Who Is Frances Rain? (5 page)

Chapter Eleven

“BUT that was last night,” I said aloud, pushing my bare feet into the cool corners of the covers. “And today is today, and I've got work to do on Rain Island.”

I forced myself to concentrate on the gear I'd need to excavate the cabin site. In the pile of history books I'd read over the winter, there had been a pamphlet put out by the city museum showing how a group of their archaeologists had dug up the remains of an ancient Indian village. Maybe I could be an archaeologist someday — if not a trapper or a writer or an artist, that is.

I'd need a trowel, a shovel, a tape measure, some strong string, my sketchbook, a cardboard box or two, an old screen and my lunch. For starters.

A few minutes later, after washing up in last night's basin of soapy water and dressing in jeans and a T-shirt, I walked down the hall towards the kitchen. Raised voices floated towards me along with the smell of frying bacon. Mother and Gran were arguing. I peeked around the corner.

“ ... so don't go lecturing me on being a better wife and parent, Ma. You should be in Toronto lecturing Carl on good parenting. He's the one who left town.”

Her shoulders were up near her ears and her thin hands were clenched in front of her. I sincerely hoped that she didn't do that in court when she was arguing a case. No one wants to be defended by Squirrel Nutkin.

Gran was calmly pouring herself a cup of coffee, but the hand holding the cup shook a little and her voice had gone down two octaves. It always does when she's mad.

“I'm not lecturing you, Connie,” she said patiently, “but you might have gone blueberry picking with Tim and Erica. That's all. They really wanted you to go. He's very good to her. Spending time. You're practically handing her over to him to raise. She needs you. So does he. He's good to you, too.”

“I am so sick of hearing how good he is,” Mother said fiercely. “What the hell am I? Chopped liver? I should never have married him. Tim pressured me too soon and now he expects everything to be just rosy. Don't you see? I wasn't ready — it's more than I can give. And now Carl's calling all the time. Wanting to talk.”

“Talk's cheap, Connie. Tim is here.”

“Thank you, Ma, I didn't notice.”

I had moved into the room, drawn by a dreadful curiosity, but began to edge out again, trying to be invisible. Funny how the minute you try to disappear, everyone sees you.

“Elizabeth! Stay right there,” Mother demanded. “Tell your Gran. Go ahead. Tell her about Tim. You and your brother have made it very clear how you feel about my new husband.”

“Uh ... he's okay,” I said. “He just takes getting used to. He did come out in the storm to get me. And he'd never driven a boat before. He could've —”

She stared at me, her eyes bulging. “So now he's Mr. Wonderful, is he? That's just fine. After three months of treating him as if he's a social disease.”

“Don't worry.” I tried for a joke. “Evan'll still treat him like that. Tim won't get spoiled.”

“Very cute. Now Tim is just fine! And I suppose I'm not.” She turned to Gran. “Don't give me that look, Ma. I come home every night. I work hard. I like my job. Why can't I do it, without being suffocated?” She shook her hands in the air as if they were wet. “Or feeling guilty.”

Gran cut in. “I think that's enough, Connie. Maybe what you need —”

Mother brought the flat of her hand down on the counter. “What I need is to be left alone! What I need is
peace
and
quiet!
What I need —”

“Listen to yourself. What you need ... what
you
need. What you need, Constance, is a kick in the backside.”

Mother sagged against the counter. “You just don't understand, Ma.”

Gran's voice softened. “I think I do, Connie. Carl left you. You've hardly seen him for two years. Now, for some reason, he wants back in your life. You have a choice to make. But, Connie, he's the loser. Not you. It wasn't your fault. But you're starting to lose everything, too. By closing yourself off. Shutting out Tim. You have to decide. Tim won't leave you. Not like Carl.”

“How do you know that? You've never understood, Ma.”

Her eyes looked so stricken and bewildered that I wanted to put my arm around her, to protect her. I looked away. When I looked back, she was gone. The back door slammed.

Running to it, I saw the tail of her red sweater disappear into the foliage along the path leading to a rocky ridge behind the cabin.

“Best to leave her,” Gran said, behind me.

“I've never seen her like this,” I said. “Not ever.”

“She needed to let go a little,” Gran said. “She's been holding it in too long. Your dad never learned to share. Neither of them learned to give. Every-thing's always come easy to Connie. Let's see if she's ready to give some of it back.”

Chapter Twelve

WHEN I left the dock to paddle over to Rain Island, Mother still hadn't returned, and Gran refused to say anything more. Maybe I should have been more upset, but I was actually relieved. Relieved, I guess, that my mother could yell and carry on like real people. I preferred that to white-faced, silent anger.

I wondered what decision she'd make about Tim. And Dad. He'd never been around much, so I couldn't pretend I'd missed him. But Tim was different. Hard to believe that I'd actually miss someone I thought I'd hated for three months. Maybe I was a born-again stepdaughter.

Lucky for me Gran hadn't even asked where I was going. I'd left her taking out her frustrations chopping wood behind the cabin, waiting for Mother.

The sun was high and the dappling shadows of the trees had moved across the landing rock by the time I'd carried the gear bit by bit to the site. The waves on the lake were pale silver and glittery in the distance, and birds sang high in the trees. Mother's problems drifted away on the morning breeze that cooled my face. Suddenly I felt ready for adventure.

Walking around the site, I chose a spot that faced the lake through a wide break in the trees. It looked as if that view had been around a long time. Maybe the builder of the little cabin had even put a window overlooking this stretch of open water — as good a place as any to start. It was all going to be hit and miss anyway.

I hammered four tent pegs into the ground marking off a square four feet by four feet, running a string around the pegs the way I'd seen the archaeologists do in the museum pamphlet. Now I had a spot I could attack. If nothing happened here, I'd move on.

First I pulled up clumps of damp green moss and tossed them over my shoulder. Smaller plants, like blueberries and bunchberries, had all worked their way down through the sphagnum. The axe and shovel got a good working out on the snaky brown roots.

Only smaller plants were growing in the sunken space — not one tree had taken hold in the low green bowl. The tallest plants were a few clumps of fern near the back of the cabin. I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I couldn't have hacked my way through anything bigger. Paul Bunyan, I'm not.

Bit by bit I pulled up clumps of dirt and roots, shaking them through an old screen window I'd brought with me. I wasn't expecting much at this point, so I was surprised when my trowel hit something that sounded kind of hollow. I poked through the dirt again and — thunk — the same hollow sound echoed back.

A whole layer of matted roots and soil, thick with the smell of rotting plants, lifted easily in one piece. I rolled it back. Underneath was the roof. The decaying bits of black and green roll roofing had once been attached to the boards below.

An hour later, I'd pulled out the crumbling boards and log stringers. Under the roof, I found pieces of broken glass and a rotting wooden casement. So, there
had
been a window at this spot. After I'd dropped the razor-sharp pieces into one of the smaller boxes I'd brought, I sat back on my heels and looked at my first real find. A small tabletop. Not much, you say. But it was covered with tiny yellow tulips and blue polka dots. Now, I ask you, what tough prospector covers his table with oilcloth painted in a tulip design? It had been nailed on with a neat row of copper nails all around the edge.

I carefully lifted it to one side. I was tempted to rip through everything, but the pamphlet warned against that, so I cautiously moved away more dirt and found a carved wooden table leg for my trouble. Dull blue paint chips peeled back under my thumbnail. I tried to imagine what it must have been like, sitting at the little blue table with its cheerful oilcloth covering, looking out over the lake and watching the seasons go by.

A large black beetle scuttled out from under another table leg wedged into the soil. Waving his long antennae anxiously in the air, he tried to pick up any murderous vibrations before disappearing under a clump of peat. I watched his back legs toss up some dirt and at the same time noticed a glint of something under him. I flicked him away and he disappeared into the moss. From the soft earth, I pulled out a large cream-coloured mug. It left a perfect imprint of itself in the dirt. I brushed off the lettering on the front: “Sparton's Root Beer, The Cream of the Crop, Est. 1889.”

I crowed out loud. It wasn't even chipped. The inside was filled with muddy-looking gunk. I tipped it over, tapping the bottom gently with the palm of my hand. A small leather parcel fell to the ground along with some crumpled oilcloth and black dirt. I delicately opened the rolled piece of leather. It was stiff under my fingers, but still fairly flexible. The oilcloth must have protected it for all the years it lay underground.

When I was through, I held bits of oilcloth, a blackened piece of animal skin, and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles whose small round lenses were dirty but unbroken. They looked smaller than those that a man would wear. They looked like kid's glasses. I put them on and looked around. The murky glass gave the scene a dull, gloomy look, almost as if it were dusk instead of a sunshiny noon.

Grinning idiotically, I tucked them into the pocket of my shirt. Before I could stand up, though, everything around me dipped and swayed. For a second, I though I was going to faint. I put my head between my knees. The dizziness drained away almost as quickly as it had begun.

“Must be hungry,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Well, kiddo, you deserve a break today, so get up and get away. For some lunch. More digging later.”

I ate my picnic with my back against the trunk of a big jack pine overlooking the bay. The lake was sparkling in the noon sunshine and the warm breeze cooled my sweaty shirt.

“Next time, I'll bring my bathing suit,” I said to myself, happily working my way through a tuna and pickle sandwich, two apple tarts and half a thermos of raspberry Kool-Aid.

When I leaned over to screw the lid onto the thermos, I felt the glasses shift in my shirt pocket and pulled them out for another look.

I buffed them on the tail of my shirt and put them on. At first, because they were someone else's glasses, I figured they were blurring my vision. But the thing was, my eyesight wasn't blurred — something else had happened. The summer sunlight and clear blue sky were gone. It was dull and misty, with low hanging clouds barely skimming the tops of the trees. And the distant shoreline had somehow changed to the hazy khaki and yellow of late autumn. Many of the trees were bare. Here and there a flash of red shone through.

When I pulled off the spectacles, another sudden wave of dizziness ran through my head like an electric jolt. I had to sit down.

“I must be dozing off like Alice,” I thought, shaking my head. “I'll be seeing the White Rabbit next.”

As soon as my head cleared, I scrambled to my feet and picked my way cautiously to the site. I stood a little way off, peering suspiciously around. It looked so peaceful.

I slid the specs out of my pocket, opened their thin arms and stared at them. The sensible Elizabeth side of me was telling the reckless Lizzie side of me that I was simply imagining things — a mood, a feeling that wasn't really there. But the reckless side, as usual, wasn't listening. She never does.

I put them on.

Chapter Thirteen

NOTHING happened. I looked all around. Then, I happened to glance down. Far, far in the distance, I could see my sneakers. I wiggled my toes and the tips of the sneakers moved. The path, just to my left, was well worn and hardened, as if it hadn't rained the day before.

Path? There was no path on the island. Yet I stepped over onto it and my feet, distances away, lifted themselves and carried me along. I thought I could see the vague outline of blueberry bushes beneath the flat greyness of the path. Behind me, it stretched to the sloping shore. I turned and faced the cabin.

It was lower and wider than I'd imagined. I had just finished digging up a place of rotting, mildewed logs. The logs in front of me were pale grey and silvery smooth, the roof over them covered in the green roll roofing that I'd found in bits a pieces a foot under the soil.

As I stumbled towards it, the scene shimmered, like a home movie on a hanging bedsheet screen. The cabin was there and yet it wasn't. The background of my own world wasn't really there and yet it was. If you'd asked me later how I'd felt at that moment, I'd have told you how surprised I was I didn't drop dead from shock. But, in fact, I only remember shutting my open mouth and taking a few hard gulps. The glasses stayed on though. My bump of curiosity has always been much larger than my bump of self-preservation.

I mean, I knew that what I was seeing wasn't real, but I was also sure that I was seeing the cabin as it had once been. The path drew me forward and I walked along it, my feet now and again getting tangled up in the small plants behind its shadow. Once I tripped on a log that wasn't there. Or was it?

What I'd do when I reached the cabin that was wavering in front of me, I didn't know. As I walked closer, everything seemed to become clearer, more solid and more attractive, as if it was a magnet and I was a bit of metal.

The door of the cabin was made of rough boards, the door handle a simple carved block of wood with a metal latch. I could make out the coarse grain of the boards and the rust spots that had dripped down from the nails. But the weird thing was, I could also still see the outline of the trees that ringed the clearing behind.

A pain that had started at the back of my head when I'd first put on the glasses suddenly grew stronger. I shook it away before reaching towards the latch. When the pain came again, harder this time, I moved back a few steps from the cabin. Pressure seemed to be building up inside my brain. I could feel it pushing against the backs of my eyes.

Shaking my head to relieve the pain, I saw something out of the corner of my eye — something that flitted around the dim light at the edge of the building. My heart beat in thick, sickening throbs. Someone was there. I listened and looked, my head crushed with pain. Again, I saw the flicker of movement, but now it seemed to be drifting behind me, out of my line of sight. The horrible thing was, I couldn't turn to see if it was coming closer. It was as if I was being held in a vise.

I tried to tear the glasses from my face but ­couldn't move my arms. The awful silence I had felt the day before once again hung around me, as if someone had dropped a deadening headset over my ears. Suddenly, I felt a terrible weight fall against my shoulders, a weight so strong my knees started to buckle under it. I fought to stay on my feet.

A whistling sound, like a giant's breath, rushed in and out through my head. My hand moved from my side, as if someone had taken control of it, and it hung in the air ready to take hold of the door handle. I watched in horror as its long paleness dissolved to a filmy mist, and in its place, a larger hand, brown and sinewy, reached towards the handle. A flat gold signet ring glinted in a far-off light.

I didn't wear a ring ... I didn't wear ... slowly, slowly, the pressure pushed me towards the door. The hand with the ring took hold of the handle and pushed the door open. Yet it was the other pale spirit hand — my own hand — that drew away. The muscles in my arm, driven by my terror, lifted it towards my face.

With every ounce of willpower left, I forced my eyes shut. It took all my concentration, for other eyes were also looking at the door, wanting to get inside the cabin. I knew I'd be pulled in, too.

When the scene before me was finally blacked out, it was easier to move my arm. I fumbled with numbed fingers for the glasses, and somehow managed to hook my thumb under the wire arm, yanking them up and off in one hard pull.

The glasses and I hit the ground at the same time. I lay for a long time with my back deep in the damp thick moss, waiting for the tall pines above me to stop turning, waiting for the dizziness and nausea to leave. I felt as if I'd been on the biggest ride in the fairground. Only it hadn't been any joy ride.

The top of my hand felt as if someone had hit it with a hammer. Carefully I touched it. No bump. Just a tender spot. I winced and dropped my hand. It felt like a dead weight.

I'm not sure how long I lay there, gulping and gasping like a jackfish out of water, but when I did manage to stagger to my feet — probably looking like a drunk orangutan — I knew I had to get off the island. Archaeology wasn't any fun anymore.

Not daring to look behind me, I stumbled towards the safety of the Beetle, stopping only long enough to pick up Gran's tape measure, the trowel and the shovel.

After I'd paddled away from the landing rock, I made myself look back at the island. The sun had that deep yellow glow of northern afternoon and its heat was lying heavy and thick over the water. The pines stood silent and still, keeping their secrets to themselves.

The smooth wooden paddle gripped tightly in my hands and all the familiar sights around me — the flashes of light off the waves, the rich green of Gran's distant shore, and a sharp-winged tern riding high in the shimmering heat — they all seemed to only heighten the feeling that maybe I wasn't really here anymore, that somehow I'd become part of someone else's dream.

I shook my head. No. I had to be real. I'd read somewhere that if you pinched yourself hard and it hurt, then you weren't dreaming.

“Ouch!” I cried.

I was real all right. “So, if that's true, and if I'm real,” I snuffled to myself, as I paddled hard for home, “then who the heck did I bump into on Rain Island?”