Once We Had a Country (30 page)

She climbs on top of him. Afterward, she can’t stop crying.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It was just so horrible all week.” He strokes her hair. “You think Brid heard?” He doesn’t
think so. “Is it okay, her being here? She bawled when we crossed the border.”

“Don’t worry. Only a few more days for me anyhow.”

She groans and holds him tighter. He says he wishes they’d met long ago, when he was still young. She asks him if he was being honest when he said he’d liked her even in the summer, and he says it’s the truth. Then she starts to question him about his wife. At this, he rolls to the far side of the bed, but she pursues him across it. Will Velma meet him at the airport? Will they make love the first night, or will she make him wait to pay him back for being away so long?

“Do you ask these questions to punish me?” he demands. “Or to punish yourself?”

“I don’t care what happens, I’m resigned to it,” she says. Turning onto her back, she asks, “You think Velma’s had lovers?”

There’s a flicker of impatience on his face. “Seven years for me in Canada,” he replies, “six months apart each year. Long time to be lonely.”

Maggie cogitates on these words. She tells him he should go back to the barracks, and he says he doesn’t want to.

“Go,” she insists. “Think about your beautiful wife and children.”

“Don’t say such things. You had a sad day. I want to be with you.”

“Why? What can you do?” He tries to hold her, but she shrugs him off. “You should leave. It’s good practice for later.”

He lets his head drop heavily on the pillow. “All right, if you insist—”

When he starts to get up, though, she grabs his leg.

“Wait, not yet!”

And laughing quietly, he falls back to the bed.

That night in her dreams, she’s at the Syracuse airport again, waiting for her father’s ashes to arrive. The plane lands, and with its appearance her trepidation begins to build. The aircraft taxis down the runway, stopping some distance from her, and passengers start to disembark, a line of tourists in Bermuda shorts along with soldiers in uniform. Maggie hopes that this time her father will appear among them, but there’s no sign, only a pair of men in dark suits who wait ominously by the tail. Maggie doesn’t want to be here. When she wills herself to turn, something won’t let her. She tries to scream and discovers that fear has stopped up her mouth.

A shadow falls across the ground. Someone’s standing behind her. His voice speaks into her ear.

“Who are you waiting for, little girl?”

At the moment his hand clutches her neck, she leaps awake.

All morning, Brid doesn’t leave her room. Maggie putters in the kitchen while terrible images run through her head, but she’s afraid to go upstairs and knock, fearful that Brid will sense the reason. Maggie shouldn’t have let her come. Half the time she can barely get out of bed herself; how can she be expected to look after someone else? Brid took
pills, for God’s sake. In a panic, Maggie goes upstairs and clears out the medicine cabinet.

Afterward, she stands in the hall by Brid’s room listening for signs of life. When she hears the creak of bedsprings, she decides she’s had enough. An impulse has been growing in her ever since she awoke, but until now she hasn’t been able to act. Now she goes to her bedroom and retrieves the Super 8 camera, loads it with film, and carries it into the orchard.

The weight of the strap on her shoulder feels out of sync with the season. The trees around her should be green-leaved, the air sweltering and alive with voices, but there are only dark clouds and a chill breeze promising winter. Hoses have been put away for the year, while the branches of the cherry trees are bare and pruned. The pumpkins were harvested weeks ago. A lone relic remains on the porch, skull-faced and caving in on itself, welcoming costumed kids who never came.

The camera in her hands feels alien and ill-intentioned. For whom would she be filming, anyway? Not for Fletcher. Not for any child of theirs. Not for Maggie’s father. He’ll never see this place. Her father is buried dust. He’s a roll of banknotes. Gran’s right: Maggie should have replied to his letters. She shouldn’t have let him go in the first place.

Walking up and down the orchard lanes, she looks for things to film. The ground is muddy, and George Ray has laid out planks on which to pass over the worst stretches. As she makes her way across, she thinks about her calls to him this week, the late night whispering down the line in
Gran’s kitchen. It was amazing how much solace Maggie took from hearing his voice, when two months ago they barely knew each other.

All she knows about her father’s death comes from the priest at the mission. On the phone, he told her that there’d been an opium deal with Yia Pao as the middleman, that her father had been an innocent bystander who was kidnapped when the deal went wrong. The man in the State Department who talked to Maggie after she sent them Wale’s letter was unable to confirm the existence of a man named Sal, and he didn’t put much stock in Wale’s story. He called it hearsay from a deserter.

Her father’s body was found miles from anywhere, in a region so depopulated by bombing that news of his death didn’t reach the authorities for weeks. A month had passed by the time Gran and Maggie found out. The weekend of the Labour Day party at the farm, her father was likely dead already. There was no coroner’s report or police investigation to tell them what happened for certain; death in Laos is too common for that. There has been no sign of Yia Pao, either, and no trace of the gang that kidnapped them. There’s only the priest’s account of what was discovered: her father, still warm; the infant, barely living. The priest said Maggie’s father must have escaped his captors, because how else could he have ended up with the baby in the jungle? She doesn’t know, and Wale hasn’t surfaced to tell her. No word in two months, nothing since his letter. But somehow he must have been involved in what happened. Maybe he’s too ashamed to get in touch, or maybe he’s dead and nobody will ever reveal the truth.
No one will tell her what to do with the ten thousand dollars in the statue of Saint Clare.

Maggie hasn’t put it in a bank, hasn’t spent a dime of it, just hid it in the attic and hasn’t breathed a word, not even to George Ray. She can’t go to the police, because what if they seize the money and her father intended it for a purpose? It was tempting to tell Gran, if only to disrupt all the talk of holy martyrdom, but Maggie has no desire to tarnish her father’s reputation. She wants to believe that somehow he didn’t know what was in the statue, that he was smarter than to get involved with criminals and send so much money through the mail. Except he must have known. Maybe he was in on some scheme with Yia Pao; maybe her father double-crossed him. Maybe he felt reckless and didn’t care if he was caught.

These possibilities have to be considered, because on her nightstand lies his final letter, now read over many times, damning him with its guile.
We’re all His vessels
, he wrote,
sealed up in ourselves
. A hint disguised as theology, spelling out his guilt. Did he want her to spend the money, or did he plan on coming back and claiming it? Sometimes she thinks the only fair thing would be to give it over for the care of Yia Pao’s son, but when she wrote the priest at the mission, he replied that he didn’t know where the child was, and he warned it would be foolish of her to come searching for him.

The priest’s right. What does she know of Laos? That it’s cold at night in the mountains where they found her father but tropical and humid in the valleys, hot enough for those who handle the dead to forgo embalming. Instead,
they burn bodies on pyres and send the ashes of foreigners back on planes.

If she could do so without guilt, she’d use the money to purchase the farm. There’s no other way she can afford it. Her father’s debts will gobble up the life insurance payout, even if the company makes good. They’re claiming his policy was voided when he entered a war zone. They say it was tantamount to suicide, and maybe they aren’t wrong.

She has walked half the orchard without stopping once to film. The camera’s strap digs into her shoulder. Ahead of her is the farthest corner of the farm, where the perimeter fence ends and the corrugated metal of the wrecking yard wall begins. Nothing grows along it; the soil is stained rusty orange and reeks of gasoline.

As she gets nearer, she glimpses something she has never noticed before: flashes of scarlet on the wall. Writing done with spray paint. Her first thought is that Lydia Dodd has returned to cause trouble. Then she realizes what the writing says.

In two-foot lettering are the words
DIRTY MONEY
.

They can’t be referring to what she fears. Lydia couldn’t know what’s in the statue. Maybe it’s a reference to Morgan Sugar. Maybe it’s just an obscure joke.

She starts back toward the house thinking she’ll grab a bucket of paint from the cellar. A few brushstrokes and the words will be gone. Then she won’t have to speculate with anybody about their meaning. She won’t have to imagine someone who knows about the money lurking on the farm at night, seeking to torment her with the knowledge.

Getting rid of it takes half an hour. When she’s finished, she finds Brid lying on the living room couch in her nightie, watching
Captain Kangaroo
.

“What happened to the other TV?” says Brid, pointing at the new set. It’s plain and boxy, with imitation walnut panels.

“I threw it out,” Maggie replies. “Thought I didn’t need it.” She’s distracted by the sight of Brid’s tangled hair and puffy face. Could Brid have been the one to do it, sneaking outside late at night to paint the words? Maggie can’t imagine why she would, but it seems a strange coincidence that the graffiti should appear the same night as her return. Brid doesn’t look in shape for such a venture, though. She doesn’t look much in shape for anything.

“I look bad, huh?” she says.

“No, same old you,” says Maggie. “But without the sunglasses.”

“Yeah, my eyes are better now that I’m off La Evil.”

The admission feels like an invitation to talk, but Maggie’s mind is still on the graffiti. She wants to check on the money and make sure it’s there. To do that, she needs to get Brid out of the house, and right now it doesn’t feel safe to send her someplace on her own.

When Maggie asks whether she’s hungry, Brid jumps from the couch and proclaims how thoughtless she has been. What would Maggie like? Some tea? A sandwich? It takes a moment for Maggie to accept that Brid isn’t being sarcastic.

“Really, you don’t have to,” she says, but Brid insists. Isn’t that why she came? To take care of her? Maggie
agrees to tea, though she doesn’t want it, and Brid heads for the kitchen. A few minutes later she returns, looking troubled and without any tea in evidence.

“I don’t have money,” she says. “I can’t pay for my keep.” She seems genuinely anxious, as if she might be turned out for want of funds. Surely it can’t be that heartbreaking.

“Don’t worry, stay as long as you like,” Maggie says.

“I’m sorry I left,” says Brid, bursting into tears. “I’m so sorry.” Maggie takes her hand and squeezes it. “God, I’m a disaster. I cried when we crossed the border, did you notice?” Maggie says she didn’t. “I feel terrible about your father.” Brid sniffles and collapses onto the couch. “Poor Pauline. Poor little sweetie. You must think I’m rotten. I’ve left my daughter.”

Maggie sits down beside her. “You just needed a break. She’s being looked after, isn’t she?”

“Sure,” replies Brid without conviction. “God, she’ll never forgive me. I’ve fucked her up for life.”

“She’ll be fine,” says Maggie, thinking that once Pauline is reunited with her mother, she’ll probably forget about what happened. Maybe one day it will come flooding out again in front of some encounter group.

Brid seems to have followed her own unspoken train of thought, because her head is cocked in curiosity. “You’re on the pill now? I saw the package in the medicine cabinet before you emptied it out.” She says it without any clear intimation. Still, Maggie feels herself blush.

“It keeps my period steady.” She thinks of adding that it’s a different brand than before, and that so far this one hasn’t bothered her, but she never told Brid about her
troubles with the pill in the first place. Then she thinks ahead to another night of George Ray sneaking down the hall or of her crossing the lawn to the barracks in the darkness. “Also,” she says, “George Ray and I have got involved.”

Brid’s face drops, and Maggie rebukes herself. She hasn’t told anyone; she and George Ray made an agreement. Why start with Brid, the last person who should know? She’ll feel passed over; she’ll make a scene. Maggie tries to think of an amendment to undo her mistake.
George Ray and I have got involved—with the Kiwanis Club
. No, it’s too late. Brid nods as if the news confirms something long suspected.

“His wife doesn’t know,” Maggie adds. “He’s going home in ten days. You’ll keep it quiet?”

Before Brid can respond, Elliot slinks into the room and makes a beeline for her. When she spots him coming, she looks surprised.