Bellewether

  Jean-Philippe did not—would not—deny it.

  Pierre sighed. “You’re like the sheep, Marine, so stupid. Always you look back at where you’ve come from, what you’ve been, what you believe you are, and so you do not see the path you should be taking.”

  “I’m a soldier. I don’t get to choose my path.” He’d meant for that to stop the argument.

  It didn’t. “You’re a soldier, so you follow, yes? Then follow this.” Pierre’s hard finger jabbed him in the chest, above his heart. “God gave you this. He set it like a light within you, so that you could see it well and know the way to go. You follow this, Marine. Don’t look behind.”

  And with a rough slap on the arm meant to encourage him, Pierre walked back to finish helping with the clean-up in the barn.

  • • •

  It was not light when they rode out. Monsieur Wilde fetched the mare for him and saddled her himself and said his nephew would provide a better mount when they reached Millbank, and return the mare to them again.

  There was not much to carry. Just the haversack and pack that held the things he long had taken where he travelled, camp to camp. Things that were practical, not permanent. He’d left behind the wooden locking box that Monsieur Wilde had made him, all those months ago, to keep his few possessions safe beneath his bed. It, too, was practical, and he would have been happy to have kept it, but it was not built for travelling, and he knew it was not the kind of thing a man like him was meant to keep.

  But Monsieur Wilde refused to let him leave with empty hands. He brought the cribbage board, and cards, and pegs, and motioned Jean-Philippe should add them to his pack. He had insisted. “It’s my gift,” he’d said, a little roughly. “So you won’t forget us.”

  Jean-Philippe could have assured the older man he never would forget them, that it was impossible, but words were hard to find just then, so in their place he gave Monsieur Wilde what remained of his tobacco and said simply, “Thank you.”

  Turning, he prepared to mount the horse and Monsieur Wilde stopped him with, “Lydia. She’ll want to say goodbye. Wait, I will get her.”

  “No.” She was asleep, and must remain so until after he was gone, or it would be too difficult. He found the tight edge of a smile to smooth the word as he told Monsieur Wilde again, more quietly, “No.”

  He swung into the saddle, took the reins, and turned the horse’s head towards the path that led into the woods. The path that life had set him on.

  And out of the advice Pierre had given him, he took one piece and followed it: he did not look behind.

  Charley

  Rachel filled her water bottle at the kitchen sink and set it down. “So she just left?”

  Malaika, sorting paint chips at the table with my grandmother, looked up. “It was Sharon. She had things to say. Then she left.”

  I cut in with, “I thought I was telling the story.”

  Malaika said, “You’re leaving out all the good parts.”

  “She does that,” said Rachel. She looked so much better, I thought. Her hair was cut and styled, and she was standing taller. Brighter. So I let the minor insult pass.

  “What part did I leave out?” I asked Malaika.

  “Eve.”

  “Oh.” She was right. I backtracked. “Well, we’ve had some extra items donated, some duplicates. They’re mostly smaller artifacts, so I had the idea we could make some outreach kits, you know, to loan out to the schools so they could use them in their classrooms. And that means learning the curriculum and how those kits could fit with it, so I asked Eve, because she’d been a teacher, whether she would like to take the lead on that, and be our outreach supervisor.”

  “Smart,” said Rachel.

  With a nod Malaika told her, “Yes, it was. So Eve was flattered, and said yes, and—”

  Rachel guessed, “And that’s when Sharon lost it.”

  “More or less,” I said.

  Malaika put in dryly, “It was definitely more. But all that did was get Rosina—little, sweet Rosina—mad enough to make a motion that we offer Charley an extension on her contract.”

  Rachel grinned. “It passed, I hope?”

  “It did. The only vote against was Sharon’s, and that hardly matters anyway, now that she’s quit the board. She’s left an opening,” Malaika told my grandmother.

  “Don’t look at me, dear. I’ve got better things to do these days than sit in meetings.” Pulling out a paint chip from the ones fanned across the table she said, “That one, I think. It’s the closest.”

  She was right. We’d had a specialist come out to analyze the layers of the Wilde House walls and test the colours, and Sam knew a guy who knew a guy who made authentic reproduction paint, and he’d made us sample chips we could compare to the originals, from room to room.

  “I like that blue one,” Rachel said.

  My grandmother smiled. “That’s my favourite, too.”

  They had been getting along better with each visit, although I still had my doubts about what they’d planned for this morning, and those doubts grew stronger when I heard the footsteps on the porch.

  “Here’s your boyfriend,” my grandmother said.

  Rachel’s eyes rolled. “He isn’t my boyfriend.”

  I told her, “He acts like your boyfriend.”

  She said, “You can talk.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” But she’d already gone past to open the door.

  Gianni breezed into the kitchen like a blast of cheerful sex appeal, with perfect hair, an easy smile, and a fluorescent life jacket held swinging in one hand. Hot pink. “It’s not for you,” he said, when Rachel raised her eyebrows. “It’s for your great-grandma.”

  “Are you sure,” I asked my grandmother, “you want to do this?”

  “Certainly.”

  “We’ll keep her safe,” said Rachel. “I’ve been out in it already, and it doesn’t leak.”

  Malaika reassured me it had passed Darryl’s inspection. “He knows boats. If he says this one floats, then you can trust his word.”

  Agreeing, Gianni added, “Rachel did a real good job.”

  “I know she did.” I’d watched her. Watched the care she took. I’d been impressed. I’d told her, joking, “Maybe this can be your new career.”

  She’d answered, seriously, “I know. Sam said if I wanted to, I could apprentice with him. Learn to be a carpenter.”

  I’d left it there and hadn’t pushed her further, but I’d noticed lately she’d been reading articles online about apprenticing. And watching her be interested in anything was wonderful.

  She told me not to worry now, and then she told my grandmother, “I’ll go help Gianni get the kayak on the car, Elisabeth. Just wait here for a minute.”

  As she went outside, Malaika’s phone rang and she left us, too, to step out on the porch and take the call.

  Across the kitchen table, my grandmother’s eyes met mine. “If I know Sharon Sullivan,” she said, “she didn’t walk out of that meeting without saying something hurtful.”

  I still had the scorch marks, but I lied. “It wasn’t bad.”

  My grandmother just looked at me. By now, I knew what that look meant.

  “What is it that I do?” I asked her. “What’s my tell?”

  “If I let you know that, I’ll never know when you’re not telling the truth, will I?” After a brief smile, she asked me straight out, “What did Sharon say?”

  I shared the least of the insults. “Just, in essence, that I don’t belong here.”

  “Well, what does she know? Her family only moved here in the seventies. Your family’s lived on this same shoreline for eight generations. You remember that, my dear. You’re not just a Van Hoek, you’re a Boudreau, like me. Our ancestors came here with nothing, not even a chicken to put in their pot. Or a pot, for that matter,” she said. “But they dug in, they worked hard, they put down roots, little by little. Held on to each other. Possessions and land, anybody can take those away from y
ou—they knew this, being Acadians. But family . . .” Her voice dropped off wistfully. “If you have your family, you have everything.”

  I knew who she was thinking of, specifically. I knew she thought about my father every day.

  Gently, I said to her, “Why don’t you write him a letter, and tell him that?”

  I watched her think it through. “Maybe I will.”

  And then Rachel was back. “Ready?”

  “Don’t dump my grandmother into the bay,” was my final request.

  “If they do,” said my grandmother, “I’ve got my life jacket.”

  Rachel reached over and lightly touched Niels’s chair as she was leaving. “Bye, Dad. See you later.”

  Left alone at the table, still wrapped in the love and the friendship and warmth that had been in that room, I looked over at Niels’s chair, too, and I smiled. “Yes, I know,” I said. “Better, right?”

  No answer came, but the side door swung open. Malaika leaned in. “Get your shoes,” she said.

  “Why? Where are we going?”

  “Road trip.”

  “Where?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I hate surprises.”

  With a smile she promised me, “You’ll like this one.”

  • • •

  The carriage house stood at the edge of the road, framed by trees and the green of a park at one side, with the millpond behind, and beyond that, the steep, mounded rise of the bluffs. It was built as a simple block, two stories high, its bottom level dominated by the twin arched double-doors of old white-painted wood that hung a little crooked on their rustic iron hinges. Next to them a square window and quaint, glass-paned entry door made it look more like a welcoming home, as did the shingle-sided upper storey with its larger, white-framed windows underneath a sloping roof. Someone had painted it a rich barn red that stood out warmly next to the old stone of its foundations.

  “This is it,” Malaika said, as we pulled in and parked. “This is the one.”

  “The one what?”

  She looked satisfied. “The perfect Sam house.” Seeing that I looked confused, she explained: “You get to know what kind of place your client’s looking for. The things they like, the things they don’t. When Sam first came to live here, I sat down with him and we went over everything he wanted and I found a house that fit all that. And what did he do? Fixed it up and flipped it. Not his perfect house, that’s what he said.” She imitated Sam’s voice: “ ‘It’s just not my perfect house, Mal.’ ”

  We got out. She carried on, “So I said, fine, I’m up to this. Let’s find the man his perfect house. But every single one—it’s fix and flip, that’s what he does with them. I ask him what he’s missing, what he’s looking for, and he just says, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ Like that’s helpful.”

  She did such a good job imitating Sam I couldn’t help but smile. “But isn’t it to your advantage, profit-wise, to have him keep on buying homes and flipping them?”

  “My profits aren’t the point. Now it’s the challenge. It’s like hunting a damn unicorn. And baby,” she addressed the house directly, “I have got you now.”

  It was unique. I’d seen some carriage houses, but I’d never seen one done like this, or in this kind of setting. “Can I look around?”

  She opened the front door and told me, “Be my guest.”

  The door hung slightly crooked on its hinges. Sam could fix that, though. Or even hang a different door, in keeping with his grandmother’s insistence that it never hurt to walk through new doors now and then, to see where you end up.

  I felt that promise of discovery as I stepped across the threshold.

  And besides, I didn’t want to just be standing there outside when Sam drove up. I didn’t want to be that girl you danced with once in high school who decided on her own that you were dating and kept getting in the way.

  We’d danced. And it had altered everything for me, but Sam was . . . Sam. A steady, certain presence in my life who worked close by me in the daytime and some evenings turned up at the house, helped Rachel with the kayak, hung a shelf here, fixed a baseboard there, and sometimes stayed for popcorn and a movie.

  He liked science fiction thrillers. But not horror. Rachel tried to show him the same movie she’d been watching on the morning after Gianni took her out to see the ghost light in the woods—the old haunted house thriller that gave me the creeps. Sam had tapped out after twenty minutes. “Nope,” he’d said.

  Rachel had used the same argument she’d used with me. “But the ghost isn’t trying to hurt anybody, he’s trying to right an old wrong. He just wants them to listen.”

  But Sam had held firm. Handing her the remote, he’d said, “Find me a movie where something blows up.”

  She’d obliged him, and while we were watching he’d stretched his arm out on the back of the sofa and I’d leaned into it and we had stayed like that the next two hours, comfortable.

  But if someone had strapped me to a lie detector and asked, “Are you dating him?” I wouldn’t have known what to answer.

  By the time I heard his truck pull up outside, I was upstairs inside the carriage house. The walls were old, the windows were uninsulated, so I caught most of Malaika’s sales pitch as she told him all the features of the property and showed him how the carriage bay was perfect for his workshop. And I felt a little tug within me, wanting him to buy it, and yet wishing that he wouldn’t, because every step I took across the floorboards made me feel more strongly this house wanted to be mine.

  It wasn’t something I could put in words, it was just that—a feeling. Folding slowly over me the way a blanket wraps you in its warmth, it drew me deeper into it as I moved through the big room at the back.

  It had no furniture, but it would be a bedroom. Where the ordinary window looked out now, across the shaded grass that rolled towards the millpond, with the deep green trees along the moraine ridge stretched out against the cloud-flecked sky, there I would put the huge round window Sam had taken from Malaika’s shed, and it would be a perfect fit.

  I was half lost in daydreams when I felt the nudge of Bandit’s nose.

  I heard Sam’s work boots on the stairs, and turned to find him looking at me.

  “Come and see,” I told him. “Look at this.”

  He came across, and stood beside me.

  “Can you just imagine waking up to this,” I asked him, “every day?”

  He looked, and didn’t speak at first. And then he told me, “Yeah.”

  And then he kissed me.

  Everything just stopped. And then it spun, and when he slowly raised his head I felt like everything was different. Better. Just as when we’d danced, I felt that sense of total rightness. Of belonging. As though I had been away for a long time, and had just found my way back home.

  “Sam?”

  His forehead lowered till it rested warm on mine.

  “Do that again,” I said, and with a smile, he did.

  Malaika was outside and waiting when we came downstairs. She didn’t comment on the fact that we were holding hands, or that it must have been completely obvious what we’d been up to.

  But she looked a little smug. She asked Sam, “Well? Did I deliver? Does this one have everything you’re looking for?”

  Indulgently, he let her score the point. He turned my hand in his and interlaced our fingers. And said, “Yeah. I think it does.”

  • • •

  I was ridiculously happy when I stopped by the museum Sunday morning to pick up my work boots. Sam had told me if I wanted to be upstairs in the carriage house, I’d have to wear my proper footgear because he’d found loose nails on the floors.

  I’d only meant to grab my boots and go, but as I bent to pick the boots up from the floor beside my desk my office door swung shut. And when I went to open it, the doorknob wouldn’t turn.

  I tried the door that led into the old part of the house, but it, too, wouldn’t budge.

  “Okay,”
I said, in French. “Joke over. Let me out.”

  I’d become used to him, by now. I knew deep down he wouldn’t hurt me. But the feeling, being held there in my office, was uncomfortable.

  “I mean it. Let me out.”

  I tried the doors again. No luck. Reached for my cell phone, and discovered I had left it in the car.

  I sighed. And sat down at my desk. Because there really wasn’t anything else I could do.

  I waited.

  Half an hour, maybe more, had passed before I figured maybe he’d get bored if I ignored him, so I started doing work. Against my wall I saw the box of books that Dave had bought at auction. All the sermons of the Reverend Tillotson, twelve volumes, that still needed to be properly accessioned. So I hauled the box across and started dealing with them, one by one.

  And while I worked, I talked to him, because it made me feel a little braver.

  But he didn’t let me leave the room.

  I closed the cover of a book and set it to the side. “You really are the most infuriating man, you know? If you have something that you want to tell me, maybe try just telling me, instead of doing all this hocus pocus stuff.”

  He must have heard me, because when I looked down at the book I had just closed, it had reopened to the first page of a sermon with the title printed crisply in italics: The patience of God.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll be patient.”

  I finished with all twelve books, noting their details and carefully writing the number in pencil to enter them in our collection. I cleaned out the drawers of my desk. I was closing the last one when, all of a sudden, the door leading into the old house swung quietly open.

  I picked up my work boots again, told him, “Thank you,” and would have slipped into the big upstairs bedchamber I always thought of as Lydia Wilde’s. Except I could hear footsteps now, climbing the stairs at the front of the house, from the entrance.