“I need some time to think. Don’t you see? Everybody else can stay, and—”
“Have you already checked with your father? Does everyone else know too?” None of what’s happening seems real. “I don’t understand what I’ve done for you to treat me like this.”
Fletcher stands blinking with his face toward the sun. “It’s not you. It’s that film! The whole place is poisoned now. I can’t stay, really I can’t.” He takes off his glasses to scrub at a lens with the corner of his shirt. Then he notices Karl and Lambchop hovering at the side of the house and waves them toward the convertible.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I’ll be back, I promise.” When he moves to hold her, she shrugs him off, so he picks up the suitcases again and starts for the car.
“Wait!” she says. “Why do you have to leave right now? This isn’t the way to say goodbye!”
“Karl and Lambchop need to be back in Boston tonight. Please, Maggie—”
“Then drive yourself tomorrow in the camper. Don’t go now.” Karl and Lambchop are already in the car again, watching her. “You know,” she says to Fletcher, “I’m three weeks late.”
It takes him a few seconds to comprehend what she means. Behind him, Karl lays on the horn, and Fletcher yells at him to knock it off.
“It’s probably just stress,” he tells her. “You shouldn’t worry—”
Maggie kicks the ground again. “You’re heartless, you really are.”
“Christ, how can I be heartless when I’m asking you to come with me? Please let me go. Don’t you see? If you care about me at all …” His voice falls apart, and he bows his head.
Maggie gazes across the lawn, wanting to tell him everything at once, all she has kept from him lately to make his life easier: Wale meeting her father; Gran’s phone call; Dimitri and the girl.
“All right,” she says. “If you have to go, go.”
He’s slow raising his eyes. “Really?” Some barrier in him gives way. Dropping the suitcases, he moves to hold her. “I’m so sorry, I really am, but—”
It’s the last word that makes her break free and rush toward the porch. Even when he calls to her, she keeps on going. Inside the door, she stops and hears Lambchop say, “You told her you’re coming back, right? Why’s she acting like such a baby?” With that, she runs for the stairs.
Sitting on their bed, she wraps her arms around herself, while from the drive come the sounds of the convertible being loaded. At one point Karl laughs. On an impulse, she leaps up and opens a drawer in the dresser. It’s empty. So is another, and another. She turns and notices an envelope lying on the windowsill. Before she can go to examine it, the car’s engine starts and there’s the crunch of tires on gravel. A line of reflected sunlight travels like an arrow across the bedroom wall. The noise slowly fades and vanishes.
6
“You okay?” asks Brid the next morning when Maggie enters the kitchen.
She nods, trying not to pay attention to the nausea that woke her, and pours herself coffee while Brid sits at the table brushing Pauline’s hair. A minute later, Maggie’s stomach leaps. She covers her mouth and flees the room.
It’s half an hour before she makes her way into the orchard. Long-fallen cherries lie squashed and puckered underfoot, crawled upon by yellow jackets. The brush piles wait for her at the ends of the lanes. Reaching the first one, she bends low to light a match. The flames spread quickly, and soon the air is plumed with smoke. She moves along a beaten-down path in the grass until her matches are exhausted and half a dozen piles are aflame.
From the barracks comes George Ray, running and shouting like a madman. “What are you doing? The whole orchard could go up.”
“It was on a list of jobs that Fletcher left,” she replies.
He shakes his head vehemently. “Too early. Everything’s tinder.” Even as he says it, sparks begin to meander into the trees. From one of the piles there’s a rifle shot of exploding bark. Above the crackle she hears the chorus of geese calling to each other, a phalanx of dark dots moving south.
George Ray enlists her help in dragging a hose across the orchard, then begins to spray down the piles. She stands watching him, fearful and curious. When the water meets the flames, there’s a hiss like static through giant speakers.
Eventually the flames abate and he takes up a place beside her, sweating in the cool air as the doused mounds smoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just wanted to get it all done.”
He pats her on the shoulder and tells her not to worry. When she returns to the farmhouse, Brid’s waiting at the mud room door in her bikini top, one of its straps askew to reveal the sear of a tan line. She smiles and extends an arm to draw Maggie inside.
“Good idea, kiddo,” she says. “Burn the place down.”
It takes an hour of seclusion in her room before Maggie thinks that she should have filmed the fires. There’s still time for her to record the ashes, maybe even a whiff of smoke, but when she goes for the camera, it isn’t there. Then she discovers it isn’t just the camera; all her reels are missing, including the one with Fletcher on the bed. She searches the house and finds nothing. He’ll have destroyed the film by now. It isn’t right. Those reels weren’t his to take.
Twenty-four hours and no phone call from him. There’s just the single page of writing he left for her in the envelope, a list of instructions laying out in legalistic prose what to do while he’s away. George Ray Ransom’s contract is to be extended until the thirty-first of October, and only Margaret Dunne and Brigid Garland shall continue in the employ of Morgan Sugar. Fletcher listed dozens of farm chores too, with no suggestion of when he might return.
At lunch, Maggie breaks the news that there’s no more money forthcoming. Dimitri says it doesn’t matter because he and Rhea are heading back to Cambridge anyway. Everyone else is furious; almost unanimously, they vow to pack their bags. Jim and Sarah won’t even look Maggie in the eye, as if it’s her fault. They don’t seem to care when she tells them Fletcher will be coming back soon.
Most go that evening, the rest the next day. Nobody expresses regret or concern for her well-being, and no one asks her to accompany them. Their hearts are already bent on some other place. Part of Maggie wants to cry out, “Wait! I could be pregnant,” but they’re a pack of mutineers. After each round of goodbyes she circles through the house picking up relics forgotten or forsaken: clothes, books, homemade jewellery, toys. In the playroom, she stares at the blank wall, waiting for it to present her with some revelation.
The Centaurs are the last to go, Rhea with her makeup on, Dimitri freshly shaved, Judd and Jeffrey in their good shoes as if they’re heading off to church. It’s Labour Day, exactly when Dimitri always said they’d leave. Maggie expects him to be triumphant in the wake of Fletcher’s desertion, but he bids her farewell without any evident emotion. She wonders whether he has bothered saying goodbye to Lydia. When Maggie waves from the porch as they drive off, none of them returns the gesture.
Only Brid and Pauline stay. Maggie half wishes they’d go too, but Brid expresses no interest in leaving. A few minutes after the Centaurs’ departure she starts doing calisthenics in the living room, jumping in place and shaking out her arms, while Pauline lies on the couch watching TV with her doll.
“Cheer up, babe,” Brid says to Maggie. “You’ve still got me, at least. We’ll be a real pair here, sitting in our rockers all day.”
This is an image to chill Maggie’s blood, yet at dinner Brid’s too preoccupied with Pauline to bother with Maggie, wiping her daughter’s nose and cutting up her food as if she’s a baby. Maggie considers asking about Wale but thinks it safer not to mention him. After Pauline has been put to bed, the two of them watch television without speaking. Onscreen, people are talking politics; it turns out that Canadians are having their own election soon. Maggie’s too distracted by the day’s departures to be interested. Until Fletcher returns, this is how things are going to be: just her and Brid, alone together for hours. What is Brid thinking and feeling as she sits there? Might she too be waiting for the phone to ring? Maggie imagines Wale on his way to Laos. No, it’s impossible. He wouldn’t go there just because of one missed call. Even Wale isn’t that deranged.