A Good House (18 page)

She had thought she would just go out to sit in the waiting room and leaving she glanced for some reason over to the window. The girl was there again, covered and turned away and curled up.

She didn’t ask herself what she was doing, she just walked over, pulled the chair up close to the bed, and sat down. The girl looked up at her as if she had two heads, two very ugly, unwelcome heads.

“I’m on my way down to the gift shop,” she said. “Can I bring you a chocolate bar or something? A magazine? Maybe
Seventeen
?” The girl was silent, her face collapsed into a sturdy frown.

Daphne took a deep breath. “I just thought I’d like to tell you,”
she said quietly, “that I was adopted. My mother was young, like you. But I’ve had a really good life. I’ve always wished I could tell my mother that. And I’ve always wished that she had a good life too. When I think about her, that’s how I imagine her, having a good life of her own.”

The girl’s eyes were wide open now. She was looking at the high green branches of the elm just outside the window. She spoke so quietly Daphne almost missed it. “That’s nice of you to tell me,” she said.

Daphne stood and tucked the girl’s blankets up around her shoulders, a useless gesture because the girl had already pulled them up as far as they would go. But it was all she could think to do. “Sore bottom?” she asked.

“Yes,” the girl said, crying a bit now. “They keep bringing me the heat lamp and I hate it. I really hate it.”

“I’m a nurse,” Daphne said. “Maybe I can try to put a stop to the heat lamp for you.” The girl hadn’t moved but Daphne hadn’t expected her to. She ran her hand lightly over the curled-up, covered body and left.

She found the head nurse doing paperwork at the nurses’ station. By the evidence of her cap she had trained in London too, which would mean that she was a very good nurse indeed. Daphne was careful to introduce herself as the woman’s junior, to smile a quick deferential smile. On the way down the hall she had thought about asking if the girl could be moved to another floor, but with the head nurse standing there in front of her, attentive and patient but obviously busy, she decided to settle for the lesser but more probable win. Initially the discussion veered close to the abrupt, although it soon settled down to a successful resolution, Daphne’s point being that since the nurses themselves decided on heat lamp treatment, what would be the harm in no more of it for a kid who might be distraught but was likely sharp enough to know whether something was helping or hurting her.

The older, larger woman, the one in the different uniform who had been walking the girl up and down the hall, had come up to the desk and was standing there listening. She was, Daphne decided, the
homeliest woman she had ever seen. “You think she should be pampered?” she asked Daphne.

The head nurse ignored this. “I’ll have a look at her myself,” she said. “As soon as I’m finished here. If she’ll try to get up and get a move on, we can maybe put an end to the heat lamp.”

Daphne thanked her and went to sit in the waiting room for ten minutes and then she walked back down the hall to Andy’s room. The girl’s curtain was still open and she had shifted to lie on her back, with her hands out on top of her blanket. That looks like courage, Daphne thought, smiling a bit in case the girl looked her way, which she didn’t. She ducked in through Andy’s curtain.

Meagan was asleep in her mother’s arms, apparently sated, and Andy was still sitting up straight on the bed. She had been waiting for Daphne to come back through the curtain. She didn’t speak the question but mouthed it, slowly and clearly. “You’re adopted now?”

Daphne just shrugged her shoulders and reached out for Meagan. “Give her here,” she said. “I’m her perfectly healthy aunt. They can stuff their rules and regulations.”

Lifting Meagan into her forbidden arms she thought, She feels so heavy, why would a baby born early feel so surprisingly heavy?

T
HE
promised storm arrived early in the evening two days after Meagan was born, at the end of their last full day at Dunworkin.

Paul and Murray and Margaret and Sally had gone in to the hospital right after lunch, and while they were gone, Patrick and Mary came in the door from Boston, surprised that there were no cars parked out behind the cottage, surprised to find Daphne alone with the kids. They had timed their return to have one last night at the lake and to help clean the cottage properly in the morning, before the owners moved in for August. They hadn’t expected to come home to a new niece.

They’d had a quick rest upstairs and were sitting at the table drinking beer and asking Daphne about Andy and Meagan when they heard the car doors slamming shut. Sally was with Murray in his Mustang and Paul was alone in his truck. Margaret had stopped off in town to come back out with Bill and on the way they’d gone
to the drive-in beside the Casino to get fish and chips and milk-shakes for everyone.

Margaret set the table and while they ate, Patrick and Mary answered questions about their trip, about the hotels they’d stayed in, the seafood they’d eaten, the people they’d met, the traffic. When the table was cleared Bill said they should start to think about packing up because there was a storm in the air and they were likely going to lose the lights before the night was out. But they didn’t start to think about packing. They took their coffee out to the porch to wait for the storm to come up over the water.

At about seven, the temperature dropped quickly, heavy clouds gathered and settled low over the lake, and the breeze began to stiffen into wind, to skim the sand on the beach and in the grassy dunes. You could see the sand moving in the dunes, shifting itself into new patterns. And then the nature of the waves changed. They came to shore not in frothy little overlapping spills but each wave on its own, in a loud, dark rush, smacking the sand.

Margaret and Mary went upstairs to close the windows and drop the shutters in the sleeping porch and bring the bedding and mattresses inside and Bill ran down with Patrick to pull the boat farther up on shore. Paul and Murray got the tarp and the ropes from the shed and after the tarp was wrestled onto the boat, Bill walked around it and pulled hard on the ropes, double-checking their knots. He yelled to them above the wind that they had to be especially sure because this wasn’t their boat. They’d never had their own boat, although one spring the boys had built a rough raft and launched it in the creek behind the house. They’d taken it only a few miles, past the golf course and Livingston’s gully but not very far after that, not all the way over to the lake.

Aside from a bit of quick eye contact, the younger men made no response to Bill’s comment. Just in the last few years, but more and more predictably, Bill could not restrain himself, could not resist the chance to teach them a little moral lesson, as if grown and educated and capable, and as sensible as they were ever likely to be, they might suddenly begin to slide down the slippery slope to childish or criminal behaviour, to moral decline.

Daphne had joined them on the beach. She was jumping up and down on the hard wet sand, still in her bathing suit from her afternoon with the kids, wrapped in the quilt from the porch couch. She wanted someone to go walking in the storm with her. “Not very far,” she told them. “Just down to the Casino and back. Before it really gets going.”

Bill shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said. He was looking back at the cottage, at Margaret and Mary. The sleeping porch was closed up tight and they had dropped all but one of the downstairs shutters and now they stood together at the one open screen watching, waiting for the men to come in out of the storm. Soon Sally was there with Krissy squirming in her arms and Neil beside her, standing up wide-eyed on a chair to see the action.

Bill started back up with the wind behind him, pushing him. Patrick and Paul followed and Murray went to Daphne, put his arm out to direct her toward the cottage. But she ducked and pulled away. When she turned around and opened the quilt to him, he moved in beside her. “Not all the way to the Casino,” he yelled above the wind, taking some of the quilt over his shoulders.

Margaret was not surprised to see them go. She stood at the screen and watched the wind as it tried to snap the quilt away from them and then she dropped the last shutter.

Inside the cottage, although it was not yet cold, Paul was ripping and bunching newspaper for a fire. Mary suggested that they rearrange the heavy old maroon couches and the chairs into a circle around the fireplace and Patrick helped her, said they should have thought of it sooner, should have done it the first day. When they were finished, Bill sat in the corner of the smaller couch and Sally flopped down beside him, taking Krissy up onto her small lap. Neil ran across the room and started to climb the stairs, saying he wanted to have some more nap. Margaret scooped him up and cuddled him, knowing that he was both frightened of the sounds the storm made and lonely for his mother, although he wasn’t the kind of child who would want this said.

Margaret always made a point of giving generous attention to the grandchildren. She wanted these two and all the ones that followed
to get to know each other, to like each other, and later have a few memories of liking each other. She had told Bill she’d had nothing like that when she was young.

They settled in to watch Paul’s fire. The wood had been seasoned and he’d stacked it carefully, correctly. Within minutes the bottom log appeared to be entirely on fire, the flames jumping out, stretching to lick the logs above it.

The wind was fully up now. The rain was starting to come down hard on the roof over their heads and the sound of the waves was a pounding roar. Sitting watching the fire, Margaret allowed herself to wonder if Daphne and Murray had found shelter, and where. If the others shared one thought, it was that the two of them would likely come bursting through the kitchen door any minute, would likely come back laughing and drenched from their idiotic adventure.

Looking around the room, from face to face, Margaret noticed that Sally was wanting something. “What is it, babe?” she said.

Sally hugged Krissy close. “Shouldn’t we go find Daphne and Murray?” she asked.

“They’ll be all right,” Margaret said. “Don’t you worry about them. They’re somewhere.”

Satisfied with this answer, Sally turned to the fire to study the quick bursts of firelight that brightened the faces of everyone close to it and then she asked, “Shouldn’t we watch the storm?”

Margaret looked over at Bill. “All right,” he said, getting up. “But if we lift the shutters, the porch will turn into a sandbox and that means in the morning it will be Sally and Dad who wake up really early to sweep it out.” He opened the door to the porch and closed it quickly behind him and they watched him through the big front windows. As he released the hooks the force of the wind pushed the shutters against his chest, pushed them halfway up to the ceiling. After he’d got three of them fastened he turned back to look at Sally, who was standing at the window holding Krissy, nodding her head. He went over to the picnic table and gathered what was left of Margaret’s jigsaw puzzle into the box, bent to collect a few pieces from the floor. Watching him from her chair by the fire with Neil snuggled close beside her, reaching back to knock on the window
but then not knocking, Margaret said, “That doesn’t matter, Bill. My puzzle doesn’t matter.”

The sky was as black as night. Every few minutes long branching forks of lightning pierced down through the clouds to the rolling surface of the slate grey water. Sheet lightning, broad and quick and unanticipated, lit the whole grey lake. The waves had thickened, they were moving in now like liquid muscle, breaking hard and sudsy white on the dark sand, throwing up driftwood and bits of garbage and stunned minnows and coarse sawdust from the mills on the far side of the lake, the Michigan side.

The first of the thunder cracked just as Bill was coming back in from the porch with the puzzle box in his hand. The lights, two in the kitchen, one above the big oak table, and three in a floor lamp beside Patrick’s chair, flickered twice as one light and then died. Mary had been sitting holding the flashlight, ready for the darkness, and when it came she pushed the switch and pointed the cone of light at Bill as he walked back to the kitchen to get a towel to dry his head. Paul was fiddling with the transistor radio by the light of the fire, turning the dial back and forth through the static, searching for the voice of a weatherman. “They’ll have a generator at the hospital,” he said.

“They’ll have a generator for sure,” Bill called from the kitchen. “Likely several.” After he was dried off he came back to sit down again beside Sally and Krissy on the couch, put his feet up on the hassock, and locked his hands behind his head. “Let’s talk about Florida,” he said.

This is what they did when there was nothing else for them to do. They talked about going south for a winter holiday, driving down in two or three cars but staying together on the road, finding a nice stretch of ocean, renting some kind of cottage for a couple of weeks. Bill always started the talk. And they had discussed it so often and in such detail, the details always presenting some kind of problem and then one way or another getting sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction, that it seemed almost possible that one day they might actually get themselves down there. They would buy loud American bathing suits and jump ocean waves under a hot February sun and when they were tired of jumping waves, they would lie back in
black-and-white striped beach chairs, the stripes being one of Daphne’s contributions to the dream, to drink perfectly chilled glasses of cheap American gin.

A
FTER
they’d made love in the small unlocked shed behind the Casino, Murray and Daphne waited out the worst of the storm with Mary’s parents, drinking Canadian Club.

They had just started back to Dunworkin when it really broke loose. They’d thought it was likely almost over, but running down the Casino hill they could hardly see their feet in front of them and the crosswind coming off the lake soon slowed their running to a hard walk. Their hair was blown wild and plastered wet to their faces and everything that covered them, the quilt, and their clothes and skin under the quilt, was quickly, thoroughly drenched. When a flash of sheet lightning created a brief, queer daylight under the black clouds, they were able to recognize Mary’s parents’ cottage and they left the beach thinking just to take shelter under the broad eaves around at the back where they would be protected from the full fury of the wind. But Mary’s father heard them and opened the kitchen door with a flashlight in his hand. He knew them immediately and ushered them inside, his only comment a surprised but cheerful, “Good grief, Mother.”