A Map of Glass (20 page)

Annabelle took the pencil and the small sketchbook out of the pocket of her skirt, stared for a while at one blank page, and began to draw the outline of a raft from memory. She had considerable trouble with the perspective. Having never before attempted to render something so thoroughly horizontal, she was unable to make the structure look as if it were lying flat in the water. Frustrated by this, she concluded that this was not to be a day during which the making of drawings was possible, so she returned the sketchbook and the pencil to her pocket, rose to her feet, and began to walk back to the house.

Passing the quay, she noticed that several of the men were on their hands and knees testing the withes that held the timbers in place. The raft was nearing completion. Soon it would begin its journey down the river, past a scattering of villages and a quantity of islands, moving through the shallows and rapids out into the world.

A
nnabelle could recall quite vividly the March day in her twelfth year when Marie had been brought across the ice, how she had been transported and then delivered like a package during the least negotiable month when, because of rising temperatures, it was necessary for islanders to make use of a contraption – half canoe, half sleigh – in order to make the journey back and forth to the mainland. This vehicle either slid with great difficulty (pushed by its passengers) over frozen bumps and cracks, or it floated in constant slush and broken ice through frigid and partly thawed waters. The girl, who from a distance appeared to be paralyzed either by fear or by frost, sat upright in the bow, not moving when the other passengers climbed out onto the ice to push, as they made their slow progress from Kingston Harbour to the island.

Annabelle was not a pretty child, and there were moments when, despite her almost complete lack of vanity, she felt a twinge of resentment at the injustice of this arbitrary fact of nature. That March morning, looking through the watery glass of one of the parlor windows toward the partly frozen lake, however, she’d had the odd, inexplicable notion that the small, distant girl in the boat was her other, her more beautiful self being conveyed to her, and that when this girl eventually stepped into her house their two bodies would overlap and become three-dimensional like the twinned images on the photo cards she slipped into the stereoscope on Sunday afternoons. She was mad with excitement, convinced that the girl’s imminent arrival would be more of a longed-for reunion than a first encounter. She stood by the window, transfixed, as the skipper heaved the brown mail sacks onto the dock, then held out a hand to the child who had not moved one inch. The man made no effort to escort the girl, but pointed instead at the big house where Annabelle waited.

Branwell, who was then in his thirteenth year, and home for late-winter holidays, joined Annabelle at the window. As he watched the girl limp toward the house, he said disapprovingly, “She’ll never do, she’s too thin. And, look, she’s lame.”

Annabelle, who was thinking of her own damaged leg, said nothing at first, then whispered, “I think she will be beautiful.”

“Doesn’t she know that she’s supposed to come to the kitchen door?”

The girl’s pale face was visible now. She was about to climb the front steps. Branwell rapped on the glass to get her attention and Annabelle saw two startled dark eyes glance toward the window. “Next door down,” Branwell shouted with more volume than was necessary. “Not here.”

The girl looked at them for some time – long enough to cause discomfort – and the look combined curiosity and a not insignificant amount of contempt. Then, quite suddenly, she stuck out her tongue before moving toward the appropriate door. Annabelle and Branwell racketed through the intervening rooms of the house to the kitchen. They had both fallen hopelessly in love. But at that moment Annabelle was the only one of them who knew this.

Inside the kitchen Annabelle and Branwell grabbed each other’s arms and pulled at each other’s clothing, each wanting to be the one who opened the door to the stranger. When Branwell advanced, Annabelle kicked him in the left shin and he swore and lost his grip on the porcelain knob. “Damn,” he said in a tone much like his father’s, and then again when he saw that his sister was drawing the girl into the room by the sleeve of her tattered coat.

“Leave go of me,” the girl hissed. She jerked her arm out of reach, then sat on the floor and began hastily untying her boots, ignoring altogether, it would seem, the presence of the other two children in the room. Annabelle withdrew slightly and took in the girl’s costume: a soiled bonnet, worn overcoat, and grey lisle stockings with holes in the knees. Some kind of pinafore was visible where the coat fell open over one raised leg, then the other. Once the boots were off, two white hands covered the dark grey cloth on the feet. She’s not lame at all, thought Annabelle with a rush of disappointment, just frostbitten. The sodden boots lay like small dead animals near the fire. Tears of pain gleamed on the girl’s eyelashes, eyelashes that were dark and plentiful. The sight of those wonderful lashes was to be among the first of many things about Marie that Annabelle’s mind would retain indefinitely.

“Well,” said Branwell in the condescending tones of an adult, “what’s your name then, girl?”

The child sat clutching her toes. She stared at Branwell but did not answer him. Then she sniffed, looked away, and announced, “I don’t have to tell you that. I’ve only got to tell things to the Missus.” She scanned the kitchen, as if she expected to find this person hidden in a shadowed corner.

“My mother is in bed,” said Branwell truthfully. “She stays there all the time,” he added. This was somewhat of an exaggeration. Mrs. Woodman was prone to bouts of migraine – more prone in winter than in summer – and withdrew for days at a time. But in fair weather, and sometimes even in the coldest season, she would be a more or less cheerful if somewhat vague and occasional presence in the kitchen.

“She stays in bed all the time,” continued Branwell with an air of authority, “so you’ll have to wait on her and I’ll be the one telling you what to do.”

“No he won’t,” said Annabelle indignantly. “He’s good for nothing. My father says so.”

Just then, the cook, a tiny woman with a disproportionately large face marked by two fierce black eyes, entered the room. “What’s this?” she asked, surveying the still-huddled child. “Oh, yes, the girl from Orphan Island.” She shot a look in the direction of Branwell and Annabelle. “What are you two up to?” she asked and, without waiting for a reply, turned again to the recent arrival. “We don’t sit on the floor here,” she offered and then, “I expect you’re far from clean.”

“
Far
from clean,” echoed Branwell.

“No one asked for your opinion,” said the woman testily. “In fact, no one asked for you – either of you – to be in here at all. Both of you – back into the house!”

The siblings reluctantly withdrew, but not before Annabelle and the girl had exchanged a brief complicitous look.

How forbidden Marie was! Annabelle’s father had made it clear to her and to her brother that they were not to consort with this girl who was an orphan who would therefore have come from God knows where, the progeny, most likely, of a drunken lout and a shameless hussy. Furthermore, she was there to work, not to lollygag about with the likes of them. Mackenzie, the cook, who up until that time had tolerated the children’s presence in the kitchen only occasionally, now barred them completely from the premises on the grounds that they were too much of a distraction. Banishments and admonishments did nothing to dispel the air of romance and mystery that Annabelle believed was attached to the girl, and, as the days went by, she thought about little else. Often she found herself standing behind the open kitchen door, watching Marie through the space between the hinges while the girl went about her various tasks and was, more or less, bossed and pushed around by Mackenzie, who eventually softened somewhat under the influence of Marie’s stubborn pride and unquestionable beauty.

One day, while Annabelle stood in the V-shaped shadow behind the door, Marie, who was scrubbing the floor, began to crawl toward the spot with brush and suds and pail until Annabelle could see quite clearly her small, soapy knuckles and thin, damp wrists. She hunkered down and reached into her apron pocket for a pencil and one of the small pieces of butcher paper she always kept with her in case she might want to make a sketch. Squinting in the gloom, she wrote a message that told the girl to come to her room late at night for a secret that would be told.

Annabelle wondered if the girl could read, doubted, in fact, that she could, but had made the decision, nonetheless, to make this attempt to communicate with her.

At first the girl ignored the scrap of pinkish-brown paper as if its sudden appearance in her line of vision had caused her no curiosity whatsoever. Then, quite abruptly, she snatched the paper from the floor and crammed it into the pocket of her pinafore. Mackenzie said something about the fire, the oven, and then something else about the length of time it was taking Marie to finish the floor. The girl did not look up from the brush in her hands, glanced neither toward the door nor toward the cook stove, and even when Mackenzie left the room, she did not remove the paper from her pocket. Just as I thought, she can’t read, Annabelle concluded and having thus concluded did not bother to invent a secret.

Still, believing the girl to be illiterate had no diminishing effect upon her fascination, and the following day Annabelle was back at her post. She had the odd sense that her already small world had in fact shrunk, and now included only the dimensions of this triangle of shadow and the limited view that could be seen from it. A spider shared this space with her, but it didn’t disturb her at all. Branwell might have screamed and run away, but not her. She wasn’t afraid of spiders, and even had she been, there was theatre on the other side of the door crack and she was able to watch it all day long for months and months if she chose to do so. She was not required, as Branwell was, to participate in any formal kind of education because she was a girl so, even when her brother returned to school, she would be able to remain in close proximity to Marie. When she told Branwell about her luck he repeated his father’s words about the drunken lout and the shameless hussy and predicted that Annabelle would catch cooties from the girl if she didn’t keep her distance.

Her mother, though as listless and seemingly preoccupied as always, made the odd appearance. Occasionally, she would drift into the kitchen, where she would look at Marie – not with curiosity exactly – but with detached puzzlement until Mackenzie explained, for the fourth or fifth time, who Marie was and what she was doing there. Annabelle squirmed in embarrassment behind the door at these moments. What was it, she wondered with some impatience, her mother thought about all day, what made her seem so absent even when she chose to leave her room and be among them? Though Annabelle didn’t know this, the truth was that Mrs. Woodman had never successfully managed to emigrate from England in her mind, and even as she stood in these rooms and gazed out the windows of this house, a landscape of a very different kind lit her imagination. Only Branwell would listen with any interest when their mother described stone villages and picturesque fields. Annabelle had no time for this rhapsodizing about distant places, places she doubted she would ever see and knew her mother would never see again.

“The girl from Orphan Island,” Mackenzie would say, and Annabelle’s mother would reply, “Oh yes, of course,” then move vaguely around the kitchen touching a pewter jug, an earthenware bowl, as if she hoped that something in the kitchenware’s insistence on being solid might pull her back from the lost green landscapes of the past and into the overheated interiors of the present.

On one of these days, shortly after Mrs. Woodman had floated out of the kitchen to wander aimlessly through the other rooms of the house, Marie was commanded by Mackenzie to once again scrub the floor while the cook went to fetch a brisket of beef at the island’s butcher shop. What a thin back she has, thought Annabelle, looking at the nearby laboring figure. Her clothing, which was not finely tailored as Annabelle’s, fell away from her spine toward the floor and appeared to be much too big for her frame. She watched the girl’s muscles move under her cotton clothing and, as she was watching, one arm shot out from the body and shoved a familiar piece of butcher’s paper under the door. Annabelle stooped to retrieve it and, in the gloom, read her own message. Then she turned the paper over in her hands and was confronted with a one-word message:
No
.

It wasn’t as if Annabelle was unaccustomed to this word: her father often shouted it across the shipyards, or yelled it in the direction of Branwell and her when they were making demands. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen it scrawled in two large characters across various letters of request on her father’s desk. But to have the negative emerge from such a small, such a powerless source shocked her deeply and hurt her in a way she hadn’t been hurt before. What could it mean, this refusal, this annulment?

Annabelle crumpled the paper in her fist, then walked into the parlor where she stood looking out the window at late-spring snow falling on vessels that had remained useless and dry-docked all winter long. In the corner of the room the recently fed Quebec stove roared as it devoured wood. Overhead she heard Branwell’s quick steps progressing along the floorboards of the upper hall toward the back stairs, along with the clicking sounds made by the dog’s nails. Soon, from the direction of the kitchen, Annabelle could make out the sound of Branwell’s voice demanding that Skipper perform the one trick he had managed to teach him. “Roll over,” he said and, shortly after, and much to her chagrin, she heard Marie’s laughter followed by some light scolding about dog hair on the floor, and then the sound of Branwell and the dog beating a hasty retreat when Mackenzie must have been coming up the walk.

Nothing was ever going to happen to her, Annabelle suddenly knew. Plenty was going to happen to Branwell, she suspected. A great deal had undoubtedly already happened to the rejecting Marie, but she, Annabelle, was never going to be granted access to that intriguing history. She felt as if she were now and would be forever outside of everything, forced to dwell in the shadows, witnessing only a fraction of the world through a thin crack of light. With this feeling came a considerable amount of resentment.