Catch Me When I Fall (13 page)

God sees the little sparrow fall, It meets his tender view;

If God so loves the little birds, I know he loves me, too—

Cora had shaken her head. Samuel had a good memory for the songs he was taught in Sunday-school, but where had he learned the Doors song? What she would give now to hear him sing anything at all, she thought, closing the drawer.

The room went dim. Cora fetched the quilt from her bedroom, feeling her way through the dark hallway. Downstairs again, she picked up the phone, but the line was dead. The house had a gas fireplace—she rarely used it, but tonight it would be the only source of heat. She shoved the sofa closer to the fireplace and wrapped the quilt around her. Outside the wind shrieked and sleet battered the windows. After a while she dozed, dreaming about a chickadee lost under the snow, and then about Samuel, who sat halfway up the nearby tobogganing hill, refusing to pull his toboggan any farther.

The doorbell rang. She must have imagined it. It was probably 8:00
PM
by now. It sounded again. Perhaps someone stranded in the storm? Still wrapped in the quilt she scuttled to the door. Someone tall and thin, clothed in ski pants, ski jacket, and snowmobile boots. Rodney. “Come in—quickly!” she said.

He entered, holding a shopping bag from Esprit, a store Vicky often visited in Edmonton. He didn't offer her the bag, though it must be for her, whatever it was. Not, surely, a gift of clothing during a storm. She shivered and shook her head. She needed to wake up. And to get warm. And to eat something. When was the last time she ate?

Rodney was talking to her, his pimply face earnest, his hands crumpling the bag so that it rustled in accompaniment to his words.

“You'll have to ride on the snowmobile, but it's not far. Mom says you can't stay here with the power out—you'll freeze to death.”

“I have my gas fireplace,” she said, with little conviction. She shivered.

He stood, uncertain, watching her. “Mom said you should come,” he said again, looking like a small boy sent on an important errand.

“What's in the bag?” she asked. Why would he arrive with a bag if he were there to fetch her?

Rodney looked sheepish. “Well”—he wiped his wet bangs away from his eyes—“Mom told me I absolutely had to make you come to our house. But then she said if you absolutely refused, I should give you this shepherd's pie. It's warm—Mom heated it on the camp stove and wrapped it with a hot water bottle.”

•  •  •

Vicky, I feel weighed down lately, Cora said, only not aloud. The waves slithered up the wide beach, then slid away to the blackening ocean. Actually, not so much weighed down as unhinged. Like when I was a kid watching the night sky, seeing the stars going on forever.

She stared out at the water as they walked, looked to the vague line of the horizon—one dark grey meeting another, a blurry smear like the soggy watercolours Samuel used to paint. I think I'm drifting away, she told Vicky, only her voice—had she spoken aloud?—drifted apart like vapour, like her breath, lost to the elements.

Vicky spoke. “I stopped at a cute little boutique this afternoon and bought a few summery things—I tried not to spend much money, but we packed for rainier and cooler weather than this.” Vicky was wearing a sundress with tropical pink and orange flowers twining over it, growing up from the hemline at her ankles. “Pretty hot and balmy for May in Vancouver,” she added. Cora thought the dress must be new. Maybe she should compliment Vicky on it. But now Vicky was saying, “We could go out for seafood tonight yet, or maybe just pizza.”

Cora gazed at the strait and imagined swimming out and out and out, swimming until her muscles failed her. The death she imagined was gentle—no flailing arms or thrashing legs. Her head just slipping silently from one element into another.

“Or we could eat in,” Vicky added. “Microwave something.” She bent to pick up a shell and held up her find, a pearly jingle shell. She said, “We could watch a movie or we could read . . .”

Cora tried to remember if she packed a book. She had looked at one in the airport bookstore. A recent translation of
Beowulf
. Was Beowulf the monster or the main character? she'd wondered, flipping through it. “Whoever remains for long here in this earthly life will enjoy and endure more than enough,” she'd read and then placed the book gently back on the shelf.

“Well, what would you like to do?” Vicky was asking. What? Cora stopped in place, feeling unhinged again, wanting both feet on the ground at once. But in spite of the vast expanses around her roaring and tugging, she could hear the faint pleading in Vicky's voice. On an impulse—they had known each other for so many years now—she took Vicky's arm. She was astonished at how warm and solid it felt. She looked down at Vicky's feet. Probably it was just the twilight, but the flowers that wound over Vicky's dress looked like they began not at the hemline, but as if they were rooted solidly in the earth below. For the moment the sky receded and Cora stood in the suddenly benign evening air. She held on to Vicky, grounded, grateful for her arm, and gulped in deep, sustaining breaths.

AFTER HIGH SCHOOL
, I spent a lonely year at university and then married Lawrence, a boy I'd known from church and school. We started a family right away and last year, with some help from Lawrence's parents, we bought our own farm a few kilometres west of Lacombe. While I'd been away, my old friend Kristy had moved to Red Deer, where she gave manicures in a day spa.

I'd seen her briefly three Christmases before at the morning service. She had a boyfriend, Joseph Dove, with her, who looked as out of place in the sanctuary as our minister does at the annual rodeo. Joseph was a thin chain-smoker with a handsome face and nervous fingers. He won't stay with you, I wanted to tell Kristy. She followed him to Edmonton and two years later they had a son.

When I was a kid I used to love sleeping over at Kristy's house. Her pesky sisters, the clutter, the noise. Setting the kitchen table with six of everything. “Forks on the left,” said Mrs. Meijer. She sat down last, in the chair nearest the stove. Mr. Meijer presided over meals from the head of the table, his daughters and me his courtiers. He was tall, with broad shoulders and an outside voice, even indoors. He gave me a smidgen of applesauce with his knife. “That's all you want, right?” he'd bellow. He'd lift his bushy eyebrows one at a time, and Kristy's little sisters would squeal. “Helena, my dear, what nefarious schemes are you hatching for this evening?” he'd say. That's the way he talked to me. I'd blush and squirm, but his attention was as delicious as the roast and potatoes on my plate.

I liked Mr. Meijer so much that I based my picture of God on him. It started the day after I kissed Jakey Burke. He was the dumbest boy in our grade six class, with a narrow weasel face and thick and rubbery lips. When I confessed the kiss to Kristy in her room after supper, she didn't believe me. “When? Where?”

“Recess yesterday. Behind the gym.”

“Why would you do that?”

I felt a shivery pinch of delight. “He had the new Madonna
CD
—
The Immaculate Conception
, and he said he'd trade it for a kiss.”

She turned her back on me to look out the window that faced the barn. “You couldn't just buy it?” She sounded neutral, but her back was as stiff as the window frame.

Later, as I lay in my sleeping bag on her floor, I felt uneasy. I'd expected more support. What if God were mad at me too? Maybe I should pray for forgiveness. The God my mother taught me to believe in, a stern and towering being, was good at disapproval. But there was also the Sunday-school God, whom my teacher described as a devoted father who loved children a little more than he loved adults. I decided to address him. I closed my eyes tight and pictured him. I made him look a lot like Mr. Meijer, although bigger and without Mr. Meijer's off-centre nose. “I feel kind of icky about kissing Jakey Burke,” I whispered.

“Helena, my dear,” God said in Mr. Meijer's voice, “it didn't harm anyone. Is it a good
CD
?”

I thought about that. “Yes.”

The Mr. Meijer-God in my head nodded tolerantly.

The next day at church I joined my mother in her pew near the front. “You didn't wash your hair last night,” she said. When I listened closely, I heard Mr. Meijer's strong, deep voice many pews behind us booming the hymns: “How blest are they whose trespass has freely been forgiven.”

I imagined it was God himself singing.

•  •  •

That's why it took me so long to figure things out. I missed all the clues. Like the morning I said, “Let's ask your dad if we can help milk the cows.”

“No.” Kristy closed the bathroom door, leaving me in the hallway.

I walked into the kitchen and asked Mr. Meijer, “Can I help with the milking the next time I'm here?”

“You'd like that?” He glanced at my body like he was sizing me up. I pulled back my shoulders and tried to look tall and strong. Kristy strode into the kitchen with an expression I couldn't read. Almost angry. She did chores with her dad whenever their hired man had a day off, but she'd told me she hated the barn. The smell. “Not this week,” said Mr. Meijer, watching his daughter. “Kristy has some things to learn yet.”

The next summer Mr. Meijer made plaster casts. He had built a little workshop in the back of the machine shed where he experimented with art projects and installations. First he made a cast of Mrs. Meijer, and then one of Kristy, who was twelve that year. She didn't want to talk about it. Just said it felt gross. When Kristy's little sister told me you had to be naked to have a plaster cast made of your body, I shrugged. I didn't have a dad—he died of cancer when I was two. Probably, I thought, it was normal to be naked around dads, especially dads who were artists.

Kristy changed in grade ten. On the way back from Ski Day she sat at the back of the bus with Luke Ross, and everyone was still talking about it on Monday. “What's wrong with you?” I said. She was staring into the magnetic mirror on her locker door.

“Wrong with me? What about Jakey Burke? Remember that?” She flicked her long, nut-brown hair behind her shoulders and pulled out her lipgloss. With her heart-shaped face and smoke-coloured eyes, Kristy looked glamorous with or without makeup. I looked like the farm girl—chubby and plain. I felt hurt, but not surprised, when she found a new set of friends, a partying group, none of them Christian, none of them Dutch.

I prayed for her those years. By then I kept my distance from Mr. Meijer, but the God I appealed to still resembled him. “Keep her safe,” I begged. I thought of the dangers I knew. “From drunk drivers. And the wrong kind of guy.”

•  •  •

Now, I thought of visiting Kristy. We would have more in common now that we were both moms. But she hadn't invited me, and the two-hour drive with kids in the back seat seemed too hard. I made do with the news that Mrs. Meijer passed along at church.

“I'd love to see her,” I said.

“Me too,” said Mrs. Meijer. “I ask her over and over. I tell her I'll send money for the trip—her dad and I don't like driving in the city—but she just makes excuses.” Mrs. Meijer pushed out her bottom lip and blew up at her wispy grey bangs. “I guess I've got to let her live her own life.”

Then, in April, the Meijers showed up at church with a little boy in tow. “Joe's in jail,” Mrs. Meijer murmured to me, while the grave-looking child, dark-haired and beautiful, gazed up at her. “Kristy's looking for a job, and I'm taking Kyle for a while.” Mrs. Meijer looked down at her grandson, who continued to stare at her with Kristy's sorrowful eyes.

The eyes followed me in my imagination that week. Had there been reproach mixed with the sadness? I should have stayed in better touch with Kristy. But a marriage, a new farm, and two children all within six years was a lot to manage. And what would I have said to her if I had visited? Was there comfort or advice I could have offered her? When I talked to my mother about it, she said, “‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.'” My mother nods when she quotes Scripture, as if she is agreeing with God, or as if she imagines God agreeing with her.

“I can't get Kristy out of my head,” I told my husband.

“You've got enough to deal with here.” He motioned toward our fussing toddler in the high chair. Bending toward the floor, he retrieved her soother from a puddle of spilled pea soup. I picked up her overturned bowl and dropped it into the sink.

“I'm going to check on that heifer tonight yet,” Lawrence said. “May have to call the vet.” He strode out the side door. He returned in less than ten minutes. “Where's the phone?” I handed it to him. “The calf's breech, I'm sure,” he said. “I'm going right back out. Don't wait up for me.” He punched the autodial, then grabbed my arm as I turned away. “If you really think Kristy's in trouble, maybe you should go find her,” he said. “Your mom and I can manage the kids.”