Falling From Grace (32 page)

“What a coincidence,” Grace quipped. “Don't be greedy. Hand her back over here.”

But Mel ignored Grace; he was looking straight at me. “It's the name I wanted for you.”

Tears welled up in my eyes.

Mel touched the curled fingers of his sleeping granddaughter. “A beautiful name for a beautiful girl,” he said.

30

I stopped
typing and leaned back in my chair. My home office had become a cross between a photography studio and nursery, pictures of Camille and Rainbow pinned to the wall, toys and stacks of laundry scattered over the floor and furniture. Camille lay asleep in her infant seat beside me, hand curled in a fist at her chin. She was growing well, but we had a bit of a scare a week earlier. She caught a cold and couldn't breathe. Middle of the night. Why do these things always happen in the middle of the night? I rushed her to hospital and they put her on a ventilator for two days.

I read over the last words I'd written.
An acre of old-growth stores as much carbon as a hundred cars emit in a year
. I'd laboured over the letter to the forests minister for a week, a summary of scientific evidence supporting a moratorium on the logging of old-growth forests on Vancouver Island.
There's no ecological justification for clear-cutting.
I wasn't hopeful, but I couldn't watch the old forests on the island disappear any more without speaking up. I stroked Camille's tiny foot. She needed big trees in her world.

I rubbed my eyes and yawned. The sleep deprivation was hard. I hoped to go back to work in the fall. Camille in daycare. Rainbow to school. Grace had asked Esther, a retired social worker, to make discrete inquiries about an application for custody. Still no word about Mary. Rainbow was practising ukulele in her room, the discordant chords and tentative strumming a tender reminder of her sweet and determined heart. A familiar pain flared in the vicinity of my own heart. Paul's assailant was still at large; no witnesses, no fingerprints. Not a half-believable motive. What did it matter who did it? Paul was gone. He'd been alive, well along on his way to healing, when I had forced him back to Otter Creek. If I had pushed him into the flood and held him under with my own hands I couldn't be more guilty of his death. Paul wasn't coming back. In the darkest hours of the night I convinced myself he would have left me in the end. The decision to stay out of a sense of duty, a fragile bond. Camille stirred; her tiny pink hand opened and closed like the wing of a butterfly against the curve of her chin. Camille was his perfect woman, not I.

Camille opened her eyes and yawned. I sat on the floor, my back against the couch, and gathered her in my arms to nurse. She suckled with an intense desperation that left me weak; fear and love shooting through me like arrows. What would the future bring? At six months Camille couldn't roll over. Would she walk? Would her legs develop problems? Would she need surgery? She relies on me for her every need, for life. On the darkest of days I would stand by the phone, receiver in hand, ready to call Bryan, but I never followed through. Sometimes I saw myself in Camille and imagined her a toddler, climbing spiderlike up the counter, the lattice, the drainpipe to the roof.

The doorbell rang. I threw a spit-up rag across my shoulder and carried Camille in my arms to the front room and opened the door. Sergeant Lange stood on the porch. Rainbow's ukulele sounded down the hall. I crossed my fingers she'd stay put.

“Faye,” the sergeant said, official this time in his uniform. “Sorry to bother you, but could I come in for a moment?”

I stepped back to let him pass, cringing inside as the strains of “On Top of Old Smoky
”
floated from Rainbow's room.

He declined a cup of coffee, but accepted a seat in the living room.

“Cute baby,” he said, taking the chair by the door.

“Thanks.” I settled across from him onto the couch with Camille. “What can I do for you?”

“The Pemberton detachment contacted me a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “Someone reported a young couple with a child squatting in a cabin up on the Duffy Lake Road. The neighbours suspected them of minor theft in the area.”

“Mary and Cougar?” My heart skipped a beat and I couldn't help but glance toward the hallway and Rainbow's bedroom.

“We're pretty sure. The descriptions by the neighbours match the warrants. By the time officers got out to the cabin, they'd run. In a hurry. They left a few things behind.”

“Oh?”

He glanced down the hallway to the bedrooms, where Rainbow had launched an all out assault on one of her favourite songs. “‘B-I-N-G-O,'” she sang, her voice off-tune. “‘And Bingo was his name, ho.'”

The sergeant smiled, then turned his attention back to me. “We found an envelope addressed to you,” he said. “Our only real clue it was them.”

I stroked Camille's back. “To me?”

He drew a package out of the leather folder. “I thought I'd drop it by.”

I took the envelope from his hand and read my name scribed in clear, square letters, the address merely
Victoria
.

“Sorry, we opened it in case it contained evidence, but it's not of much use to us.”

I draped Camille across my lap and opened the flap on the envelope. Rainbow thundered along the hallway and slid on stocking feet across the wood floor in front of us. Her smile revealed a gap in her mouth where she'd lost another tooth. “Can I have juice pl—” her voice petered out at the sight of Sergeant Lange.

“Honey”—I tried to suppress the fear in my own voice— “This is Sergeant Lange.”

Rainbow's head swivelled back and forth between the officer and me.

“Your name's Rainbow, isn't it?” Sergeant Lange said, voice gentle.

She fidgeted with the buckle on her overalls.

This is it. He knows and we're going to lose her.
I opened my arms. “Come here, sweetie.” Rainbow slid onto the couch beside me.

“You're a great ukulele player,” he said. “Well, I should go.” He stood and replaced his hat. “I'll let you know if there's any more news about those two.” He walked toward the door, paused, and turned back. “You know, Rainbow, your baby sister looks just like you.”

Neither Rainbow nor I moved until the car pulled away from the front of the house.

“Is he going to take me away?”

I pulled her into the crook of my arm. “No,” I answered, hopeful about the implications of Sergeant Lange's visit.
He knows and he isn't going to do anything about it
. I kissed the perpetual cowlick on the top of Rainbow's head. “Besides, I won't let him.”

“What did he bring?”

I hesitated. In the end, the contents of the envelope might take Rainbow away from me anyway. “It's a letter from Mary.”

Her face lit up. “For me?”

“It's addressed to me.”

“Is she coming back?” she said.

“I haven't read it yet.” I studied her, trying to read her thoughts. “What if she did? What would you want to do?”

Rainbow lowered her gaze.

“Don't worry about what anyone else wants,” I said. “What do
you
want?”

She twisted her hands around in her lap. “I miss Cedar.”

“I know you do.” I caressed her cheek, touched by her honesty.

Camille stirred and grunted in her sleep. Rainbow patted her back. “Go to sleep,” she crooned, her brow furrowed in a way a child's should never be. “Can we read it?”

I opened the envelope to find a folded sheet of paper with two swatches of hair taped inside. A soft white blond curl on the left, a poker-straight hank of brown to the right. Beside each swatch an infant handprint, the creases in the palm visible in the paint, and in careful script below, the names
Cedar
and
Rainbow.

Rainbow stroked the blond hair with a fingertip. “I think these are for you,” I said, offering her the sheet, holding my tears at bay.

Rainbow took the paper, slid off the couch, and disappeared to her room. I listened for the sound of crying, but all was quiet. “Poor sweet thing.” I hugged Camille close. Rainbow's door opened and she stepped out, the paper in one hand, her watercolour set and a brush in the other.

“What's that for, honey?” I asked, surprised by the radiance in her face.

“Let's make a handprint for Camille too.”

While Camille slept in my lap, we painted her chubby hand bright blue and made her mark on the paper beside Rainbow's, a wispy curl of infant hair taped below. Rainbow hung it in the kitchen on the refrigerator with two bird magnets from the junk drawer.

31

A temperate
old-growth rainforest in spring is little different from a temperate old-growth rainforest in winter. No showy tropical orchids dripped from hanging gardens, no dramatic lanais, teeming with epiphytes, looping from the ground to the tree crowns and back again, no birds of paradise, no heady fragrance from gaudy blooms. Temperate rainforest flowers are shy and subtle—the solitary pink blossoms of salmonberry, a low carpet of white trillium at your feet, the tiny hidden bells of twisted stalk. Spring colour flits like ghosts through the green and browns of the forest understorey. Young fiddle-heads unfurl beside last year's fronds, twinflowers inch along the ground, conifers add grass-green fingers to the tips of their branches. Migratory birds appear, mothers birth in hollows, under fallen logs, high up in trees on moss-laden branches.

Rainbow is pacing the perimeter of a tree. “One, two, three . . .” She places her feet heel to toe, one after the other, careful not to crush the forest plants beneath. “One hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three.” She shouts out the last number and leaps into the air, arms raised. “One hundred and twenty-three.” After two years of home-schooling, she can also add and subtract, and knows her times tables by heart to ten. At eight, she clears my height by her cowlick, and yesterday, she asked me eye to eye if she could live with me forever. When I said, “Yes,” she hugged me with a force that left a bruise on my arm. We haven't heard from Mary since the handprint letter. I want to curse and bless the woman all at once. The temporary custody papers are due in a month.

The tree is one of the largest hemlocks I have ever seen. As far as I know it has no name. “Are we the only people in the whole wide world to see this tree?” Rainbow asks, reading my mind, this valley remote, with no established trails and difficult access. She's become adept at anticipating our thoughts, her abandonment making her sensitive to the moods and actions of those who care for her.

Jen measures the height of the tree with a clinometer. “It's over eighty metres.” Twenty storeys high. I had hired her in the spring. The woman's tree-sitting experience during the protest had inspired her to become an accomplished and well-trained climber. Together we had discovered this remote rainforest. Dozens of ancient giants live here.

I scratch a number into the aluminum disk—WH-1-1— western hemlock site 1 tree 1, and below it in tiny letters and at Rainbow's insistence, Harry the Hemlock, and tack it onto the base of the tree. Nineteen more disks wait in a nylon bag for engraving and tacking on my way up. We set the rope in the tree with my new invention, a high-powered slingshot with a fishing reel mounted on the underside. As accurate as the crossbow, but lighter and easier to use.

“Yes!” The shot bag clears a high visible branch and I raise my arm in a victory salute while Rainbow leaps and cheers.

After the hemlock is rigged, I clip my ascenders to the rope and jug my way up. The long straight trunk rocks in the breeze. I bang the four-metre marker into the bark and signal to Jen, who waves, adjusts her helmet, and starts up an old crone of a cedar not far away. Grace supervises from a moss-covered nurse log, two-year-old Camille on her lap. The child spoke her first word this morning.
Dwee.
Her delay in verbal skills, according to Grace, has nothing to do with her dwarfism. “She never has to ask for a thing,” she accuses. The interpretation of Camille's debut into language inspired a contest over breakfast; Rainbow and I voting for tree, Grace for Nanna, Mel non-committal. Mel is off calculating diameter at breast height with a
DBH
tape for all the potential study trees and recording the measurements in a field book, happy I had invited him along. He can't get enough of Camille, a fact that both pleases and distresses me.