Where She Has Gone (6 page)

Once as children, Rita and I had crouched in silence behind a row of packing crates in the barn to hide from my
father. We’d heard his footsteps coming up while we were playing, and had hid, with no other motive than the fear that he should find us there, being children. Rita couldn’t have been much more than three at the time and yet she had crouched beside me in perfect, almost unbreathing stillness, so feral had been the awareness of danger in her. We could see my father like an enemy through the slits in the packing crates, could feel the barest tremble of earth as his steps moved near, then away; and then he was gone. Afterwards, I’d wanted to hold Rita in my arms and take her fear from her, make it small. But instead with a ten-year-old’s diffidence I’d simply helped her up roughly from her place, and sent her home.

The next morning, a Saturday, she came by my apartment again, simply there against a blaze of frigid, snow-reflected light at the fire-escape door, hunched and shivering from the cold.

“I was on my way to the market. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

She was wearing an old oversized blue parka I remembered from her high-school days, gone a bit ragged now.

“Not at all. Really. Come in.”

We stood shyly at the door while she took off her things.

“Have you had any breakfast?”

“Actually, no.”

“I’ll make you some.”

She settled herself at the kitchen table near the rad while I started breakfast, huddling up against the heat. The sun coming in through the window there lit bits of orange and red in her hair.

“I wanted to say I was sorry again. About last night. I didn’t mean to break down like that.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She had pulled her legs up on the chair, had pulled her hands up into the floppy sleeves of her sweater. I had the sense I could have whisked her up from where she sat, this economical package she’d hunched down to, and hardly felt the weight of her. I remembered her as a baby, how hopelessly tiny her limbs had been then, how soft the underside of her head, how I’d been afraid of breaking her each time I’d held her.

“I hope you and Elena can work this thing out,” I said. “Maybe if you talked to her about it.”

“She’s not that easy to talk to these days.”

“I guess you’re right.”

We ate in the kitchen. The heat from the stove and the rad had made the room steamy.

“Do you have any plans for the day? I mean, apart from the market.”

“Oh. That wasn’t anything important.”

From the moment she’d arrived it had seemed that there was some tone between us that would have been the right one, but we hadn’t found it yet.

“We could go for a drive if you wanted.”

I had tried to put this offhandedly but still felt infected by the intimacy of the previous evening, the memory of holding her in my arms.

“Actually,” she said, “that would be very nice.”

We set out early in the afternoon. Almost as a kind of joke, we’d settled on driving down to Niagara Falls – Rita had never been there before, though it had been a regular destination for people from Mersea.

“I remember that film,” she said. “With Marilyn Monroe. The one where her boat is drifting toward the edge of the falls.”

The weather had turned overnight to a brittle cold, the city streets skinned over with an unmelting slick of icy wet from the previous evening’s snow. But out on the outskirts, the cold seemed to have sucked the roads dry. We followed the expressway through the built-up outer suburbs – they stretched unbroken for miles, a string of quaint-sounding older communities, Streetsville, Port Credit, Lorne Park, that had slowly been swallowed up by the city, their sea of snow-covered roofs just visible above the sound walls that lined the expressway. Further out, the houses gave way to warehouses, silver-glassed office buildings, the occasional factory sitting desolate amid fields of asphalt or snowy rubble. Watching the landscape fly by us from the warmth of the car put me in mind of the Sunday afternoons that Rita and I used to spend alone watching TV when we were small, Rita cradled against me in my father’s armchair in the living room’s sheltering warmth while outside it was winter and cold.

Past Hamilton I veered off onto a secondary highway. We were in open country now, the road flanked by grey-limbed orchards and by the orderly rows of a crop I couldn’t place at first: vineyards. It was strange to see grapevines in that flat, snowbound countryside, frozen there in their rows by the bright cold like startled pilgrims.

“Almost like home,” I said, but then, seeing that Rita hadn’t understood, added, “The vineyards. Like Italy.”

“Oh.” We seldom spoke about Italy. Sometimes it would come to me to share some memory with her, but then the instant I’d try to put it into words it would seem false. “I
guess you made your own wine and all that, when you were there.”

“To tell you the truth I can’t remember,” I said, and laughed.

“When I was in England, I kept imagining that that was what Italy might look like. Those rolling hills and little villages.”

She had been to England a few years before, to see Mrs. Amherst’s family.

“I wouldn’t have thought England, exactly. But I suppose from here it might look that way. All those old buildings and things.”

Mrs. Amherst was travelling to England for Easter, with the thought of looking into her possible return there. Rita hadn’t spoken much about the trip; there had been some talk of her and Elena going along, but more, it seemed, as a matter of form than as a real possibility. The few times Rita had spoken about her previous trip, it had always been in a forced positive tone that had suggested its opposite.

“Elena was thinking of having a party at our apartment on Good Friday,” she said. “Since Mom won’t be around for us to go home. But I guess you’ll be going back to Mersea then.”

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“It’ll be her friends, mainly. Though I think she wants it to be a sort of birthday party for me.”

“That’s right. I forgot.”

There had never been any sort of protocol for us around Rita’s birthday. Every year it came around less as a day I remembered than as one I passed through: it seemed too intimate, somehow, to commemorate a birth which I’d seen the blood of, which our mother had died from.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” Rita said. “Maybe he’ll be there.”

So she’d met a boy, then. I was surprised how casually she’d brought him up, how much her casualness hurt me.

“Is it someone you’re seeing?” I said, though in a tone gentler than I’d intended.

But she blushed.

“It’s nothing like that. He’s just a friend.”

There was an instant’s awkward silence.

“I’ve told him about you,” she said.

“What’s there to tell?”

“Oh. Stuff.”

It was already late afternoon by the time we arrived at Niagara Falls. The town looked smaller and meaner than I remembered it from when I’d come with my family as a teen, although then, too, we had come in the off-season, half the sights closed down and the town giving off an air of desolation like after the departure of a circus or fair. I remembered my father on that trip being in unusually good spirits, pulling wads of tens and twenties from his wallet to get us into museums and laughing with Uncle Alfredo over the exhibits in Ripley’s and Madame Tussaud’s. But it had already been years by then since Rita had left us.

There was a huge parking lot, nearly deserted, across the road from the falls. We pulled up there and stepped out from the comfort of the car into a bitter, mist-soaked wind. Even at this distance the spray from the falls fanned out in great, gusting sheets, rainbowing in the setting sun before falling frozen to the pavement. The path down to the observation lounge and shops at the edge of the falls was a treachery of ice despite the heaps of salt that had been sprinkled there. In
one of the thicker patches Rita instinctively hooked her arm in mine for support, but then let go apologetically when the pavement cleared.

“I suppose it’s not the best time of year to have come,” I said.

“I don’t know. You could write something about it. The power of nature and that. Like the letters you used to write me from Africa.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No I’m not. I thought your letters were beautiful. Really. Sometimes they were the only things I had to look forward to.”

We had come to the falls. Out in the islanded shallows upstream, the river was covered with ice and snow. But here at the brink the water coursed freely. It was such a relentless thing, this surge and surge and surge, this aeons-ancient heaving forward like the bloodrush of a continent.

The spray had built up massive pillars of ice, great phantom shapes that loomed up from the folds of rock at the falls’ edges like rising spirits.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Rita said.

We stood a few moments without speaking. A sudden gust of wind sent a shower of spray against us, and Rita sank deeper into her coat. I stood behind her and instinctively opened my own coat to enfold her within it, holding her to me; and then for several minutes we stood like that without tension, staring into the falls, though it was clear in the way I held her, in the way she leaned in against me, that some line had been stepped over, that some emotion that had been hovering between us barely acknowledged had grown suddenly real. I remembered a picture in my grade-one reader of a
young boy and girl, brother and sister, making their way along a rotting footbridge over a rocky chasm, and had the same sense of beginning a dangerous crossing. In the picture, a guardian angel had hovered over the two; but still the outcome had seemed uncertain, a matter of one careful step after another.

The sun had almost set.

“I guess we’ll freeze if we stand here much longer,” I said.

We walked back to the car in silence. For a few minutes the sense of our closeness lingered between us like a note struck in a bell; but then the strangeness began to settle in.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

We drove back through town toward the expressway. With nightfall, the town had taken on an eerie, dream-like quality. A few marquees had come on in neon blues and reds above some of the restaurants and museums; on the sidewalks a few straggling shoppers were making their way through the bitter cold toward home. At a traffic light an ancient big-finned Chevrolet crammed with teenagers wheeled out in front of us from the lot of a corner take-out, then rounded a corner and disappeared down a darkened sidestreet.

Out on the expressway there was nothing for us to focus on in the growing dark but the stream of tail-lights racing ahead of us. I caught a glimpse of Rita hugging her window, staring out into nothing.

“We could stop somewhere to eat, if you want.”

“It’s all right. I’m not that hungry.”

The wind had picked up. On the Burlington Skyway, a gust of it caught the car broadside and seemed ready to heave it over the rails. Then toward Toronto it began to snow, in
small, blizzardy flakes that formed shifting patterns on the surface of the highway. For some reason the sight of the city’s skyline through the snow, something distantly hopeful in it, brought a lump to my throat.

The silence between us had begun to grow oppressive.

“Maybe we could catch a film or something,” I said.

But if was as if our parts were interchangeable, as if we were both merely trying to find the way to say no.

“I don’t know. There’s some work I should probably do.”

When I pulled up to her house, Elena was standing at the front window like a waiting parent. She stared out expressionless toward the car, arms folded over her chest.

“I’ll call you,” I said, and though conscious of Elena watching, still I leaned over and brushed my lips against Rita’s, the barest flicker of a kiss.

My heart was pounding.

“I’d better go,” Rita said, and then without looking back she was out in the cold, and home.

Sunday morning, early, there was a knock at my door. I hurried up out of bed expecting Rita again, but it was Sid Roscoe from upstairs.

“Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to get you out of bed.”

Sid had moved in above me in January. In his first few weeks he had come by to borrow things – tools, some paper, a bread knife, the knife coming back flecked with small, greenish bits of what I took to be hash. Then at some point I’d made the mistake of lending him a bit of money, and afterwards he had more or less dropped out of sight.

“I just wanted to leave that cash off,” he said now, and my first irritation at seeing him abated.

“Sure, sure. Come on in.” He was dressed in his usual street clothes, boots, jeans, leather jacket, but I couldn’t have said if he was just rising or just coming in. “You want a coffee or something?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

He took a seat in the kitchen and went into a long explanation about why he was late with the money, something to do with a deal that hadn’t gone through and a late paycheque from the bar on Queen Street where he worked as a bouncer. I had developed a habit of only half-listening to him when he talked, to save the trouble of sorting truth from fabrication. Even this money he’d borrowed: when I’d first met him he had dropped comments about the large sums that passed through his hands from his dealing, and yet he had had to come to me for the piddling amount he was repaying now.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said when he’d finished, neutrally, not wanting to sound either encouraging or reprimanding. It was hard to tell with Sid when he might suddenly call up short my low expectations of him. Once, for instance, he’d mentioned that he did some writing, and then had actually shown up the following day with a sheaf of stories in hand, neatly typed with uniform margins and carefully whited-out corrections. The stories had surprised me, a bit crude in execution but with a real power to them. In one, a man went out on a weekend drinking binge that ended with his picking a woman up in a bar and then seriously beating her. What was chilling in the story was how it was presented utterly without judgement or excuse, stuck simply to the plainest telling of what had happened. Sometimes Sid would bring women home with him from work and I would think of the story when I heard their laughter on the stairwell, the thud of Sid’s fire-escape door.