Anna From Away (22 page)

Anna followed him out to a mud-spattered car, salt-stained and scabbed with rust, Billy at the wheel grinning.

“Hey, Anna,” he said.

“Where’s your resplendent pickup, Billy?”

“My what? Oh. Not far.” A man sat behind him, his face obscured under the long bill of a ball cap, and next to him, looking glum, was Connie in his black coat. He raised a hand to her like he did when she drove by him, then turned his face away.

She held her hair against the wind, thanked Livingstone for stopping by, but he halted and looked sharply at her before he got into the passenger side.

“You’re just a visitor here, Anna. Don’t forget that.”

“I can’t,” she said. “You keep reminding me.”

“Hang on to that sweater. I’ll be back for it.”

Billy waved amiably as he pulled away, the car bouncing on bad shocks up the driveway, out of sight through the trees.

How had she handled him? Not exactly the way she’d intended—to be cold, give him nothing, cut him, at least. But he had other things on his mind besides her. Just a visitor. And she was not a cold person, that didn’t come to her naturally, even Chet told her, Anna, you were never cold, that has nothing to do with what’s happening between me and Alicia. Well, she had kept a distance at least, salvaged some pride. That was better, had to be, him still entangled with Breagh in whatever way, and Anna didn’t want any of that for herself, whatever Breagh still had with him. Maybe one more evening alone with him sometime would have been nice. Was that terrible, to want that? One night? Risks, of course. Murdock could find out, it might get around to him. Where would that leave her in his eyes? Did the men in that car know what she was doing with Livingstone’s sweater? How much did he care about her anyway? Just sex. Why not—as long as it was mutually enjoyable, singular, private, discreet, not a pale imitation of something else. But what did she know about him? Even less than she had, it seemed. One intimate night, little more. He wasn’t fishing lobster, for her or anyone else. Sorry, Livingstone. No rags on the mailbox.

She stayed outside in the swirling, electrical air, the wind swept coolly through her clothing. She braced herself in it at the top of the path. She had taken to daily swims, unless it was storming, and now clouds blackened over the sea, whites in them like the wild, rolling eyes of horses, charged, a little mad. Tiny waves moved over the pond like echoes, its gulls were gone. The shore stones would be restless, shifting under foam. She felt tremendously alive, anonymous, given over to this weather growing huge, until stinging rain drove her indoors.

T
HAT NIGHT
the tail of a hurricane swept through, she woke in her bed to slashing, window-rattling rain. Shingles flapped away like wings. She stiffened at times under the storm’s eerie, cooling wind, wailing through the trees, not from the sound itself but the force it was announcing, a breadth of ocean so suddenly near, arriving from far away, hurling its grey and breaking weight against the land. She imagined, in the smothering dark, waves swelling from her shore, an angry spume surging over the bank and up her hill.

The storm’s thrilling racket did not unnerve her as it might have once, gasps of lightning lighting her room, sounds from old movies, from country-house terror in the rain—groaning woodwork, flailing curtains, moans in the eaves: her fear lay in her isolation, lightning-lit. She might even have turned it into fun were someone sharing it, a warm and humorous man perhaps, lying against her. At its height, she felt her way to the kitchen and picked up the telephone, just to hear that homely, levelling tone in the receiver, nothing more. But the line was only a loud silence in the windy noise. She swept a flashlight over the room, its beam glared in the rain-smeared windows. Who would she have called anyway? Breagh? Red Murdock? She didn’t need her hand held, but she’d have liked his voice. Chet? About what? That was all over. She was just picking at pieces that no longer fit. What she was in the middle of, he could never understand. Did she?

How would you like to feel? Donald John said. He was holding his glass of rum up to the big window light, sighting through the dark brown liquor.

Like a lighthouse keeper, Molly said.

Bird Island?

St. Paul ‘s.

You’re way out there, all right, girl. On St. Paul ‘s.

It’s an automatic light now. I meant the old days.

Billy Budge was a kid there. They were on their own, boy, the whole family. Burst your appendix out there, Jesus.

The little girl, they had to take her off there with a storm on, wind to kill you, and no shelter.

Oh, those rocks. St Paul’s is just bare bold cliff, the water right into the face. It’s always angry.

Hard but happy life, in some ways.

Oh, the little boy there, he had kind of a nervous breakdown, you know? They didn’t call it that but that’s what it was.

You never know what an island like that will put to you. Nothing but ocean all around you, and so near.

Some days you can forget it but not every day, every night. Surf crashing. Foghorn going. That light would tear through your dreams.

T
HE PADLOCK ON THE ROAD GATE
looked secure until Red Murdock yanked it. The shackle slipped free and dangled open from the thick chain. A corner of the brass had been dented by a hammer strike, it looked like. Beyond the gate, the soft treadway, scored with tire tracks, curved into the woods.

He drove slowly through the trees that all but hid the old house now. So much forest, silence, it had pushed out the former life here. The shutters he’d made were still in place and the grey of the spruce shingles showed through what was left of the white paint. He’d kept the roof patched but it would need a new one soon. He left his truck idling while he checked the doors. Nothing forced, he’d put in new deadbolts after a break-in that cost Donny a few family heirlooms, but they shouldn’t have been left there anyway, not in a house now so hard to see from the road. Robbie and Rowena would be saddened at that, God love them, to see their home blinded by forest, good people, they’d do anything for you, even if they did boil the same teabags over and over and not light a lamp until the room went dark. Robbie over ninety and still hauling eelgrass from the beach with his horse and cart. Worked right up to his death, a pipe in his mouth all day long till he got so he couldn’t pull it anymore and he’d ask Rowena to light it and blow the smoke in his face. He’d have killed for tobacco, old Robbie, he’d have smoked in his sleep.
And sleep he did when the rum-runners were here, Murdock’s dad included, Robbie had looked the other way when a boat slipped into his cove after dark, and the crew made sure a case of liquor found its way to his barn.

Some vehicle had come into the weeds and poplar saplings behind the house, flattening them, then continued toward the cove. Murdock followed in his truck, the late sun filtered through the closely packed trees, until he emerged into a small, grassy, treeless field. Near the short path that dropped quickly to the shore, the turf had tire gouges deep enough to hold water from a recent rain. Had to be a truck, a van or pickup, and it got good and stuck here, rim-deep before they freed it, the site congested with the busy slide of boots where they had slipped and strained pushing it out. Mud-smeared pieces of board had given purchase. Scavenged from the barn ruins and scorched with rubber burn, they lay where flung. Up above ran the border of his own field: a lip of turf and wind-beaten spruce along the cliff edge, the clay face studded with rocks waiting to work loose in storm and surf. At the foot some were scattered among boulders still carrying wet clay from the hard rain a few days ago. Murdock couldn’t have heard much from the house, if anything, not when a wind like that was on, and he slept on the west side anyway, deeply.

A night operation, whatever it was, but after several tides anything left behind had been cleansed from the rocks and sand. Not a party. No burned-out bonfire or litter, apart from cigarette butts in the grass. But there’d been action nevertheless, frantic maybe, at some point. They’d wanted to get in here, and they’d wanted like hell to get back out.

Would they return? He couldn’t think why, not after miring themselves like this, and there was more heavy weather working its way up the coast. But he would make that gate a tougher barrier, more chain, heavier padlocks. If they came here for a good time, they could just walk in, he might never know or care, but these folks were not revellers. He couldn’t keep a vigil up, he had a trestle table to finish and bookshelves for a doctor, that damned pretentious desk for Livingstone. And now that swamped skiff he’d salvaged just off his beach. He was keen to make her seaworthy.

But he’d ask Donald John and Molly to keep an eye on the road once in a while, if they’d leave their picture window for a bit, and Willard was always watching of course, suspicious of everything. But none of them, you could be sure, would be up late. Maybe Connie? No telling what end of the road he’d be on at night or what shape he’d be in. Even so, he knew what went on here and who was in it, didn’t he?

Murdock plucked out of the mud a cheap yellow flashlight.
Click.
Batteries dead. Tossed. He was too late anyway. That’s the way it was now—things passed and you didn’t notice, you didn’t see them because memories were always coming at you clear, strong, seizing your attention. Like his father’s suitcase that he had called a grip. Why? Good God, he could feel its pebbled hide, could see it lying open on the bed, Dad carefully layering in his unpressed clothes, he didn’t have many and he was going to the hospital in Halifax for an operation he never came back from. You fold a shirt like this, Murdock, he said, crossing the arms into an X like a knight’s on a tombstone, your mother showed me once, and then years later Murdock himself laying Rosaire’s clothing into her red luggage, pressing a blouse of hers to his face for a few seconds of her scent.

I
N SWIMSUIT
and sandals, a white canvas hat, Anna made her way along the high tide line where rocks had diked against the deep strip of sea oats, green as hay. Clumps of sand grass whispered like taffeta. The oats ran to the higher, darker bulrushes, vigorous as a cornfield now, their new tufts coppery, iridescent, yielding gradually to the green, velvety catkins forming beneath them. She broke one off to draw at home. A red dragonfly chased a frantic moth, its jerky, evasive flight no match for the smooth bull’s-eye strike of the dragonfly—moth in mouth. Just under the pond’s surface lurked a thick feathery plant whose touch she would not care for. A bleached tree trunk was pushed into the cattails like the keel of a boat. Beach pea was in bloom at the edge of the grasses, and a red-winged blackbird hovered over the rushes before perching on the tip of a reed, trilling its warning.

The high surf had shifted stones of all sizes, and Anna stretched her stride from one big one to the next. Everything had an edge to it today, charged somehow with what she’d found yesterday, shoved ashore in storm-swelled waves. The sea’s cleansing hiss had been a constant sound in her morning window.

She looked back at the spit near Red Murdock’s, casting a high bank shadow where spruce trees clung to the sod at dangerous angles like the masts of a careened ship. She’d hoped Murdock might be out here this morning, but the weekday beach was deserted. Good. It gave her more time. Would she tell him what she had in her kitchen? Not yet.

After he’d fixed the leaking window, he showed up to attend to a balky water pump, a loose door latch, a moody lamp socket. Anna would watch him work, asking questions so she might fix it herself the next time. He seemed to like her looking over his shoulder, appreciate that she wanted to learn such things, No reason why you can’t, he said, be glad to show you.

Would he be glad to know what she’d found after the storm, that it was likely more than innocent flotsam? Probably not. Couldn’t she put her situation within the pale of his understanding, his sympathy? Or was that only a fantasy of him, like others she’d had? She didn’t
know
him. How did you test a friendship with such a man, so with holding, so unlike the men she’d known—one reason she was attracted to him?

T
HE BEACH
of fine buff sand, cradled in the arm of the point, protected from tidal currents, was littered with rope and eelgrass and small crabs flipped on their backs, their innards plucked clean by gulls or crows. Crows, Willard told her, had keen sight because they liked to eat eyes, even humans’.

In the distance a semi truck was crossing the bridge, a pale blue box moving between girders. The night of the dog and the bridge swept into Anna’s mind sometimes, she would turn around suddenly, hot and dozy at the shore, and feel winter gust through her, a blank chill, a door flung wide and slammed shut in the same instant when that sight came back brilliantly, searingly cold and clear, the dog tumbling through the air, trying to right itself. Or at the kitchen window in a glance at the bridge’s shape inked in the mist, glimpses of the dog flickered and froze. Why did it seem worse somehow, more persistent, than her own terrifying moments plunging through the ice?

That night and its aftermath had strengthened her. She was sure of that now. She unfurled her towel on the sand, hot from the high sun, and sat, hugging her knees, absorbing the summer fullness. How long she’d waited for this, the sun in her hair, on her skin! She bought a new swimsuit in Sydney, a sleek black one-piece in a sporting goods shop, she’d lost weight in those cold weeks, so much walking, driven to get outdoors and move, some days she barely cooked. Now the swimming, the sudden chill charging into her, the long, calming strokes as the water warmed, it pumped her, cleared her mind.

But today she waited, lazy in the midday heat, somehow excited but fearful too, uncertain, pondering a next step. Cut open the plastic bale still damp on the kitchen floor? No. She’d wait.

The day felt so good, uncomplicated, sensuous, here on the sand alone, she let herself muse on Livingstone, no harm in that, a little fun, luring him back—if his mood had mellowed. She lay down and shut her eyes, smiling into the bright heat. Her Riviera. If her own alluring self were not sufficient, maybe what was now sitting in her kitchen might be. Ah, such foolishness. Were he to reappear, she could never let him know about the bale, for any reason. Murdock, on the other hand.… Why did it seem so necessary to involve him before she acted? He might, troubled by the illegality, insist immediately they turn it over to the Mounties, and she’d be on her own again, the woman from away. Yet, she
wanted
him to know, or she couldn’t move ahead.