Maxine (9 page)

Where they go this time is up Signal Hill. As they climb the last rise Maxine notices Gail glancing off to the left towards Cuckold's Cove, where Cindy was scattered just over a year ago. She knows what Gail is thinking but this is not the time, and neither of them opens that subject. It's hard not to remember, though. Cindy's mother's pale face. Cindy's father gripping the urn his wife passed him and flinging his arm out. His mouth seemed swollen. It looked as if someone was pulling his top lip one way and his lower lip the other. The wind took the ashes and blew them in every direction.

Gail parks facing the water, turns off the engine. She opens the window but there are voices of young people frolicking and presumably she's not feeling frolicsome because she winds it up again. There wasn't much wind below, but here the car moves up and down as if people were lifting the rear bumper several inches and then dropping it. This sensation is so real that Maxine looks out the back window, but there's no one around. In front is darkness— water—off to the right, a small cluster of lights and, further on, the lighthouse at Cape Spear. You can tell the water from the land only because the land is darker.The hills curving around Freshwater Bay to the right look solid black. The ocean, on the other hand, seems to be a foamy grey, not dense—misty, insubstantial, the way clouds look from an airplane. If you threw yourself over,Maxine thinks, it looks as if you'd just fall into a grey mist and keep falling.Whereas in fact the cliff is high enough that you'd probably feel as if you hit a concrete floor, and then you could die of the cold in ten minutes, as long as there wasn't a swell on and you could keep your head out that long.

He's fine, says Maxine. It's a bit windy, that's all. This is nothing.

I know. I was watching TV and there was some stupid movie about a storm at sea. And I got started thinking how deep it is. What a tiny bit of metal is up there on top and how much sea is around and underneath. The proportions.We're all so small.

I know.We're not any smaller though.Than we were yesterday. Or last month. Speaking for myself.

Actually, Max, I think you're larger.

Ha ha. Not.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, gazing out over the grey foam. Gail turns on the engine. Other side? she asks.

Sure.

Gail manoeuvres the car across the lot to where all the other cars are lined up.Who wants to squint out into darkness?Here you can see the whole town spread out like an electric blanket.

When Gail and Maxine were growing up, the blanket was a lot smaller. They're both from the north-east end, Gail from Wedgewood Park, which was, at the time, the remote outreaches of civilization, beyond which lay trees and more trees. You can't see it well from here because it doesn't contain large floodlit buildings. Cindy andMaxine were across the road fromthe school andMount Cashel orphanage, which is now a supermarket. But these days all the neighbourhoods run together in an extravaganza of glowing white and yellow. It's pretty in a way, but something about it seems depressing and overdone. Gail starts the car.

I'm through, she says. Thanks, Max. Want to go out somewhere? Or will I take you home?

Maxine unzips the top of the jacket she threw on with her jeans. Underneath it is the purple PJ shirt with the cows on it that she'd found at the clothes swap.

Home, I think, Jeeves.

Maxine takes an hour or more of each workday to read. It's hard to force yourself to read slowly, to spend a long time over a short paragraph, but you can get used to it. She's fixating on a line from a novel she recently finished: “I love old Scott, the flexible lips said.” Who would have thought to write that: “the flexible lips said”?

"Rub your teeth on my nipples, honey," said the vermilion lipstick.

Three-thirtyish is turning out to be a good time to move from the desk to the couch for some reading, and on Wednesday, Maxine is preparing for that transition when the doorbell rings. She brings out a glass of milk and a plate with four chocolate-covered digestives from the kitchen and places them on the coffee table. She considers them for a minute and then pulls the coffee table a little closer to the computer. Kyle is for some reason not coming in, and she remembers that he doesn't ring the bell either. As soon as she turns the corner into the porch she can see that it's Barb, looking lost in her fat winter parka. She swings the door open quickly.

Is he OK?

Barb looks surprised:Who?

Kyle. I thought it would be Kyle.

Oh. Yes he's fine. Dave took him out to buy me a present.

Maxine, there's something I need to talk to you about.

Maxine nods in silent resignation and holds the door open for Barb, who stamps the snow off her boots, steps in, wipes them on the mat, and pulls them off, her eyes moving from the computer chair to the old couch and back. Maxine adjusts a throw to cover the mangiest bit of the couch and Barb sits there, gazing at the digestive biscuits as if she once saw such things but can't quite recall their function. Maxine passes her the plate.

Thanks, but I don't eat chocolate, Barb says. Maxine, I have to tell you something.

There's a flap of panic between Maxine's stomach and lungs. Um. Are you sure? I mean, don't feel—

No, no I have to. I feel like I'm lying to you all the time, I can't stand it. Look, Maxine, this is between us. I haven't told a soul.

Maxine winces.

When Kyle got lost and you couldn't reach me—

Oh! Oh, that! Barb, please.Maxine smiles and waves her arm as if a fly had landed on it: That's ancient history now.

No, you don't understand. You couldn't reach me because I wasn't there. I wasn't at the hospital. Dave wasn't at the hospital. Barb reaches for a biscuit, her eyes fixed on Maxine. She eats it in two bites and licks her index finger.

Oh!... Oh. Anyway, it's all over now. You don't owe me any explan—

I was in a lawyer's office downtown, Barb says, with Dave. I had no idea anything would happen to Kyle. And even so, I really knew it was the wrong thing to do but I was in such a state I didn't know what to think about anything, and the meetings ran much later than I'd expected, and when I called and you weren't home I thought you'd just gone out with Kyle somewhere.

Ah.

Maxine, Dave is being investigated at work.There's a possibility of criminal charges. Fraud and insider trading.That's why wemoved here.

Oh man.

Barb is whispering now: I didn't know. I didn't know that's why we were coming here. He didn't tell me. She seizes another cookie and sucks it in like a jail ration. I guess, she says. I mean, I think he figured if he didn't do anything, the situation would just evaporate. Merry Christmas, hey? Fucker!

Maxine has never heard Barb swear before. It sounds much more shocking than when she and Gail do it. It sounds like a child swearing for effect and not succeeding in sounding mean but creating an effect all the same. She pats her pockets discreetly for her inhaler, just so she'll know where it is.

He's going to have to go back at some point and face the music. Head office, in Alberta. That's why I'm telling you. One reason.

Maxine's head pops up like a spring-loaded toy: Me?

I'm going to have to go with him, for the first few days. It'll look bad if I don't and I think they want to talk to me too... not that I know anything about it. Barb fires a venomous look out the window at her own front door. But I was doing some administrative stuff for them at the time. Some clerical and bookkeeping.

And, I?...

I can't take Kyle. I was wondering if he could stay here. It would be maybe four or five days. Probably some time in the late spring. Early summer. These things seem to take forever.

Stay here. Youmean, sleep andmeals and. If it's the school year, homework? Lunch bags...Maxine trails off, wondering what other mysterious and emotionally complex responsibilities mine the path parents seem to navigate so effortlessly. I'm not sure I'd be your best bet. I didn't do so well the first time. Don't you think you might be better off asking someone else?

Barb picks up Kyle's milk glass and empties it down her throat. She helps herself to the last cookie. Her jaw champs up and down in an exaggerated and rhythmic manner, as though she were a teacher demonstrating the meaning of the word
chew
.

There is no one else, she says calmly.

6

december 2002

t
hroughher living-room window, Maxine sees Barb walk up the steps to the Larsens' white house carrying a stick of French bread. At the top she hauls the door open, wedges herself into it, and searches her purse for keys. If called upon, her wiry body could probably perform a tight series of somersaults down themiddle of the road. Barb's head is bent over the bag so her ponytail points skyward. She looks pint-sized and vulnerable.

Barb's a farm girl from Saskatchewan and sometimes she gets a puzzled look, as if she'd been heading out the back door in her gumboots with the egg basket when a sudden breeze had flicked her cheek, she'd tasted salt on the air, coloured row houses had sprung up between her and the chicken coop, and she'd lost her bearings. It's as if part of Barb is still that tough, skinny, sunburnt ten-year-old, as if the house and Kyle and the car and how all those things came to be remain a mystery. As if one day when she's driving her wet-headed boy back from the Aquarena or reaching for a carton of eggs in Dominion, she might feel the basket bumping her thigh and blink; she might find herself staring in a daze at the henhouse and hear her mom calling and gather the eggs in her quick, practised way, and go on in for breakfast.

Maxine hadn't thought working on the novel would be easy, but somehow she had imagined it would be more straightforward. OnceMaxine knows what to do she forges on. Forging on is one of her areas of expertise. It may be her best trait, a thought she prefers not to pursue. But what to do seems often unclear now. She has two chapters and a bit, misgivings about the first, not much plot in mind for the rest. Should she revise the first chapter or soldier on? What if she spends a month revising the first chapter and later cuts it? She doesn't have time for that. She's feeling a bit panicked about time. Life isn't supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be about getting things done.

The strength of the novel is rarely plot, not these days. It's character, psychology, language. Maxine read that in a book Barb stuffed into her mail slot—
“Right” a Novel in Six Months!
Maxine has skimmed it, and there's not much about plot. The book allows that plot is necessary without revealing how it might be confected.

She will ask Gail what should happen. Gail isn't always so good at the forging on—she gets distracted—but she's busting with ideas. Gail will have to have an idea becauseMaxine is growing desperate. Maxine runs the kitchen tap desperately until the water is cold enough to cramp your teeth, and fills a large, desperate glass. Then she turns on the computer.

Early Friday morning there's a docu-update on the radio—the second Christmas for the families is only days away, etcetera. Maxine turns it off. It's not that she minds the families talking. It's everyone else. What drove her nuts, in the weeks and months afterwards, was all that radio coverage, the TV, the papers. People just never shutting up, feeling that although it had no direct impact on them, they had an entitlement, a civic duty, to go on and on and on about it. They had an expert on to talk about how it was important to meet the needs of the people who wanted to help but who lived too far away...what could we do to make those people feel better? Maybe, Maxine had said to Gail in the cold, quiet tone reserved for the fury of the just. Maybe if those people had no friends or relatives hurt, and no money to contribute, and they weren't going to New York—maybe they could shut the fuck up.

The eagerness of the utterly uninvolved to elbow their way into the spotlight. But it was more than that. You can feel sorry for a few odd socks with not enough to do clambering aboard the tragedy wagon. It was the self-righteous collective imperative to blab that gotMax glowering. If you weren't talking about it, you didn't care. Those who yapped the most cared the most.Maxine's approach to someone else's catastrophe is: see if you can help. If you can't help, take one hard compassionate look and then turn away. There's nothing to be gained by watching the same people jumping from windows over and over again. Mind your own.

Freezing snow now smashes into the front window: the noise reminds her of visiting her mother's Acadian family, a bunch of grownups playing cards in a trailer in the rain, the warm fug of rum and cigarettes, laughter, Maxine squeezed in next to her mother, rain hammering on the roof and she'd never felt so safe and dry. But now it looks almost dark outside. Suddenly the Larsen front door opens; an arm emerges and points at the black hatchback; its headlights flash. Moments later, Dave hurtles down the steps holding a newspaper over his head, flings a briefcase onto the back seat, throws himself in the car. Next, Kyle shoots down, drops something halfway, stops on the bottom step and turns; Barb has the door open and points at the whatever-it-is, Kyle runs back up and grabs it, jumps down the rest of the steps, staggers back to the car as Dave starts to honk the horn. Now Barb, jacketless— and, surely, in socks?—descends at speed on tiptoe, holding a lunch bag. She raps on the passenger window for a while until the door opens. Her torso disappears into the car for a few moments and then Barb pulls herself out, stands on the sidewalk, waving at the back of the car as it pulls away and the sleet hammers down on her; she waves until it has turned the corner. Then she's back up the steps and in the house, the car gone, the door closes, show's over, and Maxine heads for the kitchen to plug in the kettle, exhausted by it all.

While she's waiting for the water to boil,Maxine returns to the window and gazes at the empty street, wondering what it would be like if Kyle stayed with her for a few days, what unforeseen challenges might arise. How do you know what to put in those lunch bags? He could get sick. She might lose him. (Again.) He walks to school by himself when the weather is fine, it's so close. What if a car hit him? A snowflake hits the glass and melts. It slides down with stops and starts and a sudden burst of speed, like a spider lowering itself on a thread.