A Walk Through a Window (22 page)
Read A Walk Through a Window Online
Authors: KC Dyer
They stepped onto the gangplank and a crew member rushed forward to help with their bags. Simon’s mother scooped him up in her arms. “Well, whoever lives here and wherever they came from, your papa says it is the land of the future. And now it will be our home.”
“Take a deep breath, Simon,” said his brother. “This is what your new home smells like.”
“I smell green apples,” said Lizzie. “Does anyone else smell apples?”
Darby hurriedly stepped back a little and tucked her hair behind her ears.
“Look!” shouted Andrew. “There’s Papa!”
The children ran toward a smiling man who stood in the doorway of the immigration shed and Darby took her too-recently shampooed self over to where Gabe was standing.
“Do I smell of apples to you?” she hissed at him.
He shrugged. “All I can smell is the docks—and perhaps cinnamon,” he said, as a man bearing a large spice-laden crate trundled by.
“They shipped cinnamon from Scotland?” Darby asked, staring after the man with the crate.
“Perhaps not from Scotland, but through Scottish ports,” Gabe said. “The ports were the gateways to the world.”
A voice called “Fergus!” and Gabe’s head snapped to look.
“Fergus?” Darby muttered. “I thought you were called Monroe.”
“Ach, I have many names,” he said with a smile. He lifted a hand to wave at Alasdair, now standing with an elderly gentleman.
It was Gramps.
Darby felt her legs go weak.
Alasdair waved Gabe over. “Father, may I present my young travelling companion, Fergus Monroe. Fergus, my father, Allan Urquhart.”
Gabe-known-as-Fergus caught Darby’s eye as he shook Alasdair’s father’s hand. He actually winked at her. All she could do was gape in shock.
“Fergus.” Urquhart gravely bowed.
Darby knew it wasn’t Gramps as soon as she heard the highland burr, softened but not lost after nearly twenty years away from Scotland. But the resemblance was unbelievable—a face for the ages. Allan Urquhart, her grandfather’s great-grandfather. And the answer to her question. This was why she found herself in Charlottetown in 1875. No crisis to witness, no horror to remember. Just the last piece of her own family puzzle, snapped into place.
Alasdair slipped something into Gabe’s hand and slapped him on the back.
Gabe bowed slightly to Allan Urquhart and then stepped off to one side as father and son began the slow process of getting to know each other again.
Darby slid back into the shadow of the building so that Gabe would be able to speak with her unobserved.
“I must go,” he said quietly, turning his back to the flurry of activity on the dock.
“I know,” she said. “Alasdair said he would take you to your family.”
Gabe pointed to a tiny stone building at the end of one of the wharves. “Your route home is through that doorway,” he said.
Darby clutched at his arm as he turned to go. “Gabe—you know I am leaving in a couple of days.”
“I knew it would be very soon,” he said, and his smile left him for a moment. “I
am
terribly sorry about your grandfather,” he added softly. “I hope these small journeys helped you find something of what you seek.”
Darby didn’t know what to say.
“But wait,” he said, and his face lit up again. “I nearly forgot.”
He reached in his pocket. “For your collection,” he said. “From Alasdair. His father was thrilled to see the highland soil, but said he had ploughed enough rocks to last a lifetime.”
He pressed the stone into Darby’s hand. For the first time in all her summer’s travels, she held something warm. It was a small rock, flat, grey and almost heart-shaped. “From the heart of the highlands to the heart of Canada,” he whispered.
She had to laugh. “I thought I told you that Toronto was the heart of Canada.”
“That you must decide for yourself,” he replied, and as he stepped away from her, his eyes gleamed. “See you around, sometime,” he said. Without another word, he turned and followed Alasdair and his father through the door of the immigration shed.
“See you,” Darby whispered.
It was time to go home.
D
eath by misadventure.
Misadventure.
That’s what a coroner calls it when a grandfather runs into the water to save a toddler. Even when the toddler doesn’t need saving, not really. And even when the toddler is not the toddler he thinks he’s saving. One that he didn’t manage to save nearly fifty years before.
Darby sat in the funeral parlour and thought about the coroner. Who would want that job? Looking at dead bodies and trying to figure out how they got that way. The PEI coroner told Nan that Gramps’s heart attack was probably brought on by the rescue of the little girl. He also told her that Gramps’s brain showed evidence of Alzheimer’s.
Darby tried not to think about what Gramps looked like when Ernie pulled him out of the water. She’d seen so much death already this summer—why should his be any different?
He was Gramps. That made it different
.
The night before, when she had run home from Gabe’s house, she’d got to the top of the stairs by her room before she realized she didn’t have a headache. No aura. Not even a trace of pain.
Just a rock in her pocket, still warm from the hands of the man who brought his family—her family—to Canada.
The sign over the door said Viewing Room, but Darby was alone with Gramps and there wasn’t any viewing going on. His casket was not much more than a plain wooden box with some kind of brass handles. Not too shiny.
Darby figured the least she could do was to sit with him. Her parents weren’t set to arrive until later. Besides, Gramps had agreed to take her to the beach. Mostly because Nan had talked him into it, but still. His last trip away from his house was because of Darby. She couldn’t take this trip with him, of course, but she could at least sit with him a while.
Nan came into the room. Every time Darby had seen her since Gramps had died, she had been surrounded by women. Darby had recognized some of them: the two sisters she had first met that day in the front yard with the fire department; and there were Shawnie, and Fiona; Dr. Brian’s wife, Addie, had been over, too. Darby didn’t have a clue who most of the others were.
But for once, Nan wasn’t surrounded by all the clucking old hens. She sat down beside Darby with a sigh, and took her hand.
“I was wondering where you’d gotten to,” she said in a low voice.
“It didn’t seem like you really needed any help,” Darby said. “So I thought I’d just sit here a while.”
“Ernie is here. He wants to take you to the airport to meet your parents.”
Darby stood up reluctantly. She wasn’t at all sure she was ready to face her parental units so soon. “Okay. Is there anything you would like me to do first, Nan?”
Nan shook her head. “No, I think everything is looked after. The service is this afternoon, and—” She sat quietly for a moment, then stood to take Darby’s face in her hands. “Oh, I am so going to miss you, girlie, when you go back home. I have become accustomed to having you here. The house will feel so empty with you gone.”
“With both of us gone,” Darby said, bitterly. “Nan, this is all my fault. If you and Gramps hadn’t had to drag me to the beach that day, he would still be here with you.”
Nan dropped her hands to Darby’s shoulders and gave her granddaughter a little shake. “Don’t you even think such a thing,” she said severely. “In the first place, the trip to the beach that day was my idea. And,” she sighed a little, “if it comes right down to it, your Gramps was already almost gone. Any hope I had of trying to care for him in our home was lost.”
She smiled sadly. “After he burned his uniform with the iron, well, I should have seen how serious things were.”
The door opened and Ernie poked his head in. “Ready to go to the airport, Miss Darby?” he said with a gentle smile. “Oh, and you can come, too, kid.”
Nan arched an eyebrow. “Very funny,” she said, dryly.
“I think I’ll just go home and get changed, if you don’t mind, dear,” she added, looking at Darby. “You bring your mother and dad right into the house when you get back.”
They followed the still-chuckling Ernie out the door.
The funeral was held at Trinity United Church that afternoon. Darby was surprised at how many people packed the benches inside.
I guess a person makes a few friends over a life that long
, she thought.
She was not as surprised, however, as she had been at the airport when her mother walked into the arrivals section. Darby’s mother had beamed at her, yelled “Surprise!” and given her daughter a huge hug. Literally huge, seeing as her mother was at least twenty pounds heavier than when she had kissed her goodbye in Toronto. And Darby was pretty sure it hadn’t come from eating doughnuts because she was missing her only daughter.
“Honey, you’re going to be a big sister!” she yelled. Just in case Darby had missed it—or any of the hundreds of other passengers in the airport had.
“Uh, congratulations,” Darby said, feeling strange. Her grandfather was dead, a new baby was coming and from the beaming smiles on her parents’ faces, she guessed she’d been a little off base about the whole divorce idea. She wasn’t actually sure how she should feel, but for the moment she settled on feeling a little sick.
They had to go through the whole thing all over again when they walked out to Ernie’s cab. He had known
Darby’s dad while he was growing up, and soon the three of them were all talking at once about the baby, and the parental units’ worries because of their advanced ages and the reno, which was finally done. When they got to the house, Nan got into the action, too.
Darby stood a little to one side, just listening. The strangest thing seemed to have happened to her dad’s voice. It took her a few moments to figure it out, but suddenly she realized he was speaking with an Island accent. She’d never heard it in his voice before. Maybe it got stronger when he was surrounded by all the other Maritime accents. It made Darby think of Gabe, and how his voice changed depending where they travelled. And then Darby started to wonder about her own accent. She knew
she
didn’t have an accent.
Did she?
People will do whatever they can to get through a funeral. Darby didn’t remember much about the service, except that a bunch of old guys from Gramps’s Legion dressed up in their uniforms. Everybody had a lot of nice things to say about him. Near the end of the service, the minister invited people to share their memories of Gramps. Michael and Shawnie both got up to talk about how he helped mow their lawn. Doctor Brian got up to speak and Fiona Grady had a few nice things to say, too. Even Darby’s dad managed to say a few words about his own father. He spoke quickly, with his head down, but
he smiled at Darby when he was done. She hugged him tightly when he sat back down beside her, and she could feel his shoulders shake a little at this last, sudden goodbye.
Afterwards, there was a reception in the church hall and all the ladies tried to outdo themselves with fancy recipes for the sort of finger foods you usually only see in women’s magazines. Everyone was laughing and milling around, and even Nan seemed to be enjoying herself.
