Scare the Light Away (2 page)

Chapter 2

The Diary of Miss Janet Green. July 17, 1943

Today, I met HIM. HE is the most wonderful, perfect, handsomest, smartest man in the entire world. I am IN LOVE. Is it mere happenstance that only last week I received this diary from Aunt Joan for my 17th birthday? It can’t be. I am sure that I was meant to start the rest of my life in the pages of this very book.

I went with Jenny; she practically had to drag me there. To the dance they put on in Woking for the Canadians. I had nothing at all suitable to wear. Aunt Betty fussed; she even dragged out one of her old hats for me. Horrid thing. I’m sure she has owned it since the
last
war. I stuffed it inside the Robinsons’ hedge and fetched it again on my way home. I didn’t want to go to the dance. I always feel so awkward and uncomfortable—so
tall
—at those things: all the girls lined up against one wall, drinking tea or lemonade, the soldiers watching us, most of them as shy as we are, some of them nipping outside regularly for something stronger than lemonade. Everything made worse of course, by the simple fact that Jenny, of the long golden hair, the huge green eyes and figure I once heard called ‘ripe’ was the prettiest girl within twenty miles.

I might not have gone had Jenny not begged me. She might be pretty, but even she couldn’t go to a dance alone. And poor Mary Jones is confined to bed with the flu.

I might not have gone!!!!! It doesn’t bear thinking about.

I promise that I will write in this diary as often as I can for the rest of my life.

Wednesday, August 4, 1943

Bob called on us today. He came for tea and to meet Aunt Betty and Dad. Dad even closed up the shop for a while so as to be home at tea time.

Nancy Young, who always helped out at the shop, has turned 18 and it’s time for her to be conscripted. Her mother wanted her to join the Women’s Land Army and stay close to home, but she didn’t want to do that (neither would I, if I had HER mother!) so she went up to London for a factory job, Dad said. I heard him tell Aunt Betty later, when they didn’t know I was listening, that to his mind Nancy was looking for trouble. Mary Black joined the Land Army. She’s gone off to Yorkshire to work on a farm. I will have to do something when I turn 18, although they might let me stay on at the factory if they think that what Barnum and Son is making is important for the war effort. I’m just the junior secretary, but only last week Mrs. Bradley told Mr. Barnum what a big help I am. I have been thinking I might like to join the Land Army too. It must be a lot more fun than stodgy old Barnum and Son and it’s important work. Very important, Mary told me. If we all starve then the Germans can take over England without firing a shot.

But now I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with Dad. Near Bob.

Aunt Betty did a nice bit of a cake with some of the sugar rations she’s been saving up. There were only a few tiny currants, but it was so nice to have a proper cake. Bob ate every bit on his plate and then accepted more when Aunt Betty offered.

He is so wonderfully handsome. I love his accent. It’s ever so smart and sophisticated. He told Dad and Aunt Betty all about his family farm in Ontario (it sounds just huge, with lots of cattle and miles and miles of wheat fields). Dad enjoyed having him here. They went for a walk out to the yard after tea with their cigarettes and to look at the coop Dad built for the chickens Aunt Betty has taken to raising for the eggs. It must be so nice for Dad, to have a young man to talk to, again.

And it’s so nice for me!!!! Bob asked me if I would go with him to the dance next Saturday. I pretended to think very hard as if I had something else planned. Then of course, I said ‘Yes’. It will be wonderful. He is so handsome, and it isn’t just the uniform either. He is much more handsome than any of the other soldiers that were at the dance, or the ones that I see around the village. I only wish he wasn’t quite so short. The man should always be the taller in any couple. But at least he’s strong. He looks to be very big underneath his uniform shirt. That makes him look taller, so it’s perfectly all right.

Chapter 3

“You’re back.”

“Indeed I am.”

My sister blocked the entrance to her house, hands resting firmly on her flat, bony hips. Her bitter, pinched face was as familiar to me as if I’d last seen it this morning. But the combined effects of weather and hard work had beaten the skin into leather, and the brittle brown eyes were collapsing into bags on her cheeks. Her hair was the same shade of fake blond as always, but the lush, thick locks were now only a memory, and patches of pink scalp shone through the thin, bleached hair.

Underneath the stiffly ironed apron, she wore a proper suit with pantyhose and pumps. A tiny string of cheap, fake pearls was wrapped around her crepe-paper neck. She was eleven years older than I.

“Why didn’t you tell Dad I was coming?”

“I did. He must have forgotten.”

“Right.”

I was afraid I was going to have to push her aside and elbow my way into her house, but then my father bustled up, brimming with platitudes about how wonderful to have his two daughters together again, and Shirley stepped aside to allow me entry.

I hadn’t been to this house before. It wasn’t the hovel she and Al lived in when they had finally moved out of his parents’ place, but a neat, although tiny, modern bungalow not far from the center of Hope River.

The screen door leading off the living room opened and Al stepped through, carrying a vicious-looking barbecue fork. The scent of burning flesh drifted in behind him. He smiled broadly and wrapped me in a fierce hug.

“Rebecca. Look at you now. Still the beauty of the family after all these years. Doesn’t she look great, Shirl? Just great.”

“I’ll finish setting the table,” my sister said.

“It’s nice to see you, Al.”

In our youth he’d been painfully thin and cursed with the greasiest hair any of us had ever seen. Everyone knows an Al Smithers. So nerdy that even the mention of his last name would instantly have the “in” crowd in giggles. Every small town has a loser, and Al personified it for Hope River. But nerdy Al Smithers managed to knock up my sister (not that a McKenzie amounted to any great catch), and thus here he was, all these years later, the scrawny frame replaced by a substantial beer belly, bowing and scraping in his tiny living room.

“Let me get you a drink? What’ll you have?”

“A glass of white wine?”

“Sure, sure. And a beer for you, Bob?”

We settled into sagging chairs while Al fetched the drinks.

“To family.” My dad offered a toast. Mom had told me that Dad now had “control over” his drinking. I could slap Al for offering him a beer. But it wasn’t my business—I was only here for a couple of days, and then I’d be well out of it.

Al and I nodded and raised our glasses. “To family,” he said. I swallowed heavily.

“Our first barbecue of the year,” Al announced proudly, hurrying back to attend to his duties. “With the weather being so nice after all that rain we’ve been having.”

Living on the West Coast, making rivers of money and having no children, my husband Ray and I had become accustomed to eating only the freshest of foods usually prepared in one of the city’s best restaurants. I have become quite the “foodie.” So much so that I had forgotten what bad food tasted like. Al’s steak was thin, cooked to the consistency of shoe leather, and drowned in commercial barbecue sauce, the potato salad slimy with bottled mayonnaise. Shirley stared sullenly into her lap, merely pushing her food around her plate although Al chowed down enough for the both of them. I forced myself to keep on eating although the food stuck in my throat. Dad babbled on as cheerfully as he always did, even in far tenser situations than this.

But one thing was certainly different from the old days: Although Al offered another round, Dad refused and made that one drink last right through the meal.

And my mother was missing. Her calm, caring presence wasn’t here to cast a loving blanket over the troubled undercurrents.

But no torment lasts forever and dinner finally ended.

To make way for the worst torment of them all.

We traveled together in the SUV. It being the largest, by far, and Dad eager as a schoolboy to show it off. He was a strange man, my father. As a child and then a teenager I never knew whether he really didn’t understand the hurricanes of emotion that were constantly rolling through his family or whether he simply didn’t care. Here he was leading us all out the door, chattering on about the speed and horsepower of my rental. What Dad doesn’t know, he makes up.

Watson’s had undergone quite a transformation since I’d seen it last. Perfect rows of carefully pruned tea roses were stirring themselves back to life, and crisply pruned hedges lined the neat brick path. Not only Watson’s, but the entire downtown of North Ridge, the larger town to the north of our own Hope River, was light-years from the town I left so long ago. Someone, or something, had brought money into this once almost abandoned Near-North Ontario town.

A smiling woman in a severe gray, pinstriped suit, long dark hair pulled back into a skin-stretching bun, stood at the door to greet us. “This way, please,” she said, her young voice forced into deep and somber tones. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

I followed my family into Watson’s Funeral Home.

Chapter 4

Diary of Miss Janet Green. January 14, 1944

Mrs. Robert McKenzie. Mrs. Robert McKenzie. That sounds so perfectly wonderful. Last night we went to a dance in town with Bob’s best mate Charlie and Charlie’s date Louise, who is Mrs. Bridges’ niece, come up from London to stay with her grandparents for the duration of the war. It’s safer, they say, out here in the countryside. Charlie and Bob were walking us to the bus when Bob took my arm and we dropped back a bit.Then he asked me if I would marry him. I said “Yes” so loudly, I was sure that the whole of Surrey would hear me. I am to be married! Mrs. Robert McKenzie. I can’t wait to tell Dad and Aunt Betty. She has gone to London for a fortnight’s visit to her and Dad’s sister Joan, who got word that her second son, Raymond, has been killed in Italy. And that after losing her Arthur, named in honor of my own dad, in North Africa last year. Two of my cousins, gone. I remember when we traveled on the train to London that Christmas before Mum left. They were horrid boys, Raymond and Arthur. I cried and told Mum and Dad I wanted to go home. Mum hit me and told me I was a foolish girl and I would never get a husband if I didn’t learn how to be nice to boys. Things have changed so quickly. Is it the war, I wonder? Or do things always change? Must be the war. Dad has lived in this village for his whole life, and his parents before him. Aunt Betty escaped for a while. She went up to London. I was only little then, but I remember Granny saying she would never speak to Betty again. And she never did. Granny died the next winter—as if the devil was getting back at her for making such an evil promise. But Aunt Betty came back, and now she keeps house for my dad and me.

What was I saying? Oh yes. I’m not that plain little girl any more. I’m seventeen years old and engaged to be married and Raymond and Arthur are dead. I wish I could tell Mum, tell her I am going to be married.

I told Bob that I don’t want to tell Dad before Aunt Betty. So we will wait until next Tuesday, when she comes home. They will be so happy for me! In the meanwhile Bob will start whatever it is that he has to do to get us married. It is such a dreadfully complicated process. I would love to just skip down to the rectory one sunny Sunday and ask the Vicar to marry us. But Bob has to fill out all sorts of papers, and talk to his commanding officer, who I hear is a perfectly horrid brute. Bob said he might even want to meet me before he gives us permission. I hope not! I would be simply terrified!

I want to get married today!

Chapter 5

“Reverend Wyatt’s come home a day early from his conference to take the funeral,” my father said, slathering strawberry jam onto his toast. “We coulda had the visiting Reverend, but your mom, she and Mr. Wyatt were real close these past few years. He knows she’d want him to be there.”

I poured hot water into the old brown betty. The handle was cracked, the lid broken into several pieces and badly glued back together. It wasn’t one of the procession of traditional brown teapots I remembered from my youth, but it seemed like an old friend nonetheless. My mom, English to her core, loved her teapots. Earlier, scrounging through the unfamiliar cupboards searching for breakfast ingredients and utensils, I had uncovered the gift I sent her for her birthday a few years ago: a replica of an English cottage, cast in the mould of a teapot. Unwrapped, it lay abandoned in the dark recesses of the cupboard. In other circumstances my feelings might have been hurt, but they weren’t. I should have known that she would discard it as a modern frivolity. I smiled as I imagined her steeping her afternoon cup of tea in the chipped brown betty while she contemplated what she would do with this monstrosity of a gift.

If she had known I was coming, it would have been laid out in pride of place.

I haven’t eaten bacon and fried eggs for more years than I can count, but there was no granola, yogurt, or even bagels in my mother’s kitchen. I like a big breakfast, so along with Dad’s meal I prepared a serving for myself. I tentatively lifted a slice of crispy bacon to my lips, telling my inner diet cop to ignore the fat and calorie content. It tasted rather good. I took another bite.

“I’m so glad you’re home, Rebecca.” Dad smiled at me through a mouthful of fried egg. “I trust you can stay a while.”

“I’ve taken time off work, Dad.” An extended leave of absence, in fact. After the hours I’d put in since Ray’s death, they owed me something. (Of course, I’d left my father’s phone number with my secretary and brought my laptop computer so that I could dial into the office every day.)

“Good.” He turned his attention to his breakfast, scooping up a bit of runny egg yolk with a thin slice of toast. What my mother called a “soldier.” Sampson thumped her tail on the floor and watched the food with wide eyes.

“Always liked a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said finally, placing his knife and fork neatly in the center of the scraped-clean plate. “When I was a young man. But your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Insisted on making tea. Every day of her life, ’cepting when she were in hospital having you kids.”

“You could have made your own coffee.”

He looked genuinely astonished. “Now why would I have done that?”

I shrugged and tossed Sampson a piece of toast. She would have preferred bacon, but she accepted the toast with an air of offended grace.

“She didn’t much cling to her English ways, your mom. She tried to fit in real well to how we do things here. But she wouldn’t give up that tea.” His old eyes clouded over with sorrow. I walked over to him and placed one hand on his shoulder. It was all I had in me to give him.

He gripped my hand with his own, worn by work and lined by age. “Don’t know how I’m gonna manage without her, girl.”

“I know, Dad. I know. I’ll make coffee tomorrow. More bacon?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Embarrassed, he rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to wipe away the traces of emotion. My dad had certainly not been raised to show his feelings. Exactly the opposite. “Too bad Jimmy didn’t make it to Watson’s last night. He should be by this morning.”

I sat back down and the cracked vinyl squeaked under my weight. I stirred milk into my tea. “Where’s Jimmy living?”

“In the big house.”

“Mom didn’t tell me that. I assumed you sold it years ago. It’s bigger than this place. If you didn’t sell it, why didn’t you move in there when Grandpa died?”

“Not mine to sell. Dad left it to Jimmy.”

“And you didn’t object to that?”

“Nothing to object to, girl. It was his home. He could do with it as he wanted.”

“Even after he’s dead?”

“Specially then.”

We finished our breakfast, the silence broken only by the patter of Sampson’s toenails on the linoleum and the thumping of her tail as she snuggled up to her new friend’s legs.

“Got any plans for today?” I rose to clear the table.

“Thought I’d drop in at the Legion after lunch. Play a bit of snooker.”

“Okay. I have some work to do. Do you mind if I plug my computer into the phone line in the living room?”

“Sure,” Dad said. “You got that Internet on your computer?”

“Yes.”

“Can you show me how it works sometime?”

“You’ve never been on the Internet?” In my world that was like saying you’d never driven in a car, nor seen a television.

“Woulda liked to give it a try. But your mom, she said we didn’t need it.”

“That’s too bad. She could have kept in touch with some of her family in England or her old war bride friends. E-mail makes it so easy.”

“She didn’t want much to do with any outsiders,” Dad mumbled. “Said we were her family now.”

Too ashamed, more likely.
I bit back the words. I hadn’t come here to fight ancient battles.

He pulled his cap down from the hook by the back door. “Going for a walk. Up to the big house. Talk to Jimmy. You wanna come?”

“No.”

“Your dog would like a walk.”

Sampson was already in position in front of the door, her expressive brown eyes wide and expectant, a happy smile on her face. It would take a bulldozer to move her out of the way.

“Take the leash, but you won’t need it. She’ll be good.”

“Maybe we can have Shirley and Al, Jimmy and Aileen over for dinner tomorrow?”

I stared at him.

“Give Shirley a treat. Not to have to cook after work. You and Jimmy can have a visit.”

“Shirley has to work? The day before her mother’s funeral?” I was horrified.

His turn to stare, as he might at a creature from another planet. As perhaps I’d become. I certainly hoped so: I’d spent thirty years trying to. “Don’t work, she don’t get paid. It’s been hard for them, with Al out of work all this winter.”

“Oh, all right. Do I have to cook?”

“If’n you don’t want peanut butter on toast.”

I finished loading the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and tidied up the kitchen. My dad was going to have a very hard time indeed coping without my mother. I’d never seen him wash a dish or boil an egg in his life. Apparently nothing much had changed while I was away, if peanut butter on toast made up the extent of his culinary repertoire. He’d probably end up moving in with Shirley and Al. They must have the room, now that their daughters were long married and out of the house. Poor Shirley.

Poor Dad.

I quickly cleared space on the coffee table in the living room to make room for my computer and papers. My parents had modernized the house nicely, but they hadn’t stretched quite as far as a CD player. The music center consisted of a tape deck and that relic of a bygone era, a turntable. I popped the Indigo Girls into my Discman and settled the headphones over my ears. A copy of the local newspaper, still the
Gazette
, several days old, caught my eye. I settled back to read and listen to the music while the laptop booted up and dialed my company’s Internet connection. Poor Shirley, going to work tomorrow—the day before her mother’s funeral. But on the other hand Shirley wasn’t spending her Sunday morning dialing into the office to pick up whatever mail had accumulated since Friday afternoon.

Old economy versus new economy.

Pick your poison.

The paper lay open to the sports page. The senior baseball team of Wilfred Laurier High School, my
alma mater
, had been thoroughly trounced by the team from North Bay. It was a good while later, after getting through all my e-mail, that I finally flipped to the front page. A girl, pretty in a generic, modern teenage way, stared out at me from what could be nothing other than her school photo. A breathless, screaming headline reported Still no trace of Jennifer. Search continues.

Jennifer Taylor, a grade twelve student at the same school as the losing baseball team, had not been seen since leaving the house of a friend last Thursday evening. The friend had stood on the front porch watching as Jennifer took a shortcut through the woods for home. She was described as last seen wearing a blue wool coat with matching cap and scarf. In Vancouver I wouldn’t have given the article more than a cursory glance. Common enough, unfortunately. But up here, in small-town Ontario? I stared into her eyes, reduced to no more than dots of black and white in the poor photograph, and then read on. There was no sign that the girl had run away. The paper described her as a good student who never gave her parents “a minute of trouble.” The friend didn’t notice anything amiss with Jennifer that day, and the girl gave no indication of being unhappy at home or school. That meant nothing—what do friends know? Or teachers? Of what really goes on in families? And certainly not police officers, nor newspaper reporters. How could they know to what lengths a young girl would go to hide the depth of her pain? I looked at Jennifer’s eyes one more time, as if I could find a clue hidden in the grainy newspaper photograph. Not that she would tell me anything, had she anything to tell. I was an adult now. One of “them.”

Sampson barked once at the back door, and my father’s heavy footsteps sounded on the wooden stairs. I slipped the paper under a pile of sports magazines, shut down the Internet connection, and removed the headphones.

“Get down, Sampson. You’re a mess.” I leapt up to hustle the mud-encrusted dog back into the kitchen. “Wipe her paws off with a towel, Dad, before letting her in. Look at the mess she’s made.”

“Nothing but a bit of mud.” He pulled his own rubber boots off and placed them neatly on the back step. “Won’t hurt nothing.”

Not if you don’t have to clean it up.

Sampson sat politely and offered one paw after another for attention. “Have a nice walk?” I asked.

“Yup. Good dog you got there. Smart.”

“She gets it from me.”

“Eh?”

“Never mind.”

“Really muddy out there. Lots of rain this past week. Warm. Must be this global warming I been hearing about. If it gives us summer sooner, I say bring it on.”

“Do you want something for lunch?”

“No thanks. Ate lunch at the big house. Aileen says she and Jimmy’ll be happy to come for supper tomorrow.”

“Was Jimmy there?”

“Nope. Just Aileen. Jimmy was off at work.”

“That must make a change.”

For once he picked up on my tone and looked at me sharply. “Jimmy’s doing well these days, Becky. He made a few mistakes when he was young but he’s had a hard life.”

I turned my attention to my dog and gave the thick fur under her chin an extra deep rubbing. “And maybe he’s just plain lazy.”

“Now Becky, that’s no way to talk about your brother.” He changed the subject; my dad was always good at changing the subject. “Aileen phoned Shirley about dinner tomorrow. They’re going to come, and she’ll ask the girls. It would be nice if we could all get together.”

Yeah, swell.

“I’m going to the Legion now. Play a bit of snooker, hang out with the boys. I’ll take the car. Too far to walk into town on these old bones.” He stretched up on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. “It’s nice having you here, Rebecca. I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

My dad was shorter than Mom, something they were always embarrassed about, although they pretended not to be. My grandpa had been even shorter than his son and when feeling particularly mean he usually had something to say about Mom’s height. And then he would throw in a dig at my dad, something along the lines of not looking like he wore the pants in his family. Which was sort of funny, as the old man made sure that my dad didn’t wear the proverbial pants. Shirley and Jimmy took after Dad, short and scrawny. I’m a tall woman, like my mother. Tall and thin. Thin but filled out in all the right places. Lucky in the gene pool, me. Just another reason for my sister to resent me.

I remembered when I was twelve years old, sprouting like one of the beans in my mother’s garden in springtime, and deeply embarrassed about it. Already taller than my older sister and gaining on my brother, eight years my senior. I towered over my grandparents. And to make matters worse, my chest had been swelling with matching speed. I tried to hide it with baggy sweaters and stooped posture, hard in a mid-summer heat spell. My brother (twenty years old!) had taken to hiding behind doorways and leaping out to grab a handful whenever Mom wasn’t looking.

My mother didn’t often leave me alone at my grandparents’. Practically never. In her own quiet way she tried to protect me from the venom from which she couldn’t protect herself. I don’t know why I was there that day, with her not around to deflect the verbal blows onto her own shoulders.

My grandmother had smiled vacantly and bustled off into the kitchen for lemonade and cookies. Grandma always bustled. She also spent a lot of time in the kitchen.

I made to follow, but my brother Jimmy blocked my way.
And then he grabbed my
shirt and pulled it up, twirling me around at the same time so I faced the hated old man. Grandpa chuckled. I still dream about that chuckle.

I swallowed hard and hugged Sampson. She whimpered and I rubbed her ruff. “Wish I had you then, dog. No one would have messed with me if you’d been around.” She licked my face, at the tears that I refused to shed. I had cried the day I left home, and I vowed that I would never cry again. And I hadn’t. Not until I stood over Ray’s coffin, when it seemed that the tears would never stop. On that day I gave myself permission to cry for Ray and all that we had lost.

“You and me and Ray, eh?” I smiled at Sampson. “What a team we were. God, I miss him. I need him to get me through this.”

She barked once in agreement.

Dad had said that he would be back for dinner. Presumably that meant he didn’t plan on preparing the meal himself. Thus the only one left appeared to be me. Ray always said that the best thing I made in the kitchen was reservations. But he was a great cook, and I’m pretty smart, if I do say so myself. I must have learned something by watching him.