Anna From Away (29 page)

“Oh? I’d love to hear what they’d be.”

“Why are you so cool to me?” Anna had to ask even though she knew the answer, she’d face it however she could.

Breagh set aside her sewing. She stood up, tall and lovely in a dark green gypsy blouse of soft cotton, cinched with a wide black belt, its silver buckle incised with a Celtic horse, her full skirt crimson, its hem just above high black boots. Anna had missed the sight of her on those wet, grey days, the energy in that absurdly lovely hair: there was nothing passive or complacent about her beauty, she made no great thing of it, used no makeup but touches of mascara that startled the green of her eyes.

“Livingstone told me about it, about you and him.”

“Oh.” There was an empty chair near her and Anna sat down slowly. A door in the rear said Private, and tacked underneath were two child’s drawings, one a light blue fish possibly, dolphin-like, in a watercolour wash, the other on orange paper, black, frantic figures too small to decipher. “It’s not as if he knows that much to tell. About
me,
I mean.”

“He wasn’t making it up, was he? Your hot night?”

“What in God’s name made him tell you?”

“He was drinking. That helped, that and your drawing of me. Why did you give that to him? It was supposed to be mine, and it’s on his damn bedroom wall, so he says.”

“I didn’t, I wouldn’t. He must have taken it, Breagh, when I wasn’t home. It’s been missing. I didn’t know where it went. And I never invited him to my house.”

“You must have had it out in plain sight?”

“No, no. It was under a table, I was touching it up to give you. He might have been looking for something else.…”

“Like what?”

“Drugs maybe …”

“Oh, go ‘way! In your
house?
He’s got his own contacts, believe me, unless you’ve been up to something else I don’t know about.”

“I’m just guessing, Breagh. He does have a history of just wandering in, doesn’t he?”

“Billy, more likely. Now I’m up on his wall for his buddies to leer at.”

“Is that why he did it?”

“A little blackmail in it, maybe. Well, I know you’re not lesbians, he says to me, you two. I says, what the hell are you talking about? I mean, he says, I’ve had you, and I’ve had her. Is that so? I says, tell me more, I’m dying. He starts in, I don’t know if it’s all true, he likes stories.”

“It just happened, that’s all. Once. Not planned or calculated, not on my part. He stopped by on his own, that Saturday night. We had some wine, a little pot … what can I say.”

“Not much, girl. Not now.” Breagh shuffled the clothes on a rack, talking over her shoulder. “Just once? Doesn’t sound like Liv. Sorry.”

“A long time afterward, we talked, nothing more. He seemed more interested in what he could see of the shoreline.” Anna looked past Breagh through a back window where, on the far horizon, a container ship, boxy and dull, seemed immobile.

“Oh, I could see it coming,” Breagh said. “He gets curious about a woman, he used to say, and he has to find out what she tastes like.”

“He said that to
please
you?”

“He was talking about me at the time. That’s what I thought.”

“Would you have done different than I did, Breagh? If he’d showed up at your door on a Saturday night carrying wine? Be honest.”

“Honest? Sure, maybe not, if I didn’t know him better. But that’s not the point, and you know it.”

“It wasn’t an affair, Breagh.”

“Good for you.”

“Not really. I had no designs on him, believe me.”

“I thought you were straight up.”

“Older? Sensible? Like a schoolteacher’s shoes?”

“Just different. Someone I could trust, if it came to that. Jesus, Anna. You fairly jumped in bed with him.”

“That’s his version? Not that mine would make any difference. I’m sorry, I wish it had never happened.” That was not entirely true, but true enough to say it: she regretted the consequences, not, even now, the evening itself. Trust. Oh, that hurt. This was not what she’d hoped to be talking about on this particular afternoon, here by the sea. Breagh’s disgust with her was disheartening, isolating. How lovely it would have been to tell her everything about the bale of weed, as she had about falling into the winter pond, every detail of its appearance, what had happened since, to find humour in it, to listen to how Breagh, as a woman from here, would respond to what Anna had done, and not done, she would have sheltered in her judgment, advice, whether or not she agreed with it. She felt older, trapped, unlikely now to salvage anything good.“You heard about Connie?” Anna said.

“Molly phoned. And Murdock, later. Connie, poor devil. Bound for a bad end, that fella. Liv gave him work, pocket money. He was never a criminal or anything like that. Murdock asked me then if Livingstone ever came to your house. Why? I said. So I can warn her about him, he says. He might be foolish sometimes, but he’s not dangerous, I told him, and you might want to warn
him
while you’re at it.”

“I didn’t think I was dangerous. I should feel good about that, but I don’t. That’s a lovely pendant you’re wearing.”

Distracted, Breagh touched the chunk of amber that hung from a gold chain. “Murdock. His girlfriend’s. There’s an insect in it.”

“You didn’t tell him about …?”

“I came close, yes I did. I know you like him.”

“Don’t you?”

“Of course! Oh, hell!”

Breagh moved to a window, raised it high and stood in its wind pushing her hands through her hair. The ocean beyond was broad and grey and restless. Below her, a weed-ridden playground held a little red swing. “If Liv told me about you,” she said, “what’s he told others about
me?
I hate that.”

“Some men will do that. They enjoy it.”

“Women don’t? He seemed angry with you. Been edgy anyway since a while, lean on him a little and he flies off.”

“Something’s been going on at Cape Seal, Breagh. Connie was tied up in it some way, I don’t know. Maybe smuggling, that boat he and Billy …” Anna wanted an opening to spin it all out, but she couldn’t make one, it seemed wearisome, overcoming Breagh’s hostility, getting past her anger. “Do you love him?”

“I’m not
through
with him. Okay? Maybe I should be, but I’m not.”

“Yes. I know how that goes. You dated a college professor, Murdock said.”

“We’re friends. So far. Nice to talk with a man about something different.”

“Murdock says Livingstone’s desk is finished. You expecting him here?”

“His
desk?
I know a man who’d get more use out of that.” Breagh faced the window, hands on her hips. “I don’t know what to expect.” She lowered the window to her waist and turned around. “What did you mean, smuggling? Smuggling what?”

“I guess dope. Somebody landed it in MacDermid’s Cove, Murdock thinks. Livingstone might have been in on it somehow, he said. From his boat.”

“You’re not just saying that to …?”

“Talk to Murdock, Breagh, I don’t know.”

Breagh sat down and shoved her sewing aside. “Jesus. It’s not like he’s above it or anything. Foolishness. Who knows about this?”

“At the Cape? Maybe no one else. Not the Mounties at least, but they’re looking into Connie’s death, looking for a car that might’ve hit him. Murdock suspects the smuggling, but there’s no evidence left, in the cove. Anywhere. But …”

“But what?”

“The smugglers might’ve lost cargo, Murdock says, overboard. Billy, I think, believes that I found some, that it washed up on my beach. Where he got that idea I couldn’t tell you.”

“He said that to you?”

“He implied it. I can fill in the blanks. Some odd things have happened around my house. I’m not sure who it is.”

“Them and that damned boat … Billy, worthless bugger that he is. God, they had me keeping an eye out, eh? I didn’t know, I didn’t much care at the time what he was up to. Poaching a few lobsters, I thought. I’ll see him again, he’ll be by, sooner or later. We’ll talk. Yes.”

“Please don’t let on I’m the one who told you. I didn’t want to pull you into this anyway.”

“Oh, I was pulled in a long time ago, I think. It explains a few things.”

“I suppose I should get back, Breagh. Murdock’s … I should give him a hand.” Anna stood up, fingering a scarf she would have bought. “I really miss seeing you and Lorna,” she said. “A lot. I guess I’m an evil influence now.”

“We’re not talking about evil, Anna, nothing grand as all that. Garden variety stuff. Loyalty.” She sat down at the table. “Lorna thought Liv was the greatest thing since candy, he’s got a way with kids. Funny, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” Breagh turned back to her stitching.

Anna stepped outside and waited on the small porch hoping she might catch Lorna coming back. She could feel Breagh in the room behind her, aware that this was what a mother might do, fret and wait. But the little girl did not show up, and when a car with Alberta plates pulled into a parking space, she left.

M
URDOCK DID NOT WANT
his grandmother’s house broken into, by anyone. He parked underneath the poplar tree and got out.

A sculpture sat out in the front yard, metal in angles of anger or confusion, it seemed to him, rusted scraps Anna epoxied together. A long barn-door hinge and pin, iron from a buggy frame, a small plow blade, wheel spokes, a copper scuttle handle, other strange bits that had caught her eye. They must have meant something to her that he could not see, could not grasp. I’ll show you how to weld if you like, he’d told her, you can do bigger pieces. She was keen, and he to teach her, but then the storm, and that bundle of trouble.

Murdock scanned the lawn Willard had mown out of the field thick with goldenrod and fading daisies and blue asters mixed with the last of the old timothy and browntop, its purplish heads shining with moisture, all sweeping down through Queen Anne’s lace to the pond silvery in the rainy light, the bar of stony sand diking it from the sea and its darker, moving water: no one there. Nor on the grass ground, as they used to call it, the flat field behind the point, cleared in his youth of flotsam and stones, where men would knock together on a weekend a wooden platform and people would dance the nails out of her. His feet and Connie’s feet had thumped those boards, round dancing or square dancing, they had bonfires and there were good fiddlers up and down the Island, and in the wee dark hours men step-danced in the headlights of the last car until the lights went yellow and it had to be pushed to get it a start home. They’d invited girls into their arms, a stammer didn’t hold Connie back, not then, he was a handsome boy, and how many words anyway did it take to get a girl out on the floor with you? And the ones who drank, you’d slip away later into the trees with, back and forth for swigs of liquor, whether the girl stayed with you or not. A beginning, to what they never knew, but for Connie, and anyone like him, he was choosing the partner he’d always be faithful to: a bottle in his pocket or behind his belt. That was when of course their people were here in numbers, and they all had a stake in each other’s lives, you knew everyone from the Cape to the highway—Careys and Stewarts and Gunns and Dunlops and MacNeils and Drohans and MacKenzies—no one broke into your home, the doors unlocked anyway, and no strangers took over a house and led a secret life there, and no man, not even an alcoholic on his last legs, would be cut down on the road and left there.

Anna was right, he tried the back door and it gave to his shoulder, the latch plate tore easily out of the wood. Granny’s house. How many repairs had he done for her in her later years?

Tense about Anna’s privacy, he stepped quietly through the kitchen, struck by her things. He stomped his foot and felt the hollowness under the rug. Was Granny’s churn still in the cellar? Used to be. A vase-like crock, and the wooden stopper and the dasher’s handle running up through the small hole in it, she working up and down the plunger with its wooden disk, gazing out the window, thinking of something different in the middle of a dull task, her iron-grey hair falling into wisps, and just before the thick cream turned to butter, she’d give him a glass of it with a big spoonful of sugar.He turned a few pages in the book she had been reading, not noticing the words, they didn’t matter. She’d tidied nothing today, left everything as it was, too much of her lay carelessly about, for anyone’s eyes. Yet as he walked the rooms downstairs he felt a surprising tenderness toward her: something of herself she’d always kept out of sight, and, whatever it was, here he was protecting it.

He could carry the bale out the front door, hide it in his van. Up the mountain a ways he knew a small lake that would hold it until it rot. Not as risky as the sea, and it would be done with.

He slid his palm along the banister as he climbed, its maple oiled smooth by many hands, his great-grandfather had made it, and the newel post and balustrades. On the landing wall the old wood-framed photo of that man still hung—chin-whiskered, in a high-lapelled black coat, but if you looked closely, his eyes, pale and gentle, belied the severe gaze Murdock had avoided as a boy. He paused at her bedroom door: sheets spilling, her bed gaping with window light, a pillow crushed on the floor. He’d forgotten how it felt to be immersed in the intimacy of a woman’s bedroom, of her scents, the hints of her tastes and habits, the clothes she wore, the objects she chose to surround her as she slept. Rosaire too had been slow to make a sprawling bed, Oh, it just speaks of the night before, she said, I like that. Last night had been hot. Upstairs here it was always hot in high summer, hard to sleep sometimes. He used to lie in that little bedroom, the raised window bereft of air, and kill the big, slow flies on the ceiling with a long rubber band, his grandmother scolded him for the dark spots, threatening to make him scrub them clean, but she never did, she was soft with him, he would be, after all, the last man home and she loved him. I’ll bake you some raisin bannock, will I, darlin’? Will we walk you down for a swim, dear? Where had that feeling gone, of being adored and tended to? What a place to hide, what warmth, what comfort, and he could never have it again, from anyone—a love without responsibility, without debt. He had given back to her what he wished, nothing more was asked of him but to return her affection.… At some moment near the last, he had squeezed Rosaire’s wrist, harder than he should have, he was trying to keep her from spinning dizzily away from him, he’d never have bruised her but now he wanted to see blood marks, hear her say, No, no, that hurts. But instead he touched his lips to her hand, to its dry, frightening coolness.