The Last Woman (16 page)

Sully dropped dead of an embolism when Richard was eighteen. He can recall, still, his father’s head laid on its satin pillow in the funeral home. The few strands combed back over his bald head; his mouth too big, as if it had been stretched; and the hands, the huge, nicked hands clasped over his one good suit, the beaded loop of his rosary draped across his fingers. The numbness of those days lasted for a long time, as if Sully had gone out with a final, enormous explosion, stunning Richard and his mother both.

Escaping the traffic at last, he turns into the neighbourhood of Cartier Point: an enclave of big, 1920s-era houses held in a bend of the river. Fifteen years ago, they bought a two-storey, stuccoed house with a tower he considers pretentious, a stone’s throw from where Ann grew up. When recently he suggested they move to a new sub division on the edge of town, Ann wouldn’t hear of it: she didn’t want one of those new houses, she said, with their oversized
garages that made the whole street look like an industrial park. She was adamant, as she often was; her ferocity, her deep certainty about some things, were qualities he both respected and feared. He had a sense sometimes of putting his own opinions on, like a style in coats; and while he had his convictions too, he thought that at times she was excessive in the way she clung to hers. She
knew
those houses on the new estates were bad. They were wrong. They were an excrescence in taste and social living. And when he said, modestly, “Well for
you
they are. Lots of people, me for instance, actually like them,” his relativism left her unimpressed. He felt superior to her in these matters: more reasonable, more generous. And yet at the same time, he envied her her passions – the natural authority they gave her. There was something primitive in his wife, he had thought more than once. Something capable of striking at random, out of an obscure depth.

Their neighbourhood is in decline. Some of the bigger houses have been broken into apartments; many lawns and gardens are no longer well kept: he can’t imagine Reg being impressed. They had compromised with an addition – family room and expanded kitchen below; a studio for Ann above, its huge windows overlooking the long backyard, the maple tree, the crumbling brick of the enormous outdoor grill built by an earlier owner, the dyke that protects the neighbourhood from the river. He slides past the overgrown hedge, its tiny leaves crisping in the drought, stopping just short of the open garage where her Honda
sits. He misses his wife. Her decision, weeks ago, to stay at Inverness took him off guard. Billy had shown up and stayed for supper. Later, she had been getting ready for bed when she announced that she couldn’t leave her new painting – it was simply going too well. She intended to remain at the cottage on her own. He picked up something in her voice – a nervous eagerness to gain his favour, as if she were afraid he might not grant it (when had he ever stood in the way of her painting?) – a certain thickening of her words, as if she were holding something back. He thought immediately of Billy – a crude reaction, he decided, and unworthy of her, of them both. Yet waking in the night, he finds himself returning to Billy obsessively – to the Toronto hotel room where they confronted each other ten years before, after hearing they’d lost the claim. Billy sitting on the edge of his bed while he paced the fading carpet, arguing that they should appeal. Billy hadn’t seemed to be listening, but sat in silence, rigid as wood, and it was only some minutes after Richard finished that he began to speak. He had attacked Richard’s handling of the case, accusing him of going maverick, of ignoring their agreed-upon tactics. But he had said worse, much worse. Richard can’t shake it from his thoughts. He finds himself back in that tawdry room, compulsively speaking the words he was unable to speak at the time: piling up his arguments, point by unassailable point. But it is never enough.

It galls him that Billy and Ann are both at Nigushi. It’s true that Pine Island and Inverness are miles apart. But
seen from the vantage point of Black Falls, a ninety-minute drive to the southwest, that distance shrinks to almost nothing.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Paisley sits behind the glass-topped kitchen table, with her thick shanks braced under the lap of her patterned dress and the pages of the
Black Falls Sentinel
spread before her. Richard makes dutiful small talk while she waits to be picked up by her husband. No, Ann hasn’t phoned, she tells him. He pours a Scotch and calls hello into the family room, where Rowan is watching TV. He’d rather join his son, but Mrs. Paisley is tapping her finger on the paper.

Someone from Pine Island has been convicted of a stabbing in a downtown bar, apparently. “So
terrible
,” she croons. “These people.”

“Well.” Richard swirls his Scotch. He knows it’s pointless to argue with her. “It’s only a chance that he’s native.”

For a second or two she stares at him from behind her bifocals.

“I’m afraid to go shopping. I’ve got nothing against them. But we can’t have them just lying around.”

“I really don’t think they’re any danger to you,” Richard murmurs, glancing at the clock.

At last he can sprawl beside Rowan. It is a good moment – the best of the day – to lounge beside his son with his
Scotch as two guys with sticks wearing white pyjamas whack the hell out of each other.

“So how’d it go today?”

“Fine.”

“How’s the backwards skating?”

For a long moment Rowan simply looks at him. There is a sweetness in his face, a wondering openness that recalls his mother’s more reflective moods. Reaching out, Richard squeezes the boy’s knee in its faded jeans.

The white pyjamas continue their battling. It’s a collage of footage from various matches, held together with the dubious bonding agent of disco music.

“When is Mom coming home?”

“Well, like I said, after this weekend – we’ve got a big dinner this weekend. I don’t know if she’ll come back on Monday with me or stay up for a few more days. She’s got a painting going.”

“I don’t want to go to the Ducettes’.”

“You wanted to before,” Richard says, smiling encouragingly.

“I
said
I don’t want to.”

“Rowan, listen –”

“Really, I don’t!”

Rowan’s tears astonish him. They seem to astonish Rowan too. He sniffs and turns back abruptly to the TV. “Let’s turn this thing down,” Richard says. Finding the remote, he kills the sound. “Now, are you listening? You know you had a good time at the Ducettes’ before. We had trouble getting you away.”

“I want to be with you and Mom.”

“It’s just two nights, Row. We have people coming, for my business. It’ll be boring, I can guarantee,” Richard says, speaking as calmly as he can. “Remember, you
asked
to go to the Ducettes’. They’re making special plans. You’re going to the water slides.” Rowan is watching the screen with his jaw thrust out – that, too, like his mother. “You
love
the water slides. Rowan, buddy, look at me –”

O
n the smooth rock shores of a bay not far from his house, their gold-brown bodies stand in the late-afternoon sun or cannonball into water crosshatched by their play. He listens to their cries, their watery explosions, as he works around the house. Their existence seems to him provisional, like the light that glows on their skin and gives the lake its steely sheen. When a day goes by without their appearing, he worries they have returned to the clearing. Yet the light keeps coming back. And the boys come back to the rock.

Since he surprised them that afternoon, they have avoided him: stepping off the path at his approach, falling silent as he goes by, unresponsive to his greetings. It is
clear they remember how he had laid into them. He half-regrets it now. He should put them out of his mind. What good can he do? But he wakes thinking of them in the morning. At night, sitting out on his step, he listens to them laughing as they chase each other in the dark, and for a time all seems normal, and the hope rises that they have turned their backs on the gas.

But he cannot tell for certain. He can only see what he can see. That cut over George Shewaybick’s eye, glimpsed across a pile of boxes in the co-op – where did that come from? What are those boys carrying in that rolled blanket? Yvonne has given him names, bits of information, and soon he can fit each boy into the web of Island families, reading their parents and grandparents in the turn of a mouth, the darting of a glance. For they are aware of him, no doubt of that. At a distance, a few of them stand watching him across the rock, as a group of animals will watch in the stillness before flight.

Sometimes he sees girls among them – a promising sign, for he believes the girls are a good influence. In some ways, they have it worse – they have us to deal with – and yet (he’s noticed it at Yvonne’s) they have more maturity, more calm.

Among the boys, only Lance Cormier acknowledges him openly. He will sit on Billy’s step and drink chocolate milk: a bright, eager little fellow with a ready laugh, perhaps a bit too ready.

Linda Cormier had been in her nightgown when Billy arrived with her son. Holes in the interior walls – the
wallboard punched right through – a stench of shit and Linda, smelling of booze, chastising the boy for upsetting her. Lance had clung to him, and in the end, with his own past waking, Billy had brought him to Yvonne’s.

Despite what Yvonne said about the clear-cuts, he keeps thinking of taking Jimmy to the cabin on Silver Lake. Just being in the bush can put a person right. He has seen it many times.

One night he’s at his sister’s when Jimmy appears. “Come and sit down!” his mother says. “We’re hearing about Mardi Gras.” The boy has stopped inside the door. “Go on,” Yvonne urges Billy. “The girl in the cat suit!” Brenda is there too, playing on the floor; and Eddie, sitting across the table with sawdust in his hair from his job in Black Falls. Billy goes on with his New Orleans story: the party, the girl in the cat suit, the men in the room upstairs. He does not look at Jimmy again, but his attention tends toward the door where the boy hovers. The story is for his nephew now.

Yvonne laughs. Eddie smiles. Brenda bangs a plastic baseball bat on the floor. And still, by the door, the boy waits with his head down, hair hanging past his face, as if he were more interested in his shoes.

Billy has never put so much into a story. The girl in the cat suit. The men in the room upstairs. The man with the gun. Yvonne is roaring. By the door (he only dares look once), Jimmy is frowning into space, his eye, the only one visible past the wing of his hair, fiercely bright.

Sometimes Billy has coaxed a chickadee to take food from his hand. The crimp of its claws; the thrill of its tiny, pulsing life. Jimmy’s presence is like that: a wrong move, or even the thought of one, and he will vanish.

Finishing his story, he begins another. His sister is soon laughing again – calling him her bad little brother. With exaggerated casualness, almost like someone asleep, Jimmy comes to the table, draws out a chair, and sits.

Yvonne tells stories from their childhood – the good ones involving a joke, or a piece of luck so outrageous you had to suspect the little people. The talk drifts to more distant times. That famine spring. The year the lakes were overrun with beaver. Now and then they fall silent, as the spaciousness of the country enters the room; the silences of winters past.

Billy tells a story of ice-fishing up at Silver Lake. He forgets even Jimmy as he talks – even though he is telling it for him: to show him another life. When he rediscovers the boy, he has pushed back his hair behind both ears and is watching him.

Two days later, he is outside his house working on his motor when Jimmy shows up. Alert, Billy goes on fiddling.

“This gas feed,” he says, after a while. “Dead worm’s got more appetite.”

The boy watches intently. Sometimes with both eyes, sometimes only with one, as his hair falls back down. “Been thinking,” Billy says, and has the sense of approaching a precipice. “Maybe you’d like to go up to Silver some time: see the cabin. Might be in rough shape, but…”

Jimmy says nothing. Billy works at a nut with a wrench; at last Jimmy’s foggy adolescent’s voice comes. “Mom says it’s wrecked.”

“Well.” He twists the nut. “We could fix her up, if she needs it.” He grasps the nut with his fingers. “Anyways, we could take a tent. Do some fishing. Maybe get us a moose.”