Winter Shadows (2 page)

The sun suddenly streaked through the window, slanted across the opening of the hearth, and glinted off something deep inside. I reached in and touched the faint glitter with my fingertip, surprised to feel it move. I pulled it out and was shoving it into my pocket when Jean’s head poked around the door. She frowned and vanished again.
Yes, I am still here, Jean
. Dad would be home soon. She didn’t want me getting to him first.

Something I’d refused to admit until that moment hit me with a swift and painful stab. I’d lost not only Mom, but, slowly and surely, I was losing Dad too. I ran up the back staircase that led off the kitchen and came out next to my room. Locking my bedroom door behind me, I fell on the bed and stared at the old beamed ceiling without really seeing it.

I tried to take a deep breath, but it stuck in my throat. I wouldn’t think about Dad. Or Jean. I slid a new CD called
Wintersong
into my machine and put on my earphones. Sarah McLachlan’s sweet voice floated into my head. Just like last year, I couldn’t listen to our old Christmas music collection because the memories hurt too much, but maybe this one of Sarah’s wouldn’t make me sad.

When Mom was still with us, on the dot of December 1
^st
, in the midst of loud, fake complaints from Dad, our
house was always filled with carols, jazz, and Christmas ballads – everything from Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Mel Tormé to the Vienna Boys Choir and even strange ones – like Yoolis carols and medieval motets, which I quite liked. My best friends, Tina and Crystal, didn’t know a single old Christmas song when we were in grade school until Mom made them drink eggnog and listen. They’d giggled a lot at first, but they liked Mom, and soon the eggnog thing became a tradition. They even started buying their own oldies and bringing them over.

I hadn’t really talked to either of them since early September, when Dad married Jean. Both live about ten miles away, in Selkirk. I had to change high schools when I moved, and at first we kept in close touch. Until Mom got sick. Now they may as well be a thousand miles away. I still got a few E-mails asking what was wrong, but how could I tell them I hated Jean and her kid, hated my life, and that I just didn’t want to talk to anyone? I wrote back that I wasn’t mad or anything – I just needed time to get used to things here.

Sarah’s gentle voice flooded my ears. She sang about seeing someone standing in the snow on Christmas morning and how she’d keep that memory alive. All the times Mom and I made angels in the snow together flashed into my head. I pushed them away. But other memories rose up in their place – the ones that are always nearby … the ones that never go away. Mom’s final few days.

Her skin looked translucent the last Christmas Day we shared, as if she were vanishing into the light. In less than two weeks, the cancer took her away. Now, in less than two weeks, it would be Christmas again – the second one without her and the first with Them. How would I ever get through it?

Why didn’t you wait for me, Mom? Why aren’t you here, so I can beg you to forgive me?
I swallowed hard. I wouldn’t cry. I couldn’t cry – hadn’t been able to since she died.
Where are you, Mom? Where have you gone?

When I woke again, Sarah’s voice was silent, the room filled with a dark blue light spinning spidery branch-shadows across the walls. Night meant I didn’t have to see or talk to anyone. On the weekends, I slept a lot – even during the day. No reason to get up. I checked my watch: almost six o’clock. Only a few minutes left before facing Them at dinner. For the first time, I included Dad in that group.

Shifting my position, I felt something poke me in the hip. I dug it out of my pocket and rubbed some of the soot off with my thumb. A small brooch, shaped like a star.
How long has it been hiding in the fireplace? Who put it there?
I should tell Dad. No, Jean would take it for herself. I walked into the bathroom and carefully washed it with toothpaste and an old toothbrush I found under the sink. It came up nicely. Aunt Blair taught me that.

Back in my room, I stood by a window and examined
the little star while gently polishing it with an old cloth. Each gold point was filled with tiny pearls, the center crusted with bits of … 
glass? Diamonds?

All at once, the floor softened and heaved under my feet, the room lurching in staggered shifts, like a rusty merry-go-round. Nausea washed through me. I groped my way to bed. At the same time, I was sure I heard two muffled voices near me – an old woman’s and a younger one answering. When they stopped, the room anchored itself again.

My heart pounded. The wind was whistling through the cracks in the old window frames.
Is that where the “voices” came from? Did my dizziness and nausea come from not eating much all day?
I closed my eyes, took deep breaths, and forced myself to think about something else – something that would get me back on track.

Like the fact that my room wasn’t my room anymore.

When Mom inherited the house from her great-uncle, Barton Andrews, I was allowed to pick my own room. I chose this one because it overlooks the river. After the cheap siding was stripped off to reveal thick stone walls, we used electric baseboard heaters to keep the deep cold at bay. Even so, pockets of icy air still floated in all the corners of the room. Mom and the restorer had worked out a plan for insulating it and putting up original-style paneling. So far, not done. Facing the river were four deepledged windows. I would tuck myself into one on warm summer days and watch the tawny Red River flow slowly past, but in winter the ledges were rimed with ice.

The next job in line for this room was the removal of the stained and crumbling wallboard around a square bump in the wall – a small fireplace for sure. You could see one tiny edge of pale stone. I’d been looking forward to a fire in the grate on a midwinter’s night. I stupidly said this to Dad a few days ago – with Jean hovering nearby.

“For safety reasons, we won’t open the flue,” she’d said firmly. “So there will be no fires, Cassandra. The fireplace,
if
we keep it, will be purely decorative.” And she’d looked at me as if I were holding unlit matches behind my back and biding my time.

Maybe she thought I’d push her pest of a daughter into the roaring flames. Maybe she was right. I’d never had the heart be cruel to anyone, especially those who didn’t fit in like other kids at school. And I’d never been a stray-dog kicker. But when Jean and Daisy moved in, Jean’s condescending and Daisy’s obnoxious attitudes toward me, Mom, and the house triggered this horrible coiled thing inside me that flung itself around and blurted out malevolent comebacks. At first, I got a lousy torn feeling after mouthing off. Not anymore.

The wind howled past the window beside me. Beyond its thick icicles was a big maple, snow flying off the heavy branches. Past that was a white slope down to the river, edged by more trees. Mom said the old house had faced winds off the river for well over a hundred and fifty years. This room was my haven after she died.

No more.

Now, across the floor was a second bed, piled with
clothes, Barbie dolls, and kid-junk. Daisy’s bed. My stuff had been crammed into a much smaller space. How I hated the sight of it!

Before the wedding, Dad and Jean decided we’d all live in our place, and her divorce settlement would help pay for the restoration. She’d owned a market garden on her family farm nearby until she and her husband split. Now she taught piano to locals.

The third bedroom should have been Daisy’s, but Jean had grabbed it as her music room, moved in a baby grand piano, and put our old upright one in the living room, which she kept telling me to use whenever I wanted – like it wasn’t mine in the first place. She also hinted she wanted to help me with my grade-ten music exams, so I made sure all my music books were packed away. Like I’d let her anywhere near my love of music.

Dad said that, one day, this house would belong to me because that’s what Mom wanted. But as far as Jean was concerned, it was hers now. There was no way she’d ever give it up. Seeing her swanning around Mom’s house made me sick.

Last week, after another fight with Daisy, I told Dad I wanted to live with Aunt Blair. He and my aunt had a bad falling out after Mom’s funeral, and they still weren’t talking.

“No, Cass,” he’d said. “You’re staying right here with us. Give it time. Your mom would not want you leaving Old Maples.” He was right, so I stayed. Very reluctantly.

When she was a kid, the minute Mom saw the house where Great-Uncle Bart lived, she fell in love with it and
the little parish of St. Cuthbert’s. She, Aunt Blair, and I used to come and visit Uncle Bart, and he’d tell us stories – like how, when his father inherited the place from his grandfather, there was a set of turbulent rapids upriver. It was drowned out when a large bridge with power locks was built to control flooding downriver to Winnipeg.

Old Maples was one of the few stone farmhouses remaining from those belonging to retired officers of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the mid-1800s, all built on strip farms dotted along the banks of the Red River. There were lots of smaller farms, too, given to retired workers called servants of the company, set in long rows like two-mile ribbons, running from the river road’s edge to shared pastureland far in the distance. Except for a few like ours, and a few more cared for by Parks Canada as historic sites, almost all of them were gone now, replaced by modern houses.

Old Maples was set well back from the steep riverbank – two stories high, with tall chimneys, but still managing to look wide and low at the same time. Its roof was slate, smeared with green moss in the summer. A stone wall stretched across the yard facing the road. It ended at a low wood fence, which sloped past a large stand of trees and staggered down to a wide flat river shelf, where it encircled a huge vegetable and flower garden. The house was surrounded on three sides with wide lawns ringed by pines, oaks, and maples. Old Maples’ actual farmland lay across the road. Uncle Bart’s family worked it from the late 1800s right up to the 1970s.
Since then, a local farmer rented it for growing hay.

Dad used the old barn for Jean’s car, our truck, and things like sleighs, gardening tools, firewood, and now our old furniture.

I slid off the bed and stood looking out the half-frosted window. Maybe it was time to visit Aunt Blair. Sometimes, after school, I’d catch a lift to her place and have supper there. Sometimes I’d spend the night.

When Mom was told that, as the eldest, she would inherit Old Maples, my grandfather, Duncan Andrews, willed his house and antique business near Selkirk to Aunt Blair. He’d died seven years ago of a heart attack in Scotland, and that’s where he was buried. Most of his final years were spent in Scotland, in a cottage he’d inherited from his family, so I didn’t really know him. Blair had been running the shop on her own for years, anyway.

Usually I felt a bit better after seeing Aunt Blair, but sometimes the opposite happened. Blair didn’t like Jean any more than I did, but she never talked about her – or Dad. So I couldn’t really let her in on what was going on at Old Maples. Besides, I figured she might do or say something that would only make things worse.

When Dad married Jean this fall, I felt a lot like I did after Mom died – restless, with an irritable exhaustion that never let up. Except for school, where the work was pretty easy and distracting, I just couldn’t focus on anything for long. All my favorite books lay unread. I couldn’t even watch TV. I was either twitchy and on edge or plain
dog-tired – no in-betweens. Old Maples felt alien, not like home anymore. I didn’t tell Dad. He would’ve gone all defensive on me or insisted I take the antidepressants I was given after Mom died – which, by the way, I secretly threw away because they made me even more tired.

Before Jean and Daisy moved in, all I wanted was to keep my own room, but Dad sat me down and said, “Can’t do it, honey.”

“But there
is
a spare bedroom. Dad … please?”

I could see he was struggling. He knew that Jean snagging that third bedroom was wrong. For just a moment, he looked right at me. He knew what was going on. When he sighed, I felt a surge of sad tenderness for my tall thin father, with his receding hairline, small paunch straining against his gray flannel pants, and boring blue school shirt. Mom always bought him greens and rusty oranges and bright checks that suited his pale freckled skin and dark red hair. But Jean liked him in what she called a more classic look. He seemed washed-out and old now.

Dad looked down at his hands. “Jean needs the smaller one for her music lessons. That’s a big room you girls will be sharing. Takes up almost the entire front of the house. I don’t want to divide it into two rooms. We’re all going to have to try and shake down together the best way we can, Cass. Even if it means making compromises.”

“But compromises that never include Jean, right?”

He couldn’t look at me this time. Any warmth I’d felt shriveled up. He was betraying Mom in the worst
possible way. By forgetting her.
How could he live with stiff, unfunny Jean after the bright quick warmth of Mom?
Of course, he didn’t really
love
Jean.
How could he? But what made him bring her and her demented twelve-year-old kid into Mom’s house?
Beats me.

The day of the wedding – I don’t know why – I’d blurted this out to my dad’s sister, June, from Toronto. She’d looked at me witheringly from under the brim of her huge hat and said, “You want him to be happy, don’t you? Your father’s had a tough time, Cass. Accept the rules of good behavior today, and don’t look so annoyingly miserable.”

Aunt Blair, who to my shock turned up that day, gave June a scowl and put a hand on my arm, but I shook it off.
Why couldn’t she have stayed at home? Why was she here with Mom’s clear blue eyes and her own tight concerned face?

As I walked away from both of them, I thought,
Who but the annoyingly miserable would ever want to do anything else
but
break the rules?

So, after that, I just kept on breaking them.