Home Schooling (7 page)

“Compelling evidence, but circumstantial,” says the famous actress.

“Oh, my poor darlings,” Jane says. “That's the thing, isn't it?
Chagrin d'amour dure toute la vie.
”

Nori built a small fire on the gravel path in front of the house. She fed it with twigs she'd gathered from under the trees. She threw a dead cedar branch on it. Just a small branch, but it burned quickly. Sparks flew into the air and set new fires in the grass. Nori kept turning around and there was another fire, and another. Flames raced along the ground right up to the porch steps. It happened so quickly, she couldn't do anything. She picked up a stick and prodded at the flames, trying to put the fire out. She saw Mika's shocked face, her wide eyes. “Get out of the way,” she shouted at Mika. “Go,” she said, giving her a little push. She ran into the house and coaxed a trickle of water from the tap into a glass, then ran outside to throw the water on the flames. What was she doing? How could she extinguish the fires with half a glass of water?

Sophie and Annabel were running around with buckets. Annabel said they should take water buckets to the salt marsh. Sophie said they should smother the fire with blankets.

“Quiet,” Nori said. “Stop running around. Let me think.” Clearly she wasn't using her head. She tried to remember her original intention. She remembered that distant August night, when her grandmother had taken her to put a lighted candle in a river that resembled the Milky Way, all those fallen stars. She'd wanted to summon a feeling of reverence, the same childish wonder and fear
she had felt then. Instead, here was this ridiculous out-of-control fire mounting the steps of the house like an automated toy.

She almost laughed when she saw Harold's face as he drove up to the house in the truck. He leaped out and ran to the side of the house, where the garden hose was lying on the ground.

“There isn't enough water,” Nori called.

Harold threw the hose down. He ran over to the shed and got a shovel. He shovelled dirt onto the flames. “I presume it wasn't your intention to burn down our home?” he said.

“No, no,” she said. “It was supposed to be just a little fire.” She measured a tiny space with her fingers. She and Harold stared at each other. The smell of bitter ashes seemed to originate in them, in their hearts. Resentment and discontent left smouldering too long, Nori thought. Yet Harold couldn't keep from smiling. She found this, too, ominous. He took an envelope from his shirt pocket. He waved it in her face. “This,” he said, “is a letter from a man in Calgary. He wants a prospectus. He wants to enroll his son and his daughter for the fall term.”

“You can't have a school with two pupils,” Nori said.

“We would have five pupils. We already have Annabel and Sophie and Mika. It's a start, isn't it?”

Couchin.
She remembered:
couchin
was Japanese for paper lantern.

That night in March, nearly twenty years ago, in Cupertino. If Harold had arrived at her second floor dressing room door on any other evening, she might have been impervious to his charms, his good looks. But earlier that day she'd made an important decision. She'd decided she was a good pianist — she had performed Schumann's
Arabesque in C Major, Opus 18
and Schubert's
Wanderer Fantasy
nearly flawlessly that night — but she wasn't good enough. Or she didn't have enough ambition. Did she want to spend her life in hotel rooms, suffering debilitating bouts of nerves before every performance? Did she want to be judged by strangers? Worse, did
she want to perform with her parents in the audience, listening and jotting down a list of her mistakes — a messily executed arpeggio, an overly controlled passage that would have benefited from more spontaneity?

That night, for luck, she was wearing a gift from her father, a diamond heart on a platinum chain, and this was the luck it had brought her: this handsome, crazy man who looked at her as if she were a saint, an angel, a rare butterfly he could ensnare, not understanding that the butterfly would die in captivity. She hadn't exactly died, though, had she? In fact, she'd flourished, she had to admit. She'd turned out to be Harold's perfect co-conspirator. She'd agreed to marry him even though she knew he was an underpaid, over-qualified teacher at a private school in San Jose. He was thirty-five; she was twenty. She had never tried very hard to dissuade him from his dreams of having his own school. She'd agreed to home-school their children. She'd agreed to move from San Jose to Berkeley, then to Portland, to Seattle, to Victoria, and then here, to this remote island.

She had loved Randal. She thought of the scarf he'd knitted, its flame-like colours, the way he'd carried it everywhere with him. The scarf was the first thing Harold had found, when he'd gone in search of Randal that terrible morning.

If she could help Randal to find his way home. Come into the house, she wanted to say. Here is some cake. Here is a doll for company, a boat to play with. Here is the piano, waiting for you. Here is the music.

“Mom, what were you doing? You almost burned the house down,” Sophie said. She stared at the smouldering ashes on the porch steps. She was shaking. Nori put her arm around her and guided her into the house. “It's okay,” she said. “It was just a little wild-fire, nothing serious. You'll be fine, Sophie.” She went into the house. Even in the kitchen she could smell the smoke. It was bitter, yet strangely bracing. She'd made something happen, and out of that
small action, something else would happen. She made tea and served it with the remains of Annabel's chocolate cake. Her plans had gone awry, but still, this was a small celebration, in honour perhaps of some small triumph she couldn't yet identify.

Harold talked about giving the schoolhouse a fresh coat of paint. He intended to caulk the windows and replace the weather-stripping, render everything ship-shape, he said, before September. He'd hired some local people to begin work on the fence. Nori was mending sheets, sewing pillowcases. Two more pupils had registered, and then another two. Annabel and Sophie had swept and dusted in the dormitories. Of course, it was just a beginning. In some ways the school remained a dream, Harold said. He knew that. It was makeshift, provisional, like one of those airy constructs that formed in cumulonimbus clouds just before a thunderstorm: a castle, a sailing ship, an entire continent, and then a moment later there was nothing but sky. He paused. “Well, anyway, we'll hope for the best, and see what transpires,” he said.

Annabel sat near the fireplace, across the room from Patrick, listening to him and Harold talking. Her mind wandered, and then she would catch a few words about artificial intelligence, or genetic sequencing, or the merits of homeopathy. At one point Harold got up and threw a few charred sticks of wood on the fire, remnants from Nori's bonfire. Nori had gone upstairs to put Mika to bed and when she came back she went to the piano. It was a Heintzman upright, its walnut case a dusky, bruised-looking purple, like the skin of an Italian plum. Sophie came into the living room in a robe patterned with peonies. She'd washed her hair and wrapped a towel around her head. Her eyes glittered in the firelight. Annabel thought she looked like one of the dolls her grandfather had brought back from Japan for her and Sophie.

“Are you ready?” Nori said. Sophie nodded. She picked up her violin and positioned it beneath her chin. At the piano, Nori flexed
her fingers. She let her hands hover above the keys a moment and then allowed them to descend. Patrick leaned forward, entranced, or seemingly so. Being in the same room with Patrick made Annabel feel a little fretful and uneasy and tender, all at the same time. She wanted to go to him and take his hand and kiss him, startle him. She saw that he couldn't quite meet her gaze. He kept sneaking surreptitious looks at Sophie, whose slender form swayed as she tuned her violin.

Annabel looked into the fire for a moment, to recover her composure. When she looked up again, Harold had closed his eyes. His hands were clasped across his chest. He looked old, suddenly, to Annabel, and tired. The music rose and fell. It filled Annabel's heart. Clever Patrick, she thought. In life as in a game of chess he knew better than to betray his thoughts to his opponent. All her pawns lay in a little wounded heap. She wouldn't capitulate. She hadn't lost. She thought of Patrick in this house with Jane and Freddy. They took comfort in the solemn dark-eyed little boy, in his beauty. They brought him kittens and told him stories. They fed him treacle cookies. They loved him just as Nori had loved Randal. Love was necessary to life, but it was rare; it was a rare element, and she didn't know, she hadn't worked out a strategy yet to cope with that fact.

The music was so pure and graceful it hurt Annabel. It made her catch her breath. She couldn't stay in the room any longer. She got up to go into the kitchen, to put the kettle on for tea. At the door, she looked back at her people, her family. For a moment she believed Nori's fire had in fact burned their house to the ground, and they had gathered mistakenly in its luminous afterimage, unable, or unwilling, to see how tenuous their situation was, how fragile and beautiful and transparent they had become.

I
N HER BEADED TULLE DRESS
, flowers scattered in her hair, Nadia's mother, Sherry, looked like the miller's daughter in
Rumpelstiltskin,
just as she began to believe she really could turn straw into gold. She was dancing with her new husband, Nolan Ganz, an imperious little man who'd made a lot of money as a logging contractor on Vancouver Island. He had deep lines on either side of his mouth and large, heavy-lidded eyes that were watchful without giving anything away. Nadia thought he was very ugly and severe. Yet here he was letting his hand slide down Sherry's back to rest possessively on her hip. He put his mouth close to her ear and said something that made her laugh. Her laughter was high and bright, sharp as a flung sword.

At the reception a man called Maurice danced with Nadia. Maybe he felt sorry for her, sitting alone at the littered banquet table. Or
maybe Sherry had asked him to be nice to her shy daughter. When she said she didn't really know how to slow dance, he said she was doing fabulously. His silver hair was long and tied back. His grey eyes were mild and kind and intelligent. One side of his face was badly scarred, and he kept that side turned away. He told her he'd been in a car accident, back in the
1970
s, when he was a student at Osgoode Hall. It was his car, he said, but his girlfriend had been driving; luckily, her injuries were minor, but the accident had ended their relationship. For twenty years he was a trial lawyer and that, he said, about summed up his life: socializing with other lawyers, defending some pretty lame-brained mendacious individuals, making money out of it and spending the money. Then he'd quit the law and moved to Victoria, where he'd opened a little bookstore on Fort Street, near Richmond. He'd always had a fondness for books, he said; the way their spines lined up on a shelf; the prickly sense of expectation and dread in just taking one down and opening it. He'd hoped to withdraw from society, like Bartleby, yet he'd ended up in the thick of it. Words on a page were the words of life, after all. And people browsing in a bookstore liked to chat. They liked to get his opinion before making a commitment. Or they used to, he said, back in those halcyon days. Still, he was doing all right.

When the music ended, Nadia walked with Maurice over to a wall of windows that looked out on the beach and the marina, where yachts were tied up for the winter. Berthed, she should say. Nolan Ganz's boat was there. Last summer Sherry had sailed with Nolan to Desolation Sound. This was after she'd left Jonah and Nadia, but it wasn't the first time she'd gone away. In the spring she'd stayed at a hotel for a week, to be alone and think. Nadia had imagined her mother lying on the bed in her room, listening to sad songs, staring up at shadows as lush and dark as birds in their winter plumage. When she came home, she brought the shadows with her. She had seemed to shrink into them, her eyes burning with fervour. She made tea and put out a plate of cookies she'd picked up at
her parents' bakery, in the village. She told Nadia and Jonah, in a soft, not unsteady voice, that Nolan would be picking her up in the morning. “Well,” she said. “That's about it, I guess.” Jonah flinched. He walked out of the room, his shoulders back and his head up, an unnaturally formal posture for Jonah, Nadia had thought. She couldn't bear to see her parents in such pain. Until that moment, she'd thought people reached a certain age and became immutable, like gold or lead. She'd thought they didn't change, but they did.

Maurice was saying he couldn't call himself a friend of the groom, since Nolan didn't have any friends, as such. He had alliances; he had a sphere of influence, like a country on a war footing. “Nadia, I shouldn't be talking to you like this,” he said. A waiter came by with a tray of drinks. Maurice took a glass of beer. Nadia helped herself to white wine in a plastic wine glass. The waiter beamed at her. He gave her a look. He was tall and thin, his wrists bony and clean, scoured-looking. His waiter's jacket had a patchy greenish sheen and his tightly curled hair looked wet, as if he'd just emerged from the sea.

“Thanks,” she said. He nodded and smiled again. She sipped her wine. She was thinking of possibly getting drunk.

“Nadia,” Maurice was saying. “Nadia, the truth is, Nolan and I go back a long way. My sister, Marjory, was married to Nolan — not unhappily, as far as I know. Poor Marjory died a long time ago. She left two young sons, James and Simon. James lives in Australia and Simon lives in Florida, where he's an attorney. He's a good kid. I'm very fond of my nephews.” He smiled at Nadia. “After Marjory, there was Eleanor. Nolan was married to Eleanor for four years and then she drowned in a tragic boating accident. It should never have happened. It was a stupid accident. Anyway, then came Samantha. Of course, you know Samantha's daughter, Marni, don't you? The bridesmaids: Nadia and Marni,” he said, in an amused tone. “You both look very sweet, by the way, in those Russian princess getups.”