From the Chrysalis (5 page)

My cocoon tightens, colors tease,

I’m feeling for the air;

A dim capacity for wings

Degrades the dress I wear
.

*[ Dickinson, Emily,
From the Chyrsalis
]

Grandma Magill’s, Dublin, Ireland, 1966-1971:

Liza had always half-wished they would send her “back home” to Ireland, so she could grow up quickly and move away. And get away from her father, even if he were going to pay her
grandmother for room and board.
A win-win situation,
he’d said.
The old girl’s always griping she doesn’t have enough money and now she will.
And if Liza went to Dublin and lived in another world, maybe she could stop thinking about Dace. She could stop thinking:
even if there is a reason, is any reason good enough?

Aside from her mother’s unexpected reluctance to let her go, the worst part about leaving Toronto was the flight. She had never flown before and was more scared than she let on. The stranger in the aisle seat beside her, a Country and Western guitarist in his twenties, held her hand and slept on her shoulder for most of the flight.
 

She’d expected Dublin to be different from Toronto, but once she’d arrived on the north side, near Findlater’s, it felt like she had never left home. Bricks and mortar. Cars racing in the street. A school filled with girls in little cliques, and teachers too tired to teach. The only difference was in Dublin it rained instead of snowed. And the food was different. Chips and beans for tea, cheaper cuts of meat—when they had any—overcooked peas, lots of potatoes and maybe tinned fruit for a treat.
 

“Maeve,” her grandmother said the first time she saw her. “You don’t look anything like our Maeve. You’re a Devereux, aren’t you?”
 

Observing the older woman, who was now less than five feet tall, Liza tried to reconcile her fading blue eyes and orthopaedic shoes with the only photo she had ever seen: a black and white studio portrait of the newlywed Mrs. Brigit Magill at eighteen. Now that she was a brisk, bustling woman with a copious amount of white hair bundled up at the nape of her neck who still looked strong.

Liza had no idea what to say to her. She had never even written to her before. Her mother did all that. She was shown to her own little room at the rear of the four room house.
Thank God
, she thought.
My own room
. Her mother had said she might have to share her grandmother’s bed if she had a lodger, but she didn’t have one right now. Maybe she wouldn’t get one as long as Liza’s father paid. Still, the ceiling sloped so low over her flat pillow she was bound to feel buried alive. She would have to focus on the unfamiliar tree close to the tall window, still green in October. And ignore the overflowing garbage pails. Oh, brother, she thought as she gazed out the window. Was that a rat running down the street or just a skinny cat?

“Do you miss my mother?” she asked.
 

Her grandmother stood in the doorway, the jam of it just above her head. Liza had never seen a doorway so small except in an illustrated book of children’s fairytales. The two rooms downstairs had high ceilings, but the upstairs was more like an attic. Where had her mother and all her brothers and sisters slept?
 

“I don’t miss her any more than the rest of them,” the older woman had replied, restless hands reaching out and smoothing a worn chenille cover on the small bed. It had once been pink or perhaps white. Liza soon discovered her grandmother was like her mother in that she never stopped working. Liza gazed back out the window. “At least your Ma’s brothers and sisters write regularly. Maeve, now, she only writes when there’s trouble. Speaking of trouble, a letter arrived for you, from your Da’s nephew. A Devereux.”

Liza swung her head around so sharply she almost hurt her neck. “Dace! Did you read it?”

“Mother o’ God. That’s the first spark of life I’ve seen since you arrived. Such a skinny, dark little thing you are. Why don’t you take off that pouffy-looking coat and stay a while, Missy?” She shook her head, then extracted the letter from her apron pocket with the air of somebody yanking out a bad tooth. “Someone should have told you that boy’s a convicted felon. The envelope was postmarked from the jail. Why’s he writing here? The cheek of him!”
 

Liza stuffed the letter into the pocket of her coat without looking at it. At home it was 7:00 a.m. She was exhausted, almost comatose, from the long, sleepless night on the plane. Knackered, she’d heard the Irish say. But the minute she was alone, she sat on a wooden chair in front of a tiny table overlooking the crammed and cobbled alley, and savoured what Dace had to say.

I guess you probably heard I’m in Maitland Penitentiary, but it’s not as bad as it seems. I would have written sooner, but I had to earn the privelege [sic]. There is so much I can’t say. I just wanted to let you know there’s a wayward cousin thinking of you in this godforsaken place. If you don’t want to write me, it’s okay. But why are you in Dublin? I had a devil of a time getting your address.

She wrote him back the next day, borrowing an Irish stamp from her grandmother for the first and last time, in spite of the disapproval in the old woman’s eyes. Liza had to know Dace’s side. Even if it were a bad side, she no longer cared. At the end of a ten page letter, handwritten in her small, neat script, she tucked in,
What happened?
then set off for her new school and began another long vigil, awaiting his reply.

She must have scared him, for the long nights ticked by without so much as a note or a postcard arriving. She knew it was because she’d asked
why.
Had he really shot that man? If so, why? What was happening to him now? Was he scared of everything the way she was all the time? At least she hadn’t asked how he hoped to one day come out of there unscarred. If he didn’t hate her, he must at least think her a fool. You don’t ask questions like that of somebody in prison, you just don’t, no matter how much you wanted to know. She saw that now.
 

Christmas came and passed, with letters and cards from her far flung aunts and uncles in Canada and Australia, but she still didn’t hear from him, even after sending him a greeting card with a short,
I-don’t-care-what-you-did
note inside. She wrote longer letters as well, but somehow they never made it into the post.
If you don’t answer me, I’m going to die.
If he didn’t answer her by New Years, he probably never would, she despaired.
Dear Dace,
she scribbled in ink on the inside covers of her notebooks,
do you remember me?
 

Sometimes she wondered if her grandmother were hiding his letters, but she doubted it. For one thing, although she’d always been a late riser, now she sprinted down the skinny linoleum hallway to intercept the postman long before the older woman had even lit the gas for their morning tea. For another, her grandmother was too tired. Too tired to have custody of a young girl, she started saying. Especially a girl like Liza who ate every speck of sugar in the house and forgot to shut off lights. No matter that both these things, forgetting to turn off the hall light and eating the last sugar cube, had happened only once. Did Liza think money grew on trees?
 

It got worse after Liza met Tony Harper, because now her grandmother could say: And let’s not forget the way “she showed her skin to a man who wouldn’t cover it”—at sixteen! And after all she had done for her, too. Liza did her best not to think about Tony. Now she bit her knuckles so she wouldn’t cry.
Well
, she thought,
she has me there.

Many evenings the older woman fell asleep before 8:00 while Liza reread C. S. Lewis’s
Tales of Narnia
and daydreamed through William Butler Yeats. Narnia seemed even more magical knowing Lewis had woven Ireland into his work. Although she would have loved to visit the Mourne Mountains and Dunluce Castle more often, places that had given birth to the dreams of Lewis, she almost never left Dublin over the next five years. Her grandmother, careful as she was, couldn’t afford it. The money her father sent, when he remembered, wasn’t enough. On the rare occasions she went on a school trip to Dunluce Castle, the Giant’s Causeway, or Newgrange, she was thrilled. It was always a hassle crossing the border, though.

Ireland,
she thought, her fingers tracing an ancient Celtic swirl on one of the stones.
I’ve come back to the land of my ancestors’s dreams.
But the school trip she treasured most was going to see the
Book of Kells
. For an hour or so she escaped her classmates and walked the streets where some of her favourite authors had once walked. From the moment she saw Trinity, that’s where she wanted to go to university. Oscar Wilde, the author of
The Ballad of Reading Goal
, had gone to school there.
 

“None of the Magills have ever gone to university,” her grandmother said. Her lips were pursed around a clothes peg as she stripped sheets from a clothesline slung over her stove. She was also canning jelly, so a big pot of rolling water sat on the stove.

“Maybe my father would pay the tuition.”
 

“I doubt that, girl. And do you really mean to keep living here?”

Listening to her, Liza’s heart sank.
You don’t want me,
she thought, although it was silly to feel hurt. Her grandmother had already raised eight children. On impulse, she stepped forward and almost flung her arms around the older woman’s neck but stopped herself just in time. Her grandmother hated public displays of affection. Not that Liza blamed her. She was a little like that herself. It was her family’s style.

Still, she thought her grandmother had gotten used to having her around, that she was company at least. On Saturdays they always talked late into the night. Granny Magill, much as she held her emotions in check, was a born raconteur. Liza knew all the Magill family secrets now, but knowing them wasn’t enough. She was lonelier than she had ever thought possible. Lonely for her old neighbourhood, her sad mother, even her brothers. And as it turned out, lonely, achingly lonely for a man.

Within a short time Liza had wanted to go back to Toronto as well as the more familiar tensions and rhythms of her own house, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t been gone six months when the worst happened, at least from her mother’s point of view. Her father left for good, leaving her with nothing except the twins. They’d sold the house, so there was no place for Liza in Toronto. Not in her mother’s little place, anyway.

Then one day, just when she needed him most, Dace wrote again. His parole was coming up for review and he needed to contact the outside world.

 
I’m sorry I didn’t write before. I was afraid of what you might think of me.

As if that mattered. Life wasn’t black and white, like a newspaper, and love wasn’t either. She knew that now. And who was she to judge, based on the decisions she’d made while living here? At least she had a second chance. Everybody said so, her grandmother and the infirmary staff. And as long as she was real careful, nobody would ever know what she’d done in Dublin to survive. It wasn’t all over the news like Dace’s life had been, even if it felt that way sometimes. With any luck, she’d even forget herself, no matter what Granny Magill said.
A girl is marked by something like this. Even when she knows it’s the only way.

Also, I spent a lot of time in solitary, so it was hard to get letters out. Oh, yeah. Then there was a sitdown and I got involved in that. But I’m okay now. I’m taking some correspondence classes and the librarian and I are in cahoots. You’ll like this part. I read all the time. I live in books, just like you do.

It bothered her, though, all those lost years. What had he been doing? Look what she had done! And his family, how had they coped? Her own family was settling down a bit. They’d lowered their hopes, she supposed. They mustn’t know about her either, and Gran had promised she wouldn’t tell.
 

“Okay,” she wrote back, determined to focus on him. “But what about Uncle Norm and Rosie? How are they?”
 

Of course he was sorry for what had happened, for what he’d put his family through, he persevered, his energy sparking from his letter to her. And even though there were mitigating circumstances—the man was going to hurt Rick—Dace knew he was responsible. He said he had to accept responsibility for what had happened or he would never be free. And if deep down in her heart Liza felt it might be just what the parole board was waiting to hear, she didn’t say.