From the Chrysalis (53 page)

And the monarchs would come back too. Because somehow they knew where they belonged. Lucky them, they didn’t care with whom. She would have to hurry, though. A door opened and closed across the street. Mel’s mother was on her way back.

“C’mon, Liza. You’re
pregnant. Yo
u can’t do this by yourself,” Mel said, shoving his bare feet into boots.
 

“I know. I’ll stay at Uncle Norm’s for a couple of months, even a year if he lets me, and I think he will. When Dace shows up,
if
he shows up, I’ll be gone. Long gone. Me and the baby.” She shook her head. “No, Mel, really, it’s okay. Please don’t put your jacket on. I promise not to hitchhike. Really. The bus station’s just down the street. I’ll wait there until the storm is over,” she said, pushing her hands against his chest.
 

Suddenly she was glowing with so much vitality, she thought her eyes must look feverish. She distinctly felt two bright red spots burning on her cheeks. For weeks she hadn’t been cold, with the baby growing inside her, millimeters every day. All his organs were developed now, she exulted. He weighed half a pound and he could cry. Her baby.
Dace
, Dace’s son. Their Devereux boy.

“Maybe I should call my father,” Mel said coolly. “Get something to calm you down.”

He thinks I’m insane.
Well, maybe she was. If she didn’t leave right now they would sit around all day, arguing until they were both weak and broken down—
a tedious argument of insidious intent
. His parents and his grandmother would get in on the act, too. How ironic that Dace, the escaped convict, had been spared all this. For a moment she felt a pang of envy so sharp for her renegade cousin that she almost stayed.
 

But in the end she couldn’t. She was busting to get out of this place. Looping her purse around her neck, she lifted both her bag and her coat and glided down the porch steps. She made it down the Melvilles’ recently shovelled front walk to the road, although she could tell by the look on Mel’s face that he didn’t think she would. Maybe he even hoped she would fall. He watched her go, his high forehead pressed against the frame of the open door. But when she looked back over her shoulder and smiled, he closed his eyes. The snow, big, wet flakes, had temporarily stopped, and his mother, still across the street, hung back, her expression palpably relieved.

Yes, I’ll wait again. And Dace’s baby and me, we’ll both have a life. Without you, she thought, following tire tracks in the snow down the street to the bus station. And oh my God, without Dace.

– THE END –

Karen E. Black lives in Toronto, Ontario with her family. She went to university in a small city like Maitland. She has always written and done family research. Her work as a reference librarian helped her enrich the setting and heighten the suspense of
From the Chrysalis
 by using historical detail about the deadliest event in Canadian penal history, the Kingston Penitentiary Riot of April 1971.