Garden of Eden (53 page)

Then he strides away, down the cracked cement of the narrow sidewalk, past his dead brother’s truck to his own. He gets in, slamming the door hard, and drives away, gunning it so that the motor roars halfway down the block.

What she feels is such longing for her mother. It is as if all the years since her mother’s death she has held her longing in a hard-shelled nut tight inside her, that she has been squeezing smaller and smaller with the years, and now — ever since she got on that plane in Addis Ababa to head back to Canada, a crack has been developing in its shell, first tinier than a hair, then widening and descending its length. Now she feels that nut crack apart with a soundless
boom
like the earth’s layers shifting subterraneously, its contents spilling out and expanding. Her head is full of soundless roaring.

After long moments Lannie gets slowly to her feet. Staggering abruptly before she regains her balance, she walks the few feet to the stairs. They creak loudly as she goes up them and into the porch, past the sagging, cracked wooden outside door that sits half open, to the closed, locked door with the blue paint peeling from it that leads inside. She reaches into her shirt for the old-fashioned iron key she has hung on a cord around her neck. Fumbling, she lifts the cord over her head, weighs the key in her palm, grasps it and, her hand shaking so badly that the key chitters against the rusted metal plate, manages to insert it in the lock. It squeals, resisting her effort at first, before its voice lowers to a groan, and with a last rasp, clicks open.

“I didn’t expect you back so early,” Iris says, as Lannie comes into the kitchen. She glances at the clock — it’s early afternoon — and then at Lannie who is grubby with dirt and grass stains on her jeans and shirt and her hair stringy with sweat. Iris looks into Lannie’s face.
“How’s the house coming?” she asks.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Sure,” Iris says carefully. “I made some iced tea. Let’s take it outside.” Lannie goes out onto the deck to the picnic table and benches. As she shuts the screen door behind her, she hears Iris opening and closing the fridge. When Iris comes out a moment later carrying a tray with a pitcher of iced tea on it and two tall glasses, Lannie is seated on the bench facing her.

“I don’t need iced tea,” she says, through clenched teeth. Iris’s smile wavers slightly and is replaced by a frown that she also erases. “Iris,” Lannie says. “For God’s sake, sit down.” Iris puts the tray down on the table and slides onto the bench across from her. Lannie can see her resisting her need to fill the glasses, and she reaches across the table and takes Iris’s wrist firmly in her hand to prevent her. Iris flinches. “Listen to me.”

“I
am
listening,” Iris says in a clear, precise voice. Lannie withdraws her hand then, realizes she has been counting on Iris’s weakness, and Iris’s weakness isn’t there any more. Both of them stare at the red mark that’s fading from her wrist.

“I want to know about my mother,” she says. “Tell me about my mother.” Iris gazes out across the yard to the row of steel bins that shine in the sun. The faint roar of the combine Vance is driving floats across fields to them. She opens her mouth, but Lannie interrupts, “I want the truth.”

“The truth!” Iris says then. “You think
I
know the truth?” There is such irony in this response that Lannie draws back. Then Iris lowers her head, embarrassed apparently, and says in a low voice, “I didn’t know her well. You look exactly like her. She was very pretty, but she was — I think she was weak. Which you are not.”

“Weak,” Lannie repeats.

“She was raised in foster homes.”

“I know that,” Lannie says.

“Well, think about it!” Iris snaps. “What did she know about being a wife or a mother? Batted around the way she was from pillar to post when she was a girl. I suppose she thought Howard would save her — he was so big and strong —”

“Did she love me?” Lannie cries.

“She adored you.”

“Adored me?” Lannie repeats uncertainly.

“Yes,” Iris says firmly. “She told me herself that you were the best thing that ever happened to her. She couldn’t get over how beautiful you were, or how smart. She had no time for Howard for a couple of years after you were born. I think that was part of the trouble between them, I mean, that she couldn’t see Howard any more for this baby she had, that in some strange way I can’t quite figure out but I see it now —”

“What!” Lannie cries.

“That mothering you was like
having
a mother — like it was filling up the emptiness from not being mothered herself — You were everything to her.” Lannie has been leaning toward Iris, her back rigid, her eyes not leaving Iris’s. Now, she relaxes a little.

“Dad was jealous?” she murmurs.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” Iris says. “But he was always rough and angry — you know that — and I don’t think it could have worked out anyway. He was fighting with Luke, and he was jealous of Barney because Barney was Luke’s real son and he wasn’t. He took his anger out on Dorothy a lot, I think.” Lannie winces at this, remembering his voice shattering her sleep. “Then Dillon came along, and then Misty, and by then Dorothy was getting worn out. She just seemed exhausted by it all. And I think she was depressed.” She says this last sentence slowly, as if she’s just becoming sure of what she has said.

“I remember her not getting up in the morning,” Lannie says suddenly. “I remember getting breakfast for the three of us before Dill and I went to school. I don’t know why Dad wasn’t there.”

“He’d drive up to the ranch early to work,” Iris said. “Sometimes he wouldn’t come home at night. After he quarrelled with Luke finally, he got a job near Medicine Hat and then he’d only come home on weekends. When your mother got sick —” Lannie’s head goes up at this, to stare at Iris. “He took her straight to the hospital, but it was the weekend, the doctor had gone to Swift Current for the day and his replacement was busy with a heart attack over in Antelope. By the time he got back it was too late. She died within minutes.”

“Were you there?” Iris shakes her head no.

“She was gone by the time I arrived. Howard was inconsolable.”

“Where was I?” Lannie asks, then, “Inconsolable?”

“At home with Dillon and Misty. He’d phoned his mother to come and get you. Yes. Inconsolable.”

“What do you mean?”

Iris sighs, passes her hand across her face, as if remembering all this wearies her. “He cried. He tried to pick Dorothy up and carry her away as if he thought he could bring her back to life. Or maybe, he just didn’t want death to have her. The doctor stopped him. He broke the glass in the hospital door on his way out he banged it so hard.”

“You saw this?”

“I was coming up the steps with Barney, but I don’t think he even noticed us.”

“I don’t remember this.”

“You weren’t there. Mary Ann took you three home with her.”

“Dad?”

“Nobody saw him again until the next day. Barney made the funeral arrangements. It was meningitis, they think.” There is a long silence during which Lannie tries to take all of this in.

“Does he deserve,” she hesitates, “some kind of — sympathy?”

“Don’t we all?”

Lannie has turned sideways on the bench as if she plans to get up and walk away.

“Did he love us?” she asks. Iris is silent for a long moment and Lannie feels such a hard, sharp pain in the centre of her chest as she waits for the reply, thinking now that she already knows what it will be.

“I don’t know, Lannie,” Iris says. “I think he did in his way. I think he tried to love you —” She falls silent again. Then continues, in a voice so different that Lannie steals a glance at her. “His own father had rejected him. Mary Ann left him because he was violent and a drunk, and then she married Luke. Luke had trouble loving him, I think. Luke has trouble loving, period,” she finishes. Lannie swings her other leg over the bench and sits for a moment with her back to Iris. Then she stands, slowly, not knowing where she’s going. Iris says quickly,
“Lannie!” so she turns back to her questioningly. The words burst out of Iris, low, fast, as if she’s been holding them back a long time.

“I was going to clear out your room — I went through your old book bag, from university, I mean, I found …” Iris stops, staring into Lannie’s eyes.

“What,” she says softly, involuntarily.

“I found some — notes. In the zipper compartment on the side.”

“Notes?”

“From men —” Lannie takes a step backward away from her. “I put them away and forgot about them because I was sure there had to be some explanation — like, maybe, they weren’t yours. But then, when I knew I would go to find you, I thought of them again. And now that you’re back, I can’t stop thinking about them.” Iris waits, her eyes on Lannie’s face.

“I have to go,” Lannie says, but now Iris reaches out and catches her wrist, holding it tightly. Without letting go or taking her eyes away, she rises, comes around the table to Lannie’s side, and stands, her back to the railing, facing Lannie, still holding her wrist.

“I want to know what that was all about.”

“No. No you don’t want to know.”

“So, they
are
yours,” Iris says, at last, and her cheeks flush with pink and her dark eyes take on a new light. Lannie lifts her head and meets Iris’s gaze.

“You seemed to think I was full of virtue. As if losing your mother purified you — made you into a saint. Or else so exhausted you, you wouldn’t have the energy for evil,” she says, not looking at Iris. “I was angry with you for that, too,” she mutters.

“Too?” Iris asks, and when Lannie merely glares at her, goes on. “Maybe I did think that. Maybe I was too …” Then softly, “What are you telling me?”

“Let go of me,” Lannie cries. Iris releases her quickly; she seems to have forgotten she’s holding her. “I am not a good person. If you could see inside me —”

“I can!” Iris cries. This silences Lannie and in the moment she is stilled, she looks into Iris’s face and sees some new seriousness there that reminds her of Abubech.

“You’d see that I have failed to be — what you wanted me to be — I was never what you thought I was —”

“Lannie!” Iris cries. “It’s all right! You don’t have to tell me!”

But now she’s started, she can’t stop, she doesn’t want to stop. “When I was at college? When you thought I was eating pizzas with my gang, going to dances and movies, playing cards in the student union lounge like you did. Well, I wasn’t. I was going to bars and drinking and picking up men. Men I didn’t know. Men I never saw again. I lied about my name, what I did, where I lived. I went to their rooms with them. I did what they wanted me to do. I —”

“All right,” Iris says quietly. “That’s enough, Lannie. You don’t have to say any more. It’s all right.”

“You wanted to know,” Lannie cries, and when she hears the ungovernable
pain
in her own voice, she tries to quiet herself. Iris puts her arms around her and pulls her close. Lannie, her face pressed against Iris’s hair, doesn’t move, although she finds now she yearns to collapse there, to give up all resistance. She struggles with herself, feeling Iris’s fingers smoothing back her hair.

Now Iris stiffens and steps back, releasing Lannie.

“Your baby — you didn’t know who the father was. It wasn’t Tim. That’s why you swallowed James Springer’s pills. Isn’t it?”

“Would you have wanted to live if you were me? Knowing what you know now?” she asks.

“And yet, you must have wanted that baby,” Iris says. “You tried to kill yourself, and the baby, but, nonetheless, you’ve blamed me for making you have an abortion.”

“I didn’t!” Lannie denies, and then, “I did. It’s true. I’m — sorry. I —” But what can she say to explain to Iris what she doesn’t understand herself? “I haven’t menstruated for years,” she hears herself tell her, and recognizes consciously at last, the full implications of this devastating fact.

And her own anger confuses her. What genuine grievance has she against Iris who fed and clothed her when her parents left her, who mothered her as best she knew how? She feels herself whirling back through time: the day she left here ten years earlier, the day she understood Barney desired her although he would not, had never
touched her; the day she knew Iris was having an affair with James Springer and had hated her for it and, wanting to die, although not solely because of their affair, she had swallowed his sleeping pills and only later, back from the dead, had forgiven Iris; the day her father brought her here; the day her mother died.

Grandma Mary Ann coming into the house, walking so quietly, her face soft and sort of hollow, holding Lannie pressed against her stomach while she smoothed back Lannie’s hair and smoothed it back over and over again so that Lannie knew that her mother wouldn’t be coming back.

She had screamed and hit Mary Ann. She had struggled and pulled away from that hand that was smoothing her hair and hit her over and over again, flailing with both fists against her grandmother’s stomach and thighs and arms until Grandpa Luke had grabbed her, picked her up bodily, carried her out of the house, and put her in the truck beside him. After a moment Mary Ann had followed them, Dillon walking ahead of her, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk, Misty asleep in her arms.

Then, suddenly, she remembers the look on Iris’s face when her father brought her here and said, “Look after her for me, Iris, will you?” In that expression Lannie saw Iris’s refusal.

Barney broke in, “You know we will. Until you’re ready to make a home for them again.” And Iris still standing there. Lannie had seen all that through a sort of haze that for a long time had sat between herself and the rest of the world, a gauzy veil through which she saw everything happening as if her life were only a dream, and not real at all: Iris standing there looking at Lannie as if she were a worm, or a disease she was afraid of catching.

“You didn’t want me,” Lannie says, and hates herself.

Iris blanches, then colour comes rushing back and she says, “For about five minutes I didn’t want you. I was selfish and childish and Howard took me completely by surprise. All I had to do was look at you for a minute and then I wanted you. And I have wanted you ever since.” She turns away to look out over the railing at the caragana hedge and the ripe crop bending in the wind as it waits for the combine and the grid road to town beyond it. When she speaks, her
voice is muffled. “You resisted me, you refused me, no matter what I said or did. You would not unbend and let me be your mother.”