The Blondes (26 page)

Even at the small crossing at Lewiston, the line for the border was jammed, and when we finally crept within sight of the guard stations a full hour after arriving, Moira and I could see why. In addition to the usual border guards, patrol with rifles stood at the ready. Moira and I exchanged glances.

“I’m not a musician,” she said. “They always stop musicians, so make sure you don’t say that I am one.” She turned around and tucked her trench coat around the glockenspiel case in the back seat so it wouldn’t show.

“I don’t think they care about musicians today.”

She smiled weakly.

I asked if she thought my brown hair looked natural. It looked natural to me, but I was used to dyeing. She said that she could see my freckles through my cover-up, but that she couldn’t imagine they were performing the kind of tests Larissa had told me about. At the same time, she handed me her tube of mocha lipstick and I swiped some on my mouth in an attempt to look less like a natural redhead.

When we got to the next-in-line position, a patrolman with a rifle came up. I sucked in a breath and rolled down the window. He bent and looked in. He gave Moira little more than a glance but looked me up and down thoroughly.

“Your vehicle has been selected at random for an additional security search,” he told me in an even voice. Did I understand?

I said I did, since I didn’t expect I could refuse the check. He asked for my passport. Once it was in his hand, he retreated and gestured our car into an empty space between two guard houses.

“He didn’t take yours,” I said to Moira, who was still holding her passport in her lap. I pulled the vehicle ahead.

Then a different guard was at my window, a woman. Because of where they’d pulled us over, we weren’t quite under the station roof. She had a big black slicker slung over the shoulders of her tight blue uniform, and even though it was noon, she seemed to shine under the station’s lights.

“We’re just going to ask you a few additional questions, if you don’t mind.” She looked like a Barbie doll after its hair had been cut off. I turned off the engine so we could hear each other. “Where are you coming from?” she asked, and when I told her New York, she said to wait right here, please, ladies. In spite of her congenial demeanour I noticed the patrolman stood close by. The woman disappeared into one of the stations and came back with a map and a black umbrella open overhead—to keep the map dry, I realized as she unfolded it. “Now if you can, I’d like you to show me where you were staying.”

The tines of the umbrella squeaked, scraping the hardtop of the car as she leaned closer and tried to get the map spread where I could see it.

I pointed roughly to the area of the Dunn Inn. “And my friend too,” I told her.

“Oh, you’re fine, ma’am. We don’t need any information from you today,” the guard said, nodding to Moira. “But we do have to run your passport inside,” she said to me. “It will only be a minute, and then I’m sure we can get you on your way.” She asked me how long I’d been outside the country. I told her, and she presented the map again. “Due to recent events, we must be thorough, you understand. I’d just like you to point out any other areas of the city you may have visited.”

The map was blocked into distinct sections, which were different colours, like a climate or agricultural map. It was not unlike the
National Geographic
map of the disease I’d been looking at—except this one had been painted by hand with marker, rather than professionally done. The veins of Manhattan throbbed with orange, brown, and green streaks. It made it hard to tell which streets were which, and I had to look closely.

“No one’s behind you—take your time, ma’am,” she said in a chipper manner, even though I knew a whole bridge of cars waited, idling. Armed Canadians were an eerie enough sight, but armed Canadians “please and thank you, ma’am-ing” me did nothing to bolster my confidence.

I indicated only the two areas closest to the hotel. One was green, the other a mud green. They looked like safe zones.

“All right, then,” the guard said.

I glanced at Moira again. Her shoulders lowered a little. Then she looked past me and through the window on my side. I followed her gaze. Another guard had come out of the little hut. He was carrying my passport. I smiled and wiped the sweat off my palms onto my jeans.

The new guard pressed my passport into our guard’s hand. He said something to her quietly.

She folded the map back up and leaned back down to the car. She gave me a hard look, like I had tried to take something from her. “JFK,” she said. Her tone had changed dramatically. “You had a ticket and cleared Security there on the eighteenth of September.”

It wasn’t a question, but she hovered there, expecting an answer. “Yes,” I admitted.

She lightened a little. “Given that, ma’am, we’re just going to ask you to come inside for a moment and fill out some paperwork. We only need to ask a few questions about what other areas you may have passed through recently, and if you don’t mind, we’ll conduct a little test or two.”

The rain pulsed over the car top, and I looked at Moira. The dark freckles on her nose and cheeks stood out.

“I’ll ask you to step out of the car and come this way, miss.”

I unfastened my seat belt and put my hand on the door handle. Moira’s expression was uneasy, but she nodded at me to do as requested. Not having any choice, I got out of the car into the rain.

The male guard who’d brought out my passport took it back, along with the umbrella from the female guard. He touched me by the elbow and guided me.

“I’m going to need you to vacate the vehicle also,” I heard the woman guard say to Moira behind me.

When I looked back, Moira was unfolding herself stiffly from the passenger side as the wind pushed her hair back from her face.

Then we were at the station and the male guard was saying, “Step this way, please.”

The door hit me in the shoulder on the way in because I was looking back at Moira, who was standing on the sidewalk as two officers appeared from some other station. With gloved hands they arranged a plastic netting over the car. They hooked it to a tow truck that had appeared as if it had been grown there by just adding water.

I entered the office in a fog. Our things were still in the car. How would I find Moira when I was done? I glanced around that hut—just a single desk and computer, a rack of maps, a wall calendar, a box of latex gloves, and a small folding screen set up in one corner. My government had duped me with pleasantries. Moira would be sent back to the U.S. side, and they would deal with me separately. This was goodbye. I could still feel the car door handle between my fingers and the rain on my shoulders where the umbrella hadn’t reached, and I hadn’t thought to touch her or say a word to her before I went. How long was quarantine these days? Three days, four, a week? They wouldn’t make her walk back over the long bridge past all
that idling traffic to the United States, though, would they? I couldn’t believe that.

She would be waiting for me, I told myself, in one of the other stations. I took off my corduroy jacket and hung it over the chair the guard had indicated. My laptop bag was still in the car with my cellphone and all my ID besides the passport.

“I’m going to conduct a private test with you, or if you prefer you may request Officer Howe, who questioned you earlier,” the male guard was saying. I noticed that even as he hung up the umbrella, there was a hand on his hip not far from his holster. The rain dribbled off the umbrella onto a rubber mat on the floor:
drip, drip, drip
. He smiled amiably and gestured to the screened corner of the room. “It’s just a formality. There’s nothing to worry about, Miss Hayes. It’s a standard procedure, and not invasive in any way. If you could just step to this side of the room and we’ll get your paperwork taken care of right after. Leave all of your clothing in place, please, and simply lower your pants and underthings to your knees. I’ll step around the screen when you’re ready. It will only be a second.”

But I knew that second would be my undoing. My blazing bush was not going to pass inspection, and the likelihood of my seeing Moira anytime soon was slimmer than the chance that I’d be able to keep my appointments in Toronto.

PART THREE

GRACE ISN’T COMING HOME
tonight, either. That’s pretty clear. As awful as she could be, dealing with her games and jags and binges was preferable to this—this feeling of isolation. It’s been five days and five nights now since I woke up and she was gone. Everything is dark out there again. The bushes are just little flames of grey against the snow, and the trees are a black wall. I’m going to sleep in her bed. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to sleep in her bed and I don’t care if she comes back and finds me there. I
want
her to come back and find me.

I’ve already decided that if she doesn’t return at all, eventually I’ll go too. I don’t want you born here, all alone, because if something were to happen to me, what would happen to you?

There’s a calendar here and I’m counting the days on it. When we get to eight months, exactly, that’s when I’ll leave. I know if I go outside, I might be able to find the North Star, like I was shown. But where will I walk to? To town, and from there, our fate will depend on who I can find to help me. We have another two weeks until then, although we may have to go sooner, depending on the food. When Grace came up here, she stocked the pantry pretty well, like this was her bomb shelter. Nothing fancy. Cans of beef stew and chicken soup, tinned pears and mandarin oranges, beans and corn, bags of rice, granola, canned milk, potatoes, dry pasta, salt, and olive oil. But she didn’t plan for two of us, and she certainly didn’t stock up with the idea of meals balanced enough to grow a healthy baby.

She may not have planned well enough to last the winter herself. It is easy to imagine Grace under the fluorescents of some Price Chopper, snapping up items as they came within sight and slinging them into the squeaky-wheeled cart without tallying the prices or considering their long-term value. I don’t think she made a careful inventory.

In contrast I remember when I made that drive here with Karl, that one and only time. We brought little delicacies with us. He was really trying to woo me, I think. None of this camping stuff. The cottage was a hideaway. Even though he walked around the place nervously, putting away things that were too personal, too Grace. Even though he avoided waving to the neighbours and wanted to stay indoors. We went down to the water, but we went at night. It was cold and still, and we looked out at the glass sheet of ice and the black tarp of the sky for
about two minutes, then kissed and headed back. No wonder I thought I was the first. When I think of it now … It was as if—Oh god, it wasn’t that I was his first affair—it was that I was the first one he brought here. Into a place that was theirs. Oh.

When I made that little getaway from Toronto with Karl, it was early on, you understand. We’d had that one session in his office, and then we ignored each other for about two months. I worked on my thesis, and I thought I’d done a pretty good job. I’d come up with the title and a reading list and the first four or five pages. I had sent the lot to him via email and he’d told me to come in and we’d talk about it. The meeting was at one-thirty in the afternoon, so I understood what message he was sending me. Purely professional. I remember his hair had started to grow back a little then, and he was getting that slightly crazed professor look, the one the other students had told me about. His glasses were greasy and his hair tufted up from his forehead in a silver-brown horn. He was standing behind his desk with his hand drawn up to his chin, over his mouth, and I was waiting for him to tell me what he thought. I really couldn’t read him then. Maybe what we’d done had obliterated my ability to read him.

“I think—” he said. “Hmm. Well. I’d like you to try—” He came around the desk and braced his hips on it, leaning, or sitting, the way he’d done that first time we messed around. He laughed nervously. “Try—” He held his fist up and made a pulling-down motion. It looked like a very earnest dance move of decades past.