Elizabeth and After (23 page)

My Elizabeth
, Adam said to himself, over and over. He thought he must have gone crazy because inside there was nothing but a storm battering to get out. He finished his coffee, went upstairs and changed. Then he drove to see for himself: huge raw splinters had been torn from the tree when the right front fender, Elizabeth’s side, smashed into the oak. Gerald Boyce was out there with a tow truck, surveying the mess. There was blood all over the car, the hood, the snow. The whole front of the car was twisted to one side, the right headlight pushed halfway back to where the windshield gaped open, shattered as though Elizabeth had shot straight out to heaven, leaving nothing behind but the hole in the windshield, the blood and a piece of her scarf which had caught on the glass. Adam put the scrap in his pocket, then stood looking at her blood on the snow. She hadn’t gone to heaven after all. At least not her body. There remained the outline of her legs, one arm and the stained dent left by her skull.

“Pretty awful,” Gerald Boyce said. They were standing in the snow. Twenty-five years had turned them from whatever
they’d been that day in the rowboat into two almost-old men bundled up so heavily they could hardly move. They’d never spoken of that time on the lake but now they moved close and gave each other little taps on the shoulder.

Adam was helping Gerald get a hook under the rear bumper when Arnie Kincaid arrived to check things out for the insurance. Another car stopped. Soon the whole township would be gathered around, shaking their heads over another drunken crash.

Adam went home. He tried doing various consoling things like reading
Anna Karenina
or remembering their motel visits but in the end all he could do was lie on the floor, clutching his belly and moaning. It wasn’t until he read the paper the next day that he learned Carl had been driving.

The funeral was two days later. A raw January day at the West Gull Cemetery with cars stretched down the hill from the graveyard towards town. After all these years Elizabeth, who had started out so different and apart, had touched hundreds of lives: through her years in the school, on the library committees, as the one with the courage to telephone people about such bizarre issues as nuclear warheads or dumpsites or to help raise money for an extension to the school. Maureen was there and also her father; it was he who offered the eulogy. But what he said Adam couldn’t hear because of the wind and the hat he’d yanked down to avoid the looks Maureen kept throwing him.

After the funeral Adam went to the McKelvey place to pay his respects. Again there were a lot of cars; Adam had to park a long way from the house. The wind had picked up and by the time he got inside his eyes were red and tearing. He thought back to his mother’s small wake. She hadn’t lived to a very old age but nonetheless her life had seemed, from the
outside, complete, and her ending peaceful. With Elizabeth there was no such consolation.
My Elizabeth
. The lives the two of them might have lived. Now that she was gone it was as though he had never been alive.

Carl was in the living room, sitting on a small couch in the corner. His face was puffed with crying and drink. Chrissy was sitting beside him, rubbing his hand. McKelvey was on crutches, his leg swollen with bandages. He looked awful. Partly because his face had been bruised in the accident but it was more than that. Elizabeth had been his light, his true crutch, his everything. Adam closed his eyes to keep from crying. What he saw was himself, a dark blank ghost standing in the midst of the living.

B
Y
A
UGUST THE LIGHT IS A DUSTY BLUE-GOLD
and every morning it seems a little more green has bled away during the night. No one can remember the day it last rained. In the afternoons the fields shimmer under the sun and as evening deepens, the haze rises and deepens with it, turning the sunset into a long Technicolor symphony until the moon, tinted yellow and orange, floats high in the sky to preside over summer’s waning.

In the hollows by the Second Line the morning breeze rises from the clover, dry and sweet. Floats into a bedroom where a man, almost naked, is carefully adjusting a camera on a tripod, bending his wide back and peering through the eyepiece to focus the lens on a sleeping woman. To centre the frame, the frame that includes most of the bed, most of her body, he chooses her face, homing in on her eyes, the dense curved resting lashes. A button is pressed, the motor activated, the camera begins a soft whirr that could almost be mistaken
for the hum of summer insects. The man pulls off his underwear and slides under the covers. The woman adjusts her body to his, there is a moment of repose, then the sheet begins to ripple as his hand strokes her thigh. She sighs and moves away. He follows. At the centre of the frame is the moving shape of his hand sliding down her belly. The sheet goes slack as the target is found, then comes a first sharp cry as he draws the woman onto him, a second when she opens her eyes and sees she is looking into the camera.

Mid-August and Carl was lying in bed thinking he could feel the exact measure of drought by the scratch at the back of his throat. Drought was what people were starting to call it now. In the north, the radio was reporting new fires sparked by lightning every day. Around West Gull the farmers were complaining about withered corn crops and wells running dry. Not that he had been so dry himself. Last night, just as he and Lizzie were about to watch a movie, Ray Johnson had dropped over with a case of beer and a soccer ball. Instead of turning on the VCR the three of them had gone outside and ran around like little kids in the last of the light, using fenceposts for goals, Ray taking on Lizzie and Carl until it got so dark that not even the moon could find the gleaming white ball.

Lizzie, tousled and sweaty, had collapsed into bed. After he had kissed her goodnight, Carl had gone down to the kitchen where he and Ray started to work on the beer. Now, wide awake, he could see the moon through the bedroom window; the pollen had given it halos and in the halos were the dark spots his father had always called moondogs. “See those dogs,” McKelvey would say, “and you know they’re coming after you. Werewolves is what they should be called. You can almost hear them howling.”

Carl couldn’t hear them howling. It was a more a feeling of lying there and being gnawed from the inside. Chrissy of course. That night with Chrissy. These days—these nights—when he’d had a few drinks he just had to close his eyes to be back in the truck with Chrissy. That Chrissy feeling blowing through him except now the Chrissy feeling was empty and gnawing and like the moment that began with his hands under her sweater and ended with his hands empty and her walking away. He had come home to start something new but he was sinking into everything that was old, sinking into it so deep he might as well be climbing into his mother’s grave. Or his own. That was a thought he also had these nights—not so much when Lizzie was there but when he was alone. How much easier it might be for everyone if he put an end to things. Drew a line through his name. Erased it altogether. Evaporated.

He was taking Lizzie home the next morning when he saw Moira Lapointe and, he thought later, he must have unknowingly had her on his mind because he recognized her right away. She was half-hidden by the hood of her car, which was up like a distress flag at the side of the road barely outside of town. This Moira was a dilapidated version of her R&R self, baggy T-shirt flying up in the wind to show strips of her waist, chewed-up straw hat, butterfly-frame sunglasses. As Carl slowed he could see her radiator fluid spreading in a dark pool beneath her car.

“You think we should stop?”

“It’s Moira,” Lizzie said. “Of course we have to stop. She always brings me cookies when I go to visit.”

Since the night he’d spent with her, he’d seen her at the R&R a few times, but though she’d spoken to him when he was with McKelvey there’d been nothing more than those few words of greeting. It was as though she was telling him that
however indifferent he was to her, she felt the same way. There was something forced and brisk in her manner; it made him glad things had stopped when they did.

After he showed her where the radiator had burst, Moira got in the truck, Lizzie between them, and soon she and Lizzie were talking about one of those summer movies that make a hundred million dollars in the first weekend, then end up at the Movie Barn six months later. The artificial tone was gone from her voice and Carl found himself remembering the weight of her body. It occurred to Carl that the three of them could go to a drive-in movie. Lizzie would sit between, they’d eat popcorn and drink Cokes. Just to think about it was a vacation. Lizzie and Moira would chatter away, always rushing off for more food while he slumped behind the wheel, smoked cigarettes and didn’t worry about anything.

He pulled up in front of the garage at the New & Used but when he offered to go in and explain the problem with her car, Moira looked over Lizzie’s head, gave her nice smile and said she could handle it, but thanks.

Friday night Carl was at the Movie Barn, dealing out the weekend’s entertainment. So much of West Gull would spend the night goggle-eyed in front of their TVs watching what he’d given them that his hand was cramped from entering film titles in the register. When there was a momentary lull and he was about to step outside to stretch, the telephone rang and it was Chrissy calling to ask him to pick up Lizzie an hour late in the morning. In their conversations since the night at the tavern her voice had been measured and cold, as though they were supposed to be in some kind of purgatory for taking a drive into the past with a bottle of peach brandy.

The morning after, he had called to tell her that Marbles had “run away”—the lie he’d decided on until he could think of something better. Her initial reaction had been, “So you’ve spent the day worrying about a cat.” But now her voice struck a curious new note.

“I hear you did something to Ned Richardson.”

“Where’d you hear that from?”

“Ellie Dean. She just found out. You’d better expect her.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Carl said.

“You used to go out with her, didn’t you?”

Chrissy’s voice had a little buzz-saw edge Carl hadn’t heard for a while and still didn’t know what to do with. “This some kind of memory test?”

“Just that I was thinking the other day that you’d probably be getting a new girlfriend.”

The truth was, that stupid idea of taking Moira and Lizzie to a drive-in had come back to him a couple of times but he hadn’t figured out how he would ask her or how he would manoeuvre things afterwards. It was irreconcilable that a man could first lie in bed contemplating his own suicide, then plan to get another person to lie beside him, or maybe even on top of him or beneath him.

“I guess I’d be jealous if you started up with someone else,” Chrissy said.

“For Christ’s sake, you’re living with Fred. Might as well be married.”

“How much do you like that?”

Out the window of the shop he could see car headlights flashing by on Main Street.

“You’re the one who’s with him,” Carl said. “You’re the one who has to like it.”

“Fred wasn’t too happy the way I was when I came home.”

Carl got a picture of Fred standing at the door of the Second Line farmhouse, wearing his lumber-yard vest with the little tag saying
MANAGER
sewn over the pocket where he kept his cigarillos.

“How were you?”

“I tried not to be anything.”

A car had stopped in front of the store and Carl recognized Adam Goldsmith approaching. “I better go,” Carl said. “Anyway, its all over now.”

“Baby Blue,” Chrissy said softly, hanging up. That was what they used to call each other back before they called each other names, Baby Blue. Then, like now, being with Chrissy had been a state of its own, a state he still didn’t know how he was going to live without.

“Hi there,” Adam said as he came in. “Thought I might as well start giving you my business.” He stood motionless for a second so awkward and bewildered that Carl wondered how difficult it had been for Adam to leave his house and come here. “Felt a few drops on my way over,” Adam said. “Almost needed my umbrella.” Again he hesitated and Carl smiled and gave a little snicker so Adam would know he was appreciated. Nine-thirty on a Saturday night. Weekend evenings the Movie Barn was like an open house for every lonely person in town. Often they made excuses for themselves: just picking up something for the children or grandchildren, just dropping something off. After his first week Carl had borrowed an old coffee maker from the R&R and set it at the end of the counter. People who wanted to helped themselves, then put some change in the styrofoam cup beside the machine. When Luke Richardson had seen the coffee maker, he raised his eyebrows and asked Carl if he’d been taking community-care courses
while he was away. He’d poured himself a cup of coffee, gulped it down and left a bill in the styrofoam cup, just so Carl would know who was the big man.

“All this dry weather,” Adam said. “They say dry weather brings on the fall.”

“
I
guess.”

“Just get used to summer and the snow comes.”

Adam had taken half a cup of coffee and was adding his second plastic container of cream when Ellie Dean came bursting through the door.

“Jesus!” Then she saw Adam. “Good evening, Mr. Goldsmith. Excuse my French.”

“What’s up?” Carl asked.

“So the birds are going to eat his eyes out, are they? God, you’re one to talk.”

“That’s all ancient history,” Carl said.

“
I
just found out. Fred Verghoers got it out of him. You scared him so bad he was afraid to tell me.”

“Did he tell you what
he
did?”

“I don’t care what he did. You’re just a bully.”

“Calm down,” Carl said. “Have a coffee.”

“How long have you been back anyway, Carl McKelvey? A month? You’re already in more trouble than when you left.”

So it seemed. Ned Richardson had slit the throat of his daughter’s cat but somehow he was the one being blamed. He looked down at the floor. Ellie was wearing those same shiny white sandals she’d had on when he’d come to get Ned that morning. But that morning, not so long ago, she’d been all legs above the sandals. Now she was in a carefully tapered and pressed pair of jeans. Adam Goldsmith was right: despite the dry weather, fall was on its way. Soon they’d all be wearing boots and ski parkas and clapping their hands together while
they talked about how cold it was and how if it didn’t stop snowing soon old so-and-so would take a heart attack shovelling himself out of his driveway for his daily trip to the liquor store.