The Last Woman (5 page)

The next day, Hooch called. Soon his mother was singing around the house again – Hooch was back in her life – and now, for Hooch, for the date she had with him that evening, she was painting her nails. And telling him he had a girlfriend.

But he had no girlfriend – not if his mother was a girlfriend, not if the girls at the dock were girlfriends. Whatever he had, whatever had happened to him, was different. There was no word for it; he didn’t
want
there to be a word for it; and anyway, what did he
have
? He didn’t have anything, at least not anything that anyone including him could see or touch. A feeling in his stomach. The memory of the girl’s hand reaching out to take the scone. The memory of the back of her arm brushing his, as they lay beside each other in the grass. As soon as he could, he went
back outside. A long red cloud pointed across the sky like a banner. Sitting on a rock, he watched as it shaded to pink, then dark blue, a shadow over the channel where she had driven off with her father.

For days afterwards he felt the lifting of a weight he had become so used to he didn’t notice it until it was gone. Now it almost didn’t matter whether his mother got drunk or yelled at him. There was a place in him she couldn’t touch. He spun until the trees whirled above him. He ran like mad through the bush. Using the jackknife Matt had given him, he gouged a deep mark in a pine; then he gouged another one beside it. The sap made a mess of his knife and his hands, but he felt he had done something that would hold the thing he feared was already slipping away: the feeling that something better than he had ever known was about to happen.
Had
happened. It was fixed there now in the gashes, like two yellow eyes in the dimness of the trees.

Then one day, surprising himself, he swore at his mother. She smacked him and demanded to know what had got into him. When he shouted at her, she smacked him again, and again, and still he came back at her, shouting – shouting for more, really, craving her blows, something hard, definite, for the girl had left him with nothing.

He drifted back to his friends, to the usual swimming and fishing and hanging around the co-op. Still, from time to time, he thought of her. It was hard to remember what she looked like. What came back was a feeling. But it was not the old excitement, the old sense that everything
was going to get better. It was the fear he had felt when they first stood together in the sun and he was unable to answer her. For moments at a time, it could stop him completely, as if she was again waiting for him to produce an answer that (if he could only have found it) would have made everything turn out differently.

He travelled around the lake with Matt, who did work for the summer people. They built steps, hauled away rubbish, delivered firewood. He would sit perched up in the bow, watching the cottages draw past. When he saw white kids playing, he always looked for her; but Lake Nigushi with its endless maze of islands and passageways kept her hidden.

One day, they approached a cottage he had not seen before. High on the rock, half-hidden by pines, the old house seemed to be aware of them, almost, to be watching from the deep, shadowy recesses of the screened porch that wrapped it on two sides. On the dock, a red canoe had been overturned.

They were met by the man he had seen at the blue house. As he led them up the path, Billy kept looking at the cottage, but they were soon walking away from it, down another path to an open place where lumber and bags of cement had been stacked.

Later, while Matt was busy measuring boards, Billy crept back to the house, moving stealthily along the screens of the porch until a soft, rhythmic creaking stopped him.
Someone was rocking in a hammock. Then came a thud, and a figure appeared, dimly, behind the screen.

She vanished and a few seconds later came around the corner of the cottage. “Look,” she said, thrusting out her hand. In the centre of her palm was a small white scar, like a fishbone. It was like the moment when she had told him her father owned a lumberyard: here was a fact. What was he going to do about it? Leaning forward a little, he peered at the scar. He could not tell whether she was blaming him for it or boasting of it; whether there was something about the scar he couldn’t see or understand, something obvious that, if he missed it, would throw him back into the unhappy place of her disapproval. She snapped her hand shut.

She led him down the path to the boathouse, into its dim interior and up a steep flight of stairs to a room brightened by many windows. From a large, green table cut in half by a low net, she picked up a flat thing with a handle.

“Pick up your paddle.”

He thought it wasn’t much of a paddle. He held it as she was holding hers. Her tongue came out, the paddle flicked, a small white ball came hopping toward him. He watched as it hopped off the table onto the floor.

“You’re supposed to hit it back.”

Okay, he knew that.

On the floor, digging in a corner, he swept the little ball toward her. But it bounced off a table leg. He scurried on all fours, scraping it frantically between her legs. Then he stood up, grinning, his face hot.

“That’s not the way! Do you know that’s not the way?”

In a flood of shame, he crossed his eyes, twirled on the spot, and fell down: dead.

She squealed and picked up his foot. Laughing, she dragged him across the floor until finally she dropped his leg and stood looking down on him with her hands on her hips. “Want to draw?”

On a low table below the windows were stacks of paper and cardboard, cans of crayons and coloured pencils, a huge tray of watercolours. They sat side by side on two stools, making pictures. He loved art, his favourite class at school. He loved it when Miss Kilkenny handed out the big, white, stiff pieces of paper on which he might make anything, anything.

“What’s that?” she asked him, after a while. He had drawn a tall, wide-shouldered man emerging from a tree stump – stepping out of it with a grin.

“Nanabush.”

“Looks like a man to me. Not somebody’s Nana.”

“He is a man,” he said. “He changes himself into things.” He pointed. “He changed himself into a stump so he could catch some ducks.”

“Why is he red?”

Red had seemed right. Now he wondered if it was wrong.

He came back the next day with Matt, and again they painted. She made a picture of a girl in a multicoloured dress facing a line of mountains with her hands up. Her skill astonished him – he could not draw so well himself – but the detail that absorbed him most, that made him look
up at her, as she frowned at her work, was that the girl’s skin – her arms and legs and the backs of her hands – were bright red.

They went into the cottage. The rooms were dim, cool; she sat on a couch of green leather, patting it to indicate he should sit beside her. “This is our living room,” she told him. She pointed at the tall shelves. “My father’s books. A lot of them belonged to Grandpa and Nana. Grandpa’s dead. Nana can’t come up here any more. She’s in a nursing home.” He looked around at the shelves, the pictures, the red and blue regatta ribbons pinned on a wall, the newspapers heaped on a low table, the patterns in the worn rugs, the stone fireplace where under the mantel three dark stones made a kind of face. The place was still and cool; the ceilings were far away. A smell of pine wafted from the wood box. He had never been in such a house before – its spreading rooms – rooms behind rooms where the daylight glowed mysteriously. And all this was her.

In a room off the hall, he saw a big bed with posts, a rumple of sheets. “My parent’s bedroom,” she announced. She flipped a switch and overhead the blades of a fan began to turn, wafting a breeze onto their lifted faces. He laughed for no particular reason – for delight, for relief, for amazement that the world contained such things. “You’re funny,” she said. She was beaming at him with pleasure; he wondered if he should try falling down again. Her eyes, he saw, were the same colour as birch leaves when they first came out.

For the rest of that summer, while Matt was building the new guest cabin, the only days that counted were the ones he spent with her. She had not told him her name, though hearing her father call her Annie, he knew what it was. She called him Billy, or Billy-Billy, or some such nickname she made up on the spot, delighting them both. But he did not call her anything. And yet, when he was alone, he spoke her name. On Pine Island, he breathed it south, over the water, in the direction of her cottage. Her name had a power.

Sometimes, on the days he didn’t go to her cottage, he feared she had forgotten him. Yet each time when he arrived with Matt, she was there to greet him, prettier and odder than he remembered – the oddness centred in her eyes, which held, for all their playfulness, some suggestion of sleep.

Through July and August, the new guest cabin rose among the trees. Sometimes, they sat and watched Matt work, or did simple jobs. As she bent to pick up a board, her pale hair, almost as pale as the wood that opened under Matt’s saw, swung down. When she rolled down the edge of her shorts to examine a mosquito bite, the whiteness of the untanned skin astonished him: it almost didn’t look normal.

One day she took him up to a room on the second floor. Piles of books, a bed, a birdcage with paper birds inside, a Hula Hoop, a pair of skis, a photo of a woman in a tiny skirt, poised on tiptoe, a huge blue bear with one eye missing – fragments of her wondrous life, its entirety too large to see. She threw herself back on the bed, just as she
had thrown herself on the grass that day, and bounced, legs loose and flying, in a solitude of pleasure.

One day he found a fisherman’s plastic float that had washed up – a little red-and-white ball. Teasing, he refused to give it to her and they ended up wrestling on the ground. Grabbing her wrists, he overpowered her.

“Okay,” she said, lying still.

He let her go. He did not get up right away but continued to straddle her, and for a little while, out of breath, they looked into each other’s faces. Later in the summer, when the guest cabin was finished and he no longer went down to Inverness, this is what he would remember: how she had looked at him in perfect stillness, perfect seriousness – all her mischief disappeared – in the green stillness of the afternoon.

As he idles along the shore of Inverness, it glides above his boat – the deck that had not existed a decade before, with its deep wooden armchairs and low table where someone has left an overturned paperback, a glass containing a slice of lime. Up the slope of rock, the old cottage rotates behind its pines. The dark veils of its porches, the needle-drifted roof, a little window tucked high under an eave, all turning to fix him, placidly, as he swings around the point and, his engine burbling on a lower note, approaches the boathouse. No one seems to be around, though their boat is at the dock. He is just tying up behind it when, up at the cottage, the back door opens and Ann
emerges onto the steps. For a long moment they simply regard each other, across the little bay where a few lily pads rock in the aftermath of his wake. Then she starts down the path toward the boathouse.

Behind her, the door opens again and a copper-haired boy appears, with Richard towering behind him. They, too, take Billy in, until – Richard tapping the boy on the shoulder – they set off after Ann.

Her gaze as she strides out the dock meets his directly. There are dark places under her eyes. His memory of her, he realizes, has faded, as the worn photo in his wallet had faded – the photo-booth picture they took at nineteen, her face under its level bangs confronting the camera without expression. At once she is restored – not the Ann of nineteen, or even of ten years ago, but a woman of strange familiarity. “You!” she cries, mock-scolding. “You were supposed to give us some warning.” Then she is in his arms: the brief shiver of hair along his cheek, her body against his. Pulling back, he sees she is tearful. “You’ve gotten so skinny. I thought those southern women knew how to feed a man.”

Too soon, the others are there. “Look who I’ve found,” she says to the big, sunburned moon of Richard’s face. As he takes Richard’s hand, Billy is surprised by a rush of affection – a sense they had had some good times, done some good things, after all. But the grasp of the large hand is brief: Richard steps away. “And this is our Rowan,” Ann says, bringing the boy forward. Richard’s big bones, but Ann’s eyes, peering shyly from a round
face. Rowan also takes Billy’s hand, pumping it with an exaggerated earnestness.

They go up the path together. Ahead of him, Ann’s calves flex as she treads the carpet of pine needles – past the cottage and down through trees toward the new deck. “My father built it two years ago,” she sings back to him.

“Just before his stroke,” Richard adds from behind. “I guess Ann told you he passed away.”

By the time they reach the deck, Rowan is no longer with them. Billy and Richard sit while Ann picks up the glass and book from the little table, then stands before them, taking orders for drinks: radiant, he thinks. Her gestures – that way she throws out her hand, as if presenting some entertainment, a bit ironically – are the Ann he knows. That nearly invisible mole over her mouth –

Both men watch her go off, uneasy at being left.

“So,” Richard says. He is wearing shorts that reveal his thick legs; his big arms rest along the arms of his chair, and he gives off an air of worried seriousness Billy cannot remember. “I want to ask what you’ve been up to, but that’s an impossible question – impossible. We’ll get it out of you as the night goes on – you’re staying for supper, no arguments. Put some weight on you there.”