Читать книгу Wildwood - Elinor Florence - Страница 6

July, Two Months Earlier

It was the hottest day of the year in America’s hottest city. A dust devil spun off the desert and across the burnished pavement of the parking lot. The leaves of the surrounding palms flipped over in the scorching breeze and showed their yellow underbellies.

“Ready, Bridge?” I stood at the shopping mall exit, clutching her hot little hand. When the automatic doors slid open, the scorching heat struck us like a soundless blast. We ran to the car as fast as Bridget’s four-year-old legs would carry her, counting in unison. It took seventy-three of her short steps to reach the car.

I thrust her into the passenger seat and turned on the ignition, then pulled a bottle of cold water from my purse. We counted our sips while the air conditioner battled with the heat. Sweat poured off our bodies and dried instantly, leaving a salty residue.

I gazed down at Bridget with my usual anguished adoration. Tendrils of dark curly hair, so much like mine, stuck to her forehead, and her round cheeks looked like small ripe tomatoes. Her eyes were swollen with weeping, and she still gave the odd hiccupping sob.

Our trip to the supermarket had ended, as usual, with a tantrum. Bridget was placing each item from the cart onto the counter with mathematical precision when the cashier smiled at her. “How are you today, honey?”

Bridget hid behind me, grinding her face into the backs of my knees.

“Oh, she’s fine, just shy.” I spoke quickly, giving the cashier a significant look. But she hadn’t taken the hint.

“Don’t worry, sweetie. I won’t bite.” She reached down and patted Bridget on the head.

Bridget let out a primal scream. All around us, heads swivelled. I thrust a $20 bill at the cashier and grabbed my bag of groceries with one hand while Bridget howled like a banshee. We fled to the public washroom and hid there until she was calm enough to leave the mall.

The fan had now reduced the interior temperature to eighty-six degrees, and the searing metal seat belt buckles were cool enough to touch. I didn’t want to waste any more gas, so I backed the car out of the parking spot and we headed toward home.

It wouldn’t be home for very long, though.

Between the heat outside and the waves of burning anxiety that washed over my body, I felt dizzy. Each hour seemed to speed past more quickly, as if time were accelerating. We had to leave our rented condominium before midnight on the last day of July. I glanced at the dashboard clock. We had twenty-eight days, eight hours, and thirty-seven minutes left.

Back at the condo, we performed our usual ritual of going straight into the bathroom and scrubbing our hands. Bridget ran off to the sanctuary of her bedroom while I put away the tortillas, canned beans, lettuce, and cheese, then I walked into the living room and sank into the cream leather couch.

I looked around at the stylish furniture. This was a former show home, and five years ago I had been happy to rent the place fully furnished. As a result, we inhabited a space-age interior filled with glass tables and snowy tiles. Even Bridget’s bedroom was starkly modern.

I wondered occasionally if she yearned for pink drapes and ­fluorescent stars on the ceiling, but she hadn’t complained. Like me, she preferred an orderly life. Just yesterday I had come into her room to find her sixteen Barbie dolls laid on the bed in a neat row.

“Are you playing with your dolls?” I asked indulgently.

“Mama, I’m not playing with them, I’m organizing them!”

As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

I dragged myself to my feet and went over to my immaculate desk. This was the second worst year of my life. Second worst, because nothing compared with the catastrophe I had experienced twenty years ago, when I was only twelve.

But this was going to be a close contender.

Two months ago, I had been laid off by the accounting firm that hired me fresh out of college. The recession hit Phoenix like a tidal wave, and I watched several rounds of layoffs with increasing terror until finally it was my turn.

I came home and glued myself to my computer, emailing hundreds of resumés. But there were no accounting vacancies, not in private firms, banks, or government departments. My skill with numbers and my stellar academic credentials were simply without value in today’s marketplace.

I had barely managed to make July’s rent. Yesterday I dismissed Gabriella, the Mexican nanny who had cared for Bridget ever since she was a baby. And I didn’t have the courage to tell my fragile little daughter that Gabby wasn’t coming back.

Tomorrow I would start looking for the cheapest apartment I could find, in a less desirable area. I would find a daytime job as a retail clerk or server, and Bridget would be forced into a low-­income daycare centre.

I didn’t mind so much about myself. The fancy condominium and the white furniture could go. And I could endure waiting on tables for the sake of a paycheque.

What I couldn’t bear was the effect it would have on Bridget. When I thought about leaving her in an unfamiliar place, filled with noisy children and strange adults, then turning my back and walking away, I felt physically ill.

I opened the financial folder on my computer desktop and studied the numbers again. How I wished that the great banker of life, like the one in the Monopoly game, had made an error in my favour. But the numbers remained the same no matter how many times I reviewed them.

At work they jokingly called me “The Human Calculator.” So it didn’t take long to add the figures in my head. My total assets included my personal savings, the 2006 Nissan Altima purchased before Bridget’s birth, and some miscellaneous belongings.

My liabilities included a medical bill from the ear infection that struck Bridget two days after I lost my job, along with my company health insurance. Bridget’s psychotherapy had already drained my savings account, and I still owed the child psychologist $2,000. When I told Dr. Cassalet we couldn’t afford to come back, she looked grim. “Please get Bridget into treatment as soon as you can,” she said.

After setting aside money for the first and last month’s rent in a new apartment, I had $800 to last until I found a job and received my first paycheque. If I could find a job. Otherwise we would be living in a homeless shelter.

I took my hands off the keyboard and scratched my elbows. My eczema had flared up again, and both elbows and shins bore an itchy, painful rash. My skin never did well in the Arizona heat, anyway. I had the milky white complexion of my Celtic forebears that burned without tanning.

With an audible sigh that sounded more like a moan, I left the computer and went into the kitchen, opened a can of beans, and started to make burritos. Cheap and filling, they were one of the few things that my fussy child would eat.

When the phone rang seven days later, my heart leaped. Hoping it was a potential employer, I snatched it up without checking the call display.

“Hello!”

“Hello, is this Mary Margaret Bannister?”

“Yes, it is. Who’s calling, please?”

“My name is Franklin Jones. I have a legal practice in Juniper, Alberta. I’m the executor of a will in which you are named as the principal beneficiary.”

My impulse was to hang up immediately, but he was still speaking.

“According to the will, you’re the only surviving relative of Mary Margaret Bannister Lee. She passed away two weeks ago.”

I paused. It was true that Mary Margaret Bannister was the maiden name of my grandfather’s sister, but she had died decades ago, somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. I had been named after her, although everyone called me Molly.

“Where did you get this number?”

“I searched for Bannisters in Arizona and found your name on Aztec Accounting’s website. When I called the office, one of your former colleagues was kind enough to give me your telephone number. I realize it’s unorthodox to call rather than write, but I wanted to expedite matters.”

“Well, I’m afraid you have the wrong person. I did have a great-aunt by that name who lived in Canada, but she died many years ago.”

“Perhaps you were misinformed. Mrs. Lee was in a nursing home for the past twenty years suffering from Alzheimer’s, but she was very much alive until recently. In fact, she was 104 years old on her last birthday.”

Was this possible? After The Accident — I always thought of it with capital letters — the Arizona social services department had concluded that I had no living relatives. Surely the lawyer was mistaken — if he was in fact a lawyer.

The man spoke again. “When Mary Margaret made her will many years ago, she told me that she had a brother named Macaulay Bannister who emigrated from Ireland to Arizona, and he in turn had a son named Fergus Bannister. Was Fergus your father?”

“Yes.” I hadn’t heard my father’s name spoken for years. Just the sound of it gave me a pang.

“If you give me your mailing address, I’ll send a copy of the will by courier and you should receive it within forty-eight hours. Then you can call me back to discuss your inheritance.”

I couldn’t think of any way a scam artist could have come up with my father’s name, let alone my grandfather’s name, but I was still suspicious.

“Just a moment, please.”

I walked over to my computer and searched for “Franklin Jones lawyer.” Sure enough, a website popped up, belonging to a firm based in Alberta.

I reflected briefly, then gave him my mailing address. It wouldn’t be mine for long, anyway, so there was nothing to lose.

After hanging up, I searched for Alberta, a large province bordering Montana, and found the capital, Edmonton. I was surprised to find that Canada’s northernmost large city had more than one million residents.

We had learned little about Canadian history or geography in school. I knew only that Canada was enormous and sparsely populated, dotted along the border with a few urban centres, like Toronto and Vancouver. I hadn’t realized there was another large city so far to the north.

When I thought about them at all, I pictured Canadians as a hardy people who escaped to warmer climes whenever possible. From the local media, I knew that thousands of Canadian snowbirds bought homes in Phoenix, something that helped to bump up our real estate market. Michael Bublé, my favourite singer, had grown up in Canada before moving to Los Angeles. But overall, I felt slightly ashamed that I was so ignorant about this vast northern neighbour.

When the will arrived, we had nineteen days left in the condo, and nineteen sleepless nights. I had applied for another six jobs without success, including one as a server at a downtown coffee shop.

I didn’t know what I would do if an employer wanted to arrange a personal interview. When Gabby was here, I could leave Bridget at home. But now that there were just the two of us, she had to accompany me everywhere.

I opened the large brown envelope without much hope and scanned the contents. Most of the material was difficult to read, couched in incomprehensible legal language, but it concerned a farm in northern Alberta, “herein referred to as Wildwood.” But I could easily understand the accompanying letter. This was written in black ink, in a strong yet feminine hand, attached to the will as a codicil, signed and witnessed, dated June 4, 1988.

“My fondest hope is that one of my surviving relatives will come to know and care for my beloved home as I have done. To that end, I am leaving Wildwood to my nephew Fergus Bannister, and in case of his death, to my great-niece Mary Margaret Bannister, on condition that the heir inhabits the property for a full twelve-month period prior to the transfer of title. During that time, he or she will receive a living allowance in the form of the monthly rental income from the farmland.”

Well, that was out of the question. I had no intention of living on a farm, especially one that remote. And Bridget’s precarious mental state would completely unravel if she had to adjust to unfamiliar surroundings.

On the other hand, she was facing a very uncertain future here in Phoenix.

Where was this place, anyway? I went to my computer and googled Juniper, Alberta. It was two thousand miles straight north of Phoenix, a ridiculously long way. To put things in perspective, if I drove two thousand miles east instead of north I would find myself in the Atlantic Ocean. I checked the map again. It was farther north than Ketchikan, Alaska!

I tried Google Earth. The digital globe revolved, then zoomed into the town, a small settlement along the banks of a wide river, surrounded by a checkerboard of rectangular green fields. Apparently it didn’t snow there all the time.

I wondered if I could find the farm itself. I entered the legal description of the property, and Google Earth focused on a spot that seemed a long way from Juniper. Eighty-eight miles, to be exact. It wasn’t bad enough that the town was so far away, but the farm was even farther. Unfortunately the satellite image was blurry. The farm was no more than a dark blot on a green background.

I zoomed out. The farm stood at the edge of an irregular block of light-green and yellow rectangles that looked like they had been carved out of the forest. At the northern edge of the property, the landscape abruptly changed into flat, dark-green wilderness that continued — I scrolled north, farther and then farther again — practically into infinity. The forest, dotted with rivers and lakes, morphed into frozen tundra that finally ended on the banks of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Circle.

This particular farm was situated on the very fringe of human habitat.

I turned back to the will again. My inheritance, if I fulfilled my great-aunt’s condition, consisted of two sections of land, plus a dwelling, its contents, and several outbuildings.

What was a section, anyway? I did some more research and was pleasantly surprised to find that a section was 640 acres. So there were 1,280 acres. That sounded like a lot. But what could be grown so far north? Christmas trees?

I typed: “Value of farmland in the area of Juniper, Alberta.”

That was when I got the shock of my life.

According to an official-sounding report from Agriculture Canada, dated one month earlier, the value of land was $1,150 per acre and “trending upwards.” I did the mental math at my usual lightning speed. Two sections of land were worth $1,472,000.

I fell back in my chair, staggered. But then I remembered that the price was listed in Canadian dollars. With my luck, the Canadian dollar would be worth ten cents on the American ­dollar. Hastily I looked up today’s exchange rate. This time I was more than staggered; I was stunned. The Canadian dollar, at eight o’clock this morning, was worth two cents more than the American dollar.

One hour later I called the lawyer in his office. It seemed incredible that he was in the same time zone — just two thousand miles closer to the North Pole.

Franklin Jones was shocked when I told him the news. “Miss Bannister, when I sent you the will, I certainly never expected you to accept that ridiculous condition. Let me explain. The farm is in a very remote location, with no power or water, and the house hasn’t been lived in for years. I must urge you to reconsider.”

He sounded so convincing that my heart sank. If he was right, I was going to waste my remaining funds on a wild goose chase.

I couldn’t keep a quiver out of my voice. “Can you tell me how much rental income to expect?”

“It’s not much, I’m afraid.” There was a rustle of papers, and then a long silence. I thought we might have been disconnected, but finally he spoke. “I’m afraid it’s only $400 per month.”

That was less than I had hoped for, but at least we would have free accommodation. What would we need except groceries?

I took a deep breath and forced myself to speak firmly. “Thank you, Mr. Jones. We’ll be there in three weeks. I’ll come straight to your office when we’ve arrived.”

That evening after Bridget had her usual bubble bath and fell asleep, I stepped onto the balcony. The night was simmering, thick with the muffled roar of invisible traffic coming from freeways that surrounded us on all four sides.

I looked up at the sky. Phoenix lay in a bowl on the desert, and at this time of year the bowl was filled with thick smog. I could hear an airplane overhead, beginning its descent into the nearby international airport, but I couldn’t even see its blinking red landing lights through the grey blanket above.

Arizona was my birthplace, where my parents had chosen to raise me. I felt almost disloyal for thinking of leaving.

But the numbers didn’t lie. For that kind of money, I would have moved to the Congo. If I could inherit and sell the farm, I could afford the best doctors, the most skilled therapists in the world for Bridget. This was her only chance.

Twelve short months from now, God willing, we would be back in Phoenix with enough money to create a new life for both of us.