Page 11 of Each and All

Chapter 11

  Wayne and Charles left just past noon as the wind rose and the snow drove itself into the white silhouettes already on every vertical surface of the farm. By the time they got to Toronto the roads were crawling lines of steel social insects on single clotted lanes. The big storm got bigger and by the morning the great city was struggling to keep it’s automotive blood cells moving in it’s perpendicular veins. The brutal wind stayed steady, and windows and windshields stayed or turned opaque white. But unlike most winter storms that came and went with the speed of their intensity, this storm came to stay. Every day the wind closed the open roads again and every day it drifted in the cars and houses that were forced to stop and wait. By the following weekend the interminable storm had paralyzed the biggest city in the country so that the mayor was forced to ask the Army to come in to deliver essential services. ‘Toronto The Wimp!’, headlines read in other cities and towns that were used to the digging themselves from the deepest paralysis of winter.

  There was something about watching Toronto, the good and superior, trying to struggle to its feet in its heavy diaper of snow that the rest of the country seem to find truly enjoyable. There was some serious gloating from other towns and cities that kept themselves moving in the seemingly unending storm.

  At the farm it was business as usual except that the lane ways the snow blower kept open sank beneath white cliffs of heavy snow. For Laura, walking the long lane to the cabin through the wall of the wind was like walking a long roaring tube of white as the snow, piled windward, blew back over the path like a wind whipped linen sheet. In the grave-deep snow, in her big boots and balaclava the walk to the farmhouse she made twice a day was the only time she was forced to face the feelings inside her that were so much like the storm. She ate only twice a day for the two weeks the storm raged. To her, it was fitting that she and her daughter were the only ones who would have to walk through what everyone called the snow storm of the century. She felt it was fitting and ironic that she endured it in the little warm cabin, and on the long, cold path, and watched it rage outside as she sat every evening beside Eugene where he lay in the sun room full of blooming moth orchids.

  It took almost the whole two weeks that the storm raged before Laura and Eugene agreed on twelve stories for the book. Eugene had fought very hard for the story of Petsuliack, the Inuit orphan boy who had slain the polar bear. Laura’s point was that few people could relate to being an orphan, that the emotions in such complete and total rejection were unlikely to be ones to which most readers could relate. Eugene disagreed, saying that he believed it was common in this world of busy parents for young children to feel abandoned and rejected by everyone. ‘Everyone is an orphan, one way or another.’ he had written.

  It was a sore point for Laura, but she stuck to her guns, pointing out that there was another story about a latch key child who became obsessed with cows that was not as dramatic but was funny and touching and made the point much better.

  “Every kid gets obsessed with something. It’s the transitional object that lets them let go of their parents.” Laura had pointed out. She thought that she had been Eugene’s.

  Eugene replied that he hadn’t thought of that. He thought the cows were just something powerful and gentle at the same time, something that would make a great obsession for a city boy.

  After they talked about it for some time, Eugene teased Laura by saying that cows were more than transitional objects, they were the true Buddhists of the animal kingdom, peaceful vegetarian monks who harmed no one and meditated all day long. They were the only creatures that accepted every moment of life, he pointed out.

  “Except the moment of death.” Laura had replied. “I just really like it that a child could end up by getting in such trouble because he loved cows. And I liked how funny it was when Arthur and Laura Lee were defending cows and the right to love them.”

  Finally, Eugene relented because the other dark stories they had chosen were so heart rending that the story of the Inuit boy might be just too much to bear.

  Amanda moved into the routine on the farm as if she had lived there her whole life. Her relationship with Tom seemed to be like that too. The strange thing about their simple familiarity with one another was that they behaved like they were an old married couple when, in fact, they were anything but that. Where there should have been the passion of discovery and novelty, it was as if there was a deep, light comforter of down separating them. The intensity of the connection they had felt kissing on Christmas Eve was gone. For Tom it was as if sexual passion was in the very next room, but the door to it had been closed. No matter what he did, it seemed that the handle to that door just spun in place, unable to move its latch

  “Are you okay?.” he asked a couple of times when they were kissing and he could feel the door handle spin.

  “Sure. Sorry.” she had replied and didn’t know how to face her feelings or tell him that it wasn’t her desire she feared, it was his. She was afraid of the force of sexuality in a man, even the gentle, tender man who loved her. The way her mother was afraid of a snow storm, she was afraid of sex. She told herself it would only take time. She reminded herself of how she felt when she and Tom had kissed on Christmas Eve. She reminded herself of how deep the bone bruise to her soul had been. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t face it. She shut the door to Tom’s desire and she, ironically, faced hers in bed beside her mother.

  For Ian, buried for two weeks in the city was a strange solitary confinement broken by his calls to Laura’s cell phone every day. For the first week he hadn’t even been able to get to work. The courts were closed and so there would have been little for him to do but prepare the few cases that he had waiting. As the storm got worse and the city succumbed to paralysis, he thought every day about somehow getting to the railway station and taking a train back to the farm. At first he couldn’t have done it if he had tried, because all the secondary roads were completely snow bound and impassable, and by the end of the second week when his street was finally opened, his office did too, and so he had to make his way downtown to see if there was anything he should be doing.

  Talking once a day to Laura had the same strange paralysis of familiarity that only old married couples know, but it was worse for the real distance. He had nothing to report about his day, no news from work, no reports about Amanda, nothing but the weather, the overpowering weather. Like a teenager whose whole life was in the responses of someone on the other end of a phone line, Ian tried to drag out the conversation, tried to get Laura to talk about her day, her work, her reports about Amanda, even her news about her view of the weather. The one thing Ian had that made him feel a little less than perfectly alone was the phone. And it was disconcerting for him to realize that the only people he really wanted to talk to that weren’t on the farm were Wayne and Ann Marie.

  Wayne’s antique business was closed, so his days were long and boring. Ann Marie’s patients were unable to reach her, so her days were long and quiet. The whole city, in fact, was as quiet as its deep, frozen parks. Unlike his talks with Laura, Wayne and Ann Marie would gladly spend hours on the phone with Ian. Ann Marie was the emotional apex of the triangle the two men supported as she rode the sine wave of emotions as Wayne’s friend wrote his daily email about Megan and she composed her own constrained reply.

  The storm was all she could think to write about without getting emotional and appealing to her daughter to come home. The replies she received every day reporting Megan’s concern for her mother, trapped and alone, was the only emotional response reported in reply.

  Ian, Wayne and Ann Marie, three professional listeners, looked forward to the long, long telephone calls they shared every day. Over the phone, dealing with the overwhelming problem of Ann Marie’s runaway daughter, they each, inevitably, had to describe their own personal histories and the heartache they had known in losing someone they loved, and how that made them feel so lost.

  For the
first week, Ian had Amanda to talk about, her rebellion and transformation in the previous year when she rejected everything and everyone who thought well of her. He could describe to Ann Marie his own helpless feeling, and understand and sympathize with her about how much worse it must be, knowing Megan was completely out of her control and, even worse, might be in terrible danger.

  Wayne was able to talk to Ian and then to Ann Marie about his own past, when he was the lost and lonely rebel, when he moved from one foster home to another where he couldn’t understand that there was a difference between those who treated him well and those who treated him like dirt, or worse. It was Wayne who was able to make them realize that a developing child sometimes has no real sense of internal references, no real standards by which to judge either themselves or others. Living in the moment and in its anxiety and tension, a feeling of helpless frustration and anger was inescapable without the perspective of experience. And for some children, it took a long time to believe what their own experiences taught.

  “When you’re innocent and unhappy, it’s impossible to appreciate your own good feelings. It’s impossible to believe that your own worst feelings will ever stop tormenting you. Growing up in my teens on the farm, with about the best parents anybody could ever ask for, didn’t help to make me believe my best feelings meant any more than my worst ones. It was my dad buying me heroin and spending money they really needed that finally made me come to terms with believing in something that lasted more than a moment.” Wayne had explained to Ian.

  Ian had then passed Wayne’s comments on to Ann Marie and they talked for a long time about what they could have done as parents that might have somehow helped their children the way Eugene had helped Wayne. It was a long anxious talk where they finally expressed their personal guilt to someone else as they tried to face the fact that they both believed that they should have done so much more as parents than they had done. But they were thwarted in coming to some better hindsight about what they might have done with their daughters because it had seemed to be the typical teenage rebellion, and so the pain they had experienced was just too typical and easy to dismiss as growing pains. Until the very last moment when Amanda was raped and Megan ran away, there was no great life or death crisis where they would have to intervene and prove to their daughters how much they loved them. There was just no framework for urban parents and children to share any common concerns.

  The first week, while Toronto was buried in the snow, Amanda was surprised that she started getting daily email messages from Megan in Vancouver on Tom’s computer, at his email address.

  It seemed that Megan knew about Amanda’s rape from her mother’s email, and Wayne’s friend had told her how Amanda was now living at the farm with Laura. Wayne’s friend had prevailed upon her sense of compassion to send Amanda some messages of support. Wayne had supplied Tom’s email address and so Megan, with compassion as an excuse, reached out to help someone from her past. That it would ease her own aching loneliness was something she couldn’t and wouldn’t admit. Megan soon saw herself as a strong center of support for a lost boy in Vancouver and a poor traumatized old acquaintance from her past. She didn’t realize that she was being put in that position so that she would feel that the strength she had to offer someone else might be enough to make her realize that she had the same strength to offer herself.

  Amanda didn’t know what to make of the messages she suddenly started getting out of nowhere from Megan. In trying to comfort Amanda, Megan seemed to think the best thing to do was describe all the misery and all the terrible things that she had seen and overcome since she had come to Vancouver. Without shame or self-consciousness, she described in detail what she had to do when turning tricks on the street. It was like boys boasting about how drunk and sick they were one day after another and how they were strong enough to do it all over again. Megan’s descriptions didn’t deal with her own sad behavior, but with rather the disgusting, pathetic behavior of the people she sexually serviced. Morality seemed, to Megan’s way of thinking, to be nothing more than secondhand values that she had long outgrown. She had the undeniable strength to survive the streets, and that was a strength to be proud of having, the only strength that really mattered at all.

  Amanda couldn’t believe what she was reading and certainly didn’t know how to respond without sounding negative and judgmental, which she knew was something Megan wouldn’t accept for a minute. She didn’t want to sound like a hectoring parent and so she limited her responses to worrying about Megan’s safety. She told her she didn’t want to describe the horror she knew could strike without warning, but Megan should be afraid.

  Amanda was shocked when Megan’s reply began with the description of what she knew about the details of Amanda’s rape. Those details were ones she had only shared with Ann Marie and she was shocked that Ann Marie would have described them in such detail to her daughter. Megan said that she could understand being frightened because Amanda had gone through this and this and this, and as Amanda read the words on the screen that described with such cold, ordinary, inadequate words some of the things that she had suffered, it made her furious. And Megan’s final question to her made her almost nauseous.

  “So how fucked up are you?”

  That was the question. That was the question Amanda didn’t want to answer or even face. The answer to that question might just destroy her life. She felt a doorknob turning in her hand, turning and turning. The doorknob was Megan’s terrible, insensitive question.

  Despite her anger, Amanda knew something about the psychopaths that lived on the street and so she thought the best way she might help Megan was to describe the one sick monster who had ripped her soul to shred’s. It was the hardest thing that Amanda had ever had to write. Putting down on paper a description of the psychopath’s mind and body that she would feel touching her life for as long as she lived was like letting him touch her again with her own permission. Bringing on the memory of his eyes and his hands and his overpowering rage was to feel them all again. Trying to get someone to believe such people existed, and convey the enormity of the danger was beyond Amanda’s or anyone’s ability. The one sentence that she wrote that she felt was some small measure of a warning of the enormity of the danger, was when she simply said, “If you can imagine looking in someone’s eyes and it makes your whole body feel like the dry heaves, then you can start to imagine what he was like.”

  “I meet creeps like that every day.” Megan had replied, and it made Amanda’s eyes roll back in their sockets at the irrational absurdity of what she was reading. My creeps are bigger than your creeps. Life is shit. Get used to the smell. Amanda didn’t know what to do or what to say.

  Tom was no help. Megan was describing the life Tom’s own mother had lived, the life in which he was born. He was even more angry than Amanda at how easily Megan had accepted her own degradation, and realizing that it was the same degradation his own mother had once accepted made him silent and, for once, apparently helpless. He had no suggestions about what to say or do to make Megan realize what she was doing to herself.

  After a week of email messages Amanda finally told Laura about her communication with Megan and how angry and frustrated it made her feel. Laura told her she knew how she felt and suggested that Amanda might still be the best one to help Megan because she certainly understood rebellion. “What was it that meeting Tom did for you? How did he change your life when we couldn’t.” Laura asked pointedly.

  “I don’t know what it was he did. He was just there, all of him, just there.” Amanda replied.

  And the unspoken message was that she and Ian had not been there. Of course, there was more than a little truth to the implied accusation.

  “Maybe you can just be there for Megan.” Laura answered, and Amanda knew she wasn’t going to be able to do that. Like mother, like daughter. That was all they said, but Amanda spent a long time thinking about the first time Tom touched her life
over a phone line just a few months before. Amanda would never know or be able to explain the sense of completion that she experienced in those few minutes. There was a drive to completion and the sense of it when it happened that was as powerful a binding force as anything on earth, yet how or why one person felt completed in another was absolutely impossible to understand or define. Remembering that first night talking to Tom was still like diamond dust drifted over her heart.

  Amanda intuitively knew that Megan was aching for some kind of personal context, and the ache for it grew exponentially with its need. Megan needed something or someone desperately, even as she tried to convince herself that she needed nothing and no one. Amanda fell asleep feeling frustrated and helpless. She hated facing her old pain once again, secondhand.

  When Laura mentioned to Ian the next day that Megan had been sending email messages to Amanda for the past week, he was very excited, and when he realized that Laura had actually gotten very little information from Amanda about those messages he quickly ended his daily call with Laura and phoned up to the farm to get Amanda on the phone to get a fuller report. The report was not encouraging; except for the fact that Megan, thankfully enough, was still able to stay off heroin, mainly because her boyfriend had no interest in sharing anything with Megan, especially his most precious commodity.

  Tom was more upset by the email messages Amanda was receiving than she was. His natural compassion was reinforced by the identification he felt with a girl who was the same age as his mother when he was born, probably on the same streets Megan walked. He knew a great deal about aboriginal social problems and one thing that outraged him most was that ninety percent of the child prostitutes in Canada were aboriginal children. It was as if the sickest part of white society would not rest until it had destroyed the last, most precious, native resource, the last hope of cultural survival, the children of the aboriginal nations. That he was a product of that degenerate exploitation made it harder not easier to accept. If it had not been for the Van Fleet family and the incredible luck of his adoption, he assumed he would have shared with Megan the horror of worthlessness.

  Tom could barely sleep from his anxiety over what to do, what advice to give Amanda about what she should say when you replied to Megan. Tom being Tom, with Amanda’s glad permission, composed the next reply. It would come from him. It could only come from him because of what he intended to say. He introduced himself with his typical directness.

  “You don’t know that I exist, but I am Amanda’s boyfriend Tom Van Fleet. I am eighteen years old and I was born in Vancouver. I am an aboriginal, like you. My mother was a prostitute, just like you. I love and respect my birth mother, and so I hope you won’t feel I’m judging you or putting your down for what you’re doing with your life, but I have to tell you I’m very, very angry at what my mother was forced to do and for what you feel you have been forced to do. I don’t believe any child would choose to sell their body if they had another way to live.”

  “Because Amanda was so worried about your safety on the streets she let me read your messages to her and I have been sick with worrying about you because of the things you describe and how you seem to have accepted such things as your world. I am not angry with you. I am angry and outraged at anyone who would come and offer you money to buy your body and your heart and your soul. I known you don’t feel it’s so bad right now. I know you feel you’re doing it for love. But anyone who loves you would fight to protect you. I’ve never even seen you but as a part of my people who is being ruined by the sick part of the white race, I want to fight for you, but I don’t know how.”

  You are living the story of our whole people. They take away every hope and opportunity and treat us as inferior and primitive and then they force us to accept our own ruin while they take advantage of our own desperation. All white society offers the children of our nations is a bottle or a bag of gasoline or a life of exploitation or becoming white on the inside like you and me.

  I know you grew up like me in a middle-class family and have had all the opportunities of being like an all-white child. But you know and I know we’re aboriginal peoples and we should be proud not ashamed of who we are. I am angry for what you suffer and understand it because, like you, even having parents who love you doesn’t take away who you are. Like me, you’re lost from your own people the way your own people are lost from themselves.”

  I have found myself, and my connection to our people, in my heart. I hope you will look for yourself and your people inside your own. When your heart breaks, it breaks at the end of a long line of broken hearts. I ask you to remember who you are on a whole lot of levels. I ask you to remember that you are never alone unless you believe it.”

  “Be careful. Be proud. Be angry! Be who you are.”

  Tom signed his message your distant brother Tom.

  It was three days before Megan replied and the message came addressed directly to Tom.

  Tom’s message had shaken Megan as nothing she had ever experienced before. It completely shook up her frame of reference. It made her see herself in ways she had never conceived or imagined. She, of course, was always conscious that she was a native person with the same skin and features as her own mother, and she had known the difference that made while she was growing up. But her culture was completely white; her mother had grown up from infancy with the white family who had adopted her. She was white on the inside, just like her mother. And, in the years her mother had grown up, the idea of connecting an adopted child with their native culture didn’t really exist. An adopted child became a part of their parent’s culture. To do anything else was thought to be alienating a child from their new life, risking the child’s connection to a parent. Megan was not really sure that she wanted to think of herself as an aboriginal person. She didn’t know even how to begin to do such a thing, if she wanted.

  But the tone of Tom’s message and the things that he said to her, for the first time in her life, made her wonder if it was something she should want for herself the way Tom obviously wanted his cultural connection for himself. No one had ever spoken to Megan the way Tom had done in his message. The obvious concern and worry and identification he felt with her and her situation touched her deeply. That he feared for her without judging her was something very new. That he was an eighteen year old boy gave him a power and authority no one else would have had. When Tom opened his heart, it was hard not to respond.

  Answering Tom, it was impossible for her to posture and rationalize. For the first time in her life, Megan gave someone a serious and honest response. It had taken her three days to get ready but when she sat down to make her reply she couldn’t help it, Tom had opened her heart so that was what she let speak for her.

  The first thing she did was to make him promise not to show her reply to Amanda, or her own mother, or anyone else in the world. Making the request didn’t even require his answer because she immediately went on to tell him her deepest fears and feelings.

  “I don’t know who I am so I don’t know how to tell you what’s going on and why am doing what I’m doing. I see all kinds of other kids out here who are way younger than me and they don’t have a chance. They are so not going to make it. At least I’ve got a place to stay and somebody who’s supposed to love me. I think he really does, but he loves junk way, way more. My mom wants me to be like her and go to college and be a white girl, but I’m not. I can’t be like that. I don’t belong any place. I don’t belong on some reservation. I don’t belong with people who look like me. I hate white men touching me and getting inside me. I don’t belong any place and I don’t belong with anyone. You’re the only person I’ve ever known who knows what I’m saying. You’re the only person who’s ever said anything to me that made any sense.”

  “I have nothing to be proud of. I don’t know what it means to be myself but I will try to take care of myself for you.”

  She signed her message; Yours, Megan. br />
  Tom wrote back immediately and from that moment, like Amanda’s, he held the key to Megan’s future. When he told Amanda that Megan had replied to his message and she asked him to keep it private, Amanda suspected that the power that Tom had to touch another person’s heart had reached across the continent, and it made her anxious, if not actually afraid. Yet she didn’t dare object.

  In the three days before Megan replied to Tom’s message the phone lines were busy with Megan’s name as the center of many conversations between the farm and Toronto. Ian quickly phoned and debriefed Amanda about her previous week’s messages and how it came to be that Megan was writing to her at the farm. Ian then passed what he learned from Amanda to the Ann Marie and they had a very long conversation about what to do with the information she had received, and whether she should mention it in her own daily communication that was being passed to Megan. She also wanted much more detail about the things Megan had said to Amanda and so she phoned, and Amanda had to undergo a second intensive debriefing about a girl she hardly knew.

  After the flurry of phone calls from Toronto in which both Ian and Ann Marie pressed Amanda very hard to follow Tom’s message to Megan with her own, the hopes and expectations very far away in the city grabbed Tom and Amanda with its fierce, anxious insistence.

  Amanda finally agreed to write Megan again herself, but received no reply and would receive no reply ever again because Megan had unilaterally decided she would only correspond with Tom. After the first three-day pause following Tom’s first message they wrote to each other every day, sometimes twice in a day.

  The situation was difficult for everyone but Megan. Tom, having promised Megan the discretion of his silence, was unable to report anything that Megan communicated to him. This made everyone extremely frustrated and anxious: Ann Marie and Ian far away and hopeful and Amanda so close and so nervous and reluctant to even begin to question Tom about what was going on in the exchanged messages.

  The only thing that Tom said when Ann Marie phoned and asked him what he was saying to her daughter was that he was just encouraging her to be angry. It was not what Ann Marie wanted to hear because the daughter that she knew so well seemed to have untapped reservoirs of anger that she already had difficulty controlling. Tom apologized to Ann Marie for not being able to explain more fully what he intended to do to reach Megan or what she had said in reply because he had to respect and honor the sense of confidentiality her daughter had asked him to promise her. As a psychologist, Ann Marie would have understood if it had been another psychologist saying what Tom said but, from an eighteen-year-old boy, it was just too frustrating and difficult to accept. Even though she had betrayed her own professional standards by talking to Megan about Amanda, she had to fight her own anger as he adamantly refused to tell her anything about what Megan said to him. That Ann Marie wrote her own message every day to her daughter that said virtually nothing about what she was feeling and what little she knew about Megan’s communications with Tom only made it worse.

  What Tom was encouraging Megan to do came from what he had gone through when he came to the farm to live. After he finally learned to trust the Van Fleets, to trust that they would value and respect him, he still could not shake off the pain he felt inside from having lived all his life as a throw away child. Before he moved to the farm, when his frustrations and his pain overwhelmed him, he would almost always strike out, and he would punch whoever was at hand. The very first time he did it after he came to the farm, Sharon had talked to him alone and made it perfectly clear that anger was perfectly permissible at the farm but violence was absolutely forbidden. If he wanted to physically strike anyone, if he did actually strike anyone again, the other members of the family would stand beside who ever he struck, and he would be expected to strike each of them as well. It was a reverse kind of gauntlet that none of the children ever did more than once. After Sharon explained to Tom that the whole family would actually line up in front of him and he would have to go down the row striking each, one after another, even after his anger was satisfied. Tom was appalled. Just the thought of doing such as thing was horrible and humiliating.

  “You hit one member of your family, you hit all the others.” she had added, “Anyone who hits you, hits each of us as well.”

  “So how am I supposed to get angry?” Tom had asked Sharon all those years ago and she told him simply that he could do it any way he wanted except with physical violence. Every one of his brothers and sisters had seen and suffered physical violence, which would not be allowed to happen at the farm. She had suggested to him that the best thing to do with anger was to figure out how much of it someone deserved and how much of it was just his own doing.

  And that was just what he did. He understood he had a right to be angry. He also learned he had a right to be a lot angrier than he was, but the anger wasn’t something his new family deserved from him. After he understood and respected his own anger, he was able to stop being its victim. He had been a victim in many ways. He learned that he would not do that to himself. In telling his own story to Megan he was trying to get her to understand the same thing.

  Deep in the big snow it was all about secret letters, old ones and new ones, the new ones passed in an instant across the continent, the old ones that had passed across an imaginary ocean and two worlds of time.

  After the evening meal Laura usually spent two hours on the porch by the fire, getting ready for her hour’s appointment with Eugene. She either finished her days work on the first story of Arthur and Laura Lee falling in love or she sat thinking about it and what she would say to Eugene and what she would ask him about what she planned for her next day’s work.

  The porch was usually for adults. Laura was often sat with Sharon and Jonas who sat some distance away and talked quietly while Laura worked on her laptop. Of course it was impossible for her not to overhear the conversation, and when she would pause and listen to something they were saying, she was usually intrigued by the way Jonas would respond to his mother. Jonas had the manner of a natural confessor and Laura at secondhand listened to bits and pieces of a mother telling her son her fear, her doubts and her questions about the enormity and the meaning and the consequences that would flow from Eugene’s death.

  The real unspoken reason that Jonas had chosen not to fight his way to an airport was because he discovered that his mother needed him, as he never imagined she would. To him, as she was to all her other children, she was the Rocky Mountains, the majestic spine of their family. The thought of her feeling weak and frightened was almost inconceivable. Jonas stayed to listen to his mother’s private heartache. He also insisted that he take over some of the therapeutic duty with Eugene so that Sharon was finally forced to take some time to herself to rest her body and her heart. Her hands moving on her husband’s wasting body every day, moving to relieve his pain and discomfort was a slow and subtle pain that transferred into her own flesh. Touching him was losing him and she could feel it in her hands and it gave her dreams of terror she would never describe to anyone.

  Unlike his mother, who was so familiar with his father’s body, the massage and exercise Jonas gave to Eugene was a contact he had never known or even imagined. A boy never imagines his own father’s body helpless under his hands. Feeling the limp flesh under the translucent skin should have been heartbreakingly sad, but Jonas was more than surprised to find that the touch produced a tenderness inside him, a sense of contact and connection with who his father really was. He was surprised that it wasn’t just in Eugene’s attentive eyes that his father still survived. The touch he had never known, the flesh that was once so strong and agile was there in his hands.

  Jonas also knew that these memories of his father would probably be the last ones he would have of him, and so they made every touch more real, more tangible and more precious than he could ever have imagined them being. Occasionally tears would well in his eyes as he felt his father’s limbs as he moved the
m. Occasionally his eyes flowed with tears because of the joy he felt in his love, and sometimes he would just let them flow and wash away toward the great waterfall of anguish ahead, the loss that would come only too soon.

  Laura, because she was re-creating an imaginary world within an imaginary world, began to see the real world change as only imaginary worlds could do. The moments of the day that had passed without notice suddenly became clear and in focus the way the long lens of a camera could make invisible things at a distance suddenly appear out of nowhere.

  The thought first struck her when she was walking from the cabin to the farm. It was the first day of bright of sun, and she was surprised that all the shadows that fell on the dark side of the pristine white world were of a pastel, cobalt blue. She thought that shadows had color only in impressionist paintings. Before the week was out, she was even more surprised when the sun made all the shadows as black as bark.

  After that she started to see gestures in people and in the tone of their language that carried its intent in very little content. Small talk could say so much. As she listened to Sharon and Jonas talk about Eugene’s condition and his daily responses and needs, she began to see the way shared ordinary observations unconsciously connected mother and son in a way that could not be spoken.

  Laura began to live more and more in the dreams and realities of her own invisible friends, Arthur and Laura Lee; and the more real they became, and the more she could see them and feel them inside her, the more real and strangely distant her own life appeared. Her own life just didn’t compare. Her dreams had never soared through centuries and its best hearts and minds, real and imagined. The more real Arthur and Laura Lee became to her, the more she envied Eugene’s secret, invisible mind.

  When she came to him each evening she spent most of the time talking, partly because of the limitation of his replies, but mostly because the story she was writing was something she knew only Eugene could completely understand and appreciate. She had so much to tell him and so many unspoken questions. She wondered if his children had taken the stories to heart the way she had. She wondered what the stories meant to him. She wondered how he had the time for his imagination to create two young lovers who time traveled through a century’s consciousness. The more she read and the more she wrote, the more questions she discovered, and it was the questions not the answers to them that somehow seemed to put a new exhilaration into her life. Arthur and Laura Lee were taking her to places she never been before and yet they existed and thrived within the distant familiarity of her thoughts and feelings for Eugene. Turning blue letters to words and voices, holding them in her hands, made them so real she couldn’t imagine that anyone would be touched the way she was.

  The more she worked, the more she loved what she was doing. Working alone for the first time in her life, she came to understand that she was reaching herself through an invisible veil of silence, a silence that was creative and warm, and took her in, and gave her shelter from the storm outside and in.

  It was not long before the story of the two imaginary young people falling in love with all the time in the world, exploring the first summer of soaring hearts, raised the memory of her own first summer at the farm with Eugene. The lyrical touch and anticipation of desire that they had known before the cold realities of their differences came into focus was like Laura Lee’s and Arthur’s. It was a time when love was simpler and so much better for it.

  As people, Arthur and Laura Lee were almost mirror reflections of herself and Eugene all those years ago. Arthur and Laura Lee were ordinary, in the extreme; in the way they looked, in the way they reacted to the world, in everything except their dreams.

  Laura had been the golden girl with the beauty and intelligence and all the expectations middle-class people made of those things. Her grades and her beauty were her destiny and she accepted it the way she accepted what she saw in the mirror. But her gifts only brought about higher expectations and unavoidable envy and it made it difficult for her, especially because of her own need to be a part of something where people could recognize who she was, even if she could not. She had an extrovert’s needs, and an extrovert’s fears that she could never show to anyone.

  Eugene had been just the opposite. His looks and even his exotic car were things he never seemed to consider as making him attractive or special. Until her, Eugene had seemed reluctant to engage in high school society, especially when it came to the opposite sex. It made him a challenge for more than just her, and when she finally got him to ask her out, it was almost like pulling teeth. She was shocked to discover the first time they were alone that he had thought about her every day for years.

  Arthur and Laura Lee lived in a world even simpler than the one Laura and Eugene had known. They were two farm children who had known each other all their lives, who had fallen love on the yellow school bus coming and going from two farmhouse doors. The first sentence of the first story Laura wrote said it all, ‘No one thought that Arthur and Laura Lee were anything special.’ Laura felt the delicious excitement of knowing that, with her words, she would soon prove everyone so incredibly wrong.

  Writing and rewriting, editing the previous days work on the story as she sat beside Eugene and they looked at the words on his computer screen, was an irony that escaped Laura. Polishing words and worrying about all the ideas and feelings they could contain with someone who was forced into absolute silence when the story file was in view was completely lost in her rolling enthusiasm.

  They worked paragraph by paragraph, Laura reading it aloud and waiting while he absorbed the words and his eyes would blink once for yes as a signal and then they would minimize the window and Eugene’s program would come up so he could speak. It would have been so much easier if he could have just used a keyboard or voice recognition program, but the slow work had the advantage of letting Laura think as Eugene made comments and suggestions about the paragraph they were considering. It was like waiting for a few words that changed the tone and, even occasionally, the content of her voice. And to Laura, to her great surprise, from the very first paragraph she wrote, she did have a voice that was very different than Arthur’s or Laura Lee’s or even Eugene’s.

  One morning, in the second week of the storm, Sharon took a moment alone with Laura.

  “There’s something I’d like you to think about.” Sharon began, “Everybody here does something that’s part of the daily maintenance tasks of life. I think everyone looks at what you are doing with Arthur and Laura Lee’s letters as very important. Doing chores doesn’t have to be a requirement for you, you may be the one special case that’s ever come to the farm, but if you’d like to help for half an hour with dishes after breakfast or dinner, it might be a good idea. It might be good because it would give you some time to work with Amanda. I have a pretty strong belief that working beside your children is one of the best things you can do in life.”

  Laura was surprised that it never had crossed her mind to offer to do chores. She felt and understood the respect everyone on the farm seemed to have for what she was doing. If anything, people tried to help and be considerate in any way they thought might make her life easier. People went for walks to bring her snacks or to bring her the morning newspaper that arrived in the mailbox late in the morning.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t offer to do that before.” Laura told Sharon quite honestly. “I think it’s a good idea. Thanks for mentioning it. Really.”

  Sharon looked pleased and relieved, and from that day until the day Eugene died, Laura washed dishes on the same regular turn as her daughter. Sharon was right. Washing dishes with Amanda in the huge beautiful kitchen with the other children of the Van Fleet family came to be something she looked forward to as the social highlight of her day. She always loved being part of a group and the dishwashing detail had a range of conversational topics and interests that Laura would never have believed was possible to discover in a group of children. Laura was shoc
ked that children in a group were actually interesting, they were funny, and they were amazingly perceptive. The aggressive curiosity they had was something she had never known among adults, and being an only child, adult company was all she had ever known.

  One day after dinner, after she had helped with the dishes, she and Jonas ended up sitting alone on the porch because Sharon was busy with something else. Jonas had been one of the people who would bring her the morning paper or snacks sometime around noon because everyone knew she never came to the table for lunch. She asked him the one question she always wanted to ask but always felt might be too intrusive.

  “How did you ever decide to become a priest, growing up here on the farm? When Amanda took me along to Sunday service this week, it didn’t seem very much like the traditional religious service.” Laura asked, tentatively.

  “Once every month or two my Mom used to take us to a traditional church service, but after a while everybody seemed to prefer the one she created in the gazebo, everybody except me. She didn’t want to force any religious dogma on us so my parents were both pretty anxious about what they were doing about our religious education. It was when we were studying native cultures that my mom decided that that was the model she wanted for us. Native peoples believe that religious duty comes down to respect and thankfulness. My mom decided that if she could give us that, it would be enough.”

  “These days, she was probably right.” Laura agreed.

  “I didn’t think so. For me it just left too many questions and no way to understand how to look for an answer. It’s only in the last couple of years that our family’s religious service didn’t seem somehow sad and empty to me. I’m coming around, but slowly.”

  “Why isn’t respect and thankfulness enough?” Laura asked, knowing what a difficult time she had just living up to those simple ideals.

  “They don’t answer the old hard questions. People die, people suffer, people kill one another, senselessly. Why does it happen and how do you live with it? Respect and thankfulness don’t get you very far, at least that’s what I used to think.

  There’s never been, there’ll never be any answers to those kind of questions.” Laura replied, sounding almost indignant.

  “I think you’re wrong. There are answers but it’s just hard to believe them.” Jonas said, sounding as if he was one of the ones having that difficulty.

  Laura’s heart started to beat faster and she could feel her breath constrict as it came from her lungs and she thought of the boy gurgling his last gasps beside her in the snow.” Tell... tell...” It was something she couldn’t forget or accept, forgive or deny, and the unanswered questions about why it had happened and how she would live with it, slowly and secretly ate away at her heart because she just didn’t believe in answers.

  It was then that Jonas told Laura about watching his older brother many years ago when he was killed while they were logging with their father. A tree had kicked back and to the side as it fell when Jonas was just twelve years old, and it had grazed the right temple of his fourteen-year-old brother, and it had killed him after it left him in a vegetative coma for four months. Jonas remembered, but didn’t tell Laura, that his brother had wasted away like Eugene before he died.

  Putting your brother and ally in the ground when he’s fourteen really does raise certain unavoidable questions.” Jonas said, and Laura could see the heartbreak on the event horizon of Jonas’s eyes.

  “I think you can avoid any question, if you put your mind to it.” Laura replied with what sounded like firm certainly. “Denial is highly underrated. Sometimes it’s the only way you have to survive.”

  She lied. She had her own dead fourteen-year-old boy whispering from his sepulcher into her ear. The whisper was like a wind driving cold snow that would bury her if she ever stopped moving. And then she was thinking of Amanda and the rape and how the denial of the emotions inside her and her daughter was like an emotional amnesia. There was some pain that only denial could keep the heart from imploding like a hammer blow to the face of a vacuum tube. Laura’s pulse was racing and she had no reply to any real questions, and the questions that remained unanswered, in denial, inside her as each new day rose, made each moment become all that mattered. She was giving her life to her invisible friends Arthur and Laura Lee.

  Laura was going to get up and leave, but Jonas, cool Jonas, touched her hand and his eyes made her sit down again and then he told her the story of his own heartbreak and anger, his rejection of everything and his tentative reconciliation with himself and his life and his God.

  “It doesn’t take evil to break some people’s hearts.”

  His great unanswered question, he said, was how anyone could grow up surrounded by love and still feel alone.

  “It’s how much can you ask from someone you love. I was twenty five. I was her priest. It was a love that could never be told or even speak its name. Nothing happened except she married my best friend and had three children. Nothing happened except ten years when our love never even made it into the confessional. I served at her wedding. I baptized her children. She was a master of denial just like you. When I met her I had no idea what it took to deny a perfect desire. They sent me into the wilderness to be punished for arrogance. They had no idea how well it would work.”

  Jonas went on to tell Laura all the details of the worst, best secret of his heart, and she became the second person, after his father, to ever hear what love had been and done to him. It was a kind of love out of romance novels. The Van Fleet men seemed to fall like silent Sequoias and Laura just couldn’t relate to Jonas’s great secret. As she listened, it was the woman who never responded with whom Laura identified. But, in the whisper and the roar of the different kind of heartache, her breathing calmed and her heartbeat settled, and when Jonas was finished his story, the question she asked him hit in the face like a glass of ice water.

  “So what do you think your life would’ve been if your brother hadn’t died?”

  “Oh, my God!” Jonas replied. “I never thought of that.”

  Laura left him with the thought and it wouldn’t go away for a very long time.

  When Laura joined Eugene, a few moments later, she was tempted to replay the conversation she just had with Jonas, but she decided she didn’t want to face the reality of pain. She much preferred the reality of the pain of two teenage lovers who were about to be separated by fate and an ocean. After the heavy talk and the heavier love story of Jonas’, it was refreshing to lay beside Eugene once again and feel the momentum of their imaginary story moving downhill with the force of its feelings and its sweet, solid style. She didn’t know why, but she felt a strange and powerful tenderness for Eugene that night and she told him how much she enjoyed writing the story, especially when Arthur and Laura Lee went to places they had gone together when they were young but were not nearly so innocent.

  “One of my favorite memories was going swimming on Haystack Island with you, the way they went swimming; only they did it with so much more modesty.”

  “I remember.” The words appeared on the screen, followed by, “It looks like the feeling is going to pass to Tom and Amanda.”

  The summer was so far away. The thought that Amanda would still be here in the summer shocked Laura when, in fact, if she had thought about it, it was the logical assumption. She didn’t want to admit that her daughter was now part of the farm, even if her fears about its power and influence had diminished. Laura didn’t want to talk about Tom and Amanda because she knew her hour with Eugene was almost up, so she asked him a question that would just change the subject, with a question she was almost sure he wouldn’t want to answer.

  “What does it feel like living with your disease, being so locked inside?”

  Then it was Laura who knew what it was like to get hit in the face with the ice water of a reply.

  “Like life.” The two short words quickly appeared on the computer screen. His answer took
no time at all.

  Laura would feel the cold shock of those two words dampening her life for as long as she lived.

  She didn’t understand. At first she thought he was saying that it was like being locked in like her little shadow, David, his inaccessible son. Had he meant little David, his face in flowers, his face to the ground, his eyes following her everywhere, expressionless and inaccessible. He may have meant that too, she had no idea, but she only knew he had meant more than that, so much more than that, and so much more that it was impossible for her to even conceive of the living horror that he meant to include in those two words, two words that most surely, and most especially, included her. Then he wrote the first little poem of many to come that would echo inside her like a musical earworm.

  And nothing really matters

  If everything that matters

  Is spoken silently.

  Usually Laura squeezed Eugene’s hand when she got out of the bed and left him and, at the very last second, she did remember to do it. She could do it. She could remember. She said goodnight and, “Tomorrow.” And the next thing she knew she was back in the cabin shaking the snow from her coat as she heard Amanda’s voice from the loft call down to her.

  “How was work?”

  “Work? Oh, right. It was good. Work was good.” Laura replied distantly.

  “Are you going to come right up to bed, or are you going to do some more work?” Amanda’s voice continued.

  “No. No more work.”

  “Can I make you some tea?” Amanda asked her mother.

  “Sure. Some tea would be nice.”

  As Amanda came down the ladder from the loft, Laura asked her if it was all right if they didn’t talk. She couldn’t talk tonight. Amanda didn’t seem to mind. She made the tea and the only sound above the wind was the kettle starting to squeal and rattle as it rose to a boil. Mother and daughter sat at the Arborite table, mother and daughter, like life.

  The green tea was beginning to cool when Amanda finally spoke.

  “You look terrible.”

  “So do you.” Laura replied, “Is it Tom?”

  “I don’t know. He goes up to his room early so he can email Megan every night. I guess it’s just stupid. I’m not really jealous. She’s a hooker in Vancouver for god’s sake. It’s more than that. I don’t know why, but the thing that really scares me is how much I love him and way, way worse is what do I do with his feelings for me. He’s been really patient and sweet, but he makes everything into such an enormous thing, I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to keep up. He’s making me make all these enormous decisions without ever saying a word.”

  “Like what decisions?”

  “Like I don’t want to decide if I’m really grown-up, like I don’t want to decide what that really means, like I don’t want to decide what I really want and don’t want in my life, like I don’t want to decide who I really am.”

  “Join the club. Why do you have to decide right now? The one thing Tom doesn’t know is how young you both are. I know that young love wants to feel like forever, and sometimes, for a very few people it may be true, and you and Tom may be one of the lucky ones, but the present can’t carry the weight of the future.”

  “I know. I know. But he’s not like that, for him it’s like the future exists in everything that he does.”

  “And that’s why you’re worried about Megan.”

  “I never thought of that, but it’s true.” Amanda replied, looking shocked and hurt. “Why is being happy so scary and hard?”

  “You know why.” Laura replied, and Amanda did know and that was why Laura felt a rush of fear and tenderness for her daughter, and that was why she told her what Eugene had said about how his disease was like life.

  Laura was surprised that Amanda seem to understand instantly what Eugene meant, and felt the same horror of the realization that she had experienced. Amanda’s face had frozen.

  “When I visited him, I guess he could see I wanted to know what it was like for him being locked inside because, out of nowhere, he said that everyone has ALS, nobody has a way to express what they feel, especially to the people they love. His is just really obvious.”

  “I don’t know whether to feel more sorrow for him or for us.” Laura added.

  “This place is sometimes just too hard.” Amanda replied.

  “I know. It is. I know.”

  There was nothing more to say or do and so Amanda and Laura quietly sipped their tea until it was gone and Amanda announced she was going back to bed. As Laura undressed, Amanda’s voice came from the loft.

  “I can’t wait to see Daddy tomorrow.”

  As they had arranged, Tom and Amanda picked up Ian at the railway station in Belleville the next evening. In Toronto, he got out of the office as soon as he could and took a cab to Union Station. The surprise for Tom and Amanda was that Ann Marie was with Ian when he got off the train. Ann Marie had talked to Sharon once more and she had invited her to come for the weekend because she very much wanted to talk to Tom about his correspondence with her daughter.

  Ann Marie had spent a considerable amount of time talking with Wayne and Ian about how she could get more information from Tom, who seemed to be honor bound to disclose nothing that Megan wrote. They decided the best time for Ann Marie to try to talk to him would be during Saturday coffee house when Tom was relaxed and might be feeling more comfortable with her personal presence. By the time they got back to the farm from the train station, Laura was already with Eugene working on the book. The surprise had been incidental because she knew Ann Marie was coming but had completely forgotten to mention it to Amanda.

  When Laura joined them on the porch by the fire, and Ian saw Laura and Amanda together for the first time in two weeks, he was stunned at the transformation. He did not have any idea what sleeping in the same bed, and doing dishes after meals, and tending a wood stove together and sharing tea and talk could do. He didn’t know why it had happened, but it was as if the relationship between mother and daughter had walked into the sunlight for the first time. It was the same but different, so clear and vivid and alive that he and felt very much left in the shadows. It was the relationship that he always hoped he might someday have with his daughter. He worked so hard to give it the security and love to make it happen, but it never had, not like the simple, comfortable, knowing glances that passed between his wife and his daughter. His heart sank a little as he embraced Laura and kissed her before she sat down.

  There was a strange tension in the room as Ian tried to reconnect with his family and Ann Marie tried to get Tom comfortable with her presence and Amanda tried to convey to her father how much she had missed him, how much his ordinary presence meant to the stability of her heart. The way all those mixed emotions expressed themselves was in people trying to be oh so pleasant who were so much more comfortable with being oh so smart. Subtle ALS was everywhere you looked.

  It wasn’t long before Tom left and Amanda explained to Ann Marie that he was going to write to Megan. The look on Ann Marie’s face was like she was being told she was being denied a treasure she longed for with all her heart.

  Not long after that, Laura announced that she heading back to the cabin and Ian and Amanda said they would join her. Sharon showed Ann Marie to the guest room in the farmhouse where she lay quietly, knowing that a few doors away a boy was able to reach out to the daughter she couldn’t touch.

  Back in the cabin, the McCalls sat and had tea and chocolate covered digestive biscuits that Ian had brought because they were Amanda’s favorite. He brought Laura her own laptop computer and a huge box of Laura Secord chocolate creams that she shared. He was glad he had brought the presents, but it was hard for him as well because it only made him feel more like a visitor.

  Amanda went up to bed first, leaving her parents sitting quietly alone. They were both shocked to realize that when they looked in each other’s eyes they both felt the hot glow fr
om the old embers of desire. They both knew, in the unspoken way old married couples know, when those embers were about to burst into tongues of flame. Ian rolled his eyes and Laura smiled and laughed, knowing exactly what he was thinking. They would never face a greater challenge in discretion and restraint, but they did make love that night with barely a movement, with barely a sound louder than a sigh. They savored the still touch of their warm bodies conjoined, the wet silken connection at their soft, sensitive core. And when Laura slept, denial was an eyelid asleep, softly enclosing the movements of her dreams.

  The next morning the storm broke at last and the blue sky made black shadows on the perfect white world. Laura noticed.

  After breakfast Laura joined Ian and Amanda and all the other children in getting out all the classic cars that belonged to the children to give them more than just their Saturday run. They were getting ready for the annual ice races around Haystack Island.

  The snow blower had cut a wide half-mile track around the outside of the pasture beside the house, and when it was done, the track was a deep cut through high drifts of snow, piled higher and higher, as the snow blower circled and blew the snow twenty feet into the air.

  The cars were revved up and brought out in long row to warm up before making their way onto the pristine white track.

  The youngest children went first doing three laps each as they warmed up themselves and the cars before they raced the time clock Sharon used to record every lap time for every one of her children, for every lap they made that day.

  Eugene had been bundled into blankets to get him in his chair to the minivan that was then parked at the start- finish line where he could sit inside, warm and delighted, watching the cars go roaring by in the hands of his children.

  Ian and Amanda, Ann Marie, and even Laura, sat alone in cars in the waiting line warming them up, waiting until the cold oil became viscous and hot.

  Laura didn’t even last until her little cold Morris Minor convertible even got close to the front line. Seeing cars roaring by at speed was too much for her to stand. The older she got the more she hated to be at speed in an automobile, and the fatal accident carried too many flashbacks. She couldn’t watch and enjoy the excitement. She knocked on Ian’s window in the car ahead and told him she was going to work in the cabin. She looked so pale that it almost frightened him, but he nodded his understanding and she left him there wondering if he should follow her and spend the day with her. He had missed her so much for two weeks that seeing her go was disturbing. But it wasn’t long before he forgot, almost completely, about Laura because he would be having the time of his life.

  Tranh had arrived and come to where Ian was sitting in a 57 Chevy Nomad station wagon and told him that he should come up to the front of the line and take a turn in one of the cars.

  Before he did that he got out of the car and left the engine idling in neutral as Tranh proudly showed him his own car two spaces ahead, a 1958 Cooper S. with an extractor exhaust and twin Weber carburetors that gave the little white box of a Mini the deep throated roar of a big Jaguar. Tranh showed Ian the polished, beautiful, tiny transverse engine and Ian was impressed and said so.

  The first six weeks of every year at the farm saw each Saturday and many evenings taken up with the children practicing on the big oval course in the pasture for the ice races to come in mid February.

  Each entrant would only be able to race two cars in the Haystack Island ice race weekend where anyone who showed up with a car that had been restored at the farm could participate. The Van Fleet children had twenty cars to choose among, and doing that in the six weeks before the February ice races was not an easy task.

  Driving abilities changed, and so did the familiarity of the drivers with the cars, and so it was all great fun, but keeping an accurate record of lap times was very important.

  Even the children under twelve could race in the Haystack Island event, so everyone was involved. The young children were restricted to cars with an engine displacement of less than 1000 cc but because the ice was such an equalizer, power wasn’t necessarily an advantage, so even younger children did respectable lap times, after they had practiced for a while.

  Ian and Amanda and Ann Marie were new to it all, of course, and when they were stuffed into cars and sent on their way, it was a heart-stopping new experience for them. They had been expecting their cars to slide all over the place and be almost impossible to control but, in fact, their studded tires, which were illegal on the road, were perfect for ice racing.

  It was like driving on noisy egg shells, not the usual road noise, and by the time Ian and Amanda and Ann Marie had finished their first three lap sessions, the anxiety clenched in their hands on the steering wheel went all the way back to the anxious tension that had taken hold of their backs and their shoulders.

  Ian and Amanda spent the morning like everyone else, in and out of cars, staying warm, getting cold, getting nervous, getting frightened, calming down, and relaxing in the sweet smell of engine oil riding the crystalline air. Ann Marie also had fun driving the old cars, and for the first time in her life, purposely going as fast as she could while racing a clock. Like most city people, she always thought that farm folks had very simple pleasures and so she was very surprised that her Saturday visit to the farm would include powerful adrenaline rushes that were actually fun. Ann Marie also enjoyed the morning’s excitement because she could hang around Tom and Amanda without looking like she was trying to ingratiate herself, which was the secret real purpose of her trip that weekend.

  Tom had already made clear to her, when she had talked to him on the phone previously, that he wasn’t comfortable talking about his email connection to Megan, but he wasn’t able to repeatedly look into an anxious mother’s eyes without seeing her unspoken questions. Finally, looking into her eyes, time after time, broke down his will, and he told her the news that his birth mother was going to take Megan out the next day on her visit to Vancouver, and they would be spending the afternoon together. Tom realized almost immediately that it was a mistake for him to say anything because the one piece of news only made Ann Marie’s ravenous hunger for more information rise like an Orca whale for a seal pup. The questions came so fast Tom was stunned, struggling desperately to know how to respond.

  What was the purpose of the meeting? Why had it been arranged? How did Tom’s mother know about Megan? Where were they be going? Where would they be meeting? How much did Tom’s birth mother understand about the situation? Finally Tom had to put up both hands to protect himself from the assault of Ann Marie’s questions and he confessed that it was probably a mistake for him to tell her about the meeting, but she should be reassured to know that his birth mother was someone who best understood Megan situation because she had been there herself.

  “She knows the street. She knows the people. She knows the price people have to pay to stay and the price they have to pay to get free. My birth mom’s a neat lady. It’ll be okay.”

  “I’m sure your right.” Ann Marie replied excitedly, “You think that there’s a chance I could talk to your mother after she sees Megan?”

  Ann Marie wanted to grab Tom’s coat and scream at the top of her lungs, “Don’t you understand; I’m her mother. You have to tell me everything you know!”

  How it was that teenaged children had assumed all the power in family relationships, Ann Marie didn’t understand at all, but like most adults who felt powerless with their children, she hated what society had become. She didn’t know who to blame, and so she kept quiet as usual.

  “I don’t really think it’s too good if there’s stuff going on behind Megan’s back.” Tom answered, “If she found out it might shake her trust. She needs to learn how to trust.” Tom added, seriously.

  “I suppose your right.” Ann Marie answered, but it was obvious that she was frustrated and disappointed and excited at the same time by what Tom had said to her.

  Ian joined the three of them af
ter climbing from the Gull Wing door of the Mercedes. He had actually spun the car completely around when he accelerated into the first turn of his first lap and, as he spun around all he could see were the thousands of dollar signs that it would take to repair the car that was worth more than everything his own little family owned. After his scare he drove very gingerly until the last straight in the last lap when he stamped on the gas a little too briskly so the torque in the engine almost spun him again. Ian’s heart was still pounding hard when he joined Tom and Amanda and Ann Marie.

  “I love that car. It just about scared me to death.”

  “You should try the Dodge Charger.” Tom replied, “Not many people have ever made it around three laps without putting a few trails in the snow.”

  “The Mercedes was as much as I can handle I’m afraid.” Ian replied, and he obviously meant it. His eyes were still wide with the remnants of fear and excitement.

  None of the city people knew that it was only since Eugene’s sickness that the Gull Wing Coupe had been included with all the other cars as a possible choice for each member of the family to consider for practice or race day. The first time that Eugene couldn’t drive was the first time his family could. It was a bittersweet change in the traditions.

  In the hour before lunch, Ian joined Eugene and Sharon in the big white Van as Sharon worked the stopwatch and time sheets for each of her children and guests. After Ian gushed for a few moments about how much fun he was having and what a wonderful tradition they had, there wasn’t a lot of talk because he could see the intensity of the focus in Eugene and Sharon’s eyes.

  Ian let himself sit back in the big captain’s chair and watch all the activities outside. The older children, Tranh, Jonas, Rosie, Lucy and Sara had arrived not long after breakfast some with children in tow, and Ian saw the generations climbing in and out of the cars, the younger children riding with their parents as they turned laps, the older children driving themselves for the first time since the year before. Martha was driving the big cars for the first time in her life and so she received a lot of special attention from her brothers and sisters as they went with her on her maiden laps in each car. For more than anyone else, the first day of practice for the ice races belonged to Martha, and it showed in her excitement and nervousness and dancing blue eyes.

  As it was with so many material things on the farm, automobiles were so much more than their practical purpose. Each car had its own tradition, both intrinsic and personal. Each car had its own aesthetic, both intrinsic and personal. Each car had its own connections, both private and personal. A car was not just a car, was not just a car.

  It was watching the common bonds of family opening and closing with the beautiful polished doors of automobiles that made Ian realize in a strange kind of envy, that there was so much more to what families were, and did, and possessed, than he had ever imagined in his life.

  That night was the quietest Saturday coffee house gathering that anyone could recall for years. The older Van Fleet children who lived off the farm stayed home because they were tired after the long day of racing practice. With New Years so close and the big storm draining everyone’s energy, the usual crowd of guests was thinned down to a few teenage friends and the McCalls and Ann Marie. The evening proceeded regardless, but it changed into a sing along jam session where everyone was either singing or playing an instrument or both. Laura had stayed after supper and she sang with Ian and Amanda and Tom, joining in various songs that they all knew.

  There was as much laughter as singing as everyone improvised arrangements to songs that spanned generations. Ian got to sing the lead in Jim Croce’s Leroy Brown with all boys on the stage, snapping their fingers and doing a chorus of Bad, Bad, Bad. The girls and ladies replied, with Sharon taking the lead doing the theme to McArthur Park while the others sang ethereal Oh nooooos behind her. Tom and Martha, as usual, were the chief arrangers. They understood the harmonics and could quickly make up simple bits of choreography for every song. Faces concentrating, feet finding patterns, and eyes alive and ready for laughter, it was intense fun. The McCalls and Ann Marie learned to do simple time steps and do Motown moves the Van Fleets knew by heart.

  Both Laura and Amanda were silently, personally proud of Ian for his enthusiasm and his unexpected grace, and most especially his knowledge of old songs. He was almost strutting, he was so proud that he was such a big part of the show. He fit in like an old glove and acquitted himself like a trooper. Laura and Ann Marie finally relaxed when they realized that it was all right to be less than perfect, sometimes so much less, that they felt like two legs tried for a sack race. Ann Marie had never let her body do ridiculous things before in her life, but she did that night, and her nervous face let go because she was facing children who didn’t care one whit about adult dignity. She even sang her first solo in public, Joni Mitchell’s, Big Yellow Taxi. Laura had never been a part of a chorus before and she found that she loved the funny co-ordinations of being back up.

  For Amanda, the two highlights of the evening, ones that she would never forget, came when Tom played the piano accompanying his parents singing There’s a Place for Us, from West Side Story, and when Ian sang a solo to Laura, They Can’t Take That Away for Me.

  The most moving part of the evening was when Tom and Amanda sat at the piano and he sang You Go to My Head and she did Dolly Parton’s showstopper, I Will Always Love You.

  Amanda was still surprised when it happened, and so she blushed when she got another standing ovation, and her face tripped and fell when she saw the look in Tom’s eyes. It was unmistakable, powerful desire. Sharon led the last song of the evening, the old traditional song that had been revived in the summer of love in 1968, Further Along. It was an old favorite at the farm, and everyone knew the words, except Amanda, as she sat quietly opposite Eugene.

  Further along, we’ll know all about it.

  Further along, we’ll understand why.

  Cheer up my brother, live in the Sunshine,

  We’ll understand it all by and by.

  Amanda watched as everyone sang, and she listened to the words and saw the tenderness connecting all the people in the room. It was the greatest power in the world simply gathered once again, and once again she was silent, the only difference being that now she knew, and everyone else knew, that she was the best singer in the room. Something about the thought changed something inside her she could neither understand nor express. She joined in the last chorus, and as she always did when she sang, she listened to the words and wondered if she would ever believe they were true, wondered if her parents would ever believe them, wondered how many of the Van Fleets already understood why. The thought gave her a chill.

  The little party broke up just after midnight, and everyone was in bed half an hour later. The McCalls in the cabin loft were still too excited to sleep and Laura lay quietly for half an hour listening to her husband and her daughter talking about the fine points and perceptions of racing old cars in the snow. That the logic of life could lead to the most unlikely of conversations was almost a proof to her that life was absolutely arbitrary and completely unknowable. Her personal history had proved to Laura there would never be a way to understand it all by and by. Life was getting whatever sweet tastes it allowed, as she tried to savor the conversation passing over her in the dark. For once the sweetness of life was something she enjoyed second hand.

  As it was every Sunday, breakfast was over by eight a.m. and those that wished to attend bundled up and made their way to the glass gazebo for the Sunday service.

  Both Laura and Ann Marie were reluctant to intrude. Laura’s experience the previous week had been less than satisfying. The truth was that almost an hour of silence and stillness was too much for her to endure. In the cold and the wind noise, it was hard to feel anything but uncomfortable.

  It was Ian and Amanda, almost insisting, that made the city ladies give in and go along.

  As everyo
ne bundled up and went out to the unheated gazebo, the McCalls learned that Jonas was going to lead the service for the first time since he was a boy.

  Sharon explained that Jonas had always chosen to go to Mass with the neighbors every Sunday, leaving his own family to explore and develop their own way of worship. Jonas had always said his family’s way of worship was much too pagan for him. This was the first time Jonas had asked to lead his family’s Sunday ritual, and everyone was curious and excited.

  Everyone expected that this would be an emotional time because it might be the last time that Jonas was home while Eugene was alive, and everyone wondered how an ordained Catholic priest would conduct the simple ritual. It was unlike any service that had ever been done in the little glass-enclosed church surrounding the huge old walnut tree.

  He began in the traditional way, with a song he had chosen. It was Bob Dylan’s, Every Grain of Sand, and everyone knew the words except the people from the city. The McCall’s and Ann Marie sat in the big wicker chairs and listened to the words of confession and repentance as all the other Van Fleets sat singing in the three circles of chairs around the tree. Sparrows fell out of the trees onto the bird feeder by the house as everyone sang in the glass room in the glistening snow that shone like white sand all around the acappella voices. What usually followed the song was some spiritually interesting thought or reading that whoever was leading the service had chosen for everyone to consider in silence for the next hour.

  No one was surprised when Jonas started with a story. It was ten minutes before they realized the story had only just begun. Everyone was shocked that the story just went on and on, and everyone found it most interesting that Jonas seemed to be telling the story straight into the eyes of his father. Eugene’s eyes danced where he sat bundled in his wheelchair, buried in his big sheep skin coat and hat, listening to the shaggy dog story that was the essence of faith.

  “This is the story of young man with a passionate desire to understand the great questions of faith. He wanted, with all his heart, to know the answer to the mysteries and meaning of life. He wanted the answer that everyone seeks but few people attain, so he decided that he would spend his life searching for it. He would find a wise man who would tell him the answer.” Jonas began soberly.

  Over the next hour Jonas proceeded to tell the story of the young man’s quest. How he made his way deep into the mountains of India where he went from one holy community to another seeking audience with one holy man after another, asking each and all of the great mystics he met, ‘What is the answer? What is the answer? ‘ But no one would tell him the answer that satisfied his longing. Finally, after many years, he found an old hermit in a tiny cave, an old man with a body wrinkled with age, but with a face almost like a young boy. The hermit told him that he must sit down beside him and wait and, if he was patient, one day he would give him the answer he sought.

  Jonas told the long story of the years the young man spent in the cave learning to face the cold and the damp and the silence, until he passed beyond the discomfort in the cold and the damp and the silence, so they were just like more stones on the hillside. Jonas told of the years that it took to learn just to enjoy the simplest moments, the diamonds of rain drops on grass blades, the mountain mist so fine that only way to realize it was there was when it touched a warm cheek.

  For years he sat and slept and worked beside the old crooked monk with the boy’s face and beautiful eyes, and he learned enough patience to know it was not yet time to ask his great question. Finally the old man grew very sick and was obviously dying, so he had no choice but to ask him, ‘What is the answer? What is the answer?’ Then the old monk looked in his eyes and said nothing, and died with a strange and lovely smile on his lips that was no answer at all.

  Then Jonas proceeded to tell the long adventure of the man who was now in his middle years setting out once again to find his answer. His journey eventually took him far, far up the Euphrates, where he searched out a great wise man that he heard lived in a monastery where he danced every day until he was in a trance, after which he would sit down and answer the most difficult questions in the world. It wasn’t easy finding him. There were great long adventures escaping from bandits and raging dust storms and cruel corrupt officials until he finally found the great Dervish who would spin and spin and dance and dance in his white robe. There was a long line of people waiting to ask questions, and Jonas gave a number of long examples of the questions and superstitions the dervish would consider. Finally the turn came for the man to have his audience, and he asked his question, ‘What is the answer? What is the answer?’ The dervish looked at him and said,” You’ve got to be a dancer before you’ll understand.”

  And so the man joined the monastery and learned how to spin like a top until the world was spinning under him and he could feel the great movement of the earth spinning around the sun, and the sun spinning around the galaxy, and the galaxy spinning in the universe. And when he became a great dancer, he came once more to the wise man and said, ‘What is the answer? What is the answer?” and the holy men said, “If you don’t know by now, I can’t help you.”

  Sorely disappointed, the man next went to Japan and sought out the wisest Zen master in the nation and told him of his many years of searching and how he longed for the answer to the mystery of life. The Zen master’s response was to slap him hard in the face and tell him to go away immediately. It was an unsatisfactory answer, although every time the man thought about the slap on his face, he suspected that he had missed the wise man’s intention.

  Jonas told shortened versions of many of the man’s other adventures; studying with an Indian Sorcerer, an Inuit Shaman, and a greatest Christian philosopher, until the man was himself very old, and still unsatisfied with all he had learned.

  By this time the usual hour long service had been taken up with the long, long story that Jonas was telling, but the telling was done with such sincerity and vividness that even the McCalls and Ann Marie were caught up in the story.

  Jonas continued the story, telling about how the man ended up sitting on a park bench in New York City having decided he would search no more. His search was over. His quest was a failure. He was feeling sad and broken hearted, when an orthodox Jew sat down beside him, and the Jew could see the old man was broken and sad, and asked him the source of his sorrow. When the old man told him he was looking for the answer, told him how long he had searched, and told again the stories of his days in the cave, his days of dancing, his days learning the power of medicinal plants, his days in the North, his days in the South, his days among library shelves, the Jewish man said he had come to the right place because he knew just the person to satisfy his great need, the person who would give him his answer.

  “If you want the answer, you should come to meet mine own Rabbi Morris. People come all the time with questions so hard, I can’t even tell you. But the one thing I can tell you is no one has ever left Rabbi Morris without feeling completely satisfied, satisfied, satisfied. If you got a question, he’s got an answer.”

  And so the man went to meet with Rabbi Morris and the waiting room of his office was indeed filled with people waiting to have their questions answered; questions of finance, questions of love, questions about children and questions about God. All the people in the room were talking about their questions and everyone seemed confident that their answers were near.

  Finally, the man’s turn came and he went into see Rabbi Morris and the man told Rabbi Morris his long, long story about his years in the cave and his years of dancing and his years in the North and his years in the South and he told Rabbi Morris how he was giving up his quest, that Rabbi Morris was his last chance, and that after him he would die a sad and disappointed man.

  “So you heard my story, Rabbi Morris. You are my last chance. What is the answer? What is the answer?” the old man pleaded in desperation.

  And Rabbi Morris replied immediately, “So, vat is d
a qvestion?”

  After a terrible pause, the whole room groaned at the ending of the shaggy dog story, and some people laughed and some of the younger children didn’t understand why the story was over and why everyone groaned.

  Jonas waited for the reaction to subside, and then surprised everyone because the story wasn’t over, as he added, almost as an afterthought,

  “And that was the moment that the man understood the answer to the meaning and mystery of life. He too left Rabbi Morris completely satisfied.”

  Jonas listened to the silence that followed. The family tradition was that no one could question the story or the reading the person leading the service had chosen. Spiritual thoughts were to be considered, not discussed.

  Martha broke the silence in the room by asking Jonas if the story was over and if there would be a song to close to service. Jonas replied that the story was indeed over and that he would like everyone to sing Every Grain Of Sand once more, and the family did that, and for many years that followed, Jonas’s family would tell him it was the most memorable service they ever experienced, that they thought many times of the man and Rabbi Morris and how it was that the old man could be satisfied by having his question answered with the most obvious question of all.

  Not only the Van Fleets, the McCalls thought about the story as well. Amanda and her mother talked about it before they slept that night, and when Ian called after returning to Toronto that evening, the story was also their main topic of conversation.

  It was obviously a joke, but somehow it felt like the story was almost like the slap in the face the man received from the great Zen master, there was something about it that somehow made sense. Amanda loved the story. Not Laura, for some reason that she couldn’t understand, it made her feel ashamed.

  Ian and Ann Marie went back to Toronto, with Jonas, on the train that afternoon. Both of them wanted to talk about the story that Jonas told that morning, but he just laughed and said it was a joke. But when Ian pressed him, it was obviously intended to be something much more serious because Jonas confessed that he made up story so that he would have something to fill the silence between him and his father.

  “I think I’ve come to believe that each of us has a question to answer in life, the answer to the meaning of our lives is in finding the question we are meant to address.” Jonas said, and before he could be asked, he added, “My question, I think, is about the meaning of desire.”

  “Interesting question for a priest.” replied Ann Marie.

  “Who better to answer it?” Jonas responded, and it was obvious in his question that he meant that only someone who was supposed to spend his life with unexpressed desires could really appreciate what it was.

  “You think there is an answer to the meaning and the mystery of life?” Ian asked.

  “Yes.” Jonas replied simply.

  “You think an ordinary person can find the answer?” Ian pursued.

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Love.”

  “Then wouldn’t everyone know the answer?” Ian continued.

  “I should have said being and feeling loved, seeing they are sides of the same coin.” Jonas replied, and neither Ian nor Amanda had any reply to make to that.

  “My mother always told us that we could change ourselves, and if we changed ourselves the world would never be the same. I think for anybody to change they have to find the question they were meant to answer with their lives.” Jonas continued.

  “I can’t imagine the question my life was meant to answer.” Ann Marie interjected.

  “Me either.” Ian agreed.

  “Maybe you’d like the address of Rabbi Morris?” Jonas said as a joke. No one laughed.

  Later that night,when Ian told Laura about the conversation on the train, she dismissed the idea of life having any real meaning beyond a personal reaction. What did interest her, was the idea that everyone had a certain question they were driven to answer in their life. She could not imagine such a question for herself or anyone she knew, but she could imagine that each of the stories she was writing with Eugene did have a question that each of the characters faced. That was what made them characters to Laura, and that was what made them fiction.

  She told Ian what she was thinking and gave examples from the stories: how to live with total rejection like Petsuliack, how to react to the pure evil of a death camp, how to respond to an arbitrary God, how to love someone you may never see again. Each of the stories asked a different question and all of them came to a similar resolution in the dreams of Arthur and Laura Lee. Somehow each story came to some resolution, even when it didn’t really answer the question at all. And the question that Laura was left to face after she hung up the phone, was how different questions could be resolved in a similar way, could have something in common she couldn’t understand or put into words. She became more and more interested in the characters of Arthur and Laura Lee, much more than the characters that they visited in their dreams. She also became more and more interested in who and what Arthur and Laura Lee were to Eugene.

  That night, Ian fell asleep thinking about the shaggy dog story and about the question his life was meant to answer. Amanda fell asleep thinking about that as well, after Laura had told her the conversation she had had with Ian. Amanda fell asleep wondering if Tom’s question was how to be both native and white and whether her question might end up being the same one.

  Laura wasn’t interested in finding any question her life was meant to answer, but thinking of those questions as real and imaginary people in her life faced them distracted her from the two words dividing in her heart like the first split of a cancer cell that would eventually move slowly and silently and inexorably through her being. Like life, the two words terrified her like the two syllables of cancer.

  Later that week, one of the few mysteries created since Laura and Amanda had been at the farm was solved. No one knew where Amanda went during the hour of silence and solitude everyone who lived on the farm enjoyed each weekday at four o clock.

  Ryan had nearly jumped out of his skin when he had gone to the root cellar for onions and turned on the light and found Amanda sitting on the bench in the pitch pure blackness. He had not even noticed her sitting there blending into the deep shadows that fell from the forty watt bulb, so when she spoke his name as he turned to leave, the shock of her voice where no voice should have been, so frightened him that he ran screaming away to his mother. ‘A ghost!

  For a few days he had to endure his brothers and sisters jumping out at him from behind corners and furniture because of his reaction to Amanda the ghost. Amanda was almost sorry that her secret place had been discovered, although she was pleased that everyone respected her privacy so that she could continue to use the root cellar as her own for her hour of solitude. It was a strange place to find comfort, the pure and perfectly black hole in the earth smelling of musk and sweetness, hard roots and red apples, but from the first moment she had sat in the root cellar with Sharon, Amanda loved the feeling of losing all her senses. Raven black, grave silent, Amanda could sit on her little bench and feel safe from her own senses, her eyes, her ears, and most especially her sense of touch, all of which still seemed so incredibly tender. Nevermore, evermore - indelible memories, how the lingered. The hour she had endured under the hands of the psychopath would never leave her completely. Unlike physical scars, emotional scars were often more tender when they healed, the nerve endings more alive as if the wound never completely closed, so that she was never sure when something would touch it and the nerve endings to her soul would scream in agony from the depths of her heart. Amanda loved the pregnant garden, and the root cellar beneath it, and the big heavy door, and the old iron latch, and the tiny bench, and the smell that she would never know anywhere else.

  Amanda understood the symbolism, understood that her hours of gestation were something she needed so much, something she needed that she couldn’t express, somethi
ng she needed that no one could give her except the black womb of the earth. Amanda knew she needed to be reborn better than Tom or her parents or Ann Marie or Sharon or even Eugene knew it, even Eugene who, for some irrational reason, she believed understood her best. The most they would know, the most she would ever tell them of how she was finally reborn, was that it happened in the root cellar on the farm.

  The one thing she would never tell anyone was that her body was reborn from her heart when the day finally came when she snapped the button on her jeans and slid down the zipper and felt her cold hand moving into the warmth of her body and she touched herself tenderly and sensation returned in the blackness and she could smell and feel the power and the beauty of desire flood through her body until it flung itself over a great precipice like a roaring river’s waterfall. What was to come in Amanda’s life began in the one place she finally felt safe from herself.

  For Laura, it was different. Since her disastrous affair with George, and the dead boy lying in the snow, true desire had not touched her heart or even her imagination. She was glad that her body still responded to her husband when she felt his hands and his lips touching her, but that was sex, not desire. It was that week that desire returned to her imagination through the immediacy of many distant memories.

  Being so close to the beach of her best summer of love, going to Eugene’s bed every night and seeing what was left of his body, somehow made her mind move back to when his body and hers were so much more beautiful. She was surprised she could remember the feelings on her skin when it was supple and his was so hard, and so soft. The sun, the sand, the heat that made her body thirst for another’s, were buried under drifts and decades of snow, but they came flooding back. Laura remembered Eugene’s lean body and the feel and the power of his muscles when he lifted her into his arms like she was down. She remembered the feel of his hair in her fingers and his fingers in hers.

  Then she thought about Ian and his body, still so lean and toned from running. Shorter by only in inch or so from what Eugene was as a boy, Ian, still in Laura’s sense memory, felt so slight and angular compared to her memory of Eugene. Ian’s receding dark hair was already flecked with gray but his body had hardly changed. Laura could remember when they were first together and how she loved his agility and stamina in bed. Laura remembered desire when it lived every day in her body and her mind. She remembered desire and what it became, as if it had the changed from its fast roaring headwaters to a wide black river that hardly seemed to move at all. Laura remembered desire and wondered whether it would ever leap into the air in another great fall as it had with George. Laura remembered desire and it was a bittersweet memory.

  For Laura desire was a dessert cart she usually sent back. For Amanda it was the illusion of diamond dust floating on new snow. For Ian it was like chocolates. For Tom, like his father, it was heroin. For Sharon it was the warp to the weft of the tapestry of love. It was comfort, warmth, protection, privacy and intimacy.

  Before the weekend, Laura told Ian, in one of his nightly calls, the news that Tom had passed to her through Amanda, about Megan’s Sunday meeting with Tom’s birth mother. It had gone well. They had lunch for two hours in a Japanese restaurant and then spent the rest of the afternoon walking the streets where they had both sold their bodies to strangers. Tom said that Megan characterized it as a walk down memory lane. Ian passed the short message to Ann Marie who seemed almost hysterically excited by the news, because she thought that Tom’s mother’s harsh memories might get her daughter to face reality and finally get her to come home.

  When Ian came the following weekend, some of the children decided to make a tour of flea markets before they came back later in the afternoon and got in a few hours of practice for the ice races. Ian was completely torn. Tom and Amanda had talked Laura into going on the flea market excursion with some of the younger children. Ian wanted to spend time with Laura and Amanda, but he was absolutely excited to have another chance to race the beautiful cars against the ice and the clock.

  Ian was glad that he chose to go along on the flea market excursion. Whenever he had gone with Laura through antique stores and flea markets, he had been invariably bored. This time he could feel the excitement grow in all seven of them in the passenger van because it was almost a month since the Van Fleet children had gone looking for treasure.

  The McCalls had no idea how much money these children could make in a morning sorting through what looked like mostly junk. They began to get some idea of the money involved when Tom, as the banker for the trip gave each of his brothers and sister five hundred dollars in cash.

  Tom stayed with the McCalls as they walked slowly through the aisles of vendors. Martha also stayed nearby, but the other two children were quickly lost in the huge room. Tom explained what he was doing as he looked at each piece that caught his attention. A brief history of glass and pottery factories came with each. He explained the stamp marks on pieces of silver. He explained how to tell fake from real cast iron doorstops. He was the traveling antique road show and the McCalls were entranced.

  They moved with surprising speed because Tom seemed to quickly recognize the few things that might be of real value. He bought nothing until all of his brothers and sisters had joined them again, carrying their purchases in plastic bags. He took them all to a vendor who had a great number of old prints stacked on the floor behind tables of tools. Tom pointed to a big print of hunting dogs in front of a fire inside a modern brass frame. He asked Martha what she thought, and she said she had no idea, except it probably was a very good bet, because of its size, which was enormous for a print.

  The vendor was delighted with the interest, and lifted the print up on to the table for everyone to see. Tom read the printing details identifying it as being from the Remington Gun Company. There was a price of a hundred dollars written in magic marker on a piece of masking tape stuck to the glass.

  “These were made in the ‘forties by the Remington gun company for their dealers, so there were very few produced, and they were done to the most exacting standards.” Tom explained. He paid the dealer and then told him that the print was probably worth three or four thousand dollars. The dealer looked like he had been pole axed and couldn’t believe what he heard when Tom told him that when he re-sold the print he would give the dealer a quarter of whenever he realized. He took the dealers name and address before they all went out to the van. As they drove to the next flea market Tom explained that the dealers who knew his family were happy to see the Van Fleets because they knew they might see a significant return on whatever they sold to them.

  “If a dealer isn’t sure about something they sometimes put it away until one of the Van Fleets comes along. They get a fair appraisal and a significant return. It’s good business.” Tom explained.

  As they drove, the other children passed around their purchases. The Van Fleets usually only bought things in perfect condition because they were just so much easier to sell. Because all of their purchases went to only a few dealers, and mostly to their own brother Wayne, they wanted to make sure they did not have a lot of inventory that was difficult to sell.

  As they walked through the next flea market in Belleville, time and mortality lay in the pieces of glass and China that once served to make personal and public history. Now the Van Fleets picked for the best remnants of almost two centuries of artifacts that were the history of the people who came and displaced the history and artifacts of the people who had borne Tom’s blood. Cardboard boxes under folding tables were filled with past lives; old tools beaten and ground by hand, old tools from a different world of calloused hands. Hands had once touched and valued such things as a part of life, and now those things had a price tag that indicated how little of their value and values remained.

  Soft hands in pockets, soft curious hands, soft hands, so indifferent, the busy aisles knew the new economy of old things. When fifty cents was half days work, things that cost
a few pennies were now marked at three or four dollars. Small change. Crocheted doilies and tablecloths that had been hours or weeks of handwork lay in piles that could all be purchased for a half hour of Ian’s time as a lawyer, or a few seconds in the fluctuation of the Van Fleet’s stock portfolio. Shelves of salt and peppers, shelves of dusty books, shelves of kitchen implements, a pegboard rack of eggbeaters, collectibles for the casual collector, all waited for some impulsive interest from someone with a few dollars to spare.

  On the way back to the farm Ryan, who was the expert on pre-war Disney, showed everyone a Mickey Mouse organ grinder he purchased for eighty five dollars. It was only in fair condition, but it still played a tune and Minnie still danced on the organ as Mickey played. Ryan was excited because Mickey had teeth and a long pointy nose, which made it very early indeed. He knew it was German, which also made it even more desirable. He estimated the value at about 2000 dollars. When it was sold, both he and the dealer were surprised that it brought nearly 6000.

  Even without knowing final monetary values, it was clear to the McCalls that the Van Fleet children had turned a few hundred dollars into more than a few thousand in just a few hours.

  When Ian was telling the Van Fleet children how he was surprised there was such a profit margin in old junk, they laughed.

  “This was a lucky day. Flea markets are mostly picked over now.” Martha answered, “It’s when we go picking with the cube van on back roads up North on old century farms that we really make money. Old barns and old farmhouses still have things in them that are incredible. It’s my turn to go next time with Tom. You should come Amanda.”

  Amanda said it might be fun but, without the knowledge of antiques the Van Fleet children had, she couldn’t imagine it being any more interesting than the flea market. It would be the antique road show going door-to-door, and she wasn’t sure that was something she wanted to do.

  The rest of the weekend went by with the usual strange sense of time that seemed to exist on the farm. Days seemed to last such a very long time but a week was gone in what seemed like minutes. Weekends were always dedicated to fun, and when the Van Fleets had fun they were serious about it. There didn’t seem to be enough time to fit in all the possible things that were going on around the farm. It seemed impossible to be bored, even for teenager. Amanda remembered her many lonely hours in her room, and on the street, and in malls looking for some distraction, something interesting in a shop door or window, something crying for attention.

  Before Ian went back to Toronto on Sunday, they decided that the day was so clear and beautiful, and the snow was so deep and perfect, that they would go cross-country skiing. Tom and Amanda led the way over the pristine snow in the diamond dust dancing in the sun. With only her daily walks to and from the farmhouse, Laura was the one that was most out of shape, and when she could feel her breath gasping for air, before she got her second wind, she promised herself that she would have to do more exercise if she was going to stay trim and in shape.

  Laura and Ian followed the tracks of the children as they made to slow climb up onto the rise past the family Cemetery. The sun had stripped trees of all the ice and snow they had been forced to carry by the big storm. Fence lines were short stretches of wire crawling out of serpentine drifts that had lost their clean lines to the wind. The temperature was just above freezing, and so the skis bit into the softening snow easily, and there was barely a breath of wind, and the sun shone round and lemon yellow in the cerulean sky, and the only thing breaking the silence was the sound of their skis and a blue jay screaming like an iron hinge in a dead tree.

  Ian and Laura didn’t talk as they skied side-by-side behind Tom and Amanda, who were twenty yards ahead. The children were talking softly to each other, and they didn’t realize that their voices carried so well that it was like they were walking right beside Amanda’s parents. They were talking about Otis Redding and the song Tom had sung the week before, These Arms of Mine. They were talking in quiet voices and they didn’t realize they could be heard.

  “Were you singing that song, just for me?” Amanda asked, nervously.

  “Partly.” he replied. They skied side-by-side looking straight ahead as they talked.

  “What do you mean, partly?” Amanda pursued.

  “It wasn’t meant to press you or complain or anything like that. I know it’s really hard for you, but my arms are lonely. Sometimes holding you feels like I’m holding a cardboard box.”

  “But you’re not complaining? I can’t help it. I can’t help it.” she whispered quietly, and her parents could barely hear her.

  “Singing is just a way to let that feeling out.” Tom explained, “There’s a whole lot of feelings you can’t really do anything about. You know what it’s like to be able to sing and let them free.”

  She was thinking about the song she had sung after he did These Arms of Mine. She would always love Tom, just like the song said. She understood what he was saying and she felt the guilt and her own frustration pack down inside her the way her skis packed her weight into the snow.

  When they finally reached the Cedar wall enclosing the Walnut Wood, Tom and Amanda stopped two abreast and waited for her parents who were now about three hundred yards behind them.

  “How do you hug someone wearing skis?” Amanda asked, looking into Tom’s eyes.

  “I think you have to take a run at it. I’ve never done it, so I don’t know.” he answered.

  Amanda skied away from him and did a slow, awkward turn on her skis, stomping little arcs in the snow. Then she pushed with her poles, and Tom stood and waited for her to come at him, and when he caught her in his arms and lost his balance, they both fell into the snow, laughing like lovers, awkwardly embracing with poles dangling from wrists, feeling nylon ski shells sliding between them, feeling the snow where it touched their skin. Amanda stuffed a handful of snow up Tom’s shirt. He washed her face and she did his, and he was suddenly as happy as he had been in her arms on Christmas Eve.

  By the time Ian and Laura arrived, they were both back on their feet and brushed clean of the wet snow that hadn’t made its way into their clothes. Amanda’s parents could see she was relaxed and grinning, and Ian was thrilled to imagine there might be many other moments like this to come for them all.

  Tom led the way through the hall of Cedars and when they entered the five acre Cathedral it was to a breathtaking stillness that seemed to reach down and lift them as they went down to the dark stones resting, buried in the snow around the perfect white table-flat frozen pool.

  The spires of the huge White Pines thrusting soft green into the blue sky seemed to be a living Parthenon. The old Walnut trees, spreading wide between them, were like enormous fists on huge black forearms rising from the white earth. At the base of each tree there was a twisted bare circle opened in the snow, leaving heavy roots exposed. No one dared disturb the stillness or the close and holy silence between them that they each somehow could feel was touching them, connecting them, holding them down, holding them up in an embrace as soft and light as down and as high as the sky. They each said a few words about how beautiful it was, and then they all knew it was time to go back.