifax.

One Saturday in the middle of June, Alma sat on a bench in the park by the estuary, writing in a notebook with her fountain pen. The soft afternoon air was suffused with the fragrance of daffodils and tulips and iris, and salt water. Occasionally she looked up toward the clouds that were building above the horizon as the afternoon wore on, as if searching for something, then she bent to her writing again, putting down the word she had been looking for.

“Amma,” she heard.

Alma turned and smiled at the elderly woman sitting by the bench in a wheelchair, a dark shawl
over her shoulders and thin woollen gloves on her hands, despite the warmth of the day.

“Yes, Miss Lily?” Alma replied, intent on the dark eyes sunken into Miss Lily’s wrinkled face. The turned-down mouth twitched. The eyes looked skyward. Alma followed Miss Lily’s line of sight. “Yes, I see it,” she said.

Above the estuary, a bald eagle soared on motionless wings, riding the wind, like the point of a nib, Alma thought, writing with invisible ink on the dome of the sky.

Her face expressionless, Miss Lily seemed not to acknowledge Alma’s words. The stroke had left some paralysis. Though she could stand, even take a few steps, Miss Lily had lost most of the use of her right leg. Her right arm was completely paralyzed. But worse, she had lost the ability to speak anything more than a few single-syllable utterances.

It seemed especially cruel to Alma that a fiercely intelligent woman whose gift was the talent to spin stories and express them in magical words could no longer communicate on anything above a basic level. But Alma understood her. Miss Lily’s eyes still sparkled with energy, and behind them her mind was sharp and active.

When Miss Lily had come home from hospital and begun her long convalescence, Olivia Chenoweth had asked for Alma’s help, after first clearing it with Alma’s mother. So Alma’s job had changed once again. She no longer copied letters or did light housekeeping; she was companion to Miss Lily, visiting at least twice a week. People who wrote to RR Hawkins now received a form letter stating that the author was convalescing from an illness and unable to answer personally.

At first, Alma hadn’t wanted to return to the Chenoweth house. Though she had wished RR Hawkins the best, and hoped she’d recover from her stroke, Alma hadn’t wanted to be with her. But she found she couldn’t say no. No matter what Miss Lily had done, Alma couldn’t abandon her, especially after Miss Olivia had pressed her, explaining how much she needed help with her mother, and how she just knew in her heart that Alma’s presence would help Miss Lily get better. How can I refuse? Alma had asked herself. Didn’t Miss Lily forgive me in the past?