From the Chrysalis (8 page)

Her mind bounced to and fro, a butterfly trapped in a jam jar. A good thing that boy had dummied up or Dace would have ended up in the Hole, no visitors allowed. He’d been caught before. Helping out a friend? What kind of friends did he have in there? He never mentioned names. He couldn’t.
 

The bus fare was clenched so tightly in her hand she had to force her fingers to relax. When she dropped the change into his box, the driver looked her up and down like she was put on earth for his pleasure. She hesitated, realizing she had almost forgotten how to count Canadian coins. More women came up behind her, some with children yapping at their heels. Instinctively, she backed away from the sticky little hands. The bus driver looked at the young mothers in the same proprietary way, his bright bluejay eyes almost dangling out of his capped head.

“Make up yer mind, honey, I haven’t got all day,” he rumbled in his old man’s voice, motioning her to the back of the bus with a nicotine-stained thumb. “The sc—” If he were saying
scum
, she couldn’t believe her ears, so she revised what she was hearing to:
the guy waiting for you might have all day, but I
don’t
, and bowed her head to hide her blush, embarrassed other people could hear.

Damn,
she thought, easing down the aisle, hiding her anger behind her waist-length hair. Styles were a little behind in Ireland, so back in Dublin she had let her hair grow and grow. The floor of the bus slanted slightly, tilting up to meet her face and she grabbed hold of a seat for balance. What was wrong with her? Why hadn’t she told that old coot off? She had to speak up. If she didn’t … well, who cared.
 

She was going to see Dace. Nothing else mattered. Searching for a window seat, a single line of poetry flitted through her head:
There will be time, there will be time, to prepare a face for the faces that you meet …

Time. Yes, she reminded herself, she still had time, no matter what had happened in Dublin, no matter what she’d gone and done. Because the world belonged to the young and privileged in America in 1971, or that’s what older folks said, people like her grandmother who’d struggled through the Great Depression and World War II so a girl like her could reap the benefits: a university education.
 

And she would, she would. It was her chance to make good, to do something with her life. Everybody said so. Get an education. Fall in love, write books, have children, do anything she wanted. Hurry, hurry, she thought. She was the same age as the rest of the first years at Maitland University, but an accelerated sense of time made her feel older than she was. Used up. That and knowing what she had done.
 

Several kindly Irish people had told her she still had time to make a new life, but she wasn’t sure. Life had a way of plummeting forward.
Hurry up, hurry up, let’s be forty. Let’s have some peace
. Not that she expected to make forty. Forty was
old
. Her parents were still in their forties, and their forties looked like a mountain peak with a landslide down the other side, rushing past the sites of all their old regrets. As if they had exhausted all their possibilities, she thought, irritated with herself for having anything on her mind except Dace.
 

Sitting on the edge of the last vacant window seat, her bag on the aisle seat, she looked out at some battered brick walls. Why were bus stops located in such dismal places? She might as well be back in Dublin gazing at warehouses on the north side instead of in Maitland by the lake.
 

My God, was the bumpy-faced driver on a coffee break or what? What on earth was taking him so long?
 

At last the bus jolted forward, dislodging a tattered copy of
The Great Gatsby
from her bag. It was the kind of story she’d always favoured, one with a dark Byronic male character. She looked around, hoping nobody else had noticed. Not that most people cared about books. Still, she hated people knowing what she was doing, even what she was reading. Maybe because she’d been keeping secrets for so long: the divorce of her parents, her cousin’s incarceration, and dear God, her relationship with an older man in Dublin. Jesus, she wished she’d waited. But he hadn’t really let her.
 

Tucking
Gatsby
out of sight, she stifled a sigh, too keyed up to read, but a magnet for any fool who wanted to talk. Something about her had always invited confidences from strangers. Or maybe it was just that any sort of sounding board would do. Much as she enjoyed listening to other people’s stories, finding out what made them tick, she wasn’t in the mood today.

So much had happened since she’d disembarked from her Aer Lingus flight at Toronto International Airport three days before. She’d stopped overnight in the Ford Hotel across from the bus station, then headed straight to her assigned university residence in Maitland, a city she’d never even visited before.

Liza had left for Ireland five years earlier. Then the twins had gone to their father’s house in Scarborough last year because dear Dad had gotten a new wife. He hadn’t wanted the boys, but he’d had no choice after they were picked up for drinking underage and his ex-wife got hysterical.
 

Liza chewed her lip and looked as if she were focusing on the bustle outside her window, but the street scene had vanished.
 

Dad had tried to knock some sense into her hard-drinking, truant brothers, with predictable results.
The twins,
as they would always be known, were almost seventeen and keen to avoid finishing high school. They spent their days sleeping until noon and their nights drinking bootleg beer and smoking grass. Dad had a grade eight education. He wanted his sons to get their grade twelve diplomas at least, but Liza, well …
She’s a girl,
he’d said when her grandmother wrote to ask if there were any money for her university tuition.
Just wait. Someday she’ll get married and all that education would be wasted.

He was her father. Sooner or later she would have to visit both her parents and make amends. That’s what an adult would do, Gran said so, and of course she was right. Even if it were a colossal waste of time. By now she’d read enough of the great American authors: Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, Williams, and Thomas Wolfe, to know she could never go home again, except in the physical sense. She was grown up now. Somehow, somewhere, she’d make a new home for herself. But she couldn’t just forget her parents, no matter what. And she couldn’t expect them to visit her. Too expensive. Well, lots of reasons really.
 

Her mom, especially her mom. Maybe when she felt stronger she could visit her. After she settled into residence. Her classes in Sociology, English, Political Science, Philosophy and Journalism were beginning next week though, and she was already so nervous she could barely eat.

Squirming on her seat, she thought about getting into university. How on earth had she pulled off such a stunt? Where had she even come up with such an idea? Sometimes she didn’t understand herself. Maybe it had something to do with walking through Trinity all the time, where so many writers had studied. She’d loved that place.
 

A small smile crossed her face. It was exhilarating to be back in Ontario on her own. Nobody even knew she was back from Dublin, never mind that she was going to Maitland University. Well, almost nobody. Dace knew, except he was in no place to share his knowledge. Maybe he’d told his father, but Uncle Norm was a silent, solemn man, a slow leak like herself when it came to sharing tales. In her secret heart, she was thrilled with her own daring, and at night when she imagined her father finding out and getting absolutely stiff with rage—because he really
did
think education was wasted on women—adrenalin flooded her body from her head to her toes. As long as she wasn’t living with him he didn’t worry her at all.
 

A nicer girl might have felt sorrier for Dad. He’d been angry for as long as she could remember. And Mom, well, she didn’t get mad much. She tended to be a talker, more prone to migraines than rages. Mom was always wrong when she opened her mouth. “Don’t be so stupid!” her husband had been apt to splutter, inciting spectators to nervous laughter. Over the years, although her mother’s conversational skills had been honed to chatter, her listening skills had remained undeveloped. In the end, even her usually failsafe intuition about her husband’s moods had eluded her.

So Liza knew better than to plan a
tête-à-tête
with her mother, although she would have liked another confidante besides Dace. The part of herself that she recognized as unkind might even have enjoyed upsetting her, though she didn’t want to hurt her. There was no reason to hurt her, since her father already had. Why had she allowed him to hurt her? He wasn’t worth it. No man was. Granny Magill was right. She was always right.

The woman in front of Liza had a
strident
voice. Liza had hesitated to use that word ever since she’d noticed it was only applied to women, but this one definitely qualified. And she also had, as Liza had noticed before she’d even sat down, bleached blond hair and a blubbery body too old for her face.
 

Her voice took over the entire bus. “So this is the last time, I told him. Get straight, or me and the kids is outta here. I been visiting guys in prison for twenty years. First my Dad, now him. Whatsamatter with me? I goes to Jonesy: Why do I get only garbage? I ain’t garbage.”

“You never said he was garbage! You never!” her younger companion shrieked. Liza, who was used to much softer spoken Irish women, surreptitiously covered her ears.

“Well, no, but I thought it. I am too sick of gettin’ garbage,” the blond repeated.
 

“Well, sure you are,” her friend murmured. Liza detected the burr of a Scottish brogue in her speech. “And sure it’s a hard life, but you’ll feel better when you lay off the sauce. AA saved my life.”

“Oh, Christ. Irma, you sound like you got religion or something since you went with that there AA. Bunch of Jesus freaks is what they are.”

Liza cleared her throat, hoping the women would take a hint.
 

Irma turned around and glared. “Yeah? What can I do you for, college girl?”

Liza gazed back out the window and resisted the urge to stick out her tongue. She pretended she hadn’t heard, but in truth she was puzzled why some people enjoyed airing their problems in public. Liza was always able to put on a face. At least Irma had recognized her as a college girl, she thought, smoothing her long, flared denim skirt across her lap. Liza had made the skirt back in Dublin on her grandmother’s sewing machine.
 

A younger girl across the aisle turned up the static on her radio, trying to get a clear transmission of
Hey, Jude. … Take a sad song and make it better. Remember to let him under your skin …
 

Liza wrapped her heavy, waist-length hair around her and daydreamed. It had been a little shorter then, but Dace had loved her hair at the farm, he’d said. This was one of those moments where she imagined him, one of those unused, in-between places of her life. Like those no-man’s moments that happened just before sleeping or waking. Or queuing up. Or spinning through a revolving door. Whenever she was waiting for something to happen, he snuck up behind her and made her feel alive.
 

Even if he were just a phantom lover, he was the one she’d courted since she was nine or ten. He had been everything to her, every day except for those urgent weeks she’d spent with an Englishman named Tony Harper in Dublin, who was so much larger than life.
How romantic
, she thought sarcastically, scooping her hair off her shoulders and letting it fall again. Romantic and ridiculous.
 

So much had happened since the last time she’d seen Dace at the farm. To both of them. In hindsight, she knew now he had ignored everybody because he was headed for jail. Like a leper with open sores under his clothes, he had feared exposure in front of his relatives, especially in front of a little girl. She might have loathed him—or worse, been afraid. The rest of the family might settle for secrets, rumours and innuendo, but not her. She’d ferret out the truth.
 

Damn, Liza. You had the most beautiful, the most knowing eyes. And those monarch butterflies were so thick in the air. It looked like you were leading them somewhere. I wanted to tell you everything, but you were only fourteen.
 

So tell me now
, she’d written back.