Cricket in a Fist (24 page)

It had already been growing dark when they left the hospital for the last time, and Tamar sat beside Steven in the front seat. The others squeezed into the back, Minnie in the middle. The sky was grey, streaked with clouds, and the hospital and the parking lot were grey, too, white showing through only where the last remnants of snow lay in filthy piles. Steven's hair, at the temples — Tamar had never noticed it before — was turning grey. Steven started the ignition and turned on the heat, which blew cold air from outside into the already uncomfortable car, and then he let his arm fall to his side.

“Just going to let the engine warm up a bit,” he mumbled, then cleared his throat and said, “We're here for you, Ginny. Do you
understand that? We are all sitting here, we all come to this hospital again and again, me, your mother and the girls, for no other reason than you. Do you understand that?” He turned to look, and Tamar couldn't help but do the same. Ginny was impassive in her ski jacket and track suit. She had removed her mitts and folded her bony fingers in her lap. The hapless air she'd adopted after the accident had given way entirely to straight-backed, patient tolerance. Minnie was leaning as far as she could into Aga, practically sitting on her lap to avoid contact with her mother. Aga turned from the window to watch Ginny as well; they were all staring at her, waiting, except for Minnie, who rested her face against Aga's collarbone and closed her eyes.

“Do you have something to say?” Tamar tried. “Please. This has gone far enough, don't you think. Surely you can tell us something — what do you think about what Dr. Manning said? Do you want us to stop coming with you? Do you think he's helping you?”

A family was crossing the parking lot, a couple pushing a young boy in a wheelchair, another boy walking alongside. “I always hated it when they put you in a wheelchair. Every time you were in the hospital, do you remember? They always made you leave in a wheelchair. Remember,” said Tamar half-heartedly. She sounded absurd to herself. Remember, remember — Tamar was weary at the very word, the monotony of repeating it again and again, dredging up anecdotes. And now Dr. Manning was telling them to stop the stories, to stop hoping that one magical time, Ginny suddenly would remember. That something would remind her of herself, and she would blink, shake her head and say, exasperated, “Oh, Mother, that's not what happened at all. What planet are you living on?”

“Minnie,” said Aga. “Don't. Stop that.” Tamar opened her eyes to see Minnie with both booted feet against Ginny's arm, pushing hard, her back braced against Aga's side. Ginny wriggled, trying to get away, looking no more alarmed than someone struggling to find a comfortable position in an ill-made chair.

“Minnie,” said Steven.

With the low, sustained whining sound she'd make when she'd fallen and was deciding whether to cry, Minnie twisted in Aga's
arms to plant her feet more firmly against Ginny's side, kicking her quite hard with one foot. It wasn't clear from the way she held the child whether Aga was trying to stop or to bolster her. Ginny leaned back to escape the little boots, but, without flailing or losing control, Minnie kept up her attack, pushing and kicking and increasing the volume of her whine until it was almost a howl. Finally, she stopped to take a deep breath and then shrieked so loudly and despairingly that Tamar cringed, pressing her hands to her ears. Aga looked pained as well but kept her arms around her sister, who arched her back to push Ginny with all her might. Ginny moved quickly to open her door, step outside and slam the door closed again. She pulled her hood up over her tuque, shoving her hands into her pockets as she turned away to look off toward the highway.

Tamar inhaled deeply; she had been holding her breath.

“Minnie,” said Steven. “Come here.” The child was sobbing. “Come here. Come on.” Minnie climbed between the front seats, Tamar and Aga both helping her, to sit on Steven's lap. “All right. All right, baby.” He rocked the child in his arms, quieting her howls to a muffled weeping. As Minnie's sorrow gave way to silence, Tamar watched Ginny, who was still facing away from the car and had taken a few steps, futile, since there was nowhere to go. Her pants were enormous. It was a wonder they didn't fall down.

Oh, how Tamar longed to know what her daughter was thinking. She watched Ginny walk slowly away from the car and stop a hundred feet away to stand in the middle of the concrete expanse. Arms straight down at her sides like a child's, she looked around, sleeves ruffling in the wind. No one would have guessed that this wisp of a woman was the nick in an intricately woven fabric, that a world was unravelling around her. Tamar wondered if she'd have recognized Ginny, so thin and bundled into so many clothes, standing so still and quiet and looking so alone, from across a street, across a parking lot.

“We'll get out of this mess,” Steven told Minnie, who was leaning against his chest, a few matted red curls sticking out from her tuque.

No
, Tamar whispered, and then turned to Steven with a horrified
sense of revelation. She dug her nails into her palms. “You want to be rid of her,” she said. Steven put his head on Minnie's head, and Tamar said, “You want to be rid of us.” He wanted the girls to himself, to make other plans, to move on. Ginny couldn't resume her old life; perhaps she sensed that the moment she seemed herself again, Steven would push her out the door. Tamar met Aga's eyes and saw the anguish on her face. He wasn't even her real father.

Without looking at Steven, Tamar opened her own door and stepped outside. It was so cold the wind blew through her cashmere hat, burning her ears. “Come back,” she called. “Please come back.” She walked over and pushed her arm through Ginny's. “Please come back now,” she said again. She tugged gently. “Don't you know that men come and go? I hope this isn't about a man,
liefje
.” It felt strange to use the old endearment; she was still pretending she was speaking to Ginny. “Those aren't the people to depend on.” The thin woman's hood hid her face. “You've always asked too much of men.”

She almost expected her daughter to sigh, “Oh, Mother. You don't understand anything.” Why wouldn't she just say it? She would never say it; this woman would never say anything of the sort, this woman who was no longer Ginny. Minnie was right; Minnie knew, had known.

Tamar started at a knock on the door. She began to stand, but then exclaimed, “Oh,” as Aga came into the room. She eased back into her chair. “Do you like it? What an improvement. The way it frames your face.”

Aga touched her new bangs and ran her hand over the length of her hair. “I really like it, yeah.”

“She didn't do your face, too?”

“I don't really want makeup, Tam-Tam,” Aga said, standing just inside the doorway, hesitant to come further inside the room. “I don't wear makeup.”

“Just some lipstick? I'll tell Cassandra.”

“It doesn't suit me. Honestly, Tam-Tam. I really don't want it.”

“Doesn't suit you.” The familiarity of the argument, the comfort of it, gripped Tamar with the allure of a route walked many times, long ago. “You are your mother's daughter,” she said. Aga stiffened at this, pressing her lips together.

Tamar remembered the photograph she held. “Come and see this. Don't you smell lovely,” she added, as the girl leaned over. She turned and pushed Aga's bangs to one side experimentally, then smoothed them back down. “I love the layers,” she said. “There's some wave in your hair, you know. It's not bone straight. We could even out the colour — it's so dark on top.”

“That's you, Tam-Tam?”

Tamar looked back at the photograph in her hands. “Yes, can you believe it? That's me. We'd been having a picnic — see, that's the beach umbrella my father's holding. Look how tanned I was, brown like a little Indian.”

“Tam-Tam.”

“And my mother, your Oma Esther.” She tapped the glass with her long, red nail. “And my father.” She tapped the glass again. “My father's name was Jozef. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” said Aga. “Mama told me. When I was little. I always used to look at this picture when I was here and wonder about him.”

“You did?”

“What was he like?”

“He was — he was very tall. He had so many friends, always a house full of friends. And he was funny. Oh, he was such a funny man. He was like a child pretending to be grown up. That's what he was like.”

Aga turned to lean against the desk, half sitting on a folder full of receipts. Her hands, Tamar saw, were trembling.

“When you were a tiny thing,” said Tamar, “I thought,
there is a child with secrets
. Your mother never wanted secrets; she wanted to tell. Always to tell everything.” Their legs were almost touching, and for a moment Tamar wished she was the kind of grandmother who held children in her lap to comfort them. What a thing to think about a grown, sixteen-year-old girl.

“Tam-Tam, what did you think of Dr. Manning? Was he doing
any good, do you think? Was he right that we shouldn't go anymore?”

Tamar ran the tip of her nail over her father's face. She almost laughed, suddenly imagining Jozef in a psychiatrist's office. “I don't know what good it does,” she said finally, “to remember every little thing the way he wanted us to. It doesn't seem right to me. Never in my life. I wasn't brought up to confess things but to make the best, to make a good life. That's what my father would have said.” Aga's father, her real father, had been the type to collect confessions like something rare and precious. To squeeze secrets from his subjects, despite the damage he might do.

Dr. Manning's story-telling sessions had done nothing at all to remind Ginny who she was supposed to be, but they had provoked in Tamar a distressing habit of focusing on the past, forever attempting to reconstruct long-past scenes in all their detail. Shopping at the Bay, months after leaving Dr. Manning, Tamar found herself thinking of Asher Acker and struggling to recall, not just his manner, but the details of how she had let him into her life. Sheila and Fred, Steven's parents, had known Asher, too, at least a little; they had known him as Steven's friend. “He was a bright boy with a lot of misdirected energy,” Sheila said one time, motherly, forgiving, “a confused kid.” And how humiliating that it hadn't occurred to Tamar until so late that she was an adult and he a child. The first time she met him, at the makeup counter, surely she'd doubted she would see this odd young man ever again. It was incredible that this absurd person would go on to have such an impact on her life. Why had Ginny been holding that terrible letter when she fell? A twelve-year-old letter, its cheap ink already fading.

“But sometimes,” said Aga, still leaning against the desk so Tamar had to look up to see her, “keeping a secret could drive you crazy.” Tamar saw that Aga's face had grown pale as paper, pale to the lips, and she barely resisted saying no, preventing whatever words were about to bombard her. “I” — Aga addressed the back wall, looking at the door to the servants' staircase — “I argued with my mother the day of her accident.” Aga's face contorted as she struggled not to cry.

Tamar reached up to brush a small clipping of hair from the child's cheek. “Daughters and mothers always argue,” she said, and Aga sighed. It was such a familiar, disappointed sigh. Just as Ginny had sighed, always, after offering Tamar some anguished confession. Tamar looked back down at her young parents in the photograph. Even as a child, Tamar hadn't told her mother about any discomforts beyond the obvious scraped knees and sore throats. And as an adult, she could never have complained to Esther about her worries, about her anguish over Robert. She would never have thought to do so. She had protected her mother; she had tried; she had tried so hard.

“You were always Oma Esther's favourite,” Tamar said.

“I know.” Aga sighed again, deeply, resigning herself to disappointment in Tamar for changing the subject. “That's what Mama always said.”

“Yes. She was right. Oma Esther used to feed you the strangest foods, did your mother tell you? It drove her mad.”

Of course, Esther had loved Ginny from the moment of birth, but it was a subdued kind of caring, as though the sounds of a baby in the house might shatter her. As though she didn't want to get too attached, just in case. And why it was different with Aga was as much a mystery to Esther, Tamar suspected, as to anyone else. Esther was in her late sixties when Aga was born and hadn't seen it coming; she had watched Ginny's growing belly with noncommittal trepidation all through the pregnancy. But at the hospital, as Ginny lay limp and exhausted and radically, alarmingly depleted in size, just as Ginny told her nurse, “I don't know, there is no father” and agreed, finally, to move back home, Esther placed the tip of her index finger in the baby's tiny palm, and, as the fingers closed and held on tight, she fell in love.

It came as a shock, surely, to love someone new with such force after two and a half decades of directing her passion away from anyone still living. Convinced that Ginny was breastfeeding for too long, Esther eventually began sneaking the baby pureed chicken and vegetable concoctions. She continued to feed Aga as she saw fit, waving off Ginny's increasingly enraged protests. “She's a big, growing
girl. She doesn't need your milk any longer, needs you to find a job, rather.”

And Ginny did get a job. Tamar avoided most of the commotion because she was up in the salon, hiring, managing and waiting for the money coming in to balance that going out. But when she went downstairs during the days, she found Ginny teaching piano, bringing a stream of children into the living room to stab at the keys as Esther barricaded herself in the kitchen, writing cryptic messages to herself in her cookbooks, planning meals and blending utterly inappropriate ingredients into baby-food softness.