The Journey Prize Stories 27 (18 page)

“You’re lucky,” I said, thinking of Michael and whatever his name was, and cast a glance in her direction. “That sort of situation doesn’t always work out for people.”

She looked as though she was about to ask me something, but then quickly faced the highway again. “Yes, darling,” she said. “I think I was lucky that way. I was loved by two very dear men in my life. And it’s a good thing to be loved. A very, very good thing indeed.”

I expected her to ask me if I was married or had someone special in my life, but when she didn’t, I knew that my father, in one of their long pre-meeting phone calls, had told her I’m gay. And I was glad she didn’t; I didn’t want to get into it. What she said instead was this: “You ever go to the theatre, darling?”

I glanced over at her. “I was supposed to see a play today, actually.”

“It’s been ages since I’ve seen a play,” she said. “Patrick always used to take me after Robert died, the two of us spending the night in Toronto. Wonderful productions we saw. I so miss that now.

“Here we are,” she said after we exited the highway and turned onto her street. “The house on the left, dear. Isn’t it lovely? Yes, Robert knew how to take care of me.”

I pulled into the driveway of a suburban white brick split-level, a house that had once been the gleaming happy home of a young family but that had slowly taken on the slightly shabby look of neglect: the lawn was crowded with dandelions, rust trailed the bottom of the eavestroughs, and the driveway was sun-cracked and warped. A widow lives here, the house seemed to be saying.

I helped Barbara out of the car and, slowly and carefully, up the three steps to the front door. “Would you like to come in, dear?” she said when she’d dug her key out of her purse. “Have a cup of tea?”

“I really should get going,” I said, anxious to be on my way.

She held her purse in both hands and looked at me fixedly. “I’m not going to call your father,” she said. “I’m going to leave the ball in his court, as they say. But it would be nice to get to know him. Y’know, go out to see movies with him, maybe go to Toronto and see something onstage, spend the night.”

You still don’t get it, I thought, do you? My father could not give her what she was looking for: she was too educated for him, too worldly, and what she was looking for, like my father’s own futile search, was some unattainable ideal, illusory and out of reach and still deeply rooted in the past. He was looking for a
hausfrau
; she was looking for Roger Moore.

“I’m sure he’ll call,” I said, knowing that he wouldn’t, and I smiled, an honest smile that came without any effort or strain because I knew it was over, that neither my father nor I would ever see her again. And I’m guessing she knew it too.

“I think I’ll sit outside for a bit,” she said, suddenly reaching for the plastic patio chair behind her. “Lovely evening. Nice weather.”

I got in the car and backed out onto the street, but when I waved, she was no longer looking in my direction but at the ill-tended rosebushes. She was already elsewhere, perhaps along the Italian coastline, decades away, alone with her memories.

As I expected, my father never ended up calling her. Or if he did, he never told me about it. But I doubt it. What I didn’t expect was the departure of the good spirits he’d been in during the week leading up to that one and only date. He became his old cantankerous self again, snapping often at the PSWs, accusing them of trying to poison him or filching money out of his wallet. Once, he even got it in his head that Lisa had called him a “stupid old man” behind his back. There were tears, apparently—Lisa’s, not my father’s—and the next time I went home the doctor decided it was time to add risperidone to the cocktail of meds he was already on.

Since the afternoon he’d stood on the porch and waved goodbye to Barbara, I assumed my father had forgotten all about her, that he was glad to be rid of her, and that as soon as she walked out the door she would have slipped into that chasm of non-memory known as dementia. But that October, while we were having Thanksgiving dinner and my father was on his second glass of wine (“C’mon, just another glass. If I can’t live it up now, when can I live it up?”), a commercial for an online travel company came on TV. Cupping his wine glass, my father turned to me and in a slightly drunken, downcast voice said, “The sun … the sea … lovely company …” And that’s when I knew she returned to his thoughts from time to time and that he regretted the outcome of that afternoon. “What more could I want?” he said.

It was just the two of us in the house at the time. A year earlier Michael had sat at this table too, the presence of a guest adding, however illusory, to the festive spirit of the day. But something momentous must have happened to Michael the afternoon he saw the play because I’ve not heard from him since, except for the card I received in the mail inviting me to his wedding, a tastefully chosen card I quickly tore up and threw out. Of course, neither my father nor I mentioned his absence. In fact, his not being there reflected an even greater emptiness in my father’s life, magnifying it to grotesque proportions: no loving wife, no daughter-in-law, no multitude of grandchildren, not at all how my father imagined his last few years would turn out. We were just two aging men alone together, eating turkey and watching TV.

And yet I think about it occasionally, the mistaken sense of satisfaction I felt that warm June evening when I got back to Toronto and called up my father, thinking this intruder in our lives had left for good and we could happily carry on as before.

“What’s she going to do for me?” my father grumbled into the phone. “You think she’s going to cook and clean? Oh no, she’s not going to do that. And what’s she thinking? That I’m made of money? Going on cruises and whatnot … Silly woman. No,” he said. “No, she’s not for me.
She’s
the one who needs help.
She’s
the one who needs someone. Not me.”

He carried on in this way, and I believed every word of it.

T
he girl and the boy speed farther and farther away from Piacenza, where they should have detrained. The girl’s perched on the edge of her seat, rocking back and forth slightly as she looks out the window at the blurred landscape painted with the burnt umber sunrise. The boy is completely silent, clutching his stomach as if his chronic, anxiety-induced cramps are gnawing away at him. He’s never worked on a farm before. On top of that, they both dread being late to meet Margaret. She hired them on faith, without even meeting them. They’ve also put a lot of faith in her by buying the ticket to Alessandro with the last of their money. But Margaret doesn’t know it counts for anything because she doesn’t know how desperate they are.

“Do you think there’ll be another train?” the girl asks.

“Yes, of course,” says the boy.

“What if it doesn’t leave until tonight? Or tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” the boy says. He’s looking at the floor, as
if the view through the window is making him nauseous. “Maybe there’s a bus.”

“How are we going to contact Margaret? She won’t know where we are—she’ll think we decided not to show up at all.”

“We’ll find a phone at the next station,” the boy says. “We’ll call her.”

“But she’ll already be waiting for us.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I am worried,” says the girl. “How are you not worried?”

The boy licks his lips, but makes no reply.

“We need this job,” the girl says. “You know how much we need it.”

As it turns out, Margaret isn’t waiting for them at the Piacenza station. When the boy telephones her at the next stop, he discovers that she hasn’t yet left her farm.

“Well, what did she say?” the girl asks, as the boy hangs up. They’re standing across the street from an old church, their backpacks slumped against the clear plastic wall of the telephone booth. Pigeons strut along the cobbles, pecking at empty shells that lie at the feet of an old man selling hazelnuts roasted on a portable barbeque.

“She said we should take the bus back to Piacenza,” the boy says. “There’s one every half hour.”

“Did she seem upset?” the girl asks. “Irritated?”

“No. She said she’s running late, too.”

They wait at the station for Margaret. The girl, sitting on her pack, her elbows on her thighs, is just beginning to reach an unbearable level of anxiety when a tiny Ape pickup truck pulls up in front of the station. The horn honks.

A tall, thin woman in her early forties climbs out of the driver’s seat. “I’m looking for a couple of Canadians who need a lift,” she calls, with an English accent.

“You’re Margaret?” the boy asks, as they shake hands. She has a strong grip; firm and dry as firewood. But her eyes are watery.

“No, no. My name’s Diane. Don’t mind me, I didn’t have enough time to change.”

She’s wearing blue overalls and tall rubber boots patterned with skulls and crossbones. Mud stains on her knees and hay in her greying blonde hair. When she picks up the girl’s bag and hauls it into the back of the Ape, it’s as if she’s slinging a bale. She hops behind the wheel.

“Are we all going to fit in there?” the boy asks.

The Ape is comically small. Usually they’re portable produce or flower shops—the girl wonders if maybe that’s why they’re called “bees.” There’s only one long, narrow seat in the cab.

“We’ll have to squeeze in, unless one of you wants to ride with the luggage,” says Diane.

All three of them pile into the tiny truck, the girl sitting in the middle with her knees pulled up and her arms crossed in front of her and resting on her lap.

“Are you Margaret’s barn manager?” the girl asks.

“Me? Oh no. I just arrived in Italy a few weeks ago. I got a flight from Heathrow to Malpensa Airport for one pound. You have to book far ahead to get a deal like that. Those flights are going to be the collapse of the airline industry.”

On the ride out into the countryside Diane tells them that she’s just finished working at a trail-riding business in the
forests of Romania. The Romanian language came very easily to her, and now she’s hoping to pick up Italian.

“That’s one of the reasons Margaret hired me,” Diane says. “She needed someone to talk to the Romanian boys she keeps hiring. They don’t speak any English at all, and very little Italian.”

“How did Margaret hire them?” asks the girl.

“Oh, the same way she found you. She casts her nets very wide.” Diane gives them a sideways glance. “Is this your first job in Europe? You look so young.”

“We’re nineteen,” says the boy. “We were backpacking, but we thought we would stop for a while and try something different.”

The girl is relieved that the boy doesn’t tell Diane they’ve been eating only apples and cheap baguettes from grocery stores for the past week, and sleeping in stations because they can’t afford hostels.

“The farm is a little slice of heaven on earth,” Diane says, “except, she’s had awful luck maintaining the place. It’s so hard to find good help, and Margaret’s not a farmer. The place is just a hobby farm, really, but she’s let it get a bit out of control. She buys up animals whenever she gets the chance—not just horses. Goats and chickens. She says she likes to have fresh eggs for her guests. But I haven’t seen any guests and I’m sick of crawling through their coop on my hands and knees.”

“Guests?” the girl asks.

“Margaret teaches horse whispering.”

“Horse whispering?” the boy asks.

“Back in the Old West there used to be cowboys who’d shut themselves up in a barn with an unbroken horse. When they
came out a few hours later, the horse would be tame. The whisperers never revealed their secrets. But when the townspeople pressed their ears against the barn doors to try and listen to what the horse whisperer was doing, all they would hear were mutterings, whisperings.” Diane drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “Margaret uses her techniques on rescue horses or horses that have never had any contact with human beings. She insists on following the tenets of her own brand of horsemanship very closely. It’s a way of life, really. As long as you listen to her—I mean, do exactly as she says, to the
letter
—you’ll be all right.”

They drive deeper and deeper into the countryside. Finally, Diane pulls the Ape up to a tall gate that is surrounded on either side by orange trees. She jumps out of the car and presses a button on the gate’s intercom.

“Hello?” says a voice on the other end. “Diane? Are the new girl and boy here?”

“They’re here, Margaret.”

“Tell them to come up to the intercom, please.”

They stand in front of the intercom. Margaret says, “Hello!

Welcome to my farm.”

She has a beautiful Italian accent. But her words are rushed, as if she’s pulled herself away from something very important.

“What a beautiful property you have,” the girl says, though they’ve yet to see beyond the gates.

“Thank you. I am so very lucky to have such a beautiful place to keep my animals. I have arranged things so that you may stay in the guest cabin. Please unpack your bags and have lunch, and then we can get started on the afternoon
chores. I have some work to do in the office, but I should be down presently.”

The gates slowly open. Diane drives the Ape through. They buzz over a dirt road that slopes downwards through the hills into a small valley where a grey stone farmhouse sits nestled in a grove of trees. The girl can see the roof of an English-style stable just beside the house.

Diana parks the Ape in front of a log cabin at the top of the valley. She gives the girl and the boy a brief tour, showing them how to work the stove, which burns bags of woodchips. There are already towels in the bathroom, and Margaret has filled the fridge and the cupboards with groceries.

“Why don’t we meet back at the barn at one-thirty or so?” Diane says. “That should give you enough time to eat something and get settled. Just come down to the gate when you’ve finished, and I’ll let you in.”

When Diane leaves, the girl and the boy search their new home.

“Look here!” the boy calls. “What the hell is this thing?”