Where She Has Gone (13 page)

“Are you better now?” Rita said.

“Sorry?”

“I mean, you were sick.”

“Oh, that. Yes.”

We were already at her street; in a minute more, at her house. I pulled over to the curb. A car wheeled around us with the slick, wet sound of tires against rain, then another.

“John said you were upset about your mother. About her moving away.”

“Yeah. Well. It’s no big deal.”

“Is it set then?”

“Sort of.”

“You know you can still count on me for help. You know that.”

“I know.”

In the tiny front lawns lining the street, clusters of old leaves preserved through the winter sat glistening in the rain. The weather, the leaves, the barren trees stretching out their grey limbs made it seem as if we had skipped through the seasons to autumn again. I had an image of making wine in the fall back in Mersea in this same drizzly wet under a lean-to my father had built against the kiln, cooking the pressings over a fire that we huddled around against the cold.

“I guess we made a bit of a mess of things,” I said.

“I guess.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know. There’s nothing to do.”

Twilight was coming on. In the car, darkness had settled like silt, Rita just a wash of shadow across from me.

“I don’t want you to think it’s your fault,” she said.

“It’s hard not to think that.”

“I’m not a kid. We both did what we wanted. We could look at it that way.”

“Yes.”

“Except that it was a mistake.”

We were coming to an agreement, how to see things, how to live with them. That wasn’t the difficult part after all. What was harder was the sane reasonableness of letting go, of being on the verge of grasping an unutterable thing, and passing it by.

“I was thinking of that tree near the barn at your father’s farm,” Rita said. “The mulberry tree. Is it still there?”

“I don’t know. We cut some of them down.”

“It was the one you built the treehouse in.”

“Oh. Yes. I’m not sure.”

The house had been just a crude platform of old planks where the trunk branched. On the far side of the trunk, where my father wouldn’t see them, I’d nailed a few two-by-fours as steps to allow Rita to climb up.

“We used to go up there together,” she said.

“I remember.”

“You used to tell me not to go up alone, but I did. It was so quiet there, with the leaves and that smell. That mulberry smell. I’d sit up there for hours sometimes.”

The rain was still falling. For some reason the streetlights had not yet come on; with the growing dark, it seemed the world was dissolving, slowly washing away. There was no
traffic now, just the hush of early evening with its eerie expectancy, the tiny hammering of rain.

“What made you think of that?” I said.

“I’m not sure. The rain, maybe. We sat up there when it was raining, once, the two of us. The leaves were so thick we didn’t get wet. I thought then that that was what made it a house. That we could stay dry in the rain.”

It hurt me to remember her as a child, in my charge, the ways I had held her life in my hands then, the ways I had failed her. All the things that had brought us here to where we were now, and that made being here impossible.

“I’m thinking of going away,” she said.

“Going where?”

“I don’t know. Away. For a while.”

“Because of what happened.”

“Maybe. Because of everything.”

“If you need money –”

“I can get by.”

I couldn’t read her expression in the dark.

“We could go together,” I said.

The smallest pause.

“You know we can’t do that.”

We had reached a point of stillness. Everything had been acknowledged, every possibility veered toward and passed over.

“I’m probably going with John,” she said. “Just so you know.”

“I see.”

“It’s easier that way. He was planning a trip. He asked me.”

“I suppose it’s none of my business.”

“You think it’s strange, his friendship with me.”

“I’m not one to talk,” I said.

“It’s just easier, that’s all.”

“Sure. Anyway, thanks for telling me.”

The streetlights came on. A moment later a light went on in the front room of Rita’s apartment: Elena was there, moving through the room, arranging things on her desk. In a minute she’d turn and see us sitting in my car at the front of the house, and begin to wonder.

“So is it set?” I said. “Your going away?”

“More or less.”

“When?”

“In a few weeks. After exams.”

“Does Elena know?”

“I’ll tell her. Maybe she’ll have to move to a smaller place until I get back.”

“Which is when?”

“The end of the summer, I guess.”

“It’s okay. I’ll cover the rent.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s okay.”

“Maybe she could get a roommate or something.”

“Sure.”

But we were just spinning words out now. In a moment she would have to get out of the car and there would be nothing more to say.

“It might be better if we didn’t see each other before I left,” she said.

“If that’s what you think.”

“I don’t know what I think.”

Her hand was on the seat between us, a delicate tracery of shadow and bone.

“I should probably go,” she said.

We didn’t look at each other.

“All right.”

And then she’d stepped out into the rain, crumpling slightly beneath it before disappearing through her door, no looking back.

The weather continued cold and wet. April weather, not quite free of the shackles of winter. It put me in mind of my first month in Canada, closed off in the house with Rita, just a baby then, and the cousin who’d come to look after her. At times when my father was working night shifts and slept in the day, we’d take Rita out to the porch to keep her from waking him, though the wind rattled the windows there and the cold seeped in at every crevice.

My classes had ended by now but I still had final papers to write. I kept to my apartment, trying to work though my mind was like an alien substance no longer matched to the world, that no new thought could take shape in. I’d picked up a small black-and-white TV at a yard sale down the street, and for days sat watching reruns on UHF of shows I’d seen as a child. There was an innocence in them that was like a balm, the television world they presented of hopeful suburban domesticity as if they’d preceded some global loss of faith, a great falling away that had somehow broken us.

Then one day, I got a call from Elena.

“I’d like to know what’s going on,” she said.

My heart was pounding.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Bullshit. You knew Rita was going away.”

“She mentioned it.”

“Was it supposed to be some kind of secret?”

“No.”

A pause.

“Look. I’m not sure what’s going on with you two. It’s probably none of my business. But I think I’m entitled to some information. Getting anything out of Rita these days is like pulling teeth.”

“She’s just going travelling for a while. With John.”

“And you don’t think that’s a little weird?”

“It’s what she wants to do.”

“Okay. Fine. But in the meantime, I’m a little involved in all this. Like this apartment, for one thing.”

“I told Rita I would pay her rent while she’s gone.”

“That’s not exactly how she put things to me.”

“What did she say?”

“Something about not taking money from you any more. That I should look at getting a place on my own. If that’s what you want, fine. It’s just that I’d like to know.”

“That’s not what I said. I told her I’d pay.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“Jesus. All of a sudden everything feels so fucked up. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s just this whole thing with Mom.”

“I thought you guys were all right about that.”

“Yeah, well, think about it for a minute. How would you feel if you were suddenly homeless?”

“Is she leaving you any money?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Maybe after she sells the house. Meanwhile, Rita decides this is when she has to go off and find herself.”

I was left feeling that Rita was much more concerned about her financial situation than she’d let on. The question of money seemed to put what had happened in an entirely different light: I had abused a trust. She was my ward, I was her family; there couldn’t be any emotion between us that wasn’t tinged with these half-shades of dependence and power. It had been a life’s work just to reach a point of sanity between us, of normality, and now in a matter of weeks, of days, an hour, all that had been wrecked.

I decided to send her a cheque to help tide her over, finally making it out for just over half what I had in my account. I tried to write her a letter to accompany it, but was at a loss what to say. I thought of the letters I used to write her from Africa, with their careful weighting of implication like a balance set to tip – the tension between us then, the very possibility of expression, had been all in that balancing, the constant featherweight of difference between what we said and what we held back. With that gone, there seemed no place to speak from any more except to descend into ravings, apologies, pathetic pleas. I ended by attaching only a short note:

I put the cheque in the mail and waited. The days went by and still the money sat in my account; but just after a week had
passed it was gone. I had expected some relief at this, but instead it was like having something cut out of me, a splitting down the middle of what was hers, what was mine. Another, perhaps a final link had been severed: she was on her own.

One afternoon toward the end of April I saw her from across the street at Spadina and College. We had hit another day of cold after some warmer ones, and she was dressed in her old blue parka again. When I spotted her she was just coming out of a bank at the corner; at the threshold, she looked both ways like someone in flight from a pursuer, then started south down Spadina. I followed from across the street. At Baldwin she turned into the market and I had to run to make the light. I caught sight of her turning down Kensington, then reached the corner in time to see her entering a coffee shop at the market’s edge.

It was one of the cleaner places in the market, a sort of European-style café with a large front window that allowed a clear view inside. I watched her from the vegetable store across the way. She had taken a window seat at a table for two; from her shoulder bag she pulled out a paperback, then a pack of cigarettes, something that surprised me, since I had never known her to smoke more than the occasional one she cadged from me or Elena. A waiter came for her order and returned a moment later with a coffee; and then for several minutes she sat smoking and reading. A vase on her table held a single yellow tulip that made her look as if she’d been posed for a painting: woman reading in café window.

A man in a dirty overcoat went into the café and up to Rita’s table. She smiled at him as if she knew him, exchanged a few words, handed him a cigarette from her pack. She
watched as he brought a match tremblingly to the cigarette to light it, then reached into her bag and took out some coins from a change purse to put them discreetly in his hand.

She finished her coffee and came out. At the street entrance of a second-storey pool hall on the corner, she looked nervously in each direction again, then went inside. It was another of the places where dealers hung out; sometimes acned acid-heads or dreadlocked Rastas stood at the door whispering to passersby as if not to wake some sleeping infant inside. I waited a little way down from the entrance. When Rita emerged several minutes later, her hands fisted down in the pockets of her coat, she did so swiftly and eyes forward, disappearing almost at once around the corner back in the direction of Spadina.

I followed again. It was utterly different, seeing her this way, not only because of her secrets, her delinquencies, but because I was glimpsing the space that I was not in, what in the usual course of things was always kept from me. I had the sense I was invisible, that if she turned now, as this different person she was, she’d see only a stranger’s face amongst others, and walk on. Or else being here among strangers, outside other people’s ideas of us, or our own, it would be possible for a smile to form, for a complicity to make itself manifest: something had happened between us, a devious, hoped-for, unexpected thing, we were large enough to let that be part of us. I’d go up and silently take her arm, and we’d walk on together, into the anonymous world; and we would not stop.

She returned to College Street. An eastbound streetcar was just coming along and she boarded it. I followed behind in a taxi, the driver not understanding at first but then taking on
an air of pleased collusion, as if we were playing a game. At Yonge, Rita emerged from the streetcar amidst a throng of other passengers – I thought she’d turn up the street toward John’s place, but she went into an office tower on the far corner. I followed her inside to check the building’s directory. The automobile association had its offices here, an architectural firm, several lawyers, a medical clinic. The thought formed that she might be pregnant: there would be doctors then, procedures, lies, some monstrous thing taking shape inside her. I didn’t know what would be worse for her, carrying that alone or sharing it with me, admitting the sordidness of it, the horror.

I waited. Everything had to be lived through now, every consequence. Even standing here outside this building in the cold, this crazy shadowing: it seemed part of a story already fixed, where every turning had been laid out in advance to lead exactly here, to this moment. In a minute or ten Rita would emerge and I would confront her or not, we would come to some new understanding or stay imprisoned in inchoate emotion; and at each instant it would be the story deciding, propelling us forward. Perhaps there was only this tyranny, with nothing to choose, no moment to say, We will do things differently.