Thanksgiving (17 page)
Authors: Michael Dibdin
After a while, my feet started to get cold. My father had programmed the furnace to turn itself off at night, and I had not bothered to reset it. I rolled over and started to get up. The figure to my right stirred and murmured something.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Is there any water?’
I found the tumbler on the bedside table and turned back to the person beside me. She pushed herself up on one arm, took the glass with the other and drank, her head arched back and her neck exposed all the way down to the buttoned lace collar of her pink flannel nightdress.
A moment later, she had pulled the covers over her, rolled over to face away from me and was snoring quietly, the way she always used to.
In the morning, from the kitchen window, there is nothing to be seen but a white ground merging into the whitened sky. A granular, wind-sculpted bulk of snow covers the terrace, the wall, the woodpile, the outside table and chairs. Beyond that, nothing except teasing glimpses of our neighbour’s vineyard, immediately whisked away by another flurry of snow swirled about by the wind gusting to and fro across the landscape beneath a high array of cloud.
Conditions on the roads are worse than I thought, and even with the Peugeot’s four-wheel drive engaged we only just make it to the station in time. On the way, Claire explains the situation in a calm, no-big-deal tone to Daniel, who is wrapped up in his dressing gown and one of my father’s padded jackets. The boy seems anxious and tearful, sensing that something important is happening which he doesn’t understand. For the first time I begin to realize that this could turn out to be a complete disaster.
At the station, Claire finally manages to calm Daniel down enough to hand him over to me. At the east end of the stretch of straight track, the train appears in the distance.
‘But what’s going to happen?’ I find myself asking in a panicky tone, almost as though I’ve been infected by Daniel’s disease. ‘Jean-Claude can’t get a job in America, you can’t work over here. Assuming this turns out to be serious, what are you going to do? How are you going to manage? Do you think it will all work out?’
She gives me another of those looks so expressive of the spaces and silences of this nubby new personality forged out of so much suffering. Comparing our respective losses for the first time, I am put to shame.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she says.
The train pulls in. When Claire climbs aboard, clutching her overnight bag, Daniel tries to follow. I hold him back, and he starts to scream and kick. The guard gives the signal and the train begins to move. Claire stands at a window, waving goodbye. Daniel looks after her, sobbing and protesting.
The drive back is a nightmare. I don’t have a child seat, and Daniel refuses to stay put. In the end I turn round, drive into town and buy him a large ice-cream to keep him quiet until we get home. Up at the house, in the hills behind the coast, the weather has started to clear, with patches of blue sky opening up.
That’s the extent of the good news, though. Daniel is still inconsolable at his mother’s disappearance. I keep going over the story Claire and I agreed, about her going to see a friend for a few days and then coming back real soon with lots of presents. I might be speaking French for all the difference it makes.
But as Claire predicted, this fit soon passes. The next phase is an intensive search of every room in the house, just to make absolutely sure that this isn’t some game, and that Mom isn’t hiding somewhere, waiting to be discovered amid squeals of glee. Once this is over, he returns to the kitchen, an imposing figure in his tiny greatcoat.
‘Not here,’ he announces.
‘She’ll be back soon.’
But I know he’s right. Lucy has left me for good.
The clockwork toys and pyromaniac stunts of the previous day no longer work their magic. They’re associated with Mom’s presence. I need to come up with something new. In the end, I take him to go and see Robert’s chickens. We trudge across the snow-covered yard and up the steep flight of steps to the raised area above the house where the barn is located. I’m so busy making sure that Daniel is all right that I’m not looking where I’m going myself, and at the top of the steps I slip and land painfully on an outcrop of rock.
Daniel starts laughing loudly, his descant cackles rebounding from the rigid air. Adults don’t fall over, he thinks, that’s what toddlers do. So I must have done it deliberately, to entertain him, and he’s determined to show his appreciation. I’m on my knees in a puddle of pink snow, my shin gashed open, and Daniel finally realizes that this is real, that I’m hurt. His laughter breaks off abruptly, and for a moment I’m worried that he’s going to fall apart again. But he just comes to me, holding out his hand.
‘Up again,’ he says.
I know I should be reassuring him that everything’s all right, that he needn’t worry, but I can’t. Instead I’m talking to someone I don’t know who isn’t even there. Thank you, I’m saying. Thank you for Lucy, thank you for Claire and for Daniel, thank you for this cold and this blood and this pain. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2002
Copyright
©
2000 by Michael Dibdin
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except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House of Canada Limited.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dibdin, Michael
Thanksgiving / Michael Dibdin.
eISBN : 978-0-307-42807-3
I. Title.
PR6054.I32T’.914 C2002901864-1
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sony/ATV Songs LLC and Sloopy
II, Inc. for permission to reprint excerpts from the song lyric “Here
Comes the Night” by Bert Burns. Copyright 1965 (Renewed) Sony/ATV
Songs LLC and Sloopy II, Inc. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Songs
LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square
West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights on behalf of Sloopy II, Inc.
administered by Sloopy II, Inc., P.O. Box 158629, Nashville,
TN 37215. All rights reserved.
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Author photograph © Isolde Ohlbaum
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