Patterns of Swallows (23 page)

Graham started the car. It was
cold, and it resisted his first attempt, turning over but not
catching. When it caught, the noise of the engine was a desecration
of the sacred silence of the early hours.

"Close the door!" he
said. His volume had amplified, and he added a string of curses for
good measure.

But Lily wasn't ready to close
her door.

She smiled (if it could be
called a smile – at any rate, the corners of her mouth lifted)
at Ruth.

"I told you I'd never
forgive you," she said in silken tones to Ruth.

"What?" Ruth said.
Her brain had not begun to make sense of anything her senses were
telling her.

"I told you I'd never
forgive you," Lily repeated, "and I never have. You
prim-faced, perfect, little prig. I never could stand you. Whatever
you get is what you've got coming to you."

"What?" Ruth said.

But Lily slammed her door shut,
and the car roared away, taking Lily and Graham with it.

*
* *

Ruth lay in bed and shook,
partially from being out in the snow in only her robe and partially
from uncertainty. Her feet felt like ice when they brushed against
each other.

She tried out a hundred
different explanations in her mind to find one that fit. The one she
liked best was that Lily was taking a vacation. She had an early bus
or train to catch, and when she and Graham had run into each other
sometime, she'd mentioned her trip and managed to get Graham to agree
to take her to the station, not wanting to bother her parents.

Ruth had no idea where Graham
and Lily could have run into each other, but Arrowhead was a small
town. You always ran into people you knew everywhere you went.

She could imagine Lily chancing
to meet up with Graham somewhere last night. At ... wherever it was
Graham had been before he came home. Lily had happened to be there,
too.

Or maybe they'd passed each
other on the street yesterday. (The Turnbulls lived just around the
corner, after all.) And they had chatted as people must in a small
town whenever they see each other, even accidentally. And Lily had
complained about the early bus she had to catch in the morning.
She'd mentioned that she hated to ask her parents to roll out of bed
at four on a February morning to drive her to the station. And
Graham had gallantly said, "I could take you. I don't mind.
I'm not working. I can always go back to sleep." And Lily had
laughed and said, "Well, if you're sure." And Graham had
said, "What are old friends for?" And they'd arranged that
Lily, living near by, could walk over in the morning with her
suitcase so that Graham, in coming to collect her, wouldn't wake her
parents. And they'd parted then, and he'd gone home to his wife and
to his bed and had simply forgotten to mention to his wife about
bumping into Lily and the arrangements they'd made.

Or maybe he hadn't wanted to
bother his wife about it, knowing she'd think she had to get up and
fuss over him and put on a pot of coffee to warm his chilled blood
when he got back from the station.

Ruth considered getting up to
put on a pot of coffee for him. But no! Graham hadn't wanted her to
do that. That was why he hadn't told her where he was going or why.
Besides, when he got back, he'd probably want to go right back to
sleep, and coffee would keep him awake.

But where was he? Why wasn't he
back yet? Maybe the bus or the train was late? And, of course, he
wouldn't leave Lily there on her own. He'd wait until she was safely
aboard before coming home to crawl back into bed.

And as the hands on the
luminescent clock crawled around ... where was he? Surely the bus
wasn't as late as all that!

Maybe he didn't take Lily to the
station. Maybe he'd had to drive her out of town – all the way
to Camille or maybe even farther for some reason. Some emergency had
come up. Or some secret misfortune. It was something she hadn't
wanted to tell her parents, but somehow she'd told it all to Graham
as they passed each other on the street one day. When he'd mentioned
that she looked worried, her eyes had welled up with tears, and the
whole, sad tale had come spilling out into the sympathetic ears of an
old friend. And, of course, he'd gallantly said he'd do whatever he
could to help. Whatever it was, it was something she couldn't tell
her parents which explained why Graham was taking her wherever she
was going. And it also explained why he hadn't told his wife. It
was something he had to keep secret. Maybe Lily was ill and had to
see a specialist in the city and didn't want anyone to know she was
sick.

Maybe Ruth shouldn't expect
Graham back until this evening. She'd get up and get ready for work
and maybe by the time she got home from work, he'd be there, waiting
for her. She rose in the half-darkness, pulled the bed covers up,
and hastily smoothed them without bothering to make the bed properly.

But what had Lily meant by that
look of triumph and the strange speech she'd made before she and
Graham drove off? None of that part made any sense. But then. Why
should Lily make sense? Ruth had never been able to understand Lily
Turnbull before. Why should she expect to start now?

It
was as though Lily was pretending she and Graham were ...
leaving
together
.
Permanently, like. Not just for the day while Graham drove her to
Camille.

Knowing Lily, it was like her to
pretend something like that. She'd claim later she'd only been
joking, but they'd both know it was intended to hurt and to worry
Ruth. But Ruth wasn't about to let it. She wasn't falling for any
of Lily's cruel jokes. No wonder Graham had been annoyed at Lily.
He'd never sworn at Ruth the way he had at Lily. It was too stupid
of Lily.

Ruth puzzled over Lily's, "I
told you I'd never forgive you!" None of it made sense at all.
What would Lily have against Ruth?

And then, from some dusty shelf
in the back of Ruth's memory, she pulled out a mental filmstrip and
looked at a showing of three little girls on a playground. Then she
could remember clearly Lily shrieking after her, "I'll never
forgive you! Never!"

Funny! She hadn't thought of
that incident in years and yet it came back to her in that moment as
though she was there, reliving it. She'd often thought about the
incidents immediately before that one. The one where Wynnie had been
the person to inform her that her mother wasn't really her mother.
And the one where Lily had called her a dirty half-breed. (The
"dirty" part was so silly! Mother had certainly kept Ruth
well-scrubbed, believing cleanliness to be next to godliness and a
great deal more attainable.)

But, somehow, Ruth had always
tended to stop the film there. Before she got to the part where
she'd said what she'd said to Wynnie and Lily and before the part
where Lily screamed at her in a fury that she would never forgive
her! Never!

Yet Lily must not have forgotten
that part. That must have been the part of the film Lily rewound and
replayed often in her memory.

Memories were strange things.
Why do we remember what we remember? Like the baby swallow and her
father. Now why would she think of that? She'd better stop thinking
and just get to work.

But her mental snapshots of the
morning's events refused to be ousted even as she greeted customers
and handed out menus and took orders and remembered all the things
that needed to be remembered, like, a refill on the coffee for Mars
Mitchum and like, Ray Schultz still needing his side of hash browns.
She remembered all those things without really thinking about them
while she couldn't stop thinking about the other things she was
trying not to remember.

Ruth felt cold all day, even in
the warm kitchen of the warm cafe.

Was
it possible that Lily had borne a grudge all those years from one
childhood round of mud-slinging? No one could be that petty. It was
beyond belief. Yet why else would Lily have said what she'd said
when she was pretending to ... to, well, to
run
off
with
Graham? Could she have meant what she'd said? That she had never
forgiven Ruth and she never would? Is that why she had played her
cruel joke, pretending she and Graham were running away together?

*
* *

When Ruth looked back on that
first day, she never again felt tempted to shake her head in
frustration at her mother-in-law's "hunting accident"
theory. From that day forward, she better understood her
mother-in-law's initial reaction to her tragedy, having gone through
a similar thought process herself in the midst of her own, personal
tragedy.

Not that Mrs. MacKellum
persisted in touting a hunting accident once she understood that Guy
had lost his business and their money. She may have been naive, but
she wasn't one to self-deceive knowingly.

It
was just that, for that first day after Guy's death, nothing made any
sense
to his wife. A hunting accident seemed equally as likely as any
other enormously unlikely possibility. But when she knew all the
facts, she accepted Guy's death for what it was.

That entire day, the day of
seeing Graham and Lily drive off together, nothing made sense to
Ruth. She was able to believe in any wildly unlikely explanations.
Because all explanations, even the one any casual observer would have
instantly landed upon after seeing what she had seen that morning,
were equally wildly unlikely.

Somewhere during the day at
work, in spite of her best efforts, she'd begun to allow the idea to
play around the edges of her mind that Graham had ... well, that
things were what they would have looked like to a casual observer.
At least, she had begun to admit to herself how things would have
looked to any casual observer, but how things looked didn't make any
sense. It just wasn't possible in any kind of a rational universe.

Graham
loved her. She was sure he did. She and Graham had hardly been
fighting at all lately. True, Graham wasn't working, and he'd been
drinking as much as ever, but she'd become very good at keeping her
thoughts to herself. So whatever Graham did wrong was no reason for
him
to leave
her
,
was it? Maybe if she'd persisted in nagging or lecturing or
badgering or if she'd given him the cold shoulder when he came home
long after he should have, maybe then the casual observer's
explanation of the morning's events would have made sense.

But she hadn't done any of those
things. She'd battened down the hatches and prepared to ride out the
storm, huddled below deck. That was how she'd handled things of
late. Wasn't that how she was supposed to handle them? Wasn't that
what Graham would have wanted if he'd been in his right senses, and
wouldn't he appreciate how she'd handled things when he came to his
senses? Surely, there wasn't anything she could have done
differently.

And if she'd done what she was
supposed to, things would eventually turn out right. Wouldn't they?
Wasn't that how it worked? In any rational universe. And the
universe must be rational to produce rational beings.

And hope, while it keeps alive
the capacity for intense pain, must be the only rational response to
a rational universe because it is always the last bastion abandoned
by a rational being. Those beings who abandon it soon find
themselves adrift on a sea of insanity.

And so, Ruth found her own
imaginings much more credible and rational than the casual observer's
explanation.

Until, as Ruth dragged her tired
feet in the door after that long day of work, Mom handed her the
note.

"I found this," Mom
said to Ruth with a scared rabbit look on her face. "I wouldn't
have read it, only I didn't know what it was. And I'd already read
it before I'd realized what it was."

"Where did you find it?"
Ruth asked, wondering how she'd missed it. Surely, Graham wouldn't
have left a note for her where his mother would find it before she
would. She took the piece of paper by one small corner as though the
touch of it might contaminate her with something deadly. She didn't
know what it said yet, but all the same, she knew what it said.

"It was on Graham's pillow.
I went in to change the sheets for wash day."

Ah yes! Today was wash day. It
suddenly struck Ruth as fantastical that her husband could have left
her on wash day. How could the stolid normalcy of wash day have
continued on such a momentous day as the day her husband had left
her? Shouldn't it have been a national day of ... something? Of
rest? Or of mourning? Certainly not a day where her mother-in-law
came to strip the sheets on their bed and to find the note Graham had
left for her.

She recognized that she was
losing control and hastily reined in her thoughts. She must keep in
her right mind. It wouldn't do to have Graham come back to his
senses and come back to her, only to discover that she'd lost hers.