Somewhere In-Between (3 page)

In the large office adjoining the living room, Ian paces off the floor, measuring the space. Julie can see him mentally placing his desk and furniture to take advantage of the views from the wall to wall windows. She walks over and opens one of the French doors that overlook an ambitious garden on the east side of the house. The smell of freshly turned earth wafts in with the breeze. Feeling the need for counter measures, finding something negative to balance Ian's overly positive enthusiasm, she closes the door. “Mosquitoes? Black flies?” she asks, eyeing the screens.

Elke shrugs. “Not so bad. The wind from the lake helps.”

“Yes, I imagine that the north wind must be brutal in the winter. I'm surprised you built the house at the head of the lake instead of in the shelter of the trees.”

“Yah. Virgil, he tells Helmut the same thing, not to build here. But,” she shrugs again, “the view.”

She leads them to the den on the opposite side of the living room. “Look at the light in here, Julie,” Ian says. “Don't you think this would make a great office for you?”

An office for what?
she wonders, then not wanting to dampen his enthusiasm any more than she has she nods and returns his smile. But something about the view of nothing except the barn and empty meadows stretching south makes her cringe. Mental isolation is one thing, but physical isolation? Could what was left of their marriage survive it?

Heading upstairs Julie tries to ignore the stuffed animals, the deer, mountain goat, and moose heads gazing down from the log walls. Ian doesn't ask if they stay, and like herself she senses him avoid their glass-eyed stares. While they tour the upstairs bedrooms, she feels him checking her reaction every now and then. It's difficult not to be impressed with the opulence of the house, the oversized master suite with a private balcony overlooking the lake. Back downstairs, she concedes, “You have a beautiful home, Mrs Woell,” as they follow her into the kitchen.

The widow opens a maple cabinet and takes out four pottery mugs. “Yah. It is beautiful,” she says, placing two of the mugs under the coffee machine spigots. “I tell my husband he is spending too much.” She turns to face them. “I say, ‘Helmut, you will never get your money back.' But it didn't matter he says, he wants to live here for the rest of his life.” She leans against the counter, crossing her arms in front of her. “
Und
,” she says, “he did.”

Richard clears his throat and places his briefcase on the table. “You couldn't build this house today for the list price of the entire ranch,” he says, gesturing for Julie and Ian to take a seat.

“Yah, the price is good. Firm,” Elke announces, oblivious to her agent's slumping shoulders. “Everyone tells me, it is too soon, you must not sell so fast. You must give it some time. Virgil will look after the ranch. So yah, I could stay.” She places steaming mugs in front of Julie and Ian. “But no.” She shakes her head and straightens up. “Now, I go to the city. This was Helmut's dream, not mine.”

Hearing the woman's statement—so similar to her own thought earlier today—Julie watches for Ian's reaction to her words. But Ian is too intent on studying his surroundings to notice.

Sipping her coffee, Julie, too, looks around the immaculate stainless steel and granite kitchen. It would be impossible not to admire the imported European appliances, the gleaming wood walls and beamed ceiling, the wood-fired oven built into the kitchen side of the rock fireplace. And, Julie has to admit, the comforting aroma of baking bread wafting from that oven, is the perfect touch. Through the bay window over the sink, Julie catches a glimpse of the lake's sun-sparkling surface. At that moment a loon glides past the shallow reeds near shore. It lifts its ebony head and releases a warbling call, a haunting plea to some unseen mate.

A professional house stager could not have planned it better. Beside her, Ian tilts his head and listens with an appreciating grin as a volley of answering cries echo across the water.

In another life Julie would just as easily have allowed herself to admire the beauty of it all. She envies Ian's ability to do so now.

“Purging?” her sister asks from the kitchen doorway.

Julie looks up from where she is sitting on the family room floor attacking the lower shelves and drawers of the wall unit.

“Something like that,” she says straightening up and arching her back. Even with the professional movers there is still so much to do. Such a nasty job.

“I've finished cleaning the fridge,” Jessie says, snapping off her rubber gloves. “Why don't I start packing the kitchen dishes?”

“No, the movers can do all of that. I'm just finishing up the personal stuff.”

“Well then, how about I make a pot of tea?”

“That would be great. I'm almost done.”

Watching her sister head into the kitchen, Julie says, “Jess, I know it couldn't have been easy leaving the girls in Vancouver with Mom. Have I thanked you yet for coming?”

“Only a half-dozen times,” Jessie calls over her shoulder.

Julie smiles at her retreating back then returns to her final task in this room.

Moving forces a sorting of the bric-a-brac and dust collectors of life, forces a culling of the past. The last time she did this job was twelve years ago, when they moved from their first modest home across town to this executive home above the Waverley Creek golf course.

Back then, it was so much more difficult to pick and choose which ‘stuff' to hang on to and which to let go. Darla, who was four years old at the time, hadn't made it any easier. While Julie had sorted and packed, her daughter had followed behind rescuing most of the discards.

This time Julie finds it easy to chuck anything and everything. There's nothing to prevent her from sweeping the tacky travel souvenirs off of the bottom shelf into the share-shed box, and she does so with morbid relish. One at a time she pulls sales awards and wall plaques from the drawers to toss them thumping and clattering into the recycle boxes.

Opening the end cabinet she is stopped short by the sight of the collection of pink albums, standing spine out, labelled from one to thirteen. She still hasn't put together Darla's fourteenth and fifteenth years. She wonders if she ever will. The neglected and unsorted photographs are stored in the shoebox on the bottom shelf. Her hands shake as she slides the box out now and places it on her lap. Unable to stop herself, she removes the lid. At the sight of the top photograph, a bittersweet memory of the moment Ian took the picture of her and Darla on Darla's fourteenth birthday floods through her. Now she is glad that she had swallowed her shock and kept her opinion to herself about her daughter's new haircut that day. Staring down at Darla's Irish black hair—shaved to the scalp on one side of her head with a long careless swatch hanging over a mascara-laden eye on the other—Julie wonders why she had hated the style at the time. It was so much better than the purple and orange spikes that would follow.

She places the shoebox on the floor, pulls a tissue from her pocket and blows her nose. It's the dust, she tells herself. Picking up the photograph again, she studies the image of Darla standing beside her, their arms around each other's shoulders. She tries to read the thoughts behind her daughter's ‘say-cheese' smile, searching for any clue, any hint that things were about to change. She detects nothing in the round-cheeked face, which looks so much like her own had at the same age, minus the haircut and make-up.

When Darla was a little girl, Julie remembers other mothers warning her about the terrible teenage years to come. She had laughed off their stories about living with mother-hating she-monsters. She had sympathized when a co-worker's seventeen-year-old daughter ran away and ended up on the streets of Vancouver, but secretly she had felt immune from it all. Julie believed that her and Darla's relationship was different, special, too close to follow that route. Unlike her friends and female co-workers, she had only one child—not from lack of trying, but simply the way it turned out—and so she could focus completely on her daughter. She had foolishly believed that was all it took.

Then Darla turned fourteen. From that exact day it seemed, the little changes, small shifts in her personality, started. The changing-hormone moodiness was to be expected, certainly, but the silences, the irritation at most things Julie said, the rush to criticize or challenge her values, where had that come from? Where had her little girl gone, the one who had brought home a heart-warming Mother's Day essay from school, which concluded ‘
and when I grow up I want to be just like her
'?

How could it all have changed so quickly? During her fourteenth and fifteenth year the only thing her shape-shifting daughter ever gave her was the dreaded shoulder shrug in response to the simplest of questions. Still, it hadn't been all bad; there were the odd moments when she forgot her rebellion, the moments that brought out the little girl excitement, and exposed the wears-her-heart-on-her-sleeve daughter. Through it all, Julie always knew that, beneath the trying-to-be-tough teenager was her same sweet Darla. She just had to wait the stage out, she had told herself. And then last year there were signs that it was coming to an end when Darla had taken a sudden interest in the American presidential race.

“Do you believe it's possible, Mommy,” she had asked while watching Barack Obama's declaration speech in February of 2007.

“Of course, anything's possible,” Julie had replied, more thrilled at the ‘mommy' slip than the question.

Overnight it seemed, Darla turned into a news junkie, watching and taping everything she could find concerning the Illinois senator. Her bedroom walls became a shrine—like to the rock stars of Julie's youth—to the presidential candidate. She and some of her friends started a ‘Canadian Students Supporting Obama' group at school that graduated to the Internet and mushroomed to other schools across the country.

Julie picks up another photograph and smiles at the image of herself, and a very different-looking Darla, both wearing matching
I've got a crush on Obama
t-shirts. Using a time delay Julie had taken that photo herself last summer. At fifteen Darla was already five foot two. She had begun to tease her mother that she would soon be looking down at her. Yet in this picture Julie appears so much taller than her daughter, who never felt the need to exaggerate her height with high heels. How well Julie recalls the night when she took the photograph. The evening of the Democratic presidential candidates' debate. June 2007. Was it really almost a year ago? It seems like yesterday, and it seems like another lifetime. A lifetime in which Julie had foolishly thought that she had everything under control again. She knows only too well now that no one, and nothing, ever is. Like the difference in their height in the photograph, it was all an illusion, the life she had built, her marriage, her family.

But on that June night, two months before Darla's sixteenth birthday, it was easy to believe everything was as it should be. After watching the debate on CNN together, they had worked side by side preparing dinner. While she diced cucumbers, Darla had gushed, “Wow, this could really happen, couldn't it?”

“It certainly could,” Julie had answered, giddy with relief that they had finally found something to share, something to be passionate about together.

Darla dumped the cucumber into the salad bowl. Popping one into her mouth she pushed her stool away from the island. “I'm going to call Gram,” she said jumping down. “See what she thought of the debate.”

While Darla retrieved the phone, Julie had tried to ignore the twinge of regret—or was it jealousy?—at losing her daughter's attention. How could she be jealous of her own mother? Julie forced a smile as Darla climbed back up on the stool and pressed the speed dial for the Vancouver number. As Darla's interest increased in the US election, she had spent hours talking on the phone with her American-born grandmother. From the other side of the island Julie could hear the joy in her mother's voice when she realized who was calling.

“Did you watch the debate, Gram?” Darla asked excitedly, turning on the speakerphone. For the next five minutes Julie remained mute in the background, listening while the conversation segued to her mother sharing her teenage memories of the very first televised presidential debate, between Nixon and John Kennedy in the 1960s.

“Everyone I knew hopped on the bandwagon for Kennedy, after that,” she reminisced. “It was all very exciting, the same excitement over the possibility of a change I suppose.” Then without waiting for a response she asked, “But what about Hillary Clinton?” changing gears in a way so typical to her. “Wouldn't it be just as interesting to see a woman become president?”

“Yeah, sure, but it has to be the right woman,” Darla said, reaching into the salad bowl for a piece of carrot. “Anyway, I think Canada's more likely to have a female leader before the States.”

“We already did. Kim Campbell,” Julie interjected just to prove she was in the room.

“I mean an elected one.”

“Well, either way, Dear,” her grandmother said without commenting on Julie joining the conversation. “With both a woman and an African-American running for president, we've come a long way.”

“Someone's gender? The colour of their skin?” Darla rolled her eyes, as if in silent conspiracy with Julie. “Just the fact that we're talking about it means we still have a long way to go.”

Later, while they ate dinner alone, because Ian was working late, Julie asked Darla if all this interest in the American election might be leading to an interest in Canadian politics.

“
Très
boring,” Darla replied. At her age, nothing was more tragic than boredom.

“Well, don't have a cow,” Julie said, causing Darla to roll her eyes once again, this time at Julie's use of the outdated expression. Still she forged on. “What about the old adage that ‘if you don't like the way things are, then be part of the change'?”