“So?” She pulls her slip off over her head, turns her back to him and removes her bra.
“The guy’s broke.”
“We don’t know that.” She pulls on a nightgown.
“You haven’t seen where they’re living.”
She turns to him. “And you have.”
He hesitates, but why should he? “Yes I have, I visited them, so?” He instantly regrets the defensive so?
“So? So what, you tell me what’s so?”
Normally he would tease her about a turn of phrase like that, but not tonight. “Nothing,” he says. “What are we talking about?”
“They’re not our family, Jack. That’s not my son.”
“The kid is innocent.”
“Maybe not.”
“He is.”
“How do you know?” She looks at him. He doesn’t answer. “Madeleine was sick to her stomach because she knows you wanted her to lie.”
“I didn’t want her to—”
“What’s going on!” She has screamed at him.
He says very quietly, “Mimi,” making a calming gesture with his hand.
She screams in a whisper, “I want to know!” Slaps her hairbrush against her thigh. “Why do you care so much about that family?!”
He waits.
“You care more about that boy than you do about your own son.”
“Mimi, that’s not—”
“And you don’t want another baby.” Her face trembles, but she compresses her lips and doesn’t take her eyes off him. “Do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s why you hardly ever—” She bites her upper lip and takes a deep breath, tears standing in her eyes.
“Mimi, what could possibly give you the idea—?” He moves to her, opening his arms.
“Don’t touch me.” Her voice has cooled. “That family, they’re having terrible trouble, but it has nothing to do with us. Does it, Jack?”
He says nothing.
She opens her jewellery box and says, “What’s this?”
A scrap of paper. “What is it?”
She hands it to him. “That’s what I’m asking to you.”
He reads: cherries, cognac, caviar…. Fried’s shopping list. He looks at her.
“For how long?”
He’s cautious. “What do you mean?”
Her voice is trembling. “You cut their grass, you’re at their house, you leave your office in the day — I know, I call and they can’t find you. You go in a staff car to God knows where; I answer the phone, there’s no one there.” Her voice lurches up but she catches it, poised at the edge of tears. “Goddamn, if I’m going to cry, you’re not going to see.”
“Mimi. Do you think—?” He smiles in spite of himself, knowing he sounds guilty. She turns away from him. He laughs. He sounds stupidly fake to himself; think how he must sound to her.
“Mimi, that list was for Buzz Lawson, he forgot his anniversary and I was going in to London anyhow so he asked me to pick up some — you know Buzz — Mimi, look at me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You think I’m interested in Karen Froelich?” He chuckles, but she turns and stares at him.
“You see? I didn’t even have to say her name.”
He feels his face suspended in jovial bewilderment, the picture of masculine guilt — he doesn’t need a mirror to know it.
She gets into bed. “We have to go tomorrow, Jack.”
“Mimi—”
“I’m going to sleep.” And she turns out her light.
His grin corrodes and his throat begins to rust. His eyes sting salt. If only she would turn and look at his face now. He wouldn’t try to hide it. She would say, “Jack, what’s wrong?” And he would tell her. It was me. I waved.
He waits, motionless, but she doesn’t turn or open her eyes, and he has lost the power of speech.
Madeleine takes a long time to fall asleep. Her parents have been fighting. She has never heard them do that before. Not for real. Maman must be terribly angry at Madeleine for lying to the police. And even angrier at Colleen for telling her to. She will never be allowed to play with Colleen Froelich ever again.
She hugs Bugs and rolls onto her stomach, where it’s safer. She remembers that Colleen will probably not want to play with her ever again anyway. And she is relieved.
She wakes up screaming and spends the rest of the night sleeping in her parents’ bed with her mother. A dog was barking in her dream. It woke her up, but she knew she must still be dreaming because, when she went to her window, her curtains lifted in a breeze she couldn’t feel. At first she thought her curtains had a new pattern, because they were covered in yellow butterflies. Then the butterflies began to move and she saw that they were real ones.
Dad picked her up out of bed and hugged her. She asked him, through hiccups, what had happened to that dog that was trapped in the storm sewer the night of flying up. At first he didn’t seem to remember, then he said, “Oh yeah, I remember. I think the fire truck came and they got him out.”
“They did?”
“Oh yeah. They brought him home, he’s fine.”
And she didn’t ask any more questions.
Dad put her in bed with Maman and left the room. He was not in his pajamas yet. She whispered, “Maman?”
“What is it, Madeleine?”
“Can you tell me the story of Jack and Mimi?”
“Non, pas ce soir, Madeleine. Fait dodo.”
“Sing ‘O Mein Papa.’”
“Go to sleep, Madeleine. Think nice thoughts.”
Madeleine has a sore throat. She stands on her front lawn, staring across the street at Rex’s old front lawn. Mimi says, “Get in the car. Madeleine. I said, viens. Main-te-nant!”
She gets into the back seat, alone. Mike is riding up front. Dad is staying here. It will be the back of Mamans head all the way to New Brunswick. The Rambler reverses out of the driveway. Slowly, because it’s her mother driving. She watches out the rear window as her house recedes, along with Colleen’s and Lisa’s and Auriel’s, and Claire’s; like the word repeated on the Donnellys’ tombstone, Empty, Empty, Empty, Empty…. Until they turn the corner and her white house with the red roof is out of sight.
“Goodbye Rex.” She says it very softly because her throat is sore. She asks, “When are we coming back?”
“When the holidays are over,” says her mother, annoyed.
“I never said goodbye to Rex.”
“Come off it,” says Mike in the front seat, and Maman doesn’t reprimand him.
Her tears feel hot as hot water from the kettle. Her mother and brother don’t see her crying. She lies with her face wedged in the crack between the seat and the backrest and feels her tears slime onto the plastic. Poor Rex. She whispers the words through her tears, dark and thick as woods and she can’t find her way out of the Black Forest, poor Rex. She takes a deep breath but she’s careful to make it smooth, so that, if her mother or brother happens to glance back, they will think she is sleeping, poor Rex will think, I went away without saying goodbye.
She sobs quietly. Just before they get onto the 401, they pull over and Mike buys her a Nutty Buddy. He climbs into the back seat beside her. “Here you go, Rob.”
She is more grateful to have him hogging the back seat again than she is for the treat, which she takes with a stoic smile.
But all the way to New Brunswick, all the way to their next posting and the one after that, all the way to the day when Madeleine left home and got her own place and decided not to finish university, she could still cry fresh hot tears from the kettle every time she pictured Rex’s face. Even though he had already moved away with his family to the trailer park by then, she pictured him — and in future would insist to Mike that Rex had been — standing there on the front lawn of the purple house that day, watching as she drove away in the Rambler, wondering why she left without saying goodbye.