“Are you still in school?” Iris asks. “I’ve lost track of how old you are.”
“Naw,” Misty says. “I quit a long time ago. “I been married, but I’m not any more.” She pulls out a chair roughly, gracelessly, and sits. “I work at the house, cleaning and sometimes in the kitchen.” She pauses. “He likes me to serve when he has company. Guests.” She says this last with special emphasis, as if she’s been corrected, and didn’t like it much. “I wear this dress, with this apron” — indicating it with her hands, and a faint, scornful smile. “Dad got me the job. I sort of look after him here,” she adds, and shy pleasure creeps into her voice, quickly muted by a tension Iris takes an instant to see as uneasiness, if not fear.
“How lucky for him.” Now she realizes Misty must be in her early twenties. “And Dillon?”
“He works here too. For now, anyway.” Her voice has lightened a little, the shy note remaining. “I’ll miss him if he goes. I might go back to Calgary, try to get a job there. Maybe …” Her voice trails off. The door opens behind Iris and a wedge of sunlight widens across the room. Iris stands and turns. Behind her, Misty stands up abruptly, noisily, and goes to the stove. With the light behind him Howard, a big man, looks about twelve feet tall and she can’t make out his face. But she can smell him — sweat mostly, and horse — but some other odour too that makes her think of Barney, Howard, and Luke working together in Luke’s big corral, and all the tensions that flowed among them, only half-concealed beneath the surface.
Now she remembers Barney climbing the corral, using his body to hide the dehorning of steers going on behind him. Afraid that if she saw the blood spurting ten feet from the animals’ heads, if she had time to really hear the screams of the steers as Howard sawed off their horns, she would run away in horror, she would never marry him. The wind whooping around them mingling with the animals’ cries, her glimpse of Howard’s contemptuous half-smile that she thought then was meant for her and knows now was meant for Barney because he wanted a woman out of his class, would give up his
manhood for her. And Luke, grimly determined to ignore it all. The fistfight the next day it took Barney years to tell her about. His black eye she’d seen herself. Luke knocked backwards into the manger. Howard packing his gear and leaving that night. And yet Luke forgave Howard for going, but not Barney.
“Hello there, Iris,” Howard booms, advancing with his hand out. She takes it, overcome by his size, by the fact that she still can’t see his face, and by the boisterous way he has chosen to greet her. As her hand touches his she knows his manner masks dislike. Like his father, she thinks.
“It’s good to see you again,” Iris says. “We hardly spoke at the funeral.”
“Couldn’t stay long,” he’s scraping out a chair and sprawling in it. Now Iris can make out his features, he has always been the handsomest of the Christie men, that dark, rough, all-man look, where Barney’s features were more precise, less aggressively masculine, and in later years had been softened by excess flesh. “Whew! That bastard’s something to handle,” Howard says to Misty, whose laugh wavers between admiration and contempt, as if she’s not sure which would be best. She fills his cup.
“Hungry?” she asks. He shakes his head, no, without looking at her. Misty hovers a moment at his shoulder, touches it so lightly Iris is sure he doesn’t know she has. Iris is struck by how pretty she is, how curvaceous her small body. Certain men would be very attracted to her; Iris can see how tempting she is. Misty sets the coffeepot on the burner, then turns to face them, her back resting against the stove.
Howard says in a lazy drawl, “I’m surprised to see a lady like you in a place like this.”
“I won’t stay long,” she replies too crisply, bristling at his comment. “I’m finding time a bit long on my hands now.” She hesitates, then decides to plunge ahead. “I thought how much I’d like to see Lannie again. I miss her very much. But I don’t have an address for her any more, and I thought you might.”
“Hell, I coulda told you over the phone. You didn’t have to come all the way out here.”
“I was on my way to Calgary,” Iris lies. “Anyway, I — to tell the truth the funeral sort of blurs in my mind, but I felt bad that I didn’t talk to Barney’s brother.”
“Hell, Iris, I’m only Barney’s half-brother,” Howard says, falsely amiable, and again Iris sees his rage and wonders why he can’t get over the grudge he bears all of them because he isn’t Luke’s full son.
“I’m sure Barney never thought of you as anything but his brother.” She knows though, that Barney was Luke’s favourite, even if he didn’t know how to show it, even if Barney didn’t know it himself. The two brothers, eyeing each other, vying for Luke’s approval. She doesn’t dare say that Howard’s the only one who can’t forgive Luke for not being his father. Howard is silent, then snorts as if he has just remembered something he didn’t like much.
“The old man wants me to come back and take over the ranch.” But his voice is quieter now, as if he no longer cares that she’s here. “Now that Barney’s — gone.” He turns his head away toward the patch of blue in the small window above the sink.
“It would be good if you could,” she says. “They’re getting old and your mother suffers a lot with her arthritis. It’d be nice if she could move into town, at least for the winter —” Howard interrupts as if he can’t stand to hear what she’s saying.
“Yeah, I might have to do that.” His eyes are dark and hard; they glint, but emit no light.
I raised your daughter for you,
she’s thinking, although she’ll never say it out loud. She thinks instead how ironic it is that tough old Luke succeeded in instilling his hardness in his stepson, but failed when he tried to do the same thing with Barney. How glad she is of his failure.
“I haven’t seen Misty or Dillon in — it must be a dozen years. I didn’t recognize her.”
“Yeah,” Howard says. “She grew up all right.”
“You should see Dill,” Misty says. “He’s not as big as Dad, but he’s …” She hesitates. “Really grown up.” She keeps shifting between a sullen forty-year-old and an eager ten-year-old, Iris notes. Is that what not having a mother does to you?
“I haven’t heard from my oldest in a long time,” as if he can’t bring himself to say Lannie’s name.
“Years,” Misty interjects. “I was about sixteen the last time she wrote me a letter. She was in Toronto. She said I could come and visit her there.” Her voice sounds muffled, she might be going to cry. “But I never did.”
“We don’t know where she is,” Howard says flatly, but there’s a hint of something that makes Iris hesitate; she understands that one word from her would be all it would take to make him blow up.
“But when she left our place years ago, she said she was coming to see you. Didn’t she find you?” As soon as she asks it Iris remembers that, of course, she did. Lannie wrote to them about it:
I stayed with him for a while.
“Do you think she’s all right?” she asks Misty finally. “What was she doing in Toronto?”
“Receptionist in a doctor’s office,” Misty says. “Taking university classes at night — or something.”
“How the hell should I know if she’s okay or not?” Howard interrupts. “What am I supposed to do about it? You and Barney raised her.” His anger frightens Iris and suddenly a matching anger at his unfairness rises in her:
We raised her because you refused to! You gave her away to us — you told her you’d come back for her!
She’s about to respond, but Howard says, in a calmer tone, “Yeah, she found me. I was working in Kamloops. She stayed a while. Then she left.” He’s not looking at Iris at all.
Misty says, “She was living with a guy in Toronto. Tim, she said his name was.”
“Oh, Tim!” Iris says, relieved to hear a name she recognizes and Howard looks quickly at her, would like to know who Tim is.
“She told me,” Misty says, that sullenness suddenly reappearing, “when I was about ten or something, that she was going to come back and get me. Hah!” Iris wants to defend Lannie, but not even to write to her sister after she’d left the farm; this isn’t excusable, and it shakes her.
“God knows what’s become of her,” she says abruptly. “I —”
“She’s mad at
all
of us, I guess.” The simple, glum way Howard says this makes Iris forget his unreasonable anger. She’s warming to him a little. After all, she didn’t treat Lannie with enough understanding either. And she can’t help but think of Howard’s intense grieving after
Dorothy’s death, so that when she looks at him now, she feels her own expression soften. Surely he deserves a little sympathy too.
“She doesn’t know Barney is —” she forces herself, “dead,” her voice breaking a little.
“I still have that letter some place,” Misty says.
“Do you? Could you get it? I want to find her now,” she says, her resolve hardened. “Don’t you worry. I’m going to find her,” she repeats looking straight at Howard. He blinks and looks away.
“Come on,” Misty says. Iris follows her through the door beside the stove into a short hall running parallel to the kitchen. Directly ahead is a cramped little bathroom, the white fixtures and white vinyl floor shining with cleanliness. There are doors on either side of the bathroom and Misty leads the way through the one on the right.
It’s a small room too, the dark log walls rendering it gloomy, but there’s a patchwork quilt, its bright colours faded with age, spread neatly on her single bed. The quilt is oddly familiar to Iris. Three teddy bears — white, grey, and a tawny gold — lean against each other on the pillow. The red curtains at the small high window have been there a long time judging by the way their folds are faded. Opposite the bed there’s a shiny, dark brown, imitation-wood chest of drawers, and on the white-painted dresser that sits below the window Misty has arranged small glittering bottles and jars of cosmetics and perfume. A large poster of a rock star with spiky blue hair and a flaming guitar hangs on the wall between the bed and the dresser. Iris is swept through with pity for this lonely girl. A black-and-white snapshot sits on the dresser in an ornate gold-coloured plastic frame, a woman squinting into the sun. She doesn’t have to look closer to know it’s Misty’s mother.
She opens the top drawer of the bureau and carefully lifts out a jewellery box of the kind Iris remembers seeing on her girlfriends’ dressers when they were adolescents: cream-coloured imitation leather, gold trim stamped around its borders, fake red suede inside. Misty says, smiling, “It was Mom’s. So was the quilt. Grandma Christie gave it to me, oh, years ago. She said Mom made it for me.” She and Iris look down at the quilt in silence. Then Misty pulls out the chair in front of her vanity, sets the box on her lap and opens it
gently. Handling it as if it were gold, Misty lifts out a letter, closes the lid, and sets the box on the vanity. Her cheeks are flushed pink, and Iris sees how she treasures it.
A flash of memory: Lannie’s macramé book bag, the texts and notebooks spilled on the rug. Iris had unzipped the interior pocket and pulled out a mass of awkwardly folded paper, some written on paper from memo pads:
Meet me at four for coffee, A.
Or stick-it notes:
See you tonight at eight, Tim;
or on fragments of paper torn from notebooks,
the whiteness of your skin
— she’d not finished that one.
Cunt be there
a violent scrawl, his pen leaving a tear in the cardboard bar coaster, another one, naming a sexual act, a lewdness Iris won’t remember. She hadn’t shown them to anyone. She doesn’t know what they mean. Nothing, she tells herself again. Nothing. Young girls alone in cities full of psychopaths and predators — But why did Lannie keep them?
“I would have looked for her myself. But I wrote to this address and the letter came back. Somebody wrote ‘Not here’ on it. And I didn’t know what to do next. I was only a kid,” Misty adds disparagingly. She gives the letter to Iris, whose heart flutters at the sight of Lannie’s handwriting. She opens her purse, finds a pen and her address book and copies down the return address on the envelope. The postmark is unreadable.
“It came a long time ago,” Misty says softly. But now the fact of Lannie’s not having written to Misty, to any of them, seems more ominous than a mere failure of duty or love. The name of the city pictured on the postcard she’d sent Angela comes back to her: Iraklion, somewhere in Greece. For the first time she wonders if Lannie might be dead. Or in some terrible situation she can’t get out of, not even to let them know.
“You can read it,” Misty says.
“Oh, no,” Iris says. “It’s private. I don’t want to …” She hands the letter back to Misty who shrugs, but lowers her head, as if she’s trying to hide that she’s glad Iris hasn’t read it. She puts it carefully back in the box.
Then, as if she has forgotten Iris is there, she swings around on the chair, leans forward, peering into the mirror, uncaps a tube of pink
lipstick and stretches her mouth to apply it. The shift in mood is so abrupt it’s unsettling. She straightens the collar of her shirt, smoothing it where it opens to show cleavage, trying to make it sit neatly but revealingly against her small breasts. Iris is taken back a thousand years, to herself at that age — that pride in her young body. Wasn’t she just like that once?
“I’m so sorry about your mother, Misty,” Iris says. “About the way things have turned out —”
Misty lifts her head slowly, her eyes meeting Iris’s in the mirror. The little girl is gone, she looks forty. Her voice is harsh. “It’s too late to be sorry now.”
For a second Iris can’t think what she means, but then it comes rushing over her:
You should have taken me too, not just my sister.
Iris is aghast, she wants to defend herself. It was Howard’s choice, not mine; what would I do with three children? Or even two? But then she sees the cruelty of splitting up the children, especially Lannie and Misty. Dorothy had used Lannie as Misty’s substitute mother whenever she didn’t feel like being a mother herself, which was pretty often, come to think of it. Dorothy was lazy. Or maybe she was depressed, Howard being such an awful man, an awful husband.
She remembers how smitten Howard was when he met Dorothy. He had loved her, at least at first. But there was something funny about Dorothy, some fuzziness, for lack of a better word, as if she’d never understood herself as capable of action, but only as someone always acted upon. Dorothy had been an orphan, she remembers, hadn’t had a mother to raise her and show her how to be a full person.