Real Life (16 page)

“You men let him get away with it. You treated him like he was just one of the boys too. Like it didn’t matter to you one bit.” They are partway into a very bad row; Nick has sat up on
the side of the bed, ready to start shouting back. They glare at each other through the lamplight’s glow.

Seeing suddenly how he has aged in the wrinkles in his neck and the lines around his mouth, remembering him telling his own daughters they had to get an education, get away from here, Louisa’s anger slowly deserts her. She says quietly to him, “She’ll never be okay, Nick. She’s just—wrecked.”

He puts out his hand to her, she moves to sit beside him and he places his arm around her waist, pulling her against him, turning his face into her hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You know how sorry I am. I always liked Pat, I
wanted
to …” He tightens his grasp and for a long moment she leans into him, her face pressed against his work-hardened chest.

Nick gets back into bed and Louisa finishes undressing. She pulls on her nightgown and slides in beside him. In a moment, he’s snoring. Louisa lies with her eyes open in the dark, but instead of seeing Pat, she sees Stephanie, how she never smiled, never moved from her chair, how—it seems now to Louisa—she gave off a mute suffering, that surely she couldn’t have been the only one in the kitchen who felt it.

She thinks, In the morning I’ll go to the Mountie. But if the Mountie goes there and everybody finds out, as they always do, that I sent him, Rory will come gunning for me; Marina and Harry will never speak to me or Nick again for shaming them; then Nick will be furious. She moves her legs roughly under the covers and Nick turns over, mumbling.

But Stephanie’s face won’t leave her, her mind won’t stop going around and around. Finally, she decides: she’ll drive down to the Degler place herself and pay Stephanie a visit, just a visit—to see the baby, she’ll say. She’ll do it when Nick is off at the last calf sale of the season over in Victory. He doesn’t need to know. And if she gets the chance, she’ll make it clear to
Stephanie that she, Louisa, knows what’s going on. If she gets the chance, that’s what she’ll do.

As Louisa drives south down the grid toward the Deglers’ isolated farm, it’s cloudy and threatening to snow, and in the distance it’s hard to tell where land leaves off and sky begins. She’s not afraid, but nervous, her palms are damp inside her mitts and her shoulder and neck muscles tense. She keeps reminding herself that almost certainly Rory will have gone to the calf sale with all the other men, that she doesn’t have to do anything more than pay a friendly visit. But the tension doesn’t go away.

The Degler place looks deserted, there isn’t a vehicle anywhere in sight, although there are a few tracks in the snow. The old frame house, once yellow, needs paint, the bottom step on the porch is broken, and seeing all this, for a second Louisa is tempted to turn around and go back home. I’ve come all this way, she tells herself, I can’t quit now.

She gets out of her truck slowly and mounts the steps, and the blue heeler chained by the door snarls and barks. She goes into the porch, its floor has shifted so that the outer door doesn’t close any more, and knocks loudly. After a long pause, the door slowly opens a few inches and Stephanie’s face appears in the crack.

“Hi, there, Stephanie,” Louisa says. Inexplicably, at the sight of the girl she feels the tension that’s been growing in her leave, and she goes on casually, “I was just on my way down to Smith’s, thought I’d stop in and see that baby of yours.” Stephanie has the door open only about a foot, she appears frightened, but at the mention of the baby, she says hesitantly, “Hello, Louisa.” She doesn’t sound surprised to see her, she doesn’t sound anything at all. But she opens the door wide
enough for Louisa to enter the kitchen and steps back. She seems diminished, surely she’s lost weight since the night Louisa saw her at Stephanie’s parents’ ranch? There is not a touch of colour in her face. Even her lips are pale.

Louisa asks cheerily, “Rory not home?”

“He’s gone to Victory—to the calf sale,” Stephanie says. She’s holding both her hands in front of her, twisting them together nervously. She looks around her spotless, shabby kitchen, as if she can’t remember just what it is she should do now. “Would you … like some coffee?” I bet she’s not supposed to have visitors, Louisa thinks.

“Oh, okay,” she says. “I have to get on over to Lisa’s, but I guess I got time for coffee.” She wants to calm Stephanie, so that she’ll drop her guard, maybe talk to her. Louisa doesn’t know what will happen then, but she came to try to help, and she’ll stick it out until she finds a way. She sits down at the wobbly kitchen table, remarks on the weather, says she hopes prices at the sale are good, while Stephanie puts the coffee on. When it’s dripping through its filter, she asks to see the baby. Stephanie almost smiles. She goes out of the room—how quiet she is, she doesn’t make a sound—and comes back quickly with her baby, Tara is her name, in her arms.

Louisa takes the baby and coos to her, tells Stephanie how pretty she is, how she’s growing like a weed, although the little face looks pale to her. But while Stephanie pours the coffee into mugs, sets them on the table, Louisa feels her composure slipping away from her. It’s the baby’s weightlessness, the way she’s too still, too quiet, like her mother. Sweat is breaking out on her forehead; she has to duck her head so Stephanie doesn’t notice how fast she’s begun to breathe.

“I have to feed her,” Stephanie says, in that same quiet, emotionless voice, and stands. Louisa hands her the baby, she’s
gotten a grip on herself again, and Stephanie goes back to her place, sits, and begins to unbutton her neat cotton blouse so the baby can nurse.

Louisa says carefully, “Everything okay here?” Stephanie’s fingers on the blouse buttons give a little jerk.

She says quickly, “Sure, fine, everything’s fine.”

“Don’t try to kid me, Steph,” Louisa says. “I can see how things are.” Stephanie freezes, looks at Louisa with a terrorstricken expression. “He’s gone for the day, Stephanie,” she reminds her. “He can’t hear this—”

“Sometimes he comes back.” This bursts out of Stephanie in a high, breathless voice, while her eyes flit to the door and back to fix themselves on Louisa.

“If you want,” Louisa says, keeping her voice as calm as she can manage, “you can come with me right now. Just bundle up that baby and we’ll go. He’ll never know where you went.”

Now colour floods Stephanie’s pale cheeks, she’s breathing quickly, and she puts the baby up against her shoulder, hugging her, as if the child will be a shield between her and Louisa.

“I can’t just—I can’t—”

“Of course you can,” Louisa says. She’s found the right tone now, self-assured, collected, so firm as to brook no disagreement. “You don’t have to live like this. He’s got no right—”

“He’s my husband,” Stephanie whispers. She still hasn’t taken her eyes away from Louisa’s face. Louisa wants to say what she thinks of Rory, but holds it back, and just shakes her head slowly, no, as if Stephanie is, quite simply, wrong.

“Get your coat and a warm blanket for Tara and we’ll go. Go on, now.” Stephanie still stares at her, clutching her baby, but Louisa sees in the way Stephanie’s composure is going that she can win this. “Hurry, now,” she adds in a friendly way, almost conversationally. “Be quick about it.”

The girl stands clumsily, noisily, lowering her baby to the
crook of her arm—it’s then that Louisa sees the dark bruises on her neck—and whispers, “You better go, Louisa.”

Louisa stands, too, careful to move slowly. “Give me Tara. You run and get some diapers.” She reaches for the baby. “You hurry, now,” she says again.

There’s a long moment when they stare at each other mutely, Stephanie’s eyes large and glittering with something that might be the awakening of hope, Louisa trying to keep her gaze steady and confident. Then, her eyes still locked to Louisa’s, Stephanie hands her the baby.

As they go out of the house and get in the truck it’s snowing; judging by the thin drifts of snow on the hood and windshield, it must have started when Louisa went into the Degler house. She backs around and drives away, out of the yard, and at the grid, points the truck north. It occurs to Louisa that they’re leaving tracks. Never mind, by the time Rory gets back from the sale, they’ll be covered up or they’ll have blown away.

They ‘re not two miles north of the Deglers’ farm when they meet a pickup driving south fast, but the snowfall is thicker now, and with it billowing up as the vehicles meet and pass, Louisa can’t tell who the driver is. Stephanie has her face buried in her baby’s blanket, Louisa doesn’t know if crying or praying, or what. She steps on the gas, but visibility is too poor, so she drops her speed back to an even eighty klicks.

“I heard there’s a safe house over in Victory. Bars, locks, the Mounties guard it.” Louisa doesn’t know if the part about the Mounties is true, but she doesn’t care. “You’ll be safe there,” she adds. Stephanie puts a free hand up to her face, then puts it down again. She hasn’t spoken since she got into the truck.

Suddenly, it seems out of nowhere, Louisa sees a half-ton has pulled out of the curtain of falling snow and is riding their bumper. She’s about to slow and pull over so it can pass, when the driver pulls out, roars past them, then, braking, slides his
truck in front of them at an angle, cutting them off. Louisa brakes hard. Her truck fishtails on the frozen gravel, bouncing over the ruts, and jerks to a halt a foot from the half-ton’s side.

Beside her, Stephanie has begun to gulp air, letting out short screams with each breath, like a woman in labour. She’s clutching the baby so tight that the child starts to shriek too. The driver’s door of the half-ton opens and Rory Degler gets out, facing them, his left hand setting something along the top of the seat so they can see it through the back window. It’s a rifle. He passes Louisa, squeezes between her hood and his truck’s side, still facing them, goes to Stephanie’s side, and opens her door.

Stephanie has stopped screaming, but she’s shaking so hard that as she tries to step down to the road he has to grab her jacket to keep her from falling. He isn’t even looking at her; he’s looking at Louisa with his wide, light blue eyes. She stares back, fascinated; she can’t look away; she can’t tell what she feels, although she doesn’t think it’s fear—it’s something else; it’s as if in his gaze she’s encountering something fascinating, something she’s never met before.

Behind him, Stephanie has opened the door of her husband’s truck, slides the screaming baby in on the seat, stumbling twice, tries to get in, succeeds finally, and pulls the door shut. Louisa sees this out of the corner of her eye, because she can’t take her eyes from Rory’s. He stares into Louisa’s for another long minute: there is some moving darkness in his pale eyes, some blackness that she can see, and whatever it is it pulls at her insides, it both scares her and—

Abruptly, without closing her passenger door, he turns and walks away. He gets back into the driver’s seat, slams the door, guns the motor, does a series of rapid partial turns on the narrow road until his truck is facing back south, steps on the gas, his tires spewing gravel that hits Louisa’s truck with a
series of angry thuds that make her flinch, and vanishes behind her into the wall of falling snow.

Louisa sits in the truck, her hands flat on her thighs, staring through the windshield as the snow piles up on the wipers. She finds herself shaking, but she ignores this. Her mind is racing: she’ll go to the Mountie, swear Degler threatened to shoot her—but Stephanie will lie for him, what else can she do?
Now,
she’ll go to Stephanie’s parents—A huge anger is rising in her, her chest swells with rage, and for a long moment she can’t breathe.

I will kill him myself, she thinks. Shocked, she lifts her hands abruptly from her thighs, holding them in mid-air for an instant, and then sets them on the icy steering wheel.

The passenger door is still open and a thin drift of snow is settling on the seat. She slides over, brushes the snow out, and pulls the door shut, then moves back into the driver’s seat and sits there, not moving. Her rage, her astonishment, her determination—even her pity—have left her, and she is no longer trembling. It is as if for the first time in her life she’s felt the force of gravity. It has entered her through her pores, it sits like a steady rock inside her, lending her a new weightiness, a new, grave sobriety.

Her mind sweeps across the peaceful, snow-covered prairie to the deserted-looking farm and ranch houses, to the cattle and horses standing in corrals, snow building up on their backs and manes, to the homely village miles down the road full of people she’s known all her life, going about their business, as if—as if they’ve never seen, never even guessed at the existence of what she just saw in Rory Degler’s eyes.

        Today Lawrence leaves for Africa. I know he is leaving and where he is going because he told me when we had drinks together the other night in the mall near his parents’ apartment in a senior citizens’ high-rise. He had not seen his parents in a very long time and I think he does not expect to see them again in this life. He has come to say goodbye. It is too bad because they are very old and he is their only child.

Lawrence and I have been divorced for fifteen years, but even though I’ve been married to someone else for most of that time, and have children with him, I still love Lawrence.

I don’t think he loves me. It is worse than that: he loves no one. “I no longer have relationships with women,” he tells me. In that particular wording I do not read homosexuality; he is telling me he has become celibate.

I am a writer and I have been accused of merely writing autobiography in my stories, as if that were somehow easier to do than making everything up. Before I went to meet Lawrence, agitated as I was, it crossed my mind that I would find some way of writing about seeing him after so many years—the things we say to each other, what has become of us—some peripheral telling of lies maybe, or an extension of fact that will
take the encounter from the banal to the cosmic, that will find a universal chord, because that is what good writers do, the ones who know there is no difference among autobiography, biography, fiction or non-fiction, between stories and real life.