The Retreat (11 page)

The next morning, at breakfast, her mother sat at the far end of the table, close to the Doctor, with Fish at her side. Her mother cut up Fish’s eggs with a fork and leaned into him, showing him the utmost care. Lizzy ate quickly and then walked out, meeting her father at the doorway as he was entering. He said good morning to her, and though she responded, she did so grudgingly, feeling resentment at his ignorance.

Later, as she sat unhappily on the porch of her cabin, she noticed Raymond’s pickup parked near the Hall. She watched for him, and when he didn’t appear she walked up towards the
kitchen and just as she was about to go in, the screen door swung open and he was there. He stopped and then his mouth lifted slightly on one side and he said, “Lizzy.”

His voice, and the way he said her name so lightly, opened something in her and she said that Fish had nearly drowned the day before, down by the pond, and that everyone was blaming her and maybe it was true that it was her fault. She stopped, looked at Raymond, and said, “Why are you smiling like that?”

“
Is
he dead?” Raymond asked.

“No.”

“So, you saved him. Good for you. If
I
were drowning I’d want you close by.”

As Raymond walked past her towards the pickup, she followed him and said, “Where you going?”

“The golf course. Work.”

“I had fun. Up at your place.”

He nodded. “It was good.” Then he said that Nelson sometimes said the wrong thing. He could be an asshole.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t think so.” She leaned towards him and then took a step back. “We could maybe see each other again. With or without Fish. He doesn’t
have
to come along. You know?”

Raymond had propped himself against the pickup. One leg bent, boot planted against the door. He studied Lizzy and said that she probably had parents who didn’t want her being seen with someone like him.

“Are you dangerous?” she said, and made a fist and pushed it against his stomach, not hard, but enough to feel the coil of
his body, his solid mass. She laughed, as if to hide her own surprise at this sudden boldness.

He said that he wasn’t, actually. Dangerous. He reached up a hand as if he wanted to touch her shoulder, her arm, or maybe her hip. Then his hand fell and he nodded and climbed into his pickup, waving to her as he backed up. She stood motionless, thinking about how close he’d been to touching her.

All that afternoon, she took care of Fish. Her father had taken her mother to the hospital in the late morning to have a smaller cast put on. Lizzy had seen them leave, her mother talking and laughing in the front seat, as if Lizzy’s words of the night before, and the meaning behind those words, had not affected her. There was a brief thunderstorm in the afternoon, during which Fish napped on Lizzy’s bed, his arms thrown back over his head, his brow wet with sweat. William and Everett had found an old Monopoly game and were playing in the Hall. Everett had seemed happy and for this she was grateful.

The Molls had left that day, early, before anyone else was awake, and later in the morning, Everett had told Lizzy, when they were alone on the sand by the pond, about his experience with Dee Dee. He said that he was to blame for the family leaving. Lizzy had not been surprised at Everett’s honesty, though she had been amazed at how clear he was in telling his story, how matter-of-fact, as if what had happened to him was not at all sexual. She thought then that he might not have understood what Dee Dee had wanted. She told him that the
Molls had left because they had not liked the Retreat. It had had nothing to do with him and Dee Dee. The morning was cool, the sky grey. Lizzy smoked and she and Everett talked as they huddled under a blanket. She had loved her brother magnificently at that moment.

Now, watching Fish sleep on the bed beside her, she heard the family car pull up, and she heard the doors slam, and then the sound of her parents walking past her cabin. They did not appear at dinner and when Fish asked for his mother, Lizzy walked him up to their parents’ cabin. She walked in without knocking. Her mother was lying on the bed, a wet towel across her forehead and eyes. Her father was sitting in a chair, leaning towards the lamp on the side table. He did not see or hear Lizzy above the sound of his own raised voice. “You’re living a pipe dream, Norma,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just hit him in the lip.”

Fish called out, “In the lip, hit him in the lip,” and he ran to his father and jumped onto his lap. “Who? Who?” he asked. Lewis placed a large finger against his son’s mouth. He looked over at Lizzy and said, “Next time, knock, all right?”

Lizzy was still standing in the doorway. She rolled her eyes and said, “Jesus Christ. Who am I? The nanny?”

Her mother groaned. With the cloth still covering her eyes, she told Lewis that she had misbehaved the day before. She’d been so frightened by the possibility that Fish might have died, that she’d blamed Lizzy. She said that she’d thrown her fear onto Lizzy. She called for Fish. “Come,” she said.

Lizzy glanced at her father, who was studying her mother with what seemed utter weakness. The argument they had
been having, the one in which he was going to hit a man, probably the Doctor, in the lip, seemed to have been forgotten. Lizzy realized that her parents, even when in conflict, were a team. And she was only their daughter. She felt acute sadness, a deep pity for herself. She left Fish with her parents and went back to her cabin and changed into jeans and a flannel shirt. William was sitting on the floor, studying his collection of glass jars, into which he had placed bugs and worms and pieces of grass and leaves. He had, in the last while, become a collector like Emma Poole, who he sometimes followed about. Lizzy had seen him talking to Emma, asking her questions, showing her his own collection of bugs. Everett was lying on his bunk, watching Lizzy. He wore shorts and his bare legs were long and bony and his feet, reflected in the mirror of the bureau, appeared oversized. He had inherited his father’s feet. They were scooped slightly, shaped like spades.

“Where you going?” Everett asked. “Can I come?”

Lizzy pulled her hair into a ponytail and shook her head. “I’m tired, Ev. Anyway, I’m going to visit a friend.” She had not known of her own intentions until she said the words. And then, after saying them, it became clear that this was what she wanted; to ride the bicycle up to the golf course and meet Raymond. She asked Everett if he was going to be okay.

“Yes,” he said. “I guess.”

She said that he should go play chess with Harris or someone. She said she wouldn’t be long.

As she rode up towards the golf course she saw cattails in the ditch, and small birds that swept along beside her, and she felt the warmth of the evening sun against her neck. Lizzy thought of her mother on the bed with the wet cloth across her forehead, her arm thrown backwards as if she were falling, and the weak defence that she had offered. Her mother only cared when something threatened to brush too close to her life and alter her happiness: Fish drowning, her husband accusing her of some betrayal, Lizzy opposing her.

The golf course wasn’t far from the Retreat, and she realized that she had never considered whether Raymond would be finished work, or whether she’d be interrupting him. He wasn’t expecting her and he hadn’t exactly invited her, and this filled her with a feeling of excitement. Maybe he would tell her to turn around and go home. A few days earlier, she’d borrowed the Retreat’s pickup and driven to town because her father wanted her to be more independent, and Everett had come along and they’d bought food at the Safeway. Later, they’d driven down to the wharf by Canadian Tire and sat on the benches close to the houseboats. A group of men had approached them. The men were drunk and one, older than the others, had asked for beer or money, or anything of value. He’d said the word
value
and Lizzy had looked up into his dark and slightly ravaged face and she’d thought of Raymond and wondered if Raymond knew this man. And then the thought had flown away.

She had been writing lately. Her letters to Cyril had become letters to herself, and when she mentioned this fact to
Harris several days ago, he had encouraged her. He offered suggestions, he told her that the material world had much to offer, and that it was dangerous to be too ephemeral or romantic. She had thought at first that he was talking about falling in love with an actual person, and then she’d understood that Harris was referring to language and words. He’d said, “Name things. If a shoelace is blue, say that it’s a blue shoelace. Or, play with some variation of it. And, of course, lie. You have to lie to make everything clearer.” She’d wondered about this and decided she didn’t have to lie. She’d written something about her mother, about the bone-coloured dress her mother liked to wear, and the buttons that were like tiny bones themselves, and about the shape of her mother’s bones within the dress. And the bone of her mother’s wrist cracking as she fell down the stairs. “How nice to imagine the snap of my mother’s ulna.”

The clubhouse was lit up and inside there were two men drinking at a small round table. Looking through the large plate-glass windows, Lizzy thought she saw Raymond, but it turned out to be another, a younger boy, who was wiping the tables. She stood alongside her bicycle, near to Raymond’s pickup, and she wondered if she had made a mistake. She was about to climb on her bike and return home when Raymond appeared. He did not seem particularly happy and so, as he approached, she said, “I shouldn’t have come.”

He looked behind him, and up at the sky, and then back at her and he said, “Did someone tell you that?”

She said, “No, but it’s strange, me standing here waiting for you. I mean, we didn’t plan this.”

Without asking, he took her bike and laid it in the back of his pickup and he got in. Tentatively, as if still expecting to be scolded, she climbed in and shut the door, which creaked and then clicked.

“Another day, another dollar,” Raymond said. He turned and said that this was a surprise. A good one though. Then he told her that he used to caddy for an older woman who wore pink skirts and now she had married a Texan and was living in the States. He said that it was funny because he knew nothing about golf. He had been a mule, that was all. He said that his brother Marcel claimed that the woman had probably liked young boys. “You know.”

The cab of the pickup, as they sat there, not moving, felt like a small room, and Lizzy felt safe as she listened to Raymond’s voice inside that room. She asked where Marcel was.

“He lives in Montreal. He calls me sometimes and lectures me on life. He’s a lawyer, so he figures that’s his job.” He said that Marcel didn’t like white people. Lizzy looked at Raymond, as if to see if this were a joke. She couldn’t tell.

The two men who’d been drinking in the clubhouse walked out onto the parking lot, their golf shoes clicking on the pavement. Raymond waited till they had left and then pulled a joint from his front pocket. “You smoke?” The match flared and revealed his right eye.

She shook her head.

“Never, or just not now?” he asked.

“I never have,” she said, and she felt embarrassed.

He held it out to her and told her to try. It was nothing, he said, just a little buzz in the brain. For floating.

She took the joint, raising it to her mouth, and then pulled and exhaled, coughing.

“Hold it as long as you can,” he said, and motioned her to go again. She did, and closed her eyes this time to concentrate, aware of expectations and the need to discover some small key that would unlock her longing. And then, as if to throw off some awkwardness, or perhaps to fill in the blank spaces she thought might exist, she began to talk. She told Raymond that she had come up to see him here because she didn’t know where else to go. She’d been angry at her mother and she didn’t want to stay back with her family and so here she was. She said that her mother never talked to her. She always talked at her, through someone else. This had always been the case.

She paused. Said, “Oh, boy. Fuck my mother.”

“Okay,” he said, and he laughed and told her that he was joking. He took tweezers from his front shirt pocket and used them to hold the last bit of joint. He said that the night before he’d gotten stoned with Nelson, and everything had been very funny. He could get Lizzy a little bag, neatly packaged, fresh. “I have a great supplier. A seventy-five-year-old man who lives in town. White. Big citizen. Used to own some fancy shop. Now he sells great shit to kids. Weird.” He pulled in smoke from the little bit of joint that was left and offered a last drag, but she waved his hand away, thinking that this was not what she had imagined. The weed was doing nothing good for her. She felt a little dizzy, but that might be her own sense of panic. Raymond had slid down in his seat so that his head was resting against the top of the seat. He had lifted his right leg and rested his boot on the dash and she realized that
he was far away. She felt disappointment. She said that she should go. She had to go. She opened her door and waited for him to stop her but he was just looking at her. Then he said that she probably wasn’t as far along as him and he could fire up another, to help her. Or, he said, they could walk out on the golf course. He liked doing that at night, when everybody was gone, and the animals came out. He said that animals were beautiful. He dropped his leg, opened the door, and said, “Let’s go.” And he walked out down the fairway, with Lizzy tentatively trailing behind him. It was fully dark now and the bushes were black and the grass at her feet was black; she could only see the sky above her, which opened up onto far too many stars, which swam and fell.

“What kind of animals?” She ran slightly to catch up to Raymond.

He lay down on the short grass of a green and told her to join him. “Don’t worry,” he said.

She laughed and said, “I’m not worried.” And saying this, she began to calm down.

They lay side by side and gazed up at the sky. Lizzy could hear Raymond breathing, and though she wanted to turn her head to look at him, she didn’t. He began to talk. He said that he had hardly known his father and that his mother had died when he was six. Ever since, his grandma had raised him. He loved his grandma. She was there, and sometimes he thought she might always be there, though he knew that that was impossible. He said that last year a cousin had told him his father was living in Winnipeg, and so he’d taken the bus to the city and looked for him. “That was the easiest part. Took me
half an hour. Asked a few people where Tom Seymour was and they led me right to a bar off of Main Street.” He said that he had lived with his father for a while then, but it was awful. His father stole from him, and he wasn’t interested in talking, and he had a girlfriend called Clara, who thought Raymond was going to take his father back home to Kenora. “So, she didn’t like me much. I lasted a few weeks and then went back to my grandma.”