A Walk Through a Window (18 page)

“Yes, Nan.”

“Hm. I guess it can’t do much to protect those shins of yours. You look like you’ve been crawling through broken glass,” she said, gesturing at the scrapes on Darby’s legs.

Darby had to admit they did look pretty bad.

“It worries me more that your eyes are still so red,” Nan said. “Is your head aching again?”

“It was a bit sore today, but it’s a lot better now,” Darby said carefully. She didn’t want to lie to Nan, but there was no way she wanted to share any wacko theories at this point—or admit she’d been crying.

“I think you need a little more rest,” Nan said firmly.

“Well, I’m only planning to go to the library tomorrow. Nothing strenuous,” Darby said.

“All right,” Nan agreed reluctantly. “But only if you walk over. I want you to take a day away from riding that skateboard.”

A one-day ban? No problem. Darby could live with that.

“Okay,” she agreed, and went over to the sink to wash her hands.

The telephone rang again. Nan laughed. “My goodness. I hardly hear this thing all year, but now that you are here it seems to ring all the time.”

She picked up the phone with a jolly “Hello!” but her face fell almost immediately. “Thank you, Ernie,” she said quietly. “I’ll get my bag and meet you right out front.”

She hung up the telephone and Darby could see her trying to put on a cheerful face.

“What is it, Nan?”

“Oh, it’s just your grandfather, up to his tricks again. I thought he was having a nap upstairs, but it turns out he was taking a little trip down to Province House.”

She picked up her purse and headed for the front door.

“I’ll come too,” Darby said, and flipped off the switch on the stove burner under the potatoes.

“Thank you, dear,” Nan said. “Between the three of us, I know we’ll be able to persuade him to come home.”

It was really only a couple of blocks to get to the big government building, so Ernie had them there in a flash. “I was just circling, looking to pick up a fare,” he said to Nan, “when I saw him sitting by the cenotaph. I—I just thought it might be better if you came to get him.”

Darby hopped out of the cab with Nan as soon as Ernie pulled over at a taxi stand, and she spotted Gramps right away. He was the only person standing beside the cenotaph in boxer shorts and undershirt.

“Oh, dear,” she heard Nan say, under her breath. Darby knew this would be horrifyingly embarrassing for Nan, so she decided to put a different spin on it.

“We have pyjama day at school all the time and all the kids wear boxers,” she said to her worried grandmother. “The more colourful, the better. Besides, half the guys wear their pants so low, their boxers are hanging out anyway.”
It could have been a lot worse
, Darby thought.
Lucky he didn’t sleep naked
.

“Hi Gramps,” she said cheerfully, as she walked up to him. “Did you know that Nan’s making garlic mashed potatoes for supper?”

Nan shot Darby a grateful look and they both reached over to take one of his hands. He had been staring at the names listed under the Korean Conflict, reaching up and running his fingers over them as he read them under his breath. When Darby spoke, his eyes were cloudy
and distant, and he looked like he didn’t have a clue who she was.

But at the sight of Nan, his eyes cleared. “Just thought I’d nip down to have a peek at the boys,” he said gruffly and then caught sight of the cab. “What are you doing here, Ernie?”

Ernie slapped Gramps on the back. “Just cruising around, Vern. It’s a slow day today. How’s about you let me give you a lift home?”

“No need for that, Ernie. It’s just a block or two if we cut through the lane.”

“Darby is not feeling well,” blurted Nan, suddenly. “I think it’s better to accept Ernie’s kind offer and get her home quickly.”

Gramps bobbed his head immediately. “These young ones,” he said to Ernie as he hopped in the front seat beside him. “No stamina. Let’s get the kid home, Ern.”

He leaned over the backseat to look at them. “I hear ye’ve got garlic mash on the menu, Etta. That so?”

Nan nodded at Gramps, then turned to smile at Darby. The drive home took all of two minutes, and Nan insisted that Ernie come in and enjoy roast chicken and mashed potatoes with the family.

Crisis averted. Gramps even appeared at the dinner table with his trousers on.

“It’s lucky it’s summer,” Darby said, staring up at the indigo sky. She’d last seen a sky that colour when sailing
on a ship in a different century. The very thought made her shiver a little.

Nan and Darby were sitting on the porch after dinner. They had just waved goodbye to Ernie. Gramps was in watching the news and guarding his remote from teenage-girl invasion.

“I’m sure anyone who saw him thought he was just out walking, wearing his shorts.”

Nan arched an eyebrow at Darby. “Oh, yes. He commonly goes out in his blue-striped shorts with horses on them.”

Darby laughed a little. “Nan, you have got to get Gramps up to speed with today’s fashion. Blue stripes are
so
last year. This year everyone will only be seen in green stripes with horses.”

Nan laughed a little, too, which made Darby happy. She was more concerned about Nan at the moment than she was about Gramps. He’d be okay. For a while, anyway.

Nan sat beside Darby with her medicine-in-a-sherry-glass. She’d even broken down and let her granddaughter have a Coke.

“But the caffeine is so bad for you, dear,” she’d wailed. Darby grinned. Half the kids in her class would’ve been sneaking the sherry, for Pete’s sake.

But Nan had caved and the two of them were sitting in the screened porch so they could enjoy the night air without being eaten alive. Darby had been given official flyswatter duty, but so far they’d managed to keep them all outside the screens.

“You’re not up playing your new video game,” said Nan, sipping her sherry.

“You said I can’t drink Coke in my room,” Darby reminded her.

Nan grinned an evil little smile. “We old grannies have ways of keeping our granddaughters nearby,” she said.

Darby laughed. “I was just kidding, anyway. It was really nice of Fiona to give me that stuff. My wrists are still a little sore from playing with it so much the other day.”

She spotted a fly that had made it in past the screen and introduced it to eternity with the swatter.

“That Fiona is a lovely girl,” said Nan when Darby sat down. “I’d almost forgotten about the connection between our families.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of cool having a sort-of cousin I didn’t even know about.”

“When family names change it makes it hard to keep track.” Nan suddenly looked at her granddaughter sharply. “You do know my maiden name, don’t you dear?”

Talk about putting a person on the spot. Darby thought fast.

“Um—is it Urquhart?” she said, flailing wildly.

Nan laughed. “Nice guess, but that’s your grandfather’s family, dear. No—it’s Darby.”

Her granddaughter looked at her blankly. “Darby? Your name was Etta Darby?”

“It still is,” she said. “Or rather, it is Etta Darby Christopher. I am the youngest of three girls, my dear, and by the time I was born, they couldn’t be bothered to think up a middle name for me. So when I married, I kept
my maiden name as my middle name. And when you were born, I think your mother liked the sound of it, and here you are.”

“Wow,” Darby said, and she meant it. “I’m kinda mad my mom and dad didn’t tell me this before. I mean, it’s so cool we share a name.”

“It’s Irish,” said Nan, draining her glass. “My family, and Fiona’s, of course, came to Canada after the great famine. My great-grandmother arrived on a coffin ship. Her name was Alice.”

Darby knocked her Coke bottle over. “Alice? You’re kidding me—her name was really Alice?”

“Let me just get a cloth for that, dear,” Nan said. “I think I may have a refill, anyway.” She opened the door and turned back absently. “You know, I’ve always loved the name Alice.”

Darby’s head practically exploded right on the spot. Could it be the same Alice? It was a common name. Every neuron in her brain began leaping fast and fierce, but before she could say a word, she noticed Nan’s eyes had filled with tears.

“I’m sorry, Nan. It’s only a couple of drops,” Darby said, wiping up any evidence with the paper napkin Nan had handed her with the drink.

“Oh, it’s not the spill, dear. Accidents happen in the best of regulated families.” She smiled a little. “I was just remembering Alice.”

As more evidence of how stunned Darby was feeling, she asked: “Did she die?”

Nan laughed a little at that brilliant remark. “Well, yes, she did die eventually, but not until she was an old
lady. She was the only one in her family to survive the crossing from Ireland. I believe her brother made it over as well, but he died of tuberculosis shortly after they arrived. No, Alice lived a long life. She eventually married into another Irish family that was already living here on the Island. There were many Irish immigrants who came to Canada long before the great famine, but her story is as far back as I know within my own family heritage.”

“Maybe I can find some records at the library tomorrow,” Darby said quickly. “It would probably help if you could remember the name of the ship Alice came on …”

“I always loved the name Alice,” Nan said wistfully. “I once—”

“Etta!” Gramps was bellowing from the living room. “Etta, the goddamned battery has fallen out of this remote and rolled under the chesterfield.”

Nan slipped inside the house without another word.

A billion questions and not an answer to be had. It was as bad as talking with Gabe.

Darby slipped out the screen door, careful not to let a single member of the insect world get past her, and walked through the moon shadow cast by the oak tree in front of the house. The stars were a little less bright tonight than last, probably because a beautiful fingernail moon had risen. It hung like a white hammock in the sky, almost cradling the tiny gleam of Venus to one side.

Could it be the same moon that had shone down on Alice and Pádraig on their coffin ship? Darby hoped the kind librarian would help her find out.

D
arby soon discovered that searching for information about a time in the past is a whole lot easier when there is a written record. Over the next few days she realized that she had the opposite problem from her hunt for clues into the lives of the people of the North. When she looked up the Irish Potato Famine in the computer catalogue at the library, hundreds of entries came up. There was
way
too much information. How would she ever find out what happened to Alice and Pádraig and the rest of the passengers on the
Elizabeth?

She spent a whole day looking at pictures of the coffin ships, including drawings and sketches of how cramped the quarters were below decks. People were crammed in like sardines. Darby remembered the awful smell that wafted up out of the stairwells and hatch covers. Every time she thought of little Ellen sleeping down there with her mother and the dead baby, her stomach clenched into a knot.

Reading the text that accompanied the pictures, Darby discovered that some people lived through smallpox
because they had once been exposed to something called cowpox. In fact, it was through this connection that doctors finally figured out how to come up with a vaccine. Darby sat back in her seat with a sigh. So maybe Ellen had a chance of survival, after all.

She also learned that she was not the only one interested in looking at this information. The librarian, whose name tag said “Alfie,” called them genealogists and pointed out hundreds of web sites on the computer that helped people trace their heritage.

Darby thought she had hit the jackpot when she found a web site listing ships that travelled out of Ireland during and after the famine, but after checking and rechecking the list, she still couldn’t find the
Elizabeth
named anywhere.

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” said Alfie when Darby asked her. “The reason life aboard those ships was so terrible was that most of them weren’t meant to carry people in the first place. They were supposed to carry cargo like coal or other minerals, and they just crammed the people on board to make extra money.”